'Dark Winter' at the White House: Just 41 Percent Approve the Way Joe Biden's Handling Job as President (VIDEO)

What a surprise. I mean, with all the Franklin Roosevelt-style leadership Biden's been providing, who would've guessed?

Look, Americans should be worried about this president's dark matter at least as much as his prophesied dark winter. (*Eye-roll.*)

At PBS, "Biden’s approval dips to new low as independents sour on his leadership":

As President Joe Biden heads into the end of the year, he’s facing a sour reality: The number of Americans who approve of his performance has hit a new low. Just 41 percent of Americans approve of the job he has been doing as president, according to a new PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll. Support among independents alone dropped eight points in a week.

Overall, more than half – 55 percent – of Americans disapprove of Biden’s performance, including 44 percent who strongly disapprove. His disapproval ratings have jumped 20 points since he took office, reaching a record high this month. The number who strongly disapprove jumped 6 points since a Marist poll conducted just one week earlier...

Ouch! (*Cringe emoji here.*)

The Mystery of 22-Year-Old Gabby Petito (VIDEO)

My was was telling me about this story last night, when it was really breaking into the big leagues.

You can make hunches about what happened, especially because the young woman's boyfriend --- with whom she was traveling cross-country, visiting the national parks --- has refused to answer questions, and that's after not reporting his girlfriend missing after arriving back in Florida.

At Deseret News, "Florida police say there are holes ‘to be plugged’ in Gabby Petito missing case."

And the Orlando Sentinel, "Police: Missing Florida woman and slain couple unrelated":

A Utah county sheriff said Friday detectives have determined there is no connection between the disappearance of a Florida woman who went missing during a cross-country trip with her boyfriend and a still-unsolved slaying of two women who were fatally shot.

Police in Florida had said Thursday a possible connection was being explored because the women were found dead in the same tourist town of Moab, Utah, where the missing woman, Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito, and her boyfriend Brian Laundrie had an emotional fight to which police had been called.

Petito and her boyfriend Brian Laundrie were in Utah when the victims in the double homicide, Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner, disappeared, WFLA reported.

Petito and Laundrie were in Moab on Aug. 12.

Body camera video shows the police pulling the couple over after a witness reported seeing them arguing and hitting each other, WFLA reported.

According to the Grand County Sheriff’s Department, Turner, 38, and Schulte, 24, were last seen Friday evening, Aug. 13, at a local tavern in Moab. The two women were found shot to death on Aug. 18 in the South Mesa area of the La Sal Mountains.

Friends of Schulte and Turner told authorities the couple told police someone near their campsite was intimidating them and that “if something happened to them, that they were murdered,” WFLA reported.

 

Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show

As a professor of teenagers, this is something that's worrisome to me, and I try to keep abreast of what's going on. I'm not young, though, and of course I don't use Instagram, so it's hard. 

This is an excellent piece, at WSJ, "Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public":

About a year ago, teenager Anastasia Vlasova started seeing a therapist. She had developed an eating disorder, and had a clear idea of what led to it: her time on Instagram.

She joined the platform at 13, and eventually was spending three hours a day entranced by the seemingly perfect lives and bodies of the fitness influencers who posted on the app.

“When I went on Instagram, all I saw were images of chiseled bodies, perfect abs and women doing 100 burpees in 10 minutes,” said Ms. Vlasova, now 18, who lives in Reston, Va.

Around that time, researchers inside Instagram, which is owned by Facebook Inc., were studying this kind of experience and asking whether it was part of a broader phenomenon. Their findings confirmed some serious problems.

“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.”

For the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.

“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.

“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups

Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.

Expanding its base of young users is vital to the company’s more than $100 billion in annual revenue, and it doesn’t want to jeopardize their engagement with the platform.

More than 40% of Instagram’s users are 22 years old and younger, and about 22 million teens log onto Instagram in the U.S. each day, compared with five million teens logging onto Facebook, where young users have been shrinking for a decade, the materials show.

On average, teens in the U.S. spend 50% more time on Instagram than they do on Facebook.

“Instagram is well positioned to resonate and win with young people,” said a researcher’s slide posted internally. Another post said: “There is a path to growth if Instagram can continue their trajectory.”

In public, Facebook has consistently played down the app’s negative effects on teens, and hasn’t made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it.

“The research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing in March 2021 when asked about children and mental health.

In May, Instagram head Adam Mosseri told reporters that research he had seen suggests the app’s effects on teen well-being is likely “quite small.”

In a recent interview, Mr. Mosseri said: “In no way do I mean to diminish these issues.…Some of the issues mentioned in this story aren’t necessarily widespread, but their impact on people may be huge.”

He said he believes Facebook was late to realizing there were drawbacks to connecting people in such large numbers. “I’ve been pushing very hard for us to embrace our responsibilities more broadly,” he said.

He said the research into the mental-health effects on teens was valuable, and that Facebook employees ask tough questions about the platform. “For me, this isn’t dirty laundry. I’m actually very proud of this research,” he said.

Some features of Instagram could be harmful to some young users, and they aren’t easily addressed, he said. He added: “There’s a lot of good that comes with what we do.”

What Facebook Knows

The Instagram documents form part of a trove of internal communications reviewed by the Journal, on areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking. They offer an unparalleled picture of how Facebook is acutely aware that the products and systems central to its business success routinely fail.

The documents also show that Facebook has made minimal efforts to address these issues and plays them down in public.

The company’s research on Instagram, the deepest look yet at what the tech giant knows about its impact on teens and their mental well-being, represents one of the clearest gaps revealed in the documents between Facebook’s understanding of itself and its public position.

Its effort includes focus groups, online surveys and diary studies in 2019 and 2020. It also includes large-scale surveys of tens of thousands of people in 2021 that paired user responses with Facebook’s own data about how much time users spent on Instagram and what they saw there.

The researchers are Facebook employees in areas including data science, marketing and product development who work on a range of issues related to how users interact with the platform. Many have backgrounds in computer science, psychology and quantitative and qualitative analysis.

In five presentations over 18 months to this spring, the researchers conducted what they called a “teen mental health deep dive” and follow-up studies.

They came to the conclusion that some of the problems were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly. That is especially true concerning so-called social comparison, which is when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth and success of others.

“Social comparison is worse on Instagram,” states Facebook’s deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that “keep the focus on the face.” In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.

The features that Instagram identifies as most harmful to teens appear to be at the platform’s core.

The tendency to share only the best moments, a pressure to look perfect and an addictive product can send teens spiraling toward eating disorders, an unhealthy sense of their own bodies and depression, March 2020 internal research states. It warns that the Explore page, which serves users photos and videos curated by an algorithm, can send users deep into content that can be harmful.

“Aspects of Instagram exacerbate each other to create a perfect storm,” the research states.

The research has been reviewed by top Facebook executives, and was cited in a 2020 presentation given to Mr. Zuckerberg, according to the documents.

At a congressional hearing this March, Mr. Zuckerberg defended the company against criticism from lawmakers about plans to create a new Instagram product for children under 13. When asked if the company had studied the app’s effects on children, he said, “I believe the answer is yes.”

In August, Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn in a letter to Mr. Zuckerberg called on him to release Facebook’s internal research on the impact of its platforms on youth mental health.

In response, Facebook sent the senators a six-page letter that didn’t include the company’s own studies. Instead, Facebook said there are many challenges with conducting research in this space, saying, “We are not aware of a consensus among studies or experts about how much screen time is ‘too much,’ ” according to a copy of the letter reviewed by the Journal.

Facebook also told the senators that its internal research is proprietary and “kept confidential to promote frank and open dialogue and brainstorming internally.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said the company welcomed productive collaboration with Congress and would look for opportunities to work with external researchers on credible studies.

“Facebook’s answers were so evasive—failing to even respond to all our questions—that they really raise questions about what Facebook might be hiding,” Sen. Blumenthal said in an email. “Facebook seems to be taking a page from the textbook of Big Tobacco—targeting teens with potentially dangerous products while masking the science in public.”

Mr. Mosseri said in the recent interview, “We don’t send research out to regulators on a regular basis for a number of reasons.” He added Facebook should figure out a way to share high-level overviews of what the company is learning, and that he also wanted to give external researchers access to Facebook’s data.

He said the company’s plan for the Instagram kids product, which state attorneys general have objected to, is still in the works...

Still more, if you can read it. 

In Return to Classroom, Universities and Professors Struggle with Covid

My division dean just sent out an announcement on this yesterday. How to handle? 

1. Notify sick student to stay the hell off campus. 

2. Reassure the lamebrains that you're not going to drop them from class.  

3. Make sure students are screened and cleared for classes at the check-in tables on-site.

4. Contact college administration to inform them of a cases. 

5. Maintain strict confidentiality. (Or else?) 

At the New York Times, "The Masked Professor vs. the Unmasked Student":

Matthew Boedy, an associate professor of rhetoric and composition, sent out a raw emotional appeal to his students at the University of North Georgia just before classes began: The Covid-19 Delta variant was rampaging through the state, filling up hospital beds. He would teach class in the equivalent of full body armor — vaccinated and masked.

So he was stunned in late August when more than two-thirds of the first-year students in his writing class did not take the hint and showed up unmasked.

It was impossible to tell who was vaccinated and who was not. “It isn’t a visual hellscape, like hospitals, it’s more of an emotional hellscape,” Dr. Boedy said.

North Georgia is not requiring its students to be vaccinated or masked this fall. And as in-person classes return at almost every university in the country, after almost a year and a half of emergency pivoting to online learning, many professors are finding teaching a nerve-racking experience.

The American College Health Association recommends vaccination requirements for all on-campus higher education students for the fall semester. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends face coverings, regardless of vaccine status, for indoor public spaces in areas where the rate of infection is high.

But this is not how it has worked out on more than a few campuses.

More than 1,000 colleges and universities have adopted vaccination requirements for at least some students and staff, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. In an indication of how political vaccination has become, the schools tend to be clustered in states that voted for President Biden in the last election.

But at some campuses, particularly in Republican-led states with high rates of contagion — like the state systems in Georgia, Texas and Florida — vaccination is optional and mask wearing, while recommended, cannot be enforced. Professors are told they can tell students that they are “strongly encouraged” or “expected” to put on masks, but cannot force students to do so. And teachers cannot ask students who have Covid-like symptoms to leave the classroom.

At least nine states — Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Tennessee — have banned or restricted school mask mandates. It is unclear, education officials say, whether all of these prohibitions apply to universities, but public universities depend on state funding.

Certainly, some professors are happy to go maskless. A smattering have resigned in protest over optional mask policies. Most, like Dr. Boedy, are soldiering on. But the level of fear is so high that even at universities that do require vaccination and masks, like Cornell and the University of Michigan, professors have signed petitions asking for the choice to return to online teaching.

“Morale is at an all-time low,” warns a petition at the University of Iowa.

Universities are caught between the demands of their faculty for greater safety precautions, and the fear of losing students, and the revenue they bring, if schools return to another year of online education.

“I think everybody agrees that the idea is to have people physically back in the classroom,” said Peter McDonough, general counsel for the American Council on Education, an organization of colleges and universities. “The turning on a dime to provide online education last year and the previous spring semester was only seen as temporary.”

For some faculty, the new year brings not a return to normal but a strong sense that things could go off the rails. In the first weeks of class, case counts have risen at schools including Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Arizona State, Liberty University, the University of Arkansas, the University of North Florida and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“It seems like a repeat,” said Michael Atzmon, an engineering professor at the University of Michigan. “On the one hand, we have the vaccine. On the other hand, we have Delta.”

Dr. Atzmon helped organize a petition asking the university to be more open to online teaching. It was signed by more than 700 faculty members and instructors.

In a response to the petition, Michigan’s president, Mark Schlissel, said on Thursday that, given the “stellar” rate of vaccination at the Ann Arbor campus (92 percent for students, 90 percent for faculty), the classroom was “perhaps the safest place to be” on campus.

Dr. Schlissel suggested that faculty would just have to get used to the idea that there would be Covid cases on campus. “A pandemic is unsettling, it’s unpredictable, and yes, it involves an unavoidable level of risk,” he said.

There are signs of defiance against state policies. The three big public universities in Arizona — University of Arizona, Arizona State and Northern Arizona University — are tiptoeing around the ban on masks and requiring them in class. If all students have to wear masks, university officials believe that they are obeying Gov. Doug Ducey’s order not to discriminate against students who choose not to be vaccinated.

“It’s kind of a cat-and-mouse game,” said Peter Lake, an education law professor at Stetson University...

For real, man.

Keep reading. 

 

Zero Covid

It's Kat Rosenfield, "The zero COVID delusion: We’ve been led to believe that if we just care enough and try really hard, we can stop getting sick and save lives":

During World War Two, ordinary citizens were encouraged to plant victory gardens, collect scrap metal and carpool to save fuel, always with the understanding that these measures would somehow contribute to victory. The propaganda of the time was heavy on the same ‘do your part’ messaging that we’ve seen during the COVID pandemic, giving meaning to people’s sacrifices by characterizing their efforts as a patriotic duty and a moral imperative — and by strongly implying that those who balked at those sacrifices were on the side of the bad guy. One of the most famous posters from the era shows a snappily-dressed man behind the wheel of a car, with a ghostly, familiar figure sporting a toothbrush mustache in the passenger seat.

‘When you ride ALONE,’ the poster warns, ‘you ride with Hitler!’

The moral and patriotic imperatives of our current moment are different. (A 2020 version of that same poster might read, ‘When you ride TOGETHER, you ride with Death!’) But they offer the same comforting assurance: that together, if we just try hard enough and follow the rules, we can beat this thing.

Therein lies the problem.

We cannot beat this thing.

The notion that we could literally stop the spread of COVID by locking down and vaccinating it out of existence was always a fantasy. As National Geographic recently noted, ‘only two diseases in recorded history that affect humans or other animals have ever been eradicated’. (Only one of these viruses, smallpox, was a danger to human beings; the other is a bovine disease.) Every other virus, from ebola to influenza to the bubonic plague, still exists among us; we’ve just learned to live with them, and to control them as best we can through inoculation, preventive measures, and treatment for those who get sick.

Until very recently, we lived with them relatively easily. Take the flu: every year, it ripples through the American population. And every year, people deal with it according to their own personal set of priorities and risk tolerances. Some are content to take their chances. Some get a flu shot to protect themselves or their loved ones. Some take additional precautions because they’re immunocompromised or otherwise at above-average risk. But every year, no matter what, tens of millions of Americans catch the flu. Some get very sick. Some die.

Yet we still don’t assign a moral element to the flu season — even though every person who dies from the flu caught it from somebody else. Nobody hisses through their teeth at the selfish irresponsibility of people who don’t upend their lives to avoid getting the flu; nobody tells you that you have an individual moral duty to stop the spread of endemic viruses, generally. Co-existing with other creatures is the price of admission for planet earth, and that includes the millions of microorganisms that have evolved over the course of millennia to survive by making us sick.

But COVID — and more specifically, the messaging around it from our authority figures — changed how we conceive of our relationship with viruses...

Still more.

 

 

Rep. Ronny Jackson Predicts Biden Won't Finish Term

At the New York Post, "Rep. Ronny Jackson, ex-White House doc, predicts Biden will be forced to resign":

Rep. Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician-turned-congressman, says he’s “terrified for our country” in the wake of President Joe Biden’s disastrous town hall this week — and that he doubts whether the commander in chief has the cognitive ability to make it through a full term.

“He’s completely LOST it!” Jackson (R-Tex.) tweeted Saturday, along with a video clip — recorded this week — in which Biden bizarrely answered a reporter’s question about defunding the police by claiming that Republicans accuse him of “sucking the blood out of kids.”

“Needs a cognitive exam NOW!” Jackson posted...

More. 

I Can't Leave My Spouse — I'll Lose My Healthcare

It's Jessa Crispin, at the Guardian U.K., "Like millions of Americans, I can never leave my spouse. I’ll lose my healthcare":

It was around the second dose of fentanyl going into my IV bag that I stopped trying to control how much all of this was going to cost. I had been arguing with every decision the caregivers at the emergency room were making – “Is this Cat scan actually necessary or is there another diagnostic tool?” “Is there a cheaper version of this drug you’re giving me?” – and reminding them repeatedly that I was uninsured, but either the opioids in my bloodstream, or the exhaustion of trying to rest in a room next to a woman who, given the sounds she was making, was clearly transforming into a werewolf, forced me to surrender.

I walked out of there four years ago alive, yes. And, as the doctors and nurses kept reminding me, if I had waited another 48 hours to discover I didn’t actually have the magical ability to self-diagnose and self-treat serious problems with Google and herbs, I might have gone septic. But all said and done, I was also walking home to a $12,000 bill, which was approximately half of my annual income as a single woman.

It took me several years of hardship, contributions from my friends and the assistance of the hospital’s charity program to pay off the $12,000.

Then, last month, it started again. I was at home. I turned my head a little, the whole world started sliding away from me, and I crashed to the floor. I tried to crawl back into bed, insisting, “It’ll pass, it’ll pass.” My husband, on the other hand, was raised in a country with compulsory public health coverage, so his first instinct upon something weird happening isn’t to lie down for 48 hours and see if it goes away. He immediately started plotting the route to a hospital on his phone.

I was back, but this time I was married. The whole hospital visit cost us $30, including the prescription. Everything was covered by his insurance. That’s when I realized I can never divorce my husband.

The first emergency room visit might have been an anomaly – a freak health problem that the nurse explained as “sometimes these things happen”. The intense vertigo was the result of the deterioration of the condition of my ears. It has been a problem since childhood, one left in “let’s wait and see what happens” condition until a weird virus last year – yes, I was the big idiot who caught a debilitating non-coronavirus virus during a coronavirus pandemic – forced me to a doctor, who discovered significant hearing loss and structural damage that will require lifelong treatment and intervention.

As a freelance writer who has tried and failed for years now to get a real job with real benefits, the costs of the surgeries and hearing aids and other treatments the doctor sketched out as part of my future would be suffocating. But almost all of it is covered by my husband’s insurance, making my health and ability to access healthcare dependent on his presence in my life.

While I convalesced from the virus last year, I watched the discussion about health insurance take over the Democratic primary debates. I had little hope that the bright, sparkly Medicare for All plan championed by candidates like Bernie Sanders would be made reality. But still I despaired of the excuses other candidates made for why they did not support guaranteed coverage for all. It angered me to see Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and the eventual winner, Joe Biden, defend their plans to largely maintain the status quo – a system in which employment and marriage determine access to healthcare – as though they were protecting our “freedom” to “choose” coverage that was right for us.

The coercions built into American social welfare programs limit freedom, not preserve it. People who are not financially independent are forced to maintain ties with family members who might be abusive or violent unless they want to relinquish their housing, healthcare or other forms of support. And as outlined by Melinda Cooper’s Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, the dismantling of protections like food and financial aid in the 80s and 90s had the express purpose of increasing familial obligations in the name of “duty” and “responsibility”. Single parents seeking public support for their children’s well-being now had to first seek assistance through their partners, no matter how fraught or harmful those relationships might be. While politicians spoke of “strengthening families” and repairing the social fabric, one of the consequences of these policy changes was to limit the ability for people to make the basic decisions required to live the lives of their choosing, unless they had the money that in this country is our substitute for freedom...

Still more.

 

U.S. Life Expectancy Declines

The decline is a direct function of the coronavirus pandemic. 

This is both interesting and sad.

At NYT, "U.S. Life Expectancy Plunged in 2020, Especially for Black and Hispanic Americans."

More here, "How the White Working Class Is Being Destroyed."

Joe Biden's Small Town Hall (VIDEO)

Following-up from yesterday, "Stumbling, Bumbling Joe Biden 'Town Hall' on CNN."

It's Laura Ingraham, at Fox News:

Stumbling, Bumbling Joe Biden 'Town Hall' on CNN

The small studio auditorium was less than have full. 

Lots of folks were hammering the president last night, but S.E. Cupp pushed back with some considerably compassionate comments: 

“Whether or not we should be in a position where you are why can’t the experts say we know that this virus is in fact it’s going to be or excuse we know why all the drugs approved or not temporarily but permanently approved, that’s underway too” —Joe Bidenpic.twitter.com/ebkp9TJaZT

— Alana Mastrangelo (@ARmastrangelo) July 22, 2021

Speaking from experience: Don’t shame or question someone’s mental health struggles.

Not JUST because you don’t know what they’re going through; not JUST because many others may be going through similar things and need to see supportive responses; but bc it’s needlessly cruel.

— S.E. Cupp (@secupp) July 22, 2021

Two Dead After 32-Year-Old Man Stabs Mother and Her Brother During Live Zoom Session With Four Others Watching (VIDEO)

Honestly, if it wasn't for my wife, who uses some news app on her phone, which bombards her all the time with stories (and me, as I had to finally download that sucker, as my wife constantly forward articles to me), I doubt I would've caught it.

The New York Times reported on the story last week, with a lot of details there, "Woman Is Fatally Stabbed by Her Son During Video Call, Authorities Say: At least four people were on a work video call when Carol Brown and her brother were stabbed in an Altadena, Calif., residence on Monday."

Also at KABC Eyewitness News 7 Los Angeles, "2 fatally stabbed at Altadena home in incident partially witnessed on Zoom, officials say: Part of the incident was witnessed on a Zoom call, officials say."

Apparently, Ms. Brown worked as "a coordinator of Pasadena City College's Black STEM Program," according to London's Daily Mail, and her son, Robert, is black.

So, there's not much point in belaboring the argument, but as Altadena is in Los Angeles County, which foolishly elected the radical, Soros-backed District Attorney George Gascón last year, it's hard to see how justice will be forthcoming for Ms. Brown and her brother.

And while it's likely that her son had mental issues, and as I don't see anything about the motive for the killings, one can bet that that ghoul Gascón will find some way, perhaps justified, but likely not so much, to let this man, Robert, get away with murder.

And I'm already grieving for the four witnesses, because no matter how much psychotherapy they're offered or go through, they'll never get those heinous images out of their minds. 

The 'Primal Scream' of Working Moms Trying to Handle At-Home Teaching Amid the Pandemic

 At NYT (with the usual disclaimers), "“I wish I had the energy to scream. All my energy just goes into getting through every day, until I can go to sleep. I have three kids, all in virtual schools since March, and work full time. And it just feels like failing, every day, at everything I do. And I just want to change, want to be by myself for one minute. I don’t know how to keep doing this. But there isn’t really another option”:

“I cannot remember the last time I did not worry, I did not spend my day worrying about so much stuff. Every day is something different. I just want to wake up and go through my day and not worry, and not wonder, and not know what the future holds. Because this right here sucks. And I’m sick of it. I’m so sick of this.”

“There is just so much talking. Talking all the time. All day long. Words. Words. Words. So much talking. I just, I need no more talking. No more words. I need no more. No more. So much talking. I just need silence. Please. Silence.”

“I love my kids. I love my family. But we are together all of the time. Like, I never appreciated teachers and school as much as I did now. I don’t want to be my child’s teacher. I am not doing good with this. But, all things considered, things are cool. Somebody else rear my children, please. I miss going out. I miss being drunk. I miss dancing.”

'Coronasomnia'

I've had this. 

I still have it, lol.

At ABC News 7 Los Angeles:

'And it's just sometimes an excruciatingly heightened awareness of being, loving being alive..."

Caitlin Flanagan wrote "I Thought Stage IV Cancer Was Bad Enough" at the Atlantic in June. Not many people, myself included, know her story. It's riveting. 

Well, she did a podcast with Sully, and this short segment is so existential. She's such a graceful woman. It's really inspiring:

Johann Hari, Lost Connections

Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope. 

If You're Tired of Quarantine...

 ... Maybe head out to the (Chinese?) market and do some shopping? With luck you'll bump carts (or private parts?) with an absolutely amazing woman like this, dang! (Via Funky Links.)

"'Oh My Heavens' This is Joe Biden's Thanksgiving Day message. He has no idea what the Psalms are. He calls them the 'Palmists' and then looks confused..."

"Oh God" is right. 

Cringeworthy. 

At Althouse, "The LORD is my Teleprompter and my shield; my heart trusts in Him, and He helps me... except when He doesn't help me... and I'm sure He has His reasons...."

The Elites Plan to Use the Pandemic to Finally Inflict Authoritarian Tyranny on Us

At AoSHQ, "Hard to disagree."

Hundreds of New York City's Bodies Still Stored in Pandemic Freezer in Brooklyn

This is just gross. 

Horrific too. But just gross, disrespectful to the dead and their families, and a damning indictment of New York's "award-winning" leadership in this catastrophe. 

At WSJ, "NYC Dead Stay in Freezer Trucks Set Up During Spring Covid-19 Surge":

The bodies of hundreds of people who died in New York City during the Covid-19 surge in the spring are still in storage in freezer trucks on the Brooklyn waterfront. 

Many of the bodies are of people whose families can’t be located or can’t afford a proper burial, according to the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner. About 650 bodies are being stored in the trucks at a disaster morgue that was set up in April on the 39th Street Pier in Sunset Park. 

Before the pandemic, most if not all of the deceased would have been buried within a few weeks in a gravesite for the indigent on Hart Island, which is located in the Long Island Sound near the Bronx. 

But Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged in April that mass burials wouldn’t take place following reports that New York City was considering the use of temporary graves on Hart Island. 

Officials at the chief medical examiner’s office said they are having trouble tracking down relatives of about 230 deceased people. In cases like these, a spokeswoman said, it isn’t uncommon for the deceased to have been estranged from families and for next-of-kin details to be dated or incorrect. When next of kin have been contacted, officials said most bodies haven’t been collected because of financial reasons 

New York City increased its burial assistance to $1,700 from $900 in May. That is still short of the average $9,000 cost of a traditional service with burial in New York, according to the New York State Funeral Directors Association. A typical cremation with service costs about $6,500, according to the group. 

Every family has a right to request a free burial on Hart Island. Some families are confused about what to do, according to Dina Maniotis, the chief medical examiner’s office’s executive deputy commissioner, who oversaw the unit’s pandemic response. 

“This has been traumatic,” Ms. Maniotis said. ”We are working with them as gently as we can and coaxing them along to make their plans. Many of them will decide they want to go to Hart Island, which is fine.” 

The chief medical examiner’s office wasn’t built to deal with a global pandemic that killed tens of thousands of New Yorkers in a matter of months. Its forensic-investigations department has 15 staff members tasked with identification of bodies. A further seven people are responsible for contacting next of kin. 

The unit is set up to handle about 20 deaths a day, said Aden Naka, the office’s deputy director of forensic investigations. During the peak of the pandemic it was inundated with as many as 200 new cases daily. Scientists from the laboratories of the chief medical examiner’s office were drafted to reinforce the investigations team and speed up the identification process, Ms. Naka said. 

Family members deluged the office with calls seeking information about relatives who might have died as well as advice on requesting a death certificate, viewing a loved one’s body and making funeral arrangements. Officials of the chief medical examiner’s office said the city’s health department redirected more than 100 staff from other fields to manage the volume of calls, which soared to 1,000 a day from the usual 30 or 40. 

Ms. Naka said many of the callers were struggling with problems of their own. Some were recovering from the virus themselves or had lost their jobs because of the pandemic. Others were dealing with the second or third family member to die of Covid-19...

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Blue Exodus: California Is a Failed State

It's Jon "Ex-Jon" Gabriel, at the Arizona Republic, "California is a failed state. How do we know? They're moving to Arizona in droves":

Driving across Arizona, it’s hard not to notice a surge in California license plates. The reason for this is becoming more apparent every day. California is a failed state.

After nearly a decade of one-party rule, the once-Golden State is tarnished, possibly beyond repair. Listing all the problems facing our neighbors across the Colorado River would require several books, so I’ll only highlight a few.

The fifth-largest economy in the world and home to many of the greatest technology companies on Earth can’t keep the lights on. The state’s three largest utilities turned off power to more than 410,000 homes and businesses on Friday, Aug. 21, then again to half as many Saturday, Aug. 22.

Gov. Gavin Newsom sprung to action on Monday by announcing more blackouts. "We failed to predict and plan these shortages,” the governor said. “And that's simply unacceptable."

But accept it he did, noting that the state’s near-religious promotion of solar and wind power left a gap in the reliability of its power grid. You don’t say.

Wildly unpredictable events, like August being hot, never occurred to Newsom last October when he signed six more bills to kill off his state’s fossil fuel industry. Shutting down one of California’s two nuclear plants certainly didn’t help. Perhaps their plan to close the second one in 2024 will have different results.

So have those to stop homelessness

Documentary filmmaker Christopher Rufo’s latest work reveals the tragic failure of the city’s homeless policies. In “Chaos by the Bay,” he shows the results of well-meaning progressive efforts, from decriminalizing homelessness to plying addicts with free drug paraphernalia, alcohol and cannabis. For the most part, rampant mental illness has been left untreated...

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