cullery.bsky.social
cullery.bsky.social
@cullery.bsky.social
But what really, really bugs me is if they're so concerned about how DEI could cause more fires, why aren't they petitioning Trump to reverse budget cuts that could make wildfires more of a problem?
May 16, 2025 at 5:46 AM
The Texas fire was started due to a power line that broke and fell into some brush last February. High winds helped spread the fire that killed two and destroyed an estimated 500 structures, according to and NBC article.
May 16, 2025 at 5:46 AM
No, what's bugging me is this one part where they blame DEI for the Smokehouse Creek fire, the largest fire in Texas history, and another fire in Colorado that the director for the Center to Protect Ranchers referred to as the largest in that state's history.
May 16, 2025 at 5:46 AM
The press release doesn't really say how the order putting stricter requirements on longterm transmission lines and cost allocation "turns Americans' basic need for energy against employers and people of faith," but that's not what's bugging me.
May 16, 2025 at 5:46 AM
There's this group called the Christian Employers Alliance and they're partnering with analysts and ranchers to ask President Trump to repeal FERC Order 1920, which they say "nationalized radical DEI and ESG frameworks" that will drive up utility costs.
May 16, 2025 at 5:46 AM
My next step for this project is to go back to the RatedBooks page and use the filters to assign content warnings to each book. I also need to figure out the best way to share the new database without giving away too much information about how the scraper works. 14/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
And I also don’t want to explain how I know that, apart from Mary in the Library, that an email connected to the Vice President of Policy for Texas Parents United, Florence Erickson, has uploaded 52 PDFs to RatedBooks source earlier this month. 13/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
Also, when I said BookLooks was the more popular option, I meant it. The source of the PDFs for RatedBooks wasn't very active until about two weeks ago, when over 700 files were uploaded. The majority of the report files on RatedBookswere uploaded between March 9 and March 13. 12/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
I was going to explain a bit more about how the scraper works from there, but I also don’t want the group to change up too much of how they do things. For example, I don't really want to show how I can tell you when every PDF was created since 2022. 11/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
This is one of the “product_page” links the scraper iterates through. We compiled the book summary and summary of concerns here (a lot cleaner than the PDF versions). We need to collect every tinyurl and confirm it goes to a Google Drive link to make sure we found the PDF 10/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
This is the first stop for getting to the files themselves on RB, which is where I’m now scraping the titles, ratings and the links to the “product_page,” where more information on each book is stored. I haven’t used the filters yet, but that’ll be a project for next week, I think. 9/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
A lot of that information is now readily available in spreadsheet form on RateBooks, right above it’s catalogue of book reports, along with a review of the rating system borrowed from BL (which is modeled after the MPAA rating system). See my old thread on ratings here bit.ly/3Y1GR4P 8/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
The BL website didn’t give us much information beyond the title, author and rating. I had to pull book summaries and summaries of concerns off of the first page of each PDF. Formatting issues causes a lot of spelling errors. It looked like this in the end bit.ly/3Y1GR4P 7/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
I made a scraper for BookLooks that collected basic book data on the website and the first page of several hundred book report PDFs on its website. As BL went out of commission, Mary reported moving the entire inventory over to RatedBooks on X earlier this month. A new scraper was needed. 6/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
There’s probably a lot more to add about Mary and LaVerna here, but I’m honestly not the expert to ask about that. I’ll defer to @tasslyn.bsky.social if she’d like to throw in anything here. For now, I want to tell you what I made this weekend. 5/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
Mary In The Library, which I think is the national version of LaVerna In the Library, has been kind of a lesser known group focused on banning so-called age-inappropriate books from school libraries. The earliest iteration of RatedBooks includes references to both Mary and Laverna 4/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
RatedBooks was first registered a day after BookLooks, though records at domain.glass indicate it was registered in Ontario, Canada, and with a separate registration company than BL, and it does seem to be more closely tied to another book banning group than M4L 3/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
BookLooks was created back in March 2022, about a day after RatedBooks was registered, by Emily Maikisch, who has said she was a former M4L member but had a falling out with the group before creating BL. More on that here: bit.ly/4hbDAH1 bit.ly/4hbDAH1 2/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
March 29, 2025 at 10:02 PM
March 28, 2025 at 8:35 PM
It's official, all of the BookLooks pdf reports are officially unavailable on the website.
I ran my scraper to download the files this morning, while they were still available, but contained no new fiels from last week.
Here's my archive of every PDF available.
drive.google.com/drive/folder...
March 24, 2025 at 1:52 AM
"We need to make sure children of a certain age can't read about certain topics"
March 17, 2025 at 4:52 AM
"We need to make sure children of a certain age can't read about certain topics"
March 17, 2025 at 4:52 AM
"We need to make sure children of a certain age can't read about certain topics"
March 17, 2025 at 4:52 AM
"We need to make sure children of a certain age can't read about certain topics."
March 17, 2025 at 4:52 AM