Men's Lifestyle July 10, 2026 0 Comments

The Shocking Truth About Republicans’ Support for Resegregation—Here’s What No One’s Talking About

Ever noticed how some stories pop up like a bad rash—you try to ignore ’em, but they just keep itching away? That’s exactly the vibe with the latest nightmare unfolding in Houston where ICE agents fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. And here’s the kicker: the official tale? It’s fizzing out faster than a flat soda. Wrong place, wrong guy, no body cam footage, and witnesses suspiciously locked up by the very agency involved—it’s like a plot straight out of a suspense film nobody asked for. It begs the question—how many layers of this bureaucratic onion are we actually ready to peel back before we see what’s really stinking underneath? Strap in and hold tight, because this is just the start of one hell of a deep dive into power, prejudice, and the unrelenting pursuit of truth in the shadows. LEARN MORE

8 min read

Out on the Weekend

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents in Houston is beginning to stink to high heaven. From The New York Times:

Details of the interaction between Mr. Araujo and immigration agents were still murky on Friday. The federal authorities initially said that ICE agents stopped a vehicle around 6:50 a.m. on Tuesday and tried to arrest Mr. Araujo, whom they described as an “illegal alien.” They said he “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run over an agent, who then fired at him.

Yeah, no.

At the time of the stop, Mr. Araujo was on his way to work at a construction site. Three men were in the car with him, including Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, his younger brother. As of Friday, they remained in immigration detention in Conroe, Texas. On Thursday, the three men told a lawyer, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, that Mr. Araujo did not use his vehicle as a weapon or attempt to run over the immigration officers, and that no agent had been positioned in front of the vehicle, the lawyer said.

The credibility of the “he tried to run us down” explanation died bleeding on the streets of Minneapolis. It is now an autonomic reflex in every ICE agent who screws up and shoots someone in a car. And what in the hell are the primary witnesses doing in the custody of the agency against whom they are likely to testify? That’s just a terrible situation. They’d be better off in the custody of the Houston PD.

Surveillance and witness videos obtained by The New York Times show two ICE vehicles tailing Mr. Araujo’s white van and trying to cut it off. The van can be seen doing a U-turn before stopping alongside the road, with several immigration agents running toward the van as it comes to a halt. Video of the moments when shots were fired has not emerged.

And none of the ICE agents involved had their body cams activated.

The authorities did not provide video footage of the encounter. The ICE agents were in unmarked vehicles and were not wearing body cameras, and none of the vehicles had dashboard cameras that captured the shooting, according to Representative Sylvia Garcia, Democrat of Houston, who said she had spoken to the acting director of ICE, David Venturella.

And as the cherry on top of this bloody sundae, Salgado Araujo wasn’t even the man for whom ICE was looking.

But on Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration agents, said that Mr. Araujo was not the intended target of the operation. Federal officers had been looking for a different man.

If this political era ever ends, ICE should be torn down to the studs and rebuilt from the ground up. This time, include a soul in the blueprints.

To think that so many people believed this benighted ski run masquerading as a state should continue to have pride of place in helping to choose the next president. From Granite Post:

A leaked group chat—seemingly used by Republican members of the New Hampshire House Education Committee—appears to show the committee’s chair, State Rep. Kristin Noble, suggesting that public schools would have varying test scores if New Hampshire separated students into different schools for white and non-white children. In the “EdPolicy2026” chat on an encrypted messaging app that appears to be Signal, a username bearing Noble’s first and last name wrote that Republicans could add “fun stuff” to public schools “when we have segregated schools.” The user then added: “imagine the scores though if we had schools for them and some for us.”

In 2026. Lovely.

Do not fool yourself by thinking that Brown v. Board of Education doesn’t have a bull’s-eye on its back visible only to the members of the wing-nut Right—elected, appointed, or otherwise. Hell, they’ve already pushed voting rights far back toward Plessy v. Ferguson, so why not go after desegregation generally? My guess is that there are at least three votes to overturn Brown on the Supreme Court right now. At the very least, the current Republican party has given its wilder elements control of the party so that they can let their freak flags fly.

Noble is a sponsor of HB 1792, a 2026 bill that would prohibit state school districts and school personnel from teaching “critical race theory” (CRT) while creating a path for students and parents to bring lawsuits against public schools or school districts for monetary damages. A similar “divisive concepts” bill from 2021 was struck down by a federal judge for being unconstitutionally vague. Many opponents described that bill’s intent as being overtly racist in its attempts to silence discussions of race in New Hampshire classrooms.

That’s only because it is, and it is because it is encouraged to be.

Please move along. There’s nothing to see here. From The Guardian:

Donald Trump has terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide just a few months before the midterm elections, multiple outlets reported on Thursday. The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission ⁠were forced out on Thursday in different ways. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other ⁠two, Democratic, appointees were notified of their terminations via email from the White House presidential personnel office. “On ‌behalf of President ‌Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position ‌as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email, seen by Reuters, said.

Of course, he was empowered to do this by the Supreme Court’s decision that now allows the president to fire any member of an executive-branch agency no matter how “independent” it is purported to be. (Except the Federal Reserve, of course.) This is what you get. Scalp hunting with a purpose.

The Election Assistance Commission serves as a “national clearinghouse of information on election ‌administration”, accredits testing laboratories and certifies voting systems, and maintains the national mail-voter registration form developed by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, according to the commission’s website. The terminations follow Trump and top administration officials’ advocacy to change vote-by-mail requirements and investigations into the 2020 election outcome, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. … The 2002 law that established the commission, the Help America Vote Act, states the president can appoint replacements to the commission. It is unclear how Trump will move ahead with the commission.

Glorioski, it is to wonder.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “Bluesiana Triangle” (Montana Banana): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1953, an American reporter named William Oatis returns after being jailed in Czechoslovakia on charges of espionage. After being subjected to what we in the United States later would come to call “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Oatis confessed to spying for the U.S. After a two-year campaign to spring him, including a Sternly Worded Letter from President Dwight Eisenhower to the Czech government, and roughly coincidental to the death of Joseph Stalin in Russia, Oatis was freed, whereupon he renounced his confession. History is so cool.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found. From RTE:

Human remains discovered almost a century ago in a megalithic tomb in Co Leitrim have been dated to 5,300–5,600 years ago. This date places them earlier than remains associated with Newgrange and Stonehenge, two of Ireland and Britain’s best-known prehistoric monuments. The bones, found at Sheebeg near Keshcarrigan during an unlicensed excavation in Christmas week 1930, have been stored in the National Museum of Ireland since 1931.

Another piece of evidence in support of my Junk Drawer Theory of Archaeology. Instead of sending dozens of people into the wilds of Iraq, let’s start sending a few teams into the basements and storage units in our museums to see what’s on the back shelves and inside the fire lockers. And you don’t have to dig anything up, but if you can pick a lock, there may be a place for you in one of our expeditions.

Hey, Sci News. Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Mamenchisaurids were common across China during the Middle to Late Jurassic period, but their presence beyond China has been documented only rarely. “Mamenchisauridae represents the predominant non-neosauropodan eusauropod clade throughout the Middle to Late Jurassic of East Asia,” said Mahasarakham University’s Dr. Apirut Nilpanapan and colleagues from Thailand. “Members of the clade are characterized by extremely elongated cervical vertebrae with highly developed pneumatic structures, and in derived taxa by procoelous anterior caudal vertebrae, distinct them from other eusauropods.”

Uragasaurus kalasinensis is known from a single, remarkably well-preserved anterior dorsal vertebra—a bone from just behind the animal’s neck. The fossil came from the Phu Noi fossil site of the Phu Kradung Formation, a sequence of river-deposited rocks that has yielded one of Southeast Asia’s richest assemblages of Jurassic vertebrate fossils. Catalogued as PRC 460, the specimen was excavated alongside several other sauropod bone fragments, though those pieces could not be confidently linked to the same individual.

And the neckbone is connected to … another neck bone. I am singing happily now because these “individuals” lived then.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people, and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the Epstein victims, whose trauma is back in the news again, and the victims of the wildfires in Spain, and the victims of the floods in Missouri, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and for the families of the victims of the mosque shooting in San Diego, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the victims and their families of the shootings in Wilmington, Delaware, and Kansas City, and for the families and victims of the mass shooting in Midland, Texas, and for the brilliant journalists of The Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont, and for all the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and for the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and in Georgia, and for the people affected by the tornadoes in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius, the outbreaks of measles, the Hegseth Flu down in Texas, and the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Harlem, and the victims of the heat wave in Europe, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they’re getting.