The beginning of the end of the Malheur occupation

Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, and several others have been arrested, and someone unnamed has been killed.

The FBI and Oregon State Police report Ammon Bundy, Ryan C. Bundy, Brian Cavalier, Shawna Cox and Ryan Waylen Payne were all arrested.

Officials also said there was one fatality and one person suffered non-life threatening injuries and was transferred to a local hospital.

It is unfortunate that the standoff seems to be ending (but this encounter occurred outside the refuge, and I presume the fanatics instead are still hoping for martyrdom) in violence, but I suppose it’s inevitable that people who babbled about killing or be killed weren’t going to just peaceably surrender.

Let’s hope the heart has gone out of the remaining occupiers and that the rest fades away quietly.

Jaw dropped, lost somewhere on the floor

Richard Dawkins does it again. Citing a crude cartoon from Sargon of Akkad that claims feminists are in league with Islamists? Fuck me.


Obviously doesn’t apply to vast majority of feminists, among whom I count myself. But the minority are pernicious.

The text on the video: Feminists and Islamists have basically the same ideology, demonstrated through the magic of song by SyeTenAtheist. A pile of nonsense, favorably promoted by Richard Dawkins. Demonstrated. Jebus. I’d at least expect him to understand the meaning of that sentence.

Uh-oh. Hillary faces the scorn of Ta-Nehisi Coates

My wife watched the Democratic town hall meeting last night — she’s becoming a fierce Sanders supporter. I mostly ignored it, so I missed this comment by Clinton, on Abraham Lincoln:

You know, he was willing to reconcile and forgive. And I don’t know what our country might have been like had he not been murdered, but I bet that it might have been a little less rancorous, a little more forgiving and tolerant, that might possibly have brought people back together more quickly.

But instead, you know, we had Reconstruction, we had the re-instigation of segregation and Jim Crow. We had people in the South feeling totally discouraged and defiant. So, I really do believe he could have very well put us on a different path.

Ta-Nehisi Coates noticed it, though. And I learned something: this version of American history has a name.

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Deep down, we all want to be Bond villains

lander

I wrote earlier about the latest contretemps in the CRISPR community, and it turns out that I was a paragon of restraint and moderation in my comments. I am not accustomed to this role. I will try harder in the future. For now, I’ll try to turn to turn to Michael Eisen as a model. His review of the very same issue starts this way:

There is something mesmerizing about an evil genius at the height of their craft, and Eric Lander is an evil genius at the height of his craft.

Lander’s recent essay in Cell entitled “The Heroes of CRISPR” is his masterwork, at once so evil and yet so brilliant that I find it hard not to stand in awe even as I picture him cackling loudly in his Kendall Square lair, giant laser weapon behind him poised to destroy Berkeley if we don’t hand over our patents.

I had to laugh, and now I’m wondering what actor will play the Bond villain modeled after Lander.

Just add norovirus and this cruise would be perfect

There’s something called a Conspira-Sea Cruise, and it’s apparently “holistic”, which I suppose is a good thing. You wouldn’t want it to make that trip from LA to Puerto Vallarta in pieces, you know! They’ve got all kinds of speakers: there’s a futurist, a lot of Libertarians, a paranormal investigator, UFO people, a Spiritual Space Cleaner, astrologers, and a child-killer (Andy Wakefield is a speaker), so they’ve got all the people that you’d want to be trapped on a boat with, far from land.

They’ve also got a skeptical journalist on board, giving day-by-day reports of the shenanigans. Thank you, Colin, for taking the hit, and the extra pounds from the buffet, for us. It’s going to be entertaining. It reminds me a bit of the Paradigm Symposium, which I should think about attending this spring, except that it might conflict with a real science meeting I have to attend.

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A delicious twist

A Houston grand jury was convened to decide charges in the case of the faked Planned Parenthood videos. They came to an interesting decision.

A grand jury here that was investigating accusations of misconduct against Planned Parenthood has instead indicted two abortion opponents who made undercover videos of the organization.

Prosecutors in Harris County said one of the leaders of the Center for Medical Progress — an anti-abortion group that made secretly recorded videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of fetal tissue — had been indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony, and on a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs.

Planned Parenthood was cleared of all charges. Slimeball Daleiden who patched together misleading videos under false pretenses…well, he’s going to court.

Unfortunately, the article also features several blustering Texas Republicans declaring that they don’t care about the decision, they’re going to continue to ‘protect life’ by persecuting Planned Parenthood.

Well, it’s Oklahoma

redskins

There is a high school in Oklahoma that calls their athletic teams the “Redskins”. No, really — all the national debate about offensive sports team names sailed right on by them, and after years of public discussion elsewhere, it took until 2016 for McLoud, Oklahoma to stop and debate whether their name is inappropriate.

They had a public discussion, and then the school board voted to keep an ethnic slur as the proud label for their football team.

But that’s not all! Let’s abuse American Indians who argued against the name!

Bella Aiukli Cornell, a 14 year old Native American girl and a citizen of Choctaw Nation, gave a testimony against the name and mascot of the McLoud High School Redskins in December, at a school board meeting. A male peer, and a racist, yelled get off the stage, squaw!

Nice to know the rot extends to all ages.

We’ve got a lot of history, said Albert Baldwin, 74, a life-long resident of McLoud. I don’t know anyone around here that objects to being a Redskin. If there is, I don’t know about it.

That is simply the perfect explanation for this phenomenon.