Enter the dragon

 While we were distracted by other concerns, the history of the species was being re-written in China, and the twentieth century prologue is more exciting than any Indiana Jones kerfuffle.  Back in 1933 workmen in Harbin, in Heilongjiang province, discovered a huge fossilized skull.  They hid it in a derelict well to keep it out of the hands of Japanese occupiers, and there it remained until one of the men revealed the secret to his grandson in 2018.  Anthropologists have named it Homo longi or "dragon man," probably related to other hominims who were around China and Siberia 146,000 years ago.  Human evolution "was not a simple evolutionary tree but a dense intertwined bush," says Mark Maslin of University College, London.  Dragon Man had a larger skull, and therefore probably a larger brain, than many a 2021 human.  A few examples:

The state Board of Education has banned Florida students from learning about critical race theory and specifically from reading The 1619 Project but Republicans decided that wasn't enough.  As of July 1 state college and university students must be "surveyed" to make sure they have not been brainwashed with "orthodoxies" that the legislature doesn't like, or as Ron DeSantis calls it, "stale ideology."  Like the gruesome fairy tale about the crucified carpenter?  No, probably not.  No one seems to know what use will be made of the surveys -- maybe they'll be handed to the Cyber Ninjas for tabulation.  

This is the eighth anniversary of the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in Shelby v. Holder that decided we no longer needed the pre-clearance clause of the 1965 Voting Rights Act because racism was clearly over.  There was a Black president and everything.  What more do you want?  "Decades-old data and eradicated practices" is how John Roberts described the basis for that section, setting in motion the hundreds of voter-suppression laws now being passed by our white-collar lynchers.  Matthew Steilen,, a law professor at the University of Buffalo, has suggested that other racist SCOTUS decision like Scot v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson be glided over so as to spare students text that is "gratuitously insulting and demeaning."  These are law students -- they'd better toughen up lest they burst into tears the first time a judge overrules them.  And what better time to learn that the Supreme Court has usually been on the wrong side of history?  Don't omit Korematsu v. US, and Buck v. Bell ("Three generations of imbeciles is enough"), and of course Shelby v. Holder.  

While the Democrats struggle to pass the John Lewis act, the Justice Department is suing Georgia over the vote suppression law it passed in March alleging that it was meant "to deny or abridge the right to vote on the basis of race or color."  Roberts didn't get around to shredding that bit.  Maybe next October.

Another day, another bombshell book:  Michael Bender's Frankly, We Did Win This Election:  The Inside Story of How Trump Lost documents what we long knew, that Trump is a thug who wanks to violence.  On January 6 he was too entranced by the mayhem on his TV screen to respond to pleas for help from Kevin McCarthy and others, and as demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd grew more heated, he told law enforcement officials to "Crack their skulls!"  He urged the military to "beat the fuck out of" protesters in Seattle and Portland.  "Just shoot them!"  Even Bill Barr ignored him.  Stephen Miller made the mistake of comparing the protests to overseas war zones in the hearing of General Mark Milley, who responded, "Shut the fuck up, Stephen."  According to Bender, Milley pointed to a portrait of Lincoln and said, "That guy had an insurrection.  What we have, Mr. President, is a protest."  The general has now atoned for allowing himself to be dragooned into the St. John's church upside-down-Bible disgrace.

Andrew Giuliani brought a smile to many faces with his video Tweet in defense of daddy, but it was blown away by Trump hailing the Borat co-star as "the Eliot Ness of his generation."  Unless he's thinking of the imaginary creature in the Scottish lake, Trump probably remembers Ness as the man who nailed Al Capone for tax evasion after failing to nail him for murder and racketeering.  If he listens carefully, he can probably hear his former money man Alan Weisselberg making a deal with the Southern District of New York.  Tick...tick...

Election fraud found!  Meet McCrae Dowless of Bladen County, North Carolina, who pleaded guilty to an absentee ballot scam he's been running since 2016 along with collecting phony disability checks.  The North Carolina GQP says they never heard of him. 

Another charge for Biden:  According to  Tom Cotton he's responsible for all the airline violence, too.  No, says the president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA International, Sara Nelson, "Masks were politicized and violence was stoked."  Who are you going to believe, someone who deals with assaults on her members or a doofus with -- and I hardly want to write this -- presidential aspirations?  I await the assertion that Biden caused the collapse of Champlain Towers South.  Surfside, Florida, is on a barrier island.  The sea level is rising inexorably.  He should have spotted the coming disaster forty years ago.  Impeach!