Huh. Well, you can’t just believe everything you read on Twitter. I’m going to fact check this. It is far too ridiculous to assume that this is true. I mean, we all know they’re racists and they know we know that they know we know but they don’t think that we have any real proof because to them it isn’t racist if you don’t say the N word out loud. So they certainly wouldn’t, just a few weeks after Juneteenth, suggest that teachers must not tell their students that the KKK is morally wrong.

Anyway, I found a Huffpost link that links directly to the bill. So here’s the bill, hosted at capitol.texas.gov. 

Sure enough, “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong” is listed under things teachers “may not” do.

Since I started writing, they’ve removed the offensive language. It was absolutely true – they wanted our civics classes to NOT provide the context of racism when discussing the KKK. Which is like trying to discuss the composition of water without mentioning the two Hydrogen atoms.

Left in the bill is something just as ridiculous, just in case you thought this improvement made it better:

 

an individual, by virtue of the individual ’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;**

an individual should feel discomfort,
guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual ’s race or sex;

It all comes down to the poor snowflakes who can’t stand to learn the facts: an economic system based on race-based slavery inescapable by birth was perpetrated by people with the same skin color as them. I’m not sure why the state of Texas wants children to be taught that their actions won’t have any impact on future generations since they clearly want to teach that the actions of the past have no effect on our current situation. Generational poverty, racism, and oppression? Naah, throw that out and pull yourself up by your bootstraps!

I find it blatantly hypocritical that they’re giving the teachers the ability to tell children the facts of what happened but forcing them to not talk about any type of shame or guilt that a child might feel over what their ancestors did, and yet they didn’t want those same teachers the room to teach the context of what the racists did and why they did it. This is the same reason half of the deep south believes with all their hearts (bless them) that the civil war was fought over state rights.

Recently, I discovered a newspaper article where my husband’s 3rd great grandfather was named as a stop on the Underground Railroad. I showed the genealogical evidence to my husband and children and they were all proud and happy that they come from a long line of abolitionists. We have no slaveholders in our history. We have no more control over that than anyone else and who they are born to, yet I feel pride in these facts.

Either way, let’s leave education up to the educators and allow them to teach context where it is appropriate.

In the 10th grade, my history teacher taught me that slaves were better off with their “masters” because they had nowhere to go when they were freed. That’s a statement that was missing a LOT of context. Funny that the Texas legislature never made sure teachers didn’t teach that to their students.

As reported in the Texas Tribune, the Texas Senate is considering a bill that would prevent cities and counties from enacting paid sick leave ordinances. Republican politicians that run on small government and local control, as usual, have no qualms about violating that “principle” of theirs when it interferes with big business. Like when Denton county decided to ban fracking, the state quickly put a stop to that type of local control. Now that Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio require paid sick leave, big government is coming to put a stop to it.

You see, they really know what’s best for us, y’all. The Tribune article quotes a “CEO” of a company that runs Auntie Anne Pretzels and Cinnabon franchises in Texas. According to her, offering her food-service workers paid sick leave would be terrible for them, because if she had to pay sick leave, she couldn’t offer them 401K’s. Which is funny, because the stores owned by her company don’t offer 401k’s at all. Or maternity leave. Or any benefits. As usual, they’re just anti-worker and full of shit. They would rather the employees serve covid pretzels than pay a part-time employee $7.25 an hour for a four-hour shift while they rest and recover.

This is all public information based on employee reviews from Glassdoor and Indeed, by the way.

Employees of these mall stands make minimum wage. They work with food. They do not have health insurance and I imagine they’d have to work 15-20 hours to afford one cash pay doctor’s visit, not including prescriptions. These people have absolutely nothing, and their boss is fighting against offering them sick pay. I hate humanity.

In a pandemic, when we are all told to stay home if we are sick, Texas Republicans want to make sure that we are not guaranteed sick leave. It’s for our own good, really.

To get your Monday off to a roaring start, the NYTimes is reporting that the DOJ has replaced the entire legal team defending Trump’s outrageous attempt to circumvent the SCOTUS by insisting that the citizenship question go on to the census form in defiance of their ruling.  According to reporting, lawyers in the federal programs branch of the DOJ were defending the case and are known for being particularly non-political.  Anonymous sources in the DOJ are confirming that this team of lawyers was refusing to sign the arguments that Trump, through Barr were insisting on, because those arguments are obvious and provable lies.  Trump’s solution?  Fire the entire team and bring in other more compliant lawyers.

Your president at work.

Michael Lewis of Moneyball and The Big Short fame has a new book called The Fifth Risk.  This book describes the corruption/incompetency in the US government since Trump ascended to office in early 2017.  The main character in Lewis’s book is a guy named John MacWilliams, who joined DOE under Obama as chief risk officer.  For Lewis, MacWilliams identified five big risks to the US that he observed.  The first four are pretty obvious:

• Broken Arrows (loose nukes)
• North Korea
• Iran (keeping them from building nukes)
• Protecting the electric grid from cyberterrorism

The fifth risk, though, is the scariest – Program Management.  That doesn’t sound scary, but it is.  Lewis puts it this way:

“The risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. … ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. … It is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”

In other words, the biggest risk to the US is likely something you’ve never even thought about thinking about.  Lewis outlines a number of issues that the US government assesses used to assess that could be cataclysmic if it occurred.  However, when Trump took over the government, he didn’t give a hoot about those threats, or, more tragic, was too stupid to even recognize those threats; since then he has stripped funding and slashed key staff positions that manage those risks.  One typical example of this negligence is the Office of Chief Scientist at the Department of Agriculture. This office manages $3 billion a year in research grants for important programs such as how to grow food in a changing climate, which seems sort of important.  The person holding that job was a distinguished research scientist in agriculture named Cathie Woteki.  Trump fired her and named a climate denying talk radio host, Sam Clovis, who had ZERO science background to be chief scientist.  Ol’ Sam, though, withdrew suddenly from the nomination when he became embroiled in the Mueller investigation.  Trump has since named a Dow Chemical pesticide executive as chief scientist.  Swell.

Another glaring example of Trump’s incompetence is naming our own Rootin’ Tootin’ Rick Perry to be Secretary of Energy.  Perry famously announced during the 2012 primary that he wanted to shut down Energy, Education, and, er… that other one (oops), so Trump thought he would be the perfect pick to protect our power grid, nuclear arsenal, and fossil fuel industries.  Perry clearly has no idea what he’s doing, so our energy security is in the hands of devoted public employees who are not morons like him.  He didn’t even take a briefing from staff, and has left day to day management to lieutenants, who are more interested in promoting the oil and coal industries and couldn’t care less about nuclear security or resilience of the power grid.

Even worse, budgets for data collection have been slashed.  That includes everything from weather data at NOAA to climate science and food safety and the USDA.  Essentially, the federal bureaucracy has been set adrift with slashed funding and no appointed leadership.  Career employees have been either ignored or fired, and so the US is essentially blind to threats against everything from our power grid to pharmaceuticals to nuclear weapons.

This bungling of management of the government is certainly incompetence on the part of Trump and his cronies; but that is not the only problem.  There is the profit motive.  If Trump succeeds in cutting off weather data from the public, then private providers of that data are then free to sell it for a profit.  And since that data is critical to state and local governments, farmers, ranchers, distribution companies, then the value of their monopoly of critical data is virtually limitless.

The Trump administration is nothing but a gigantic robber baron scheme.  The rich get richer, government services crumble and private companies receive soaring profits.  Lewis’s book should be a wakeup call, but I fear no one who can do anything is paying attention.  And that is when the threat you’ve never even thought about thinking about strikes with tragic consequences.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

I’m sitting here watching the FEMA morning briefing on Hurricane Irma with Grinning Tom Price and director Brock Long while they are speaking of 8,000 FEMA employees advance deployed and commodities (food, water, medicine) staged from Florida to North Carolina.  They’re speaking of evacuating electricity dependent medical patients, evacuation routes, and other issues that professionals discuss preparing for landfall of major hurricane.

Over the last several weeks, elected officials in Texas and Florida have actually conducted themselves as adults, taking responsibility and using their authority (and government coffers) to serve their constituents.  The weakest person I’ve seen is Greg Abbott who has played a very small role compared to Houston mayor Sylvester Turner and Harris Country judge Ed Emmett, staying pretty much in the background, showing up only to suck up to Cheeto Jesus while he grandstanded during his two brief and embarrassing appearances here in Texas.

Speaking of embarrassing, Donald Trump. His performance during his cringe-inducing visits (accompanied by his wife impersonating Michael Jackson in those silly caps and shades) were nothing short of embarrassing.  Thank God he left to go play golf immediately after instructing shelter victims to “have a great time”.

I digress – what’s really struck me during these events is how Trump administration appointments and elected officials are bringing the force of government to bear to serve its residents.  Trump has already proposed, and the Congress is virtually certain to approve, an initial $8 billion relief appropriation.  Local, state, and federal officials are working together to save lives and shelter victims of the recent storms.  FEMA has been on the ground in Houston since initial rains started and is processing over 300,000 funding applications already filed.

The difference between these responses and the disaster during Katrina 12 years ago is striking; today government is being proactive rather than passive as it was during that crisis where local, state, and federal governments were simply incompetent and totally unprepared.  The current response is strikingly different – in general, politics have been set aside by elected officials to get help to Americans.  There’s none of the nonsense about “compassionate conservatism” which created the shameful Katrina response.  It looks to me that government is pretty much working as it should – for the good of society.

The collective power of people working together using the resources available to soften the blow of catastrophes like Harvey and Irma is how advanced societies are supposed to function.  Government money and resources help; individual citizens volunteering is key; law enforcement and firefighting agencies must galvanize to serve.  In short, this is how it’s supposed to work.  Libertarian ideology goes out the window because it simply doesn’t work.  Radical right wing ideology goes with it because no person is an island.  In short, during crisis, everyone is a socialist working for the collective good.  That’s how society is supposed to work.