Bucha

Russian troops are retreating from the area around Kiev, and leaving behind the wreckage of war. The recently liberated town of Bucha is an example: dead civilians left in the streets, some bound up and shot. The survivors have horror stories about the brutal occupation. There are mass graves. The Russians have abandoned any pretense of civilized behavior.

At least there are also signs that the Russian invasion cost the invaders heavily, too.

You have to stop & think … who would invite Madison Cawthorn to an orgy?

Cawthorn made a surprising admission: he has been invited to an orgy by Washington fat cats he previously admired.

Whoops. We can exempt a whole slew of liberals from the suspect list, since he wouldn’t have admired them. I don’t know what criteria orgy hosts use to select their guests — I’ve never held one or been invited to one, which feels a little bit like an embarrassing admission about me — but I suspect most people on the left side of the aisle find his views repulsive.

So now the guessing games begin. Which Republicans are staging orgies in the Capitol?

(This is not a very titillating thought exercise. If you’re trying to suppress your libido, just picture a Republican sex party in your head, all interest in sex will vanish quickly.)

I’ve never been to Mississippi. I guess I never will.

There are politicians there who want to murder me.

Robert Foster, a former Mississippi House lawmaker who lost a 2019 bid for governor, is using his social-media platform to call for the execution of political foes who support the rights of transgender people.

He ran for governor of the state. He lost. But he still got 18% of the vote — I am not reassured at the thought that about a fifth of the state didn’t find that automatically disqualifying.

This guy wants to kill me for being an atheist, too.

Do I need to mention that he’s a Republican?

“A city the size of Minneapolis”

Did they have to compare the devastation with a city so close to home?

Don’t worry, though: the Russians say they didn’t do it. The Ukrainians blew up their own city.

If Minneapolis were flattened like that, I guarantee you we could come up with a better excuse. “St Paul must have done it.”

An ugly way to lose a war

Huh. I’ve had my head down for a day — I’m getting back into the swing of classes and had to get a lot of new material together — and I check out the news today, and whoa:

NATO says that up to 40,000 Russian troops have been killed, wounded, taken prisoner or are missing in Ukraine, said a senior military official from the alliance.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization calculates the figure based on information provided by Ukrainian authorities and information obtained from Russia–both officially and unintentionally, the official said.

NATO estimates that between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the invasion began on Feb. 24. Using statistical averages from past conflicts that for every casualty roughly three soldiers are wounded, NATO analysts reach their total figure.

Russia began its invasion with roughly 190,000 troops. It has since brought in additional troops from Chechnya, Syria and other locations.

That’s a lot of casualties. If that was an American army rather than a Russian one, we’d be backpedaling so fast, and the media would be blaming the president for their incompetence, and there would be massive protests in the streets. Russia, though, has a reputation for brute force and pouring men into a meatgrinder to accomplish their ends, so it’s probably too early to declare victory.

At best, they can hope for a Pyrrhic victory here. More likely they’re going to have to find an excuse to get out.

You won’t be surprised to learn where Freethoughtbloggers stand on the Ukraine war

I await the announcement from various regressives that this isn’t really “freethought” because we are unanimous in condemning the war.

Can everyone just go home now and begin to rebuild?

Running the gauntlet

I knew that Ketanji Brown Jackson was a good choice when I saw this illustration:

Not shown is possibly the most important qualification: she isn’t the choice of the Federalist Society.

But I also made a prediction to myself, that the hearings over her appointment were going to be a kangaroo court. Her qualifications don’t matter. She’s black. The Republicans were going to go for blood. Of course they did: Josh Hawley immediately accused her of being soft on pedophiles.

The pedophilia smear put the lie to Republicans’ assurances that they would conduct the hearings with dignity.

“We won’t try to turn this into a spectacle,” proposed Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the committee’s ranking Republican.

“It won’t be a circus,” promised Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.).

Even Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), a regular ringmaster, said “this will not be a political circus.”

Then the clown car rolled in. Republicans used their opening statements to portray Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the high court, as not just a pedophile enabler but also a terrorist sympathizer with a “hidden agenda” to indoctrinate Americans with the “racist vitriol” of critical race theory.

Then the assholes opened their sphincters.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) scolded Jackson, a former public defender, for the way she represented “people who have committed terrorist acts against the United States,” saying her “zealous advocacy has gone beyond the pale.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) seemed to be trying to associate the nominee with a host of evils in an inchoate tirade about “anarchists, rioters and left-wing street militias,” the “breakdown of society,” and “Soros prosecutors” who “destroy our criminal justice system from within.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), the final Republican to speak, accused Jackson of providing “free legal services to help terrorists get out of Gitmo and go back to the fight,” supporting “the radical left’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court” and harboring a “hidden agenda … to let violent criminals, cop killers and child predators back to the streets.”

A further prediction: in the final vote, the Republicans will be in lockstep to deny a highly qualified person a seat on the court.

We really need to destroy that political party. Those named Republican senators above, and many more, are a national disgrace, every one of them.

They’re indoctrinating school children? How horrible!

It is most peculiar to read an article deploring the use of propaganda in Russian schools. I agree that this practice is sad and dishonest and intended to mislead and miseducate a whole generation…but this is the United States of America.

Russia’s education minister, Sergey Kravtsov, openly described schools as central to Moscow’s fight to “win the information and psychological war” against the West. At the same time, Russia has imposed laws against spreading “fake” news or “discrediting” the Russian armed forces — prompting many journalists and activists to leave Russia.

The country’s Internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, also ordered media outlets to delete reports using the words “invasion” or “war” and only rely on official government sources, which call the Ukraine war a “special operation.” Russian state TV removed all entertainment shows from its programming, filling the broadcasts with propaganda-filled talk shows and state-vetted news.

On March 3, Kravtsov said more than 5 million children across Russia watched a lesson called “Defenders of Peace.” It’s part of a government-produced series broadcast online in schools or given to teachers in the form of a slide show for mandatory lessons. The series includes other episodes, including “Adult Conversation About the World,” all pushing Putin’s historical revisionist speeches justifying the Ukraine invasion.

I grew up having to recite a pledge of allegiance every morning. There are flags everywhere. Go to a baseball game, and someone is going to sing our awful national anthem, and you better stand up for it. Put your hand over your heart and look reverent, damn it. GOD BLESS AMERICA.

Remember the blacklist, when you could lose your livelihood for even once attending a communist party meeting? Remember when a television show featured the Tulsa Massacre, and everyone was saying, “What? That was a real historical event?” We had a few generations grow up with the mythologizing of the westward expansion, cowboys & Indians, and the cowboys were always the good guys who shot ‘redskins’ without remorse. Hey, we’ve still got athletic teams that promote ethnic slurs.

In the 1940s, Bugs Bunny was a propaganda tool, a cartoon rabbit who humiliated little yellow bucktoothed ‘Japs’, while in the real world we herded people of Japanese descent into concentration camps.

Our schools dutifully taught that Columbus was a brave explorer who sailed the oceans blue in 1492, glossing over the fact that he enslaved the people he met, murdered them, chopped off their hands, etc. The American Revolution was a noble effort to bring liberty to the people…except for the ones who had the wrong color of skin. Any effort to counter the white-washed version of history taught in the schools is met with near-hysterical opposition — Google the 1619 Project to see what I mean.

I agree that it is disgraceful that Putin is erasing history and lying to schoolkids, but before you get high and mighty about it, look to your classrooms at home.