5/10/21: Remember when President Trump used to tell everyone that climate
change was bogus, and ill-informed individuals believed him?
Melting
glaciers in the Italian Alps have now revealed long hidden front line positions and buildings from World War I. The
good news: historians have compared it to finding “a time machine.” Cups, letters, old tin cans, ammunition boxes, a
perfectly preserved lantern and even weapons have been found. The bad news? More proof
that climate change is threatening the globe. First, nearly a century of snow
and ice built up at more than 10,000 feet above sea level, burying everything. Rising
temperatures in recent years have uncovered the site.
For
more evidence that the globe is warming, feel free to read about various finds of wooly mammoth remains, as bodies frozen for
up to 50,000 years are revealed. The permafrost layers in large parts of
Siberia are thawing – after 50,000 f**king years!
Good
news for archaeologists. Bad news for humanity.
Unless you are a wooly mammoth
fan.
*
The commies come for the
children.
Meanwhile, we know that the folks at Fox News are furious, after a copy of a book written by Kamala Harris, Superheroes are
Everywhere, is seen on a bunk at a facility where unaccompanied migrant
children are housed. The people of Long Beach, California had organized a
toy-and-book drive.
Now the
most obnoxious voices on the right were raised in anger. Clearly, the plot was
to put one of Harris’ books in the hands of every child. Then, President Biden
would force American families to have access to affordable daycare – and we’d
all end up living in a red, white and blue version of the Soviet Union!
As Amy
Davidson Sorkin explained in The New Yorker:
Someone donated a copy
of Harris’s book, and a journalist touring the facility saw it on a cot and
took a picture of it. Partisan mayhem ensued, with headlines in the New
York Post and on Fox News and complaints from sundry
Republicans about an imaginary scheme to put a copy in a “welcome kit” for
every immigrant, as if it were the Little Red Book, or an enrollment brochure
for the Democratic Party. “Was Harris paid for these books? Is she profiting
from Biden’s border crisis?” Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican
National Committee, asked on Twitter.
Sorkin warned that the “child wars” were likely to grow in
intensity:
Biden’s proposals
include one that would make pre-kindergarten programs for three- and
four-year-olds universally available. “You know who else liked universal day
care,” Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted, before the speech was over. She linked
to a Times story from 1974 about state-run nurseries in what
was then the Soviet Union. Of course, our Western European NATO allies
tend to like universal pre-K, too, and, in any event, nobody would force
parents here to take advantage of the option. The question is not whether
people will be allowed to raise their children as they wish, rather than
handing them over to the commissars, but whether the U.S. will invest in
children in the same way that other wealthy countries have.
According to The New Yorker, “One in every six
children lives below the federal poverty level, which is an income of $27,501
for a family of four. For Black children, the rate is thirty per cent; for
Latinx children, twenty-four per cent, according to the Children’s Defense
Fund.”
Sorkin explains the political games being played, with the
littlest Americans caught in the middle:
Children in this country
are, in many respects, the focal point in a nexus of poverty. A lack of
affordable, high-quality day care keeps women out of the workforce, and many
people in the child-care field are also low-wage earners. The Biden plan would
insure a fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage for employees of the pre-K
programs it envisions. Those programs would be developed in partnership with
the states, a detail that does not jibe with Blackburn’s fears or with House
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s warning, after the speech, that Biden “wants
to control your life.” (McCarthy continued, “He’s going to control how much
meat you can eat”—a reference to an invented claim that Biden will limit
Americans to one hamburger a month.) Similarly, Senator Tim Scott, in the
official Republican response to the address, complained that Biden wanted to
“put Washington even more in the middle of your life—from the cradle to
college.”
UPDATE (11/16/25): As we now know the plans to improve day care, to pay day
care workers better wages, the nation went nowhere. Or, with Donald Trump back
in power you know we’re going backwards.
More
tax cuts for billionaires! What parents would ever want affordable day care for
their children?
x’s 2.
