I saw a ridiculous item on Facebook yesterday, comparing Obama urging reform to gun laws while surrounded by children with Hitler urging reform to gun laws while surrounded by children.

Our friend Stewart found and translated an item from the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, 21 March 1938.

A new weapons law.

Berlin, 21 March. In the latest edition of the Reich law gazette a new weapons law is announced which was recently decided upon by the Reich government and which replaces the defensive weapons law of 1928, as well as a series of weapons directives from the emergency period.

The new law is the result of an examination of the weapons law in order to see which relaxations could be made in the current legal situation in the interests of the German weapons industry, without endangering the maintenance of public security. The pre-condition of any relaxation of the current weapons law must naturally be that the police authorities remain in a position to prevent without hindrance the acquisition and possession of weapons by unreliable persons.

The obvious fundamental point of ensuring that weapons are not possessed by enemies of the people and the state, as well as other elements that pose security risks, will be taken care of in the new law by enabling the police to forbid such persons from acquiring, possessing or using weapons of any sort. As this makes it possible to forbid any ownership of weapons considered undesirable by the police, it was possible to permit, among other things, a relaxation of the restrictive directives, in order to permit an improvement of conditions which would benefit the economic situation of the public in general and particularly that of the German weapons industry and the workers employed in it.

Thus, the acquisition of weapons will in the future only be possible with police permission, as far as pistols or revolvers goes. The necessity to obtain a permit to purchase ammunition is no longer in force.

The restrictions on the free circulation of cutting or thrusting weapons dating from the emergency period are, for the most part, rescinded.

In other ways, too, the law contains a series of relaxations compared to the current law. Of the many other new points, one should mention the basic prohibition on selling weapons or ammunition to those under 18 years of age. In addition, the granting of a permit for manufacturing or acquiring weapons will be linked to being of German nationality, to personal reliability and to functional aptness. Jews may not receive a permit.

The provisions of the new law, which goes into effect on the 1st of April this year, are supplemented by a comprehensive set of rules by the Reich Minister of the Interior, which has also been published in the Reich law gazette.

“Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro”, 21 March 1938

Not quite what Obama is suggesting.

Nick Cohen tears into the pope and the pro-theocracy left.

The only respectful way to mark the first anniversary of the Paris killings is to honour the memory of the dead by fighting for the Enlightenment values they lived by and died for. Whether we can is moot. Anglo-Saxon societies have enjoyed the privilege of Enlightenment freedoms for so long our defences have fallen into disrepair. We fool ourselves into thinking we are in a post-Enlightenment world. The old battles appear dead and gone, even though all around us murderous fanatics remind us that they intend to fight the war all over again.

It’s like vaccinations all over again, isn’t it – we’re so used to our freedoms that we don’t realize how shit it would be if we lost them. We take them for granted, we assume they’ll always be there, we feel safe enough to throw friendly bouquets at those funny little men in Nigeria or Iraq or Bangladesh who aren’t going to come bothering us.

Charlie Hebdo was free at all times and dared to exercise its freedom in public. So many lies have been told about it by the regressive left that I must remind you that its journalists were at the forefront of the campaigns against the French far right and in favour of asylum seekers.

But it would not refuse to mock sharia law because polite society preferred to look away. Nor could its journalists in conscience lay into the Catholic church, while leaving radical Islam alone. Where is the satirical edginess in savaging the beliefs of Catholics, who will not murder you, while passing on Islamists who might?

So they were killed, and many on the “left” carry on blaming them to this day.

The pope responded to the murders of satirists by lecturing their corpses. You cannot insult or make fun of the faith of others, he said, as he came as close as he dared to blaming the victims. A man’s religion was like his mother, he added. And anyone who insulted his mother could “expect a punch”.

Last week, the Vatican changed its line without changing its mind, the tactic of every cornered propagandist in history. Perhaps it realised that the pope’s claim that you could not satirise militant religion without expecting a punch in the face or a bullet in the head might unnerve even the most uncritical churchgoers. Instead, it tried to pretend that militant religion had nothing to do with religion.

Hebdo had marked the grim anniversary by putting a cartoon of a blood-spattered God carrying an assault rifle on its cover. “The assassin is still out there”, read the headline. Rather than have the sense and decency to keep its mouth shut, the Vatican denounced Hebdo for “hiding behind the deceitful flag of an uncompromising secularism” – this about a magazine that never “hid” from danger and whose staff had been the victims of truly “uncompromising” murderers.

The “left” and the pope, attacking our secular freedoms from a place of safety.

It may be objected that the New Testament is less gory that the Old. But Christ no more forbad slavery, rape, torture and genocide than did the Ten Commandments. Christians in power engaged in orgies of persecution of one another, of non-believers, of witches and of Jews. Indeed, the true Judaeo-Christian tradition was the 1,600-year tradition of Christians murdering Jews. What civilisation Judaism and Christianity possess came from the outside. They did not reform themselves, which is why calls for a Muslim reformation so spectacularly miss the point. Civilisation came from the battering that religion took from the Enlightenment, from sceptics, scientists, mockers and philosophers, who destroyed their myths and exposed the immorality of their taboos.

Charlie Hebdo told us a truth that too many do not like to admit: anyone who tries to do the same to Islam today can end up dead.

While the pope discreetly cheers in the background.

Think about corsets for instance. Yes, corsets.

We all know they were hella uncomfortable, and bad for the internal organs – but I’m not sure I had realized they were also bad for mental functioning.

Elizabeth McGovern, one of the Downton Abbey crew, spent a lot of time wearing them, and she says they are. It makes sense, of course – obviously you can’t breathe properly in them, and obviously breathing properly is important for mental functioning – but I don’t think I’d made the connection until I saw her say it on some dopy PBS special about How Fabulous is Downton Abbey the other day.

Elizabeth McGovern is talking about restrictive underwear. Or more precisely – since we are talking about the new season of Downton Abbey, in which the action has moved into the free-and-easy Twenties – she is talking about the absence of it. ‘There is no way,’ she says, speaking heavily and with the conviction that can be born only of bitter experience, ‘that I can convey to you what a profound experience it is not to be wearing a corset. In the series, we’ve been through the years leading up to the First World War, the years during it, and now we’re in the years after it, and I have actually physically inhabited the clothes of each era in that I have not only tried them on but spent the major part of my days wearing them.

‘Corsets are so uncomfortable that they drive me mad, and it is incredible how much it changes your world view to be out of them. You can move around so much more freely, and the passage of air is not constricted – you have more oxygen making its way to your brain so you have much more ambition, much more desire to achieve things and connect with the outside world…’

I didn’t fully realize that, specifically, but I resisted the confining nature of girls’ clothing from earliest childhood. I detested skirts, and wore jeans or corduroys whenever I possibly could; I whined and resisted whenever I was told I had to put on a dress. Trousers were freedom and skirts were constraint; it was that simple.

It’s a funny thing the way female clothing is designed to hobble and restrain women, and women put up with it.

Oh good god – this exists on Twitter – #JeSuisNero. Nero is the loathsome professional misogynist Milo Yiannopoulos. Why are imbeciles saying they are Nero aka Milo Yiannopoulos? Because Twitter removed his verification check, as punishment for being a loathsome professional misogynist and harasser.

He lost his verification check on Twitter, so people are comparing him to Charlie Hebdo.

I want to vomit.

Travis Longcore takes on the attack on science at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, saying he stands with Linda Sue Beck.

Linda Sue Beck. It is at her desk that Ammon Bundy, leader of the group of armed anti-government religious fanatics occupying Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, has set up shop. As a federal biologist, like my father was for decades, she works to steward the resources that are held in common trust for all Americans. My stomach turned as the report came through the radio today — approaching a week into the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — and I heard the descriptions of the Bundys picking through her belongings and ridiculing her work.

“She’s not here working for the people,” Ammon’s brother Ryan is quoted as saying. “She’s not benefiting America. She’s part of what’s destroying America.”

That made me extremely angry too – especially coming from men who were occupying a federal wildlife refuge at gunpoint.

The occupiers of the refuge poke fun at Beck, her research on fish, and the normal trappings of a research station, including a dried bird in a storage area. They incredulously claim that the bird is “what they’re going to kill people over.” Presumably “they” is the federal government, and they mean to convey that Nature — the birds, the fish, the land — has no use or value.

I’m guessing the word “sustainable” doesn’t mean much to them.

Science and the National Wildlife Refuges are intertwined, with an entire model of species conservation and management emerging from regulated hunting and fishing with wildlife refuges at its core. National Wildlife Refuges are places where pathbreaking scientific research has taken place that has led to the great breakthroughs of wildlife management: research on the impacts of lead shot and its replacement by steel shot, the effects of DDT and its subsequent ban, and of course the impacts of harvest on fish and game populations. I know; refuge names were etched into my adolescent vocabulary as my father’s research sites. Patuxent. Missisquoi. Moosehorn. National Wildlife Refuges are secular shrines to wildlife science and scientific management. Do politics and consensus play a role in their management? Certainly, but the National Wildlife Refuges and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are built on the bulwark of the science of wildlife and fisheries sciences.

The armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is, therefore, not just an attack on a federal property. It cuts deeper than that. It is an attack on the modern science-based approach to land management and it is an attack on the value and worth of science and scientists in the United States.

That’s not surprising, he goes on, considering that the Bundys are fanatical Mormons.

The occupiers are photographed kneeling in prayer at the refuge. In Linda Sue Beck’s office. Attacks on science from those with extremist religious views are now an unfortunate part of the American political landscape.

They always have been.

Unfortunately, the ill-informed reporters sent to cover the slow-motion catastrophe in Oregon fall into the rhetorical trap of the Bundys and their anti-scientific talk-radio enablers. When the occupiers blithely talk of putting the land “to use” again (as if scientific research, recreation, hunting, fishing, education, and all manner of public access were not “use”), the CNN reporter mindlessly repeats the trope, implying that the occupiers have a legitimate demand in wanting to work the land, as if it were some sort of de Tocquevillian tragedy that one of the most productive migratory bird stopover sites on the Pacific flyway was not being overrun with cattle by the ranchers from Utah. No, Malheur National Wildlife Refuge does not need to be worked, and CNN should have reporters that know better than to take the claim at face value.

That would be an improvement.

The New York Times takes a squint at the “give all the land to us” movement behind the Bundy putsch.

Ken Ivory, a Republican state representative from Utah, has been roaming the West with an alluring pitch to cattle ranchers, farmers and conservatives upset with how Washington controls the wide-open public spaces out here: This land is your land, he says, and not the federal government’s.

Is it indeed? How? According to whom or what? On what terms? With what mechanism for dealing with conflicts? If it’s “their” land it’s presumably “my” land too so what if I want to protect it from development and “they” want to develop it?

How did it get to be anyone’s property in the first place? It was seized, that’s all. It doesn’t belong to cattle ranchers more than everyone else.

Mr. Ivory, a business lawyer from suburban Salt Lake City, does not fit the profile of a sun-scoured sagebrush rebel. But he is part of a growing Republican-led movement pushing the federal government to hand over to the states millions of acres of Western public lands — as well as their rich stores of coal, timber and grazing grass.

In other words a movement pushing the feds to hand over public lands for exploitation so that a few people can get very rich, as opposed to regulating and conserving according to criteria other than making a lot of money in a hurry by stripping everything.

This Ivory dude founded a group that’s funded by the Koch brothers.

In the past few years, lawmakers across the West have offered up dozens of bills and resolutions seeking to take over the federal lands inside their borders or to study how to do so. Some of the legislation has been aimed at Congress, to urge it to radically revise the laws that have shaped 550,000 square miles of national forests and terrain run by the federal Bureau of Land Management, stretching from the Great Plains to the Pacific.

The whole thing is just “fuck the common good, give it to us so that we can use it to death for big bucks.”

In practice, local land disputes — fueled by deepening antagonism toward federal land agencies — now unfold like social-media passion plays. Last summer, armed groups intervened by providing security and standing guard at mines in Oregon and Montana that had received stop-work orders from the Bureau of Land Management. And in December, Phil Lyman, a commissioner in San Juan County, Utah, received a 10-day jail sentence after he led a protest ride on all-terrain vehicles through a federal area that had been closed to motorized use.

“All I did was drive down a canyon road,” Mr. Lyman said. “It seems to be getting worse, and the federal agencies, they are expanding. Their restraints are being overstepped. It’s not the way this country was set up. It’s not the founders’ design.”

Well the founders weren’t familiar with motorized vehicles, were they. They also weren’t familiar with a population of 321 million people, were they. There are a lot of things they weren’t familiar with. They don’t have the last word on everything.

“The land policies now are, basically, lock it up and throw away the key,” said Leland Pollock, a commissioner in Garfield County, Utah, a county roughly the size of Connecticut with pine forests and stunning red-rock spires. “It’s land with no use. The local economy’s really suffered as a result. Grazing has been reduced. We used to have a thriving timber industry — that’s all but gone.”

Whereas if the feds gave the forests to the timber industry, they would be gone in a few years.

Mark Zuckerberg took the baby to the doctor.

Doctor’s visit — time for vaccines!

See what he did there?

The Washington Post reports on the reactions:

The nearly 70,000 comments on Zuckerberg’s post run the gamut of pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine arguments. On the one hand, users have pointed out, scientists credit vaccines with eliminating formerly widespread diseases such as smallpox, and severe allergic reactions to vaccinations are rare.

Yet, many Americans, including Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, doubt the medical efficacy of vaccines and have pointed to their potential dangers. During a September 2015 GOP debate, Trump recounted that the 2-year-old child of one of his employees “got a tremendous fever” and “now is autistic” after getting vaccinated.

People just have no clue. It’s like feminism – most people now have no clue how bad it was before the renaissance of feminism in the late 60s. Most people now have no clue how bad it was before vaccinations, so they freak out about statistically tiny risks while ignoring the massive risks of skipping vaccinations. No clue.

New York to LA

https://youtu.be/9G4jnaznUoQ

Sky News hosts a discussion of cricketer Chris Gayle’s sexist “flirting” during a tv interview. Despite being between two blowhard men who constantly interrupt her, Kate Smurthwaite wins the debate.

Comedian and feminist activist Kate Smurthwaite and former lad mag editor Piers Hernu discuss cricketer Chris Gayle’s inappropriate behaviour during a TV interview. During the discussion Hernu decides it would be appropriate to try to stop Smurthwaite from talking by touching her arm. It does not end well for him.

 

NPR ruminates on the Cologne New Year’s Eve issue.

Cologne police are currently investigating 379 criminal complaints, about 40 percent involving allegations of sexual abuse, the Associated Press reports. The wire service earlier noted two allegations of rape.

The Cologne police chief described the assailants as “Arab or North African” in appearance. As a result, the outcry over the attacks has not only centered on victims and perpetrators: it’s extended to a broader national debate over migrants, multiculturalism and Germany’s open-door policy to asylum seekers.

Rhetoric is running hot. The story currently dominates the German press, with headlines referencing the “New Year’s Horror” or “Night Of Shame.“

Because there are reports that some or many or most of the attackers appeared “Arab or North African” and that some were asylum seekers.

But the fact that the majority of current suspects are asylum-seekers has been taken by many as confirmation of their fears, even though it seems very few of the total alleged assailants have been identified.

There’s an issue about whether or not the attacks were planned and coordinated, and an issue about why the police were so not there.

And why did it take days for the police to admit the scale of the crime and chaos? The police chief says victims were slow to file complaints, Soraya reported: but some victims, like Michelle, have accused the police of ignoring claims they filed.

And then there’s the issue of under-reporting.

In addition to the police being slow to disclose the events, one prominent German media outlet, public broadcaster ZDF, was slow to cover them.

That’s fueled both criticism and conspiracy theories, Der Spiegel reports: “In Germany, there is a stable minority that is convinced that the country’s broadcasters, newspapers and magazines are controlled by dark powers and have agreed to suppress bad news about foreigners so as not to endanger the political project of welcoming refugees.”

ZDF has apologized for the delay in reporting on the attacks.

I’ve seen a lot of ill-natured sniping about this on social media today, mostly (as usual) aimed at “The Feminists.” Why aren’t The Feminists talking about this?!!1 Well, one, some of us are, and two, it’s not evil to be worried about possible increased hostility to asylum seekers and immigrants as a result of this.

And then there’s also the question of popular response, and whether women’s experiences are being hijacked for political purposes.

[Anne] Wizorek started a campaign in 2013 to use the hashtag “#aufschrei,” or outcry, for women to share their experiences with stalking, harassment, assault and rape.

“Back then when #Aufschrei was big in the media and people talked about it … a lot of people also tried to downplay the problems. They were saying, ‘Well, but we’ve gotten so far and we have gender equity in Germany right now, we have a female chancellor, so what do you want?’ All that kind of argument was going on,” she told Michel.

“And those people are the ones who are now talking a lot about what has happened in Cologne. So they are using these stories and these experiences of the people who have been attacked in Cologne to only push forward with their racist agenda against migrants and refugees in Germany. And I think that’s a huge problem.”

In short this mess is a gift to racists and Nazis.

A protest Saturday by the far-right group PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, attracted 1,700 people in Cologne, and was broken up by riot police, Reuters says:

“Demonstrators, some of whom bore tattoos with far-right symbols such as a skull in a German soldier’s helmet, had chanted “Merkel must go” and “this is the march of the national resistance.” “Rapefugees not welcome,” one banner read.

The Oregonian:

In taking control of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, militants occupying the site have also taken over the desks of the people who work at the site – their cubicles, their computers and, evidently, their personnel files.

Oregon Public Broadcasting visited the compound Friday and reported that militants appeared to be using federal computers inside the compound, machines that can be accessed only with employees’ ID badges. Lists of names and Social Security numbers were visible, alongside government ID cards.

They say no no, they haven’t done that, they haven’t touched anybody’s stuff. Right, because they’re so scrupulous that way.

Seventeen people work at the refuge headquarters, administering the 190,000-acre site. Their responsibilities include overseeing the refuge’s firefighting administration, removing invasive carp from Malheur Lake and working with volunteers to build paths and make other improvements to the site.

Reporters from Reuters spent a night inside the headquarters with the occupiers earlier this week. They reported a vivid scene, with armed militants vigilant against a federal raid, working in the office of a federal biologist. Working how? Ryan Bundy referred to her as the “Carp Lady,” according to the report.

“She’s not here working for the people,” he told Reuters. “She’s not benefiting America. She’s part of what’s destroying America.”

And he’s got access to her computer and her personnel file.