Last Call For Aborted, Retried, Failed

Well, after watching this video of kids born after 2000 try to get an old 80's era Apple ][ to work I think I'll go eat some floppy disk shards and lay down and die like the ancient, useless pile of worthless old person I am.



 I am filled with sadness.

Dear America:

"Far be it from me to politically take advantage of the tragedy in Santa Barbara last week, but clearly Elliot Rodger was everything wrong with liberal and liberalism and the left.  The fact is the vast majority of criminal scumbags out there have to be, by definition, liberals.  (Or black.  Same difference.)  Clearly we need huge piles of guns to protect us from Obama."

--John Hinderaker, Power Line

Actual Verbatim Stupid:

Actually, mass shootings are pretty equally distributed among ethnic groups. The worst mass shooter in American history was an Asian-American, Seung-Hui Cho, and an African-American, John Muhammad, murdered at least ten people in the D.C. area. And, of course, the overall homicide rate among African-Americans is something like eight times the white rate.

Now, you and I would probably interpret "pretty equally distributed among ethnic groups" as 1 to 1, or at least "in a ratio similar to the US population as a whole" if I was going to be generous.  Instead, Hinderaker finds two non-white mass shooters in the last 15 years and says "yeah, it's equal".  OK.

Bonus Verbatim Stupid:

Beyond that, some might argue that Rodger was a prototypical liberal male, only carried to a pathological extreme. Consider the profile: socially awkward, convinced of his own brilliance but not notably successful in life, hungry for revenge against those who have done better despite their obvious inferiority, eager to gain power over others, but through political influence rather than firearms–is this not a typical liberal on Twitter, or elsewhere on the internet? Or, for that matter, in the Obama administration? Isn’t state power the legal path to the long-awaited revenge of the liberal nerds? This strikes me as a plausible suggestion.

To recap, Hinderaker apparently believes the Obama administration and indeed liberalism itself is full of Elliot Rodgers, angry nerds with revenge fantasies who simply haven't yet acted upon them, and this pretty much justifies whatever measures are necessary to deal with them.  You know, more guns.

Sure, that's not paranoia or anything.  Jesus.

The King Of The Nice Guys

Mass shooter Eliot Rodger apparently did leave enough warning signs to trigger a visit from sheriff's deputies last month.  They apparently found a charming young man who totally wasn't planning to murder women.  Rodger's sprawling manifesto/premeditated murder handbook details the notion that he thought he was caught for sure.

"I had the striking and devastating fear that someone had somehow discovered what I was planning to do, and reported me for it," Rodger wrote toward the end of a 137-page account of his life. "If that was the case, the police would have searched my room, found all of my guns and weapons, along with my writings about what I plan to do with them.

"I would have been thrown in jail, denied of the chance to exact revenge on my enemies. I can't imagine a hell darker than that."

The manifesto, titled "My Twisted World," was obtained by CNN affiliate KEYT.

"It was apparent he was very mentally disturbed," Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said, referring to the contents of the autobiography.

So disturbed that someone from a mental health agency, after consulting with one of Rodger's relatives, requested police check on his welfare April 30, Brown said.

Rodger's family contacted police after discovering social media posts about suicide and killing people, family spokesman and attorney Alan Shifman told reporters Saturday.

Brown said Rodger told deputies it was a misunderstanding and that he was not going to hurt anyone or himself. Rodger said he was having troubles with his social life.

"He was articulate. He was polite. He was timid," Brown told CNN on Sunday.

There was nothing in his behavior to suggest he was violent, and the deputies "determined he did not meet the criteria for an involuntary hold," Brown said.

And so a month later, he happily carried out his plan and murdered six people and himself because women would sleep with him.  He got the benefit of the doubt, I guess.  The two bored deputies didn't think anything was wrong.

Rodger wrote that a wave of relief came over him when the deputies left. "If they had demanded to search my room ... (t)hat would have ended everything. For a few horrible seconds I thought it was all over."

Instead it was all over for six other people, and yes, Rodger himself.  Something to think about.

StupidiNews, Memorial Day Edition

• Billionaire Petro Poroshenko has won Ukraine's election for President, the so-called "Chocolate King" getting 56% of the vote.
• Just days after Britain hard-right UKIP party made local election gains, French right-wing nationalist party National Front scored major victories in EU parliamentary elections.
• President Obama will speak at the commencement ceremony at West Point on Wednesday, where he is expected to lay out a defense of his six years of foreign policy gains.
• Officials in Shanghai are warning children and the elderly to stay indoors as smog alerts continue to plague the Chinese capital. 
• The US government is considering restricting Chinese nationals from attending the DefCon and BlackHat hacker conferences this year in order to "curb Chinese espionage".