I’ve been through Burns, Oregon a few times — don’t remember a thing about it. It’s a nice long empty drive through fairly arid country: lots of rock and sagebrush, and an occasional shallow marshy stream adding a little green to the landscape. There are towns, mostly consisting of a gas station, a tiny post office, and maybe a little cafe, but you just drive on through, because it’s two hours to the next town, and you really want to get this trip over.

So having a mob of ‘militia’ take over a town there isn’t just a criminal act, it’s a cowardly act. They picked a quiet little place which is probably mostly conservative, but conservative in an old-fashioned way that says you leave your neighbor along, and they found themselves a target that is far away from anyone else who might tell them “no”.

I know the kind of people who committed this criminal invasion, too. They also come from small isolated places, the kind where there aren’t many people to talk to, except a few family and friends. They work all day at something mindless and get out of the habit of thinking; they get together with their buddies, or their father, or their grandfather, and they start bouncing their resentments and theories and lonely thoughts off of one another, and there’s no check against reality — it all just reverberates back and forth and gets fed now and then by talk radio and pretty soon they’ve got a goddamned mythos that ennobles them as heroes of the land and the government as their enemy. It’s the only enemy they’ve got. It’s pretty empty out there on the edges of the Palouse. The struggle is against loneliness and low wages and hard work and a future of low prospects, and there isn’t much heroic about fighting those. It’s hard to get your ego fed raging against a hay-baler or that danged bitter wind.

The worst of them are little angry men who get a rush from carrying a gun. And they egg each other on over some little bit of news that frustrates them, and soon enough a gang of idiots are carrying out an act of armed sedition. Nothing too dangerous, it’s not like they rushed a National Guard armory, where they might have gotten shot and where the government might have felt compelled to act fast. Nope, they picked their target with a complete lack of courage.

They took over the headquarters of a regional bird sanctuary, and terrorized the nearby small town. You really can’t get much more picayune than that.

What the government ought to do is bring up a unit of trained soldiers, fire a few warning shots, and tell the criminals to lay down their weapons. But I’m sure that’s what is causing some hesitation is the fact that a battle over a bird sanctuary occupied by twits in gimme caps isn’t exactly going to get featured in the curriculum at West Point. It’s not as if Burns, Oregon is a strategic chokepoint in the War on Terror.

These are clowns who got to caper on the evening news in their prior stunt at Bundy Ranch, and now they’re escalating. Their next act of treason will be bolder. I’m afraid it’s time to stop pussyfooting around and shut these bozos down, call them what they are — domestic terrorists — and bring the whole ratpack into court. Without their guns.

It’s not even as if they’re protesting an injustice. The two ranchers they claim to be defending were convicted of setting fires on federal land, and they aren’t arguing against that: instead, they’re trying to claim that these few farmers have right of ownership over land held in federal trust for all of us — they aren’t demanding fair play, they’re demanding to be given big chunks of property which they’ve already been allowed to use for grazing. They aren’t out for truth, justice, and the American way — this is simply a bunch of yahoos committing extortion for personal gain.

Oh, but there is a little something else: religious fanaticism. These are yokel terrorists, high on self-righteousness, believing god has called on them to die for their cause. To die for an undefended building on a bird sanctuary.

What a bunch of goobers.

He’s a writer, sort of. He’s mainly an indignant Christian. Here’s a sample: he starts off furious that historians use “CE” rather than “AD”, which is solely intended to insult the Christian religion, and segues into fulminating rage against all that modern stuff — you know, sodomites and leftists.

We must pry their hands from the levers of power, slap their megaphone from our ear, remove their boot from the neck of our economy, drive the swine from the public trough, remove the leprous private parts from their plundering the soul of innocence.

The Sexual Revolution, and no fault divorce, has done infinite harm to the public weal, and ruined countless private lives, including those in my immediate family and immediate circle of friends. Femininity, motherhood, fidelity, charity, chastity, honor, honesty, monogamy and family, all these things were demeaned and repudiated in the name of freedom. Freedom did not result, but slavery. Those chains must be broken. The feminist movement has grown into a corrupt parody of itself.

We want our men back. We want our women back. We want masculinity for the men and femininity for the women. The man-haters have no more arguments to make and nothing more to say.

How have we come to the pass where to indulged in unspeakable sexual perversion is a constitutionally protected right which overrides the rights of the faithful not to participate in the celebration of an abomination their religion, as well as common decency, condemns: but to use the word ‘pervert’ is to be shunned by the elite, subject to harassment and lawsuit, and in our neighboring countries, to jail?

Leftists have proven themselves unfit for positions of command and trust in our society. Even my little corner, the science fiction field, has been overrun by the termites that enter the moldy walls once the sunlight of truth is absent.

[Read more…]

It’s the only possible explanation. The Arizona senate has just appointed Sylvia Allen to be chair of the Education Committee. This Sylvia Allen:

Allen is best known for her controversial public comments over the years. During a legislative hearing in 2009, she said the Earth is 6,000 years old, a belief held by “Young Earth” biblical creationists. In 2013, a Facebook post about chem-trail conspiracies gained widespread media attention, as did a March comment suggesting mandatory church attendance.

She was appointed to regulate the educational policy in Arizona by a fellow Republican, the senate president. I don’t know what he was thinking — she sounds like the kind of loon you steer into positions where she can’t do much harm. Maybe it’s just the standard Republican game of blowing up the government from within?

But you can’t just blame this on Republican idiocy.

Sen. Steve Farley, D-Tucson, who had criticized Allen’s church comment, said he looks forward to working with her on education issues.

“She’s made some interesting comments to the public, but it’s not like she’s going to be teaching,” he said. “We have accredited teachers for that.”

He said Allen has always had an open door for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

“I think she’ll do a pretty good job,” he said.

A pretty good job. Of what? Saying stupid stuff to make the Republicans look even more nuts? Or did the chemtrails get to him, too?

Just evangelical Christians, which is even worse.

Jim Bakker has taken his apocalyptic Christian ministry to the next logical step. Since the world is going to end soon, with years and years of tribulation, his flock is going to need to eat, and with no more senior discounts at the Sizzler he’s going to have to provide for them. So after stirring up fear of doom for a while, he now tells his audience to hoard gold and silver and buy great big buckets of food to store away for Armageddon. Nice racket.

One little problem: somebody actually tasted the food in buckets. Their sole virtue is that they’re so loaded with preservatives that they should last for 20 years.

They taste, he says, like, “paper-mache,” “a bathroom at a bar at the end of the night in a college town,” and, simply, “one of the worst things I’ve ever eaten in my life.”

Religion poisons everything. Including, literally, food.

She knows what’s up.

On November 27, a mass shooting left three dead and nine wounded at a Planned Parenthood clinic just miles from the headquarters of the Religious Right flagship, Focus on the Family. Was the shooting exactly what conservative Christian presidential candidates and members of congress wanted? Maybe, maybe not. But it is what they asked for. Republican members of the Religious Right incited violence as predictably as if they had issued a call for Christian abortion foes to take up arms. Inciting violence this way is called stochastic terrorism:

“Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf.”

In an incident of stochastic terrorism, the person who pulls the trigger gets the blame. He—I use the male pronoun deliberately because the triggerman is almost always male—may go to jail or even be killed during his act of violence. Meanwhile, the person or persons who have triggered the triggerman, in other words, the actual stochastic terrorists, often go free, protected by plausible deniability.

She’s also not afraid to name names.

We can be confident that communications teams for Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and others are scrambling at this very moment to figure out the nuances of plausible deniability—weighing how best to distance themselves from the violence that killed a police officer and two others without making their protestations of surprised dismay sound as hollow as they actually are—without actually denouncing the disgust and dehumanization of women who have abortions and those who provide them.

But of course they’re going to get away with it. They’ve got obedient masses who were trained in the churches to obey authorities.

Let’s look on the bright side of this infuriating story.

Khalil, 29 and Ayyad, 28, moved to Philadelphia from Palestine 15 years ago. Khalil now owns the Feltonville pizza shop — Pizza Point — that gave him his first job. The friends were in Chicago visiting each other’s families and met back at the airport Wednesday night to take the same flight home. The gate agent told them apologetically they wouldn’t be allowed to board because a passenger was afraid to fly with them after overhearing the men speaking Arabic.

So they called the police, and argued, and finally, after a delay, were allowed to board the plane. It’s totally unjust that someone can just whine about a fellow passenger’s religion or language and get them kicked off.

But…you know, last time I was on a flight, there was a Catholic priest in all the sombre regalia boarding the plane with me.

You can see where this is going.

Can I go to the gate agent and claim that I am afraid to fly with a member of a child-raping cult that worships death? Because that is just as reasonable as claiming I’m afraid that a couple of pizza guys were a danger because they didn’t speak English to each other. But hey, if airlines are going to bend over so much to avoid defying the bigotry of their passengers, we could start acting as stupid as those fools and be really annoying.

Except, unfortunately, that I have no interest in competing in the idiocy race with bigots, and generally when I’m boarding a plane I just want to get the process over with and get to my destination.

Also, I doubt that they would care what an atheist fears, anyway.