When they tell you who they are, believe them

Matt Keefer is running for the school board in Zion, Indiana. He just admitted who he is on Facebook.

Keefer responded by saying, “All Nazis weren’t ‘bad’ as you specify. They did horrible things. They were in a group frenzy in both cases you site.” He goes on to write, “Who is to say if we were both there in the same place and time, that we wouldn’t have done the same thing.”

Do you know why they say “never forget”? It’s so you don’t do the same thing if you find yourself in similar circumstances.

Just to make it even more fun, he goes on to suggest that someday people will look back on the people who responded to the pandemic with sane health measures in the same way we see Nazis today. And he’s an MD?

You know, everyone should scrutinize their local school board candidates carefully. The wackaloons all know that school boards are a great entry point to inject all kinds of lunacy into a community.

Proud to be part of the coalition of chaos

The Tories are getting all het up over there in the UK. Suella Braverman put on a fine display.

it’s the Labour Party, it’s the Lib Dems, it’s the coalition of chaos, it’s the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati, dare I say, the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption that we are seeing on our roads today.

I do read the Guardian, and I quite like tofu — I had a marvelous spicy tofu-and-shrimp soup from an Indian kiosk this past weekend — so I fail to see what her complaints are all about. I’m not sure that a party that hates immigration so passionately should be accusing others of being anti-growth.

By the way, just this morning it was announced that Ms Braverman is out of a job. Chaos! More chaos! The current UK government is truly the epitome of chaos!

So far…the US has midterm elections next month, and I expect even more chaos here.

Her departure was a resignation.

She was specifically irate that they weren’t dispatching those dirty immigrants fast enough to suit her.

Boy, the Truss government sure is crumbling rapidly.

Morris is too diverse, according to a Republican regent

WHAT THE FUCK? It’s hard to believe that a regent of the University of Minnesota asked this fucking stupid question, but then you notice that it’s a former speaker of the Minnesota house of representatives, a Republican, and it becomes a little less surprising.

Steve Sviggum asks if my university has become too diverse, from a marketing standpoint. Jesus.

His concern, or rather his excuse for his concern, is that two people, two bigots, wrote to him to say that the diversity on the University of Minnesota Morris campus made them uncomfortable and they wouldn’t send their kids here.

Seriously. This is one of the people who controls the pursestrings of my university. He got two letters that he should have instantly shredded, and instead he decided to confront our chancellor with the fact that the Republican bigots of Minnesota have his ear.

Fortunately, Chancellor Ericksen responded calmly and appropriately to such an outrageous assertion.

It’s a good thing she has the job, and not me (not that there’s ever a chance I’d end up in such a position), because I’d have just yelled, “Fuck you, asshole” and scrabbled for something on the desk I could throw at Sviggum.

Weird guy, weird senate race

Pennsylvania politics is taking a twisty and unsavory turn. It seems Oz has a long fascination with drinking urine.

OK, it’s odd and rather woo-wooish (but then we knew he was a quack), but what’s particularly annoying is the lying. Med schools don’t expect you to taste urine. It’s not part of modern medical diagnostics. Historically, it was a test to diagnose diabetes, but Oz is not a centuries-old doctor who might have done such a thing. I like CD’s take: it’s a kink that isn’t going to endear you to the voters, but if you’re doing it at home, it’s not something that would disqualify you for office. If you’re trying to promote it as a tool for better health, though, you’re wrong and you’re a quack.

Flying to Washington state tomorrow

Should I worry?

It’s no secret that Washington state has a white nationalist problem. Among the rugged mountains and towering pines are neo-Nazi groups and one of the largest chapters of a violent white supremacist organization. But there’s one group that has been increasingly and alarmingly connected to these extremists: Washington state’s GOP.

The latest example is a pro-Nazi blogger Greyson Arnold’s affiliation with the state party. According to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by The Daily Beast, the Washington State GOP paid Arnold $821.87 on July 15 for “payroll.”

Arnold runs the far-right Telegram account “Pure Politics,” which traffics in Jan. 6 conspiracy theories, praise of controversial lawmakers, and anti-COVID-containment sentiments. It also has more than 12,000 followers who frequently comment with racist and antisemitic language.

But Arnold himself has said plenty of distressing things. As CNN reported last year, Arnold has advocated shooting refugees, killing undocumented immigrants, and has posted praise for Nazi Germany. He actually once said Adolf Hitler was “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand.”

Nah, I’m not going to worry any more than usual, because the Republican party is pro-fascist everywhere. It should not be at all surprising anymore that Republicans are finding common cause with Nazis.

Also, I grew up there. I knew people who were exceedingly deplorable; I had good friends of Japanese descent who could tell stories about how their families were mistreated in WWII; I’ve been reading David Neiwert for years (his blog has gone quiet, unfortunately, but he’s now a staff writer for Daily Kos). It’s a great state with some ugly veins of authoritarianism running through it. Also, being dependent on a single major employer, Boeing, for so long, now supplanted by places like Amazon and Microsoft, really enabled a lot of pro-business Republican types.

Violent spasms are never a healthy symptom

That’s what we’re seeing in Ukraine — senseless, vicious attacks on civilian centers to pointlessly satisfy Russian honor.

Tragic and terrible. Also tragic and terrible: take a moment to pity the Russian mothers whose children are dying and rotting in Ukrainian fields. No one wins. It’s all a stupid waste of life.

They’re all liars

Last week, Elon Musk tweeted (you know, the usual forum for high-level diplomacy) a “peace plan” for Ukraine that was simply total surrender and concession to all of Putin’s demands and then some. Then it was revealed that Musk had had a recent phone call with Putin, which I could believe — he’s not a very bright guy, and simply parrots whatever the last person who spoke to him said. Now he denies the phone call, and I can believe that, too. Musk is the kind of ego-driven guy who would claim to have inside info on the plans of powerful people.

Elon Musk has denied the claim he spoke to Vladimir Putin before tweeting a peace plan for the war in Ukraine.

The Tesla CEO’s peace suggestion included Ukrainian territory being handed over to Russia.

Eurasia Group subscribers were sent a report in which Ian Bremmer wrote that Mr Musk told him that the Russian president was “prepared to negotiate” if the Crimean peninsula remained in Russian hands, Vice reported.

Other conditions included that Ukraine retains permanent neutrality and that Ukraine recognises the Russian annexation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.

Mr Bremmer reports that Mr Musk said that Mr Putin told him that these targets would be reached “no matter what”.

Basically, I can shrug and believe he said things that have little basis in reality, because he is a glad-handing liar. Once you accept that, you can understand the motivation behind all the noise that comes out of his mouth.

I’ll also easily believe that Putin is a liar. The people who have the most experience with Russian neighborliness will tell you that.

Baltic leaders have long argued that Western sanctions adopted in 2014 after Putin illegally annexed Crimea showed the West’s lack of resolve in confronting the Russian president over his land grab. European leaders seemed to think the Baltics were so traumatized by Soviet occupation that they could not be objective.

“Jokingly, you know, we call this ‘West-splaining,’” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said. The West’s message, he said, was that “after 50 years of occupation, it’s understandable that you would have trust issues with a country that occupied you.”

“For us in the Baltics, it all boils down to this notion of appeasement: that basically we can appease Russia,” Landsbergis continued. “For us, it was always very clear, black and white. If a country is eager to cross another country’s border, they’re an aggressor and they will do that again, if they’re not stopped. And they have not been stopped.”

“That notion is quite pervasive, this notion of peaceful settlement with an aggressor,” he added. “I’m really hopeful that it’s now waning.”

Don’t trust imperialist countries. It’s that simple.

I think Central and South America are all clear on that, too.

The prize for coolness under pressure goes to…

Ariel Elias, a comedian who was doing a comedy set in front of a few MAGA rednecks who didn’t like what she was saying and threw a whole can of beer with great force at her. She scooped it up and drank it while mocking them. I was impressed.

It’s got to be tough to be doing comedy in a bar attended by deplorables. I did notice, though, that when she called for support, the overwhelming majority of the crowd cheered in her favor — the few MAGAts must be feeling isolated and alone, which is good.

Also good: the beer-flinger is being prosecuted for his actions.