The Washington Post graces us with articles on what an AR-15 bullet does to a human body. It’s unsettling stuff, especially when they describe what happens to actual, named human victims. The only people who would want to own these murderous devices are psychopaths, so why haven’t we criminalized them already?

If you have to ask why the US has these devastating shootings, the answer is simple: it’s the guns.

The debate is over. Stop arguing for lethal weapons and do something about it.

This comic is appropriate.

There was another school shooting, this time in Tennessee: 3 dead kids and 3 dead staff, and the shooter killed on site.

Nothing will be done.

There was another train derailment in North Dakota, an hour and a half away from me. It spewed ethylene glycol and propylene into the environment, all because the railroad companies don’t like spending money on rail maintenance.

Nothing will be done.

Don’t get me wrong, there will be lots of talk and argument and indignant posturing, but nothing of substance will be done, and these terrible things will continue happening. This is a religious country, so they must be acts of God, don’t you know.

Thoughts and prayers, everyone.

Minnesota has a Democratic governor and a Democratic house, and that means…children get fed.

Kids and parents in Minnesota won’t have to worry about affording school meals thanks to a new law that guarantees free school meals for all children in the state.

Gov. Tim Walz (D) signed the bill into law Friday to cheers and hugs from some of the kids who will benefit from the program.

The new law provides free breakfast and lunch for all K-12 students, regardless of their parents’ income.

In case you were wondering what the benefits of helping kids might be, here’s an explanation.

One study published in 2020 looked at the adoption of universal school meals in middle schools in New York City that occurred in different years for different schools. The researchers focused on changes in test scores for individual students followed over time. They paid special attention to the comparison of students previously eligible for free meals due to their family’s low income status versus those students who were not previously being offered free meals.

After each school started to offer free meals to all students, test scores increased in both English and math. While test scores went up for both low-income students and those who were not from low-income households, the students who were not previously eligible for free meals benefited more. The gains in test scores for the students whose families had higher incomes or were missing out on free meals due to problems with certifying eligibility was estimated to represent six to 10 weeks of learning.

Another examination of data from NYC found an improvement in attendance for kindergartners once all students were offered free meals.

More recently, a 2022 study looked at the adoption of universal free meals by school districts across the U.S. Using district-level test scores rather than test scores on individual students, the author also found that the decision to offer universal free school meals was followed by an increase in math scores. A comparison of districts with high levels of poverty to those with lower poverty levels found that the math score gains were greater in districts that had fewer students from low-income households. In other words, school districts with fewer low-income students experienced the greatest improvements in math scores.

What happens if you put Republicans in charge? They deny the problem and do nothing.

The bill drew the ire of Republican state Sen. Steve Drazkowski, who argued Tuesday that “hunger is a relative term” in his opposition to feeding kids.

“I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry,” Drazkowski said on the Senate floor in St. Paul before voting against the legislation. “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have access to enough food to eat.”

I think that says more about the elite circles he moves in than anything about the state of the citizenry. Why isn’t everyone eating cake?

By the way, Minnesota also allowed immigrants, all immigrants, to get a driver’s license, which is sensible, good news for everyone who uses our roads and highways.

A bill to allow unauthorized immigrants to obtain a driver’s license without showing proof of legal residence was passed by the Minnesota House of Representatives on Monday.

The “Driver’s Licenses for All” bill passed in the House by a vote of 69-60.

If you keep Republicans out of power, you’ll get all kinds of nice incremental improvements to your life.

Texas, not satisfied with wanting to ban critical race theory, ending colleges’ diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and eliminating tenure, has set its sights on banning people from countries conservatives don’t like with HB 4736.

PROHIBITED ADMISSIONS. Notwithstanding any other law, an institution of higher education, as defined by Section 61.003, may not admit an applicant for admission to the institution as a student if the applicant is:
(1) a citizen of China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia;
or
(2) not authorized under federal statute to be present
in the United States.

Honestly, I’ve never had a North Korean student — the North Korean government isn’t big on exposing their citizens to strange foreign ideas, much like the Texan government. I’ve had lots of Chinese students, and a few Russian and Iranian students. They’re fine. They’re often more motivated than American students, and if they go back to their home country after a few years with a little sympathy for the US, that’s a net gain for us. Or if they decide they want to stay in the US, that’s also a net gain. We can’t lose by freely sharing education with the world (it’s also a good idea for American students to study abroad). We all win.

Unless, of course, your goal is to make sure your citizenry doesn’t understand and hates foreigners from certain countries that have been currently designated as an enemy.

I’ve been hearing a lot about how the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, a bank in the heart of tech bro country, where Peter Thiel kept his money, was due to it being too woke. Go woke, go broke, as they say. As it turns out, the claim is contrived nonsense.

According to stories bursting across the right-wing mediasphere today, a key reason for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was its focus on spreading “woke culture” rather than efficiently managing risk and profits. Ground zero for this is the allegation that SVB had donated over $73 million to the “BLM Movement & Related Causes.” That struck me as quite a lot of money for a single company, even a large and profitable one, to give to any cause or even all causes. So I tried to find out where this factoid came from and rapidly found my way to a Trumpist think tank. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s a complete lie. I want to show you the receipts, but first some key details.

The story came from an “analysis” from the Center for the American Way of Life, a project of the Claremont Institute. You can tell from the name it was going to be a skeevy, dishonest organization, where they conflate “American” with “Capitalist”. What they did was compile all charitable donations to a huge range of organizations under one umbrella they called Black Lives Matter…not that BLM isn’t an unworthy recipient, but that they threw in so much money that any grass roots organization would have no way to spend it all.

Basically, if a donation benefitted a black person in any way, it was “BLM”. For instance:

Claremont lists 3M pledging a whopping $50 million to “BLM.” But the cited document, published in September 2020, appears to be mainly focused on supporting STEM learning in Black communities. It’s a pledge of $50 million over 5 years and lists $6 million in initial investments. That $6 million consisted of $5 million to the United Negro College Fund for work in St. Paul, Minnesota; another $1 million is slated for “annual investment to social justice partnerships, led by our employee resource network community champions and building on the initial investment from 3M Foundation in 2020.”

For Claremont, these are all “BLM.”

Oh, look, Boeing supported BLM! Not really.

Then there’s Boeing’s $15.6 million to “BLM.”

You can see the cited list of recipients here. The largest recipients include the Seattle Children’s Hospital, United Negro College Fund, Chicago Urban League, D.C. College Access Program and the Forum to Advance Minorities in Engineering, Inc.

My favorite, though, is Bank of America.

Rather unbelievably Claremont lists Bank of America as giving more than $18 billion to “BLM.”

Yes, billion.

The cited documents appear to report only $1.25 billion and that appears to be almost entirely going to financing for housing and business development in minority communities. So this money may be targeting minority advancement, but its in the form of loans that BOA will get paid back for. An apparently tiny fraction of that total (no specific numbers are cited) goes in grants to organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice, National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development and The Leadership Conference Education Fund.

Bank of America gets a big chunk of change from me every month, since they hold my mortgage. Which means, by the transitive property of the Claremont Institute, that I am giving a large fraction of my income to BLM every month.

The vast majority of the organizations are highly mainstream and even corporate in their focus (supporting minority-owned small businesses, recruiting minority employees in STEM fields). The ones that aren’t mainly focus on housing, closing gaps in medical care in minority communities and supporting STEM education and coding. In many cases, the cited documents include no information to support the purported dollar amounts at all. In some cases a claim about one corporation is backed up with a document about another corporation entirely. So there’s a high degree of slapdash and incompetence involved. But the general message is that anything in any way connected to Black people in pretty much any way is “BLM riots,” and explicitly supporting mayhem and violence.

Slapdash and incompetent is a good summary of most conservative organizations. Add in dishonest and it’s perfect.

The conservative vision of the future of America is quite clear. Let’s hide the ugly parts of our history. An eighth grade history teacher was canceled.

Finally, on Feb. 8, 2022, at 4:05 p.m., Wickenkamp scored a Zoom meeting with Superintendent Laurie Noll. He asked the question he felt lay at the heart of critiques of his curriculum. “Knowing that I should stick to the facts, and knowing that to say ‘Slavery was wrong,’ that’s not a fact, that’s a stance,” Wickenkamp said, “is it acceptable for me to teach students that slavery was wrong?”

Noll nodded her head, affirming that saying “slavery was wrong” counts as a “stance.”

“We had people that were slaves within our state,” Noll said, according to a video of the meeting obtained by The Post. “We’re not supposed to say to [students], ‘How does that make you feel?’ We can’t — or, ‘Does that make you feel bad?’ We’re not to do that part of it.”

She continued: “To say ‘Is slavery wrong?’ — I really need to delve into it to see is that part of what we can or cannot say. And I don’t know that, Greg, because I just don’t have that. So I need to know more on that side.”

He left the teaching profession after that load of waffly rubbish.

They hate women. Conservatives have a radical perspective on abortion and contraception.

The House Judiciary Committee in Arkansas was scheduled to discuss a bill that would classify “causing the death of an unborn child” as a homicide. I’m not using the word ‘abortion’ here for a reason—because while the legislation would certainly make abortion prosecutable as a homicide, it goes far beyond that. HB 1174 says that it’s a crime to end a pregnancy by “wrongful act, neglect or default,” language so broad that women who have had miscarriages could be prosecuted for murder if the state decides that they somehow ‘caused’ it. (The bill even specifies that “accidental miscarriage” is not prosecutable, which means that legislators believe there is such a thing as a miscarriage that is not accidental.)

So if a woman miscarries and the state decides that it happened because she lifted a heavy box, or didn’t take her prenatal vitamins—they could charge her with murder. I wrote about this bill back in January, but it’s worth repeating: There is no limit to what a zealous prosecutor could argue ‘caused’ a miscarriage or stillbirth. In fact, cases like this have already been brought forward before Roe was even overturned—for reasons ranging from alleged drug use, refusing medical interventions like a c-section, even a suicide attempt.

But there’s more. Because this bill defines human life from fertilization, women could also be charged with murder for using Plan B or IUDs—which conservatives believe prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg—or undergoing IVF. In fact, legislators removed language that would prevent the prosecution of women who use contraception or IVF:

On the bright side, the future is looking bright if you’re a wealthy white man with a strong bigotry streak.