Today in Panic News

I don’t want you to panic, but the Lt. Gov. of Texas announced that prayer rugs have been found on the Texas side of the border. The sneaky, nefarious payer rugs apparently attempted to disguise themselves as soccer jerseys. Don’t trust textiles.

On a more serious note, there is considerable panic over the workplace decapitation in Oklahoma, which strikes me as the work of someone with borderline personality disorder who watched the recent ISIS beheading videos a few too many times. This is a good argument for keeping some things off the Internet.

So far only Breitbart — the same crew who can’t tell the difference between a prayer rug and a soccer jersey — plus the usual suspects such as Pam Geller and Jim Hoft are reporting a direct connection between the perpetrator and actual jihadists.  This tells us with a high degree of certainty that there  is no actual evidence of such a connection at the present time, although that hardly matters to the unfortunate woman who was killed.

As Steve M says the mainstream press is downplaying this story, possibly because there’s not much to report so far except the grisly details. And the world is full of people with borderline personality disorder.

 

14 thoughts on “Today in Panic News

  1. “And the world is full of people with borderline personality disorder.”

    Yes, and many of them are Republican politicians and their supporters.

  2. Being a conservative means always having to be afraid of something and hating someone.
    They’re like little rays of dark-shine.

  3. It’s probably superfluous to point this out, but if he’d used a gun:

    1. More people would be dead.

    2. The people who are now screaming about Islamofascism would instead be screaming about gun rights.

  4. There was a nasty beheading incident on a Canadian bus a couple years back (as opposed to non-nasty beheading incidents, I thought as soon as I’d typed that). This one was awful too, but as Stephen Stralka pointed out it could have been a far worse incident in terms of numbers.

  5. Chicken Little was right! I’d duck and cover, but where is there to hide?
    Sometimes I’m glad I’m old and will probably be dead before it all falls apart. Then I think-with my luck, I’ll be reborn right *after* that. #nowheretohide 😛

  6. “Being a conservative means always having to be afraid of something and hating someone.”
    Cund Gulag
    I agree. I think a daily diet of Foxnewsdrama and talk radio has turned fear into a part of the fabric of their lives. They can’t be without it. Everything outside whatever they decide is normal or virtous is to be greeted with fear. That is the only way they can process it. I’m not making excuses for them I’m just saying that I think a good amount of it is trained behavior,and their media is driving it. Hell Fox does a better job of promoting terror to Americans than the terrorists do.

  7. It’s a daunting task to separate historical reality from my personal experience and observation. So I won’t even try.

    In the New Testament, Satan takes Jesus to a mountaintop and shows him the a huge extent of land that he might rule over. Where Jesus threw off the temptation, the Christian Right did not. When I was a kid, the Christians around me weren’t particularly fun to be around, but their faith seemed to demand something of them, it compelled them to act with mindfulness and compassion, to the extent that they were capable. By the time I moved to the American south, Christian leaders who had bitten into the apple of politics were firmly in control and on the offense. A southern brand of fundamentalism was taking root everywhere, and it would form a reactionary wing of the Republican Party.

    Many years ago, when we first took in some rescue horses, I was struck by the panel truck that our farrier had. When he opened the rear doors there was a confederate battle flag on one side and a large, schmaltzy, “Precious Moments” Jesus on the other. My northern brain had a hard time reconciling the images at first. But, soon they made perfect sense. The main function of southern fundamentalism was the validation of the social order. It had been a remarkable social control mechanism since the days of slavery, and remains so. In this way it always had a “secular” function. Maybe the religious component is, and always was, just window dressing.

    When Newt Gingrich complains about the “secularization” of society, he does so with a purpose. He and his Christian Right cohort have refined and exploited the southern church as a political, secular machine. But, lamenting “secularization” makes them feel embattled and motivated. His religious persona is a complete fraud, and he is hardly alone.

    Nowadays, if someone were to form an understanding of Christianity based on what the most prominent Christians say about it, it seems they would form the impression that hating gay people, liberals and non-believers was its primary concern, along with the unfettered acquisition of wealth and power. So, young people are turning away from it, because its public face has become so remarkably ugly in the pursuit of political power.

  8. Goatherd…your last sentence is so true…some of us old folks are repulsed by these same people as well…

  9. If I had a dollar for every time that I mistook a soccer jersey for a prayer rug, I’d be sipping my latte in the 16th arrondissement.

  10. You’re right Ed, I would bet that it does make “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” They couldn’t make up a better one. What was the quote? “The art of fiction is dead, reality has strangled invention.”

    I don’t know, cundgulag, it’s kind of like with my goats. One day they do something amusing and the next day they bite me on the ear lobe or splash muddy water in my eye. Most of the time, they just hang out and eat weeds. … I think there was supposed to be an analogy there somewhere.

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