Certain political beliefs are treated as interchangeable with child abuse

My Friday evening movie, my second of the Freep Film Fest, was Gradually, Then Suddenly, about Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy. I streamed it from home. As I watched I took a page of notes. Here’s the basics of the story. Back in 2013-14 I wrote about the bankruptcy as it happened, perhaps a dozen posts. I also wrote about it in 2018 after seeing the Freep Film Fest movie Beauty and Ruin about the history of the Detroit Institute of Arts and how it got caught up in the bankruptcy proceedings. This movie focuses on why the bankruptcy happened and the issues around it resolution. Leading up to 2013 Detroit was $18.5 billion in debt. This was the largest city bankruptcy. All city services had been cut back due to a lack of money. Many street lights were out. There were huge numbers of arsons and homicides. Bus service was sporadic. If one called the police it might be an hour before they arrived – if they came at all. The city and its residents were in bad shape. Detroit and Michigan are highly racist. They’re not as bad as the South – here black people can vote – but there is still a lot of oppression. In the 1950 census the Detroit population was 1.8 million. At the time of the bankruptcy it was about 0.7 million. Freeways that were built in the late 1950s made white flight easier. Over the decades the middle class black people fled as well. That meant a great deal of the Detroit population was poor. The tax base dropped. And the city government budget took a big hit. There was also an adversarial relationship between Detroit and the state legislature. There is a law that says the state is to share revenue with cities with declining population to prevent them from spiraling into decline. But the state was increasingly reluctant to approve all of that money. Yes, that’s racism. Detroit’s first black mayor was elected in 1973. Part of the bad relationship was because white people in Lansing were annoyed with the audacity that black people wanted to govern themselves, so reduced payments to Detroit and other black majority cities. In a way that was to show black people couldn’t govern themselves. For a good long time Detroit was essentially a one industry town. The Detroit Three automakers employed a large part of the city’s (and region’s) population. But they tended to squabble amongst themselves for market share while ignoring the gains Toyota and other foreign brands were making. The Detroit Three had to cut costs and shrink their workforces. The Great Recession sent GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy in 2009. (Chrysler had several partners and name changes over the years and I don’t remember which name it held in 2009.) The woes of the auto industry made Detroit’s problems worse. By 2008 Detroit was pretty much out of money. The city fell way behind in making pension fund payments. The mortgage crisis that brought on the Great Recession hit Detroit especially hard. And the problems were made much worse. Detroit wasn’t the only Michigan city with a financial mess. The legislature came up with an Emergency Manager law, which swept aside the democratically elected city government and put in someone with sweeping powers to tear up existing labor contracts. Essentially a dictator. Yeah, the state refused to keep up the revenue sharing and when, because of that, the city couldn’t keep up the state took it over. In 2012 Michigan residents gathered enough signatures to put overturning the EM law on the ballot. The proposal won – and the lame-duck legislature promptly reinstated something very similar with a provision that prevented citizens from overturning it. The EM law was passed because city governments could not balance the books. Sheila Cockerel, who was on the Detroit City Council, said that was true. They were too beholden to political supporters. They spent too much, promised too much, and borrowed too much (though see above about the state withholding payment). I think it was sometime between 2008 and 2012 the city, in a desperate move, did some sort of pension bond swap. The essentially bet that the bond market would move in one direction. And it moved in the other. They lost their bet. Part of this is amazing – Detroit obviously was in debt and didn’t have enough money coming in to cover expenses – and yet institutions were still willing to lend it money with no obvious way for it to be paid back. In one of my previous posts I wondered (based on various presentations I had attended at the time) if those institutions could be convicted of fraud for misrepresenting the deal. Alas, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t pursued. This makes me think the institutions were working towards a scheme to suck money out of black people to give it to white people – which is what happened. Perhaps to them it was worth several million (or billion) to make the black people of Detroit even more impoverished. It’s a supremacist thing. The city owed money to two primary groups, the financial institutions and the retired city workers on pension. Even though the state constitution said pensions were sacrosanct, it also said they were contracted. And courts said that contracts could be voided, which meant pensions could be cut. That put the pensioners, mostly black and for whom the loss of a pension could mean life or death, up against big bankers, who were rich, mostly white, and for whom the loss of a few millions, maybe billions, wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference in their solvency and way of life. The conflict between pensioner and bank came down to the debt owed to the banks was secured and the money owed to pensioners was unsecured. And law puts secured debt first. This also annoys me because the banks – the financial institutions – knew the bet was risky. And they knew their money would be valued as more important than human lives. The story turned to the city’s assets. There were only two worth enough to matter. One was the water system. Detroit owned it, though it served the entire metro region and beyond. It also needed a great deal of repair and upgrading. The only way to pay for improvements was to raise rates and many Detroiters already had problems paying their water bill. It wouldn’t help pay the banks. However, the bankruptcy resulted in more regional representation on the water department’s board. The other big asset was the Detroit Institute of Arts. Yes, owned by the city. It’s collection was assembled at a time when Detroit had a lot of cash. Even though museums follow a code of not selling their art because it could end up in private collections and removed from public view, the pressure was on and appraisers came for a look. Soon the way out of bankruptcy was framed as pensioners v. art. Of course, many pensioners said sell the art. But as the earlier movie about the DIA stated, the money from the sale of the art would have not gone to the pensioners, it would have gone to the banks. Some people rightly framed the conflict between pensioners and the banks, but it wasn’t the usual view. A Grand Bargain began to shape up. Community foundations were urged to “buy” the DIA and its art, though the value they contributed was far from the value of the collection. Once that was mostly in place the city went to Lansing and pressured the legislature for a match. One of the arguments was this deal would be less than what the state would pay out in supplemental assistance to help all of those who become impoverished. There was a lot of resistance, but the money was approved. Then attention turned to the pensioners. Though the city was being run by an unelected administrator the pensioners voted on whether to accept their part of the deal. They were told their pensions would be cut and they would lose health insurance, but this is the deal we have and if you reject it any future deal will be worse for you. They approved it. And the deal was done. As for the investors, some got a quarter of what they were owed, others got a tenth. Thankfully, the deal included enough money for the city to restore and upgrade services. The city’s downtown and midtown areas are thriving, though many neighborhoods have seen little improvement. And the city’s finances are stable. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported the library board of Enid, Oklahoma has created a policy of not making exhibits about sex, sexual perversion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and several other categories related to sex. For now, the books can stay on the shelves, but they can’t be highlighted. That has meant the cancellation of two programs. One is the Shameless Romance book discussion club. The other is Sexual Assault Awareness, which sounds important. Displays for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day might be canceled. The language the library adopted is directly from a bill introduced in the Oklahoma legislature that is currently stalled. I’ve written that the library in Llano County, Texas has pulled books from shelves. Marissa Higgins of Kos reported several citizens filed a lawsuit against several county commissioners, the library system director, some library board members, and a county judge.

According to the lawsuit, the plaintiffs tried to check out several books that had been removed from the system and were denied access to those texts. They believe their constitutional rights have been violated because public officials censored the books based on their content. They also believe the public officials did not give proper notice or opportunity for the community to comment on the decision. “When government actors target public library books because they disagree with and intend to suppress the ideas contained therein,” the lawsuit states in part. “It jeopardizes the freedoms of everyone.” Rather brilliantly, the suit also points out public libraries are not places of government “indoctrination” where people in power can “spoon-feed one-sided information” and dictate what people are allowed to read and discover.

I had mentioned Florida is including math books in its list of books to be banned. Higgins explained a bit more.

We now have a few examples from math textbooks that allegedly include references to CRT and social-emotional learning (SEL), as reported by CNN. Social-emotional learning, as some background, helps students learn how to solve problems and make decisions while managing their emotions and using empathy. Sadly, it’s easy to see why conservatives would want to stomp this sort of learning out—imagine if their minions developed a hint of empathy for the marginalized people they love to hate? Suddenly they’d have to work a lot harder to get votes. In a more advanced application, social-emotional learning is valuable for adults, too, when it comes to us understanding how and why we engage with others (as well as ourselves) in various situations at home, work, or with friends. For white people like myself, for example, this could mean an opportunity to identify and take accountability for microaggressions or racial bias. ... One example shared by the Times includes a word problem where, in addition to the obvious math, students are able to learn how to support a friend who is scared about crossing a bridge in the jungle. Students learn that they can help the hypothetical friend by building up their confidence and supporting them, which is probably why conservatives are upset about it. ... Ah, yes, because nothing distracts from learning like … developing basic social skills, compassion, and real-world problem-solving. Guess kids should go back to copying multiplication tables on the blackboard and call it a day?

Clawson discussed what Christopher Rufo has been up to. He’s the guy who laid out the plans for the GOP to turn Critical Race Theory into a battle cry. His latest efforts are to turn “grooming” into a toxic accusation against Disney (for opposing Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law) and anyone else he can figure out how to tar it with. And, like a Bond villain, he likes to explain what he’s doing. For his efforts he got a nice puff piece at the New York Times.

But as [Don] Moynihan, a political scientist at Georgetown University, wrote at his Substack, it goes deeper. In Rufo’s usage, “this language is largely not about sexual abuse of children. Rufo is much more likely to describe ‘grooming’ in the context of kids being exposed to ideas he dislikes rather than actual sexual abuse. In other words, sharing certain political beliefs — usually centered around recognizing the status of historically marginalized groups — are treated as interchangeable with child abuse, its perpetrators akin to child abusers.” “The reservoir of sentiment on the sexuality issue is deeper and more explosive than the sentiment on the race issues,” Rufo told the Times. In translation: He thinks he can ride anti-LGBTQ bigotry even further than racism. ... Rufo is part of a broader Republican movement to end public education, something he’s strategically laying the groundwork for with each new campaign he wages. CRT, grooming, social-emotional learning—all of these are buzzwords intended to weaken support for public education. Disney came into it because of the company’s opposition to the Florida Don’t Say Gay law banning the teaching of anything that might imply to children that LGBTQ people are acceptable members of their communities. Rufo laid out his approach in an April speech at Hillsdale College, titled “Laying Siege to the Institutions.” In it, he called for a “narrative and symbolic war against companies like Disney” in which “You have to be very aggressive. You have to fight on terms that you define.” On schools, he was explicit: “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”

Prairie Pilot of the Kos community proposed ways to diffuse the challenge that someone is a “groomer.” One could respond with sentences such as:

I want to groom the children of our country to build on this nation’s promises of equality and justice.

Some of the commenter are worried this will backfire. The word may already be too poisoned with its association with anti-LGBT hatred. Smiff added:

I worry that the R’s will just spam ads out of clips of Dems saying “I want to groom our children…” and say “See? I told you so...”

Chepe added an alternate use:

I’ve started talking about “Christian groomers” trying to inculcate hatred, ignorance, and denial of reality into unsuspecting children.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary. Here’s a bit of it:

If you think Florida is overreacting now, just wait until they find out that math can be non-binary. —Trevor Noah

When Disney began to build Disney World in Florida, all those decades ago they worked out with the state what is known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Over the land it owned (and it looks like over some of the surrounding neighborhoods) Disney is its own local government. It provides its own fire service and sewer treatment. In exchange Disney does not pay local property taxes. Because Disney is now working against a favorite Republican project, that Don’t Say Gay law, there is now an effort to overturn that Reedy Creek agreement. Hunter of Kos reported that Disney isn’t worried. State law says the District cannot be dissolved if there are outstanding bond debts – and there are, about a $1 billion worth. So the state, or maybe Orange County, would have to take over that debt – causing a steep rise in local taxes. That would be a big financial gift to Disney. Another barrier is the county would also have to pay for fire and sewer service. This “retaliation” looks pretty good from Disney’s point of view.

Definitely one of the fathers of LGBT rights

I looked at Michigan’s COVID data, updated Wednesday. I get the data here (the website and its address have been updated). The number of new cases per day has gone up again. For the last three weeks the peak has been 1300, 1949, and 2529. The number of deaths per day remain low. In the last 10 days the number has been 8 and less. The Freep Film Fest is happening now. That strange word in the title is the common nickname for the Detroit Free Press. This is the 9th year in which the newspaper had sponsored a festival of documentary films that have something to do with Michigan. This year I bought tickets to three of them, one of which I’ll watch from home. Last night I went to an actual theater to see the premier of America, You Kill Me. It is the story of Jeff Montgomery who started the Triangle Foundation, a Detroit organization working for LGBT rights. The title comes from his speech at the first Matthew Shepard Memorial Lecture at Brown University. The movie was to have been premiered at the 2020 festival, which was canceled. The two years since allowed the director to more finely edit the film. The movie wasn’t good on attaching years to various events, so I found Montgomery in Wikipedia. In 1984 he and his boyfriend Michael were to the point of considering they would together buy a house (the Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Palmer Park neighborhood). But Michael was murdered outside a gay bar – and the Detroit Police said they would not investigate because they didn’t have the resources for “just another gay killing.” That stepped up Montgomery’s activism, and in 1991 he and a couple others formed the Triangle Foundation. They went to LGBT bars with business cards that said if you are in trouble call. That meant they were receiving calls up to 3am. Then working a day job. Montgomery worked to end police entrapment, “bag a fag,” programs. This is when an officer pretends to ask for gay sex and when the other guy agrees arrests him for indecency. Those efforts ruined a lot of lives. Some of of these sting operations were at highway rest stops. Montgomery used a good way to combat them – he invited a lot of gay friends to a picnic at a rest stop. Of course, plainclothes police were there. Many who attended knew which ones were the police and made sure they were included in the legal party. He was active in the Scott Amedure case. On the TV show Jenny Jones Amedure, a gay man, surprised another man by saying he had a crush on him. Three days later that other man murdered Amedure. At the trial the defense tried to say it was the show’s fault for ambushing their client that way. Montgomery worked with the prosecutor to shut down the gay panic defense – a man should not fly into a panic/rage simply because another guy expresses sexual interest. Though those three days meant the murder was premeditated the killer was convicted with second degree murder instead of first – the jury was still swayed a bit by the gay panic defense. Montgomery compiled statistics, trained public prosecutors, and spoke to government officials at the city, county, state, and national level. Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm was in the film saying how much he helped her set up pro LGBT policies even when the Legislature and state Supreme Court were controlled by Republicans. When a legislator said he couldn’t support a bill because there were no gay people in his district, Montgomery was soon back with a gay person from his district. Montgomery also started a network of LGBT advocacy groups similar to the Triangle Foundation. Through that he and colleagues across the country went to Washington to meet with the Clinton administration. Alas, Montgomery was in great pain due to an autoimmune disease. He tried to control the pain through alcohol, though he had been sober for 19 years. He started showing up drunk. He was far more progressive, working for the rights of transgender people and sex workers, than his white donors were comfortable with. A second organization, Michigan Equality, was formed. In 2007 Montgomery’s progressive views and health issues prompted his ouster – early retirement – from Triangle. Soon Triangle and Michigan Equality combined to form Equality Michigan – and the movie and crowd last night had comments about how ineffectual they have become. The victim advocacy that Montgomery built has fallen away and their legislative lobbying seems ineffective. Even worse, after Montgomery was ousted the Detroit LGBT community ignored him. He died in 2016, after being interviewed for this movie. I certainly knew about Montgomery from the many articles about him in Between the Lines, Michigan’s LGBTQ newspaper. I’m sure I saw him at an event or two, though never actually met him. I was a donor to Triangle for many years, and even did a day of volunteer work at their office in Detroit (which was hard to find because they didn’t put the name on the building for security reasons). I still donate to Equality Michigan, though I now wonder if my money would be better spent elsewhere. I recommend this film. Jeff Montgomery is definitely one of the fathers of LGBT rights. Jillian Orr just graduated from Brigham Young University. BYU is run by the Mormon church and which bans same-sex relations. Orr is bisexual and had to hide her relationship with a woman. She received her diploma in January though participated in the recent graduation ceremony. She used that as a chance to make a statement. She and her sisters sewed a pride flag into the inside of her graduation gown and once on stage and past the dignitaries she flashed the colors. In a Ukraine update Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote about the fuel depots in Russia that have exploded. Ukraine was careful to hit the depots – and not civilian areas. These explosions mean Russia will have a harder time storing fuel near the fighting. Sumner quoted a conversation between father and soldier son that was tweeted by Dmitri. In what could be dark comedy they discuss what weapons the son might steal – Can you get rifles? Sorry Dad, want an anti-tank thingie, a rocket? I don’t need that – can you get pistols? No one here has pistols – do you want a land mine? No, don’t need that. Sumner discussed the most important vehicle in the military. Not the tank, but the jeep, or its modern equivalent, the Humvee. The troops need to get around somehow. Over the last couple months I’ve learned a great deal about the military – a lot more than I wanted to know. Kos of Kos discussed that yeah, Russia has taken over this town and that, but there isn’t an overall strategy. One would think Russia would be trying to encircle Donbas. So why is Russia attacking west of Izyum? Kos included a tweet from Julia Davis:

Russian state TV is raging about WWIII and an inevitable escalation over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Citizens are being primed to believe that even the worst outcome is a good thing, because those dying for the Motherland will skyrocket to paradise. Just when you thought Russian airwaves could not get any more bizarre, Putin’s puppets have now surrendered to the idea of nuclear apocalypse, because at least they’ll “go to heaven.”

If I remember right Charlemagne tried that trick and was rather successful at it. I learned about that from a book on early Christian history, titled Saving Paradise by Brock & Parker. In the centuries after Jesus Christianity was focused on his life. Starting at the time of Charlemagne the emphasis shifted from the life of Jesus to his death. We’ve been dealing with that ever since. In another Ukraine update Sumner quoted the same video posted by Julia Davis mentioned above and added this comment:

Think of Putinism as next-stage Trumpism: Oh, sure, we’re all going to die, but that’s a good thing because we get to go out while expressing our hate for everyone else. It’s all the worst things about radical jihad, in a western suit. Oh, and with nukes.

Sumner reported that while people, both civilians and military, are safe in the tunnels below the Azovstal factory in Mariupol, they aren’t safe if they need to go to the surface. Russia shelled a field hospital in the complex and reportedly dozens died. In an update from Thursday afternoon Sumner discussed the two towns Popasna and Pervomaisk that are two miles apart. Before this war Popasna was controlled by Ukraine, Pervomaisk by the Donbas separatist forces. I had mentioned the pair in a previous post. Sumner thinks these must be the longest two miles in the world. “How else to account for Russia reporting ‘steady progress’ in Popasna for 12 days in a row, without actually taking Popasna?” Maria Pevchikh of the Anti-Corruption Foundation did a long thread on classical music conductor Valery Gergiev. The reason he is the topic is because he is an ardent Putin supporter. He also asks for donations for various musical efforts and much of the money goes into his pockets. Gergiev has been quite in demand as a conductor, working in front of orchestras across Europe and the US. He did such a fine job during his tenure in Rotterdam he was given honorary Dutch citizenship, though he didn’t give up his Russian citizenship. Prevchikh wrote Gergiev’s usefulness to Putin can be described this way:

They came up with a simple formula targeted at the Western audience: You love Gergiev and his talent → Gergiev loves Putin → Therefore, you should like Putin too. Maybe Putin isn’t that bad if your favourite musician endorses him. Just think about it. Reconsider.

That Gergiev conducts memorial concerts for Putin’s victims – such as the plane shot down over Ukraine in July 2014 – is a nice cover. How does Prevchikh know the grieving for victims isn’t genuine? Gergiev was awarded by Putin the job of Directorate of the Imperial Theaters, of both they Mariinsky in St. Petersburg and Bolshoi in Moscow. Gergiev also owns several properties worth millions of dollars in NYC and across Italy. One doesn’t own this much expensive land on a conductor’s salary.

The incarnation of a bullying and harassment problem

I spent the middle of my day at the Museum of Innovation at The Henry Ford. I went because of a special exhibit that will be there another ten days. It’s an exhibit of the Apollo moon missions. It includes: The start of the space race. President John Kennedy proclaiming the goal of reaching the moon before the end of the decade interspersed with corresponding comments by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Kennedy’s assassination. The civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s. Models of the various rockets. Video of the Apollo 11 descent onto the moon while hearing the dialogue between the astronauts and Houston – hearing the phrase “Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed” is always emotional for me. The news as reported around the world. Small displays for Apollo 12 to 17 and the US-Soviet joint efforts for Mir. And a full size model of the lunar rover. A big reason I went is because the Apollo program was a big part of my teenage years. I watched the Gemini and early Apollo flights (I was too young to pay much attention to the Mercury program). While in the exhibit I saw a lot of people my age and older. And, of course, lots of school kids. One display was of an engineer’s desk. I was nearby and heard kids wonder what some of the stuff was. One declared “I know what that is – it’s a ruler.” It was actually a slide rule. In a Ukraine update from Sunday, Kos of Daily Kos included a diagram of the tunnel network under the Azovstal factory in Mariupol. Reports he’s read say the only thing the soldiers and civilians lack is ammunition. Meaning they have plenty of food. They could hold out for a while and harass the Russians by popping out from one tunnel entrance or another. Hunter of Kos reported on ...

the continued tendency of major infrastructure inside Russia to violently and inexplicably explode. Two massive fires are burning in Bryansk, 90 miles from Ukraine, after explosions rocked two large oil depots in the city. One of those depots is next to a Russian "artillery and missile storage" site. The cause of both explosions is currently unknown; this, after fires destroyed a Russian missile research facility, a Russian space program facility, and Russia's largest (and absolutely critical) chemical plant in recent days. It also coincides with a string of bloody murder-suicides plaguing the Russian oligarchy since Russian strongman Vladimir Putin issued his orders to invade. We remain in the same position as before. Ukrainian defenders around Izyum are in a precarious spot, with any significant Russian advance posing a potential existential risk to the Ukrainian trenchlines that have held for eight years now. But Russia continues to suffer losses not compatible with victory, backed by supply shortages that will put a time limit on its ability to press its assault.

In a Tuesday update Kos again noted Russia is trying to advance on too many fronts at once, meaning it will have a lot of difficulty in all of them. He also noted a couple of tweets that say Russia is warning that Western armaments sent into Ukraine are “legitimate targets” for Russia's military. Kos noted that of course Western military equipment – in Ukraine – is indeed a legitimate target. Russia hasn’t talked about targeting shipments of arms still outside Ukraine. Also, after all the war crimes Russia has committed, they care about what targets are legitimate? Kos also included a tweet by Nolan Peterson that includes a photo:

I was on hand to watch workers dismantling the Ukraine-Russia friendship statue today in Kyiv — it stood since 1982, now 2 months into the war, this probably isn’t what Moscow had in mind...

Greg Myre of NPR reported on the success Ukraine has been having intercepting Russian communications. Ukraine has been releasing some conversations it has gotten when the contents are embarrassing to Russia. An example is two soldiers taking and one calling for Ukrainian prisoners of war to be killed. When Russian soldiers came into Ukraine they brought their phones. Ukraine banned those numbers from its network. So Russian soldiers seized phones from civilians. The citizens notify the government which now has listening devices and a big advantage in intelligence. Why Russia hasn’t bombed Ukraine’s communication network into rubble is a mystery (same with the railways and electric power grid). Perhaps Russia wants to be able to use those things after the win that won’t happen? Russia hacking and taking down parts of Ukraine’s electrical grid in 2015 prompted much better sharing of intelligence between the US and Ukraine. Putin probably doesn’t appreciate this irony. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said,

We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.

Because that comment has gotten some fake outrage Sumner discussed that yes, this is a noble and important goal. Even if Ukraine wins this won’t be the last country Russia tries to invade. In the same way Ukraine has a “breakaway” region in Donbas, Moldova has a breakaway region in Transnistria. There were a series of explosions there on Monday. Were these attacks from Russia who will try to blame Ukraine? Whatever the cause, the explosions prompted long lines of people leaving Transnistria and heading into Moldova or maybe farther west. As Alina Radu put it, “People do not want to be ‘liberated’ by Russians.” In a report from yesterday afternoon Sumner started with a picture of what’s left of that Ukraine-Russia Friendship statue. The pedestal has little more than the figure’s shoes with the rest on the ground behind and little children posing in front of those shoes. Then Sumner discussed that Western countries are being careful of what weapons they give to Ukraine. All those wonderful military toys aren’t all that useful if they don’t come with all the right spare parts, if they require weeks and months of training, or if they require a different gauge shell. We don’t want to be a burden to Ukraine while we are trying to help them. Shashank Joshi, the defense editor for The Economist, tweeted:

All this hand-wringing at Austin's comment that US wants to see a weakened Russia. Russia has spent the last decade seeking to weaken the US & Europe. It has spent the last two months seeking to erase the Ukrainian state. Weakening Russia has costs, but it is in NATO's interest.

Heavy sanctions of Russia and a sustained military support of Ukraine will weaken Russia. “That’s a feature, not a bug.” The cost is a different balance of power in the world and China saying we told you this wasn’t about Ukraine, but about the US/NATO goal of weakening Russia. Julia Davis, who created the Russian Media Monitor tweeted, with video:

More genocidal talk on Russian state TV: political scientist Sergey Mikheyev claims that no one speaks the Ukrainian language & it doesn't even exist. No one in the studio contradicts him or stops him. Every pundit is aboard Putin's train to destroy everything Ukrainian for good.

Kos took a look at the term “combined arms,” used by war analysts. Kos has help from a thread by Andrew Fox, a British paratrooper. Tanks are fearsome, but vulnerable to anti-tank missiles. Also fearsome yet vulnerable in different ways are soldiers, howitzers, helicopters, surface to air missiles, planes, and ships. A military also needs logistics, engineers (who would be glad to talk about their bridges), transport, mechanics, medical, and experienced commanders. Since each part is vulnerable in a different way a competent military needs it all. It is complicated to pull off. Western militaries use large training exercises to practice all those pieces put together. And Russia can’t afford training exercises and can’t make it all happen when needed. Laura Clawson of Kos reported that after Elon Musk, the (second?) richest man in the world, made an actual offer too sweet to be ignored, the board of Twitter agreed to sell the company to him. Musk says he will take the company private and he will make Twitter a platform of free speech. Many have big reasons to be skeptical. Musk’s big company Tesla lost a lawsuit that said the Tesla factory is highly racist. Musk is known for tweeting crude and insulting messages aimed at his enemy of the moment. Clawson wrote:

“What Musk seemingly fails to recognize is that to truly have free speech today, you need moderation,” Katie Harbath, a former Facebook executive, told The Washington Post “Otherwise, just those who bully and harass will be left as they will drive others away.” ”A platform that allows people to spam misogynist and racist abuse is unsafe for pretty much anyone else and would lose advertisers, corporate partners and sponsors rapidly, leaving it a commercially unviable husk within months,” said the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate’s Imran Ahmed.

Mary Louise Kelly of NPR spoke to Anand Giridharadas, author of the book Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World. Some of what Giridharadas said:

Free speech has become a dog whistle in American life in recent years, and Elon Musk means it in a much more specific way. And he's been much more specific about it. And what he's talking about is the feeling that what is, frankly, content moderation on sites like Twitter and other social media platforms is suppressing free speech. In other words, efforts that have been made to clamp down on very real problems that you and I see on Twitter every day - which is Nazi speech going unchecked, racism going unchecked, disinformation going unchecked, misogyny, rape threats to women who've made the mistake of having opinions going unchecked - there have been modest - inadequate, but modest efforts in recent years to clamp down. And Elon Musk thinks that kind of reform, which actually allows more people to speak more freely and safely, is the problem. ... And when I talk to people who work at Twitter, these are the three they're thinking about, right? So Twitter has a disinformation problem by its own acknowledgment, right? And Elon Musk has shown himself to be someone who spreads falsehoods. Twitter has a racism problem, which, again, Twitter has fessed up to and has tried to fix and not done enough, but owned up to the fact that it is working to make it a less bigoted, harassing place for people of color. Elon Musk runs a company that the California Department of Fair Housing and Employment recently said is a segregated workplace; not awkward, not mean - segregated. And Twitter has a bullying and harassment problem, as particularly women and people of color experience every day. And Elon Musk is the incarnation of that kind of social media behavior, siccing his followers on people who disagree with him.

Twitter may not have the reach of network TV in the 70s with an audience of 40 million people. But Musk is correct Twitter is a town square. And Musk will own the square and shape how things are discussed there. Leah McElrath (whose tweets I’ve quoted a lot) wrote that she is staying on Twitter until doing so is unmanageable. She is also pursuing other platform possibilities. David Rothkopf, who is a contributor to USA Today, tweeted:

The richest guy on the 2021 Forbes 400 owns the Washington Post. Number 2 now owns Twitter. Number 3 owns Facebook. Numbers 5 and 6 started Google. Numbers 4 and 9 started Microsoft. Number 10 owns Bloomberg. Free speech? You decide. Combine this w/the Citizens United formula that money equals speech & so those w/the most money are entitled to the most speech, lack of campaign finance regulation & pols who depend on $ to hold power & you've got a country sinking ever deeper into the quicksand of corruption.

Musk is not going to enhance the voice of the little guy. Billionaires controlling public forums is linked to growing inequality, more division, and more shaping the narrative to suit themselves. We don’t deserve this. We need regulations to protect us from hate and Musk’s purchase made that more urgent. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas tweeted what she says is not legal advice, but still important. Research before you deactivate from Twitter. Musk will own your data and you won’t have access to it. Don’t burn a digital bridge. A few months ago when Twitter started to demand I sign up to look at all of McElrath’s tweets I contemplated it, but didn’t. Now I’m glad I didn’t. Michael Harriot, a black man who writes about racism, tweeted:

Before everyone leaves, let's have some fun. What are some of the things we'll see on #WhiteTwitter?

Some replies: John Malkontent: A fundamental misunderstanding of the first amendment. Randy Watson: And 2nd... Mad Bastard: The saddest recipes for potato salad. Jamie Oberdick: Even more RTs of Christopher Rufo with comments like "if you really listen to him with an open mind, he has a point." Jay Bullock: How many black friends you need to not be considered racist. Pure True Love: #CriticalRaceTheory is banned & your account will be suspended if you mention #MLK

An act of murderous petulance

My Sunday viewing was the first two episodes of Sweet Tooth on Netflix. It is the story of a pandemic so bad it brings down civilization. About the same time all children are born with some aspect of an animal – the snout and ears of a pig on one child, feather covered arms on another, furry tail on a third and so on. Society grapples with whether the hybrid kids caused the virus that killed a high percentage of humanity (and are thus worth tracking down and killing) or the virus produced the hybrid kids. Gus is one of the first of such kids. He has antlers, ears, and sense of smell of a deer (the promo says half-human, half-deer, but this much isn’t half). While Gus is still an infant his father takes him to a compound in the woods to keep him safe while he grows up. But when Gus is ten an unfortunate fire attracts the bad men to the compound and Gus is no longer safe. In a way, this is a gay story. Or, to turn that around, gay stories are like stories such as this one of people who are different and have to deal with others who don’t want them around. The series is based on trio of graphic novels by Jeff Lemire. When the Netflix series came out last summer there were eight episodes in season 1 covering (I assume) the first book. I see now there are 16 episodes. In addition to Gus and his safety, the show has featured a former doctor using treatments to keep his wife alive and discovering the human cost of those treatments. There is also a woman who lives at the Zoo (all the animals already freed) and discovers one of these hybrid children at her entrance. But she’s had only about 10 minutes of story time so far. I probably won’t watch the rest of the first season. A story in which the driving conflict is relentless bad men with big guns coming after the lead character is not my idea of a good time. Fending off Ultimate Evil has gotten stale. I’d much rather have a story of conflict on a small scale (in which the evil doesn’t need to be vanquished and eliminated) or a story of inner conflict. Or this story could have been about overcoming the collapse of civilization, how plucky people build a community. That’s a common Science Fiction storyline. Since a good amount of Science Fiction published these days is all about defeating Ultimate Evil I haven’t been buying and reading as much Science fiction. An example of a story driven by inner conflict is the novel Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman. Yeah, there is a movie by that name and based on this book released in 2017, which I saw and enjoyed. When I saw the author had a sequel I bought both books. It is a coming of age story of Elio. He and his family have an estate on the Italian Riviera, and Papa the professor invites a grad student to come each summer for six weeks to help him in his research and to do some of their own as they live with the family and enjoy the town and sea. The summer Elio is 17 the student is Oliver from America, who is 24. Elio spends the first half of the book trying to figure out his attraction to Oliver, whether Oliver attracted to him, and what he wants to do about it. Compared to the movie, in the book Elio seems more smitten, obsessed, and conflicted. He seems to over analyze what’s going on, even when he and Oliver actually become lovers (spoiler alert? Hmm. The two of them together are on the cover of the book (which is the movie poster) – and you have seen the movie, haven’t you?). The end of the book goes further than the end of the movie. It goes so far I wondered why the author bothered with a sequel – or how much of the last 20 pages will be stretched into 250 pages of a novel. In a Ukraine update from Saturday Mark Sumner of Daily Kos noted there hadn’t been major attacks on either side, just small movements. There were also three missiles thrown at Odesa, which is away from the active fronts.

Putin’s war was always a war of conquest. As the days go past, Russian attacks meet ever more resistance, and more civilian areas are targeted for destruction by a frustrated Russian military, the whole story about those “independent republics” [of Donbas] is being discarded. ... Throwing cruise missiles at Odesa isn’t a military tactic. It’s an act of murderous petulance. For all the damage it causes, it’s an expression of how powerless Russia is to actually take the things it wants from Ukraine.

War In Ukraine tweeted:

Russians started forced mobilization on occupied territories of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv regions – Ukrainian intelligence.

Which prompted Sumner to ask:

Exactly how is this supposed to work? Step 1) Take someone prisoner after bombing and shelling their homes. Step 2) Give them a rifle. Step 3) ????

On Sunday Kos of Kos discussed a plan that was broadcast on Russian state TV on how Russia would conquer the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all formerly oppressed by the Soviet Union. Kos went through the plan point by point and laid out how absurd each step was. I’ll only mention the first point. Russia would inflict a massive radio-electronic strike that would stop all communication and cause NATO radars to go blind. Kos responded that if Russia had such a capability they would have already used it in Ukraine. But it wouldn’t have worked because NATO has so many other ways to assess what is going on. And that isn’t the most absurd. These three countries are members of NATO. Attacking NATO is entirely different than attacking Ukraine. So why did Russian state TV – the mouthpiece of the Russian government – say such things? I also wonder why detail such a plan when they know the West monitors what the state TV says and would thus have ample time to spoil that plan? Kos wrote:

This fantasy conquest of the Baltic countries is symptomatic of Russian thinking—that its former colonies long for more of the same oppression and wouldn’t fight back, would welcome them with open arms. And while anyone who understands the actual military capabilities of NATO vis a vis Russia knows this is laughable stupid, the Russian people don’t. Ukraine was an easy “special military operation.” Russia is so mighty and powerful, that it would similarly be easy to conquer the Baltic states. And Russia’s populace, suffering from economic stagnation, are thrilled to wave the colonialist Soviet flag. War has always been a great distraction for domestic discontent.

It will define the world we all live in for a long time

Friday evening I actually went to a theater to see a play. The play was Home and the venue was Ann Arbor’s Power Center. This show was part of the University Musical Society that has been showcasing touring talent for (I think they said) 144 years. This play was originally scheduled for April 2020 – and didn’t happen then. I’m glad it was rescheduled. Home is about the place we call that name and the ordinary things we do in it, so there isn’t a plot. The show begins with a guy starting to build the house. I wondered how they will construct a two story set, do it quickly, and have it strong enough to not fall apart as they act on it. Short answer: they don’t, the main walls of the first floor, the stairs, and the floor and outer walls of the second floor appear as a unit. Then there are a lot of workmen who hang interior doors, then bring in kitchen cabinets and appliances, bathroom fixtures, and all the furniture upstairs and down. The rest of the show was about daily living in a house – waking up, preparing for work, taking out the trash. All of this is without talking. The routine of the bathroom in the morning was a delight with the entire cast seeming to use it all at once including one person climbing into the shower and a moment later another climbing out. This was all finely choreographed. There were several incidents of this swapping, such as one person getting into bed and a moment later another getting out. Much of the second half seemed to be a series of parties all rolled into one – wedding, baby shower, New Year’s Eve, birthday, and several more. During this the actors spoke, but they did not project or have microphones so what they said wasn’t clearly heard, which seemed to be the intent. During this the actors came into the audience and brought people on stage as more people coming to the party. There were eight people listed in the cast, and this more than doubled the size of the party. The first guy brought on stage really seemed to know his way around the set – such as which drawer to open in the kitchen – that I thought he must be someone actually a part of the cast. But then more and more people were brought onstage. I quite enjoyed the evening. It was an imaginative concept done well with an imaginative set and imaginative lighting with finely timed choreography. The small annoyance was the singer who appeared every so often. I didn’t always understand what he was saying and when I did I wasn’t sure what that had to do with the action around him. The singer played both guitar and autoharp – and I don’t think I’ve seen one of those since my youth. Kos of Daily Kos wrote about Russia deciding not to continue to waste troops to try to take the Azovstal steel factory in Mariupol. Instead, they’ll divert most of those troops to the Donbas fight, though I think they are continuing to shell the factory. Kos said that’s actually a good tactic by Russia. That factory is huge, covering four square miles. The perimeter is nine miles. Russia won’t be able to take it over or to keep forces stuck in the factory from coming out and attriting the city’s occupiers. Because the factory is so huge and because so many of the buildings are connected by tunnels, the Ukrainians, both troops and civilians, could stay there a good long time – if they stockpiled enough food, which was the plan. Mark Sumner of Kos said what is going on in Ukraine is not the World War III people had anticipated. Even so, the West has recognized we win this war or Putin will try again and we’ll have another war. And that future war, like this one, will come with massive war crimes. Russia can’t manage the battlefield, but it can pulverize cities and lives.

Unless, of course, someone makes them stop. Which is where we are now. Not “Does Ukraine have the weapons it needs to stand against Russia in a fair fight?” but, “Does Ukraine have what it needs to destroy Russia’s ability to kill civilians in their homes?” Which is a very different thing. ... To really win this thing, Ukraine can’t fight the Russian army to a draw or force them to halt their advance. Ukraine has to destroy the Russian army in a way that keeps it from committing mass murder of civilians, not just right now, but for a long time to come. That is a very big task. What’s happening in Ukraine is not World War III. Except in the sense that it will define the world we all live in for a long time to come. Which … okay, maybe it is.

Sumner objected to a CNN opinion piece on how the US should try to reach a peace deal – we should give Putin what he wants so that he’ll stop killing civilians. One objection, which the piece mentioned only briefly, is that Putin would need to be willing to make concessions, and there has been no evidence he would. The other is the piece didn’t mention that Ukraine should have a voice (and the loudest voice) in how the war ends. Giving Putin what he wants is not an option. The biggest problem in all that is Putin wants Ukraine. Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote that Ukrainian officials say satellite images show there is a mass grave near Mariupol in which up to 9,000 people may be buried. Kos reviewed the mistakes Russia made before it withdrew from around Kyiv. Then there were attacks along four fronts, none done well, and there were exposed supply lines, on which Ukraine feasted. Kos mentioned all this because in the Battle of Donbas they are attacking along five fronts and their supply lines are exposed. This looks like Groundhog Day.

Worrying about Russia’s reaction seems quite quaint these days

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. The weekly peak in new cases per day is up again. For the last four weeks the peak has been 840, 981, 1239, and 1609. That first number is the last in four weeks of very little movement. I also see the huge early January peak has been revised from somewhere above 27,000 to 23,700. In the last ten days the deaths per day has been 5 and fewer (though about half of that is still preliminary). In a report from a couple weeks ago Adrian Florido of NPR spoke to Allison Skinner-Dorkenoo, a University of Georgia psycologist who studied COVID and racial disparities. She said:

What we found was that the more people perceived there to be racial disparities, the less fearful they were of COVID-19, and the less they supported safety precautions to prevent the spread.

Then Florido talked to LaFleur Stephens-Dougan on how to humanize public health campaigns without causing this backlash. Because the country is so racist that is difficult to do. Kos of Daily Kos reported the heavy weapons spigot is open in Ukraine. The promised armaments are now arriving. For the military nerds out there Kos lists and describes the stuff that’s now showing up and is ready for battle. As part of his conclusion Kos wrote:

While Ukraine hasn’t gotten everything it wants, the spigot is now open, with heavy armor (tanks and armored personnel carriers), aircraft, artillery, MLRS, and air defense systems finally flowing into the country. No one aside from the Germans and the French seem particularly worried about Russia’s reaction, and worrying about it seems quite quaint these days. Russia has watched impotently as NATO has flooded Ukraine with the very weapons that have killed or injured tens of thousands of Z invaders.

Hunter of Kos reported that because there are so many smartphones out there this war is more closely documented than any previous war. We have a great deal of information. But we still don’t have a clue about Russia’s “strategy.” If there is one. That means even the Pentagon has a hard time figuring out if the “major Russian offensive” has already started. The bombardments have increased. So is it “softening the enemy” before the big offensive, or is this all they got? What this war has shown is NATO leaders no longer believe Russia has the military of a superpower. In another update Kos reported that Russia has inched forward. In some of these places Ukraine has done a tactical withdrawal. Germany is towards the bottom of the list of donors of equipment to Ukraine. Germany is still importing and paying for a great deal of Russian oil and gas. Which prompted Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale, to tweet:

For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism. When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.

Yesterday I wrote about the speech Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow gave in response to a bigoted colleague. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported on some of the positive response to that message (I’m sure there was negative response, but I don’t visit those websites and Einenkel didn’t either). A few of the responses were wishing other Democrats had that much spine. Another, from Carol, said “Every Republican accusation is a confession.” There is also this tweet from Siggy Rose:

In Germany, teaching the Holocaust is mandatory. It includes visits to concentration camp, museums, etc. They don’t shy away from their own ugly history. Yet the kids aren’t damaged; they’re strengthened, matured, humbled. US needs to do same re slavery. Not that complicated.

April Siese of Kos wrote:

There is yet more evidence showing that major U.S. utilities are doing their damnedest to resist climate change mitigation. A recent report from nonpartisan climate crisis think tank InfluenceMap reveals that a majority of utility companies are not positively engaging with climate policy. Instead of using their considerable influence to help hasten a greener future and move closer to net-zero goals, many energy companies have at least mixed records, if not outright hostility toward that transition. InfluenceMap’s findings range from an analysis of social media posts and state hearing testimonies to lobbying and legal action. Just four out of 25 companies analyzed consistently offered positive engagement ...

Two of the four are in California, none in Michigan. Meteor Blades of Kos reported that Biden campaigned on no more oil and gas leasing on federal land. Last week he broke that promise. Much of the rest of his post is various environment and climate activists saying how much of a bad idea this is. Part of that is the more oil and gas we leave in the ground the better for the environment. Another part is the huge amount of land oil companies have already leased and are not drilling on, so why lease more? A third part is the industry saying this will lower high gas prices, but none of the oil from these leases will be on the market before 2025, if at all. The critiques by the activists bring up several more points. The bits of good news, though they don’t outweigh the bad news, is the amount of land up for lease is 80% less than was being evaluated for possible leasing and the price of the leases has gone up 50%. Joan McCarter of Kos, in a post from ten days ago, discussed the trend in recent abortion bans. The authors and supporters of these laws are no longer “pro life.” We used to say abortion bans should exempt pregnancies that result from rape and incest. That implies that maybe some abortions are not justified and a ban for those is appropriate. We should have been saying all along that in all cases the decision to terminate a pregnancy is up to the woman. McCarter got into that discussion because many of the new laws Republicans are passing to go into effect when Roe v. Wade falls do not include an exception for rape and incest. Which is government sanctioned secondary harm to rape victims. Even when those exceptions remain in the law there are still problems. An incest survivor, usually a child, doesn’t have easy access to police or doctors. A rape victim has plenty of reasons to not report the assault. Also going away are the exceptions for “the life of the mother.” Forced birther groups are no longer pretending that the mother is as or more important than the fetus. Yes, they’re saying the potential for a human is of more value than a fully realized living woman.

Service was far more important than performative nonsense

My Sunday video was Young Royals episodes 5 and 6 on Netflix. As I said last week I’m not going to go into a lot of detail so there won’t be any spoilers. I’ll only say there were a couple good plot twists and that the ending I thought I heard about (which prompted me to watch the show) wasn’t how it ended – and season two has been announced. According to a quick internet search if COVID doesn’t interfere much with shooting and post production work that second season may be available this summer. I see Netflix doesn’t show how much of the show I’ve seen, they show how much is left to see. At one time I checked and saw there was 20 minutes left. I thought there was a lot to be packed into those 20 minutes. They’ll be packed into season two instead. The more I thought about it the more I see didn’t get resolved in season one. The story is about the love between Prince Wilhelm and commoner Simon. There will be more about that, of course. But there are other things not resolved. Why did Wilhelm’s cousin August have trouble paying his tuition? Are Simon’s sister Sara and her friend Felice both in love with August or are they both using him and in love with each other? Will we see the ending I thought I heard about? I will probably watch season two when it is released. If the story drags into season three I doubt I’ll watch it. It is interesting enough to hold me through six episodes of 40-50 minutes and maybe through twelve episodes of that length. But not eighteen. In the news today was Netflix reporting a big drop in subscribers that prompted a big drop in the stock price. Along with that came talk of Netflix cracking down on password sharing. If they do season 2 of the Young Royals or likely anything else on Netflix in my to-watch list would not be enough to prompt me to actually pay. In response to comment in Twitter that the military aid promised to Ukraine isn’t getting there with enough urgency prompted Kos of Daily Kos to discuss such things take time. A deployment of Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers with related howitzers took five weeks. Kos talked about the number of tons all this equipment weighs – just the ammo is 2,000 tons. And the airport in Poland all this stuff is going to already has a parade of planes from several countries delivering goodies. Kos wrote:

Meanwhile, NATO is rubbing Russia’s nose in these shipments. Those planes could turn off their transponders and arrive in secret, but they’re actively broadcasting their presence, their source, and their destination. They want Russia to know what they’re up to, repeatedly reminding them of Western resolve, perhaps hoping it erodes Russia’s own. Russia is certainly helpless to do anything about it.

Getting armaments to Ukraine is not like clicking a button on your phone app and Amazon delivering it tomorrow. There is a difference between “could more be done?” and “nothing is being done.” The history of this war will include the massive international logistical effort to help Ukraine win. Mark Sumner of Kos told the story of two villages in Donbas with about a mile between them. Since 2014 one has been held by Ukraine, the other by pro-Russian separatists. In satellite imagery Sumner pointed out the open fields and two military trenches between the villages, plus the heavily mined road with lots of wrecks and car-sized potholes. When the war comes here it will be deadly, with one side or the other trying to cross an open field to get at an enemy protected by trenches. David Neiwert of Kos wrote about Putin claiming his goal was to de-Nazify Ukraine. Neiwert discussed the numbers of neo-Nazis in the Russian army – some of them flying flags of Russian fascist movements. Hunter of Kos reported Ukrainian President Zelenskyy again vowed he won’t negotiate away any territory in exchange for ending the war. The reason is simple: He doesn’t trust the Russian military and leadership. It is quite likely that if he concedes territory in Donbas Russia will set up a base there and, ignoring any peace deal, use it to launch an attack on Kyiv. The likely outcomes of the war are a stalemate or a Russian loss. And the economic sanctions against Russia will last a long time – likely until after Putin retires or dies. And the country faces a long isolation. Kos described the various battles and tactics around Izyum – Russia doing this and Ukraine countering with that. However, what caught my attention was the discussion in the comments. Mainstream media appears to be discussing only Russian successes and not their setbacks. Which makes several of them glad for the clarity and accuracy of Kos reporting. There was also a quote of a tweet from the Kyiv Independent. April 16 was the first time more people entered Ukraine than left. The border guard said over a million people have returned to Ukraine. Kos reported that Russia has started attacking at various places as the start of the Battle of Donbas. But the attacks have been so light the Pentagon thinks something bigger must be yet to come. But Kos thinks what we see now is about as good as Russia can do. Chef José Andrés and his World Central Kitchen has set up several kitchens in Poland and other countries and in Ukraine. They’re busy feeding those they can in 30 cities and towns across Ukraine. Gabe Ortiz of Kos reported that one of those sites in eastern Ukraine (I don’t know how close to Donbas) was leveled by a Russian missile. One person died, a few others went to a hospital. The operation quickly shifted to a new location and those in the hospital have been released. Commenters suggest a Nobel Peace Prize be shared between Andrés and Zelenskyy. Rebekah Sager of Kos got me thinking of the joke that circulated about 20 years ago about the Al Gebra gang and their Weapons of Math Instruction. She started her post with:

In a statement released Friday, the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) announced it had rejected 41% of K-12 math books for not meeting Common Core standards and/or for “indoctrination” or “exposure to dangerous and divisive concepts,” aka critical race theory (CRT).

Math books teaching CRT? Are Florida officials afraid that anti-racist themes would be hidden in the story problems like Nazis used to hide racist themes? It looks like the math books were rejected for not meeting the Common Core standards (or maybe meeting them and shouldn’t). Even so, math is now a part of the politicization of education, a serious thing – or Gov. DeSantis is looking for campaign donations from book publishers. Hunter discussed the latest chapter in a long story, this one in Llano, Texas. Someone with a huge grievance got a judge to order the halt of the library purchasing new books and the county commissioners purging the library board and replacing them with the loudest advocates of removing pornographic books. Strange that “pornographic” means anything having to do with racism or LGBTQ issues whether or not sex or body parts are described. Hunter wrote:

So to sum up: A single angry conservative of the sort who believes they have a direct line to God, who shares all their own gut instincts on everything, popped up with a list of books to be disputed that she had not read herself but had simply cribbed from some other conservative group milking the same cow. They convinced a local judge to march into the library to seize books about The Pornographies. The growing movement convinced the county commission to purge local libraries of anyone with experience or who argued against one-party censorship, got themselves put into those now-empty positions of minor power, got freaked out when other members of their local community started taking notes about what they themselves were doing—after they had literally shouted and bullied the previous appointees out of their positions, which was according to them just fine because when Jesus is behind you you're allowed to be as cruel and tell as many lies as you want—and are now holed up in secret non-public meetings where they hold seances with Jesus to make decisions about rote library management that they can't figure out how to handle themselves. Because they got here by being loud, outraged know-nothing theocratic bulls***-shrieking paranoid bullies and don't have any other skillset that would apply here.

Neiwert started a post with:

The long-running gradual consumption of the Republican Party by the authoritarian QAnon conspiracy cult is nearing the terminal takeover phase: A recent survey by Grid found 72 Republican candidates with varying levels of QAnon affiliation. The most salient fact, however, is not only is the cult presence growing, but not a single Republican in any capacity can be found who either denounces the trend or works in any other way than in concert with it. That reality is terrifying not just because QAnon has a long record of inspiring unhinged, violent behavior with its fantastically vile beliefs and rhetoric. Most of all, QAnon at its core is deeply eliminationist, with an agenda calling for the mass imprisonment and execution of mainstream Democrats for ostensibly running a global child-trafficking/pedophilia cult—which seamlessly fits the people being targeted by Fox News and mainstream Republicans as “groomers” for opposing the right-wing attacks on the LGTBQ community.

And ended it with:

What all this tells us is that Democrats this fall will be facing a multipronged attack by Republicans, all based on hysterical fantasy: Democrats are soft on crime, they want to push critical race theory and “transgender ideology” on your kids, and they’re pro-pedophile. All three are designed to appeal to the lizard-brained lowest common denominators: the people inclined to violent eliminationism. Candidates should come prepared.

Lauren Sue of Kos reported on one who is prepared. Michigan state Sen. Lana Theis, a Republican, in a fundraising attempt, called Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow a “groomer” and accused her of being a snowflake “outraged they can't teach can't groom and sexualize kindergarteners or that 8-year olds are responsible for slavery.” After a moment of marveling how much over the top lying and fear mongering is in that charge, enjoy a bit of McMorrow’s response, starting with why her priest declared her mother wasn’t meeting church expectations:

So where was my mom on Sundays? She was at the soup kitchen with me. My mom taught me at a very young age that Christianity and faith was about being part of a community; about recognizing our privilege and blessings; and doing what we can to be of service to others, especially people who are marginalized, targeted, and who had less often unfairly. I learned that service was far more important than performative nonsense, like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing Christian in your Twitter bio and using that as a shield to target and marginalize already marginalized people. ... So who am I? I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom who knows that the very notion that learning about slave slavery or redlining or systemic racism somehow means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are white is absolute nonsense. No child alive today is responsible for slavery. No one in this room is responsible for slavery, but each and every single one of us bears responsibility for writing the next chapter of history. Each and every single one of us decides what happens next and how we respond to history and the world around us. ... People who are different are not the reason that our roads are in bad shape after decades of disinvestment or that healthcare costs are too high or that teachers are leaving the profession. I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight white and Christian. We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people's lives.

SemDem of the Kos community wrote on the first anniversary of the death of Rush Limbaugh that the loud voice on the right left behind nothing. No one quotes or references him. He never said anything profound or meaningful – just racist. He wasn’t all that meaningful in life because he merely repeated the same conservative talking points and his jokes were to make fun of those not like him. A lot of people do that same thing – and they’ll be forgotten too. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, ha a couple interesting quotes. One is a thread from Dan Lavoie referring to a poll conducted by the AP:

The AP poll found a majority of REPUBLICANS think schools are teaching about race and sexuality the right amount or not enough! How do we end up with a brainless "America divided" headline off this legitimately surprising and newsworthy result?! What to do when your polling results don't fit The Narrative? Just say Americans are "divided" -- a meaningless, amorphous term that you could've asserted even without a poll! Overall, 71 percent of Americans think schools are teaching about race and sexuality the right amount or want more. That's a shocking level of social agreement on any issue -- and more than twice as many people as think schools should teach about race and sexuality less. More independents want schools to teach MORE about racism and sexuality than less. But some very loud people at a school board meeting say otherwise so therefor: America Divided™️

Dworkin quoted Lawrence Freedman, writing on Substack, who quoted an essay by Hannah Arendt that was written 50 years ago. Arendt wrote:

Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers, the “National Security Managers” as they have recently been called by Richard J. Barnet, who “exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.” The President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man of the most powerful country, is the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined.

Added Freedman:

The key insight was that someone so powerful could also be so badly informed. That was the case with Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s. Could it also be the case for Putin in 2022?

We love our guns more than our children

The war reports for today say the same sorts of things they’ve been saying for a while, so I won’t repeat it. On to other stuff. April Siese of Daily Kos wrote that On March 29 wind turbines provided more electricity for the lower 48 states than coal and nuclear. Wind accounted for 19% of the electricity generated that day. Nuclear was a bit under that. Coal provided 17%. It happened because spring tends to be windy and nuclear and coal plants tend to get maintenance done while the overall power needs are lower. This ratio may not be repeated for a while (in the fall or next spring?), though it shows we’re heading in the right direction. Last week France had round one of their election for president. Incumbent Emanuel Macron got 28% of the vote in a large field. Far right candidate Marine Le Pen got 23%. The two are in a runoff that happens next week. Dartagnan of Kos reported that Le Pen is a more intelligent version of the nasty guy. She’s just as racist and campaigns on that. Climate issues are a low priority. And she wants to withdraw France from NATO and form an alliance with Putin. Which is about all one needs to know about her. Dartagnan summarizes her (and the nasty guy) with:

This brand of Putin-envy appears to be particularly common among more autocratic, fascist-leaning politicians who have traditionally applauded the Russian despot as exemplifying what they call “strength” and resolve. In reality, they admire and envy the lack of any real constraints on his power, which they all shamelessly covet. We now see the end product of that lack of constraints playing out in Ukraine.

Dartagnan discussed a few more similarities between the two. The he considered how the current war would be different if our own presidential election had a different outcome.

It’s impossible to know how much resolve to assist Ukraine would have existed among the remainder of NATO, but without a credible leader, it’s difficult to imagine how that response would have been effective. The world has never seen a nuclear-armed pathology like Putin invade a peaceful neighboring country for wholly irrational reasons, wielding his nuclear capability as a threat against any country that dares to oppose him, and even worse, vowing to continue his efforts until he is stopped. History suggests that such countries will not stop until they encounter an immutable opposing force. And Trump would not have delivered that force.

James Fallows, in his Breaking the News articles on Substack, discussed how the frame used for news will flatten it.

As a reminder: framing involves the assumptions that go into the who, what, where, why, how of a story—all of which generally make a bigger difference than obvious expressions of bias. What deserves coverage? Which stories should a news organization stick with week after week? Which ones, by contrast, become old news—“we’ve already covered that”—once they’re a few days in the past? What are the “sides” of a disagreement that deserve a platform and attention? Which can be dismissed? The endless stream of such decisions constitutes “news judgment.” As they mount up they shape the view of the world that journalism offers.

He offered a few examples. First, the Washington Post posted a job for a Texas based reporter to document life in a red state and how policies and politics are shaped by conservative ideology. Fallows’ complaint: Texas is much more diverse than simply being a red state. There are a whole bunch of internal contrasts from East Texas piney woods, to flatlands and winds of the panhandle, to farming of the Rio Grande, to the Hill Country west of Austin, even the differences between Fort Worth and Dallas. Houston is the most racially diverse city in the US. A region shaped by conservative ideology is only one aspect of Texas. Second, stop with the predictions of the 2022 election. NPR tweeted about the 10 seats in the Senate most likely to flip, tipping the balance of parties. Lots of people predict the next election and there is little accountability for guessing wrong. Seven months ago the big news story was the way Biden handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And of those 10 vulnerable seats, half are held by Republicans. So more on what is happening now, such as discussing the mechanics of democracy and how that is being threatened, and less on what might occur. Third, stop using a framing of “that’s just Trump.” That dismisses the damage being done. The current version is that’s just Clarence and Ginni Thomas. They are doing real damage to the country and readers need to know that. Fourth, there is a difference between rudeness and toughness. Many in the press want to sound tough and pose “challenging” questions. They’re vying for a spot on the evening news. They’re just being rude. As an example of tough, consider Jonathan Swan of Axios interviewing Moscow Mitch. Swan asked Mitch if there was anything the nasty guy could do or say to stop Mitch from supporting him. Mitch tried several tactics to get out of answering. Swan held firm. That should be a lesson to other reporters in how to conduct tough questioning. Katia Riddle of NPR reported on how the Mt. Scott neighborhood of Portland, OR reduced gun violence. Over the last year the violence got so bad residents felt they could no longer use their Mt. Scott Park. Pastor Joel Sommer of Access Covenant Church and other community leaders got together to work on non-violent solutions. Since they know the area they could generate better ideas than the city leaders. They looked to other cities – Philadelphia lowered violence by turning abandoned lots into green spaces. In the Mt. Scott area they installed traffic barrels to slow down traffic – which deters drive-by shootings. They increased lighting. They reclaimed community events. And they began to look out for each other. Small changes can make a big difference. We can create peace where we are. In a post from ten days ago Hunter of Kos discussed a study that showed Republican-led states have higher murder rates than Democratic-led states. Keeping in mind that correlation is not causation Hunter asks, so which causes which? So he looked at more details. We know what does predict violent crime: low average education, high rates of poverty, modest access to government assistance. Which describes much of the deeply conservative South. There’s still the riddle. Is the region violent because it is conservative or conservative because it is violent? Back to what we do know:

If you want to reduce violent crime, you fix up the schools to raise education levels, you institute programs to lift people out of poverty, and you provide government assistance to make sure people are at least getting food and a roof over their heads. Since all of these are things that Republicanism is absolutely bug-eyed dead-set against in any form, in any venue, we're hardly going out on a limb by saying A leads to B leads to C. Republican governance leads to lower education and higher poverty rates; lower education and higher poverty leads to violent crime; therefore voting for Republicans causes higher murder rates. There ya go, there's your bumper sticker pitch. Stop voting for Republicanism if you want to not be murdered, America. Hmm. And yet, that's not something you really hear on not-conservative television shows.

And you won’t hear it at all on Fox News.

Anyhoo, this study is not likely to convince any of the people that need convincing; conservatives have long insisted that we need to gut social programs, including our schools, because regardless of the actual outcomes of doing that it is simply not "fair" for Americans to pay taxes for those things. It is better, in conservatism, to increase poverty and cause higher rates of violence than it is to decrease poverty through government action; the resulting high crime rates can then be dealt with by convincing Americans to buy guns to protect themselves from the new criminals. Then when those Americans commit violent crimes themselves, as they attempt to police their towns, a new set of Americans must be recruited who are willing to buy more and better weapons than the previous group. ... It's only going to get worse as places like Texas get it into their heads that they can privatize laws by putting them into the hands of "bounty" hunters, or private citizens willing to go farther than the Constitution-bound government is allowed to. It takes no great expertise to imagine how Americans both given guns and told to hunt down lawbreakers will react to these new powers, and in the wake of Jan. 6 and after many years of Fox News painting targets on American backs, it seems vanishingly unlikely that the conservative writers of the law don't "intend" for those escalations to take place.

If my mathematical friend and debate partner finds fault with this logic I’ll let you know. In a post from two months ago (yeah, it has been in my browser tabs from two days before the war started), Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos wrote:

Of course, stand your ground legislation has always felt like an incitement for society to get far more shoot-y, and now it looks like there’s evidence to support our hunches. According to a new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open, the proliferation of stand-your-ground laws in recent years has been associated with an “abrupt and sustained” increase in gun-related homicides.

One little quote from the article:

Analyzing applications of stand-your-ground in 2013, the Tampa Bay Times reported that defendants were more likely to cite the law successfully when the person they killed was Black.

Also from two months ago Aysha Qamar of Kos reported a pair of bills were introduced to the Tennessee state Assembly and Senate that allow the holder of an enhanced handgun carry permit to carry it anywhere police can carry a gun and also act as a law enforcement officer. I checked one of Qamar’s links and saw little action has been taken on either bill. Those in opposition to these bills include police. Citizens are not trained in law, defense tactics, and a lot of other things taught to a police cadet. These bills will only increase the “self defense” excuses used by racists after assaulting people of color. Also two months ago and on the fourth anniversary of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida Hunter discussed that we love our guns more than our children. Since the purpose of guns is to enforce a person’s position in the social hierarchy it follows that people love their high position in the hierarchy more than they love their children.

Perhaps community volunteers could shoulder assault rifles and patrol school perimeters, went one proposition. Perhaps teachers themselves should be forced to carry guns in their classrooms, went another. Again, though, the central premise remains: Whenever Americans face a conflict between their "right" to be armed and the "rights" of their children, they have chosen their guns. Every. Single. Time. ... It is not that America can't keep its children from dying in schools. America has gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure children keep dying in schools at whatever rate will best support adult hobbies, pleasures, and culture wars. If there comes a day when some high-profile blowhard decides that fire extinguishers in schools are socialism, parents across the country will begin demanding that they be stripped out and sold for scrap metal. American schools will be kill zones, places where our children are taught what sorts of furniture are the best for hiding behind, places where children have drills to teach them how to hide quietly even in crisis situations where their every instinct is to cry out, places with secured perimeters and regular lockdowns when gunshots are heard nearby, until our society values the "right" to kill our neighbors as of less consequence than the "right" of neighbors not to be killed. ... What a rotten anniversary. What a sad and broken culture.

To have all that power… and use it to bully children

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos, in a Ukraine update, discussed Putin’s threats that don’t seem so threatening anymore. He threatened the US because we’re sending lots of high-precision weapons. But his “or else” (which he didn’t actually say this time) seems quite lame. We’ve seen how his military operates. Putin has threatened Sweden and Finland for applying to join NATO (applications are being fast tracked). He says he’ll strengthen his military forces in the Baltic Sea. After watching his flag ship sink in the Black Sea the countries around the Baltic aren’t scared. There is one thing Putin has the West should be discussing – Russia’s tactical nukes. If he uses one over a NATO country there would be a swift and costly response. But what if he uses one over Ukraine? The West should think about how to respond to that. In a second post Sumner included a photo of a Ukrainian tractor doing its day job – actually working a field for planting. Sumner also discussed what remains of Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol – just two small areas and one of those under heavy shelling. Then Sumner discussed the latest Russian propaganda, tweeted by Sam Ramani:

Russian media is now pushing the conspiracy that Europe is about to divide into three parts. The three parts are a recreated Austria-Hungary led by Viktor Orban, a Eurasian bloc led by Russia and a U.S. and Britain-dominated Western Europe Russia will gain East Germany, Poland and the Baltic States.

Sumner added:

As with many such conspiracy theories, the biggest point is to claim that your enemy—in this case, both NATO and the EU—is very weak and soon going to fall apart, leaving your team in the driver’s seat. This kind of claim can be good at raising morale and confidence in the short term. In the long term, people begin to notice that your wonder team is always losing to a weak team.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos included a tweet by Charlie Angus that has a picture of a statue in a town in Sweden. The statue is of Danuta Danielsson swinging her handbag. Angus wrote:

Now this is a statue: In 1985 Danuta Danielsson was on the streets of her town in Sweden when a Neo-Nazi march went past. Ms. Danielson's mother had been at Auschwitz and she waded into the fascists and hit the Nazi with her handbag.

Dworkin also quoted Kaleigh Rogers of FiveThirtyEight about conservatives who use the word “grooming” when discussing to LGBTQ people. It is the modern term for “recruiting” that we had long been accused of doing. Rogers wrote:

This is a deliberate tactic that was promoted as early as last summer by Christopher Rufo, the same conservative activist who helped muddle the language around critical race theory. “Grooming” is a term that neatly draws together both modern conspiracy theories and old homophobic stereotypes, while comfortably shielding itself under the guise of protecting children. Who, after all, can argue against the safety of kids? But by adopting this language to bolster their latest political pursuits, the right is both giving a nod to fringe conspiracy theorists and using an age-old tactic to dismantle LGBTQ rights. “There is no better moral panic than a moral panic centered on potential harm to children,” said Emily Johnson, a history professor at Ball State University who specializes in U.S. histories of gender and sexuality.

Marissa Higgins of Kos reported that in the Missouri House Republican Rep. Chuck Basye slipped a provision to let schools decide whether to allow trans athletes compete into an unrelated bill. Democrat Rep. Ian Mackey, who is gay, had a few things to say about that. On the House floor Mackey asked why did Basye’s gay brother feel afraid to come out to Basye? Perhaps he would keep his children from seeing their uncle? Basye was surprised by the question because his kids adore their uncle. Mackey said if he was Basye’s brother he would have been afraid to come out. And the reason is simple: Basye spends so much time on anti-LTBGQ legislation one might think it represents they way he feels. Laura Clawson of Kos reported that 2021 had the highest level of attempts to ban books since the American Library Association started tracking the issue 20 years ago. There were 729 challenges to 1,597 books and these books were overwhelmingly about black or LGBTQ people. The ALA says this effort is led by organized groups who go to school and library boards and demand actual censorship in order to conform to their moral or political views. Librarians are also coming under attack in the form of bills that include criminal charges for not removing challenged books. Though these efforts are in the language of parental rights, there is a difference between a parent preventing their child from reading a book and a parent preventing all children from reading a book. Concluded Clawson:

In the short term, Republicans are trying to get their base angry and scared enough to turn out in droves in November. In the long term, they’re engaged in a pitched battle to claim themselves as the only legitimate judgment about education or parenting or who matters in this country. And they don't care how many kids or librarians or teachers they have to trample on to do it.

Andrew Limgong of NPR spoke to Nick Higgins of the Brooklyn Public Library about a new program called Books Unbanned. A teenager or young adult in a school that has banned books can email the BPL and explain the situation. They will give the young person free access to the to the half million audiobooks and ebooks in their library. This access normally costs $50. In addition, the library connects these young people with contemporaries in Brooklyn to discuss books and to learn how to fight against book bans. In a post from a month ago Williesha Morris of Kos Prism explained the book banning situation in more detail. There have been studies on the effects of banning books – “books with ‘objectionable’ material reveal the true lives of students, and banning these books can foster isolation in children.” There are groups forming to denounce and prevent bans. They need collaboration from educators, parents, and especially students. Education is not where one can straddle the fence, be an impartial observer. In a post from two months ago George Johnson, also of Kos Prism wrote that book bans are a result of white fear. The bans are...

about protecting white supremacist ideology and the indoctrination of children in the K-12 system with a false, revisionist history of the U.S. that continues to feed systemic oppressions. Contrary to school board talking points, it is less about protecting the innocence and purity of white children and more about denying and erasing the experiences of other races, genders, and sexual identities as the country’s demographics become more Black, brown, and nonheterosexual. ... According to the 2019 census, Gen-Z is 52% non-Hispanic white, 25% Hispanic, 14% Black, 6% Asian, and 5% other. According to a poll, 15% of Gen-Z identifies as part of the LGBTQ+ community. This current data showcases that Gen-Z could be the first generation where nonwhites outnumber whites within a few years. These shifting demographics are at the heart of the banning of books. They are also at the heart of the attacks against voting rights, challenges to abortion rights, voter redistricting, and anti-transgender legislation. ... Our books also share experiences that are nonwhite and nonheterosexual, giving other young adults their right to read about experiences like—and unlike—their own. No one banning the books seems have any issue with nonwhite kids being forced to read almost exclusively about the experiences of white children like my family has for generations. At the heart of this is anti-Blackness and anti-queerness, as our stories and experiences are being deemed potentially “hurtful” to white students without regard for how their experiences have historically and systemically oppressed us. ... We have reached an unprecedented time where the fear of the majority becoming the minority has reached its boiling point. ... Book bans are about more than removing books—they’re an attempt to remove our existence, and we must fight against them fervently.

There are a couple things we can do. First, conservatives tend to win by being the loudest voices in the room. We must be in those same rooms and share our dissent. Second, buy the banned books. The higher the sales the more likely bookstores will carry them. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), demonstrating one way a person in power can be an ally, gave a 15 minute floor speech about the oppressions trans people, especially trans youth, endure every day. This post includes a video. Trans people (and all LGBTQ people) face a higher rate of mental health issues, which is a public health crisis. It is made worse by the anti-trans legislation pushed by Republicans, especially the bills and laws that ban gender affirming medical care. The trans people of today have more space to explore their gender. That process is a fine one and not a threat to anyone else. You might not know any transgender person, but you do. They just may not be out to you. Squeamish about sharing a bathroom with a trans person? You probably already have.

“Imagine how small and weak a person must be to have all that power… And use it to bully children,” he added in reference to people like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others who spew their views and rhetoric.

Lauren Sommer of NPR discussed green infrastructure. As the federal government starts handing out billions of dollars to improve infrastructure states should make sure green infrastructure is part of the package. Rain storms are becoming more intense, causing flooding. Stormwater systems are being overwhelmed. They also haven’t been updated in a long time. So the gray – the concrete part – will likely receive most of the funding. But the green part – actual plants – can keep the gray part from being overwhelmed. The green part can be rain gardens and plants in the street median. The plants absorb the water and slow its way to stormwater pipes. As we start to spend those infrastructure billions we need to upgrade both the gray and the green. A few years ago I read an article about an excavation of dinosaur bones in Tanis, North Dakota. The site showed evidence those dinosaurs died directly because of the giant meteor impact that killed off the dinosaurs. They didn’t die because they were where the meteor struck. They died because of the tsunami that raced across the inland sea that covered much of America. The sign that the deaths happened on that day was the presence of little glass balls that were formed and thrown up by the impact that then rained down across the world. Lib Dem FoP of the Kos community posted a trailer for A BBC program about this excavation. It aired sometime today and will be available on iPlayer. Also PBS Nova will broadcast it later this year.