I don’t need a ride, I need ammo

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated Friday, and ran it through my graphing program – and it didn’t work. This spreadsheet had a different format for the date, using dashes to separate the parts of the date instead of slashes. So I had to revise my program to handle both formats (I still want to display old spreadsheets). Once I did that, I could see good news! The new cases per day continues to go down. The peaks in the last three weeks are 4260, 2117, and 1426. The high peak at the start of January has been raised to 28,136. For the week of February 20th the deaths per day have ranged from 23 to 50. Also good news! I didn’t post yesterday because I watched a livestream concert of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. I watched and listened to a Mozart violin concerto and Mahler’s Titan Symphony. Then this afternoon I watched the livestream of an elite handbell event where 150 people gather to play the hard stuff. That means I have a lot of updates on the Russia/Ukraine war. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote an update post Friday afternoon and updated it into the early evening. As with other Kos “Ukraine Updates” this offers some analysis and includes various tweets and videos. There are a couple major points in this one: First, Russia is obviously not worrying about civilian casualties. Second, thousands of Ukrainians are fleeing – and thousands more are staying for the fight. In amongst the various videos and tweets is one from an Irish TV host asking a Russian ambassador: “Why should our government entertain your presence here when you’re acting as an apologist for slaughter?” A long list of countries have closed their air space to the Russian airline Aeroflot. Marissa Higgins of Kos wrote about the Sunflower Babuska, who is in a video that is getting a lot of circulation (even Kos writers have posted this video a few times). She is a Ukrainian woman who goes up to Russian soldiers and, speaking in Russian, offers them sunflower seeds. Sunflowers are the national flower of Ukraine. She does this so the soldiers can put them in their pockets and when they lie down (are killed) at least the sunflowers will grow Higgins also included photos of various buildings around the world, plus Niagara Falls, that are lit up with the Ukrainian colors of yellow (representing wheat) and blue (representing sky). On Friday evening Kos of Kos posted images of bravery by Ukrainians and solidarity by the rest of the world. The first tweet had me pondering what a leader might do when his country is attacked. An option is to flee, either to another country or away from the capital. Perhaps he can direct the response and inspire the citizens while providing a way for the leadership to continue when the fighting is done. Or he can lead the actual fighting. Volodymyr Zelensky (I’ve seen the name also spelled with a double “y” at the end) has chosen that route. An image in this post showing him in military gear. I’ve heard he has told Western leaders a couple things. First: This may be the last time you see me alive. Second, when offered safe passage out of the country: I don’t need a ride, I need ammo. Not bad for a guy whose previous job was a comedian and best known for playing the president of Ukraine on TV. This reminds me of Britain’s Queen Mum, mother of the current monarch. She didn’t evacuate during WWII, but stayed in London, dealing with the Blitz and everything else the same way Londoners did. She was adored by the country for doing that. On Friday evening Kos wrote about how bad the Russian military was doing, and how shocked everyone is with such low performance. I’m including it because the situation doesn’t appear to have changed. Though well aware that what he is sharing may be Ukrainian and international propaganda meant to humiliate Putin and inspire Ukranians, Kos included tweets that Russia hasn’t achieved any of its major objectives of surrounding key cities – especially Kyiv – and replacing the government with a puppet. Kos goes into detail. Russia still hasn’t captured key border towns. As of Sunday evening that still hasn’t happened. Why? So perhaps Russian troops might bypass towns and head cross country. But that can also be a problem – supply lines are much more vulnerable to attacks. And supply lines are critical. Other posts have shown mud is also a problem – tanks can sink into it. Kos noted that Russia has amassed 150K to 190K troops on the border yet only 30% have crossed into Ukraine. Some warn that means Russia could intensify the attack at any time. But Kos wrote:

If Russia could send those troops across, it would’ve done so already. The fact that it hasn’t suggests that it can’t. Why? Supply lines. You send all your tanks across, but without the infrastructure to fuel and maintain them, and they end up dead in the water, sitting uselessly at the side of the road (or even worse for Russia, captured, and pressed into service by the Ukrainian side). ... Ukraine is still seriously overmatched, in manpower and equipment, but it’s starting to look like a much fairer fight than anyone dared hope. As I’ve written about, morale can be a great equalizer, and Russia’s early difficulties are doing more to buck up Ukraine’s national fighting spirit than just about anything else possible (absent the entrance of allied armies into the fight).

So with Putin appearing to be humiliated by Ukraine and his actions driving neutral Sweden and Finland into NATO, what’s next? I like the sign a protester is holding:

DEAR PUTIN, LET’S SPEED UP TO THE PART WHERE YOU KILL YOURSELF IN A BUNKER.

I see at the speed I’m going I will not be able to keep up. So here are links to other Ukraine Updates with minimal commentary. Saturday morning and Ukraine is still here. The Ukraine Interior ministry asked residents to take down street signs to confuse invaders. One went further – a sign pointing in three directions with all three destinations saying “Go F--- Yourselves.” Saturday noon. In amongst the other tweets and videos Sumner included short one of a rally at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate (which used to be right along the Berlin Wall) in which hundreds sing the “Ode to Joy” (though we really only hear the nearby voices). Saturday afternoon Kos wrote about Putin is becoming more isolated, especially after he threatened Finland and Sweden. Viktor Orban, working to become the autocrat of Hungary, used to be best buds with Putin. But even Orban has turned against him. There was a vote on a resolution in the UN Security Council. Only Russia voted no, though there were a couple of abstentions. Russia’s veto killed the resolution, but that hardly matters now. Saturday evening. Russia is making gains, but more slowly than people expected. Even so, the night will be hellish. Sunday morning Hunter of Kos that a humiliated Putin might become more dangerous. Rather than encircling major cities and trying to topple the government, he might switch to leveling the cities. Will more weapons arrive from NATO in time to prevent that? Sunday noon Sumner again ponders what is going on with the Russian military. He included a video of a Russian ship asking a Georgian maintenance ship to refuel. The assistant captain refused, telling the invaders they should row their boat. Kos wrote that the new Ukrainian pastime is to say to a Russian soldier’s face to “f--- off.” It’s especially brave when a gun is pointing in your direction. Sunday afternoon Kos looked at tanks stuck in mud and destroyed by the side of the road and wondered if this might be the last war fought with tanks. Also, always neutral Switzerland is talking about freezing Russian assets. Sunday evening Hunter reported that Putin has demanded Kyiv be taken by Monday. The risk of escalation and more destructive actions remains high. Why Monday? When financial markets open in the morning the ruble, already plummeting, will collapse. Many have said sanctions will take a while to work, but maybe not. To keep control Putin needs to show a victory – as the world hopes he doesn’t get it. On Friday, Gabe Ortiz of Kos reported that chef and humanitarian José Andrés and his World Central Kitchen is going to Poland to see about setting up operations to feed Ukrainian refugees. By now he may already be there and making things happen.

Here is your test for “Never Again”

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos posted another update on Ukraine this morning. As in his previous updates it includes several videos of various parts of the attack and defense. A couple bits from the post: SWIFT is a system banks use to send transactions to one another. Barring Russia from SWIFT (and isolating its banks from the rest of the world) is not yet part of the sanctions applied to Russia. Sumner wrote:

The Ukrainian foreign minister has a message for European leaders—actually, for Germany, which is the only nation holding this up: “Every year at ceremonies you repeat the words: ‘Never again.’ Time to prove them. Russia is just now waging a terrible aggressive war in Europe. Here is your test for ‘Never Again’ — disconnect Russian from SWIFT and isolate it everywhere!”

Putin is calling on Ukrainian soldiers to turn on the “band of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” that he claims make up the Ukrainian government. Sumner included a tweet from Yair Rosenberg that includes a video:

The director of the main synagogue in Odessa tearfully bids goodbye to the synagogue, asks people to pray for them as they evacuate during the Jewish Sabbath. ... Odessa was once had the third largest Jewish population in the world. Then came pogroms, Stalin's purges, and the Nazi Holocaust. The city, once half Jewish, had fallen to 6 percent Jewish by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. And now this.

Sumner added:

Putin says “denazification” but what he means is destroying historic Jewish communities. It’s weak cover for a policy and actions that are blatantly anti-Semitic.

Kos of Kos reported on the four fronts of this war – on the south side with Russians out of Crimea, on the east side with Russians pushing through the Donbas region, on the northeast side with Russians aiming for Kharkiv, and on the north side with Russians aiming for the capital Kyiv. Kos included maps and discussions on what is happening on each front. Ukrainians are doing a lot to block Russian efforts, though that may not be enough. There has been fighting in the Chernobyl exclusion zone because that is along the direct path to Kyiv. While the core of the reactor is still safely under a slab of concrete there is still a lot of radiation in the area. Soldiers on both sides will be facing cancer. Summary: Putin thought it would be a swift strike. And it isn’t that.

Never underestimate the power of morale—the longer Ukraine holds firm in key towns, the better it rallies the populace and the rest of the country’s defense forces. Meanwhile, the opposite is true for Russia, with conscripts suddenly finding themselves facing their ethnic kin after weeks of hearing Putin say that Russia had no plans to invade. This isn’t Chechnya, where they were killing Muslims. It’s a much harder sell pitting neighbors against neighbors. And unlike China, there is no great firewall keeping out alternate viewpoints. They all have phones. They can watch the videos and photos. No one wants to be a POW. Putin wanted a quick and decisive victory, one that would prevent internal dissent from crystalizing, both among military ranks and the general populace. That may still happen! Some western observers are predicting Kyiv will fall in a matter of hours or days. But there still appears to be plenty of fight among regular military units. The longer this drags on, the more time for Ukraine to fortify its positions and get resupplied by the West, the longer the Russian people can rally for regime change, and the longer for Russia’s military establishment to decide its had enough. We’re just in Day One. Dark days lie ahead. But this won’t be the cakewalk Putin clearly expected.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported on some of the anti war protests in Russia. She noted reports of 1,600 people arrested in 50 Russian cities, more than 900 of them in Moscow.

The protests in Russia were noteworthy because a brutal response was expected and explicitly threatened, with the government warning of “severe punishment for mass riots.” As the arrest numbers show, that response did materialize.

There have also been protests across the US and around the world. Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote that many in Ukraine are regretting giving up their nukes. When the Soviet Union broke apart a sizable chunk of the USSR nuclear arsenal was in Ukraine which then was the world’s third largest. Jay’s history lesson is rather long, so I’ll briefly describe his various chapters. In the 1990s Ukrainian leaders debated what to do. Some wanted to keep the nukes as deterrence. Some knew maintaining the arsenal was too expensive and couldn’t be done without Russia’s help. They would be hostage to their own missiles. In 1994 Ukraine gave up its nukes and signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non nuclear weapons state. The warheads were sent to Russia to be destroyed. The uranium was processed into reactor fuel and returned to Ukraine to power nuclear plants. In exchange the 1994 Budapest Memorandum gave Kyiv security guarantees from Russia, Britain, and the US. Those guarantees lasted until 2014 when the Russian puppet prime minister was forced from office through citizen protests. Russia declared the new government to be illegitimate, and not the one he signed the Memorandum with. He voided his part of the deal. The Memorandum had no enforcement provisions. In the US the nasty guy and his minions undermined the Ukraine security guarantees. Republicans spread Russian disinformation about Ukraine. They disavowed the guarantees. Ukrainians now see the guarantees were worthless. Many say they should have kept the nukes. Can and will Biden undo the damage?

What’s at stake could be the future of efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons. If the Budapest Memorandum’s security guarantees are shown to be worthless, it will deal a blow to nuclear arms non-proliferation and make the world a much more dangerous place. It will discourage countries like Iran and North Korea from giving up their nuclear weapons programs. And it will encourage more nations like Saudi Arabia and South Korea to pursue their own nuclear arms programs as a deterrent.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, shared several interesting quotes. From a tweet from Garrett Graff:

One thing worth keeping in my mind today: There’s a straight line from Russia’s attack on the US election in 2016 to 1/6 to today’s new invasion of Ukraine. The chaos that Russia unleashed with the election of Trump weakened us to the point Putin feels confident invading Europe. I wrote in 2017 that Russia’s election attack was probably the most successful intelligence operation in history, and today’s developments bear out just how much it changed the world stage and how much space it gave Putin to operate.

Dworkin quoted a tweet by Gabrielius Landsbergis:

We in Lithuania know it very well that Ukraine is fighting not just for Ukraine, but for us in the region, Europe and everyone in the democratic world. It is our obligation not just to punish Russia for its actions but to help Ukraine with all and every means available. Now.

And from a thread by Garry Kasparov:

Ok, after years of warnings were ignored and hearing "Garry, you were right!" all damn day today, I'll repeat what I said in 2014: Stop telling me I was right and listen to what I'm saying now. My recommendations follow: -Support Ukraine militarily, immediately, everything but boots on the ground. All weapons, intel, cyber. -Bankrupt Putin's war machine. Freeze & seize Russia's finances & those of him and his gang. -Kick Russia out of every intl & financial institution. PACE, Interpol, etc -Recall all ambassadors from Russia. There is no point in talking. The new unified message is "stop or be isolated completely". -Ban all elements of Putin's global propaganda machine. Turn them off, shut them down, send them home. Stop helping the dictator spread lies & hate. -Expose and act against Putin's lackeys in the free world. If Schröder and his ilk continue to work for Putin, bring charges. Ask the owners & advertisers of networks platforming Putin propagandists like Carlson why they allow it.

On to a couple other things in my browser tabs. Moscow Mitch (that name feels a bit more ominous today) had said the Republican Party would not issue a platform, instead run against whatever Biden is doing. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Sen. Rick Scott, the guy heading the Senate Republican election effort, filled the void. His 11 point plan (with 128 action items) is, as McCarter described it, “full-on fascist.” Some parts of his plan: Eliminate the Department of Education and fund private (and segregated and preferably Christian) schools. Build that southern wall and name it after the nasty guy. Because he declares there are only two genders government forms will not ask about gender identity or sexual preference (note “preference” implies orientation is a choice, and it isn’t). No government assistance unless you are disabled or aggressively seeking work. All Americans should pay at least a small amount of income tax to have skin in the game (currently half of Americans don’t). The IRS will be halved (so they can’t go after the wealthy who pay no taxes). Socialism will be treated as a foreign combatant. All federal legislation sunsets in five years. Sell off all non-essential government assets, buildings, and lands (goodbye national parks). Prohibit debt ceiling increases unless a declaration of war and stop all non-essential government spending until the budget is balanced (goodbye national and global economy). Stop left-wing efforts to rig elections. Wrote McCarter:

Scott’s ideas are an amalgam of standard Republican economic principles—keep taxes low for the rich, punish the olds and poor—and bats--- Fox News, MAGA culture warrior propaganda fueled by conspiracy theories. It’s a fun—albeit terrifying—gift for Democrats. There it all is: what Republicans really think about the majority of Americans and how they intend to suppress us. No wonder McConnell didn’t want to put out an agenda; he knew it was going to be full of this kind of stuff. Too late, though. It’s been embraced by the Republican National Committee (RNC)—you know, the official Republican Party that said the Jan. 6 insurrection was “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

That little bit about halfway through saying all Americans need to pay taxes (just before the bit about gutting the IRS so the rich can cheat)? Yeah, that one. McCarter reported that on that point Scott had to backpedal furiously. And Democrats have already jumped on it for a campaign ad. McCarter wrote:

About 50% of Americans earn so little they don’t pay federal income taxes, or what they would have to pay is reduced by tax credits. That half of America that can’t afford to pay federal income taxes already pays plenty in federal payroll tax, state income and sales taxes, gas taxes, and other state and local levies. The people who don’t pay federal income taxes are mostly the disabled, working poor, retirees, and of course, the unemployed.

Meteor Blades of Kos reported that the Interior Department has released proposed name changes for 660 federal sites that include “squaw” in the name. That word is to be written as “sq---” in all future department communications. Racist terms have no place in place names. I’ve heard the word means “Indian whore.” There is a spreadsheet with all 660 names (in small print) plus five alternative names for each. I took a look at the Michigan names. I was surprised at the number of places – eleven – in my state named “Sq--- Creek” and thirteen named “Sq--- Lake” plus one “Sq--- Creek Lake.” Add in Island, Brook, Point, and Bay for a total of 32 places in the state that use that word.

Where no one has so much power that they can dominate others

Brother came for a visit of just over 48 hours. I very much enjoy his visits, even when brief. Brother likes to do home improvement projects. I showed him that my bedroom extends outward so that a strip a couple feet wide doesn’t have basement under it. Brother commented the insulation between the floor joists didn’t look like enough. So we bought a roll of thick insulation batting. In pulling out the old stuff Brother found some of it had been chewed and had lots of leaf litter. Yup, a few holes in the concrete and gaps between facing boards. So we bought caulk and he used that and some quick dry mortar which I happened to have. Alas, the temperature was too cold for applying the caulk and he still felt a draft. The new bats are in place. The next time he visits he’ll redo the caulk. Yeah, I accumulated a bunch of browser tabs while Brother was here. Alas, many may have to wait while I summarize the latest on Ukraine – and some of that story has been in browser tabs too. On Tuesday Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that Putin declared two eastern provinces to be “independent” and he could take them over. Sumner included a video of the Kenya ambassador to the UN Security Council explains what Putin’s aggression means. I didn’t watch it, though mention it to show how much the whole world is watching Putin and knows what he is. Also on Tuesday Sumner explained what was going on that day. Then he noted, building on comments by opposition leader Alexei Navaldy, that the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 led to the collapse of the USSR. Will Putin’s invasion of Ukraine lead to the collapse of support for Putin? Sumner then noted that some American news companies appear to be taking Putin’s side. An editorial on the Wall Street Journal said Putin “outfoxed” western leaders. And the New York Times repeated Putin’s claims that Ukraine has always been an integral part of Russia. To that last point the US Embassy in Kyiv tweeted pictures of important churches that were built before 1108 – when Moscow was still undeveloped woods. Later on Tuesday Sumner wrote that Russia can’t afford war. Russia may have the 11th largest economy, but that is with a GDP of $1.6 trillion, compared to the US at $19.5 trillion and China at $12.2 trillion. Per capita that is $11,566 for Russia and $53,366 for the US. Like any tyrant Putin fears his populace. If he really thought he was popular and represented a majority he would hold free elections. Russia’s economy is heavily dependent of fossil fuels. And that money doesn’t go into growing and diversifying the economy. Russian’s are pessimistic of their future because of that lack of growth. An army in barracks doesn’t cost very much. An army in the field is horrendously expensive with supply lines to feed, arm, and shelter troops. There is also the cost to maintain vehicles and aircraft. Putin has bragged he has a stockpile of financial reserves. But with strong sanctions the reserves will eventually be used up. On Wednesday evening Sumner posted that Russia has invaded Ukraine. Not just from the eastern provinces it claimed on Tuesday, but from the north and south as well. This post was updated through the early morning hours with videos of various parts of the attack and of tweets from world leaders and news sources. There is also mention of the Moscow stock exchange suspending trading because it dropped so fast and the ruble also dropping by quite a bit. This Thursday morning Sumner posted again, and again with lots of videos. Sumner noted: Putin claimed he was invading to engage in “denazification” of Ukraine – which many Ukrainian parents and grandparents did in WWII. That lie is vile because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish. Finland is asking to join NATO. Yes, the Ukrainian military is sustaining damage – but so is the Russian military. There was a battle in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and Russia captured the old power plant. The melted reactor core there is well covered and unlikely to be disturbed. Ukrainians are lining up to enlist in the defense forces. Protesters gathered across Russia. The protest in St. Petersburg was large. In an early afternoon post Sumner liveblogged Biden’s speech. This war is not going to end in days. In an afternoon post Sumner included more videos and: The list of the latest sanctions. The Moscow stock market had dropped 33%, erasing $200 billion in wealth. The Ukrainian defense forces are having some success, such as keeping control of the Hostomel Airport. Aysha Qamar of Kos reported on the anti-war protests in Russia, both in person and on social media. Some protests have been quite large. The protesters know this is risky and many are arrested. If the Russian police know about them they may be arrested as soon as they leave home. Protesters may not be arrested for protesting, instead for violating COVID restrictions. Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about arrests of protesters. Chitown Kev, in a pundit roundup for Kos included a series of tweets from Hayes Brown of MSNBC. The UN Security Council has been meeting to discuss the invasion. Russia is one of five countries with permanent membership on the UNSC with veto power over any UNSC resolution. Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN, challenged Russia’s seat. The UN Charter says the permanent members are China (Taiwan), Britain, France, USA, and USSR. Not Russia. And the USSR seat was not properly turned over to Russia. The process in which China replaced Taiwan wasn’t quite proper, even though it went through the General Assembly. Russia replacing the USSR didn’t even get a General Assembly vote. Kev says this is a gutsy move by Ukraine. If it comes to a vote China is likely to veto it. Brandi Buchman of Kos hopes Europe is ready to receive Ukraine’s refugees who are already clogging roads heading west. Crossings into Poland and Hungary are ready to receive refugees, though just three crossings are likely to not be enough. All but Britain appear ready to welcome Ukrainians. Even some American lawmakers are trying to show their welcome. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos pondered the question of why didn’t Putin invade Ukraine during the reign of the nasty guy? The effort might have been so much easier at a time when the nasty guy was working to wreck NATO. Instead, the invasion is happening after Biden worked to unite NATO. The reason is that Putin was expecting the nasty guy to win again (and had provided help to make it happen). In a second term, with the nasty guy unlocking all the doors from the inside, a takeover of Ukraine would have been even easier, followed by Putin’s pick of other Eastern European countries. Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, claimed that Putin didn’t invade during the nasty guy years because the nasty guy was too unpredictable. Steve Schmidt, an ex-Republican strategist, rebukes Lowry’s claim. The nasty guy is very predictable – ready to sell out America for nothing but flattery. In a post from yesterday Sumner lists some of the things Republicans are saying in support of Putin. And that the whole thing is Biden’s fault. Sumner wrote:

When they’re not spreading the news that Putin is strong, Biden is weak, and that the United States has no interest in promoting democracy, defending nations against aggressors, or upholding our word to allies, Republicans have taken some time out to make it clear that Ukraine totally deserves it. That “corrupt” that Kirk tossed into his statement was no coincidence. It’s how Republicans are describing Ukraine in statement after statement. ... It’s not that Republicans don’t want a war. It’s that they’re already waging one—against democracy in the United States.

They just don’t want the Ukraine war to distract from their own war. Janne Korhonen of Finland tweeted a thread on Tuesday explaining the war from Finland’s point of view. Finland had been a part of the Russian Empire until 1917. From the speech Putin gave on Monday Korhonen says Putin’s goal it to recreate that Russian Empire. Putin doesn’t really fear NATO. What he fears is the Russian people decide to get rid of him. And democracies show that an alternative is possible. That’s why Putin and his formidable propaganda machine have been trying to undermine the European Union and supports the far right in Europe and America. A divided or corrupt West would benefit Putin. Yielding to Putin means a country isn’t really democratic. The people will choose candidates acceptable to Putin. And Putin gains power. That could mean the end of democracy in Finland. So many in Finland are now asking to join NATO. In another thread Korhonen wrote:

I would very much like that every human had the same or better opportunities I've had. But that requires a fair and just sharing of resources. Which necessitates a fair sharing of power, and limits to the powers of individuals. That is, radical democracy. ... The goal should be a society where no one has so much power that they can dominate others, nor so little they can be dominated.

After all that grim news we need a smile, such as this 10 second video of father and son.

They want everything, and we should have nothing

Tara Lipinski won gold in Olympic figure skating 24 years ago. She and Johnny Weir, who competed in two Olympics, have been commentators for NBC for skating and at the Closing Ceremonies. Lipinski and Weir commented on the women’s figure skating mess. Lipinski said that she won her gold at age 15. But unlike the young Russian skater, she had a very supportive team around her, helping her as a teenager deal with the pressure. SemDem of the Daily Kos community wrote about the next nasty law coming out of Florida. It is a “Don’t say gay” bill to prevent teachers from discussing LGBTQ issues. Or that we exist. This is during a legislative session full of bills to ban books about race and the Holocaust, and ban lessons that might may white people feel discomfort. Also in the news: Florida has a massive teacher shortage. SemDem suggests boycotting companies based in Florida. This post has a link to a list. MSNBC tweeted a link to an article on their site with this quote as an intro:

54% of American adults between the ages of 16-74 read below a 6th grade level. So that means we have an epidemic of illiteracy," professor Brittney Cooper reacts to book banning. "If you make people ignorant, then it becomes much easier to control them.

Aldous Pennyfarthing of the Kos community discussed a national security hole. After the nasty guy’s accounting firm said their statements over the last ten year cannot be relied upon, no legitimate bank is going to allow him to be a client, and certainly not give him a loan. So who will? Saudis, Russians, narcoterrorists. And what would they want for giving the nasty guy a loan? National Security secrets. That’s why security clearance isn’t given to people who are financially compromised. Maybe we should be glad he never read the daily security briefs. The nasty guy is being sued in civil court for his actions before the January 6th Capitol attack. I’m not sure why a criminal suit hasn’t been brought, but we’ll take what we can get. Mark Sumner of Kos reported on Friday Judge Amit Mehta ruled the suit against the nasty guy can proceed. Giuliani and nasty junior are excluded because they didn’t actually call for violence at the rally just before the attack. But the nasty guy actually called his followers to “fight” as part of asking them to march on the Capitol. Some of the things Mehta wrote about in his ruling. Yes, public speaking is part of a president’s official duties. But not everything he says in public is part of those duties. A president speaking cannot be immune from a civil suit. The nasty guy called his followers to fight knowing militia groups were in the crowd and were prone to violence. And he appeared to ratify that violence in a tweet afterward. Keep this ruling around for the criminal cases. Rebekah Sager of Kos profiled John Boyd, Jr., a black farmer. Boyd went to the Farmer’s Home Administration. White farmers were able to get loans. He was denied, repeatedly. So in 1995 he formed the National Black Farmers Association. The NBFA sued. The USDA settled for $50K to each black farmer, though many of them didn’t know about it until it was too late to apply. Boyd went back to Congress to get the time limit extended. Last year the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill included $5 billion for farmers of color. Sid Miller, Texas Republican Agriculture Commissioner, challenged that part of the law as discriminatory. Boyd said:

All these white farmers out on the federal court, talking about reverse discrimination. I read the complaint, and I'll be honest with you, I almost fell out of my chair. They left out the part that says they got debt relief the whole time and pretty much all the loans. I mean, $1 million per farmer and subsidies, meaning they don’t even have to pay it back. While we, Black farmers, are getting foreclosed on, white farmers are getting debt relief. In all the years I went to court, I never once sued to stop white farmers from getting anything. These guys went to court to deny Black farmers our justice. And it’s a continuation of Jim Crow. They want everything, and we should have nothing. ... Here’s the thing. I’m a 6-foot-tall, 240 pound Black man. I’ve got a baritone voice and dark skin. I’m the epitome of a Black man in this country. I don’t want this country to look at me and that’s all they see. I want them to look at me and say, “this guy’s been farming since 1983. He knows his trade, his art, his skill. Let’s see what we can do to work with him.” That’s what America has to do. And until we are able to accept that, we're going to continue to have the same discussion.

Cirien Saadeh of Kos Prism reported on the basic income pilot project launched by St. Paul, Minnesota. As have previous projects, this one showed how a little extra money a month can help a poor person improve their lives. Saadeh tells some of their stories. The program has worked so well that dozens of other cities, including Minneapolis, have launched similar programs. This week’s pro-vaccine memes, assembled by Kos of Kos, are here. My favorites:

So you think COVID is a Chinese bioweapon? OK, so you’ll wear masks and get vaccinated against it... You’ll actually protect yourself from this Chinese bioweapon, right?

One showing a newly married couple at their reception:

And a toast to vaccines! Thanks to vaccines, we won’t need to have 10 children in hopes that 3 or 4 of them live to adulthood.

Showing what might be a magazine cover with brief summaries of the stories inside (an excerpt):

ANTI-VAXXER The Magazine for Absolute Twats It’s My Body, My Choice Writes an old white man who is against abortion

Overwhelmingly wealthy, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly men

Overwhelmingly wealthy, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly men As I’ve been doing for nearly 20 months I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data today. After a peak of 27,739 new cases in one day back at the beginning of January, the last few peaks have been 12,899, 9839, 4020, and 2629. Good news indeed! The last time weekly peaks were this low was back in August in the early part of the delta rise. Deaths per day for the second week of February are in the 39-53 range. I watched the Olympic pairs figure skating short program last evening and the free program tonight. It has much less drama surrounding it than the women’s competition. One of the USA pairs teams is Ashley Cain-Gribble and Timothy LeDuc. They ended the short program in 7th place, a tenth of a point from 6th – but ten points from the leaders. This team is of interest for another reason – Timothy is the first openly non binary athlete at the Olympics. NBC even included a shot of Tim’s boyfriend cheering at home. After the free program Cain-Gribble and LeDuc finished 8th. The Chinese pair won by 0.6 points, which led to a lot of jubilation because the lost the gold four years ago by a half-point. For more background on the messy women’s figure skating Scott Simon of NPR spoke to Polina Edmunds who competed in the same event in 2014 and now is host of a figure skating podcast. Some of what they talked about: The center of this media circus should not be the 15 year old athlete. It should be her coaching team. Back when Edmunds competed judges were looking for both the technical and artistry, something a woman, not a child, could bring. Just eight years later the focus is on the technical and things, such as quad jumps, a girl can do and a woman cannot. What we have now is a jumping contest. The way out of this is to return the artistic score to actually mean artistry – intricate choreography and actual emotion displayed by the skater. Current competitors can demand change. As for Kamila Valieva, the adults around her need to see her as a human, not a vessel for medals. If Edmunds could talk to her Edmunds would say get yourself into long term therapy. Valieva has been through way too much negative attention for anyone to handle, especially someone so young. Kos of Daily Kos commented on the situation in Ukraine, in which he believes Putin has put himself in a no-win situation. Some of the things he discussed: If one looks at Russia from the North Pole NATO is on two sides – Europe to the west and USA and Canada to the north. That explains some of Russia’s paranoia. Some more is explained by Ukraine’s size. It is the second largest country in Europe (Russia is the largest – and Turkey is mostly in Asia). I checked a couple of comparison sites. One shows Ukraine a bit smaller than Texas. Another shows Ukraine extending from New York to west of Chicago. In the ranking of the 48 European countries by GDP, Russia is 46, Belarus is 47, and Ukraine is 48. Other former Soviet states: Romania is 10th, Poland 13th, Armenia 15th, Hungary 18th, and Georgia 20th. Russia doesn’t do responsible economic stewardship. It’s client states do worse. If this was really about NATO expansion it could easily be handled by treaty. The treaty could cover things like not placing missiles aimed at Moscow in Ukraine or using NATO membership to recover Donbas and Crimea. This is about wounded pride and the only way to handle that through diplomacy is to acquiesce to Putin’s ridiculous demands. I believe more this isn’t about pride. Rather it is about Putin not wanting a big democracy as its neighbor. Might give the natives ideas. Ukraine has significantly improved its military since Russia took Crimea eight years ago. Finland and Sweden have been neutral – they haven’t joined NATO. But they’re in talks now – as in hey, Russia, don’t make us do this. Putin’s actions may strengthen and expand NATO. Russia’s economy is not in good shape – see the ranking of 46th above. A war would make the economy worse. Also, because of the already poor economy Russian public opinion has been turning against Putin. And a war (plus all that corruption) will discourage investors. I learned the harsh Russian winter defeated Napoleon in 1812 (which Tchaikovsky depicted in his 1812 Overture). So why would people think Russia would want to launch an invasion in winter? The answer is that tanks do better on frozen ground than in spring mud. If Putin withdrew could he go to the Kremlin and say “I tried but they refused by demands”? Doubtful. Russian leaders who show weakness don’t fare well. Biden has offered Putin a way out – a new nuclear arms treaty. So far Putin has refused. Another way out is Putin simply declares Russia is still a superpower. It’s now up to Putin. Mark Sumner of Kos reported the nasty guy is trying to sell his lease to the Trump Hotel in Washington. He wants to get $375 million for it. Since this was a way for other countries to slip him a bribe, does selling the lease mean he isn’t running in 2024? The nasty guy’s accounting firm has said their numbers cannot be relied upon. The General Services Administration owns the building (it is a historical government building) the nasty guy is leasing. Because of the unreliable numbers the House Oversight Committee has asked the GSA to terminate the lease. Which means the nasty guy would have nothing to sell. Too bad. Somebody released a report that again cleared Hillary Clinton of any wrongdoing. Of course, the conservative squawk machine is cranking up. Laura Clawson of Kos reported Clinton herself had a few things to say.

It’s funny, the more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get. ... So now his accountants have fired [Trump] and investigations draw closer to him and right on cue, the noise machine gets turned up. Fox leads the charge with accusations against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again. And as an aside, they're getting awfully close to actual malice.

“Actual malice” is a legal term that sets a standard for when public figures can win libel cases. Fox News dismissed the idea by saying it’s not malice, it’s news. As for the claim the Capitol attack was “legitimate public discourse” Clinton said:

When the Republican Party officially embraces violent insurrection as legitimate political discourse. When storming the Capitol, assaulting police officers, trying to overturn an election, are being normalized, we are in uncharted territory. And make no mistake, our adversaries around the world are watching. Republicans are defending coup-plotters, they're curbing voting rights at precisely the moment when democracy needs champions, when we should be standing together against autocracies like Russia and China.

Clawson concluded:

Clinton’s specific take on Trump and her take on the Republican Party tie together: The Republican embrace of lawlessness is so broad and so deep that it needs to create people like Clinton as villains at the head of vast conspiracy theories to distract from its own sordid realities.

No surprise here. Republicans plus Joe Manchin opposed the extension of the expanded child tax credit. It expired in December. Clawson reported in January the rate of child poverty went up by 41%. Clawson wrote:

That’s 3.7 million more children in poverty, with Latino and Black children hit the hardest, according to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. Everyone knows how to keep those kids out of poverty because the United States government did it for six months, and then, thanks to a small number of people—overwhelmingly wealthy, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly men—3.7 million children were made poor in the space of a month. ... It’s on the consciences of those senators. The ones who have consciences.

It's about keeping the culture war going

The Olympic women’s figure skating free program was shown last night, though delayed instead of live. Which meant I heard about the outcome on NPR’s afternoon news. I watched anyway. The news was about Kamila Valieva of Russia. She tested positive for a heart medication that also boosts performance, a substance that is banned in Olympic and international sports. Strangely, the results weren’t returned until six weeks later and the required second test has yet to be analyzed. She was permitted to compete anyway and finished 1st after the short program. She skated last in the free program. News reports say she “fell apart.” I wouldn’t describe her performance that way. Yes, she stumbled in one part of her program and fell after a jump and that likely rattled her. But she did complete her routine and did well. However, she didn’t do her best and dropped to fourth place and out of getting a medal. She did fall apart once off the ice and her coach lit into her. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported more of the story. Gold and silver went to Valieva’s teammates Alexandra Shcherbakova and Alexandra Trusova. Bronze went to Kaori Sakamoto of Japan. Trusova was upset because she had delivered five quad jumps, piling on another 30 technical difficulty points than any previous skater in a routine that seemed without much artistic merit (according to NBC announcers, though others also noticed it). Yet, Shcherbakova, with only two quads though much higher artistic merit, got the gold. Clawson then discussed the coach of all three Russian skaters. She is Eteri Tutberidze and is notorious for abusing her charges (Clawson has details). Those skaters tend to have careers that are hot and short. Valieva, at 15, does not have heart disease. A 15 year old does not, on her own, take performance enhancing drugs. So the chances are quite good that Trusova (five quad jumps!) and Shcherbakova also took the drugs, though early enough the tests did not detect them. This situation exists because the International Skating Union lets it. In spite of the red flags, Tutberidze was given a “best coach” award in 2020. Also, the ISU has been implying that winning requires quad jumps – that only abused Russian skaters can do reliably. Valieva’s reputation has been damaged. So has the reputation of Olympic women’s figure skating. How many of us are there? Us being LGBTQ+ people. Back in 2011 I wrote about a study by the Williams Institute determined there were 9 million LGBT people in America, or about 3.5% of the population. I wrote at the time that several decades before the Kinsey Institute estimated we were 10% of the population. Other estimates since then put us at 5%. These later estimates are probably low, because, as I wrote at the time, LGBT people are not out to a person with a clipboard. And, yes, at the time we hadn’t added the Q or the + for non binary, intersex, and others. In 2015 I wrote that Neil Swidey updated his report on why some people are attracted to people of their own sex. Again, it said we are about 3.5% of the population. Marissa Higgins of Kos discussed a new study by Gallup. That bit about not being out to a person with a clipboard seems to be changing. Now 7.1% of adults identify as LGBTQ+. The data was also broken down by generation. And this shows things are changing. Greatest Generation (older than 76): 0.8% Baby Boomers: (58-76): 2.6% Generation X (42-57): 4.2% Millennials (26-41): 10.5% Generation Z (18-25): 20% Twenty percent claim an LGBTQ+ identity? Wow! That is amazing to this Boomer. And that’s almost double the percentage of Millennials! Yes, Gen Z includes people much younger than 18, but they’re not allowed to participate in Gallup polls. The change over the years does not mean there are more LGBTQ+ people in younger generations. It does show the willingness of people in younger generations to claim an LGBTQ+ identity for themselves and a willingness to tell researchers about it. If one fifth of Gen Z are willing to tell researchers they have nothing to do with the closet they are certainly not going to go into a closet. They will continue to push for an open world. They will continue to push against the Republican efforts to cram them into a closet and continue to work against violence done to LGBTQ+ people, especially done to black trans women. Clawson of Kos reported that thirteen states now have laws telling teachers not to teach about race. They’re having the intended effect. A New Hampshire law is vague enough and its penalties are strong enough that Jen Given, a 10th grade history teacher, no longer teaches about Jim Crow, redlining, and how they contribute to the racial wealth gap. An Oklahoma teacher edits herself much more than she has ever done before. A Utah middle school eliminated a class on American institutions because it included Black Lives Matter. Clawson concluded:

The claim is that white kids have to be protected from knowing about things that have been done to Black kids in the past, because it might make the white kids feel guilty, or something. Bridges had to walk into school under federal protection past people screaming slurs at her. Moms for Liberty thinks it’s unacceptable for kids now to see pictures of that moment, not because of the trauma inflicted on one little Black girl then, but because of the guilt it would supposedly make white kids feel now. People feel empowered—with the support of Republicans at the very highest levels—to threaten school board members. And teachers can hear loud and clear that their careers will be over if they teach a fact the wrong white person finds inconvenient.

Students are not submitting quietly. Higgins reported two students have sued the St. Louis School District over the removal of eight books from the school libraries. The books, not surprisingly, all have something to do with race or LGBTQ+. The books are removed pending review after a complaint. So people could just complain to get a book pulled. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted some late night commentary:

Banning books isn’t about books. It's about keeping the culture war going for political benefit. You don't just have dozens of Republican states around the country suddenly realizing all at the same time that there are books they want banned in their libraries. It's happening because they think it's a winning issue. Or at least more of a winning issue than “Trump is still the president.” —Trevor Noah

Jason Campbell tweeted a video of Charlie Kirk comparing a restaurant asking for his vaccine status to living in Nazi Germany. Joe Walsh added:

What should make you worry for America? Not grifters like Charlie Kirk. You should worry because of the millions & millions who laugh, cheer, & applaud at the ugliness & ignorance spewed by grifters like Charlie Kirk. Worry because Charlie Kirk has an audience.

A set of requirements that makes public education impossible

Hunter of Daily Kos discussed the end of the trucker protests in Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked Emergency Powers act to clear the continuing protests in Ottawa. All the closed borders have been reopened. Another aspect Hunter discussed was the glee in which the American right has been reporting this story – with the usual false claims.

To many of the Republican supporters of the Canadian "siege," the supposed trucker protests are transparently viewed as an offshoot of the anti-democracy riots and coup attempt of January 6. It's not about whether truckers have to quarantine or be vaccinated when driving international routes during a deadly worldwide pandemic. It's about the possibility of far-right rebellion toppling legitimate democratic institutions, in this country and others, after their ideologies have gone too sour for the general public to support.

The right has been trying to get trucker protests going in the US. So far about all they’re getting is neighborhood irritants. Mark Sumner of Kos reported Mazars USA is the company that has been doing the accounting for the nasty guy’s companies. They have been looking at the reports coming from the New York attorney general and conducting their own investigations and have concluded that the financial records they produced for the last ten years should no longer be relied upon. It also said the nasty guy is no longer a client. Documents stating the value of nasty guy properties to secure loans cannot be relied upon. Documents stating income from these properties for tax purposes cannot be relied upon. Documents created for justifying business deals cannot be relied upon. The nasty guy claimed the statement from Mazars vindicates ... something. He issued a statement saying Mazars worked within accounting standards and statements do not contain any material discrepancies. All good. Sumner wrote:

Which is the opposite of what the letter actually said. Yes, Mazars produced reports that followed accounting guidelines, but they did so based on unreliable information. Trump’s team seems to be saying, “They have accurately reported the lies we fed them,” so all is well.

Sumner laid out what the Republican platform for 2022 is, based on what various candidates have been saying – loudly – lately. No, there isn’t an official platform. They didn’t bother with that for the 2020 election and won’t this year. The Republican platform for 2022 is: Arrest the members of the January 6 Committee for daring to investigate the insurrection. Make them the target of prosecution when they return to power. Conduct more investigations into Hillary Clinton. She hasn’t been charged with anything. There has been no new information in years. Yet a report saying there is no new info prompted renewed calls to lock her up and execute her. Ditch democracy. Candidates are running on the lie that the nasty guy won in 2020. They see nothing wrong of schemes to create slates of false electors. They are working hard to control elections. Bonus: Destroy public education. Wrote Sumner:

They’ve not only managed to pass hundreds of bills protecting their little Jane and Johnny from every hearing that the world exists only because white Christians made it, they’ve also convinced roughly 100 screaming anti-vaxx, anti-book, anti-diversity Republicans to run for every school board set in America, and they’ve put together a set of rules and requirements that makes public education absolutely impossible. This is a win, win, win all around. Because what good is it to destroy democracy if you don’t also get to rewrite history and warm yourself around stacks of burning books? Republicans have an agenda. It doesn’t have anything that looks like a normal agenda with plans for the economy, or a single idea for making lives better. Don’t worry: They’ll get around to the small stuff after they get rid of all the big stuff.

As for that last one ... Laura Clawson of Kos reported on the number of threats targeting school board members across the country. A report from Reuters

documented the intimidation through contacts and interviews with 33 board members across 15 states and a review of threatening and harassing messages obtained from the officials or through public records requests. The news organization found more than 220 such messages in this sampling of districts. School officials or parents in 15 different counties received or witnessed threats they considered serious enough to report to police.

And the Republican response: criticize anyone, such as the Department of Justice, attempting to do anything about these acts of domestic terrorism. And lift up the terrorists as heroic parents. Biden has been setting a record pace getting judges confirmed. Even so he has many judicial seats and various other government positions to fill. Confirming judges isn’t subject to the filibuster, though I think confirming other positions is. Either way Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Republicans have been using another strategy to grind government to a halt: They haven’t been showing up for committee meeting votes, denying a quorum. Not getting a committee vote means the nomination doesn’t go to the full senate. And the filibuster doesn’t matter. So, Democrats, don’t go looking for bipartisanship. Georgia Logothetis, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Dana Milbank of the Washington Post:

Covering the hypocrisy of the Trump right is a full-time beat these days. “Law and order” Republicans now embrace insurrectionists. Those who decried “cancel culture” now ban books and history lessons. Conservatives who supported “tort reform” now enshrine the rights of private citizens to sue one another. A party that welcomed libertarians now has officials incentivizing people to report on their neighbors. Onetime Cold Warriors now sympathize with Putin.

April Siese of Kos discussed the large number of electric vehicle ads that aired during the Super Bowl. She considered the likelihood the large number of ads appeared this year because of the $7.5 billion in the infrastructure act to build charging stations. Perhaps. But perhaps not – these ads need a lot of lead time and the infrastructure act was passed only a short time ago. I’ve noticed that for several weeks now there has been an article in every Sunday Detroit Free Press about electric vehicles. I don’t remember all that was reported in this series, other than considering the question of how an automaker goes about naming its EVs. However, it is good to keep the idea of EVs before readers, to make us more used to the idea. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included quotes from people born in February. Here’s one from President Lincoln:

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves, in their separate, and individual capacities.

And another legitimate object of government is to protect the little guy from the big guy.

They win when the liberals accuse them of hypocrisy

I watched the Olympic ice dancing last evening on the Canadian station. They showed one batch of teams live. As the last batch did their warmup, they switched to another sport. So when they got back the ice rink they were showing things delayed by a half hour (according to the clock in the rink wall). The streaming finished at 12:15. I very much enjoyed watching all of the top half dozen teams. Alas, only three of those got a medal. Perhaps in the spirit of building community we could watch all of these beautiful programs and not worry about scoring or medals? SquireForYou of the Daily Kos community is an ER nurse and had a lot to say about an anti-masking bill that has passed the Virginia Senate with the help of a Democrat.

Newly elected Gov. Glenn Youngkin is like a toddler with a shotgun: enormous power, nowhere near competent enough to wield it, prone to fits of petulance, and unable to care about the damage he causes.

I’m one of many who believe Youngkin does know how to wield that weapon and the damage he causes is the plan. Our nurse knows the dichotomy – the mental whiplash – between those who say “What pandemic?” and the guy who shows up in the ER who can barely breathe and we had better get his wife and kids on the phone and hold it up to his ear. The people who ban masks haven’t visited an ER. This nurse is in Charlottesville. When hospitals in the rest of the state run into problems they send patients into the cities around Charlottesville. They are treated as the safety net. And they’re tired. It is the taxpayer who is paying for the costs of a spreading pandemic. Every traveling nurse demanding extra pay, every dose medication, every long COVID patient. People say they don’t want government run health care because they are convinced they’ll be waiting forever for care. But now people are waiting an average of eight months for a specialist. Except the elite, the ones making the laws, don’t have to wait. The Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor is open again. An Associated Press story posted on Michigan Radio reports it opened at 11 pm last night. The protesters had been cleared by police earlier in the day, but then a snowstorm came through, delaying the reopening. Yes, I shoveled show today. I think I got about an inch. I see my sidewalk has a drainage problem and a lot of meltwater collected on it, which then froze as the temperature got close to 0F. As I shoveled snow off the ice I could hear it cracking. On a second pass I was able to shovel away the broken up ice. Mister Race Bannon tweeted a quote from a person at the bridge blockade:

I’ll go to jail forever if it means freedom.

I didn’t watch that football game yesterday. I wouldn’t have watched even if there wasn’t Olympic ice dancing to see. I’ve heard the half time show (which I didn’t watch either) featured a lot of black performers and was a pretty good show. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted David Lauter of the LA Times. Lauter wrote that many Republicans are losing interest in the NFL.

People who say they are less of a fan now than they were five years ago are more than twice as likely as everyone else to say the NFL is doing “too much to show respect for its Black players.”

John Stoehr, in his Editorial Board, discussed the unsurprising backlash against Biden saying he would nominate a black woman for the Supreme Court. Republicans may not have the votes and can’t use the filibuster. But they can drive liberals crazy. They can say a black woman can’t be qualified. But Amy Coney Barrett was never a judge. Kavanaugh was credibly accused of sexual assault. Were either qualified? Liberals wail about hypocrisy.

Liberals can accuse the Republicans of hypocrisy all day. It won’t matter. They don’t care. Neither do their supporters. They’d have to care about the truth to care about looking hypocritical. They don’t. All they care about is winning. They win when the liberals accuse them of hypocrisy. The liberals are missing the forest through the trees. The Republican goal isn’t stopping Biden. They can’t. Their goal is making the nomination of a Black woman seem like an assault against white people.

Whenever black people gain just a bit there is a backlash. Stoehr discussed this backlash with Samuel Hoadley-Brill. He’s a fellow at the African American Policy Forum and a graduate student at CUNY. They discussed Christopher Rufo, who thought up how to repurpose Critical Race Theory to bash teaching race in public schools. Rufo is just one of many professional BS artists who receive a lot of funding and hype from people who want to stir up old-fashioned racial moral panic. They’re an American tradition. As are the people who want to ignore that we have a racism problem.

Race is a very powerful manipulator of the rational mind, especially in the US, and so race-baiting demagoguery can be incredibly effective.

The discussion turned to the similarities between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement. Both eras included the rise of organizations devoted to reasserting white supremacy.

Unfortunately, white backlash has been extraordinarily successful. It’s been able to undo a lot of progress without registering itself as a pervasive problem in our collective memory.

Kos of Kos posted his weekly collection of pro-vaxx memes. Here are a few of my favorites. The first one reminds me of the number of times Evangelicals accused gay people and others of such things as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans and the 9/11 attack.

Should we tell the Evangelicals that as soon as they made a godless, lying, lawless, womanizing conman their messiah ... a plague showed up? Conservative n. a person who bets their life they will not be in the one percent of Americans who die of Covid but will be in the 1 percent who benefit from Republican economic and tax policies.

One by Steve Hofstetter:

New term: Agnorant. Definition: people who are extremely ignorant, yet are simultaneously extremely arrogant. Example: people who think they know more about science than scientists.

I ignore Valentine’s Day. Even so, I enjoyed CBC Music’s midday show that included stories of composers involved in Messy Love (see Hans von Bülow, his wife Cosima, and Richard Wagner), Friend Love (see Beethoven – always the friend, never the lover), and Love (featuring a few husband-wife performing teams). Leah McElrath tweeted an image by Introvert Doodle that said “You don’t need to be in a romantic relationship to live a life filled with love.” Examples include friend love, family love, fuzzy love, nature love, team love, book love, and self love.

Preparing the child as an equal participant in democracy

I usually don’t listen to the NPR program On the Media, which discusses how the media treats various stories in the news or provides background on a current story. However, an advertising clip of the February 4th episode was intriguing. So I waited until the transcript was available and worked through that. The host of this episode is Brooke Gladstone. In the first part of the hour she talked to Kelly Jensen of Book Riot, who writes a weekly update of book censorship news. That intriguing advertising clip was this by Jensen (which didn’t appear in the story):

It's not about the kids, it's about creating such havoc in public schools that they're able to say, why are we paying tax money to this institution that isn't doing its job?

Gladstone and Jensen discussed a case in one of the suburbs in the Seattle-Tacoma area. The principal of a middle school heard some parents were working towards challenging certain books. To avoid a noisy school board meeting the principal went into the library and removed those (not surprisingly LGBTQ positive) books. A big problem in this case is the parents who might welcome these books don’t know it was done. The students and teachers don’t know either. Thankfully the librarian blew the whistle. The group Moms for Liberty, and their sub group Moms for Libraries, has 70K members in 165 chapters in 33 states. They operate a county at a time – their actions can be quick and targeted. While pulling books from a library is negative press, they work with Brave Books to donate books to these libraries. But the books that Brave Books publishes are conservative propaganda. Gladstone and Jensen discussed various other cases. Each town or school system has its own policy or procedure to handle book challenges. Politicians in some states are imposing their policies or books to removed. As above, sometimes school or town officials try to get ahead of possible challenges. The speed at which it happens varies. Some librarians demand books be replaced. Challenges are based sometimes on appropriateness for the age group, some tie to obscenity laws. Sometimes the book is moved to a shelf near the librarian’s desk so a child will feel intimidated to browse there. Most of the people challenging books are white – one school board meeting had a visit by the white supremacist group the Proud Boys. Gladstone included a clip of Virginia Governor Glen Youngkin, back when he was campaigning, talked about parents not allowed to be engaged in their child’s education. Gladstone says the key word is “engaged” which is a euphemism for “limit.” Gladstone talked to Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider of the Education Podcast: Have You Heard. They discussed case law. They said parents aren’t the only ones with rights. Children also have rights, including the right to be exposed to ideas that may not be aligned with the ideas they hear at home. These are future citizens we all have a stake in. We want young people who learn to think for themselves. Yes, that can divide child from parent. But that’s not indoctrination. But preparing the child as an equal participant in democracy is more important than parental desires. Examples of this tension include the teaching of evolution and climate change. In the 1990s there was a push for parental rights. Columnist George Will said it would set off an explosion of litigation – at a time when Republicans were pushing tort reform to limit lawsuits. These debates are happening in school board meetings because since the decline of most civic associations this is the only place of civic activity. There are more parents who want their children exposed to an honest accounting of history than parents who don’t. But the parents who don’t engage in anti-democratic behavior, such as shouting down their opponents and saying we’re coming back and bringing guns. The good parents decide it is better to say quiet. But limiting a child’s education through other parents getting books removed has consequences in AP tests and college admissions. Parents are vying for an advantage. When parents realize other parents are limiting their child’s education the backlash will likely begin. Micah Loewinger of On the Media guided the story of the third portion of the show. Back in 1976 three members of the school board of Island Trees School District on Long Island went to a conservative conference and picked up a list of objectionable books. When they returned home they went through the middle and school libraries and removed the books on the list they found. The removal was not prompted by students, parents, or the community. The board sent out a press release saying the books they removed were offensive to Christians, Jews, Blacks, and Americans. They contained obscenities and perversions. Steven Pico was part of the discussion of this episode. He was 17 at the time and student council president, He challenged the board. He had read some of the books and suspected they cherry picked passages and handn’t actually read the books. He got in touch with the ACLU to challenge the constitutionality of the removal. The board’s position was they were a democratically elected body and it was up to them to make judgments about the curriculum and contents of the library. The ACLU argued they could not impose a narrow orthodoxy of views and values. Pico won at the Second Court of Appeals, so the board took the case to the Supremes. There the arguments included the question: What if the board removed books because they didn’t like Republicans? Each side got a confirmed four votes. The ninth vote couldn’t decide, which sent the case back to a lower court to see if there was evidence of motivation. The school board returned the books and dropped the case. It is hard to apply this case because seven opinions were written. Arthur Eisenberg, the ACLU lawyer on the case and a part of this episode, said:

Public education is not just about reading and writing and arithmetic. That an element of a sound basic education involves being educated in democracy and ideological diversity and pluralism, are foundational democratic values. And democracy rests on the power of reason through public discussion, and the remedy for bad ideas is not coerced silence, it is not censorship, but more speech to correct those errors.

Charles Jay of the Daily Kos community reported Jeff Bezos, whose fortune increased by 70% – $113 billion to $182 billion between March 2020 and October 2021, isn’t sharing that wealth with his Amazon employees. Instead, he is spending a half billion on a new super yacht. He has contracted with a shipbuilder in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The boat is 417 feet long and its masts reach 229 feet high. It will likely be completed in June. There’s a little problem. There is a bridge between the ship yard and the open sea that can be raised up only 130 feet. The bridge was built in 1927, rebuilt after it was damaged by German bombs in 1940, and restored in 2014-2017. It is declared a national monument. The mayor of Rotterdam must now decide whether the shipbuilder be allowed to partially dismantle the bridge to allow Bezos’ yacht to pass. Presumably the bridge would be rebuilt afterward. In what began as a joke among friends, 4,000 people have signed up to throw rotten eggs at the yacht as it heads to sea. I’m puzzled about something. Why isn’t is possible to attach the masts after the ship reaches open sea? Why is it cheaper to dismantle and rebuild the bridge than do that? Rebekah Sager of Kos highlighted Isias Hernandez, the Queer Brown Vegan. In high school he learned about environmental injustice – one’s zip code was the most significant indicator of whether one lived in a toxic environment. The poor knew they were being poisoned, but didn’t have the resources to defend themselves. Yet it is white celebrities who are at the forefront of environmental movements. White and people of color should be working together. He tries to insert himself in white conversations. Artist Badiucao is Chinese, but because his art is a protest against the Chinese regime he lives in Melbourne, Australia. For these Olympics, he created a series of posters. The Chinese biathlon contestant aims the gun at a blindfolded Uyghur captive. The Chinese curler’s stone looks like the coronavirus. The Chinese figure skater slices up the flower that is the emblem of Hong Kong. The Chinese snowboarder is riding a surveillance camera. And a few more. A couple of these images are in a story about blockchains and NFTs. Others can be seen by searching for Badiucao Olympics. I’m posting a bit early tonight. Ice dancing will be live and may run late. I’m watching CBC because of that football game on NBC.

A government record that says our love exists

Olympic ice dancing began this evening. In this case the contestants have to move to the music. I’m not sure what the requirements are for tonight’s event. It is called “street dancing” and the music is from the likes of John Legend, the Backstreet Boys, and Janet Jackson. The free skate is tomorrow evening (I hear sometime after a football game?). I’m pleased to see ice dancing men are more likely to have a beard. One of the dancers was Paul Poirier from Canada. The announcers, said that he had come out as gay a couple years ago. He danced with a woman partner to music by Elton John. Alas, the skating world it too uptight to allow two men to dance together. Tonight I watched NBC. They finished the skating by 10:30. I’m pretty sure, based on the clock on the wall in the rink, this was recorded last evening Beijing time. The most recent peak in Michigan’s COVID data is 4845 new cases in a day. This is a mere 17% of the height of the omicron surge five weeks ago. That looks pretty good! Cases per day haven’t been this low since October. On my current chart, with the vertical scale set by the recent surge, this indeed looks low. But it is only 54% of the peak at the end of March a year ago. There is still a lot of virus out there. Deaths per day, starting a week ago and going back another two weeks, has been ranging from 63 to 108. My program is now charting 713 days of data. Matt Glassman of the Government Affairs Institute of Georgetown University, tweeted:

Here's a simple guideline: don't trust elected officials to give you good substantive expert info; don't trust substantive experts to make policy decisions that balance competing values or stakeholder interests; and don't trust randos on the internet to do either.

He added that politicians are the only ones that can weigh policies that have competing values. But they shouldn’t be a source of expertise. Glassman doesn’t get into how this balance changes when the politician is corrupt and beholden to his backers. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted an article in The Atlantic in which Yair Rosenberg talked to Steven Shapin, a historian at Harvard. These are Shapin’s words:

We don’t know things directly. We know things through trusted sources. So part of the science that’s relevant in this situation is the science of credibility: how credibility is established, how people come to know things. One of the things I think that people mean by following the science is, “Look, there’s this guy, Fauci; he knows what he’s talking about, believe him. Look, there’s this guy, Trump; he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; don’t believe him.” The problem we have today is a radical splintering in sources that speak about the world. In a sense, we’ve always had this, but now we’ve got such a diversity of voices that we’re asking laypeople to decide between Joe Rogan and Trump and Fauci, and determine who is speaking the truth about the virus. It’s a hard thing to do!

Elena Moore of NPR, in a report posted on Michigan Radio, said police at the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor started requiring trucks to leave the protest. It looks like nearly all did. However, as of this afternoon, the bridge is not yet open because pedestrians swelled from a few dozen to hundreds and were still blocking traffic. The Moth is an organization that invites people to tell a true story about their lives. The Moth Radio Hour episode that aired today featured Jim Obergefell telling his story at a Moth event in 2016. His name is on the marriage equality Supreme Court decision. He and his partner wanted marriage only if the government recognized it. After the case that overturned the Defense of Marriage Act Jim and his lover John got married. By then John was deep into ALS and died just a few months after the wedding. Jim wanted his husband’s death certificate to show him as surviving spouse. It was about a piece of paper, a government record that says our love exists. Jim’s story starts at minute 34 and went for 15 minutes. I heard parts of the other stories in the hour. They’re pretty good too. I usually don’t listen to The Moth, which is on Michigan Radio every Saturday. I was running errands today while it was on and listened. I’m glad I caught Obergefell’s story.

This isn’t a whoopsie, it’s a crime

The trucks blocking the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario are still in Michigan and Canadian news. Today’s newscasts talked about getting injunctions from a judge and declarations of emergency by various government officials. I also heard of plans to airlift parts from Canadian to American factories. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos, in an article posted today, wrote:

As BBC News reports, officials in the province of Ontario have had enough. A state of emergency has been declared, making blocking critical infrastructure subject to arrest, a fine of up to $100,000, and the possibility of a year in jail. Trucks used to blockade access to bridges, airports, and border crossings can be seized, held, and sold at auction. "There will be consequences, and they will be severe," said Ontario Premier Doug Ford. “To those who have attempted to disrupt our way of life by targeting our lifeline for food, fuel, and goods across our borders, to those trying to force a political agenda through disruption, intimidation, and chaos, my message to you is this: Your right to make a political statement does not outweigh the right of hundreds of thousands of workers to earn their living." The cost of the blockades so far has been estimated at $300 million a day.

The mandates they are protesting have been imposed at the provincial level, not national. Many of them are being lifted, though protesters and their US supporters are pretending otherwise. Sumner also reported that the number of trucks blocking roads is rather small – around a hundred or two, not the “50,000 trucks” breathlessly reported by conservative media. The number of people involved is small. The amount of economic damage they can do is quite large. That’s what makes this scary. Our transportation system, both here and in Canada, focuses on highways. Passengers share routes with freight. A small number of vehicles can shut down a major route. Protesters have long known they can raise the profile of an event by inconveniencing travelers.

But what’s happening with the “convoy” is a particularly 2022-oriented event, one that recognizes the vulnerability of the supply chain and the difficulty of policing such events in an environment where many people are frustrated by the lingering pandemic. It’s also an event that gleefully celebrates the one thing that the right has become so well-versed in over years and decades: hurting people. Thanks to a stream of attention and funding funneled in to those few trucks, they’re able to sustain this action over a long period and to spark copycats in other areas, including the United States. It’s like the highways are a 1,000-mile-long lever with which just a few jackasses can hold the economy hostage. It’s very much like that. ... To generate damage that runs into the millions of dollars an hour, all it takes is a handful of people spread out across the lanes of a busy interstate and moving very slowly. ... In this case, that damage is augmented by a right-wing media that’s making international heroes of those causing disruption, and helping to see that causing damage is a profitable occupation. Where the first $1 million of funds dispersed to those involved in the Canadian protest went isn’t clear, but considering the size of the actual protest, some of those involved are likely getting a much larger payday for protesting than working.

Sumner also talked about a convoy leaving California ready to cause chaos in Washington, DC at the time of the State of the Union address. He also notes that “caravans” are what migrants form on their way to the US and are scary. “Convoys” evoke songs of truckers outsmarting Smokey and are good. Also, Black Lives Matter protesters took to the highways knowing they would be arrested. No sign yet whether the truckers will be. Jared Yates Sexton tweeted:

The convoy in Canada is funded by wealthy donors who are relentlessly attacking democracy. It isn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon, and its actions aren’t just randomly disrupting a capital and shipping routes. I can’t believe there are people who still don’t get this.

Sumner discussed the nasty guy’s habit of tearing up documents rather than turning them over to the National Archives as required by law. The latest bit of this story is that in some cases the nasty guy flushed torn up documents down a toilet (sometimes clogging it) and in some cases he ate them. Sumner then discussed the way the news media is treating this story compared to the way they treated Hillary Clinton’s emails.

What almost every media outlet seems to be ignoring is that this isn’t a whoopsie, it’s a crime. Every time Donald Trump ripped up a document, that was a crime. Every time he tried to flush one down the sadly not gold White House crapper, that was a crime. Everything he boxed up and carted off to Mar-a-Lago, that was a crime. In the “statement” on Thursday morning—the one where Trump is still raging about Hillary Clinton “acid-washing” her emails—Trump claims that there are “two legal standards, one for Republicans and one for Democrats.” Trump is absolutely right. Both the Department of Justice and the major media treated Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails as if they were major crimes. They greeted even the possibility that she had mishandled a classified document as if it were a disqualifying action. Hillary Clinton would have been president of the United States had not both the FBI and The New York Times spent the last days before the 2016 election hammering the idea that there might—might—be a mishandled email from Clinton on a laptop they had already examined. There wasn’t. But Trump … sure, he shredded documents in violation of the law. They treated that as a laughable habit. ... But hey, it’s not like he actually handled his email according to the instructions from the previous secretary of state, testified about it at length, and cooperated with every possible investigation into how those emails had been handled. Oh, no, he didn’t do anything that heinous.

Since the nasty guy claims he took documents to Mar-a-Lago because they may someday be displayed at his presidential library. Which prompted commenters to debate whether there would be such a library because no one would fund it – knowing most of the money would go straight into the nasty guy’s pockets. Sumner then took the New York Times to task because their staff knew about the nasty guy’s document destruction and didn’t tell its readers. Sumner knows they knew it because one of their writers is putting that detail into a book. Sumner also included a tweet by Matt McDermott what shows several NYT front pages with stories of Clinton’s emails. But the story of the nasty guy destroying documents – that’s on page A15. Laura Clawson of Kos discussed a new Pew Research Center Poll that shows Republican politics is all about white grievance. The poll found that 55% of white Republican agree with the statement that white people face a lot of discrimination. Back in 2015 only 38% agreed. A Cato Institute researcher found that 73% of nasty guy supporters believe that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks. This at a time when black households have just 12.7% of the wealth of white households.

What do you even say to that? To that deep a level of victim mentality, in which the mere prospect of seeing centuries of political and economic and institutional advantage seized through violence be redistributed ever so slightly leads to the conviction that you, a member of the group that has been and remains on top, are being discriminated against? Barack Obama was elected president, and then he was reelected president, and white Republicans just could not take it. And then here came Donald Trump to tell them that they were right to feel that way, that even a small handful of Black people succeeding was a significant danger to all white people, and Republicans have run with that. ... In their focus on education, older Republicans are trying to recreate their own sense of grievance in another generation of white people. If they succeed at completely centering white people in U.S. history, erasing Black people and Indigenous people and other people of color from that history and simultaneously denying the nation’s voluminous history of violent racism, then when that next generation, the kids who are being taught this literally whitewashed history, is confronted with reality, they too will feel that they are losing, that something that is theirs is being stolen.

Commenter GrafZeppelin127 added:

Never in history have so many people drawn so much pleasure and satisfaction from feeling victimized without actually being victimized.

That discrimination they’re feeling is society frowning at them for discriminating against others. The nasty guy said that if he regained the White House he would pardon the participants of the January 6th Capitol attack. That has caused a split within the Republican Party with Sen. Lindsay Graham, of all people, saying the idea is inappropriate. Politico/Morning Consult did a poll and 68% of registered voters say they do not believe attackers should be pardoned. Strong nasty guy supporters like the idea of pardons. A strong majority of the rest of the country do not. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late light commentary.

According to a new book, the White House engineer—who's kind of like the plumber, I guess—would frequently be called in to unclog the president's toilet because he had a habit of flushing papers down it. What do you think about the fact that Trump had to come out and, in writing, deny he clogged up the toilet in the White House? It's a conversation you have with your three-year-old. —Jimmy Kimmel Turns out Trump couldn't drain the swamp because the pipes were clogged with classified documents. —Trevor Noah Canada's police are fining the truckers for "excessive honking," and yet Canada geese continue their lawless mayhem. —Stephen Colbert

Rikki Held is one of sixteen youth suing the state of Montana saying the state government has violated her constitutional right to a “healthful environment.” Held suffered heat exhaustion and headaches from wildfires while working on the family ranch. One of the claims is that Montana’s fossil fuel consumption wreaks havoc on public trust resources that are explicitly protected. Some parts of the case were dismissed last August. The rest will be in court about a year from now. This case is the first. Others have already been filed and are waiting to see how this one turns out. The January issue of The Hightower Lowdown, written by Jim Hightower discusses the Rights of Nature.

It’s a simple idea: Rather than continuing to rely on the corporate- controlled, business-as-usual model of environmental regulation, why not grant self-protective rights of law to our invaluable natural systems?

One big change this idea would cause is to shift the debate from whether humans are harmed by an action to whether the ecosystem – the animals, fish, and other organisms – is harmed. An ecosystem, with lawyers arguing on their behalf, could sue for its own preservation. Of course, as this idea is spreading the corporate world is screeching. Rights belong to people, they say, not to artifacts within an environment. Giving rights to the land means no farming, no new roads or buildings, no cutting grass, or swatting mosquitoes. This from the same people who have created the grand fiction that corporations are people and have the rights of people.

The Rights of Nature movement is ascending now specifically because the existing system–which regularly allows corporate lobbyists, politicians, and big donors to undermine, evade, and mock environmental laws and regs–simply doesn’t work.

This idea that an ecosystem has rights – and that we humans are a part of it – has been practiced by indigenous communities for a long time. And they are also taking matters to courts. Three years ago the Objibwe of Minnesota filed a case naming wild rice as a plaintiff. Wild rice is grown in Objibwe territorial waters, but that water is affected by industry and contaminants in water on adjacent lands. An ecosystem is not bound by property lines. In addition to indigenous people, three dozen US communities have enacted Rights of Nature provisions. Tamaqua Pennsylvania did it to end toxic dumping that had caused an outbreak of cancer. These are communities not waiting for politicians. Infrastructure Porn is a cute name for a Twitter account. What little Twitter allowed me to see showed photos of complex highway interchanges and railroad bridges. They also show cool ideas, such as this one:

Solar panels being installed over canals in India. It prevents water evaporation, doesn't use extra land and keeps solar panels cooler.

As I’ve mentioned before another good place to put solar panels is over parking lots of big box stores and sports stadiums. This has been done at the Lincoln Financial Field parking lot in Philadelphia where the panels keep the sun, rain, and snow off cars and is prime territory for tailgate parties.