I was awakened this morning by the heavy patter of raindrops on my house. This cannot be. This is against the natural order. January and February are our coldest months, we simply do not get liquid water falling out of the sky in midwinter. I looked, and it’s +1°C out there! Unthinkable! Inconceivable!
Now I’m wondering, if we melt all the icecaps and glaciers, will we get enough sea water rise to refill the great inland sea of North America? If so, I could pretend I’ve moved back to Seattle.
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.
Lakes around here freeze over solid on the surface. Lakes in more temperate places just stay liquid. It’s the ones trying to be in-between that get weird.
Be sure to have the sound on. Lakes aren’t supposed to sound like that!
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.
An Australian town is being overrun with tumbleweeds. They’re complaining.
This is exactly wrong. You treat tumbleweeds laconically. You gaze at them all flinty-eyed, and at most you might shift your toothpick from one side of your mouth to the other. Bonus points if you do that while listening to an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.
There. Problem solved.
You have to listen to Rick Wiles pontificating on the death of Scalia. It’s free-form stream of consciousness in which he connects the dots on his own delusions to conclude that Obama sacrificed Scalia in a Luciferian
ritual.
You can be an engineer, too!
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.
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.
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.
It’s a surprisingly fraught issue, and it may get worse. The South Dakota legislature wants to pass House Bill 1008. The Republicans there seem to be obsessed with who is using the bathroom.
FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to restrict access to certain restrooms and locker rooms in public schools.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:
Section 1. That chapter 13-24 be amended by adding a NEW SECTION to read:
The term, biological sex, as used in this Act, means the physical condition of being male or female as determined by a person’s chromosomes and identified at birth by a person’s anatomy.
Section 2. That the code be amended by adding a NEW SECTION to read:
Every restroom, locker room, and shower room located in a public elementary or secondary school that is designated for student use and is accessible by multiple students at the same time shall be designated for and used only by students of the same biological sex. In addition, any public school student participating in a school sponsored activity off school premises which includes being in a state of undress in the presence of other students shall use those rooms designated for and used only by students of the same biological sex.
