It is possible to be genuinely concerned that Fetterman is pushing to do too much and is having serious health issues and be relieved that Oz lost.

Maybe I'm wrong but my concern is very real.

I'm very glad he beat Oz but it's getting increasingly uncomfortable to see this getting the relentlessly positive spin. He's broadening the Senate by using speech to text! He's bringing awareness to mental health issues! None of those are bad things but it's one thing to have a handle on your disability and choose to start a campaign vs. getting knocked down by a goddamn stroke mid-campaign and be figuring out your recovery and the Senate environment at the same time. That's too much to cope with. Being hospitalized for depression for weeks is very, very far out of the norm and makes me think he either has very, very serious mental shit going on or they were trying to hide physical fallout from his stroke. I would be really surprised if he isn't hospitalized again within a few months. I hope I'm wrong, I wish him only the best, but what he's contending with right now is insane.

Yes, I lived in Utah as well and Mormons in general tended to center their social lives around their ward a lot more than most other churchgoers do now -- I would say they're more like the average mainline Protestant or Catholic was fifty or sixty years ago in that they often live in neighborhoods with coreligionists, attend the same church, go to the same stake events etc. It's not surprising that they're more susceptible to this, but I don't think it's their particular doctrine that makes them susceptible, it's the social closeness and reliance on each other. And yes, I sat through many a Mary Kay presentation, but nothing like this. I would have thought that promised rate of return was a bit much even for the average Utah County resident.

Yes, this is the kind of situation where you only get one chance to find out, and if you screw it up, you're done for.

In this case it was pretty close, though. Harold Lowe, the only officer who went back for people, redistributed the already-rescued people into several boats and waited for the shouting to die down before he went back, be cause he was afraid of the boat being swamped. Later he said he realized he had waited too long, that the water was too cold for people to survive in it for more than a short while. I think about four people got pulled out of the water total.

A couple of things in the article make it sound like she was trying to pretend that she was one of their classmates -- the official's remark about how it gradually became clear that the messages weren't being sent by a child despite the references makes it sound like the mom was either pretending to be anonymous classmate or impersonating someone. As for why, who knows. Probably trying to break her daughter and the boyfriend up but for what reason there's no way to know.

Yes, let's all remember the real victim here.

Ouch. She looks all wrong in that atmosphere, they wouldn't have thought she was gorgeous so much as half-starved.

Yikes, that's insane. I hope your half-brothers ended up ok.

That's the reason the Brackeen lawsuit exists, though -- the authorities did find a Native foster family for one of their foster children when she was quite young and they were suing to prevent her being taken there. On a human level, I understand that it's awful to say goodbye to the baby you've cared for. But they signed up for foster parenting, they had to take classes, and they either learned about how ICWA works there or they had terrible instructors. Foster parents aren't usually able to adopt for a lot of reasons, not just ICWA -- this is literally what they signed up for.

If they were both your biological parents, how did that work? ICWA doesn't say that non-Native biological parents should be favored over Native ones.

It's true that there are difficult edge case situations that arise with ICWA but the Brackeens' isn't one of them and honestly, they piss me off. Anyone who becomes a foster parent has to realize that the situation is unlikely to be permanent, and if they weren't instructed about how ICWA works when they were taking foster parenting classes that was horrific negligence on the part of whoever did the instruction. I'm sure they truly love these children but they knew from the beginning that they were Indian and that if suitable Native/biological family members or foster carers could be found, the kids would go to them -- and now they're basically trying to run out the clock hoping that the kids will have spent too long with them and courts won't want to send them anywhere else. And the arguments for not sending the little girl to her relatives is basically that they're poor -- and that's the reason ICWA was passed in the first place, so many children were being taken from Indian families due to poverty (and also for legitimately good reasons, but the bar was a LOT lower when it came to taking kids from Indian families) that their communities were being hollowed out. I mean damn, dude, I don't have a swimming pool either, does that mean you have the right to take my kids in court? It's awful to have a child leave your home, but this is literally what you signed up for when you became a foster parent.

Gacy actually took people who would be missed quite early on, that's the crazy thing about him. Yes, there were runaways and prostitutes mixed in there but his second or third victim had worked for him and the kid's father was begging cops to look into Gacy, and throughout the next few years Gacy employees also disappeared. It's just that it being the seventies, no bodies, and the kids being older than, oh, 12, the cops were all too happy to write them off as runaways. I've seen people say he only got caught because his last victim was a "good kid" but the kid really wasn't that different from plenty of previous victims -- a high school kid living with his parents and looking for part time work. What really got Gacy in trouble was kidnapping the kid as his mother was literally waiting in a drugstore for him to come back from the parking lot so she could drive him home. Even lazy Illinois cops couldn't write that one off as a random runaway.

Also, we don't know how direct she was about reporting. It sounds bad now but if you have a 12 year old saying something indirect like "I just get a really bad feeling about that well" or calling in a tip anonymously then it's hard to know how serious it is. And I wouldn't blame her one bit for not just spitting it out, because in that sort of situation, if you tell the wrong person and they roll their eyes, send you home, and possibly even tell your father what you said, you could have just punched your own ticket.

That's not very helpful unless they give further details, though. "Autistic" can mean anything from "Doesn't speak and needs diapers" to "you wouldn't know it at first glance."

I guess the upside is that this makes it more likely the family could still be alive. Family annihilators don't usually leave living loose ends like that.