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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • As a person who participated as a parent in the foster system in Texas, I’m here to say that its about as abusive and dysfunctional as you could possibly imagine. Kids get shuttled between foster homes at the whim of state administrators. The entire focus of the program is to minimize how much they spend. The well-being of the children is an absolute afterthought. You can and will be sued by the agency if you voice any kind of complaint or try to act in the best interest of the child in your care. And even in the middle of said lawsuit, they’ll try to assign you another kid, because their left-hand doesn’t know what their right-hand is doing.

    Its a physical, financial, and emotional pain machine for everyone involved. Absolutely nightmarish.

    On the other hand, you have “domestic adoption” which amounts to a bunch of expensive private agencies doing all the things CPS is supposed to be doing while CPS officials provide a rubber stamp. Significantly less traumatic for the people involved. But because the private system is entirely funded by the adoptive parents, you’re talking about spending $50-80k to cover the budgets of all these little independent agencies tasked with finding candidates, vetting households, and caring for expectant mothers.

    The Texas model for adoption is the closest thing you can image to a full privatization of social services. It exists by, of, and for upper class predominantly white childless adults. I feel slimy every time I have to interact with it, and the only thing that keeps me going is the idea that I might be keeping some innocent kid out of the clutches of the disastrous public system.





  • Surely there’s one better young person in the USA ?

    None of them ran. Biden’s admin and his fund raising base held enormous sway over the party at-large. As soon as he corralled the support of this tiny monied elite, everyone else had to either get in line or get marked as party pariahs and ousted for their disloyalty.

    The pastiche of democracy is predicated on a primary system that can produce and sustain rival candidates. But when leadership in the party are terrified of “Russian bots” and “Leftist Antifa Agitators” undermining the general election, they circle the wagons around their incumbents and bow down to their mega-donors out of cowardice.

    No rival candidates means no real primary means no one actually challenges Biden on his merits.






  • BIDEN: Fentanyl and the byproducts of fentanyl went down for a while. And I wanted to make sure we use the machinery that can detect fentanyl, these big machines that roll over everything that comes across the border, and it costs a lot of money. That was part of this deal we put together, this bipartisan deal.

    More fentanyl machines, were able to detect drugs, more numbers of agents, more numbers of all the people at the border. And when we had that deal done, he went – he called his Republican colleagues said don’t do it. It’s going to hurt me politically.

    He never argued it’s not a good bill. It’s a really good bill. We need those machines. We need those machines. And we’re coming down very hard in every country in Asia in terms of precursors for fentanyl. And Mexico is working with us to make sure they don’t have the technology to be able to put it together. That’s what we have to do. We need those machines.




  • His next words after “I don’t want to put you in jail” were “…but I will if you continue to jeopardize the judicial process.”

    After the tenth contempt citation.

    Most people think he’s going to walk on the basis that he has no prior criminal convictions and that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee, but there’s also the fact that he’s shown no remorse for his crimes even after the verdict and that allowing him to escape a prison term with a slap on the wrist house arrest or a fine will not realistically deter him or others from committing the same crime.

    I doubt he’ll make this particular mistake another time, mostly because he’s got too much media scrutiny to still run around with high end call girls.

    But when it comes to the actual governance? He’s not going to get punished for that.

    I’d say it’s still a good possibility that he sees jail

    I would not put any amount of money on it.

    The real kicker is his next conviction will mean he has to contend with a criminal history

    All the rest of the cases are either dropped or delayed until after the election. Either way, there’s not going to be a “next conviction” before it no longer matters.