If I wanted to be rich, I wouldn’t be a college professor. There are many professions that pay so much better.

Like right-wing moocher off of religious charities. LaVoy Finicum, one of the mouthy militia that’s taken over Malheur Preserve, is sad because while he’s gallivanting off to pointless, egotistical crusades in remote places, they have taken his foster children away.

“They” being the organizations that pay him to take care of these kids. On top of neglecting his parental responsibilities, his complaint reveals something of his character. Rather than desperately begging to have his loved ones returned to him, which is how I’d have reacted if Child Protective Services had swept my children away, he’s moaning about the loss of income.

Finicum said he is licensed and has a care contract with Catholic Charities Community Services in Arizona. While his license has not been revoked, Finicum said he would no longer receive referrals to care for foster children.

That represents an enormous loss of income for the Finicums. According to a 2010 tax filing, Catholic Charities paid the family $115,343 to foster children in 2009. That year, foster parents were compensated between $22.31 and $37.49 per child, per day, meaning if the Finicums were paid at the maximum rate, they cared for, on average, eight children per day in 2009.

“That was my main source of income,” Finicum said. “My ranch, well, the cows just cover the costs of the ranch. If this means rice and beans for the next few years, so be it. We’re going to stay the course.”

My first thought: wow, he’s bringing in $100K for taking care of kids (a job he seems to be shirking)? My parents had six kids and were living on $10K a year that my dad had to work two jobs to earn. Clearly, the lesson is that while my father was earning a pittance for hard manual labor, my mother should have been getting paid ten times as much for her hard work raising kids.

My second thought: oh, so this ranching nonsense is really just a hobby for people who have worked the angles and are getting paid beaucoup bucks from charitable institutions? Just like the Bundy family is all anti-government while living on government subsidies? Color me unsurprised.

My third thought, after it all sunk in: those poor kids. They were nothing but a paycheck to their foster parents. It is simply cold, callous venality to say “so be it” when children are taken away, and to regard the great cost of that loss being to have to live on rice and beans. It’s positively Dickensian. May they never have another child brought to their home, and may they die lonely and alone at some distant time.

I may make a lot less money than that exploiter, Finicum, but at least I can say I love my kids, and I came from a happy family, and I’m not a paranoid conspiracy theorist loon, so maybe I actually did pick the right line of work.

Marco Rubio bought himself a handgun for Christmas. There’s nothing wrong with that, I guess; when asked why, he could just say because he wanted it, and he could afford it. But no, he had to spill his guts and expose the real reason.

In fact, if ISIS were to visit us or our communities at any moment, the last line of defense between ISIS and my family is the ability I have to protect my family from them or from a criminal or anyone else that seeks to do us harm. Millions of Americans feel that way.

There’s our problem in a nutshell. One of our presidential candidates thinks that ISIS/ISIL/Daesh is credibly going to invade Florida, that they’re going to break into his house, and that he’ll be able to fight them off with a pistol. That’s such a fantastically naive and childish vision of a sociopolitical conflict that it tells me he’s got an unrealistic view on how to handle a serious problem, and that what’s driving him is really an irrational fear.

Matt Taibbi has assembled all of the absurdity of the Bundy militia. From weepy oath taking to begging for snacks to their delusional belief that taking over a federal building will have no consequences, it’s all there.

The Bundy militiamen are an extreme example of a type that’s become common in America. Like the Tea Partiers, they seem to not only believe that they’re the only people in history who’ve ever paid taxes, but that they’re the only people who were ever sad about it. What they call tyranny on the part of the federal government just means putting up with the same irritating bills and regulations and other crap that we all put up with, only the rest of us don’t whine about it in the front seats of our cars while posing in front of tripods.

Again, these people may be dangerous, but their boundless self-pity, their outrageous sense of entitlement and their slapstick incompetence as rebels and terrorists are absolutely ridiculous. Sure, it may not help, but how can we not laugh?

These guys have done a wonderful job of making laughing stocks of themselves.

There’s no way that I would or did. Can we just scratch the capering clowns of the Republican party off our dance list? I can’t imagine any circumstances under which I’d vote for any of them; watching them argue is like trying to intellectually decide which shit-smeared boot I’d scrape clean first. Doesn’t matter, both get the treatment.

This is a competition between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, and everyone else is the sideshow. And on that, Charles Pierce can speak for me.

Of course, the Republicans have little Jingo Girls singing about ‘crushing the enemies of freedom’ so maybe we should keep a closer eye on them, and their horrible fans.

I give it a 2 out of 10. The North Koreans would have provided more dignified formality in their rhetoric, but these kids have a lot of enthusiasm. Very classy, in a Trumpian sense.

This is a very familiar situation, and if you want to puzzle out what’s actually going on, I recommend you do one or both of these things:

• Watch the movie Shane.

• Read this article by Chris Clarke.

Maybe you’ve already seen Shane, so I’ll just refresh your memory. A cattle baron tries to take over huge tracts of land by driving out settlers and small farmers; Jack Palance is the bad guy, working for the greedy cattlemen, terrorizing the farmers, who have Alan Ladd defending them. It’s the old range war story that has driven a lot of Westerns. You could also watch Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider, or any of dozens of movies with that theme. Why, just last night I watched a Danish Western, The Salvation, which recycled that story: Mads Mikkelsen is the Danish settler in America, who just wants to build a little farm with his family, when he is victimized by a brutal campaign to destroy a town so rich people can seize the oil-rich lands there (this, of course, prompts prolonged violence, unfortunately, but that’s another familiar trope in these movies).

It happened and is happening all across the West. There are all these open spaces, and a few people decide that they own ALL of it, and that no one else gets to use it. Their demands are usually couched in terms of privatizing public lands, so our Libertarian-leaning compatriots just love it. Also loving it are the few rich beneficiaries of the heavily subsidized use of public lands.

Or instead of a fictionalized old movie, you could read Clarke’s article for the non-fictional details.

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Matt Taibbi has announced the official Republican debate drinking game. He claims to have tuned it so it isn’t instant death to play, but looking it over, it still looks pretty lethal.

I will not be watching the debate — my brain simply cannot take it. I’ll probably go out to a movie, or charge into the lab to tinker for a few hours instead. Unfortunately, my wife is going through a phase where she’s fascinated with really bad arguments, so she’s already planning to sit through it all. Should I hide the good liquor, or just plan on coming home with a stomach pump?

That’s a direct quote from the militant idiot in Oregon. He’s very upset that people are sending them dildos — someone spent $17.90 to ship a sex toy as commentary to them. But in the category of spending and wasting money, I’d like to know how much he has spent on military-style weapons.

But what bugs me most in the video is the first line: So we went and picked up some mail. Really? These armed assholes have seized control of a bit of federal property…and they’re treated so lightly that they’re driving back and forth into town to pick up their mail and go to restaurants? What kind of takeover and siege is this? I can agree that some restraint is a good idea — please don’t charge in with tanks and guns blazing — but come on. When the criminals come into town to have a burger at McDonald’s and pick up their butt plugs at the post office, arrest them.

Probably. Every four years, ScienceDebate.org comes along to suggest that the presidential candidates ought to have a debate about the science issues that confront us. It’s a good idea, I think.

I’d like it to happen. On the plus side, watching Republicans poop the bed over and over again would be vastly entertaining. Just recently, Rick Santorum said something stupid, for example (and who are we kidding? Santorum has like an all-automated electric stupidity generator permanently mounted in his mouth.)

For me, when you say the states have the right to define marriage, it’s like saying, well, the states have the right to redefine the chemical equation for water, it can be H3O instead of H2O. Well, the states can’t do that. Why? Because nature dictates what water is, nature dictates what marriage is, and the states don’t have the right to violate what nature has dictated.

Imagine a two hour show with those loonies babbling on the stage. Comedy gold!

Unfortunately, on the negative side, I can’t quite imagine either Clinton or Sanders putting in a solid performance. They’d probably be OK by just going with the consensus science view and avoiding controversy, but I don’t think they could demonstrate a deep knowledge of science. And who knows, maybe they have some weird ideas that would slip out and throw me into deeper despair. Maybe Clinton is a UFO fan, or Bernie Sanders thinks there might be something to homeopathy. I don’t know whether I really want to turn over that rock.