Vignettes from home school conferences

Don’t.

If you want to know why America is getting stupider, read these short accounts of incidents at home school conferences. The author has to go to these events — she’s selling materials to teach feminism, but of course she can’t mention feminism. She gets nauseous every morning before hitting the aisles at the thought of the rabid Christian/conservatives she has to be nice to.

One sample:

I am in Texas, my home state. A mom wanders in, picks up a journal, and reads about Kate Warne, the first woman detective.

“Where do you do your research?” she asks. I give her several sites. “That’s good, that’s good,” she says.

“Now then,” she begins again, “what is your slant?”

“Slant?” I ask.

“Which way do you lean?”

“Just historical facts,” I tell her.

“OK. But listen, I need you to do something for me.”

She reaches out and takes my hand. Apparently we are best friends now.

“Write about Biblical characters,” she says. “We need that. Especially the men.”

I tilt my head to the side.

“Well, we focus on actual women from history,” I say.

Wrong answer.

“Well, I will have to think about this.”

She drops my hand. The friendship is over.

Keep in mind that Ken Ham is the king of homeschooling. The dreck that floods these conferences is guaranteed to degrade the quality of the homeschool experience.

Note: I am not dead set against homeschooling — some homeschooled kids emerge from the experience with great educations. But it’s really, really hard, they are the minority, and the majority of homeschooled kids are there entirely because their parents are ignorant and don’t want their kids to be smarter than they are, and the schooling is often driven by religious fanaticism. Or nowadays, weird political fanaticism. MAGA parents don’t want their kids exposed to Liberals and Socialists and Ideas.

I would never have homeschooled my kids, because my wife and I don’t know enough. And we both have PhDs!

Air those grievances!

A resolution has been made to censure Marjorie Taylor Greene on pretty much inarguable grounds. You can just read the resolution yourself, or if you enjoy angry rhetoric, you can watch Becca Balint read it aloud, although it will take a while to get through it all.

None of it really matters, since all the pundits agree that it will be simply tabled by the Republicans, who don’t mind a lying, bottom-feeding scumbag thriving in their party. There isn’t a single person with any integrity there.

The best of the Republican Party

Imagine if Chauncey Gardiner were a malignant cancer.

The drunken game of musical chairs has ended, and creationist/election denier/bigot/Trump vassal Mike Johnson has won. It was a revealing game, because this should have been an opportunity to show off the very best of their party, the people who would represent the Republican vision of the future. Instead, we got a peek at what they think is great, and got serving of sewage sludge.

Steve Scalise, white supremacist and anti-Semite? Jim Jordan, notorious enabler of sexual assault? Tom Emmer, dullard and heir to Michele Bachmann’s electorate? They finally settle on a low-key (most people don’t know how awful he is yet) Trump stooge. This is their best? He won because he was a cipher!

Finally, on Tuesday night, House Republicans picked the name “Johnson” out of the phone book. He was acceptable because he was unknown on Capitol Hill, even to many Republicans. During Wednesday’s roll-call vote on the House floor, Kay Granger (R-Tex.), chair of the Appropriations Committee, rose and mistakenly voted for “Mike Rogers” — the chairman of the Armed Services committee — before correcting herself to Mike Johnson. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), in a statement congratulating the new speaker, called him Jim Johnson. Susan Collins of Maine, top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, told CNN’s Lauren Fox Wednesday morning that she’d have to Google him.

Johnson’s anonymity was his greatest asset. In just his seventh year in Congress, he hadn’t been around long enough, or had enough power, to make enemies. He is the least-experienced speaker in a century and a half. But he has also been an avid election denier, Trump defender and promoter of the deep-state conspiracy, which appealed to the MAGA hard-liners who had defeated McCarthy, Scalise and Emmer.

The Republican party is fucking done, or the United States is done, a failed state. The next election has become even more important, because we have to purge these losers from the government.

Do you want a creationist for Speaker of the House?

After chewing up 3 nominees in the last few weeks, the Republicans have thrown up a fourth ugly slug: Mike Johnson, a far right goober from Louisiana. Nothing good comes out of Louisiana politics, but I also know something else about him. He’s a creationist. He writes for Answers in Genesis. Several years ago, he wrote a hilarious letter to the Lexington Herald-Leader, complaining about Dan Phelps, friend of the blog.

It’s always ironic when a self-professed man of science allows his emotions and ideology to cloud his reason. But that’s exactly what Daniel Phelps has done in his most recent rant against the Ark Encounter theme park.

You know what’s really ironic? When a theocrat and openly anti-science loon tells a professional scientist that his mind is clouded by emotions and ideology.

Phelps’ Aug. 17 column made a number of unfounded allegations against the Ark Encounter, its investors, and even supportive state officials. Phelps’ diatribe reveals quite clearly his own political agenda and his utter contempt for religion and people of faith.

That’s not Phelps’ political agenda at all. On the other hand, you can see Johnson’s agenda on display in his organization’s Model Bylaws for Christian Churches. He’s a Christian Nationalist. I think it’s safe to say he has utter contempt for secularism.

Unlike Ark Encounter proponents, Phelps shows no tolerance for points of view different than his own, and rabid hostility towards those who disagree.

Oh yeah? Doesn’t the Ark Encounter require a “Statement of Faith” as well as a “Salvation Testimony” and a “Creation Statement Belief?” They sure do. Who has a rabid hostility to different points of view?

He is willing to sacrifice hundreds of millions of dollars in new economic development and thousands of jobs for Kentucky. If his proposition were followed, the commonwealth would be legally liable for blatantly unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Phelps’ preference — that religious groups should be denied equal access to tax incentive programs and also forced to hire people who openly disagree with their main beliefs — is not only unfair, it is clearly unlawful.

Hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs? I didn’t know conservative Christians could indulge in mind-altering substance, because no, the numbers show that Ken Ham and AiG lied about the potential economic benefits, and their promises remain unfulfilled.

His discriminatory ideas have been repeatedly invalidated by the Supreme Court, lower courts and federal and state statutes. Phelps may be a trained geologist, but a constitutional law expert he is not.

Mike Johnson claims to be a constitutional law expert, so that burn doesn’t even sting.

Johnson might end up getting the votes he needs. He’s anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, anti-Ukraine, and a good buddy of Donald Trump. The people who will vote for him probably think the creationism is a bonus.

I would hope no Democrats to vote for this creepy authoritarian, but the media, as usual, think that supporting a repulsive idiot is the answer. I approve of Roy Edroso’s response to that bullshit.

The Republicans finally got their act together enough to elect this asshole.

You didn’t want Tom Emmer anyway

You know, Tom Emmer (R-loonytown) was elected from the same district that cursed Minnesota with Michele Bachmann, right? He was a bad choice for the house speaker, but the Republicans nominated him anyway.

He got to bask in the glory of possibly becoming the Speaker of the House, 3rd in line for the presidency, before everyone counted the votes and realized there was no way he could be elected to the position.

So Emmer quit. Goodbye, Tom Emmer. We didn’t have time to complain about you.

It’s OK to be indifferent to the lives of Palestinian civilians

I heard that people were walking out on Dave Chappelle’s comedy shows, and I was not surprised — he has a history of being offensive and expressing contempt for gay and trans people. But then I learned why they were walking out.

During his show at TD Garden on Thursday, Dave Chappelle spoke out about the Israel-Gaza conflict, which spurred a walkout by some of his audience members. According to The Wall Street Journal, the comedian first condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel before slamming Israel’s bombing of Gaza and the United States of “aiding the slaughter of innocent civilians.”

Chappelle’s comments were made after he said that he didn’t think students should lose job offers for being pro-Palestine. An audience member then demanded Chappelle to “shut up,” which elicited an emotional response from the comedian. Chappelle proceeded to bash the Israeli government for cutting off water and other essentials to Gaza and accused it of killing innocent people, according to those in attendance at the Boston show.

A few members of the crowd cheered and shouted “Free Palestine” in support of Chappelle, while others yelled, “What about Hamas,” the attendees said. Some individuals got up and left the show. At the end of his routine, Chappelle reportedly added that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” when speaking about Israeli policies and the Hamas attacks.

But wait, I marveled, I agree with Chappelle in this one case. I think that’s the only humane position to take, to both condemn Hamas and their terror attacks, and to condemn the state of Israel for their hateful history. This does not excuse his other views by any means, but he is not approving of Hamas’ cruelty; he is simply also not approving of Israel’s cruel policies.

Fortunately, I am not a comedian, so I’m safe from ‘cancellation’ (not that Chappelle is cancelled — members of an audience have always had the right to disagree with a comic.) And then I read that a prominent academic has lost his editor position for expecting sympathy for the Palestinian people.

Michael Eisen, editor-in-chief of the prominent open access journal eLife and a longtime critic of traditional journals, says he is losing that job for publicly endorsing a satirical article that criticized people dying in Gaza for not condemning the recent attacks on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas.

“I have been informed that I am being replaced as the Editor in Chief of @eLife for retweeting a @TheOnion piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians,” Eisen tweeted today.

The furor began on 13 October when Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, praised one of The Onion’s fake news stories on X, formerly Twitter. The story bore the headline “Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas.” Eisen said “The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @TheOnion university.”

Here’s the tweet that got him fired.

And the “offensive” tweet from The Onion.

And here’s a sampling of the responses.

I agree with Hector Rivera; they’re proving his point. Eisen was not approving of beheading babies, there was absolutely nothing heartless and callous said by Eisen. He was not expressing moral ambiguity, but moral clarity, by expecting that we’d have the same respect for all human life. I guess his big mistake was expecting that people would have some sympathy for all the civilians currently targeted for death by the Israeli military.

Hamas and Israel mark each day of war with new numbers measuring the accumulation of death and destruction. The Gaza Health Ministry said more than 5,000 Gaza residents have been killed so far, including 436 in the past 24 hours, primarily in the enclave’s south, where Israel has told more than 1 million Gazans to seek shelter from air raids in the north. The ministry’s figures, which could not be independently confirmed, are not broken down between civilians and militants.

Palestinian babies don’t count, I presume. I made a quick search of a few sites where the anti-“cancel culture” fanatics hang out, Bari Weiss, Heterodox “University”, Jerry Coyne, FIRE, etc. — ouch, that was painful, I normally avoid that crowd, with good reason — and surprise, surprise: they’re not raising a hullabaloo about the Eisen dismissal. They’re all about hating the right people, so I shouldn’t be surprised at all — hating Palestinians is a fine thing to do now, since, don’t you know, they’re all Hamas.

Look, see all the Hamas terrorists fleeing the righteous wrath of the holy IDF?

If you don’t agree they should all be shot or bombed, you should be ashamed and be fired.

Oh. So that’s why he was called “the Corsican Ogre”

I am coming off a four-day weekend, and I had decided I needed to get my mind off things, so my project was to read a book about a period of history I know very little about, a distraction from this period of history that is so thoroughly fucked up. I’ve missed out on the early 19th century, just a little gap in my education, so I picked up this free book via Kindle Unlimited, Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life, by Alan Schom.

As a book, it was OK: it tended to plod a bit, as it was a condensed biography that nevertheless tried to cram in as many details as it could, but I learned a fair bit. It didn’t take my mind off the current situation, though, because the early 19th century may have been even more fucked up than the early 21st.

I have a complaint, though. The author keeps telling me Napoleon is brilliant, a genius, a general impression I had from my pop culture understanding of the Great Man: that he was a great general. Reading what he actually did, though, it’s obvious he was a narcissistic psychopath who was a terrible general. He basically took the great wealth and manpower of France and threw it wastefully at grandiose campaigns that allowed him to loot entire nations, at the cost of great loss of life.

To give him his due, though, he was aggressive and would fight to the last man: he won battles because his opponents would hesitate and back off when they lost tens of thousands of men, while Napoleon would just hurl another corps into the fray, and afterwards, write back to Paris and order another levy of 80,000 men.

Often, that wasn’t enough. His Egyptian campaign was logistically incompetent and a total failure. Do I need to even mention his ill-fated Russian campaign?

That was a moment for me. I’m reading this book, I’d gotten up to 1811, and his Spanish adventure was floundering, the French people were rioting, Austria was mobilizing, and I suddenly realized that I did know a bit about Napoleonic history — wasn’t there going to be a huge catastrophe at the walls of Moscow in 1812? I heard a symphony about that. There was no real prelude to those events, one month he’s flailing about in his fracturing and fractious empire, and the next he’s marching off to frolic in the Russian winter wonderland. It was insane.

Also appalling: he lost, was banished to the island of Elba, and then…he came back, and the enthusiastic French people, whose young men he’d slaughtered in futile, fatal wars, elevated him again in patriotic fervor, and sent him off to Brussels with another army. The masses promoting a lying boob against their own self-interest is not a novel behavior, I guess. End result: 25,000 Frenchman rotting in a field near Waterloo.

What I learned is that the Great Leaders of nations can easily be greedy, self-serving monsters who will sacrifice the lives of their supporters for their own gain, and there will always be historians who look at the body count and conclude that they must be a genius. My cynicism has risen again.

But it’s not all negative news. I also learned how to deal with petty tyrants: banish them to a small island in the south Atlantic (far enough away that he’s not going to be able to row back), and give them a nice house and a small party of their sycophantic supporters and let them cheat at cards (Napoleon was notorious for cheating disgracefully at games of chance, which says a lot about his character) together. Give them five years to grate on each other’s nerves, and also, for one or more of the party to slowly poison the unpleasant ex-dictator. It was a little pocket of hell on Earth. The British dealt with him generously, and it was the most unkind torture they could have performed.

At least I got a little pleasure from fantasizing about the banishment party I’d ship my least favorite modern monsters to. If I were to exile Donald Trump, for instance, who would I send to accompany him? His own children, for sure, and Rudy Giuliani, and maybe Sydney Powell and a few Fox News hosts. It’s easy to imagine a true hell-hole made up of his own most persistent supporters.

World-class sarcasm

Have you seen Piers Morgan’s interview of the Egyptian comedian, Bassem Youssef? I know, you hear “Piers” and you are immediately repelled, but it’s worth it — Morgan is so effectively punctured, without even realizing it, that he’s left floundering about like an empty balloon. Youssef totally dominates and leaves Morgan whimpering about ‘language,’ and also manages to skewer Ben Shapiro, all while making Israel look like a lying bully. And he does it with the most precise use of sarcasm I have ever witnessed.

Absolutely brilliant.

There’s a really good question in there, too. What is a “disproportionate response”? Has a “disproportionate response” ever worked? Hasn’t Israel been engaging in an ongoing “disproportionate response” for decades, and has it brought peace to the region? Maybe they ought to try something different.

The world is not helping my depression

I wish I could avoid this, but the world keeps slapping me in the face with the horrors going on in Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Israel has decided that the northern part of Gaza, with over a million people living there, must be completely emptied within 24 hours before the tanks roll in and the white phosphorus comes raining down and the soldiers march in and clear out the region house by house. This, I presume, they consider a reasonable approach to a terror attack. Just as America considered devastating an entire country and killing hundreds of thousands of people a proper approach to a terror attack that Iraqi citizens had nothing to do with.

Israeli commanders have said they’re readying a ground invasion of the territory in a bid to end Hamas rule there. The militant group launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on Saturday, killing more than 1,300 civilians and soldiers and taking scores of hostages.

Israel has responded with airstrikes and a siege. With exits to Israel and Egypt shut and food, drinkable water, medicine and fuel running low, the operations have effectively turned the densely populated 140-square-mile strip into a death trap.

No fuel has been allowed into the territory since the crisis began; many users, including the largest power plant, have run out or will soon. Nearly 1,800 people, roughly half of them women and children, have died in the bombing campaign, according to the territory’s health ministry. Another 7,300 have been wounded.

“Death trap” is right. This is another kind of terror attack against Palestinian citizens.

“The situation in Gaza has reached a dangerous new low,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres told reporters. “Moving more than 1 million people across a densely populated war zone to a place with no food, water or accommodation when the entire territory is under siege is extremely dangerous and in some cases simply not possible.”

Clive Baldwin, a senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch, warned that the order “does not alter Israel’s obligations in military operations to never target civilians and take all the measures it can to minimize harm to them.”

Nancy Okail, president of the Washington-based Center for International Policy, called the evacuation order “a license to kill. Because those who remain behind, it would be sort of a warranty to kill those who stay.”

The Norwegian Refugee Council, which operates in Gaza, said the demand to evacuate without clear guarantees of safety and return “would amount to the war crime of forcible transfer.”

Israel is planning to kill 2 million people, slowly and callously and brutally. The UN is posting alerts about what is about to happen.

Across the Gaza Strip, more than 2 million people are at risk as water runs out.

“It has become a matter of life and death. It is a must; fuel needs to be delivered now into Gaza to make water available for 2 million people,” said Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA Commissioner-General.

No humanitarian supplies have been allowed into Gaza for a week now.

Clean water is running out in the Gaza Strip, after its water plant and public water networks stopped working. People are now forced to use dirty water from wells, increasing risks of waterborne diseases. Gaza has also been under an electricity blackout since 11 October, impacting the water supply.

At the UN base in the southern Gaza Strip – where UNRWA has moved its operations- drinking water is also running out. Thousands of people have sought refuge there after Israel issued a warning to residents demanding them to leave their homes in the northern parts of the Strip.

Only in the past 12 hours, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced. The exodus continues as people move to the southern parts of the Gaza Strip. Nearly 1 million people have been displaced in one week alone.

“We need to truck fuel into Gaza now. Fuel is the only way for people to have safe drinking water. If not, people will start dying of severe dehydration, among them young children, the elderly and women. Water is now the last remaining lifeline. I appeal for the siege on humanitarian assistance to be lifted now,” added Lazzarini.

I don’t know what to do. Do we just wait for the slow death of all those Palestinians, justified by the actions of a few terrorists? Just don’t ask me to ever support the criminal Israeli state ever again.