Feb 26, 2023

A Thought

It should be interesting. If Republicans of the House Loudmouth Caucus get their way, and they investigate the money "going to Ukraine", and follow every dollar like a hound from hell (their words), what happens when they've (oops) made it plain for all to see that the money is staying right here in USAmerica Inc, and that a bunch of it is going into the pockets of some of the GOP's biggest dark money donors?

More Ukraine


Majorities in both parties, and in both houses, support helping Ukraine.

A lot of the money allocated "for Ukraine" goes to US companies so they can ramp up production and replace the stocks we're sending them.

So when Repubs say "stop the funding", one very important thing they're saying is that they want Americans out of work. (at about 11:35)

I was slammed on Twitter for "warmongering", and I can admit there's an element of that in what I want to see happen, but I think it's very much outweighed by the need for everybody to stand up and fight the best they can.

I haven't changed my default position of wanting to defuse and de-escalate, because I don't like the kind of fight where people bleed and die.

But my dad did manage to instill a little Galahad in me, and sometimes, ya just gotta punch some joker right in the face to straighten him out.

Anyway -


Walter Isaacson interviews Julia Ioffe

Yay Nerds

Even in my ignorance, I think I can grok part of the concept - as much as my limited brain capacity allows me to do anyway. Especially the teleportation part.

Instead of thinking of it as COMMAND-X, and COMMAND-V, where you have to eliminate the subject from over there before you can reconstitute it over here, this quantum stuff says the subject could exist in two places at the same time (?)



Scientists Defy Physics, Basically Pull Energy Out of Thin Air

That’s not supposed to happen.

  • A shelved theory appears to have new life in pulling energy from one location to another.
  • Two experiments have now extracted energy and filled a vacuum.
  • A fresh world of quantum energy science is opened with the new findings.
Energy teleportation sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but now, research shows that you can actually pull energy from nothing.

Using quantum mechanics, two different physics experiments prove it’s possible to conjure energy from an energy vacuum—essentially pulling energy out of thin air—by teleporting energy across microscopic distances, helping bolster a 2008 theory from Japanese physicist Masahiro Hotta, according to a new report from Quanta Magazine.

“This really does test it,” Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and not a member of the research teams, tells Quanta. “You are actually teleporting. You are extracting energy.”

When Hotta debuted his theory more than a decade ago, it wasn’t met with much fanfare. Pulling energy from the quantum vacuum wasn’t considered a realistic equation. But every vacuum still had some sort of fluctuation in the quantum fields. And pulling energy from nearby into the vacuum, and then using that energy, was something in the realm of reality known as the teleportation concept, since produced twice by scientists from University of Waterloo and Stony Brook University.

Hotta’s 2008 research led him first to negative energy, which he believed wasn’t an independent action. He then researched the quantum vacuum, which he believed—based on calculations—could actually fluctuate within quantum fields, allowing energy to move between two areas.

In a more modern-day experimentation, the team at Waterloo found that when energy was spent in one place, it allowed another—in this case, an energy vacuum—to access energy. “It was very neat to see that with current technology it’s possible to observe the activation of energy,” Nayeli Rodriguez-Briones, now at the University of California, Berkeley, and part of one of the experiments, tells Quanta.

“This is real physics–not science fiction,” Hotta says.

She Didn't Blow It


On dog-ass Mike Pence and the pearl-clutching about the Special Grand Jury in Fulton County GA.



The rules in Georgia are a bit different.

Foreperson Kohrs did nothing wrong, and she said nothing wrong.

Jake Broe



As jake points out, these goofballs "brainstorming" on Russian TV (at about 16:30) sound like Bond villains - or something straight out of an Austin Powers movie. It could also be Dr Strangelove, when the Rooskies tell us about their Doomsday Scheme.


It's like they know they're going to lose this thing - and lose it badly - so they're trying to "reassure" their people by threatening to annihilate the whole world if it looks like Putin's about to get beat, so everyone needs to be fully on board to make sure we don't lose (?)

Or they may be painting the worst possible picture of the worst possible outcome in order to minimize the loss and sell it with, "Hey, c'mon - it coulda been worse ... Putin's actually the hero here - he taught the west a lesson, and now he's ended the war Special Operation, and everything can get back to the way it was before NATO threatened us, and blah blah blah."

Turn that around, and you may have the military command structure trying to tell the Russian people just how crazy Putin is, and they'd best be getting out in the streets - or doing whatever they have to do - to take this regime down before they blow everything up.

Makes my head hurt.

Feb 25, 2023

Today's Perfect Example



Brian Tyler Cohen explains

те ж саме

Very reminiscent of a similar speech, under similar circumstances, a long time ago.

"So, let us not be blind to our differences - but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
--JFK 06-10-1963


Brad Paisley with Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Same Here - те ж саме



Today's Pinch-Faced Blue-Nosed Prigs



The Real Reason North Dakota Is Going After Books and Librarians

Last fall, I was the keynote speaker at the North Dakota Library Association’s annual conference. The theme was “Libraries: The Place For Everyone.” There were rainbow flags, paper-link chains and multicolor glitter scattered across tables. It was the safest I have ever felt back home as an out, gay man. When I was a young person, libraries were where I went to find stories that made me feel I could fit in, not only in North Dakota, but in the wider world. But two pieces of legislation that may soon be signed into law in North Dakota would make it possible to restrict libraries and, in some cases, to imprison librarians.

House Bill 1205 would prohibit public libraries from keeping and lending “books that contain explicit sexual material.” The bill’s definition of explicit material could include “pictorial, three-dimensional, or visual” depictions of anything from sex scenes in movies to educational materials meant to teach teenagers about puberty. As the bill states, libraries have until Jan. 1, 2024 to create a procedure “for the development of a book collection that is appropriate for the age and maturity levels of the individuals who may access the materials, and which is suitable for, and consistent with, the purpose of the library.” Currently, the bill contains no explanation of what “the purpose of the library” means or how to determine “appropriate” age and maturity.

The more far-reaching Senate Bill 2360 prohibits organizations open to minors from displaying “objectionable materials,” whether image or text, including visuals or descriptions of “nude or partially denuded human figures posed or presented in a manner to exploit sex, lust or perversion.” The bill defines “nude or partially denuded human figures” as “less than completely and opaquely covered human genitals, pubic regions, female breasts or a female breast, if the breast or breasts are exposed below a point immediately above the top of the areola, or human buttocks;
and includes human male genitals in a discernibly turgid state even if completely and opaquely covered.”


note: politicians - especially the wingnuts way out there on the right - are fond of trying to "legislate their values". They're always telling us how they put a lot of themselves into the laws they wanna pass. So I guess the ND legislature includes a bunch of swollen bombastic pricks(?)

By that definition, a photograph or even a written description of the Venus de Milo could — depending on the eye of the beholder — be out of bounds. It’s not just a matter of interpretation, though: Senate Bill 2360 would make it possible to charge offending librarians with a class B misdemeanor, punishable with up to 30 days in jail and a fine of $1,500.

With these bills, North Dakota stands to become a model for other towns, cities and states to censor not only their libraries, but also their citizens.

Growing up in the closet in North Dakota in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I found sanctuary in libraries that I couldn’t find anywhere else. I ate breakfast every morning in Bismarck High School, combing the stacks and reading books by authors like James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Willa Cather. When some of the school’s football players circulated a petition to have the one openly gay boy in my class change in the girls’ locker room, I went deeper into the library shelves, tried to keep quiet and hide who I was.

The summer after graduating from college, when I was outed by my aunt, and my home was no longer a safe space, I searched the stacks of the Bismarck Veterans Memorial Public Library for stories of gay people disowned by family members to help me find my own way to stable ground. During those evenings, I would settle into a plush armchair with a pile of books and magazines and read. I read authors like Kent Haruf and Amy Tan and Mary Karr. I would listen to classical music CDs to try and calm myself. I was free to roam, peruse, and free to be myself, at least privately.


North Dakota is a part of a growing national trend. Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31 of last year, the American Library Association recorded 681 attempts to ban or restrict library resources. There were 1,651 book titles targeted, up from 1,597 in 2021. According to PEN America, 41 percent of books banned throughout the 2021-22 school year contained L.G.B.T.Q. themes, protagonists or prominent secondary characters. Bills similar to North Dakota’s have also been introduced or passed into law in states like West Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Montana, Iowa, Wyoming, Missouri and Indiana.

Under Missouri’s new law banning the provision of “explicit sexual material” to students, school districts removed works about Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; comics, such as “Batman” and “X-Men”; visual depictions of Shakespeare’s works; and “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust.

But let’s be honest: It’s not the Venus de Milo these laws are going to come for first. It’s books with L.G.B.T.Q. stories, or books by L.G.B.T.Q. authors — the kind of books that have provided so many queer young people with a lifeline when they needed it most. I don’t know where I would have ended up if I couldn’t read my way out of despair. My heart breaks to think of all the kids now who won’t have that option.

Libraries should be places where everyone is welcomed, no matter who they are, and where everyone can find themselves reflected in the stories on the shelves. Laws like these make that a lot less likely.


Censorship of this kind is a flat-out straight-up contradiction in a country that's supposed to be all about equality, and free speech, and the unfettered pursuit of knowledge, and progress, and self-actualization.

So the good news comes from that glittering icon of liberal truth, Ayn Rand, who said:

Contradiction exists,
but it can't prevail
because it's self-defeating.

BTW, we've been here before.

And - oh yeah - today marks the last day of Freedom To Read Week.


Some of the most controversial books in history are now regarded as classics. The Bible and works by Shakespeare are among those that have been banned over the past two thousand years. Here is a selective timeline of book bannings, burnings, and other censorship activities.


Some highlights:

1983: Members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee called for the rejection of The Diary of Anne Frank because it was “a real downer.” It was also challenged for offensive references to sexuality.

1973: The school board in Drake, North Dakota, ordered the burning of 32 copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and 60 copies of James Dickey’s Deliverance for, respectively, the use of profanity and references to homosexuality.

1954: Mickey Mouse comics were banned in East Berlin because Mickey was said to be an “anti-Red rebel.”

1933: A series of massive bonfires in Nazi Germany burned thousands of books written by Jews, communists, and others. Included were the works of John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Lenin, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Upton Sinclair, Stalin, and Leon Trotsky.

1885: A year after the publication of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the library of Concord, Massachusetts, decided to exclude the book from its collection. The committee making the decision said the book was “rough, coarse and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.” By 1907, it was said that Twain’s novel had been thrown out of some library somewhere every year, mostly because its hero was said to present a bad example for impressionable young readers.

1807: Dr. Thomas Bowdler quietly brought out the first of his revised editions of Shakespeare’s plays. The preface claimed that he had removed from Shakespeare “everything that can raise a blush on the cheek of modesty”—which amounted to about 10 per cent of the playwright’s text. One hundred and fifty years later, it was discovered that the real excision had been done by Dr. Bowdler’s sister, Henrietta Maria. The word “bowdlerize” became part of the English language.

1559: For hundreds of years, the Roman Catholic Church listed books that were prohibited to its members; but in this year, Pope Paul IV established the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. For more than 400 years this was the definitive list of books that Roman Catholics were told not to read. It was one of the most powerful censorship tools in the world.

35: The Roman emperor Caligula opposed the reading of The Odyssey by Homer, written more than 300 years before. He thought the epic poem was dangerous because it expressed Greek ideas of freedom.


Feb 24, 2023