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

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 … Read the rest

Sam issues a warning about The Frenzied Women.

… Read the rest

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

… Read the rest

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 … Read the rest

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 … Read the rest

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

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

Fun guy.

… Read the rest

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… Read the rest

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.

… Read the rest

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