Oh Dear God, Tennessee Just Passed a Bill Banning Chemtrails, Which Are Not Real

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done and where lights flicker in the opposite loft and in this room, the heat pipes just cough.

We begin in Tennessee, which really is coming up hard on the rail in the race to be the wingnuttiest of wingnut states. From the BBC:

The bill forbids “intentional injection, release, or dispersion” of chemicals into the air. It doesn’t explicitly mention chemtrails, which conspiracy theorists believe are poisons spread by planes. Instead it broadly prohibits “affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight”.

Oh, dear Lord.

Several witnesses who testified before the Tennessee legislature cited debunked conspiracy theories or speculated about secret government geoengineering programmes, according to Scott Banbury, conservation director of the state’s branch of the Sierra Club, an environmental organisation. Their claims were troubling, he said.

“As a serious environmental organisation, if what was in the bill was actually going on we would be calling for a stop to it,” he said. “It’s not happening.”

In recent decades speculation about chemtrails has risen as the number of airline flights—and thus the number of contrails—has surged. In the debate over the Tennessee bill, lawmakers and witnesses cited a range of both reliable and debunked facts about geoengineering and weather modification, and at least one witness said she believed the White House was engaged in climate experiments but could not provide definitive proof.

I linked to the Beeb’s account of this foolishness because it’s written with some fairly deft British drollery concerning the eccentricity over here in the colonies.

Although several lawmakers mentioned chemtrails while the bill was being discussed, during Monday’s session Mr Fritts focused on cloud seeding. “Everything that goes up must come down, and those chemicals that we knowingly and willingly inject into the atmosphere simply to control the weather or the climate are affecting our health,” he said. In a joking response, John Ray Clemmons, a Democrat from Nashville, introduced an amendment that would protect fictional beasts.”This amendment would make sure that we are protecting yetis, or Sasquatch or Bigfoot, from whatever this conspiracy is that we’re passing in this legislation,” he said during debate.

Let’s move on to Florida, where failed presidential candidate Governor Ronald DeSantis apparently is going to order all kindergarten classes to remove all the red crayons from their boxes. From the Orlando Sentinel (with thanks to Diane Ravitch for the catch):

State lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the measure (SB 1264) during the 2024 legislative session that ended last month. Under the bill, lessons on the history of communism will be added to required instruction in public schools starting in the 2026-27 school year. The lessons would have to be “age appropriate and developmentally appropriate” and incorporate various topics related to communism, its history in the United States, including tactics used by communists. “Atrocities committed in foreign countries under the guidance of communism,” also would be required as part of the lessons.

Florida schoolchildren must be protected from fictionalized gay penguins, but it is important that they learn about the engineered starvation in the Ukraine in the 1920s and ’30s. “Mommy, I made a General Walker out of clay!” And, just for the record, those of us in Catholic school in the early 1960s got plenty of information about the evils of Godless Communism, and too many of us went home as baby McCarthys. Which I guess is the whole point here. And speaking of flashbacks to those halcyon days.

DeSantis signed the bill on the 63rd anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and was joined at the bill-signing event by people who fought in the invasion in an attempt to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime. Rafael Montalvo, president of Brigade 2506 Veterans Association, was among the people who addressed the event at the Hialeah Gardens Museum. The museum features a building funded through the Florida Department of State to honor “the noble efforts of the 2506 Assault Brigade during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.” “The most important fight against communism is the one that’s done in the schoolrooms,” Montalvo said. “That’s where the battle is happening right now. And this is going to be a tool [giving] us the victory in that area.”

Re-Elect Senator Goldwater!

Let’s escape Florida as quickly as we can, even if it means landing in Ohio, where high-level ratfcking is the order of the day. From the Columbus Dispatch:

Secretary of State Frank LaRose warned Ohio Democrats earlier this month that Biden is at risk of not making the Nov. 5 ballot. State law requires officials to certify the ballot 90 days before an election − which is Aug. 7 this year − but the president won’t officially be nominated until the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19. In a letter to LaRose’s office, obtained by the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, attorney Don McTigue said the Democratic Party would provisionally certify Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the Aug. 7 deadline. McTigue noted that Biden already secured enough delegates for the Democratic nomination after facing no significant primary challenge.

But Attorney General Dave Yost’s office says provisional approval won’t work, nor can LaRose unilaterally change election deadlines. “Instead, the law mandates the Democratic Party to actually certify its president and vice-president candidates on or before August 7, 2024,” Julie M. Pfeiffer, an attorney on Yost’s staff, told LaRose’s legal counsel. “No alternative process is permitted.”

First of all, who in hell was asleep at this switch? Somebody either at the DNC or at the Ohio Democratic Party should be sent to activist hell for missing this. It’s not like you couldn’t anticipate that the Ohio Republicans wouldn’t jump all over this… and they have the law on their side. At best, I see a very messy lawsuit coming out of this. At worst, the Democrats should consider themselves lucky that “Biden” is an easy name to write in.

Let’s seek refuge from the news in Alabama…whoops, really out of luck here. State-sponsored grave robbing may have to be added to the lengthy bill of particulars regarding the state’s medieval corrections system. From CNN:

After inmate Jim Kennedy Jr. died last year at the Limestone Correctional Facility in Harvest, Alabama, his sister-in-law got an unusual call from the funeral home preparing the body for burial.“Did y’all realize he came back without his organs?” Sara Kennedy recalled being told. “Liver, heart. All of your major organs. They were gone.” “He had nothing,” said Kennedy’s brother, Marvin. Another inmate suffered a similar fate. Arthur Stapler was 85 when he died five months after Kennedy Jr. at the Brookwood Baptist Medical Center in Birmingham. He had been housed at Hamilton Aged and Infirmed Center, which is also run by the Alabama Department of Corrections. “It’s like a horror movie that I can’t wake up from,” said Stapler’s son, Billy, who learned about the missing organs after hiring a private pathologist to perform an autopsy on the body.

As CNN pointed out, this grotesquery is of a piece with the rest of the Alabama penal system.

With more than 26,000 inmates, Alabama’s severely overcrowded and understaffed prisons are the target of a US Justice Department lawsuit that alleges the state not only fails to prevent violence and sexual abuse behind bars but does not protect inmates from excessive force by prison staff or provide safe conditions. Alabama’s men’s prisons are also the country’s deadliest, with a homicide rate in 2019 more than seven times higher than the national average, according to a report by the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative.

I don’t even want to think about what this situation might be like if Alabama Governor Kay Ivey weren’t so staunchly pro-life.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Prairie Dog Whisperer Friedman of the Plains brings us the tale of the turkeys and people who track them. From Tulsa Public Radio:

Colter Chitwood, a wildlife ecologist at Oklahoma State University says the decline has researchers flummoxed. Turkeys have been one of the country’s conservation success stories after being hunted to near-extinction in the early 1900s. “Fast forward to the late 1900s, and we had turkeys coming out of our ears in most places,” he said. “And then all of a sudden we see this decline and even some scientists are scratching their heads, going, ‘Wait a minute, what?’” His lab has funding from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation to address some big turkey questions.

“What’s our current situation with turkeys in Oklahoma?” he said. “And how might our research give us ideas on how to stall the perceived decline in turkey numbers?” To answer those, Chitwood and his team catch turkey hens and put little backpacks on them to track their survival. “Those backpacks, most of them are GPS equipped, which means we see where they go,” he said. “How much time they spend in different places, what types of barriers they might be exposed to, how they select to use the landscape.”

“Big turkey questions,” eh?

So many punchlines, so little time.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.