The crisis of the day

This week there are stories in the news about a heat wave in London. Wildfires as a result of the heat in France, Spain, and Portugal. Five hundred fires in Alaska. Record low levels of water in Lake Mead (low enough that sunken boats can be seen). San Antonio, Texas usually gets two days of temperatures above 100F in June and this year had 17 days. And last Thursday Sen. Joe Manchin officially sunk any chance for reasonable climate change legislation this year. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported this comes after months of stringing other senators through tortured negotiations as they try to come up with something, anything, Manchin will support. Climate change is the greatest threat facing the nation and the world. Significant action is needed to address it. Manchin said no to doing something about it – while raking in record cash from Big Oil and dirty coal.

John Podesta, former aide to President Barack Obama, put it this way: “It seems odd that Manchin would chose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity.” But the truth is simply this: Manchin is being paid to destroy humanity. Anything, anything, anything else he says is simply filler. He is collecting that check, and nothing else matters to him.

I wonder if it is just the money, though that certainly is a big part of it. He’s a supremacist in that he values his money more than the lives a great number of people. Is he also a supremacist that he really wants all those people to die? Does he believe, as so many billionaires do, that he’ll escape the consequences of an unlivable world? Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Manchin is doing all he can to spin that he’s not the bad guy. As it’s someone else’s fault. He said something about really wanting an energy and climate policy – but he has to check July inflation numbers first (see above about “filler”). John Harwood, a White House correspondent for CNN, tweeted that Manchin could strike a deal on this or any number of bills at any time – but he doesn’t want to. That’s clear when he cites inflation as a reason to oppose a bill that would reduce inflation McCarter wrote that it is time to make Manchin obsolete. His term isn’t up this year so we can’t yet vote him out. But we can make him irrelevant by getting a 51st Democrat in the Senate. And we can demand he be removed as chair of the Energy and Natural Resource Committee where colleagues are challenging him. Alas, Democrats seem to rely too much on voting him into irrelevancy rather than pulling him into line. We get tired of being told we have to “vote harder” each election. Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about the other culprits in this mess – the Supreme Court and their ruling that strips some power away from the Environmental Protection Agency. This court will be remembered for five words, for referring to all those things at the top of my post as “the crisis of the day.”

So this is the way it plays out. Ten, 20, 30 years from now, long after Clarence Thomas’ harassing days are over, long after Brett Kavanaugh has sipped his last beer, and long after Amy Coney Barrett finally realizes that her imaginary white Jesus is never showing up to save her and her church friends from the “Tribulation,” those of us still around will be staring out at the bleak, heat-ravaged landscape, cursing the memory of John Roberts’ words. Every time a town ends up underwater, every time a power grid collapses from the heat, every time crops fail, or the heat outside becomes unlivable, and the air from the fires just burns out our lungs, we can look to those five little words for our cold comfort. Because, after all, it was only “the crisis of the day.”

Dr. Leah Stokes, a professor of climate and energy policy, tweeted with a link to an article in the New York Times saying Manchin’s legacy will be climate destruction.

Hold your children close tonight. Leave some water out for the birds. And make a plan to rip out your gas furnace. The climate crisis is getting worse, and thanks to Manchin, Congress is one vote short of saving us. We’re going to have to save ourselves.

According to my notes I replaced my furnace in December of 2017. It’s the second furnace I’ve had installed in my 30 years of living in this house. I can see from the way the ductwork has changed each new furnace has been shorter and more efficient. And this one is quite efficient. But it is still a gas furnace. At the time I didn’t think of installing anything different. Since it was installed in winter it was because the old one went kaput and I needed something now. With a furnace less than five years old I’m reluctant to buy another, especially since the air conditioner will need to be replaced soon. Hunter of Kos started a post with an example of one of the things I need from a government – protecting the little guy from the big guy. It’s a concept many federal agencies were designed to do and which Republicans are determined to eliminate (or at least make unable to function). I made a list of the departments in the federal government back in March of 2017 when the nasty guy first started a move to gut them. I also listed which ones protect the little guy from the big guy, which is most. Hunter wrote:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau exists to keep consumers from being scammed. That's it. Its very existence was staunchly opposed by the nation's business community because post-capitalism all but requires scamming people in its bid to invent ever-more-exotic ways to squeeze money out of the economy while doing as little as possible to earn it, and the financial industries that do the most scamming are the ones who have devoted the most time to whining that the bureau is oppressing them.

Hunter went on to describe the pathetic complaints the US Chamber of Commerce has issued against the CFPB. Added Hunter “Never has a collection of wealthy tycoons suffered like they are suffering now, according to them.” Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, noted the Emmy nominations include a category of best commercial. Two of the nominees are about school shootings. One, titled Teenage Dream, features the voices of teens shot in school and some of what they did to still be alive. The other, Lost Class, features a former NRA president “practicing” his graduation speech in front of 3,044 empty chairs. Why that number? It’s the number of seniors who didn’t graduate in 2021 because they had been killed by a gun. Yeah, the speech rehearsal wasn’t used in the way the NRA guy thought it would be. Bill also linked to an article by Natalie Neysa Alund in USA Today discussing a protest organized by Change the Ref. It is made up of 52 school buses in a mile long convoy that have 4,368 empty seats. That’s the number of children killed by gun violence in 2020. The roofs of the bus show the location and date of a shooting. Some of the buses have exhibits of photos and artifacts of those children, so the whole fleet is known as the NRA Children’s Museum. Where they can the buses are parked so from above they form the shape of an assault rifle. The convoy stopped at the home and office of Sen. Ted Cruz. He said he’s committed to doing something about the carnage, but his actions haven’t matched his words. Janie Har of the Associated Press reported that to retain teachers many school districts are building subsidized housing on their property that their teachers can rent. It is a way for teachers to live in the communities where they work. An example is in Daly City, California, off the southwest corner of San Francisco. Rents in the area are quite high and teachers weren’t making enough money to pay those high prices. Alas, some of these places limit the stay to five years. The assumption is teachers will save enough money to buy a house in that time. Teachers say the houses will still cost too much. I’m pleased school districts make sure their teachers have a place to live, but it is wrong to think it’s appropriate to pay teachers so little they can’t afford a place to live in the community where they work. There isn’t a lot new in a Ukraine update by Kos of Kos. I mention it because he included a tweet from Julia Davis:

Meanwhile on Russian state TV: Apti Alaudinov, the commander of Ramzan Kadyrov's Chechen detachment "Akhmat," tells state TV host Olga Skabeeva that Russian forces in Ukraine are fighting "holy war" against the LGBT & the Antichrist. He hopes Russia will soon face off with NATO.

Yeesh! Because it is important for as many people as possible to know... Americans can now dial 988 to be connected to mental health services, including a suicide hotline. Alas, it isn’t completely up and running yet. The goal of no busy signal and not being put on hold may not happen for a while.

Intended as a final act, to be witnessed, to be a spectacle

My Sunday movie was actually a few short films. These are from a list I had accumulated. In a Moment is a German film. Max is new to the high school. He meets Leon who is openly gay and accepted as that by the other students. His father is wrapped up in soccer matches and thinks gay kids have it hard. At a school open mike program Max sings a song he wrote about busting out of his fortress. All that in 17 minutes. It won a few awards. In Louder than Words Ansel is looking for a place to practice his guitar and encounters a dance lesson featuring Niall, who is pretty good. Ansel discovers Niall is deaf and keeps time by feeling the musical beats. He’s also good at lip reading so he understands what Ansel is saying, though Ansel doesn’t get the signs. It takes a moment for Ansel to admit the attraction. Under 17 minutes. There were several scenes I wished were a bit more brightly lit and in Niall’s opening dance perhaps the camera could have backed up a bit to include more of the dancer. Tyler is a super smart white nine year old who goes to lunch with his older half brother black Daniel. Tyler admits to having a boyfriend. Can someone so young come out? Some gay men say they always knew. Under 16 minutes. Out, a Pixar short. Greg and Manuel are packing up to move. Greg’s parents show up to help pack. One problem – Greg hasn’t told his parents he’s gay and there is evidence of his love to Manuel around the house. A couple gay spirits help to set things right. There is a minute long intro by the director and producer at Pixar and the actual movie is about 10 minutes. I’m pleased this is on YouTube rather than hidden within Disney+. I see a problem – how does one find out if a gay short film is any good? Many movie sites don’t rate them. Do I face the problem the film might be shorter than the time it takes to find out about it? IMDB showed me a link to a list of 113 gay themed movies. Most of these are feature length. Many appear to be of the type where A with this background meets B with that background and they fall in love or, because of their backgrounds, have a hard time dealing with their attraction. How many of this type can I watch before their sameness all runs together? It’s one thing to watch a gay love story once a year, another to watch one every week. Also, while they have viewer ratings not all have an outside rating by Metacritic. So for many it is hard to tell whether they are worth watching. Even so, I found a few to add to my movie wish list. I have already seen several of them – Love Simon, Edge of Seventeen, Call Me By Your Name, Giant Little Ones, Were the World Mine, Young Royals, C.R.A.Z.Y., The Way He Looks, The Strong Ones, Swan Song, Proud, and Pride. I’m sure I wrote about many of these. So there is my own list of recommendations. Leila Fadel of NPR spoke to James Densley, a professor at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota. He and Jillian Peterson created the Violence Project. They researched nearly 200 mass shooters to figure out what they had in common. Their reason for doing it is to hopefully prevent the next one. Some of the things they found: Very often a mass shooter is not living a fulfilled life (this sounds like an understatement). They reach a crisis point where they no longer care if they live or die – a suicide crisis. The shooting is intended as a final act and intended to be witnessed, to be a spectacle. A hatred of self becomes a hatred of others. Once they decide their life crisis needs to be resolved through a bloody spectacle the next step is getting access to a gun. They are inspired by other shooters. They study what others did. They try to use the same weapons. They cite other shooters in the manifestos they leave behind. Prevention has three parts. There is the individual level – are guns in the home securely stored? There is the institutional level – school or workplace crisis intervention teams attuned to the warning signs of someone on the path to violence. There is the societal level – universal background checks, red flag laws, and other straightforward measures. In the Violence Project book and in discussions like this one Densley never mentions the names of shooters. He won’t give them any notoriety. He also wants to focus on the solutions, not the shooters. SemDem of the Daily Kos community discussed why conservatives are much more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. First, yes, it is conservatives. Do fake news with liberals and the claim is debunked rather promptly and everyone moves on. Conservatives register a greater response to negative stimuli. They tend to view the world as a dangerous place. That’s why fearmongering is used so much and works so well. Liberals tend to be more hopeful. They look at the benefits and drawbacks of actual policy.

Democrats push legislation to expand rights, create programs, or build infrastructure. Conservatives, however, tend to promote bills to address perceived dangers-–even if the dangers are fake.

A Republican Congressman noted that up to 2015 90% of discussions were about policy and 10% about perceived threats. Since then those numbers have flipped. Both the left and right tend to believe claims that support their views (it’s called confirmation bias). However, conservatives are more likely to believe outright lies – and the right’s media machine is happy and eager to oblige. Recent research showed those most likely to spread misinformation were low-conscientiousness conservatives who also had an appetite for chaos. That second trait is defined, SemDem wrote, quoting the study, as “a motivation to take down the social and political institutions to ‘assert dominance and superiority of one’s own group.’ ” Yup, all about their high position in the social hierarchy by oppressing those they want below them. The right’s media machine is also conditioning their audience to mistrust fact providers. They are told all other sources are biased (well, yeah, because facts have a liberal bias). So if the poor viewer can’t trust anyone it is easier to trust those pushing conspiracy theories. The right had built a gigantic information bubble, an echo chamber. Negative info about one of “their” officials is treated as a partisan attack. Negative info of an opposition official is treated as a major scandal. But that bubble can work two ways. Putin has been injecting misinformation into American politics – the top Facebook posts changed drastically when Russia couldn’t post. Yet, a bubble around Putin prevented him from knowing the likely outcome of his invasion of Ukraine. Researchers paid some Fox News viewers to watch CNN instead. I think the experiment ran for a month. They changed their minds on many issues. There was a 5% switch in believing long Covid is real to 13% less likely to agree that if Biden were elected there would be more Black Lives Matter activists shooting police. It is possible, though not easy, to pull someone out of the bubble. It is hard because they have been trapped by fear.

A positive school experience

Savannah Tryens-Fernandes of AL.com wrote about a new high school just south of Birmingham, Alabama that is about to graduate its first seniors. The Magic City Acceptance Academy opened last fall and is the first LGBTQ-affirming charter school in the South. It serves grades 6-12. As with other charter schools they accept more than LGBTQ kids. The process to receive a charter was quite long. – they had to go before the charter commission four times. When it was preparing to open the staff thought why would a student want to leave a high school with just one year to go to come here? When 11 seniors showed up the answer was obvious: they didn’t feel safe at their former school. As in really didn’t feel safe. So unsafe they didn’t dare go to a dance and kept scissors handy as protection. Some didn’t dare go to the cafeteria. So this was a last chance at a positive school experience.

In Alabama, LGBTQ youth are three times more likely to attempt suicide compared to their peers, and twice as likely to not go to school because they felt unsafe or experienced violence on campus, according to the state’s most recent youth risk behavior survey. Trevor Project researchers found that “LGBTQ youth in the South with at least one in-person LGBTQ-affirming space, such as a school, had more than 40% lower odds of reporting a suicide attempt in the past year,” said Myeshia Price, senior research scientist.

And at MCAA they have become a family for each other. In January 2022 they had to go virtual while the omicron variant raged. Once back together they needed to celebrate. So they did a drag show. That included dressing up Social Studies teacher Daniel Evans (who has a transgender child). A week later Tim James, candidate for governor of Alabama, issued a TV ad decrying tax dollars going to a “transgender” school. The ad also called the drag show “exploitation.” Which pretty much proves why the school is necessary. Of course the ad made the students feel a bit more anxious and unsafe. Time to upgrade the school’s security. And five days later the state legislature cut $2.9 million designated for charter schools. The money will instead go to the department of education without designation. 48 hours later the emergency room at the children’s hospital in Birmingham had a big uptick in suicide attempts. That prompted Evans to teach some basic skills, such as how to change a tire so a student doesn’t have to walk a couple miles to a gas station late at night. On senior prom day Lindy Blanchard, another GOP candidate for governor decried taxpayer money going to that “transgender school” when it could be better spent improving mental health and other programs across the state. Yeah, that’s clueless. Giving students a safe school environment is mental health. This sounds like a cool high school to attend. Back when I was in high school all these decades ago I was more than closeted, I was clueless. I made no attempt to figure out why I liked to watch the young men and ignored the young women – well other than the one I “dated” because I thought that’s what I’m supposed to do. I wasn’t particularly upset when she started going out with someone else. At that time a school like this would have terrified me. I had written about the small number of trans kids who do a social transition and then decide to retransition to their birth gender. Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos looked at another study of the number of trans youth who receive gender affirming surgery and then regret it. That number is 1%. Republicans love to talk about trans folks and regret. Are they going to talk about this study? Higgins also explains some of these surgeries. The most important part is:

None of these surgeries, treatments, or processes make someone more or less trans or more or less of their gender identity. You never need to know any of this information in order to respect a person’s identity, which includes using the correct pronouns, providing bathroom access, and so on.

Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that Russia took two months to grind out the two miles from Pervormaisk to Popasna. The town, reduced to rubble, is now theirs. But now that it’s theirs they don’t seem to know what to do with it. Should they attack north? Or is it west? Or maybe south? Yeah, they capture another village or two, but haven’t put up enough sustained effort in one direction to get anywhere else. Sumner also included a tweet from AP Oddities with a photo showing...

A small brewery in Finland has launched a NATO-themed beer to mark the Nordic country’s bid to join the Western military alliance.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary:

There's bad news for Russia. Finland and Sweden have both signed off on their bids to join NATO. Finland and Sweden are very serious about making this official—they've each left a toothbrush in NATO's bathroom already. —Stephen Colbert

Charles Jan of the Kos community reported nearly 1,000 Ukrainian soldier who had been in the Azovstal plant in Mariupol are now in Russian hands. Their fate is uncertain. The injured ones were taken to a hospital in the Russian controlled part of Donbas. Ukraine wants to do a prisoner exchange. Russia wants to interrogate them then put them on trial for war crimes. Some of these soldiers were part of the Azov Regiment, a far right group. Russia has declared them to be Nazis. This regiment had recaptured Mariupol in 2014 and had repelled repeated Russian attacks since then. Ukrainian officials say Azov had become part of the Ukraine National Guard and had abandoned its far right origins. Russian social media channels are calling for the Azov forces to be imprisoned or murdered instead of being used in negotiations. The Russian parliament was to consider a resolution banning using these soldiers in an exchange, but didn’t act on it. Kos of Kos referenced translated Russian language accounts of the war to explain that Russia may have a large number of Battalion Tactical Groups on paper. But on the ground that’s an entirely different thing. One BTG is to have 600-800 soldiers, 10 tanks, 40 infantry fighting vehicles and a long list of support vehicles. At the Izyum front estimates say Russia has 22 BTGs. In reality ... a company of 120-160 soldiers actually had 13. Since they are told they’re being sent to sure death, many find a reason not to go. For those who do fight they don’t have enough trucks (no fuel?) to carry them to the front, so it is a several hour march to get there. Which means they’re mighty tired before any fighting begins. Then they have to carry (or abandon) the dead for the long march back to camp. No wonder it takes them two months to capture two miles. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Dara Massicot of Foreign Affairs. After listing a large number of things the Russian Army is doing wrong, Massicot wrote:

These problems do not stop at technical equipment issues, poor training, or corruption. Rather, they are linked by a core underlying theme: the military’s lack of concern for the lives and well-being of its personnel. In Ukraine, the Russian military struggles to retrieve the bodies of its dead, obscures casualties, and is indifferent to its worried military families. It may spend billions of dollars on new equipment, but it does not properly treat soldiers’ injuries, and it generally does not appear to care tremendously whether troops are traumatized.

Legal marriage is good for you

A study in Denmark and Sweden shows that after same-sex marriage was legalized the suicide rate of those in same-sex partnerships declined significantly. Suicide overall dropped by 28%, suicide by those in same-sex unions dropped by 46%. Alas, even as those numbers decline suicide rates of people in same-sex relationships is still twice as high as those in opposite-sex relationships.

Alas, again, suicide by LGBTQ teens is still significantly higher than other teens.

Need for inclusion and connection

The cover story for Newsweek a couple weeks ago (yeah, still behind) is about suicide. The rates have been rising worldwide for the last couple decades (as in well before the current economic mess). Worldwide, suicide now accounts for more deaths than war, murder, and forces of nature combined. Tony Dokoupil explores why.

Thomas Joiner Sr. killed himself. Thomas Joiner Jr. has spent his professional life examining the reasons. After exploring many things that turn out not to affect suicide Joiner found a few things that do:

* Loneliness, a "thwarted need for inclusion and connection."

Twelve years and a tech revolution after Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, his treatise on the decline in American community, the institutions that used to bind America together have, if anything, crumbled even further. People tell surveyors that the world has become less helpful, trustworthy, and fair. It’s a place where you work longer at more deadening jobs for less pay, your life pulsing away with each new email, or worse, each additional hour on your feet. What’s deadly about all this is the loss of what Joiner calls “reciprocal care.” When people have no shoulder to lean on, they feel more isolated, and that isolation can be lethal.

A big part of preventing suicide is to build up community, which is one of my guiding principles. From the quote above it looks like a lot of people are feeling the effects of the GOP working to destroy community. Blacks and Hispanics have a lower rate of suicide because they have a more enduring bonds of faith and family.

* Burdensomeness, a feeling of no longer being effective, no longer providing for family or contributing to the world. It is a feeling of being a liability, of failing those who need us. We are so geared towards offering help to others we have a hard time accepting help. This is why suicide rises with unemployment and why it is high in cultures of high honor. Depression is also a big part of this factor.

* Fearlessness of death. Our bodies are built to endure, our minds rigged to flee from death. To be fearless of death one must be numb to violence and pain. Yes, it has been shown that some of us become numb to violence through what is shown in media.

We may have periods of all three of these factors. It is the intersection of all three that lead to suicide. That means it is possible to prevent suicide by disrupting one of the three factors. To do that we must overcome the cost and stigma of treatment. Joiner says,

We need to get it in our heads that suicide is not easy, painless, cowardly, selfish, vengeful, self-masterful, or rash. And once we get all that in our heads at last, we need to let it lead our hearts.