good afternoon https://t.co/7xZfu86jDV pic.twitter.com/czRhpLu57W
— Kelly Weill (@KELLYWEILL) June 14, 2018
I’m a bad person. I envisioned an officeful of white supremacists, every one holding a coffee mug imprinted YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE – BUT IT HELPS!!!…
… [Taylor] Wilson, a Missouri man who lives with his parents, boarded a cross-country Amtrak train in October with a backpack full of weapons and a plan to run the train off the tracks. While passing through rural Nebraska, Wilson allegedly pulled the train’s emergency brake, leaving it stranded on the tracks at 2 a.m.
While Amtrak staff swept the train, Wilson allegedly burst into the control room and took a place in the engineer’s seat, where a staffer found him “playing with the controls.”
“What are you going to do, shoot me?” Wilson allegedly asked the Amtrak staff who confronted him. “I’m the conductor, bitch.”
Amtrak staff pinned Wilson to the floor, while Wilson reached for the waistband of his pants, according to the criminal complaint. Police took more than an hour to respond to the rural scene. When deputies searched Wilson, he attempted to claim a bulge in his pocket was “my dick,” according to a criminal complaint. The bulge was actually one of two fully loaded guns Wilson was carrying on him, one of which was in the waistband he’d allegedly attempted to reach during the struggle…
One of Wilson’s associates told investigators that Wilson had been acting strangely since at least June, after joining an “’alt right’ Neo-Nazi group that he had found researching white supremacy forums online,” according to the criminal complaint. The associate told police that Wilson had expressed an interest in “killing black people” and had claimed to have been part of a group that pasted “Whites Only” signs in local businesses.
In August 2017, Wilson had marched at Unite the Right, a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Wilson was also involved in a road rage incident in May 2016, during which he allegedly pulled a gun on a black woman, according to the criminal complaint…
Yes, this guy obvs needs therapeutic assistance, but he also needs to be in a situation with more supervision than his parents seem capable of.
trollhattan
Surely, Florida has space for Mr. Wilson. He seems nice.
HumboldtBlue
I bet Sara Bareilles doesn’t shove a gun down her pants.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
I believe that you are stretching the definition of nice just a wee bit farther than the fabric of the universe will allow. And that’s giving you the benefit of knowing that’s exactly what you were trying to do.
Platonailedit
Nope, this guy obviously needs to be treated as a terrorist that he is.
Major Major Major Major
Hoo boy, what a piece of work.
@Platonailedit: And how would you suggest we should be treating mentally ill terrorists?
Ruckus
BTW In leu of reading any more about the haters, fuckers and thieves now trying to destroy our country I watched an episode of The West Wing tonight. It was strangely satisfying to know that someone could write a TV show with far better humans than the gang that couldn’t do a fucking thing right. Of course SpongeBob meets that minimal level. And I fucking hate SpongeBob.
B.B.A.
An old, very tasteless Sarah Silverman gag comes to mind: “It’s not that I’m in favor of executing the mentally retarded, but how else will they learn?”
Platonailedit
@Major Major Major Major: Just as you would treat any non-white terrorist?
opiejeanne
@Ruckus: The West Wing was a great show and the president didn’t just speak in complete sentences, he was portrayed as a truly brilliant person.
Major Major Major Major
@Platonailedit: I think we should actually treat more criminals as well as we treat white men.
Mnemosyne
@HumboldtBlue:
Barielles won a lot of new fans with her performance in “Jesus Christ Superstar Live!” She was really terrific.
In more general news, we’re having a good time so far at the Happiest Place On Earth. By a lucky chance, we got a room that had a pocket (aka obstructed) view of the fireworks, so that was kind of cool.
Platonailedit
@Major Major Major Major: We should but we don’t. So …
Lapassionara
I spent yesterday (in Paris) at the Memorial to the Deported and the Holocaust Museum (memorial de Shoah). I came away with the realization that we do not have much time to get our government back on track. The Jews in France had been accepted and assimilated for years (maybe centuries) before the war. It took little time for those rights to be stripped away. It began with propaganda referring to them in animalistic terms, included vile cartoon depictions of them doing harm to French people, especially children and women.
Just a few years into the war, most of the Paris Police force followed orders to round up Paris Jews and take them to the Vel D’Hiver to await transport to the camps.
The Trump administration is now dehumanizing immigrants, and family separation is now its policy. We should be in the streets protesting this.
One fact to emphasize when discussing this, asylum-seekers are not breaking the law. This policy is not about enforcing any law, it is about closing our borders to those who are fleeing domestic violence, gang warfare, and other horrific conditions. It is about making a shameful choice, as a country, that is further eroding our international standing and credibility.
Duane
@trollhattan: I wish those idiots would go to Florida. Anywhere really. Their ruining our state. Take that disgraced Greitens with them too. Damn carpetbagger should be tarred, feathered, and ran out of Missouri.
Major Major Major Major
Anybody missing a 29-pound cat?
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@B.B.A.:
That hasn’t aged well at all.
OT: A story I’ve been contemplating, (I’ve mentioned it many times here), has gone through many changes. I decided that I liked the backstory (the past set in a fictionalized version of the 80s) better than a realistic nuclear holocaust. Less complicated (no time travel needed) too. Recently, I’ve been toying with the notion of making up a world that is very similar to ours but has analogues of real places. For example, the United States of America would be named the “Federated States of Vespucia” or the “United Federation of Vespucia”. It would be fun to see how creative I could be with names.
I’ve run into a few problems with this idea though. The motivations of one of the villains ties into a lot of real world history and making fictional analogues for all of these places, people, and events could prove to be onerous.
I’m thinking I should just ditch the idea.
Mary G
@Major Major Major Major: Chubbs is the right name for him!
That’s the shelter where I got my beloved Sophie in 1990. They will fix him up.
The article below the one on the white supremacist is about Ghouliani. He’s nuts. He denied sleeping with the woman his third wife accused him of cheating on her with, despite having taken a trip with her, and has fallen for yet another woman who’s a Republican fundraiser. His Via gra bills must be through the roof.
Ruckus
@opiejeanne:
I liked even more that when the series was over the next president sworn in was better than the TV show was. And was real, not an actor.
Major Major Major Major
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
Just fork your universe off in the 70’s or something.
LesGS
@Major Major Major Major: Oof! My Max was only 26 pounds when we got him. He still had issues grooming himself though. He’s a svelte 19 pounds now, which is appropriate for his frame. (Rearing up puts him at eye level with whatever interesting thing I am chopping on my cutting board.) I think he’s a Ragdoll, big floofy boy with blue eyes.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.)
How is this guy not Florida Man? Come on, Florida Man, get in the game here.
Mnemosyne
@LesGS:
If your cat is that big, he may be a Norwegian Forest Cat. They’re closely related to Maine Coons (in fact, the breeds are hard to tell apart). They’re the largest domesticated cats.
Our cat Keaton is either a NFC or a MC. Every time we take him to the vet, they open the carrier and say, “My, he’s a big boy!” He’s about the height of a Jack Russell terrier so, yeah, very tall for a cat.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Major Major Major Major:
Well, the background of the Cold War and the everpresent risk of a nuclear exchange is pretty important to the villain’s motivations. He’s the powerful head of the largest conglomerate on Earth and is obsessed with the notion of the Ubermensch. He’s extremely arrogant and believes he alone can save humanity from itself, believing free will is the root of all of humanity’s problems. That’s the story he likes to tell himself and others. The reality is that he’s a power hungry asshole who doesn’t want the world to potentially end and live forever.
As for making analogues, I figured it would fit if I was expanding on the setting of a cartoon.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: Last time Samwise saw the vet, she weighed him, and said, “Well, actually, that’s a pretty healthy weight for a cat so… long… and wide…”
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Ruckus: FYI, “He/she seems nice” is a long-running Wonkette in-joke, and possibly here as well, used to signify the exact opposite of its literal meaning. You may already be aware of this, of course; I’m… very sleep deprived at the moment, so it’s entirely possible I just completely misread the subtext here.
@Ruckus: I don’t think I could re-watch the series right now, just as I can’t watch video of Obama/Hillary Clinton speaking, or for that matter, probably, handle watching video of Anthony Bourdain right now. It’s too painful to have such visceral reminders of what we’ve lost as a country/species.
Yutsano
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: Since you’re in the millenial cohort, want to know something else y’all are responsible for?
Ruckus
@(((CassandraLeo))):
Yeah, I was being sarcastic. I have occasionally been known for that, minor character flaw. Or asset if that’s the way you roll.
I haven’t watched for a long time, mostly due to the same reasoning as you. That a TV show could be that realistic and good and not measure up to the last president and now we have the haters, fuckers and thieves maladministration. It is possible that TWW made up somewhat for GWB in all his glory. We were able to have some hope that some people weren’t zombie asswipes. But that hope has been set on fire by the cast of Shitstorm for President.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Yutsano:
Oh, I’m a late-millenial. I’m still too young for kids imo.
LesGS
@Mnemosyne: Max, upon poking his head out of his carrier, had one vet tech gasp, “My God, his head is massive!” Fortunately, he’s very gentle.
I have no idea what breed(s) he might be. I lean toward at least part Ragdoll because of his blue eyes and untufted ears. The males can get pretty big.
Major Major Major Major
@Yutsano: @? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: Millennials to snake people is an excellent browser extension btw
@LesGS: Samwise has this weirdly tiny head.
Yutsano
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: It just makes me laugh how Forbes needs to blame millenials for not hatching out kids early enough so Grandma can dump the old homestead. Amazing how they completely ignore the fact that A) most millenials can’t even afford these big houses and B) despite their supposed data fewer millenials want to live in suburbia.
And now I collapse because I am tired as all get out.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
Which also makes me wonder: did anyone at time (1985-86) really think the USSR was going to collapse any time soon? The villain’s corporation has extensive ties to the government. I’ll have to do some digging to see what the US government thought of the Soviet Union’s long-term stability.
Major Major Major Major
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: Adam would probably be happy to give you an idea of where to look.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Yutsano:
Forbes sucks. It seems Millenials are everyone’s punching bag just like the Baby Boomers when they were young. We’re lazy and don’t want to work. We’re “snowflakes”. It’s all bullshit of course. The future belongs to us, as it belongs to every new generation. My generation will set it right (I hope).
Jager
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: I had a hell of an idea for short story: A Harvard grad (ex hockey player) is drafted, goes to Vietnam. He is back on campus in the fall of 71 for grad school. People keep calling him Oliver or Barrett or Oliver Barrett IV. Young women, look him in the eye and say they are so sorry about Jenny. The poor guy who has been on an all expense tour of SE Asia hasn’t a clue about what’s going on. It’s driving him crazy, he finally calls up a guy who he went to undergrad with, lived across the hall, they were drinking buddies, Al Gore’s roommate, a guy from Texas named Tommy. Tommy sets him straight, “That wimpy shit Segal wrote this book, about a rich kid, guy played hockey, the guy falls in love with a poor chick who’s going to Radcliffe on a scholarship, a lot of bullshit goes down and she dies of cancer, the fuckin’ book took off and they made a movie out of it and I’ll be damned, if the actor, guy named Ryan, they hired to play the lead looks just like you Jimmy. Then I got a part in the movie. Fuckin’ crazy huh? Book was called Love Story, same as the movie. Kind of a big deal. At first I thought that goddamned Segal wrote the book about you but your girlfriend Jenny was from the richest family in Rhode Island, she was blond and you were on one of them phony academic scholarships they give to dumb hockey players. So anyway, the big line in the movie was “Love means you never have to say you’re sorry”, now what in the hell does that even mean?”
Amir Khalid
If any Jackals are thinking of visiting, here’s some real-deal Malaysian street food as sampled by a travelling Arkansan. Notice from the comments that RM10 (the exchange rate is about RM4 = US$1) is considered a steep price for these victuals.
opiejeanne
@Yutsano: It’s not just the millennials. I have three kids, one will be 48, one is 39, and the youngest is 35. No grandkids. They’re all slackers, the lot of them.
Brachiator
I say round up everyone connected to alt-right groups and put them into camps. Separate out the ones who show signs of mental illness and try to rehabilitate them.
Deny entry to the US of any foreign nationals who belong to alt-right groups.
ETA. I was not a regular watcher of The West Wing. But almost every episode I watched had a great story, great acting, great writing. Wasn’t the original concept of the show that POTUS would not be seen?
opiejeanne
@Yutsano: The Millennials will figure things out, I trust them to. Some other, younger Boomers or GenX will buy our semi-rural place when we get too old to handle it, and right now I feel like this is it. Nothing terribly wrong with either of us but the little surgeries and minor ailments this spring have allowed the weeds to flourish. I mean, the place looks terrible even by our scruffy standards.
The Olds yelled at us Boomers for so many things, and not reproducing enough to suit them was one of their complaints. There was one year in the school district’s enrollment chart where there were very few kids enrolled. I think the birth year was 75-76 when the huge dip showed up. . Riverside Unified School District had 700 7th graders and 8 middle schools. The number of 7th graders per middle school was usually about 400. When we had our second child in 1979 people would come up to us just to stare at her, like they’d never seen a baby before because there had been such a “drought” until then.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Brachiator: No, POTUS is seen at the end of the first episode(he had a bicycle accident).
opiejeanne
@Brachiator: We watched it after Obama was elected and loved it. It was so topical.
We started watching it again during the campaign in 2016 but hadn’t finished it when the unbelievable happened,, and haven’t had the heart to even look at it since. I think the last one we watched was about the senior staff getting stuck in the middle of Iowa, the campaign bus left without them and they had a terrible time getting back to DC, but that was only half the fun.
NotMax
@>Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Vespucci, with the double C, please.
As Firesign Theater sang in a throwaway line in 1968, “God bless Vespucciland.”
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax:
They had other kinds?
(Off to bed with me.)
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Hm. Where have we heard that before?
;)
Redshift
If anyone’s still up, go look at Mars toward the south. It’s incredibly spectacular, and noticeably bigger than usual. In July, it’s going to be the closest to Earth since 2003.
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
By putting them in a secure facility with stimulation for their bodies and minds and a psychiatrist ratio of 1-3 or 4 inmates. All inmates spending lots of time with their shrinks, multiple shrinks seeing multiple inmates. psychiatric drugs and education in cultural history.
Off shore, Virgin Islands. Use them in intensive experimentation attempting to install a soul into their minds. Being able to repair these kinds of abnormal mental construction would be very valuable lesson to learn.
If they don’t improve to human levels of empathy in some set period put them down humanely. Just a thought experiment, they obviously won’t ever bee safe to live in society without some kind ot breakthrough in treatment of their lack of human caring and understanding.
msb
@ Lapassionara
Bingo.
This guy reminds me of something Morris Dees (SPLC founder) said in his autobiography: that the guys who murdered Michael Donald became Klansmen because they were such losers that the KKK was the only group that would take them. There ought to be a better option for such people.
J R in WV
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
Everyone BUT the CIA thought the Soviet Union was unsustainable with their defense based command economy. They still are, with a command economy driven by Kleptocrats rather than by commissars. It’s artificially propped up and doomed to fail.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Brachiator: @?BillinGlendaleCA: They originally intended to use POTUS sparingly, but Martin Sheen gave such a commanding performance that they almost immediately dropped this idea.
@Ruckus: Yep. It was much easier to re-watch during the Obama era. I still felt it was naïve about our politics, but it wasn’t serving as a reminder of a much nicer time in our nation’s history.
Um, spoiler warning, I guess:
Hell, the ending pretty much predicted the Obama years. Santos is literally based on Obama and Vinick is literally based on McCain; the writers for the show explicitly confirmed the former, and while they said Vinick wasn’t directly based on any real-life politician… come on. He’s McCain. Despite that, though… well, it’s really naïve in assuming much better faith from Republicans than most of them ever demonstrate. But nonetheless, it was watchable then, and I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to watch it now.
Jim Parish
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was predicting the USSR’s collapse and dismemberment as early as 1978.
Joel
He should gel all the therapy he needs while spending the rest of his life in protective custody
evodevo
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: IIRC, the CIA had a realistic idea of the state of the Soviet Union, but the Repubs and the media were all in on the fiction of EVIL EMPIRE!!11!!!!, so your general public, as today, was NOT well informed about the paper tiger…
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@evodevo:
IIRC, the conservatives thought the CIA was wrong and came up with the idea of “Team B”, which rewrote analyses to reflect their beliefs that the USSR was stronger than it really was.
Those analyses gained traction in the media.
FridayNext
Is it wrong of me that my most immediate response to the train story was, “well if you are the conductor, THEN GET OUT OF THE ENGINEER’S SEAT!”
Dumbass.
Steeplejack
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
Russian dissident Andrei Amalrik published a book called Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? in 1970. Got a lot of buzz in the United States. I remember reading it sometime in the ’70s.
The Wikipedia article is interesting:
As the snippet above mentioned, Amalrik didn’t live to see if his prediction panned out. He died in a car wreck in 1980.
NorthLeft12
I know there always were people like this around, and they were always committing dangerous and illegal acts, but what I will hate [I don’t use that word lightly] about Trump and his fellow high profile bigots, and toadying enablers is that they have given them a license to act out their worst impulses in public.
A growing number of these deplorable people are no longer internalizing their hate and anger……..and they think that is okay.
Gin & Tonic
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman): Team B was what we now call the neo-cons – the intellectual children of Scoop Jackson and the Committee on the Present Danger. Names you’d recognize, like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. But the CIA authorized its creation (under then-head GHW Bush.)
different-church-lady
Wow, “white working class economic anxiety” sure does play itself out strangely.
Neldob
He needs a “Deplorable” t-shirt and a MAGA had.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@Gin & Tonic:
Yes he did.
I unintentionally gave the impression that Team B was an outside group instead of one created by then Director Bush.
Mea Culpa.
Faithful Lurker
@Amir Khalid: Amir, thank you for the video. We lived in KL for 2 years ion the early 90s. I can’t tell you how much I miss the food and especially the te tarak. When we came back to MI I was appalled to see crowds of white folks, they all looked alike. Pink and bland. I wish the video had showed some Indian food or the coastal sea food joints.
Thank you.
Parfigliano
@FridayNext: probably not as wrong as me. My initial respons to the train guy story was he should have been shot after asking “what are you going to do shoot me”
Amir Khalid
@Faithful Lurker:
Teh tarik is a tasty but deeply unhealthy drink. it’s made with sweetened condensed milk, and it’s got way more sugar than tea in it.
Noah Brand
Who wants to bet Mr. I’m The Conductor has read Atlas Shrugged a lot?
This occurs because I asked myself “Who the fuck thinks trains are that big a deal?” and the name Ayn Rand came up immediately.