Lessons of History and Trying To Avoid the Same Mistakes

Federal law enforcement officers say they seized 11 guns, a silencer, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, body armor plates and several pounds of a binary explosive from a Springfield man with ties to the Boogaloo extremist anti-government group.
I recognize there is nothing new that a right-wing extremist is arrested possessing a lot of guns and explosive.

However, this is Missouri so the phrase “Federal law enforcement officers” is key. The only law enforcement agencies mentioned in the entire newspaper report are federal agents and the indictment was brought in FEDERAL court. There is a reason.

In Missouri, local law enforcement agencies, under penalty of being fined, can't help in enforcing federal guns laws.

n Missouri, a state with some of the most lax gun laws in the nation, and a virtual statewide ban on enforcing any federal gun laws. The ban comes in the form of the Second Amendment Preservation Act [SAPA] – a law designed to invalidate any federal regulation of guns or ammunition in the state.
The act, which Gov. Parson signed at a gun shop in June of 2021, states that any gun law that violates a citizen’s Second Amendment rights, by Missouri’s standards, cannot be enforced, essentially invalidating federal authority to regulate guns.

I’m not a reporter and I don’t live in Springfield, but in Kansas City, Missouri (where the Chiefs play).



I would love to know if there was NO communication between the feds and local authorities about this case. Did the feds tell local agencies what they planned to do? Did the feds tell the local agencies about the arrest? If there was any communication, did it violate the “Second Amendment Preservation Act”?


 
[ From one theory to the next, religious extremists trying to erase science for good ]


Montana Public Radio brings us this small story of Republicans being Republicans in the Montana state legislature. Senate Bill 235, sponsored by Republican state Sen. Daniel Emrich of Great Falls, would ban the teaching of "scientific theory" in public schools.

Only "scientific fact" must be taught. The bill states that the state board of public education "may not include in content area standards any standard requiring curriculum or instruction in a topic that is not scientific fact."

You can see where this is going. At the bill's first public hearing, objectors pointed out that this was likely to be interpreted to ban introduction of any scientific concept commonly referred to with the word "theory." The theory of gravity and the theory of evolution are the two most commonly known examples. It would be extremely weird, to say the least, to scrub Newtonian physics from the curriculum because the equations represent a theory of how objects move that, as it turns out, is just a mostly-accurate-enough approximation of what's going on in the quantum realm.

And we still don't understand half of what's happening in the quantum realm, so that's right out too. The Bohr model of the atom is what everyone first learns in school, and likely the only thing about atoms they'll learn unless they go on to higher education, but it's not "scientific fact." It's a brazen simplification of more complex models which are in turn simplified approximations of much fuzzier stuff, and down in that fuzz there are still things the scientific community knows to be in conflict with other things and that's why we've been building big ol' honkin atomic murder donuts to figure out which details we got wrong.

The existence of black holes is theory. The notion that the universe has three spatial dimensions—height, width, depth—is a theory that's both seemingly unassailable and yet almost certain to be, in our lifetimes, proven upsettingly wrong. If we're banning all mentions of things we know in theory, our science classes could run out of material in a week.

The entire classification of animals into reptiles, birds, mammals, and the like is only theory, and the thinner branches of those family trees continue to be scientific war zones as DNA shows what we once thought to be closely related species are, sometimes, not even cousins.

The heart of the problem is the difference between how science uses the word "theory" and how it's used in all other speech. A scientific theory is an interpretation of observations and a prediction for future observations, one that may never be "proven" because we have no way to design a test that would disprove all other possibilities.

Newton's theory of gravity is commonly referred to as a law, but the math is wrong. It doesn't take quantum effects into account, and it doesn't take the "theory" of relativity into account, so it fails when predicting behaviors on very small or very large scales or with absolute precision. But should we ban teaching it, holding out for a future universal theory that might require preteens to account not just for friction, humidity, and barometric pressure, but also the current state of Jupiter's magnetic fields and local spacetime fluctuations caused by supernova detonation when calculating the speed at which an apple will fall from a tree? Let's, uh, not.

At the hearing, Emrich insisted that the bill would not have such catastrophic effects but admitted that an amendment might need to be written that still allows Advanced Placement science classes to be taught.

"It may need to be tailored down to actually address that fact for limiting it so it doesn’t go into the high schools and affect them as more of a transition to the college environment," Emrich granted.

It's a bit difficult to parse that one but we're going to presume he's saying that he wants to allow "theories" to be taught to Montana kids planning to go to college, so as to not wreck their careers before they start, while still making sure that the rest of Montana's children are not exposed to them.

You know, I think we were all prepared to give Emrich the benefit of the doubt until he opened his mouth with that one. Perhaps he was introducing the bill with a general ignorance of the terms and the effects. Perhaps he meant it only to bar teachers from bringing up "theories" like alien construction of the pyramids or flat earth theory, theories that would harm little Timmy and Debbie if they were allowed to lodge in their brains and turn them into YouTube weirdos.

But no, that's clearly not what he means. He's clearly of the opinion that education-seeking children will need to be taught these unnamed "scientific theories" in order to advance to "college environments" that rely on those theories as foundational scientific building blocks. He's also clearly of the opinion that those scientific foundations need to be "limited" to students looking to "transition" to college, so ... hmm.

As for the elephant in the room, the question of just what "scientific theory" the Montana Republican's bill is trying to block from being taught to children, NBC News reports that only one member of the public spoke in favor of the bill at its hearing, one who suggested the theory of evolution, in specific, was "fraud that goes against the bible."

"No one was there with Big Bang, no one was there with creation. No one was there when the first bird flew. No one was there with any of these events."

Getting a very old man yells at cloud vibe from that one, but he's on point. That appears to be precisely the distinction that the Republican bill is trying to wedge into state law.

In the end, it's not clear what's going to happen with this bill. A legal review by legislative staff suggests the bill might run afoul of the state constitution in its attempt to work around the Board of Public Education's own power to set curriculum standards.

(full article online)


 
[ Hoping to get Jewish votes by claiming to be Jew-ish ]

By now, many people know about serial liar Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) who made up almost his entire resume and claimed to be Jewish on the campaign trail. He’s facing various investigations and stepped down from his committee assignments but is still somehow in Congress. And now, the House GOP appears to have another fabulist on their hands!

According to a damning story in the Washington Post, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) is an Air Force veteran and former Obama supporter who used to go by Anna Paulina Mayerhofer before she switched parties to run for Congress. She’s now a member of the House Freedom Caucus and has argued that House members should be able to carry firearms to committee meetings.


 
On Friday, the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation filed a 27-page complaint revoking the liquor license of The Plaza Live, a venue operated by The Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation, though the venue can continue to sell alcohol while the complaint is processed. The six-count complaint said the venue violated Florida law by allowing a person to “commit lewd or lascivious exhibition” in the presence of children under the age of 16, the New York Daily News reported.

The Orlando Sentinel reported that in a statement, DeSantis Press Secretary Bryan Griffin said the venue “violated Florida statutes,” and therefore “the Department is revoking the venue’s license for the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages.”

The complaint itself said: “DeSantis stands to protect the innocence of children, and the governor always follows through when he says he will do something."

The Dec. 28 event at Plaza One was billed as “A Drag Queen Christmas,” a show that has toured the country during the holiday season for eight consecutive years. The show includes several alumni of RuPaul’s Drag Race, an Emmy-winning reality TV competition that has been broadcast by MTV since 2009.

The Orlando Sentinel reported that the philharmonic foundation’s board had issued the following response to DeSantis’ action:

In a joint statement, the Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation’s board of directors said The Plaza Live has hosted drag performances for eight consecutive years and described the venue to be a “welcoming and inclusive establishment that operates in good faith and compliance with all applicable laws.”
“That includes respecting the rights of parents to decide what content is or is not appropriate for their own children,” the statement said. “… We have just been made aware of this administrative complaint and are working with our legal team to evaluate and respond appropriately.”
In a tweet, Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, whose district includes part of Orlando, denounced the move as “FASCISM in action. Queer celebration is anything but obscene. We cannot tolerate DeSantis and his attempt to erase our communities. I wholeheartedly condemn this attack and remain in solidarity with our beautiful LGBTQ+ family in Orlando.”

Frost, 26, is the first Gen-Z member to be elected to Congress.

(full article online)

 
The coming to power in Germany of Hitler’s National Socialists in 1933 was possibly the biggest political disaster of the 20th century. But the victory of Hitler was by no means inevitable: the German labour movement was the strongest in the world, with mass Socialist and Communist Parties, each with an armed militia, and a powerful trade-union movement. Yet the Nazi rabble came to power almost unopposed, with barely a shot being fired against them.
 

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