Underprivileged is not unqualified

My Sunday movie was Young Royals, season 3, episodes 3 & 4. And, yes, here be spoilers. The school is a month or so from graduation. Simon is seeing a lot more clearly what dating a royal means (though I think the palace should still give him a class). Simon attends, as he has before, the May 1st demonstrations for worker rights and that doesn’t sit well with the palace. Someone threw a rock through a window of Simon’s home, so palace security has to get involved. Wilhelm and Simon are seeing how different they and their backgrounds are. Wilhelm’s mother the queen is having a nervous breakdown and he’s afraid he’ll have to start fulfilling her duties. And August is still playing his mind games. Late in episode 4 some dialogue implied that August was at the school much longer than Wilhelm was, yet they’re graduating in the same year. That dialogue was another of August’s mind games. This week is Holy Week, the time between Palm Sunday and Easter, with a few extra worship services, if that’s your thing. My performance group won’t rehearse this week because so many members are church musicians. My own church bell group isn’t rehearsing tonight because half the group had other commitments. So I don’t have any evening rehearsals this week. Which gives me time to blog – or finish off Young Royals. Or both. So, episode 5. Some of the timeline issues were cleared up. Simon brought Wilhelm a birthday cupcake and it had a 17 on it. I had expected 18. There was also a graduating class dinner and many of the girls who I thought were graduating were servers at the meal. I realized it is August’s graduation, but not Wilhelm’s or Simon’s or the girls who were serving. A big part of this episode is a birthday party for Wilhelm at the palace. Simon was invited, partly to support Wilhelm and partly to meet the parents – the queen and duke. Simon got a suit for the occasion and I could tell it was too big for him. Was the a way for the costumers to say Wilhelm as a royal gets well fitting suits and Simon as a commoner gets badly fitting suits? That birthday party did not go well. Thankfully, it wasn’t because the parents were upset that their son’s lover was another boy. But there were a lot of unresolved issues around Wilhelm not liking being a royal and his parents seemed to be handling it in a passive-aggressive manner. I plan on watching episode 6, the finale of the whole series, tomorrow. Last Friday I wrote about the nasty guy’s options on meeting the $454 million judgment against him in the civil fraud case. At the top of the list I wrote:

An appeals court could step in because in the current American legal system “courts generally despise the thought of handing out big penalties to wealthy financial crooks.”

I mention it because, as reported by Hunter of Daily Kos, (of course) the Appellate Division of the Manhattan Supreme Court said the nasty guy has to pay (or have bonds for) $175 million instead of the full amount before he can appeal the case. He now has ten days to cover the smaller amount. The nasty guy had claimed he can’t pay the $454 million. The $175 million is an amount he has been saying he can come up with. How convenient. And yes, the court gave him a big favor. What’s next is the nasty guy pays (or has bonds for) $175 million. He can then file an appeal. So far the nasty guy’s lawyers can’t explain what parts of the ruling they plan to appeal. If he doesn’t have an appealable case, then he’s back to owing $454 million, plus interest. More likely is the process drags out beyond the election, as appears to be happening with many of his trials. His hope is to get back to the Oval Office and use his authoritarian power to make even this state case go away. In an Earth Matters column for Kos Meteor Blades included a couple interesting topics. First, Republicans are, as they have always been, saying they don’t believe the climate scientists and they are trying to limit the Inflation Reduction Act, with all its goodies to protect the climate (though not nearly enough for what’s needed). As examples, Blades listed several bills taken up by the House that undo IRA provisions. Some have passed the House (alas, some with a few to several Democratic votes), others are still in committee. Getting past the Senate is doubtful. They won’t get past Biden. Even so, this shows what Republicans intend. The other interesting story starts off this way:

The Environmental Integrity Project published its “Feeding the Plastics Industrial Complex” in mid-March. The key findings: 64% of plastics manufacturing plants built or expanded since 2012 received tax subsidies totaling $9 billion, and 84% violated federal air pollution limits. These subsidies cost nearly twice as much as the combined budgets of the state agencies in Texas and Louisiana tasked with regulating most plastics plants in their jurisdictions.

In a thread on Threadreader, Michael Harriot discusses diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at Duke Medical School. Some say DEI initiatives lower standards, others say that’s false. Who is right? First, DEI policies aren’t about lowering standards, they’re about inviting more diverse students to apply and then helping them stay in the program. Under the program the applicants’ GPA increased and the total number of white students also increased (so who is taking spots away from white students?). Duke also found the admission process favored the privileged (children of doctors who know how to navigate the system) and the rich. So they changed it. The “underprivileged” students may not do as well in the first year – but they did better than the privileged students starting in the second year. One more thing. If Duke lowered it standards its graduates – including the white ones – would have a harder time finding jobs. Also, the rich and privileged would stop sending their kids to an inferior school. Underprivileged is not unqualified. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev had a couple interesting quotes. George Makari and Richard Friedman of The Atlantic wrote that we as a nation (perhaps the whole world?) have not dealt with the effects of COVID that is still killing hundreds a week.

Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.

Perhaps that is why so many people believe the economy isn’t doing well in spite of the data saying it is doing great? Makari and Friedman added:

We are not suggesting that the entire country has PTSD from COVID. In fact, the majority of people who are exposed to trauma do not go on to exhibit the symptoms of PTSD. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t deeply affected. In our lifetime, COVID posed an unprecedented threat in both its overwhelming scope and severity; it left most Americans unable to protect themselves and, at times, at a loss to comprehend what was happening. That meets the clinical definition of trauma: an overwhelming experience in which you are threatened with serious physical or psychological harm.

Kev also quoted Nick Paton Walsh of CNN discussing Russia and the terrorist attack at the concert hall.

It exposes how far adrift and overstretched Putin now is. The safety of his muted, urban electorate in the capital has been entirely sacrificed to his war of choice in Ukraine. Special forces did not race in; they are dead, or busy elsewhere. Even some police have been deployed to the frontlines. ... There is so much the Russian system of authoritarianism cannot quash. It relies on patriarchy, fealty, corruption and a curious sense that the tsar, in this case Putin, will intervene to right palpable wrongs. But he does not. He does not always know how badly his state is functioning. And so, four young men can just roll up with automatic weapons to a vast Moscow mall and set fire to it, after shooting dozens dead.

A cartoon posted by Marian Kamensky shows Putin chasing Zelenskyy while a mob chases Putin. Biden says, “Be careful, Vladimir, ISIS-Terrorists!” And Putin responds, “Oh Joe, is that your cheap distraction?”