James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

“You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife, the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry,” said Erika Kirk, the wife of slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, in her first public message since his killing.

Just days after a gunman shot and killed Kirk at a Utah university, Erika Kirk addressed her husband’s supporters and the nation as a whole, saying she would continue Charlie Kirk’s political activism through his Turning Point USA organization.

“To everyone listening tonight across America, the movement my husband built will not die. It won’t, I refuse to let that happen … All of us will refuse to let that happen,” Erika Kirk said. “No one will ever forget my husband’s name, and I will make sure of it.”

She thanked first responders and investigators, as well as President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, for their support in the wake of the fatal shooting on Wednesday.

“Mr. President, my husband loved you, and he knew that you loved him, too,” Erika Kirk said, fighting back tears. “He did. Your friendship was amazing. You supported him so well, as did he for you.”

Charlie Kirk was husband to Erika and the father of two young kids at the time of his death on Wednesday, a 1-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter.
“When I got home last night, our daughter just ran into my arms … and she said, ‘Mommy, I missed you.’ I said, ‘I missed you too, baby.’ She goes, ‘Where’s daddy?’ What do you tell a 3-year-old? She’s three. I said, ‘Baby, daddy loves you so much. Don’t you worry. He’s on a work trip with Jesus so he can afford your blueberry budget,” Erika said.

The founder of the conservative youth activist organization was shot while speaking at Utah Valley University, the first stop this fall for Turning Point USA’s “The American Comeback Tour,” which was traveling to multiple college campuses across the country.

In what has been described as a “political assassination,” Kirk was struck by a single shot while he was speaking at the event on Wednesday. He was rushed to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Trump announced Kirk’s death on social media, writing, “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead.”

“No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us,” the president wrote. “Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”

When Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced at a Friday press conference the arrest of a suspect in the shooting, he spoke of Charlie Kirk’s family.

“I especially want to thank the family of Charlie Kirk — Erika, Charlie’s parents, his children,” Cox said. “I want us to be thinking of them as we bring justice in this case. They will be involved in that justice. We will be working very closely with them as we move through this process as well.”

Erika Kirk is a former Miss Arizona USA and collegiate basketball player who is currently studying for a doctorate in Biblical studies at Liberty University, according to a biography on her website.

She is the founder of Proclaim, a faith-based clothing line, the host of the “Midweek Rise Up” podcast, and the founder of two nonprofit organizations, according to her website.

Erika Kirk has also been a frequent presence by her husband’s side at speaking engagements and public appearances.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

A year earlier, hard-charging right-wing Republicans took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Their wide margins gave them far more running room than the G.O.P. has now. A battered Mr. Clinton later pleaded with reporters that he was still “relevant,” which sounds a lot like today’s congressional Democrats.

Yet when the shutdown ended in early 1996, Mr. Clinton had won big. How? Mr. Clinton, who had struggled to communicate a message, boiled down his dozens of wordy policy positions to what his aides called “M.M.E.E.” — Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. Intense focus on those four popular Democratic positions powered Mr. Clinton’s shutdown comeback and his re-election that fall.

The Clinton analogy is imperfect; Mr. Clinton had the megaphone of the presidency, while Democrats today control no branch of government. The politics of a shutdown favor them nonetheless.

Democrats have a big edge on what’s seen as the No. 1 problem in America: affordability. According to a new CBS News poll, a paltry 36 percent of Americans approve of the way Mr. Trump is handling inflation, a blaring sign of the president’s vulnerability on the main issue that brought him back to the White House.

In a world of short attention spans, Democrats should go to the ramparts on just three instead of four issues, with a tightly focused popular solution for each.

Today’s version of M.M.E.E. should be H.T.T. — health, tariffs and troops in the streets. The first two are directly related to affordability, with health-care premiums and drug costs surging and tariffs causing steep price increases, not to mention resentment from parents who don’t want the president telling them, as he did in April, that it’s OK if they can now afford only two dolls for Christmas.

On health, Democrats should demand an extension of the popular tax credits that make Obamacare more affordable for millions of Americans, which are scheduled to expire next year. They should insist on restoring funding for popular National Institutes of Health grants, particularly for cancer research. And in the glare of a shutdown, it would be tough for Republicans to resist a Democratic push to reverse at least some of the unpopular Medicaid cuts. Finally, Democrats should insist on a provision guaranteeing the availability of vaccines, a position supported by 78 percent of adults in a recent NBC News poll, including overwhelming majorities of independents and Republicans.

On tariffs, Democrats should demand that almost all tariffs be approved by Congress, a view that might soon also have the backing of the Supreme Court. This would peel off some Republican senators who like neither tariffs nor Mr. Trump trampling on the legislative branch’s longstanding authority over trade.

.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Soon after psychiatrist Leo Kanner first identified autism in the 1940s, he and his colleagues proposed a simple explanation for its cause: mothers’ “lack of genuine warmth” toward their children. Being raised by “refrigerator mothers,” the researchers explained, was what caused autistic people’s difficulties with social communication and sensory processing and their repetitive behaviors and interests.

But in the 1970s, studies of twins revealed that autism is highly heritable, not something that develops after birth. Thus began the search for the genes responsible. “We had rather simple views about what it might be” that caused autism, says Helen Tager-Flusberg, a professor emerita at Boston University. The idea in the 1990s, she recalls, was that “we’re talking about six to 10 genes.” Instead, researchers found hundreds.

No simple theory of autism has ever panned out, and the scientific community has moved on from the search for a simple answer. Researchers now know that autism develops from a staggeringly complex interplay between genes and factors that can influence development in utero. But attempts to pin the condition on one root cause abound, most famously in the disproven idea that vaccines cause autism. And earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced that he will reveal the “interventions” that are “almost certainly causing autism” in September.

While scientists rarely proclaim absolutes, autism researchers say that they are as sure as they can be that there’s no one cause of the condition. “It’s never going to be true,” says Tager-Flusberg; decades of data reveal that a complex (and highly variable) origin is the only logical conclusion.

The Genetic Picture

In the past 50 years, researchers have identified hundreds of genes linked to autism spectrum disorder. But which genes are involved varies greatly from person to person and can be much harder to pin down. About 10 to 15 percent of cases (some estimates are as high as 39 percent) involve genetic mutations that are new to a child—not inherited from their parents—explains Shafali Jeste, an autism researcher and pediatrician, who leads the neurology division at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. In another approximately 50 percent of cases, autism is linked to the combination of many common variants of genes that were inherited from parents. In the remaining cases, the causes are murky

But even for new genetic mutations that are known to cause autism, the story is far from simple. The same mutations can be present in nonautistic people, too. “If you have this mutation, it doesn’t guarantee that you will have autism per se, but it increases the risk substantially,” says Jed Elison, who studies brain development and autism at the University of Minnesota. There are still other factors involved that researchers haven’t fully characterized—some that are likely genetic and some that are likely not.

Untangling genetic factors from nongenetic ones (which scientists call “environmental factors”) can be tricky. For example, studies have consistently shown that parental age at conception can play a role, with older parents being more likely to have autistic children. But that could be because of the effect of age on genes: people accumulate mutations with age and can pass these on to their kids. Other factors that have been linked to autism include people being born prematurely or through cesarean section, as well as pregnant people having obesity, using certain medications (such as the antiseizure drug valproate and the pain reliever acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol), and being exposed to air pollution. The strength of the evidence for these links varies, though, and the increases in risk tend to be small. The evidence is also only correlational, meaning it can’t establish what caused what.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

With a provocative title and over 175 comments at the time of writing, a thread in the r/Parenting subreddit is getting a lot of attention because a parent has admitted to loving their kids equally—but not liking them all the same.

In the post titled, “The dirty secret my parents never told me,” the Redditor says they believed growing up in a “somewhat large family” that their parents loved all the kids equally. “Now that I’ve been a parent, I think that actually was true,” they add.

Then, the poster goes on to drop the bombshell confession: “But what I didn’t understand, until I had my own kids, is that I wouldn’t like them all equally.”

Loving Your Children vs. Liking Them

The Redditor says one of their kids is a lot like them in all the good ways, while the other reminds them of themselves “in all the cringe-worthy ways.” For instance, this child is “emotionally needy” and “high maintenance.” A third child “is always lying and getting into trouble, and fighting with the rest of their siblings.”

Again, the poster stresses that all the kids are loved equally. “But do I like being around them all equally? Hell no.” They then go on to share that although this realization used to cause a lot of guilt, having the same feelings about your children is “just not the way it works out.”

Finally, the Redditor says that being your kids’ friend is not the primary job of a parent. “It’s to love them and get them ready to function on their own in the world. And I don’t need to like being around them in order to do that,” the poster says.

The Post Was a Conversation Starter For Sure!

Not surprisingly, the hot-button post has divided commenters. 

Many can relate hard to what the poster said, with one sharing, “I have four kids. I love and enjoy them all for different reasons. They also all uniquely irritate me in their own ways.”

Many comments were in a similar vein to this one: “I love all my kids the same, and quite honestly, they all take turns stressing me out or melting my heart completely. I literally couldn’t tell you which ones I like better on a consistent basis because it’s always changing!”

Dozens of commenters agreed that which of their kids they like the most varies by the day, hour, or even minute, and often it’s age and stage-related. For instance, teenagers and toddlers understandably make liking your kids all the time a challenge for so many parents who responded to this thread.

But many Reddit users reacted differently to the share, with one cautioning the original poster, “I hope you do a good job not letting it show though.” Meanwhile, another noted that kids can sense how their parents feel about them versus their siblings.

“It’s not nice growing up in a house where you know you’re liked a lot less than your siblings,” someone else acknowledged, while another poster agreed, “My entire life, I felt this from my mom. I’ve always said that she loves me because she’s my mom and has to, but doesn’t actually like me. We can always tell.”

Yet another Reddit user had an even more pointed message for the poster, writing, “You have a favorite, and just by how you describe your other child, it’s probably pretty obvious to everyone around you, including that child… which is probably why they’re acting out.”

To be fair, the post was commended by several Redditors, like one who said, “This is really insightful. It makes so much sense that love and liking can be different emotions. It’s tough to balance those feelings as a parent. I admire your honesty in sharing this struggle.”

And someone else defended the poster against critics by saying, in part, “I know you’re a great parent. S****y parents aren’t making posts on Reddit, guessing themselves on how they’re doing as parents.”

My Two Cents (From a Mom of Many)

As a mom of five, I’ll jump in and say that in my view, it’s not so much that I don’t like my kids equally, but that I may not like what they are doing, or the stage they are in.

It’s like I tell my 3-year-old after he throws a truck at my head out of frustration and I make him go to time out: “I will always love you, but I do not like what you’re doing.” 

As far as loving all of my kids equally, I’d say, well, yes, I do, but maybe I’d state it in another way, as I love them all the same, but differently. They are different people! Meanwhile, I can relate to the original poster in that learning how to parent each of your kids according to their individual personalities and stages in life can be a huge challenge—and leads to conflicts with each for varying reasons. 

Ultimately, parenting is the toughest job there is, and I have to agree with the commenter who essentially said that as long as you are constantly evaluating your own performance as a mom or dad, you’re probably pretty engaged and doing the best you can.

.

Photo:  Parents / Zing Images via Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The grandmother of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson — who has been arrested for allegedly murdering far-right activist Charlie Kirk — is now saying her entire family is strongly in the Republican camp.

According to a Friday report in the Daily Beast, Robinson’s grandmother, Debbie Robinson, told the Daily Mail that the alleged shooter was raised around a family of people who fully supported President Donald Trump. The 69-year-old said that her son, Matt — who is the suspect’s father — is a “Republican for Trump.”

“Most of my family members are Republican,” she said. “I don’t know any single one who’s a Democrat.”

Robinson insisted she was completely caught off-guard by the news of her grandson’s arrest, saying that the 22-year-old “has never, ever gotten in trouble in his life. And she added that despite her family’s political leanings, she never personally had political conversations with her grandson, who was registered as non-party affiliated in previous elections.

“I’m just so confused,” Debbie said of her grandson’s arrest. “[Tyler] is the shyest person,” she said. “He has never, ever spoke politics to me at all.”

The alleged assassin’s mother, Amber, is also a registered Republican, according to public records. Both Amber and Matt Robinson live in the Republican stronghold of Washington, Utah, and are employed full-time as a licensed social worker and a home furnishings entrepreneur, respectively. One 2021 Facebook post shows Amber Robinson praising one of Tyler’s brothers as a “gun-toting, cowboy-loving, brilliant kid” with a photo of him holding a scoped rifle.

According to a Friday report in the Wall Street Journal, Tyler Robinson graduated high school with a nearly perfect grade point average, scored a 34 out a possible 36 on his A.C.T. test, and earned a $32,000 scholarship to Utah State University. However, he dropped out of school after one semester and appeared to be deeply steeped in far-right online meme culture. Ammunition recovered by police were covered in obscure references to video games and niche memes

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

They first met in middle school – when they were wide-eyed and 10, 11, or 12: before Americans could so easily separate themselves based on what they believed.

“Even then, he was political,” Christina Lorey wrote in a social media post after his death. “A Republican – but not an extremist. He was funny, friendly, and always the first to debate anything and everything.”

Lorey, a left-leaning journalist with a Substack following, who now lives in Wisconsin, and conservative influencer Charlie Kirk grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. On Sept. 10, a shooter is believed to have fired a single gunshot that killed Kirk, 31, on the campus of Utah Valley University.

Now, Lorey is paying tribute to her childhood friend, years after their paths diverged. She declined to speak further out of respect for his family.

In her post, Lorey wrote that Kirk “talked a lot.” She did, too. They “became friends,” she said. They weren’t “best friends,” but “the kind of people who’d work well together on a school project and have fun doing it.”

Then, at the end of 6th grade, both Lorey and Kirk were voted “Most Likely to Become President.”

“He was much more excited about that than I: it always seemed like he might actually run for president someday,” Lorey wrote. “In high school, we were on different tracks, but had one memorable class together senior year: AP Government. It was an election year, too; Charlie’s Super Bowl.” Former President Barack Obama and former Arizona Sen. John McCain were on the ballot.

“I got to know Charlie very well during that year,” Lorey said. “One of my favorite memories was the schoolwide campaign he launched to get the cafeteria to lower the price of its chocolate chip cookies. I don’t remember what they’d hiked the price to or if his campaign was even successful, but he was extraordinarily passionate about it.”

She continued: ‘That trait stayed with him until the end – When Charlie believed in something, he REALLY believed in it.” Then, just before they both graduated from Wheeling, senior superlatives were released. They were both voted “Most Likely to Become President” – again.

Graduation came and went. The Wheeling Wildcats from the class of 2012 walked their own paths. Lorey said Kirk started Turning Point USA that summer. The organization advocates for conservative politics on high school and college campuses. His high school friend Lorey went to college. Kirk dropped out.

“We didn’t talk much besides the occasional check-in, and even though I didn’t at all agree with or admire what his organization turned into, I was amazed that the middle school boy that always wanted to debate built THAT,” Lorey said on social media. “It was impressive.”

But she built something impressive, too: Lorey now boasts 125,000 Facebook followers while sharing good news across Wisconsin.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________