He isn’t preparing to win, he’s preparing to lose

No movie on Sunday because it was a performance day. I finished the book Priddy’s Tale by Harper Fox. According to the Forward (which is as fictional as the rest of the book) “Priddy” is Cornish slang for a man one never sees working, implying he has a job but does very little. There is a second possibility, that the economy in Cornwall is so slow that many men can’t find work. In this story the main character is Jem Priddy and he doesn’t have a job. I’d like to say this is the gay version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. But they’re more different than alike. They both have a merperson falling in love with a human. Instead of Ariel falling in love with Prince Eric we have merman Merou falling in love with Priddy. And that’s the end of the similarities. The rules on how a merperson can become human are completely different – Merou does not need a sea witch for the transformation and doesn’t lose his voice in the process. There is no three day deadline, though the core story is only about four days long. Priddy is recovering from using party drugs that were stronger than they should have been. Useless for any other job he is offered the job of lighthouse keeper, which includes a room where he can live and recover. It’s not a hard job – most of the lighthouse functions are automated. During storms Priddy does have to use binoculars to check the rocks near the base of the lighthouse in case a boat hits them. If he does see a problem he should alert the professional Search and Rescue team and attempt a rescue. During one storm he sees a boat on the rocks and a guy in the water who smiles and waves. Of course, it is Merou. From that meeting they fall in love. In comes researcher Geoff Blades. He’s heard Cornish tales of merpeople and he deduces that creatures that can change form have something that humans could use to heal diseases, so he wants to capture one. He also isn’t concerned with the destruction his efforts may cause. At times I got a bit tired of all the wonderful talents the merpeople in this story have. The worst was their ability to “swim through time” – to time travel. Thankfully, that actually had very little to do with the story (so why include it?). As for the other talents, such as the way the merpeople can rescue drowning humans, I wonder how much the author conjured up and how much of it comes from Cornish tales told over pints at the pub. I enjoyed the story. But it isn’t a recommendation. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos wrote the nasty guy “isn’t preparing to win, he’s preparing to lose.” Here are the reasons for that observation: All of his apparent VP choices have avoided committing to accepting the results of the election. Nasty guy allies, such as Steve Bannon are pushing rigged election fears early and often. They declare Biden can’t possibly win fairly. The only way to defeat the nasty guy is steal the election. Congressional Republicans are pushing voting conspiracy theories. The claim pushed the most is that immigrants are brought across the border to vote for Democrats. Of course, no evidence. There are also laws that ban non-citizens from voting. But it lets racist Americans believe “their vote is being nullified by someone who isn’t a citizen.” The nasty guy is telling the Republican National Committee, the group co-chaired by his daughter-in-law, don’t worry about get out the vote efforts, concentrate on poll monitoring. He believes adoration of himself is enough to drive voting. The RNC is planning a “massive” election integrity program to “focus on the cheating.”

Trump doesn't seem nearly as concerned with resourcing the front end of his campaign because he likely believes he has less control over the election’s outcome than he does over how his supporters respond to those results. Instead, Trump is pouring time and energy into cultivating an insurance policy for losing—a way to agitate and animate his most loyal followers in the event things don’t go his way. In Trump's view, if he wins, great. But if he loses, he is laying the groundwork for months of mayhem, protests, and election denialism that could easily surpass the scope of the violent 2021 insurrection he incited the last time he lost a presidential election.

I had mentioned VP candidates refusing to commit to accepting election results. Walter Einenkel of Kos reports Sen. Marco Rubio is the latest. He joins Doug Burgum, Kristi Noem, Elise Stefanik, and Tim Scott. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed that Burgum could be what the nasty guy wants in a VP candidate. First qualification: he’s rich, though maybe not in the billionaire category. And...

In the end, Trump’s favorite thing about Burgum might not be his money. It could be his utter lack of charisma and memorability. As The New York Times reported, the No. 1 rule for Trump’s vice president pick is to never hog the spotlight. Burgum is a guy who will never threaten to replace Trump or challenge him for the hearts of the MAGA faithful. His utter blandness just might be his selling point. Doug Burgum is like Mike Pence 2.0: unthreatening and uninspiring, only this time with $100 million and 100% less concern about upholding the Constitution.

Last week I wrote that the nasty guy asked for a bribe from Big Oil, by saying if they gave him a billion dollars he would overturn oil regulations (what the rest of us would call human and environment protections). Pakalolo of the Kos community reported the request has been accepted. And that acceptance is happening in Houston, which had a heat wave followed by record-breaking rainfall. That crippled the city and left 800K without power. Jeremy Schwartz, in an article for the Texas Tribune posted on Kos, told the story of Courtney Gore. Back in 2021 she ran for the school board of Granbury Independent School District, southwest of Fort Worth. She pledged to inspect every bit of curriculum for messages inappropriate for “small town, conservative Christian values.” Yeah, we know what that means – messages of sexuality and race, or more accurately messages that said anything other than man-woman sex and also anything discussing an alternative to white supremacy. The result of all her searching...

The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.” Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.” So, in the spring of 2022, Gore went public with a series of Facebook posts. She told residents that her backers were using divisive rhetoric to manipulate the community’s emotions. They were interested not in improving public education but rather in sowing distrust, Gore said.

She had been a part of accusing others of not being conservative enough. She is now accused of the same thing by the people who backed her race. After board meetings school marshals escort board members to their cars. She’s received threats to her home.

Gore said she feels that she was unwittingly part of a statewide effort to weaken local support of public schools and lay the groundwork for a voucher system.

Gov. Greg Abbott is pushing hard for a voucher system. Gore is speaking out so that she isn’t complicit in damaging public schools. Since then two conservative board candidates lost by wide margins. And Nancy Alana, the woman Gore defeated to get on the board, is back. Alana and Gore are now friends and allies. Now the effort is to get the community to trust the board again. A big step towards that was Gore saying “I was wrong.” An Associated Press article posted on Kos discussed the state of school integration as we pass the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. That case, decided in 1954, found that in education separate but equal was a lie. “Students who attend high-poverty schools, regardless of their family’s finances, have worse educational outcomes.” And high-poverty schools strongly correlated to high percentages of non-white students. The ruling was followed by a decade of delay and avoidance. Only in 1964 did court rulings, monitoring, and enforcement lead to improved integration. Starting in 1974 a series of rulings by the Supremes weakened Brown. And by 2007 the last of the tools of integration were taken away. Some of those rulings came from white parents who sued because a black student got something better than their white child.

At its peak, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools was considered such a success at integrating classrooms and closing the gap between Black and white students that educators around the country came to tour the district. Today, more than 20 years after a court ruling overturned busing students on the basis of race, CMS is the most segregated district in North Carolina. ... Efforts to integrate schools can take two paths, Stefan Lallinger, executive director of Next100, a public policy think tank, says. They either fight around the margins, creating slightly less segregated spaces, or they address the problem head on, which in many parts of the country would mean tackling boundaries deliberately drawn to separate rich from poor.

What seems to work towards more integration is more litigation. This time from parents of color trying to place their children in better schools and facing long waitlists. In this week’s edition of “7 stories to know” Sumner included a few that are of interest to me. Both major parties are reaching out to new voters. But the youngest voters are strongly Democratic. The young ones are also the ones most likely reached by voter registration drives. So Republicans have shifted tactics a bit. Rather than (or maybe in addition to) putting up barriers to individuals registering to vote, they are putting up barriers to registration drives. The penalties are strong enough that many groups that run drives have shut down that work. To justify it they spread unfounded claims about registering undocumented immigrants. The Los Angeles Times reports that because of the overturning of Roe more young men are seeking vasectomies. It is a lot easier and more dependable than other forms of birth control. In North Carolina Republicans passed a bill to restrict wearing masks in public. The stated reason was because of masks being worn by pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses. But the bit that exempted wearing masks for health and safety reasons was removed. Yeah, that means it is illegal in North Carolina to wear a mask to protect yourself from COVID or any other pandemic virus. And down at the bottom is a video by British linguist Rob Watts, who uses the name Rob Words when he explains interesting things about English. This 15 minute video talks about why English spelling is such a mess – two words spelled similarly (foot and boot) are pronounced differently and two words spelled differently are pronounced the same (break and brake). The reason is over a few hundred years in the middle of the last millennium there was a Great Vowel Shift, which affected many words but left many untouched. There are a few possible reasons for the shift. At the same time the printing press was came into use, which standardized spelling as vowel sounds were changing.