Omnibus Evil MFers in the news thread

Illinois teenager dresses as a clown, approaches a home and stares at the Ring camera, and later is arrested as a suspect in a homicide.

Man deliberately runs into and kills a coworker because he saw him hug a woman he had a crush on.

https://www.king5.com/article/news/crime/police-renton-man-fatally-hit-costco-co-workers-motorcycle-he-saw-him-hug-woman/281-869c57c2-2b57-4999-a453-1cae2802dbde

So he had a crush on the coworker?

I’ll let myself out.

This 100% sounds like it’s from the TV show Vice Principals.

The suspect in the Spokane arson case says he’s set at least 25 fires in recent days.

Also, I am very aware that kids have done this kind of thing for as long as we’ve had trains, but what was likely an attempt to make a viral TikTok video could have had very different consequences. (In the mid 1980s, I worked with a woman who lived in a small town outside Des Moines, where I lived and we worked, and one day, IIRC the FBI showed up at the high school because some train signals were messed up in southern Missouri, and they had traced it to a smashed signal light outside this town. The culprits were identified.)

The jokes falls flat because of the same syntactic ambiguity.

Not just kids. I spend time on Virtual Railfan’s camera in Flagstaff. East of the location is a busy crossing and there are a lot of bars to the north and Northern Arizona University to the south. As a consequence there is a lot of foot traffic across the tracks not all of which is entirely sober in the evenings.

One evening in particular some years ago one of the pedestrians stopped in the middle of the tracks and mooned an approaching freight train. The engineer made an emergency application (“Dumped the air.”) and the train stopped about twenty yards after the crossing as the miscreant scampered away. Since the speed limit in town is 45mph there was no real danger of derailment as there might have been at 70mph but as the slang term above might tell you, there was no air left to control the train’s speed. It had to sit there a good twenty minutes to recharge the reservoirs.

We heard the next day from someone who lived in Flag that irate motorists had detained the guy and handed him over to the police. What happened after that is unknown.

Well if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand…

I have no idea how private yachts operate but wouldn’t the hired captain of the ship be able to decide to rescue the stranded vessel no matter what the yacht owner wants to do?

Hey! Us, too. I even waved at the camera once when I was up there.

Only if they didn’t care if they had a job.

Isn’t coming to the aid of another vessel in trouble required by maritime law? Can he be held legally liable?

“He” as in Zuckerberg or the captain? Or both?

That’s what I was thinking, although I can imagine that someone like Zuckerberg might think that the vessel in distress was merely a pretext to an attempt at hijacking his yacht.

Hijackers wan their targets isolated, not with the Coast Guard in the loop and other ships already in the area.

I wonder how much of a concern high seas piracy is in the Gulf of Alaska these days.

Some quick Googling referred me to 46 US Code § 2304;

(a)

(1)A master or individual in charge of a vessel shall render assistance to any individual found at sea in danger of being lost, so far as the master or individual in charge can do so without serious danger to the master’s or individual’s vessel or individuals on board.

(2)Paragraph (1) does not apply to a vessel of war or a vessel owned by the United States Government appropriated only to a public service.

(b)A master or individual violating this section shall be fined not more than $1,000, imprisoned for not more than 2 years, or both.

So if they were capable of receiving the request from the Coast Guard (which they absolutely should have been) and deliberately ignored it, the captain could definitely be in some trouble.

Will a GoFundMe be started to cover the $1,000 fine if Zuckerberg is found liable?

Let him try to GoFundMe a prison sentence!

Wouldn’t the yacht captain be the one subject to the fine and not the yacht owner?