Tag Archives: stupid human tricks

politics, poor judgment, stupid people, true crime, Trump

A leisurely drunken drive through the neighborhood in a stolen backhoe…

I suppose I could rant about how Amy Coney Barrett was just rammed into the Supreme Court by the hypocritical Republican Party. God knows, she’s an inappropriate choice for the Supreme Court, just as Brett Kavanaugh was. But I don’t really feel like writing about how the newest Justice was a literal handmaid in the Christian group, People of Praise. According to The Washington Post:

A 2010 People of Praise directory states that she held the title of “handmaid,” a leadership position for women in the community, according to a directoryexcerpt obtained by The Washington Post.

Also, while in law school, Barrett lived at the South Bend home of People of Praise’s influential co-founder Kevin Ranaghan and his wife, Dorothy, who together helped establish the group’s male-dominated hierarchy and view of gender roles. The group was one of many to grow out of the charismatic Christian movement, which sought a more intense and communal religious experience by embracing such practices as shared living, faith healing and speaking in tongues.

Nah… enough has been written about that fuckery and how it’s liable to blur the line between religion and state. I’ll leave that alone. Instead, I’d like to write about the latest fuckery done by a Trump supporter.

Some readers may recall a post I wrote in 2019 about two Trump supporters who got drunk and shot each other while wearing a bulletproof vest. Well… they weren’t named as Trump supporters in the news article about the incident, but it wasn’t too hard to figure out who they backed for the White House by their idiotic and self-destructive actions. When I read about what they did, I knew they were Trumpers. And then I visited their pages on Facebook and my hunch was immediately confirmed.

I wrote about that case and some Trump loving guy who happened to see that a mutual friend left me a comment, read it and chewed me out for bashing Trump supporters. So I wrote a follow up post defending my “leaps of logic”, as the commenter put it, concluding that these two dumbass guys were Trump supporters. I really think it’s something when all I have to do is read about some dumb thing someone did and nine times out of ten, it will turn out the person supports Donald Trump. He loves the uneducated. He’s said so. But he would never give them the time of day.

He loves them… BUT– his old pal, Howard Stern said he is “disgusted” by MAGA voters…
Yup… and Trump supporters are mostly too dumb to see this and continue to idolize the orange menace.

So… on with today’s topic, which concerns a 26 year old Trump supporter named James Blight. Mr. Blight decided to get “blotto” on whiskey last Saturday. Then, demonstrating the predictably poor judgment of people who prefer to vote for a rapist/conman for POTUS, Blight stole a backhoe, which he did not know how to drive, and proceeded to rampage through a central Florida neighborhood. Bear in mind that Blight was also drunk at the time, and now claims that he doesn’t remember most of the day.

Blight drove the backhoe through Haines City, Florida and destroyed several front yards and a fence, picking off Biden-Harris campaign signs as well as a city-owned speed limit sign. He claims that he could not help but hit the signs while driving the heavy construction equipment that he did not know how to operate… while he was drunk and cussing out people. I think this quote from Haines City Police Chief Jim Elensky sums it up quite nicely:

“It’s absurd that a grown man could think he had the right to destroy someone else’s property based on a difference in political opinion. The fact that he was driving this heavy equipment, that he did not know how to operate, down busy roads could have been disastrous. We’re thankful that no one was hurt in this matter…”

And now, Mr. Blight, the emboldened Trump supporter who claims he was drunk and has no memory of his actions in a predominantly Black neighborhood, is cooling his heels on grand theft auto and trespassing charges. Meanwhile, one family whose Biden-Harris signs were destroyed by Blight has responded by putting up twenty more of them.

I’ve been reading a lot of stories about people taking it upon themselves to vandalize signs and steal them from people’s yards. And lest anyone think I’m picking only on Trump supporters, I will admit that I’ve read stories of Biden supporters stealing Trump signs, too. Personally, I have never understood why a person needs to put a sign in their yard indicating support for political candidates. I doubt most people are swayed by those signs, although they do show spirit, I guess. In any case, a person has the right to put what they want on their private property… unless, of course, they live in a neighborhood with a homeowner’s association that forbids it. I hope when we finally do buy a house of our own, it won’t be in a place with those kinds of rules. We’ll do our best to avoid HOAs. See? That’s my conservative side coming out to play.

But if you live in a place where you’re not bound by city ordinances or HOAs, you should have the right to post a sign, if you want to, on your own property. You should expect that no one will steal it or vandalize it without repercussions. And you certainly should not have to worry about a drunken Trump supporter driving a stolen backhoe through your neighborhood, cussing people out and destroying your private property. I’m not sure what Mr. Blight thought this would accomplish. I guess he’s terrified that people will vote to take back the country from the orange narcissist in charge and try to reverse the terrible damage he’s done to our reputation worldwide.

To be clear… until Trump, I really didn’t have a problem with Republicans. I didn’t hate George W. Bush the way many of my liberal friends did. I didn’t have much of an opinion about most conservative politicians, even if I didn’t agree with a lot of their views. Donald Trump has changed my opinions about the Republican Party. I still think people should vote for the person they wish to vote for, but I think if you’re aligning yourself with people like James Blight, or those two morons who got drunk and shot each other while wearing a bulletproof vest, it’s not the best look. These men are definitely not “thinkers”.

And as I read about Trump’s plan to force civil servants to be loyal to him or lose their jobs, I am especially fearful about the future if he wins another term. It makes me very grateful that Bill decided to be a contractor instead of a government employee. I wish Trump supporting people would wake up and see that they’ve been had. Here’s a quote from Ronald Sanders, a Trump appointee who recently resigned over Trump’s order regarding civil servants:

The order, which could affect tens of thousands or more career positions involved in making or carrying out policy, “is nothing more than a smoke screen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the President, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process,” Ronald Sanders wrote in his letter of resignation Sunday from the Federal Salary Council.

“I simply cannot be part of an Administration that seeks . . . to replace apolitical expertise with political obeisance. Career Federal employees are legally and duty-bound to be nonpartisan; they take an oath to preserve and protect our Constitution and the rule of law . . . not to be loyal to a particular President or Administration,” he wrote.

Wake up, Trump supporting America. Quit drinking the whiskey and driving the backhoe over everyone else’s rights. Donald Trump is not a “fit leader” in any sense of the term. He must be voted out before the country gets backhoed by his stupid, cruel, and un-American policies. Believe me, he doesn’t care about you at all. Howard Stern should know better than anyone.

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stupid people

I feel like I’m living in an episode of ER…

Remember ER, the wildly popular show created by the late Michael Crichton? I was a super fan of it from day one. I watched it religiously from its premiere in 1994, until I left the United States for Armenia. Then, when I came back in 1997, I went back to watching it. I downloaded all of the episodes and have seen them all at least twice.

One thing I remember about ER is that the writers were always coming up with some new fantastic situation involving the cast. One episode I remember in particular involved quarantine. Everyone in the emergency department was forced to stay isolated due to an epidemic. Seems like all of the medical shows have some storyline like that one. I remember Trapper John, M.D. also had a show about an extremely dangerous and contagious plague.

A 1980 episode of Trapper John, M.D. called Quarantine. It was very memorable.

I just watched this episode again. It’s about a baby with pneumonic plague. I looked it up and I see that it’s a lot like COVID-19, only it’s caused by bacteria rather than a virus. Antibiotics would help, although it seems there isn’t a mild version like there is with COVID-19. Notice that the mom is wearing a gown, hair covering, and a face mask, but no GLOVES! And she takes off the gown while still in the room with the baby. None of the staff is wearing PPE properly. They wear gowns, but no masks or gloves.

Also, this episode is about illegal immigration, which is also oddly timely at this point. I guess we were more humane in 1980, though, because Gonzo promises the illegal alien mom that he’ll do everything he can to keep her from being deported. I shudder to think about what the conditions are like at the southern border of the United States right now.

A clip from an ER episode called “Lockdown”. I believe that one involved a smallpox outbreak.

I’m sure most medical shows have at least one episode’s storyline related to quarantines. They’re exciting and unusual, and they bring out the best– and the worst– in people. A lot of folks are panicking due to the COVID-19 crisis, and some of them are doing incredibly stupid and selfish things, just as they always do in medical dramas. This morning, I read a news article about a couple in Canada who visited a grocery store and bought out the entire meat department– two shopping carts worth of stuff.

Caught on tape cleaning out the meat section…

Dan Marcotte and his girlfriend, residents of Lake Country in British Colombia, reportedly went to a Sav On Foods and bragged about “cleaning house”, as they also wondered if they could afford to pay for all the meat they’d thrown into their carts. They’d run in front of other customers, blocking them from being able to buy meat as they proceeded to hog all of the pork, beef, and chicken. Now, Marcotte is complaining because he’s getting negative reactions from the public, including death threats.

Here in Germany, people have been “panic buying” as well. Just as it has in the United States, toilet paper has become a hot commodity, as have hand sanitizer and hand soap and, curiously, flour. However, the local powers that be have put a stop to the “Hamsterkaufen” nonsense by placing limits on the numbers of these items people can buy at a time. It seems sad to me that this would be necessary in our so-called era of civilization, but it sounds like meat products are going to have to be rationed too, to stop greedy, selfish people like Dan Marcotte and his ilk from hoarding.

Marcotte explains that he has a “big heart” and used his moving company (which gets one solitary one star review) to help people escape the wildfires in 2017 and 2018. But now he complains that people have forgotten his past kindnesses in the wake of his regrettable decision to buy up all of the meat at a grocery store. I don’t condone people threatening other people’s lives over something like this, but I also don’t blame people for thinking Marcotte is a jerk and for letting him know that he is. What he and his girlfriend did is selfish and unreasonable, and karma can be a massive bitch with big teeth.

Marcotte claims that he felt “anxious” about the virus and had bought the meat entirely for his family. He says he has a mental health problem that causes him to “overreact” in certain situations (I don’t recall ever going through anything like this before in my 47 years, but what do I know?) Well, Dan, what about other people’s families? Have you thought about that? Guess not. In fairness to Dan, I did read that he is eager to “make things right”. He donated $1000 to a local food bank, which theoretically could feed up to 3000 people. However, he reportedly has no plans to return the meat he’s hoarding. I wonder if Dan has considered that money is very nice, but if there’s nothing to buy with it, it’s worthless. He says he’s still getting death threats and negative publicity, which will surely affect his business. I don’t think he deserves to have his livelihood destroyed, but he really should give back some of that meat.

As for Bill… he was finally let off “ROM” (restriction of movement) status yesterday, so he went to the commissary, where his temperature was taken, hands were washed, and he was allowed to shop in a group of about fifteen people at a time. He said it was a pretty relaxed shopping experience, although a lot of the shelves were cleaned out. Although there was plenty of TP available, he couldn’t find any hand soap that wasn’t in a bar form. Naturally, there was also no hand sanitizer, and Bill found three bags of flour– one all purpose and two self rising. He got the last of the all purpose flour.

Meanwhile, my allergies are acting up, and I have a very annoying dry cough. But that’s normal for me at this time of year. I don’t feel sick and don’t have a fever, and I mostly isolate myself even when there isn’t a “plague”. Hopefully, once the pollination is finished, I’ll stop coughing and wheezing. Asthma is not a joke, but it’s probably more humorous than a bout with the COVID-19 virus is.

I know there have also been some good stories about people being kind and generous. I guess this story about the “meat packers” really amazed me. I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. People can be very selfish and greedy, particularly during a crisis. This is a time when people show their true colors. I just hope it’s not an extended time, because I’m not sure how long people are going to be able to tolerate this “new normal”.

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silliness

Housework can be dangerous…

I hurt myself yesterday. My right ring finger is currently swollen and sore, and has an unusually limited range of motion. It doesn’t hurt to use it for typing, but there is pain when I try to use it for scrubbing. Consequently, I probably won’t be doing much cleaning today. Housework can be dangerous.

I was doing housework when the spectacularly stupid injury occurred. I had stripped the sheets off of the bed so I could wash them. There are six pillows on my bed and I put them on the floor so I could get everything off of the mattress. I also have a backrest that I use when I sit on the bed to watch TV. It has a handle on top of it.

That handle almost killed me yesterday…

As I was making the bed, I reached down to get one of the pillows so I could replace the pillow case. The top of my foot somehow got caught in the handle on top of the “husband” backrest and I lost my balance, suddenly hurtling forward. Instinctively, I put up my right hand to protect my face from hitting the sloped wall so common in Germany.

I hate sloped walls/ceilings. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve hit my head on one of these damned things in every German house we’ve lived in.

My right ring finger hit the wall with so much force that it hyperextended backwards. The sudden wrenching of my phalange led to copious swearing and a massive endorphin rush.

Pain is such a rush.
“There could be some major damage here…”

I can’t really tell by looking at the finger that it’s injured. There’s a little shadowy bruise on the backside of the digit and there’s a bit of swelling that is only obvious to me. It doesn’t hurt quite as much today either, although it’s hard to straighten it. I’m relieved about that, since I couldn’t help but remember something that happened to my late father at the end of his life. He almost lost his middle finger after injuring it while he was dreaming. My dad suffered from post traumatic stress disorder due to being abused by his father and spending too much time in a war zone. Dad was deployed to Vietnam, and was profoundly affected by what he did there.

I have read that when people are dreaming, most of the time their muscles are so relaxed that they don’t function and they’re pretty much “paralyzed”. This is what keeps most dreamers from acting out while they sleep. However, the “paralysis” that stops people from acting out their dreams doesn’t always work. Besides having PTSD, my dad also suffered from several sleep disorders, including sleep apnea and REM Sleep Behavior Disorder. So he would have vivid dreams that would cause him to jump out of bed, scream, shout, and throw punches. One time, when he was sleeping, he threw a wild punch and hit the wall, which really hurt his finger.

Unfortunately, he didn’t take proper care of the injury, and the finger got badly infected. There was some talk that he’d need to have it amputated, but fortunately the injury eventually healed. I remember being freaked out that my dad might need to have his middle finger removed. Then I was reminded of another funny story involving my dad and middle fingers.

Back in 1983, the Waterside was opened in Norfolk, Virginia. In the early days, Waterside was a really cool place to shop. It had a lot of unique stores and restaurants. My parents took me to see it, even though we lived somewhat far from Norfolk. I was about eleven years old at the time.

One of the shops we visited that day was a hat store. They had all kinds of funny hats in there that ranged from the elegant to the profane. I remember laughing uproariously at a baseball hat that had a felt dog on the brim, passing a plastic fire hydrant. You pulled a little plastic string, and the dog’s leg would lift on the hydrant. I think I begged my mom to get it for me, but she refused. My dad, on the other hand, ended up purchasing a black baseball cap that had a yellow felt hand on the brim that formed a middle finger salute.

The hat looked like this, except the hand was made of bright yellow felt stuffed with batting. It was really funny!

Despite his 22 years in the Air Force, my dad was never big on profanity. I think it was because his alcoholic and abusive father swore a lot and his mother, whom everyone adored, never did. Consequently, in 1983, my dad was unaware of what displaying the middle finger means. He showed the hat to my mom, who did know what it meant. She was shocked that he would ever buy such a hat, and she said, “You’re not going to wear that hat in public, are you?”

“Sure, I am.” Dad replied. “I’m gonna wear it to Rotary.”

Mom said, “No, you’re not going to wear that!”

“Yes, I am! I’m going to wear it to my next Rotary Club meeting and say, ‘I don’t agree with any of you!'”

“Do you know what that means?” Mom asked, completely aghast.

“Doesn’t it mean ‘go to hell?'” Dad asked, starting to look a little worried.

“NO!” Mom said, leaning over to whisper in his ear.

She needn’t have bothered trying to protect my virgin ears, since I was watching a lot of HBO and already had a very advanced dirty word and gesture vocabulary for a kid. As many people who know me realize, I still use vulgar language with pride. That hat wound up underneath the driver’s seat in my dad’s ugly bright orange VW van. He never wore it anywhere, yet didn’t throw it away for the longest time. I wish I had pilfered it from him. I’d wear that hat with glee at any pro Trump rally.

When I heard that my dad might lose his middle finger due to injuring it, I couldn’t help but laugh at the memory that he’d once bought a baseball cap with a middle finger on it, not knowing that the middle finger is a very vulgar hand gesture that, if flashed at someone in Germany, can actually lead to arrest and/or fines.

I’m not going to need to have my finger amputated. It’s just going to hurt for awhile. Sometimes I have a habit of thinking of worst case scenarios, which causes unnecessary worry. I don’t think this injury is going to affect me for too long, although it may be awhile before I can straighten my finger properly again.

Most injuries are caused by something stupid, like tripping on the handle of a backrest. Who would have thought that something that was supposed to make life easier would cause me to fly into a wall and hyperextend my finger? Too bad it wasn’t my middle finger. At least then, I’d have a funny story.

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stupid people

Hold my beer…

I read an initially amusing news story this morning about two guys in Rogers, Arkansas who both wound up arrested after shooting each other while wearing bulletproof vests. On March 31, 2019, Charles Eugene Ferris, 50, and Christopher Hicks, 36, were sitting outside on the back porch drinking. Ferris was wearing a bulletproof vest, so naturally he decided he needed to test it out. He told Hicks to shoot him.

Hicks, obviously an obliging sort, shot his friend with a .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle. The shot hurt, and it pissed off Ferris, who then gave the vest to his friend to try on. Ferris then unloaded the clip into Hicks’s back. Fortunately… or maybe unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the bulletproof vest did its job and the two men weren’t seriously injured. But when Ferris complained of pain after the shooting, his wife ordered him to visit the emergency department of their local hospital.

The hospital staff determined that Ferris’s injuries could have been a result of foul play. They called the police, who interviewed Ferris. Ferris didn’t want his friend to get into trouble, so he came up with a bullshit story about taking fire after having been paid $200 to “protect an asset”. He claimed that he took fire after driving off gunmen who shot him. The truth came out later when the police officers spoke to Ferris’s, wife, Leslie.

Both men were arrested and have been charged with aggravated assault. They are both free on $5000 bonds. The rifle and the vest have been confiscated, and the men are under orders not to contact each other. They will be arraigned May 13th.

As I read this story, I couldn’t help but notice how sheepish these two guys looked. I’m sure it seemed like harmless fun at the time, trying out the bulletproof vest to see if it actually worked. Naturally, alcohol was involved… and probably boredom. These two guys are probably Trump fans, too. Yep… in fact, I looked up Ferris on Facebook and he has a picture of himself holding the severed head of a ram. He’s even some kind of minister. Indeed, he is a fan of Donald Trump and a vehement pro-lifer. And yet, he also gets drunk and shoots his friend for shits and giggles.

I hate to say this, but it seems that America is full of idiots like these two guys. They are all about gun rights, restricting access to abortion, and being racist. Ferris purports to be some kind of religious leader and has several pictures of himself on social media dressed in religious garb. And he also has a very public Facebook page, loaded with memes about conservative politics, being anti-abortion, and maintaining the right to bear arms. He and his friend have proven that neither of them should have any access to weapons. They lack critical thinking skills and good judgment.

This morning, I also read a very sad story about a family that fled violence in Honduras. They probably would have liked to have stayed in their homeland, but they were targeted by gangs who were looking for money. They headed to the United States, where they were separated in Calexico, at the California border. They were trying to reach San Francisco, where the mom had an uncle who might help them. The youngest of the three children with the family, a toddler girl, was snatched from her father’s arms and sent to San Antonio, Texas. The father, who had previously been expelled as an illegal alien, was arrested. It took the mother going to the press and threatening to go to Texas to retrieve her child before U.S. authorities returned the girl, thinner, suffering from a hacking cough, and infested with lice.

I wonder if Charles Ferris, a supposed Christian with his pro-America, anti-abortion, pro-gun views, would be in favor of helping this family? Would he want them protected, provided for, and loved the way Christ taught people should love their fellow man? I have a feeling he hasn’t thought much about it. It looks to me like his religion is more about maintaining white power. I see that he’s even proud of his sudden notoriety. Ferris is a founder of a couple of Facebook groups. On one them, he re-posted this.

It doesn’t matter that Donald Trump is a horrible person. He’s seen as an “exterminator” of sorts, getting rid of the “undesirable raccoons”… which actually, even sounds horribly racist. “Coon” is a racist term, after all.

Ferris runs a page called “Poor Knights of Christ”, which may or may not have anything to do with racism. However, when I look at the picture of the men in that group, I can’t help but be reminded of the Ku Klux Klan. Click on the associated Web site, and you go to a site with the word “militia” in its address. Having looked at the Web site, it appears to be some kind of Catholic organization, perhaps married with the Masons. Upon further examination of this guy’s social media, I found both of these photos…

Hmmm…
Does he not notice that he wears a robe that looks much like this?

I just can’t wrap my head around this. This man is supposedly a “man of God”, but he gets drunk, shoots his friend, lies to the police, and posts all kinds of vile, hateful rhetoric. Plus, he openly supports an immoral criminal who is leading our country down the drain. And he openly admits to selling his soul to the devil that is Donald Trump, simply because of illegal immigration– brown people invading the United States because they’re being terrorized by gangs in their own country. He supports forcing women to give birth, but he has no problem killing people who have already been born and are in need of help. He likens them to invasive “raccoons”.

It’s nauseating and scary. I’m now kind of sorry I didn’t just laugh off this story. But I have a habit of falling into rabbit holes, don’t I?

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