What's wrong with people nowadays?

"A space in Mankato that promotes reflection and healing for families who have lost a child has been vandalized, according to the nonprofit in charge of the memorial.

The nonprofit behind the One Bright Star memorial at Victory Drive and E. Main Street said on June 5 that someone in recent days broke off a large landscape rock, damaged a plaque and threw both of them into the memorial’s pond...

One Bright Star was founded in 1998 by four mothers who each experienced the death of a child, and the memorial was completed in 2003. It includes a shallow pond centered by a large star sculpture and a wall with paver bricks in remembrance of children who have died."

"The police in Boston are searching for two boys who they said flashed a handgun at a pair of children running a lemonade stand on Wednesday and stole... cash from a bright pink lockbox...Tiffany Byrne, the aunt of the two children working the lemonade stand, said that about $80 was taken...

Ms. Byrne said her nephew, David, 12, and niece, Juliette, 11, “were pretty shaken up” but otherwise unharmed. She said she believed the robbers were wearing masks and were around middle-school age."

Fake invitation phishing scam

The invitation was addressed from a high school classmate and sent to me personally and not to a group.  Note that it requires not just a reply, but the downloading and installation of a program in order to validate the invite.

A dangerous scam, which was recently featured in a NYT article about fake invitations:

Phishing scams involve “two distinct paths,” Ms. Tobac added. In one, the recipient is served a link that turns out to be dead, or so it seems. A click activates malware that runs silently as it gleans passwords and other bits of personal information. In all likelihood, this is what happened when Mr. Lantigua clicked on the ersatz invitation link.

Another scam offers a working link. Potential victims who click on it are asked to provide a password. Those who take that next step are a boon to hackers.

“They have complete control of your email and, in turn, your entire digital life,” Ms. Tobac said. “They can reset your password for your dog’s Instagram account. They can take over your bank account. Change your health insurance.”

Over-the-top online extortion

Here's the text of an email I found today in my spam folder:

Call was lost, as usual.

Ok. I don't have much time, so let's get straight to the point.

I want to make you an offer that you can refuse, but only once.

Here's what I have:

Your complete personal information: full name, date of birth, home address.

Your social security number and driver's license details.

All your email account login credentials, including this account.

Other login details and your private messages.

A multitude of files found on your devices.

Access to your bank accounts.

The details of your credit cards: number, expiry date, and cvv.

I have compiled this entire package into a single folder. I can and intend to do two things with it. It is up to you to decide which one:

I will send this entire package to darknet markets, where other criminals will buy it.

It is unknown how they will use this information. They may purchase something illegal in your name, or they may not, but you will definitely not like it.

Or you can buy it from me for a small fee of 600 usd.

Changing the entire package of documents and data is very expensive, very time-consuming, and unsafe.

I already know that you have just read this text. Do not try to ignore this.

I only accept payment in bitcoins at the exchange rate at the time of transfer.

Transfer money here: [redacted for posting]

After payment, I will delete the folder containing your data, and you can continue living as before or, if you don't trust me, take your time changing all your data. It's more profitable for me if you pay me. It's easier and better for everyone.

This is a unique offer. Take advantage of it. I will wait for 1 day.

The "from" address was one of my own email addresses.

Anomalous behavior in financial markets

I did not blog it at the time, but when Trump overthrew the government of Venezuela with his military action, an article in The Atlantic noted that some people profited very handsomely by correctly betting on that outcome via the prediction markets:

When U.S. Delta Force commandos slipped into Venezuelan airspace over the weekend, they did so in secrecy. And yet, in the hours before President Donald Trump gave the final order for the strike, someone bet more than $20,000 that Nicolás Maduro would be ousted as the country’s leader by the end of January.

On Polymarket, the online platform that lets people wager on almost anything, an anonymous trader somewhere in the world placed a series of suspiciously well-timed bets. Using a fresh account created last month, the individual made just a few bets in the days leading up to the raid, according to The Wall Street Journal—all on the possibility of imminent regime change in Venezuela—and appeared to come away with more than $400,000.

The Guardian made the same observation and interpretation:

The online wager platform Polymarket has angered some gamblers by declaring it will not settle millions of dollars’ worth of bets on a US invasion of Venezuela, arguing that the capture of the then president, Nicolás Maduro, does not qualify.

Before Donald Trump’s forces seized Maduro on Saturday morning, some traders appeared to have anticipated the shock move by placing bets on “prediction markets”.

These were not random "man on the street" bets.  Someone had inside knowledge and bet accordingly.  The publicly available data do not allow one to judge whether the people doing this are friends of Trump, or military commanders, or low-level communications staff.

Now it has happened again.  The embed at the top of this post is a cropped photo of my television, which was tuned in to Bloomberg at about the start of the trading day.  Donald Trump had announced (via Truth Social for crying out loud...) that he was going to scale back military action, which might lead to a easing of tensions and the reopening of the Gulf of Hormuz and (theoretically) lowering the price of oil.

The circled data point in the charts show that someone (??who??) traded options on the S&P 500 (proxy for the general market) and oil futures to the extent of more than a billion dollars IIRC.   The purple line in the bottom graph is either Brent or West Texas Intermediate, which immediately traded down when the market opened (and the equity indexes immediately traded up).

Someone knew this would happen.  Again, available data (at least public data) don't show whether it was a Trump friend.  But somebody is making big bucks from Trump's decisions.

Addendum:  Here are more details, from a BBC report -

...However, at 07:04 Eastern Time (11:04 GMT) on Monday, before US markets opened for the week, the president posted on his Truth Social platform that Washington had held "VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS" with Tehran over a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities.

Immediately, stocks bounced and the price of oil dipped to as low as $84 (£63) per barrel for the benchmark US price.

Observers have since scrutinised what happened in financial markets in the minutes leading up to the president's post.

At 06:49 ET, traders placed 734 bets on WTI crude oil contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex). 

One minute later, that number had jumped to 2,168. That's equivalent to about $170m.

The same pattern can be seen in traders buying contracts for Brent crude, the other major oil benchmark. Between 06:48 and 06:50 ET, the volume of trades rose from 20 to more than 1,650. That's about $150m in contracts.

Data for previous Mondays shows that far fewer trades are normally made at that time of day. 

Similar trades also happened on Monday with futures contracts for the S&P 500, Euro Stoxx 50, and other markets.

This means traders placed bets on the value of the largest firms listed in the US and Europe rising minutes before Trump's announcement.

A teacher expresses doubts about her career

"I start school tomorrow with 150 new students. Although I don’t know them yet, I’ll protect them with my life if/when a shooter decides we’re the target.

I decided to be an English teacher when I was in seventh grade. I’ve never really wavered in my vocation. I started volunteering in schools as a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I student-taught at twenty-one, the same semester in which I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from my elite liberal arts college. (There were only four of us teachers in my class at Macalester, and the school has since stopped offering teacher training because no one wants to do this job anymore.)

In my career, I’ve switched positions more than teachers usually do, I think because I keep hoping that there’s a utopian school community that embodies what I feel is possible in K-12 education. Maybe I can find the right grade level, I tell myself, the right school policies, the right leaders, that will make me feel at home. A parent of a student once told me I was born to be a teacher. It was a compliment — I’d done well for her kids. I do think I’m born for it, but I don’t really want to do it this year.

It’s my twenty-fourth year. Because I’ve taken three years off along the way, the math works out like this:

The Columbine shooting happened while I was student teaching at Tartan High School in 1999. The school had been designed in the 1960s progressive era, and the classrooms were situated in circles with a common space in the middle of each loop. The classrooms didn’t have doors.

The teachers sat in the auditorium on the afternoon of the first school massacre. Was it even safe to go to the auditorium, all together like sitting ducks? We teachers wondered this that day. We discussed how shooters in our school could just stand in the middle of our department areas and hit people in each room around the circle without even moving their feet.

The very next year, or soon after that, I started practicing active shooter drills with students. In the beginning, we all did the same things — turn off the lights, pull the shades, hide in the corner. At one school, they wouldn’t tell us if the drill was a drill because they didn’t think we’d try hard enough to enact the protocols if we knew we weren’t actually going to get shot. Kids would always ask, “Is this real?”

“Probably not,” I told them. “Listen for the sirens. If we don’t hear them, it’s not real.” And then, we’d go back to talking about characters or commas, or whatever we were doing before the alarm sounded.

There was a big kerfuffle the year I was teaching third grade (I had decided maybe elementary was the utopia I sought) because the school moved to a run-hide-fight model where you trained children to throw scissors and staplers at the shooters who came to their classroom doors. Some of us thought that it was inappropriate to teach them to expect to be shot.

At my next school, we started table-top drills during which we discussed shooting scenarios. It was a Catholic high school (also not the utopia I imagined), and the kids were empowered to make their own decisions during attacks. I imagine this is because of liability? Like, if I, the teacher, decided to go out the window, and we all got obliterated that way, then at least the girls had had the choice to run down the hallway instead?

Anyway, you get the idea. My new school does the I Love U Guys model. We teach with our doors locked and closed all the time. We stay and barricade. We practice the system a bunch of times per year and assure the children that we’ll protect them with our lives if necessary.

Last week, my brother’s and my sister’s kids’ school was the latest site of a school shooting. My brother was there, as was my sister’s husband. They all saw it. They were all there at Mass, not a location we normally practice in, by the way. We don’t practice escaping shooters at lunch or recess or in the auditorium because it’s super logistically hard to do. I think today’s shooters know that. All of today’s madmen and women have been through the same drills I just described for the last twenty-six years themselves.

So… in addition to being in a job where, despite my talents and qualifications and dedication to the craft, my earnings are capped in the five figures…

… in addition to being in a job where all/most/some parents think they know more than I do about how to teach…

…in addition to being in a job that suffers the whims of public opinion about our lack of quality and suitability as professionals…

…in addition to being in a job where successfully writing and publishing four novels makes me LESS employable (thanks to the snobbery of high school English departments??)…

I also have to be ready to die at work.

I already thought about it a lot, and now that six of my family members have actually been shot at in school, I’ll think about it more. I’ll go back tomorrow because I have to (I need a full-time income, I have a life and family), and also because it’s my vocation. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher.

But I don’t want to do it tomorrow."

The author is Kathleen West, a daughter-in-law of one of my high school classmates; she is currently teaching at a public middle school in northeast Minneapolis.  The essay has been published in her Substack.

Is the United Kingdom recruiting police from the United States?

Chilling details from the report in The Guardian:

A man who had returned home from his allotment with a trug of vegetables and gardening tools strapped to his belt was arrested by armed police, after a member of the public said they had seen “a man wearing khaki clothing and in possession of a knife”.

Samuel Rowe, 35, who works as a technical manager at a theatre, had come back from his allotment in Manchester earlier this month and decided to trim his hedge with one of his tools, a Japanese garden sickle, when police turned up on his doorstep...

The tools he had on his belt, he said, were a Niwaki Hori Hori gardening trowel in a canvas sheath, and an Ice Bear Japanese gardener’s sickle.

When he was arrested, Rowe said, the officer pulled the trowel out of its sheath, and said: “That’s not a garden tool.”

“I said it is, because it was in the Niwaki-branded pouch that you get at garden centres,” Rowe said...

Rowe said police had questioned him on whether he was “planning on doing something” with the tools, and he said he was also asked to explain what an allotment was.

“[I had] to explain in very basic terms what an allotment is to this guy,” he said. “So it didn’t fill me with a lot of confidence that I was going to be let off.”..

Rowe said he was interviewed without legal representation as officers had been unable to reach a solicitor, and after spending several hours in custody he said he accepted a caution so he would be released...

“I shouldn’t have been arrested by armed officers. I want my caution removed, and then I’d like my gardening tools back. And if I got that, I might even like an apology off them, but I know the chances of that are next to nothing.”

FFS.

New technology for stealing your car

"At about 9 pm a stranger knocked on the door then pulled out this small metal thing and held it up to the door for awhile before seemingly giving up and placing it back in his pocket. He looked nervous which in turn has made both of us very nervous and we cannot for the life of us figure out what he's pointing at the door. Worth noting in the video it's clearly not a phone."

Useful but disjointed discussion at the whatisthisthing subreddit.  I may have blogged about this before but can't find the link right now.  

Just A Car Guy may have better information.

This is the ethos of MAGA-world

"An Ohio sheriff’s lieutenant has apologized – and been merely reprimanded – after authoring social media posts boasting about how he would refuse to assist people who voted for Democrats during Tuesday’s elections and would require proof of a person’s voting choice before providing aid.

John Rodgers, a veteran lieutenant with the Clark county sheriff’s office, reportedly posted on Facebook that he would consider a person’s voting record when responding to calls for service in his jurisdiction, which includes the city of Springfield that has recently been at the center of conservative conspiracy theories, according to the Ohio news outlet WHIO. 

In a series of posts, Rodgers reportedly wrote: “I am sorry. If you support the Democrat Party I will not help you.”

In another post, he reportedly said: “The problem is that I know which of you supports the Democratic Party, and I will not help you survive the end of days.”

And in another, WHIO reported, Rodgers indicated people would need to “provide proof of who you voted for” if they asked him for help."

Text and image from The Guardian.

Apple Cash scam/fraud

Informed discussion re the "why" and "what to do" in the Scams subreddit.

Where to hide stuff in your home

Wicked

This came to me in an email.   I'm sure it went to tens of thousands of other people, many of whom will not be sophisticated enough to recognize that some sleazeballs are basically asking for their credit card information.  And the ones vulnerable to maneuvers like this are the ones least able to afford the consequences. 

Jon Stewart on "victimless" financial crimes

This Daily Show monologue started with commentary about Donald Trump, but in the embedded segment he extends the argument to the wider financial community:

"He's commiting bank fraud where there is no victim"

"No victim.  The ruling is blatantly unfair."

"That didn't go over well with the investment community, because we're asking each other "who's next"?"

"Every [crime] you've just listed is done by every real estate developer..."

According to Stewart the system is "incentivized for corruption", and that apparently if enough people commit a crime, it automatically becomes legal.

Try to watch the video without getting mad at the US financial system.

I'll file this post under "humor" but it's really trenchant social commentary.

What's wrong with people these days??? Updated.

I have fond memories of walking along Hadrian's Wall when I was a younger man.  This wasn't a whimsical folly; it was planned vandalism requiring heavy power tools or a two-man crosscut saw.  Whoever did this should be castrated.  Publicly, IMHO.

The embedded photo is a screencap from a brief video homage at the BBC.

Addendum April 2025:  The two men responsible for this heinous act have been apprehended and are now on trial.

Reposted from last year to information about vandalism of rock formations at Lake Mead:

The embedded image is a composite I made of screencaps from a video of the incident.  In the video a park ranger explains that it is impossible for staff top monitor the entire recreation area, and asks the public's help in this regard.

The unappreciated threat of ransomware

Everyone has heard stories about unfortunate businessmen who have had their restaurant or store rendered inoperative until they paid "ransomware" to a cybercriminal.  The Economist explains that ransomware technology presents immense potential damages on a much larger scale:

In October cyber-criminals hacked into the British Library, a storied institution in the heart of London, encrypted its data and demanded money in exchange for the key. Months later the library and its catalogue of 14m books remain offline, with no end in sight. Similar ransomware attacks—in which criminals encrypt or steal data and demand a ransom to decrypt or refrain from leaking it—are not only undermining business and sapping prosperity across North America and Europe. Financially motivated attacks on infrastructure, such as schools, hospitals and power utilities, also pose a large and growing threat to national security. Western countries now face what a British parliamentary committee described on December 13th as “a high risk [of] a catastrophic ransomware attack at any moment”...

Ransomware has been mainly a Western problem but it is spreading globally. America, Australia, Britain, Canada and Germany are the most affected countries, but Brazil and India are not far behind them. Victims span the public and private sectors—in recent weeks attacks have hit an Italian cloud-service provider that hosts government data, Germany’s energy agency and a Chinese bank in New York, among others. An attack on Christmas Eve disrupted emergency care at a German hospital network, and attacks on the education sector are rising. This adds up to a slow-burning but serious national-security crisis. “It is the one serious organised crime that could bring the country to a standstill,” warned Graeme Biggar, the director of Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA), recently...

 The hardest part of a ransomware attack was once cashing out and laundering the ransom. Attackers would have to buy high-end goods using stolen banking credentials and sell them on the black market in Russia, losing perhaps 60-70% of the profit along the way. Cryptocurrency has enabled them to cash out immediately with little risk...

At the same time, ransomware’s business model is also changing. In the past hackers demanded a ransom in exchange for decrypting a victim’s data. But scrambling data is usually the most technically demanding part of an attack, and the part most liable to alert a victim. Now attackers almost always exfiltrate the data and threaten to publish it online; in a growing minority of attacks they do not even bother encrypting it...

Generative artificial-intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT are helping improve everything from the quality of English in phishing emails to the potency of malware, says Mr Lyne. He points out that the online forums used by cyber-criminals already have dedicated AI sections. Ransomware syndicates remain “well-resourced, adaptable and [are] growing bolder”, says Mr MacColl, despite all the disruptive efforts of the past three years. “I’m fairly confident in saying they’re still doing as much harm to UK national security as anything Russia, China, Iran or North Korea does in cyberspace.” 

More at the link.

The trauma of school "shooter drills"

 "... nurses are telling us that they are walking away from situations where there are hyperrealistic active-shooter drills, and they themselves are traumatized by the experience. And they are watching the children be traumatized by the experience. They are telling us that they see preschool-age children go home and tell their parents that there was a shooter at school today. And they are telling us, in some situations, that they feel a gun-violence incident at their school, if it hasn’t already happened yet, feels inevitable. There is a lot of concern about the long-term and harmful psychological effects of hyperrealistic active-shooter drills, and that they are, in many instances, likely to be much more harmful in the long term than helpful in any kind of realistic scenario. And I think we need to understand what works before we widely implement something without understanding the long-term consequences...

So last year, there were 305 different shootings at a school. Two of them were deliberate attacks. The other 303 were a time when a gun was fired, and in that moment, students hear gunshots, teachers hear gunshots, the school goes into lockdown usually for hours, for 3, 4, 5, 6 hours. And because everyone heard that gunshot, they think that it is the real thing. They’re texting their parents, “I love you, goodbye.” But in reality, what we can see from data is that the most common situation to happen at a school is a fight that escalates.

There are more teenagers carrying weapons than there have been at previous points in history, and when there’s a conflict, these conflicts are turning into shootings. And the shooter almost always runs immediately, so there’s no threat at the school anymore. But we only have one plan for when a shot is fired, and that’s lockdown. On the other end, when there is a deliberate attack — there have been 230 of those since 1966 — they don’t all happen in the classroom."

The discussion continues at The New England Journal of Medicine (not behind a paywall).

Addendum:  Relevant new report - "Guns are seized in U.S. schools each day. The numbers are soaring."

Last school year, news reports identified more than 1,150 guns brought to K-12 campuses but seized before anyone fired them, according to an investigation by The Washington Post. That’s more than six guns each day, on average...

Allegations about Ron DeSantis at Guantanamo may be unfounded

Excerpts from "See No Evil", published in Harper's Magazine, March 2023:

From a November discussion on the Eyes Left podcast, between Mike Prysner, an Iraq War veteran, and Mansoor Adayfi, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay.

mansoor adayfi: As you know, Guantánamo was created out of the legal zone, out of the legal system. Torture was the mechanism of Guantánamo. Torture, abuse, and experimenting on prisoners. We went on a massive hunger strike in 2005. And there was force-feeding. It was torture.

I saw a fucking handsome person come in and he said, “I’m here to ensure that you are treated humanely.”

mike prysner: It was Ron DeSantis?

adayfi: Yes. And, “If you have any problems, if you have any concerns, just talk to me.” We were drowning in that place. So I was like, “Oh, this is cool. This person will raise the concerns.” But it was a piece of the game. What they were doing was looking for what hurts us more so they could use it against us. In 2006, when DeSantis was there, it was one of the worst times at Guantánamo. The administration, the guards, all of them were the worst. They cracked down on us so hard. When they came to break our hunger strike, a team came to us. The head of the team, he was a general. He said, “I have a job. I was sent here to break your fucking hunger strike. I don’t care why you are here. I don’t care who you are. My job is to make you eat. Today we are talking. Tomorrow there will be no talking.” The second day, they brought piles of Ensure and they started force-feeding us over and over again.

prysner: For those who don’t know, Ensure is a thick milky nutritional shake mainly marketed on daytime television to elderly people. It is very hard to drink.

adayfi: Yes, and Ron DeSantis was there watching us. We were crying, screaming. We were tied to the feeding chair. And he was watching. He was laughing. Our stomachs could not hold this amount of Ensure. They poured one can after another. So when he approached me, I said, “This is the way we are treated!” He said, “You should eat.” I threw up in his face. Literally on his face...

prysner: It was well deserved. A JAG lawyer at the time, he would have been well aware this was a violation of international law. There is no question that it was torture.

adayfi: They used to restrain us in that feeding chair. They tied our head, our shoulders, our wrists, our thighs, and our legs. They put some kind of laxative in the feeding liquid. We were shitting ourselves all the time. Then we were moved to solitary confinement—really cold cells. It was like five times a day. It wasn’t feeding. It was just torture. Five times a day. You can’t possibly handle it. They just kept pouring the Ensure. In one week, they broke all the hunger strikers. And he was there. All of them were watching. They also used to beat us. And if we screamed or were bleeding out of our nose and mouth, they were like, “Eat.” The only word they told you was “eat.” We were beaten all day long. Whatever you were doing—they just beat you. Pepper spray, beating, sleep deprivation. That continued for three months. And he was there. He was one of the people that supervised the torture, the abuses, the beatings. All the time at Guantánamo.

prysner: So Ron DeSantis was actually supervising torture, beatings? He was supervising these force-feedings?

adayfi: I’m telling Americans: this guy is a torturer. He is a criminal. He was laughing. And he was there to ensure we were treated humanely.

prysner: He was laughing?

adayfi: Yes, they were looking at us, laughing because we were shitting ourselves. I was screaming and yelling. When your stomach is full of Ensure you can’t breathe. And you are throwing up at the same time. I was screaming. I looked at him and he was actually smiling. Like someone who was enjoying it...

prysner: So he basically was gathering intelligence to tell the interrogators what it was that was impacting you most so they could do it more.

adayfi: I remember when we were talking about the noise in the night. We were talking about the vacuums, the generators, the fans, and everything. And they brought more stuff.

prysner: You told DeSantis this and then they increased the noise?

adayfi: They increased the noise. And also the food, for example. We told him we don’t eat meat. What the guards did after that is they mixed all the food with meat.

More at the link.  This is unlikely to come up at the Republican debate this week, so I'll present it here.  The mic is open for your comments; please keep them civil.

Addendum:  Related onnline articles from the mainstream media -

The Guardian, April 2023 "questions haunt the Florida governor"

Rolling Stone, July 2023 "documentary about this has been cancelled"

Forbes, June 2023 "Showtime pulls show about this"

The Hill, April 2023 "DeSantis fumes, calls this 'totally bullshit'"

Addendum:  DeSantis' military service came up during the debate, during which he said he was deployed "with the Navy SEALs."  The Daily Beast clarified that..

"DeSantis also spent time during his JAG career stationed at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was an assistant urinalysis coordinator."

Addendum September 24: "A former prisoner’s story of mistreatment at the hands of Ron DeSantis made headlines. But The New York Times found no evidence to back it up... an examination of military records and interviews with detainees’ lawyers and service members who served at the same time as Mr. DeSantis found no evidence to back up the claims. The New York Times interviewed more than 40 people who served with Mr. DeSantis or around the same time and none recalled witnessing or even hearing of any episodes like the ones Mr. Adayfi described."  More information at The New York Times.

Free range parenting punished - updated

The Port St. Lucie, Florida, mom was arrested on Saturday for letting her 7-year-old son, Dominic, walk alone — in the daytime, with a cellphone — a half-mile to a local park. “I honestly didn’t think I was doing anything wrong,” she says. “I was letting him go play.”During his approximately 10-minute walk, the boy passed by a public pool, where a patron asked him where his mother was and other questions. As he told a local news station, “I got scared and ran off to the park, and that’s when they called the cops.” Police picked up the boy at the park, brought him home and arrested his mother for felony child neglect. In their report, police noted that “numerous sex offenders reside in the vicinity.” Gainey says the cops “just kept going over that, you know, there’s pedophiles,” which sounds to me like the kind of problem that perhaps there’s a better approach to than whisking kids off playgrounds and arresting mothers...

More at Salon, and an extended discussion thread at Reddit.

There is a Wikipedia page on slow parenting/free range parenting.  Years ago I wrote a post (which I frustratingly cannot locate this morning) which incorporated a map showing the range a man's father had wandered freely as a child compared to the range he wandered as a child compared to the neighborhood his child is allowed to wander.  The circles get smaller and smaller...

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging hat to reader Dan for finding the link I referred to above, which contained this image:

Addendum #2:  This Pearls Before Swine cartoon seems relevant -

Addendum #3:  It has happened again, to another family.

It was a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. But what the parents saw as a moment of independence for their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, they say authorities viewed much differently.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv say they are being investigated for neglect for the Dec. 20 trek — in a case they say reflects a clash of ideas about how safe the world is and whether parents are free to make their own choices about raising their children...

The Meitivs say they believe in “free-range” parenting, a movement that has been a counterpoint to the hyper-vigilance of “helicopter” parenting, with the idea that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to progressively test limits, make choices and venture out in the world...

Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them...

Danielle is a climate-science consultant, and Alexander is a physicist at the National Institutes of Health. Alexander said he had a tense time with police on Dec. 20 when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world. The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services, he said, which showed up a couple of hours after the police left...

The Meitivs say that on Dec. 20, a CPS worker required Alexander to sign a safety plan pledging he would not leave his children unsupervised until the following Monday, when CPS would follow up. At first he refused, saying he needed to talk to a lawyer, his wife said, but changed his mind when he was told his children would be removed if he did not comply...

The family has a meeting set for next week at CPS offices in Rockville.
“I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing,” Alexander said. “We feel we’re being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with.”

I don't have time to cover it now, but I would note here that the April 2014 issue of The Atlantic has an excellent article by Hanna Rosin entitled "Hey! Parents, Leave Those Kids Alone."

Addendum #4:  I just finished browsing I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream Because Puns Suck (a Pearls Before Swine compilation), so I'll repost the above from 2015 to add three more cartoons:

A pigeon dyed (and died) for a gender reveal

"Flamingo, who was believed to be less than a year old, was found wandering through Madison Square Park, in Manhattan, last week. His plight prompted anger at the person or people who had dyed him pink and have not yet been identified. The Wild Bird Fund took Flamingo into care and announced the king pigeon’s death Tuesday."

Thousands of fake nursing diplomas in Florida

Twenty-five people have been charged in a Florida wire fraud scheme that created thousands of illegal licenses and employment shortcuts for aspiring nurses, according to the U.S. Department of Justice...

“The bogus diplomas and transcripts qualified purchasers to sit for the national nursing board exam and, after passing it, to obtain licenses and jobs in various states as RNs and LPN/VNs,” USDOJ reported. “The overall scheme involved the distribution of more than 7,600 fake nursing diplomas issued by three South Florida-based nursing schools: Siena College in Broward County, Fla., Palm Beach School of Nursing in Palm Beach County, Fla., and Sacred Heart International Institute in Broward County.”

Federal agents reported that the schools are now closed, with each defendant facing up to 20 years in prison. The USDOJ said that this type of crime “unfortunately continue[s] to spring up, especially” in South Florida...

“What is disturbing about this investigation is that there are over 7,600 people around the country with fraudulent nursing credentials who are potentially in critical health care roles treating patients. Were it not for the diligence and hard work of the investigators on this case, the extent of this fraud may not have been discovered, “ Yarbrough added.

I hope they punish these people to the max.  More information at The Hill. 

The Onion reminds us

42 mass shootings so far this year.  And January isn't even over yet.