DesMoines school superintendent to be deported

The superintendent of DesMoines schools has been arrested to be deported. I know the Left will go crazy, but the charges against Ian Andre Roberts are considerable and he was actually ordered for deportation under Biden, not Trump. (a rare catch?)  Roberts has existing weapon possession charges from February 5, 2020. Roberts entered the United States in 1999 on a student visa and was given a final order of removal by an immigration judge in May of 2024. What happened to all the security checks schools should be doing? What agencies are schools using to do those background checks, and how many other criminal aliens are paying to have fake credentials and authorities are relying on them. 

This is not new. I recall that in the fall of 1955 a sex offender was hired by the school board of Mt. Morris, the little town where I went to school. I think it was one of the moms of a football player who got suspicious and blew the whistle. Unfortunately, in those days, these characters were just dismissed and moved on to another school, or church, or business.

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-arrests-criminal-alien-serving-des-moines-public-schools-superintendent-prior?

LGBT training in the schools

Michael Smith writes:  “I found the recent article about Iowa Safe Schools, the gay advocacy group disguised as an anti-bullying resource, to be intriguingly disturbing. This group has been teaching Humbolt, Iowa middle school students about homosexual relationships and anal sex under the watchful eye of government school administrators – and without the knowledge or approval of parents. According to the article in the Daily Caller, when approached with concerns of parents about such an agenda, “Nate Monson, executive director of Iowa Safe Schools, said parents who worry about middle school kids hearing about anal sex with strap-ons and analingus are ‘disgusting.’”

I’ve been watching with interest the recent SCOTUS ruling on same-sex unions and the very recent decision by the Boy Scouts of America to drop all prohibitions of homosexual scout leaders. I’ve noticed a pattern that develops as a social deviancy is mainstreamed. While it is true that the existence of homosexuality is a historical fact, it is also a fact that members of this group are a distinct minority and their behavior has been viewed as a deviant behavior for almost the entirety of the two centuries of America’s existence.

I am confident my observations are unoriginal – and my views are based on a premise that America is being subjected to a particular form of progressive ideology that demands individuals submit to the cognitive dissonance of the two mutually exclusive concepts that libertine behaviors are to be promoted yet regulated at the same time. I have deduced 6 laws from these observations:

In any given progressive-libertine societal system:

1. Deviant minorities will tend to erroneously define the majority’s tolerance of a specific deviancy as acceptance of the entire minority and/or a specific deviancy.

2. Majorities rarely unconditionally accept deviancy, but they do allow it.

3. The fallacious assumption that allowance constitutes acceptance of the entire minority and/or a specific deviancy leads to an equally fallacious assumption that such allowance mandates active celebration of the deviancy by the majority.

4. When a previously forbidden deviancy is allowed, the aggrieved minority will not treat it as with a passive acknowledgement of equality, it will be expressed as overt promotion of that particular deviancy.

5. Minorities are generally incapable of accepting equality as a contemporary status, they believe reparations and/or retribution for past prohibitions of the aforementioned deviant must be co-equal with the new “equality”.

6. When the deviant minority is challenged, they exhibit transference of guilt and responsibility by accusing the majority of equal or greater sins for retaining any opposition to the allowed deviancy.

For clarity, I do not use the words minority, deviant and deviancy as pejoratives, rather to describe aspects of society that are numerically small and distinctly different from the prevailing social mores of the majority.

LGBT activists have assured that the entertainment industry and government schools have moved quickly from allowance to acceptance to promotion of gay lifestyles, seeking to mainstream behaviors of an admittedly extremely small minority population. With the SCOTUS decision, the pattern is evident as they seek to do the same with commercial and religious activities. One wonders how soon the Boy Scouts will have a Gay Pride badge and what the requirements will be to get it.”

Dewey the library cat

Tonight our book club will be discussing Dewey; The small town library cat who touched the World by Vicki Myron and Bret Witter (Grand Central Publishing, 2008). It was my nomination back in May when we chose this year's books, so I am the discussion leader. And, if I must say so, I'm well qualified for this one, unlike when I did 1776 or Alexander Hamilton. I am a retired librarian, a former resident of two small towns in the midwest, and a current cat lover. In fact, my own cat is so intuitive, she's hardly left my lap since I began rereading Dewey in preparation for this event. I think she suspects competition. And she's right. She's a wonderful cat with her own personality and quirks, but she's no match for The Dewkster.

Everything you need to know about the basics of this book is on the front and back cover. The cat, the town, the world, Vicki, and the marketing blitz. I didn't do any internet searches to confirm my own ideas until after I read it. I didn't care for the book that much my first time through, but really enjoyed it while preparing for tonight. I originally read it in March when we were on our Holy Land Cruise and I was trying to fall asleep on the very rough seas--didn't work--so I only skimmed it. Asking an Iowa cat to compete with the Steps of Paul and the Pyramids is too much.

Those of you who've never worked in a library, particularly a public library, will probably skip over the library history and details--I loved it; if you've never lived in a small town you'll miss the places Vicki evens some old scores--I saw that immediately; if you haven't raised kids and been through that pulling away time when they are teens--that cuts like a knife--other parts may not be so meaningful; if you didn't grow up or live in the rural midwest, you may be puzzled that some people think flat acres of corn in deep black soil is as beautiful as the ocean or mountains. However, if you have a "companion animal" in your home, or remember one fondly from your childhood, you'll identify with all the Dewey stories which is only about one third of the book, the rest of it being about Vicki and Spencer, Iowa.

Dewey enters the library world on January 28, 1988 at about 6 weeks old, and died on November 29, 2006 and that's a very long life for a cat. But he lives on today in book tours and radio interviews with Vicki, a children's book that came out this fall, a young adult book not released yet, a sequel, and someone is working on the script for the movie, possibly with Meryl Streep playing Vicki. Dewey has made Vicki very rich and famous, and probably the target of jealously and envy back home. You go girl! You've done more to explain how the library world works than a hundred "how I did it good" articles in library journals.

If Iowans were NOLAns

the flooding would be the President's fault, especially since he was attending a funeral today and not flying over the flooded cities. But being Iowans, even with 83 of their 99 counties declared a disaster area from flooding and 12 tornadoes, they are not accustomed to being made helpless and hopeless by government or Mother Nature. They've pulled together, sandbagged, rescued valuable art, library and museum collections, buried their dead, shared resources, comforted their neighbors, put disaster plans in place and they will rebuild. And yes, insurance and government aid will help--Iowa's our breadbasket (and increasingly our gas tank). But look out down below--New Orleans. That water will soon be in the Mississippi, and I doubt that your Mayor Nagin has done much to prepare, but at least this time you've got Bobby Jindal in the governor's office instead of Kathlyn Blanco.

First week on the job

How would you like to face this? An historic flood.

NEW YORK In just his first four days on the job, Editor Steve Buttry of The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is overseeing what may be the most demanding story he will ever encounter at the paper.

. Story at Editor and Publisher

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Hillary's handlers

may want to get Bill out of the kitchen. His remarks this week in Iowa about opposing Iraq from the beginning, were just false, and so easy to check, that it's just a reminder for the American people about how glib and prone to lying for no particular reason, he was. Even I remember his lauching air strikes to take out WMDs, "Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors." He believed Hussein had the weapons and believed he'd use them again. Like Bush, he still believed in the cause months after we went to war in 2003. Why not just say that you used to believe in regime change and then admit being wrong or saying he would have done it differently? Is it better to lie about what you said and believed? I can't imagine that this helps his wife. He didn't help Gore, so maybe he'll stab her in the back too. Maybe it's all about Bill?

How many other problems

will the greenies compound? Steamier weather in Iowa this summer was attributed to more corn (which is driving up our food costs) being grown and narrower rows.

Climatologists are building evidence that crops, particularly corn, are driving up dew points as they put water into the atmosphere through evaporation. They also may make corn-growing areas cooler and alter rain patterns. Story

Doesn't anyone read the research from the 70s when we went through all this hysteria before the gen-xers were born? It's bad enough to drive through our beautiful farmland--90.5 million acres of corn this year, up 15 percent--and see nothing but corn planted right up to the roads, encouraging erosion and destruction of bird habitat, but just crazy when you think of rising food costs, agricultural inputs and all our tax money being thrown at it.

Cellulosic ethanol--which is derived from plants like switchgrass--will require a big technological breakthrough to have any impact on the fuel supply. That leaves corn- and sugar-based ethanol, which have been around long enough to understand their significant limitations. What we have here is a classic political stampede rooted more in hope and self-interest than science or logic. WSJ hot topic

And nary a new refinery or coal mine in sight (God's plan for storing vegetative matter for later fuel use) as the Chinese burn dirty coal putting filth into the atmosphere to make our "energy saving" light bulbs, while grabbing up the oil markets. Thank you Algorians.