Doug's Darkworld

Photographer: Andrew J. Russell Public Domain under US copyright law.

A BBC presenter, Danny Baker, has been fired for being a racist poopy head. He tweeted a picture of a British royal couple with their child … the child being depicted as a chimp. Baker apparently missed the memo: Depicting POC as monkeys is racist, no exceptions. He did his best to weasel out of it with the ever popular “It was just a joke!” line. So not only he is a racist, he thinks people who point it out to him are stupid enough to fall for that? No, Mr Baker, it wasn’t a joke, it was a racist troll cartoon, exactly what you intended. And you got what you deserved.

And another “What the hell is wrong with our society and when are we going to fix it?” story repackaged as a “feel good” story: Colorado School Shooting Victim Died Charging Attacker. Thank you mainstream media for helping us feel good about living in a country awash with guns and the attendant senseless gun violence. Don’t worry, nothing will be done, so stories like this will keep coming. Jesus wept.

Denver, CO, voted to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms, aka magic mushrooms. Good, it’s a remarkably safe drug that doesn’t cause any social problems I am aware of. Long past time to treat recreational drugs as a medical and social issue on an individual user basis; prohibition is a strategy that not only failed, it actually makes the situation worse. Made a lot of corrupt cops and corporations very wealthy though, welcome to America.

Oh man. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Joe Dunford, speaking to the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee on Wednesday,  insisted that US troops should stay in Afghanistan “As long as an insurgency continues.” I am assuming it takes years of special training to say something like that without smirking or giggling. 18 years in, the insurgency is worse than ever, and no one had a clue how to defeat it. But “stay there forever” is what the Pentagon wants. See last sentence of previous paragraph, replace <cops> with <soldiers.>

In the “Who does he think he’s kidding?” file the Pope has made it mandatory for clergy to report sexual abuse and cover-ups to the church. Wrong on so many levels. If someone discovers criminal activity in their organization, especially something as horrible and criminal as sexual abuse … they call the effing police. Child sexual abuse is a crime, there is no other acceptable course of action. Letting the church hierarchy decide how to respond to such allegations is how the church became a haven for pedophiles in the first place.

Speaking of medieval, in the “Are time travellers from the Middle Ages among us?” file we have a state representative from Texas checking all the hate boxes in his profile. Hates gay marriage, thinks marital rape is OK, adamantly opposes the ungodly evils of vaccination. OK, I understand the twisted interpretation of Christ’s teachings that lets people hide their obsession with other people’s genitals under religious concerns. I get it, you see a married couple, their genitals don’t match your religious preferences, so it’s icky. So, you know, Christ must have been against it. And marital rape, the Bible says it’s OK in 1 Corinthians 7:3-5. Granted there are other Bible verses that say otherwise, but hey, if I know anything about bible worshipping Christians is that it’s their God given right to pick and choose what parts of the Bible to obey.

How Mr Stickland got his anti-vax views from the Bible, that’s a mystery to me. Pretty sure Jesus had nothing to say on the topic. In fact safe to say the Bible has nothing to say on the topic, being as vaccines weren’t around 2,000 years ago. So somehow this life saving medical treatment is bad, but other stuff doctors do is ok? Basically we have a political leader urging citizens to deliberately spread disease in the name of his God. The Muslims got nothing on our Christian crazies.

End rant. I have nothing against religion, being Episcopalian and all, but people using Our Saviour to spread hatred and lies, yeah, I have problems with that. Today’s post is an extemporaneous post, as the post I was writing Thursday ran aground so to speak. I probably have dozens if not hundreds of abortive posts. Preserved forever on the Interwebs for future historians to mull over.

The picture, yes. 10 May 1869. The USA’s first intercontinental railway was completed in Utah. 150 years ago today. What a great picture. There’s almost certainly people alive today who would have known people in this photograph. This is the sort of stuff I think about. Have a great weekend everyone.

(Copyright © 2019 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.)