If you’re not sure, don’t share

I wrote about the HBO series We’re Here. The three drag queen hosts go into a town and help three locals prepare to be part of a drag show. Along the way they deal with coming out and acceptance. This past Monday was an episode I didn’t watch but very much would have wanted to. The city was Evansville, Indiana and one of the participating locals was Pastor Craig Duke of Newburgh United Methodist Church. Duke isn’t LGBTQ, but his daughter is. Yeah, doing drag was way out of his comfort zone. However, he said:

If you want to involve people different than yourself in your ministry, you have to go to where people different than you are. The invitation to be part of the show allowed me that.

Preparation for the show also provided a spiritual connection with Duke’s “drag mother” Eureka O’Hara that benefited both of them. Religion News Service has an article about Duke and the show. Since I didn’t watch last Monday I’d have to subscribe to HBOMax to see it. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported US District Court Judge Lee Yeakel in Austin ruled Texas Gov. Greg Abbot’s ban on mask mandates violates federal law. The reasoning is through the Americans with Disabilities Act – students with special health issues are at higher risk of illness and death from the virus and masks work. If a higher court doesn’t overturn it, the reasoning behind the ruling could be applied to several other states with Republican governors. One thing the new governor of Virginia campaigned on was that certain books should be removed from schools. That guy isn’t in office yet. So I guess the Spotsylvania County School Board is using his election as permission to do what they’ve wanted to do for a while. Laura Clawson of Kos reported the board voted unanimously to remove “sexually explicit” books from school libraries and to consider what else might be “objectionable.” One board member wants to throw the books in a fire, complaining the schools would rather kids read gay pornography than about Christ. Yeah, we know the definition of “sexually explicit” will be interpreted to mean anything having to do with LGBTQ – two guys kissing would be “sexually explicit” and a guy kissing a girl would not. Clawson also reported that Texas Gov. Abbott is all in for banning books in schools, though he seems to be having a hard time finding the proper state agency willing to do the deed. Clawson also wrote about the need for school libraries to stock books about LGBTQ youth. These kids frequently must look outside their home for understanding about who they are. Today was to be the last day of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. News reports today say it has gone into overtime to produce an agreeable final statement. April Siese of Kos reported yesterday morning UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres wasn’t hopeful that whatever is produced will be enough. Siese reported:

Guterres warned of a worst-case scenario of a watered-down agreement being adopted for the sake of adoption. According to Guterres, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is “on life support.” “When you are on the verge of the abyss, it’s not important to discuss what will be your fourth or fifth step,” Guterres told AP. “What’s important to discuss is what will be your first step. Because if your first step is the wrong step, you will not have the chance to do a search to make a second or third one.”

Mark Sumner of Kos reported the Department of Health and Human Services under Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, has created a document and toolkit to help people combat disinformation. The document (which I looked at) explains the reasoning. It then has a page on what individuals and families can do, what educators can do, what health professionals, journalists, tech platforms, researchers, funding foundations, and governments can do. I also looked at the toolkit. Some of its sections: Common types of health misinformation, such as sites that look professional or mimic news sites, quotes taken out of context, cherry-picked stats, misleading graphs, old images recirculated as recent, and videos edited to change the meaning. Why we want to share info, including helping the people we care about or seeking explanations that make sense of events. Understanding why people create harmful information, including doing it deliberately, make money off it, fool people for the fun of it, support a person or cause, and share so friends have as much info as possible. A comic strip about why people might seek out information that might be misleading. A big reason is to deal with a serious illness. This strip points out ways a person might be directed to misinformation. How to talk about misinformation with loved ones – listen to their fears and the wider issue, not on the specifics of the false claim. Empathize, then point to credible sources. Don’t shame. Types of disinformation tactics, such as using the logo of a credible source, using visual cues such as a stethoscope around the neck, using rare terms so web searches won’t include results to debunk the claim, say “this happened to me” which is harder to fact-check. And a misinformation checklist: did you check the CDC, a credible health care professional, a credible webpage, the site’s “About Us” page? If you’re not sure, don’t share. Clawson reported earlier this week that NPR obtained recordings of internal NRA deliberations on how to proceed after the Columbine school shooting in 1999. The decisions made that day have been used since. What prompted the discussion was that the NRA’s national convention was just days away in nearby Denver. If they canceled the event they would be seen as running away, which meant accepting responsibility for Columbine. But if they stayed the must appear to be deferential in honoring the dead. The media would be swarming the exhibit hall looking for kids fondling guns. But if the exhibit hall closed the media would focus on the actual meeting with the wackos dressed like hillbillies and idiots. They complained that the media was looking for a villain for political gain.

At that convention, the NRA laid the course it has followed ever since following mass shootings: Attack the media and insist that it’s disrespectful to the people murdered by guns to discuss the role of guns in their murders. ... And because the NRA was committed to ensuring that there would be lots of fresh graves for decades to come, that message has gotten a regular workout. But back then in 1999, with 13 dead at Columbine, they knew just how bad it looked for them, and how important it was to get the right message to get people to look past the gun lobby’s role in that mass killing.

Sumner wrote an essay for Kos about the state of American retail. His own family owned three clothing stores in a small town. In addition to supplying jobs to the community they brought traveling salesmen to town, which also brought in their travel expenses. Then Walmart arrived. The small town’s downtown cycled through candy shops, diners, specialty coffee, and anything else that wasn’t cheaper in the behemoth at the edge of town. Then the downtown became empty. He remembers back in 1981 the opening of a small shopping center in St. Louis that soon grew into a huge mall with four anchor stores. Malls peaked about 1990. By the 2000s malls began to close and by the 2010s their closures took out big retail chains – K-Mart, Sears, Borders, and many more. Ghost malls and empty megastores are a thing. Some became public parks, others became antique malls, many more stand empty. Online sales barely registered in 2000, rose to 4% of consumer sales in 2010, and 9% in 2015. The pandemic prompted a jump to 15%. I lived through the Just in Time model sweeping the auto industry. I wasn’t involved in manufacturing, though I had to watch a video or two so I knew what it was. Sumner says JIT meant not keeping inventory on hand. It also meant experienced, flexible workers were let go. Focus shifted to management and their pay began to rise. The goal was the plan with the fewest and cheapest workers. Problems were addressed by management. This concentrated wealth in the hands of the few. FedEx went with the leanest workforce. UPS didn’t. FedEx had to hire contractors to handle staffing shortages and they cost more than the workers who were let go. UPS made almost $2 billion more on nearly identical sales. But over the last four decades MBA programs have been teaching the lean staffing system where the lack of worker knowledge wasn’t seen as a detriment. Companies with such leadership couldn’t face the pandemic and online competition. Companies that valued workers, including Costco, were more flexible and durable in a crisis Sumner concluded:

None of these realities were created by the pandemic. If the advantage that e-commerce holds over the “brick and mortar” world got another big underscore during the last two difficult years, so did the advantages of companies that are able to retain experienced workers. Still, don’t expect most CEOs to read much into that second advantage. After all, Costco had revenues of almost $200B in the last year and the CEO isn’t even a billionaire. Clearly they’re doing it wrong.

I’ve been seeing this online ad for a t-shirt modeled by a guy with a white beard that seems appropriate for me (though I won’t buy it): “Built in the Fifties, Original and Unrestored, Some parts still in working order.”