Fragile egos who refuse to grow out of an adolescent naiveté

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated as of Friday. The peaks in new cases per day for the last three weeks are now set at 783, 780, and 748. I think we’re in a plateau, fortunately a low one. I also see the peak at the beginning of January has been revised downward. About the time we hit the peak it was above 28,000. Recently it was above 27,000. It is now at 26,694. In the week before this past week the deaths per day was in the 7-12 range. That’s good! Starting next week Michigan will only update its COVID data once a week on Wednesday rather than three times a week. In the Ukraine news of the day, Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that the Russian Military presence has disappeared from around Kyiv. After several weeks of various little movement of the battlefronts analysts have needed to redraw their maps several times a day. The focus now shifts east where Russia is trying to encircle the Ukrainian trenches just west of Donbas. They’re going a ways around because of a wide section of a river. In response the Ukrainians are trying to cut the thin Russian supply lines. As part of his next post Sumner wrote that as Russia left the fronts around Kyiv and headed back to Belarus one of the things they left behind was bodies, both Russian and Ukrainian, military and civilian. A couple days ago I had mentioned the Russian city of Belgorod, not far from Kharkiv, that is home to several military units. Shortly after that a munitions warehouse, or maybe an oil depot, was hit and exploded. Russia is accusing Ukraine of invading its airspace. Ukraine is denying they caused the explosion. Sumner wrote that it isn’t just the loss of the oil. It is also the loss of oil storage. The region is now rationing gasoline. In a third report Sumner discussed what Kazakhstan had to say. This country had been part of the Soviet Union and since then has maintained the closest ties with Russia. Putin has been calling on them to support him in his invasion of Ukraine. Kazakhstan’s deputy chair of the Presidential Administration – not the top guy – told Putin his country is staying out of this fight. And won’t help Russia get around the economic sanctions. In a little extra snub the deputy foreign minister has invited Russian companies to move production to Kazakhstan so they won’t be caught behind a new iron curtain. Russia may collapse and Kazakhstan doesn’t want go with it. On to other news. Joan McCarter of Kos reported the US House has voted to lower the cost on insulin. Well, sorta. It doesn’t cap the price Big Pharma can charge. It only caps the copay patients are charged. And only if they are in Medicare’s prescription drug benefit or have private insurance (Medicaid and the VA already cover insulin). The uninsured don’t get a cost break. Neither is there a cost break for all the other stuff insulin users must have. So this plan is for a drug that those who need it must have it, it doesn’t cover everyone, and Big Pharma is protected. And still 193 Republicans voted against it. My sister Laney used insulin for most of her life. She complained frequently about the price going up, wondering how she could pay for it. Insulin is necessary for life and raising the price so high that those who need it can’t afford it feels like a crime against humanity. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos quoted Robert Jones, who quoted James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time:

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors. ... The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.

Jones added:

These white American myths—staples of former president Trump’s rallies and rhetoric—are the mark not of a great people but of fragile egos who refuse to grow out of an adolescent naiveté. This untenable version of patriotism is an encumbrance not only to achieving our democracy but to becoming authentically human.

In another pundit roundup Dworkin quoted Scott Maxwell discussing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill signed by Floridan Governor DeathSantis. Disney, who prompted a lot of protest by employees for not taking a strong enough stance before the bill was passed, has now vowed to lead the effort to repeal it. And has stopped donating to politicians. DeathSantis is accusing Disney of meddling where it didn’t belong. Maxwell quoted Jason Garcia:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed today that Disney has only ever gotten 1 thing from his administration. "The one time they got something when I’ve been governor was that Big Tech carveout," DeSantis said. That's not true. Here are 3 more things DeSantis has given Disney:

One can see the details by clicking on Garcia’s tweet. Maxwell added:

DeSantis has been a reliable errand boy for Disney - like most Florida politicians. They cut him checks. He did them favors. But now that Mickey's cutting him off, he's pitching fits ... and accidentally shining a light on all the special deals he made. There are receipts galore.

I’ve done a lot of genealogy research. I caught the bug from my parents. Mom had done quite a bit of research. When she couldn’t anymore Dad took it over. When they died I inherited the database. There are times I wish I could have shown them what I and my brother found, such as tracing Mom’s ancestors back to the little German villages they came from and, before the pandemic, visiting those villages. So I was intrigued when NPR host Ari Shapiro talked to Maud Newton about her memoir Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation. Her father was quite racist, though her mother was not. When she became an adult she didn’t try to avoid her father’s beliefs, she tried to reckon with them. And that her father’s ancestors enslaved people 170 years ago. She started investigating the stories in her mother’s family. Such as an ancestor who was accused of being a witch in Salem. That was a surprise for someone born in the South. The next surprise was the “witch,” who was acquitted, then pinned the witch charges on a black woman and pushed for a trial in which the black woman was sentenced to lashes. That has shown her that her family history overlaps with the systemic problems we still see in America. This is still our problem. What our ancestors did led to privileges for us. None of my ancestors I know about owned slaves. However, there were a few, many generations back, who were part of the English aristocracy who likely made things difficult for those who lived on their land. And there is this one ancestor who was born in Maryland about 1815 and I haven’t been able to identify her parents and what they did.