We saw this coming long ago

Pat yourself on the back, creationists. You’ve succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. I’d give special appreciation to the Discovery Institute, which came up with so many potent slogans. “Teach the controversy!” “Teach both sides!” So many school administrators and politicians fell for it, taking it for granted that what a school was supposed to do was throw every crank idea at the students, and let them sort it out…while teachers were supposed to sit back and provide no guidance from hard-earned learning and experience, because that would be “bias”. How dare you teach all that evidence-based science about evolution and the history of life on Earth, don’t you know that’s discriminating against fringe theories that have no logical, rational, evidential basis? Make room for Ken Ham, right next to Darwin and Fisher and Simpson and Beadle and Tatum and…it’s a long list.

But that’s the triumph of their idea, that education shouldn’t be based on merit, and that teachers are useless unless they promote their propaganda.

And now it’s come to this.

A senior school administrator in the Lone Star State was recorded telling educators that if they’re going to keep books about the Holocaust in their classrooms, they must also stock material representing “opposing” views or “other perspectives.”

NBC News has obtained a recording that it says features Carroll Independent School District executive director of curriculum and instruction Gina Peddy explaining to teachers that House Bill 3979 requires them to offer alternative information when it “comes to widely debated and currently controversial.” That, by her account, includes the systematic execution of millions of people — mostly Jews — at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

“Make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives,” Peddy said.

You can hear the whole thing here. Listen to the administrator tell the teachers how she wants to work with them and help them, but if they offer a book that teaches about the Holocaust, they better also include a book about Holocaust denial. The teachers sound appalled and horrified.

The administration’s excuse:

In a statement, a Carroll spokeswoman said Peddy’s example about the Holocaust reflects the district’s attempt to comply with a new state law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues.

The law says we have to “teach both sides”. That is so familiar, as is the language about “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. All you need to do to make an issue widely debated and currently controversial is to get a local ignorant church pastor to stand up and argue for bullshit. Presto! Debate! Controversy! Therefore it has to go into the curriculum. It’s only fair, after all.

That’s not how education works. It has never worked that way. You can thank the creationists for a decades-long campaign to misrepresent how science and teaching work so they can get their fables and lies into the classroom. The end result: opening the door for Nazis and kooks to pollute public education. Fuck those motherfuckers, every one.

I get Christopher Rufo spam

I’ll lead with the happy news: I survived another grueling Thursday coupled to my continuing Achilles tendon agony. But I did get through the whole day without puking (the pain is intense enough that when I have to hobble for any length of time, I get nauseous) and actually, the throbbing stabbing pain is starting to ease up, thanks to a heavy drug dose from my doctor yesterday. Hooray for not losing my stomach contents! Hooray for some easing of the pain!! Hooray for lots of good drugs!!! Gosh, I sure hope my lecture this morning was comprehensible.

But now I’m home, and I find spam from some crappy conservative liars, and my gorge begins to rise again.

Dear Friend,

You are not, and never will be, my friend.

Are you ready to become even more effective in the fight against radical curriculum in your schools?

Yes. Always have been. You know that the “radical curriculum” is the conservative/capitalist propaganda promoted by billionaires, right? I am so totally against that.

Since we started Breakthrough Ideas, this fight has been one of our main areas of focus.

No, I don’t think so. The founder of this organization is a failed Republican candidate for the US House from Illinois, whose campaign in 2020 was built around the idea of put[ting] in place the infrastructure to begin the pushback operation against the socialism that invaded the US House in 2018. She also ran, and failed, for governor of Illinois. I think her only idea is to build up Wingnuttia.

She seems to have founded this half-assed think-tank in 2020/2021, after she flopped everything else, in order to continue her grift. I have no idea who is funding it.

Now we are teaming up with nationally-renowned education and critical race theory expert Christopher Rufo to give you the information you need to influence your local school boards and push back on toxic ideologies.

Wait wait wait. nationally-renowned education and critical race theory expert? Hold your horses, lady. Rufo has zero qualifications in education. He doesn’t understand or is lying about CRT; he has none of the training or experience in law, philosophy, race relations, or history to have earned the title of “expert”. He’s a fraud through and through. Here’s his background from Wikipedia.

Rufo was previously a visiting fellow for domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation and a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute.[12][11] Later, he was a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Christian think tank known for its opposition to the theory of evolution and advocacy for intelligent design to be taught in public schools.[11][13][14] In 2017, Rufo was a plaintiff in a lawsuit to prevent Seattle from imposing a 2.25% income tax on sums above $250,000 a year for individuals and over $500,000 for couples.[15] In 2018, he unsuccessfully ran for the Seattle City Council.[16] Rufo voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 United States presidential election.[5]

Yeah, he’s just another right-wing grifter oozing out of the woodwork of a series of think-tanks. Not an expert in anything but profitable parasitism.

Oh, the best part: the bill.

Check out Christopher Rufo’s video invitation here!

You can listen to Rufo on Zoom for an hour for the low, low price of $25, which is a bit over-priced. Or you can listen to him in person if you’re willing to fork over $50 and travel to some random wedding venue in Illinois (there is a McDonald’s next door), and for a lousy $250 you can attend the VIP Q&A session for a half hour.

Jesus. Unqualified hack gets those kinds of ticket prices for just lying out of his ass. I’m such a failure, I should have made up more shit to get on the right-wing rubber chicken circuit and the no doubt substantial speaking fees. On the plus side, I won’t get publicly disemboweled for my ignorance on national TV.

I’m full of alien substances now

I got shot up with Pfizer a few months ago, yesterday I got a buttload of pain-numbing happy juice, and today…

When can I officially be designated a cyborg transhuman mutant alien hybrid? I’m looking forward to when my nictating membranes, extra limbs and nipples, and compound eyes kick in.

I hope you’re all getting all of your vaccinations so we can team up and take over the world.

I’ll probably end up voting for Kamala Harris in the next election

After all, can you imagine a Republican stating these obvious truths?

This does not mean I agree with everything she, or the Democratic party, says or does, but that there is a clear, distinct separation between the two parties on at least some issues, and I’ll always go for the one that doesn’t lie about our history.

First you fondle your gun, then you worship it as your god

A Moonie splinter cult is now buying up property and using AR-15s as church accoutrements. These are not good neighbors.

Moon’s congregation, Rod of Iron Ministries, also known as The World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, is a gun-centric spinoff of the much larger Unification Church, founded by his late father, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a self-proclaimed messiah and businessman whose followers were famously known as “Moonies.” The younger Moon, who also goes by “The Second King,” split from the main church amid a dramatic falling-out with his mother about who, between the two of them, was the rightful heir to his father’s empire.

In 2017, Moon founded his church in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, siphoning off hundreds of followers from the main congregation who were willing to make the seemingly radical leap of incorporating high-powered rifles into their spiritual life. He did this with the backing of his older brother, Kook-jin “Justin” Moon, the CEO of Kahr Arms, a gun manufacturing company headquartered nearby. In recent years, he’s made headlines for recreating the mass wedding ceremonies that his father’s church was famous for, with the addition of AR-15s.

I think a good part of the problem here in America is that we have a constitution that says you have freedom of religion, which is interpreted to mean that churches have complete freedom from any kind of regulation, rather than that individuals have freedom of conscience. Similarly, despite the word “regulated” in the amendment that allows people to keep and bear arms, we have interpreted that to mean we get to go crazy with guns. The constitution doesn’t say anything about capitalism, but similarly the parasites have decided that a “free market” implies a total absence of constraint.

Oh, well, we all know how this will end up.

(In case you’ve forgotten your trashy pop culture, that’s a scene from Beneath the Planet of the Apes, where the mutant humans worship a nuclear missile they want to use to destroy the world.)

The poison in Murdock, Minnesota

If someone said to you, We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children, and if they then said they were good people, would you take their word for it? I sure wouldn’t. That’s Nazi shit. If you were a city council member voting on whether they could buy a church in your community, would you be reassured if they argued that their goal was to guarantee that there were would be blond haired, blue eyed children a hundred thousand years from now? Would you vote yes if they promised that, while they weren’t going to allow any black people to set foot in the church, they’d be polite about escorting them out?

All that happened just a few miles down the road from me, in Murdock, Minnesota, where the Asatru FolK Assembly is setting up shop. The city council member who voted in favor, Pat Thorson, is a smug centrist white guy who wasn’t offended as long as they weren’t coming after him, and he asked if he looks like a white supremacist. Yeah, Pat, you do. You don’t have to wear a pointy white hat and set crosses on fire to be a racist — all it takes is that you shrug your shoulders and look the other way when bigots move in.

The Guardian sent a crew to Murdock to dig into what’s going on. I went down there myself a while back, and all I could see was another tiny Minnesota hamlet, population 300, which was dead quiet and sleepy, with absolutely nothing happening. I should have gone on a Sunday morning and crashed the church if I wanted to see anything, I guess.

I watched that and came away with total contempt for their church, which they call “Baldurshof” and less respect for small town city councils.

Speaking of uncool: Blue Origin about to fly

It seems to me that the way to remove all the glamor and heroism of space travel is to hand out passes to corporate executives and hammy 90 year old actors, which is exactly what Blue Origin is about to do. It’s like a confession that all this is about is naked, blatant PR and pandering to capitalists.

Way to kill the dream, guys. Kids who want to become an astronaut now know the pathway is to get a marketing degree or make lots of money or pretend to be an astronaut on a TV show really hard. Aspire to be spam in a can, kids! You don’t need skills, just an insider angle.

Who needs toe beans when you’ve got spatulae?

People are always going on and on about the itsie-bitsie cutesy-wootsy toe beans that cats have. I don’t get it — those are the ends of the limbs a predator uses to kill its prey, and they aren’t particularly interesting structurally.

Far better are the complex sticky hairs spiders use to climb. Not only are they cute, but they’ve been written up in a mechanical engineering journal. Point: spiders.

Don’t believe me? Look at these adorable little tootsies!

Enhance!

See? Cute!

Ah, so that’s how we kill Facebook

We just have to spread the word about what Facebook is really about.

Tech reporter Kevin Roose argues that what he sees in the revelations is a company that is in a desperation mode. He says that what keeps Facebook executives up at night is not the threats of lawsuits (that it has ample resources to fight) or fines (that it can easily afford to pay) or Congressional investigations or government regulations (that it feels that it can circumvent) but an existential threat that they cannot control: they are losing the desired younger demographic that is the key to their revenue stream. He points out that social media companies come and go as young people’s tastes change and that Facebook may be seeing its future as similar to that of Friendster and MySpace, both major players of their time that eventually became irrelevant. While Facebook has outlasted them, it is already seen by young people as a space for old people, which is a devastating image for the company..

All these problems have led to speculations that Facebook may be on the way out, sooner than we may think.

Oh, yeah, Facebook: that’s the place where uncool boomer grandpas and dotty old great-aunts go to share racisms and stupid conspiracy theories, right? Why would anyone want to join that? Everyone would rather hang out in the cool spaces, like Instagram.

Instagram is where vapid “influencers” pretend to be celebrities when all they actually are are shallow poseurs who can be lured off to Fyre Festivals. No one wants to be seen dead there. The hip people are flocking to…whatever the next fad is.

With the right degree of cynical ennui, the language of disaffected teenagers, we can kill off any nascent social media juggernaut!

Soapdish

Are you at all curious about what Kent Hovind is up to, or his latest legal travails? Oh boy, it’s a long video that sums it all up.

He has taken a fourth “wife”? Wow. He has lost all of his latest court cases, he’s got another decision coming out tomorrow, and Steve and Ernie sure sound like dirtbags.

You know, I came home worn out and with my left leg on fire, and I just wanted to sit back and unwind for a little bit, so I clicked on play for a little light entertainment, and now my leg aches and my head hurts.