"Republicans get weirder and weirder."

Just so.

Science works. Complex -- really complex, so complex no one person does or can understand what's going on in them -- organizations exist, and do things, some of which are really cool or good and few of which have been in the world before. The present day is the time in which there has been a mighty change, and more and more of the world becomes a place in which the assertions of Ecclesiastes just don't apply.

If you, or your culture, isn't good enough at dealing with new and strange things (I want to type "complexity handling" here, but suspect it's like "change budget" in being too terse to be helpful), there's this ... strain.

Eventually, you either build a (virtual, but functional) wall, you give up and change culture, or you go a little nuts.

The Hutaree appear to have gone a little nuts and then asked "but what's over the next hill?"

That said, I'm at home but totally afraid to look at that video for fear my head would go a 'splody.

That might even qualify as dinosaur sodomy.

First aid implies reality.

If you live in a contingent universe and make the effort to comprehend reality, First Aid is there because if you get to your grave without needing it you're beyond lucky.

If you live in whatever mental universe the Hutaree are inhabiting, First Aid is of the devil; you have to train, it's really easy to do it wrong, what counts as wrong changes (raise your hand, people taught to do mouth-to-mouth in a way that will now fail you in a well-conducted first aid course) it's implacable about all the things you don't know how to do and shouldn't try, and you won't need it anyway because god won't let anything bad happen to you.

I lived as a student in a house owned by a local not-particularly loony church; the church was however loony enough to refuse to either move the pile of solvent based paint out of the other half of the house or have fire extinguishers because -- and this is, honest to Tiwaz, an exact quote -- "God wouldn't let anything bad happen". And that guy was close to sane and could function well in general society.

Paula Helm Murray @11 --

My apologies to your much beleaguered rug. (And my general ones for not making the explicit point that I think the process in that post is why the Republicans are getting weirder.)

I lived as a student in a house owned by a local not-particularly loony church; the church was however loony enough to refuse to either move the pile of solvent based paint out of the other half of the house or have fire extinguishers because -- and this is, honest to Tiwaz, an exact quote -- "God wouldn't let anything bad happen". And that guy was close to sane and could function well in general society.

If you believe God created the universe, God created the laws of physics and chemistry that say that piled-up cans of solvent-based paints are a bad idea.

Furthermore, Tiwaz would never leave cans of solvent-based paint sitting around like that.

I don't like embarrassment humor and I suspect this would be excruciating.

... Say, does anybody here happen to have Jodie Foster's address?

These were usually quiet folks who liked to read SF but didn't feel they needed to be in a club to enjoy it. Not convention goers. Not stay up all night watching bad horror movies or playing Cosmic Encounter with three Powers each.(According to legend, Spider Robinson may once have been one such fringe member.)

But some of the short-timers were . . . odd. A born-again christian dude with what today we'd call a personality disorder. An Ozzie Osbourne fan who cackled endlessly about the awful things his hero did on stage. (Bats. Dolphin.) A guy who sat around flipping his butterfly knife open and shut. Another guy who was only interested in "Lost in Space." ONLY "Lost in Space."

They drifted in. They drifted out. I don't think they were SF capital-F Fans, or even read SF; the science fiction library was just a quiet place full of much less judgmental than usual folks where they'd light for a time.

I wonder if this Kris Sickles guy just kind of drifted into the Hutaree Militia. He's clearly not well, and the Hutaree folks are clearly not well, but that video suggests that Sickles is clearly not well in ways that don't shout out "Born again Christian Warrior."

"God wouldn't let anything bad happen".

It's worse when they're refusing needed repairs to the parsonage on those grounds. And it's usually a condition of employment that the pastor live in the parsonage.

@22 Stephan Jones. As a mostly-lurker, I feel a bit like the short-timers in your club, sitting quietly on the Making Light couch - the one in the corner, out of the main flow of action. But now I need to brush the hair out of my eyes and speak up: Where did you go to school that had a science fiction library? Are you talking about a serious SF library like at UC Riverside? Or a cozy collection of battered paperbacks with a few swayback couches?

Yes, I am using thoughts of cosy SF libraries as a unicorn chaser.

Some of the things we know about the Huttaree starting to suspect, like Al Qaeda, that if you scrape the surface and look at them right, you'll see that a significant number of their adherents might have been fen had their lives gone differently.

those losers out in columbine would have made a video quite like this, i imagine, and they killed a dozen of their classmates. unstable people are just that, i.e. unstable; they lurch in many different directions, some more obviously harmful and some less. their very instability makes it harder to infer from one piece of behavior to the next. inferences that would normally go through for normal people ("anyone who would take care of an injured dog and pay its vet bills surely would not torture and kill it!") just don't go through for unstable people.

and when you get a few unstable people in unstable orbits around each other (strangely attracted to one another, so to speak), then all bets are off. the next video we find may be a sober, restrained re-enactment of "the bells of st. mary" with a remarkably convincing solo by a bing crosby baritone.

and that *still* won't tell us that they were harmless. it will just tell us that they were unstable.

of course, instability is not *proof* of criminal intent, either, or of any tendency to be harmful. (which also does not need to be said in this group). what matters is the evidence, the testimony, and so on.

the govt still has to make its case. this video doesn't do it for the govt, or show that, on its basis, we can tell the hutaree were bad scary people. all i'm saying is: it sure doesn't exculpate them. (and i can predict with some confidence that it will be spun in just that way by their defenders).

As for the first aid issue, IME it's entirely possible for somebody who knows real first aid (or engineering, or scientific technique, or law) to leave it out of their movie on the theory that the audience won't know or care. To ensure that your make your characters treat an injured character properly, it is not enough that you know how to do first aid. You must also treat your characters as rational and quasi-intelligent beings rather than as mere puppets of your messed-up plot.

protip: if you ever consider running for public office, this is exactly the kind of thing that people will dig up about you, seeking explanations.

"i want to represent eugene, oregon"

"there have been questions about my past, but i have not ducked them!"

Gee, is that what they call moral hazard?

you can find this observation already in one of the comic sketches of lucian of samosata writing say 170 AD.

it's in lucretius' 'de rerum natura' book 6.417-420, and since lucretius (writing around 70 BC) is generally copying older epicurean material we can conjecture that it goes back easily to c. 300 BC.

anyhow--zeus' blasting his own temples is an old trope.

One note: unlike the Dead Guy on the Ground and Improbable Karate Guy who enters later, the Naked Mr. Sickles can actually deliver a line with some degree of fluidity. I'm not saying he can act, but he doesn't seem frozen by being in front of a camera which--given that he's standing there in all his considerable all, is a little disturbing in itself.

Consumer abnormality is real abnormality as a our native and idiosyncratic fantasies are to the ones we've been fed.

This looks like any number of self-made videos...I can't honestly say whether this particular individual is involved in evil, as not all shared in this group's supposed evil intentions, but I can say that he is Banal.

"It's a dick! It's a duck! It's a dick! It's a duck! NOOOOO! DUUUUUUUCK!"

Some other guy’s bleeding, his head is all dented,
We see no use of the healing arts,
It seems quite amazing that death is prevented –
Reviving him seems to depend upon farts.
But right about there, the brannigan starts,
A guy in a diaper’s running amuck
With a dildo. He swings, and it certainly smarts,
That, and the quack of the rubber duck.

For the guy’s in a duck mask. It’s probably rented.
He clobbers our hero, and then imparts
Some gibberish ‘way worse than merely demented,
Then quacks, throws a smoke-bomb and swiftly departs,
When a stranger shows up and displays martial arts,
The wounded guy’s grappled. They drag the poor schmuck
Ignoring his cries as his pancreas parts,
That, and the quack of the rubber duck.

Prince, if you’re shopping, I hear the Wal-mart’s
Got a special on brain-bleach, so back up the truck.
I’ll need several tons for the whole and the parts,
That, and the quack of the rubber duck.

Still in operation.

First, this is only an excerpt. The full-length movie apparently has not survived, but it's possible it's somewhat more coherent. Not any better, mind you, but more coherent.

Second, the fact that a character in a movie doesn't practice good first aid doesn't mean the filmmakers don't know it. This character is clearly supposed to be a loser; you can tell by the junior-high-school-level semaphore: he farts every time he bends over. That makes him a clown character.

Third, it is possible this is intended as a parody. The farting could be to add absurdity. "How many things can we do wrong in one movie?" is a game some people play.

Adults who wear baby-style cloth diapers as their outermost layer...well, I don't know about you, but I've never met one who wasn't evil.

Did you overlook my link @25? I just checked, and the Pure Sanity site is still up as of a couple of minutes ago.

I'm one of the people who snicker every time I see "servicing" outside of the context of livestock, but I think there aren't many of us left. Or maybe all those companies talking about servicing their customers really mean it that way?

I don't know that this video is all that strange. Well, it is strange but not in a 'made by lunatics' kind of way. It struck me more as an amateur attempt at absurdist comedy - inspired by things like Monty Python, though perhaps they didn't quite comprehend what Monty Python was doing. More like a surface reading of Python which was then imitated.

I mean, is being c**k-slapped by a duck terribly different on the surface from the fish-slapping dance? I think the line delivery is the real clue here. The "Scar...mallet" line particularly struck me as intentionally overwrought and delivered in what they considered to be tongue-in-cheek. I'd even go out on a limb to say Duck Head is an attempt at a pun (homonymic humor? Homonymiphobic humor?) for d**khead.

Which I guess is a more long winded way of saying I think Xopher @ 45 has it right - attempt at parody with Jr High humor.

Rubber Duckie, you're the one,
You make bathtime lots of fun,
Rubber Duckie, I'm awfully fond of you;

Woo woo be doo

Rubber Duckie, joy of joys,
When I squeeze you, you make noise!
Rubber Duckie, you're my very best friend, it's true!

Doo doo doo doo, doo doo

Every day when I
Make my way to the tubby
I find a little fella who's
Cute and yellow and chubby

Rub-a-dub-a-dubby!

Rubber Duckie, you're so fine
And I'm lucky that you're mine
Rubber Duckie, I'm awfully fond of you.

Every day when I
Make my way to the tubby
I find a little fella who's
Cute and yellow and chubby

Rubber Duckie, you're so fine
And I'm lucky that you're mine
Rubber Duckie, I'm awfully fond of -
Rubber Duckie, I'd like a whole pond of -
Rubber Duckie I'm awfully fond of you!

Doo doo, be doo

Maybe Fred at slacktivist knows. Maybe Left Behind gets interesting in book 3?

Erik, #53: I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when I saw that!

My cat will not forgive you. She was sitting next to me when I read that.

Xopher #46- good point.

Xopher #46- good point.

FOR THE DUCKYS!!!!

But as others said, its the sort of thing I can imagine non-right-wing non-nut-jobs doing for a laugh (Am I the only one who heard the Stingray theme at the end?)

There have been sf cons that might have had something not very different from that put on late at night. Mostly in Glasgow in the 1980s, but they have existed. Though they would probably have been funnier and certainly fuller of fannish in-jokes - but maybe this was full of in-jokes we didn;t notice cos to them we are not *in*.

30 US governors sent threatening letters.

Summary: 30 governors, Democratic and Republican both, have received vaguely-threatening letters from a group called Guardians of the Free Republics. The letters give the governors 3 days to resign their offices or they will be "removed". The FBI is investigating.

My questions:

1) ISTR that some 20 US governors are trying to sue to exempt their states from Obama's health-care reform. Are these 30 governors the ones who haven't? If not, why were they targeted?

2) Is "Guardians of the Free Republics" associated with the Freepers?

3) Why the HELL isn't the mainstream media all over this? I saw it on the Headline News cable channel yesterday, but when I went looking for more info, I had to find it from the Christian Science Monitor, forghodsake!

And why am I not at all surprised that this has been linked with a Texas hate-radio station?

No. One of the governors who got the letters spoke at the bit Tea Party shindig in Nevada the other day.

hopefully the story will get picked up on Monday. It is Easter so I expect a slow news day. Though there are a lot of stories regarding the Catholic Church scandal.

NYT has it; that's where I saw it.

Article on the letters was in the Washington Post on Saturday. According to the last paragraph of the article "The FBI expects that all 50 governors will eventually receive such letters".

If you shorten it to "Hutaree Gunnery Duckery Buggery," it is crying out to be the opening line of a double dactyl .

Our AG sued, but the governor still got the letter. The WashPost reported that the FBI thinks all 50 will get them.