Counts of death by heat are way too low

I finished the novel Gwen and Art Are Not in Love by Lex Croucher. Art is a descendant of the legendary King Arthur many generations and a few centuries back. Or maybe the line goes through Mordred. He’s the son of a lord and has no interest in doing the things lords do and a lot of interest in being a playboy. Gwen is a descendant of Guinevere and probably not King Arthur and she is glad her full name is Gwendoline. Her father is the current king of England, who has relocated his capital back to Camelot. Gwen was betrothed to Art when she was an infant – something that happens with royalty at the time. But while they were growing up Art acted like a bratty brother and they still despise each other. The summer Gwen turns 18 and Art is 19 Art’s father sends him to live in the King’s castle for the summer in hopes the two will turn their spat into love. Within a day of arriving Gwen sees Art kissing Mitchell the assistant to the master of the hounds and Art sees Gwen swooning over Lady Bridget, a female knight who has arrived for the summer to take part in the season long tourney. They agree to cover for each other, which means they have to spend time together acting like their relationship is developing. And it works – they no longer hate each other. But will someone please call off the wedding? In the meantime Art notices the bookish Gabriel, Gwen’s brother and crown prince, looks mighty cute. The story is enjoyable and the writing pretty good, though not to the high quality of Fredrik Backman’s work I praised in my previous book discussion. There is a sequel. Alas, I think its title and book cover are somewhat of a spoiler for this book. I had recently written about projections that high heat could kill off half of humanity by 2050. Mary Louise Kelly of NPR spoke to investigator Alejandra Borunda who, along with Quinn Adams of Boston University, took two years to investigate how many people die each year of heat-related causes. The segment I am linking to is one of several being aired this week. US Federal numbers day 1,700 people die each year from high heat. Boruda’s reporting made her think the number was much higher. Her research suggests the real count is about 9,000 deaths a year. Boruda explained the difference:

So to show up in those official counts, heat must be marked down on someone's death record, but that doesn't always happen, and that's because it can just be really hard to figure out how heat influenced a death. There's often multiple factors at play, like a preexisting heart condition, and so doctors or medical examiners or coroners often have to really look for heat role - heat's role. And that takes time, it takes training, it takes money, and there aren't really clear national standards, so everyone is kind of figuring this out for themselves.

She talked to people who lost family to heat. Factors can include: Living in a manufacture home. Addiction and drug use. Medical conditions. Financial pressure so the people couldn't afford to run or fix an air conditioner. What do do? Count deaths more accurately. We can’t fix a problem we don’t understand. A barrier to doing that is heat may not leave a mark on the body. The medical examiner may not think to ask whether the deceased had just been in a hot environment. Other needs: Understand who is most at risk. Teach people and their caregivers what to do. Pay for cooling. Pay for insulation. A comprehensive article of the series is here. It includes a chart showing the CDC counts compared to their models and a chart showing maximum temperature across the US – 2026 is at the top as the hottest. It also includes the study methodology. In the comments of today’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos exlrrp posted a meme:

You know you’re a terrible person when the photos of you with Jeffrey Epstein are real, but the ones of you with Dolly Parton are fake.

I’d revise that a bit. He’s not going to know he’s a terrible person. So it should say, “We know he’s a terrible person...” and “...photos of him...” A tweet from Headquarters News posted by paulpro:

Fox News complains that underage teenage girls aren’t getting pregnant enough: “The problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19, the fertility rate is down 70% in the last 2 decades, which means we are telling people who are young not to have babies.”

Something is profoundly wrong when a dude insists that 15 year olds should be getting pregnant. That seems way too adjacent to being a pedophile. I went to the tweet where Midatlantica added, “Teen pregnancies and single mothers were literally sold as the root of all societal ills by this same cohort through the 70s, 80s, and 90s.” A cartoon posted by paulpro shows an AI robot sucking resource, wages, and intellect out of a worker.

Bears, beavers, and moose defend Canada from tariffs

My Sunday movie was Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. It was released in 2022 and sounded interesting, but I always found something else to watch (my lists are long). I watched now because Kanopy is dropping it at the end of the month (as in tomorrow). Marcel is a shell, an inch high, with feet (with shoes on) and one eye. He lives in a human house with his grandmother Connie. The house is used as an Airbnb and there used to be a much larger community of shells. Most of the time the shells hide from the humans. Marcel thinks that during an argument someone threw their stuff in their luggage and happened to include the rest of their community hiding in the shoes and clothing. Now Dean is living in the house (that’s Dean Fleischer Camp, who wrote, directed, and acted in the movie), discovered Marcel and is making a documentary about Marcel’s life. Dean uploads episodes to social media and gets a lot of response – even the house becomes famous. But the thing Marcel really wants – to find his community – remains elusive. Help comes from a surprising source and Connie has to persuade Marcel to seize the opportunity. Marcel and Connie are quite inventive in creating their environment. They tend a garden. Marcel steps in honey so he can walk up the walls (to the annoyance of the cleaning lady). He hollows out a tennis ball for a faster way to get around. Marcel moves through stop motion animation and this is done quite well. His world is well thought out. The story is cute and touching. I quite enjoyed it. Marcel was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature film. It was also nominated and won a slew of other awards. Last Monday an Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos discussed climate disasters. They will be more frequent and more intense. As that happens regular people will think scientists are exaggerating, like the boy who cried wolf. A few other things in the article:

In the 1850s, while living in Seneca Falls, New York, amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote did a series of experiments that put different substances, including carbon dioxide and moist air, inside glass cylinders and left them in the sun. What she found was extraordinary: cylinders with carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is released when coal, gas or oil is burned, heated up faster and took longer to cool after the sun went down. ... Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist at Australian National University, says she had a “come to Jesus moment” when she realized that constant extreme weather events wouldn’t stop even if the world could immediately reach net zero, the point when as much greenhouse gas is taken out of the atmosphere as released into it. Many countries and major companies have net-zero targets for 2050 or beyond. Because carbon dioxide can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and so much has already built up, the damage could take centuries to reverse. And we keep adding more.

We’re not prepared for major climate disasters. Also, the risks are changing. We don’t like to talk about uncomfortable things, and the worst the weather can dish out is one of those. Denial is a way of coping. However, if people believe risks are real and solutions are possible they will make changes. Alex Brown, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos wrote about his experience in becoming a Certified Prescribed Burn Manager. Brown didn’t take the course to become a manager, but to be able to accurately write about those who do as part of his job of environmental reported. A Prescribed Burn Manager is a person who can use fire to clean out the undergrowth in a forest, to start a small fire with the intention of preventing a massive fire. This is a well known tactic to improve a forest, but for perhaps a century it is one forest managers have been avoiding, thinking all fire is bad. Those who completed the class have to consider the current plant moisture level; to understand the current weather to know what the smoke will do; to know the nearby roads, dwellings, and businesses and how they might be affected; and to know what city and county organizations need to be contacted and involved. Those leading the class want all kinds of people to attend because so much forest land is under private ownership, including timber companies and native tribes. Prescribed burns need to happen there too. The bad news is the nasty guy has cut the funding for such training and operation. The good news is state and local governments are picking up some of the shortfall. Andrew Mangan of Kos, in his weekly look at important surveys, looked at the state of Texas gerrymandering. Texas fired first in the Great Gerrymander War in an effort to flip five House seats from Democrat to Republican. A new poll showed Democrats leading in three of them. One of them, the 15th District, was designed to be very safe for Republicans. Yet, Democrat Bobby Pulido is ahead. This is a 23 point swing towards Democrats. Part of what is happening is Republicans based their new districts on the Latino vote in 2024 and Latinos have made a huge shift away from the nasty guy. Just remember a poll result is not the same as an election result. Kevin Hardy, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, wrote about ALEC and Democratic efforts to match it. I’ve written about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative effort started in 1973 to craft conservative state legislation and to get state legislatures to pass them. They have been annoyingly successful. Hardy wrote that Democrats are becoming more serious in matching that effort. ALEC had recognized that they can do a great deal to advance their goals at the state level. Part of that is because Congress can be dysfunctional and is sometimes firmly in Democratic hands. When a state legislature passes a bill the national discussion is changed, making the passage of the same bill or similar bill in another state or in Congress more likely. So doing the same effort for liberal goals improves our chances. The current Democratic effort isn’t the first. However, ALICE – American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange, started in 2012, seems to be gaining strength. Matching the strength of conservative efforts might still take a decade or two. I’ve written that Republicans are very concerned about the national debt when a Democrat is president but not when a Republican is. Oliver Willis of Kos confirms that and adds a bit more to the story.

In 2020, after working as Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney laid out the entire scheme in a speech to the Oxford Union in England. “My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House. The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president. Then Donald Trump became president, and we’re a lot less interested as a party,” he said.

Willis wrote that this two-sided effort by Republicans is promoted by mainstream media because they tend to repeat Republican propaganda. In doing so they also push the lie that Republicans are better at economic issues. Jessica Kutz, in an article for The 19th posted on Kos wrote about men’s fascination with cars, the bigger, louder, and faster the better. The most recent examples are the Indy style race in Washington in the Mall and down Pennsylvania Avenue and the plans to defund “DEI bike lanes” Kutz has a few examples of men who love cars and their message of “freedom, domination over the environment, strength, power, speed.” There are examples of administration officials promoting car culture and with it the idea that women belong in the kitchen. There was also ridicule of Pete Puttigieg and his commuting to work on a bicycle. The effort to defund bike lanes is part of the promotion of the macho image of cars. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been leading that charge. Along with it is lying about the benefits and harms of bike lanes. A bit of truth: bike lanes improve the safety of both cyclists and drivers. In contrast, American cars have gotten bigger and the number of deaths of pedestrians and cyclists has been going up. Back in January I wrote about AI generated videos showing polar bears and walruses coming to the defense of Greenland as the nasty guy threatened to take it over. The images were accompanied heroic music. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, has included a similar video by the same maker, demonflyingfox. This one shows bears, beavers, moose, and a few wolverines (the actual animals, not residents of Michigan, which is known as the Wolverine State), on their way to take up the barriers to defend Canada against the tariff war begun by the nasty guy. The video quality is quite good, the tune again heroic, and all quite fun. Beavers playing bagpipes... I went to the YouTube channel for demonflyingfox and found the video made for the defense of the name of Lake Ontario. It has been up for only three days and has 1.8 million views. An eagle with a nasty guy hairdo keeps erecting signs claiming the name was now Lake America, but beavers, moose, and finally bears with big guns keep destroying the ever bigger signs. This one has a lot more interaction between the animals and humans as it promotes what fun activities can be done around the lake.

A book full of humanity, humor, and tenderness

I finished the book My Friends by Fredrik Backman. On the title page translator Neil Smith is listed, so I had to do some checking. Backman is Swedish, so a translator is necessary. The story is triggered by a painting. Most people looking at it see it as a painting of the sea. But Louisa sees there is also a pier and three boys in their early teens portrayed as laughing. Louisa spent most of your childhood in the foster care system and at one point was given a postcard of the painting. That painting is up for auction and she just has to see the real thing before it is sold for millions. She does see it before being thrown out of the auction. Then she encounters the artist who, with his friend Ted, sold all they had to buy it back. The artist recognizes Louisa as a fellow artist. That night the artist dies, telling Ted to give the painting to her. She doesn’t want something that expensive. But Louisa, just turned 18 and out of the foster care system, convinces Ted to take her with him as he boards the train to return to his home. On the way he tells her about the origins of the painting. The story then switches back and forth between the summer when Ted and his friends are fourteen, about to turn fifteen, when the painting was created and Ted traveling with Louisa twenty-five years later. Beside Ted and the artist (never explicitly named until the end of the book) the friends are Joar and Ali, the one girl in the group. Yep, one of the boys in the painting is a girl. They spend as much time together as possible and most of that time is on the pier or in the sea around it. They’re together so much because their home life is bad. Joar’s father is abusive. Ted’s is dying. Ali’s father tends to not pay bills so she’s in town only a couple years before dad needs to move on to avoid creditors. And the artist’s parents think he’s strange, drawing all the time, and just want him to be normal. Joar recognizes the artist’s talent. He also recognizes the artist can’t stay in this city and develop his craft. The artist isn’t doing much after being thrown out of the class of a nasty art teacher. So Joar announces that a contest is coming up and the artist absolutely must enter it, then makes sure he does, creating this painting. In the later time Ted took care of the artist as he was dying. There is strong implication that they were a gay couple. That is reinforced on the train ride when Louisa notices Ted admiring he conductor. Though this explains some of the artist’s strangeness, that they are probably gay is barely mentioned. Though the kids are dealing with bad home lives they are great friends to each other with days that are idyllic. Being fourteen they also get into mischief, usually with funny consequences. There are moments of blessing with mothers, older brothers, and various adults. It’s a beautiful story, full of humanity, humor, and tenderness. There isn’t much plot, though a great deal of simply living. Backman is an excellent writer and Smith did a masterful job in translating – I thought of the translation process a lot while reading. I very much enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. I may have to find some of his other books. Nick Romeo, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Daily Kos wrote that the most dangerous innovation of Silicon Valley is tech fascism. He discussed this with author and journalist Gil Durán, who wrote the book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Romeo described tech fascism...

This anti-democratic ideology is destroying laws and norms while promising a glorious future delivered by technology, and it’s now moving from the fringe belief of a few eccentric billionaires to the cultural mainstream, according to Durán.

Some of the major points Durán talked about: There is a rising cult of Silicon Valley billionaires “who believe that technology is going to make democracy obsolete in the 21st century.” It is fascism because it aligns with the MAGA cult and is funding the nasty guy through gifts and crypto.

Fascism is generally a cult of grievance and self-victimization that promises a return to greatness through the purging and persecution of enemy groups. What tech fascism adds is that instead of only promising a return to some greater period in the past, it also promises this great, glorious future that will be achieved if only we eliminate the obstacles in our way, including regulation, law, democracy and anybody who opposes this acceleration of technology.

AI is being marketed as a terrifying invention that will fundamentally disrupt our lives quickly while not giving us a choice. Yeah, a lot of it is hype, but AI isn’t harmless and is already having an effect. The AI industry is calling it an existential threat to humanity and the biggest job killer ever. Of course, there is a backlash. Another claim is AI will create super abundance. We already have that, but too much of it is sucked up by the tech billionaires. The tech bros are claiming that AI is promising the greatest economic depression (except for billionaires becoming trillionaires). That’s while AI seems less useful than its marketers say.

We are taught to revere wealthy people. If you’re wealthy, it means you’re morally better. It means you’re a superior intellect, and you’re important, and people should be in awe of you. I think that people get this idea in our country that somehow people become billionaires because they’re smart and disciplined and visionary, which is actually not the case at all. And unfortunately billionaires also buy into this myth of their own greatness.

The tech bros demand all the power to destroy everything and no one has the right to stop them. What if farmers said that? Or garbage men? His book is about, “the radicalization of Silicon Valley billionaires into the most dangerous anti-democratic force the country has ever faced.” We have to deal with the billionaire threat. But many of the big champions of the Democratic Party blast at the nasty guy, but not at billionaires. The nasty guy will be around for only a couple more years. Tech bros will be around a lot longer. There are some Democrats speaking out, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. People don’t trust billionaires. We need politicians that won’t take billionaire money and will increase the distrust. Start with the 5% wealth tax on California’s ballot. It’s great, but not nearly enough. In Wednesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jill Lawrence of The Bulwark listing the three new demands that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made that prompted Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, to pull out of trade talks. The quotes are quite likely from Carney:

Limits on Canada’s ability to negotiate and sign trade deals. Canada has negotiated twenty economic and security partnerships in the last year, and forthcoming deals in the next six months could double its market access. “We’re the partner of choice in many respects for countries around the world and the Americans wanted to restrict that. ... It’s a power play and becomes a question of sovereignty.” Continual efforts “until the very last minute” to restrict French language protections (like bilingual labels), Canadian culture, “and in effect our sovereignty,” even though “these issues were never on the table” and never will be. Late U.S. demands that would have been unfair to Canadian auto parts and extended favorable tariff treatment to some cars and trucks but not others. The exclusions were “a big change” with no rationale given, Carney said, and would have made Canadian vehicle production “more uneconomic over time.”

Each of the three sounds like a good reason to pull out of the talks. In the comments exlrrp posted a meme of a Dolly Parton quote from the Larry King Now show in 2016:

If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you’re straight, you’re straight. And you should be allowed to be how you are and who you are.

Thanks, Dolly. Another meme posted by exlrrp:

Remember when Trump collected $12 billion dollars, started WWIII, & then we never heard from the Board of Peace again? One of Trump’s biggest scams and nobody ever talks about it.

In the comments of today’s roundup exlrrp posted a meme about the broken trade talks with Canada that prompted the nasty guy to order Lake Ontario be renamed Lake America. The meme has the text:

Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, announced today that the United States of America will be renamed South Canada, the 14th Province.

Another meme posted by exlrrp show a house labeled Quality of Life and rooms labeled Affordable Housing, Healthcare, Good Jobs, Lower Prices, Safe Communities, and Education all going up in flames. In front of the house the nasty guy is telling a man in a MAGA hat, “Oh look, a trans person!” Anil Dash has a couple tweets on Meta’s settlement over the harm its products might do to children and teens:

So Meta will always choose to pay, rather than to fight, because then it doesn't have to change. The initial investigation by the FTC into Facebook's abuse of its users was *SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO*, and that one also ended in a settlement. After which, they... went back to abuse their users. Meta is a creep who will _never_ take no for an answer, and never stop trying to ignore their lack of consent. Every media & regulatory organization in the world seems determined to ignore this reality; I genuinely don't understand why. Today's settlement is so that Meta can keep violating consent.

David Michigan added that the $17 billion in payments will be spread out over ten years. This becomes barely more than a rounding error to the company. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos has something to say about Meta’s settlement:

No admission of algorithmic skullduggery. No apologies. No nothing. Just some chump change distributed to a bunch of states that will probably toss it into their general fund to shore up their coffers a bit. But, hey, Zucky Boy promises—cross his heart and all!—that he’ll “make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm [to kids] from its platforms—and will do it within months.” And here’s my promise: I’ll let you know when media outlets start publishing stories “within months” about how Facebook and Instagram’s “transformations” are riddled with holes, if they’ve been done at all.

Bill also remembered an event from, 2002, which was 24 years ago. Bush II invited Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan to his Crawford ranch. In on the meeting was Adel Al-Jubeir, a foreign policy adviser to the Saudi kingdom.

“If the objective is to dismantle the weapons of mass destruction program, we could probably do that without going to war,” Al-Jubeir said. “Why not use that option? Why do people want to risk the lives of tens of thousands of American men and women in uniform for an objective that can be achieved through negotiations?”

Bill added:

Oh, let’s see: to get our hands on cheap oil, to feed the military-industrial complex, to scare Americans into re-electing the macho Republicans, to bully the world, to get revenge on Saddam for “tryin’ to kill muh daddy,” and to act out G.I. Joe fantasies aboard an aircraft carrier under a “Mission Accomplished” banner. Other than that, I got nothin’.