Fresh Hell

By Your Side

Earlier this year, a British police officer kidnapped, raped, and strangled thirty-three-year-old Sarah Everard before incinerating her corpse and dumping it in a pond. That officer, sworn to uphold fundamental human rights and accord equal respect to all people in the process of preserving the etc., etc., and preventing offenses against people and property, etc., is now on trial—and in an ab-so-lutely stunning twist, one that simply shocks the senses, it turns out that the officer falsely arrested Everard for violating Covid-19 lockdown measures in order to lure her into his car. Perhaps, in the wake of yet another cold-blooded murder committed by an officer of the “law,” we might collectively realize that abolishing the police is the decent—indeed the only—solution. But no, that couldn’t be the way to prevent police officers from killing civilians! The obvious solution is to deploy hundreds more police officers to places “where women and girls often lack confidence that they are safe,” as the Metropolitan Police in London announced they’ll do this week.

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

Meanwhile, back in these solemnly united states, police continue unchecked their gleeful abuse of human rights. Two years ago in Colorado, two police officers tackled, tased, arrested, and jailed for four months a deaf man after he failed to respond to police commands because he was, as we’ve noted, deaf. The crime that incited this string of brutality? Police “allegedly witnessed him run a stop sign.” That deaf man is now suing the city of Idaho Springs in federal court, but the police, of course, maintain their innocence: in the intrepid pursuit of justice, how were they to know that the man they’d violently thrown to the ground was deaf? In fact, the confused deaf man was lashing out with such violence that one officer allegedly managed to break a leg—according to police, at least, who have absolutely no record whatsoever of totally making shit up. While one of the officers involved was later fired from the force and charged with third-degree assault after he tased a seventy-five-year-old man, the other cop remains gainfully employed.

Bad for Women, Great for Commerce!

To Texas now, where the flinty sociopaths in charge continue upchucking defenses of the state’s new law effectively banning abortion. Governor Greg Abbott, for instance, thinks it’s really quite reasonable that the law contains no exceptions for victims of rape—and that’s because he’s actually just going to “eliminate”  all rape in the state. The attorney general, on the other hand, who just last year undertook the Lord’s work of suing to overturn the results of the 2020 election, finds the abortion ban to be a stimulant of interstate commerce! 

Attack of the Ninja

In California, the military has confirmed that, yes, a sword-wielding man dressed as a ninja really did attack several special operations soldiers at a secluded airfield one hundred miles north of Los Angeles earlier this month, and, yes, it’s true that the soldiers were forced to retreat to a hangar to escape the man, and, yes, they required stitches. Officials, however, have no further information to add, leaving the radiated collective consciousness of the American public churning: was this ninja-man really Q, come to liberate us? Or was it, perhaps, a botched branding exercise for The Masked Singer? Or both, simultaneously—a cross-promotional event whose full import we will only come to understand in the distant future?

The Hamster of Wall Street

In other news, meet Mr. Goxx, the Youtube-famous, crypto-trading German hamster outperforming the S&P 500. MarketWatch reports on how Mr. Goxx gives the lie to the unrivaled brilliance of stock market honchos: Mr. Goxx, you see, selects a cryptocurrency by running on his little “intention wheel.” Then, Mr. Goxx runs through either the “buy” or “sell” decision tunnels in his cage. This innovative approach has generated gains of 16.6 percent since June, to the S&P 500’s comparatively small 4 percent.

The Forty-Year-Old Doomsayer

And finally, a new report indicates that anyone under the age of forty will have the distinct pleasure of watching civil society disintegrate, as though this was not something anyone under the age of forty did not already know, did not feel, deeply, in their bones was the fate to which they’ve been sentenced. This sorry lot, saddled with debt and rapidly obsolescing tech-trash, will, on average, enjoy seven times as many heat waves, twice as many wildfires, and nearly three times as many droughts, crop failures, and river floods as their grandparents. According to one scientist, “This is true even under the most conservative scenarios.” Delightful.