Which is how it should have been done in the first place. At least they're fixing the mess Walters left behind. I have a hazmat endorsement, I can haul it away for them.
Ryan Walters was typical of the religious extremists who draw their conclusions first, then work backward looking for justification. He saw his magic book as the solution to every problem, and that’s where his thinking evidently ended.
I can almost guarantee to you that he has never read the whole book, beginning to end. His mentor, David Barton told him exactly which parts to read and that is what he did. Can’t be polluting his pure Christian thoughts with those nasty bits in Ezekiel and Song of Solomon, can he?
It's a good thing there is no legal definition for a historian, because David Barton may as well be calling himself an astronaut. No university that wanted to hold on to their accreditation would ever hire him to teach history.
Think of a historian like eg a plumber. Or a baker. Basically someone who has learned certain skills, like a baker who knows how to make choux pastry, a (proper!) historian has learned how to interpret sources. And that comes with its own challenges:
Eg if you're looking at times when you've got very few written sources, you need to interpret all kinds of other remnants from that time. That's why areas such as numismatics or heraldry exist. It's where carbon dating and counting tree circles (yes, that's a thing) contribute knowledge.
And if you're looking at a time period when there are lots and lots of written sources, you'll need to find a way to filter them, because you cannot consider them all.
Addendum - AI can (can!) be helpful. I read an article which was considering the role AI can play when looking at genealogy in Scotland. That article suggested that AI can help pointing out that eg places named in a variety of sources are actually the same place, it's just that the spelling varies so widely, not only by the poor writing skills of the people writing the documents but also by people switching from Gaelic to English and back again.
I am generally pretty anti-AI but this article gave me food for thought, so that maybe there is a role for AI.
It’s certainly better than his ‘christopretendisomething’. I actually put his phrase into my search engine (no, not google) and came across a youtube and a tiktok, all authored by one …. yes, you guessed. Our pal from yesterday.
His Christopretensism is just an Urban Dictionary colloquialism. It's not a recognized word or concept. Not in academia, not in political discourse and not even among theologists.
It made no sense. And the more he wrote, the less sense he made.
He clearly had no feel for the room, otherwise, he'd have written a couple of comments and then walked away.
What a twat!
(Due to his 'contributions' being scrubbed, my post about a place called Twatt got deleted, too. It's a lovely little place in the Orkney Islands and yes, they do a roaring trade of souvenirs with their village name printed on them.)
If you are referring to Ryan Walters, I am unaware of anything he did that might have been helpful to the condition of public education in Oklahoma. But I could say the same about every other state superintendent of education. I suspect we know more about Walters because of his resource wasting efforts. Had he been doing his job properly, he would have been largely unknown outside of OK educational circles. A lot of us here think that was the point. We believe he was angling for higher office of some sort. A Trump appointment.
The religious right puts their magic book forward as self-evident truth in spite of the fact there is next to nothing in the way of independent corroboration for any of it. There is no independent corroboration for any part of the Jesus story what so ever. The Constitution does not mention the words Bible, Jesus or God, and specifically bans religious tests for holding public office. Never the less, the Christian Nationalists continue to claim this country was somehow based on their book. It wasn’t.
"It's the old American double standard. Say one thing, do something different. And, of course, the country is founded on the double standard. That's our history. This country was founded on a very basic double standard. This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free."
Our founding fathers could not have avoided being influenced by Christianity. And, important ideas found in our government such as the separation of powers came from Locke who came up with them based upon his understanding of the Bible. However, the Constitution is not a religious document and there has never been and will never be a "Christian America". Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world which excludes every nation and government in power.
Yeah, I accept that. I accept that the founding fathers were influenced by christianity. After all, it was the dominant religion in their environment. So, it goes without saying that they were influenced by it.
But - and that is more important - they were aware of that influence and then CHOSE to write the constitution of the new country as a secular document. They CHOSE to write a clause specifying the separation of church and state, they chose to write a clause that there should be no religious tests before anyone can take up an office of the state.
Which means that I'd have no problem if history lessons pointed out the 'christian influence' aspect but only if they then leaned on heavily on the founding fathers' choices in writing the constitution.
Or to put more simply - by all means say 'A' but if you do, you also have to add 'B'.
Right. It should also be pointed out that the founding fathers had the long history of religious wars in Europe to consider when writing the Constitution. Needless to say, they sure didn't want them occurring over on our side of the Atlantic.
You'll probably have seen me recommending a specific book, this one has got a whole (!) section on those religious wars, they're calling it the 'Age of Religious Discord'. That section takes up about 10% of the whole book!
We are moving this week. I didn’t sleep well last night so I’m pretty fuzzy and tired today. You may not see me much for the rest of the week. Have fun.
Don’t forget to wash the true believers thoroughly before you chew on them. You don’t know where they’ve been.
Thank you. It actually is going well. It’s just hard to leave my house because I love it so much. But we’re moving to a very nice place that’s not too far away.
Though it is a little late to tell you this now, the key to moving successfully it is an organization and getting rid of stuff that you really don’t need. But mostly organization. We had already decided where the major items would go. All boxes are labeled as to what room they are going to and what they contain.
Since you are post move and swimming in boxes, I can give you this much advice. You don’t have to decide where everything goes and is going to live forever. You merely need to get it out of the boxes. So make your best guess, and get it out of the boxes and get rid of the boxes. It’s a huge mistake to pick stuff up look at it turn it around a few times and put it down again.You can accomplish a huge amount in just a couple of hours if you take that as your basic principle. Once you have the boxes gone you can have room to move around.
The last time I moved was 28 years ago, and it was a relatively easy because I adhered to those rules. This is going really well right now.
Thanks. I have actually moved many times, and did all the things you described. It was still hell.
This time was off the scales worse, because:
A) I had barely two weeks notice that we were moving, and therefore barely enough time to put in my two weeks notice at work. Husband pulled a real Ricky Ricardo and just announced "we're moving" because he was suddenly tired of Minnesota. He had already put the house on the market and signed all the contracts. I was the last to know.
So, I was packing boxes willy-nilly every evening until the wee hours of the morning. I made a lot of quick decisions about what to get rid of, but it wasn't nearly enough, and there just wasn't enough time for multiple trips to Goodwill, and they did not have pickup service in our area.
B) We were moving to mom's house in Florida. Mom had lived in Minnesota with us the last two or three years, but we kept her house, She passed away about a year ago.
I *thought* I had cleared some of the clutter out of her house years ago (had to smuggle it out when she wasn't looking) but apparently not as much as I thought, and she had added back to the clutter (she grew up on a farm during the Depression where you NEVER threw anything away).
Since she and dad had lived in that house for nearly 70 years, just imagine the accumulation.
So it was wall-to-wall furniture and floor to ceiling boxes in every room. Literally no room to maneuver. We had to rent a storage unit for some of our stuff until we could make some room. I've been going room-by-room, but when you have no room to put anything you unpack until you get rid of what's already there, it gets overwhelming and depressing as hell.
I've had to go through dozens of boxes of old bank statements going back to the 70's. In later years, mom had a bad habit of sticking family photos and money in random envelopes (Alzheimer's patients tend to do strange things with photos, as I have discovered). Books - stacks and stacks and stacks of mindless romance novels (mostly Danielle Steele and Nora Roberts) squirreled away all over the place, and again, she would use photos and currency for bookmarks. I've even found money stuffed into the spines of the hardbacks. And because she was a Sunday School teacher for over forty years, there were file cabinets everywhere filled with religious lesson plan crap for preschoolers, as well as a metric ton of crafting and art supplies for their Bible story art projects. I counted at least 27 Bibles she had collected. Old plastic dishes, thousands of flower pots, sewing paraphenalia (TWO sewing machines), years and years and years of Christmas decor....
I have gotten rid of a good bit of it. Thank goodness for numerous nearby thrift stores. We've also made about 50 (and counting) trips to the solid waste facility with entire trailer loads of crap we couldn't fix or give away.
The yard, well, imagine a yard not trimmed or mowed in about three-four years. In Florida, where stuff grows almost year round. The entire back yard was head high in weeds, and trees had sprouted all over the place.
C) The usual plumbing and heating disasters, and other repairs that had to be made right away.
D) Bugs. Everywhere.
Whenever I had to move before, I used the system you described, and I would have loved to have time to prepare for this move properly. Like If I had been told six months ahead of time that we were moving, I could have started working toward it, packing a few things, giving stuff away, paring down on everything. As for labeling, I am a fanatical labeler. But with only two weeks to pack, I barely had time to write "kitchen" or "bedroom" or whatever. Some of the boxes toward the end had little more than B, K, LR, DR, (bedroom, kitchen, living room, dining room, etc).
So, because I didn't have time to go through stuff carefully and deliberately, and make the hard decisions then, I'm doing it now. And I am having to clean away years worth of grime as I go along. Because you can't scrub a filthy floor when boxes are stacked all over it. It has been unpack a column of boxes, clean a spot on the floor, rinse, repeat.
And also, I suppose part of the reason I'm taking my time now, is to get even with you know who. He sprang this on me out of the blue, so now I tell him, "well, if you had given me adequate warning I could have done a lot of this before we moved."
There are more stories I could tell, including one about our cat Squeaky, but I've already gone on way too long. :)
I am truly sorry that you are having to go through that. My husband is difficult enough to deal with. If He did something like yours did, we would not be married anymore.
You’re right, being systematic is not going to be helpful in the face of all of that. If there’s still so much of it, you might get yourself a dumpster. A lot less time involved. When my friend Aggie’s husband died 12 years ago, she decided it was time to move to a retirement community. She didn’t want to take care of anything. She got a very large dumpster and her daughter, an efficiency nut, just started dumping it, even though a lot of it useful, even valuable stuff. Aggie moved from a three bedroom house with a garage to a one room apartment..
At least it's a little better than it was. I have found a lot of family records and important documents I thought had been lost. One was an old military trunk with all dad's records and stuff from WWII. Also found a few lovely pieces of silver, including a silver tea set, that I recognized as a late great aunt's. She must have given it to mom at some point.
The whole thing has made me so crazy I have started smoking again just to keep my sanity. The husband would have a cow if he knew I was smoking, so I have to be very careful and keep lots of mouthwash and Big Red gum on hand.
I just keep picking away at it, and each day it's a little less. I can be pretty resilient.
Maybe someday, I'll even have time to tell the Squeaky story. :)
“… the 2026 Oklahoma Standards reflect the education establishment’s studied lack of interest in patriotism, the historic roots of the American republic, or any notable achievements by conservatives or Republicans.”
You don’t teach patriotism, you engender it. You don’t have to lie and hide the truth to do so either. Patriotism is borne from the ideals that the country was built upon, the people who keep guiding faulty humans toward those ideals, and even if we don’t always live up to the ideals, we are always striving for them. So, you can’t teach pride in your country, but you can help people see the good in it so they can have pride.
What Walters actually did was make people less proud of the state and country by demanding conformity by going against the ideals that the country was built on. Any time patriotism is forced on a population, it backfires. The whole Bad Bunny Super Bowl response makes me less patriotic that a vanishing third of the country thinks that patriotism means we have to sing about how awful LGBTQ people are, or how we should be seeking our sexual partners in elementary schools, while pretending g to love Jesus, rather than celebrating the people who live and work and build up the country, even if it was sung in Spanish. One show was a Walters’ special, the other a portrait in patriotism. Despite the vitriol and violence directed at Bad Bunny by our leaders and vocal town assholes, he expressed joy, love and community. That is how you engender patriotism, not lying about history, pretending a villain is the second coming of Jesus, and forgetting that the country is for “We the People.”
And if beatings don't work, they'll just continue the random shootings of American citizens until those damn hard-headed libs learn to fall in and shut their yaps while ICE is conducting kidnappings in their cities.
i saw part of the halftime show. It looked and sounded great, but I knew right away that the right was going to be bigly pissed off. How dare them firriners sing about our country in SPANISH!!!!
Other than slavery and genocide, I cannot corollate any overlapping themes between the foundation of the United States and the Bible.
The Bible says to submit to the governing authorities because they are put in place by God. The United States was founded as a rebellious act against the governing authorities.
The Old Testament gives the rules for a theocracy or theocratic autocracy. The New Testament is not particularly interested in describing an ideal government at all. The United States government is modeled on a classical Republic.
Our government was founded on principles from the enlightenment. That the new government was compatible with Christianity and Judaism and Islam speaks to the benefits of separation of church and state.
Terrific. Oklahoma is at least TRYING to unfuck all the fucked-up stuff that Ryan Walters tried to put in place. If Mr. Fields can fully follow through on his expressed intentions, one might expect a serious improvement in the quality of education in the Sooner State.
And being that they languish at or near the BOTTOM of education ratings in the United States, THEY NEED IT.
Walters was so hung on his belief system that I doubt he could consider much of anything else. Anyone taking his place would be an improvement, almost by default.
"We are presenting a successful model that others can emulate for how to restore public education and eradicate radical woke influences from our schools."
When I hear someone use the word "woke" these days, I automatically think "That person is a complete imbecile".
One can only imagine how Republicans in Oklahomastan and other Red states will re-write Trump's sham of a presidency in future history, from the re-tweets of the Obamas as apes to his lies about Jeffrey Epstein.
The United States has proven itself to be the stupidest nation on the planet, electing a malignant narcissist totally unqualified and unfit to hold what once was the most important office in the world. Not any longer. The world deplores Trump and, by association, the United States.
Trump has not only decimated the present, but he has successfully sullied the past and endangered the future. All abetted by the Republican party.
All that work by the child killer undone. Beautiful. And despite Walters' tongue being lodged firmly inside Trump's rectum, he never did get that cabinet position he so lusted after.
Thus it it ever with those who try to align themselves with the Golden Goblin.
That said, I would be curious to know where Walters goes from here. Considering his penchant for shoving Christianity EVERYWHERE and especially in schools and/or government, keeping an eye on him strikes me as a fair idea.
I have little doubt but what he will make big money on the Christian speaking circuits shedding crocodile tears about he was the victim of the godless left. Your donations appreciated.
I expect he will be a thorn in our side for the next 20-25 years as he is only 40. He will hop from one conservative advocacy group to another, show up on Fox, speak at TPUSA, etc., etc.
“ In March 2025, the Freedom Foundation established the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a new national organization to provide educators with professional support services and resources.[15] The group is designed to provide educators with an alternative to teachers unions.[16] On September 25, 2025, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters announced he would resign from his position and become the CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance.[17]”
He's also fairly young, there are many years ahead where he is likely to try that kind of shenanigans again.
A thought has just occurred to me, it's a question: Do you (=everyone here in this forum) think that anything could dislodge his thinking? Do you (=same) think that there is anything which would convince him that there is merit in secular spaces? Including secular education?
Could Walters change his mind? Anything is possible. PROBABLE? Not so much. He's bought into the con so deeply that I doubt anything could dislodge him from it.
There's one thing that's wiggling around in the back of my mind in all of this- whatever happened to Chaya Raichik? Did that vile stochastic terrorist leave with Walters, or is she still on staff at the OK Dept. of Ed. somewhere? Because we really haven't heard anything about her in a while, and bigots as 𝘭𝘰𝘶𝘥 as her don't just drop off the radar like this unless they're busy cooking up something evil in the shadow of larger events.
Yes, this is a victory – good. But how much money was wasted? These people don't seem to give a shit about waste, fraud, and abuse do they? Not if it's their waste, fraud, and abuse.
Oh for fuck's sake, Republicans. Get yourselves some better pop culture, and we'll thank you to do it quick- the last thing we want is Nick Fuentes ringing 𝘰𝘶𝘳 doorbell!
I have to mention this again: TPs canonization of Charlie Kirk was made specifically for Trump and the Bronze Barrage Balloon didn't even watch it. Guess where he was? That's right. Rage tweeting all through Bad Bunny's performance.
Oh, boo fucking hoo. Poor Nick Fuentes is whining because the half-time show didn't suit his limited taste/STUNTED intellectual capacity. While low income families who have had their SNAP benefits cut are scrambling to pay bills and put food on the table. While brown people even in blue cities are afraid to leave their homes because they might be kidnapped off the street or at their workplace by masked ICE agents. While at least two families (that I am aware of) are struggling with the aftermath of having loved ones murdered by masked ICE agents. While the working poor try to find decent affordable health care.
Nick Fuentes can just kiss Trump's shit-covered ass and shut the fuck up.
𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐸𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝐷𝑒𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑎 𝑡𝑒𝑎𝑚 𝑜𝑓 𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑟𝑑𝑠.
Which is how it should have been done in the first place. At least they're fixing the mess Walters left behind. I have a hazmat endorsement, I can haul it away for them.
Ryan Walters was typical of the religious extremists who draw their conclusions first, then work backward looking for justification. He saw his magic book as the solution to every problem, and that’s where his thinking evidently ended.
I can almost guarantee to you that he has never read the whole book, beginning to end. His mentor, David Barton told him exactly which parts to read and that is what he did. Can’t be polluting his pure Christian thoughts with those nasty bits in Ezekiel and Song of Solomon, can he?
It's a good thing there is no legal definition for a historian, because David Barton may as well be calling himself an astronaut. No university that wanted to hold on to their accreditation would ever hire him to teach history.
Think of a historian like eg a plumber. Or a baker. Basically someone who has learned certain skills, like a baker who knows how to make choux pastry, a (proper!) historian has learned how to interpret sources. And that comes with its own challenges:
Eg if you're looking at times when you've got very few written sources, you need to interpret all kinds of other remnants from that time. That's why areas such as numismatics or heraldry exist. It's where carbon dating and counting tree circles (yes, that's a thing) contribute knowledge.
And if you're looking at a time period when there are lots and lots of written sources, you'll need to find a way to filter them, because you cannot consider them all.
Addendum - AI can (can!) be helpful. I read an article which was considering the role AI can play when looking at genealogy in Scotland. That article suggested that AI can help pointing out that eg places named in a variety of sources are actually the same place, it's just that the spelling varies so widely, not only by the poor writing skills of the people writing the documents but also by people switching from Gaelic to English and back again.
I am generally pretty anti-AI but this article gave me food for thought, so that maybe there is a role for AI.
"also by people switching from Gaelic to English and back again. "
At least part of the problem is the late development of Scottish Gaelic as a written language.
The socially conscious words of Jesus are anathema to them!
"magic book" ? hahahahahah
Question - did that chap [Walters] achieve anything? I mean anything positive? Or was his tenure just a waste of time, effort and money?
Edited to add the name, it became clear that my comment was ambiguous. Apologies.
JG? He was here to derail the thread and pick fights so he could martyrbate and pretend to be persecuted for his faith.
‘Matyrbate’ - that’s a good one.
It’s certainly better than his ‘christopretendisomething’. I actually put his phrase into my search engine (no, not google) and came across a youtube and a tiktok, all authored by one …. yes, you guessed. Our pal from yesterday.
Maybe he managed to get some clicks or views?
His Christopretensism is just an Urban Dictionary colloquialism. It's not a recognized word or concept. Not in academia, not in political discourse and not even among theologists.
It made no sense. And the more he wrote, the less sense he made.
He clearly had no feel for the room, otherwise, he'd have written a couple of comments and then walked away.
What a twat!
(Due to his 'contributions' being scrubbed, my post about a place called Twatt got deleted, too. It's a lovely little place in the Orkney Islands and yes, they do a roaring trade of souvenirs with their village name printed on them.)
I saw your reference. There's also another place in the Shetlands with the same name.
Lol, that’s where I found it.
I actually meant that Oklahoma chap rather than yesterday's apparition.
Oops.
No need. I wasn't very clear. I've now edited my comment to clarify.
Thank you for the new word, though.
Thanks. Wish I could claim it was one of mine. Honesty forbids. :)
If you are referring to Ryan Walters, I am unaware of anything he did that might have been helpful to the condition of public education in Oklahoma. But I could say the same about every other state superintendent of education. I suspect we know more about Walters because of his resource wasting efforts. Had he been doing his job properly, he would have been largely unknown outside of OK educational circles. A lot of us here think that was the point. We believe he was angling for higher office of some sort. A Trump appointment.
You know something? I am looking forward to all those folk scrubbing their CVs and downplaying their role they played in Trumpian times.
We've seen this movie before - there were millions of Nazis on the 25th April and hardly any a fortnight later. 1945.
I hope the same phenomenon can be observed in the year ..... [insert suitable date].
Like that joke from the first trump maladministration, updated:
Human Resources to job applicant in 2029: Interesting resume- but what were you doing from 2025 on? The resume is blank.
Applicant/former trump employee: Prison. I was in prison from 2024 to 2029.
The religious right puts their magic book forward as self-evident truth in spite of the fact there is next to nothing in the way of independent corroboration for any of it. There is no independent corroboration for any part of the Jesus story what so ever. The Constitution does not mention the words Bible, Jesus or God, and specifically bans religious tests for holding public office. Never the less, the Christian Nationalists continue to claim this country was somehow based on their book. It wasn’t.
And wouldn't it be nice if the standards actually required THAT FACT to be pointed out?
Yes. In fact, why not post it in the public school classrooms.
Yet another lesson why fanatics should never have anything to do with education… public or otherwise.
"It's the old American double standard. Say one thing, do something different. And, of course, the country is founded on the double standard. That's our history. This country was founded on a very basic double standard. This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free."
-George Carlin
Our founding fathers could not have avoided being influenced by Christianity. And, important ideas found in our government such as the separation of powers came from Locke who came up with them based upon his understanding of the Bible. However, the Constitution is not a religious document and there has never been and will never be a "Christian America". Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world which excludes every nation and government in power.
Yeah, I accept that. I accept that the founding fathers were influenced by christianity. After all, it was the dominant religion in their environment. So, it goes without saying that they were influenced by it.
But - and that is more important - they were aware of that influence and then CHOSE to write the constitution of the new country as a secular document. They CHOSE to write a clause specifying the separation of church and state, they chose to write a clause that there should be no religious tests before anyone can take up an office of the state.
Which means that I'd have no problem if history lessons pointed out the 'christian influence' aspect but only if they then leaned on heavily on the founding fathers' choices in writing the constitution.
Or to put more simply - by all means say 'A' but if you do, you also have to add 'B'.
Right. It should also be pointed out that the founding fathers had the long history of religious wars in Europe to consider when writing the Constitution. Needless to say, they sure didn't want them occurring over on our side of the Atlantic.
Absolutely!
You'll probably have seen me recommending a specific book, this one has got a whole (!) section on those religious wars, they're calling it the 'Age of Religious Discord'. That section takes up about 10% of the whole book!
We are moving this week. I didn’t sleep well last night so I’m pretty fuzzy and tired today. You may not see me much for the rest of the week. Have fun.
Don’t forget to wash the true believers thoroughly before you chew on them. You don’t know where they’ve been.
Wishing you all the best, hope your move goes well.
Thank you. It actually is going well. It’s just hard to leave my house because I love it so much. But we’re moving to a very nice place that’s not too far away.
As one who moved from Minnesota to Florida, I can say with authority, "moving is hell."
We're still swimming in boxes and the house is a wreck. Plus the house we moved to has some issues.
Though it is a little late to tell you this now, the key to moving successfully it is an organization and getting rid of stuff that you really don’t need. But mostly organization. We had already decided where the major items would go. All boxes are labeled as to what room they are going to and what they contain.
Since you are post move and swimming in boxes, I can give you this much advice. You don’t have to decide where everything goes and is going to live forever. You merely need to get it out of the boxes. So make your best guess, and get it out of the boxes and get rid of the boxes. It’s a huge mistake to pick stuff up look at it turn it around a few times and put it down again.You can accomplish a huge amount in just a couple of hours if you take that as your basic principle. Once you have the boxes gone you can have room to move around.
The last time I moved was 28 years ago, and it was a relatively easy because I adhered to those rules. This is going really well right now.
Thanks. I have actually moved many times, and did all the things you described. It was still hell.
This time was off the scales worse, because:
A) I had barely two weeks notice that we were moving, and therefore barely enough time to put in my two weeks notice at work. Husband pulled a real Ricky Ricardo and just announced "we're moving" because he was suddenly tired of Minnesota. He had already put the house on the market and signed all the contracts. I was the last to know.
So, I was packing boxes willy-nilly every evening until the wee hours of the morning. I made a lot of quick decisions about what to get rid of, but it wasn't nearly enough, and there just wasn't enough time for multiple trips to Goodwill, and they did not have pickup service in our area.
B) We were moving to mom's house in Florida. Mom had lived in Minnesota with us the last two or three years, but we kept her house, She passed away about a year ago.
I *thought* I had cleared some of the clutter out of her house years ago (had to smuggle it out when she wasn't looking) but apparently not as much as I thought, and she had added back to the clutter (she grew up on a farm during the Depression where you NEVER threw anything away).
Since she and dad had lived in that house for nearly 70 years, just imagine the accumulation.
So it was wall-to-wall furniture and floor to ceiling boxes in every room. Literally no room to maneuver. We had to rent a storage unit for some of our stuff until we could make some room. I've been going room-by-room, but when you have no room to put anything you unpack until you get rid of what's already there, it gets overwhelming and depressing as hell.
I've had to go through dozens of boxes of old bank statements going back to the 70's. In later years, mom had a bad habit of sticking family photos and money in random envelopes (Alzheimer's patients tend to do strange things with photos, as I have discovered). Books - stacks and stacks and stacks of mindless romance novels (mostly Danielle Steele and Nora Roberts) squirreled away all over the place, and again, she would use photos and currency for bookmarks. I've even found money stuffed into the spines of the hardbacks. And because she was a Sunday School teacher for over forty years, there were file cabinets everywhere filled with religious lesson plan crap for preschoolers, as well as a metric ton of crafting and art supplies for their Bible story art projects. I counted at least 27 Bibles she had collected. Old plastic dishes, thousands of flower pots, sewing paraphenalia (TWO sewing machines), years and years and years of Christmas decor....
I have gotten rid of a good bit of it. Thank goodness for numerous nearby thrift stores. We've also made about 50 (and counting) trips to the solid waste facility with entire trailer loads of crap we couldn't fix or give away.
The yard, well, imagine a yard not trimmed or mowed in about three-four years. In Florida, where stuff grows almost year round. The entire back yard was head high in weeds, and trees had sprouted all over the place.
C) The usual plumbing and heating disasters, and other repairs that had to be made right away.
D) Bugs. Everywhere.
Whenever I had to move before, I used the system you described, and I would have loved to have time to prepare for this move properly. Like If I had been told six months ahead of time that we were moving, I could have started working toward it, packing a few things, giving stuff away, paring down on everything. As for labeling, I am a fanatical labeler. But with only two weeks to pack, I barely had time to write "kitchen" or "bedroom" or whatever. Some of the boxes toward the end had little more than B, K, LR, DR, (bedroom, kitchen, living room, dining room, etc).
So, because I didn't have time to go through stuff carefully and deliberately, and make the hard decisions then, I'm doing it now. And I am having to clean away years worth of grime as I go along. Because you can't scrub a filthy floor when boxes are stacked all over it. It has been unpack a column of boxes, clean a spot on the floor, rinse, repeat.
And also, I suppose part of the reason I'm taking my time now, is to get even with you know who. He sprang this on me out of the blue, so now I tell him, "well, if you had given me adequate warning I could have done a lot of this before we moved."
There are more stories I could tell, including one about our cat Squeaky, but I've already gone on way too long. :)
I am truly sorry that you are having to go through that. My husband is difficult enough to deal with. If He did something like yours did, we would not be married anymore.
You’re right, being systematic is not going to be helpful in the face of all of that. If there’s still so much of it, you might get yourself a dumpster. A lot less time involved. When my friend Aggie’s husband died 12 years ago, she decided it was time to move to a retirement community. She didn’t want to take care of anything. She got a very large dumpster and her daughter, an efficiency nut, just started dumping it, even though a lot of it useful, even valuable stuff. Aggie moved from a three bedroom house with a garage to a one room apartment..
At least it's a little better than it was. I have found a lot of family records and important documents I thought had been lost. One was an old military trunk with all dad's records and stuff from WWII. Also found a few lovely pieces of silver, including a silver tea set, that I recognized as a late great aunt's. She must have given it to mom at some point.
The whole thing has made me so crazy I have started smoking again just to keep my sanity. The husband would have a cow if he knew I was smoking, so I have to be very careful and keep lots of mouthwash and Big Red gum on hand.
I just keep picking away at it, and each day it's a little less. I can be pretty resilient.
Maybe someday, I'll even have time to tell the Squeaky story. :)
“… the 2026 Oklahoma Standards reflect the education establishment’s studied lack of interest in patriotism, the historic roots of the American republic, or any notable achievements by conservatives or Republicans.”
You don’t teach patriotism, you engender it. You don’t have to lie and hide the truth to do so either. Patriotism is borne from the ideals that the country was built upon, the people who keep guiding faulty humans toward those ideals, and even if we don’t always live up to the ideals, we are always striving for them. So, you can’t teach pride in your country, but you can help people see the good in it so they can have pride.
What Walters actually did was make people less proud of the state and country by demanding conformity by going against the ideals that the country was built on. Any time patriotism is forced on a population, it backfires. The whole Bad Bunny Super Bowl response makes me less patriotic that a vanishing third of the country thinks that patriotism means we have to sing about how awful LGBTQ people are, or how we should be seeking our sexual partners in elementary schools, while pretending g to love Jesus, rather than celebrating the people who live and work and build up the country, even if it was sung in Spanish. One show was a Walters’ special, the other a portrait in patriotism. Despite the vitriol and violence directed at Bad Bunny by our leaders and vocal town assholes, he expressed joy, love and community. That is how you engender patriotism, not lying about history, pretending a villain is the second coming of Jesus, and forgetting that the country is for “We the People.”
Patriotism at the point of a gun or the insistence of an authority figure is something ... but it sure as hell isn't patriotism.
The beatings will continue until patriotism improves?
Or words to that effect...
And if beatings don't work, they'll just continue the random shootings of American citizens until those damn hard-headed libs learn to fall in and shut their yaps while ICE is conducting kidnappings in their cities.
Don't. Hold. Your. Breath. 😡
https://ibb.co/7xY215xF
It's not at all odd – it was performed by 'furriners'.
i saw part of the halftime show. It looked and sounded great, but I knew right away that the right was going to be bigly pissed off. How dare them firriners sing about our country in SPANISH!!!!
The horror! The horror!
Other than slavery and genocide, I cannot corollate any overlapping themes between the foundation of the United States and the Bible.
The Bible says to submit to the governing authorities because they are put in place by God. The United States was founded as a rebellious act against the governing authorities.
The Old Testament gives the rules for a theocracy or theocratic autocracy. The New Testament is not particularly interested in describing an ideal government at all. The United States government is modeled on a classical Republic.
Our government was founded on principles from the enlightenment. That the new government was compatible with Christianity and Judaism and Islam speaks to the benefits of separation of church and state.
Thank goodness saner heads prevailed in Oklahoma.
Never thought I'd write that sentence. ;)
Terrific. Oklahoma is at least TRYING to unfuck all the fucked-up stuff that Ryan Walters tried to put in place. If Mr. Fields can fully follow through on his expressed intentions, one might expect a serious improvement in the quality of education in the Sooner State.
And being that they languish at or near the BOTTOM of education ratings in the United States, THEY NEED IT.
If only Walters had listened to educators in the first place. He couldn't do that, of course, because indoctrination is one hell of a drug.
Walters was so hung on his belief system that I doubt he could consider much of anything else. Anyone taking his place would be an improvement, almost by default.
Walters and yesterday’s troll have a lot in common.
Hemant blocked that one. What an irritant!
That one was particularly obtuse. I feel sorry for anyone who has to have him over for a holiday gathering.
He wouldn't take a telling!
Not just anyone. What if it had been David Barton?
Okay ... ALMOST anyone! 😝
Indoctrination that leads to hallucination.
Better Sooner than later, eh?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
😝😝😝
"We are presenting a successful model that others can emulate for how to restore public education and eradicate radical woke influences from our schools."
When I hear someone use the word "woke" these days, I automatically think "That person is a complete imbecile".
I think that about people who use “agenda” — unless they are referring to an actual agenda, like for a meeting.
One can only imagine how Republicans in Oklahomastan and other Red states will re-write Trump's sham of a presidency in future history, from the re-tweets of the Obamas as apes to his lies about Jeffrey Epstein.
The United States has proven itself to be the stupidest nation on the planet, electing a malignant narcissist totally unqualified and unfit to hold what once was the most important office in the world. Not any longer. The world deplores Trump and, by association, the United States.
Trump has not only decimated the present, but he has successfully sullied the past and endangered the future. All abetted by the Republican party.
Good! Knowledge triumphs over superstition. As it should be.
Everyone needs a friend like James.
https://ibb.co/r2Gf5cQ9
In other OK school news:
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/education/2026/02/10/oklahoma-religious-jewish-charter-school-rejected-osbe/88604288007/
I see that they are from outside the state, angering the local Jewish community.
Ah, outside agitators.
What do alligators have to do with Oklaho.... say what? Agitators? Never mind.
Agitator alligators! Ohmygoodness! 😱
At least it's not lions, tigers and bears. 😁
Oh, my! (George Takei voice optional!)
"A 2022 report confirms that alligators still reside within OK."
Those damn Jews. The chutzpah to demand public funding for their yeshiva.
Something something judeo-christian values.
All that work by the child killer undone. Beautiful. And despite Walters' tongue being lodged firmly inside Trump's rectum, he never did get that cabinet position he so lusted after.
Thus it it ever with those who try to align themselves with the Golden Goblin.
That said, I would be curious to know where Walters goes from here. Considering his penchant for shoving Christianity EVERYWHERE and especially in schools and/or government, keeping an eye on him strikes me as a fair idea.
I have little doubt but what he will make big money on the Christian speaking circuits shedding crocodile tears about he was the victim of the godless left. Your donations appreciated.
When it happens, rest assured that Hemant will be all over it.
He will be on the wingnut welfare tour or the NFP grift-tank circuit.
More than likely, and preaching to the choir strikes me as about his speed.
I expect he will be a thorn in our side for the next 20-25 years as he is only 40. He will hop from one conservative advocacy group to another, show up on Fox, speak at TPUSA, etc., etc.
“ In March 2025, the Freedom Foundation established the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a new national organization to provide educators with professional support services and resources.[15] The group is designed to provide educators with an alternative to teachers unions.[16] On September 25, 2025, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters announced he would resign from his position and become the CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance.[17]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Foundation_(Washington)#Teacher_Freedom_Alliance
He's also fairly young, there are many years ahead where he is likely to try that kind of shenanigans again.
A thought has just occurred to me, it's a question: Do you (=everyone here in this forum) think that anything could dislodge his thinking? Do you (=same) think that there is anything which would convince him that there is merit in secular spaces? Including secular education?
Could Walters change his mind? Anything is possible. PROBABLE? Not so much. He's bought into the con so deeply that I doubt anything could dislodge him from it.
i bet he goes on late nite tv..hawking his 'magic prayer cloth' @ 19.99, (inbtwn the tupperware,and the "REAL looking " jewelry adds )
Stranger things 'ere now have come to pass!
Hopefully he went into business selling fertilizer. That would be right up his alley.
Plus, he can produce as much of the product he wants; just from his own ass!
That is MR. ORANGE SKUNK APE to us! 😇
I tend to call him different things each time. :)
Walter’s was an incompetent fanatic, but didn’t have the jack to buy a cabinet spot.
There's one thing that's wiggling around in the back of my mind in all of this- whatever happened to Chaya Raichik? Did that vile stochastic terrorist leave with Walters, or is she still on staff at the OK Dept. of Ed. somewhere? Because we really haven't heard anything about her in a while, and bigots as 𝘭𝘰𝘶𝘥 as her don't just drop off the radar like this unless they're busy cooking up something evil in the shadow of larger events.
She still has Libs of TikTok to work her evil.
Yes, this is a victory – good. But how much money was wasted? These people don't seem to give a shit about waste, fraud, and abuse do they? Not if it's their waste, fraud, and abuse.
They don't pay for it personally = no big deal.
https://www.alternet.org/trump-religious-liberty/
Hehe ... Bring out the popcorn.
Soon, there will be 40,000 commissions.
And the game of whack-a-mole will continue.....
Let's ask Jose who the REAL Christians are on the RLC.
https://www.mediamatters.org/nick-fuentes/nick-fuentes-turning-point-usas-halftime-show-what-fuck-was-i-mean-if-thats-best-we
Oh for fuck's sake, Republicans. Get yourselves some better pop culture, and we'll thank you to do it quick- the last thing we want is Nick Fuentes ringing 𝘰𝘶𝘳 doorbell!
I think Larence Welk is dead.
And Liberace – gay of course.
What??? : )
Hope you had your clutching pearls, smelling salts and fainting couch ready. ;)
When did that happen?!?
I don't know when, but it was a bubble machine malfunction.
What really happened to Lawrence Welk
youtu.be/551TAqEO49M
That was pretty good. Took me a few moments to figure out it was a parody.
Wanna see something freaky? The Chantays performing “Pipeline” on Lawrence Welk’s show, of all places.
youtu.be/ZFucCXherLg
I remember those collarless jackets. I was too poor to buy one at the time.
Minnesota has a couple of polka channels - will those do? (I didn't even know there was such a thing until I lived there for six years! :)
I have to mention this again: TPs canonization of Charlie Kirk was made specifically for Trump and the Bronze Barrage Balloon didn't even watch it. Guess where he was? That's right. Rage tweeting all through Bad Bunny's performance.
My God – I think I just saw a pig fly past my window.
Did it look like THESE guys?
https://ibb.co/PqB6dCZ
That group would make a better government than what the U.S has now!
Light-years better.
Unfortunately not.
This pig?
youtu.be/XZ55MUlQgpQ
Oh, boo fucking hoo. Poor Nick Fuentes is whining because the half-time show didn't suit his limited taste/STUNTED intellectual capacity. While low income families who have had their SNAP benefits cut are scrambling to pay bills and put food on the table. While brown people even in blue cities are afraid to leave their homes because they might be kidnapped off the street or at their workplace by masked ICE agents. While at least two families (that I am aware of) are struggling with the aftermath of having loved ones murdered by masked ICE agents. While the working poor try to find decent affordable health care.
Nick Fuentes can just kiss Trump's shit-covered ass and shut the fuck up.