cullery.bsky.social
cullery.bsky.social
@cullery.bsky.social
No, no I don't like this at all.
May 16, 2025 at 5:47 AM
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
My working theory on how these fires were caused by DEI:
Texas 2024: Transgender termites
Colorado 2020: Careless gays
Colorado 2024: Pansexual Zeus (I think he was straight, but didn't he turn into a swan that one time?)

Or ... maybe DEI is just a convenient scapegoat?
May 16, 2025 at 5:46 AM
There was also a more recent fire last August west of Golden, Colorado, but it doesn't appear anywhere close to be "the largest" fire on record. That one was also started by a lightning strike.
May 16, 2025 at 5:46 AM
I think the Colorado fire he's referring to is the Cameron Peak fire, which burned 208,663 acres in 2020. All I can really find about the cause of that fire are news stories that say it remains under investigation but believed to be "human-caused."
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
I mean, they do say that it will divert money from critical infrastructure towards "unnecessary renewable energy initiatives" but I've been through a couple of fact sheets like the link below and renewables don't seem to be a major part of it.
www.naseo.org/Data/Sites/1...
www.naseo.org
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
If there’s any ideas about what you’d like to know about these books, I’m open to suggestions. I don’t know if it can be compiled but we’ll find out together. 15/15
March 31, 2025 at 12:13 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