Weekly Roundup: A Petting Zoo With Wings Edition

It used to be part of the suburban pilgrim's progress: you got a house, you had a child, then you got a dog for the child. My parents did it, my friends' parents did it. Every kid wanted a dog.
Things are different now. Grown men and women get dogs for themselves, often because they want a child but they would rather have something that can be put down or given up for adoption if times get tough. Dogs are children now. They ride in strollers and they eat gluten-free health food from specialized boutiques.
Naturally, these dogs have to go everywhere with their owners. They pad around on shit-stained paws in restaurants, they bark at you on the street, they attack cyclists. They get about the same level of discipline that the Millennials got, with similar results. And of course they have to get on planes. After all, you can bring children on planes. Why shouldn't you be able to bring dogs, which are children now, on planes? Further more, why shouldn't you receive special treatment for having done so, even though the whole thing is a scam?
This week, a fake child and a real child had an incident on a Southwest Airlines flight. The dog attacked the child and scraped her face. There's a photo of the dog and its owner in the linked article. Experienced Southwest customers will recognize that these two bitches are sitting in the bulkhead seat, which is almost always a sign that they "pre-boarded" due to a medical condition. In my experience, 50% of Southwest pre-boarders do it because they are fat. Another 25% are old people on the way to Las Vegas. The final 25% consists of scammers and scumbags, which I think is the case here. She brings the dog as a "comfort animal" and then she insists on boarding first, with her dog.
After the dog attacked the six-year-old girl, both it and the owner were removed from the flight. That's great, but I'm of the opinion that attacking a child should be a one-strike activity for animals. You hurt a child, you are going to die. Simple as that. Because children are actually human beings. We need children in order to continue the American nation and the human race. Dogs are not people. They are disposable. I'm not saying that to be cruel. I've owned dogs and cats. I can be very sentimental about animals, trust me. But animals are not people. Our national fetishization of animals over real children is having real and measurable effects on humanity.
Actually, scratch that. Let the dog live, maybe on one of those farms I always heard about as a kid. Shoot the woman in the head. In public, pour encourager les autres. Comfort animal. My ass.
For R&T, I talked about how we program ourselves to drive poorly.
At TTAC, I told a story about potholes and forced my son to test drive the BIRD scooter around Santa Monica.
Brother Bark took a swipe at the Mercedes-Benz CLA250.
Alright, everybody, fly safe and I'll see you soon!