Incompetence

Via Fake Posters.

This is rich:

The Trump administration says it would require extraordinary effort to reunite what may be thousands of migrant children who have been separated from their parents and, even if it could, the children would likely be emotionally harmed.

Jonathan White, who leads the Health and Human Services Department’s efforts to reunite migrant children with their parents, said removing children from “sponsor” homes to rejoin their parents “would present grave child welfare concerns.” He said the government should focus on reuniting children currently in its custody, not those who have already been released to sponsors.

The government's incompetence in the carrying out of their own stupid, cruel, and illegal policy has led to their being unable to rectify it for at least 2,737 children; they don't know which kids belong to which adults: Jallyn Sualog, deputy director of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, told the court in response to an ACLU suit, it's not "within the realm of the possible," and besides please give us more money:

“Even if performing the analysis Plaintiffs seek were within the realm of the possible, it would substantially imperil ORR’s ability to perform its core functions without significant increases in appropriations from Congress, and a rapid, dramatic expansion of the ORR data team.”

Now this Jonathan White, Executive Director, HHS/ASPR National Advisory Committees, is trying to suggest it's for the kids' own good. I don't think so.

Also, how many separated children that White wants his department to "focus on" are still in ORR custody since the court order of LAST JUNE required the agency to reunite them? In October, according to GAO, there were 437. WHY WOULD THERE BE ANY AT ALL?

Now we know those numbers were fraudulent; the administration began separating children from families almost a year before Sessions announced the policy in June 2018, and the GAO is unable to tell us how many children were separated altogether, but it could be thousands more than we were originally told. Don't you want to focus on finding the information you falsely claimed to have last fall before you start explaining which kids you're going to take care of as the law requires and which ones you're going to abandon?

We don't have to prosecute them/but then we're not prosecuting them

Francisco de Goya, St. Peter Repentant, 1823-25. Via Wikipedia.

The truest Trump is perhaps the one who's spare and blank and at the same time musically repetitive, like the Eliot of "Ash Wednesday" ("Because I know that time is always time/ And place is always and only place/And what is actual is actual only for one time/ And only for one place...")—in this case literally true, because, speaking to the National Federation of Independent Businesses on their 75th anniversary, uncharacteristically using fairly elaborate notes but no prepared text, he found himself hovering around, if not quite landing on, a helipad of contrition:

Confessional

by Donald J. Trump

I

We have one chance
to get it right.
We might as well
get it right or let's
just keep it going but
let’s do it right.

II

We have a chance. We want to solve
this problem. We want to solve
family separation. I don’t want
children taken away from parents
and when you prosecute the parents
for coming in illegally, which should happen,
you have to take the children away.

III

Now, we don’t have to prosecute them
but then we’re not prosecuting them
for coming in illegally. That’s not good.

It's the acknowledgment that this crisis of concentration camps for children is of his own making: he did it, personally, voluntarily, in some kind of knowledge of what the consequences were going to be. "We don't have to" but it "should happen" (dodging the responsibility with the impersonal verb).

And then what do you know? After contrition comes atonement, and lo and behold!

Important: Missing Children Announcement

William Blake, "The Little Boy Lost"

They aren't missing. That's the announcement. This is one of those awful things floating around the Internet spreading rage and distress in its wake that just isn't true. It is not the case that the government has lost 1,475 children.

Now that we’re all on twitter because of this game, I am making a public service announcement: PLEASE STOP SHARING THAT STORY ABOUT 1500 KIDS MISSING. The outrage I’ve seen is a result of a total misinterpretation and could SERIOUSLY threaten the children you want to save.

— josie duffy rice (@jduffyrice) May 28, 2018

The story is, rather, that on 26 April 2018 Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary of the HHS Administration for Children and Families (and you can see by the "acting" that it's another job Trump hasn't managed to fill, so this is a professional you can trust) was testifying to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, on Office of Refugee Responsibility care and placement of "unaccompanied alien children" (UAC), that is children who surrendered to immigration authorities at the border when they were unaccompanied by their parents or adult family members (so the government did not separate them from their families; these children, in contrast to the ones violently mistreated by the new Jeff Sessions policy, were already separated when they got here).

For the Record: It's the RPM, Stupid.

Three rounds per minute and sometimes you still needed a sword. Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe, via WhiteRoseWritings.

Over 30 shots, 17 lethal, in under 5 minutes.

AR-15 firing rate cited as between 45 and 700 rounds per minute.

Thompson submachine gun, 600-1500 rpm, banned successfully 1934.

2nd Amendment written before invention of Baker rifle, 2-3 rpm.

Has something to do with guns.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

The Las Vegas shooter used a bump stock to achieve 9 rps (540 rpm).

The Orlando shooter reached 2.66 rps/160 rpm.

Ban on Tommy gun didn't stop gang killings, but made them far less lethal. Banning semi-automatics would save lives.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

Not a majority of lives lost to guns, which are mostly suicide and spouse/partner murder. Just a few. But these include concertgoers in Las Vegas, clubbers in Orlando, children slaughtered in Columbine, Newtown, Va Tech, now Broward County. How do you have a problem with this?

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

Trouble in Mind

Revised and Updated

Senator Hatch "has a rough time" with renewing the Children's Health Insurance Program.

.@SenOrrinHatch on CHIP: “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves – won’t lift a finger – and expect the federal government to do everything.”

Unbelievable. https://t.co/4VHROvIL8X

— Jenny Wilson for UT (@JennyWilsonUT) December 2, 2017

About $14 billion a year, and it's true small kids are shamefully slow on paying their medical bills like "I think Daddy takes care of it right?"

Everybody—starting with Joe Scarborough!—took this a little bit out of context, I'm sorry to say. What Hatch said, as reported in The Guardian, is this:

Why does David Brooks hate children?

Screen capture via WNEP, Moosic, PA.

It's getting so bad even former New York Times columnist David Brooks, freshly back from his honeymoon, is coming up with instant hot takes ("When the World is Led by a Child"):

At certain times Donald Trump has seemed like a budding authoritarian, a corrupt Nixon, a rabble-rousing populist or a big business corporatist.

But as Trump has settled into his White House role, he has given a series of long interviews, and when you study the transcripts it becomes clear that fundamentally he is none of these things.

At base, Trump is an infantalist.

Heh. He's an enumeration or compilation of a set of, or of items pertaining to, the daughters of Portuguese kings?

No, this is just a case of a little-known phenomenon, that it's possible to spell a word wrong even if you just made it up. He should have written "infantilist", meaning a person who advocates being infantile.

Annals of Derp: Why Conservatives Can't Read

Basically, because they don't want to. You could get all stuffed up with information, and it might contradict your assumptions. Have some, if you must, but responsibly, and always leave a few paragraphs on your plate.

Photo by Mark Bonifacio/New York Daily News.

What's up in the world of universal pre-K, Callie Gable for National Review?

It helped get progressive stalwart Bill de Blasio elected mayor of New York, and it resurfaces again and again in speeches by both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, but the Left’s dream of publicly funded child care is suddenly getting pushback from an unlikely source: Jonathan Gruber, the liberal economist who helped design Obamacare.

Is that right?

Um, no, it's not. In the sense that Jon Gruber did not help design the Affordable Care Act (he did play a noteworthy role in the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law, from which the ACA borrowed a number of important elements, but was only an outside consultant on limited aspects of the latter), and that the study we're talking about today, "Non-Cognitive Deficits and Young Adult Outcomes: The Long-Run Impacts of a Universal Child Care Program" (NBER Working Paper 21571, September 2015) had three authors, Michael Baker of U. Toronto, Jonathan Gruber of MIT, and Kevin Milligan of UBC, working for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and far from unlikely or sudden, it is a followup study to one the three published seven years ago, “Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being,” Journal of Political Economy 116 (4), 2008.

Cheap shot: Cokie

Via Holly Daze.

But my earliest memory of the Capitol, I mean firm memory, was Opening Day. And I love Opening Day. I still love Opening Day. There are all these little kids on the floor in their Christmas velvets. (Cokie Roberts, in an interview for the Oral History of the House project, August 28 2007) 

She used virtually the same words on the radio this morning, eight years later. It is clear that representatives' children indeed show up for Opening Day and hang out in the Well, but I cannot find any other reference to congressional "Christmas velvets" on the Web. Nor does it seem like a description borne out by the physical evidence:

Sunday morning getting down

Digby Village Hall, North Kerstevens, Lincolnshire.

Cokie Roberts came up with something. No, really, on a subject she is no doubt passionately interested in, that of who gets invited to Sunday morning talk shows, in the context of Marco Rubio's unprecedented feat yesterday of appearing on seven different programs, which has obviously set certain pulses racing: Chris Cilizza, of the Washington Post's The Fix (Is In) with a video mashup, Adam Clark Estes of The Atlantic Wire ("basically every Sunday morning talk show known to man") , and so on.

We-all on the Upper Left Side have our own ways of discussing the phenomenon, based on the well-respected though unproven hypothesis that the Sunday talk [jump]

Who could have suspected?

Dave Morris's Frankenstein app, via The Guardian.

Mr. Bill Gates in the Washington Post!!!

Efforts are being made to define effective teaching and give teachers the support they need to be as effective as possible. But as states and districts rush to implement new teacher development and evaluation systems, there is a risk they’ll use hastily contrived, unproven measures. One glaring example is the rush to develop new assessments in grades and subjects not currently covered by state tests. Some states and districts are talking about developing tests for all subjects, including choir and gym, just so they have something to measure.

In one Midwestern state, for example, a 166-page Physical Education Evaluation Instrument holds teachers accountable for ensuring that students meet state-defined targets for physical education, such as consistently demonstrating “correct skipping technique with a smooth and effortless rhythm” and “strike consistently a ball with a paddle to a target area with accuracy and good technique.” I’m not making this up!

This is one reason there is a backlash against standardized tests — in particular, using student test scores as the primary basis for making decisions about firing, promoting and compensating teachers. I’m all for accountability, but I understand teachers’ concerns and frustrations.

Well, I have to say this makes me feel a lot better, about humanity in general and about Barack Obama in particular. Neither Obama nor Gates is a vile union-hating blood-sucking thug with a secret plan to turn America's public-school children into soulless factory robots. Au contraire! If their ideas about educational reform (not to be confused with rephorm) could be implemented, it might well be an on-the-whole okay thing.

But will somebody kindly tell me how the blessed fuck such smart guys have managed to be so blindingly stupid? Will you please explain to me how they have gotten themselves associated with plans that are clearly designed to turn America's public-school children into soulless factory robots? Can you give me one good reason why they should be working with fools, liars, and incompetents like Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and Thomas P. Friedman (better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Schnurrbart des Ewig-Daseins), while ignoring Diane Ravitch as a Dirty Fucking Hippy? Just asking.

From Charfade at DeviantArt.

In other news, Dr. Victor Frankenstein published an op-ed piece in the Geneva Villager:

Horace-Bénédict de Saussure may be the best mountain climber in town, but you'd hardly guess that from watching him tooling his way up Mont Blanc: he seems totally distracted, stopping every two or three minutes to examine a bug or a striation in the rock. If you were scouting for mountain climbers, he'd be your last choice, alongside Ferdinand the Bull. But you'd be making a mistake.

Just as today's sports coaches have recognized that supreme athletic ability is a highly complex phenomenon and developed whole batteries of tests to help them identify promising young talents, so have biologists in nearby Germany come to understand the complexity of life itself—pretty deft segue, huh?—, and learned how to take a Raggedy Ann or Andy of scavenged corpse parts and literally reanimate it through the miracle of electromagnetism, turning it into a living, breathing Creature, capable of reason, passion, and reverence for its Creator (that would be yours truly).

But you can't just turn such a thing on and then duck out the lab window and take off for Geneva, marry your fiancée, and forget the whole thing. A Creature is a big responsibility, capable of great goodness and great harm. You have to take care of it in a holistic way, feeding and clothing it, showing it affection, cultivating its strength and grace as well as its intellect, artistic sensibilities, and emotions. You have to—Aargh, I hear its fiendish footsteps! Tell Elisabeth I may be late for dinner!