Mixed Bag

The Union of Satirists and Surrealists would like to protest the following:

• Mike the Mad Biologist on "the Flint, MI mass poisoning" and the educational effects of lead poisoning.

  Snyder needs to be impeached* and federal** [footnotes in original] and state dollars need to get to Flint, not just for the short term but the long-term (that’s the problem with brain damage). Less obviously, the state-appointed dictator who controlled Flint (aka ’emergency manager’) while the mass poisoning occurred also needs to be removed from his new job of…running Detroit’s public schools.
  
  And the next time, a subset of technobrat pundits complain about there being too much democracy at the local level [cough Yglesias cough], the one word response is “Flint”.

• Eric Lander and Big Science.
• Funding neo-Nazis in Ukraine.  And why that is a bad idea.

  The reason the Pentagon is playing such a dirty game with Congress on funding the neo-fascist elements in Ukraine is not hard to deduce. Neo-Nazi militias, like the Azov Battalion, are the most dedicated and fierce killers, driven by racial bloodlust and unmoored to civilized thinking or conduct. Azov and their comrades are anxious to get into the fight and spill blood whereas many other Ukrainians are doing everything they can to avoid the war in the east.
  
  What the Obama Administration will soon learn, as the government in Kiev knows now, is that the rabid dog you release on your enemy can just as easily bite your own hand. Empowering the neo-fascist militias today may lay the groundwork for another coup tomorrow.

  Let's not even mention the mujaheddin and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the '80s.  Mmmmmkay?
  
• Speaking as a surrealist, the proper response to these people would be shaving cream pies with a touch of butyl mercaptan.  Speaking as a normal person, the proper response is shunning.  And becoming more like Denmark.  [Addendum:  The event was cancelled, and Anonymous is on the case.]