Farmers will be harvesting shrapnel for generations

I have thankfully read through a lot of posts about the war and Ukraine and decided little has changed and I don’t need to write about it. Though there are a few things to mention. The focus of efforts has turned to the city of Severodonetsk. Russia has been fighting hard to take it and Ukraine has been fighting just as hard to keep it. But it is on the wrong side of a river and Lysychansk, on the other side of that river, is much more easily defensible. Kos of Daily Kos has been pondering why Ukraine has been making the deadly effort. Kos quoted the Institute for the Study of War, which might have an answer:

Severodonetsk itself is important at this stage in the war primarily because it is the last significant population center in Luhansk Oblast that the Russians do not control. Seizing it will let Moscow declare that it has secured Luhansk Oblast fully but will give Russia no other significant military or economic benefit. This is especially true because Russian forces are destroying the city as they assault it and will control its rubble if they capture it.

Kos added:

Lots of people will die for a pile of rubble, all in the name of propaganda. Russia wants it to declare all of Luhansk Oblast captured, and Ukraine wants it to deny Russia that propaganda victory. If Ukraine wants to bleed Russia, there is a vastly more defensible position literally across the river at Lysychansk. Ukraine has made a habit of exceeding expectations. Let’s hope they do it again in Severodonetsk.

Kos included a photo of fields with lots of craters from artillery shells. He wrote, “Farmers will be harvesting shrapnel for generations.” News site Visegrád tweeted with a picture:

A Russian vessel has been photographed in a Syrian port from a satellite. "Matros Pozynych" is loaded to the brim with grains stolen from Ukraine. Army of thieves, it always was.

Another from Visegrád, this one with video.

Putin’s propagandists on Russian state television now say that the “special military operation” has ended and that the real war, World War 3, has started. They also say that the goal is no longer to “demilitarize Ukraine” but to “demilitarize all of NATO”

Unless Putin is considering nukes, the response to this is something I wrote before: Yeah? You and what army? Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted tweets from Velina Tchakarova:

There won't be any peace negotiations no matter how often Germany & France (small-size countries in Europe have no geopolitical weight) call Putin. Once Russia establishes control over Donbas & reaches its war goals in the this phase, Moscow will unilaterally declare ceasefire. Preventing Russia from winning in this critical phase of the war requires the heavy weapons deliveries to Ukraine to sustain the Russian attacks. If Ukraine has to give up on territories in Donbas for the sake of Western appeasement, this won't stop the war. On the opposite.

Dworkin also quoted a thread by Phillips O’Brien, who was responding to a tweet by Andrij Melnyk replying to people who are saying Ukraine should “compromise” with Russia. O’Brien wrote:

This is what I don’t get about those calling for the Ukrainians publicly to cede lots of territory. At best that land will see brutal ethnic cleansing, and possibly mass murder on an epic scale. The Ukrainians on that territory will be wiped out. They are calling for this. Instead of saying they are in favour of ceding territory, why don’t they say they are in favour of ethnic cleansing and societal destruction. That would be more honest. This is not like Alsace/Lorraine being handed back and forth between France and Germany in 1871 or 1918, it’s like saying parts of Poland should be given to the Nazis in 1939.

Dworkin shifted topics to quote a thread by Thomas Zimmer, a professor of history. Zimmer included a tweet by Drew McKevitt who quoted Joey Johnson:

This is a thread of political radicalization, no doubt, but it's also a thread of conspicuous consumption. Guns are expensive. Working-class people cannot afford these arsenals.

Zimmer:

This is a crucial observation – and it points to a problematic distortion in the broader political discourse: White people parading guns are automatically coded as “regular folks,” or “real Americans” in the parlance of the Right, while their socio-economic status is ignored. In addition to the fact that the GOP is all in on the culture of gun-toting militancy, that’s another reason why Republican politicians have their families pose with whole arsenals of firearms: They want to signal how very much in touch they are with “real America.”

That tweet include photos of families posing with guns (are these supposed to be family Christmas cards? Yeesh!) More from Zimmer:

When people can afford to invest in a collection of kevlar vests and all sorts of weaponry, this is seldom discussed as the extravagant lifestyle of white conservatives (as opposed to, say, liberal elites indulging in “luxury items” like e-bikes). In that way, the conventions of political terminology are often entirely in line with the self-description of white conservatives - not coincidentally creating and perpetuating the idea of “regular folks” as a clearly racialized category of specific political valence. These conventions perpetuate the pervasive assumption of a white “normal” that still governs the American political and cultural discourse. Concepts like “working class,” or “parents,” or “Christians” often come with a silent “white.”

Republicans try to present themselves as the party of the working class. But they’re completely detached from actual working class Americans. In claiming that connection they also claim their voters are “regular folks” and those who vote for Democrats are “elites” – though strangely by that definition a lot of poor black people are elite. Finally, Dworkin quoted Jake Charles quoting Scientific American:

More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members.

Charles added: “This is such a jaw-dropping line.” Michel Martin of NPR talked to Ryan Busse. He’s a former gun industry executive and is now a senior advisor to the gun violence prevention organization founded by Gabby Giffords. He wrote the book Gunfight: My Battle Against The Industry That Radicalized America. Busse grew up on a ranch and loved to hunt with his dad and now hunts with his boys. The NRA tapped into that culture. After a while Busse realized the NRA twisted that connection and inserted fear. Then 15 years ago the NRA ended its ban on prominent advertising of tactical gear used by the Buffalo shooter. Up to that point they didn’t want to incite irresponsible behavior. Busse said:

It happened because the NRA figured out that radicalization, hate, fear, racism - those things could gin up a populace to vote in irrational ways. If you could keep - I like to say that they could keep this group of, you know, fervent NRA fans just in the populist, just one degree below boiling. And then they were volatile. They could get them to vote in very irrational ways. Well, it turned out that those same exact things made people buy guns and still - and make people buy guns. And when you mix in, you know, classically authoritarian things, militarism, so this tactical gear, AR-15, which were persona non grata in the industry up until about 2006 or '7, you mix all that in, and you start to have an even more volatile situation. And I'm worried now that it's gotten to the point where it threatens our democracy, but the spillover effects darn sure threaten our kids in schools. ... And it's all based on fear. And you're going to see it classically at the NRA convention. You're going to hear people say, see, these people are going to use the death of these kids to come get our freedoms, to come get our rights. And you see how it's framed into this fear of loss. Something horrible is framed into fear of loss. ... One thing that I really think is important for listeners to understand is that the Trump administration and Donald Trump himself kind of viscerally knew that racism, angst, turmoil, conspiracy, hatred, all those things were good for him because they created such a fearful, tumultuous populace that they made rush out and vote for him when they might not otherwise.

Busse senses a shift that responsible gun owners, the vast majority of gun owners, may stand up and say that’s enough. He added:

This glorification of militarized violence, this faux patriotism, this you can only be a man - there's an actual man card campaign. You purchase an AR-15 and get your man card. That was the advertising campaign that led to the sale of the Sandy Hook rifle and the exact same rifle that was used in the Buffalo shooting.

In a democracy we have to figure out how to balance rights and responsibilities. Right now they’re way out of whack. Walter Einenkel of Kos posted a couple videos of Australian comedian Jim Jefferies at a show in Boston discussing America’s love of guns. Back in 1996 a shooter killed 35 people and seriously injured another 23. In response Australia passed sweeping gun reforms. Alas, Jefferies’ routine, given in 2014, is still accurate. I watched it, all 15 minutes in two parts. He says he’s not really against guns. He’s against BS and lies. About the only argument for guns, and it’s not a great one, is “I like guns.” The lies: I need guns to protect my family: So why assault guns? Where are the defense guns? How many enemies who want to murder you do you have? Teachers should have guns: What about the students bent on making the teacher cry? If we ban guns only criminals will have guns: In Australia an assault weapon on the black market is $34 thousand. If you have $34 thousand you don’t need to be a criminal. In a comparison: I’m a responsible slave owner. I’m trained in how to use my slaves safely. Just because that guy mistreats his slaves doesn’t mean my rights should be taken away from me. Down in the comments is another clip of Jefferies a couple years later on Conan, adding a bit more. This one is two minutes.

Intended as a final act, to be witnessed, to be a spectacle

My Sunday movie was actually a few short films. These are from a list I had accumulated. In a Moment is a German film. Max is new to the high school. He meets Leon who is openly gay and accepted as that by the other students. His father is wrapped up in soccer matches and thinks gay kids have it hard. At a school open mike program Max sings a song he wrote about busting out of his fortress. All that in 17 minutes. It won a few awards. In Louder than Words Ansel is looking for a place to practice his guitar and encounters a dance lesson featuring Niall, who is pretty good. Ansel discovers Niall is deaf and keeps time by feeling the musical beats. He’s also good at lip reading so he understands what Ansel is saying, though Ansel doesn’t get the signs. It takes a moment for Ansel to admit the attraction. Under 17 minutes. There were several scenes I wished were a bit more brightly lit and in Niall’s opening dance perhaps the camera could have backed up a bit to include more of the dancer. Tyler is a super smart white nine year old who goes to lunch with his older half brother black Daniel. Tyler admits to having a boyfriend. Can someone so young come out? Some gay men say they always knew. Under 16 minutes. Out, a Pixar short. Greg and Manuel are packing up to move. Greg’s parents show up to help pack. One problem – Greg hasn’t told his parents he’s gay and there is evidence of his love to Manuel around the house. A couple gay spirits help to set things right. There is a minute long intro by the director and producer at Pixar and the actual movie is about 10 minutes. I’m pleased this is on YouTube rather than hidden within Disney+. I see a problem – how does one find out if a gay short film is any good? Many movie sites don’t rate them. Do I face the problem the film might be shorter than the time it takes to find out about it? IMDB showed me a link to a list of 113 gay themed movies. Most of these are feature length. Many appear to be of the type where A with this background meets B with that background and they fall in love or, because of their backgrounds, have a hard time dealing with their attraction. How many of this type can I watch before their sameness all runs together? It’s one thing to watch a gay love story once a year, another to watch one every week. Also, while they have viewer ratings not all have an outside rating by Metacritic. So for many it is hard to tell whether they are worth watching. Even so, I found a few to add to my movie wish list. I have already seen several of them – Love Simon, Edge of Seventeen, Call Me By Your Name, Giant Little Ones, Were the World Mine, Young Royals, C.R.A.Z.Y., The Way He Looks, The Strong Ones, Swan Song, Proud, and Pride. I’m sure I wrote about many of these. So there is my own list of recommendations. Leila Fadel of NPR spoke to James Densley, a professor at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota. He and Jillian Peterson created the Violence Project. They researched nearly 200 mass shooters to figure out what they had in common. Their reason for doing it is to hopefully prevent the next one. Some of the things they found: Very often a mass shooter is not living a fulfilled life (this sounds like an understatement). They reach a crisis point where they no longer care if they live or die – a suicide crisis. The shooting is intended as a final act and intended to be witnessed, to be a spectacle. A hatred of self becomes a hatred of others. Once they decide their life crisis needs to be resolved through a bloody spectacle the next step is getting access to a gun. They are inspired by other shooters. They study what others did. They try to use the same weapons. They cite other shooters in the manifestos they leave behind. Prevention has three parts. There is the individual level – are guns in the home securely stored? There is the institutional level – school or workplace crisis intervention teams attuned to the warning signs of someone on the path to violence. There is the societal level – universal background checks, red flag laws, and other straightforward measures. In the Violence Project book and in discussions like this one Densley never mentions the names of shooters. He won’t give them any notoriety. He also wants to focus on the solutions, not the shooters. SemDem of the Daily Kos community discussed why conservatives are much more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. First, yes, it is conservatives. Do fake news with liberals and the claim is debunked rather promptly and everyone moves on. Conservatives register a greater response to negative stimuli. They tend to view the world as a dangerous place. That’s why fearmongering is used so much and works so well. Liberals tend to be more hopeful. They look at the benefits and drawbacks of actual policy.

Democrats push legislation to expand rights, create programs, or build infrastructure. Conservatives, however, tend to promote bills to address perceived dangers-–even if the dangers are fake.

A Republican Congressman noted that up to 2015 90% of discussions were about policy and 10% about perceived threats. Since then those numbers have flipped. Both the left and right tend to believe claims that support their views (it’s called confirmation bias). However, conservatives are more likely to believe outright lies – and the right’s media machine is happy and eager to oblige. Recent research showed those most likely to spread misinformation were low-conscientiousness conservatives who also had an appetite for chaos. That second trait is defined, SemDem wrote, quoting the study, as “a motivation to take down the social and political institutions to ‘assert dominance and superiority of one’s own group.’ ” Yup, all about their high position in the social hierarchy by oppressing those they want below them. The right’s media machine is also conditioning their audience to mistrust fact providers. They are told all other sources are biased (well, yeah, because facts have a liberal bias). So if the poor viewer can’t trust anyone it is easier to trust those pushing conspiracy theories. The right had built a gigantic information bubble, an echo chamber. Negative info about one of “their” officials is treated as a partisan attack. Negative info of an opposition official is treated as a major scandal. But that bubble can work two ways. Putin has been injecting misinformation into American politics – the top Facebook posts changed drastically when Russia couldn’t post. Yet, a bubble around Putin prevented him from knowing the likely outcome of his invasion of Ukraine. Researchers paid some Fox News viewers to watch CNN instead. I think the experiment ran for a month. They changed their minds on many issues. There was a 5% switch in believing long Covid is real to 13% less likely to agree that if Biden were elected there would be more Black Lives Matter activists shooting police. It is possible, though not easy, to pull someone out of the bubble. It is hard because they have been trapped by fear.

No place is safe

If you really want to read the details (and I understand if you don’t), Joan McCarter of Daily Kos wrote about the inaction of the Uvalde police while the shooter was amongst children. I also understand if you want to skip the stories of what some children did to survive. Kerry Eleveld of Kos wrote that it’s time to retire that myth that the way to stop bad guys with guns is good guys with guns. Wrote Eleveld:

That did not work in Uvalde, nor did it work weeks ago in Buffalo, where an armed, off-duty security guard and former police officer was unable to stop the racist slaughter of nine Black grocery store shoppers. The guard was also killed. Yet, so far, we have yet to hear even one Republican lawmaker admit that it's time to put to rest the failed “good guys with guns” myth that has been perpetrated on the American people.

After listing some of the variations of this lie Republicans are still spouting Eleveld wrote:

The truth is, law enforcement seems very very afraid of the firepower now pulsing through America—turns out AR-15s are uniquely scary killing machines. It's not just the resource officers. DPS [Texas Department of Public Safety] Lt. Chris Olivarez explained to CNN Wednesday that local officers hesitated to do their jobs because they were being shot at. “Don’t current best practices, don’t they call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on-site?” Wolf Blitzer asked Olivarez. "The active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life, but also one thing that—of course, the American people need to understand—that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is," Olivarez responded. "They are receiving gunshots. At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school. They could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed.

Walter Einenkel of Kos wrote about Sen. Ron Johnson fleeing from reporters. The reporters wanted to ask, “Why not expand background checks?” As part of his post Einenkel wrote:

The “solutions” being offered up by those on the right are a mixture of suggestions to turn our schools into prisons and to enact various degrees of authoritarian measures. About 99% of the proposed “solutions” have already been tried, and because they do not fix the problem of everybody having guns, they have also been proven not to work.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Amanda Taub of the New York Times:

Desegregation sparked a reactionary backlash among white voters, particularly in the south, who saw it as overreach by the Supreme Court and federal government. That backlash, with the help of conservative political strategists, coalesced into a multi-issue political movement. Promises to protect the traditional family from the perceived threat of feminism drew in white women. And influential conservative lawyers framed the Second Amendment as a source of individual “counterrights” that conservatives could seek protection for in the courts — a counterbalance to progressive groups’ litigation on segregation and other issues.

Dworkin also quoted NBC News who had stories from people who survived the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. They feel grief as the trauma is revived and anger because their school shooting ten years ago was supposed to be the one that prompted politicians to act. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary:

Congress could pass HR-8, a bill that was passed by the House over a year ago which would close loopholes in the background checks law. It's being held up by Senate Republicans, possibly because background checks are only supported by 90 percent of voters. Ninety percent! The only thing more popular than background checks is Dolly Parton riding a giant corgi bringing you ice cream. —Stephen Colbert Maddeningly, there are those who say they support gun-control measures, but aren’t willing to use their power to get those measures passed. Like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who said he would do “anything I can” to move common-sense gun legislation forward, but still refused to eliminate the filibuster. Then you're not willing to do anything you can! It's like if you told your spouse you're willing to do anything to clean the dishes except get up from the couch. —Seth Meyers

Scott Simon, in his opinion moment on NPR on this morning, listed the various locations of mass shootings since 2000: elementary, middle, and high schools; community colleges and universities; churches, synagogues, and a Sikh temple; on streets, in parking lots, in factories and post offices, airports, movie theaters, nightclubs, shopping malls and diners; military bases, in municipal buildings, at festivals, in bowling alleys and spas; supermarkets, health care clinics and apartment complexes, nursing homes, trailer parks, and subways. Simon called it a grim routine. It keeps happening and nothing changes. I’ll describe the list another way that I heard expressed in the last few days – the supremacists are telling us: No place is safe. Daily Kos and NPR are my primary sources of news. That’s because I distrust much corporate news. A couple days ago Kos reached 20 years since its founding. Kos posted about what prompted him to start the site – conservative voices dominated mass media and “liberal” voices weren’t all that liberal (remember political triangulation?). He also discussed how it has grown into a community. True Blue Majority reported on the results of the Koscars for best posts by the community in the categories of Snark/Satire, Call to Activism, Downballot Candidate Story, Community Group, Series, Community Writer, Personal Essay, Rant, and Congeniality. I had written about the Snark/Satire category when there was a request for nominees. I looked at that list when voting began (I didn’t vote because I had read so few of the nominees). Here are a couple posts that were nominated for Snark/Satire that I read and appreciated, but didn’t win. Hunter explained the dark meaning of the Itsy-Bitsy Spider poem that children are taught. An excerpt:

The last two lines of the song may, however, be the saddest of all. Only when the spider has lost all progress does the rain stop, and not a moment before; only when the spider has been returned to his original, lowest position does the sun deign remove the impediments that have so cruelly blocked and brutalized it. Only then is the sociopolitical state returned to an equilibrium, encouraging the spider, which always remains at least alive after the deluge, to begin its long, futile journey once again. The top, however, will never be reached. The climb is eternal, as is the failure. The spider will never reach the bright light at the end of its lifelong tunnel; never will it taste the free, warm air, except as filtered through the long, dark pipe that defines its struggle. Whether it be economic conditions and the abuses of the upper classes, as is represented by the rain, or the fleeting and inconsistent governmental protections against those abuses, represented by the ever-too-late sun, the spider will never improve its lot even an inch, save as temporary perch.

A lot of progressives are annoyed that Democrats don’t fire back at the vile things Republicans do. There is a joke that Democrats are keeping their powder dry. That is usually followed by a complaint that if there is ever a time to use that powder it is now! as democracy is threatened. In 2007 blueness visited the hidden vaults where all that dry powder is stored. An excerpt:

"This vault we have the most trouble with," he said, swinging wide the doors to an enormous room filled with blood-red powder molded into a ninety-foot-high statue of Saddam Hussein. "The dry powder for Iraq. "In the early days," he explained, "Dean was the worst--he was in here scooping it up as fast as we could dry it. Nowadays it's Kerry and Feingold--that lot--who we can't keep out of here. Worse than mice in a granary, those two! Couple of damn powder-pilferers! We've even chained-out pit bulls here: doesn't matter. They keep coming back." He shook his head sorrowfully. "Kerry, of all people, should know better. It was the Democratic Congress refusing to fund the Vietnam War that lost the war, you know. That and the media, of course. Still, it's we Democrats who get the blame. Just listen to any Fox anchor--they'll tell you." "Are you out of your mind?" I snapped. "The Vietnam War was lost because in a post-colonial world no nation of any decent size or population is going to be successfully occupied by anybody. The Russians learned that in Afghanistan, and so will we. We're learning it every day in Iraq." "You sound like Kerry," he sneered, "and look what happened to him.

The murderers get to shoot first

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data updated on Wednesday. The situation might be improving. In new cases per day the peaks for the last four weeks are 3475, 4093, 3978, and 3673. That means we’re in a slight decline from a peak two weeks ago. That’s not what it looked like last week. The peak for last week had been 4807 and was adjusted down by over 800 cases. The number of cases for the week before were adjusted up by 100. Last week the deaths per day were mostly in the single digits and the week before they ranged from 8 to 17. That remains pretty good. David Neiwert of Daily Kos reported on what the far right media machine has been doing with the Uvalde, Texas school shooting. The first claim was that the shooter was a transgender woman. They tried to prove their point with a photo. That was debunked by the actual transgender person in the photo who was nowhere near Texas at the time. The lie spread through the media machine anyway. Another attempt was to claim the shooter was an illegal immigrant. Why the transgender line of attack? It is to portray trans people as mentally ill – so ill they’ll shoot up a school. One source of this lie (who I won’t name) said:

What drives an 18-year-old to murder innocent children? I don’t know, but judging by the photos of him cross-dressing, we can assume there were plenty of signs he was mentally disturbed and abused by adults in his life. An adult man that wants to dress up like a female is a glaring symbol of mental disease. A society driven by cowardice prevents this topic from being discussed honestly and openly. All of our children are at risk [because] we refuse to acknowledge—and instead encourage—mental illness.

A reminder there is no photograph of the shooter dressed as a female. And the rest of what this person wrote is pure bunk. As for the claim of being an illegal immigrant that was made to reinforce the lie that immigrants are inherently scary. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote about what is (and isn’t) going on in Congress. She began with:

It’s been 23 years since Columbine. Nine-and-a-half since Sandy Hook. Four since Parkland. Dozens of other schools scattered throughout the grim list in the past two decades. We don’t even have to explain why those place names are seared into the collective conscience. More than 300 shootings during school hours in those decades, and at least 185 children, teens, teachers, and staff slaughtered. More than 311,000 children have directly witnessed gun violence at their school, and millions have been forced to imagine—and act out—what they will do when it happens to them.

Sen. Cory Booker said, “We are caught in the most perverse version of Groundhog Day.” Democrats try to negotiate something. The usual Republican suspects pretend to try to negotiate. That game continues until the news spotlight turns to something else and they end the charade. Until the next time. Hunter of Kos reported that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blamed “mental health” for the school shooting. That’s one of the Republican talking points whenever there is a mass shooting. Hunter calls that out, and a few other things. And, yes, he’s annoyed. He wrote:

In Actual F---ing Fact, Greg Abbott and his Texas Republicans have done exactly the harm to "mental health" programs that every pro-gun Republican hack always does. NBC News politely reminds Abbott that when it comes to access to mental health care, Texas ranks Dead. F---ing. Last. It is the worst state. And, not content with being the worst of the worst but wanting to add their own special Texas capper to it, just last month Abbott and his craven pro-murder Republican buddies hacked a whopping $211 million from state mental health programs. Abbott just cut the very programs he now says were the solution that would have kept these children alive. So Abbott? You're a liar, you're an asshole, and even if we were supposed to believe your stupid bulls---ting attempts to evade responsibility for yet another day of mass deaths, you still just pinned yourself, personally, as The Reason This Happened. ... We're done. Greg Abbott has personally bragged of his efforts to bury his state in murder weapons. He has made it a central plank of his campaigns and of his very personality. He says “mental health” solutions are needed to keep American children alive while cutting programs to provide those solutions.

Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that some dear unnamed soul listed all the “solutions” to school shootings mentioned on Fox News in 24 hours. The list has 49 items on it. There really aren’t many categories of ideas. The main ones are: give more guns to more people, turn the schools into fortresses, and crank up belief in God. And one more: raise your children properly (yeah, blame the victim). Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about the growing story that police assumed the shooter barricaded in a classroom with students was a hostage situation even while gunfire meant that it was an active shooter situation. When there are hostages the plan is to talk the perpetrator out of doing something bad – and wait for reinforcements when necessary. But in an active shooter situation the police need to act promptly to prevent more carnage. Sumner wrote:

For everyone claiming that “more armed officers” at schools is the solution, a reminder that this is far from the first time children have died while police stood by. At the Parkland, Florida, shooting in 2018, a police officer on scene was charged with negligence after hiding rather than confronting the shooter in a mass murder that left 17 people dead.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, had several important quotes. First from Liz Smith of the New York Times who listed the things Republicans voted against: the American Rescue Plan, infrastructure, capping the price of insulin, stopping oil company price gouging, importing baby formula.

Why? Because they want to impose as much misery as possible on the American people so that voters blame Biden and vote Republican in November. It’s really cynical, dark stuff. And then when they win, they want to criminalize abortions and ensure that we never have free and fair elections again. That’s my rant.

I think it is less they want to impose misery so voters blame Biden, and more they want to impose misery. Dworkin quoted Carl Hulse of NYT who quoted Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota. He said Republicans refuse to do anything about guns because they believe voters will throw them out of office. Dworkin also quoted Nicholas Kristof of NYT, who suggested talking about gun safety instead of gun control.

For example, consider the minimum age to buy or possess a gun. The suspects in both the Texas and the Buffalo shootings were only 18, and that’s not a surprise. Americans ages 18 to 20 account for 4 percent of the population but 17 percent of those known to have committed a murder.

On to Akela Lacy of The Intercept:

As the number of school resource officers has ballooned over the last two decades, so has the number of school shootings. There is no evidence that police have the ability to stop these shootings from happening. “The idea that a standard armed school police officer is gonna stop someone in that situation has proven not to be true, time and time again,” said Alex Vitale, a sociologist at the City University of New York and the author of “The End of Policing,” who noted that police and security guards are often the first casualties in mass shooting events.

Finally to a poll reported by Politico. The poll asked about several restrictions on guns and reported on those who approve, those who disapprove, and the net approval, which is the difference between the approval and disapproval scores. Some of what they found: Require background checks on all gun sales: Approve 88%, disapprove 8%, net approval 80. Create a national database about each gun sale: net approval 57. Ban assault weapons: net approval 42 And, alas, equip teachers and staff with guns: net approval 20. Hunter took on more of the Republican talking points, the same ones that get put on display every time there is a mass shooting. Hunter’s lambasting reinforces the idea I mentioned a couple days ago that Republicans and conservatives in general want the mayhem and want the deaths from guns. Texas Republicans say the answer is more police and more guards in schools. But if they believed that they would have done it. They talk about “here’s what we should do” but never follow through. The say we should “harden” schools – bullet resistant doors, bullet resistant backpacks. But that costs money, as does the pay for all those guards. And they won’t adequately pay teachers. All those costs would promote big government, which they oppose. Of course, one way to not have big government is to not have schools. Hunter, with help from tweets by Derek Thompson, countered Sen. Ted Cruz’ claim that more law enforcement will keep kids safe. Studies say when armed guards are present the rate of death is 2.83 times greater. Hunter wrote:

The actual data shows that the more guns you put in schools, the more children end up shot. Putting professional, trained law enforcement officers on guard inside schools results in more children being shot; one can easily imagine the outcome if the other Republican murder fantasy, in which every school teacher in America keeps a loaded gun on their hip or in their desk, came to pass.

Hunter included tweets of David Waldman with headlines of students shot by security officers. Hunter again:

Over, and over, and over. The same story unfolds every day. Putting a loaded gun in a home results in more children dying of gunshot wounds. Putting a loaded gun in a school results in more children dying of gunshot wounds. The less training a parent or security officer has, the more children die of gunshot wounds—while Texas Gov. Greg Abbott brags about his success in making sure his state’s newest gun owners need no training to begin with. ... This is due in large part to the rules of American engagement: The murderers get to shoot first. They get to walk into any business, any public place, shouting and fully armed and ready to kill a dozen or a hundred, and police aren’t allowed to interfere with those unencumbered and holy "gun rights" until the man planning to kill those around him has gotten where he wants to be, raised his gun, and moved his finger to the trigger. Whatever security guards Ted Cruz fetishizes as Our American Solution then die, but as "heroes," or are forced to flee, leaving the gunman to his devices until more militarized forces can arrive on the scene.

Then there are the gun advocates that brag about how they’ll respond if anyone tries to take their guns. Hunter says they are promoting fantasies of good mass murderers ready to get rid of the opposition. They then promote these good murderers as the patriots.

And stop pretending you give a flying damn about our dead children following decade after decade of new laws meant to make it easier to kill them in more places, and faster.

They have a mass murder fantasy. They want the mayhem. They want the deaths.

The Second Amendment is failure and a mistake

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos posted a map of the territory from Kharkiv to Kyiv that Russia controlled in March. This included the cities of Sumy and Chernihiv. Russia left this area by early April. Sumner wrote there is word that Russian forces are again gathering across the border from Sumy and Chernihiv. The first question is what Russian forces? The Russian military, after three months of war, has been significantly degraded. The second question is why? Weren’t they pulled out of norther Ukraine to help the Donbas attack, which isn’t going all that well? Is Russia doing this so Ukraine must divert forces that have been pushing back the Russians threatening Kharkiv? https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/5/25/2100121/-Ukraine-update-As-Russia-captures-towns-in-the-east-it-s-once-again-threatening-the-north The effort to push Russians away from Kharkiv has slowed. Russia’s advance in Donbas is progressing, slowly. Sumner wrote:

Russia is in a stronger position to threaten Ukraine’s eastern cities than it has been at any time since the invasion began. The situation north of Kharkiv is far less rosy than it was two weeks ago, with Ukrainian forces apparently stalled and possibly in retreat from locations that were previously liberated. Things are looking tough. None of this means Russia is about to “win the war.” It doesn’t even mean that Russia is close to achieving the pared down goals it announced after the ignominious retreat from Kyiv. Not that achieving those goals matters, because Ukraine won’t stop fighting just because Putin declares he has filled in his checklist. It is not time for panic. Russia has been pushing their forces forward in patchwork units against defended positions. They’re still having far more failed attempts to advance than they are successful ones.

And NATO weapons are still being put in place. In response to the latest mass shooting, this one in Uvalde, Texas, Sumner discussed the history of the Second Amendment. Some of his major points: The First Amendment, the one on Free Speech, has no qualifiers within its text in the Constitution. And yet the law does put limits on it. Libel and slander are illegal. So is inciting sedition. These laws were updated when radio, movies, television, and internet came along. The boundary between what is and isn’t libel and slander are constantly fought over in court. So, of course, the Second Amendment needs limits and updating as well. The Second Amendment has a qualifier, that part of being part of a well regulated militia. At the time the Constitution was written there was fear of an authoritarian leader or of a new democracy being overthrown by the military. So the Second was written so that state militias could contribute to national defense. At the start of the war of 1812 what national military existed was far from adequate. So were the civilian militias in the states. The Second was a failure. And that was shown more than 200 years ago. In a year the national military quadrupled and state solutions were on their way out.

The Second Amendment is failure. It never worked for its intended purposes. It was born from the understandable fears of a new nation engaged in a radical new scheme. But it was a mistake.

It has been the second most costly mistake in the nation’s history – the costliest was failing to end slavery from the start. The right thing to do would be to repeal it – in the same way the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th. Yeah, Sumner knows how not likely that is to happen.

An AR-15 is not a musket, damn it. It’s not “a modern musket” or the “equivalent of a musket” or anything like a musket, and all the bulls--- in the world won’t make it so. Congress and regulators recognize that changing technology obligates them to change how they deal with other rights. They could at least do that much when it comes to guns. The idea that any government body, from the local city council to Congress, can’t pass regulations limiting the technology that can be included in a weapon is ridiculous. It’s counter to the way we treat every other right, rights that are genuinely unbounded in the Constitution.

And the nonsense that individual citizens have a right to own guns didn’t exist until it appeared in the minds of enough Supreme Court Justices in 2008. Many of them are still on the Court. When the Texas shooting happened Schumer quickly vowed there would be a vote in the Senate over a House passed bill to strengthen background checks. He wanted to make sure American voters knew where their senators stand. Yeah, that didn’t last long. Joan McCarter of Kos reported by the next day Schumer was backing down. The first reason is the Memorial Day recess – the day to mourn and remember the dead. Second reason: Americans already know the position of their senators. And the third, and most true, reason: He doesn’t have the votes and doesn’t want Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to publicly declare they will vote no on breaking the filibuster. And protecting Manchin and Sinema, and their protecting the filibuster, is more important than protecting the lives of children. It is good to see a few senators, such as John Tester of Montana and Mark Kelly of Arizona, expressing their frustration. Mark Kelly’s wife is Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot and nearly killed in 2011. Texas Republicans held a press conference at Uvalde High School. I do not want to know what they said and thankfully April Siese of Kos doesn’t tell us. I’m sure they nicest thing they said was “Thoughts and Prayers,” the rest would have been a steaming pile of ... well, never mind. At this press conference was Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Speaker Dade Phelan, Sens. Cornyn and Cruz – all of them darlings of the NRA. There was one more important person there: Beto O’Rourke the Democratic candidate for Abbott’s job. No, he wasn’t invited. He interrupted the proceedings to call out those on stage saying, “this is on you.” He was escorted from the room. He talked to the press outside, repeating his basic point and listing all the other things that could be done to support grieving Uvalde families. That included things like paying for funeral expenses. And tightening background checks. And banning 18 year olds from buying guns.

An ideology that lends itself naturally to murderous tendencies

In a report from last Friday Charles Jay of the Daily Kos community wrote that the last Ukrainian fighters have left the Azovstal factory in Mariupol. Their fate in the hands of Russian soldiers is unknown, though Russians now have a reputation for brutality. Mariupol was under siege since March 1. At the end of April the factory was surrounded. President Zelenskyy has declared them to be heroes. Kos of Kos wrote again about the tankies in an update from Monday. These are the people who demand peace and allow Putin to save face even though that means Ukraine concedes territory. The tankies include the New York Times editorial board. Strange they say little of what Ukraine thinks of that demand. Strange they get to decide for Biden and Congress what kind of aid to send and to decide for Ukraine how much destruction they should be able to tolerate to preserve their own country. M. Podolyak of Ukraine was rather diplomatic in response:

Today, any concession to Russia is not a path to peace, but a war postponed for several years. Ukraine trades neither its sovereignty, nor territories and Ukrainians living on them. It's a pity that we have to explain such simple things to such reputable media as @nytimes.

Kos quoted Hillel Neuer who tweeted:

Russia’s Counsellor to the United Nations in Geneva has resigned. Boris Bondarev: “Never have I been so ashamed of my country.” UN Watch is now calling on all other Russian diplomats at the United Nations—and worldwide—to follow his moral example and resign.

Part of what Bondarev wrote:

Those who conceived this war want only one thing - to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity. To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes. Thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have already died just for this.

Kos also quoted a tweet from the Lithuanian government that said they are now totally independent from Russian gas, oil, and electricity. Kos included a video posted by Igor Sushko of a bunch of Ukrainian soldiers doing a bit of song and dance in praise of the Bayraktar drones that have been so helpful to their cause. It is good to see them have fun, though the way some of those guns hang is mighty suggestive. By the time I got around to writing about one mass shooting anther has happened (and wasn’t there a smaller one in between?). Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about the shooting at the Tops grocery in Buffalo. She then compared some of the writings of the shooter to things Tucker Carlson of Fox News said back in 2018. Both questioned how does diversity increase strength? Both Carlson and the shooter posed the question to imply diversity does not increase strength. I’ll give that question a moment of serious consideration, meaning what I can come up with in a moment. (1) Diversity encourages the input of multiple points of view so that more points can be considered when shaping a solution. (2) Diversity helps in shaping a solution that is beneficial to all people rather then beneficial to a few and oppressive to others. (3) Diversity demonstrates that all are welcome, which welcomes more people and more diverse people, which lessens the chance of one group trying to declare they should hold a social status higher than others. As a result all are safer. Michael Harriot tweeted:

It’s easy to point to a mass murdering racist and call him a white supremacist. But can we acknowledge that these restrictive voting laws, anti-CRT legislation and gerrymandered maps are also based on the Great Replacement Theory? Probably not.

Georgia Logothetis, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quotes several that I think are worth quoting. Many are talking about the Great Replacement Theory that influenced the Buffalo shooter. This theory claims that liberals are working actively to replace white people with immigrants (definitely meaning black and brown immigrants) so that white people lose political power. Yes, white people in this country are becoming a smaller percentage of the population and about 20 years from now will drop below 50%. But liberals are not actively working to make that happen. Jonathan Chait of the New York Magazine:

Carlson’s allies on the right wish to exculpate him of any blame for the violence committed by his adherents. Their defenses amount to lawyerly haggling, collapsing important distinctions in service of avoiding the obvious: Carlson explicitly advocates “great-replacement theory,” a belief system that has inspired a string of mass murders. [...] Carlson is not directing his audience to commit murder. But he is spreading an ideology that lends itself naturally to murderous tendencies and has accordingly spawned a violent wing. White nationalists see Carlson as their champion, and so too does the vast majority of the conservative movement. ... The defenses of Carlson will ensure that the power of white nationalism continues to grow, along with its body count.

From an NYT editorial:

Replacement theory is an attack on democracy. It privileges the purported interests of some Americans over those of others, asserting, in effect, that the will of the people means the will of white people. It rekindles fears and resentments among white Americans that cynical practitioners of American politics have stoked throughout the nation’s history. It also provides a disturbing rationalization for people inclined to resort to violence when the political process does not deliver what they want or protect what they see as their place in society.

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post:

What we need to talk about is how politicians and thought leaders on the right are using the vile poison of replacement theory to further their own selfish ends — garnering campaign donations and votes, boosting television ratings, achieving fame. And we need to talk about how most of this demagoguery is coming from people who should know, and probably do know, that what they are telling potential killers, such as Payton Gendron, the man in custody after the Buffalo shooting, is complete fiction.

Michelle Norris at WaPo who noted a poll that found nearly half of Republicans believe in a deliberate attempt to decrease white voter influence.

GRT is like the fertilizer that feeds and sustains white fear when America’s racial makeup is changing. These trends will continue and how that is explained — or alternatively exploited — will impact the safety and security of all Americans. But Black and brown people cannot inoculate against fears that Whiteness is no longer America’s cultural default. White people have to do that themselves.

Brittney Cooper at The Cut:

Taken together, violent racist acts like these, the stripping of rights from women, and the collective political will to do absolutely nothing about it effectively inculcate the idea that this is normal. Just accept it. Just be scared. Just demand less. Just shut up. Just stop yelling “Black Lives Matter!” Just stop insisting on your right to vote. Just stop insisting on your right to control your reproduction. Just stop critiquing the police. Just stop it with your demands. Just stop. I imagine images of white people with their fingers in their ears, yelling insolently like children, “I can’t hear you!” in the face of Black protest. Perhaps that’s not fair. But I’m not interested in being fair, or nice, or reasonable, or nuanced, or civil. That s--- does not work.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos has details of the poll Norris referenced. Mark Sumner of Kos dissected a poll by Morning Consult that showed 60% of Republicans voters are more concerned about white replacement than the mass violence of white supremacists. Sumner said the choice is false because one side of the comparison is false. US immigration policy does not try to lessen the influence of white people. Nick Anderson of Kos posted a cartoon about the Great Replacement. Hate, paranoia, fear, and a lot of other garbage are being dumped into a person’s head, replacing their brain. deltopia of the Kos community wrote that since 1850 the percent of the US population that was foreign born has been rather consistently under 15%. This post started with another cartoon: A white man in a suit points to a family and says “It’s time to reclaim America from illegal immigrants!” And a native person replies, “I’ll help you pack.” In another pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Greg Sargent of WaPo interviewing Amy Spitalnick, who takes on neo-Nazis and sees ominous signs.

Sargent: There’s a tendency in the culture and in the media to see these mass shootings as isolated events. But in many of these cases — and particularly Jan. 6 — organizers and shooters see them as part of a much larger struggle. They fully intend for them to be galvanizing of more such events later. Spitalnick: That’s exactly right. They’re not lone wolves. They’re part of a broader extremist network in which each attack is used to inspire the next one.

In case you missed it (and with just the corner of news I consume I doubt you have) here is a report by April Siese of Kos on the latest mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas and the surrounding politics. Biden is annoyed and called for action. Schumer set up a vote in the Senate for a small gun control bill (which won’t pass, certainly not with the filibuster in place). Abby Vesoulis tweeted:

In 2021, Gov. Abbott signed 2 laws allowing Texans 21+ to carry handguns without licenses or gun training, and to allow certain 18-20 year olds to carry handguns too. Today, he says the shooting—which killed at least 14 children and one teacher—is "incomprehensible."

Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that the senators who most talk about prayer as the appropriate (and only) response to a mass shooting are the ones whose campaigns have accepted the most from the NRA. Brady United listed the top senators who have received NRA money and Einenkel lists 20 of them with the amounts they’ve received over the years. Most have received millions. These numbers are from 2019, which makes me wonder how big donations have been since then now that the NRA is “bankrupt.” Einenkel pointed out usually the biggest money goes to candidates in swing states. Why give to Texas Republicans when they’re going to win anyway. Better to donate to candidates in Ohio or North Carolina. However, that doesn’t quite explain Mitt Romney of Utah at the top of the heap receiving $13 million. I don’t believe (and haven’t for a long time) that Republicans refuse to vote for any sort of restrictions on guns because the NRA pays them well. Sure, they’ll take the money and use it to get elected. However, I’m convinced they refuse any sort of restrictions on guns because they’re high in the social hierarchy and want to protect that spot. Guns are very good at enforcing the hierarchy. Their spot in the hierarchy looks better (to them) when those lower down are oppressed. Killing and terrorizing are great tools of oppression. I’m convinced they want that terror. They want that mayhem. They want those deaths. And Americans will keep dying. I had written about Zander Moricz, the gay high school class president who was told he wasn’t allowed to talk about the Don’t Say Gay bill at graduation under threat of his mic being cut. Melissa Higgins of Kos reported the graduation ceremony happened without incident and Moricz talked about the bill without saying “gay” and doing so in a clever manner: Here’s a bit:

I must discuss a very private part of my identity. As you may know, I have curly hair. I used to hate my curls. I spent mornings and nights embarrassed of them, trying to desperately straighten this part of who I am. But the daily damage of trying to fix myself became too much to endure. There are going to be so many kids with curly hair who need a community like Pine View. And they will not have one. Instead, they’ll try to fix themselves so that they can exist in Florida’s humid climate.

Later, Moricz was on Good Morning America, where he said:

I knew that the threat to cut the mic was very real. So I wasn’t gonna let that happen. I just had to be clever about it. But I shouldn’t have had to be, because I don’t exist in a euphemism. I deserve to be celebrated as is.

Higgins included videos of both the graduation speech and the GMA interview.

No one can force you to use your body to save their life

My Sunday movie was Mank, the story of Herman Mankiewicz and the writing of Orson Welles’ most famous movie. Yeah, Mank did the writing. Welles got most of the credit. The writing happened in the late 1930s at a ranch in the California desert. Much of the movie is flashbacks about what prompted Mank to write a veiled skewering of William Randolph Hearst. What did that prompting was the old battle of those with power protecting that power. The 1934 campaign for governor of California had a Republican whose name I don’t remember and Upton Sinclair as the Democratic candidate. I remember reading one of Sinclair’s books in high school that featured descriptions of the meatpacking industry that brought regulations protecting what we eat. Yeah, Sinclair was on the side of the common man and has socialist sympathies. Louis B. Mayer, a friend of Hearst and head of MGM Studio, created videos (I suppose at the time they were called newsreels) to sway public opinion. Many scenes used actors to pretend to be a voice from the street. I enjoyed this one. Mank was usually quite good with a comeback line and it’s an interesting story. A lot of the actors portray real people and it was at times hard to keep them straight. At other times I think, yeah, I’ve heard that name, so why is he famous? I finished the book The Guncle by Steven Rowley. A guncle is a gay uncle. In this case it is Patrick (never Pat because that sounds too straight). He had loved Joe, who had been killed in an auto accident. Patrick had been a TV star and when his series ended he moved to Palm Springs to get away from LA. Patrick’s best friend was Sara, who ended up marrying Patrick’s brother Greg. When Sara died Greg realized he needed to go into rehab and asked Patrick to take his children Maisie, 9, and Grant, 6 in the meantime. Patrick refused, until his sister Clara said she’d take them. Then he wanted to make sure Clara didn’t. This story could have been the hapless gay guy faced with caring for children. It wasn’t. Patrick turned out to be reasonably competent at the parenting thing. Patrick had another thing going for him – he knew grief, though he hadn’t yet dealt with it, and could begin to guide the kids through theirs. It wasn’t all about grieving. He and the kids had some fun times too. Patrick instituted Guncle Rules. An early one was when Maisie saw Patrick’s caftans and was sure they were dresses. This was when Maisie hated the swim suit Aunt Clara had packed. This rule (and I’m paraphrasing) is there are no girls clothes and no boys clothes. There are only comfortable clothes. That’s a nice thing for an uncle to teach. I enjoyed this book. In addition to being a good story it is also quite well written. There were several times when I thought a cultural reference (and there were many) might not be so well understood a few decades from now. I’ve accumulated a bunch of browser tabs about abortion. I’ll get through as many as I can within today’s writing time. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine who discussed the filibuster. It matches what Moscow Mitch wants to get done. Not surprising since he shaped it. The things Mitch wants passed, tax cuts and spending cuts, get passed. Things Mitch wants blocked are blocked. That includes both new regulations and what he considers radical measures, such as a national abortion ban. That last bit is obvious from the way they talk about the leak of the draft Supreme Court ruling and not the contents of the draft. Hunter of Kos reported that Clarence Thomas complained about that leak. Thomas said it is the worst thing to happen in his career. Hunter added that’s a career of stripping away American civil rights. So no sympathy. If I felt I had more time (and a lot fewer things I want to blog about) I’d go more into Hunter’s complaints about Thomas and Alito. And into the New York Times for saying the leaker was being rude to Thomas and that rudeness could lead to the destruction of democracy. Hey, NYT, Thomas and Alito are already got that covered. Hunter discussed a story from Mother Jones about Brighton, New York and their opposition to a new Planned Parenthood clinic in their neighborhood. I can described the basic outline from Mother Jones (though I only read Hunter’s discussion). You’ll have to read Hunter’s post to take in his disdain for the people being described. The basic argument of the residents is that all the aborted fetuses would be flushed down the toilet where it would clog and pollute their pristine waterways. Don’t they understand what happens to the other stuff we put in a toilet? The other complaint is that the clinic would attract undesirables to loiter and play loud music as they smoke marijuana. Sheesh, nope. Hanging out at the abortion clinic is not high on anyone’s idea of a great Friday night. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary:

If Kavanaugh doesn't like the way people in his state are gathering outside his house, maybe he can just take off work and drive hundreds of miles to a different state. —Samantha Bee Just do the nine [months] and plop. Do your nine, leave it on the sidewalk, wrap it up like a little Moses, put it in a little basket and send it down the crick. … Just give it to a stork, and the stork will give it to a lesbian. I would think the lesbians would be happy because now there's more babies to adopt—'til we ban that, too. Come on, ladies, it's just nine. It's not even ten, so just do your nine and dump. —Justice Amy Coney-Barrett, channeled by Kate McKinnon on SNL

In another C&J column, Bill quoted Molly Ivins from 1984:

The other day at the Southern Legislators Conference, as I was attempting to point out that Canada has a sane, effective and cheap system of national health insurance, I was told: “Canada practices low-tech medicine. Why, in Thunder Bay, women have to have babies with no anesthetic.” ... It takes a lot to startle a Canadian. Understatement is their national art form, calmness is their national mode, and their national motto is “Now, let’s not get excited.” Canada, Land of Low Blood Pressure. I think they even have a law against rolling their eyes. Even so, I wish you could have heard the reactions over the phone from successive layers of bureaucrats at McKellar Hospital in Thunder Bay, Ontario, when I called to ask if the assertion were true. They variously and politely gasped, strangled, wheezed and giggled.

I’ve heard this basic argument before, though not this forcefully and directly. Liberal in a Red State of the Kos community wrote there is a simple response to the forced birth crowd: No one can force you to use your body to save their life. If a person is injured and rapidly losing blood in front of you no one can force you to donate blood. No one can force you to donate a lung or a kidney. Even after you die you must have previously given written permission for anyone to harvest your organs. In the same way no one should be allowed to force the use your uterus for nine months. That means the argument about when life begins is meaningless. No matter if the fetus is six weeks or twenty six weeks, no matter if it is considered a potential life or a full life, you should not be forced to allow that life to use your uterus if you don’t want it to. I and the author use twenty six weeks rather than forty because abortions in that time are rare and happen because the fetus is clearly no longer viable or the mother’s life in in clear danger. It’s her blood, she can say no. It’s her kidney, she can say no. It’s her uterus, she can say no. Anything else and it is an imposition of religious belief or a misleading argument. So, Democrats, there’s your argument. Use it. Leila Fadel and Allison Aubrey of NPR talked to employees of CHI, a maker of overhead garage doors in Arthur, IL with about 800 employees. The discussion was about what that company is doing about employee mental health. That’s a big topic as companies across the country try to attract and maintain employees. As part of an ownership change several years ago each employee was given a small ownership stake. More importantly, each employee got a say in how the workplace should change. First up: lunch. There were no healthy options near the factory. The employees asked for an on-site canteen to make fresh and affordable food. Next: health. They asked for an on-site health clinic. No need to take time off for urgent care. Perhaps next is a gym. It was more than food, health, and exercise. Those sorts of changes in other places don’t produce meaningful change. Manager Jay Scamihorn said:

I do think we get more out of these employees because they are making their decisions. They're solving their own problems. They have somebody to support them when they bring an idea forward. The idea that we didn't have a place to eat for lunch and we built a cafeteria, I think that empowers people. I think they feel like, hey, they're listening to me. And they're going to be more productive because of that.

How productive? Management recently called everyone into a meeting for profit sharing. Not thousands per employee. Not tens of thousands. But hundreds of thousands. The average for hourly workers was more than $175,000. The amount was based on seniority and wages. One long time truck driver got close to a half million. For many this is life-changing money. They can pay off debts, like mortgages and college loans. See what can happen when management listens to employees.

A positive school experience

Savannah Tryens-Fernandes of AL.com wrote about a new high school just south of Birmingham, Alabama that is about to graduate its first seniors. The Magic City Acceptance Academy opened last fall and is the first LGBTQ-affirming charter school in the South. It serves grades 6-12. As with other charter schools they accept more than LGBTQ kids. The process to receive a charter was quite long. – they had to go before the charter commission four times. When it was preparing to open the staff thought why would a student want to leave a high school with just one year to go to come here? When 11 seniors showed up the answer was obvious: they didn’t feel safe at their former school. As in really didn’t feel safe. So unsafe they didn’t dare go to a dance and kept scissors handy as protection. Some didn’t dare go to the cafeteria. So this was a last chance at a positive school experience.

In Alabama, LGBTQ youth are three times more likely to attempt suicide compared to their peers, and twice as likely to not go to school because they felt unsafe or experienced violence on campus, according to the state’s most recent youth risk behavior survey. Trevor Project researchers found that “LGBTQ youth in the South with at least one in-person LGBTQ-affirming space, such as a school, had more than 40% lower odds of reporting a suicide attempt in the past year,” said Myeshia Price, senior research scientist.

And at MCAA they have become a family for each other. In January 2022 they had to go virtual while the omicron variant raged. Once back together they needed to celebrate. So they did a drag show. That included dressing up Social Studies teacher Daniel Evans (who has a transgender child). A week later Tim James, candidate for governor of Alabama, issued a TV ad decrying tax dollars going to a “transgender” school. The ad also called the drag show “exploitation.” Which pretty much proves why the school is necessary. Of course the ad made the students feel a bit more anxious and unsafe. Time to upgrade the school’s security. And five days later the state legislature cut $2.9 million designated for charter schools. The money will instead go to the department of education without designation. 48 hours later the emergency room at the children’s hospital in Birmingham had a big uptick in suicide attempts. That prompted Evans to teach some basic skills, such as how to change a tire so a student doesn’t have to walk a couple miles to a gas station late at night. On senior prom day Lindy Blanchard, another GOP candidate for governor decried taxpayer money going to that “transgender school” when it could be better spent improving mental health and other programs across the state. Yeah, that’s clueless. Giving students a safe school environment is mental health. This sounds like a cool high school to attend. Back when I was in high school all these decades ago I was more than closeted, I was clueless. I made no attempt to figure out why I liked to watch the young men and ignored the young women – well other than the one I “dated” because I thought that’s what I’m supposed to do. I wasn’t particularly upset when she started going out with someone else. At that time a school like this would have terrified me. I had written about the small number of trans kids who do a social transition and then decide to retransition to their birth gender. Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos looked at another study of the number of trans youth who receive gender affirming surgery and then regret it. That number is 1%. Republicans love to talk about trans folks and regret. Are they going to talk about this study? Higgins also explains some of these surgeries. The most important part is:

None of these surgeries, treatments, or processes make someone more or less trans or more or less of their gender identity. You never need to know any of this information in order to respect a person’s identity, which includes using the correct pronouns, providing bathroom access, and so on.

Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that Russia took two months to grind out the two miles from Pervormaisk to Popasna. The town, reduced to rubble, is now theirs. But now that it’s theirs they don’t seem to know what to do with it. Should they attack north? Or is it west? Or maybe south? Yeah, they capture another village or two, but haven’t put up enough sustained effort in one direction to get anywhere else. Sumner also included a tweet from AP Oddities with a photo showing...

A small brewery in Finland has launched a NATO-themed beer to mark the Nordic country’s bid to join the Western military alliance.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary:

There's bad news for Russia. Finland and Sweden have both signed off on their bids to join NATO. Finland and Sweden are very serious about making this official—they've each left a toothbrush in NATO's bathroom already. —Stephen Colbert

Charles Jan of the Kos community reported nearly 1,000 Ukrainian soldier who had been in the Azovstal plant in Mariupol are now in Russian hands. Their fate is uncertain. The injured ones were taken to a hospital in the Russian controlled part of Donbas. Ukraine wants to do a prisoner exchange. Russia wants to interrogate them then put them on trial for war crimes. Some of these soldiers were part of the Azov Regiment, a far right group. Russia has declared them to be Nazis. This regiment had recaptured Mariupol in 2014 and had repelled repeated Russian attacks since then. Ukrainian officials say Azov had become part of the Ukraine National Guard and had abandoned its far right origins. Russian social media channels are calling for the Azov forces to be imprisoned or murdered instead of being used in negotiations. The Russian parliament was to consider a resolution banning using these soldiers in an exchange, but didn’t act on it. Kos of Kos referenced translated Russian language accounts of the war to explain that Russia may have a large number of Battalion Tactical Groups on paper. But on the ground that’s an entirely different thing. One BTG is to have 600-800 soldiers, 10 tanks, 40 infantry fighting vehicles and a long list of support vehicles. At the Izyum front estimates say Russia has 22 BTGs. In reality ... a company of 120-160 soldiers actually had 13. Since they are told they’re being sent to sure death, many find a reason not to go. For those who do fight they don’t have enough trucks (no fuel?) to carry them to the front, so it is a several hour march to get there. Which means they’re mighty tired before any fighting begins. Then they have to carry (or abandon) the dead for the long march back to camp. No wonder it takes them two months to capture two miles. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Dara Massicot of Foreign Affairs. After listing a large number of things the Russian Army is doing wrong, Massicot wrote:

These problems do not stop at technical equipment issues, poor training, or corruption. Rather, they are linked by a core underlying theme: the military’s lack of concern for the lives and well-being of its personnel. In Ukraine, the Russian military struggles to retrieve the bodies of its dead, obscures casualties, and is indifferent to its worried military families. It may spend billions of dollars on new equipment, but it does not properly treat soldiers’ injuries, and it generally does not appear to care tremendously whether troops are traumatized.

Learn about it safely by, you know, reading

I went to the Detroit Institute of Arts this afternoon. The reason for going is an exhibit that ends in ten days. It is By Her Hand: Artemisia Gentileschi and Women Artists in Italy, 1500-1800. The website says there are 17 women featured. It didn’t seem to be that many, but I didn’t count. Gentileschi is the featured artist, though I hadn’t heard of her or any of the others. A big part of their creative work involved how to be noticed in a male dominated world. One made several self portraits in a variety of settings, saying see I am good enough paint you and your family. One did miniatures. Another painted on ivory. Gentileschi was able to do religious themes – such as large altar pieces for churches. One was a nun who sold paintings to support the convent and taught her fellow sisters to paint. Beyond the paintings patrons commissioned many of these women painted scenes featuring strong women. Judith and her maidservant cutting off the head of Holofernes was depicted several times. Madonna and child was also a frequent subject – I was amused by one where there was a ring of flowers instead of a halo and one can’t tell whether the child is bestowing the ring or playfully snatching it away. I finished the book Managing Martians by Donna Shirley. It is her autobiography, mostly of her time at the Jet Propulsion Lab managing the team that developed Sojourner, the first rover on Mars, the one that got there in 1997. The first part of the story is of her growing up in rural Oklahoma where she definitely didn’t fit in. She wanted to go to space, and Mars in particular (science fiction stories set on Mars fueled that dream). She wasn’t accepted as an astronaut, so going there virtually on a rover would have to do. There was the usual problems of being a woman at JPL in the 1960s and not doing a traditional woman’s job. And then the problems of being a woman manager. And the ever present we can’t give you the job of developing something that flies in space if you’ve never developed something that flies in space. Turns out she was a good manager. Her style was different from other managers who determined their worth by the number of people they controlled. She wanted none of that hierarchy stuff. She recognized that her team would talk about concepts that made no sense to her and that was fine. There were other colleagues who could verify the ideas. Her management style helped JPL reduce costs. After Sojourner successfully worked on the moon Shirley wrote a book on how to manage creative people. She said it is different than a lot of books on management styles in that they seemed classroom exercises and she figured it out by doing it. I enjoyed the book. I also enjoyed the technical discussions about this problem appeared and this is how we fixed it. None of this was deeply technical, but might be a turnoff for people who are definitely not technical. There was also a lot of discussion of how JPL projects were funded by NASA. And that was followed by how to balance cost with all the other requirements. I learned there was always a lot of balancing – we could do this, but it weighs too much. Or this, but it would have to be a less expensive version. If you are interested in how spacecraft get developed you will enjoy this book. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. The peak in new cases per day for last week was lowered, but the peak this week is higher. The peaks in the last three weeks are 3250, 3993, and 4807. Counties in the Detroit metropolitan area and in a few other places in the state have now said masks in public are recommended. As for deaths per day, for the last six weeks they have been at 15 and below and in the last ten days they have been at 8 and below (though these are likely to change as more data comes in). Remember towards the start of the pandemic the meat packers were saying there is a meat shortage and the nasty guy responded with an executive order keeping the plants open in spite of the unsafe conditions that killed hundreds of workers? Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported it was all a lie.

Now, the House select subcommittee investigating the pandemic response says that the meatpacking industry misled the public about the threat of a shortage and basically drafted Trump’s executive order keeping the plants open.

Mark Sumner of Kos reported that Sweden and Finland have applied to join NATO – and there is opposition. Erdogan, the autocratic leader of Turkey is objecting, saying Sweden is harboring Kurdish terrorists. For those who don’t remember history of the last 35 years, the Kurds are a people who don’t have their own country. Their people are split between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. And Turkey considers them terrorists. When Russia invaded Syria a lot of people fled. And some of them are Kurdish and some of them went to Sweden. The real reason, wrote Sumner, is Turkey committed a NATO no-no. They bought military equipment from Russia (quite a while ago). In response the US canceled Turkey’s order of 100 fighter jets.

So Erdogan is holding up the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO until the U.S. agrees to give him his planes. But he can’t quite say it that way, so he’s making other excuses while waiting to see if he can get what he wants.

President Milanovic of Croatia saw an opening. He is also opposing Sweden and Finland. His complaint is about neighboring Bosnia, who he thinks are treating the Croats living there in some unkind way. Russia has invaded Ukraine, in which people are dying and which has dire consequences for the world. Sweden and Finland see a genuine threat to their neutrality and safety. And Erdogan and Milanovic are using the situation to try to address a pet peeve. Sumner has a good word for them – jackasses. Kos of Kos reported that Russia might be about to take a small city or three. Twitter now has hyperventilating accounts of how disastrous this will be for Ukraine. Other accounts are full of joy that Ukraine is about to be defeated. Kos said it is time for the big picture. Some of that is what I wrote about yesterday – Russia’s shrinking ambitions. Another part is why Ukraine stuck around so long in the cities that Russia has been bombarding.

Ukraine’s strategy is simple—bleed Russia while buying time, as hundreds of thousands of Ukraine’s reserves train up and equip with the current influx of western arms. Over the last several days, several Ukrainian military and intelligence officials have referenced late summer as the inflection point at which Ukraine will start liberating territory. And not just post-invasion territory, but the entire Donbas and Crimea. All of it. It’s tough, ambitious talk, but the timeline speaks to Ukraine’s strategy— to hold out another four months as the nation mobilizes.

So don’t worry that Russia has taken a town or three. Kos warned that Azovstal factory in Mariupol is a toxic waste dump. If Russia isn’t careful the toxins could be released, which would kill life in the Sea of Azov and damage the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. Alas, we know how careful Russia is. George Johnson, who uses they/them pronouns, wrote the book All Boys Aren’t Blue. They talked to Marissa Higgins of Kos. The books is about growing up black and queer in a family that was supportive but didn’t have the language. The book has earned serious accolades and Johnson has received letters and emails from readers who say the book changed their lives. Wrote Higgins quoting Johnson:

“When you're getting that type of messaging from so many people in the world, you know that you created something that is not just deeply impactful but is a change agent. The book is shifting culture. And how do we know that? Because we're watching them attack.” And attack they are.

This book is one of the top books that has been banned or targeted for banning. The usual reason is to say certain scenes are pornographic.

The book, in fact, is not pornography. It does include passages about sexual abuse ... a subject that teenagers and young adults can learn about safely by, you know, reading. And not just reading whatever random thing they find on the internet, but a book that’s been widely praised by editors, teachers, and librarians—you know, actual experts in what’s appropriate for the age group they work with.

Johnson said the real reason for the book bans and for many other things conservatives are doing these days is they are freaking out that the country is becoming more non-white. They want to maintain white supremacy. Leah McElrath tweeted:

By adhering to white supremacist ideology, some white people mistakenly believe they are raising themselves up or putting others down. What they are really doing is disconnecting themselves from their full spiritual capacity as sentient beings capable of connection. It’s sad.

The Federal Elections Commission bars politicians from repaying loans to their own campaigns by receiving donations over $250K after election day. It is important for new candidates to loan money to their campaigns to get started. It is also important to control how those loans are repaid. Allowing donors to give big donations after election day to pay off those loans means the money goes straight into the candidates pocket. And that is indistinguishable from a bribe. Rebekah Sager of Kos reported that of course, Sen. Ted Cruz loaned his campaign $260K so he would have a case to take to the Supremes. This week the Supremes sided with Cruz, essentially legalizing a method of bribery. The six justice majority says candidates need to be able to loan to their campaign, no matter the size of the loan. Kagan wrote the dissent noting this leads to government corruption.

Yeah? You and what army?

A week has passed since I last wrote about Ukraine. Kos of Daily Kos wrote about Russia’s shrinking ambitions. Back in March Russia’s original goal was to head southwest of Kharkiv and north from Kherson, encircling a huge chunk of eastern Ukraine. The goal in April was to capture about half that. The goal for May cut the April goal in half. And the territorial goal for June is quite small. Kos explains that even this small goal will be a stretch for Russia. Kos concluded:

Russia’s slow pace of advance now ensures this war will last well into this year (and likely longer), allowing time for a full Ukrainian transition to NATO-standard weapons. Indeed, Ukraine General Staff is arguing they can be fully transitioned by the end of summer. That may be little consolation to those who would rather see peace break out, global food deliveries reestablished, an end to needless death, and money spent on more fruitful endeavors than weaponry. But Vladimir Putin cannot retreat now without delivering the glorious (and easy) victory he promised his nation, and Ukraine sees no reason to surrender given Russia’s sorry battlefield performance. It really believes (and I agree) that with the right gear, it can recapture everything lost to Russia since 2014, including the entirety of Donbas and Crimea. And as long as the Ukrainian people are prepared to make that sacrifice (and they appear so), it makes perfect sense for the West to help it achieve its goals.

I had written about Russia attempting to cross the same point of the Siverskyi Donets River and failing twice. Kos wrote: Make that three times.

So Russia just lost two BTGs worth of troops attempting to make the same compromised river crossing three times. Can you imagine the drone operator calling it in? Drone operator: “Another crossing!” Artillery fire direction: “S---! What are the coordinates?” Drone operator: “Uh, same ones!” Artillery fire direction: “Ha! Okay, I really thought you were kidding the second time! That was crazy. But seriously, what are the new coordinates?”

In a third post Kos reported on what Ukraine appears to be doing next. Ukraine could work to take Vovcchansk, a town near the Russian border with a primary rail line from Russia. A second option would be Kupiansk where a few rail lines meet. Either could do significant damage to the supply lines to Izyum, a primary Russian attack point. Or, it appears, Ukraine could directly attack the Russian troops around Izyum.

Now, with Russia already at its limits, Ukraine is taking direct aim at the largest concentration of Russian forces in Ukraine. Guys, 20-25% of Russia’s entire Army is in that pocket. Something big is happening. I mean big, as in war-altering. We were looking at Izyum’s supply hubs in Kupiansk and Vochansk. Ukraine is going straight for the jugular instead.

Kos included a tweet from Visegrád:

Massive forest fires raging in the Tyumen region in Russia right now. The army used to play an important role in helping the firefighters to put these out but they are nowhere to be found at the moment.

In a fourth post Kos commented on how important American artillery was in helping Ukraine, including smashing the three Russian attempted river crossings. At the bottom of the post Kos added this update:

The separatist city of Donetsk is having serious problems with their drinking water supply. But they can’t do anything about it because they’ve conscripted the people who used to maintain it.

Mark Sumner of Kos reported that it appears that Ukraine has crossed the river. One of the bridges that had been blown up wasn’t all that damaged and Ukraine was able to repair and use it. That allows Ukraine to attack the supply lines into Izyum. In a fifth post Kos reviewed the state of the war. Then ... A common response to a meaningless threat is the reply, “Yeah? You and what army?” That taunt takes on a different meaning when used in response to the threats Russia has been making lately. Russia has threatened... * Kyrgyzstan for showing signs of wanting to withdraw from the Eurasian Economic Union (the Russia centered counterpart to the EU). * Finland and Sweden for applying to join NATO. * Poland for who knows why. * Iceland for organizing flights to transport military equipment from eastern Europe to Ukraine. * The UK for being a part of NATO (I think) though this could be serious because nukes are mentioned in the threat. * The Eurovision Song Contest for excluding them. Minna Ålander wrote a thread saying Finland is ready to handle whatever Russia might do to them. Cut electricity? Already close to self-sufficient. Cut gas? What they get from Russia is only about 5%. Station troops on Russia’s border? What troops? In a post from today Sumner reported that Russia is making an advance here and there, close to ready to take two key cities. But he also included a list of ten villages that on Tuesday Russia attempted to take and failed.

But Russian military leaders still have one ace up their sleeve. Which is: They don’t give a f##k about how many men they lose in the field. Repeating an action that resulted in failure may be one definition of insanity. It’s also Russia’s underlying military tactic. And in two key locations, that tactic is bringing Russia close to capturing key objectives.

Kos discussed tankies.

You’ve seen tankies around. They’re the ones who believe that all the world’s evils are the product of imperialism and the only country capable of imperialism is the United States. ... The pejorative term “tankie” comes from American leftists who defended the violent Soviet crackdown of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, an uprising crushed by tanks. They were our allies during the Iraq War, so it may come as a shock seeing them become pathetic apologists for Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to reconstitute the Soviet empire. ... In the tankie worldview, no one has agency except the United States. Poland and Slovakia and Romania and Bulgaria didn’t have the ability or right to choose to join NATO. Neither do Finland and Sweden. These are all imperialist provocations and machinations by the American empire. What other option did Russia have but to defend its borders by, uh, explicitly advocating for its own empire?

Kos quoted tweets from Max Blumenthal, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, and Noam Chomsky to show the way tankies think. Kos concluded:

But nothing galls more than their utter disregard for the choices of free nations to decide their own destiny. They have been so impacted by America’s real foreign policy sins that they have lost the ability to understand that the world is a complex place, and sometimes, other people get a say in their own affairs. And sometimes, America is on the right side.

Thee has been a lot of news of Republican legislatures make the lives of trans people difficult to the point of many considering fleeing to new homes in more welcoming states. Marissa Higgins of Kos reported two weeks ago that that in spite of that oppression 19 legislatures are in the process of passing law saying they are refuge states for LGBTQ people. Since one of these states is Michigan I have doubts it will pass here and in some of the other states. Even so, I’m glad the concept is out there. Higgins reminds us that a family may have a lot of reasons to stay in a city or state even as rights are taken away and oppression increases. Bert Johnson of NPR reported those new laws restricting trans and gay rights are prompting a lot of LGBTQ people to run for various levels of government. The Palm Beach County Human Rights Council and the AIDS Healthecare Foundation created a rainbow mural on a city intersection as a memorial to the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando. Two days later a 19 year old in a pickup with a nasty guy flag decided just being part of a noisy vehicle parade to honor their nasty hero wasn’t enough so he sped up, then skidded through the mural, damaging it. And someone caught the incident with their phone, including the license tags. The perpetrator went before county Judge Scott Suskauer expressing remorse, saying he was trying to fit in (but be careful which crowd you want to fit in with!). He is to pay restitution, do volunteer at an LGBTQ organization, and to write a 25 page essay. That essay is to include research on the 49 victims of the Pulse shooting plus a summary of why people are so hateful and why people lash out at the gay community. I like this judge for choosing reconciliation over punishment. In another post from two weeks ago the Panhandle Patriots of Idaho plan to show up next month in Coeur d’Alene to confront the Pride event. They say good people need to stand up and add to that a lot of religious nonsense. Yes, the intent is to intimidate people gathering for a safe space. Zander Moricz is the youngest public plaintiff in a lawsuit against Florida’s new “Don’t Say Gay” law. Zander is the first LGBTQ class president at their school. When they organized a protest of the law the school administration told them to shut it down. They held it anyway and it was the county’s largest protest. The administration then told them if their graduation speech referenced this activism the microphone would be cut and the ceremony halted. There is a plan to fight back – they have 10,000 Say Gay stickers for seniors across Florida to wear as they cross the stage during their ceremonies. They may be done with high school, but not the fight. One of the complaints of gender affirming health care for trans kids is what if the kid really isn’t trans? Higgins reported the Trans Youth Project with Princeton University did a study on the issue. The study followed 317 trans youth. The participants did some level of social transitioning, usually around age 6 or 7. That means they begin to live as their target gender – new pronouns, new clothes and haircut, maybe even a new name. Only 6% decided they weren’t trans and returned to their birth gender. The rest decide a more complete transition is what they want. That means taking puberty blockers to give them time make sure, then taking hormones to begin the process of physically transitioning. There are a few things anti-trans people get wrong. They assume (or at least stir up hysteria over) any kind of transitioning requires irreversible surgery the child will regret. But the child usually has a few years to live with the target gender. Puberty blockers only delay puberty and cause no harm. And by then 94% are sure and the other 6% have already backed out. Libs of TikTok posted a video with the caption, “A drag queen was crowned prom king in an Indiana high school.” Leah McElrath added:

I unironically love this. Kids in Indiana said FU to tradition gender norm restrictions. Right-wingers are pathetic—and this account targeting this teenager like this endangers him and his school.