Bad Crow Review: Gone Fishin'
Fishin' for ketamine, that is, but we got some stuff here anyway
Links are at the end.
Here’s a White Supremacy Court case aimed at invalidating the Indian Child Welfare Act1, which aims at prioritizing Native American families in adoptions of Native American children. It is meant to redress the long-time practice of stealing such children and erasing their culture and heritage.
The law passed unanimously in 1978 to help rectify what Congress then called “the most tragic and destructive aspect of American Indian life today”: the widespread and sometimes forced removal of Native children to boarding schools and families with no links to their tribes. Tribes’ existence, Congress asserted, depended on their children.
Now, in a case that originated over the adoption of a Native boy by a White Texas couple, seven individuals and three states are asking the court to strike down the law, which they say discriminates on the basis of race and unconstitutionally requires states to enforce federal law. Defending the act are the Biden administration and five tribes, including the Cherokee and Navajo, which argue that the law is tied to tribal membership — a political, not racial, category.
Here’s what my friend Cal Lumny had to say in a comment on the Washington Post story.
This case is about culture and race for the court majority. Overturning the law will be a partial antidote to what they see as the Great Replacement, the undermining of Western (read "white") culture by immigrants and minorities, just as the original wholesale theft of Native American children was about taking children from heathens and placing them in good, white, Christian homes to be reared as if they were white. Taking children from the tribes both weakens the tribes and, now, addresses the low birth rate among American whites.
We now have at least three and probably four members of the court majority who can be counted as religious fanatics, and six who believe in the supremacy of western (again, read "white") culture, and they're systematically doing what they can to advance that agenda at the expense of everyone who doesn't sign on to it. It's revolting.
And remember, this law passed unanimously through a Congress of representatives elected by their home state constituents. If anything reflects the will of the people, that's it.
Liquid prose, eh? The Post story doesn’t address the reality of racism and religious fanaticism on the court, unfortunately.
Enough of that. Makes us sad.
We’re always up for the discovery of a “huge extragalactic structure.”2
Scientists have discovered a huge “extragalactic structure” hidden behind the Milky Way in a mysterious area of the sky known as the “zone of avoidance” because it is obscured by our own galaxy’s opaque bulge, according to a new preprint study.
The discovery of the structure, which appears to be a large galaxy cluster, helps to fill in this shadowy part of our cosmic map, which may as well be labeled “here be space dragons” because it is so unclear what exists there.
Dragons, baby. Let’s go see some dragons.
We also quite like the “zone of avoidance” concept, as we have a few of those.
Elon Musk may have the thinnest skin of any billionaire in the public sphere, yet he continues to embroil himself in said sphere.3
[O]ne of Musk’s first orders of business as Twitter owner was to float the idea of replacing the current verification process—one where Twitter manually verifies with your people/company that you’re actually you—with...a system where anyone can pay $8 for a blue tick (a move that has since been delayed until after the US midterm elections).
Because this is such an astoundingly stupid (and dangerous!) idea, many verified users have been spending the last few days changing their usernames and profile pics to the same ones used by Musk himself, in clear and obvious examples of what’s going to happen on a global scale should the verification process be overhauled in this way.
Musk, who recently announced that “comedy is back” on Twitter, and speech is free (or $8/month, depending on how much of it you want), has been suspending the accounts of anybody who makes fun of him—mostly popular accounts, many of them belonging to comedians such as Kathy Griffin and Sarah Silverman, but some smaller ones he happened to run across as well.
We’re thinking this could put him in ego rehab before too long, because it is never gonna stop.
Are Trees Talking Underground? For Scientists, It’s In Dispute.
I’m not disputing it. Dragons, huge extragalactic structures, more dragons, that 11-billion-years old hydra thing the James Webb Space Telescope found a week or two, zones of avoidance, talking trees and mushrooms4—count me in on it all.
Gotta get in the mood, you see. Off to visit the wizard.
Playing Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, “Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster,” which begins with the splendid Blues for Yolande, an uplifting tune played by two sublime saxophonists.
And that, comrades, is all we got. Be well, take care.
I don't use twitter but enjoyed the story that it is busily rehiring many of the employees that Musk fired because he apparently doesn't know how the system works and they do.