And then they came for the bookstores. As usual, Texas Republicans lead the way in oppression and ignorance.

A bill has been introduced to the Texas Legislature that could result in bookstores facing fines and legal costs if they place material deemed “obscene” within access of a minor.

House Bill 1375 was proposed by state Representative Nate Schatzline, a Republican, who said it is needed to keep “harmful material” away from children. Critics argue it would force bookshops to self-censor or risk potentially devastating lawsuits.

In recent years, a number of Republican-controlled states have passed laws banning school libraries from holding certain books that they regard as inappropriate.

The Texas Legislature in 2023 passed a bill forbidding school libraries from having any book among its stacks that “describes or portrays sexual conduct” in a “patently offensive way” that are not required by the curriculum.

PEN America recorded 3,362 instances of what it classified as book bans across the U.S. in the 2022-23 academic year, a 33 percent rise from the previous year.

House Bill 1375 would make commercial enterprises, such as bookstores, liable for “damages arising from the distribution, transmission, or display of harmful material to a minor.”

This would include when such material is “readily accessible to minors” or “includes a minor’s visual image, audio voice, or participation in any manner.”

Any business found to have broken this law could have to pay damages and would be liable for associated court costs and legal fees.

The library in my town has a vast collection of paperback cowboy and romance novels. We have a bookstore of sorts that specializes in gaming, D&D, and comic books. Can I deem those as “patently offensive”? Those romance novels feature a lot of heaving bosoms and passionate kisses, definitely a portrayal of “sexual conduct”. Can we shut them all down? (Don’t laugh, I’ve heard that one of our city council members actually wants to close the library).

When I was a kid in the 1970s in Washington state, my local library had copies of Playboy and Playgirl openly displayed in the periodicals section, and they had a good collection of underground comics — it’s where I read R. Crumb. I read them there, for the articles, you know, and look how I turned out. And then look at Ted Cruz. Do you really want to be like Texas?

It’s a beautiful state with a fabulous climate, when it’s not on fire, but what’s going on with their politicians? This question was prompted by an observation about their current governor, Gavin Newsom.

After two months and a gratuitous 15 episodes — including interviews with far-right talking heads Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, Obama-era Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein — guess how many women the governor of California has deigned to interview on his podcast, “This is Gavin Newsom”?

One.

That (dubious) honor went to Amie Parnes, a senior political journalist at The Hill, who shared the interview with Johnathon Allen, a political journalist with NBC News. The two co-authored “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” about the 2024 presidential election, which was released in April.

Good for her. But in a state that’s home to nearly 40 million people, more than half of whom are women, the governor really can’t find any of them to interview for his little podcast project? Yikes.

I know — that’s not the worst thing he has done with his little podcast, that honor belongs to his willingness to throw trans athletes under the bus. That podcast, which I’ve never listened to, seems to be a self-constructed catastrophe to his political aspirations, and he keeps on doing it. There was a time a few years (or eternities) ago that he was considered a solid presidential candidate, but would I ever vote for him? No. It’s incredibly shallow of me, I know, but just the hair kills my impression of him. He looks like an insurance salesman or a preacher. His policies make me think he’s in the pocket of Big Tech. He’s definitely not progressive at all.

But then I started wondering — California is a populous and rich state, where are the national leaders it should be turning out? There’s Richard Nixon, the least said the better, who was our only president born in California. Then we had Ronald Reagan, the man responsible for starting the country’s downward spiral, who wasn’t born there, but was governor and is always associated with the state. Why do so many awful political careers start there? Is it something about Sacramento?

I’m already biased against California presidential candidates, so let’s not ever nominate another one. I hope Gavin’s political career has reached its apogee.

Speaking of big powerful states with an appalling political culture, dare I mention…TEXAS?

This first one is obvious and is a knife aimed at the heart of our country: the Trump administration is talking about suspending habeas corpus, and clearly their pet rat-weasel, Stephen Miller, is floating the idea to the press.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Friday that the Trump administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the right of a person to challenge their detention in court.

If carried out by President Donald Trump, the suspension of habeas corpus would be a dramatic escalation of his administration’s immigration policy by significantly curtailing a right enshrined in the Constitution.

This is what tyrants do — they want the ability to silence critics by throwing them in prison while denying them the right to defend themselves. Never mind that they are busy draping themselves in the corpse of Abraham Lincoln, because he suspended the right during the Civil War (we are not in a war, no matter how insincerely they insist we are being “invaded”), this is a fundamental attack on the rule of law.

The second sign of imminent doom is that Dan Three Arrows is returning to posting video essays. The United States is so fucked right now.

I predict that there will be blood in the streets before this is over; if he suspends habeas corpus, why not suspend the 2026 elections next?

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If all that isn’t enough for you…

ADepartment of Homeland Security (DHS) official confirmed Saturday that arrests of Democratic members of Congress “is definitely on the table” following a confrontation at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Newark, New Jersey.

This statement comes after Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested on Friday at the Delaney Hall detention center, sparking a dispute over what actually occurred during the incident.

Huh. I woke up this morning to do as I usually do, browsing the news and commenting on it, and I just can’t. Nope. Nothing inspires me today.

My mistake might have been first reading about RFK jr’s policies.

I can’t expand on that. The man is a walking catastrophe, an incompetent buffoon who has been shielded from the consequences of his actions by wealth and privilege, and now he’s inflicting his uninformed, insane opinions on everyone else. He’s a madman, given control of HHS and NIH and dictating policy on everything from autism to infectious disease, while we sit around gawping at the spectacle. Our elected representatives are doing nothing to stop the disaster, and in fact rubber-stamped his appointment. What am I supposed to do?

I have to wonder how such a pathetic creature could acquire so much power. Naomi Klein explains that we must blame the rich.

Klein recently co-authored an essay for The Guardian, sounding alarm about the dark worldview of politically insurgent tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Klein views these men — who are guiding Donald Trump’s presidency — as abandoning any positive vision for our collective future, and instead retrenching in preparation for a dark, nearly end times-level social collapse, from which they and other elites emerge unscathed, and all powerful. “The governing ideology of the far-right in our age of escalating disasters,” she writes, “has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.”

So the guys with billions of dollars are telling people like me, who is facing existential uncertainty about personal issues like retirement and health with virtually no financial backup, that we don’t matter, that there is nothing we can do, that we might as well die and get it over with. I’d be happy to do so if I weren’t so full of rage and frustration. Unfortunately, writing on the internet does not relieve my anger. We need to literally destroy these monsters of greed.

Today is the day everyone is required to have that RealID/enhanced ID if you want to fly anywhere. It’s an incompetently managed sham.

I applied for mine two months ago, when I went to the DMV to renew my driver’s licence. I’m still waiting. Today I received email from the DMV saying they were rejecting my application, because I hadn’t included enough bank account information. Apparently you now need a verified bank account to drive or travel anywhere, so I’m going to have to resubmit the entire application all over again, and wait a few more months. This is particularly galling because I did go in person to the local license bureau (not any problem at all, this is a small town, no waiting) and had everything verified right there. I have a valid passport, so I could fly if I wanted to, but the airports are so chaotic that I don’t want to.

My wife has been struggling to get her realID for a while now, but she keeps getting rejected. She showed up at the license bureau with her birth certificate, social security card, etc., but she made the terrible mistake of changing her name when she got married, so they won’t accept it. We ordered a certified marriage license from King County, but they just sent us a photocopy, which doesn’t count.

On the bright side, ladies, I guess I’m now single and available. Except you can’t travel anymore.

This nation with the impressive interstate freeway system and huge airports in every major city is now effectively killing travel within our borders. We’re also not going to be getting much traffic from international travel, either. Tourism, who needs it? Next stop will be armed guards at the boundaries for each state, and you’ll have to show your papers if you visit any city…except that you can’t, because the bureaucracy is too incompetent to issue them.

Stay home, everyone.

It is now legal to go topless in public in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Supreme Court issued an opinion last week that holds that women can go topfree without violating the Minnesota indecent exposure statute as long as they don’t engage in sexual conduct.

In short, the Court unanimously held that a woman who is topfree is not acting lewdly merely by appearing in public with her torso unclothed. Since the indecent exposure statute only criminalizes lewd behavior, a woman with an unclothed torso is not commiting a criminal act unless she is also engaging in sexual behavior. In other words, a woman merely going topless is neither lewd nor sexual and it’s perfectly legal.

It’s only useful about 3 months out of the year, and in those 3 months you’ve got to worry about mosquitos.

The best thing about this decision is that it removes a pretext cops used to search and arrest people.

The facts in this case are short and undisputed: On July 28, 2021, the Rochester
Police Department received a report that a woman was walking around a gas station
parking lot with her breasts exposed. An officer responded to the call and saw Plancarte
in the parking lot with her breasts exposed. The officer recognized Plancarte from two
encounters earlier that week. During those encounters, the officer saw Plancarte exposing
her underwear on one occasion, and her breasts and her underwear on another occasion.
The officer stopped Plancarte and asked her why she kept exposing herself.
Plancarte replied, “I think Catholic girls do it all the time.” Plancarte then worried about
how she would get home and stated, “I dance at the biker club. I’m a stripper.” The officer
said, “Well, you can’t strip in the middle of public.” Plancarte responded, “Yeah, but they
should account for me at the club, shouldn’t they?” The officer arrested Plancarte and later
searched her purse, where the officer found a vial containing cocaine.

Yeah, this is an anti-cop decision. I approve.

The world population stands at 8.2 billion, and it’s continuing to grow. It is not shrinking. We are adding 70 million people each year. Some simple facts:

During the 20th century alone, the population in the world has grown from 1.65 billion to 6 billion.
In 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.
Because of declining growth rates, it will now take over 200 years to double again.

Does it bother you that it’s going to take 200 years to fill up the planet with 16 billion people? The 1970s were not that overcrowded nor was it empty. I don’t think we gained that much by adding 4 billion people since then, especially since so many of the additions are being exploited and are suffering to benefit relatively rich people like me.

I wonder if some people are confused by graphs. Here’s a plot of the growth rate, not total population, and yes, the rate has gone down (which is good news), but that does not mean we’re losing population.

But this graph keeps Elon Musk awake at night, because he’s a very stupid person.

Billionaire Elon Musk told Fox News recently that falling birth rates keep him up at night. It’s a drum he’s been beating for years.

Musk is one of the world’s most visible individuals to elevate this point of view. Vice President JD Vance also talks about wanting to increase birthrates in the U.S.

I am untroubled by it. I am more concerned about whether my grandchildren have a good quality of life and opportunity to personally live and grow, and whether all the other children living in the here and now also have equal opportunities. Increasing the world’s population does not increase our happiness — we should care more about the quality of life than creating bulk quantities of consumers.

I also have to ask…why are so many of the people advocating for increased growth rates such horrible fascists? There was a meeting of these “pro-natalists” back in March, and these weren’t people who just love children and want to build hospitals and daycares and open up more educational opportunities and expand vaccination, all things I would consider virtuous evidence of a true desire to help a burgeoning population…quite the opposite. The philosophy seems to be strongly tied to Nazis.

A natalist conference featuring speakers including self-described eugenicists and promoters of race science, apparently including the man behind a previously pseudonymous race-science influencer account, and the founder of a startup offering IQ screening for IVF embryos, will be held at a hotel and conference venue operated by the public University of Texas, Austin.

Details of the conference have emerged as a prominent supporter of pro-natalist positions, the tech billionaire Elon Musk, lays waste US government agencies under the banner of his “Doge” initiative, with the blessing of Donald Trump.

Natalism in its current often rightwing iteration encourages high birth rates, and Musk has been a vocal proponent. He also maintains a large compound home near Austin, where reportedly he plans to house some of his children and two of their mothers.

composite image of people wearing maga caps with red stars on their mouths
‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word
Read more
The Natal conference website embeds a Musk post on X, reading: “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end.” Musk, who reportedly has at least 13 children by four mothers, was in recent days confronted on X by musician Grimes and the rightwing influencer Ashley St Clair over his alleged neglect of the children he has fathered with them.

The conference, scheduled for 28-29 March, is being organized by Kevin Dolan, who the Guardian identified in 2021 as the person behind a Twitter account that was prominent in the far-right “DezNat” movement, and last year as the organizer of the first conference. It is the second time the conference has been held, and once again, the speakers roster runs from provocateurs who emerged from the “fascist fitness scene” to practitioners of “liberal eugenics”.

Uh, Elon…civilization will not end if we maintain a low, stable, sustainable growth rate. If you’re so concerned about too few people, open the doors of America to more immigration. More is better, right?

Also, eugenics is eugenics. Attaching the adjective “liberal” to it doesn’t make it beneficial, you’re still making value judgments on the worth of individuals. Whether you’re euthanizing them or hiding them away in institutions or giving special advantages to people who meet your subjective criteria, it’s all the same thing — it’s an attempt to short-sightedly dictate what kind of people will be allowed to thrive.

Here’s the organizer of that natalist conference.

KEVIN DOLAN: But the topic of demographic decline clearly matters to Elon Musk, JD Vance and many others in the Trump administration, which means that the great ideas developed here can get a hearing that would not have been possible last year.

HAGEN: Dolan left his data science job in 2021 after his anonymous Twitter account was exposed. Among other things, he’d used it to promote the racist notion that white men are superior to other races and women. After getting doxxed, Dolan continued sharing his thoughts about how society should be ordered on his podcast.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DOLAN: We’re expected to lie about the existence of these hierarchies all of the time. And if our goal is to rehabilitate hierarchies of nature, then the best place to start is the most fundamental natural hierarchies, which are found in the family. And that brings us back to where we started, with selective breeding.

What natural hierarchies? Nature is more of an anarchist collective, without a big boss deciding who benefits from selective breeding. Nature does not follow any human ideology, so it’s fallacious to try and attach one to it, or worse claim that humans should follow your biased interpretation of how it ought to work.

Some of the more prominent faces in this movement are Malcolm and Simone Collins, a pair of dorks who complain about “demographic collapse” (whatever that undefined disaster is) while saying that oh, no, they have nothing to do with those horrible people running the conferences they attend. They gave the keynote speech at the Austin natalist conference!

Image is everything to them. The Collinses are quick to verbally denounce fascists and the far right, but then you have to look at what they do: they ally themselves with people like Charles Haywood.

CHARLES HAYWOOD: And generally, women should not have careers. They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers.

HAGEN: That’s Charles Haywood at the first Natal Con a couple years ago. This year, he’s behind the scenes as a sponsor. He made his money as a shampoo magnate. Haywood blames birth rate declines on feminism and the overturning of what he sees as natural hierarchies of gender and race.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

HAYWOOD: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever for the history of this nation.

They can tell me they’re progressive and good people when they get around to denouncing that guy and all the racist/misogynist/neo-nazi scum that form their audience.

I should also mention the incident that put them in the news a while back when Malcolm Collins slapped his son Torsten in the face.

Torsten has knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple, before it rights itself. Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face.

It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son’s face that’s firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything.

Oops, the mask slipped for a moment. It’s OK, it was never a very convincing facade that they’ve put up, anyway.