At Amazon, Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid.
Wednesday, February 16, 2022
'Sunday Night Football' Sideline Reporter Michele Tafoya Reflects on Her Career (VIDEO
Michele Tafoya is retiring from sidelines reporting. Sunday's Super Bowl was her last night with NBC, and it was emotional.
Here she is discussing all the overwhelming feelings in those final moments.
Also, what's up next for Ms. Tafoya.
Three San Francisco School Board Members Recalled (VIDEO)
This is very big news. It's every time now: Every time there's an election this year, Democrats will get fucking shellacked.
And the three members recalled last night weren't "liberals." They're radicals, way outside of the mainstream. While overall turnout was low at 25 percent, the percentage of Chinese-Americans voting was near 80 percent. That never happens. San Francisco's Chinese community is very hands-off toward politics, but not this time. When you fuck with the schools you're fucking with a bloc of voters who aren't going to take any shit.
S.F.'s District Attorney, Chesa Boudin --- who was raised by Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn --- will be up for recall in June. No doubt this race will be fought ferociously, and it may be tight, but once this dude gets the boot local districts throughout the entire country will be given notice: We will take you out.
At the Los Angeles Times, "From liberal San Francisco, school board recall is a three-alarm warning for Democrats":
San Francisco is quite familiar with earthquakes, and what happened Tuesday — the ouster of three extreme lefties from the Board of Education — was not one of those. Earthquakes are sudden and unexpected. The result of Tuesday’s recall was neither. The removal of board members Gabriela López, Faauuga Moliga and Alison Collins was destined the moment the city’s liberal establishment, led by Mayor London Breed, joined the effort along with several discontented millionaires, who threw in loads of cash. What happened Tuesday was more a foreshock, a warning — as if Democrats needed any more of those — that November’s midterm elections could be very bad indeed, as parents unsettled by two years of pandemic-related upheaval vent their frustrations at the polls. The circumstances of the recall were both unique and broadly reflective. In a place that prides itself on social justice and forward thinking, members of the school board outdid themselves by moving to strip the names of, among others, Presidents Washington and, Lincoln and Sen. Dianne Feinstein from 44 public schools. The intent was to remediate the country’s history of injustices: George Washington owned slaves, Abraham Lincoln oversaw the slaughter of Native Americans, and Feinstein, as mayor in 1984, replaced a Confederate flag that had been vandalized at City Hall with a new one. The result was outrage. In another instance of misplaced priorities, board members spent hours debating whether a father who was white and gay brought sufficient diversity to a parental advisory committee. His appointment was ultimately nixed, but there was no recovering the time that was wasted. Perhaps most antagonizing, the board moved to end merit-based admissions to Lowell High School, one of the city’s most sacred institutions, where Asian American students are the majority. (The move catalyzed the city’s Asian American community, long an important force in San Francisco politics.) Old comments surfaced from Collins, in which she stated Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward Black students. She apologized, then sued the school district and five fellow board members, seeking $87 million in damages, for removing her title as vice president. A judge summarily rejected the case. All of which was too much for this famously tolerant city, as students struggled with distance learning and public schools remained closed even as others in neighboring communities reopened. Inclusion, sensitivity and righting history’s wrongs are all well and good. But there was a strong sense that “we are not getting the basics right,” as Siva Raj, a father of two who helped launch the recall effort, put it. He and others would have removed all seven members of the board, but only the three who were targeted were eligible for recall. It is foolish — and one of the bad habits of political prognosticators — to overinterpret the results of any one election. To be clear, San Francisco hasn’t changed. A city that gave Joe Biden 85% support won’t be voting Republican in the lifetime of any adult within sight of Coit Tower. But the results are noteworthy precisely because the recall took place in liberal San Francisco...
San Francisco is not "liberal." It's a communist enclave, Moscow by the Bay, and the voters have had enough with this takeover by critical theory.
Leftists around the country (and Canada, in the worst way) are not learning the lessons of the 2021 elections. Democrats will pay for their snobbery and elitism. These are wealthy champagne socialists who wouldn't deign to rub shoulders with the poor and working class proletarians delivering their goods from Amazon Prime and their Door Dash dinners. Workers, truck drivers, literally front-line health care professionals, kept this country functioning through the damned pandemic/lockdown. Enough is enough.
No, not only do these clowns know "what's best" for everybody else, they don't have to live with the horrific consequences of their experiments in creating the communist utopia.
I'd like to say "take them out" in a more literal sense, but mostly I mean take them out at the ballot box.
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men
At Amazon, Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.
Sarah Palin's Libel Claim Against the New York Times Rejected by Jury (VIDEO)
I haven't really followed this. Mostly, I'm interested because Ms. Palin's been out of the spotlight for a while.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Jury Rejects Sarah Palin’s Defamation Claims Against the New York Times":
A federal jury concluded the New York Times didn’t defame Sarah Palin in a 2017 editorial, a verdict that follows a judge’s surprise announcement that he planned to rule against the former Republican vice-presidential candidate after jurors finished their work. The verdict, delivered on Tuesday by jurors in Manhattan, is the latest chapter in a closely watched libel trial that probed the inner workings of a national news outlet and tested the scope of legal protections for the media. Jurors reached their judgment after a weeklong trial in which Ms. Palin and leading figures from the Times testified. Ms. Palin filed her lawsuit in 2017 shortly after the Times published an editorial about gun violence and political rhetoric. The editorial referenced a 2011 shooting that killed six people and wounded then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat. It incorrectly suggested that an ad circulated by Ms. Palin’s political-action committee inspired the Arizona spree.... [U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff], a veteran jurist with a strong independent streak, concluded that Ms. Palin hadn’t presented sufficient evidence to prove the Times had acted with “actual malice,” meaning the outlet either knowingly published a false statement or showed a reckless disregard for the truth. “This is an example of very unfortunate editorializing on the part of the Times,” he said, but added that the law sets a very high standard that Ms. Palin didn’t meet...
More Than 100 Million Watched Super Bowl LVI
I'm not surprised.
It's the entertainment event of the year, blowing out all the competition, time and again.
Well, whoa doggie! Hold your horses!
Actually, according to the Athletic, "Super Bowl LVI watched by 112.3 million viewers, up 14% from last year."
Damn!
Cincinnati, Detroit and Pittsburgh (!) lead the local market ratings (average viewers) for #SBLVI:
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) February 15, 2022
1️⃣ Cincinnati — 46.1
2️⃣ Detroit — 45.9
3️⃣ Pittsburgh — 45.6
4️⃣ Columbus — 45.4
5️⃣ Kansas City — 44.6
H/T @Bill_Shea19
More: https://t.co/tjhpPaV3ln
Your Valentine's Day Special
I hope you got out there to buy your sweetie chocolate and flowers.
We need more old-style romanticism in this country. Cucks suck. Show 'em how it's done before pounding 'em into the pavement.
On Twitter.
The World's Proletarian Working-Class Has Awoken! (And Progressive-Socialist Elites Won't Stand For It.)
Following up, "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Invokes Canada's 'Emergencies Act' to Shut Down Truckers' Protest (VIDEO)."
The radical left in power is crushing dissent? Burying the working-class, the alleged dialectical-historic force now driving the world's workers toward the proletarian utopia?
You don't say?
Here's Batya:
The workers of the world are literally uniting. And yet these truckers have not been embraced by the left. Instead they have been tagged as fascists and racists by progressive pundits, activists, and politicians—those who tweeted “Stay Home! Slow the Spread!” while truckers delivered their Amazon Prime packages.This spectacle—of workers fulfilling Marx’s fantasy, only to be smeared by the very people who claim to prioritize the working class—captures in stark relief the split emerging between the working class and the left that used to represent them...
Well, everything's upside down, so what the fuck? The populist-nationalists are gaining the upper hand, and idiot left-progressives are basically propelling the "far right" that they so much hate straight into power.
Idiots. Bloody idiots, the lot of them.
Monday, February 14, 2022
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Invokes Canada's 'Emergencies Act' to Shut Down Truckers' Protest (VIDEO)
This is tantamount to declaring martial law, over peaceful truckers protesting pandemic tyranny. Seriously.
And Canada's supposed to be the West's model democracy, a nirvana of progressive tolerance and a social safety-net paradise.
Well, no. It's a dystopian nightmare with a disgusting black-face hypocrite tin-pot leader bringing back communist repression in real time.
The New York Times nails it here, "Trudeau Declares Rare Public Emergency to Quell Protests":
The invocation of the Emergencies Act confers enormous, if temporary, power on the federal government. It allows the authorities to move aggressively to restore public order, including banning public assembly and restricting travel to and from specific areas. But Mr. Trudeau and members of his cabinet offered repeated assurance that the act would not be used to suspend “fundamental rights.” It has been half a century since emergency powers were last invoked in Canada. Mr. Trudeau’s father, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, imposed them during a terrorism crisis in Quebec. Monday was the first time that the 1988 Emergencies Act has been used. The response by the police and all levels of government to the crisis, which included an almost weeklong blockade of an economically critical border crossing with the United States, has been widely criticized as inadequate. Mr. Trudeau, some critics contend, should have intervened earlier and perhaps even deployed troops to break up the protest. On Monday, Mr. Trudeau said he would not use his authority under the declaration, which will last for 30 days, to bring in the military, reiterating his previous position against intervention by the armed forces...Thirty days? Pfft.
No one believes that. This is a state crackdown on popular dissent. The truckers' right to protest is substantiated by the majority in public opinion, though other surveys cast light on a different majority of Canadians, some hateful fire-breathing fascists looking to crush the truck convoy by military force. Trudeau claims he won't bring out the military, but who needs that when you've got your own gestapo arresting people in their own homes for not wearing a mask.More, updates at the Ottawa Citizen, "Truck convoy: Trudeau invokes Emergencies Act; Judge approves city's injunction; 'Several' trucks moved off residential streets."
And at the Wall Street Journal, "Canada’s Trudeau Invokes Emergency Powers to Address Trucker Protests":
OTTAWA—In a highly unusual move, the Canadian government on Monday invoked a series of emergency powers that include limits on public gatherings in a bid to end disruptive demonstrations in the capital city and along the Canada-U.S. border. The measures, announced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, represent one of the most striking responses by a Western government against protests by those opposing Covid-19 vaccine mandates and social restrictions in response to the pandemic, and immediately drew fire from some Canadian leaders and civil-liberties groups. The government also said Monday the country was extending laws targeting money laundering to capture transactions, including cryptocurrencies, on crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe. “It is now clear that there are serious challenges to law-enforcement’s ability to effectively enforce the law,” Mr. Trudeau said at a news conference. “We cannot and will not allow illegal and dangerous activities to continue.” Mr. Trudeau’s move to invoke emergency powers comes after police on Sunday reopened access to the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit with the city of Windsor, Ontario. Up until late Sunday night, demonstrators had blocked incoming U.S. vehicles from entering Canada for roughly a week. Officials said these extraordinary measures were necessary because of the damage done to the economy with the blocking of U.S.-Canada trade. Further, “we’ve seen intimidation, harassment and expressions of hate,” said Canada’s Public Safety Minister, Marco Mendicino, adding scenes in Ottawa have at times represented lawlessness. “That is one of the reasons why we’ve had to take [this] very careful and deliberate step.” The prime minister’s decision to invoke the special powers faced sharp criticism Monday from both rights groups and some provincial leaders. Quebec Premier François Legault said he can understand the sentiment that “enough is enough” in Ottawa but believes the planned measures aren’t needed in his province and could be damaging. “We really need not to put oil on the fire,” Mr. Legault said. An earlier and much more restrictive version of the legislation, called the War Measures Act, was invoked three times in Canadian history. Its most controversial use was in 1970, when Mr. Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, used the act when he was prime minister to squelch a militant separatist group in Quebec, known as the FLQ. The government said its invocation of the act doesn’t undermine Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which came into force in 1982 and protects rights considered essential to preserving a free and democratic society. However, there is a debate about whether the government is overstepping in applying the act to those participating in protests and blockades. Leah West, a national-security expert at Carleton University in Ottawa, said it is unclear that the current protests—in the capital, Ottawa, and at two border crossings in western Canada—meet the legal threshold of a national emergency. Invoking the Emergencies Act if that threshold isn’t met, she said, “sets a precedent that unpopular dissent against the government is enough for the government to take these extraordinary powers into its own hands.” Prof. West said Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects civil liberties, but protection isn’t absolute. She said that means rights can be limited and still comply with the Charter. The measures come into effect immediately but Mr. Trudeau must present his reasoning for using the act to parliament and hold a vote within seven days. The leader of the New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh, said he would support the move, thereby giving the incumbent Liberals enough votes to ensure passage. Mr. Trudeau said the military wasn’t being deployed against the protesters, and the government wasn’t suspending rights guaranteed under the country’s constitution. He added the measures, which local police forces would enforce, are meant to target specific regions in the country where protests are judged to pose a threat. Mr. Trudeau described the demonstration in Ottawa, now in its 18th day, as “an illegal occupation.” City of Ottawa officials say the local police force doesn’t have the necessary resources to quell the demonstration, and have asked the federal government for an additional 1,800 officers. Despite the government’s hard line, protesters believe their message is resonating. “Any government that’s ever taken freedoms away from people never gives them back,” said Tyler Chiliak, a farmer from western Canada who has been in Ottawa since the Covid-19 protests began. When he isn’t out commiserating with fellow protesters, he is keeping warm inside his cargo trailer, where he cooks food, keeps bottled water and sleeps. “It may take a while before we accomplish our goals so to speak. But whether they like it or not things are happening because we are here,” Mr. Chiliak said. Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland also said the country was extending laws targeting money laundering. All crowdfunding platforms and the payment-service provider they use must register with Canada’s financial-intelligence agency, and report what they deem as large, suspicious donations. The recent protests had success in raising money on GoFundMe...
At the video up top, check out this masked Canadian Karen, at 1:57 minutes, who's ashamed of the truckers' exercise of freedom and natural rights: "I just feel I'm living in another country, like I'm in the states ...," one of the most embarrassing things she's ever seen.
She's embarrassed. At her fellow countrymen. For standing up against the despotism of the Canadian state.
Oh this world. I can't...
Thomas Chatterton Williams, Batya Ungar-Sargon Discussing Whoopi Goldberg on Briahna Joy Gray's (VIDEO)
Batya is a really fun lady to watch. I've never seen someone push a thesis (found in her book, Bad Faith) so consistently fierce.
She's great. Just fabulous.
SBLVI Most Valuable Player Aaron Donald
This is to take nothing --- absolutely nothing! --- off Cooper Kupp. Damn though, I'm not alone when I say this man was the MVP of the night, of the Rams franchise all year, and the entire NFL 2021-2022 season.
Have you ever seen a grown man cry, like this?!! Pure heart.
My goodness I was right there with him feelin' it. God bless that man. All he said all season long is we have to win the Super Bowl, and he worked harder than anyone else to get there.
Volume on people!
WE DID THIS, @AARONDONALD97!!
— Los Angeles Rams (@RamsNFL) February 14, 2022
📺: #SBLVI on NBC pic.twitter.com/wEtNE5R7DU
GIVE AARON DONALD HIS RING. #SBLVI #RAMSHOUSE pic.twitter.com/pCBiKkq1L7
— NFL (@NFL) February 14, 2022
"Aaron Donald's gonna make a play."
— NFL (@NFL) February 14, 2022
Sean McVay knew this was 99's moment. Epic. (via @NFLFilms, @insidetheNFL) pic.twitter.com/a0E6vSpsFH
Los Angeles Rams Win Super Bowl LVI
What a moment. I'll have more, but for me, 2021-22 was the best football season ever.
At the Los Angeles Times, "Rams come up big when it counts, come back to beat Bengals in Super Bowl LVI."
Sunday, February 13, 2022
Paige Spirinac: Bengals or Rams?
She's an openly enthusiastic Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Her dad played football with the University of Pittsburgh's Panther football program, winning a national championship in 1976. But she's not a Californian --- grew up in Colorado, in fact, and lives in Arizona.
So who knows? Maybe later today we'll see her announcing her loyalties, but not yet, not yet.
What's Really at Stake in America's History Wars?
In January, McMinn County, Tenn., made international news for perhaps the first time in its history when the school board voted to remove “Maus,” the acclaimed graphic novel about the Holocaust, from the 8th-grade curriculum. The board stated that it made the change on account of the book’s “use of profanity and nudity,” asking school administrators to “find other works that accomplish the same educational goals in a more age-appropriate fashion.” This curricular change, affecting a few hundred of the approximately 5,500 K-12 students in McMinn’s public schools, was quickly amplified on social media into a case of book banning with shades of Holocaust denial. The author of “Maus,” Art Spiegelman, said that the decision had “a breath of autocracy and fascism.” “There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days,” tweeted the popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, earning more than 170,000 likes. The controversy sent the book to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. This outrage of the week will soon give way to another, but the war over history—how to remember it, represent it and teach it—is only getting fiercer. America’s political and cultural divisions increasingly take the form of arguments not about the future—what kind of country we want to be and what policies will get us there—but about events that are sometimes centuries in the past. The Holocaust, the Civil War, the Founding, the slave trade, the discovery of America—these subjects are constantly being litigated on social media and cable TV, in school boards and state legislatures. None of those venues is well equipped to clarify what actually happened in the past, but then, the facts of history seldom enter into the war over history. Indeed, surveys regularly show how little Americans actually know about it. A 2019 poll of 41,000 people by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found that in 49 states, a majority couldn't earn a passing score on the U.S. citizenship test, which asks basic questions about history and government. (The honorable exception was Vermont, where 53% passed.) Ironically, the year after the survey, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation announced that it would drop the historical reference in its own name, citing the 28th president’s “racist legacy.” It was part of a growing trend. Woodrow Wilson’s name was also dropped from Princeton University’s school of international affairs. Yale University renamed a residential college named for John C. Calhoun, the antebellum Southern politician who was an ardent defender of slavery. The San Francisco school board briefly floated a plan to drop the names of numerous historical figures from public schools for various reasons, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because they were slaveholders. It makes sense that educational institutions are leading the wave of renaming, because it is above all a teaching tool, one suited to the short attention span of today’s public debates. Actual historical understanding requires a much greater investment of effort and imagination than giving a thumbs up or down to this or that name. Often even a Wikipedia search seems to be too much to ask. One of the names that the San Francisco school board proposed to get rid of was Paul Revere’s, on the grounds that he was a leader of the Penobscot Expedition of 1779, which a board member believed was a campaign to conquer territory from the Penobscot Indians. In fact, it was a (failed) attempt to evict British naval forces from Penobscot Bay in Maine. Clearly, the war over history has as much to do with the present as the past. To some extent, that’s true of every attempt to tell the story of the past, even the most professional and objective. In the 19th century, the German historian Leopold von Ranke saw it as his task to determine “how things really were,” but if that could be done, it wouldn’t be necessary for each generation of historians to write new books about the same subjects. We keep retelling the story of the Civil War or World War II not primarily because new evidence is discovered, but because the way we understand the evidence changes as the world changes. That’s why so many of America’s historical battles have to do with race, slavery and colonialism—because no aspect of American society has changed more dramatically over time. It has never been a secret, for instance, that George Washington was a slaveholder. When he died in 1799, there were 317 enslaved people living at Mount Vernon. But when Parson Weems wrote the first bestselling biography of Washington in 1800, he barely referred to the first president’s slaveholding, except for noting that in his will he provided for freeing his slaves, “like a pure republican.” When Weems does inveigh against “slavery” in the book, he is referring to British rule in America. For instance, he writes that the tax on tea, which led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, was meant to “insult and enslave” the colonies. Today it’s impossible to ignore this glaring contradiction. Weems didn’t notice it and clearly didn’t expect his readers to, either. Another explanation for this blind spot can be found in the book’s full title: “The Life of George Washington: With curious anecdotes, equally honorable to himself and exemplary to his young countrymen.” Weems was a minister, and his goal was moral uplift. That’s why he avoided writing about Washington’s treatment of his slaves but included the dubious story about young George confessing to chopping down the cherry tree. The point was to show Washington in a light that would make readers want to be better themselves. Today’s war over history involves the same didactic impulses. Fights over the past aren’t concerned with what happened so much as what we should feel about it. Most people who argue about whether Columbus Day should become Indigenous Peoples’ Day, regardless of what side they’re on, have only a vague sense of what Columbus actually did. The real subject of debate is whether the European discovery of America and everything that flowed from it, including the founding of the U.S., should be celebrated or regretted. Our most charged historical debates boil down to the same terms Weems used: Is America “exemplary” and “honorable,” or the reverse? How we answer that question has important political ramifications, since the farther America is from the ideal, the more it presumably needs to change. But today’s history wars are increasingly detached from practical issues, operating purely in the realm of emotion and symbol. Take the “land acknowledgments” that many universities, arts institutions and local governments have begun to practice—the custom of stating the name of the Native American people that formerly occupied the local territory. For example, the Board of Supervisors of Pima County, Az., recently voted to begin its meetings with the statement, “We honor the tribal nations who have served as caretakers of this land from time immemorial and respectfully acknowledge the ancestral homelands of the Tohono O’odham Nation.” To their supporters, land acknowledgments are a way of rectifying Americans’ ignorance or indifference about the people who inhabited the country before European settlement. The use of words like “caretakers” and “time immemorial,” however, raises historical questions that the Pima Board of Supervisors is presumably unqualified to answer. People have been living in what is now Arizona for 12,000 years: Were the Tohono O’odham Nation really in their territory “from time immemorial,” or might they have displaced an earlier population? Of course, the Board has no intention of vacating Tucson and restoring the land to its former inhabitants, so the whole exercise can be seen as pointless. Still, by turning every public event into a memorial of dispossession, land acknowledgments have the effect of calling into question the legitimacy of the current inhabitants—that is, the people listening to the acknowledgment. The fear that the very idea of America is being repudiated has led Republican legislators in many states to introduce laws regulating the teaching of American history. These are often referred to as “anti-critical race theory” laws, but in this context the term is just a placeholder for a deeper anxiety. The controversial law passed in Texas last year, for instance, doesn’t prevent teachers from discussing racism. On the contrary, House Bill 3979 mandates the study of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. , as well as Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez. However, it does insist that students learn that “slavery and racism are…deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.” In other words, students should believe that the U.S. is “exemplary” and “honorable” in principle, if regrettably not in practice. In the U.S., the war over history usually has to do with curricula and monuments because those are some of the only things the government can directly control. Removing “Maus” from the 8th-grade reading list can be loosely referred to as a “ban” only because actual book bans don’t exist here, thanks to the First Amendment. But other countries that are less free also have their history wars, and in recent years governments and ideologues have become bolder about imposing an official line. In Russia last December, a court ordered the dissolution of Memorial, a highly respected nonprofit founded in 1989 to document the crimes of the Soviet era, after prosecutors charged that it “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state.” In 2018, Poland made it illegal to attribute blame for the Holocaust to the “Polish nation.” In India in 2014, Penguin India agreed to stop publishing a book about the history of Hinduism by the respected American scholar Wendy Doniger, after a nationalist leader sued on the grounds that it focused on “the negative aspects” of the subject. Such episodes are becoming more common with the rise of nationalist and populist movements around the world. When people invest their identity wholly in their nation, pointing out the evils in the nation’s past feels like a personal attack. Conversely, for people whose political beliefs hinge on distrusting nationalism, any refusal to focus on historic evils feels dangerous, like a tacit endorsement of them, as in the “Maus” episode. These extremes feed off one another, until we can only talk about the past in terms of praise or blame that would be too simple for understanding a single human being, much less a collection of millions over centuries. It’s surprising to realize how quickly the American consensus on history has unraveled under the pressure of polarization...
Overdose Deaths in the U.S. Are Rising at Troubling Rate
One can't possibly imagine the loss of a loved one to opioids, among other things.
I mean, the loss of a loved one is tragic in any case, but death from overdose doubly so, as it creates so many "what ifs." It's not like losing a parent in the twilight years of life, for as sad as that is, it's an inevitability. (And both my parents are gone, so I'm speaking from experience.) But if I lost either one of my sons right now, to overdose especially, I think I'd probably fade away. My psychology hasn't been so great this last two years. I've had a lot of anxiety (especially in March 2020 and the overnight shift to emergency remote online instruction) and bouts of depression. The last thing I need is death in the family.
In any case, God bless those facing this crisis. It's unbearable, and worse, it's not one on the top of the radar of public policy.
At the New York Times, "A Rising Death Toll":
Drug overdoses now kill more than 100,000 Americans a year — more than vehicle crash and gun deaths combined. Sean Blake was among those who died. He overdosed at age 27 in Vermont, from a mix of alcohol and fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. He had struggled to find effective treatment for his addiction and other potential mental health problems, repeatedly relapsing. “I do love being sober,” Blake wrote in 2014, three years before his death. “It’s life that gets in the way.” Blake’s struggles reflect the combination of problems that have allowed the overdose crisis to fester. First, the supply of opioids surged. Second, Americans have insufficient access to treatment and other programs that can ease the worst damage of drugs. Experts have a concise, if crude, way to summarize this: If it’s easier to get high than to get treatment, people who are addicted will get high. The U.S. has effectively made it easy to get high and hard to get help. No other advanced nation is dealing with a comparable drug crisis. And over the past two years, it has worsened: Annual overdose deaths spiked 50 percent as fentanyl spread in illegal markets, more people turned to drugs during the pandemic, and treatment facilities and other services shut down. The path to crisis In the 1990s, drug companies promoted opioid painkillers as a solution to a problem that remains today: a need for better pain treatment. Purdue Pharma led the charge with OxyContin, claiming it was more effective and less addictive than it was. Doctors bought into the hype, and they started to more loosely prescribe opioids. Some even operated “pill mills,” trading prescriptions for cash. A growing number of people started to misuse the drugs, crushing or dissolving the pills to inhale or inject them. Many shared, stole and sold opioids more widely. Policymakers and drug companies were slow to react. It wasn’t until 2010 that Purdue introduced a new formulation that made its pills harder to misuse. The C.D.C. didn’t publish guidelines calling for tighter prescribing practices until two decades after OxyContin hit the market. In the meantime, the crisis deepened: Opioid users moved on to more potent drugs, namely heroin. Some were seeking a stronger high, while others were cut off from painkillers and looking for a replacement. Traffickers met that demand by flooding the U.S. with heroin. Then, in the 2010s, they started to transition to fentanyl, mixing it into heroin and other drugs or selling it on its own. Drug cartels can more discreetly produce fentanyl in a lab than heroin derived from large, open poppy fields. Fentanyl is also more potent than heroin, so traffickers can smuggle less to sell the same high. Because of its potency, fentanyl is also more likely to cause an overdose. Since it began to proliferate in the U.S., yearly overdose deaths have more than doubled. No one has a good answer for how to halt the spread of fentanyl. Synthetic drugs in general remain a major, unsolved question not just in the current opioid epidemic but in dealing with future drug crises as well, Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University drug policy expert, told me. Other drug crises are looming. In recent years, cocaine and meth deaths have also increased. Humphreys said that historically, stimulant epidemics follow opioid crises. Neglecting solutions A robust treatment system could have mitigated the damage from increasing supplies of painkillers, heroin and fentanyl. But the U.S. has never had such a system. Treatment remains inaccessible for many...
Still more.
Saturday, February 12, 2022
College Students Forgot How to Talk to Each Other
The Democrat Party pandemic lockdown policies have set back, if not destroyed, a generation of young people, and not just school children.
I know this first hand from my oldest, 26, who moved to San Francisco to start at S.F. State in February 2020. He came back home after one semester in The City, depressed and disappointed at how isolated and inferior was his college experience compared his time at Santiago Canyon College in Orange Park Acres.
I also know this from teaching college students online for two years. I'm on my fifth semester in a transition to "remote emergency instruction" that was expected to brief and temporary. Even this semester, where my college has gone back to full in-person on-campus classes, more than 50 percent of those enrolled are taking their courses online. Indeed, the enrollment was so low in some of the campus-based classes that over two dozen were cancelled in my department alone.
You're not getting the full college experience --- and excellence in education --- with online classes. It's good for some very motivated students who thrive in the intense atmosphere of digital learning space, but in my experience, it's not for most. I'm expecting to hear soon about my class schedule for fall, where I've requested to teach all on campus. We'll see how that goes. It feels weird to even be possibly going back. I feel like I need to retrain myself, to get myself fit for teaching in person. Seriously. My lectures are quite stentorian, and I need to be in good cardio-vascular condition. I don't feel like that right now, as I haven't been physically training during the pandemic lockdown.
This summer I'll be changing my daily routine if all works out and I'm set to resume going to work everyday, like I used to for 20 years.
In any case, at the Wall Street Journal, "College Students Have to Learn How to Make Small Talk Again":
When students at San Jose State University returned to campus last fall after more than a year of remote learning, lecturer Damon Moon thought they would be chatty and excited to see one another. Instead, he noticed something concerning: They weren’t talking at all. Before class, students were looking at their phones or laptops. Even in the campus cafeteria, Mr. Moon saw that most students were eating alone, sandwich in one hand, phone in the other. “They lost the skill to have small talk,” said Mr. Moon, who teaches international business classes. To get a close-up look at this phenomenon, I spoke to Mr. Moon and his students at the university. “When I was in elementary school or middle school, if I wanted to talk to someone new, I would go up to them and try to strike up a conversation,” said Kian Kashefi, a 19-year-old business accounting major. Now, he said, “it feels weird to talk to anybody new without first connecting on social media.” In a prolonged pandemic that has shifted more interactions online, college students are finding it harder to strike up conversations and make friends. In the past, socializing wasn’t just a perk but also a big incentive for students choosing campus life. College instructors worry that if they don’t do something to facilitate conversation in class, their students will be unprepared to enter the workforce. To overcome screen-reinforced social awkwardness, some even lean on smartphones and web browsers to encourage students to interact. Researchers from three universities surveyed nearly 33,000 college students around the U.S. and found two-thirds were struggling with loneliness in the fall of 2020. More than a year later, many students, including those at San Jose State, had returned to remote instruction after winter break because of the Omicron Covid-19 surge. Joel Figueroa, a 20-year-old business major, said that since the pandemic began he has become more nervous about talking to people. “I was much more confident in my abilities before,” he said. While technology has enabled him to remain in touch with friends, it has undermined his in-person interactions, he said. “My connections with friends offline would definitely be deeper if we were not so attached to our devices,” he said. Even older students I talked to, who didn’t grow up with as much technology or spend formative years in a pandemic, are finding it hard to make connections. “I didn’t form relationships with any students when I went back to campus last fall,” said Megan Dela Rosa, a 43-year-old business major. “Everyone had their masks on and you didn’t know anyone’s comfort level.” She added, “I just went to class, got my work done and left.” Anna Touneh transferred to San Jose State from a community college last fall. Since school began this year online, the 32-year-old said talking to students has only become more awkward. In one class recently, small groups of students went to Zoom breakout rooms to work on an assignment. Ms. Touneh said in her group, no one had their cameras on and no one spoke. “It took me six minutes to say something,” she said. “I finally gathered the courage, but it was very meek. I said, ‘Hey, guys, so what are we supposed to be doing?’” Runhua Yang, a 43-year-old business major, said she’s normally extroverted but the pandemic has made it more difficult to express herself. Masks have made it harder for teachers to hear her, she said, causing her to speak up less often. “If a professor doesn’t encourage participation, I stay quiet,” she said. Parents and psychologists were already concerned that phone usage was negatively affecting social-skill development among young people, even before the pandemic, according to Danielle Ramo, chief clinical officer at BeMe Health, a mobile platform for teen mental health. In a previous job, she helped develop an app called Nod to help college students improve their social lives by challenging them to do things like smile at five new people or keep their dorm-room doors open in the evening...
Nina Jankowicz
This woman wrote a very compelling thread last night, here: "82 years ago this week, my grandfather, aged 10, was deported along with his family from present day Ukraine (then Poland) to a Soviet work camp ... In part because of his deportation, I’m sitting on Twitter tonight, writing about current Russian threats to the same land."
RTWT.
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