Yeah, It Was Supposed To Be A Guest Post

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Yeah, it was supposed to be a guest post, but the hamsters ate it.

So, since I’m actually being nibbled to death by ducks (in league with the hamsters) we’re going to devote today to “D*mn it, Babylon bee, you had one job!”

I mean, I understand they’re supposed to be satire.  They probably do too. But when Poe’s law reigns, the Bee has become…

America’s paper of record!

Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Everyone’s Pay Should Be Equal, But My Pay Should Be More Equal Than Others

Chick-Fil-A Celebrates Pride Month By Serving Delicious Chicken Sandwiches To Everyone Just Like All The Other Months

House Democrats Draft Legislation That Would Make It A Hate Crime To Eat At Chick-Fil-A

Vox Calls For Dictionary.com To Take Down Definitions Of Words They Don’t Like

I mean, really.  How hard is it to write satire.

This one is a good example, actually.  Who would promise to cure a disease if elected?

Elizabeth Warren Promises To Cure Smallpox.

Oh, wait, never mind.

79 thoughts on “Yeah, It Was Supposed To Be A Guest Post”

  1. Decades ago Will Rogers mused that it he had an easy job – the whole government (or was it “only” Congress?) provided his material.

  2. Kinda scary. Creepy Slow Shotgun Joe said he’d cure cancer if elected POTUS. I was sure I was looking at an article from the Bee. I wasn’t. He actually said it.

    When Heinlein thought up The Crazy Years, I doubt he thought things would get this bonkers.

    1. Nothing new there – remember when John Kerry’s running mate, John “Two Americas” Edwards, said that if elected they would develop stem cell therapies that would let Christopher Reeve walk again? And the Gaslight Media not only never challenged it, they damned Bush/Cheney for wanting to keep Reeve in his wheelchair?

      1. Ohhh, yeah. So is Biden’s focus $$$funding$$$ or support for murdering babies to get research materials or both?

      2. Maybe one of the Democrat runners will promise to raise Reeves from the grave?

    2. Yep, the idiot Biden actually said that he’d sure cancer. :wow:

    3. In fairness, if you elected me to high office, broke the rule of law, and gave me the backing of a murderous totalitarian dictatorship, there is a disease that I could ‘cure’. For sufficiently insane definitions of cure, that you would not be inclined to credit as valid. Plus, in practice it would not be all that effective, and the costs of providing anyone with such power would not be worth actually curing any disease.

    4. My parents know a very prominent oncologist. I suspect Biden’s remark will come up when ndxt they bump into him.

        1. And references to Biden being known to all Washington as a buffoon as far back as the 80’s.

    5. The one from Heinlein that is really bothering me is from the opening scene from “Year of the Jackpot”. A young lady at a bus stop has been doing a impromptu strip down and our hero is heading towards her.

      The transvestites were frankly staring. The male member of the
      team wore a frilly feminine blouse, but his skirt was a conservative Scottish kilt. His female companion wore a business suit and Homburg hat; she stared with lively interest.

      As Breen approached, the girl hung a scrap of nylon on the bus stop bench, then reached for her shoes. A police officer, looking hot and unhappy, crossed with the lights and came up to them.

      “Okay,” he said in a tired voice, “that’ll be all, lady. Get them duds back on and clear out of here.”

      The female transvestite took a cigar out of her mouth. “Just what business is it of yours, officer?” she asked.

      The cop turned to her. “Keep out of this!” He ran his eyes over her getup. and that of her companion. “I ought to run both of you in, too.”

      The transvestite raised her eyebrows. “Arrest us for being clothed, arrest her for not being. I think I’m going to like this.”

      The only part of the whole thing not believable in 2019 America is that a cop would intervene at such a striptease. The trans couple, one of whom is a ready lawyer and activist (as seen a couple of paragraphs later) feels like the norm.

    6. “When Heinlein thought up The Crazy Years, I doubt he thought things would get this bonkers.”

      IIRC it was “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” or maybe it was “Friday” where the governor of California did a walk-on wearing a full Indian headdress. Heinlein just had the state wrong, but you can’t predict everything perfectly.

    7. what he really meant was “I’ll spend billions, spending money to the Appropriately Connected Progressive People, just like Obama did with Soylindra”

  3. Oh well. When you’re being nibbled to death by ducks is the perfect time t make a down comforter.

    1. Don’t let a good duck go to waste!  Eat them and put them out of your misery.
      For those who can eat the fowl, I did a quick Google and Food Network starts off their list: 

      Crispy Duck Ramen in Tonkotsu Broth. Duck in Orange Sauce. Duck Confit Poutine. Seared Duck Breast with Fig Sauce. Tea Smoked Duck. Duck a l’Orange. Chinatown Steamed and Roasted Duck.

      And that is just the beginning of options I found.

  4. It’s hard for me to call out these shysters when I’m not attending their idiot rallies.
    I’d love to send Larry Corriea to every gun control rally, and Sarah to every socialist promotion rally.

      1. Yeah, that sounds like a poor idea. Now all we need to do is find some people equally fiery and with political savvy like those two who are NOT creative in the fiction world, and send them instead.

        1. Depends on the kind of fiery.

          I like to burn things 🙂

          Hell, I used to save my dryer lint in a big metal can on the back porch for when I got home from work on bad days.

          1. So, at one of our internet get-togethers several of us brought vacuum cleaners and our favorite accelerants to have a flaming vacuum cleaner competition. Blame it on Dave Barry if you want…

            In retrospect, it might have worked out better had our host raked his yard that fall, not packed his garden hose away for winter, and had any of the participants been sober enough to manage to thread the hose onto the bib in a timely fashion.

            So there were a dozen drunks trying to stamp out a leaf fire before it got to the house, mostly sending flaming leaves into the air (and hair, and clothing) without any noticeable fire-putting-out.

            In the end only a modest amount of property and a few participants wound up scorched. But a good time was had by all.

  5. Traffic today being slow …

    The Worst Advice Column Ever Written?
    Dear Amy: This week, I discovered that my intelligent, hard-working, responsible 24-year-old daughter (who lives with me) is a gun owner!

    And it’s not a normal gun, either — it is a 40-caliber semi-automatic, and she has hollow-point bullets to go with it.

    Amy, this is the kind of weapon a criminal would possess! She says it is for emergencies. There have only been two home invasions in our neighborhood in the last 11 years.

    I’ve given her three choices: She can either give her weapon to me, sell it or move out in three weeks.

    I love my daughter and would be so sad for her to move into a place that she would hardly be able to afford but now I have to lock my bedroom door at night because I don’t know what she’s going to do.

    Now she says that I don’t trust her, and is barely speaking to me. How can I convince her to stop endangering us?

    Dumbfounded Father

    Dear Dumbfounded: According to my research, possessing hollow-point bullets is illegal in 11 states; is it legal in your state to own this sort of exploding ammunition?

    n a report published in 2015, researchers at the University of Chicago found that 31 percent of households reported having a firearm in 2014, down from about 48 percent in 1980.

    According to this study, there are more guns, but concentrated in fewer households. Why must your household be one of them?

    Where did your daughter get this weapon and ammunition? Has she received any safety training or certification? (Accidental gun death is a substantial risk of owning a gun.) Is she perhaps engaged in another activity outside of your household that exposes her to increased risks and makes her believe she needs to have a weapon?

    I have news for you: A locked bedroom door is no match for this weaponry; as I write this, just five days ago a father in South Carolina tragically shot and killed his own 23-year-old daughter through a closed door — when he mistook her for an intruder.

    I agree with your ultimatum; I also weep that there is yet another (likely unsafe) gun owner in this country.

    Amy

    Considerable interspersed fisking deleted for purpose of mocking Dumbfuck Father and Amy. Read the whole thing.

    1. What’s frightening here, aside from the ignorant father and even more ignorant advice columnist, is that under some state’s “red flag” laws, the father could call the police and they could storm the house, take her guns and arrest her for her lawful ownership of a gun and exercise of her Second Amendment rights simply because the father pathologically hates guns.

    2. Wow. Of course, DF seems to be projecting just a wee bit. Should Pistol Daughter have cause to worry about DF bashing through her door? Definitely, DF should not be allowed near anything stronger than a squirt gun, and I think said item should be drained to make it safer.

      FWIW, we live in one of the rougher parts of the county. Per capita (the coyotes and cattle don’t count), we’ve had a fairly high number of shootings and one or two odd homicides. OTOH, to the best of my knowledge, we’ve not had any home invasions in our area. On the gripping hand, the chances of an invader getting perforated by the invadee serve as a good deterrent.

      It’s also quite stunning that Amy thinks that Pistol Daughter is likely to be unsafe. Do you suppose Amy should be encouraged required to stand in front of Ted Nugent’s Scary Black Rifle to see if it would go off, just in spite?

      1. It’s the kind of weapon a cop would own. The gun shops are literally overstocked with police trade-ins of that exact type.

    3. Dear Amy,

      Please let Frustrated Father’s daughter she is happy to occupy my guest room until she is on her feet. I want to encourage responsible citizens ready to defend not only themselves, but cowards like you and FF who rely on the charity of strangers.

      1. DF seems to be next to the most irresponsible of the people in that article. Amy is worse…

        Frankly, I wouldn’t trust DF with a sharpened pencil.

    5. “31 percent of households reported having a firearm in 2014, down from about 48 percent in 1980”

      There seems to have been an amazing increase in boating accidents from the start of the Reagan Administration to near the end of the Obama Administration.

        1. I have been practicing against the day when white-water skeet shooting becomes an Olympic sport. Sure, I lose lots of guns that way, but somebody has to be prepared to uphold American honour!

        2. It’s amazing just how difficult it is to duck hunt from a canoe. OTOH, an upside down canoe makes for a great blind, if only I could recover the shotgun.

  6. The Bee, as well as The Onion and Duffleblog, are clearly satire. The issue arises when folks out in the ‘real world’ decide that such satirical stories are merely the basis for good pogroms programs and decide to take action to make them reality.

    The fault lies not with the satire, but with the dimwits trying to make it truth.

    1. Sigh. THIS is what’s attacked me and WILL be written before anything else can even be thought of. We report. You decide:

      In The Pink of Hell
      Sarah A. Hoyt

      Many people have told me to go to hell. Happens to all PIs I guess. And being a PI named Seamus – Seamus McDonald, at your service — it was inevitable.
      But I never thought I’d have to go. Certainly not in pursuit of a case.
      How it started was like this: My friend Rod Rando is the manager for a lot of metal bands. Well known properties, like Goat Eternity and Bestial Cadaver and Edge of Skulls.
      He’d done great out of it. Like, he’d married a bunch of models, one after the other, and his alimony bills were epic, but he still had his offices in the penthouse of this steel and glass high rise downtown, a place so clean you could lick the floor and probably emerge in better health and so classy that if you put Marx inside it, he’d have melted to a little puddle of goo on the floor.
      Honest, I felt out of place just going in, in my jeans and T-shirt. Sure, Rando also wore jeans and t-shirts, but his were DESIGNER, carefully torn and scuffed. I mean, someone had made six figures just figuring out where to rip that denim, or where to put the stain on his shirt so it looked like someone had stepped on it.
      He’d called me in because starting about two years ago he’d noticed some of his bands, the ones who had been the most serious about their satanic symbols and altars and rituals and what not… changing style.
      Look, it wasn’t so much that they changed, though sure, that would be bad enough. When you’re administering a multi-million dollar talent, you get a little scared by change. Who knows if the fans will like it?
      And this change was really weird. Suddenly these supposedly dark, satanic artists were wearing all pink, their music sounded disturbingly like K-Pop, and instead of the horns, they made heart signs with their hands. And one of them, the Filthy Blood Whores had changed their name to Pink Fluffy Kittens and wore pink cat ear headbands.
      Their fans had no idea what to make of it, but my friend did. “Someone is giving them drugs,” he said. “And it must be some good shit, because it’s spreading from band to band.”
      “I mean, when Satan’s Handmaidens sang Pretty Pink Bubbles at their concert, the fans stormed the stage in fury and put them in the hospital. It’s that bad. And yet it keeps spreading. Even though the new style bands are tanking, the others keep changing to imitate them. And then they also don’t sell for shit. I can’t afford this.”
      He raked his hand backward across his unkempt, thinning but long hair. We’d been friends in college, and he still dressed as if he were in college. He just bought more expensive versions of the same clothes.
      “Leb, I need help.”
      Sigh. Okay, my name is Seamus Lebanon McDonald. Stop laughing. I was named after my mom. I should just be grateful they hadn’t given me her full name: Cedar of Lebanon McDonald. Rod is one of the few people who knows that, so of course I said, “I’ll help if I can. I just don’t see what I can do.”
      “Look, it has to be drugs.”
      “You mean they weren’t on drugs before?” I asked. If I sounded skeptical, it was because I’d heard some of their acts.
      “Oh, hell no. I mean, actually mostly they prefer alcohol, but sometimes, you know, some uppers, some downers, some ayahuasca… Thing is, I get those drugs and pass them to the guys, to make sure they’re clean. I monitor the alcohol they get, too. I make sure it’s nothing that will fry their brains.”
      “I didn’t just hear that.”
      “Whatever. You can’t let your bread and butter go to seed. But this shit… whatever it is… This is some crazy shit. I mean, hell, I didn’t even know Choke Slave could sing falsetto.” He dropped onto his custom made ergonomic chair and put his feet on his blue glass desk big enough and probably sturdy enough to park a mac truck on. “I want you to find the people responsible and stop this shit.”
      That was obviously my cue.
      Which is how I found myself in the apartment of on Albert Schneider, Aka Thrall of Darkness, Aka Pink Plush Sorbet on a hungover Saturday morning.
      Okay, so, just so you get the problem, his apartment looked like a Disney princess had exploded all over it. Nah, make that a set of Disney princesses. There had to be a lot of them for all that pink, glitter, frills and lace to have gone everywhere. Like, there was glitter on the ceiling.
      And then there were stuffed animals. Kittens and puppies, mostly, with big, round glass eyes.
      In a corner, a figure of Hello Kitty had pink scented candles lit in front of it. If it weren’t for the sheer oddity, I’d think it was an altar.

      5. Gosh darn you to heck…

        There’s been this character and this story that I’ve been working on, a “fixer”/PI in Hollywood/LA area and I can’t figure out his name or the first real story. I read this, and I wrote a whole chapter about the start of this story, introduced Benjamin Franklin Pierce (yes, that is his name. He also looks like Alan Alda with a serious weightlifting habit), and I think our strange minds think alike because we’ve got the same story idea on the brain.

        Willing to concede the idea to the slush bin if needed…but, I think I have a good sense of Pierce.

  9. I misremember where the question of effects of marijuana legalizatio arose, so I am cherry picking this NY Post column here:

    What Big Pot doesn’t want you to know about costs of legalizing marijuana
    By Kevin Sabet
    Lobbyists and lawmakers everywhere like to make bold-but-reality-challenged claims to advance legislation. But in its push to legalize commercial weed, the marijuana industry has taken legislative myth-peddling to brazen new lows.

    New York’s lawmakers have a few days left to show the nation they won’t be duped. Here are some of the tallest of the tales that have swirled around Albany, thanks to the pot industry:

    First, the industry claims high-potency commercial weed will provide social justice and economic opportunity for minority communities. … the pot industry — backed by Big Tobacco and wealthy, mostly white Wall Street investors — is looking to line its own pockets. These multinational forces aren’t getting into pot to help minority entrepreneurs.

    [SNIP]

    There has been no quantifiable positive economic impact for such communities in legalized states. In fact, taxpayers and communities have had to shoulder an estimated $4.50 in social costs for every $1 in revenue, according to researchers at the Centennial Institute.

    Second, the pot industry wants people to think that marijuana laws are the cause of gross racial disparities in arrest and incarceration rates. The argument: Legalize pot to reduce minority arrests.

    That’s another canard. No state that passed legalization has seen a drop in prison populations. Studies out of Colorado and Washington show African Americans and Hispanics are still twice as likely to be arrested for marijuana. In Washington, DC, marijuana arrests nearly tripled after legalization.

    A study funded by the National Institutes of Health showed that the density of marijuana dispensaries was linked to increased property crimes. Researchers found that in Denver, neighborhoods adjacent to marijuana businesses saw more property crimes each year than neighborhoods without a marijuana shop. Of course, crime and other social pathologies related to pot hit lower-income areas first and hardest.

    [SNIP]

    Third, the industry is peddling the message that pot revenue will do everything from fix the subways to help schools in minority neighborhoods.

    But former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said it best when he called pot revenue “a drop in the bucket.” Former California Gov. Jerry Brown agreed, noting that “we knew there wasn’t going to be any money.” Revenues aren’t going to swell in New York, either. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s best estimate for pot revenue is $300 million annually, paltry for a state with annual expenditures of $175 billion.

    The industry never talks about costs. Law enforcement costs to handle public safety concerns are estimated to range from $820.3 million to more than $1 billion over the first five years for new training and equipment, according to a report from my group, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, and the New York State Sheriffs’ Association. That’s to say nothing of the price of mental-health and other social-services at the local level.

    A Washington state traffic study of 2,355 drivers found that only six months after introducing commercial pot, daytime drivers testing positive for THC almost tripled. Traffic fatalities that involved drivers intoxicated with marijuana in Colorado rose by 86% between 2013 and 2017, with roughly one-fifth of all traffic fatalities involving a driver testing positive for marijuana by 2017.

    Finally, pro-pot activists want lawmakers to think that this is about smoking some harmless joints. They ignore the fact that the industry is investing billions in high-potency edible and vaping products that are up to 99% THC. There is a growing body of medical and scientific research that demonstrates prolonged exposure to THC is leading to drops in IQ, psychosis, suicide, depression, schizophrenia and other disorders.

    Immediately following commercialization in Colorado, calls to poison centers skyrocketed 80%, because high-potency THC is a dangerous drug.

    [SNIP]

    Dr. Kevin Sabet, a former drug policy adviser to President Obama, is president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana New York.

    1. Ah, but think if the boon to body shops and DUII diversion scammers educators. Not to mention the increase in one-way traffic for rental trucks. OK, they get impounded after Oregon State Police catches them, but the companies get their money right away, and the trucks, eventually.

    2. Generally, if you think that questions have been raised here about possible negative effects of legalization, there is a good chance that you are at least partly remembering something I’ve said.

      I’ll refrain from gloating or taking a victory lap, much.

      I originally bought the argument that Marijuana was a softer drug, and not deserving the restrictions appropriate to, say, PCP, meth, etc… I was radicalized by the legalization advocates. Once they proved psychiatric efficacy and were still selling harmlessness, I could infer that either they were dishonest, or so stupid that I did not want to risk it rubbing off on me.

      a) This is all stuff that could be inferred from looking at the holes in what legalization advocates were saying, and thinking through things carefully. I did so, years ago. b) The rates of negative impacts from Colorado and Washington are not truly conclusive. They do not disprove that these are simply the result of migration effects. We can guess that there is at least some actual use by people who would not have used if it had been kept entirely illegal. So some elements of my gloom and doom scenario appear may have been validated. There is is still some possibility that we will not validate all of it. c) I think my position that maximum illegality was a least bad compromise, and that we will regret leaving it may yet prove correct. I’m not seeing how we put many of these genies back in the bottle.

      If they can adequately substantiate both drops in IQ and greater use by minorities, that simplifies a number of issues. It simplifies the issue of greater minority poverty; low IQ statistically has knock on effects, and equal outcomes given equal opportunities would not be expected. It gives another explanation for the evidence lower population IQ provides for a genetic cause, beyond the already known alternative explanation of worse schooling.

      1. Probably me, too.

        I’d still like to see one of those “going 30 in a 60 because they’re on pot” guys. The inverse was always going past my house.

      2. Was remembering reading somewhere, wish I could remember where, that some “classic” pot smokers that had given it up a while ago tried out some of the new stuff. Not knowing that a lot of the “new stuff” has been so well bred for higher THC concentrations that they were getting something like a 100-200% bigger dose than they had back in the day.

        I’m on the fence-I want to see if there is some serious uses for THC as a treatment option, but I had to demand that my psychiatrist stop suggesting cannabis oil for my problems. And, I’ve been dealing with a lot of people that think that pot is the Holy Grail and that this is yet another way to stick it to the man.

        And, I think when I retire, I’m going to see and be paying for all the issues of all these people using pot…

        1. Look into CBD oil– if your state is one that includes maximum levels of THC.

          If there’s not an actually enforced law, I wouldn’t risk it.

          There’s a lot of really neat stuff in those plants, hopefully that epilepsy drug will get folks going on researching it.

            1. You have GOOD REASON to be skeptical; not only does it not cure everything under the sun, and a lot of the advocates can’t tell CBD oil from hash oil.

              Part of the mania is the drug aspect, but the folks who are sincerely over the moon about it as medicine are just folks who found a solution to a problem they didn’t know had a solution.

              I honestly only stopped rolling my eyes when some DEA guys I know started talking about how they really hope CBD gets federally legalized and regulated. It’s basically harmless, but hash oil isn’t, and given there’s an OD epidemic because of the quality control for drug dealers…..

              1. it being regulated as a drug i am ok with. would ensure content and pourity
                i know people with anxiety and/or depression, and a few with chronic pain, where cbd oil is a more effective and low key thing for them to take… (esp with the current ‘opiate epidemic’)

                1. Same here, especially since it’s so easy to use it as cover, or for the unscrupulous to “help” the sick– since /everybody/ wants to get high, or would be better for it. -.-

        4. It would be indicative of a viable market if they could offer variant breeds of pot equivalent to “beer”, “wine”, liqueur”, and “distilled”. Make it easier to control doses by means other than the amount smoked — a somewhat unreliable method.

          1. *herbalism geek hat*

            The breed isn’t the primary source of variation unless the characteristics are HUGE– time of day, temperature and humidity matter, too. That’s why herbalism is so dangerous– if you can get something strong enough to do real work, you have little to no way to tell if you’ve got a good one, or a dud. The fru-fru natural supplement crafters that talk about time of day and such when an herb was picked are dealing with a real production process– I can’t remember if you’re supposed to pick while the dew is still there, or just after the dew has gone, I do know you aren’t supposed to water and that cooler is better….. all a matter of preserving the oils in the plant.

            1. That is why I never bought the “Medical marijuana” claim in the first place: no dosage control. Even equally potent joints would deliver varied dosages depending on how the “patient” smoked them.

              That ain’t medicine.

              I recall years ago seeing an interview of the guy (no idea the name) who took it to court to get permission to use marijuana for his glaucoma (he was a rhetorician, in case anybody wants to try looking it up.) He got his marijuana cigarettes from a federal research farm, each being a measured THC level.

              I figure a laboratory can blend weed of different strengths to get a consistent dosage – e.g., 2 units of THC per joint — possibly using a THC-free pot as filler. I also reckon their failure to do so says much about their true intentions.

            2. You can take the same amount of herb and get a dose too small to affect you, the right amount, or an overdose. Plus the guarantee that the drug’s not pure.

    3. Also, I’m up a little too much past my bedtime to get properly furious about this shit.

      I find this stuff as unpleasant as John Scalzi and George Martin collaborating to write a Star Gate reboot that is essentially all the cowardice, pederasty, and razor blades in candy that they can manage to fit in.

    1. Since Our Gracious Hostess was constructing a story, perhaps it was a post and beam.

      (Saunters down to the carpapult room to see if the arrangement with the sea monster worked and he(?) ate the carp in storage.)

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