College of Southern Nevada Sociology Professor Mark Bird allegedly had a curious way of protesting President Trump: he shot himself in the arm. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Bird was considerate enough to tape a $100 bill inside the bathroom with a note that it was “for the janitor” — presumably for the mess left behind.
After being treated, Bird was charged with carrying a concealed weapon without a permit, discharging a gun within a prohibited structure and possessing a dangerous weapon on school property. Police do not say whether Bird explained his curious protest beyond allegedly admitting it was self-inflicted with the President in mind.
It seems rather self-defeating for this political demographic of critics to shoot themselves but there is precedent:
Still this is better than the choice of Farzad Vincent Fazeli who allegedly was protesting Trump when he stabbed a GOP candidate in California.
He didn’t know his ass from his elbow.
I recall after the 2016 election, my Liberal friends and family were terrified. Several of the Jewish ones claimed that death vans were going to come for them, blacks would be shot in the street, and Latinos would be hunted down. That wasn’t a metaphor; they really believed this, and were sincerely panicked. They believed that the sheriff badge on the meme Trump forwarded was proof positive that he was a Nazi, and all of his followers were racist Nazis. When Trump took office, every good person was going to die. It was going to become a white Neo Nazi/Fascist state. And we were going to bomb innocent countries. They were past all reason. There was no talking to them at all. I tried to reassure them that it was highly unlikely that the first sitting president with a Jewish first family was going to gas Jews, and that he was well liked by African American organizations. He also gave women the opportunity to hold the highest positions in his company in the decades when that was simply impossible. I couldn’t get through. They were irrational and frightened. And they passed on their gossip as if it was the absolute, proven truth. They and their friends climbed higher and higher. Some marched in women’s marches. Another didn’t breed her mare because the economy was obviously going to collapse into dystopia. They were all going to be homeless on the street.
And then…Trump moved the Embassy to Jerusalem. He maintained a good relationship with Netanyahu, much better than Obama’s. The economy boomed, and African American unemployment was the lowest since the data had ever been calculated.
None of what they claimed was true actually was. But they haven’t apologized. They just move on to the next accusation of Russia, and seem to have forgotten all about what they absolutely knew without a doubt to be true about him being a Nazi who would destroy the economy. Before that, he was going to cause Kim Jong Un to commit nuclear war upon us all. They don’t seem to stop and think, wait, we keep getting this wrong. Maybe we really don’t know what we’re talking about.
Mind you, these are the same people who harmed me quite badly with past votes. I lost my health insurance because of their vote. I had to pay double what I did in premiums and over 1,000% more in deductibles, a figure that only went higher over the years. I had to pay out of pocket to see a doctor because the good ones did not accept the Obamacare individual policy pay cut. One of my medicines went off formulary, and they cut all off formulary benefits to try to reign in the spiraling health care costs caused by Obama. And when someone hacked my account, and my debit card got frozen, I lost my insurance for non payment. Because of the ACA, non subsidized middle class people lose their insurance for non payment, regardless of the reason. Providing a letter from the bank that I was the victim of a crime did not sway them. It’s written into the law. That was a real harm to me, rather than hysterical imaginings. And yet, I’ve managed to heel-toe it without hating or disowning the ill-informed, silly people who voted this catastrophe upon my head.
They also keep voting for Governor Moonbeam, Jerry Brown, who is plowing our state into bankruptcy. He hasn’t built a reservoir, but rather wants to spend $65 billion on a vacation train to San Francisco that will do exactly squat to receive the traffic clogging LA. The party was frustrated that sprawl means that free market forces has no demand for rapid transit. Therefore, they came up with “road diets” in which major arteries had lanes trimmed, rather than expanded. That slowed congested traffic way down. People called into radio shows beside themselves. They couldn’t get home to be with their families after work. They were stressed being on the roads so long. They diverted into residential areas, speeding to try to find an escape. The Democrats claimed that Road Diets would prevent traffic collisions, with the ultimate goal of zero. There is no way to have zero traffic collisions unless no one drove anywhere. They were trying to force people to use mass transit that they didn’t want. And they don’t want to use mass transit because this isn’t London, a tiny city easily accessible by the tube. This is a massive state with enormous cities, and even more vast suburbs surrounding it. It takes hours to take mass transit anywhere in Southern CA, unless you are already in the city. Northern CA is also spread out, again, except for right in San Francisco. There’s no parking in San Francisco, but if you take mass transit, you are going to sit where a naked person sat before you, and you’ll have to navigate all the infectious dirty needles contaminated with HIV, Hepatitis C, Syphilis, and other blood borne pathogens. You have to step over the people passed out in their own vomit on the sidewalk, and walk around those shooting up, outside preschools. You have to teach kids not to touch the dirty needles. It’s not a good idea to take a kid to a public park, because who knows how many dirty needles are sticking up in the grass. Your kid could get HIV going to a playground. Again, this was caused by Democratic votes. They give out 20 clean needles for every one dirty one turned in, which results in a lot more discarded needles on the street. They are pro-homeless, claiming it’s humanitarian to enable people to camp out like it’s the Dark Ages. You can’t get a free shopping bag at the grocery store, or a straw, but the homeless can leave all their garbage and trash in dry riverbeds, which wash down to the ocean after every storm, along with the human feces, vomit, and needles. Again, don’t walk barefoot on a CA beach anywhere near where a river drains to the ocean. You could get HIV. Republicans want to clean up the state, while Democrats want to make it Woodstock genetically combined with the Walking Dead. They’ve also gotten rid of bail, enacted sanctuary city laws that protect the most vicious felons from deportation. Rapist illegal alien? Well many cities in CA are the place for you. Come here, where they’ll protect you from ICE so you can rape more women here. And don’t forget it’s Republicans who are waging war on women.
Democratic policies are turning our state into a dystopian wasteland. We don’t have a Super Scooper, but by golly, we have lots of homeless, illegal alien felons (who can get drivers licenses), and they’ll fight to the death against voter ID. Strange, how they don’t want voters to have to prove their identities…
After all this, Democrats actually believe it’s conservatives who are the existential threat to society.
My point is that Democrats protest against Republicans as being evil, and threats to safety and society. But it’s Democrats who riot, burn cities down, loot, punch people whom they disagree with. It’s Democrats who systematically target conservative business owners, and use the government to try to drive them out of business. It’s Democrats who are the Fascist Black Shirts wearing Jack Boots, ironically claiming to fight Fascism. It’s Democrats who still are racist, judging everyone by skin color or gender in identity politics. They discriminate against Asians in college entrance exams, and against whites and men in general. They harass and even get violent with conservatives on campus. And have you ever seen what they do to black conservatives? Check out the video of white Democrats literally screaming at the top of their lungs in the face of Candace Owens outside a restaurant. It’s Democrats who proclaim that Republicans should be harassed in restaurants. They especially target the Trump Administration.
They are doing their darnedest to make this country Venezuela. I don’t think they’ll be happy until we’re all starving, equally, with no money for environmental or Welfare programs. How much does Venezuela spend on the environment? How much will the planet suffer when they’ve destroyed our economy and society, and our trillions spent on global environmental and humanitarian missions dwindle to zero?
Extremism ruins everything it touches, and the Extremist Left is violent, racist, and bigoted. Extremist right is no picnic, either, but they are limited in the scope of what they can do. It’s the Extremist Left that controls the education system K-grad school, the mainstream media, Hollywood, as well as much of the alphabet soup of Washington.
This all happened because Extremist Leftists took control of the education system and Hollywood. They raised a couple of generations of people to think that Republicans are evil and want to kill everyone. They did not teach critical reasoning to students, who would have questioned them. And then academics maintained a friendly relationship with Russia, doing their PR work in proclaiming that Socialism is just wonderful, and capitalism is evil. It is dark irony, indeed, that the same academics who claim that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election, are actively doing Russian PR in undermining capitalism, which would allow Russian expansion into our own lands and call us comrades.
I hope the moderate Left reclaims the party one day, but I don’t have much hope for it. They are leaning so far Left nowadays that they’re about to fall over.
Thank you Karen.
Well said.
This guy is a complete failure. He was aiming for his head.
This is a cult.
You can’t say that he lacked the courage of his convictions. Perhaps a few of my favorite CNN anti-Trumpers/presenters will follow suit in solidarity…..
stepheng2010 – we can only hope for a televised mass suicide. 😉 I would do Pay-for-View.
It might have been more symbolic if he had shot himself in the foot.
Darwin Award Honorable Mention!
mespo – only if he was trying to commit suicide and failed. 😉 Damn liberals are lousy shots. 🙂
The Committee is not responsible for the stupidity of applicants.
mespo – or their inability to shoot straight? 😉 You have to give him points for the excuse. The WaPo is blaming Florence on Trump, why not a failed suicide attempt?
Remember now the Darwin Awards “salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it….”. Thus, only an accident is required. WaPo is intentionally developmentally delayed hence its disqualification.
I have to wonder if he intended to commit suicide, leaving the note for the janitor due to the expectation of his head coming apart. But instead he had a change of heart or he bungled it up and shot himself accidentally in the arm. Hastily afterward, he concocted the Trump Protest excuse. I’m not buying it but nevertheless he clearly needs some services to help him through his difficulties. Or another issue was that he was just going to the bathroom in the ordinary sense and had an accidental discharge of the pistol while he was pulling his pants down, hitting him in the arm, and he came up with the protest excuse.
I’ve seen both types of these cases before. In those cases it was not as the person had claimed.
Darren Smith – I think your scenario is most likely. A failed suicide attempt. BTW, I do hope the janitor gets the hundred and they don’t hold it for evidence.
The guy lives in Las Vegas. I don’t blame him. Also, he was a community college teacher. See Ronald Radosh on his long run as a community college teacher. Can be a rather demoralizing way of earning a living (at least if you work in the academic side of that trade; the people teaching aspirant car mechanics may feel better about their students and about their work).
DSS – it is clear you do not understand the community college system. They have an academic side, which is to supply the first two years of college and then move you on to another college. And they have the technical side, which is the auto mechanics, IT professionals, certifications branch. The two sides do meet at times.
As someone who start their teaching career in the community college system, I taught many classes, all of which were transferable to major universities. We had a handbook for it. You knew what school you wanted to transfer to, this handbook would tell you whether a course would transfer like for like (Eng 101 for Eng 1) or whether it fit as a humanities course, etc. You could check the handbook before you selected your courses. Of course, only C’s transfer.
We used to have two great institutions in my area. The CC was renowned worldwide, and had many international students. Now they are just collectives for state-sponsored illiterate. I tried teaching for a semester, but when I confronted a student about his poor test scores, I had to explain to him why he had to buy a textbook and read it because it was where the tests came from. I threw in the towel. I know it’s hard to believe, and you can choose not to believe it if you like. I would just like to know how did the erosion get so bad. Where was the vanguard?
slohrss29 – ASU is not allowed to offer remedial classes, so they had Gateway Community College (just down the road) offer them. I don’t know if they still do. I taught at Gateway and we had a lot of kids going back and forth between the schools. Not sure what it is like now.
Wow, slohrss29! Sad in every aspect.
You can take it up with Radosh, who taught at Queensboro Community College. Thomas Woods, who taught at Suffolk Community College, was similarly dispirited, though his remarks were less pungent.
In New York, you have generic academic degrees for aspirant transfers, but IIRC, only about 10% of the graduates are awarded one. You have to pick up some distribution credits for most vocational degrees, and that employs the academic faculty. Most students are there casually, and don’t pick up a degree. New York has been much more conservative than other states in its public higher education investments and transferring may be more of a challenge (though there are a few CUNY schools who seem to take any warm body).
Makes you wonder. Will they ever be able to tell for sure?
I don’t know but I suspect we’ll have to wait while the criminal case progresses for more information to come out. I doubt the school will be very forthcoming.
Does Mark Bird go by the name Isaac here? Did Natacha load the gun for him?
Simply too funny. Tie that one into the guy in CA (quel surpris) who couldn’t get his switchblade to work to attack the GOP candidate there. Talk about a feckless bunch.
I read the start and thought “Weak Minded.” Then I read Sociology Professor. It made sense. That type being at the bottom of the non-sciences is often embittered by the respect paid their betters in the real sciences and useful trades. I was so glad I never sunk that low. BUT I have to confess Political Science even with History and Philosophy is not all that much better. Why there is only Education in between.
Later I explain the thought to one of my friends. “Too much Philosophy, not enough history and a dash of field engineering wil set that right straight away.”
“Mmmm it really wasn’t that much engineering we had to know how things were put together in order to efficiently blow them apart.”
“That is what Philosophy is for. But as I said, ‘Sets you right straight away’.”
“Yes so it does. So does a weak mind confine one to be only the least one can be?”
“Jim you are incorrigible. But I have to give you points on that observation.”
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