California Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday unloaded on Attorney General Jeff Sessions' speech attacking California for its policies on cooperating with federal immigration officials.
“This is a political stunt," Brown said of Sessions' lawsuit against California for allowing so-called "sanctuary cities" in which local law enforcement officials are not required to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in rounding up undocumented immigrants. "This is basically going to war against the state of California -- the engine of the america economy. It's not wise, it's not right, and it will not stand."
Brown went on to say that Sessions' lawsuit is more designed to appeal to President Donald Trump's base than accomplish any good -- and he said that Sessions sounded "more like Fox News" than an actual attorney general.
"I do think this is pure red meat for the base," Brown said. "I would assume, but this is pure speculation, that Jeff thinks Donald will be happy with him and I'm sure Donald will be tweeting his joy."
Governor Ron DeSantis kicked off his official presidential campaign tour on Tuesday, traveling to Iowa after announcing last week he was launching a White House run. On Wednesday, the Republican bragged to GOP voters that in Florida he recently signed a bill into law banning teachers from forcing children to pick pronouns, insisting it is happening in other states.
"It is wrong for a teacher to tell a student that they may have been born in the wrong body, or that their gender is a choice," DeSantis announced.
"We don't allow this in the state of Florida, and we actually just signed legislation protecting students from having teachers force them to pick pronouns, which they are doing in some parts of this country, at [a] very, very young age. We’re not competing in the 'pronoun sweepstakes.' We're going to have school just like school's been, from time in memoriam [sic], we're not going to do all this other stuff,” he declared.
While DeSantis is insistent that teachers are forcing very young students to pick pronouns, NCRM found no news reports supporting that claim.
We did find several news reports of teachers suing for not wanting to use a child's preferred pronoun, which are issues for the courts.
We did find one report of a teacher who allegedly insisted on calling a 9-year old girl who identifies as a girl a boy, and the parents are suing.
News12 on Long Island, New York in March reported, "the lawyer representing the girl's family...says the student was bullied and had suicidal feelings."
"She says the teacher told the student to 'try being gay.' The teacher is also accused of calling the girl a male name.
'The teacher had some kind of agenda to have these students have alternate sexual preferences or gender identities they may or may not have had,'" the attorney said.
In April, Colorado's KRDO reported, "During the last Colorado Springs School District 11's board meeting, officials tabled a controversial pronoun policy that would prevent educators from asking students their preferred pronouns. While the policy isn't in effect, some teachers are concerned about how it would hinder them inside the classroom."
Watch DeSantis below or at this link.
Baby boys babble more than girls, according to a scientific paper out Wednesday that upends a common belief that females hold a language advantage over males early on in life.
The findings, published in iScience after the largest ever study on the subject, came as a surprise even to the paper's authors.
They say it might be the result of an important sex difference that emerged during our species' evolution.
A team led by D. Kimbrough Oller of the University of Memphis, Tennessee used an algorithm to trawl through a data set of more than 450,000 hours of non-stop audio from 5,899 infants, recorded using an iPod sized device over two years.
"This is the biggest sample for any study ever conducted on language development, as far as we know," Oller said in a statement.
While young babies don't talk, they produce pre-speech vocalizations -- squeals, growls, raspberries, and later word-like sounds such as "ba" and "ga" -- collectively called "protophones" that eventually give way to real words and sentences.
The idea that girls acquire language faster than boys has long held sway in scientific circles, and with it the assumption that baby girls vocalize more than baby boys.
However, the results showed that boys made 10 percent more utterances in the first year of life, before the girls caught up and made seven percent more sounds by the second year.
The differences occurred despite the fact that adult care-givers spoke more to girls than to boys across both years.
One theory for the finding was that male infants were more vocal because they were more active in general. But the data did not support this, since higher male vocalizations gave way to females around the 16 month mark, but higher physical activity did not.
Instead, the team suggests their findings might fit an evolutionary theory which holds that infants make sounds in order to signal their wellbeing to their caregivers, who in turn invest more energy and attention in them.
Boys have higher mortality rates than girls in their first year of life, according to a broad body of research, and so it may follow that more vocal baby boys in the distant past were more likely to survive and pass on their genes.
But by the second year of life, death rates have dropped dramatically for both sexes, and "the pressure on special fitness signaling is lower for both boys and girls," said Oller.
Next, Oller plans more research on how caregivers respond to baby talk.
"We anticipate that caregivers will show discernible reactions of interest and of being charmed by the speech-like sounds, indicators that fitness-signaling by the baby elicits real feelings of fondness and willingness to invest in the well-being of infants," he said.
© 2023 AFP
The leader of a gun-worshipping religious sect has joined the growing ranks of MAGA rappers under the name "King Bullethead."
Pastor Hyung-Jin “Sean” Moon, who heads the Rod of Iron Ministries, is turning his far-right sermons into rap videos to spread extremist messages about LGBTQ people and other topics, reported Vice News, although YouTube took down his channel when asked for comment.
“Did you hear about this group called LGTBQ/You may have heard them in your school or even your church pew/They are telling our kids they can switch to any gender/Taking hormones slicing organs like they’re playing Fruit Ninja," Moon raps in one song, called "Fruit Ninja."
Vice described the videos as low-budget productions featuring "questionable rhymes" and "bombastic" videos, which feature Moon wearing skeleton gloves and a crown of gold bullets while waving around a gold-plated AR-15 rifle, which the church teaches is the “Rod of Iron” foretold in the Bible’s Book of Revelations.
READ MORE: Goebbels-quoting Indiana Republican drunkenly crashed car and fled the scene: police
“They can’t stop us so they silence, censor and act like Communists,” he raps in "Big MAGA 20." “Politicians lie to get their power and form their little cliques/Politics is a combination of the words ‘poly’ and ‘ticks’/‘Poly’ means more than one, a few, a group of cliques, and ticks are parasites that suck your blood until the very last drip.”
The group, also known as The Sanctuary Church, remains fully on the fringe and Moon's channel had relatively few followers before it was taken down, but it's among many extremist groups that have aligned their message with the broader MAGA movement, and Moon and other senior members of the sect were present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but do not appear to have gone inside.
“They call us conspiracy theorists and domestic terrorists," Moon raps in "Red Eye Patrio." "They did the sedition and blamed it on you and me."
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