We saw this coming long ago

Pat yourself on the back, creationists. You’ve succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. I’d give special appreciation to the Discovery Institute, which came up with so many potent slogans. “Teach the controversy!” “Teach both sides!” So many school administrators and politicians fell for it, taking it for granted that what a school was supposed to do was throw every crank idea at the students, and let them sort it out…while teachers were supposed to sit back and provide no guidance from hard-earned learning and experience, because that would be “bias”. How dare you teach all that evidence-based science about evolution and the history of life on Earth, don’t you know that’s discriminating against fringe theories that have no logical, rational, evidential basis? Make room for Ken Ham, right next to Darwin and Fisher and Simpson and Beadle and Tatum and…it’s a long list.

But that’s the triumph of their idea, that education shouldn’t be based on merit, and that teachers are useless unless they promote their propaganda.

And now it’s come to this.

A senior school administrator in the Lone Star State was recorded telling educators that if they’re going to keep books about the Holocaust in their classrooms, they must also stock material representing “opposing” views or “other perspectives.”

NBC News has obtained a recording that it says features Carroll Independent School District executive director of curriculum and instruction Gina Peddy explaining to teachers that House Bill 3979 requires them to offer alternative information when it “comes to widely debated and currently controversial.” That, by her account, includes the systematic execution of millions of people — mostly Jews — at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

“Make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives,” Peddy said.

You can hear the whole thing here. Listen to the administrator tell the teachers how she wants to work with them and help them, but if they offer a book that teaches about the Holocaust, they better also include a book about Holocaust denial. The teachers sound appalled and horrified.

The administration’s excuse:

In a statement, a Carroll spokeswoman said Peddy’s example about the Holocaust reflects the district’s attempt to comply with a new state law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues.

The law says we have to “teach both sides”. That is so familiar, as is the language about “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. All you need to do to make an issue widely debated and currently controversial is to get a local ignorant church pastor to stand up and argue for bullshit. Presto! Debate! Controversy! Therefore it has to go into the curriculum. It’s only fair, after all.

That’s not how education works. It has never worked that way. You can thank the creationists for a decades-long campaign to misrepresent how science and teaching work so they can get their fables and lies into the classroom. The end result: opening the door for Nazis and kooks to pollute public education. Fuck those motherfuckers, every one.

I’ll probably end up voting for Kamala Harris in the next election

After all, can you imagine a Republican stating these obvious truths?

This does not mean I agree with everything she, or the Democratic party, says or does, but that there is a clear, distinct separation between the two parties on at least some issues, and I’ll always go for the one that doesn’t lie about our history.

Speaking of uncool: Blue Origin about to fly

It seems to me that the way to remove all the glamor and heroism of space travel is to hand out passes to corporate executives and hammy 90 year old actors, which is exactly what Blue Origin is about to do. It’s like a confession that all this is about is naked, blatant PR and pandering to capitalists.

Way to kill the dream, guys. Kids who want to become an astronaut now know the pathway is to get a marketing degree or make lots of money or pretend to be an astronaut on a TV show really hard. Aspire to be spam in a can, kids! You don’t need skills, just an insider angle.

We should have known when they made the Death Star logo

Mary and I are planning on getting new phones in the near future, and we’d even consider switching networks — we’re on T-Mobile, but Google-Fi is tempting. The one thing that is off the table is AT&T, and if we had AT&T now, we’d be rushing to ditch it. The revelation that they built OAN, the rabid conservative network that out-foxes Fox, is just too appalling. The money and the incentive was provided by AT&T.

OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr has testified that the inspiration to launch OAN in 2013 came from AT&T executives.

“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

Hold it right there: name these seven leftwing news networks. Please. If they mention CNN or MSNBC, centrist/conservative channels, I could use the laugh.

Since then, AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show. Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant.

Herring has testified he was offered $250 million for OAN in 2019. Without the DirecTV deal, the accountant said under oath, the network’s value “would be zero.”

Here’s a sample of OAN’s quality news information, subsidized by AT&T.

In case you’re confused, the people he’s accusing of “overthrowing the election”, who will be exposed by the audits in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin and who should be executed, are not the insurrectionists who attempted a coup at the goading of an ex-president — no, he wants the people behind the valid election apparatus of the United States murdered. Thanks, AT&T!

Let me know soon if you get news that T-Mobile has been funding the Taliban, or Google has been a front for Hydra, or Sprint is planning to blow up the Moon. Also, if you find any of those mysterious American leftwing news sites, let me know in the comments.

What sorting algorithm is that?

Interesting. An animated graph COVID-19 cases in the top 25 states, color-coded by party affiliation. Watch the chart gradually bleed red.

Diseases should not afflict people on the basis of who they voted for, but there they are.

Come see the violence inherent in the system!

Gab, the social networking site, is having some troubles, again. They’re being attacked! By bad actors! Oh no!

This is my favorite ironic line from the complaint.

Do you want this website to stay online or do you want to be able to threaten and incite violence by somehow claiming it’s “free speech” (it’s not.)

Wholesome, pure, violence-free Gab…you know, the site that welcomed Nazis.

Since its inception, Gab has welcomed deplatformed social media users, generally attracting those on the far right. When Twitter suspended a number of alt-right accounts just after the 2016 election — including white nationalist Richard Spencer’s — Gab welcomed them with open arms.

And QAnon.

In early October, when Facebook purged a number of accounts connected to QAnon, Torba published a blog post welcoming them to the site. “Gab is happy to announce that we will be welcoming all QAnon accounts across our social network, news, and encrypted chat platforms,” Torba wrote. He added, “Members of the QAnon community have been active on Gab for several years. We have never seen any calls for violence, threats, or any other illegal activity from this group of people.”

Except for fomenting the Jan. 6 insurrection, of course.

The Capitol mob began organizing weeks ago for the violence that occurred on January 6, planning inside conspiracy theory and far-right online communities on platforms like Parler and Gab. Groups that typically live in the darker corners of the internet stepped into the spotlight when they took the Capitol and broadcast the breach around the web.

…

The groups that stormed Capitol Hill this week have long been active on platforms like Gab and 4chan, and more recently, they’ve adopted newer tools like the lightly moderated social media site Parler and the anonymous messaging service Telegram to organize.

And who could forget?

The platform made headlines in October 2018 after a gunman opened fire in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue and killed 11 worshipers. Robert Bowers, who is accused of the crime, spent years posting anti-Semitic rhetoric on Gab. His final post before the shooting read, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

No sir, no violence here. It’s all those people trying to shut down a hate and conspiracy theory site who are being violent.

Here’s another blast from tolerant, lovely Andrew Torba from last year: the people going after Gab are Mentally ill tranny demon hackers (he’s very serious).

Irony gasps back to life! Thanks, Florida GOP.

Florida, America’s poxed appendage

Their finances are in a shambles now, because one man held the keys to all of the accounts.

After spending months railing against COVID-19 precautions and criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci, a Republican Party official in Florida passed away this week — leaving his county-level GOP organization without access to critical financial accounts.

Gregg Prentice, 61, served as accountant for the Hillsborough County GOP and also chaired the organization’s committee for election integrity. A software engineer by trade, Tampa Bay’s local Patch outlet reported that he built and maintained the local Republican party’s campaign finance software last year and was responsible for filing its monthly reports to the Federal Elections Commission.

A FEC filing from the surviving members of the organization claims that Prentice died without sharing login information for these accounts, or any sort of instructions for how to use them. The letter also tells the regulatory agency it will likely need more time to complete a report on its August fundraising numbers, and foreshadows trouble compiling the local party’s financials for future months as well.

Can you guess how he died? Can you? Guess! The Republicans are frantically straining to get extensions, so they explained how.

As a Political Party Committee, we file our FEC reports on a monthly basis. For several years we have been submitting the reports electronically, and for over a year we have done this with software developed by one of our members, Gregg Prentice. Gregg’s software converted data from our Quickbooks accounting software to supply the information needed by the FEC.

Unfortunately, Gregg passed away suddenly from Covid 19 on Saturday, September 11, 2021. Gregg did not share the software and instructions for its use with our officers. We will have to enter the August data manually, and according to the information we have received from our FEC analyst, Scott Bennett, we may likely have to re-enter the data from our first 7 months of 2021. We will be struggling to get all of this entered in the proper format by our deadline on September 20, but we will try to do so with our best effort.

Killed by a virus he had denied. It would be sad if it weren’t so fitting.

In addition to his role compiling the Hillsborough County GOP’s financials, Prentice spent most of the past year fearmongering about COVID-19 vaccines, mask mandates and other pandemic safety measures. Like many other conservatives in public life, he took aim in particular at White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, writing on Facebook that America needed to “End Faucism.” He also argued that “we need more socialist distancing than we do social distancing.”

Think of all the work the party would have been spared if only Gregg had taken a few minutes to get vaccinated. The pandemic is going to not only cull Republican voters, but is going to disrupt their organization. I hate to suggest it, but in the name of our common humanity, go get the shot, Republicans and other kooks.

What are the grifters doing today?

It’s enlightening and amusing to see what the kooks are up to. They live in a world where every stupid idea that tumbles in the arid desert between their ears will find an audience.

  • The Qux. Some ex-Info-Wars reporter has figured out how to get rich: she has “invented” a mysterious electronic gadget called a Qux that she has crowdfunded to the tune of $170,000, and which she’ll sell for $150 a pop. Supposedly, it’s going to filter out the bad left-wing propaganda or vibrations or something from your TV set.

    Except that what it seems to be is some kind of cheap knock-off of a Roku box, and the port layout looks exactly like a generic Linux TV box that sells for $15-$30. It’s going to take you to the future, though!
    They do know their audience, though. They’ll buy it.

  • Purebloods. The super-geniuses of anti-vax are rebranding. They don’t want to be called “unvaccinated” anymore: instead, they are Purebloods. Yeah, they consciously stole it from the Harry Potter books, which, apparently, they didn’t read very closely because the Purebloods were the Nazi-like bad guys.
    Now, of course, they’re coming out with “Pureblood” merch, because it isn’t right-wing stupidity if you don’t make money off of it.

    Makes you wonder what JK Rowling would think of it. She might actually approve.

Good work, California

Governor Newsom will not be recalled, and he won’t be replaced with a deranged far-right talk radio host. Larry Elder even conceded the election. That’s all good. But get ready for the new normal:

With Newsom projected to defeat the recall, conservative radio host Larry Elder conceded the race early Wednesday morning, telling his audience to be “gracious in defeat.” But his campaign’s tactics in the lead-up to the vote — including open threats to raise doubts about the results in case of defeat — suggest the possibility of a new normal, where Republicans challenge election losses even in heavily Democratic states and without proof of serious fraud or rule-breaking.

The next presidential election is going to be the biggest circus yet. It doesn’t matter who runs, or how the vote goes, the ratfkers will be frantically fking all the rats, every one of them.

Oh, and this stupid, pointless recall cost California about $400 million. Thanks, Republicans, the party of fiscal responsibility.

The drawing and quartering of Bobby Lee has been done

It’s only a bit over 150 years too late, but I’ll take it — deserved worse. It’s also a barbaric punishment, but it’s only being done in effigy, so you can’t complain too much.

He does have his defenders, though, but it’s too bad that they include a certain stupid ex-president who declares Lee the greatest strategist of them all, except for Gettysburg. Wasn’t Gettysburg ultimately a tactical failure? And wasn’t the greater strategic failure getting involved in the Civil War at all? I’d have to say that Grant totally out-strategized Lee.