Bad Crow Review: A Triumphant Return
Climb and climb and keep climbing, comrades
Links are at the end. Click some; it’s for the common good.
Elon Musk Is Setting Fans on Ex-Twitter Employees. It’s Getting Dangerous.
Musk is the Übermensch of Twitter trolls, unleashing millions of followers against people he attacks or even mildly criticizes. This time it was Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who evacuated his home after Musk sparked a flood of death threats by insinuating that Roth is a pedophile.1
Among the accounts that amplified Musk’s attack on Roth was LibsofTikTok, the online persona of Brooklyn real estate agent Chaya Raichik, who has been at the forefront of the right’s attacks on the LGBTQ community over the last year including inciting attacks on hospitals providing gender-affirming care. Raichik’s followers immediately posted violent threats against Roth.
. . .
“Watching Elon launch a digital mob against his former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, an openly gay Jewish man, is one of the most vile and disgusting things I've ever seen,” Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic and LGBTQ+ advocate, tweeted on Saturday. “He's putting Yoel's life in danger and he knows it. It's sick, twisted, and sociopathic.”
Musk has more than 100 million twitter followers. Many of those are certain to be fake accounts but as anyone who publicly criticizes Musk or Tesla knows, his fans are legion and virulent.
In other Musk news, a significant portion of the audience at a Dave Chappelle show booed the billionaire asshole to the point of where he visibly withered beneath their scorn after Chappelle brought him onstage.2
As the laughs for Chappelle’s jokes would get drowned out by boos anytime Musk tried to talk, the comedian said that people could boo all they want, because Musk had given him a jetpack last Christmas.
But every single time Musk began to speak, the crowd started booing again, much to the frustration of Musk.
“Dave, what should I say?” Musk said, clearly desperate and getting embarrassed at the roar of booing.
Gizmodo has the video of the festivities. Don’t look for it on Twitter, from which it has been mysteriously scrubbed. Yr. editors anticipate that “Dave, what should I say” will infiltrate popular culture.
Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C.
The New York Times has a story about kids forced to enter JROTC, which during the war I grew up with was the beginning of a path not unlikely to end in getting fragged on the battlefield. Not so much anymore, it seems, but the program is supposed to be voluntary and in many schools it is evidently not. You’ll be shocked, shocked! by the prevailing demographics.
J.R.O.T.C. programs, taught by military veterans at some 3,500 high schools across the country, are supposed to be elective, and the Pentagon has said that requiring students to take them goes against its guidelines. But The New York Times found that thousands of public school students were being funneled into the classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled.
A review of J.R.O.T.C. enrollment data collected from more than 200 public records requests showed that dozens of schools have made the program mandatory or steered more than 75 percent of students in a single grade into the classes, including schools in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City and Mobile, Ala. A vast majority of the schools with those high enrollment numbers were attended by a large proportion of nonwhite students and those from low-income households, The Times found.
Recruiting never really recovered from the halcyon days of the most recent Bush administration, when the services ran so low on cannon fodder that they were sending grandfathers and felons into combat, and the ROTC programs are meant to help with that. Although school and district officials may have the loftiest of motives, a significant proportion of recruits are kids who find themselves with not a lot of other options to change their circumstances.
Their plights are the result of policy decisions. Poverty and precarity are not necessary elements of society, and neither are expensive colleges and scarce trade schools. Neither, for that matter, is the vast disparity between well-funded schools and ones getting by on starvation wages, which is one of the more grievous blows inflicted on people whose property isn’t worth a lot.
Imagine imposing an impoverished education on one child as opposed to another based entirely on where they live. Just about everything stupid or malign that happens on a large scale in this country is the product of deliberate policy-making. Which we may have mentioned before.
Of course the current rage is imposing shitty educations on everybody no matter where they live. Policy!
Fusion power inches closer
Fusion power was routinely five or 10 years in the future during the first half of our life. Then the advent of it abruptly switched to perhaps 20 years out, or never. Now scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories have more or less succeeded in getting more energy from a fusion reaction than was required to ignite it. The breakthrough has brought usable fusion power closer than ever, but nobody will tack a time frame on “closer.”3
Sinematic
Who knows, who cares, nothing to be done anyway. We did see CNN reckoning that despite her votes against the progressive elements of Biden’s legislative efforts in whole and part, “it’s hard to pin down exactly what Sinema’s ideology is.” Beg to differ.4
The reporter here, evidently the dearly departed Chris Cillizza's replacement, is highly suggestible—"she said it's hard to put her in a box." Well has anyone tried?
It’s Time to Wear a Mask Again, Health Experts Say
The Covid pandemic, it seems, is not over! Time to consider not getting other people sick again, although that’s not cited as the decisive factor.5
Stan Getz & Chet Baker, “Stan and Chet;” Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd, “Jazz Samba;” Bobby Timmons, “Soul Time,” with Art Blakey and other jazz legends in the making.
That, comrades, is all we got, but at least we got something. Take care, be well.
OK, thanks. In the case of the Grandma nurse, she was probably a career person to have made major and I would guess she had her child (children) at an early age. Remember that the career people are usually in for at least twenty years. On the moral waivers, do you recall what level of seriousness of crime was being waived? In Florida there's a huge progressive push to allow discharged felons to vote. Why can't they serve in the military?
Have you got source on Bush sending grandfathers and felons into combat? Somehow, I missed that/