The future

What does the future hold for Arielle Metzger, one of the subjects of yesterday's story? I mean, she's obviously an intelligent and articulate young woman. What does the future hold for all these children, the 25 million children living in dire poverty, and the tens of millions who aren't far from it?

First things first: When you're living under conditions of such dire poverty, pretty much everything seems beyond your grasp. College looks like it might be a possibility in abstraction, but the reality is that a haphazard education caused by being homeless and moving from school to school makes scholarships problematic and grant and state subsidy programs have been gutted to the point where they'll no longer pay for poor children's college educations. Finding a way might happen, but it would be through heroic efforts and the chances... slim.

What other careers might she look at? My guess is that by this time next year she's going to be working as a waitress or as a clerk to make money to bring home to the family. She's going to do this because it's life, that's what you do, you do whatever it takes to get by, and it's what you can do if you're young and reasonably good looking and have no skills other than your ability to charm people. She's going to go to school tired and sleepy in the mornings, she's going to go to work a couple of hours after she gets out of school after studying that amount of time, and then go to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Hopefully she won't get pregnant. But a lot of girls in her situation do get pregnant, because that would qualify the teenb and the child for AFDC, housing subsidies, and a lot of other assistance they don't get as homeless teenagers.

Could she have been the next great composer? The next great inventor? The physicist who finally solves the problem of nuclear fusion? A soccer star? One of the great actresses of the world? The biomedical doctor who finally finds a cure for the common cold? We'll never know, because ten years from now she'll be taking someone's order in a restaurant, her looks will have already started to fade from the years of poor food and lack of access to good medical care and information about exercise and keeping yourself fit, and that's going to be her life, forever.

That is the sad thing of all this refusal of America and Americans to collectively take care of our children: The waste. The utter waste. Arielle is not an idiot. With sufficient bootstraps, she could make something of herself far better than her current fate. What good for our nation have we thrown away, by this refusal to invest in our children? And what kind of a nation, what kind of people, is it, anyhow, that views a few dollars of tax money more important than children?

-- Badtux the Sad Penguin

CBS commits journalism

It's only life.

Just something got in my eye and a case of the sniffles, that's all.

Heh. Yeah.

From XKCD

If right-wingers were really so serious about how much they love children, they wouldn't make it so expensive to have children.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Why can't children be children?

8 year old girl getting Botox injections.

Eight year olds are supposed to be outside playing, or indoors doing dolls, or something that eight year olds are supposed to be doing. Not getting injections of nasty toxins.

I has a sad :(.

- Badtux the Sad Penguin

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

The lizard people's war on children continues

I once wangled my way into one of the Houston Republican Party get-togethers back during the early 90′s and figured out just what they were the moment one of the prominent members started talking about how he was tired of paying his tax money to educate other people’s children (this was a short while after complaining about how he could not find good employees for his business), how public schools were socialism and how people who could not afford to send their children to private schools, as he did, simply shouldn’t have children. I interjected, “but the children didn’t choose to be born, why should they be punished for what their parents did?” He simply sneered “they should have chosen richer parents then.” There was nothing I could say to that, since the man was obviously deranged. You would not know this man, who prefers to stay behind the scenes, but you would know the man he got elected as a Congressman from Houston, a man by the name of Tom DeLay…

They are not only sociopathic scum, but they are utterly deranged, living in an alternate universe where there is no cause and effect relationship between cutting education and not being able to find good employees for your business, an alternate universe where children choose what parents they are born to and thus foster children clearly chose to be born as what they are. The fact that these utter psychopaths are running our nation, more or less, is chilling. Yet: Every single one of these lizard people, these sociopathic scum, got elected by the majority of voters in his or her district. Every… single… one. Does that say that the majority of American voters are evil? Are idiots? Are brainwashed fools? I don’t know, I just don’t see any hope for America. I mean, who would vote for people who propose that we send foster children to school in rags (presumably so that *our* children will know not to associate with them)?

Oh yes, the latest outrage in the lizard people's war on children... homeless woman arrested for THEFT for crime of enrolling her child in school. Because, you see, she didn't have a permanent address in the school district. Or anywhere, for that matter, which is why the federal McKinney-Vento law protecting the right of homeless children to an education was written in the first place, which basically says the school district can't expel homeless children for not having a permanent address in the district. But that didn't stop Republican Mayor Richard Moccia of Norwalk, Connecticut. If you cannot stop the children, he reasoned, then arresting the parents would get those unseemly homeless kids out of the Norwalk schools lickity-split.

Lizard people. Emotionless, empathyless, cold-blooded, with no morality other than greed and avarice. Lizard people. Any person who would arrest a homeless parent for enrolling her child in school is lower than knee-high to a caterpillar. And a *majority* voted for these lizard people! Whether through stupidity or evil…. doesn’t say much for America and Americans. Either we’re too stupid as a nation to continue to exist, or too evil.

-- Badtux the Maudlin(*) Penguin

(*)Who, perhaps fortunately for his liver, is currently unable to drown his sorrows in herring sauce due to recovery from recent stomach disorder, sigh.

Back to the future

During the 1870s, powerful financial syndicates controlled the railroads and the coalfields. Coal companies had begun to recruit immigrants from overseas, luring them with "promises of fortune-making". Herded into freight trains by the hundreds, these workers often replaced English-speaking miners who, according to George Korson, "...were compelled to give way in one coal field after another, either abandoning the industry altogether for other occupations or else retreating, like the vanishing American Indian, westward..."[18] Frequently unable to read safety instructions, the immigrant workers, "...faced constant hazards from violation of safety precautions, such as they were. Injuries and deaths in mine disasters, frequently reported in the newspapers, shocked the nation."[18] Twenty-two thousand coal miners worked in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.[12] Fifty-five hundred of the mineworkers in the county were children between the ages of seven and sixteen years[19] who earned between one and three dollars a week separating slate from the coal. Injured miners, or those too old to work at the face, were also assigned to picking slate at the "breakers" where the coal was crushed into a manageable size. Thus, many of the elderly miners finished their mining days as they'd begun in their youth.[20]

-- From Wikipedia article on the Molly McGuires

One wonders, based upon stories such as Sen. Bruce Caswell, R-Hillsdale(MI) forcing foster children to buy all their clothing at used clothing stores and the continued GOP jihad against Social Security and Medicare, whether the GOP pines for the days when children between the ages of seven and sixteen years earned their keep as virtual slave laborers. Are there no workhouses? Are there no coal mines to put these greedy foster children into? And those old welfare whores sucking off the government Social Security teat should just be tossed back onto the open market. Let them sort coal in the coal mines! Sheesh!

Of course, the blatant unfairness of punishing foster children for something they had no part in creating (you think foster children want to be foster children?!), or of taking away the Social Security retirement that people paid into and worked for during their entire working life, simply makes Republicans guffaw. Fairness, they say, is something losers talk about. Buck it up, they say, life's not fair. Why, if you work really hard in life, if you study hard and do everything you're supposed to do to get ahead, you could even become a personal servant to the rich and powerful, and be allowed to lick their shoes clean every evening!

Uhm, yeah. Ok. Alrighty then. So here's a song for the GOP...

-- Badtux the "Even the mighty fall" Penguin

Update: Bryan at Why Now is equally horrified... see our discussion of the lizard people there.

I feel safer

Everybody knows that a six-year-old girl can be a terror. That's why I feel safer that the TSA has protected me from the horror of a six year old girl terrorist by carefully examining this young lass to make sure she wasn't carrying a bomb in her crotch. Because everybody knows that six year old blond girls are dangerous and that their crotches could hide any number of evil things, so as long as TSA agents follow proper procedure (which they did), why, it's just keeping us safe, right?

Thank you, TSA, for protecting me from six year old blond terrorist girls! Our nation praises you for your diligence in this matter!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Are there no workhouses?

That question, asked by Dickens' villain Ebenezer Scrooge when a charity came by asking for donations for the poor, is currently "No" for children. But the State of Missouri is aiming to change that. To quote Jay Leno: “And in Missouri, Republican state Sen. Jane Cunningham has introduced a bill that would eliminate her state’s child labor laws. Well, yeah, I mean, why should the 10-year-olds in China be getting all the good factory jobs?”

I've never had a desire to move to a third world nation. I like hot showers. I like heated homes. I like cook stoves that you can simply turn on and off and they just work. People say I should at least travel to a third world nation so that I can get a first-hand look at how the majority of people on this planet live. No worries, though -- it appears I'm going to live in one anyhow, without moving an inch. Complete with child laborers in our factories and fields.

- Badtux the Third-world Penguin

Zero sense

7 year old kid arrested for bringing Nerf gun to school.

Uhm, excuse me?! When I was 7 years old I brought one or two things to school that I shouldn't have brought to school. What happened was that a) the teacher took it away from me, b) I got a trip to the Principal's office to get lectured on why what I had done was inappropriate, c) my father got a call from the principal, and d) my father was very, very angry with me for doing something stupid. And you can bet I never did *that* again!

What in the world has happened to common sense? We're talking about a 7 year old, for cryin' out loud -- not some 17 year old gang-banger who knows better. The goal of the school here ought to be to educate the kid -- not have him traumatized by being hauled off in cuffs by the cops. Sheesh!

-- Badtux the Common Sense Penguin

My First Molestation

TSA recommends using child predator tactics to calm children at TSA checkpoints.

This penguin is speechless...

-- Badtux the Speechless Penguin

An encounter

I first notice her vaguely on the bread aisle as I steer my grocery cart around her where she is standing looking at bread -- a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, healthy and beautiful in the way of 60's folk-singer girls with straight light-brown hair down to just below her shoulder blades and a clear complexion. She is standing slightly splay-footed in the flat multi-colored sneakers that are the current fad, and wearing clearly second-hand tight jeans and t-shirt. I move on to the frozen foods aisle. Then after I pick up my frozen pizza I round the corner and she is looking at the display of birthday cakes with an expression on her face that I have a hard time placing. It is not a happy expression, but it is not an expression of yearning either. Then I place it from my own childhood, it is an expression of unhappy acceptance that fancy expensive store-bought birthday cakes are not in her present or in the foreseeable future as see-able by a young child. It is the expression of a child standing outside the front window of an expensive store that she knows she never, ever, will be able to walk into and buy something.

Someone calls her and I notice a young man who looks more like her big brother than her father. He has the scruffy look of a handy-man, a resident of a world that most people who live in the Silicon Valley know nothing about. She follows him, with an expression of her face that is as joyless as the most forbidding desert, and I think to myself, "This is a girl who has not known much joy in her life." Which seemed a shame, because she was so young and healthy and beautiful in a wholesome sort of way. They walk towards the express lane as I push my cart to a regular lane.

As I push my cart out the front door of the store towards my Jeep, I notice them getting into a rusty old pickup truck that looks like it's being held together by rattle-can spray paint that has painted it in a vaguely camouflage pattern of various colors of primer. The truck starts up with a cloud of blue smoke and heads for the exit from the shopping center. I put my groceries in my Jeep, take my cart back to the front of the store, and head back to my Jeep and go out a different exit. My exit has a green light. I look to my left and see that their exit had a red light. I suspect that their exit always has a red light, regardless of which exit they pick. I turn right onto El Camino Real and head east. Their light turns green and they head east too, in the left lane whereas I am in the right lane. Their truck turns left into a place I know, a cheap hotel where a local homeless agency occasionally rents by-the-week hotel rooms for homeless families. I go straight, now knowing why the young girl had such a joyless air about her.

Just another day in the Silicon Valley -- the richest area of the richest nation on the planet Earth. Just another day.

-- Badtux the Observant Penguin

Next right-wing target: Public libraries

Fox News proposes eliminating Chicago's public libraries. Because libraries are socialism. As are police forces, fire departments, interstate highways, post offices, and all those other things that our founding fathers supported and, in some cases, wrote directly into the Constitution (like post offices and interstate highways, which they called "post roads").

OMG... that means our founding fathers were.... (gasp).... SOCIALISTS! But I forget, that's those stupid liberal FACT thingies from those notoriously liberal TEXTBOOKS or from the actual text of the Constitution. It wasn't said by Rush Limpdick or Glenn BatshitCrazy Beck, so clearly it can't be true... clearly those wiley lie-berals have tampered with the text of the Constitution that's in our textbooks!

Remember, boys and girls, if you aren't stupid and ignorant, if you dare darken the doors of one of them thare libary places and, like, learn them un-American fact thingies, why... you aren't a REAL American. Yessiree, ignorant is the only American way to be, you don't wanna be one of them, like, fact-spewin' EGGHEDS, do ya?!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Unintentionally hilarious headlines

I'm a member of my local FreeCycle group where we recycle each other's unwanted items to keep them out of the landfill. For example, I got a bedroom bureau/drawers with a broken leg, and turned it into tool storage in my garage by taking my circular saw and chopping off the other three legs (bwahhahaha!). Their software has an interesting trait: It chops off subject lines at a given number of characters. Leading to this subject line:

[SantaClaraFreecycle] OFFER: Microwaves, moving, children

Yeah, I think my Mom felt that way sometimes when my brother and I were growing up. Especially the day we burned down half the backyard and almost got the garage while testing our campfire-building skills, heh!

-- Badtux the Easily Amused Penguin

Let them eat dumpster scraps

Marie Antoinette: "Let them eat cake"(*)
Rush Limbaugh: Let them eat dumpster scraps.

That's Rush Limbaugh's child nutrition program for poor kids. No, I'm not joking. Really. Not joking.

It's clear Rush hasn't studied history, because if he had, well, he would have remembered what happened to Marie Antoinette. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Neck-measurin' Penguin

* Marie Antoinette never said that. That's right, the cake is a lie. But it was certainly well within her mentality, she said plenty of other things over her short life that were similar in nature.

There is *NO* excuse

A U.S. school for the disabled tortures its students with electroshock and long-term restraint.

As someone who once worked as a teacher in a center for BD children, I am appalled. We had some seriously ill children in our care, but we never -- *ever* -- resorted to anything like this. The most we ever did was restrain a child who was physically out of control in a non-painful and temporary manner, then escort him to a safe place like an administrator's office where he could reflect on the fact that his classmates were having a fun time up in the classroom. Because that's how we controlled the kids -- by making sure they had a good time as long as they behaved appropriately, making sure they knew at all times what appropriate behavior was expected of them, what good things would happen if they displayed appropriate behavior, and what the consequences would be if they did not behave (generally loss of privileges such as not being able to play with the toys after finishing their work to acceptable standards).

Granted, I was lucky enough to be working with verbal children. But even with non-verbal autistic children engaging in self-mutilation activities that you must stop for the safety of the child, only temporary short-term use could be justified in response to that one specific behavior that is a danger to that child -- *not* as a blanket "punish the kid whenever he doesn't do what I want" measure.

Positive reinforcement *works*. All that punishment like electric shock does is make sadists chortle with glee, and teach children to be fearful, resentful, and avoidant. It doesn't teach children appropriate behavior, and it doesn't make children want to display appropriate behavior, all it teaches children is that adults are sadists. As someone who has worked in that environment, I can say explicitly that there is nothing -- *NOTHING* -- that can justify what the Judge Rotenberg Center for the Disabled has done. My suspicion is that they started out using electroshock for the case that I mention in the previous paragraph. But it is clear that once they used it for that specific case, the ease of use -- and the glee that sadists feel at torturing children -- have led to a situation that is, bluntly, inexcusable torture.

- Badtux the Former Special Ed Teacher Penguin

Teabuggery

I've been pestering the conservative Twitterati ranting about Socialism and how it means the end of Freedom(tm) for exactly what freedoms we have that the socialist Swedes don't have. First, they say "well, socialism is the first step to Communism!" and I say "but Sweden has been socialist for over sixty years now. When do they go Communist?" Then they sort of stammer and stutter and go away. Except finally, finally one of the teabaggers came up with a freedom American parents have that Swedish parents don't have: The freedom to place their hand firmly on their child's firm, nubile young buttocks, in a most loving manner of course, to provide parently discipline to the disobedient little shit. Sort of like with the bondage lesbian night club that the GOP took their Young Republican donors to, except kinkier because the little darlings are actually related to you, but hey, Freedom(tm)!

Of course, Swedes might retort that Swedish children have a freedom that American children don't have -- the freedom to grow up without having the shit beat out of them by repressed pedophiles pretending that their "discipline" has nothing to do with sexual urgings on their part. Oh those firm, nubile young buttocks, so enticing... the child made him do it by being a naughty little boy, don't you see? Nothing to do with sexual urgings! Yay, Freedom(tm)!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Bringing Freedom!(tm) to the Internets for over six straight years and 4,000+ posts now!

Update: So now we know what the Pope and teabaggers have in common... a liking for touching the buttocks of children. Whoa!

Update#2: This post did not, did not I repeat, have anything to do with the Lucinda Williams video below it, which was queued up over two weeks ago. Still, the subject matter of both is eerily similar...

Are any RWNJ's *not* kiddie fuckers?

For real. Right wing nut job and Tea Partier Charles Dyer, aka "July4Patriot," arrested for raping a kid.

Most right-wingers love to fuck kids over, but usually just figuratively, not *literally*. As in, cutting off children's health care, fostering policies that lead to child hunger, underfunding schools, so on and so forth. But, as David Neiwert points out, there's an inordinate number of RWNJ's who really *ARE* kiddie fuckers, literally. As he explains: "Evidently, being a pedophile leads to resentment of the government -- probably for its desire to lock you away."

And these are the leaders of the "Tea Party" movement? Good job of being classy buddying up to these kinda folks, Republicans!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

How to create a Charlie Manson

1. Take a troubled 10 year old kid
2. Put him in juvenile jail for years with older kids who sodomize him and brutalize him.
3. Success!

Well, if that's what you're trying to do, it's success anyhow... and we're doing it again. Because, apparently, giving a youngster the help he needs -- or at least an appropriate environment to protect society from him -- is just too much trouble. I'd do something but, hey, look, I can't be bothered with that, American Idle is on! And what about that Susan Boyle, eh? A penguin has to have his priorities straight!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Anti-tax rhetoric fail

"Government should live within its means!"

Well, yes. But there's two ways to do this -- reducing expenses, and increasing income.

In the early 1970's, the economy in the town we lived in took a dive. Major industries left and were not replaced. When one major employer near my father's shop left, he lost over 200 customers. Our family economized as much as possible, but we weren't exactly living a lavish lifestyle to begin with -- our television, for example, was a 19" black-and-white hand-me-down from our grandparents -- so it wasn't as if there was a whole lot that could be cut without cutting into basic services such as food, clothing, water, and electricity.

So, here's the deal: Did he say, "oops, we only have enough money to buy food for two people, you kids are on your own, go scrounge some food out of garbage dumpsters"? Did he say, "oops, we don't have enough money for electricity and water and sewer, you kids are going to just have to freeze in the dark and go to the neighbor's to get water, and take baths while shivering in water hauled from the neighbor's outside faucet in buckets"? Uhm, no. He went out and got more income so we could continue eating. He spent a few dollars on advertising, but when that didn't bring in enough money, he took on a second job -- he increased his income. He might have been tired after he got home late at night from his second job, but we had food and water and electricity.

The notion that he should have just said, "oh well, we only have enough food for four days a week? Guess we'll just starve three days" would have had him slapping you upside the face (he was a fiery little Cajun dude and had a temper), because failing to provide for his family's basic needs that way would have offended him on a fundamental basis. Yet the anti-tax cretins regularly use the same rhetoric to justify government cutting basic services... "government must live within its means!" Well yeah, you cut what you can, but when you're down to the fundamentals of what government is supposed to be doing -- things like transportation, public safety, etc. -- there comes a time when you have to say, "f**k it, it's time to dig in and take a second job to increase our income." Whether a family has 4 people in it like ours did growing up, or 36,000,000 people in it like the State of California, the point remains the same -- when times are hard, you not only cut your expenses as far as possible, but you also increase your income as much as is necessary to keep the lights on and food in your children's mouths and pay for health insurance for your children. It's called, like, manning up. Duh. Not that the tighty righties who shit their pants over the notion of mean darkies would know what being a man is all about anyhow, they're too busy cringing in terror of anybody who's a different color from them to know what being a man is all about...

-- Badtux the Budget Penguin

The pernicious power of teacher's unions

These dastardly spawns of Satan, research has found, decrease student performance terribly... in the non-unionized schools of "Right to Work" states. To summarize the research studies on the performance of children in unionized vs. non-unionized schools:

1. higher math and verbal standardized test scores in unionized schools,
2. bulk of the evidence points toward higher graduation rates from unionized schools,
3. solid track record of supporting policies that boost achievement for most students based on empirical measurements

Since obviously teacher's unions can't be responsible for these facts about unionized schools, it's clear that the real impact of teachers unions must be in depressing the performance of students in the non-unionized schools of "Right to Work" states where teachers' unions in the traditional sense of the word are illegal. Yes, that's right -- teacher unions not only aren't content with ruining the educational system in unionized states, they ruin the educational system in non-unionized states even more!

Wow. I didn't know teacher's unions were so dadburned powerful. Why, next thing you know, we'll find out that they're responsible for global warming, genital herpes, and the former Presidency of George W. Bush too!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin