Ramblings of an Idle Physicist

During the stop, Lorenzo had 3 coworkers with him in his truck who have all been taken into ICE custody.

His family described Lorenzo as a hardworking family man who didn’t deserve to be killed. All he wanted was to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people. His eldest son recognized his father by his cries and pleas when trying to identify who the victim was.

The Salgado Araujo family has set up a gofundme to help with funeral and legal costs, and to help keep their family supported since Lorenzo was the sole provider.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

little horse equius. i'm fond of him.

I travel to 17 different elementary schools with an after-school program. I have consistently seen horrible mistreatment of autistic children, Black children, visibly queer children, ANY kind of children.

Black boys especially are labeled at troublemakers from the get go, and are treated vastly differently. I will never forget going to one particular school for the first time, and gaining rapport with a young Black boy. He was a joy! Playful and ornery, but well-behaved. I later learned that his teachers "had" to walk him down the hallway to "keep him in line". He is in third grade, showed me NONE of these "behaviors" outside of just being playful. Black boys are punished and treated like shit for things white kids get away with all the time. Hell, I WAS the white kid who got away with everything. I watched Black classmates get suspended for being half the nightmare I was.

I've seen first-hand a "low-functioning" 6 year old boy (autism, ADHD, and cerebral palsy) be treated like shit for stimming. Yelled at, written up, everything. This was the base I started at before my promotion--Our director told him to sit in the corner on his iPad for the whole 4 hours we had him. I had this same "troublemaker" over the summer program. Away from his usual director, I encouraged him to stim and sing and run around, no iPad allowed. I got him headphones and took him out in the hallway to give him the extra care he needed, and he was infinitely better "behaved". He shined so bright that summer, made friends, and was the happiest I'd ever seen him. I ache to think that he's back at my original base. The following school year, I was promoted to a traveling position, so I seldom get to see him. But he, too, is a prime example of children thriving regardless of the labels placed on them.

At this original base, we had one young Black boy who was ALSO labeled a trouble maker, had some ODD tendencies and did show some of the bad behavior. He was so, SO smart. Too smart for his own good to be in fifth grade, which is why I acted up, too. When he got in trouble, he refused to go to time out when anyone but me would try. My coworkers would yell and command him, pushing him further into the "trouble maker" label. Instead of yelling at him, I would sit down with him, explain why what he did was wrong and that he needed to sit down for a minute. I talked to him like a person and not a problem, and he was infinitely better behaved. This boy would make me bracelets, joke with me, be my little buddy. He hated all the other teachers because they treated him like a problem that couldn't be solved. I treated him like a little brother. I became friends with his older sister (who volunteered with us) and saw him and his sister get baptized. I'm happy to say I still see them from time to time, and that this boy is doing well in middle school.

All this to say--adults should know better. Parents and teachers alike need to really examine how to treat and label kids. If a kid has behaviors, there's a reason for it, and not always a reason they can fix. Adults want to bring the hammer down on trouble makers, and only pushes them further away from growing and reaching their full potential. All children are people; All people need to be treated with respect AND according to their needs.

If you were a young Black person who was treated like shit at school over your race, you didn't deserve that.

If you were a young neurodiverse person who was treated like shit over being neurodiverse, you didn't deserve that.

If you were ANY kind of child who was treated like shit for ANY reason--you didn't deserve that.