Anti-Vaxxers Proving Stupidity, Gullibility Are Great Targets For Evil Liars

This is one of those posts that will get a lot of blowback against me. But I don't care.

As far as I'm concerned, the blowback will come mostly from selfish idiots, but I have to take this bullet, I've decided.

This is about the hot button topic of vaccinations, and why the anti-vaxxers are putting us in so much danger.

It could be because they're stubborn, want to be trendy, believe whatever is on the internet, or think there are all these grand conspiracies among hordes of people just craving to ruin their kids.  In large part, the anti-vaxxers have been manipulated by people and organizations with evil intent, both domestic and foreign.

I've long been fed up with anti-vaxxers who believe against all serious evidence that pretty much all vaccinations will give kids autism or worse.  The parents who don't vaccinate their kids also don't appear to give a crap about whether their willful ignorance kills other kids. For some, it turns into a cult-like belief.  They've swallowed bad propoganda hook, line and sinker.

In the Pacific Northwest, there's a nasty measles epidemic going on now because many parents there are anti-vaxxers.

I'm going against some advice here as I attack the anti-vaxxers. NPR recently interviewed medical anthropologist Elisa Sobo, who suggested we deal with the anti-vaccination types with less vehemence.

Sobo said most of the anti-vaxxers she talked with are not crazy people who wear tinfoil hats and spend their days reading wacko conspiracy theories on the internet. Instead, they're smart and highly educated.

OK, maybe, but why are they going against so much factual information here?

It turns out the anti-vaxxers are being "fashionable" in a way. They're trying to fit it. Sobo says think about it. For instance, your workplace might not have a formal dress code, but people at work always dress a certain way. So you do, too. That way, you fit in.

For the anti-vaxxers, this might come, for instance, as they're enrolling their kid in preschool in which there's a certain political vibe. There might already be a fair number of anti-vaxxers there, and they might convince the newcomer through their "facts" and "information" that they shouldn't get vaccines for their kids.

Then, Sobo says, if you attack the anti-vaxxer as being stupid or what have you, they'll dig in.  If you take a different tack, she says, you might change thier minds. "If you listen to them, and you allow them to say what they think without being judged, without feeling judged, without pushing them into a corner, they're absolutely ready."

Maybe she's right. For many of them, anyway. But what of the anti-vax activists that are pushing other parents to deny science, deny safety for their children?

The real "activists," the ones trying to convince parents to not vaccinate their kids are the real villains. Some of them manage to get pretty high up on search engines like Google, and people believe the top three or four hits on Google, and believe whatever it says. There's a mistaken belief that the stuff that appears first on Google is the most reliable. It isn't.

The bad stuff also seems to be coming from every dark corner, too.  The bad aspects of social media, like sponsored ads on Facebook, are a big source of the misinformation.

It also appears we can blame Russia. Again. As Oregolive.com recently reported:

"Russian President Vladimir Putin isn't trying to mess only with America's elections. He has set loose his undercover opinion manipulators to promote fear of vaccines and set pro- and anti-vaccination Americans against one another, a recent study concluded."

Why? It's part of a much broader effort to divide and instill fear in Americans. OregonLive and many others describe it as a second Cold War.

The vaccine lies often take the form of scary ads on platforms like Facebook that fall apart within a quick pass of scrutiny.

According to Business Insider:

"A sponsored ad found by Quartz journalist Jeremy Merrill shows the anti-vaccination organization Stop Mandatory Vaccination targeted women ages 20 to 60 who have expressed interest in pregnancy living in the State of Washington, where the governor recently declared a state of emergency over the measles outbreak."

One of these fear-mongering ads stated a woman's daughter died "12 hours after being injected by eight vaccines in 2008."

Notice the statement plays on emotion. It doesn't source this information, so who knows if it's true? Even if true, why did the kid die?  If she was run over by a bus or something, that has nothing to do with vaccines.

The ad says that medical experts determined the vaccines were the cause of the kid's death. What medical experts?  Were they just some random people off the street who said they were experts?

But never mind. The ads play to emotion, not fact. Parents are scared into not vaccinating kids, then scared when measles breaks out. The situation then gets really ridiculous.

These parents then get caught between conflicting fears when a measles outbreak does arrive. It gets silly.

One anti-vax parent is the Northwest is suddenly alarmed that the measles epidemic will harm her three year old kid, and asked for advice on line as to what to do. Of course, to this parent, vaccination was still off the table.

The photo in this post shows what the parent wrote.  The parent, of course, got an earful of cutting responses. Which include:

"Build a wall around her and make the vaccinated people pay for it Sending my thoughts and prayers."

Another person sarcastically wrote: "She could try acupuncture or essential oils. If that doesn't work, how about vaccinatingt your kid."

Yet another person posted a meme that pictured a tearful little girl asking her dad, "Why do I have polio?" The dad answers: "When you were little, the internet and your mom's yoga instructor said that vaccines cause autism."

With the Northwest measles epidemic raging, one aspect of this that's getting attention is teenagers who are wiser than their anti-vax parents. They're going to health clinics, hoping to be secretly vaccinated. Or they do so as soon as they turn 18, when their parents can't do anything about it.

The kids get their vaccinations, but this causes more strife, just what the Russians and domestic social media trolls want.

One of the teenagers getting a lot of attention here is Ethan Lindenberger, an Ohio 18-year-old. He's not particularly rebellious and even though he's an adult, tries not to disobey his mother. When it comes to vaccinations, though, he did.

Ethan's mother, in the classic style of this type, made her son's wise decision all about her. She said his decision to get vaccinations was "a slap in the face."  Yeah, she feels attacked somehow, by her own son, and she's having a meltdown.

"It was like spitting on me.... saying 'You do't know anything. I don't trust you with anything. You don't know what you're talking about."

What does the mom expect? That her intelligent son is going with facts and science, or with kook conspiracy theories?

Does she think there's some massive plot  involving thousands of CDC workers, pediatricians worldwide and scientists? That all these thousands of doctors and experts and such are "trying to make millions" from vaccinations?

If all these people in the health care industry really did want to make millions, they'd be anti-vax, too. After all, there's more money to be made from people who suffer from serious complications of diseases that could have been prevented via relatively inexpensive vaccines.

Apparently, people who are anti-vax think they are smarter than doctors and other medical professionals, I guess because of what they read on the internet.

The anti-vax cult is largely rooted in the mistaken idea, or the lie that vaccines cause autism.  It's true that nobody is quite sure why autism has gotten more prevalent, but scientists are sure it's not vaccines that are causing the problem.

However, too many people think these experts are "wrong."  I guess that misinformation campaign by the Russians and others is unfortunately working.

A survey found that 34 percent of U.S. adults think they know as much or more about autism than scientists. (Remember, these scientists study autism for a living.)

Also, 71 percent of people who endorse misinformation about the link between vaccines and autism think they know as much or more than scientists.

I guess everybody is an expert. Or something.

I'm healthy. And vaccinated. Plus, I have no kids. So I'm in no danger. But this affects me like it does everyone else. One friend is undergoing cancer treatment and chemotherapy, so her immune system is compromised for now.  Another friend is HIV positive. My mother turns 90 next month, and elderly people are at risk from these people, too.

Illnesses like measles aren't always the minor ailment that some people suggest. It's often serious, sometimes fatal. There's other diseases we get vaccinations for, too. Do we really want to bring back polio?

The people I just described above have other health problems that put them at risk for even more trouble from those un-vaccinated people who are spreading unnecessary, preventable diseases.

It's certainly more than OK to question science, question authority, to make sure they're not pulling the wool over our eyes. But once the dust settles and the facts are clear, why not go with those facts instead the wackadoodle ideas that the Russians or whoever want us to believe?

Not every contrarian is trying to help us, you know.

Leave Megan Kelly Alone Even If You Don't Like Megyn Kelly

If Trump supporter want to criticize Megyn Kelly of Fox
News, fine. Just leave Megan Kelly, 24, of Pittsburgh alone  

There's a woman named Megan Kelly who I'm sure you've never heard of. She's 24 years old, and a project manager for a marketing company in Pittsburgh.

Sounds fine, but she ain't famous.

However: This is a public service announcement to all you Donald Trump fans who don't like Megyn Kelly.

Megyn Kelly, the Fox News host, pissed off Trump and his supporters weeks ago when she asked some Trump blunt questions during the Republican debate. Trump is still going after Megyn Kelly over that, and so are his supporters.

Which brings us back to Megan Kelly, the Pittsburgh project manager. She's been getting a TON of nasty emails from Trump supporters. They're apparently confusing Megan with Megyn, says Gawker. 

Stop it!  I don't know what Megan Kelly's opinion of Trump is, but it's surely spiraling downhill now that she's getting all those mistaken nastygrams from the Trump contingent.

Gawker notes that it's hard to understand how the Trump crowd got Pittsburgh Megan Kelly's email address anyway. It's not obvious, so logical guesses probably didn't work. But then again, many of Trump's supporters aren't particularly logical.

Also, Gawker points out the obvious. It's very easy to Google Megyn Kelly the Fox News person, and obtain the correct spelling of her name. It would also be easy through Google to obtain  her email address.

But a hallmark of Trump and many of his supporters is unfocused rage, so why focus their anger on the right person? When any Megan Kelly would do.

Anti-Gay County Clerk Is Milking The Martyr Bit For Fun And Profit

Rowan County Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis
is enjoying her role of rubbing her
"religious" convictions in all of our faces.  

UPDATE: 

This dumb clerk said she would wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule all the lower courts that have in recent weeks ruled against her efforts to not issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.

The U.S. Supreme Court basically blew her off Monday, so now the ball is back in her court. She has vowed to go to jail rather than comply with court rulings.

The Martyr Complex again.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION

A county clerk in Kentucky named Kim Davis is really milking her 15 minutes of fame, extending that 15 minutes longer and longer for the fun and profit of martyrdom.

Her schtick: Refusing to obey orders to marry same sex couples along with straight couples to comply with the June U.S. Supreme Court ruling saying there is a Constitutional right to gay marriage.   

True, not everybody likes that ruling, but if you're a sworn government official, you have to uphold the law.

Davis said God's law is more important, or at least her interpretation of it is. It goes against her religious beliefs to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.

Fair enough. If her religious beliefs bar her from issuing such marriage licenses, then she shouldn't. However, even though she considers God's law more important, she still has to comply with U.S. law.

The solution would be to resign as county clerk if her religious beliefs conflict with her job. Several clerks across the nation have taken that route. Those clerks, I support. I don't agree with their stance on gay marriage, but they took the honorable way out. They can't do their job because of their religious beliefs, so they found other jobs.

The clerks who resigned stayed honest and true to themselves. Can't argue with that.

I CAN argue with Davis. Courts have repeatedly ordered her to issue licenses, but she still won't.

(In a funny side note, Davis recently issued a marriage license to a straight couple. But what she didn't know was the male half of the couple is transgender. His birth certificate lists him as female, and Davis failed to check it. Ha Ha!!!)

Still, Davis is having her fun with her anti-gay lawyers.

As Michelangelo Signorile notes, Davis' intractability is a win/win. She gets to be part of the Conservative Martyr complex, in which you win notoriety and probably money for being "persecuted" by those "awful homo-fascists"

The right wing politicians win, too. Because if Davis ends up facing criminal charges or is forced out of her job as county clerk, they can point to the false notion that Christians are being persecuted in this country, religious liberty is under assault, yada yada yada.

Which is bullshit, of course.

Judge David L. Bunning of the U.S. District Court for Kentucky's Eastern District said this about Davis' religious rights:

"The state is not asking her to condone same sex unions on moral or religious grounds,  nor is it restricting her from engaging in a variety of religous activites. ....She is even free to believe that marriage is a union between one many and one woman, as many Americans do. However, her religious convictions cannot excuse her from performing the duties that she took an oath to perform as Rowan County clerk."

An editorial in the Lexington, Kentucky Herald-Leader said it best about Davis and her lawyers from the conservative Liberty Counsel:

"Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver continues to insist that elected public officials have a constitutional right to pick and choose which of their government duties they will perform based on their religious beliefs - in other words, that public officials can use religion to discriminate against certain citizens. 

Nothing could be more un-American. What he is advocating would destroy the rule of law, a foundation of our republic. And imagine the chaos, given the wide range of religious beliefs."

But Davis, the Liberty Counsel and their minions don't believe in America as it is. They want us to live in a theocracy, fashioned on their stilted, weird Biblical beliefs. They will not be happy unless everyone in the nation has the same religious beliefs that they do.

That means Davis and the Liberty Counsel really are un-American, as that Kentucky newspaper suggests.

However, most Christianists never take not for an answer, so Davis and the lawyers backing her will keep pestering us.

Sigh.

Another Explosive Drug Making Exploit

You have to hand it to illicit drug dealers, users and makers: They are incredibly innovative when it come to doing things that are dangerous, not just to them but everyone around them.

A damaged Colorado kitchen after a hash oil explosion  

The latest fad, according to an alert put out last week by  FEMA: People are using butane and other explosive chemicals to extract oil from marijuana, to get a concentrated dose of some kind of high.

It's called hash oil, and it's the production of it has led to numerous injuries and property damage, like one recent case in Lansing, Michigan which led to three men getting critically burned and a house destroyed.

Great. We already have meth labs causing explosions and toxic materials hazards and now we've got enterprising drug dealers with another explosive undertaking.

Another explosion at a hotel near Sea World in San Diego because of some moron making hash oil blowing the butane up when he lit a cigarette badly burned himself, injured at least one other guest and trashed a large portion of the hotel.

So innocent bystanders are under threat, too.

I'm not sure what can be done about all this, other than the standard law enforcement. But if you have sketchy neighbors, it looks like nasty explosions are one more thing you have to worry about.

Go Away, Joey Buttafuoco!

I'm all for book publishing, but a new memoir by Joey Buttafuoco has to be the most unnecessary potential new publication to come along in ages.

Buttafuuoco, as only afficiandos of 1980s and early 1990s tackiness and trashiness remember, is the guy who had the affair with then-17 Amy Fisher, you know, the "Long Island Lolita."

He won't go away. Joey Buttafuoco plans a book!

The ever helpful Fisher decided to help her affair along by going to Buttafuoco's house and shooting his wife, Mary Jo in the face, thereby getting rid of her forever, Mary Jo failed to do her part by surviving the shooting.

Buttafuoco now says he's penning a book called "Closure" that's telling his side of the tale, as if anybody cares, according to TMZ. 

Yeah, that's a reason to go on living. Wait around for Joey's hot new book. Sigh.

Buttafuoco puts on his halo as he explains his reasoning for writing the book: "It's time for all of us to move on. My book is closure for everyone and our respected families. It's time."

Uh, Joey? It was time to move on decades ago. What hubris! I'm going to have the last word and close this. Never mind that for most people, this episode closed eons ago.

I'm always fascinated by the number of people who, when caught in something tawdry, milk it for all it's worth. I get the need to make money, but a lot of these people seem to celebrate their awfulness, as if it's something to be proud of. "I'm weird and icky so I deserve to make lots of money because I am weird and icky."

Our beloved Amy Fisher has also made a career of this mess.  She wrote a book or two about the shooting and everything else surrounding it. I didn't read it, but I'm sure it was a literary masterpiece.

She later got involved a bit in the pornography industry. Time to pay the bills, I guess.

I guess the only part of the economy that's doing great is the weird and icky industry.

Do SUV Drivers Like Creating Roadkill?

Found a video where a guy did an interesting experiment.

He put realistic looking turtles, snake, tanatula and leaf on the shoulder of a road, and watched about 1,000 vehicles. His conclusion: Six percent of the drivers are willing to swerve to intentionally kill a small animal on the side of the road.

Of course, the positve way of looking at it is 94 percent of drivers won't be mean to small animals.

The video is strangely engaging and informative:




An interesting finding is that most of the people who swerved to kill the small animals drove trucks or SUVs.

I want a follow up study: Why do people intentionally run over the animals? It's obviously a nasty thing to do. What did the animal do to them? It probably gives these motorists a sense of power, but you have to be pretty pathetic to base your self esteem on an ability to crush a tiny turtle or snake beneath the wheels of your giant truck?

What are these people like, when they're not killing small animals? Are they future psychopaths, ready to turn into small critter exterminaters to mass murderers? Almost all of them are probably not that psychotic.  Are they loners because everybody hates them? Or do they hide their assaultive personalities well. Do they own animals like dogs themselves? How do they treat their pets?

While you're swerving to kill the turtles, do you worry that you're driving unsafely. Do you also threaten bicyclists and pedestrians?

Obviously, most people who drive SUVs and trucks DON'T run over critters for sport. I drive a Toyota Tacoma, and I feel guilty for days if a chipmunk runs out onto the road and I can't avoid hitting it.  So they will never let me into the Kill Critter Club. Or whatever.

Does anyone out there reading this run over small critters for laughs and giggles? Or know somebody who does? I'd love to know the reasons.

Creepy Kids Give Seagulls Laxatives

A video making the rounds this week shows a bunch of kids at some beach giving seagulls laxative-laced food and watching the resulting mess.



I love a good prank, but unlike a lot of commenters on the YouTube video, I can't bring myself to have a sense of humor about this one.

Really. The kids are just creeps who need to get a life. And they're proud enough about this to post a video on YouTube?

I'm definitely no fan of gulls. Those damn birds are aggressive, annoying, noisy and messy. Go away! But still, is it fair to feed them something that could injure or kill them?  I think some people are aggressive, annoying, noisy and messy, but that doesn't mean I will feed them laxatives or otherwise harm them.

What about the people below who are the victims of the shit rain from sky, induced from these lousy kids? At best, a day at the beach is ruined. People deserve a break, and these kids unilaterally decided to kill that idea.

I don't know how unsafe the bird crap is, but it can't be good.

My suggestion: Find out who these kids are and make them take a nice, refreshing dip in the local sewage treatment plant.

School Punishment Follies

Geez, I'm glad school administrators aren't supervising me.

Now that school's pretty much done for the summer, I've collected some of the worst examples of school discipine out there. Just for fun.

I've done so because I have problems with a lot of zero tolerance policies that schools maintain. I get it that they're important to keep kids safe and to provide clear, understandable rules for the kiddies.

Where we run into trouble is at the minority of schools where administrators have no common sense, and no sense of perspective.  It's amazing that some adults who should be in charge can't make the distinction between, say, a butter knife accidentally left in a backpack and brought to school vs. a cache of grenades and automatic weapons that would make a Third World army proud. These bad administrators don't see the difference.

In one  example, a girl was deemed to slutty, I guess, because her outfit was supposedly provocative, according to the girl's dad, who luckily for us is a blogger (Adult Onset Atheist) and went on about this extensively.

You can see her photo in this post so judge for yourself.

 I dunno. She seems fine to me. A simple outfit. Worn on a warm day, so it is a skirt/short sleeve shirt combination. Fashionable enough. But slutty and too revealing? Um, she's wearing standard business casual clothes, the kind you see in any office, any day.  But what do I know about fashion and sluts?

The principal who called the girl on being dressed "inappropriately" seems creepy to me, if you think about it. Says the father/blogger:

"It turns out that the principal himself had personally identified her as inappropriately dressed. He had walked up to her during lunchtime and identified her crime where nobody else could. I can’t help but think that the principal’s action creates an unhealthy atmosphere in his school. What does it say to the teachers who had her in class earlier in the day, and not noticed her inappropriate dress? Will there be punitive actions taken against the teachers who could not look at my daughter with perversion in their eyes?"

The dad suspects that because this high school is rural and in a conservative district, women need to be kept in their place. Says the blogger, again: (AOD is the girl's initials)

Tooele offered her the choice of social dance or seminary. Social dance requires that girls wear high heals, and AOD is 6 feet tall in her stocking feet. My girls have a history of trying to excel beyond the bounds of what girls should be capable of. They succeed in excelling beyond the bounds of what normal humans are capable of. They certainly exceed both my capability and expectation.


One commentor on the blog post was obviously a school administrator, and offered up this reasoning, from the perspective of the school.

Parents, PLEASE, support your school administration! For ONCE!!! Yes, the outfit looks quite appropriate compared to what we are generally subjected to on a daily basis in public schools. And why are we subjected to this much worse form of dress? Because parents like THIS BLOGGER question administrators and teachers constantly. You took a picture and posted it? And wrote an entire article? And then bashed how junior high students are treated? Seriously? This is what you do with your time? You have NO IDEA why our rules are in place, the corrosive nature of your actions, or how hard we work every day to make junior high students feel good about themselves and valued. You have no idea how we are constantly attacked by students and teachers who don't agree with what a teacher or administrator has done. YOU are the reason our schools have no recourse when students break rules. Yes, it seems silly, but evidently your child was not complying with a rule. Have you ever tried to enforce a dress code in a school? Back off on one inch, and then skirts inch up another and another. Back off 1/4 inch on a shirt strap, and then they get thinner and thinner and turn into camis and bra tops. BACK UP THE SCHOOL FOR ONCE, PARENTS! STOP THINKING YOU KNOW BETTER and that your chidl's civil rights and dignity are being violated just because a decision inconveniences you and you don't agree with it.


So, no matter how stupid the ruling, we have to support it or all the other reasonable rules will go out the window somehow?  Exactly how does all this make kids "feel good about themselves and valued.?"Do we teach kids that we should blindly follow any rule, no matter how boneheaded, without having the right to legally and ethically challenge the rule? Do we really want to raise kids who don't question unfair and unjust laws?   Well, some people do, if those unjust and unfair laws favor them, I guess.

  Meanwhile, in North Carolina, a social studies teacher, who should know better, said a kid who was criticizing President Obama must Shut Up Now, or would end up in jail for the comments, according to an article in the Salisbury, N.C. Post and later picked up by other media.

You are free to criticize this guy if you want, despite
what a North Carolina social studies teacher says.

Said the teacher: “Do you realize that people were arrested for saying things bad about Bush?” she says of former President Bush. “Do you realize you are not supposed to slander the president?” 


Um, no. You can criticize a president's policies and actions as long as you offer no threats to him or her.  At least the student had it right. We pick up the story again from the Salisbury Post:

The student responds by saying being arrested for talking badly about the president would violate the right to free speech.

“You would have to say some pretty f’d up crap about him to be arrested,” he says. “They cannot take away your right to have your opinion. ... They can’t take that away unless you threaten the president.”

So maybe the kid should get the job of social studies teacher and the teacher should go back to school, no?


Now we go to Houston, where one Diane Tran, 17, got into Big Trouble for skipping school.  As well she should. She got 24 hours in the slammer because she played hooky.


Oh, wait. There's mitigating circumstances! Turns out her parents bailed, she has to work all night, take care of her siblings, then go to school without ANY sleep.  Nobody bothered to tell the judge who sent her to jail these little issues.

Diane Tran did miss school, but nobody paid
attention to her (very good) excuse.

Shouldn't the school have tried to figure out why such a bright girl who was taking AP classes was suddenly blowing off school? No, it doesn't matter! She was blowing off school. The reasons are none of the school's business!


Luckily, when the full story came out, the judge dismissed the charges and an advocacy group raised $100,000 to help the poor girl out. 


Finally, we learn that students can get in trouble even if they behave perfectly, but their relatives don't. In Ohio, a school withheld diplomas from some graduating seniors because their families cheered too boisterously during the graduation ceremony.


Now, I can see why there's a rule for the audience to keep it in their sneaker a little bit. We all want to hear the names of our beloved graduates being called, and we don't want Mr. and Mrs. Loud drowning out our little darlings' moment of glory.


But punish the kids whose deafening family disrupts things.  By that logic, if my sibling was a mass murderer, I should go to jail too because I know her?

Another Month of Fails

Several producers put out YouTube videos each month highlighting the fails from the previous month. As per my tradition most months, I grab one of them and present them to you.

It's always fun to see how many ways people find to be stupid. It's almost as if people sit around and think about ways they can hurt themselves that have never been done before. At least by themselves.

I bet health insurers really hate, hate these people and especially these videos, because they surely give people ideas.

Meanwhile, enjoy this month's installment, below. The video offers proof that nobody how stupid you might have been in the past month, plenty of people were even more stupid. Time to inflate your sense of self worth:

49s Fumbler Death Threats, Cat Murder and Lack of Perspective

In the continuing annals of people in this country who have no sense of perspective at all, I give you two new exhibits.

First we go to San Francisco 49s wide receiver Kyle Williams, who, during the NFL playoffs over the weekend, made some mistakes and help cost his team a place in the Super Bowl.

San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Kyle Williams shown here either
expressing his disappointment in his game performance, or
trying to drown out the yahoos who issued death threats againts him.

Williams feels bad, takes ownership of the mistakes, and I know he will keep plugging. That should be the end of the story. He's not exactly a mass murderer, right? Just a bloke who had an iffy day that had no bearing on the fate of the world.

Well, a lot of people would disagree. Williams has gotten a ton of death threats for his less than stellar performance on the field. People want his wife and kids killed for this too. Seriously. (That Williams does not have a wife and kids apparently is beside the point.)

Here's one typical example, cited by bleacherreport.com who found this charming message about Williams on Facebook from some yahoo identified as Cole Matthew Mitguard:

"Kyle Williams... you need to leave San Francisco forever, you should never be allowed to play in the NFL ever again... Your play and ypur post game comments should be enough to earn yourself a spot in 49ers history's... As the biggest POS to ever wear the red and gold. Lots of hope for next year, let's just hope that KW gets hit by a bus, eaten by a lion, or dies in some other terrible way so he can't ruin the 49ers season again... What a terrible piece of garbage you are KW, you ruined the game I have been waiting for over 10 years..

Really. So Cole, you've been waiting for the 49ers to win for a decade, you think Williams took it away from you and so he must die. Oh, you poor, poor victim.  Enduring your football team's loss has to be so much worse than minor inconveniences like terminal cancer, homelessness, rape, or all kinds of awful things decent people are forced to face.

Cole, I think you're being just a tiny bit melodramatic, no?

Williams is worse than a serial killer because he fumbled a football?f  I would love to confront the people who made the threats to find out what they were thinking. What other mistakes deserve the death penalty? Do I deserve to die because I wasn't paying attention this morning while walking along a sidewalk and almost bumped into someone?

Mitguard's Facebook post and the response it got is fascinating, as it presents a window onto the psyche of people who make these weird threats.  When confronted, they do back down, in kind of a sniveling way.   At first Cole says, petulantly, "Why is it that I should restrain myself from expressing myself."

Well, because you sound like a moron.

Mitguard goes on to concede that maybe, just maybe, the death threat was a little over the top. But he goes on and on about his anguish that Williams blew two plays. The horror! "Every 49ers fan is entitled to at least 24 hours of unmitigated rage," he writes.

True, sports fans are entitled to being annoyed by a losing team. And sure, if your friendly neighborhood NFL wide receiver does a crappy job, why not publicly complain and criticize? But unmitigated rage? So you're going to start a riot or something too? I guess that's whats behind those riots you get after a team loses a big game. Right, fine folks of Vancouver?

Further responding to being confronted, our buddy Cole writes this:

"Please do not try and take the moral high ground on someone in my position who is both drunk and frustrated at this evenings events. But at the same time, I find it infanelty (sic) more embarrasing that their (sic) are fans out there who don't put their beliefs out there."



Oh, OK. You're drunk and frustrated, so that gives you the right to offer threats, even if they're not serious. And you're saying that if your team disappoints you, you're supposed to go apeshit because a real person doesn't have a temper tantrum when the home team loses?

Like I said, disappointment and frustration among fans is perfectly fine when the team loses. But again I have to ask the question:  How is this melodrama a sign of being a real man, a real team player?

Toward the end, Cole's Facebook friends talk him down. He even finds it in his heart to see some  sunshine.   "Next year is going to be an awesome year to be a 49ers fan."

Atta boy, Cole!

I don't mean to pick exclusively on this one poor soul, but his Facebook post was so readily accessible that I couldn't resist analyzing it as a textbook example of being a little over the top.

It looks like Cole has calmed down, but what about the rest of those members of the wacko death threat brigade?  Maybe killing a whole town of people is OK, but screwing up a football game is grounds for swift capital punishment?

Somebody please explain this to me.

Next we go to Arkansas, where the campaign manager for a Congressional candidate came home and found somebody killed his cat and scrawled "liberal" on the cat's corpse.

Apparently, if you're a liberal, your cat needs to die.  Because it's the cat's fault your liberal. Or something.  And which animals should die if somebody is deemed too conservative?

Ken Aden, the Congressional candidate whose campaign manager had to deal with this, naturally condemned this and said he knows that his opponent, Steve Womack, and Womack's campaign, had absolutely nothing to do with the disgusting incident.

Womack for his part, said in no uncertain terms that the idea of brutalizing an animal to make a political statement is beyond any standard of decency.

So at least the political candidates are behaving like sane adults here.

But still, some loser is out there, thinking the logical thing to do with a political candidate you don't like is torture and kill his pets.

I guess in the name of being an "American" the torturer decided to instill fear in a legitimate political campaign. Being a terrorist is OK if it fits your own political views?

Oooh, I hope they catch more of the people who did this, and the people who made death threats against the football player, and make their names public. Not because I want any physical harm to come to them. But because they need to be publicly embarrassed all to hell.

But these miscreants are probably too stupid to learn anything from this.
  .

Thinking About Irene.....

With Hurricane Irene poised to hit the Northeast, and blast Vermont with gale force winds, flooding, power failures and a tangle of falling trees, my thought naturally turn to various aspects of this storm.

Satellite view of Hurricane Irene taking a cruise
through the Bahamas yesterday

Are people named Irene pissed off that a major storm share their name?

Who names these hurricanes anyway? After Irene, we can look forward to the rest of the hurricane season featuring the likes of Jose, Katia, Lee, Maria, Nate and Ophelia.
'
Will the lines at the liquor store in advance of Irene be longer than the lines at the supermarket and hardware stores?

Along those lines, what is the best Merlot to sip while riding out the storm in your (dark) home?

New York transit officials say millions of subway rats might seek higher ground as the subway tunnels flood during Irene. Pleasant thought, no? "Honey, these 3,000 rats think our living room is a Red Cross storm shelter. What in heaven shall we do?"

I wonder how many people will die stupid deaths in Irene. I don't mean the poor people killed when a tree randomly crashes through a house. I mean the people who look at the violent storm surge rolling toward the beach and say, "Let's go surfing!"

Speaking of which, how many news reporters are going to do the I can barely stand in the wind routine while standing on the beach telling viewers to stay away from the beach.

Will a two-by-four finally sail through a news reporter's head at 90 mph, thereby ending the tradition of news reporters standing on beaches during hurricanes?

You can always tell in advance where the storm will cause the worst damage. Just figure out where the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore is (He's a native Vermonter!) And for the record, last I checked, Cantore was reporting live from Battery Park in lower Manhattan.

Every November, I have a big bonfire from the piles of branches I clean up from storms on my property during the year. I'm going to have a really, really big bonfire this November, aren't I? Bring the marshmallows!

Will all that humidity and moisture from Hurricane Irene wreck my naturally curly hair?

Bad Eyebrows

I found a random Web site that showed people with strange eyebrows.

Add caption

There's a Web site for everything, isn't there.

I stopped on the eyebrow site because I'm fascinated by people who start out looking perfectly fine and make themselves look ridiculous.

Do they want attention? Have a skewed sense of what is attractive? Want to be ugly on purpose?

I can't complain about these people too much, though. They're not hurting anybody. Well, except maybe  the guy with profanity tattooed onto his eyebrows.

So go ahead and make your eyebrows weird if you want. Just don't expect me to pay you too many compliments.

There's no limit on how people want to mutiliate themselves, I suppose.

Driving Wreckage

After a tough winter, it's understandable that people are driving around in dented, battered and mechancally iffy cars and trucks.

All those icy roads, collisions, potholes and frost heaves do take a toll. For instance, I just spent $400 on a new wheel bearing for my Toyota Tacoma yesterday.

But as the following video shows, some people don't abandon their vehicles when they get too battered. We end up with the the following scene on a Russian highway. Don't ask that guy for a ride!

Lawmaker Drinks to Montana

Every once in awhile, a politician comes along that has a viewpoint so novel, so bold, that you have to sit up and take notice.

Meet Montana lawmaker, and bar owner Alan Hale, who caused a big stir last week by essentially saying tough DWI laws are a bad idea. 

Such laws "are destroying a way of life that has been in Montana for years and years," Hale said.

Montana lawmaker Alan Hale

Or a way of death. It all depends on your perspective.

Fun fact: Another person named Alan Hale played the skipper on "Gilligan's Island." The Gilligan's Island Hale also owned a restaurant/bar called "The Lobster Barrell" for a time in the 1970s and 1980s.

Anyway, in a big, wide open rural state like Montana, Hale reasoned, how the hell do you get to a bar to drink other than driving?

Hale didn't get into the concept of designated driver, but, hey, leave the picky details to the bureaucrats. A lawmaker like Hale is the big idea guy.

Maybe he's on to something. A lot of people are on drugs, too, and they sometimes break into homes to steal stuff to buy the drugs. You've got to get the drugs somehow, right? So why is breaking and entering illegal? By preventing drug addicts from breaking into your house and stealing your electronics, aren't we destroying the drug addicts' way of life?

Hale, who hasn't been granting interviews, is surely thinking about his Next Big Idea. So, here's to our Montana lawmaker, who surely has an, um, interesting political future in this great nation.

Overreaction Patrol

In my never ending quest for examples of people who overreact just a teensy bit, I give you my latest two examples

Ricardo Jones, upset over a Taco Bell
price increase

The first incident hit recently when the price of a Beefy Crunch Burrito at a Taco Bell in Texas went up from 99 cents to $1.49. Customer Ricardo Jones, 37. was so displeased with the price increase that he fired an air gun at a restaurant manager, displayed weapons, and had a three hour standoff with police, according to the San Antonion Express-News. 

Apparently, he was trying to order seven Beefy Crunch Burritos, so Jones faced a price increase of about $3.50. Too much for him. Talk about driving a hard bargain.

In the end, he lost out, because he never did get his Beefy Crunch Burritos, and now has all these annoying legal expenses and possible jail time to deal with.

Still, it was nice of Jones to at least try and strike a blow against inflation, anyway.

Meanwhile, in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Isaiah Doyle maybe did not help his case as a jury weighed whether to impose the death penalty on him for killing a convenience store clerk in 2005.

He told the jury, "If I had an AK-47, I'd kill every last one of y'all without remorse," according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. 

As for the store clerk he killed, Doyle told the court, "The only reason she was shot four times is because the gun jammed. Otherwise, I would have emptied the gun in her (expletive deleted) head."

A jury imposed a death penalty on Isaiah Doyle
after he said he'd like to kill them. 

This of course is a terribly sad case, in that the convenience store clerk's family is still devastated.

The jury opted to impose the death penalty, no surprise there. Defense attorneys are seeking a new trial, saying Doyle is mentally retarded.

He's something, all right.

Crimes of Stupidity

I'm always fascinated by stupid criminals, or paranoid people who report crimes when something completely normal is going on.

So I was pleased when the Huffington Post offered some fun police blotter items. You know, those are those little items in local newspapers that say Mrs. Smiths flower shop got broken into or there was a fender bender on Elm Street.

These are a lot better though. Some of the better ones include a report that a car was slowing going up the street, stopping at each mailbox. Investigating officers discovered it was the mailman. And there was the call from a Wal-Mart where somebody reported finding an infant in a trash can. The "infant" was a discarded burrito.

Why did the Swanson Chicken Pot Pie cross the road?
Because somebody who reported it to police was wacko.

And there are the thoroughly perplexing one, where somebody called police to report a Swanson frozen chicken pot pie running down the street.

Um, I guess if people are going to ask why a chicken crossed the road, why not ask why a Swanson frozen chicken crossed the road.

Do any readers out there have funny police blotter stories? Put 'em in the comments section and join the fun.

Meanwhile, I'll relax, although since it's wintry out today, I am worried abotu seeing a Swanton frozen dinner run by. If so, I'll just stab it with a fork and throw it in the microwave.

Talk about hunting for dinner!