I don't have to win to be happy

A couple months ago I bought a new high capacity thumb drive. It was about half off at a store that was closing. I knew I could use it for two things. One is to have an “offsite” (my pocket) backup in case something happened to my house. The other is to hold stuff I cleaned off my dad’s old computers (yeah, he died nearly six years ago and, yeah, I’m just now cleaning useful stuff off them). I’m doing a big backup of my own computer now. Based on the amount of time – several hours – it is taking I remember again why I usually let too much time to go by between backups. (Yes, I know there are automated ways to do backup, most of them involving the Cloud. But I don’t trust the security of the Cloud.) Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported on some of the effects of the climate crisis that occurred recently. Lake Shasta, one of the two largest reservoirs in California, looks more like a meadow. It’s at 37% capacity. The other reservoir, Lake Oroville, is at 31% capacity. Hurricane Elsa marks the earliest we’ve hit five named storms. I knew Elsa hit Cuba and dumped rain over Tampa. I didn’t know that as it passed over Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia it spawned tornados, then flooded subway stations in New York City. And this isn’t even a superstorm. Lytton, British Columbia, set a record of 49.6C (121.2F), the highest recorded temperature in Canada. The next day Lytton was lost to a fire. In the Salish Sea (between Victoria, BC and Washington state):

The unprecedented and prolonged heat in the region has brought on a phenomenon that’s both sad and odorous — miles of seashore on which mussels, oysters, clams, barnacles, and other marine animals in the sand or fastened to the rocks along the shore have simply been cooked in place.

A billion animals may have died. That will have a profound effect on the ecosystem and will be a blow to the shellfish industry. A storm hit Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana that had winds above 70 mph winds and large hail along with the downpour. A flash flood created a two foot wall of water that lifted a car off the interstate and swept a 12 year old girl into a storm drain. 30,000 residents of the Marshall Islands (somewhat related to the US) have migrated to the US mainland over the last few decades. This is a climate induced migration – the ocean around the islands is rising. Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News started a post this way:

The high temperatures in late June that killed hundreds of people in Oregon, Washington, and Canada were so unusual that they couldn’t have happened without a boost from human-caused global warming, researchers said Wednesday, when they released a rapid climate attribution study of the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest.

That “hundreds” mentioned in the quote is about 800. The heat shook up assumptions of how heat waves work. Scientists are now wondering about a tipping point, where other processes now kick in causing a faster rise in temperatures. Leah McElrath tweeted a couple images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that does weather reporting. June 2021 was the hottest June on record for the US. And there have been eight weather and climate disasters in the US in the first six months of the year. Each had losses exceeding $1 billion. The disasters are: ongoing drought in the West, California flooding in January, Texas had three events – a freeze in February and hail and severe weather in April (two separate events), Louisiana flooding in May, tornadoes in the South in March, and severe weather in Kentucky and Tennessee two days after the tornadoes. Mother Mags of the Kos community wrote about the latest in the Maricopa County, Arizona fraudit. The Arizona Senate approved the fraudit and partially funded it. The company Cyber Ninjas is doing the recount, though they had no prior vote counting experience. Now the Arizona Senate says they will recount the ballots when Cyber Ninjas is done, which could be in a week or so. The Senate won’t recount the votes, how many votes went to each candidate, but count the number of physical ballots. Perhaps the Senate doesn’t trust the company they hired? Because Cyber Ninjas has declared their procedures to be company confidential, two lawsuits have been filed, one by the Arizona Republic newspaper, the other by the legal watchdog group American Oversight. In an update, Mags added:

Elections expert Jennifer Morrell says that when the Senate’s tally does not match the Cyber Ninjas’ numbers, and it won’t, the public should not assume there was any cheating, but that won’t stop the conspiracists.

The Gelayo frozen dessert shop in Chico, California is owned by Daeheuil Kim. A group of teenagers shouted racist slurs and shoved Kim, then charging inside to grab goodies off the shelves. A customer took video of the incident and posted online. Gelayo customer Aveed Khaki saw the video and started a Go Fund Me campaign to help out Kim. Khaki figured he’d raise $1000. Within a week he got $13,000. Lines of customers have been out the door. The Kim family has been delighted with the support from the community. I’ve written a lot about supremacy in all its forms. Many, perhaps most, people compare themselves to others, put themselves and us into a social hierarchy, and defend their position in the hierarchy. In more extreme examples they make the lives of those below them in the hierarchy miserable so their own lives look wonderful in comparison. An important part is the comparison. Part of my understanding is we don’t need to compare and we would be better off without it. Reject the need for a social hierarchy. That is why I want to share an NPR segment between host Danielle Kurtzleben and Sonia Bovio of Phoenix. Bovio teaches public relations. NPR is marking its 50th anniversary and talking to people about what they’ve learned over a half century. Here is some of what Bovio said:

I don't have to win to be happy. I don't have to be the best always. I don't have to be right always. And I would say it's definitely late 40s, early 50s when that finally hit me. ... It was just one of those things where I would find myself questioning if I should like another person's cat photo or not because I felt like my own cat hadn't been liked enough. And I was like - where is that coming from? Why am I even considering not liking somebody else's cat out of a sense of my cat not being liked enough? So I just had to kind of pause and go - what's going on in my head there? And then I realized it was this competitive nature that I was raised with. ... Every semester I introduce my lectures with a slide from Mr. Rogers saying, nice, just be nice. If you're going to go into this world of agency and corporate realities, you don't have to be mean. I've had so many people be mean to me in the workplace, so it's just about letting them see they can be nice and still succeed. And they can be honest and still succeed. And that's tough. I mean, I teach PR students, so I need to kind of drill this into them. Be nice.