I don’t want to care about Jimmy Kimmel, or Disney Corp.

It’s good news that right-wing broadcaster Sinclair had to reverse course on their attempt to get late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel fired, but I have to get real about this situation. Kimmel is an entertainer, not the leader of a progressive opposition party — he’s just a guy. He’s a court jester. What we should be aware of is the fragility of that position when an autocrat takes offense at relatively mild jokes and tries to destroy a person, and we also have to recognize that there are all these undeservedly wealthy people who will eagerly jump to do the wanna-be king’s bidding. If we get rid of Trump, Sinclair will still be there pushing propaganda for the very worst people in the country.

Is this a victory for free speech, though? Allow me to not-at-all subtly draw your attention to the real winners.

Facing the threat of lost advertising dollars, Sinclair said it “received thoughtful feedback from viewers, advertisers, and community leaders representing a wide range of perspectives.” Nexstar separately announced an end to its blackout of Kimmel shortly after this article published.

I hope I was clear…the ones who really control everything are the corporations with advertising dollars, that is, capitalism. There is a link between advertising and the will of the people, but it’s weakened by the reliance of those corporations on persuasive lies.

There is still some genuinely good news, though. Sinclair got nothing, their attempt to impose their rotten political beliefs on everyone was thoroughly repudiated, and they ran off whimpering with their tails between their legs.

I do wish this victory was over something more significant than propping up a media figure.

So that’s what Jey McCreight has been up to…

They’ve founded a new organization, Beyond X and Y.

As the copy on their web page says:

We’re a trans-led volunteer team of biomedical experts defending trans rights by educating the general public and political leaders about the real science behind trans identity and gender-affirming care.

Sign up for their newsletter and find out more!

An American sickness

We have a chain restaurant that advertises with intimidatingly large flags

I don’t have any flags flying from my house, which makes me an exceptional American. OK, maybe not too exceptional — most houses don’t have flagpoles and aren’t waving their patriotism in everyone’s faces, but having been to Europe and Australia and Asia, I know that in comparison we tend to be a flag-happy nation. But really, the only places, other than official places like the county courthouse and schools, that display a flag also tend to be draped with MAGA nonsense, with pickup trucks covered in ugly political bumper stickers parked in front of them.

That’s fine, I appreciate seeing another visible signifier. But then, I was sent this tweet from Eric Daugherty, a Florida Republican nobody, who has somehow earned the approval of Twitter to send out mass notifications. He is shocked, shocked, shocked that some Americans might see no problem with other country’s flags.

How strange and peculiarly American. Mexico is an ally, and Mexicans are our friends, so she is showing support for an allied nation. We are not enemies, although MAGA seems to think so. It does not diminish us to exhibit solidarity with Mexicans and residents of Mexican descent, especially when an American regime is in power and trying to oppress them.

As for the cost, you can buy a pack of 25 small Mexican flags for less than $20 on Amazon. You don’t need to be George Soros to afford that. Also, people voluntarily attend these kinds of protests without demanding payment — I was at a couple of them earlier this summer. If I ever get out to another protest, maybe I’ll sink some pocket change into getting a few flags-onna-stick to hand out.

If I want to be daring, maybe I should get a bunch of Canadian flags, too.

Anything to counter this weird “patriotic” obsession with the American flag. Did all those years in school pledging allegiance to a stupid flag poison our brains?

Megyn Kelly is deeply weird

Remember when Megyn Kelly was deeply offended at the suggestion that Santa Claus wasn’t white? It’s an imaginary figure, yet she insisted he was white.

Now she’s doing it again. Jezebel commissioned Etsy to put a curse on Charlie Kirk, which is already silly (you know, curses don’t work, right?)

I want to make it clear, I’m not calling on dark forces to cause him harm. I just want him to wake up every morning with an inexplicable zit. I want his podcast microphone to malfunction every time he hits record. I want his blue blazers to suddenly all be one size too small. I want one of his socks to always be sliding down his foot. I want his thumb to grow too big to tweet. To ruin his day with the collective feminist power of the Etsy coven would be my life’s greatest joy.

It’s silly, it’s stupid, it’s a joke. But then Kirk was shot, and the gullible reared back, aghast, certain that this was confirmation that curses actually work. No, it’s not. This is confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias, or congeniality bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

All it tells us is that the person promoting the idea has a prior belief in the power of curses, and is presenting a random fact as evidence for that belief.

So what does Megyn Kelly believe?

First of all, Christians are opposed to casting spells or contacting the spirit world – not only because they believe there is only one God, but because they acknowledge the existence of the devil and evil spirits. Fr. Mike Schmitz actually talked about this when he joined me back in episode 399.

He basically explained how you are playing with fire with this stuff. There actually are demons in this world. Calling up the spirit world – in particular the devil’s spirit world – can have real-world consequences. It is not something to mess with. This is very dangerous. It is not a game. It is literally evil.

Demons aren’t real. Neither is Santa Claus. It is literally goofy, but Kelly believes in them. But then she goes on to undermine her own beliefs.

Second, and this is what I want the people at Jezebel to know, Erika and Charlie Kirk heard about these curses, and it really rattled Erika in particular. She knew Christian teaching on this subject. She loved Charlie absolutely. She was scared when she heard of the curses Jezebel had culled up. So much so that she and Charlie contacted a friend – who I believe she said was a Catholic priest – and asked him to pray with them and over Charlie… the night before he was murdered.

She eventually worked it through, and so did Charlie, that, as she told me, “weapons will form but not prosper,” that “satan and those witches have no power.” Of course, God’s will is the one that matters, and his blessing over Charlie was real and palpable. All you had to do was spend time with him to know that.

OK, if I took this at all seriously, the Kirks brought in a priest to officially negate a curse to give him a zit, and instead Charlie got shot in the neck. Following Kelly’s logic, does that mean that the Catholic church is less powerful than a coven of Etsy witches? Is this confirmation that Etsy curses are real and powerful?

As usual, these weird fantasies vanish in a puff of contradictions. Megyn Kelly doesn’t care, though, all she wants to do is rationalize hating the people she disagrees with. They’re evil, don’t you know. It also gives her an opportunity to engage in melodramatic theatrics.

Definitely passes the Bechdel test

I ignored my doctor’s advice yesterday — I’m so fed up with being trapped in my house that I decided I was going to put my knees to work and go for a careful, slow, easy walk. I did, and I feel fine, except that I’m more tired than I would have been three months ago. This is my new regimen: I do the series of light exercises my physical therapist recommended, then I take off on a short walk. I might as well; the alternative is that I sit at home for the next six months and then maybe I’ll get surgery.

I walked all the way to the Morris theater, then sat for 2 hours, and then walked back. Yay me!

I went to the movie, Honey Don’t. I knew nothing about it ahead of time, other than that it was directed by Ethan Coen, which was good enough for me. I was surprised to discover that, if I had to describe it in only two words, it was Lesbian Noir. Margaret Qualley was a tough talking detective, Honey O’Donahue, who wouldn’t put up with any nonsense and whose two goals were to find the murderer and to get laid…which she did. The clientele at our local theater usually favors movies about Jesus, but I think if any of them accidentally saw this one, they’d have a heart attack and thereby improve the climate of the town.

There were a few men starring in the movie, but they weren’t exactly sterling role models. Chris Evans was a sleazy preacher, drug dealer, and corrupt exploiter of his congregation. Charlie Day was a cop with the usual Charlie Day personality, always hitting on the detective hero and getting shot down. The women were all strong and forceful and working for good…and for fun in bed. All very noirish, but with the genders swapped.

It was…OK. It had the usual Coen touches of turning dark situations comedic, good dialogue, and the characters (and acting) were all good. Where it failed, though, was in the plotting. It was getting interesting, when abruptly one of the lead characters had a dramatic personality change, with no build up, to be revealed as the killer, and then bang-bang the story was resolved, mostly, and we end with Honey picking up a mysterious woman on a motorcycle. Other story lines just ended. It felt like the director decided they had some good sex scenes, never mind the detective story, let’s wrap it up and go home.

It was an hour and a half long, but it desperately need another half-hour of story somewhere in there.

Anyway, I got my exercise in, and that’s all I really wanted. A little movie on top of it would have been nice.

Some good news!

We all know of and despise Ryan Walters, the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Oklahoma. He’s a Christo-Fascist of the worst kind who has been striving to destroy public education in his state.

He has tried to purchase Trump Bibles for public schools, eventually settling for sending a few hundred to AP Government teachers who don’t need them.

He rewrote the social studies standards to indoctrinate children with revisionist pro-Christian mythology, got the state’s Board of Education to approve those standards without telling them he made additional changes, got sued over it, and got blocked from implementing those standards by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

He used public money to fund a religious charter school, a decision the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court later voted not to overturn that decision.

Despite a statewide teacher shortage, he said that teachers transferring from blue states like California had to take a special “America First” test to gauge their level of patriotism. The whole charade was just a publicity stunt for the right-wing group PragerU.

He sued an atheist group for warning public schools that they needed to follow the law and not allow staffers to push religion on kids. A judge dismissed that frivolous lawsuit with a blistering takedown of his pathetic arguments.

He also tried forcing teachers to make the Bible part of their curriculum, tried to put Christian chaplains in public schools, tried to mandate displays of the Ten Commandments in those schools, claimed the Tulsa Race Massacre had nothing to do with race, falsely insisted that President Joe Biden wanted “to destroy our Christian faith,” formed a faith committee to examine prayer in public schools, appointed the troll who runs Libs of TikTok to a statewide library advisory board, and sent out a “sample prayer” for teachers to use for the people of Israel (and definitely not the innocent people living in Gaza).

He pissed off Republicans in his own party, too. They said he was withholding $150 million for security enhancements that had already been allocated to public schools, hiding information about how he spent taxpayer dollars for his office’s travel budget, failing to fulfill open records requests in a timely manner, and refusing to spend money that he was legally obligated to spend on asthma inhalers for students. (Alas, there were not enough votes to impeach him.)
…
Just this week, he announced that every high school in the state would have a chapter of Turning Point USA in honor of Charlie Kirk, even though Walters has no actual ability to force schools to launch extracurricular groups and even though high school students already have the ability to start their own chapters if they want to.

But wait, I said this was good news. It is! Ryan Walters is resigning!

Walters, 40, said Wednesday night on Fox News that he is stepping down as state superintendent of public instruction to become the CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a nonprofit that says it assists educators “in their mission to develop free, moral, and upright American citizens.”

“We’re going to destroy the teachers unions,” Walters said on Fox. “We have seen the teachers unions use money and power to corrupt our schools, to undermine our schools.”

It is fitting that he is stepping down to join a fanatical, conservative, anti-teacher organization. May he wither away in his new bubble of contempt and hatred for education — it’s where he belongs.

Now the big question: will he be replaced by someone sane? It’s Oklahoma, so probably not.

Disappointment and despair

I was supposed to get surgery on my knee for a torn meniscus tomorrow. I wasn’t looking forward to the surgery itself, but to getting everything back on the path to healing. It’s been three goddamn months!

Then, this past weekend, I had a blood vessel pop in my eye. I immediately went in to the eye clinic, and they confirmed that yes, I had a broken blood vessel, and then to my dismay the hospital went on full alert: this could be a symptom of stroke, so I got blood tests, an electrochardiogram, a CT scan, etc. It was a long day. In the end, everything was fine, no signs of a stroke, the hospital could stand down, everyone relax.

Yesterday, the orthopedist called to cancel my knee surgery. I’m at elevated risk of a stroke, you know, so they’re not going to risk it (I commend their caution). Surgery cancelled, they’ll re-evaluate in six months. Maybe in nine moths. I asked my doctor what I’m supposed to do in the meantime, and she said to take it easy and maintain and consult with PT.

I’ve been thoroughly housebound for 3 months already, and have been taking it easy and maintaining and I met with PT yesterday. I guess I’ll continue sitting in a wheelchair and occasionally hobbling about with the aid of a cane, then.

Unless I stroke out and die, which could happen.

I want one!

I want one of these right now.

This is especially urgent because our current, temporary evil cat knocked my camera down in the night and utterly destroyed a lens, and is now persona non grata, and may find herself kicked out of the house permanently. Fortunately, it was a cheap little pancake lens, but I haven’t yet evaluated any damage to the camera body. Right now I have to figure out how to lock her out of my office.