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SeaConquest

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Everything posted by SeaConquest

  1. All I see when I log into AP Classroom are these videos, but I don't know how to access the personal progress check and question bank that they refer to:
  2. No. I'm not a teacher. He originally got access to the BC class stuff through OHS, but he ended up taking AoPS instead. I can see the AP review videos, but am not sure if we have access to anything else on the AP site.
  3. Sacha is taking the BC test in May and I am panicking with you. OHS chem has taken over our lives, so he is still working through the material from his AoPS class (that finished a month ago). He's watching the AP review videos, but I was thinking about having him use UWorld's question bank (not sure if it's better to finish his AoPS coursework -- he has an extension until June -- or specific test prep, at this point?). Has anyone used UWorld? The APStudents subreddit seems to like it. Is AoPS enough exam prep?
  4. I am so terribly sorry that you are dealing with this. I am facing similar circumstances and can only share how we are currently muddling through it. My only sibling is a 46 year old, single mother to two young children (9 and 12; the father left my sister for another woman when she was pregnant with #2) with stage 4 breast cancer that has metastasized to her bones and brain. (She was on estrogen suppression for her ER+ cancer, which was in remission after a double mastectomy and lymph node removal, and was supposed to take meds for 5-10 yrs. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, nobody at Kaiser -- or her idiot big sister, who is a nurse -- noticed that my sister had stopped the estrogen suppression. She has mental health challenges and didn't understand that stopping the meds could cause the cancer to return). She lives in the Bay area and has no family around (I live in San Diego). My parents and I have been taking turns flying there and caring for her. I leave on Sunday to go back up for two weeks. We have no idea how much time she has, but it may be months vs years. My DS1 is starting high school in the fall and my younger DS will be in 4th. I am trying to keep their lives as normal as possible, save for mama having to leave for a few weeks at a time. We have planned 4 vacations this year, and have no idea if we will be able to go on any of them. But, we are still trying to power through our normal life as much as possible. I sometimes think about taking my boys with me (to get as much time with their aunt as possible), but especially after all the time they lost during the pandemic, I am trying to shield them from further disruption of their new normal. I don't know if I will be successful., or even if it is the "right" thing to do, but there it is. Again, I am so very sorry that you are facing these decisions. Sending you much love and prayers of peace for your family.
  5. I also think the "forgotten" is to query whether they have truly been forgotten or failed to evolve and were left behind. It can be interpreted in many ways, I think, depending on one's POV. It's a really great question!
  6. It's a failure to merely make it to retirement age, given how much money we spend on healthcare in the US. We should have better outcomes, which is the failure. I think the second quote is responding to the notion that middle-aged, non-college educated, white men, as a demographic, have somehow been "forgotten" (when, IMO, they remain a very powerful political demographic that continues to drive policy debates). ETA: this "forgotten" demographic is purportedly driving the deaths of despair -- but perhaps not the primary driver of our decline in longevity overall. Anyway, my interpretation.
  7. Did anyone else see that 3 TN legislators are about to be removed from office for protesting gun violence? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/us/tennessee-house-democrats-expulsion-shooting-gun-control.html
  8. I no longer see the politics forum, so I am unsure if this has been discussed already or if this violates board rules. But, did anyone see this piece in the NYT today? These stats are insane. It’s Not ‘Deaths of Despair.’ It’s Deaths of Children. April 6, 2023, 7:15 a.m. ET By David Wallace-Wells How long a person can expect to live is one of the most fundamentally revealing facts about a country, and here, in the richest country in the world, the answer is not just bleak but increasingly so. Americans are now dying younger on average than they used to, breaking from all global and historical patterns of predictable improvement. They are dying younger than in any peer countries, even accounting for the larger impact of the pandemic here. They are dying younger than in China, Cuba, the Czech Republic or Lebanon. You may think this problem is a matter of 70-year-olds who won’t live to see 80 or perhaps about the so-called deaths of despair among white middle-aged men. These were the predominant explanations five years ago, after the country’s longevity statistics first flatlined and then took a turn for the worse — alone among wealthy nations in the modern history of the world. But increasingly the American mortality anomaly, which is still growing, is explained not by the middle-aged or elderly but by the deaths of children and teenagers. One in 25 American 5-year-olds now won’t live to see 40, a death rate about four times as high as in other wealthy nations. And although the spike in death rates among the young has been dramatic since the beginning of the pandemic, little of the impact is from Covid-19. Over three pandemic years, Covid-19 was responsible for just 2 percent of American pediatric and juvenile deaths. Firearms account for almost half of the increase. Homicide accounted for 6.9 percent of deaths among that group, defined as those 19 years old or younger, and suicide accounted for 6.8 percent, according to a January analysis published in JAMA Network Open. Car crashes and accidental drug overdoses — which the National Center for Health Statistics collates along with other accidental deaths as “unintentional injuries” — accounted for 18.4 percent. In 2021, according to a JAMA essay published in March, more than twice as many kids died from poisoning, including drug overdoses, as from Covid-19. More than three times as many died of suicide, more than four times as many died from homicide, and more than five times as many died in car crashes and other transportation accidents (which began increasing during the pandemic after a long, steady decline). Last week, the former Treasury secretary Larry Summers called the deepening life expectancy crisis, documented in recent surveys and studies, “the most disturbing set of data on America that I have encountered in a long time” and “especially scary remembering that demographics were the best early warning on the collapse of the U.S.S.R.” In many ways this feels like hyperbole. And yet, by the most fundamental measures of human flourishing, the United States is moving not forward but backward, at unprecedented speed, and now the country’s catastrophic mortality anomaly has spread to its children. The new life expectancy studies pick up the thread of work by Anne Case and the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, economists who, beginning in 2015, suggested that a broad social malady was visible in the growing mortality rates of non-college-educated white men in middle age. Their research into what they called “deaths of despair” offered a sort of data-based corollary to a narrative about the country’s left behind, stitched together in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s rise, in part to make sense of it. In the years since, the same data has invited a whole competitive roster of divergent analyses: that such deaths reflected social dysfunctions driven by ballooning income inequality; that they illustrated health disparities that frequently tracked those inequalities, from obesity and cigarette smoking; that they showcased the country’s threadbare social safety net, which briefly expanded during the pandemic and then abruptly shrank; that they arose from striking declines in what conservatives often call prosocial values like patriotism and religiosity. The new data tells a somewhat different story. In the big picture, opioids still play a large role, and suicide contributes, too. But that pattern of elevated middle-aged mortality is giving way to a growing crisis of juvenile death. The demographics are shifting away from those narrow markers of class and race identified by Case and Deaton, as well. Mortality is still increasing more quickly for those without a college degree, but as John Burn-Murdoch demonstrated vividly in The Financial Times, except for a few superrich Americans, individuals at every percentile of income are now dying sooner than their counterparts in Britain, for instance. For the poorer half of the country, simply being an American is equivalent to about four full years of life lost compared with the average Brit. For the richer half, being an American is not quite as bad but is still the equivalent of losing, on average, about two years of life. And this is even though an American earning an income in the 75th percentile is much richer than a Brit at the same income percentile, since American incomes are much higher. This is not to say that longevity declines are uniform, exactly. Black Americans, on average, can expect to live five fewer years than white Americans; Black American men have lower life expectancies than men in Rwanda, Laos and North Korea. White Americans, in turn, can expect to live seven fewer years than Asian Americans. Life expectancy in the Black Belt of the Deep South is as much as 20 years lower than it is north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi, according to the American Inequality Project. And there is even a notable difference between counties that supported Joe Biden in 2020 and counties that supported Trump. While the past few years of data are skewed by Covid mortality, you still see the American anomaly even if you subtract the pandemic: In all other nations of that counterfactual world, The Financial Times calculated, life expectancy would have either stabilized or increased, while in the United States the huge surge in violent deaths alone would have cut the country’s life expectancy by a full year. For earlier generations, life expectancy at birth was often a misleading statistic, because before modern medicine, if a person survived childhood and adolescence, he or she could be expected to live at least to contemporary middle age, and so the remarkably low median life expectancy estimate was suppressed by how many newborns did not make it to 10 or 20. (Thomas Jefferson wasn’t an old man when he wrote the Declaration of Independence at 33, when life expectancy was probably about 45, but only two of his six children with his wife, Martha, survived to adulthood.) In modern America, a similar if less dramatic threshold appears to have emerged. If you make it to retirement age, you can expect to live about as long as your counterparts in other wealthy countries. This is its own kind of failure, given how much more money Americans spend on health care. But it is merely a waste, not a horror. The horror is that, as Burn-Murdoch memorably put it, in the average American kindergarten at least one child can expect to be buried by his or her parents. The country’s exceptionalism of violence is more striking among the young but extends into early adulthood; from age 25 to 34, Americans’ chances of dying are, by some estimates, more than twice as high, on average, as their counterparts’ in Britain and Japan. And the death rates are growing at a startling speed. According to that March JAMA essay, the death rate among America’s youths increased by 10.7 percent from 2019 to 2020 and 8.3 percent from 2020 to 2021. The phenomenon was more pronounced among older children and adolescents, but the death rate among those age 1 to 9 increased by 8.4 percent from 2020 to 2021, and almost none of that effect was the result of the pandemic itself. The pandemic years look even grimmer when we examine pediatric mortality by cause. Guns were responsible for almost half of the increase from 2019 to 2020, as homicides among children age 10 to 19 grew more than 39 percent. Deaths from drug overdoses for that age cohort more than doubled. In 2021, as schools reopened, pediatric deaths from Covid nearly doubled but still accounted for only one-fifth of the increase in overall pediatric deaths — a large increase on top of the previous year’s even larger one. The disparities are remarkable and striking, as well. Most of the increase in pediatric mortality was among males, with female deaths making only a small jump. Almost two-thirds of the victims of homicide were non-Hispanic Black youths 10 to 19, who had a homicide rate six times as high as that of Hispanic children and teenagers, and more than 20 times as high as that of white children and teenagers. In recent years, the authors of the JAMA essay write, deaths from overdose were higher among white children and teenagers, but increases in the death rates among Black and Hispanic children and teenagers erased that gap, statistically speaking, in 2020. In this way, the new data manages to invert and upend the deaths of despair story while only confirming the country’s longstanding patterns of tragic inequality. That narrative, focused on the self-destruction of older and less-educated white men, took hold in part because it pointed to an intuitive sense of national psychic malaise and postindustrial decline. But the familiar narratives about the country’s problems are proving more enduring: The country is a violent place and is getting more violent, and the footfall of that violence and social brutality is not felt equally, however much attention is paid to the travails of the “forgotten” working class. Probably we should be much more focused on protecting our young. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opinion/deaths-life-expectancy-guns-children.html?smid=fb-share
  9. I was just coming to post this. Thank you, Farrar. I am so so disappointed and regret ever paying him a dime. I cannot believe where we are going as a society.
  10. I haven't read the replies, so someone may have covered this, but as someone who suffers from crippling bouts of depression and anxiety, I hardly ever reach out to my friends anymore. And I often feel worse when I do because I feel so guilty for [my cognitive distortions coming up] "bringing them down with all of my bs," "infecting their lives with my negativity," "bothering them with my issues," etc. I am very aware of how deeply unhappy I am at times, so I feel guilty reaching out to others -- especially those I perceive to be in a better place (which feels like everyone). When I do reach out, I feel panicky immediately and try to get away from other people as soon as possible. Again, because I feel so much shame and guilt for not being the person/friend/relative/professional that I perceive that I "should" be. I don't know if any of this sounds like your friend. I will also say that these feelings have gotten worse with the pandemic -- in part because of the long period of isolation (I live in coastal CA and worked in the ICU during the pandemic, so we were more Covid conscious that likely many others in the US) and because I feel like people's lives are already hard enough post-pandemic that they don't need any more from me. Yes, I am in therapy and am working on all of this. My 46 yr old, younger sister (single mom to 2 young kids and my only sibling) is also dying of stage 4 breast cancer, so I have some circumstantial stuff happening as well. (But, this just makes me feel like reaching out less because who wants to talk about my dying sister).
  11. This would be us. Neither my husband nor I really cook from scratch -- like making an actual marinara sauce vs opening a jar of Rao's. We eat out and have meals delivered pretty regularly. I have cookbooks, but use them maybe a few times per year, if that. My boys are 9 and 14, and would likely ask Alexa or ChatGPT how to cook something before they would ever think to open one of the books on our kitchen counter (if they ever even noticed them). Left to their own devices, if my husband and I are out of the house and the boys get hungry, they will pretty much just eat snack foods, fruit, or use the microwave to nuke one of their familiar foods from the freezer.
  12. Put me firmly in the [possibly hyperbolic] camp of historian Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens and Homo Deus) on AI. His 2021 60 Minutes interview freaked me out and I've not since recovered my enthusiasm for where we are headed: Followed more recently by this NYT op-ed last week (below) and numerous tech titans calling for a 6-month moratorium on AI development, so better guardrails can be implemented: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-other-ai-bigwigs-call-for-pause-in-technologys-development-56327f OPINION GUEST ESSAY You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills March 24, 2023 By Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin Mr. Harari is a historian and a founder of the social impact company Sapienship. Mr. Harris and Mr. Raskin are founders of the Center for Humane Technology. Imagine that as you are boarding an airplane, half the engineers who built it tell you there is a 10 percent chance the plane will crash, killing you and everyone else on it. Would you still board? In 2022, over 700 top academics and researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies were asked in a survey about future A.I. risk. Half of those surveyed stated that there was a 10 percent or greater chance of human extinction (or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment) from future A.I. systems. Technology companies building today’s large language models are caught in a race to put all of humanity on that plane. Drug companies cannot sell people new medicines without first subjecting their products to rigorous safety checks. Biotech labs cannot release new viruses into the public sphere in order to impress shareholders with their wizardry. Likewise, A.I. systems with the power of GPT-4 and beyond should not be entangled with the lives of billions of people at a pace faster than cultures can safely absorb them. A race to dominate the market should not set the speed of deploying humanity’s most consequential technology. We should move at whatever speed enables us to get this right. The specter of A.I. has haunted humanity since the mid-20th century, yet until recently it has remained a distant prospect, something that belongs in sci-fi more than in serious scientific and political debates. It is difficult for our human minds to grasp the new capabilities of GPT-4 and similar tools, and it is even harder to grasp the exponential speed at which these tools are developing more advanced and powerful capabilities. But most of the key skills boil down to one thing: the ability to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. In the beginning was the word. Language is the operating system of human culture. From language emerges myth and law, gods and money, art and science, friendships and nations and computer code. A.I.’s new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization. By gaining mastery of language, A.I. is seizing the master key to civilization, from bank vaults to holy sepulchers. What would it mean for humans to live in a world where a large percentage of stories, melodies, images, laws, policies and tools are shaped by nonhuman intelligence, which knows how to exploit with superhuman efficiency the weaknesses, biases and addictions of the human mind — while knowing how to form intimate relationships with human beings? In games like chess, no human can hope to beat a computer. What happens when the same thing occurs in art, politics or religion? A.I. could rapidly eat the whole of human culture — everything we have produced over thousands of years — digest it and begin to gush out a flood of new cultural artifacts. Not just school essays but also political speeches, ideological manifestos, holy books for new cults. By 2028, the U.S. presidential race might no longer be run by humans. Humans often don’t have direct access to reality. We are cocooned by culture, experiencing reality through a cultural prism. Our political views are shaped by the reports of journalists and the anecdotes of friends. Our sexual preferences are tweaked by art and religion. That cultural cocoon has hitherto been woven by other humans. What will it be like to experience reality through a prism produced by nonhuman intelligence? For thousands of years, we humans have lived inside the dreams of other humans. We have worshiped gods, pursued ideals of beauty and dedicated our lives to causes that originated in the imagination of some prophet, poet or politician. Soon we will also find ourselves living inside the hallucinations of nonhuman intelligence. The “Terminator” franchise depicted robots running in the streets and shooting people. “The Matrix” assumed that to gain total control of human society, A.I. would have to first gain physical control of our brains and hook them directly to a computer network. However, simply by gaining mastery of language, A.I. would have all it needs to contain us in a Matrix-like world of illusions, without shooting anyone or implanting any chips in our brains. If any shooting is necessary, A.I. could make humans pull the trigger, just by telling us the right story. The specter of being trapped in a world of illusions has haunted humankind much longer than the specter of A.I. Soon we will finally come face to face with Descartes’s demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Buddhist Maya. A curtain of illusions could descend over the whole of humanity, and we might never again be able to tear that curtain away — or even realize it is there. Social media was the first contact between A.I. and humanity, and humanity lost. First contact has given us the bitter taste of things to come. In social media, primitive A.I. was used not to create content but to curate user-generated content. The A.I. behind our news feeds is still choosing which words, sounds and images reach our retinas and eardrums, based on selecting those that will get the most virality, the most reaction and the most engagement. While very primitive, the A.I. behind social media was sufficient to create a curtain of illusions that increased societal polarization, undermined our mental health and unraveled democracy. Millions of people have confused these illusions with reality. The United States has the best information technology in history, yet U.S. citizens can no longer agree on who won elections. Though everyone is by now aware of the downside of social media, it hasn’t been addressed because too many of our social, economic and political institutions have become entangled with it. Large language models are our second contact with A.I. We cannot afford to lose again. But on what basis should we believe humanity is capable of aligning these new forms of A.I. to our benefit? If we continue with business as usual, the new A.I. capacities will again be used to gain profit and power, even if it inadvertently destroys the foundations of our society. A.I. indeed has the potential to help us defeat cancer, discover lifesaving drugs and invent solutions for our climate and energy crises. There are innumerable other benefits we cannot begin to imagine. But it doesn’t matter how high the skyscraper of benefits A.I. assembles if the foundation collapses. The time to reckon with A.I. is before our politics, our economy and our daily life become dependent on it. Democracy is a conversation, conversation relies on language, and when language itself is hacked, the conversation breaks down, and democracy becomes untenable. If we wait for the chaos to ensue, it will be too late to remedy it. But there’s a question that may linger in our minds: If we don’t go as fast as possible, won’t the West risk losing to China? No. The deployment and entanglement of uncontrolled A.I. into society, unleashing godlike powers decoupled from responsibility, could be the very reason the West loses to China. We can still choose which future we want with A.I. When godlike powers are matched with commensurate responsibility and control, we can realize the benefits that A.I. promises. We have summoned an alien intelligence. We don’t know much about it, except that it is extremely powerful and offers us bedazzling gifts but could also hack the foundations of our civilization. We call upon world leaders to respond to this moment at the level of challenge it presents. The first step is to buy time to upgrade our 19th-century institutions for an A.I. world and to learn to master A.I. before it masters us. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian; the author of “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus” and “Unstoppable Us”; and a founder of the social impact company Sapienship. Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin are founders of the Center for Humane Technology and co-hosts of the podcast “Your Undivided Attention.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/opinion/yuval-harari-ai-chatgpt.html
  13. Longest day of most of those kids' lives. I remember getting TMJ just from stress during the week bar exam results came out. I don't envy those kids, staring at the clock right now.
  14. Sacha will likely take Linear Algebra through SOHS (most likely) or in-person at UCSD (they have an honors sequence in-person). He hasn't taken any of these classes, so I don't have personal experience, but I know some homeschoolers use these UC Extension classes: https://extendedstudies.ucsd.edu/courses-and-programs/linear-algebra-3
  15. Someone MUST have Ivy Day news, right? RIGHT!? Out with it, Hive. Signed, Parent of a rising 9th grader, who needs hope that this will all turn out ok 😉
  16. It is likely to get worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/opinion/guns-supreme-court.html OPINION GUEST ESSAY We’re About to Find Out How Far the Supreme Court Will Go to Arm America March 29, 2023 By Linda Greenhouse Ms. Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021. How much further will the Supreme Court go to assist in the arming of America? That has been the question since last June, when the court ruled that New York’s century-old gun licensing law violated the Second Amendment. Sooner than expected, we are likely to find out the answer. On March 17, the Biden administration asked the justices to overturn an appeals court decision that can charitably be described as nuts, and accurately as pernicious. The decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit invalidated a federal law that for almost 30 years has prohibited gun ownership by people who are subject to restraining orders for domestic violence. The Fifth Circuit upheld the identical law less than three years ago. But that was before President Donald Trump put a Mississippi state court judge named Cory Wilson on the appeals court. (As a candidate for political office in 2015, Wilson said in a National Rifle Association questionnaire that he opposed both background checks on private gun sales and state licensing requirements for potential gun owners.) Judge Wilson wrote in a decision handed down in March that the appeals court was forced to repudiate its own precedent by the logic of the Supreme Court’s decision in the New York licensing case. He was joined by another Trump judge, James Ho, and by Edith Jones, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan; Judge Jones has long been one of the most aggressive conservatives on the country’s most conservative appeals court. Now it is up to the justices to say whether that analysis is correct. Fifteen years after the Supreme Court’s Heller decision interpreted the Second Amendment to convey an individual right to own a gun, there is no overstating the significance of the choice the court has been asked to make. Heller was limited in scope: It gave Americans a constitutional right to keep handguns at home for self-defense. The court’s decision last June in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen was on the surface also quite limited, striking down a law that required a showing of special need in order to obtain an unrestricted license to carry a concealed gun outside the home. New York was one of only a half-dozen states with such a requirement, as the court put it in the Bruen decision. What was not limited about the New York decision — indeed, what was radical — was the analysis that Justice Clarence Thomas employed in his opinion for the 6-3 majority. Following Heller, courts had evaluated gun restrictions by weighing the personal Second Amendment claim against the government’s interest in the particular regulation, a type of balancing test that has long been common in constitutional adjudication. The Bruen decision rejected that approach, instead placing history above all else. “The government must affirmatively prove that its firearms regulation is part of the historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the right to keep and bear arms,” Justice Thomas wrote. As a result of that decision, Shawn Hubler, a national correspondent for The Times, reported earlier this month, “gun historians across the country are in demand like never before as lawyers must now comb through statutes drafted in the Colonial era and the early years of the Republic to litigate modern firearms restrictions.” She noted that “cases now explore weapons bans in early saloons, novelty air rifles on the Lewis and Clark expedition, concealed carry restrictions on bowie knives and 18th-century daggers known as ‘Arkansas toothpicks,’ and a string-operated ‘trap gun’ that may or may not be comparable to an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.” Judge Wilson, in his opinion for the Fifth Circuit, said the prohibition on gun ownership by a person under a court-ordered restraining order for domestic violence failed “the historical tradition” test crafted by Justice Thomas. While there were laws at the time of the country’s founding that disarmed people who were deemed “disloyal” or “unacceptable,” Judge Wilson asserted that the purpose of those laws was to safeguard the “political and social order” rather than to protect individuals from violence. Consequently, he said, the old laws were not sufficiently “relevantly similar” to the modern law, known as Section 922(g)(8) of the U.S. code, to meet the Supreme Court’s history test. The defendant in this case, Zackey Rahimi, was under a restraining order after he allegedly assaulted and threatened to shoot his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his child, when he went on a shooting spree, firing a weapon on five different occasions around Arlington, Texas. He pleaded guilty to violating Section 922(g)(8) while at the same time challenging the law’s constitutionality. Mr. Rahimi, “while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless among ‘the people’ entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees,” Judge Wilson wrote. Noting that a court-ordered restraining order is civil rather than criminal in nature, Judge Wilson asked rhetorically whether, if Mr. Rahimi’s civil offense was enough to disqualify him from owning a gun, as the law required, a similar disqualification might apply to those who violate a speed limit or fail to recycle. Clearly, the question now for the Supreme Court is not only the validity of one statute but how the Bruen decision’s newly minted “historical tradition” requirement will apply to any and all gun regulations. The Fifth Circuit offered a lazy and cherry-picked history that “missed the forest for the trees,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in the government’s Supreme Court petition. While it was clear that “dangerous individuals could be disarmed” at the time of the Constitution’s framing, she wrote, the Fifth Circuit treated “even minor and immaterial distinctions between historical laws and their modern counterparts as a sufficient reason to find modern laws unconstitutional.” Under such an analysis, she argued, “few modern statutes would survive judicial review.” (While the Supreme Court is not obliged to hear the government’s appeal, United States v. Rahimi, the court almost never declines to review a decision that has invalidated a federal statute.) In a forthcoming article, Professors Joseph Blocher of Duke Law School and Reva B. Siegel of Yale point out that there is a reason for the failure of early American lawmakers to consider domestic violence a reason to take away an abuser’s gun: The very concept of domestic violence was alien to the Constitution’s framers because wives were completely subordinate to their husbands and wife beating was widely tolerated. In enacting Section 922(g)(8) in 1994, they write, “Congress acted to alter the government’s historical refusal to intervene in intimate partner violence — a failure that was rooted in the belief that a man had authority to ‘correct’ subordinate members of the household, including his wife.” They note that “government response to violence between intimates only began to shift in the 1970s as this system of gender hierarchy began slowly to break down.” Protecting women from intimate partner violence is thus inherent in, and not — as the Fifth Circuit assumed — different from protecting the “political and social order.” There is no doubt that under the old interest-balancing test, the government would prevail. The interest in keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers is that obvious, as even the Fifth Circuit found in 2020. “The parties agree,” the court noted then, “that reducing domestic gun abuse is not just an important government interest, but a compelling one. They only dispute whether §922(g)(8) is reasonably adapted to that interest. We hold that it is.” The government’s petition points out that there are more than one million acts of domestic violence in the United States every year “and the presence of a gun in a house with a domestic abuser increases the risk of homicide sixfold.” Will a fact like that matter to the Supreme Court? Do facts still matter at all? That may now be the most urgent question this case presents, not only to the court but to the country.
  17. I posted precisely that yesterday, not realizing it was against board rules. You can see the representative from the district where this occurred posing with his family, all brandishing assault weapons. It is deeply disturbing how gun culture is normalized and how many children are being groomed to believe that, not only is this normal, but it is good/right/just/G-d's will. At the same time, the social determinants of health are demonized as some sort of government intrusion. Is it any wonder that violence seems the only answer to so many desperate folks?
  18. I mentioned this in the other thread, but my family has been looking into Italian passports based on Jure Sanguinis (the right to claim Italian citizenship based on Italian family bloodline). If any of you know you have a family tree with Italian relatives, it may be worth exploring.
  19. Look at the mental health crisis among teens in this country. Do people really believe this is all about social media and screen time? It's pretty hard to stay above water mentally when you live in a country where there are mass shootings and climate disasters on the regular, homeless encampments in every major city, where over a million people died during a pandemic, bodycams frequently show law enforcement killing innocent people, the head of state tries to overturn an election and incites an angry mob to attack the capitol, education and health care are unaffordable, you could be forced to give birth against your will, the meager government retirement plan is almost bankrupt, you don't know if AI will take your job/destroy humanity, etc. Kids are watching our country crumble while the "adults" refuse to invest in infrastructure, hoard resources for themselves, pull the safety net ladder up behind them, and jockey to score political points instead of solving problems. It's enough to make anyone mentally unwell. ETA: Obviously many other countries are dealing with same/similar issues, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what's different about the US vs the rest of the world in the face of these problems.
  20. Pretty hard to leave San Diego. Not sure my kids and I would survive Canadian weather, but my Canadian husband would actually be the bigger obstacle. Israel and Mexico are also both possibilities (as Jews and with one kid born in Puerto Vallarta), but not any safer at the moment. But, I may pursue an EU passport through my Italian relatives. I could definitely see us doing that in the not-too-distant future.
  21. Scout, I am so terribly sorry for this tragic loss. May their memories be for a blessing. Sending you much love and prayers for peace and healing.
  22. Agree with your DH 100%. The digital generation are a very different animal.
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