Safety

It's well known that your kids are safer at a drag show than they are in church or at school.

Kids In School

Overheard

For literally decades, Republicans have blocked legislation for:

• Paid sick leave
• Paid family and medical leave
• Universal childcare
• Universal pre-K
• Expanded child tax credit
• Programs to support prenatal, maternal, and reproductive health

Stop wondering why so many people want fewer children.

The Kids Are Not Alright

If Republicans were at all interested in the kids - their physical, emotional, intellectual wellbeing - they wouldn't be attacking everything that supports them and their families.

It's been said, and it's been said again, and again, but it's not really getting through, so here it is one more time:

Republicans love to stomp around yelling about god and Jesus and how precious the little darlings are (their little darlings anyway) while they ignore what their lord and savior said as long as it doesn't quite jibe with the politics of the moment.

Like this from Matthew, chapter 18 verses 2-6

“‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. If anyone causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.'”

They just don't fucking care.

The Trump Administration’s War on Children

The administration is quietly putting America’s children at risk by cutting funds and manpower for investigating child abuse, enforcing child support payments, providing child care and much more.

The clear-cutting across the federal government under President Donald Trump has been dramatic, with mass terminations, the suspension of decades-old programs and the neutering of entire agencies. But this spectacle has obscured a series of moves by the administration that could profoundly harm some of the most vulnerable people in the U.S.: children.

Consider: The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1. And funding for investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has been withdrawn indefinitely.

The administration has laid off thousands of workers from coast to coast who had supervised education, child care, child support and child protective services systems, and it has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in funding for things like school meals and school safety.

These stark reductions have been centered in little-known children’s services offices housed within behemoth agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, offices with names like the Children’s Bureau, the Office of Family Assistance and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. In part because of their obscurity, the slashing has gone relatively overlooked.

“Everyone’s been talking about what the Trump administration and DOGE have been doing, but no one seems to be talking about how, in a lot of ways, it’s been an assault on kids,” said Bruce Lesley, president of advocacy group First Focus on Children. He added that “the one cabinet agency that they’re fully decimating is the kid one,” referring to Trump’s goal of shuttering the Department of Education. Already, some 2,000 staffers there have lost or left their jobs.

The impact of these cuts will be felt far beyond Washington, rippling out to thousands of state and local agencies serving children nationwide.

The Department of Education, for instance, has rescinded as much as $3 billion in pandemic-recovery funding for schools, which would have been used for everything from tutoring services for Maryland students who’ve fallen behind to making the air safer to breathe and the water safer to drink for students in Flint, Michigan. The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, has canceled $660 million in promised grants to farm-to-school programs, which had been providing fresh meat and produce to school cafeterias while supporting small farmers.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency’s secretary, has dismissed all of the staff that had distributed $1.7 billion annually in Social Services Block Grant money, which many states have long depended on to be able to run their child welfare, foster care and adoption systems, including birth family visitation, caseworker training and more. The grants also fund day care, counseling and disability services for kids. (It is unclear whether anyone remains at HHS who would know how to get all of that funding out the door or whether it will now be administered by White House appointees.)

Head Start will be especially affected in the wake of Kennedy’s mass firings of Office of Head Start regional staff and news that the president’s draft budget proposes eliminating funding for the program altogether. That would leave one million working-class parents who rely on Head Start not only for pre-K education but also for child care, particularly in rural areas, with nowhere to send their kids during the day.

Some local Head Start programs are already having to close their doors, and many program directors are encountering impediments to spending their current budgets. When they seek reimbursement after paying their teachers or purchasing school supplies, they’re being directed to a new “Defend the Spend” DOGE website asking them to “justify” each item, even though the spending has already been appropriated by Congress and audited by nonpartisan civil servants.

Next on the chopping block, it appears, is Medicaid, which serves children in greater numbers than any other age group. If Republicans in Congress go through with the cuts they’ve been discussing, and Trump signs those cuts into law, kids from lower- and middle-class families across the U.S. will lose access to health care at their schools, in foster care, for their disabilities or for cancer treatment.

The Trump administration has touted the president’s record of “protecting America’s children,” asserting in a recent post that Trump will “never stop fighting for their right to a healthy, productive upbringing.” The statement listed five examples of that commitment. Four were related to transgender issues (including making it U.S. government policy that there are only two sexes and keeping trans athletes out of women’s sports); the other was a ban on COVID-19 vaccine mandates at schools that receive federal funding.

The White House, and multiple agencies, declined to respond to most of ProPublica’s questions. Madi Biedermann, a Department of Education spokesperson, addressed the elimination of pandemic recovery funding, saying that “COVID is over”; that the Biden administration established an “irresponsible precedent” by extending the deadline to spend these funds (and exceeding their original purpose); and that the department will consider extensions if individual projects show a clear connection between COVID and student learning.

An HHS spokesperson, in response to ProPublica’s questions about cuts to children’s programs across that agency, sent a short statement saying that the department, guided by Trump, is restructuring with a focus on cutting wasteful bureaucracy. The offices serving children, the statement said, will be merged into a newly established “Administration for Healthy America.”

Programs that serve kids have historically fared the worst when those in power are looking for ways to cut the budget. That’s in part because kids can’t vote, and they typically don’t belong to political organizations. International aid groups, another constituency devastated by Trump’s policy agenda, also can’t say that they represent many U.S. voters.

This dynamic may be part of why cuts on the health side of the Department of Health and Human Services — layoffs of doctors, medical researchers and the like — have received more political and press attention than those on the human services side, where the Administration for Children and Families is located. That’s where you can find the Office of Child Support Services, the Office of Head Start, the Office of Child Care (which promotes minimum health and safety standards for child care programs nationally and helps states reduce the cost of child care for families), the Office of Family Assistance (which helps states administer direct aid to lower-income parents and kids), the Children’s Bureau (which oversees child protective services, foster care and adoption) and the Family and Youth Services Bureau (which aids runaway and homeless teens, among others).

All told, these programs have seen their staffs cut from roughly 2,400 employees as of January to 1,500 now, according to a shared Google document that is being regularly updated by former HHS officials. (Neither the White House nor agency leadership have released the exact numbers of cuts.)

Those losses have been most acutely felt in the agency’s regional offices, five out of 10 of which — covering over 20 states — have been closed by the Trump administration. They were dissolved this month without notice to their own employees or to the local providers they worked with. It was these outposts that had monitored Head Start programs to make sure that they had fences around their playgrounds, gates at the top of their stairs and enough staffing to keep an eye on even the most energetic little ones. It was also the regional staff who had helped state child support programs modernize their computer systems and navigate federal law. That allowed them, among other things, to be able to “pass through” more money to families instead of depositing it in state coffers to reimburse themselves for costs.

And it was the regional staff who’d had the relationships with tribal officials that allowed them to routinely work together to address child support, child care and child welfare challenges faced by Native families. Together, they had worked to overcome sometimes deep distrust of the federal government among tribal leaders, who may now have no one to ask for help with their children’s programs other than political appointees in D.C.

In the wake of the regional office cuts, local child services program directors have no idea who in the federal government to call when they have urgent concerns, many told ProPublica. “No one knows anything,” said one state child support director, asking not to be named in order to speak candidly about the administration’s actions. “We have no idea who will be auditing us.”

“We’re trying to be reassuring to our families,” the official said, “but if the national system goes down, so does ours.”

That national system includes the complex web of databases and technical support maintained and provided by the Office of Child Support Services at HHS, which helps states locate parents who owe child support in order to withhold part of their paychecks or otherwise obtain the money they owe, which is then sent to the parent who has custody of the child. Without this federal data and assistance, child support orders would have little way of being enforced across state lines.

For that reason, the Trump administration is making a risky gamble by slashing staffing at the federal child support office, said Vicki Turetsky, who headed that office under the Obama administration. She worries that the layoffs create a danger of system outages that would cause child support payments to be missed or delayed. (“That’s a family’s rent,” she said.) The instability is compounded, she said, by DOGE’s recent unexplained move to access a highly confidential national child support database.

But even if the worst doesn’t come to pass, there will still be concrete consequences for the delivery of child support to families, Turetsky said. The staff members who’ve been pushed out include those who’d helped manage complicated, outdated IT systems; without updates, these programs might over- or undershoot the amount of child support that a parent owes, misdirect the money or fail to give notice to the dad or mom about a change in the case.

When Liz Ryan departed as administrator of the Department of Justice’s juvenile division in January, its website was flush with opportunities for state and local law enforcement as well as nonprofits to apply for federal funding for a myriad of initiatives that help children. There were funds for local police task forces that investigate child exploitation on the internet; for programs where abused children are interviewed by police and mental health professionals; and for court-appointed advocates for victimized kids. Grants were also available for mentoring programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

But the Trump administration removed those grant applications, which total over $400 million in a typical year. And Ryan said there still hasn’t been any communication, including in what used to be regular emails with grant recipients, many of whom she remains in touch with, about whether this congressionally approved money even still exists or whether some of it might eventually be made available again.

A spokesperson for the Office of Justice Programs within the DOJ said the agency is reviewing programs, policies and materials and “taking action as appropriate” in accordance with Trump’s executive orders and guidance. When that review has been completed, local agencies and programs seeking grants will be notified.

Multiple nonprofits serving exploited children declined to speak on the record to ProPublica, fearing that doing so might undermine what chance they still had of getting potential grants.

“Look at what happened to the law firms,” one official said, adding that time is running out to fund his program’s services for victims of child abuse for the upcoming fiscal year.

“I never anticipated that programs and services and opportunities for young people wouldn’t be funded at all by the federal government,” Ryan said, adding that local children’s organizations likely can’t go to states, whose budgets are already underwater, to make up the funding gap. “When you look at this alongside what they’re doing at HHS and the Department of Education and to Medicaid, it’s undercutting every single effort that we have to serve kids.”

Tik Tok (via Twixter)

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

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.

Overheard

A study published last year in the Review Of Economic Studies concludes that investments can actually pay dividends down the road.

Huh. Now whooda thunk it?

Is the Social Safety Net a Long-Term Investment? Large-Scale Evidence From the Food Stamps Program 

, , , 

The Review of Economic Studies, rdad063, https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdad063

Published: 08 June 2023

Abstract

We use novel, large-scale data on 17.5 million Americans to study how a policy-driven increase in economic resources affects children's long-term outcomes. Using the 2000 Census and 2001–13 American Community Survey linked to the Social Security Administration's NUMIDENT, we leverage the county-level rollout of the Food Stamps program between 1961 and 1975. We find that children with access to greater economic resources before age five have better outcomes as adults. The treatment-on-the-treated effects show a 6% of a standard deviation improvement in human capital, 3% of a standard deviation increase in economic self-sufficiency, 8% of a standard deviation increase in the quality of neighbourhood of residence, a 1.2-year increase in life expectancy, and a 0.5 percentage-point decrease in likelihood of being incarcerated. These estimates suggest that Food Stamps’ transfer of resources to families is a highly cost-effective investment in young children, yielding a marginal value of public funds of approximately sixty-two.

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.

Hunter Biden reaches deal to plead guilty in tax, gun case

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.”

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.”

Should you not have kids because of climate change? It’s complicated.

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.

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.

Meanwhile Back At Reality

Alex Jones spent years raking in big piles of bucks spouting weirder and weirder stories about dead kids and their families after the Sandy Hook murders.

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.”

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.

Babies

It wasn't your fault.

Know that.

Take it in, and just know it.

It wasn't your fault.

I fucking love me some nerds.

BioSpace:

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.

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

But then, Nick sent me a piece about studies conducted by various Über Nerds, looking at the possibilities that certain hereditary factors may contribute to the cycle of poverty.

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.

Nautilus

Why Poverty Is Like a Disease

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.

Arthur

Sometimes a guy just needs to take a little break.

Kids Today

'mon back. 'mon back

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.

I think I understand that yearning for "back in the day", but it's really not what we need to be doing.

"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

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