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.

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.

Today is the 215th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, so I’m wearing an appropriate t-shirt for the occasion.

This was a design created by Jey McCreight to memorialize our visit to Answers in Genesis’s Creation “museum”. Fifteen years ago. Way to make me feel old, Jey.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I made a terrible mistake. I read an essay by that amazing moral “philosopher,” Sam Harris. He hasn’t changed since those days of rationalizing nuking Mecca — he still hates Islam in his slow, ponderous, superficially philosophical way, and now he has written a justification for killing Palestine. Don’t worry, it’s OK, because we’ve always been in a Crusade, and Israel is a shining city on a hill.

So, whether we want to admit it or not, we are perpetually at war with them [Jihadists]. And we must win a war of ideas with everyone, both within the Muslim world and outside it, who is confused about that—and there are legions of the confused. And there is no place on Earth where the truth about jihadism is more obvious or excruciating, and moral confusion about it more reprehensible, than Israel today.

He later claims that there are bright lines that divide good and evil, with Israel definitely on the good side, while Palestinians are evil. To support that rose-colored binary, hhe has to greatly simplify the status of Palestinians in Gaza.

Incidentally, there has been no occupation of Gaza since 2005, when Israel withdrew from the territory unilaterally, forcibly removing 9000 of its own citizens, and literally digging up Jewish graves. The Israelis have been out of Gaza for nearly 20 years. And yet they have been attacked from Gaza ever since.

That is very much a half-truth. Gaza was under a military occupation until 2005, when Israel partially pulled out. Israel still controls the strip, in charge of all land crossings, it still controls access to food, water, electricity, and communications, it controls all access by air and sea, and they reserve the right to send troops in whenever they feel like it. It is maintained as a prison for Palestinians, where the residents are either neglected or at the mercy of Israeli soldiers.

Is anyone surprised that Palestinians might resist? That they might learn to hate the entire nation of Israel? Apparently, Sam Harris is.

But, you see, the West is restrained and would never do any intentional harm, while Muslims have no respect for human life, so it’s OK that they be imprisoned.

At this moment in history, there are people and cultures that harbor very different attitudes about violence and the value of human life. There are people and cultures that rejoice, positively rejoice—dancing in the streets rejoicing—over the massacre of innocent civilians; conversely there are people and cultures that seek to avoid killing innocent civilians, and deeply regret it when they do—and they occasionally prosecute and imprison their own soldiers when they violate this modern norm of combat.

Whoa. Who carries out mass bombing campaigns? Who puts the light shows on TV for the patriotic masses to cheer over? We killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, a majority of whom were civilians, and Harris is going to tell us that we avoid and regret killing innocent civilians? Bullshit. It’s the West that invented that useful term, “collateral damage,” to excuse wholesale murder of innocents.

Yes, Palestinians have been seen to celebrate the killing of IDF soldiers and Israeli citizens. That’s not to excuse it, but to pretend that Israelis don’t similarly celebrate the death of Palestinians is a lie. Of course they do! Both sides are locked in mutual hatred.

The boisterous crowds danced and chanted Jewish religious songs outside Damascus Gate as scores of Israeli police stood guard. In several cases, groups chanted slogans such as “Death to Arabs,” “Mohammed is Dead” and “Burn Your Village” as they stared at Palestinian onlookers. Some of the youths wore clothing identifying themselves as members of Lehava — a far-right Jewish supremacist group that opposes assimilation or romantic relationships between Jews and Palestinians.

Israel has a long history of promoting hateful propaganda to its children. And now Sam Harris is in the business of pushing similar propaganda on American adults.

There is myriad evidence of Israel’s brainwashing of its citizens to erase the humanity of Palestinians spanning many decades.

Israeli scholar Adir Cohen, for example, analysed for his book titled “An Ugly Face in the Mirror – National Stereotypes in Hebrew Children’s Literature” some 1700 Hebrew-language children’s books published in Israel between 1967 and 1985, and found that a whopping 520 of them contained humiliating, negative descriptions of the Palestinians.

He revealed that 66 percent of these 520 books refer to Arabs as violent; 52 percent as evil; 37 percent as liars; 31 percent as greedy; 28 percent as two-faced and 27 percent as traitors.

But Harris believes in a fantasy Israel.

Simply counting the number of dead bodies is not a way of judging the moral balance here. Intentions matter. It matters what kind of world people are attempting to build. If Israel wanted to perpetrate a genocide of the Palestinians, it could do that easily, tomorrow. But that isn’t what it wants. And the truth is the Jews of Israel would live in peace with their neighbors if their neighbors weren’t in thrall to genocidal fanatics.

Wait a minute–why isn’t counting the bodies a way of judging the moral balance? If Hamas killing 1100 people is bad and justifies stopping them, why isn’t killing 27,000 people (including 10,000 children) also bad? I agree that stopping terrorism is good, just like stopping Nazis is good, but the casualties aren’t negligible, they matter. If we’re concerned about justice, we have to balance that with the number killed to accomplish it.

But then…to claim that the mass of Israeli citizens don’t want to commit genocide and could just flip a switch and become a nation of benevolent do-gooders? What nonsense. Those citizens elected Netanyahu. Those citizens have been implementing a policy of brutal containment for 20 years. Those citizens have been characterizing Palestinians as liars and greedy traitors for 60 years. If only they hadn’t been in thrall to genocidal fanatics, says a nation that elected genocidal fanatics.

In the West, we have advanced to a point where the killing of noncombatants, however unavoidable it becomes once wars start, is inadvertent and unwanted and regrettable and even scandalous. Yes, there are still war crimes. And I won’t be surprised if some Israelis commit war crimes in Gaza now. But, if they do, these will be exceptions that prove the rule—which is that Israel remains a lonely outpost of civilized ethics in the absolute moral wasteland that is the Middle East.

Civilized ethics:

Declaring that your opponent lives in a moral wasteland while turning their home into a literal wasteland is either hypocrisy or irony or both. Maybe some Israelis will commit war crimes, he says, as the entire weight of Israeli military might is used to level the entire territory, bombing schools and hospitals and homes. It’s a bright line, he says, because he can excuse all the atrocities on one side as justified, while on the other, everyone is an amoral monster.

To deny that the government of Israel (with all of its flaws) is better than Hamas, to deny that Israeli culture (with all of its flaws) is better than Palestinian culture­ in its attitude toward violence, is to deny that moral progress itself is possible. If most Americans are better than their slaveholding ancestors, if most Germans today are better than the people who herded Jews into gas chambers, if the students protesting this war on your college campus—who are so conscientious that they lose sleep over crimes like “cultural appropriation” or using the wrong pronouns—if they are better than the racists and religious lunatics that inevitably lurk somewhere in their family trees—then we have to recognize that there is no moral equivalence now, between Israel and her enemies.

I’m impressed that he can squeeze in a complaint about those darned woke college students while also complaining about and dismissing Palestinian victims of the most brutal violence as lesser moral actors. He wants to complain about moral equivalence and moral confusion while blithely and dishonestly papering over Israeli violence and oppression with assertions about moral superiority that are not in evidence.

He wants to claim that intent makes all the difference. But what is Israel’s intent? What intent is accomplished by wholesale bombing campaigns that kill massive numbers of civilians? What is the intent of decades of walling off millions of people and isolating them from the rest of the world? There must be an endgame, right? A benevolent, kind, generous endgame that will welcome their Palestinian captives into a world of mutual coexistence, at least, that must be the case if we’re to believe that Israel’s motives are entirely enlightened. Harris doesn’t provide any summary of that intent, except to try to paint Israel as blameless in everything, so there must be one.

Tell me how Israel will win this war. Tell me what clear signal will tell Israel that the violence is over. Tell me what actions Israel will take at the end of this war, if such a thing happens, that will produce a happy, productive, cooperative Palestine filled with partners living side by side with Israeli citizens. Harris can’t do that, because deep down, all he believes is that Islamic people are barbarians at our gates who must be exterminated. For new he’ll be satisfied with fueling the forges of hate on both sides.

You could also tell me how Hamas proposed to win the war it triggered in October. It looks to me like a spasm of hatred and rage on both sides, and I don’t see either side backing down…or “winning” this conflict. I guess Sam Harris would call that “moral confusion.”