The Worst Week Yet: July 23-29, 2023

[1]2,408 words

Sinéad O’Connor: Finally Dead

Sinéad O’Connor, the world’s most obnoxiously political and mercurially unstable shaven-headed songstress, was found dead in her London flat last week at age 56. While some people are asking “Why?”, I’m more inclined to wonder, “What took so long?” At the moment, her cause of death has not been revealed. It could have been suicide, it could have been an accidental overdose, or perhaps the forces that rule the universe had simply grown tired of her.

Online obits made frequent note of her “mental health battles,” meaning that she fought a protracted battle against being mentally healthy. What’s worse, she had a compulsion to announce all her mental-health struggles to the world as they were happening.

Born in Dublin as Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor, at one point during the 1990s after being ordained a priest in a heretical Catholic sect, she demanded to be called “Mother Bernadette Mary.” In 2017 — the same year that, despite being the mother of four children, she posted a video [2] lamenting that she was all alone by herself and feeling suicidal at a Travelodge motel [3] “in the arse end of New Jersey” — she legally changed her name to Magda Davitt, claiming to an interviewer who was still willing to listen to her that she wanted to be “free of the patriarchal slave names. Free of the parental curses.”

The next year, after a very public conversion to Islam which saw her donning the occasional rainbow-striped hijab [4], she again changed her name to “Shuhada’ Sadaqat.” She called [5] Islam “the natural conclusion to any intelligent theologian’s journey,” but of course she didn’t stop there. In a series of tweets [6], she said that she never wanted to spend time with white people again, perhaps unaware that the feeling was mutual:

What I’m about to say is something so racist I never thought my soul could ever feel it. But truly I never wanna spend time with white people again (if that’s what non-Muslims are called). Not for one moment, for any reason. They are disgusting. . . . Everyone says the Poor Americans are the victim of Trump. But you hired him. So fire him. Otherwise you’re complicit. It is the same with all so called [sic] Islamic Terrorism. Which is exactly what the devil wants and loves. . . . No Irish person on earth would disagree. . . . We didn’t fire the church. We let them please themselves in our children right under our noses and there is no recompense. No balm in gilliad [sic] for Irish human beings under ‘civiliasation’ [sic]. . . . Final word. If its [sic] ‘Crazy’ to care. Then by all means, spank my ass and call me Fruity loops.

O’Connor shot to fame around 1990 when her version of the Prince song “Nothing Compares 2 U” became an international #1 hit. But if you think she got along with the famously oddball elfin mulatto — who, despite his own professions of religiosity and clean living, was found dead in 2018 with an “exceedingly high [7]” level of fentanyl in his blood — you clearly don’t understand what made Sinéad O’Connor tick. In a 2014 interview with a Norwegian national public broadcaster, she said:

I did meet him a couple of times. We didn’t get on at all. In fact, we had a punch-up. . . . He summoned me to his house after “Nothing Compares.” I made it without him. I’d never met him. He summoned me to his house — and it’s foolish to do this to an Irish woman — he said he didn’t like me saying bad words in interviews. So I told him to fuck off. . . . He got quite violent. I had to escape out of his house at 5 in the morning. He packed a bigger punch than mine.

O’Connor is perhaps most famous for a 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live [8] during which she sang an a cappella version of the Bob Marley song “War” before tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II and, with fire in her Irish eyes, humorlessly declared “Fight the real enemy.”

The following week, pint-sized Italian-American actor Joe Pesci hosted SNL. During his opening monologue [9], he held up an intact photo of the Pope, adding, “I’ll tell you one thing, she’s very lucky it wasn’t my show, ’cause if it was my show, I would have gave [sic] her such a smack.”

It wasn’t the first time that a prominent Italian-American performer expressed a desire to assault O’Connor. In 1990, after O’Connor demanded that venues not play the National Anthem before her concerts, Frank Sinatra [10] said that he wanted to “kick her in the ass.”

From the minute or so of O’Connor’s music that I’ve forced myself to endure over my lifetime, she appears to have had a decent singing voice. But the shitlib icon, just like John Lennon before her, apparently forgot that she was a singer and decided that she needed to project her own multifarious psychological inadequacies onto the world in some dim quest for some ill-defined notion of “justice.”

In her 2021 autobiography Rememberings, she wrote, “Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.”

Then why did she have a desire to broadcast every last niggling mental breakdown of hers to the entire world?

From what I can gather, O’Connor’s mother had been genuinely abusive to her, both mentally and physically; her own brother attests to this. At age 14, she was sent to an insane asylum in Ireland run by Catholic nuns. Such industrial-strength kiddie penitentiaries were notoriously abusive, as was documented in this book [11] I read in the course of writing this article [12] about the underreported phenomenon of sexual abuse by nuns. Poring over the available evidence, it seems that O’Connor’s early experiences with authority figures contributed greatly to her mental damage.

And I would have had immense sympathy for her if she hadn’t chosen to spend her entire adult life abusing the entire world in a non-stop and very public sadistic act of payback.

Cofounder of the Company Responsible for Last Month’s OceanGate Submersible Disaster Now Wants to Send 1,000 Humans to Venus

Just a tiny bit more than a month ago, I told you about Stockton Rush [13], who rushed to make headlines by using a video-game controller to lead himself and four other wealthy occupants in a clearly ill-designed underwater submersible to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and briefly ogle at the Titanic’s remains. Instead, he wound up being smashed to smithereens under the pulverizingly unforgiving water pressure. Even in death, Rush is to be scolded for bragging to the press that he didn’t want to hire the sort of “50-year-old white guys” who’d be capable of designing underwater vessels that might, you know, not kill him and a quartet of other fools who thought it’d be a good idea to each blow a quarter-million dollars just so they can say they saw the Titanic’s rotted-out husk with their own eyes.

Well, undaunted by the bad publicity and yearning to get a little bad publicity of his own, Guillermo Söhnlein [14] — who co-founded OceanGate Expeditions with Stockton Rush back in 2009 — says that his goal is not to send five landlubbers two miles underwater, but to propel 1,000 earthlings 29 million miles to Venus by the year 2050, where they will all live long and fruitful lives in peace and harmony in a “floating colony” somewhere in a tiny “sliver” of space about 30 miles above the planet’s surface. Y’see, the surface of Venus is so hot that it can melt lead, which would clearly be inhospitable for human life. Then again, the atmosphere above Venus is chock-full of clouds that rain down sulfuric acid, which is also notoriously human-unfriendly. And the winds, they do blow mightily — around 225 miles per hour, to be precise.

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You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here. [16]

Apart from being a co-founder of the catastrophically imploded OceanGate project, Söhnlein is also a founder of Humans2Venus [17], whose website claims that “the Venusian atmosphere may be the only non-Earth location in the solar system where humans may be able to exist on a long-term basis.” In an attempt to be fair, the site concedes that “there are downsides, including: the atmosphere is primarily carbon dioxide, and the clouds are mostly sulfuric acid. However, these obstacles can be overcome with breathing apparatus and acid-resistant materials.”

No mention is made of how these 1,000 aspirant Venusians will, you know, feed themselves or have enough air or water or waste-removal facilities or rudimentary healthcare or even WiFi reliable enough so that they can watch the next MMA super-fight without too many glitches.

In an interview with Business Insider [18], Söhnlein doesn’t sound at all like a self-important schmuck with a messiah complex:

I think I’ve been driven to help make humanity a multi-planet species since I was 11 years old. . . . I had this recurring dream of being the commander of the first Martian colony. . . . [Stockton Rush and I] both saw underwater exploration — and especially using crewed submersibles — as the closest thing that we could do to go into space and further that vision without actually going into space.

He also acts as if last month’s underwater disaster was no big whoop and that anyone who questions whether sending a thousand clowns to Venus is a wise idea is merely a killjoy conformist whose head is stuck in Squaresville USA:

Forget OceanGate. Forget Titan. Forget Stockton. Humanity could be on the verge of a big breakthrough and not take advantage of it because we, as a species, are gonna get shut down and pushed back into the status quo.

As long as Guillermo Söhnlein volunteers to be one of the 1,000 humanoids who board the space station and head to Venus, and given the condition that no 50-year-old white guys, or really any white people at all, are onboard this mission to boldly go where no one was idiotic enough to go before, I have no problem with this project.

Incoming Class at Ohio School Where White Teen Was Beaten to Death Last June Hasn’t Had One Student Pass the State Math Test in Three Years

Anyone who’s ever seen LeBron James play basketball knows that he’s an elite athlete. Anyone who’s ever heard him speak knows that he’s dumber than a bag of dirt. He’s even dumber than his first name, which is derived from an obscure French term that roughly translates as “The Bron.” His name would make more sense if it was James LeBron, but anyone who’s sensible knows that black people don’t make sense — especially their names.

James originally hailed from the busted-up, rusted-out city of Akron, Ohio. Wikipedia [19] would have us believe that in 2011, James

was researching the high school dropout rate of his hometown Akron and decided upon review to create the ‘I PROMISE’ initiative, focused on supporting the youth in his childhood community. In November 2017, the Foundation expressed to the Akron school board [20] their desire to create a school that aims to assist disadvantaged children with their studies. The plans were approved later that month and subsequent development of the school was initiated. James, having grown up in Akron, struggled as a student due to unstable conditions at home. . . . His upbringing served as a motivation to provide future generations of children with similar backgrounds with special support and care.

In 2018, a full seven years after LeBron allegedly started “researching” Akron’s high dropout rate, the “I Promise School [21]” was opened. Enrollment is only available to students who score in the bottom 25% of reading tests, so it is to be presumed that James’ promise was to make these kids less dumb.

Even though the school is primarily funded by taxpayers at the local, state, and federal levels, each year the LeBron James Family Foundation will generously peel off $1.4 million from James’ estimated net worth of $1 billion in the noble quest to ensure that Akron’s future aspiring basketball players may one day be able to type their own names in a text message to their baby mamas without making too many mistakes.

Setting aside the dubious assertion that LeBron James is even capable of researching anything, proof that he’s dumb is the following statement:

James considers the school’s founding as the most important professional accomplishment of his life.

Really? More important than four National Basketball Association titles? A grander accomplishment than being pro basketball’s all-time scoring leader?

Ladies and gents of the jury, I present as even further evidence that LeBron is certainly no LeBrain is the fact that not a single member [22] of the I Promise School’s incoming eighth-grade class has passed the state’s basic math test over the past three years. And even though the total number isn’t even one, let’s not get ahead of ourselves and assume that any of these students can even count that high.

Currently, the school’s students are testing in the bottom 5% of the state. So James’ grand vision has borne fruit by taking Akron’s bottom 25% and pushing them all the way down to the state’s bottom 5%. The Ohio Department of Education is now attempting an intervention and will spend millions of additional taxpayer dollars to help the school’s hapless students work themselves all the way back up to the bottom 25%.

Akron’s I Promise School made national headlines last June after a 17-year-old white male named Ethan Liming [23] was beaten to death in the aspiring educational facility’s parking lot after Liming and three friends — one white and two black — suddenly ambushed a trio of black youths who were playing basketball there late at night. Liming’s posse began shooting at the hoopsters with a SplatRBall gel gun [24], which the triumvirate of aspiring calculus students mistook to be some kind of deadly automatic firearm of the sort that their homies likely carry around in the courtyards of the housing projects where they live.

An autopsy showed that Liming had died of blunt force trauma. He also had a broken skull bone and a footprint on his chest wall. One of his assailants copped a plea [25] for misdemeanor assault and was harshly punished with a 180-day jail suspended jail sentence. The other two aspiring atom-splitters were slapped with involuntary manslaughter charges and appear to be out on bail awaiting trial. In April [26], one of them violated the conditions of his bond and has been placed under “a more stringent house arrest.”

Now, you can paint me white and call me Tom Sawyer’s wooden fence, but I think that Ethan Liming got a much harsher deal than those three aspiring trigonometry wizards did.

Jim Goad [27]

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