April 07, 2014
Ivan Lopez
The Week’s Most Momentous, Horrendous, and Portentous Headlines
THE WORLD’s MOST HOMOPHOBIC WEB BROWSER
The Pink Hydra has slain another Web titan. Although Brendan Eich is the creator of the ubiquitous programming language JavaScript, he lasted a little more than a week as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation before a deafening Wall of Whining from gay-rights activists pressured him to resign.
Eich’s hanging offense was that in 2008, he donated $1,000 to support California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman. Voters approved the proposition before a federal judge murdered it.
Online meat market OKCupid launched the campaign to force Eich’s resignation. Anyone who accessed the site using Mozilla’s Firefox browser was greeted with a message that read in part:
Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.
Fags “n” friends across the Web fanned the flames of fairy fury, and within days, Eich was gone in a haze of pixie dust. Although it’s likely no longer legally nor tactically possible, it would have been nice if Eich had thrown a reciprocal tantrum and prohibited everyone who supports gay marriage from using JavaScript.
In the same year that Eich made his fatal thousand-dollar contribution, Barack Obama vocally opposed gay marriage. We should expect his forced resignation any day now.
FORT HOOD MASSACRE: THE SEQUEL
Last Wednesday afternoon, 34-year-old Army Spc. Ivan Lopez opened fire at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas, killing three and injuring 16 before fatally shooting himself. The attack occurred less than five years after Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed thirteen and wounded more than thirty at the same base. Although Lopez had served in Iraq, neither he nor Hasan had ever seen combat.
Reputed motives for Lopez’s spree appear at best to be insubstantial. It’s alleged that he was angry at the Army for initially”that’s right, initially“refusing him permission to attend his mother’s funeral last November. Reports also suggest he was involved in a “verbal altercation” with another soldier shortly before his rampage.
Like so many recent spree killers, Lopez was reportedly taking antidepressants. He was also allegedly prescribed the sleeping pill Ambien. He claimed to have suffered from a brain injury and was being evaluated for PTSD but had not yet been diagnosed. An Army official said a psychiatrist had examined Lopez last month but found him neither homicidal nor suicidal. This may ultimately be nothing more than a petty tantrum that claimed multiple lives.
A 2010 Associated Press article averred that the Department of Veterans Affairs makes it far too easy for returning troops to claim they are afflicted with and thus disabled by Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, deeming their loosey-goosey policy “an open invitation to fraud.”
ECHOES OF REGINALD DENNY
One of the 1992 LA Riots” most vivid images was that of white truck driver Reginald Denny being dragged from his rig and bashed in the skull with a cinderblock, leading to brain damage.
Last week in Detroit, 54-year-old Steve Utash, a white driver of a pickup truck, accidentally hit a 10-year-old black boy who”d wandered off the curb and into traffic. Utash stopped his truck and got out to check on the boy’s condition, whereupon a pack of a dozen or so “juveniles“ beat him into a coma and stole his wallet.
As is to be expected, police have ruled out the possibility that this was a hate crime, which leaves Utash’s son Joseph unconvinced. “I think it was all a setup from the gate,” he told a TV reporter. “As far as a hate crime, it might be. You go in Detroit and you”re white, you don”t belong.”
“This senseless vigilante style attack is not the essence of who we are as Detroiters,” said Detroit’s mayor, Mike Duggan. Much of the country would beg to differ.
