Another one.

The troubling details of a kidnapping that unfolded last week in the rural community of Dapchi in northern Nigeria after Boko Haram attacked a school and apparently made off with teenage hostages horrified the nation. As many as 110 girls have been missing since Monday, when armed militants stormed the school.

Many Nigerians were all the more outraged that the attack and the events that followed mirrored a similar kidnapping of nearly 300 schoolgirls in 2014 in the community of Chibok.

That episode grabbed the world’s attention and elicited promises from officials that it would never happen again. Nearly four years later, an estimated 112 of those students are still held hostage.

“Not even our 112 Chibok Girls would imagine ANY more Daughters of Nigeria would be FAILED AGAIN,” Oby Ezekwesili, a founder of the Bring Back Our Girls group that advocates the release of the Chibok students, said on Twitter.

There’s uncertainty about how many girls were kidnapped because some have been hiding and are slowly making their way back.

Officials have been careful to avoid acknowledging anyone was kidnapped in Dapchi. Instead, they say only that the girls are missing.

Witnesses, however, described seeing the girls in militants’ vehicles as part of what appeared to be a deliberate plan to steal them. And they said militants arrived at the town looking specifically for the building, which is a boarding place with about 900 students.

One resident who lives a mile outside Dapchi, who asked that his name not be used because he feared for his safety, said his neighbor was outside his home late in the day on Monday when militants pulled up, grabbed him and asked him to point them to the school. He told the fighters he didn’t know where it was and begged to be released. They threw him aside and headed toward the town.

Schools are soft targets.

Then, late Wednesday, the state’s governor, Ibrahim Gaidam, announced that the missing girls had been rescued. The next day, parents streamed into the school, expecting to hear news of their missing daughters.

But when Mr. Gaidam arrived, he apologized, saying he was mistaken and had relied on security officials whose information had turned out to be false. He told the crowd to view the events as part of God’s plan and to pray for the girls’ return, said Modu Goniri, a father whose two daughters are still missing.

As he spoke, some parents began wailing uncontrollably. A few fainted.

In nine months some of them will have grandchildren.

Originally a pair of comments by AJ Milne on Shade of pale.

Think it was David Brin also pointed out about Star Wars: the droids are pretty clearly sentient, intelligent beings… Yet they can be bought, sold, effectively enslaved with ‘restraining bolts’. And it’s not just villains who do so.

… I find it not at all surprising Sagan would raise the issues he did. It flows quite naturally, it seems to me, from other views on the possible diversity of life in the universe, how our own perspective is, as yet, probably quite limited, against all of what might be out there.

There seems to be this very poorly thought through attitude amongs the anti-social justice (or possibly just antisocial and antijustice) contingent that, somehow, there’s this bright line between some mythical, antiseptic domain of the ‘hard scientists’ and some terribly squishy, soft social domain thing. And this attiitude, again, I suspect, is rearing its head here.

And Sagan is, in fact, amusingly enough, a fairly clear exhibit that this is not at all a clean separation. Not that it should surprise anyone, really, that there isn’t, when the very categories, here, are reified pretty willy nilly…

There’s a legitimate case, maybe, that you can’t get from is to ought in any absolutely prescribed way. As in: nothing about the arrangement of the physical matter of the universe quite says we shouldn’t enslave people or just treat them like desert. On the slavery question, economists, I’m sure, could comment pretty brutally on when it does, kinda, work out, if all you’re looking at is a specific balance sheet. (I’d add, parenthetically: chattel slavery, though it absolutely can be a helluva deal for the plantation owner, isn’t necessarily guaranteed to be that great a deal for them; it may be one of the reasons it’s not around much anymore, or not anywhere where there’s any kind of modern economy going)…

But look at what the so-called ‘hard’ sciences are, and what ‘technology’ is. Nothing, at all, walls them off from the social world. And the social world, the rules we live by, are every bit as real as a booster rocket. And technology is really only important to us when it meets up with the human, and, generally, quickly after that, it will meet up with the social. A rocket booster isn’t interesting to us just because, out in space, away from perturbing bodies, it’s an unusually clean example of the third law in action…

It’s interesting because of where we can go with it, what we can send up with it, which may be, yes, a communications satellite (a thing with social interaction as its very reason for being, that), or a robot that will send back information on what we are curious about…

What’s behind this poorly considered idea of some mythical separation of these domains is, I think, mostly wishful thinking. People like to keep things simple, and some of them, especially, just don’t want some things to change. They’d like to say can’t we just talk about the canyons on Mars; those are cool; can’t we just talk about rockets; I like those…

But real life isn’t like that. Everything you learn has implications. And everything you invent has implications. And nothing you do, you truly do in a vacuum (even if you do it halfway to the asteroid belt). And while you’re looking through your microscope, probably someone’s making your lunch. And how they’re being paid cannot be entirely separated from you, either, or how you had time to look through that microscope…

Real life isn’t like that. Reality isn’t like that. And the sciences, after all, do try to concern themselves with studying reality…

… and actually good scientists, like Sagan, are of necessity curious and wide-ranging thinkers. Inevitably, they’re going to notice those things. They will notice the connections, even if you’d rather not think about them.

Sam issues a warning about The Frenzied Women.

Uh oh uh oh, was Carl an SJW?

When someone tells me Sagan would hate discussions about diversity and identity, I always think of his response to Star Wars in 1978: Why are they all white? pic.twitter.com/LKMCcxU82Z

— M.P. (@OmanReagan) February 24, 2018

A Guardian reporter goes to CPAC.

“Do you remember I started running and people would say, ‘Are you sure he’s a conservative?’” an exultant US president asked the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday.

“I think now we’ve proved that I’m a conservative, right?”

Or perhaps more accurately, the conservatives gathered in the cavernous ballroom proved they are all Trumpians now. There were “Make America Great Again” caps, raucous chants of “Lock her up!” and “Build that wall!” and loud boos for the demons of the left. Old-school Republicans were thin on the ground, usurped by a crowd that included young and sometimes rowdy students.

Old-school Republicans are nothing to write home about either, but Trump is a fantastic tool for making them look better. Maybe that’s the secret, and not Russia at all – it’s a plot to make “screw the poor” look respectable.

The spotlight was dominated a succession of administration members answering toothless questions. Speakers included Eric Trump (“The media of this country does not understand the tone of this country”); rightwing populists Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (“I want America first for the American people, I want Britain first for the British people and I want France first for the French people”); and Nigel Farage (“I thought Trump’d be good but I’ve got to tell you, he’s exceeded all expectations”).

There was also the former White House adviser and conspiracy theorist Sebastian Gorka, who roamed the corridors basking in attention when not shoving a reporter.

On Thursday, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, sought to reject post-Parkland demands for gun control with a speech couched in Trumpian language that savaged elites, the media, anti-fascist protesters, Hollywood, George Soros and the FBI.

Nothing about The Jews? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? The Illuminati? The Masons?

Apparently Wayne LaPierre is Even More Bonkers now:

To see the National Rifle Association boss speak this week at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference was to see a man in urgent need of mental-health intervention. He turned a conventional speech about guns (specifically, the need for more of them in schools) into a paranoid fantasy about a socialist takeover of the United States.

He saw a “tidal wave” of “European-style socialists bearing down upon us,” creating a “captive society,” eliminating “resistance,” making a “list” in a cloud database of those who spank their children, expunging the “fundamental concept of moral behavior,” controlling speech through “safe zones.”

Yeah, boy, there’s no better index of moral behavior than a country packed with guns. Good people shoot first and ask questions later; bad people say let’s have less shooting ok?

With this “new socialist wave in America,” he said, “it’s just a short hop to the systematic destruction of our most basic freedoms.”

Had LaPierre fallen on his head and awakened in 1964? All that was missing was for him to quote General Jack D. Ripper in “Dr. Strangelove” on “the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

Sterling Hayden ruined that kind of crazy for all time.

LaPierre singled out three billionaire capitalists to blame for the socialist revolution: George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. But he saw conspirators everywhere in the government — Trump’s government: the FBI (with its “corruption” and “rogue leadership”) the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the intelligence agencies. He also blamed the Democrats, media, Hollywood, universities, classrooms, Black Lives Matter, elites and Keith Ellison.

Even the CPAC audience seemed to be stunned by this unhinged time-traveler from the Cold War. “You know, I hear a lot of quiet in this room, and I sense your anxiety,” he said. “And you should be anxious, and you should be frightened.”

Right? You never know when the furious white guy with the AR-15 is going to lurch into view.

The waters are rising fast around Manafort. Mueller filed new charges late today.

Prosecutors allege that Manafort, with the assistance of longtime business partner Rick Gates, “secretly retained a group of former senior European politicians to take positions favorable to Ukraine, including by lobbying in the United States.”

The new indictment came less than two hours after Gates pleaded guilty to two criminal charges in federal court and pledged to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia and the 2016 presidential election.

Prosecutors say Manafort orchestrated a group of former European politicians, called the “Hapsburg group,” to pose as independent voices. Yet they covertly pushed positions favorable to Ukraine as paid lobbyists. Manafort used offshore accounts to pay the former politicians 2 million euros.

It doesn’t get much sleazier than that.

Trump was apparently breathtakingly awful at CPAC today. (Conservative Political Action Conference. By “conservative” they mean whatever jumble of racist malevolence and boastful rapey contempt for women and shameless greed comes close enough to describing Trump.)

Addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference, the president read “The Snake,” a parable about a tenderhearted woman who takes in an ailing snake and gives it milk, honey and a silk blanket, only to be killed by the revived creature’s poisonous bite.

Trump explained the metaphor: “You have to think of this in terms of immigration.”

On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump frequently told the tale of the snake. The crowds at his rallies loved it. Other Americans were appalled and found it racist.

Nooooooooooo, it’s not a bit racist to compare immigrants to snakes who kill their kind generous hosts.

Trump mocked Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a war hero and Republican elder statesman with a terminal form of brain cancer, for his health-care vote. He vowed to “fight” a current Democratic foe, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California. And he revived his row with a previous one, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, by encouraging chants of “lock her up” and sounding off about her alleged “atrocities.”

“They’re crazed anyway, these people,” Trump said of Democrats. “They are really crazed.”

Fun guy.

This isn’t a country, it’s an insane asylum.

Watch that clip. Your jaw will dislocate, but watch it.

https://twitter.com/riotwomennn/status/966808353749000192

Performative hatred of a woman is such an effective way to rally a group that even people who know better won't stop doing it. Not that these people know better, of course. https://t.co/PE4tF9qciH

— Sady Doyle (@sadydoyle) February 23, 2018

They didn’t.

Did they?

They did.

From Left Foot Forward:

The Women’s Equality Party have dismissed a feminist academic at the centre of a transgender row, after she challenged whether children should be labelled trans.

Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans – a research fellow at King’s College London – was until this morning a spokeswoman for the Women’s Equality Party. Now she has resigned her membership after being sacked from that role.

It follows her appearance on Radio 4’s Moral Maze in November last year, where she argued that while adults could define themselves ‘in whichever way they want’, society and parents should avoid encouraging children to see themselves as being ‘in the wrong body’ – particularly if it led to surgery or treatment which would could have long-term implications.

So a party that – laughably – calls itself the Women’s Equality Party kicked her out of her role as spokeswoman. What sense does that make? How is it a good idea to make it taboo to discuss what kind of drastic measures should be taken with children who “see themselves as being ‘in the wrong body’”? Surgery and drugs are drastic things, so reasons for prescribing them should be open to reasoned discussion and research.

She added that some trans advocates were ‘abusive’ and ‘reactionary’.

Some are, staggeringly so – so much so that since reading Mueller’s indictment I’ve started to think many of them could be Russian trolls. They advocate sadistic violence, especially sadistic sexual violence, against women they label “TERFs,” which seems more like something Russian trolls would do than like something genuine lefty activists would do. Some trans activists are indeed highly abusive and reactionary, so saying that is no reason to kick anyone out of a role in a women’s equality party.

At the time, Dr Brunskell-Evans responded to the claims by denying any prejudice:

“I refute that I have promoted prejudice against the trans community either on the programme or through my writing and social media.

“I have called for transparent public debate, without fear of reprisal, of the social, psychological and physical consequences of the narrative that children can be born in ‘the wrong body’.”

However, the WEP have now completed their investigation into Dr Brunskell-Evans – and have sacked her as a spokesperson after determining the academic ‘breached articles of the constitution and our volunteer agreement’.

This is not a healthy situation. It’s the kind of thing Putin likes, but it’s not the kind of thing reasonable people should like.

Bow down, mortals.

Too bad you missed it.

But don’t worry – there’s more!