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.

Are some people becoming desensitized to the threat of millions dead?

I think so. It’s certainly the case in the US, where people protest the imposition of mask-wearing over the corpses of a million dead Americans, but this is something else. It’s a post from Adam Something, whose work I normally appreciate, but this is insane.

Let’s talk a bit about nuclear war.

As the invasion falters, Putin will be making more and more nuclear threats – the only thing he has left. These will most likely be just that: threats. I doubt him, or the Russian elite is suicidal.

If it came to nuclear war, Russia would essentially be deleted from the face of the planet, while the West would generally survive in some form or another.

A nuclear war right now would not be the end of humanity. Sure, it would suck, and by that I mean a LOT of people dying, at least a billion plus. However, it wouldn’t erase life from the planet.

Our goal must never be the ‘deletion’ of Russia. There are 140+ million Russian people who deserve as much right to survival, and peace and happiness, as everyone else in the world. Incinerating them in a nuclear war is not a desirable result, ever, under any circumstances. That the West would “survive” does not excuse the act, and “survival” has a wide range of meanings. How many of these Western people would die? If one hundred survive, is that a victory?

Humanity not going extinct is an awfully low standard to meet. A “mere” billion dead is not a trivial number, and I think he’s lowballing it. A limited tactical strike on some battlefields, sure, casualties could be limited, but if we trigger a world-wide spasm of major powers targeting the civilian populations of their opponents, that billion is only what dies immediately…then the collapse of civilian infrastructure follows, killing more, and the riots and wars that break out kill even more, and then the world famine destroys yet more.

Consider how most of our media (movies, games, etc) dealing with nuclear war takes place during the cold war, or its fictional continuation. At that point we did have enough nukes to format the planet. However, since then we have decommissioned 80% of our total nuclear arsenal, meaning a nuclear war would be fought with only a fifth of the firepower.

Also, not all our (as in: humanity’s) nukes are ICBMs. Many of them can’ t even be deployed unless you haul it above a city with a plane. Many are “just” warheads sitting in warehouses, and couldn’t immediately be launched. This is especially true to Russia, as they would be deleted long before any of those warheads could be used.

Another thing to consider is how those strikes would be distributed. Russia has to blanket the whole of Europe and US, possibly more, while the West only has to strike Russian strategic targets. This is a guaranteed death sentence for the Russian elite, including Putin. Hence I don’t think he’ll press the button, or even if he tried, he’d end up with a hole in his head.

Yes, we have gradually reduced the size of nuclear arsenals. But one-fifth of overkill is still mass murder.

Also, assassinating Putin and his cronies sounds like the most desirable outcome of such a war…but this is the crudest, clumsiest, ugliest way of achieving that end. It requires killing tens of millions (at the least) ordinary, innocent Russians to stop a handful of criminals.

Then the following is pollyannaish nonsense:

Otherwise radiation from nuclear bombs dissipates very quickly. You know how in Fallout games everything is still radioactive after 200 years? As far as I know that’s bullshit.
48 hours after the strike, the radiation will have already gone down by 99%, and at 72 hours it should be safe to come out. The tricky part is to not be in the blast radius, or at least be in a basement when a strike happens near you. That, or a sturdy enough building, in which case you should stay in the middle, on the lowest floor. Don’t go to upper floors, as fallout will accumulate on the roof.
Food and drink in closed containers that were inside during the strike should be generally safe to consume, so chances are you won’t die of hunger or dehydration.

To sum up, Putin will threaten with nukes, but it’s unlikely he will actually use them. Even if he does though, the world won’t end, plus your chances of survival aren’t bad if the bomb wasn’t dropped directly on you, and you can stick it out in a basement for 3 days.

Pure madness. Just avoid being in the blast radius! You’re safe as long as you stay in the basement! Fallout will only accumulate on the roof! Also on all the acreage dedicated to growing your food, and on all the reservoirs that supply your drinking water. You won’t die of hunger or dehydration right away, that’s true, but how long will the canned food and bottled water in your house last? Haven’t we learned already about how supply chains can be disrupted? This is a survivalist fantasy, and I hate it.

It is true that biology is remarkably resilient, and we won’t get that video game/syfy movie nonsense of monstrous mutants roaming a radioactive wasteland. Even in the best of circumstances, where the victims are an isolated population that can be supported by the remainder of society, you’re going to see a surge in cancer incidence over many years, and even longer term effects on mental health and social interactions. People have studied these things in great detail. You can look up the long-term consequences of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, for instance, and it wasn’t over after 3 days.

This paper examines long-term consequences of one of the most serious catastrophes ever inflicted on humankind: the atomic bombing that occurred in Hiroshima in 1945. While many victims died immediately or within a few years of the bombing, there were many negative effects on survivors in terms of both health and social/economic aspects that could last many years. Of these two life factors, health and social/economic aspects, the latter has largely been ignored by researchers. We investigate possible long-lasting effects using a new dataset covering the middle and older generations in Hiroshima some 60 years after the tragedy. Our empirical results show that Atomic Bomb Survivors did not necessarily suffer unfavorable life experiences in terms of the average marriage status or educational attainment but did experience significant disadvantages some aspects including the husband/wife combination of married couples, work status, mental health, and expectations for the future. Thus, survivors have suffered for many years after the catastrophe itself.

That’s an analysis of the survivors, and doesn’t include the 200,000 dead, obviously. We’re talking decades of suffering from a single relatively small and primitive nuclear bomb.

Don’t downplay the threat and dangers of nuclear war. Keep it up and you’ll find Jim Bakker running advertisements for his food buckets on your YouTube channel.

One other thing I have to mention: my views on this subject are a product of the 1960s-1980s. In particular, a big influence was George Streisinger, who most of you might have heard of for his essential work as a pioneer of zebrafish research. But also, at the same time, he was a major activist working against nuclear war and for disarmament. There was a whole cadre of biologists at that time who started out as physicists during WWII who then switched to genetics and molecular biology; George was a Hungarian Jew who fled that country to escape the Nazis, and studied viral genetics. He would be shocked to learn that some people now regard nuclear war as a minor setback in their goal of exterminating their enemies.

He was one of the good guys. I’ll always be on his side.

Living the dream

Temperatures have been in the positive degrees centigrade for much of this week, and we’ve started seeing a few spiders outdoors. It’s time for them to start emerging and filling the world with their terrible beauty. Making me king is entirely optional.

Myers vs. Meyers: the final, ultimate showdown

I will finally get to the bottom of this. I have discovered that there will be a YouTube interview with the notorious PZ Meyers today at 6pm Central, and I intend to hunt him down and confront him over his long history of stalking me. I will crash this video and tackle the horrible (although, admittedly, handsome) rascal and settle this once and for all.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t show up, though. Meyers is a coward who has been dodging me for decades.

What is a job at UCLA worth?

Turns out it’s a little less high-status than you might imagine.

I’ve seen this sort of thing a few times before. They’ve created a soft money position for someone — they’re going to provide lab space or an office to someone who is then expected to write grants for their salary. The only difference here is that they were probably compelled by university policy to publicly advertise the position, thereby exposing one of the dirty underhanded secrets of academia to the whole world.

This ought to be criminal, except…this is a way to give someone an opportunity to work in a university for the status, the facilities, and — dare I say it — the exposure. Sometimes it’s done as a way to give a spouse a position.

Republicans grasping at children give me the creeps

Hey, remember Matt Shea? He’s the Republican politician who proposed splitting Washington state in two, and further, wanted to name the new state “Liberty”. He’s a caricature of a far right conservative.

Also, he dropped out when the more rational people of Washington noticed that he was nothing but a provocateur who kept getting tangled up with armed insurrectionists, so he’s no longer in office, fortunately.

Shea was a longtime far-right legislator in the Washington House of Representatives until 2020, when he opted not to run for reelection after a report concluded that he’d engaged in domestic terrorism — the result of his involvement in the standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife refuge.

Shea, who the report found had been involved in several armed stand-offs, is also known for his support of a separatist 51st state movement, and for authoring a document, “Biblical Basis for War,” that included steps for killing non-believers (Shea is Christian).

You might be wondering what he’s up to now. He’s in Poland, where he seems to have kidnapped 62 Ukrainian children.

Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, the far-right Republican who was found by a House-commissioned investigation to have planned and participated in domestic terrorism, is in a small town in Poland with more than 60 Ukrainian children, trying to facilitate their adoption in America.

Shea has said his group helped rescue 62 children and their two adult caregivers from an orphanage in Mariupol, the city in southeastern Ukraine that has been bombarded by Russian forces.

No one is actually calling it kidnapping yet — they’re accepting, more or less, Shea’s claim that he “rescued” them. Somehow I doubt that.

But international agencies say, with the chaos and confusion of war, now is not an appropriate time for international adoptions from Ukraine. And Shea’s presence, and the lack of information surrounding the American group he’s with, has raised concerns among some residents of Kazimierz Dolny, the small Polish town where the children are staying at a hotel-guesthouse.

“I asked him many times, ‘What are you going to do with these children?’ and he told me that it’s not my business,’” Weronika Ziarnicka, an aide to the mayor of Kazimierz Dolny, said of Shea. “I got the feeling in my gut that something’s wrong with this guy; he didn’t want to tell me his last name.”

Shea claims he’s doing this on behalf of a Texas adoption agency. It’s a bit dodgy.

Loving Families and Homes for Orphans appears to have a website, but it is nonfunctional.

The group, based in Fort Worth, registered with the Texas secretary of state in 2018. No such group is registered as an adoption agency with the Texas Department of Health and Human Services. The group is also not registered with the Intercountry Adoption Accreditation and Maintenance Entity, the group that oversees American agencies involved in international adoption.

I imagine there are many Ukrainian families who have sent their children out of the country to avoid the terrors of war. Imagine doing that for your kids and then discovering that they’d been scooped up by some fanatical ideologue and shipped off to Texas to be stolen by Western conservative Christians — we don’t even know that these are orphans at this point.

Artur Pomianowski, the mayor of Kazimierz Dolny, said in a post on Facebook that he’d visited the children and they are safe and being well cared-for. He also said the “case is being investigated and clarified by the relevant authorities” and that the kids would not leave Kazimierz Dolny without consent of the authorities.

“I do not know what Matt Shea and his friends are doing here around children,” Pomianowski said in an email. “Mr. Shea and his friends have given us some contradictory information and, for that reason, it is difficult for us to trust them.”

That’s putting it mildly.

In related news, Matt Shea’s old buddy, Ammon Bundy, is also in the news, and it’s about a child. Bundy is making terrorist threats against a hospital in Idaho, which has responded by going into lockdown and rerouting patients. He is trying to get a baby out of the hospital.

The baby was temporarily removed from from family custody last Friday after officials determined the 10-month-old was “suffering from severe malnourishment” and at risk of injury or death, according to a statement from police in the city of Meridian near Boise.

The baby’s parents had refused to let officers check on the child’s welfare after the family canceled a medical appointment, the police statement said.

I don’t think either Matt Shea or Ammon Bundy ought to ever be trusted with the welfare of any children anywhere, yet there they are. I don’t even understand why these horrible people are still running free, let alone why they have the privilege of claiming they’re working in the interests of children.

Conservative Christian Comedian is an oxymoron

Matt Powell posted a new video last night — it’s a prank, just for fun. He also says This video was made for one of the channel followers who is on his death bed. Want him to be able to have a good laugh… God bless! I’m not going to link to it, but I’ll summarize. Powell drives up to some local businesses — a fast food place, a tire store, a Walmart, etc. — waves over an employee, and says that he just wanted to let them know he’s opening a competing store just down the road, and he’s not afraid of them. This gets nothing but baffled looks from his victims.

That’s it. That’s all it is, multiple times.

Somebody explain it to me. It must be some kind of in-joke, but it’s feeble in conception and execution, if it is.

Also, if I’m dying, and I ask you to tell me something funny so I can laugh one more time, could you please do a better job than Powell? I think maybe you better practice your best jokes in the comments, because if you do something like this pathetic performance by Matt Powell, I’m going to be so disappointed and pissed off.

We must preserve the purity of our essence

Chilling. Putin is decrying the influence of the degenerate West, with their “foie gras, oysters, and gender freedom”, but the most terrible line is this one: “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion, and readiness to respond to any challenges.” Uh-oh. “Purification” is a scary word. The dictator of Russia is talking about cleaning house — here come the purges, in response to his embarrassment in Ukraine.

That is exactly the sentiment that resonates with our authoritarian right wing. If only we could end gender freedom and purify the American people, we would be stronger! The white supremacists, like Nick Fuentes and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, are eating this stuff up. You know you’re way out on the fringe when even a dumbass like Herschel Walker is backing away from you.

OMG, they’ve also lost wacky conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez! What next? Will Ben Garrison say something nice about a Democrat?