Are minorities treated badly here or something?

My Sunday movie was Circus Boy. This is a documentary, less than an hour long, of one day in the life. Tom and Mike are a married gay couple in Peterborough, Ontario. Tom is an instructor at the Academy of Circus Arts. Ethan started in gymnastics, then went on to the Circus Academy. Tom was Ethan’s instructor, then his mentor, then his second dad (with Mike as a third) when Ethan moved in. On this day in 2019 Tom drives to the Toronto airport to pick up his mother (they never say where she lives – far enough away she needs to fly to get there). That evening Tom and Ethan are to do a performance for Mom’s approval. I didn’t think that Ethan should need to do something to win her approval. Fortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. Through the day Tom explains to Mom how Ethan came into his life. Later, Mom talks to Ethan’s mother to hear that side and Ethan’s mom heartily approves of these men providing extra father figures for her son. We see Ethan practice on the trampoline and spin a fire baton (unlit). Where Tom and Ethan do best is with the cyr wheel. It is a tube bent in a circle with a diameter larger than they are tall. They step on it and reach up and grab with their hands. Then with their balance they let it roll and spin, which means sometimes they’re upside down. On Sunday I switched from the Firefox web browser to the Vivaldi browser. For more than a year Firefox had been doing a lot of misfiring – pages are displayed blank. Sometimes I could display the page in another tab. And sometimes I had to shut Firefox down, wait for all its subprocesses to close (which could take a whole minute) and try again. I got tired of it happening so frequently. Mozilla, who creates Firefox, doesn’t have a help desk. I tried using their forum and was told I needed to get rid of extensions (I didn’t have any), switch to safe mode (which didn’t make any difference), and buy a new mouse (which I eventually did). None of that fixed the problem and I didn’t want to battle my way through anymore. So I put up with the misfires until I got tired of them and took the time to research a replacement. So, on to Vivaldi. It’s rather nice to have a built in ad-blocker. I mentioned frequently that posts I want to discuss can stay in my browser tabs for months. Switching to Vivaldi included opening up each tab in Firefox and copying the address to a new tab in Vivaldi (and along the way deciding not to copy a few). Firefox displays only so many tabs, then allows one to scroll the tab bar side to side. Vivaldi doesn’t do that. Instead, it just makes each tab smaller. Which meant I soon had to use the feature of tab stacking. My stack of posts I want to write about now has 41 entries in it (at least now I have a count). Yeah, my attempts to delete old tabs didn’t work so well. That stack of tabs will be hard to work through because nearly every day I tend to accumulate enough things to write about that day. So I’ll see how Vivaldi meets my needs and what adjustments to setting I need to make. One problem to handle is making Vivaldi the default browser. At the moment that isn’t taking. John Stoehr and his Editorial Board talked to Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of political rhetoric at Texas A&M University. The topic was the Republican attempts to whitewash the J6 insurrection and the rhetorical tricks they use to do it. Those tricks are common enough they are named and studied: Denial that it happened – they were just tourists, they were peaceful. Differentiation – yeah, it happened, but it isn’t what you think. They were really antifa. See also every conspiracy theory. Bolstering – people love the nasty guy (without defining that “people” was a small percent of the population), patriots loved what happened (with a strange definition of “patriot”). Transcendence – look at the bigger picture, this is a small incident in the life of a great president. Eulogistic covering – something negative is covered by something positive. In the Capitol attack there were well-trained paramilitary operatives covered by ordinary people expressing free speech rights. Mercieca discussed wedge issues. There are a lot of things that we believe in common. A wedge is to take the things that we don’t have in common and amplify them.

The first example that comes to mind is the spectacle of “critical race theory” and what we teach our children. I have a school-aged kid and I can tell you that everyone is unhappy with the schools, including the people who work in them. It’s a hard job! And parents are so concerned about their kids. But we don’t fund our schools and our classrooms are overcrowded and kids are difficult to control and the whole thing is a mess and frustrating. But we don’t talk about it from that perspective. Instead, the right has riled up parents about “crt.” We could have a serious conversation about what’s not working well in our schools, what our kids need, how to fund that kind of education and how to produce really smart, happy kids, but instead we have a pro/con moral panic about something that isn’t even real. That’s what I’d call a wedge being used to divide people.

Stoehr concluded with a discussion of truth:

I think we’d really rather know than not know to face reality. It’s Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We’re deluded by shadows. If we learn that truth, it hurts us. When we try to tell others about the delusion, they try to hurt us. It’s easier to pretend you don’t know about the delusion. But knowing is powerful. If you can know about the delusion, you can fix it. If you can see, it doesn’t have power over you. I don’t think we want to feel helpless. So you have to give people the truth in a way that makes them feel powerful and in control. So much of our political discourse is about disempowering people.

Aldous Pennyfarthing of Daily Kos discussed a study about the large number of people from Brevard County, Florida who were arrested as part of the Capitol attack. The study was done by Robert Pape of the University of Chicago and reported in The Atlantic. Wrote Pennyfarthing:

Pape and his researchers ran a few statistical analyses to help predict which regions were most likely to produce an insurrectionist, but most of the explanations they floated failed to pan out. Counties Trump won were actually less likely to breed an insurrectionist, and rural counties were also underrepresented. There also was no correlation between falling incomes and the number of MAGA coup participants a county produced. But in counties where white people were losing demographic ground, they apparently freaked. ... To paraphrase a popular meme, why would white people worry about becoming a minority in this country? Are minorities treated badly here or something? ... So we have some solid answers now. Why are so many people freaked out about immigration in a country that faces a long-term labor shortage? Racism. Why do people so easily accept that election fraud occurred in heavily Black areas such as Wayne County, Michigan; Fulton County, Georgia; and Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania? Racism. Why did a bigoted, bloviating incompetent receive 74 million votes for president, and why were people willing to give up their own safety and freedom to keep that guy in power? Racism. They think they’re being “replaced,” and after a lifetime of privilege, it’s just not fair.

My definition of privilege is I’m allowed to do something that I won’t let you do, which shows I’m higher in the social hierarchy. Mary Tracy tweeted, “World’s greatest democracy” and quoted:

Princeton University study: Public opinion has “near-zero” impact on U.S. law. Gilens & Page found that the number of Americans for or against any idea has no impact on the likelihood that Congress will make it law. “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-signficant impact upon public policy.” – Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics

Nicholas Grossman, professor of International Relations at University of Illinois, quoted a tweet from Elise Hu about Steve Bannon recruiting people who don’t believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers. Grossman added:

Overgeneralizing here, but in general, the right is better at recognizing that power comes from institutions and force (or the threat of force), while the left overrates how much power comes from word choice, symbols, chastisement, and wanting it badly enough.

I had understood “anarchy” to mean a lawless, uncontrollable, chaotic, and dangerous situations or people. I even checked the definition online. The words and phrases they used were: social disorder due to the absence of government control, lack of obedience to authority, confusion and disorder. Leah McElrath tweeted a different way of looking at it.

There is NO connection between anarchism and white supremacy. (I’d argue they are antithetical to one another.) And anarchy isn’t about violence. It’s about order without hierarchy.

So a society or a government that is very much into maintaining the social hierarchy, such as here in America, someone or a group (including myself) that is working towards a society without hierarchy would look like the absence of control, lack of obedience, and confusion and disorder. That definition depends on “order” being equivalent to the hierarchy. I’m not invested in cryptocurrency, Bitcoin being the best known, and the more I hear about it the less I’m inclined to do so. That they are used many times to launder money is not a recommendation. There is a process called cryptocurrency mining. Since these currencies don’t have any physical manifestation no one has an actual shovel somewhere digging for minerals. This mining has to do with the way the various currencies are defined and recorded as who owns what. That recording is done in “blockchains.” The “mining” is done by computers solving really big equations. The more cryptocurrency there is the more complicated these equations get and the harder they are to solve. Which gets us to this post by Alexandra Martinez for Kos Prism. She reported that currency mining companies are buying up decommissioned power plants and turning them on for the sole purpose of powering thousands of computers to do that mining. This industry now has a huge carbon footprint and is dumping huge amounts of water used for cooling back into the environment. The costs to the environment, including global warming, are huge. Some of these companies say they are buying carbon offsets, but those trees are planted elsewhere. Commenter Nimblewill quoted from a local news source that currency mining is loud. Nearby residents are complaining. Nimblewill also noted that this is electricity that is squandered, that could be used more productively. Leilani Münter linked to a tweet by Digiconomist and paraphrased:

In 2021, Bitcoin consumed so much energy that it emitted more CO2 emissions than have been saved globally by electric cars. The carbon footprint of just one Bitcoin transaction is equal to the carbon footprint of almost 1.5 million VISA transactions.

On to issues related to the traditional definition of mining. Greg Sargent, in a tweeted promotion to one of his articles in the Washington Post, wrote:

A big deal: The coal miners' union just ratcheted up pressure on Manchin to support BBB. This is a seminal moment: The divergence in interests between workers and mine owners who oppose BBB has been exposed. Manchin must choose one or the other. Mine owners are now attacking the mine workers for supporting BBB. The owners explicitly argue that BBB would transition to clean energy too quickly! This perfectly shows that BBB is in workers' interests and against owners' interests. Remember when Hillary [Clinton] committed the "gaffe" of saying we'd have to transition coal workers to renewable jobs? Now the mine workers' union supports BBB in large part because it would aid that transition, blowing up years of mythologizing about all this. ... Manchin must choose.

Alas, I have a pretty good idea which way he’ll choose. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Manchin’s Democratic colleagues are publicly losing patience with his obstinance. They complain that many times they feel they are reaching an agreement and the next day they start again from scratch. There are some who believe Manchin is still working towards some sort of deal. Others are beginning to see what Manchin is doing is making sure a deal never happens. A few days ago I wrote that Cyber Ninjas, the inexperienced company that was in charge of the Arizona fraudit was facing a fine. Pennyfarthing has a few more details. The fine is because a judge ordered the company to turn over a set of documents. The company refused. A fine of $50K a day was added. They still refused. Now between the accumulated fine and other obligations the company is $2 million in debt. Add in various reports on how badly they handled the ballot recount. And Cyber Ninjas has released its employees and closed its doors. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, wrote a bit between a couple quotes that is similar to something I said recently:

There is a difference between individual risk (lower because of decreased virulence relative to Delta) and community risk (high with Omicron because of transmissibility and previous strain on health care/hospitals). That’s why “milder” ≠ “mild”.

Kelly Hayes tweeted:

They aren't saying: Spread is inevitable, so we need to protect the vulnerable, make healthcare and testing free, and make long term plans to address waves of long COVID. They're saying: Spread is inevitable, so get back to work and be glad that it's mostly disabled people dying.

Walter Einenkel of Kos reported on another way to tell how deadly this pandemic has been. We may not get accurate stats from various Republican governors intent on hiding the severity of the pandemic. But there is another measure they have no influence over.

Scott Davison is the CEO of OneAmerica, an Indianapolis-based life insurance company founded in the 19th century. To start the new year, Davison told the audience of an online news conference that “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business—not just at OneAmerica. The data is consistent across every player in that business.” According to Davidson, the third and fourth quarters of this past year saw death rates “up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic.” Even more distressing, explains Davison, is that this is not some demographic anomaly with the eldest members of our society passing on. The 40% rise in death rates is consistent for working-class folks 18 to 64-years-old.

Einenkel added a way of explaining what life insurance is all about:

Comedian Greg Fitzsimmons once told a joke that the strange relationship a consumer has with life insurance can be summed up as the consumer placing a bunch of money on a table and saying, “I bet you I die this year,” and the insurance company picking up the money, counting it, and saying “We bet you don’t.” Life insurance companies do not care about your feelings. People either die or they don’t. Different groups of people have higher mortality rates for a variety of reasons, and life insurance companies don’t particularly care what those reasons are—they just need to know whether they can bet on you to pay them more money than they will owe you when you are no longer around. It is as simple as that.

I remember when the word “meme” meant “a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition and replication in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.” By “item” people usually meant “idea.” But the internet came along and a new meaning was added: “a cultural item in the form of an image, video, phrase, etc., that is spread via the internet and often altered in a creative or humorous way.” Of course, over the last year there have been a huge number of memes that Kos of Kos has encountered in writing his Anti-Vaxx Cronicles. So he thought it was time to put together a bunch of pro-vaxx memes. An example is Jesus doing a facepalm with the words: “I was crucified to save humanity but you won’t even wear a mask.” And one from Middle Age Riot:

Evangelicals: “God will provide.” If God didn’t provide you with common sense, basic human empathy, or half a brain, what makes you think he’ll provide anything else?

And many more to enjoy, including in the comments. Such as, “Nobody is trying to shove a vaccine down your throat. However, we do have this endotracheal tube ...”