Lazy looters and incompetent exploiters

The Bundy case is shaping up to be loads of fun. The pretrial detention memorandum for ol’ Cliven has been released, and in addition to making the case that he was a lawless, violent criminal, it explains that he was a terrible “rancher”.

While Bundy claims he is a cattle rancher, his ranching operation – to the extent it can be called that – is unconventional if not bizarre. Rather than manage and control his cattle, he lets them run wild on the public lands with little, if any, human interaction until such time when he traps them and hauls them off to be sold or slaughtered for his own consumption. He does not vaccinate or treat his cattle for disease; does not employ cowboys to control and herd them; does not manage or control breeding; has no knowledge of where all the cattle are located at any given time; rarely brands them before he captures them; and has to bait them into traps in order to gather them.

Nor does he bring his cattle off the public lands in the off-season to feed them when the already sparse food supply in the desert is even scarcer. Raised in the wild, Bundy’s cattle are left to fend for themselves year-round, fighting off predators and scrounging for the meager amounts of food and water available in the difficult and arid terrain that comprises the public lands in that area of the country. Bereft of human interaction, his cattle that manage to survive are wild, mean and ornery. At the time of the events giving rise to the charges, Bundy’s cattle numbered over 1,000 head, straying as far as 50 miles from his ranch and into the Lake Mead National Recreation Area (“LMNRA”), getting stuck in mud, wandering onto golf courses, straying onto the freeway (causing accidents on occasion) – foraging aimlessly and wildly, roaming in small groups over hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands that exist for the use of the general public for many other types of commercial and recreational uses such as camping, hunting, and hiking.

I used to spend some time every summer at my uncle’s horse and cattle ranch in eastern Washington, and what I remember was all the work: up early in the morning, walking the irrigation ditches and watering the fields, taking hay out to the cows, and there was this tiring ritual of walking the fields and picking up rocks. None of that for the Bundys! Neglect the animals, do nothing to care for the land, just let everything run loose until you feel like going out and killing a few cows.

I’m unimpressed.

Doesn’t the Bible say something about good stewardship? Maybe they should take a look at that holy book they pay lip service to — it doesn’t look good for the Bundys.

The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Isaiah 24:5

And the Lord said, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom his master will set over his household, to give them their portion of food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions. But if that servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed in coming,’ and begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and get drunk, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and put him with the unfaithful. Luke 12:42-46

They should count their blessings, though. Being cut into pieces isn’t a permissible punishment under federal law.

Stephen Hull must work for free

He’s an editor for the Huffington Post, and was asked why the HuffPo doesn’t pay its writers.

I love this question, because I’m proud to say that what we do is that we have 13,000 contributors in the UK, bloggers… we don’t pay them, but you know if I was paying someone to write something because I wanted it to get advertising pay, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. So when somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.

See, you’re inauthentic if you get paid fairly for your work. You can trust someone if they did the work for free, which implies that you ought to be deeply suspicious of people who expect to get paid.

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The Milo & Christina Show

Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers are jabbering in Minneapolis tonight, and Lindsey and Ryan are liveblogging the event. It sounds dreadful, and I’m glad I didn’t even try to make the drive in. Highlights so far: Milo’s contribution was all of ten minutes long, in which he characterized feminism as nasty, bitter, ugly, lesbianic hate fest, and Christina’s trying to criticize modern feminism by slapping around Andrea Dworkin. And then it’s over.

It was a free event, so I guess everyone got what they paid for.

Another fun moment in the Q&A. They were asked by one of the dudebros in the audience about how to defeat the affirmative consent requirement at the U of M (wait, why would anyone oppose that?), and Milo made some dismissive joke about it. Lindsey’s comment:

So. We now have 200 guys who have had a pundit they admire tell them that conversations about consent kills fun, and requiring affirmative consent is absurd. Women of the U of M, this is an appropriate time to be scared.

I also like this:

Hahahaha oh man, Milo just said feminism is hurting women because it’s chasing away good guys who are going to retreat into video games and porn instead of having a relationship with a woman given this climate. Don’t let the door hit ya, guys.

Mary Lou Bruner might even get elected

Now that’s a terrifying thought. Bruner is a retired teacher (!) running for the Texas School Board (!!) with a set of beliefs about science that ought to have gotten her fired long, long ago. Instead, she’ll probably find herself in that nest of loons with influence over textbooks all around the country.

Bruner, in fact, has written about the extinction of dinosaurs. When the flood waters subsided and rushed into the oceans there was no vegetation on the earth because the earth had been covered with water. . . . The dinosaurs on [Noah’s ark] may have been babies and not able to reproduce. . . . After the flood, the few remaining Behemoths and Leviathans may have become extinct because there was not enough vegetation on earth for them to survive to reproductive age.

Meanwhile, Climate change has nothing to do with weather or climate, it’s all about system change from capitalism (free enterprise) to Socialism-Communism. The Climate Change HOAX was Karl Marx’s idea. It took time to ‘condition’ the people so they would believe such a HOAX!

We haven’t even gotten to her political beliefs, which are just about as nutty.

bruner

That a few kooks exist and think they’re qualified for high office is never surprising. What’s troubling is that there are a significant number of people who will vote for her.

Why can’t we prosecute people for gun incompetence?

It’s another of those stories.

Det. Sgt. Troy Gilleylen of the Battle Creek Police Department said Babick and her 25-year-old boyfriend, whose name was not released, were in their upstairs bedroom at the time of the shooting, lying on their bed watching television. The boyfriend’s .45-caliber handgun was on the bed, after it had just been cleaned and loaded.

Babick got up from the bed to answer the telephone, the boyfriend told police, and when she got back in bed, the gun discharged, sending a bullet through her left rib cage.

She staggered downstairs and collapsed in the living room, where she died.

That’s tragic and terrible. But this is what also makes me furious.

The man told police she may have lain on top of the gun, or somehow hit it with her hand when she got back on the bed, causing it to discharge. Gilleylen said the distraught man has been “100 percent cooperative” with police and he has not been charged in the incident.

Wait. He’s lounging about with a loaded handgun in bed, and it goes off and kills a woman, and the police do nothing? Isn’t there a charge like negligent homicide that would be appropriate here?

This man is an idiot who killed another human being with stupidity. At the very least, he ought to have his privilege to carry guns around taken away, especially since there are two children living there. Do we have to wait until an ‘accident’ kills one of them?

Nah. As we all know, a gun-fondlers right to be a danger to others may not be infringed.

Poor Cliven

You should read all of the charges in Cliven Bundy’s indictment: assault, extortion, conspiracy, and more, and it’s all based on the 2014 standoff at his ranch. The FBI has been waiting patiently all this time to sweep him up and lock him away with an overwhelming list of crimes.

The other rather amusing thing about it all: Bundy, the guy with the great ranch and who has been grazing herds of cattle on federal land, who owes at least a million dollars to the federal government, has asked the federal government to provide him with a public defender. The freeloading never ends.

No Roosh

Do I need to mention Roosh, he of the books full of rape stories, he of the cunning plan to end rape by legalizing it on private property, he who announced a world-wide set of meetings of his fellow pick-up artists, he who cancelled all of those meetings as people around the world learned of them and laughed at him? Yes, I do, but I’ll be brief. He had a “press conference”, that started like so:

All right, so the world has gone insane in the past week. Why? Number one, I had organized meet ups around the world for men to enjoy a social happy hour to meet in private and talk about anything. Work, politics, girls, just to meet. Okay? Number two, a year ago I wrote an article How to Stop Rape. This article, to a 10-year-old, was obvious that I didn’t intend to legalize rape or cause harm against women. But starting on Sunday, a lot of you have lied by saying that I am a pro-rape advocate. He wants women to get hurt! And then the third thing, you said the meet ups are about rapists. They want to gather to learn how to rape. They are going to exchange tips. Some of you have called it a rape rally! What the hell is that? A rape rally? So because of that I’ve been all over the world in terms of the news. Over 100 articles have been written.

I think Dave Futrelle has Roosh’s history covered. Social meetups are not the problem. The problem is that Roosh brags about traveling around the world “banging” women who are drunk, unconscious, or otherwise unable to consent, he publishes recipes for tricking women into sex, he regularly disparages women, and yes, he published a bizarre article in which he suggested that rape would go away if the law disallowed charging men with rapes that occurred on their own private property — after all, the woman consented to entering his rape cave, therefore she consented to anything he might do to her there. So basically his “press conference” was all about lying about what he does.

But the operative sentence is that last one: Over 100 articles have been written. That’s exactly what he wanted. His plan was a success.

Therefore, I now declare Pharyngula to be a Roosh-Free Zone. I won’t be mentioning him in the future. I’m entering his name into the blacklist, so don’t even bother trying to mention him in the comments. Defending him will be grounds for an automatic ban.

You might be surprised at what is computable nowadays

Meet Oliver.

I’m a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher and programmer living slightly north of Castle Black. I study online communities, focusing on how people consume content, how user behaviour varies between desktop and mobile platforms, and how we can best understand systemic bias in peer-production communities.

He writes C++ and R code. His perspective sounds like the kind of contribution a lot of programming communities need, so I would think it valuable to keep him around. Unfortunately, he has resigned from the R community. He found something simple, obvious, and wrong, so he fixed it and submitted a report. Exactly as you’re supposed to do, right? Only this was the problem:

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