There is an episode of “Night Court” where the characters believe that one of their colleagues had died. The hold an impromptu memorial service for him and all of them try really hard to say something nice about him. One by one they all get up and one by one they all fail to produce anything. Luckily for him, they only thought he was dead. He was in the back soaking all of this.

One wonders whether that will be Majorie Taylor Greene someday. In her latest statements I have to wonder if her goal is to sit in back of that court room and watch her colleagues to fail to come up with anything. Apparently, she questioned why anyone would want to join the military. According to her they are just throwing their life away.

It’s a remarkable turn of events that somehow echoes the former president. So, are her comments an extraordinary example of someone trying to curry favor the leader of the abyss. Lemmings will follow each other off the cliff. Salmon will swim upstream only to die in the end. Republicans will echo the words of a sadist until they cease to be what they once were.

It doesn’t take much to remember a time when conservatives were the ones that loved the military. They would spend on them with reckless abandon. They would heap love on them with every opportunity and would accuse the other side of a failure to love them. Whether their love was true or not, they certainly wanted you to believe it was.

In its place is some kind of cultural nihilism. Nothing is sacred. Nothing outside of self is paramount. There is no high honor. We instead focus on invisible sex traffickers while we ignore the sex traffickers sitting right next to them in Congress. These are all empty pursuits in the name of owning the liberals and maintaining power.

Keith Olbermann used to have his “worst person in the world” segment on his old MSNBC show. Even then it seemed that the moniker was temporary. Someone else would hold that honor the next day. I’m not sure anyone can at this point. MTG is stealing good oxygen from the rest of us. It’s high time that she went away never to be heard from again.

Okay, as we say a fond farewell to Louie Gohmert, the FEC joins in the praise by issuing him one last violation of ethics rules.  It appears that Mr. Grubby Fingers took excessive donations from …

 

And it will come as no shock to you that the House Freedom Fund is every Donald Trump puppet in congress.

Way to go out, Louie!  Violating rules is the monument to your time in the House.

As you know, Louie ran for Texas Attorney General in the Republican primary against an indicted felon whose whole upper staff resigned and called him a crook, Ken Paxton. There were four candidates in the race. Louie came in fifth.

No, no, I just made that up. But, he came in such a distant fourth that it might as well been seventh.  Which goes to show you that Louie isn’t all that popular in Texas as a whole.  Face it, they placed an indicted felon and George P. Bush above him. That’s gotta sting.

Now you’re probably asking yourself, who is going to replace ole Louie? The Devil.

 

 

He’s the current county judge in Smith County.

Nathaniel Moran.  I’m not sure how you pronounce his last name but … he’s gonna be a fun one, that guy.

 

Okay, so here’s the deal. The only thing keeping Georgia on the map is because Florida blows.  Otherwise, Georgia would just float off into the ocean somewhere and be its own little banana republic.

There’s a Republican primary coming up in Georgia that’s become a freak show.  The current governor, Republican Brian Kemp, just allowed constitutional carry. That means if you can pick up a gun, you can carry it around with you. No license needed. No background check. No matter how much you’ve threatened your ex-wife. And, in this primary, Kemp is the moderate.

Keep your eye out for Dr. Kandiss Taylor, who is Sarah Palin with a drawl.  I do not know where she got her doctorate but I deeply suspect it required money and postage.

Her campaign slogan —

 

 

She’s got a website and is driving all over Georgia preaching her gospel of how awful the government is, calling for a forensic audit of the 2020 election, and has even said that if we had secure elections that gas prices wouldn’t be so high.

She stresses that she is “working class” and “just like you.”  She’s a school teacher.

“I want to ensure that Georgia stays red, conservative and we protect our morality and put that over money … and that’s the most important thing we’re doing.”

Now when I said that she was driving all over Georgia preaching “Morality Over Money!”, you probably had a vision of a pick up truck or something, right?

Nope.

 

She’s got a damn fancy ass bus. I guess she sold her morality to rent that sucker and buy gas for it.

Jesus, Guns, and Babies.  Why not children? Why just babies? Hummmm …

One other thing.

“Don’t talk to me about separation of church and state,” she said. “Church and state was written because the state has no business in our church. But we are the church. We are the church, and we run the state.”

She said that Georgia is “sovereign” and “we’re running the state with Jesus Christ first” before adding that other religions don’t get to “silence” Christians.

Honey, she’s Sarah Palin with a drawl.

 

Thinking on certain issues evolves over time. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was ushered in at the very beginning of the Bill Clinton presidency. It was seen as a huge step forward in military circles. It was acknowledgment that gay and lesbian people exist and were likely in the military. Instead of a witch hunt to ferret them out, we would just allow them to exist as long as they weren’t in everyone’s face about it.

It served its usefulness and ceased to be policy in 2011. After awhile, it just becomes painful for people to shut off a portion of themselves for their own self-preservation. In order to prove that the world is regressing, some prominent right wing politicians are aiming to bring that back again.

Of course, no one calls it that. We use fancy names for it like “Parental Rights in Education”. Unfortunately, the scourge is spreading. Now, nearly half of the states in the country are considering the same bill. I’m sure no one is surprised that Texas is one of those states. I’m sure no one is surprised about who is behind that effort.

In order to get the full picture of this we should return to the original name that the bill was given. What exactly do parents want? Well, it’s hard to tell based on the results of the most recent elections. Generally speaking, the numbers aren’t much better in most school board elections. So, it is fair to ask what parents actually want in education.

While LGTBQ+ issues run the gamut, the issue of same sex marriage probably sits near the core of everything. If we were to use that as a barometer of attitudes towards gay and lesbian people in general, it would seem that most parents would actually be okay with it. According to the poll linked above, 61 percent of those polled in 2019 were in favor of same sex marriage while 30 percent were against it.

It certainly is true that being in favor of same sex marriage is not necessarily the same as supporting acknowledging LGTBQ+ issues in the classroom. However, there usually is a huge difference between what has been taught in the classroom and what people seem to think was being taught in the classroom. Most of the time it is a simple acknowledgment of who teachers are. I certainly don’t know anyone that has pushed a gay or lesbian lifestyle on students. They may or may not have acknowledged who they were by simply acknowledging the presence of a same sex partner.

Kids aren’t idiots. In fact, they are probably more in tuned to this than most adults are. By allowing teachers to acknowledge who they are, it encourages kids to be proud of who they are. As you might suspect, teenagers that are members of the LGTBQ+ community are more susceptible to suicide or thinking about suicide than their heterosexual peers.

As we watched a clip on the new laws (particularly the one likely coming in Texas) my wife piped up and asked a perfectly reasonable question. “I’m a parent. What about what I want?” That has been the problem with school boards for time and memorial. A majority of parents aren’t crazy. A majority of parents aren’t bigoted. A majority of parents just want their kids to be happy and healthy. A majority of parents don’t vote in school board elections. That’s usually reserved for zealots and busy bodies. So, now we force Mr. Smith and Ms. Jones back in the closet and with them all of the teens that were hoping to come out.

There are numerous moments where we take things that we instinctively know, but fail to put them together. I support a World Geography class and in that class we got on the subject of genocide. Genocide is one of those squeamish topics that has to be covered, but it is difficult to give its proper weight with young teenage minds.

For some reason my mind immediately went to South Park. In the first episode of their seventh season they ran an episode titled “Cancelled”. In that episode it turned out that Earth was a reality television show in another galaxy. Different species of animals were thrown together purposely to see what conflicts would arise. As you might imagine, this included the various races as well. Obviously, some of the humor was dark and sometimes crude, but the point was unmistakable.

We saw Hitler do this prior to and during World War II. He took over countries he felt had common affinity with his own. The idea was that all Germanic people should be together and a part of one country. As we saw, it also meant that whoever was deemed not Germanic was to be eliminated. We have seen so-called ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rwanda, and in other locations as well. The war in Ukraine has its seeds in this in reverse. Somehow, Putin believes they belong together because they are the same.

That’s what makes the desire not to teach our history of racism so mind boggling. If you put all of these things together you get the distinct impression that racism, ethnic conflict, and cultural conflict is actually natural. The battle for everyone “just to get along” is not a natural state. It takes constant effort and if one stops making the effort then they fall into the pit of what’s natural.

Of course, this kind of discovery presents its own problems. One of the hallmarks of the KGB and their tactics is the notion of cultural and moral nihilism. It reduces everyone to zero. You’ve done evil things and I’ve done evil things, so you have no right to call me on my evil things. It’s always funny that our collective mainstream media seems to play the same game in attempt to be “fair and balanced.”

The discovery that conflict is the norm ignores those that deliberately try to move beyond the conflict. All people are created equal with unalienable rights and that governments are instituted among people to protect these rights. Those truths are not self-evident. They have never been self-evident. Knowing this doesn’t make our nation’s founding a fraud. Knowing this makes our nation’s founding that much more remarkable.

Knowing this also means that to get to that state of being we have to constantly work at it. If we acknowledge that equality and peace are not natural then we acknowledge that having peace and equality requires constant effort. It means we have to call out those that are not working towards that goal. That means calling out people who aren’t doing it now and it means calling out people that didn’t do it in the past.

It also means that both propagandists and those in the mainstream media are wrong. There are people that fight their own natural instincts every day and just come up a bit short. We aren’t perfect no matter how hard we try. We make mistakes. There are also those that aren’t trying. There are those actively working against peace and equality. They know they are doing it and are relentless in their pursuits. We cannot treat a person with good intentions and a person with evil intentions the same. Both do the wrong thing, but treating those people the same ignores that they are not the same.

While testing a group of 10th graders for their STAAR exam, I got an email from our testing coordinator. “Congratulations, you have been selected to administer the TSIA tests.” If you aren’t in education you have no idea what either of those two tests are. Many of us in education barely know. In addition to all of this we have three more STAAR tests in early May and the more driven students have AP exams around that time as well.

The TSIA stands the the Texas State Initiative Assessment. It is given to students before they graduate to determine if they need to take remedial classes at a community college before they can take the courses that really count.

Since January 1st, we have taken mock STAARs for the five different STAAR exams, we took a field test for the English STAAR because we were fortunate enough to have the state of Texas choose our school to give that exam. We have administered the SAT, both English STAAR exams, and the TSIA, AP Exams, and the other three STAAR tests will come between now and the end of the school year.

Students are told they have to pass all five STAAR tests in order to graduate. They are told they have to pass the TSIA in order to avoid paying for remedial classes that don’t count towards any degree. Teachers are told that they have to follow all of the rules or their teaching certificate could get pulled or we get drawn and quartered.

It obviously gets to the point where we have to ask exactly what we are measuring. I think all of us get it on a certain level. We want to see what students have learned. We want to make sure teachers are teaching the curriculum. We want to know if students have the skills they need to succeed in the real world. All of these are reasonable points and reasonable questions to ask.

What isn’t reasonable is putting all of that pressure on a child. What isn’t reasonable is putting all of that pressure on those teaching those children. What isn’t reasonable is designing a test where students sit for five hours fighting off fatigue and boredom to try to master a difficult test. Apparently, too many students are passing. So, the state is dramatically altering each STAAR test to make them more challenging. This is all happening during a pandemic.

Silly me, but I thought the whole point was to test whether students had mastered the skills necessary to succeed in the real world or in college. Has that changed dramatically in the last several years? Are we really adjusting to the changing times or are we simply punishing educators and kids for cracking the code to beat the test?

Meanwhile, the anxiety gets ratcheted up. A typical ninth grade student (at the tender age of 14 or 15) will take practice tests for three different STAAR tests, will take common based assessments each six weeks in all four core subject areas, will take three different STAAR exams, and will sit for the school day PSAT. That assumes they aren’t taking any AP exams. If you do the math, that’s more than 30 high stakes tests. One might wonder if you have time to do anything else.

Testing is also big business. One is free to wonder whether we really are making education better or simply filling the pockets of some powerful donors. Any good teacher wants to know that what they are doing is successful. We want to know that students are learning and that what they are learning is useful. In many cases, we are capable of doing that on our own or people within our district are capable of designing tests that can do that. They won’t take five hours we don’t have to scare the kids and threaten them. We just want to know what they know. That’s pretty easy right?