Some people think that’s a good thing, that if people get angry enough they’ll do something.
I think that’s bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.
Back in my karate days, my teacher sometimes tried to make me angry to make me fight better. It never worked.
Here’s the thing: I get angry when I feel like there’s nothing I can do.
Now maybe if you made me angry enough to trigger blind rage, I might act, but I’m pretty sure the resulting action would not be a good thing. In general, people responding out of rage cause a lot of harm, even if their rage is justified.
What I need in order to act is to be centered enough to see options.
And it’s really fucking hard to keep my center these days in spite of forty years in martial arts, because there’s just so much destruction and harm going on and many of the tools we have available are slow and ineffective or – even worse – compromised.
So I’m angry, though I’m struggling to find enough center to do something constructive.
On the “how to deal with the destruction of the United States” front – a major reason why I’m angry – I have become involved with Unbreaking, which is an organization documenting the damage done to our government and the responses to it.
It took me awhile, but I’ve found a niche there working on summarizing litigation in the data security area. I spent years working as a legal editor and reporter, so combing through opinions and dockets is something I know how to do.
Figuring out what’s happening and summarizing it: that’s something I can do. So it helps.
But some of the other things I’m angry about are not directly tied to the current regime destroying most of what actually worked in the U.S. government. Rather, they are things that would exist even if we had responsible leadership in Washington. Continue reading “So Tired of Being Angry”…
At a Senate hearing on Sept. 9, 2025, on the corruption of science, witnesses presented an unpublished study that made a big assertion.
They claimed that the study, soon to be featured in a highly publicized film called “An Inconvenient Study,” expected out in early October 2025, provides landmark evidence that vaccines raise the risk of chronic diseases in childhood.
The study was conducted in 2020 by researchers at Henry Ford Health, a health care network in Detroit and southeast Michigan. Before the Sept. 9 hearing the study was not publicly available, but it became part of the public record after the hearing and is now posted on the Senate committee website.
At the hearing, Aaron Siri, a lawyer who specializes in vaccine lawsuits and acts as a legal adviser to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said the study was never published because the authors feared being fired for finding evidence supporting the health risks of vaccines. His rhetoric made the study sound definitive.
As the head of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, when I encounter new scientific claims, I always start with the question “Could this be true?” Then, I evaluate the evidence.
I can say definitively that the study by Henry Ford Health researchers has serious design problems that keep it from revealing much about whether vaccines affect children’s long-term health. In fact, a spokesperson at Henry Ford Health told journalists seeking comment on the study that it “was not published because it did not meet the rigorous scientific standards we demand as a premier medical research institution.”
The study’s weaknesses illustrate several key principles of biostatistics.
Study participants and conclusions
The researchers examined the medical records of about 18,500 children born between 2000 and 2016 within the Henry Ford Health network. According to the records, roughly 16,500 children had received at least one vaccine and about 2,000 were completely unvaccinated.
The authors compared the two groups on a wide set of outcomes. These included conditions that affect the immune system, such as asthma, allergies and autoimmune disorders. They also included neurodevelopmental outcomes such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, autism and speech and seizure disorders, as well as learning, intellectual, behavioral and motor disabilities.
Their headline result was that vaccinated children had 2.5 times the rate of “any selected chronic disease,” with 3 to 6 times higher rates for some specific conditions. They did not find that vaccinated children had higher rates of autism.
The study’s summary states it found that “vaccine exposure in children was associated with increased risk of developing a chronic health disorder.” That wording is strong, but it is not well supported given the weaknesses of the paper.
Timeline logic
To study long-term diseases in children, it’s crucial to track their health until the ages when these problems usually show up. Many conditions in the study, like asthma, ADHD, learning problems and behavior issues, are mostly diagnosed after age 5, once kids are in school. If kids are not followed that long, many cases will be missed.
However, that’s what happened here, especially for children in the unvaccinated group.
About 25% of unvaccinated children in the study were tracked until they were less than 6 months old, 50% until they were less than 15 months old, and only 25% were tracked past age 3. That’s too short to catch most of these conditions. Vaccinated kids, however, were followed much longer, with 75% followed past 15 months of age, 50% past 2.7 years of age and 25% past 5.7 years of age.
The longer timeline gave the vaccinated kids many more chances to have diagnoses recorded in their Henry Ford medical records compared with the nonvaccinated group. The study includes no explanation for this difference.
When one group is watched longer and into the ages when problems are usually found, they will almost always look sicker on paper, even if the real risks are the same. In statistics, this is called surveillance bias.
The primary methods used in the paper were not sufficient to adjust for this surveillance bias. The authors tried new analyses using only kids followed beyond age 1, 3 or 5. But vaccinated kids were still tracked longer, with more reaching the ages when diagnoses are made, so those efforts did not fix this bias.
More opportunities to be diagnosed
Not all cases of chronic disease are written down in the Henry Ford records. Kids who go to a Henry Ford doctor more often get more checkups, more tests and more chances for their diseases to be found and recorded in the Henry Ford system. Increased doctor visits has been shown to increase the chance of diagnosing chronic conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, developmental disorders and learning disabilities.
If people in one group see doctors more often than people in another, those people may look like they have higher disease rates even if their true health is the same across both groups. In statistics, this is called detection bias.
In the Henry Ford system, vaccinated kids averaged about seven visits per year, while unvaccinated kids had only about two. That gave the vaccinated kids many more chances to be diagnosed. The authors tried leaving out kids with zero visits, but this did not fix the detection bias, since vaccinated kids still had far more visits.
Another issue is that the study doesn’t show which kids actually used Henry Ford for their main care. Many babies are seen at the hospital for birth and early visits, but then go elsewhere for routine care. If that happens, later diagnoses would not appear in the Henry Ford records. The short follow-up for many children suggests a lot may have left the system after infancy, hiding diagnoses made outside Henry Ford.
Apples and oranges
Big differences between the groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated children can make it hard to know if vaccines really caused any differences in chronic disease. This is because of a statistical concept called confounding.
The two groups were not alike from birth. They differed in characteristics like sex, race, birth weight, being born early and the mother experiencing birth complications – all factors linked to later effects on health. The study made some adjustments for these, but left out many other important risks, such as:
• Whether families live in urban, suburban or rural areas.
• Family income, health insurance and resources.
• Environmental exposures such as air and water pollution, which were concerns in Detroit at that time.
Many factors can affect how often a child visits a health care provider.
These factors can affect both the chance of getting vaccinated and the chance of having health problems. They also change how often families visit Henry Ford clinics, which affects what shows up in the records.
When too many measured and unmeasured differences line up, as they do here, the study is unable to fully separate cause from effect.
Bottom line
The Henry Ford data could be helpful if the study followed both groups of kids to the same ages and took into account differences in health care use and background risks.
But as written, the study’s main comparisons are tilted. The follow-up time was short and uneven, kids had unequal chances for diagnosis, and the two groups were very different in ways that matter. The methods used did not adequately fix these problems. Because of this, the differences reported in the study do not show that vaccines cause chronic disease.
Good science asks tough questions and uses methods strong enough to answer them. This study falls short, and it is being presented as stronger evidence than its design really allows.
I’m having a week where my attention span is very short. I keep turning to the news, and then I play solitaire, and a half hour later I remember I need to cook. An hour after that, I realise that I haven’t written my post for the Treehouse, or started a paper I promised, or filled in five forms. Some of this is due to today being the anniversary of the taking of the hostages if you follow the Jewish calendar. Some of it is due to it being Simchat Torah. Most of it is due to the hostages being released. Antisemitism took a brief pause around me, with just the die-hards blaming all Jews for all the things. We’re in new territory internationally and locally for so many reasons. We’re in old territory, too, because the Australian marches are continuing, regardless of what they do to the Australian Jewish community (create places we can’t go on those days, turn people who were friends into activists who now think we’re scum) or to Muslim Australians. Hate continues and stupidity continues, even as other things change. So I am easily distracted and lose my workday to puzzlement.
In far, far better news, I spent my evenings at the National Irish SF convention (Octocon) over the weekend. It was wonderful. I gave a talk on western European tricksters and how to identify them one night, and had the best discussion with fellow SF fans and writers the next. That discussion sorted out the cultural background of two of my families in the current novel, down to why the Irish part of their ancestry left Ireland, where they left from, and how this meant they are totally loyal to Aussie Rules football, even in NSW where it’s not the main footie code. This discussion reinforced the claim I often make, that the best way of building family history for a character is to talk to people in and from the country they come from. I’ve already done a bunch of work in Ireland for other projects, and these kind people and that discussion gave me the equivalent of two months’ work. This doesn’t deal with the time I waste elsewhere, but it means the novel can progress when my backlog is sorted.
For the next part of my backlog I have a piece to write about Jewish werewolves for the kind people of Patreon.
This is the first week in two years where more people around me are kind than are name-calling. It’s as if someone has turned on the light and I can see the world again.
According to Rob Hopkins, whose book How to Fall in Love With the Future is my current morning read, that’s something people said on the barricades in Paris in 1968.
Since he quoted it in English, it must have spread far beyond Paris .(I’m sure even Parisian students in the Sixties would use French for their slogans on account of they are, in fact, French, and French people care about their language, even the radicals.)
It certainly reminds me of my experiences back in those days that we label the Sixties even though they extended into the 1970s. And it’s yet another reminder that much of what underlies progressive work in the United States (and other places, but I know the U.S. stuff) today is built on what we did back in the 1960s.
Part of the reason I’m writing about this is that I’m really, really tired of the “OK Boomer” nonsense on social media, a phenomenon that is inaccurate and ageist and shows a true lack of knowledge about recent history (which makes me worry about the lack of knowledge of history going back more than my lifetime).
But this is not a “kid’s today” post accompanied by headshaking and tut-tutting. From my perspective, the kids of today are great, and I suspect a lot of the generational name-calling is produced by bots and provocateurs.
It’s just that a lot of what the extremists running our country right now condemn as “woke” and “DEI” grew out of work we did toward making the United States a better place, and I’m damned if I want to let them destroy it.
I’m talking about the Civil Rights Movement, which actually started quite a long time before the 1960s (there’s some fascinating history of the legal strategies that led up to Brown v. Board starting in about 1920, just as an example) though a lot of things came to fruition then – some laws on equal opportunity and voting rights with teeth in them, plus some significant activism with groups like SNCC and the Black Panthers.
I’m talking about second wave feminism, which also owed quite a bit to the suffragists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I’m talking about Stonewall and the gay rights activism that developed from that.
In honor of Banned Books week, I offer this memory of my daughter’s stand against book burning.
It would be difficult to find a neighborhood more concentrated with left-leaning intelligentsia than the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Which is not to say there are not conservatives, curmudgeons, and random people who think the world is going to hell in a handbag, but the traditional Person On The Street on the Upper West Side is likely, at the very least, to be four-square for the First Amendment.
Which is why my daughter burning a book on the sidewalk occasioned considerable outrage.
It was a perfectly gorgeous Saturday in spring; Julie, age 11 and at the tail end of 6th grade, had to do a multi-media report on a book of her choice, and the book of her choice was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. She had discussed the project with her teacher, and decided to do a three dimensional collage representing the pile of books that are burned in the book; ringed round the pile would be text from the novel (one of the major discussions was which quote; the book is chock full of good lines).
If there’s one thing we have around the house, it’s books. Some of them so old and tattered they would probably go up in smoke at an incendiary glance; others still young and green enough that a match would be required. And I’m afraid I feel rather proprietary–nearly maternal–about all of them. It took us several hours to find a grocery-bag full of books that could be sacrificed in the name of education, and I insisted, for safety’s sake, that this all be done outside on the sidewalk, where nothing much could catch fire. A book-burning kit was added to the bag: matches, oven mitts, a bucket (to be filled with water just before we went downstairs), a couple of tired old dish towels which would be sacrificed if necessary to smothering flames. In my head I had moved beyond issues of censorship and was thinking of getting my kids through this alive.
Saturday morning Julie and her little sister and I went downstairs and found a nice clear patch of sidewalk on our quiet side street, and set up for business. I supervised and distracted Becca (who was six, and to whom this was Just Another Inexplicable Thing Her Sister Did) while Julie went to work.
The first book burned too fast. Kid didn’t want a pile of ashes; she wanted books in various stages of char. This was how we decided that old, worn paperbacks were a bad idea. She took up a book of actuarial tables and had better luck with that, although working out the routine of lighting the page, blocking the breeze, pulling on the oven mitt, and putting out the flame when just the right amount of book had been burnt, took a little work. About the time the third book had been lit, an elderly couple came down the street, moving urgently. The man was practically waving his cane. The woman yelled: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!”
Julie, to her credit, finished putting out the book before she turned around. “It’s for a class project,” she said.
“WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL ASSIGNS YOU TO BURN BOOKS?” (I was not sure if the woman was upset or deaf or both, but she was very loud.) “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO BURNED BOOKS?”
For a moment Julie looked a bit confused; in her mind at that moment, the answer would have been Montag, the “fireman” from Fahrenheit 451. “My school didn’t assign me to burn books; I’m doing an art project about a book about a man who–”
“BURNING BOOKS IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO!”
“I know! That’s what the book is about.”
“WHAT BOOK IS THIS?”
Fortunately, we’d brought her copy of Fahrenheit 451 downstairs with us. Julie took off the oven mitt and showed the book. The woman reached for it, but the old man, whose caterpillar-like eyebrows had been working up and down with alarm, suddenly looked enlightened.
“Ahh,” he said. He turned to his companion. “She’s making art.”
“SHE’S BURNING BOOKS!”
He nodded. “I’ve read that book. It’s says that burning books is a terrible thing. She’s making art to show that.” He smiled at Julie. “Go ahead, sweetheart.” And he looped his arm through his companion’s and continued onward toward Amsterdam Avenue.
They weren’t the only ones to comment negatively on Julie’s project. By the time she had crisped the seven or eight books she required, four or five more people had come by and viewed with alarm. Each time she got a little better at explaining what she was doing, leading with “I’m doing an art project to demonstrate that burning books is bad.” She got into some interesting discussions. By the end of the hour or so it took her to get done, she was exhausted and a little annoyed at having had to explain what she was doing over and over again. From their accents, I think that the first couple were from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and likely immigrants from a formerly Communist country. The others who stopped were old and young, black and white. All were at least dismayed by what they saw happening. The protest I liked best came from a little kid who was out with his dad. “Don’t you like books?”
“I love them so much I don’t want anyone to do this. Ever. Plus, it’s for school.”
The little boy nodded and they went on. They’ll ask you to do anything if it’s for school.
Octocon is the Irish National Science Fiction Convention, and I’m on panels and giving a talk, online. I take seriously the fact that some people love all the things, but without Gillian. I used to joke about it with a “How to Avoid Me” guide. I decided to make things easier for antisemites by reintroducing these guides when I have time. Today I have time. (It’s either this or housework.) Here is that guide: happy Gillian-avoidance.
I’m giving Irish time and Australian time, thanks to the Octocon website, which translated everything for me. The easiest way of avoiding me is, of course, to strictly follow the Australian time and go to bed early. You can dream beautiful dreams instead of listening, say, to a talk on mostly-Medieval tricksters. Or, if you’re lucky enough to be in Dublin, go to the face to face versions of the panels.
Let’s start with tricksters. Do not be online or in the room streaming the online on Saturday 11 October at 11:30 IST or 21:30 GMT+11 (UTC+11 for those who GMT mystifies). You’ll be avoiding a talk and conversation on “Not the Usual Tricksters: Starting with the Middle Ages.” You will very happily miss hearing me snark about Robin Hood and talk about the origin stories that led to his trickster element. I may be polite about Renart (the Old French version) and Merlin (the Geeoffrey of Monmouth version). I will wax ecstatic about Ashmodai and his curious feet.
The conversation will all of us chatting about the tricksters of Western Europe. This conversation will be is less Commedia dell’Arte and more pop fantasy and folklore and regional traditions from the Middle Ages on. At this precise moment, I’m thinking about Evangeline Walton and Alan Garner and their stories about Welsh stories, but that’s this moment. Later today I plan to obsess (again) about Eustace.
The discussion bit will be open to most tales and most modern versions of tales. If people want to talk about Loki and other deities, we’ll save them until the end, because they get heaps of time in many conversations and Fulke Fitz Warin and Eustace the Monk do not. In my dreams someone informs us all about the Irish equivalents of both Eustace and Merlin.
Just this once, those tricksters who have historical evidence for their actual existence will be more important than those who are associated with building (Stonehenge and the First Temple come to mind) and anyone who existence only in literature (Renart) will be lesser players.
Why have I given you such a description? So that you can look up everything at your leisure and avoid me, of course.
Saturday, 13:00 IST or 23:00 GMT+11.
This is a classic What If… panel. Unfortunately for you, it has excellent panellists and one of the best moderators. I suggest watching online and turning the sound off when I’m talking.
Sunday 12 October 2025 at 10:00 IST or 20:00 GMT+11 is a Star Trek panel. Again, it has really good panellists (apart from me), but muting me twice would be boring for you. I suggest instead that you sing Star Trek themes whenever I speak. Or do your own version of the Charlie song from season one of the Original series. This way you avoid me, but get your Star Trek discussion… and it’s going to be a good one. Also, it turns the panel into a personal musical. If you feel the need to dance to the music, I won’t tell anyone.
Sunday at 11:30 IST or 21:30 GMT+11 is Historical Myths and How to (Not) Use Them. It’s online only, but… best avoid me and not the panel. After all, Jean Bürlesk is moderator and, unfortunately for you, the rest of the panel is also excellent.
This time I don’t suggest that you mute or sing. I suggest a drinking game. A slow, comforting half glass of something nice whenever I speak, a sip for every mention of a favourite historical myth, and a whole glass slugged down in a great hurry whenever the equivalent of an onstage costume change at Eurovision occurs. By the end of the panel you will have enjoyed a wonderful discussion on Historical Myths and also have an entirely sound understanding of why Australians love Eurovision so very much. (Just so’s you know, spellcheck wants to me change ‘Eurovision’ to ‘Neurosis.’)
And that’s it! That’s how to avoid Gillian while still enjoying every moment of Octocon.
PS If you’re avoiding me seriously and don’t even want to see my face, I suggest a moveable sticky patch to go on your computer screen. My favourite would be one with a koala and I can provide a picture for this, but stick figures are nicely universal and even easier. I do not recommend using super-glue.
I was reading an interview with Richard Osman (find it here in either video or a transcript), who has written a series of mysteries called the Thursday Murder Club about people over 80 living in a retirement community and solving mysteries.
The books are read worldwide, translated into a number of languages. In talking about how societies treat their elders – and assuming that in the UK and the US we treat them badly – he said this:
But in Mediterranean countries, in Arabic countries, in China, elders are traditionally revered. Except every time I go to one of those places, people say, “Oh no, we’re exactly the same. We treat older people terribly.” And I’ll say, “No, you don’t, not really.” And they insist, “Yes, honestly, that’s why we love these books.”
And that resonated with me, because I know there are segments in our culture which supposedly revere elders and yet as someone who technically qualifies for elderhood, when I see the way those elders are treated, I find it condescending.
I like the idea of a book that treats so-called elders like people, so I put the first one on hold at my library.
But I have to say, I don’t want to live in a retirement village. I want to live around people of all ages.
Michelle Cottle, who did the interview, said living in a retirement village would be kind of like being back in college except without having to go to class. But having spent time visiting people living in such places, I don’t find that true. Part of that might be that as much as we complained about it, going to class was a major part of going to college and generated a lot of the ideas that made for good conversations with our friends.
I would like to live in community that had some of the aspects of college – my six weeks at Clarion West, living in a dorm with my fellow students, going to class, barely sleeping, were a high point in my life. But the students in our group ranged from their early twenties to their mid-fifties.
So I’m not planning to move into a retirement village or similar facility for old folks, at least not now. My partner and I are part of East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative and we are trying to organize a multifamily co-op apartment building as part of that, one that would include a diverse group of people.
But there is another issue here, one I wrestle with. What if I develop a condition such as dementia or another severe illness or disability and need the kind of full-time care one gets in assisted living or nursing homes? I do not want my partner, assuming he is still able to do so, to spend all his time caring for my needs, and even though I’m putting money aside for my care in the future, I doubt I will have enough for 24-hour live-in aides. Continue reading “Thinking About Old Age”…
Federal judge overturns part of Florida’s book ban law, drawing on nearly 100 years of precedent protecting First Amendment access to ideas
Some school librarians in Florida have found themselves in the midst of controversy over complaints of “obscene” titles in their libraries. Trish233/iStock via Getty Images
When a junior at an Orange County public high school in Florida visited the school library to check out a copy of “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac, it wasn’t in its Dewey decimal system-assigned location.
It turns out the title had been removed from the library’s shelves because of a complaint, and in compliance with Florida House Bill 1069, it had been removed from the library indefinitely. Kerouac’s quintessential chronicle of the Beat Generation in the 1950s, along with hundreds of other titles, was not available for students to read.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law in July 2023. Under this law, if a parent or community member objected to a book on the grounds that it was obscene or pornographic, the school had to remove that title from the curriculum within five days and hold a public hearing with a special magistrate appointed by the state.
On Aug. 13, 2025, Judge Carlos Mendoza of the U.S. Middle District of Florida ruled in Penguin Random House v. Gibson that parts of Florida HB 1069 are unconstitutional and violate students’ First Amendment right of free access to ideas.
The plaintiffs who filed the suit included the five largest trade book publishing houses, a group of award-winning authors, the Authors Guild, which is a labor union for published professional authors with over 15,000 members, and the parents of a group of Florida students.
I’ve spent the past 26 years training English language arts teachers at Arizona State University, and 24 years before that teaching high school English. I understand the importance of Mendoza’s ruling for keeping books in classrooms and school libraries. In my experience, every few years the books teachers have chosen to teach come under attack. I’ve tried to learn as much as I can about the history of censorship in this country and pass it to my students, in order to prepare them for what may lie ahead in their careers as English teachers.
Legal precedent
The August 2025 ruling is in keeping with legal precedent around censorship. Over the years, U.S. courts have established that obscenity can be a legitimate cause for removing a book from the public sphere, but only under limited circumstances.
In the 1933 case of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, Judge John Munro Woolsey declared that James Joyce’s classic novel was not obscene, contradicting a lower court ruling. Woolsey emphasized that works must be considered as a whole, rather than judged by “selected excerpts,” and that reviewers should apply contemporary national standards and think about the effect on the average person.
In 1957, the Supreme Court further clarified First Amendment protections in Roth v. United States by rejecting the argument that obscenity lacks redeeming social importance. In this case, the court defined obscenity as material that, taken as a whole, appeals to a prurient – that is, lascivious – interest in sex in average readers.
The Supreme Court’s 1973 Miller v. California decision created the eponymous Miller test for jurors in obscenity cases. This test incorporates language from the Ulysses and Roth rulings, asking jurors to consider whether the average person, looking at the work as a whole and applying the contemporary standards in their community, would find it lascivious. It also adds the consideration of whether the material in question is of “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” when deciding whether it is obscene.
Another decision that is particularly relevant for teachers and school librarians is 1982’s Island Trees School District v. Pico, a case brought by students against their school board. The Supreme Court ruled that removing books from a school library or curriculum is a violation of the First Amendment if it is an attempt to suppress ideas. Free access to ideas in books, the court wrote, is sacrosanct: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.”
These 23 books were removed from Florida school libraries under Florida HB 1069. In his ruling in Penguin Random House v. Gibson, Judge Carlos Mendoza named them and stated, ‘None of these books are obscene.’ Illustration by The Conversation
What this ruling clarifies
In his ruling in August 2025, Mendoza pointed out that many of the removed books are classics with no sexual content at all. This was made possible in part by the formulation of HB 1069. The law allows anyone from the community to challenge a book simply by filling out a form, at which point the school is mandated to remove that book within five days. In order to put a book back in circulation, however, the law requires a hearing to be held by the state’s appointed magistrate, and there is no specified deadline by which this hearing must take place.
Mendoza did not strike down the parts of HB 1069 that require school districts to follow a state policy for challenging books. In line with precedent, he also left in place challenges for obscenity using the Miller test and with reference to age-appropriateness for mature content.
The Florida Department of Education argued that HB 1069 is protected by Florida’s First Amendment right of government speech, a legal theory that the government has the right to prevent any opposing views to its own in schools or any government platform. Mendoza questioned this argument, suggesting that “slapping the label of government speech on book removals only serves to stifle the disfavored viewpoints.”
What this means for schools, in Florida and across the US
In the wake of Mendoza’s decision, Florida schools are unlikely to pull more books from the shelves, but they are also unlikely to immediately return them. Some school librarians have said that they are awaiting the outcome of the appeal before taking action.
States with similar laws on the books or in the works will also be watching the appeal.
Next week is the Irish national science fiction convention, Octocon. Two days of it are online. I will be giving a talk. I want to punctuate that last sentence with so many apostrophes. I love giving talks at Octocon. Sometimes my audience is quiet and sometimes chatty, but they’re always interesting people and will often find me later to continue conversations.
This year I’m talking about the tricksters of Western Europe and how their stories grow and change. Some of them began as real people, and one of them was changed into being a trickster by a famous writer. Another goes way back… and has very strange feet. I have written about one of them in my novels. I suspect the others may appear, given time.
We don’t talk about western European tricksters often at all. This is going to be fun.
We had an earthquake in the Bay Area this week. It was in Berkeley, a couple of miles from where I live.
Not a big one – I think the US Geological Survey finally pegged it as 4.3 – but it did rattle things enough to wake us up at 2:56 a.m.
It was on the Hayward fault, which runs down the East Bay. There hasn’t been a big earthquake on the Hayward since the 19th century, which is to say that we’re overdue for one. I’m grateful that the building I live in had a pretty thorough seismic upgrade awhile back, at least one that’s good enough for smaller quakes. But of course, it hasn’t been tested by the “Big One,” as we say in these parts.
Quite a few years ago I listened to an audiobook in which the author — I’ve forgotten both his name and the name of the book — said that one of the first stages of an advanced civilization was the ability to control the weather. And while earthquakes aren’t exactly weather, I’m pretty sure controlling them would come under that idea as well.
Obviously, we humans here on Earth aren’t anywhere close to that. In trying to find the book by searching online, I ran across other scientists analyzing where Earth might be in terms of attaining any level of advanced civilization.
In general, we don’t reach even Level 1 on most scales. Carl Sagan put us at 0.7. From what I recall of the audiobook, it also had us below Level 1.
In my very cursory search, it appears that the core theory is called the Kardashev Scale, from the Russian scientist Nikolai Kardashev, who came up with it. It defines civilizations based on their control of energy, starting first on the planet, then from a star, and finally from the galaxy.
When I read this, it makes me think of a lot of hype from the broligarch crowd, who are apparently convinced that if we just buy into their idea of creating artificial general intelligence by stuffing all the written works of the world into LLMs, we will magically create something that can harness the sun and leap to the more advanced levels.
Even if the real scientists are right about what constitutes advanced civilizations – and I’m not convinced – I’m pretty sure the current crop of techlords are not going to be the people pull this off.
