Least surprising devolution ever

The Nazis are taking over the Republican party. Are you shocked?

Nazis appeared to find a friendly reception at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year.

Throughout the conference, racist extremists, some of whom had secured official CPAC badges, openly mingled with conference attendees and espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The presence of these individuals has been a persistent issue at CPAC. In previous years, conference organizers have ejected well-known Nazis and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes.

But this year, racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2017.

At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening, a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed so-called “race science” and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Also, they’re theocrats who hate democracy.

In one of the most viral moments from this year’s conference, conservative personality Jack Posobiec called for the end of democracy and a more explicitly Christian-focused government. While Posobiec later said his statements were partly satire, many CPAC attendees embraced his and others’ invocations of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

“Satire.” Heh. Right. A good question to ask when anyone makes the “satire” defense is “What were they satirizing?”

Shall we criminalize libraries?

We have a new villain (same as the old villain): librarians. West Virginia wants to make them liable to prosecution.

The West Virginia House of Delegates debated the merits of removing protections for public librarians and school librarians from criminal prosecution in the off chance a minor encounters books and content some consider to be obscene.
The House passed House Bill 4654 – removing bona fide schools, public libraries, and museums from the list of exemptions from criminal liability relating to distribution and display to a minor of obscene matter – in a 85-12 vote Friday, sending the bill to the state Senate.
HB 4654 would lift criminal liability exemptions from schools in the presentation of local or state-approved curriculum, and public libraries and museums displaying obscene matter to a minor when the child is not accompanied by a parent/guardian.

Are you surprised? Those nefarious librarians are probably plotting to commit evil acts like stocking children’s books that present sexuality in an informative and non-threatening way, and maybe they’ll even bring in people wearing women’s clothing to entertain kids and encourage reading. It’s all part of their wicked plan.

This prescient cartoon from more than 20 years saw the whole conspiracy developing.

Alabama doesn’t hate all science

The Alabama Supreme Court has decreed that human life begins at conception and that terminating a blastocyst is a crime. This decision came about because three people, rightfully upset at the accidental loss of some frozen embryos (a property crime) decided to escalate the loss into an immoral act of murder in order to get retribution…and now look what they’ve done. They took advantage of a technology that involves excess production of embryos, making those embryos themselves, and then turned around and took legal action to make sure no one else could use those reproductive technologies themselves. Thanks, guys.

Then, of course, one of the most backward states in the union has ignorant religious zealots on their court (whoa, can’t hold that against Alabama, since the federal court has the same problem) who then decided that a small collection of undifferentiated cells is a “child”. Alabama ranks 47th in the nation on overall child well-being, but now they can claim to be first in the nation for overall “child”/tissue/zygote well-being.

The Alabama ruling is the first to attribute human rights to a developing organism at such an early stage following conception. The ruling states that “unborn children are ‘children,’” and that frozen embryos should be afforded the same protection as babies under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

Lila Rose, president and founder of Live Action, a national antiabortion organization, heralded the court for showing “moral clarity” in ruling that the unborn deserve the same rights as children.

“You have children being created in petri dishes at will and then destroyed at will and used for experimentation,” Rose said. “It’s not acceptable to leave human beings on ice. It’s not acceptable to destroy them. These are not commodities.”

You know who creates these “children” in petri dishes? Hopeful parents who can’t conceive otherwise. I guess people who want children under those circumstances are going to have to flee Alabama, if they can afford it. IVF is a fairly expensive procedure so it’s mostly well-off people who can afford it, so this is another of those laws that will selectively hurt the poor and middle class — the rich will be unaffected. That’s why it’s safe for the sanctimonious Christians to applaud this decision, since it won’t hurt their priesthood, yet.

Jennifer Lincoln, a board certified OB/GYN who practices in Portland, Ore., said she doesn’t think people understand how “scary” the Alabama ruling is. She raised a common scenario: A patient undergoing IVF has an egg retrieval that leads to the creation of multiple embryos, with the hope that at least one turns into a live birth. If successful, the remaining embryos remain frozen for possible future use — but not all may be used.

“If someone has five embryos left and they decide not to have any more kids and want those embryos destroyed — and someone in that physician’s office hears that, could [the doctor] be criminalized for being an accomplice in a crime?” Lincoln asked.

I said “yet” because every Xian fanatic is cheering this decision as another avenue to attack women’s reproductive rights. The anti-choicers are gearing up to use that precedent as a tool to oppose abortion rights in Florida. Declaring that a “child” exists the instant sperm meets egg is a nice bit of sophistry to justifying outlawing abortion…and also, eventually, contraception. Oh, look, a nice example of a “slippery slope”!

Now that Alabama’s supreme court on Friday took the remarkable step of declaring that frozen embryos are “children,” a conservative group is trying to derail an expected 2024 ballot initiative in Florida that would enshrine abortion rights in that Sunshine State’s constitution.

On Monday, a religious civil rights law firm alerted the Florida Supreme Court to the neighboring state’s recent ruling in an attempt to have the high court block the amendment from reaching voters as it currently stands.

Earlier this month, the conservative-leaning Florida court heard arguments on the proposed constitutional amendment. It will decide by April 1 whether to approve the language in the measure, which states, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

Please note that these same black-robed dingbats who are wallowing in their self-righteous, superficial pretense of respect for human life are the same people who approve of the state experimenting with novel methods for executing prisoners. It did not go well.

Kenneth Smith, who survived an attempt by the state to execute him by lethal injection in 2022, was put to death Thursday evening in Atmore, the rural home to Alabama’s execution chamber near the Florida state line, Governor Kay Ivey’s office confirmed.

Smith, 58, was executed at 8:25 p.m. local time, according to a press release issued by the state Department of Corrections.

The execution took roughly 22 minutes, the Associated Press reported. He appeared to stay conscious for “several minutes” after the gas began to flow, shaking and writhing and sometimes pulling against the restraints of his gurney for more than two minutes, the wire service added.

See? Alabama does not oppose all technological advances. They just have to be technologies that kill the right people.

How much do you hate the gays?

You have to hate them an awful lot to be compelled to move from Canada to Russia, as this one family did. When asked why, the only reason the family patriarch gives is that there were just too many gay & trans people in Canada.

A Canadian family of eight sold their farm and moved to Russia. Why? They wanted to raise their kids in Russia’s morally superior environment.

“Well, Canada is not the same country it used to be,” said daddy in a video interview, “and we didn’t feel safe for our children there in the future anymore. There’s a lot of left-wing ideology, LGBTQ, trans, just a lot of things that we don’t agree with that they teach there now, and we wanted to get away from that for our children.”

But it didn’t take long for the immigrants to regret their decision. Their Russian bank accounts were frozen, and since the family doesn’t speak a lick of Russian, they have had trouble asking the morally superior Russian authorities to release their funds.

Wait. They don’t say specifically where he’s from, but he’s a Canadian farmer. He was raising his family on a vast empty plot of land raising wheat or sugar beets or something, in a community of fellow conservative Canadians. He probably never saw a gay or trans person in his daily life, so this is a problem that didn’t really affect him — he was just seething in his grand isolation, worrying that one of his many kids might turn out gay, so he packed up and moved to a country where it might be more socially acceptable to murder them?

Wow, he must really hate gay people. I’m sort of perversely impressed with his passion and commitment and self-destructive stupidity.

I also think more people with that attitude out to feel free to emigrate to Russia. Tucker Carlson, I choose you.

How did that get past Jeff Bezos?

Jeff Bezos’ pet newspaper actually posted something that would give the owner the heebie-jeebies — it reported that the economy is doing relatively well, that unemployment is below 4%, and the labor market is surging. Which even a billionaire would consider great, except that it reveals one of the mechanisms that is fueling the improvement.

Last year the public sector, which includes education, caught up with its pre-pandemic employment levels, after struggling for years with an understaffing crisis. More robust pay and benefits packages have made those jobs more attractive to workers.

Lindsey Rogers, 27, and her husband, Jared, public school teachers in Baker City, Ore., saw their household income double at the start of this school year, rising by around $48,000, because of mandated salary increases in their new union contract. Their school district in rural Eastern Oregon in previous years struggled to fill open positions, but started this school year without a single vacancy because teacher pay jumped significantly, said Erin Lair, superintendent of the Baker School District.

For the Rogers family, the pay increase means they can afford the $750-a-month child-care costs for their new baby.

“We sat down at a union meeting on Zoom, and they pulled up our new pay scale and it was life-changing,” Rogers said. “I was in shock. We were both in tears. We were going to be able to provide a great life for our kid. We were actually going to be paid like professionals.”

Shocking, I know. You mean people do want to work, they’d just like to get paid what they deserve? Revolutionary, if true.

You know, higher ed is also in the public sector, and I wonder when we’ll catch up. We’re understaffed and get occasional tiny pay raises that don’t keep up with inflation — I look forward to the day we get paid like professionals. That day will probably come the day after I retire, if at all.

We aren’t unionized, by the way.

Barbarians! Barbarians everywhere!

Texas is an evil state, with some of its powerful inhabitants relishing the opportunity to slice up immigrants with razor wire. I’m less worried about the immigrants than I am the existence of Texas Republicans.

But maybe I’m being unfair to Texas. After all, South Dakota, the state uncomfortably close to me, has a governor who is entirely sympathetic to the idea of slashing brown people with razor wire and wants to send the state’s national guard and a bunch of money to help out.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said Wednesday that her administration is considering boosting its support for Texas’ efforts to deter immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, such as sending razor wire and security personnel.

The second-term Republican governor blasted conditions at the border in a speech to a joint session of the Legislature, a gathering she requested Monday after visiting the border last week. Noem, once seen as a potential 2024 presidential candidate, has made the border situation a focus during her tenure.

South Dakota does not have any border with any other country, unless you count the People’s Republic of Minnesota. Maybe they could worry about Canada, except they do have a buffer state of North Dakota, but Mexico is not of any concern. The only southern immigrants they’ve got are being hired by the farming citizenry who like cheap labor. But this is Kristi Noem’s focus? I kind of suspect the motivation is more racism than defending the border.

Fortunately, the Oglala Sioux Tribe has a solid response to that.

At least one person in South Dakota did not appreciate Noem’s glib demagoguery. That person was Frank Star Comes Out, which is in fact his extremely cool name and not the title of a YA novel about a teenager coming to terms with his sexuality. (We checked.)

Star Comes Out is the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and he was infuriated by the naked xenophobia and obvious cry for Donald Trump’s attention as his search for a vice presidential candidate ramps up. So he penned a letter to Noem informing her that starting immediately, she is persona non grata on his tribe’s land.

Read the letter. It’s a point-by-point response to every claim Noem has made. President Star Comes Out sees right through her: “I don’t see our Indian people and reservations used as a basis to create a bogus border crisis just to help Trump get re-elected as President and Governor Noem his running mate as Vice-President.”

Only barbarians would consider drowning immigrants to be humane…and to be a good strategy for getting votes. Unfortunately, we have lots of barbarians all up and down this country.

If I were to compare anyone to a parasite, Thomas Friedman would be near the top of my list

Twenty years ago, Thomas Friedman was a standing joke for his conversations with imaginary cab drivers, his ever-retreating predictions of imminent victory in Iraq, his toxic metaphors, his faux sincerity that everyone could see right through…but he had his sinecure at the NY Times, he spent every Sunday doing the rounds of the pundit talk circuit, he was the darling of every saggy-jowled talk show host. He’s been doing this for decades without justice slapping him upside the head. For all I know (he may be writing and talking, but I’m not reading or listening) he could still be talking about achieving an honorable peace in Iraq in just six more months.

Except now he has latched onto a brand new bloody war and is cheerleading for that from the sidelines. This is all we need, more conservative assholes flatulently gassing the body politic with new poisons and new bad ideas and more demands that we treat a sociological/cultural/religious/political conflict with 2,000 pound laser-guided bombs. Here’s his new metaphor, filtered through a column by Ben Burgis, so you don’t have to give any clicks to the NY Times.

According to Science Daily, the wasp ‘injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.’

Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host—Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq—and eat it from the inside out.

We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.

Ugh. What the ever-loving fuck? The Times just published an opinion piece calling for the incineration of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, and no one stopped to suggest that maybe comparing the inhabitants of four nations to parasitic insects and calling for their fiery extermination was a bad idea? Of course not. This was the same vicious plan he had decades ago, and no one in the media seems to be able to notice how that turned out.

I have a son who, along with a lot of other soldiers, is going to be doing a tour of duty somewhere in that region (they keep the details from us) in the Spring. I’d like to hope that it is a peace-keeping mission to maintain stability there, and would rather it not become a hostile sweep to exterminate parasitic invertebrates, that is, the native population of human beings in those countries.

Anyone want to go to a concert?

Over the last several years, I’ve gone from “Who the heck is this Taylor Swift person everyone is talking about?” (yeah, I’m old) to “Those songs are catchy, I get it now.” They’re not in regular rotation on my headphones, but that’s OK, I don’t begrudge anyone their enjoyment.

What I’m especially enjoying, though, is seeing Fox News melt down over Taylor Swift’s political views. They’re getting all testerical and insisting that she needs to shut up, she shouldn’t be allowed to have opinions on anything other than music. Of course, you’re only allowed to talk about political candidates if you’re endorsing the Fox News perspective, as Jack Posobiec does here.

Desperately reaching for some Republican “influencers” in entertainment, he coughs up Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, and…Jon Voight? Does he sing?

They don’t get it. Taylor Swift is a symptom, not a cause. Young artists are not going to be attracted to conservative causes, because Republicans are the death of art. Young educated people are not drawn to conservative causes, because Republicans are the death of learning. Young activists for a multitude of causes, like environmentalism or anti-racism or sexual freedom, are not interested in conservative causes because Republicans are death of all.

But I still believe in free speech. You go ahead, Jack Posobiec, and organize your “battleground state concert tour” featuring Kid Rock, Nugent, and Voight. I always approve of the Republicans throwing their campaign money down ratholes. And I’m sure there’s someone who likes Nugent’s and Rock’s music somewhere.

If you think I’m too mean to Sam Harris…

You should listen to this podcast by NiceMangos in which she tears into multiple episodes of his blog, in particular a joint appearance by Harris and Eric Weinstein. Yikes. The amount of cringe those two generate is not helping with Minnesota’s squish problem.

There’s also this article on NYMag.

I’m very late to the ass-kicking party. My excuse is that I have a serious aversion to Harris.