July 2016, the Month from Heck

[Paul in Qatar]

Just to review the bidding:

1 July twenty-nine killed in terror attack in Dhaka
3 July a number of car bombs in Baghdad kills more than 300. Nobody in the West notices
7 July Five policemen killed in Dallas
14 July Eighty-four killed in attack in Nice
17 July 3 policemen killed in Baton Rouge
22 July Ten killed in shooting in Munich
22 July Donald J Trump becomes the Republican nominee
23 July Daddy goes nuts in Balstrop, Texas and kills family, self
28 July Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee

Not to forget several killings by American policemen that seem questionable. Nor a couple of Ramadan attacks here in Saudi

All in all, few of us will feel sorry for this accursed month to be over. I cannot take much more of this shit. I used to change my Facebook icon for these things, but I flat run out of outrage.

[dogbutler]

Between all that and all the cool celebrity deaths, I'd like to take a Mulligan on 2016 in general.

[Jaglavak]

This April there wasn't one day without a terrorist attack somewhere in the world. The vast majority of which were by Islamic fundies butchering for fun and profit. However if you goggle the map, we live in a great big quiet zone. As compared to places like Afghanistan and Iraq which are soaked in blood. Things can get a hell of a lot worse before the wheels fall off, so I would save the despair for later.

Looked at another way, the world is remarkably peaceful. Say your average Joe interacts with twenty people a day in some way. With seven billion people in the world that's 140 billion human contacts per day that work out just fine. Even if you roll in non-terror related crimes that's still a 99.9% success rate.

Looked at still another way, most of what you see has plenty of bullshit mixed in anyway. Look at Nigeria for example. The locals are blowing stuff up and killing people over the many spills that have trashed their native wetlands. But what you don't see highlighted is the fact that nearly every leak was caused by those same locals drilling holes in pipes and setting up amateur refineries using barrels and pipes, with waste draining straight into the rivers. It's mostly not about Shell's awful practices, it's organized crime. None of this is helped much by a massively corrupt and incompetent central government. Unfortunately there are large high quality oil deposits smack dab under those swamps, and it will be recovered eventually somehow. So the problem isnt going away any time soon. But it is mostly not caused by Evil Oil Inc.

[Paul in Qatar]

25 July, fifteen disabled people killed in their hospital beds in Japan.

What the heck kind of anger must a person have to kill so many with a knife? The killer was taken alive. Japan has the death penalty.

[Paul in Qatar]

Costa Rican bus driver kills himself and 25 others.

[Paul in Qatar]

Sixteen dead in a ballooning accident in Texas. Hell of a month.