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.)
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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.

It must hurt when he ejaculates

Wow. There are actually people who still believe in spermism, to an even more extreme than Pythagoras?

Actually he was in your husbands balls you just carry the home he needs to grow in
“eggs develop in a female fetus during pregnancy. So while she was in her mother’s womb, she grew fallopian tubes, ovaries, and uterus.”
No shit. The point is the actual BABY was in your partners balls. You carry the tools to hold the baby for it to grow and develop but that baby itself was never part of you. It’s home, the egg it grew from yes but what actually creates the baby no women don’t got that power.

In case you were unfamiliar with historical embryology, this was spermism.

As most of the ancient Greek thinkers were, Pythagoras was half scientist and half mystic, and for the longest time his theory on inheritance prevailed. Pythagoras’s theory attempted to explain the mechanisms between the physical similarity, or “likeness,” of parents and their offspring. At the heart of his theory lay his suggestion that hereditary information was carried predominantly in male sperm. This hereditary information was gathered by the sperm circulating throughout the body and absorbing metaphysical information from its environment (arms, legs, heart, etc.). Since this theory focused mainly around the sperm, it became known as spermism. This information-infused unit matured in the womb whose main objective, according to Pythagoras, was to provide nutrients for this raw data to be transformed into a child. The focus around the male as the primary source of hereditary information had far-reaching effects in society, with civilizations viewing women as nothing more than “human incubators,” and men being considered the forebearer of all children.

Spermism was effectively replaced by Aristotle’s view that both male and female carried hereditary information, so he’s only 2500 years behind on his homework. Nobody is arguing that there is a whole flotilla of complete babies swimming in semen, which would make every ejaculation a horrific mass murder of between 10 and 200 million babies. This ignorant guy probably considers himself “pro-life” while picturing every sexual encounter (or masturbation) as a horrific slaughter of “babies”.

It’s not the escalator that was broken

Trump gave an embarrassing speech at the UN, full of whininess and petulance and egotism, and on social media all you’ll find is conspiracy theorists inventing conspiracies about an escalator that stopped working and a faulty teleprompter. We need to stop funding the UN because they intentionally stopped an escalator! It’s the most petty stuff yet.

Except that the AP reports the actual causes:

Stephane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, said a videographer from the U.S. delegation who ran ahead of him triggered the stop mechanism at the top of the escalator.

“The safety mechanism is designed to prevent people or objects accidentally being caught and stuck in or pulled into the gearing,” Dujarric said in a statement. “The videographer may have inadvertently triggered the safety function.”

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A U.N. official speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue contributed that one to his side as well, saying the White House was operating the teleprompter for the president.

That did not stop Trump from complaining about it in his speech, nor has it prevented the MAGA hordes from inventing scenarios where the minor incidents were contrived to afflict the president.

It’s a distraction. What everyone should be talking about is his rambling, incoherent, accusatory speech where he made up lies about stopping 7 wars and that he deserved a Nobel prize for each of them (he’s obsessed with prizes, like a 4 year old at Chuck E. Cheese), and went on to accuse every other nation of being failures who had fallen for the scams of environmentalists. It was absolutely deranged. This ought to be grounds for impeachment due to incompetence, except that all the Republicans believe that Trumpism is what will keep them in power, and we also dread seeing JD Vance elevated further.

I mean, really, his brain is broken.

Oh, and about that claim that he ended 7 wars:

And the Cambodian-Thai border crisis is still going on.

He’s done diddly-squat but he wants a Nobel peace prize for it.