Dear Trump supporters, this is what you are teaching your children to think is presidential. 😳 pic.twitter.com/qR5n7TGdzv
— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) September 6, 2024
Showing posts with label kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kids. Show all posts
Sep 6, 2024
Tik Tok (via Twixter)
Jul 1, 2024
A Thought
One of the great things about being a parent is watching your kids grow into full-functioning, capable, independent humans.
The hard part is learning to live with the combination of swelling pride in the fact that you turned out some pretty good kids, and the abject gut-wrenching fear that you might have missed something, so you've basically set them up for something bad to happen because you're not around 24/7 to look out for them.
But that's mostly your ego kinda working against itself - and you have to let that go too.
In the end, I think every parent is - and has been - as good a parent as they're able to be at any give time.
As you grow older, you learn to watch more and more of the world go on without you.
Feb 9, 2024
Overheard
Huh. Now whooda thunk it?
Jun 20, 2023
The Hunter Thing
There's a distasteful feel about this that smacks of two-tiered justice. If the guy is named Jamal or Pedro or Joe Bob, he doesn't have the .50 caliber legal help that Hunter Biden has, and he's probably already doing time.
On the other hand, this guy is the son of a president who isn't always trying to duck responsibility. So the fact that he's standing up and facing the music speaks well for him and his family.
We can say Hunter's bad behavior is a reflection on his parents, but there's absolutely no guarantee that all of our kids are going to be model citizens no matter how great we think our child-rearing skills are. Everybody's got an uncle or a cousin or a half-brother nobody likes to talk about at Thanksgiving dinner. Everybody.
I'm not excusing the bone-head stunts - or truly shitty things - the young Biden has pulled. Though I will say (not to get all What-About-y on you), that we're seeing a very different thing play out here compared with all the shit the Trump gang has thrown at us.
In a lot of cases, it's not so much what you did that counts - it's how you react when you're caught doing it.
Morality is the understanding that we're punished by our sins, not for them.
The president’s son would get about two years probation and enter a diversion program, people familiar with the negotiations said
President Biden’s son Hunter has reached a tentative agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to the facts of a gun charge under terms that would likely keep him out of jail, according to court papers filed Tuesday.
Any proposed plea deal would have to be approved by a federal judge, and it was not immediately clear what day Hunter Biden, 53, might appear in court to enter his guilty plea.
The agreement caps an investigation that was opened in 2018 during the Trump administration, and has generated intense interest and criticism since 2020 from Republican politicians who accused the Biden administration of reluctance to pursue the case. The terms of the proposed deal — negotiated with Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a holdover from President Donald Trump’s administration — are likely to face similar scrutiny.
The court papers indicate the younger Biden has tentatively agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay in 2017 and 2018. The combined tax liability is roughly $1.2 million over those years, according to people familiar with the plea deal, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe details of the agreement that are not yet public. Prosecutors plan to recommend a sentence of probation for those counts, these people said. Biden’s representatives have said he previously paid back the IRS what he owed.
In a letter filed in federal court in Wilmington on Tuesday, federal prosecutors said they were filing two documents called criminal informations — typically used in cases in which a defendant has agreed to plead guilty.
“The defendant has agreed to plead guilty to both counts of the tax Information,” the prosecutors wrote. The second criminal information is about the gun charge. “The defendant has agreed to enter a Pretrial Diversion Agreement with respect to the firearm Information,” the letter says.
Both the prosecutors and the defense counsel have requested a court hearing at which Biden can enter his plea, the letter said.
While Biden is pleading guilty to two tax charges, handling the gun charge as a diversion case means he will not technically be pleading guilty to that crime. Diversion is an option typically applied to nonviolent offenders with substance abuse problems.
In all, prosecutors would recommend two years of probation and diversion conditions, these people said. If Biden successfully meets the conditions of the diversion program, the gun charge would be removed from his record at the end of that period, the people familiar with the plea deal said.
The gun purchase that led to the criminal charge happened in late 2018, at a time when, by his own telling in his autobiography, Hunter Biden was regularly abusing crack cocaine. When he filled out paperwork to buy the gun, however, he denied using drugs or having a drug problem, exposing him to a potential charge of making a false statement on the document, as well as illegal gun possession once he acquired the weapon. Biden owned the gun for less than two weeks, because his then-girlfriend threw it away, according to public accounts of that time period.
Hunter Biden’s proposed plea deal will likely become grist for the 2024 presidential race, as the nation’s two main parties once again debate the influence of politics on law enforcement, and the effects of law-enforcement investigations on political campaigns.
Biden’s defenders have argued that Hunter Biden is a recovering addict accused of relatively minor offenses — the type of case that would not typically be prosecuted by federal authorities, barring some additional aggravating factors that are not present in this case. They suggest the investigation would have been dropped long ago if he wasn’t the president’s son.
Republicans seeking to win back the White House have sought to tie Hunter Biden’s legal woes directly to his father, claiming the extent of wrongdoing in the Biden family goes far beyond a simple tax and gun case, and that the Justice Department is trying to avoid prosecuting more serious matters. Attorney General Merrick Garland has said he gave full authority over the investigation to Weiss, a Trump appointee, and would not interfere in any charging decision.
Trump, who is the early front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination for president, frequently tries to contrast the Justice Department’s treatment of Hunter Biden with his own legal jeopardy involving the discovery that hundreds of classified documents were kept at his Mar-a-Lago home and private club. Trump was indicted earlier this month on 37 federal charges of withholding highly sensitive national security information and trying to prevent the federal government from regaining possession of that material. He has denied wrongdoing.
Federal authorities began investigating Hunter Biden’s finances in 2018. Much of that work has centered around whether he evaded paying taxes on money he collected from overseas business clients. Last year, witnesses were called before a grand jury in Wilmington to answer questions about what they knew about Biden’s spending and work. Over time, the inquiry expanded to look at whether Biden’s gun purchase amounted to a crime.
People familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing case, told The Washington Post in October that federal agents had determined there was enough evidence to file tax and gun charges. Last month, The Post reported that prosecutors in the case were nearing a decision.
Lying on the government forms needed to purchase a firearm represents a small percentage of the nation’s overall firearm-related prosecutions. Between October 2022 and March 2023, federal prosecutors filed 3,863 cases in which the unlawful possession of a firearm was the lead charge, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC database, which gathers federal data. In 130 of those cases, or about 3 percent, the lead unlawful possession charge was related to making a false statement to acquire the weapon.
During that same six-month period, federal prosecutors in Delaware filed nine cases in which unlawful gun possession was the lead charge, according to the TRAC data. One of the nine involved making a false statement to acquire the weapon.
Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor whose research focuses on gun policy, said prosecutors typically would not charge lying on a gun form as a stand-alone crime, instead filing it as a secondary charge when someone also may have committed a violent crime with the weapon.
President Biden stands with his son Hunter Biden and sister Valerie Biden Owens as he looks at a plaque dedicated to his late son Beau Biden while visiting Mayo Roscommon Hospice in County Mayo, Ireland, on April 14. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
In recent months, Hunter Biden has tried to take a more public and publicly combative stance in the face of the accusations. His revamped legal team has fired countersuits, issued criminal referral letters, and sent cease-and-desist letters to some of those who have publicly argued he committed crimes.
In April, he also was part of a high-profile visit to Ireland with his father, who introduced him enthusiastically to crowds, along with the president’s sister.
Hunter Biden’s finances became a subject of heated debate during the 2020 presidential campaign, in part because of reports in the New York Post about a laptop computer that he purportedly dropped off at a Wilmington repair shop in 2019 and never came back to collect.
The laptop was turned over to the FBI in December 2019, according to documents reviewed by The Post, and a copy of the drive was obtained by Rudy Giuliani and other advisers to then-President Trump a few months before the 2020 election.
Inside Hunter Biden's multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company
Trump and his supporters have repeatedly argued that Hunter’s legal problems were evidence not just of his wrongdoing but misconduct by his father. Two areas of the younger Biden’s work came under particular scrutiny — a deal with Chinese firm CEFC, and his membership on the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
As the 2020 election drew closer, Republicans pressed the FBI and Justice Department to explain the status of the Biden investigation and the relevance of the laptop to that investigation. The bureau declined to do so, citing the intense criticism directed at the FBI in 2016 for publicly reopening an investigation of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton just weeks before Trump’s victory at the polls.
In December 2020, after Joe Biden was elected, FBI agents approached Hunter Biden seeking to question him about his finances, and he publicly confirmed he was under investigation.
At the time, a spokesman for Joe Biden said the president-elect had “never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever.”
Apr 23, 2023
Babies Not Having Babies
Neil deGrasse Tyson
I think my only push-back on this piece by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington is the fact that it's coming from someone at the University Of Chicago, which traditionally, is not exactly a hotbed of progressive thinking on sociological subjects. Color me skeptical.
That said, she's not sounding like the usual conservative dick, trying to tell young people they're overreacting or that liberals are being all squishy or some shit.
She's reporting what she's hearing from the people who're going to decide where we live out our old-age. We should probably listen, and take it to heart.
Opinion Don’t want a baby because of climate fears? You’re not alone.
As a college professor, I’m used to hearing young people’s anxiety and even anger about climate change. One of the most striking trends is the number of students who have told me they feel robbed of the ability to have children, cheated out of parenthood by decades of climate denial and inaction by baby boomers and their own Gen X parents.
My students are not alone. A global survey in 2021 of 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 shows how widespread these sentiments are. Close to 60 percent told researchers they felt “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change. More than half feared the security of their family would be threatened in the near future, and nearly 4 in 10 said they were “hesitant to have children.”
That’s an awful lot of people. But many older Americans argue that this is absurd, even morally suspect — from Fox News hosts suggesting that even questioning whether to have children amounts to “civilizational suicide,” to commentators in the New York Times who have acknowledged the reality of climate change but then dismissed concerns about the future of the environment in favor of the hope children offer. In both instances, parenthood becomes a moral referendum, separating those who affirm the value of human life, or the value of American civilization, from those who don’t.
But the decision not to have children in the face of crisis is nothing new. In fact, the impulse can be traced not only to our human ancestors but also beyond the human species.
The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has observed that mothers of all kinds, human and otherwise, make choices about how many children they will raise and when, based on ecological and historical circumstances. Primates have been seen to abandon babies born in moments of food shortages or environmental distress, the pressure to survive in their given habitat overriding any reproductive instinct or maternal bond.
Today, we tend to talk about reproductive decisions as though they take place in a vacuum, where all options are available to all people, and the choice you make is determined only by your desire: Do you want to have a child? But for centuries, reproductive decisions have been constrained by people’s economic, material and environmental conditions.
For instance, when Mormon settlers moved into Southern Paiute lands in Utah in the 1850s, bringing violence and disease, births in the tribe plummeted, and not just because women who might have borne children were killed. “My people have been unhappy for so long,” a Paiute woman wrote in 1883; after decades of war, death and loss, “they wish to disincrease, rather than multiply.”
People from marginalized communities have long had to weigh their desire for children against the safety and sustainability of the lives they imagined those children would lead. In the face of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings and racism, “Black people of the not-too-distant past trembled for every baby born into that world,” Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote in 2019. “Sound familiar?”
In the spring of 1969, a college graduate named Stephanie Mills made the connection between environmental concerns and reproductive choice explicit, when she delivered a dark commencement speech at a small college in Oakland, Calif. “I am terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is have no children at all,” Mills said. “As an ex-potential parent, I have asked myself what kind of world my children would grow up in. And the answer was, ‘Not very pretty, not very clean. Sad, in fact.’”
Mills gave her speech — and, in the next year, dozens of talks like it — at a portentous moment for environmental activism and contraceptive technology. The Food and Drug Administration had approved the first form of hormonal birth control in 1960, and by the end of the decade, millions of women were relying on the pill to put off having children — or, like Mills, to avoid having them.
This was also just as the American environmental movement was gaining steam. The spring after Mills gave her commencement speech, an estimated 20 million Americans would take part in events for the inaugural Earth Day — a victory, however symbolic, for environmental causes. But onstage in 1969, Mills was far more optimistic about contraception than she was about the promise of environmentalism. Her speech was titled “The Future Is a Cruel Hoax.”
To today’s environmentally minded observers, the fact that young people are considering having fewer children might seem like a good thing. Population is a driver of climate change, they might say, and the carbon footprint of a baby born in the United States is gigantic; having one fewer child cuts emissions far more than giving up airplanes, meat or automobiles.
But that kind of thinking — blaming individuals having babies for societal ills — has been used to fuel population control measures with distinctly authoritarian, racist or eugenicist flavors. It also misses the point. My students aren’t talking about the carbon footprints of babies. They’re talking about grief, about a future that has been lost.
If politicians and policymakers want to encourage young people to become parents — and it seems they very much do — history suggests there’s a better path than the one too many of them are pursuing: revoking our right to reproductive autonomy, making birth control harder to access and abortion a crime.
Instead, they should convince us that climate change is being taken seriously as a threat — that the environment we and our children must live in is in good, capable, rational hands.
We have to make better
short-term decisions,
in order to have
a more positive impact
in the long term.
Because those decisions
don't just determine
how our children will live -
they determine how
our children will die.
Nov 1, 2022
Today's Reddit
It's well documented here in USAmerica Inc, that every year, there's at least a few kids working hard to come up with Halloween costumes that are all but absolutely guaranteed to limit their career opportunities.
It may also be true that they've already committed to a work life that never goes beyond clerking down at the local Qwik Mart, and this kinda shit is how they buy their way into the guild.
Sep 22, 2022
Meanwhile Back At Reality
From here on out, his life is probably going to be a constant string of trials, and judgements against him, resulting in very large payments to people he's been shitting on for 10 years.
I wish no direct harm to him, but here's to watching Mr Jones suffer a long, slow, painful death, as he slithers deeper into a squalid pit of crushing despair and abject poverty.
Alex Jones testifies in trial over his Sandy Hook hoax lies
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones took the stand Thursday at his defamation trial in Connecticut as he and his lawyer try to limit damages he must pay for promoting the lie that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax.
More than a dozen family members of some of the 20 children and six educators killed in the shooting also showed up to observe his testimony in Waterbury Superior Court, which is about 20 miles (32 kilometers) away from Newtown.
Jones has been in Connecticut this week in preparation for his appearance. He held a news conference Wednesday outside the courthouse, bashing the proceedings — as he has on his Infowars show — as a “travesty of justice” and calling the judge a “tyrant.” He made similar comments on his way into the courthouse Thursday, indicating he may invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and not answer some questions.
“This is not really a trial,” he said. “This is a show trial, a literal kangaroo court.”
You have the right express your opinion, Alex, but - wow - just ... yeah - good luck, son.
Plaintiffs attorneys began by asking Jones whether he believed Judge Barbara Bellis was a tyrant and whether he calls a lot of people tyrants.
“Only when they act like it,” he said.
Several victims’ relatives, meanwhile, have given emotional testimony during the trial about being traumatized by people calling the shooting fake, including confrontations at their homes and in public, and messages including death and rape threats. The plaintiffs include an FBI agent who responded to the shooting and relatives of eight of the victims.
Bellis last year found Jones liable by default for damages to plaintiffs without a trial, as punishment for what she called his repeated failures to turn over documents to their lawyers. The six-member jury only will be deciding how much Jones and Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company, should pay the families for defaming them and intentionally inflicting emotional distress.
Bellis began the day going over with Jones the topics he cannot testify about — including free speech rights, the Sandy Hook families $73 million settlement earlier this year with gun maker Remington (the company made the Bushmaster rifle used to kill the victims at Sandy Hook), the percentage of Jones’ shows that discussed Sandy Hook and whether he profited from those shows or a similar case in Texas.
“This is not the appropriate forum for you to offer that testimony,” Bellis said. Jones indicated that he understood.
Bellis said in court on Wednesday that she was prepared to handle any incendiary testimony from Jones, with contempt of court proceedings if necessary.
Jones also was found liable by default in two similar lawsuits over the hoax lies in his hometown of Austin, Texas, where a jury in one of the trials ordered Jones last month to pay nearly $50 million in damages to the parents of one of the children killed. A third trial in Texas is expected to begin near the end of the year.
When Jones faced the Texas jury last month and testified under oath, he toned down his rhetoric. He said he realized the hoax lies were irresponsible and the school shooting was “100% real.”
“I unintentionally took part in things that did hurt these people’s feelings,” testified Jones, who also acknowledged raising conspiracy claims about other mass tragedies, from the Oklahoma City and Boston Marathon bombings to the mass shootings in Las Vegas and Parkland, Florida, “and I’m sorry for that.”
Jones had portrayed the Sandy Hook shooting as staged by crisis actors as part of gun control efforts.
Testimony at the current trial also has focused on website analytics data run by Infowars employees showing how its sales of dietary supplements, food, clothing and other items spiked around the time Jones talked about the Sandy Hook shooting.
Evidence, including internal Infowars emails and depositions, also shows dissention within the company about pushing the hoax lies.
Jones’ lawyer Norman Pattis is arguing that any damages should be limited and accused the victims’ relatives of exaggerating the harm the lies caused them.
The relatives have testified that they continue to fear for their safety because of what the hoax believers have done and might do.
Jennifer Hensel, whose 6-year-old daughter Avielle Richman was among the slain, testified Wednesday that she still monitors her surroundings, even checking the back seat of her car, for safety reasons. She said she is trying to shield her two children, ages 7 and 5, from the hoax lies. A juror cried during her testimony.
“They’re so young,” she said of her children. “Their innocence is so beautiful right now. And at some point there are a horde of people out there who could hurt them.”
Jul 25, 2022
Today's Reddit
Parenthood is not for the faint of heart. If you can't stand up for your kids - for their right to self-determination - for their right to be who they are - then you've failed, both as a parent and as a human being, and you need to step away.
May 12, 2022
Babies
It wasn't your fault.
Researchers Pinpoint Reason Infants Die From SIDS
Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) accounts for about 37% of sudden unexpected infant deaths a year in the U.S., and the cause of SIDS has remained largely unknown. On Saturday, researchers from The Children's Hospital Westmead in Sydney released a study that confirmed not only how these infants die, but why.
SIDS refers to the unexplained deaths of infants under a year old, and it usually occurs while the child is sleeping. According to Mayo Clinic, many in the medical community suspected this phenomenon could be caused by a defect in the part of the brain that controls arousal from sleep and breathing. The theory was that if the infant stopped breathing during sleep, the defect would keep the child from startling or waking up.
The Sydney researchers were able to confirm this theory by analyzing dried blood samples taken from newborns who died from SIDS and other unknown causes. Each SIDS sample was then compared with blood taken from healthy babies. They found the activity of the enzyme butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) was significantly lower in babies who died of SIDS compared to living infants and other non-SIDS infant deaths. BChE plays a major role in the brain’s arousal pathway, explaining why SIDS typically occurs during sleep.
Previously, parents were told SIDS could be prevented if they took proper precautions: laying babies on their backs, not letting them overheat and keeping all toys and blankets out of the crib were a few of the most important preventative steps. So, when SIDS still occurred, parents were left with immense guilt, wondering if they could have prevented their baby’s death.
Dr. Carmel Harrington, the lead researcher for the study, was one of these parents. Her son unexpectedly and suddenly died as an infant 29 years ago. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Harrington explained what she was told about the cause of her child’s death.
"Nobody could tell me. They just said it's a tragedy. But it was a tragedy that didn't sit well with my scientific brain.”
Since then, she’s worked to find the cause of SIDS, both for herself and for the medical community as a whole. She went on to explain why this discovery is so important for parents whose babies suffered from SIDS.
"These families can now live with the knowledge that this was not their fault," she said.
In the study, the researchers wrote, “This finding represents the possibility for the identification of infants at risk for SIDS infants prior to death and opens new avenues for future research into specific interventions.”
As the cause is now known, researchers can turn their attention to a solution. In the next few years, those in the medical community who have studied SIDS will likely work on a screening test to identify babies who are at risk for SIDS and hopefully prevent it altogether.
Know that.
Take it in, and just know it.
It wasn't your fault.
I fucking love me some nerds.
Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) accounts for about 37% of sudden unexpected infant deaths a year in the U.S., and the cause of SIDS has remained largely unknown. On Saturday, researchers from The Children's Hospital Westmead in Sydney released a study that confirmed not only how these infants die, but why.
SIDS refers to the unexplained deaths of infants under a year old, and it usually occurs while the child is sleeping. According to Mayo Clinic, many in the medical community suspected this phenomenon could be caused by a defect in the part of the brain that controls arousal from sleep and breathing. The theory was that if the infant stopped breathing during sleep, the defect would keep the child from startling or waking up.
The Sydney researchers were able to confirm this theory by analyzing dried blood samples taken from newborns who died from SIDS and other unknown causes. Each SIDS sample was then compared with blood taken from healthy babies. They found the activity of the enzyme butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) was significantly lower in babies who died of SIDS compared to living infants and other non-SIDS infant deaths. BChE plays a major role in the brain’s arousal pathway, explaining why SIDS typically occurs during sleep.
Previously, parents were told SIDS could be prevented if they took proper precautions: laying babies on their backs, not letting them overheat and keeping all toys and blankets out of the crib were a few of the most important preventative steps. So, when SIDS still occurred, parents were left with immense guilt, wondering if they could have prevented their baby’s death.
Dr. Carmel Harrington, the lead researcher for the study, was one of these parents. Her son unexpectedly and suddenly died as an infant 29 years ago. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Harrington explained what she was told about the cause of her child’s death.
"Nobody could tell me. They just said it's a tragedy. But it was a tragedy that didn't sit well with my scientific brain.”
Since then, she’s worked to find the cause of SIDS, both for herself and for the medical community as a whole. She went on to explain why this discovery is so important for parents whose babies suffered from SIDS.
"These families can now live with the knowledge that this was not their fault," she said.
In the study, the researchers wrote, “This finding represents the possibility for the identification of infants at risk for SIDS infants prior to death and opens new avenues for future research into specific interventions.”
As the cause is now known, researchers can turn their attention to a solution. In the next few years, those in the medical community who have studied SIDS will likely work on a screening test to identify babies who are at risk for SIDS and hopefully prevent it altogether.
Apr 23, 2022
Hereditary Poverty
First, my oldest just got word that he's kind of a big deal, so I have to brag on him a little.
PRESS RELEASE
For more information, contact:
Joey Martelli (703) 476-3420
jmartelli@shapeamerica.org
MSU Denver Student Nationally Honored as Major of the Year in Physical Education
RESTON, VA, March 25, 2022 ---SHAPE America–Society of Health and Physical Educators will honor Nick Roberts of MSU Denver as a Major of the Year during the organization’s 136th National Convention & Expo, April 26-30th, in New Orleans, Louisiana! The award celebrates outstanding undergraduate students in the health, physical education, recreation, and dance professions who are nominated by a faculty advisor or professor. Roberts will be recognized on Tuesday, April 26th during the Opening General Session.
“The outstanding achievements of future professionals like Nick is integral to the future of SHAPE America and our profession.” says SHAPE America President Terri Drain, the Founder and Coordinator of the Health and Physical Education Collaborative.
Nicks professors recognize his demonstrated leadership, innovative teaching, and a passion to learn a multitude of pedagogy skills. He has shown academic aptitude and ambition through his work which is creative, thorough, persuasive, timely and always well thought out and composed, He was an active member in our campus physical education club; first as a member, and then in short time he had taken on the responsibilities of our Physical Education Teacher Education Vice President and then president position. Due to COVID he has remained in the president role for 2 academic years. He has successfully navigated the grant procedure to bring in money to the PETE club.
A leader in the club, as well as in the classroom. He has taken on administrative roles with precise details and vision, as well as mentored other club officers and pushed them to give generously of their time. He was instrumental on numerous projects including getting members to our state association convention as well as the national convention, leading several fundraising events and participation in numerous club events.
About SHAPE America
SHAPE America – Society of Health and Physical Educators is the nation’s largest membership
organization of health and physical education professionals. Since its founding in 1885, the
organization has defined excellence in physical education, and our National Standards for K-12
Physical Education serve as the foundation for well-designed physical education programs
across the country. We provide programs, resources and advocacy to support health and
physical educators at every level, from preschool to university graduate programs. For more
information, visit www.shapeamerica.org
This is very interesting, but I can see a problem in that there are plenty of Bell Curve devotees who could glom onto this as "proof that there's something wrong with those people - that they're obviously genetically inferior".
And that's definitely not how I read this piece. It's not about straight genetics - it's about epigenesis - how environmental stresses can change the way genes are expressed or suppressed.
Maybe this is the kinda thing the "conservatives" are afraid will be revealed if people are allowed to view Critical Race Theory as a viable tool in the study of things like economics and culture and our justice system.
Emerging science is putting the lie to American meritocracy
It's a long piece, and some of it gets pretty dense - here's my money quote:
The science of the biological effects of the stresses of poverty is in its early stages. Still, it has presented us with multiple mechanisms through which such effects could happen, and many of these admit an inheritable component. If a pregnant woman, for example, is exposed to the stresses of poverty, her fetus and that fetus’ gametes can both be affected, extending the effects of poverty to at least her grandchildren. And it could go further.
Studies of mice and fruit flies have shown that epigenetic traits similar to the ones Meaney proposed can be passed down, and last for dozens of generations. The effects of things like diet and prenatal parental stress have been observed to be inherited, not just through histone modifications, but also through DNA methylation and non-coding RNAs.7 In one 2014 study, the offspring of a mouse trained to fear a particular smell were observed to also fear that smell, even with no previous exposure to it. The effect lasted for two generations.8 In humans, inheritable effects of stress have been observed through at least three generations from parents who survived mass starvation (Dutch Hunger Winter),9 a fluctuating food supply (the Överkalix cohort)10 and the Holocaust. The effects of early paternal smoking and paternal betel quid chewing have been observed to be transmitted to children in a sex-specific manner, supporting biological epigenetic transmission in humans.11 According to a 2014 survey of the field, “the few human observational studies to date suggest (male line) transgenerational effects exist that cannot easily be attributed to cultural and/or genetic inheritance.”10
Even at this stage, then, we can take a few things away from the science. First, that the stresses of being poor have a biological effect that can last a lifetime. Second, that there is evidence suggesting that these effects may be inheritable, whether it is through impact on the fetus, epigenetic effects, cell subtype effects, or something else.
This science challenges us to re-evaluate a cornerstone of American mythology, and of our social policies for the poor: the bootstrap. The story of the self-made, inspirational individual transcending his or her circumstances by sweat and hard work. A pillar of the framework of meritocracy, where rewards are supposedly justly distributed to those who deserve them most.
What kind of a bootstrap or merit-based game can we be left with if poverty cripples the contestants? Especially if it has intergenerational effects? The uglier converse of the bootstrap hypothesis—that those who fail to transcend their circumstances deserve them—makes even less sense in the face of the grim biology of poverty. When the firing gun goes off, the poor are well behind the start line. Despite my success, I certainly was.
The stuff your kids get into - am I right?
Proud of you, Nicky.
Mar 21, 2022
Nov 3, 2021
Mar 12, 2019
Today's Yeesh
This is 9 kinds of fucked up. And ain't that just Won-fuckin'-derful.
Via Daily Progress, Charlottesville:
College coaches and others have been charged in a sweeping admissions bribery case unsealed in federal court.
The racketeering conspiracy charges unveiled Tuesday were brought against the coaches at schools including Wake Forest University, Georgetown and the University of Southern California.
Authorities say the coaches accepted bribes in exchange for admitting students as athletes, regardless of their ability.
Prosecutors say parents paid an admissions consultant $25 million from 2011 through Feb. 2019 to bribe coaches and administrators to label their children as recruited athletes to boost their chances of getting into schools.
Prosecutors allege that fake athletic profiles were also made to make students look like strong high school athletes when they actually weren't.
Authorities say the consulting company also bribed administrators of college entrance exams to allow a Florida man to take the tests on behalf of students or replace their answers with his.
"Back in the day" it was also 9 kinds of fucked up - it was just a different set of 9 kinds of fucked up, but it seems like we oughta be able to notice a little overall improvement.
Yes - we have to teach them, and watch them, and guide them, and sometimes we have to reprimand them - and even punish them when it gets really bad.
But we have to stop trying to smash-fit them into our own expectations. We can't force them to be people they don't want to be. And we have to stop pretending they actually are the people we insist they are to our friends and families.
When do we figure out that we have to let kids be kids before we can expect any success with that other stuff?
Paraphrasing Mr Waters: Don't be a brick in the wall.
One last thing -
FUCK YOU, RICH PEOPLE
Oct 5, 2018
Perverse And Pervasive
Mad Magazine has run a piece on the real shit that happens because of our national blind spot regarding guns.
hat tip = @dizwire
Jun 23, 2018
No Good Video
In the furor over Melania's jacket and the naked political opportunism of a White House desperate to stop stepping on its own dick with a track shoe, we lost sight of the fact that Melania was supposed to visit the McAllen Border Patrol Station too.
Instead, we got some nice "optics" from a place called Upbring (part of Lutheran Social Services Inc) - a "non-profit" facility aimed at care for child abuse survivors (now there's an interesting little Freudian twist).
Anyway:
I'm not beating up on the Lutherans, btw, although I'll say again that I purely hate the idea of handing any tax dollars to any religious organization for any reason, but that's another rant.
The point is that Melania didn't visit the McAllen Border Patrol Station, where we've cloistered some goodly number of kids in a makeshift prison camp. That part of the mission was scrubbed. Because - well, it kinda got to rainin'...
They already had their nice pictures of a place they told us held some immigrant kids. So they either had to bar cameras at the next stop because comparing the two joints would prob'ly make the second one look pretty fuckin' awful, or they could make up some shit to pretend they just couldn't get there, or whatever.
And about those pictures - I didn't see every single one of them, but I didn't see any kids either.
I guess I'm also wondering what might happen to the private donations that Upbring actively solicits, now that they've gotten million of dollars worth of free publicity.
It reminds me of the practice of the English sovereign granting special favors to a particular dressmaker or whiskey distiller. Merit-Based Free-Market Capitalism my dyin' ass.
May 28, 2018
Ivanka Tweets
— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) May 27, 2018
And let the cyber-scorn rain down upon her.
Nobody's saying she isn't allowed to feel good while others are suffering. The problem is that she does this kinda shit on a fairly consistent basis - the problem is she's fucking tone deaf.
Apr 11, 2017
Wanna Know What's Dumb?
Preventing Syrian children from escaping the bombing and then thinking I'll buy your story about how we had to bomb Syria on behalf of the children.
Oct 13, 2016
Kids These Days
WaPo:
Students at Liberty University have issued a statement against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as young conservatives at colleges across the state reconsider support for his campaign.
A statement issued late Wednesday by the group Liberty United Against Trump strongly rebuked the candidate as well as the school’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for defending Trump after he made extremely lewd comments about women in a 2005 video. The students wrote that Falwell’s support for Trump had cast a stain on the school’s reputation.
“We are Liberty students who are disappointed with President Falwell’s endorsement and are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history,” the statement said. “Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him. … He has made his name by maligning others and bragging about his sins. Not only is Donald Trump a bad candidate for president, he is actively promoting the very things that we as Christians ought to oppose.”
--and also too--
The Liberty University student manifesto against Trump comes as college Republican groups across the country reconsider support for the candidate. On Tuesday the University of Virginia College Republicans announced that the group voted to rescind its endorsement of his candidacy for president. The chairman of the College Republicans at Hampden-Sydney College, Tanner Beck, posted a statement on Facebook noting that Trump “has gone from simply being an embarrassment to our party, to a potentially permanent stain on our brand and our country.”The statement was posted online as a petition
I'm not holding out a lot of hope that this will flip any given Trumpster, and I don't really give a rat's ass what anybody thinks their imaginary friend has to say about politics (or anything else for that matter).
That said, maybe I can take it as a good sign that some of these young adults are forming political identities that aren't simply Red vs Blue and My-Team-No-Matter-What, in spite of the submissive authoritarian crap that gets drilled into them at a "Religious University".
Realistically, some of these "kids" will go on to become the next buncha blue-nosed pinch-faced purity warriors that plague every system everywhere, but some will also grow into regular human-type people who can change things where they are with the tools they have at hand.
A guy can hope, can't he?
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