▪️This is an incredible story. In the past year there have been countless memes shrieking about “book bans” in red states, which are typically a single school board deciding a few books are not age appropriate, often moving them from the elementary to middle school section or similar action. Now, Ontario schools are removing giant swaths of books, as much as 50%, for equity initiatives!
▪️The school board describes this as simply a “weeding process” (book bans only apply to conservatives). The board said, "Books published prior to 2008 that are damaged, inaccurate, or do not have strong circulation data (are not being checked out by students) are removed”
▪️This follows Directive 18 from Ontario’s Ministry of Education, which tells school boards “to complete a diversity audit of schools, which includes libraries.” This instructs librarians to “review” books published before 2008 based on the MUSTIE acronym:
🔹Misleading- information may be factually inaccurate or obsolete
🔹Unpleasant– refers to the physical condition, not content, of the book
🔹Superseded– book been overtaken by a new edition or a more current resource
🔹Trivial– no discernible literary or scientific merit
🔹 Irrelevant– doesn't meet the needs and interests of the library's community
🔹Elsewhere– the material in it may be better obtained from other sources
▪️With the exception of unpleasant and superseded, this standard is HIGHLY subjective, essentially giving librarians the power to determine what is misleading and relevant!
▪️It gets worse, of course. Step 2 of curation is “an anti-racist and inclusive audit, where quality is defined by "resources that promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity."”
▪️And step 3 is “a representation audit of how books and other resources reflect student diversity.” What could possibly go wrong with that?
▪️The absolute kicker is this quote:
🔹 “When it comes to disposing of the books that are weeded, the board documents say the resources are "causing harm," either as a health hazard because of the condition of the book or because "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate." For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners."”
▪️So while not literally burning books, they are destroying them. This includes such dissident works as the Hungry Caterpillar and Anne Frank’s diary. Imagine, for a moment, the reaction if this was happening in a conservative school district.
▪️There is thankfully some pushback on this from, presumably, left wing people in Canada. But it’s based on worries that older books about Japanese internment camps or the Holocaust might be removed. Not revulsion over the equity “weeding process” itself.
▪️While this is in Canada, there is no real ideological difference between Ontario’s equity initiative for books and progressive areas in the US. This would be championed by the left in the US if they could get away with it, which tells you everything you need to know about the “book ban” hysteria.
Full story here:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-library-book-weeding-1.6964332
As with the leftist freak out over “banned books” this is not banning books, it’s still easy to get Harry Potter and bookstores should be able to limit whatever books they want for whatever reason. But not only does it show a double standard, the rationale is far less justifiable than removing certain content from school libraries. At least there the justification was the content of certain books are inappropriate for children, clearly not every book should be available in a school library. Here, there’s no argument about the content they just don’t like the author’s politics!
Because news came out about his letter to the FBI, revealing he was a nutcase. The letter was rambling and incoherent, claiming he was trained by the US military off the books, and that Walz had instructed him to kill Amy Klobuchar so he could run for Senate. None of it made any sense (Walz is not running for Senate) and none of the assassinations made any sense, even in a diabolical way.
Nearly all of his hit list was Democrats (including Walz) and abortion clinics, but he was supposedly working for Walz?! Plus, one of the guys he killed wasn’t even on his list, and others were no longer in office or deceased. None of it makes sense from any coherent angle.
Basically, it appears the guy was mentally ill and neither the left or right can use the incident to push their agendas anymore, so the story was dropped.
This is so dumb. First, this means LA began as Spanish land founded to support Spanish missions (i.e. colonialism). Which contradicts their entire premise. But the reality is that Los Angeles is a quintessential American city.
▪️When the US acquired California in the 1840s, LA was a small town of less than 2,000 people. It was basically nothing. It became large only after the gold rush and the railroads completed in the 1870-80s, which brought thousands of new settlers and a booming commercial center.
▪️But LA had a major issue limiting its growth, no water. It wasn’t until Mulholland found a water source and built an aqueduct down from Northern California that LA had the infrastructure to grow into a major city.
▪️Then, a combination of oil, real estate and the film industry caused it to boom in the early 1900s. Post WWII, industries like aerospace continued its spectacular growth. Calling this “Mexican land” is a brain dead take. Neither the Mexicans, Spanish nor ...
