Caturday felids: Canadian women recovers missing cat–after 12 years; Arizona cathouse; interview with director of the hit cat movie “Kedi”

July 1, 2017 • 8:30 am

From the CBC News, we have a story of a lost cat returning home after the longest interval I’ve heard of: twelve years! And it was not just in CANADA, but in Winnipeg, where Gus lives. Here are some details:

Freda Watson was devastated when her cat, George, went missing 12 years ago in Winnipeg, saying she cried a long time for the pet she affectionately called her “little boy.”

She was crying again on Thursday when the pair was reunited.

“Oh my god, I can’t believe I got my cat back,” Watson said in an interview on Friday. “We love George. He’s my little boy.”

George was found wandering the street near Grant Avenue earlier this week and taken to the Winnipeg Humane Society. Staff there found a faded tattoo and began investigating to decipher it and find the owner.

Watson’s last name, address and phone number had all changed since the time George slipped out of her Weston-area home past a babysitter. It was Watson’s former sister-in-law who got the message from the Humane Society, and she in turn called Watson.

“I said, ‘Are you serious?'” Watson recalled. “I couldn’t sleep the night before. I was crying that night and I was crying in the morning.”

Here are the reunited pair of George and Freda (George looks very surprised). I wonder where he’d been. The story adds “Watson, who got George when he was just four weeks old and bottle-fed him in those early days, says someone must have been caring for him over the years, because he’s in good shape.”

Freda Watson holds George on the day she was reunited with him at the Winnipeg Humane Society. (Winnipeg Humane Society/Facebook)

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As reported in the HuffPo, you can now buy a house full of cat stuff for $240,000. It’s in Arizona:

A 2,500-square-foot home in the Arizona desert is sending cat lovers into a catnip-style frenzy. Nearly every indoor surface is covered in cat images or paraphernalia, thanks to a previous owner who spent a decade plastering photos and memorabilia to the walls, listing agent Elizabeth Keller told HuffPost.

The home has two bedrooms and one bathroom, plus at least 12 cat condos, according to Arizona Central. It’s an “extremely fun home,” per its listing with Century 21.

“If you love cats this is the home for you! If not, bring your sandblaster!” the listing reads. Notable features include “cat walkways” and a “Medieval cat castle with different levels (stone).”

And there’s no cat odor inside, even though the previous owner had three cats.

The outside (all photos courtesy Century 21):

Views of the inside:

 

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Finally, if you haven’t seen the movie Kedi, about the street cats of Istanbul, do so immediately (I believe reader Charleen is doing so today). It’s highly rated and I can’t wait to see it. It has a 98% critics’ rating and an 89% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and those are very high marks.

The June 18 Guardian has an interview with Ceyda Torun, the director, who says she made “a love letter to the city and the cats.” The article notes that Kedi, which means “cat” in Turkish, was described by IndieWire as “the Citizen Kane of cat documentaries”.

I’ve visited Istanbul several times and have been struck by the number of street cats and mosque cats, and the fact that they’re usually in pretty good condition.

Here’s a bit of Torun’s interview:

Why are there so many street cats in the city?
There are a few reasons. There’s the historical factors – that cats have been in this geography for so long. We interviewed a veterinary zoologist who showed us a cat skeleton that had been found while building the new tunnel under the Bosphorus. It was from 3,500 years ago and had a break in the thigh bone that could only have healed like that if a human had wrapped its leg. So his theory was that this relationship – tending to cats and cats helping us fend off mice – goes back to at least then.

Then there’s the Islamic element: cats are highly revered in Islam and there are multiple references to the prophet Muhammad having a cat. Often, people use that to justify taking care of them. There are people who don’t like cats and are bothered by others taking care of them, but [their frustration] is more a reflection of the city’s overcrowding, I think – the population has gone from 4 million in my childhood to close to 20 million now.

What do the cats mean to the people of Istanbul?
There’s nobody here that doesn’t have a memory of cats: no grandmother, no generation has been here without cats, so they’re ingrained in our collective memory. People tend to be in awe of the freedom cats have, their ability to go in and out of almost anywhere. They show up in political situations, universities; they go in and out of places that are forbidden or dangerous for humans. And cats provide this wonderful opportunity for people in Istanbul to pick a moment to be affectionate with a being that doesn’t judge them, that doesn’t have complicated human relationship issues. We have a lot of “cat daddies”.

And a picture of the director:

Photograph: Selçuk Şamiloğlu

And Kedi’s two-minute trailer:

And here’s a picture I took at the Şehzade Mosque in Istanbul in 2008; note that the cat is in good nick:

h/t: Taskin, Jon

Saturday: Hili dialogue

July 1, 2017 • 7:30 am

It’s July! July 1, 2017, to be exact, and all Americans, save your genial host, are celebrating the Fourth of July Holiday, which is on Tuesday. It’s National Gingersnap Day in the U.S. (I believe this cookie is not only called a “biscuit” in the UK, but also “Ginger Nuts”. Correct me if I’m wrong.) And, more important, it’s CANADA DAY, described like this in Wikipedia (which, contrary to Greg, I see as sometimes being right!).

[Canada Day] celebrates the anniversary of the July 1, 1867, enactment of the Constitution Act, 1867 (then called the British North America Act, 1867), which united the three separate colonies of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into a single Dominion within the British Empire called Canada. Originally called Dominion Day (French: Le Jour de la Confédération), the holiday was renamed in 1982, the year the Canada Act was passed. Canada Day celebrations take place throughout the country, as well as in various locations around the world, attended by Canadians living abroad.

In fact, it’s the 150th anniversary of Canada as a country! Here’s a video in which the world celebrates Canada (was Superman really Canadian?):

I’ve had nothing but good times in Canada, and refuse to stereotype it by putting up pictures of beavers or Mounties to celebrate. Instead, let’s see Gus, my favorite Canadian cat, playing with the Northwest Territories license plate I bought him. Note that the plate, like Gus, is in the shape of a polar bear. That license is now affixed, along with the maple-leaf flag, to the cardboard box that Gus naps in—his Canadian “boat”.  Sadly, bear-shaped license plates are no longer produced in Canada: they’re extinct, as the bear itself will be soon.

O Canada!

If you’re a Darwin scholar, you’ll know that on July 1, 1858, the papers of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were read jointly before the Linnean Society of London; this was the solution worked out after Darwin received Wallace’s letter showing that both men had independently hit on the idea of evolution by natural selection. Exactly five years later, the Battle of Gettysburg began; it marked the furthest incursion of the Confederate Army into the north; after they were defeated, it was downhill all the way until Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. On this day in 1873, Prince Edward Island joined the Canadian Confederation.  July 1, 1916, the Battle of the Somme began, one of the bloodiest days in human history. On the first day alone, 19,000 soldiers of the British Army were killed and 40,000 were wounded. Before the battle ended in November, more than a million men were killed in this battle.

There’s lots of Canadian history today: July 1 must be a day that things must happen there. On this day in 1958, for instance, there were two events: the Canadian Broadcasting System linked its television programming throughout the country, and the flooding of the Saint Lawrence Seaway began. In 1966, the first color t.v. broadcast in Canada (from Toronto) took place. On July 1, 1979, the Sony Walkman was introduced; did you have one? (I didn’t.) And—more Canadian history—on July 1, 1980, “O Canada” officially became the national anthem of Canada. In 1997, China officially took over Hong Kong, and exactly a decade later, smoking was banned in all indoor spaces in England.

Notables born on this day include Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646), Sally Kirkland (1912), Olivia de Havilland (1916), Gerald Edelman (1929), Karen “Rayette Dipesto” Black (1939), Twyla Tharp (1941), Debbie Harry (1945), Dan Akroyd (1952; today he goes on Medicare, as I suspect that although he was born in Ottawa, CANADA, Akroyd is now an American citizen), and Princess Diana (1961). Those who died on this day include Harriet Beecher Stowe (1896), Erik Satie (1925), Ernst Röhm (1934, killed during the Night of the Long Knives), William Lawrence Bragg (1971), Juan Perón (1974), Buckminster Fuller (1983), Wolfman Jack (1995), Walter Matthau (2000), Marlon Brando (2004), and Karl Malden (2009; remember the famous movie that starred both Brando and Malden?). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, who has slimmed down for the summer, has gained in wisdom what she’s lost in weight:

Hili: Let’s not delude ourselves.
A: What about?
Hili: About anything.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie łudźmy się.
Ja: Z czym?
Hili: Najlepiej z niczym.
Finally, here’s a tweet that Matthew Cobb sent me “to cheer me up”, but I’m not much cheered when Trump says anything dumb and others react. Still, Buzz Aldrin, on Trump’s left, is not impressed.

Oh hell, the laws of physics dictated that I’d post this:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

The incredible Darwin’s bark spider

June 30, 2017 • 1:15 pm

This is hands down one of the finest Attenborough segments I’ve seen. The four-minute video from BBC Earth has incredible photography of Darwin’s bark spider (Caerostris darwini) building its web over a river on a 25-meter-long “bridging line”. Rivers are of course good places to catch insects, as they’re clear conduits through the forest. Here’s some useful information from Wikipedia:

The spider was discovered in Madagascar in the Andasibe-Mantadia National Park in 2009. Its silk is the toughest biological material ever studied, over ten times tougher than a similarly-sized piece of Kevlar. The species was named in honour of the naturalist Charles Darwin, with the description being prepared precisely 150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, on 24 November 2009.

If you are not moved by this video—which I’d call a spiritual experience in contemplating natural selection if I didn’t dislike the word “spiritual—then you’re made of stone. All those instructions coded in a tiny spider brain (though be aware that some web-spinning spiders have brains that spill out into their bodies).

h/t: Anne-Marie

NYT editor decries “intersectionality”, says Chicago Dyke March was wrong to ban the Jewish Pride flag; Dyke March says it was misunderstood.

June 30, 2017 • 12:00 pm

As I reported a few days ago, this year’s Dyke March, part of Chicago’s Gay Pride celebrations, kicked out a handful of Jewish women who were carrying “Jewish Pride” flags: multicolored Gay Pride flags with a white Star of David in the middle. I call that an act of anti-Semitism, and so does Bari Weiss, who happens to be a staff editor at the New York Times. She posted about it on Tuesday, in an op-ed with the intriguing title, “I’m glad the Dyke March banned Jewish stars“.

Why, pray tell, is Weiss glad? Because the Dyke March’s actions expose the hypocrisy and unworkability of “intersectionality” as a part of social justice. As she says,

I’m sorry for the women, like Ms. Grauer, who found themselves under genuine threat for carrying a colorful cloth falsely accused of being pernicious.

But I am also grateful.

Has there ever been a crisper expression of the consequences of “intersectionality” than a ban on Jewish lesbians from a Dyke March?

Intersectionality is the big idea of today’s progressive left. [JAC: I’d say “regressive” left, for many progressives don’t sign on to “intersectionality” as it’s used.] In theory, it’s the benign notion that every form of social oppression is linked to every other social oppression. This observation — coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw — sounds like just another way of rephrasing a slogan from a poster I had in college: My liberation is bound up with yours. That is, the fight for women’s rights is tied up with the fight for gay rights and civil rights and so forth. Who would dissent from the seductive notion of a global sisterhood?

Well, in practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

By that hierarchy, you might imagine that the Jewish people — enduring yet another wave of anti-Semitism here and abroad — should be registered as victims. Not quite.

Why? Largely because of Israel, the Jewish state, which today’s progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians — no matter that Israel has repeatedly sought to meet Palestinian claims with peaceful compromise, and no matter that progressives hold no other country to the same standard. China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang, while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but “woke” activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.

. . . though intersectionality cloaks itself in the garb of humanism, it takes a Manichaean view of life in which there can only be oppressors and oppressed. To be a Jewish dyke, let alone one who deigns to support Israel, is a categorical impossibility, oppressor and oppressed in the same person.

That’s why the march organizers and their sympathizers are now trying to smear Ms. Grauer as some sort of right-wing provocateur. Their evidence: She works at an organization called A Wider Bridge, which connects the L.G.B.T.Q. Jewish community in America with the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Israel. The organizers are also making the spurious claim that the Jewish star is necessarily a symbol of Zionist oppression — a breathtaking claim to anyone who has ever seen a picture of a Jew forced to wear a yellow one under the Nazis.

No, the truth is that it was no more and no less than anti-Semitism. Just read Ms. Shoshany Anderson’s account of her experience, which she posted on Facebook after being kicked out of the march.

Unfortunately, Ms, Weis isn’t all that woke, as she seems to be realizing only now that the Left harbors a large component of anti-Semitism, particularly on the Regressive Left. Here’s her last paragraph:

It may be wrong to read too much into an ugly incident at a single march, but Jews should take what happened in Chicago as a lesson that they might not be as welcome among progressives as they might imagine. That’s a warning for which to be grateful, even as it is a reminder that anti-Semitism remains as much a problem on the far-left as it is on the alt-right.

Earth to Bari Weiss: your piece is very good, but you can absolutely read what you did read into the March. The Cntrl-Left segment of “progressives” has been anti-Semitic for years. They call it “anti-Zionist”, but that’s just a euphemism. If you don’t think the state of Israel should exist, and was wrongly founded as a homeland for expelled Jews, then yes, you’re anti-Semitic.

Now one of the organizers of the Dyke March, Alexis Martinez, taken by surprise at the negative reaction to the expulsion of Jews, has responded in an interview on the gay site Windy City Times. I find the response disingenuous and unconvincing, motivated by the very bad press the Dyke March Collective got.  Their story is that the Jewish Pride Flag Wavers were expelled not for their flag, but because they were chanting. What were they chanting? Well, they were said to be chanting a response to pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist marchers who were already chanting “No walls from Mexico to Palestine.”

According to Martinez, the Jewish women then chanted, in response, “No walls anywhere.”

That was all it took to boot their asses out. Martinez doesn’t see the irony of her own account:

The first thing I want to say is that this was never about the Jewish Pride flags. They never came into the conversations. As long as I’ve been an organizer, Laurel has always marched [in the Dyke March] with that flag. I had a conversation on text message with Laurel the night before. She asked me if people would be protesting her Jewish flag. I told her “No. It’s never been an issue and it shouldn’t be an issue.” But I also told her very clearly that we were anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian and she needed to understand that and the nature of the event.

. . . They were taking ‘No walls from Mexico to Palestine’ and they started with “No walls anywhere.” They were disrupting the chants and nobody said anything to them.

What happened at the site [of the rally] was some Palestinian Queers who came up to organizers and said they were being antagonized verbally. The Jewish contingent kept agitating and being aggressive about presenting a pro-Zionist position to Palestinian women.

I would say 15 or 20 minutes after we entered the park. One of the organizers came to me and said “Alexis, you have to do something about this.” So, I went over and talked to Laurel. She tried to make it about the flag. I said “Nobody’s got anything against your flag. Wave it proudly. I am asking you if you’re trying to present a pro-Palestinian, pro-Zionist point-of-view.”

She said that she was proud of her Zionist views and she needed to be able to express them. I told her “This isn’t the format to do that. Either you have to stop or you have to leave.” They refused. We don’t have an armed security force to push people out so I left. They stayed around the park until the whole event was over. They were still there an hour and a half later.

So it wasn’t just a Dyke March, it was a pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic Dyke March, and the statement “no walls anywhere” was somehow taken to be disruptive, and offensive to the Palestinian Queers (n.b. Queers are prohibited in Palestine but not Israel). And that chant alone isn’t even pro-Zionist, much less pro-Israel.

It’s clear from Martinez’s long account that she’s trying to rationalize expelling the Jewish dykes because they were “Zionists,” yet at the same time saying that, vis-à-vis the world, they’re not an explicitly political march. The fact is, all this confusion just reflects their upset at being called out, and their haste to confect rationalizations, viz,:

. . . the media and social media outrage was almost instantaneous and we got hit from every possible site and angle. I have never seen any member of the Collective make anti-Semitic statements. We’re anti-Zionism and people are conflating that into being anti-Semitic. They’re saying that we acted against Jewish queer women and it’s just a complete falsehood. Anyone who interprets our political positions as anti-Semitic is profoundly wrong. They’re misinformed. There’s nothing in our history that indicates that.

and

 What we stand against is oppressive governments be they in Israel, El Salvador, Nicaragua; if people are struggling for their freedom, we try to show support in the context of the small organization that we are. The State of Israel is not endangered by anything we have to say at Dyke March and neither was Laurel. Nobody attacked her.

How hypocritical can you get? If they’re talking about oppression of women and gays, well, Palestine is infinitely worse than Israel—not to mention Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and so on. Why single out and demonize Israel? Because they oppress the oppressive and homophobic Palestinians.

But wait–there’s more! The Dyke March wasn’t political!

WCT: So, you are saying that, if the women had minded their own business, enjoyed the rally and not engaged others, that would have been fine?

AM: Right. We’re not there to resolve the political issues of the world. Laurel could have approached Dyke March at any point prior to the march and requested to make a statement but she used the occasion as a representative of A Wider Bridge to inject herself into a space and then ferment dissention.

They’re not there to resolve the political issues of the world—except to bring up Palestinian political issues and suppress dissent from them. Finally, there’s this:

WCT: There are a lot of nation states which are oppressive to populations. Example, the British to Northern Ireland, the Australians to the Aboriginal people, France to the Muslims living within its borders, Iran to the LGBTQ people living there. Is the presence of such people or open support of their government’s policies whether verbal or in a manner of dress or a sign also unacceptable at Dyke March?

AM: We’re not ignoring that. It’s why you see very few flags [at the march]. But we’re pro-Palestinian. We think that the Palestinian struggle demonstrates a good model for what constitutes oppression. [JAC: except for oppression of gays! Why not North Korea, which oppresses nearly all of its citizens?] You have a military power that subjugates a group of people. It could be any number of places in the world including the US. But I’m not going to stop somebody from wearing a US flag tattoo or whatever. It’s only if you begin to agitate a point of view that creates a condition that could explode into something much bigger. We have to be the judge of that. It’s not just hurt feelings. It could become physical. If somebody gets hurt, we are going to be held accountable. I don’t get sucked into arguments with circular logic. If you want to debate Zionism, there’s other forums for that. I’m not going to ban you from my event.

Who is “we”? I guess it’s all the dykes who aren’t Jewish, and if that’s the case, then Jewish lesbians aren’t welcome unless they keep their mouth shut. Pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic lesbians, of course, are free to chant.

You can read the long interview for yourselves; I’ll show just one more bit of dissimulation, pretending that all cultures are equally homophobic (my emphasis in Martinez’s answer):

WCT: Some commentators challenged you to hold the Dyke March in the middle of the Gaza Strip and “see what happens”—that the Palestinians would respond with violence. How do your respond to that argument?

AM: If we had our march nearly anywhere in the world, we run the risk of being attacked. There are Gay Pride marches being attacked everywhere. Even in Israel. Queer people have civil rights there but that doesn’t give you a free pass on not giving Palestinians equal rights. Having equal rights for queer people in the US doesn’t give us the right to ignore the problems that queer people of color face.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters: you see how far the termites have gone, and how well they’ve dined. To buttress her anti-Semitism, Martinez pretends that gays are just as bad off in Palestine as in Israel. That, of course, is bullpucky.

What the whole interview demonstrates is what the Times’s Bari Weiss realized too late: the cancer of anti-Semitism, masquerading as anti-Zionism, is metastasizing through much of the Left, and has now infiltrated the gay community. One would think that a gay pride march would decry the oppression, hatred, and execution of gays by Muslims in Muslim-majority lands. But no, they ignore it. Because for them, “intersectionality” puts being brown (i.e., Palestinian) higher than being gay in the Scale of Oppression. What a confused pride of people!

My WaPo review of a new book on gene editing

June 30, 2017 • 10:45 am

I’ve reviewed the new book by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and The Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution; my piece is online at today’s Washington Post and will be on the first page of the “Outlook” section in the Sunday paper. The review is free to access, and is called “New gene-editing tool could cure disease. Or customize kids. Or aid bioterrorism.”

I won’t give excerpts here, as you should read it on the WaPo website, but I will say that the book is good and well worth reading; and I’ll add a few tidbits about the science.

The CRISPR-Cas9 system of gene editing, which hijacks bacterial immune-system genes as a tool to edit genes in other species, is immensely clever and has huge ramifications for biotechnology in many species, including ours. The most publicized use is, of course, to cure genetic diseases by replacing defective genes with normal ones in embryos or somatic tissue. It could, for instance, fix the mutant sickle-cell gene in those suffering from that horrible malady, or edit out the HIV virus lurking in the genomes of infected patients.

CRISPR/Cas9 also offers the possibility of customizing your child’s genome via “positive eugenics”, though I doubt that using the system to make your kids smarter or better looking is in the immediate offing. It’s also useful for changing the genes of crops (making them generate, for instance, their own insecticides) or domestic animals (it’s already been used to produce disease-resistant swine). And of course it’s the tool of choice to “resurrect” the wooly mammoth, but that’s not really happening the way we think. The plan for that involves replacing some Asian elephant genes with genes identified in the mammoth genome that are likely to produce longer hair and longer tusks. What we’ll really produce is an elephant that looks somewhat like a mammoth, but will be able to cross only with other such “hybrids” or with Asian elephants. We’re not even near the point where we can bring back extinct species with this technique.

Like the double-helix structure and the methods of DNA amplification and sequencing before it, there’s little doubt that the development of CRISPR/Cas9 as a gene-editing tool will garner a Nobel Prize. But who will get it? Several people could claim credit for the research, including Doudna, her French collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute, George Church at Harvard, and others. Each Nobel is limited to three recipients each, but you could get up to six if you award the prize for both Medicine & Physiology and Chemistry.

The Credit Wars are far more bitter with respect to the patents, as the Broad Institute is in court against the University of Californa at Berkeley (Doudna’s home), with both institutions claiming credit for developing CRISPR/Cas9. There are millions to be made from licensing the system out to biotech companies, though, as I say in my review, I consider it unethical for scientists and their universities to profit from taxpayer-funded research.

In the meantime, the Broad has won the preliminary patent rights, but Berkeley is appealing. And there’s an acrimonious fight between Eric Lander—head of the Broad, who wrote a self-serving article in Cell (“The heroes of CRISPR“) that basically gave his boy Zhang credit for it all and downplayed the contributions of Doudna and Charpentier—and Michael Eisen, a UC Berkeley colleague of Doudna who ripped Lander apart on his own website’s post, “The Villiain of CRISPR.” (To give Eisen credit, he’s not simply defending Doudna because they’re colleagues, for he feels, as do I, that neither Zhang nor Doudna nor their academic homes should get patents on the CRISPR system.)  Having read a ton on CRISPR/Cas9 for my review—I figure that with the work I put in reading the book twice and doing background research, my fee works out to about $5 per hour—I side with Eisen on this one. Feng made a big contribution in getting CRISPR to work in human cells, and for that probably deserves a share of the Prize, but so, I think, do Doudna and Charpentier. Lander simply rewrote history in favor of his Institute, which, like Berkeley, could profit immensely from patents.

If you’re a fan of biology and genetics, do read Doudna and Sternberg’s book, for we’re going to hear a lot more about CRISPR in the future. You’ll want to learn how it works and something about its history. (It began simply with some curious investigators, having no thoughts about gene editing, wondering why there was a strange bit of palindromic DNA in the genomes of some bacteria.) A Crack in Creation (good title!) is excellent on this, and very accessible. Where it falls down is in its discussion of the ethics of gene editing (see my review) and in largely ignoring the battle for credit and patents swirling about CRISPR. My criticisms of these two points are largely quibbles, but a full recounting of the CRISPR story would show that scientists are human, and sometimes eager for credit and wealth.

New NRA ad is bigoted, divisive, and almost calls for violence

June 30, 2017 • 9:30 am

On the National Rifle Association’s (NRA’s) Facebook page. you can see their latest video, which has just gone up on YouTube. I’ve put it below (if it disappears, see it here). Listen to the rancor of NRA spokeswoman and conservative talk radio host Dana Loesch:

Here’s the transcript as it appears on Business Insider:

“They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.

“All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding — until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.

“And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. I’m the National Rifle Association of America, and I’m freedom’s safest place.”

Who are “they”? Apparently liberals,  demonstrators (read: black people), and those who don’t like “President” Trump. What should we do about their actions? Shoot the bloody hell out of them! For “the clenched fist of truth” surely represents guns, though even the NRA dares not say, “Shoot those liberals and black people demonstrating in the streets.” I find the ad, as I said, bigoted, divisive, and almost an incitement to violence. It’s surely an incitement to join the NRA and BUY MORE GUNS.

As for Obama “endorsing the resistance,” all he’s done is say that Trump’s new policies are misguided, which they are. If that’s “resistance,” so be it.

And as Business Insider reports, liberals were predictably enraged, but so were some conservatives:

The ad prompted backlash from some progressives, who called it “an open call to violence” and “barely a whisper shy of a call for full civil war.”

The conservative columnist Anne Applebaum also denounced the ad, saying it called on Americans “to arm themselves to fight liberals. Violence is coming.”

Loesch doubled down in a Periscope video posted on Wednesday night, saying that “the language of the left is violence” and calling “these people … the dullest crayons in the box.”

The ad’s language echoes what NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

“Right now, we face a gathering of forces that are willing to use violence against us,” he said, citing “the leftist radical plan to tax capitalism to collapse” and “the ISIS dream of a worldwide caliphate.”

“A lot of people, for a lot of reasons, want to blow it all up and tear the whole thing down,” LaPierre said. “The left’s message is absolutely clear. They want revenge. You have to be punished. They say you are what is wrong with America and now you have to be purged.”

I can think of few organizations—besides those like the Klan or other white supremacist groups—that are as hateful as the NRA. But the NRA is even worse, for, by perpetuating America’s violent culture of guns, it’s immensely dangerous. 

_______

UPDATE: Reader Pliny the in Between produced this cartoon called “I think this is another NRA PSA”: