BUT IT’S DONE TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN! The Absurdity Of Charging 10-Year-Olds As Sex Offenders.

A ten-year boy has just been charged as a sex offender as a result of a schoolyard game of tag that got out of control. As reported by the local CBS news affiliate: “the fourth-grade students were playing a game of tag that escalated when a boy began making inappropriate comments and movements toward the girls. One of the boys also wrapped his arms around one of the girls.”

Obviously, this incident should not be dismissed as a “boys will be boys” prank. The comments were very sexually aggressive. The boys should be disciplined, and, even more importantly, taught the error of their ways. But charging a 10-year-old as a sex offender is a devastating, merciless response. The boy has been charged with a fourth-degree sexual offense. Even if he avoids prison time, under Maryland law someone convicted with a fourth-degree sexual offense will be put on a sexual offender registry for fifteen years. This casts serious doubt on whether he will ever go to college or find gainful employment.

This sort of devastatingly punitive treatment of children is not an anomaly and it destroys the lives of girls and boys alike. Writing in The New Yorker, Sarah Stillman tells the story of 10-year-old Charla Roberts: “In Charla Roberts’s living room, not far from Paris, Texas, I learned how, at the age of ten, Roberts had pulled down the pants of a male classmate at her public elementary school. She was prosecuted for ‘indecency with a child,’ and added to the state’s online offender database for the next ten years. The terms of her probation barred her from leaving her mother’s house after six in the evening, leaving the county, or living in proximity to ‘minor children,’ which ruled out most apartments. When I spoke to the victim, he was shocked to learn of Roberts’s fate. He described the playground offense as an act of “public humiliation, instead of a sexual act”—a hurtful prank, but hardly a sex crime. Roberts can still be found on a commercial database online, her photo featured below a banner that reads, “protect your child from sex offenders.”

This is monstrous, and the people doing it are monsters. In a just world, they would be horsewhipped out of town and shunned by all decent people. But we don’t live in a just world. We live in a world in which there is zero tolerance for every infraction, except misbehavior by public officials.

CHANGE: Brent Oil Set to Disappear as Crude-Price Benchmark Lives On.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC is expected next year to plug the last remaining Brent oil wells, located in the North Sea’s East Shetland Basin, about 115 miles northeast of Scotland’s Shetland Islands. The closures mark the end of an era, as the industry shifts its focus to smaller oil finds near existing infrastructure.

Many companies are shutting down platforms above massive fields discovered in the 1970s, but Brent stands apart as one of the first and most significant of these finds. The field has generated billions of dollars for Shell, its partner in the field, Exxon Mobil Corp. and the U.K. government.

In the late 1980s, Brent crude became the benchmark on which most of the world’s oil is priced and is still used to set the price of the multi-trillion dollar Intercontinental Exchange Brent futures market.

Keep on frackin’.

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM? BLOOMBERG NEWS IS COVERING MIKE BLOOMBERG THE SAME WAY CBSABCNBCPBSCNNWPNYT COVERED HILLARY AND OBAMA: CNN, FNC Rip Bloomberg News Covering for Boss in 2020.

UPDATE: Trump campaign says it will no longer credential Bloomberg News reporters over outlet’s 2020 policy.

Finally, a Republican president is thinking of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines.

(Updated and bumped.)

VAPING IS BETTER THAN SMOKING: Great American Smokeout sees record lows in cigarette use, high levels of vaping.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for December 2, 2019. “Biden noms his wife in public, an ex-staffer reveals how badly Camp Harris sucks, Sestak drops Out (or at least stops pretending he was in), Gabbard weaponizes Joe Rogan, and New Hampshire voters beg Tom Steyer to make it stop.”

THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI GOES GREEN (FOR FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS): Hooray for Jackson State University, whose move to a green-light speech code rating from FIRE means that Mississippi joins Arizona as the only two states whose top colleges have eliminated all unconstitutional speech codes. For once, taxpayers least hard hit!

UNDER PROGRESSIVE POLICING, TRANSIT CRIME SURGES IN NYC, SF.

Which helps to explain: Why NYC feels so much less safe, even when major crime is still down.

UPDATE: Car burglaries in some California cities are at crisis levels. Prosecutors say their hands are tied.

AT AMAZON, Cyber Monday Deals in Toys & Games.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Samantha Power Rails Against Iranian Regime She Once Helped Bail Out.

ANTI-AGING: Rapamycin may slow aging in human skin, study finds.

OPTIMISM: Black Friday shoppers spent more in stores, broke records online over the weekend.

SAD: Samantha Power Rails Against Iranian Regime She Once Helped Bail Out.

DIDN’T HE JUST LEAVE A POWERFUL POSITION IN A DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATION? John Kerry launches coalition to fight climate crisis: ‘We are way behind.’

SLEEP IS NOT A LUXURY: Huge Study Hints at a Key Reason Why Poor People Have Higher Risk of Heart Disease.

WELL, BYE: China Suspends Hong Kong Port Calls by US Military After Trump Signs Democracy Act.

ARMING AMERICA: Americans Bought Enough Guns on Black Friday to Arm the Marine Corps – Yet Again!

SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

COCAINE MITCH PLAYS FOR KEEPS: Sorry Liberals, You’re Angry at the Wrong Whole Foods.

YEP: Unprecedented Leaks Underscore Deep Discontent Inside China. China spent decades putting Mao’s excesses behind them; Xi’s effort to be Mao II cuts directly against that.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The road to riches is this simple: Drive a crappy car.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Today’s Yale grads aren’t qualified to lead in the 21st Century. Analysis: True. “This sense of immunity from the real world could be heard at last Saturday’s protest, where some students shouted ‘My father is a lawyer!’ to police officers trying to persuade them off the field. These protesters did not sound like people who have faced true hardship or even learned the basics of a proper argument. But then again, why would they? They were taught to avoid all that at Yale.”

AT AMAZON, It’s Cyber Monday with Deals All Over The Place.

UH-HUH: Lisa Page: ‘There’s No Fathomable Way That I Have Committed Any Crime at All.’

PUTIN PUPPETS, UNMASKED: Impeachment Testimony Describes Putin’s Propaganda War On American Fracking. “In recent testimony to House lawmakers, Fiona Hill, John Bolton’s former direct report at the National Security Council and the White House’s former top expert on Russia, reported that Russian propaganda was working to undermine the use of hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, in the United States.”

Well, of course. Fracking has done more to undermine Putin than any other single U.S. initiative.

As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

Yep. You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.

LOSING THEIR FAITH? NOT REALLY: So says President Ronald Reagan’s  *“terrible, swift sword” over the federal bureaucracy, former Office of Personnel Management Director Donald Devine, writing in today’s edition of The American Conservative. (Full Disclosure: I spent 2.5 great years working for Devine as a Reagan political appointee).

Devine, a political scientist and data wonk by profession, took a look at the recent Pew and other polls reported by the Mainstream Media as heralding the accelerating decline of Christianity in the U.S. Not quite what the data show, according to Devine, who summarized it all thusly:

“Pew calculates worldwide that—mainly due to higher death rates and lower number of children—people with no religion will decline relative to those who are religious by the year 2060 and that Christianity will remain the world’s largest religion.

“So sorry to rain on the media parade, but while there has been a recent decrease in formal religious affiliation and participation in the U.S., mostly among the youngest, it has pretty much been within a narrow band that’s fluctuated over the last half century but maintained a participation and membership total surpassing any other type of social organization. That even includes watching the Super Bowl!”

* The inside story of Reagan and Devine made monumental reforms in the civil service.