This is just a taste of what would happen if the budget were to go through as proposed. My wife works for JCFS, and I can tell you, they are just a small piece of the social service spectrum.

Without proper care and support, thousands of children are going to fall through the cracks, and most of them are going to end up costing the state much more in the long run if we abandon them now.

Call your legislator, let them know that you care about people, and your legislator should too.

Jewish Child and Family Service

Fully implemented, the budget as it currently stands will result in:

• abrupt termination of services to 150 at-risk youth in foster or pre-adoptive care and their caregivers. This will result in more youth in shelters awaiting new foster homes, at a time when there is a drastic shortage of all placements statewide.

• After waiting up to five years to get help, 50 families are at risk of losing vital respite care. Through JCFS, these struggling families receive the professional support needed to face the unending demands of caring for their disabled, troubled and delayed children. Without this critical service, these families will be forced to survive in isolation with nowhere to turn.

The following case studies serve to further show the potential damage resulting from drastic cuts to human services funding:

System of Care – In Home Counseling
• A 14-year-old girl, who has lived in 11 foster homes, struggles to trust again. After months of working with her JCFS clinician, she is just starting to open up. This critical relationship is the key to her trusting again. A sudden ending to this in-home service, will replicate the many losses this girl has already experienced, and reduce her chances of being adopted.

Integrated Pediatric Interventions
• Currently, JCFS provides services to young children in the IPI program who have significant speech, social, motor and cognitive developmental delays. Half of these children leave our program with no delays and no longer require intensive services of any kind. However, if the State of Illinois increases service eligibility to a higher developmental delay threshold, research has shown that these children will require special educational interventions throughout their entire school experiences, rather than just during early childhood. How shortsighted is this solution?

Holocaust Community Services
• Having endured the atrocities of the Holocaust, there are survivors in our community who rely on life-linking in-home services to sustain their daily living needs for food and personal care. Abruptly removing these vital services will prematurely force the placement of these fragile older adults out of their safe communities and into nursing homes. Not only are nursing homes far more restrictive than natural living environments, for this vulnerable group they are also triggers to the horrors of the past.

Staff also will be affected by the cuts in dramatic ways:

• A staff member who has worked for JCFS for several years would be slated to lose her job if the doomsday budget is passed: she is a single parent of a young toddler. Recently, the child’s father, a huge support to her both financially and emotionally was in a terrible accident and now is permanently disabled. She is also a foster parent and an adoptive parent. With the loss of her partner’s assistance, her support system has shrunk, except for her colleagues at work. She will be impacted in so many ways by these catastrophic budget cuts—she will not only lose her salary, but at risk is also her foster care payments, her adoption subsidies and her ability to care for the vulnerable children in her home.

• An employee who has worked for the agency for 4 years is a new parent. Her son was in day care at the agency’s childcare center – a program that was recently forced to close due to budget shortfalls. Just weeks before the daycare closed, her spouse lost his job and now she is likely to be laid off if the state does not take action.

“The currently proposed State of Illinois budget cuts will be catastrophic to human services and to Jewish Child & Family Services. It is the 9/11 of budgets and will leave people devastated. JCFS provides critical services to more than 4,000 people annually. Budget cuts will result in over 435 of the most vulnerable children and their families ceasing to receive various forms of needed care or shelter,” said JCFS President Don Trossman. “And it will decimate other vital private and public resources upon which our agency and clients rely. Further, JCFS will be forced to put approximately 180 people out of work. Our legislators need to develop a sensitive and fiscally responsible balanced budget immediately and have compassion for the most vulnerable citizens and the agencies that provide these necessary human services.”

“Julia, can I get you a coffee?”

“No, I have a ton of editing to do, I need the venom of a Death Adder which has the power to strike back.”

“How about an espresso then?”

“I will bite you in your neck if you do not leave me immediately to the challenges of my intense life.”

“Look, we all have a lot of work to do.”

“You may have a lot of work to do. I have a lot of work to penetrate with my face, inject with poison, and kill.”

“Is that your heart visibly beating through your sternum?”

“Yes, it is. Jealous?”

(via The Morning News)

I think Kottke’s hypothesis is correct. I always find it interesting the people who follow over a couple hundred others on Twitter. How is it possible to use twitter in a meaningful way when you do that?

Plus, Robert Scoble and Mashable really suck.

The problem with all of the “we’re tracking the most popular links on Twitter” sites is that link sharing on Twitter depends on (in order of decreasing relevance):

1. the time it takes to read/view the link (shorter is way better)

2. if the subject of the link is Twitter or Facebook

3. the sense of outrage aroused in the reader (the more the better)

4. if the link was published by Mashable

5. retweets by popular Twitter users who have many parrot followers (i.e. disciples)

6. how interesting the link is

So unless you’re into brief but outrageous Twitter news from Mashable that you heard about from Robert Scoble — and it is incredible the number of people who are — these services just aren’t that useful.

This has got to be the greatest opening paragraph of any movie review I’ve ever read:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.