A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
A friend here in San Diego characterized today as the “High Holidays” because it is both Pride Month and Juneteenth (observed by government workers).
Readers: Are you forced to work today or are you relaxing at home reflecting on the injustices experienced by slaves who were also members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community?
Full post, including commentsComparisons of the current U.S. system of transferism to “Communism” don’t make sense to me. In the Soviet Union under “Communism” everyone had to work, the very opposite of the American system in which tens of millions of able-bodied people are relieved of the need to work either by having sex with an already married person (“child support”), a quickie marriage to a high-income person (“alimony” and/or “Amber Heard”), or via taxpayer-funded housing, taxpayer-funded health care (Medicaid), taxpayer-funded food (SNAP/EBT), taxpayer-funded smartphone (Obamaphone), and, recently added, taxpayer-funded broadband for the Xbox. Any non-disabled adult in the Soviet Union who tried to sit at home collecting child support, alimony, or government-provided services would have been labeled a “parasite” and subject to a range of punishments.
But a signature feature of the Soviet system seems to be becoming more widespread in the U.S.: the communal apartment. “Their Solution to the Housing Crisis? Living With Strangers.” (NYT, June 1):
Two facts are painfully clear to New Yorkers: The rent is too high, and it keeps getting higher. With the median one-bedroom apartment hovering around $3,500 a month, New York’s rents are officially among the most expensive in the country. Between 2009 and 2018, the city added 500,000 jobs but only 100,000 new housing units. The profound shortage in rental units has forced the city’s residents to figure out their own ways to live affordably.
Ingrid Sletten, 68, was paired with Stacey Stormo, 37, through a nonprofit that helps older adults find roommates. They share a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx and each pay $750.
Halima Muhammad, Sukanya Prasad, Ashleigh Genus and Prisca Hoffstaetter share a spacious four-bedroom apartment together on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. Two of the roommates pay about $950 a month (and have their own bathrooms), while the other two pay about $890.
Rina Sah and her husband, Ajit Kumar Sah, share their two-bedroom apartment in Elmhurst, Queens, with Babita Khanal, whom they found through a Facebook group for the Nepali community in New York. Babita pays them $900 a month, lowering the couple’s share to only $1,200.
Kazi, Amzad, Eliyas and a fourth roommate are all recent Bangladeshi immigrants who share a basement apartment in East New York, Brooklyn. They pay a combined $1,600 and live two to a bedroom.
Alexandra Marzella has lived with more than 90 people over the last decade in a six-bedroom loft in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her five current roommates also share the space with her 2-year-old daughter, Earth, who was born in the apartment’s bathtub in 2020. Each roommate pays between $1,000 and $1,300 in rent each month, including utilities.
Things must be easier up in the frozen north, right? Maybe not… “Asylum Seekers Overwhelm Shelters In Portland, Maine” (ZeroHedge):
Guthrie, a hands-on, frontline worker in the effort to feed, clothe, and house a continuous flow of foreign nationals arriving in Portland by airplane or bus from the U.S. southern border, told The Epoch Times, “Our family shelter facilities, our warming room, and even area hotel space is at capacity. We have maxed out our community resources.
The Portland Family Shelter is a complex of four rented buildings in various states of renovation located in the heart of downtown.
Some of the structures are gradually being converted into small apartments where up to four families will share a single kitchen and bathroom.
To accommodate the stream of new arrivals, the family shelter program has in recent months placed 309 families (1,091 people) in eight hotels located in five neighboring municipalities spread over three counties of southeastern Maine’s prime tourist and vacation region.
The vast majority of the new arrivals at the family shelter in Portland have come from Angola and the Congo in Africa, with some coming from Haiti in the Caribbean.
“A new arrival tells Border Patrol ‘I am here to seek asylum. If I go back home, I will be killed. I fear for my life.’ That’s the difference between an asylum seeker and an immigrant,” he said.
Those three short sentences guarantee a person’s admission for a lengthy stay in the United States as his or her claim [why only two gender IDs for migrants?] is adjudicated.
Most are given cell phones.
The shelter provides families with three meals a day, prepared off-site by “community partners.”
According to Guthrie, the cost per motel room is between $250 and $350 dollars per night and rising as the tourist season begins.
“Pregnancy is the families’ most urgent medical concern, and their most pressing medical need is OBGYN (obstetrics and gynecology) care,” he said.
Speaking through an interpreter provided by the shelter, and in the presence of shelter director Guthrie, Samantha, a young Angolan woman with a 10-month-old baby on her hip and a toddler in tow, was not shy about sharing her dissatisfaction.
“We endured a seven-month journey to come to this! We are not happy. Conditions are not good! We really need help.”
When asked if she felt welcome, Samantha said with a look of disbelief, “No! I do not feel welcome. Look at us. We are outside.”
Landry, a housepainter and electrician’s helper, brought his wife Sylvie, two-year-old daughter, and 12-month-old son to Portland from the Congo. … Sylvie said, “We came from Texas unprepared for this Maine weather. I am not happy for how I am living here. I don’t feel welcome!”
Climate change can’t happen soon enough for these folks! (Free housing, health care, smartphone, and three meals per day cooked by paid do-gooders isn’t enough to make people “feel welcome” given typical Maine weather.)
Housing is fundamental. So maybe it is fair to say that the U.S. is becoming “Communist” at least with respect to communal apartments.
Related:
One reason for the baby formula shortage is that the FDA protects American infants from being poisoned by Swiss-made baby formula from Nestlé, the company that invented baby formula. What flies off a French hypermarché shelf is strictly illegal here. (Let’s hope that it continues to be illegal to import Nestlé’s noxious formula and that, instead, we will import their Swiss-made chocolate and consume it to maintain our robust Covid-fighting BMIs.)
Another reason for the shortage turns out to be that American fathers, mothers, and formerly pregnant people of other gender IDs were too busy at home in lockdown to breastfeed. “Baby-Formula Shortage Worsened by Drop in Breast-Feeding Rates” (WSJ, May 29):
One of the contributing factors in the U.S. baby-formula shortage is a significant shift in the way parents feed their babies: Breast-feeding declined during the pandemic, reversing a decadeslong trend, health practitioners say.
Since 2020, the share of breast-fed one-year-olds has plummeted from an estimated 34% to an estimated 14% this year, according to surveys conducted by Demographic Intelligence, a forecasting firm that specializes in births and works with formula manufacturers including Abbott Laboratories and Nestlé. Because of the small sample size, the firm’s 2022 estimate has a range of error of plus or minus 6 percentage points.
After Covid-19 restrictions were introduced in March 2020, many new mothers had shorter hospital stays and were discharged before their milk had come in or their baby had latched successfully to their breast, breast-feeding experts say. Some infants weren’t given skin-to-skin contact with their mothers after birth because of concerns about Covid-19 transmission.
Some lactation consultants were furloughed, redeployed or designated nonessential personnel; others offered only virtual appointments. Parents had less access to in-person assistance from doulas and peer-support groups. They also had less help from family and friends, who stayed away to avoid exposing newborns to the coronavirus.
(I’m not sure why the article refers to “mothers” given that “fathers” can also breastfeed.)
Hillary Clinton’s wisdom remains important even as the torch of wise Science-informed leadership has been passed to Joe Biden:
“It takes a village,” Dr. Spatz said. During the pandemic, she said, “all the in-person, peer-to-peer support went away.”
Science is fickle:
Breast-feeding rates in the U.S. reached a low point in the 1970s, when many doctors told parents that formula was the best food for babies. Then a movement to promote breast-feeding, and growing research showing the benefits of breast-feeding over formula, led to a decadeslong increase in breast-feeding.
The share of one-year-olds who are fed with at least some breast milk climbed from 16% in 2001 to 36% in 2017, then plateaued in 2018 and 2019, according to latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Skin color matters:
Full post, including commentsThe recent drop in breast-feeding has been particularly steep among lower-income families and people of color, Dr. Spatz said.
The shooting in Uvalde, Texas is dominating my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Here’s an example:
(Joe Biden has been in the Senate or the White House since 1973. He didn’t do anything about gun laws, common sense or otherwise, during those 49 years, but “we have to do more” today.)
From an older guy in Maskachusetts on Facebook:
Does anyone really need these kinds of guns. I think if you want to shoot these kind of weapons you can only shoot them and keep them at gun ranges. Other than that, no one, other than law enforcement should have these weapons. I am sorry. There is ZERO need for them out in society.
What has been learned about Salvador Ramos and his motivation for killing elementary school kids?
From skimming the news, it sounds as though Mr. Ramos confirms the findings in The Son Also Rises. His grandfather was unsuccessful (“[grandfather] Rolando Reyes also said he has a criminal background and cannot have a weapon in the home.” (ABC)) and Mr. Ramos was on track to be unsuccessful (“The Robb Elementary School shooter went on the deadly rampage after apparently fighting with his grandmother about his failure to graduate from his Texas high school, according to a report.” (New York Post)).
“Salvador Ramos Was Bullied for Stutter, Wearing Black Eyeliner: Friend” (Newsweek):
“He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,” Garcia told the Washington Post. “Over social media, over gaming, over everything.”
Could this be the motivation? Plenty of teenagers in the 1970s had access to guns. Bullying in the 1970s was far worse than today and physical violence was common, as it was outside of school as well during the high-crime 1970s. In the junior high school that I attended, kids could get bullied for wearing Sears Toughskins rather than Levi’s blue jeans. I don’t think coming out as transgender or gay would have gone over well. On the other hand, 1970s bullies couldn’t follow the weak members of the herd into their own homes via social media.
What about pills? Kids weren’t medicated back in the 1970s. Psychiatrists today poke at random into a complex system that they don’t understand (the brain). Some of the most commonly prescribed medications may push pill-takers toward violence. See “Precursors to suicidality and violence on antidepressants: systematic review of trials in adult healthy volunteers” (2016): “Antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence.” But there is no evidence that Salvador Ramos was taking any pills.
What has been learned that could explain this terrible crime? (other than, in a country of 330+ million, there are going to be terrible crimes periodically)
Separately… gun nut readers: How are you going to sweep this episode of gun violence under the rug? If Americans were willing to shut down schools for more than a year and be locked down at home in hopes of slightly reducing the COVID-19-tagged death rate, why aren’t these same folks willing to repeal the 2nd Amendment? (China is the dream society, I think, for about half of Americans. China has zero COVID and no private gun ownership.)
Related:
Folks who’ve been unpersoned by Twitter, Facebook, and/or YouTube/Google might feel that their practical freedom of speech is gone. The good is is that it can be bought back from the U.S. Mint for $1,595 via the First Amendment to the United States Constitution 2022 Platinum Proof Coin – Freedom of Speech:
If you want the FBI’s January 6 task force to come to your house, add a Donald Trump medal to your shopping cart:
If you want to celebrate a Nobel laureate who has been complicit in what the U.S. now says is “genocide”, the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Bronze Medal:
Continuing the theme of celebrating the achievements of strong women, here’s one for the Apollo 11 astronauts:
To celebrate weekend warriors who like to put on uniforms, give themselves officer rank and uniforms, and buzz around in mighty Cessna 172s, one for the Civil Air Patrol:
To remember that Big Government is not always competent, one regarding the USS Indianapolis (Navy failed to notice that the ship hadn’t arrived and failed to take any action, not even a search plane launch, in response to a distress call received from the vessel before she sank):
The Mint celebrates John Muir, who advocated eliminating low-skill immigration to the U.S. in order to preserve the environment:
(See “The Extremist Campaign to Blame Immigrants for U.S. Environmental Problems” (Center for American Progress): “John Muir, known as the father of national parks, expressed racism toward Black and Native Americans and promoted ideas of restricting immigration by nonwhites.”)
Full post, including commentsA photo taken last week, while Ukrainian cities and homes were being destroyed, on the Brandeis University campus:
While bravely behind a Zoom screen, students identifying as BIPOC could participate in the “Surviving White Spaces” support group, for example. There was “drop-in” support for the pandemic (where “drop-in” is defined as clicking on a Zoom URL). For those who weren’t sure whether they belonged in the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community, there was “Gender & Sexuality Exploration”, from which one could presumably segue into “LGBTQ+ Support Group”.
What about Americans who aren’t in college and who aren’t in Ukraine? They too are experiencing a “tragedy” according to Atlantic magazine’s “How did this many deaths become normal?”:
The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?
Why did the CDC issue new guidelines that allowed most Americans to dispense with indoor masking when at least 1,000 people had been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months?
America is accepting not only a threshold of death but also a gradient of death. Elderly people over the age of 75 are 140 times more likely to die than people in their 20s.
How much of this extra mortality will the U.S. accept? The CDC’s new guidelines provide a clue. They recommend that protective measures such as indoor masking kick in once communities pass certain thresholds of cases and hospitalizations. But the health-policy experts Joshua Salomon and Alyssa Bilinski calculated that by the time communities hit the CDC’s thresholds, they’d be on the path to at least three daily deaths per million, which equates to 1,000 deaths per day nationally. And crucially, the warning lights would go off too late to prevent those deaths. “As a level of mortality the White House and CDC are willing to accept before calling for more public health protection, this is heartbreaking,”
There is some good news in the article. Most of us do follow Science:
a poll that found that mask mandates are favored by 50 percent of Americans and opposed by just 28 percent
Apparently, there is nothing that can happen in Ukraine that will stop us from focusing on the concerns that we had prior to February 2022.
Full post, including comments“More than 1,000 gather at SF’s City Hall to protest Russian invasion of Ukraine” (SFGate, 2/4/2022) will no doubt strike fear in the hearts of the any foreign military. The accompanying photo shows that a handful of the Followers of Science are equipped with hearts brave enough to go outdoors without a protective cloth mask (our 6-year-old pointed out, however, that “one has a chin diaper”):
The bellicosity of this partially masked Army of the Righteous is described in the text:
Many waved blue and gold Ukrainian flags, and there was a sea of signs within the crowd. Some read “Russians Go Home,” “No USSR 2.0” and “Support Ukraine.” Expressing both sadness and anger, the crowd chanted “Stop Putin” and “Hands of Ukraine.”
“The reason I’m here is to raise awareness of Putin’s war and show the world that Ukrainians in America stand with those in Ukraine,” said SF resident Andy Soluk, who held a flag.
While the shooting war raged and folks in San Francisco were sending thoughts and prayers, what other foes were significant enough to get the attention of the Army of the Righteous? Were they, perhaps, fighting to provide housing for the thousands of their brothers, sisters, and binary resisters who live in Bay Area tent cities? Working with Barack Obama to continue the planet healing that began in 2008? Here’s a February 25, 2022 letter from administrators at University of California Berkeley:
The campus leadership recognizes that it’s hard to adjust to the reality of masks no longer being required (even if they’re still recommended in some settings). That’s why our campus will be one of the last places in the Bay Area to still require masks prior to when our mandate is lifted on March 7. These changes are indeed difficult and I encourage anyone who would feel more comfortable wearing a mask to continue to do so. But I also encourage you to grapple with the fact that the consensus within the public health community is that it is no longer necessary to mandate masking.
Imagine the tenacity and inner strength of a person who can surmount the trifecta of (1) adjusting to reality, (2) coping with the difficult mask order change, and (3) grappling with the new facts of Science!
(Separately, regarding the impending mask-optional vaccine-and-booster-required Berkeley campus, Science tells us that (1) mask orders and vaccine coercion were highly effective at reducing SARS-CoV-2 infections and (2) the virus will be with us forever, including in potentially dangerous new mutants, Combining (1) and (2), it makes logical sense to drop these proven-effective-by-Science policies and let any future plague rage exponentially. Now that those who Follow Science know exactly how to fight COVID-19, they aren’t going to bother to exert any effort in that fight.)
And, in case that you think the valorous are limited to San Francisco, a friend in Colorado sent me the following today:
I sat in on the Zoom call our public health dept had on ending mask mandate a week ago. When asked why if they decided to end it on Monday the end wouldn’t go into effect till Friday they said they had to give people time to absorb and adjust to the new reality.
I also loved that they are voting on, and agreed to, ending a mask mandate on a zoom meeting because it was still too risky to meet in person.
Fortunately, many local business have followed the science and kept their own mandates in place.
On a vaguely related theme of cultural difference, can readers who speak Russian please tell us what the Russian recruitment video says? And, if military service is compulsory for Russian males, why do they have recruiting videos at all?
And our state-sponsored media (NPR) reminds us to curl up into the fetal position. From “5 ways to cope with the stressful news cycle” (2/25/2022; URL: “anxiety-tips-self-care”):
Full post, including commentsRussia invaded Ukraine this week, … don’t forget to care for yourself in other ways … Breathe … Nourish yourself. The kitchen is a safe space for a lot of us.
American labor force participation rate is falling (BLS):
An evil (i.e., profit-seeking) company owner whom I know installed an activity logger on the Windows laptops that he provides to employees. “Actual work fell from about 30 hours per week in the office to 20 once people were working from home,” he said. (The young engineers, meanwhile, told HR that they were overwhelmed and suffering from a lack of work/life balance.)
So we have fewer Americans working and fewer hours per week spent commuting and working for those who are, at least in theory, still working.
Here’s a report from Disney World on a recent Monday:
Historically, we’ve seen low crowds throughout much of January and February, but this year has brought 6-hour lines and ridiculously packed parks for what is supposed to be the “off-season.”
By the time we got closer to the front [of the security screening line], the Cast Members were warning the guests at the back that it would be at least an hour before they’d be able to get into the park. WOW!
We finally got through and made it to the monorail, which, unfortunately, had a line of its own. This entire process usually takes us less than 30 minutes at this time of the morning, but today it took a little more than an hour to get inside Magic Kingdom from the parking lot.
But not everyone can be in a theme park.
Perhaps the new leisure hours were filled with people applying for all of the new government grant programs? Bad news… “Biden administration denies funding programs that hand out crack pipes to prevent infection and promote ‘racial equity'” (Daily Mail):
The $30 million grant program will distribute funds to nonprofits and local governments to make drug use safer and ‘advance racial equity’
Included in the grant is money to purchase ‘safe smoking kits/supplies’
A spokesperson for HHS said included in these kits could be pipes for users to smoke substances like crack cocaine and crystal methamphetamine
President Biden’s Health and Human Services department (HHS) denied that it is finalizing a plan for funding to dole out crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its ‘Harm Reduction Plan.’
The $30 million grant program, which accepted applications until Monday and will begin doling out money in May, intends to provide funds to nonprofits and local governments to make drug use safer, to advance ‘racial equity.’
I.e., no matter how hard someone worked on a new crack pipe design, the Biden administration won’t buy it.
What about meeting up (in a COVID-safe manner) with new friends? 2020 was a record year for Tinder and 2021 was even better (source; note that the scale is mislabeled (should be $millions)):
Watching TV, play games, and streaming? It is tough to find statistics for adults, but “U.S. Adolescents’ Daily Screen Time Doubled During Pandemic” (US News): “Recreational screen time among U.S. teens doubled from before the pandemic to nearly eight hours per day during the pandemic…”
What else is a realistic possibility?
Full post, including commentsIn 2017, I wrote High minimum wage is a city’s way to keep out low-skill immigrants
Friends on Facebook are discussing “A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news for liberals” (Washington Post). Of course, like most things in the U.S. media, this starts off with a lie (the minimum wage in Seattle is $13/hour, not $15/hour). But let’s look at the rest of the article…
Suppose that the goal of a liberal is to live in a city without too many unsightly low-skilled people (see Tyler Cowen explains why rich white Democrats freely express love for immigrants and people of color for how liberals already have segregated themselves away from dark-skinned Americans and immigrants).
Can the liberal make it illegal for anyone without a college degree to live in his or her city? Probably not. Can the liberal make it illegal for anyone without a college degree to work in his or her city? Sure! That’s the minimum wage.
(Imagine that in 2017 a $13/hour wage rising to $15/hour was considered princely. Where in the country right now one could hire a reliable worker for $15 per hour?)
I wonder if something analogous is happening in our neighborhood in Florida, the planned-but-not-gated community of Abacoa (within Jupiter; see our search process). There is no means-tested public housing in our neighborhood and therefore we are missing the social/economic class of those who have managed to obtain a lifetime of taxpayer-funded housing. But there is also a missing class of folks who likely could afford to pay market rent here (as low as $1500/month): white trash.
Palm Beach County is not exactly the white trash capital of Florida, but we do sometimes see tattooed folks walking their pit bulls not too far from here and in neighborhoods that aren’t much less expensive. Why don’t we have tattooed pit bull-owning neighbors within a 1-2-mile radius? The Homeowners’ Association (HOA) for each area within Abacoa specifically bans pit bulls and some other dog breeds with a reputation for aggression.
I wonder if the dog breed rules are partly designed to keep out undesirable breeds of humans…
Related:
I hope that everyone who works for the government, at least, is enjoying having today off.
This is a reminder to check Reinterpreting MLK’s ideas of freedom for the Age of COVID (July 4, 2021).
Cited back in July:
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.
Should it be rewritten?
Vaccinated people cannot remain vaccinated forever. The yearning for a booster shot eventually manifests itself.
The July 2021 post noted that all of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park buildings had been closed in April 2021 (and, presumably, since the start of coronapanic in March 2020). Do visitors have the freedom to enter today?
“A right delayed is a right denied”?
Full post, including comments