Must be nice to have a choice

My Sunday movie was Swan Song. It is the story of Pat, a gay former hairdresser living in a home for old people (Retirement home? Nursing home?) near farms outside Sandusky, Ohio. It’s a rather basic place and Pat is bored. His boredom is interrupted by an estate agent saying the town’s premier matron, Rita Parker Sloan, has died and her will specifies he is to do her hair for her funeral. One problem – when Pat’s protege Dee Dee struck out on her own (across the street) she took Rita with her. So Pat refuses. But the boredom is too much. So Pat heads into Sandusky. He doesn’t have a car or cash, so he walks. Once outside the home he becomes his queenly self. He mourns his partner David, who died 20 years before. He visits his former house and former place of business. He tries to get the beauty products he used to use. He encounters former customers, who praise him, and Dee Dee. He visits the bar where he used to perform. Along the way he has conversations with those who have passed before. And he sees how gay life has changed – there are gay dads playing with their kids. I enjoyed this one. It’s a sweet story. Pat is based on a real person, Pat Pitsenbarger, who used to be a hairdresser in Sandusky. I’m not sure whether this incident actually happened. The movie was directed by Todd Stephens, who grew up in Sandusky. Being a gay kid was tough in that town. It was also tough when Stephens made his first movie there. He had to be careful to say nothing about the gay characters. This time Sandusky was flying pride flags and was delighted to have a gay movie shot in their town. Of course, I heard about this movie in Between the Lines, Michigan’s LGBTQ newspaper. I visited my aunt and uncle who live 20 miles south of Sandusky, A cousin was there too. I was a bit surprised when they said they had already seen it and enjoyed it. Then again, my aunt and uncle have two gay grandsons. Over the last few days Brother sent me a translated marriage record for an ancestor about eight generations back. The marriage took place in a little village in Baden, Germany. A note on the record said the groom’s father was part of the Waldensian community. Neither Brother nor I had heard of this group. So he went searching and found a Wikipedia page on them. The Waldensians were (and still are) a group that in the 12th century rejected some of the teachings of the Catholic Church, essentially creating their own Reformation. The Church responded by excommunicating them in 1215 – three hundred years before Martin Luther. Of course, over the centuries they were persecuted, including a couple massacres. About 1685 French King Louis XIV revoked freedom of religion and Waldensians who didn’t convert to Catholicism resettled in Germany, which is how my German ancestor was named Pierre. Some of their beliefs (which I paraphrased and agree with): Relics were just bones. Holy water is just water. Prayer was just as effectual in a church as in a barn. A pilgrimage serves only to spend one’s money. One doesn’t have to approach God through a priest. Purgatory doesn’t exist. The Pope is the Antichrist. Yeah, the last one won’t get you many political or religious friends. Once Martin Luther and Protestantism came along the Waldensians joined in, though tending towards Calvinism. There are now Waldensian communities in Italy, France, Germany, Uruguay, and United States. There is a Waldensian Presbyterian Church in Valdese, NC. Ten days ago, when I reported Michigan’s COVID data the most recent peak at that time was 5721 new cases in a day. That was a big increase from the weeks leading up to it. I wrote the number would likely be revised. And, in last Saturday’s data, it was, down to 5106. Late last week Michigan Radio reportrd a big increase in COVID cases, big enough that hospitals are full again. They’re full partly because this rise in cases has been over four months so there were already a lot of cases needing hospital care. There were also a lot of patients who had been putting off care for other things and were now sicker for it. The previous big rises were over 5 weeks. The state reported a lot of cases were tallied on one day and will likely be redistributed. So Michigan Radio reported the daily counts as averaged over a week – which I don’t compute. That peak in one more week of data will be revised, though at the moment it shows 6942 new cases in one day. In the week before this past week the peak in deaths per day was 55. The peak the week before was revised to 60. My graphing program reports it now has data for 623 days. In the last day or so Michigan Radio has reported that Michigan is now the leader in new cases per day per capita. Not a distinction I want my state to earn. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported Moscow Mitch wrote an op-ed that appeared in the Washington Post decrying the possibility of Democrats expanding the Supreme Court. Yeah, the court for which he engineered to steal a couple seats to give a 6-3 majority ready to dismantle abortion rights, minority rights, and perhaps even democracy. That Mitch. Of course, his reasons are bogus. WaPo should never have printed it. Democrats should just ignore it. The COP26 climate summit has ended. Around 200 countries signed the final document. Alas, at the last minute India forced a change – a “phase out” of coal became a “phase down.” Even beyond that the document is not at all as strong as climate activists wanted. Leah McElrath tweeted videos and comments about the close of the conference. The conference president Alok Sharma said at the end of the event (as tweeted by McElrath):

“I apologize for the way this process has unfolded…I also understand the deep disappointment, but…it is also vital that we protect this package…” Then he cries.

George Monbiot, columnist for the Guardian, described it as “This pathetic, limp rag of a document...” Greta Thunberg tweeted something she’s said before:

The #COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, blah, blah. But the real work continues outside these halls. And we will never give up, ever. ... Unless we achieve immediate, drastic, unprecedented, annual emission cuts at the source then that means we’re failing when it comes to this climate crisis. “Small steps in the right direction”, “making some progress” or “winning slowly” equals loosing.

After the climate deal was reached Danielle Kurtzleben of NPR spoke to Cassie Flynn, a climate advisor to the UN Development Program. If all the national pledges to reduce emissions are added up it would keep the temperature to a 2.5 degree rise – but we need it to keep it to 1.5 degrees. The Glasgow event finalized the Paris Agreement Rulebook (Paris was the previous conference). One thing the rulebook does is to standardize the rules when countries make their pledges. The most complicated issues were worked out. Back at the Paris event poor countries asked rich countries for $100 billion a year to fund changes to a low carbon future. But $100B isn’t enough and by 2020 rich countries were only giving $80B. The gap is starting to close. The biggest challenge is time. There is a better understanding the crisis is already happening. The urgency is growing. But see above about “making some progress.” I’ve flown in an airplane a lot over my long life – a brother who lived in Seattle, another who lived in Austin with children still there, cousins in St. Louis (90 minutes in the air plus airport time beats 10 hours in a car), several trips to and around Europe, a trip to Israel and Egypt, various conferences related to work and church including a several year partnership requiring travel to Albuquerque, and handbell events in Canada, Japan, Korea, and Australia. Whenever possible I get a window seat. I enjoy looking out at the land below and as I come back to Detroit I see how long it takes before I figure out where I am over the metro area. Usually not long. So it is annoying when Haricot Blue of the Kos community wrote:

Simple question: Is the climate emergency real, or isn’t it? If you believe it’s real — if you agree with U.N. Secretary General Antonion Guterres that the science proves beyond any doubt that we are “digging our own graves” (and our children’s) — then it’s time to stop flying. I wish I had better news. ... The climate emergency means that there is no ethical justification for boarding a flight that is not necessary (I won’t define “necessary” but I think we can all make reasonable appraisals). No carbon "offset" will take the tons of CO2 each flight generates out of the environment – and in any case we need to be pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, not merely “offsetting” it. No donation to a charitable cause will undo the damage your flight causes to the hope of keeping the planet’s heating below 1.5 degrees Celsius. ...The plain fact is that when you get on the plane, you dump the CO2 and other climate-impacting particulates into the environment in massive quantities. It's just science. Of course, we would already be flying less if the actual costs to the environment and human health and life were priced into the ticket. That would put frequent air travel out of reach for most of us anyway.

At the bottom of the post are links to the statistics that Blue used. I suppose with Brother no longer there I don’t need to visit Seattle again. If I don’t want to drive and worry about charging stations (no electric car – yet), I can use Amtrak to get to St. Louis in 12 hours and get to nephews in Austin in 36. And, I suppose, I can leave out the international handbell events – I have seen quite a bit of the world – and stick to the American ones. But Brother is currently living in Germany. And Amtrak doesn’t get me there. Walter Einenkel of Kos reminded us for a couple months the conservative news outlets were full of the terrors of Critical Race Theory being taught to children. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia was one of the loud voices. Now that Youngkin has been elected governor of that sate those overwrought stories have ... vanished. A Washington Post story about the phenomenon included a chart showing the number of mentions of CRT related to schools over the last year. That chart is included in Einenkel’s post. He wrote:

The Post created an easy-to-read graph to visualize how ultra-right-wing propaganda works to lather up their potential voting base. One thing you will notice is that, by screaming as loudly and as uniformly as they do, the right-wing-o-sphere can create a rising tide of BS that pulls up traditional media mentions of the bogus stories, as well. ... The constant refrain from the right-wing in the country these days is to sow as much dissent and the perception of chaos, which gives voters anxiety that things are changing too fast. For every reactionary bigot who is terrified that their child or grandchild will be taught some strange version of history titled “White people are the devil,” the rest are primarily nervous that they don’t understand what exactly is happening and want things to remain closer to the same, even if that means growing inequality and an exacerbation of all of the things that are actually stressing their communities out. This doesn’t mean that these make-em-up culture wars end, of course. It just means that the hyped-up tenor on right-wing media settles back down to a simmer.

Jared Holt, who researches domestic extremism, referenced the same chart and tweeted:

This pattern happens over and over again. Migrant caravans, racial justice run amok, communism creeping to America… they are election games. The people running the show don’t believe a damn word of it. They just know how to sell.

Laura Clawson of Kos discussed a new poll done by WaPo/ABC News that asked the question how much should public schools teach about the history of racism? Clawson wrote:

A majority of Republicans said it should be taught not so much or not at all. That’s not an objection to critical race theory even in its most expansive definition. That’s an objection to kids learning that, possibly within their parents’ lifetimes but definitely within their grandparents’ lifetimes, the U.S. had explicitly racist laws that have continuing effects today.

Yeah, that’s the history of slavery, Jim Crow laws where black people were killed for voting, and the civil rights era and its heroes. “Republicans do not want children knowing that history.” This will be another story that pops up every election cycle. Democrats need to learn how to push back. Leonard Pitts, in an opinion piece printed in the Detroit Free Press this past Sunday, wrote about young kids who experienced racism, some as young as 5. He then discussed a tweet from CBS News asking, “How young is too young to teach kids about race?” Pitts said the real question being asked was “How young is too young to teach white kids about race?” Pitts’ reply: “Must be nice to have a choice.” In another editorial in the Freep the week before Pitts wrote about Laura Murphy, a white woman in Fairfax County, VA, and her son Blake. She said the book Beloved by Toni Morrison gave Blake nightmares. Since 2013 Murphy has been trying to get the book banned. Beloved, which I’ve read and it does contain some harrowing details, is a novelization of the story of Margaret Garner. Garner was a slave who had fled to freedom with her three children. As the slave catchers closed in Garner killed her daughter and tried to kill the other two. She did not want her children to grow up as slaves where they would be “murdered by piecemeal.” I’ve seen Margaret Garner the opera. Yeah, it was intense, but it made her actions understandable. Morrison’s book considers what would happen of the ghost of that dead child came back to haunt the mother who kept her out of slavery by killing her. Along the way there is a depiction of black culture of the 1850s and ’60s in the free state of Ohio. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and in 2006 was named the best American novel in the previous 25 years. Pitts wrote:

One wishes they’d muster even a fraction of that urgency to confront, say, school shootings, which posed a greater threat to Murphy’s son than anything Toni Morrison ever wrote. The only thing she ever posed was a challenge to his understanding of the world and his place in it. Which is something great literature is supposed to do. But then for some of us, some nightmares simply matter more than others. Apparently, the one Blake Murphy had is more important than the one Toni Morrison wrote and the one Margaret Garner lived. It also seems to be more important than the nightmare America is now enduring, one of misguided priorities, misapplied resources and the misplaced anger of those who see “their” country changing and cannot handle it.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Steve Vladeck of MSNBC. The topic is Steve Bannon, nasty guy crony, who has been indicted on contempt of Congress for not appearing and testifying about what he knew leading up to the Capitol attack.

But whatever happens in Bannon’s criminal case — he is reportedly expected to appear in court next week — what the indictment really underscores is how dependent Congress has become on the executive branch to carry out even the most basic aspects of its oversight function and how dangerous that dependency can be when the oversight is directed toward, or even near, the executive. If the Biden administration really wants to make congressional subpoenas effective broadly, it should not just indict in the obvious cases like Bannon's; it should support statutory reforms like the Protect Our Democracy Act — which includes provisions to make it easier for Congress to enforce its own subpoenas.

Dworkin also quoted a tweet from Ben Collins of NBC News, though I ended up going to the original thread:

There is, finally, good news from the anti-vaccine beat. It’s wrapped in some bad news. The good: Mandates are working. Anti-vaxxers are exhausted, giving in and getting the shot. The bad: They’re running home to “detox” in weird ways, hoping to “undo” it. Antivaxxers on Facebook/TikTok are begging for advice on how to “detox” loved ones who got the shot. They caved to mandates and want help from influencers. Some say they’re doomed to death, infertility, or government tracking. But others have “remedies.” On TikTok, anti-vaxxers have rallied around influencer Carrie Madej, who claims she can “detoxx the vaxx.” Her solution? A bath with baking soda for “radiation” and epsom salt for “poisons.” Then, she says, add Borax to clean out “nanotechnologies.” (Don’t do this.) When Madej talks about “nanotechnologies,” she’s referencing the “liquified computing systems” she falsely believes are in the vaccines. ... Some antivaxxers who are caving to mandates are immediately racing back to their houses to try to “uninject” the vaccine. Some are using syringes or snakebite kits. Others are slicing the injection site and then self-administering cupping therapy. This also does not work.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, added his snark:

What utter nonsense. The only alternative therapy that actually works to remove the vaccine from your system is wedging candy corn under your fingernails while singing Puccini on top of your car while stopped at a green light in the middle of a busy intersection at rush hour. Somebody post that on TikTok. And then get the results on video. For legitimate medical research purposes, you understand.

Bill in Portland gave a jeer to the nasty guy immediately appealing the ruling he must allow the National Archives to hand over documents about the Capitol attack. This was something I wrote about a couple days ago. Then Bill wrote – and I like his ending better:

So what happens now is, we wait three weeks to get a ruling. Then the ruling is appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court sides with Trump and then throws Biden in jail for having the gall to cross God's Chosen One. Kamala Harris becomes president and chooses Hillary as her vice president. Kamala resigns "to spend more time with my family," Hillary becomes president, chooses Kamala as her vice president, who accepts because "Eh, that was enough time to spend with my family." Then Hillary pardons Biden, expands the Supreme Court with 18 new liberals, give or take, brings Manchin and Sinema into line with a baseball bat ("My little friend"), and passes a $290 trillion Build Back Better Bill, resulting in Democratic supermajorities in all the elections forever. Mmmm…I love the smell of 11-dimensional chess in the evening.

Aysha Qamar of Kos reported that Sesame Street is introducing its first Asian Muppet during its Thanksgiving Day special. The new character is Ji-Young, a Korean American.