Every year teachers all over the US rehearse with their classes what they must do if someone decides to shoot up the school. The whole country has to bend around to accommodate the profits of arms dealers and “freedom feelings” a small number of people ascribe to having no effective tracking and licensing of deadly weapons.

When checking, none of them are in “sight lines” of the windows or doors? I have never felt less free.

I'm showing fifth graders how to sew a book which we will fill with codes and encryption puzzles. They can all count in binary and came in very excited to learn since they heard about it from the older students last year.

I get paid for this.

Normal people don't know who Charlie Kirk is. My mom, dad, husband, neighbor are very confused why it's such a big deal.

Which is good to remember. He's never done anything notable. Didn't run for office, didn't break a big story, didn't write an important book.

So, for a lot of people this is all very confusing.

...
...

So.

Is he going to send the National Guard to Utah now?

Concept: graffiti that when treated for removal creates a new image or message that is a comment on the removal.

or graffiti that is subtle... until you attempt to remove it.

Is anyone in #Nepal They are reporting that the protests are about "facebook being banned" in the US. Is that what it's really about?

@GottaLaff

I need to take a break from this story for a while.

Every now and then it comes into sharp focus in a very unpleasant way. This went on for decades and the men involved didn't care about those girls at all.

They mentioned congress has the WHOLE book.

It all needs to be released.

(Others in the book have admitted their letters are real and explained "why" they wrote them. Only one person says it's fake.)

Thinking about how the human staff of any organization is an extension of their presence in the world. Consider 100 employees, reasonably happy with their job. That's 100 people who will notice things that might hurt the company, organically promote it's reach, come up with new ideas for future projects.

When some of the staff like their jobs less because you treat them poorly that shrinks. When you contract the work out? it shrinks more. When you replace them with AI it becomes a pinpoint.

One of the victims mentioned that one of the ways Maxwell would control them was by threatening to tell their parents what they were doing.

And being a kid this child thought "I don't want to get in trouble" and kept the secret.

That's what we are dealing with.

Imagine being a grown gnarled man who owns fancy homes and cars and never worries about money and looking at the blinking sparking gifs on a child's old mySpace page. Looking at a photo where she has a red solo cup in her hand and she's having fun and thinking "got her! this will ruin her."

I mean... he probably had legal staff to do that but still. Dude was "but what was she WEARING?" children.

Alan Dershowitz came down from Boston and combed through these teens mySpace pages and talked to their friends. Dershowitz was looking for photos of the children partying or doing anything to make them seem like imperfect victims. He was gearing up to smear these teens to protect Epstein. Make them out to be prostitutes, or "loose" -- this never happened because the charges were magically dropped.

Think about that, their *mySpace* pages.

One of the things we *know* the DOJ has in the Epstein files are interviews with the children he victimized in Florida.

Interviews taken with girls as young as 14. (It's different when you see the victims as adults talking about something that happened years ago. I can understand why "some people" might want to keep those interviews hidden.)

Here is an interview with their lawyer. It's a bit graphic. But whose fault is that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq5uHbAFOh8

@claralistensprechen5th

I mean, sometimes I don't want to just ignore and block because every now and then someone will tell me "there's no racism on the fediverse" and well it's not true.

However it's generally very effective to just ignore and block and or mute.

@Grumbleshroom

I hope someday you can look back on how you spent your time on a nice Saturday (trying to be a jackass on the internet) and you can have the maturity and perspective to feel regret about not doing something better with this limited time we each have on this earth. You could be learning about nature! Studying math! Calling a friend! Falling in love! Writing a book!

But instead you did this.

I want that kind of growth for you. This is really pathetic.

The bitter irony of the "family is being destroyed" crowd destroying families by trying to ban gay marriage, scapegoating and persecuting trans people, deporting parts of perfectly happy families over minor paperwork errors or nothing...

I almost don't like to point out hypocrisy any more because to do so implies some set of shared vales and a capacity for caring that simply isn't there.

But I am very upset about all of these "attacks on the family" and how "the family is being destroyed"

I wonder, if like crime, if you asked people if divorce is a big problem if people would still overestimate it?

The fall in the divorce rate presents a problem for conservatives who want to talk about how "the family is being destroyed" (which family? how?)

But I wonder if people still think that a large number of marriages are ending in divorce.

All through the 80s and early 90s the news was dominated by stories about the "divorce epidemic" and "single moms" also "latch-key kids"

Then something shifted and I think people are less likely to get married due to outside pressure and social expectations, and more likely to do it because they just really like being married. (That's why I did it. 10/10 best choice ever.)

In fact the "young people are having less sex" stat is normally reported alongside similar stats showing smoking tobacco and drinking are less popular.

I've only once seen it alongside the marriage stat... which is odd isn't it? At least if you were expecting reporting to reflect "traditional values."

I also suspect some young people aren't dating or getting married or even going on vacation or having a drink ... because they are BROKE and working their fingers to the bone to survive.

This is a question for the younger adults. Those in your 20s and 30s. There have been a few surveys and articles about how "young people are having less sex" and "young people aren't getting married"

And then some people will say there is a "loneliness epidemic"

How real is this? Are these things even connected?

There are fewer marriages but also far fewer divorces which, to me, kind of sounds like a good thing?

But I rarely hear about the low divorce rate in this context.

Writing up the report in my new job as head of labor statistics in the USA, then adding 1 to the job loss number just before I turn it in because I know how it's gonna go for me.