(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

It's been a while since we checked in on Matt Shea, the crusader monk of the Washington state legislature. The Guardian tells us that he's now hooked up with some outfit that (no kidding) trains kids to use guns and knives to wage "biblical war."

The emails, sent in July 2016, begin with an email from Patrick Caughran, who presents himself as the founder of a training group called Team Rugged. They were provided to the Guardian by a former Shea associate who was copied in on the exchange.

Caughran asks Shea to publicize a link to the group’s Facebook page, and put him in touch with “John Jacob Schmidt”, the nom de guerre of Shea associate, Jack Robertson. Robertson is a rightwing podcast host who advocates for conservatives to move to the “American Redoubt” in eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana, and, with Shea, campaigns for eastern Washington to secede and form its own state.

On Team Rugged website, it is described as “a Christian organization that strongly believes in building manly character and the capability to stand in adversity in young men”. In his email to Shea, however, Caughran offers a different description, saying that the group exists “to provide patriotic and biblical training on war for young men”.

Is there white supremacy involved here? Of course, there is.

Caughran goes on to detail the group’s training regime, writing that “there will be biblical teaching (some taken from pastor John Weaver’s works) on biblical warfare, the responsibilities, regulations, principles and mindset. So that our young men will be better prepared to fight against physical enemies, and to do so, God’s way and with His blessing."

The Georgia-based Weaver is a controversial preacher whom the Southern Poverty Law Center says is a “leading proponent for training Christians for armed battle.” As well as being a preacher, Weaver is a firearms instructor, and according to the SPLC has given weapons training to members of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate group which marched at the far-right Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 that ended in the death of a protester.



It is going to take decades to wring out the crazy from the fabric of the country, even if we all agree we should, and I'm not entirely sure all of us do. I think a lot of "us" are quite happy with the crazy.

Matt Shea is out there. Ted S Warren/AP/Shutterstock

This is an extraordinary development. In the middle of an Ebola outbreak in Africa that was complicated by murderous political violence, we get this news from Wired:



On Monday, the trial’s cosponsors at the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health announced that two of the experimental treatments appear to dramatically boost survival rates. While an experimental vaccine previously had been shown to shield people from catching Ebola, the news marks a first for people who already have been infected. “From now on, we will no longer say that Ebola is incurable,” said Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director general of the Institut National de Recherche Biomedicale in the DRC, which has overseen the trial’s operations on the ground...

The results were most striking for patients who received treatments soon after becoming sick, when their viral loads were still low—death rates dropped to 11 percent with mAb114 and just 6 percent with Regeneron’s drug, compared with 24 percent with ZMapp and 33 percent with Remdesivir.



In the middle of the worst possible environment for miracles, some researchers working in the middle of a war zone supply one. We all should keep an eye on what Very Large Pharma does with this breakthrough but, for the moment, let's all just be amazed by what people can still accomplish.



The game might be changing when it comes to Ebola. John Moore Getty Images

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Sabine Turnaround" (Lost Bayou Ramblers): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archive: Here is a Mom 'n Pram race from 1923. I'm not sure but, early on, it looks like Mom steals the baby's milk, and then there's a long pit-stop—"Ever'body's gotta pit, Cole."—involving a banana. And the winning baby looks a bit worse for wear. History is so cool.



Is it a good day for dinosaur news, TVOne NewsNow? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!



It's being called "Jurassic mile", and it's believed to be one of the biggest dinosaur graveyards in the world. Researchers say there could be more than 100 dinosaurs buried at the site in the US state of Wyoming. "We've got at least a dozen animals which are showing elements of their skeletons poking out of the ground in multiple parts of the site, so it makes it a very large site to deal with," paleobiologist Professor Phil Manning said. "For the first time in my career, we're almost looking at an industrial-scale excavation. I've never been involved in such a vast dinosaur dig in my whole career." There are so many fossils there, work could continue for at least 20 years. It's believed they died together in a catastrophic flood.



There are more benign dinosaurs in Wyoming than are thought of in the Cheney family, and they all lived then to make us happy now.



The Committee hung in there as long as it could, waiting for the Top Comment on C. Montague Schilling's political musings that it knew was coming. Top Commenter Michael Andrews—and, presumably, not the old Red Sox second-baseman—went right for the jugular of The Committee.



As a Philadelphian, I'm so glad he's getting pinned on Boston instead of the Phillies



I feel targeted. Anyway, 80.11 Beckhams to you, good sir. I hope you spill your scrapple all over yourself.



I'll be back on Monday with whatever barks out of the dog days over the weekend. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and remember, the important thing about pram racing is not the winning, it's the tsking part. And the bananas.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io