Ding dong…

Orrin Hatch is dead. He was my senator for while, when I lived in Utah, and I learned quickly to detest him. Even the Salt Lake Tribune was sometimes ambivalent about him: they called for his resignation in 2018, even after they’d propped him up for years, with this overlong and somewhat confusing headline: Sen. Orrin Hatch’s 42-year legacy includes passing sweeping legislation, working across the aisle while sometimes being sharply partisan and, for the past two years, sidling up to Trump. Not to mention his history of sidling up to Reagan.

I think this article in the Nation better summarizes his legacy.

Orrin Hatch Was Never a ‘Public Servant’. The retiring senator has always been a shameless tool of billionaire campaign donors and a partisan errand boy for the likes of Donald Trump.

Few, aside from President Trump, Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell, and the lobbyists for the special interests Hatch served, will miss one of the most egregious hypocrites ever to serve in a chamber where mendacity has always been well represented.

That was written while he was alive, and the journalist could be honest. Brace yourself for a few days of slimy politicians and biased journalists to start vomiting up buckets and buckets of whitewash now.

America, where corrupt criminals are just funny characters on a TV show

I have never watched this show, The Masked Singer, in which celebrities are dressed up in silly costumes to sing songs, and then celebrity judges try to guess their identities. It sounds insipid. From the few short clips I have now suffered through, it is deeply, painfully, agonizingly stupid. Do they pay the audience to put on over-the-top expressions and squeal excitedly over banalities, or is it just that the kind of people who get tickets to see the show are selected for idiocy?

Anyway, they unmasked one “singer” in the most recent show. It was Rudy Giuliani.

Is this the new path for rehabilitating the reputations of deplorables, letting them caper and dance like court jesters for the mob?

Fuck that evil clown. Fuck that show.

It’s not real, Ted

Ted Cruz thinks we have to worry about “space pirates”. Really. I’m not making this up.

During a Tuesday hearing of the Senate’s subcommittee on Aviation and Space discussing space policy, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) cited the threat of space pirates as a reason to back Trump’s unpopular “space force” idea. Cruz is the chair of the committee.

Discussing threats to commercial and governmental space assets, Cruz then veered off course into the realm of the fantastic.

“Since the ancient Greeks first put to sea, nations have recognized the necessity of naval forces and maintaining a superior capability to protect waterborne travel and commerce from bad actors,” Cruz said. “Pirates threaten the open seas and the same is possible in space.”

The threat of space piracy, Cruz said, now means America must recognize “the necessity of a space force.”

He’s quite annoyed that those danged Leftists are making fun of him, and is trying to defend his argument.

The threat of nations destroying commercial resources in space is not space piracy. The pirates he’s talking about were independent, lawless adventures robbing ships of cargo. There are no people living in space who might decide to start looting passing spaceships; there is no significant commercial cargo transport in space.

Coincidentally, the video game No Man’s Sky has just come out with a new update called “Outlaws” in which you have to fight off the depradations of space pirates. I’ve found that if you upgrade your phase beam and positron ejector they’re easily fought off.

Also, it’s a game. It’s not real, Ted.

Fighting back

Lana Theis: a horrible person who shouldn’t be in politics.

This is inspiring. Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow was accused by another politician, Lana Theis, of being a pedophile and a groomer — get used to it, this is the preferred tactic of Republicans everywhere, and every Democrat is going to get labeled “groomer” in the next campaign season. McMorrow decided to fight back with a fierce rebuke, which I think is the best strategy. It’s analogous to another great reply to Joseph McCarthy by Joseph Welch, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” It ought to be our standard reaction when a Republican lifts their slimy head up from the muck they wallow in.

I sat on it for a while wondering why me?

Then I realized…

I’m the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme. Because you can’t claim that you’re targeting marginalized kids in the name of “parental rights” if another parent is standing up and saying no.

So you dehumanize and marginalize ME. You say I’m one of THEM. You say she’s a groomer, she supports pedophilia, she wants children to believe they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they’re white.

Here’s a little background on who I really am.

Growing up my family was active in our church. I sang in choir. My mom taught CCD. One day, our priest called a meeting with my mom and told her that she was not living up to the church’s expectations, b/c she was divorced, and because he didn’t see her w us at mass every Sunday.

Where was my mom on Sunday?

She was at a soup kitchen. With me.

My mom taught me at a young age that Christianity and faith was about being a part of a community, about recognizing our privilege and blessings and doing what we could to be of service to others –

especially people who were marginalized, targeted, who had less…often unfairly.

I learned that SERVICE was far more important than performative nonsense like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing “Christian” in your Twitter bio and using it as a shield to target and marginalize already-marginalized people.

I also stand on the shoulders of people like Father Ted Hesburgh, the longtime president of the University of Notre Dame who was active in the civil rights movement, who recognized his power and privilege as a white man, a faith leader, and the head of an influential and well-respected institution – and who saw Black people in this country being targeted and discriminated against and beaten, and reached out and locked arms with Dr. Martin Luther King when he was alive, when it was unpopular and risky, and marching with them to say, “We got you.” To offer protection and service and allyship, to try to right wrongs and fix the injustice in the world.

So who am I? I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom who knows that the very notion that learning about slavery or redlining or systemic racism means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are white is absolute nonsense.

No child alive today is responsible for slavery. No one is this room is responsible for slavery.

But each and every single one of us bears responsibility for writing the next chapter of history. We decides what happens next, and how WE respond to history and the world around us.

We are not responsible for the past. We also cannot change the past. We can’t pretend that it didn’t happen, or deny people their very right to exist.

I want my daughter to know that she is loved, supported, and seen for whoever she becomes. I want her to be curious, empathetic, and kind.

I want every child to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted if they are not straight, white, and Christian.

People who are different are not the reason our roads are in bad shape, or healthcare costs are too high, or teachers are leaving the profession.

We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they’re not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact peoples lives.

I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen.

And I want to be very clear right now:

Call me whatever you want. I know who I am. I know what faith and service mean, and what it calls for in this moment.

We will not let hate win.

I’m glad that Christians like McMorrow exist, but I fear that there are a great many wretched, hate-filled, repressive Christians like Lana Theis. I hope that the people of Michigan make Theis’s political career a short one.

You’re not going to get a tan from red light — it’s also not going to make you more manly

Tucker Carlson is a sucker. Here he is promoting “infrared therapy”, or testicle tanning, which basically means shining red lights on your scrotum to supposedly increase your testosterone levels.

Tanning is induced by UV light — that is, high energy, short-wavelength light. Red or infrared light is weak or low energy, long wavelength light. It’s going to gently warm your balls, and that’s about it. Warming is going to actually reduce your sperm count, demonstrated here by the effects of a sauna:

Semen was collected at weekly intervals for 3 wk before and 10 wk after the sauna exposure at 85 degrees C for 20 minutes. The numbers, morphology, ultrastructure, motility, viability and metabolism of the sperm was assessed. Sperm numbers fell within one wk and slowly returned to normal in 5 wk. The earliest ultrastructural change was swelling of the plasma membrane, followed by an increase in the number of immature forms and disorganization of the arrangement of the mitochondria. Motility, glucose utilization and lactic acid accumulation of the sperm rose temporarily immediately after sauna.

A little glowing red light might have a slight warming effect (hey, maybe it feels nice!), but I doubt that it’ll do much at all for your testosterone levels. Besides, testosterone levels in normal, healthy men varies widely with no detectable effect — extremes can have serious effect. This is just another example of the right wing’s bizarre obsession with the trappings of masculinity.

That’s what the wealthy trust-fund goon is promoting now in a video.

Heh. It’s pushing that bogus “hard times create hard men” bullshit. Just what I’d expect from a fascist wanna-be.

The book bannings will continue

Now the Republicans want to ban math textbooks. Florida has rejected 54 out of 132 proposed math textbooks because Ron DeSantis says they contain Critical Race Theory. Really? I found an example of what they object to.

A few points I have to make:

1. That’s not CRT. Those are just story problems on a worksheet about Maya Angelou.

2. That’s actually a clever way to motivate students to carry out simple algebraic calculations.

3. Isn’t it obvious how it will help kids learn algebra? They have to use algebra to crack the code and puzzle out the whole story.

4. I can tell the critic just zeroed in on the mention of sexual abuse and prostitution. Those things exist. They happen. They don’t disappear if you close your eyes real tight.

5. It’s also not from a Florida math textbook. It’s taken from an unapproved collection of potential math problems from an online site. For shame, Ms Pushaw! You lied!

Florida is working so hard to become the worst state in the union. They’ll have to work harder, though, because Texas is attacking libraries.

In early November, an email dropped into the inbox of Judge Ron Cunningham, the silver-haired head chair of the governing body of Llano County in Texas’s picturesque Hill Country. The subject line read “Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.”

“It came to my attention a few weeks ago that pornographic filth has been discovered at the Llano library,” wrote Bonnie Wallace, a 54-year-old local church volunteer. “I’m not advocating for any book to be censored but to be RELOCATED to the ADULT section. … It is the only way I can think of to prohibit censorship of books I do agree with, mainly the Bible, if more radicals come to town and want to use the fact that we censored these books against us.”

Wallace had attached an Excel spreadsheet of about 60 books she found objectionable, including those about transgender teens, sex education and race, including such notable works as “Between the World and Me,” by author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, an exploration of the country’s history written as a letter to his adolescent son. Not long after, the county’s chief librarian sent the list to Suzette Baker, head of one of the library’s three branches.

This is a Texas tradition. There are always prudes and bigots who object to books that don’t pander to their blinkered, ignorant worldview — remember Mel and Norma Gabler? — the problem is that Texas actually listens to them, and has an army of conservative politicians that rush to impose their 19th century views on their electorate. Literally. That’s what motivated the Gablers to go on their long-running crusade to wreck the American textbook industry.

Norma and Mel Gabler entered the field of textbook reform twenty years ago, after their son Jim came home from school disturbed at discrepancies between the 1954 American history text his eleventh-grade class was using and what his parents had taught him. The Gablers compared his text to history books printed in 1885 and 1921 and discovered differences. “Where can you go to get the truth?” Jim asked.

How dare our understanding of the world change? Although best known to me for their efforts to expunge evolution from biology classes, you can tell that what triggered them, from the timing, was race. Same as nowadays.

Bonnie Wallace’s letter is also revealing. The only reason she isn’t sponsoring a book burning is projection — she’s afraid the liberals want to do the same thing to her cherished books. I swear, though, no one is planning to ban the Bible, and if they were, I’d be right there in opposition. The Bible is a piece of our history, everyone should be exposed to it, just as they should be exposed to our history of slavery and lynchings. Besides, it’s such a useful tool for creating atheists.

She’s also lying about “pornographic filth”. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book is not at all pornographic, but only frankly discusses the effects of racism…but yeah, they don’t want that known.

They also want to ban a whole batch of children’s books, such as Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, which is quite a lovely weird story, and has, as I recall, two pictures of naked little Mickey falling through a dream. My kids giggled at that and always pointed it out because nudity is so highly censored from all of our books. It was innocent, not pornographic, and only stood out because the prudes and assholes have gotten their way for so long.

Now it’s getting worse. They’re dissolving library boards so they can pack them with conservative Republicans.

Cunningham said in a statement that the restructuring of the library board was in keeping with Texas law and past practices to allow for “citizen participation from different perspectives.” The all-female board is overwhelmingly White and Republican, records show.

And the new board was ready to start focusing on its top priorities, including adding content of “academia, educational value and character building” and consulting with a local Christian school about their needs, Wells wrote in one email. Wells, a member of the local tea party who home-schools her six children, did not return calls for comment.

They’re also ridiculously Christian.

Panel members often stop to pray over questions brought up in meetings, and until the Lord answers, they can’t resolve them, according to county officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions.

Most chillingly, they’re quietly disappearing books they don’t like from the libraries, firing librarians, and hinting that they aren’t required to even have a library.

“The board also needs to recognize that the county is not mandated by law to provide a public library,” Cunningham wrote to Wallace in January.

I remember the Satanic panics of the 1980s, when all kinds of baseless nonsense about cults and child sacrifice and secret underground rituals made the rounds (often abetted by the police — ACAB — who made up horrific and false stories to further the repressive bullshit). We’re in the middle of another one right now. Their chants are all about “pedophiles” and “grooming”, and they use them and their lunatic fringe Christianity to justify all kinds of oppression.

Many who spoke praised the commissioners for their recent work “saving the children of Llano County” from “pornography” and “pedophiles,” often breaking into enthusiastic applause and shouts of “Amen!” Tension erupted when latecomers stuck in the hallway attempted to speak. “I’d like to speak in the name of Jesus!” one man yelled.

“Amen!” is the new “Sieg Heil!”

Spontaneous combustion for the win!

You know that Russian flagship that mysteriously caught fire yesterday? Well, it sank.

The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet sank after an attack from Ukrainian forces triggered a “significant explosion” as the vessel floated off the coast of Ukraine, U.S. officials said Thursday, with Moscow offering a competing claim about the cause of the destruction.

The alternative explanation from Moscow (which has acknowledged that it sank) is that…it caught fire.

Personally, I think the Ukrainian military has been drafting gremlins.

Suddenly, we’re in the passive voice

Russian media made a quiet announcement.

Ammunition detonated on the Moskva missile cruiser, the Defense Ministry said.

“As a result of a fire, ammunition detonated on the Moskva missile cruiser. The ship was seriously damaged,” the statement said.

The crew was completely evacuated. The reasons for the incident are being established.

Ah, yes. There was a fire in a warship during a war. We don’t know how the fire could have gotten there. We’re going to have to investigate. Very puzzling. Spontaneous combustion? Gremlins? Who knows?

It’s still floating! It hasn’t sunk! We are inwincible!

Moscow’s defence ministry said the Moskva missile cruiser was still afloat and its main weaponry had not been damaged.

Gosh. We many never know what happened except…

Russian and Ukraine agree that the Russian missile cruiser Moskva, its Black Sea flagship, was taken out of commission on Wednesday, but there’s no agreement on how that happened. Russian state-run media, citing the Defense Ministry, said “ammunition detonated as a result of a fire on the Moskva missile cruiser,” the ship “was seriously damaged,” and “the entire crew” of 510 was evacuated. Hours earlier, the governor of Odessa said Ukraine had hit the ship with Neptune anti-ship missiles and inflicted “very serious damage.”

Either way, “one of the Russian Navy’s most important warships is either floating abandoned or at the bottom of the Black Sea, a massive blow to a military struggling against Ukrainian resistance 50 days into Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his neighbor,” CNN reports. And “whatever the reason for the fire, the analysts say it strikes hard at the heart of the Russian navy as well as national pride, comparable to the U.S. Navy losing a battleship during World War II or an aircraft carrier today.”

I don’t know about you, but I am persuaded by the side using the active voice and providing a reasonable causal agent.

Ravnsborg impeached, barely

As mentioned in the previous horror story, the South Dakota House voted on the impeachment of their Attorney General, Jason Ravnsborg, this morning. It passed, barely.

By the slimmest of margins, the South Dakota House of Representatives has impeached Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg. Resolution needed 36 votes, and it received 36 votes. Ravnsborg will now have a trial in the Senate.

Yeah, it’s not over. All the vote meant is that he’ll get a senate trial. I wonder how that will go?

Is Steven King in charge of writing Republican life stories now?

South Dakota highways have an unsavory reputation: long empty stretches of nothin’ lined with occasional farms or a small town, with Republican politicians disregarding the speed limits to race hither and yon, collecting speeding tickets because they’d rather be anywhere but there. It’s a mostly featureless death maze with emptiness between the Corn Palace and Wall Drug. Every once in a while one of the conservative road warriors gets caught, but they happily flaunt the law and get back to buzzing about with impunity. Except maybe this time.

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg (R) might face a little justice, because what he did ought to be in a horror novel, or maybe a Coen brothers movie. I’m going to put it below the fold because it is particularly grisly.

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