This is possibly one of the best Substack blogs around. Father & Son - Prof Lawrence Freedman (War, Foreign Policy) & Sam (detailed UK policy analysis). It rises above the click-bait & quick takes - they write lengthy, thought out, detailed stuff.
This particular piece by Sam I almost filed away for later. But glad I made the time for it.
"Jennifer Pinsof, staff attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the technology has been used in too many nefarious circumstances to be trusted... There are several local and state-level regulations in place... to mitigate inappropriate data sharing. Police departments, for instance, are not supposed to share the license plate data with other states, nor with federal law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That, however, hasn’t stopped at least 73 departments throughout California from violating those rules...
"We found that many California law enforcement agencies share this data not just out of state but specifically with agencies in states that ban abortions, and those law enforcement agencies who now have access to this highly sensitive location data can use it to prosecute things that are crimes within their state but not within the state of California,” she said."
Reporter Jenny Gold analyzed state Medi-Cal data for 2021. Her findings on health care access for kids in the California public insurance program are sobering:
🟡 60% of babies—and 75% of Black babies—did not get their recommended well-child visits in their first 15 months of life.
🟡 65% of 2-year-olds were not fully vaccinated, leaving them vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases like measles.
🟡 Half of children did not receive a lead screening by their second birthday.
Brazilian #museums join the #Fediverse: "From a [#digitalmemory] #publicpolicy standpoint, creating an online social environment for disseminating information that is independent of centralized platforms is crucial for the sustainable functioning of information and knowledge networks of public interest."
On #climate#COP28: My fear is that getting international agreements in place is the easiest part of the problem. The hard bit will be the proverbial last-mile. People will have to change their behaviour in ways that are pro-environment. And for that, they will have to be more pro-social. It is here that things get stuck.
I recently read a toot about the burden of being a caregiver for a person with Alzheimer’s disease and can sympathize with their perspectives since I was once a caregiver for a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. My brother and I moved our parents into a retirement community when the symptoms of my father’s Alzheimer’s disease became too much for my mother to handle. My father had recently struck my sister-in-law. My mother lived in the assisted living part of the facility and my father moved into a memory care unit. My mother visited my dad almost daily. My brother and I visited him most weekends and took him out bowling or golfing. It was tiring and stressful—as working parents, my wife and I had two young children to drag along for those visits that occupied one day of most weekends. Yes, being a caregiver for a parent with Alzheimer’s was stressful for the 5-6 years the disease lasted until his death.
When we moved our father into the Alzheimer’s unit, he was too mentally incompetent to consent. My brother walked him through signing his name onto an admission form, letter by letter. Notably, no disability rights attorney or judge was there to object, to defend his civil rights. No disability rights advocates argued he would be better off homeless or imprisoned. I suspect this is how things work for most families that make the difficult choice to move an aging parent into such a place. My reason for bring up the absence of such bureaucratic impediments will be clearer a bit later in this thread.
My father lived in that memory care unit for the last 5 years of his life and my family was fortunate that he recognized us until about the last six weeks. On some days, he delusionally believed that he was back living in his childhood home with brothers and sister. On other days he was more in touch with reality. He probably would not have chosen to live the last years of his life in such a place. But he quickly got accustomed to it. When we returned from our bowling or golf outings with him, he willingly returned to his new home and waved goodbye with a smile on his face.
But even though potential harm from reality policing is neither abstract nor unlikely—a new study from a [#Harvard#PublicPolicy#researcher found that #LivePD cameras increase arrests for low-level “quality-of-life” offenses that ended up targeting lower-income communities by nearly 20 percent—they receive a fraction of the attention from #copaganda critics as scripted #police TV. ]
"In part, [governments] are threatened because we can’t provide that information. There’s no way to sort of sit on us hard enough so that we start to undermine what we’re doing... You’re not just trusting me to not play nice with governments. We literally don’t have the data, which is the only way to actually preserve privacy."
If you are in Goa (or, if you need a good reason to be in Goa) do come for a discussion of my book, The Nitopadesha, on Saturday 14th October, 10:30am at International Centre Goa.
🛑 🏛️ In the event of a government shutdown, it's not just federal employees & contractors who face upheaval. WIC, the USDA program that provides health care services and food to millions of low-income women and their children, will end immediately, Deena Zaru Pettiford reports in ABC News.
NEW income data:
Between 2021 and 2022, median household income fell.
Poverty rates remained the same.
Supplemental poverty rate ROSE.
Income hasn't regained its 2019 peak.
Child poverty is higher in 2022 than it was in 2019.
I am getting a lot of emails from the US Dept of Education in the lead-up to student loan payments resuming. We're about to find out just how catastrophic the student loan default crisis is going to get when a working population thrust into the mass death/disability and immense upward redistribution of wealth that morally bankrupt policy makers decided to make of the COVID pandemic is thrown headlong back into the fire pit of sisyphean debt bondage.
If you post to xitter, no one can sees your posts unless they have a xitter account again. Please government agencies and essential service providers, keep this mind if you don't provide a rss feed or post to a social media provider that is open to the public with out an account.
We are excited to share the early news of our new educational program the Open Policy Alliance. This program is aimed at building and supporting a coalition of underrepresented voices from public benefit and charitable foundations.
I was aware of the issue of fat shaming and poverty shaming that has taken place over the past decade based on one essential ingredient of food. Maybe the #FoodIndustry needs to be forced to act rather than blaming people without money.
This #NPR piece tells the nightmare story encountered all to frequently when paying for American #Medicalcare. I hadn’t heard of a #creditcard specifically crafted for desperate people lacking insurance coverage or unable to get procedure clearance in an emergency situation. The words cruelty and exploitation jump to mind