Star Trek's Very Own Terrorist

Although Muslim extremists have pretty well captured the news lately insofar as terrorism is concerned, the problem of individuals with a sociopathic philosophy is by no means confined to that group.

In "And the Children Shall Lead"[TOS3], we see a group of children brainwashed by a dead guy from the planet Triacus. Calling itself a Gorgon (or Gorgan ... opinions differ), the dead guy has the children controlling the Enterprise crew by the use of fear and terror. Via some power the Gorgan provides, the kids do some sort of fist-shake thing and make the crew's "beasts" of the mind work against them. Sulu fears changing course because he sees a tube of enormous swords all around the ship . . . Scotty refuses to allow Kirk to override the bridge controls because the ship is delicate . . . and so on.

One of the children was played by a little girl named Pamelyn Ferdin (who was also the voice of Lucy in some of the TV Peanuts fare).


Pamelyn Ferdin, Future Terrorist Group Leader

Ferdin apparently grew up to be much like a few of my exes . . . cute, but out of her f***ing mind:


Pamelyn Ferdin, Terrorist Group Leader Babe

But I digress . . .

You see, Ferdin eventually got out of TV, became a nurse, and later became involved with animal rights people. Indeed, she has recently become the leader of SHAC, a group dedicated to ending the activities of Huntington Life Sciences by the use of fear and terror. (Sound familiar?) Huntington is a research company which performs animal testing in order to help cure diseases and ensure that potentially beneficial chemicals are actually safe to use.

As per ActivistCash.com's write-up:

It’s called SHAC, which stands for “Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty” (our pick for a more appropriate moniker: “Sadistic, Hysterical, Angry Criminals”). SHAC has decreed that Huntingdon Life Sciences “must be shut down for good.” And they’re not too particular about how that comes about. British Animal Liberation Front (ALF) leader Robin Webb told protesters at a December 2002 SHAC rally: “It doesn’t matter if it’s closed through economic pressure! It doesn’t matter if it’s closed because the employees are too scared to work there! And it doesn’t matter if it goes out with a bang either!” The rally was held within earshot of Huntingdon’s New Jersey employees.

SHAC has employed physical violence, large-scale vandalism, verbal and physical intimidation, financial extortion, burglary, grand theft, Internet piracy, mail fraud, and even identity theft -- all in a bid to make HLS the first animal testing lab to throw in the towel and close its doors. That, says SHAC organizer Brenda Shoss, “is a door to shutting down all the rest of the labs.” At the Animal Rights 2002 convention, SHAC director Kevin Jonas [a.k.a. Kevin Kjonaas] vowed: “When we shut down HLS, we’ll move on to the next, the next, and the next.”

This siege mentality doesn’t sit well with law enforcement officers, who universally condemn SHAC’s goals and tactics. “There is no nice side to SHAC,” said Cambridgeshire (UK) Chief Inspector Michael Gipp in 2001. “This is a campaign based on fear and intimidation at every level.” FBI supervisory special agent William Voigt observed in a July 2002 AP story: “SHAC has quite an extensive history of violence.” And Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly, responding to the indictment of 12 SHAC activists for threatening Robert Harper and his family, told WHDH TV: “Those are crimes. That is criminal behavior. Are they acts of terrorism? Yes, they are.”

Almost amazingly, as with PETA these people are the "respectable" side of much darker groups that try to keep the main organization "clean" by operating under different names. One of my very rare off-topic pages on this site was in reference to the Animal Liberation Brigade and its sick manifesto . . . like SHAC, they were working against Huntington. And as it turns out, the Animal Liberation Brigade (and other terror groups like the Animal Liberation Front, the Earth Liberation Front, and so on) all have ties with SHAC.

(Indeed, that Rodney Coronado firebomber fellow mentioned in the ActivistCash write-up as being one of SHAC's keynote speakers at an event was also receiving donations from PETA. (Penn & Teller's wonderful show Bullshit usually opts for a comedic-but-fact-based approach to debunking, well, bullshit. But in their PETA episode, they actually took the gloves off and, in the midst of utterly owning PETA by letting their own words and actions assassinate their own characters, showed this Coronado freak talking. Watch it sometime . . . even in this decadent age when people seem willing to say any irrational thing, people like Coronado are still astonishing to behold.)

I guess these psycho animal rights folks think it would be better to pour chemicals into the eyes of their own children than to do it on animals. Or maybe they hope their child will die . . . not of the disease, but of the insufficiently-understood attempted-cure that ends up killing the kid because it wasn't tested sufficiently.

Oh, but silly me. That would assume too much logical consistency on their part. You see, they'd probably rather just use the children of their philosophical opponents. After all, SHAC members sent anonymous e-mails to some random lady who does business with a company that does business with Huntington, threatening "to cut open her son and fill him with poison ''the way Huntingdon does with the animals.''" As Jeffrey Gold with the Chicago Sun-Times so wonderfully set the scene:

Sally Dillenback's son used to crouch by the door brandishing a 5-inch kitchen knife when the doorbell rang, promising to protect his mommy.

The 7-year-old ''told me not to worry,'' she testified last month. ''He said he was going to get the animal people.''

The ''animal people'' referred to animal-rights activists who waged a campaign of threats and vandalism against a company that tests drugs and household products on animals. On Thursday, an animal-rights group and six members were convicted of using their Web site to incite the harassment.

The group posted information about the lab's employees and those who did business with Huntingdon Life Sciences, including their home phone numbers, addresses and where their children attended school. [...] Dillenback saw even more detailed information about her family on Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty's Web site, such as the name of her son's teacher and the fact that the boy sang in the choir.

[...] SHAC maintained its actions were protected under the First Amendment, and its leader pledged to continue to ''expose atrocities'' at Huntingdon Life Sciences.

From ActivistCash:

The Fall 2002 SHAC newsletter -- a professionally printed, glossy piece for which someone must have paid handsomely -- included the following warning:

SHAC campaigners have routinely taken Sun Tzu’s instruction to heart, learning every minute detail about their targets -- where they work, where they live, who their friends are, where they pump their gas, and what their plans are on Friday night -- identifying their weaknesses, and then preying upon those weakness [sic] until they inevitably crumble.

But naturally, these terror-mongerers have gone too far, as terror-mongerers so often do. Now the former SHAC leader Kevin Jonas/Kjonaas is behind bars. He and five others were "convicted of terrorism and Internet stalking yesterday by a federal jury that found them guilty of using their Web site to incite attacks" against Huntington and its business partners, per the NY Times. Therefore Pamelyn Ferdin is now the SHAC leader, since everyone above her is in jail.

If this sort of behavior sounds familiar to you, it should. That's the reason this post exists, as a matter of fact. You see, StarDestroyer.Net's hate-mongering contingent employs the same tactics as these "domestic terrorists" against those they disagree with. After hearing about the SHAC bit the term "Talifan" to refer to sociopathic fanboys seemed even more fitting than before. (This was especially the case when I read about Brian Cass in the opening tale of the ActivistCash.com page. He was attacked by three men armed with baseball bats in a tale reminiscent of Wayne Poe's posted fantasy about he, Wong, and some other guy beating me in a similar fashion.)

Indeed, nowadays the SD.Net Talifan doesn't really wait around to see if someone's going to turn out to be an opponent. One cross word gets the ball rolling. Recently, for instance, some poor guy joined up and, after 19 posts in which he questioned just how far you can take mathematical analysis in regards to analyzing sci-fi shows (which is hardly an invalid point), Wong flipped. He claims the guy "downplayed the importance of math and science", and so he posted a message where he claims to have "checked up on him". He handed out the e-mail address the guy registered with (with a coy "oops, did I say that out loud?"), posted info about the fellow's university, and gave everyone the guy's name (http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=86542). Fortunately, with only 19 posts the guy hadn't annoyed the rest of the Talifan there to the point that they all started gathering as much info as possible (such as home phone number, address, aerial photos, et cetera), posting it on the boards or on specially-constructed web pages, and using it for harassing phone calls, threats, openly planned "home visits", et cetera . . . but I'm sure that if he hadn't been quite so nice and diplomatic then they'd already be at that point, yet again. (As it stands, Wong just grabbed the guy's e-mail address and looked up the university, then tried to make himself sound all important and badass by saying he'd "checked up on him".)

Before I digress, though, I do want to take a moment to enjoy the fact that the same lines of BS are used to justify the activities. Both SHAC and the SD.Net Talifan group hide behind the claim that posting the information isn't illegal, and try to claim that they are somehow within their freedoms to do it. When pressed, they'll even go so far as to post disclaimer-type comments like 'oops, did I say that out loud? Well, don't go using it! (wink, wink)'. Or, as SHAC's most recent UK newsletter (#39, featuring pictures of people's homes) puts it:

This newsletter is not intended to encourage illegal activity of any kind. [...] Readers must bear in mind that certain demonstrations eg home demonstrations are now illegal in the UK although they are perfectly legal in other countries [...] Company details are listed for the purposes of readers making informative and polite communications with the companies listed. The details are not intended for repetitive, rude, or threatening calls.

In a (borrowed) word, "bullshit!" (Especially telling is that in their "SHAC SHOP" section on page 8, it has the following which I presume they thought was funny: "Warning! Anyone caught shoplifting will get a home visit...know what we mean?")

For starters that "it's not illegal" crap has always been a pansy excuse, even if true. A lot of things are wrong and unethical but not illegal, and if your moral compass is based only on the laws of the land then the problem is yours and not mine. Second, in several arenas (and some countries) that sort of activity is quite illegal . . . such as in the case of animal rights activity since 1992 in the US. (It's classifiable as harassment anyway.) Do you really think there's a wide ethical gulf between the events simply because this is ST-v-SW.Net and not HLS-v-SHAC.Net?

In any case, before you think me unfair for calling Ferdin a terrorist simply because she's assumed command of an organization linked to terrorism, with terrorists in it, and which publishes its terrorist intent in its newsletters, let's take a look at her response to the verdict:

"[She] called the verdict an insidious curb on free speech and said she was "ashamed of the jury."

"Anyone who writes anything on an e-mail or on a Web site is being treated like we're in a fascist state," said Ms. Ferdin, a former child star who played Felix Unger's daughter on "The Odd Couple" and was the voice of Lucy in the "Peanuts" cartoons. "Our forefathers fought for the right to free speech." [...] Ms. Ferdin vowed that the campaign against animal testing would continue, despite the verdict against her group.

Hmm . . . I don't see her renouncing a damn thing about SHAC's past. I certainly see no apology from SHAC on its now-broken-ass website, which simply says it is shut down for "legal reasons". The UK SHAC website protests that "All these activists are solid, decent people who were never accused of causing even $1 dollar of damage yet here they are sitting in jail."

Thank you for missing the point, you bloody freaks.

In any event, now I guess OPama bin Ferdin should renounce her participation in Peanuts since Snoopy was a confined animal, a prisoner whose Red Baron Dreams were escapist fantasy from the reality of his incarceration . . . or some other such bullshit.

The thing is, now whenever I think of Charlie Brown I'll wonder if Lucy is planning to blow up Linus because his blanket might be made of wool.

And, of course, now anytime I watch "And the Children Shall Lead" I'll wonder if the little blonde girl was messed up in the head by seeing that fist-shaking crap make people scared and thus willing do her character's bidding.

Call me a hardass if you will, though, but I don't care where she got her stupid ideas or how she ended up as a pro-terrorism nurse. There's no excuse for such sociopaths. If SHAC continues its campaign of terror under her leadership then I hope the group and its members (including her) receive the full measure of justice.

And if she doesn't like it, she can shake her fist at me 'till she turns blue. I'll be too busy supporting Huntington to notice.

(EDIT 03-06-06: Though I already mentioned Bullshit!, I had forgotten that Pam Ferdin appeared on the PETA program. Of course I still had her hot redhead pic in mind, but she's now much older and much less hot. She appeared seated next to a Dr. Vlasack with the "Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine" (PCRM), a freak of the first order who threw the "do no harm" bit out the window and has proclaimed that animal rights violence was okay. Apparently in his mathematics, killing a few humans in order to save animals is A-OK. Ferdin sat there like this was a perfectly normal and reasonable attitude. Of course, she's married to Vlasack, so it isn't like this sort of thing should've surprised her.

And you know, the sad part is that I've always been really soft-hearted when it comes to animals. Oh sure, there are lots of animals that are more worthwhile to keep around than some humans. Force me to choose between a puppy and Hitler and you better believe my choice involves future purchases of Dog Chow. But when it comes to the general question of humanity and human suffering versus the lives and suffering of animals?

It's just no contest. Screw you, animal-rights terrorists . . . and anyone else who uses your tactics.)