Another Month Gone - July 02021
Jul. 28th, 2021 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet's begin with the ways that the government of India is trying very hard to ensure that only approved history can be written, if any history is allowed at all, through the manner in which their National Archives are unorganized, unindexed, and otherwise bureaucratically entangled in red tape such that researchers may never actually get the primary sources they are looking for.
Next, If at any point in 2021 you drew unemployment benefits in the United States, you can use the health insurance exchanges to get good coverage for exceptionally good rates. But you'll have only until the end of July to make the changes, and you have to go through the entire application process to tick the correct box that gets you the good rate.
Starting training young for gymnastic athletes might mean getting them to the top of their peak on time, but it also mean setting them up for an entire lifetime of worry about whether their best days are behind them. The story here is for a rhythmic gymnast, who peaked at 9 years of age and was done by 12. In an environment of sport that provides both punishing feats of athleticism and the requirement that someone look delicate and beautiful while doing so. And while you can applaud Oksana Chusovitina competing in a record 8th Olympic Games in artistic gymnastics at 46 years of age, it's very clearly the case that nobody expected her to be a medal contender. Which is not to say she isn't good, because she still qualified for the Olympic games, but I doubt anyone was thinking of her as anything but the novelty of the gymnast still competing after 40. I have to wonder how many of the disciplines on the Olympic program are the kind of thing that someone can compete well into their middle ages and still be a medal threat. (Not to mention the question of how many items on the Olympic program are the kinds of things where you can make a career out of training to be an Olympian and competing with others.)
Elsewhere, P!nk offered to pay the fine assessed to the Norwegian Beach Handball team for choosing to wear shorts rather than more revealing bottoms. The governing body assessed the fine because the shorts are not part of the regulation uniform, and because the governing body chose to table the discussion until the first available meeting or the newly elected body. Which is both how rules get weaponized against women and how entities with structural power refuse to take responsibility for the harms they are causing by pointing at "the rules" and saying that changes have to be done by policy. Fine. But the governing body presumably has discretion about assessing that penalty, especially if the change doesn't produce any sort of competitive advantage. Since the fine was assessed, the body assessing it has been rightly mocked for requiring the women to play 'in their panties' in the words of one of the fined players.
Several Westminster parliamentary systems use their normalization of masculinity and masculine behavior to harass the women MPs, with techniques that should sound very familiar to people who are in places that claim to be neutral and that privilege the way that men behave around each other. Which results in situations where telling the truth about a Prime Minister's lies gets the truth-teller ejected because it was against the rules of decorum. Which should also sound familiar to people who work in places where being nice is enforced by unofficial policy and prized over more important things, like getting people who are abusers and liars out of the organization. Or to people who are constantly confronted with the made up and ableist image of a survivor of trauma and abuse who has been able to put it behind them, a distant memory, all fixed now, since most of us here in reality end up seeing and reliving and having to navigate a system that carries many of the same systemic biases as the world outside.
Dudes who have the protector fantasy involving guns and armed intruders and hero scenarios are, realistically, deluding themselves. The actual work of keeping people safe involves a lot less visible heroics and a lot more of following hygienic practices and picking up and getting good at domestic skills. Sorry, dudes. (Also, sorry brain that really wants to achieve semi-immortality through heroism. You're probably going to be more famous for scamming people about copper.)
Julian Assange's Ecuadorian citizenship has been annulled, clearing one more hurdle toward his extradition for trial in the United States. Not that Assange was a particularly good houseguest when he was in the embassy, either.
The Cleveland Major League baseball team will change their name to the Cleveland Guardians starting with the 2022 MLB season, naming themselves after the art deco statues in the city that are iconic and easily recognizable by any of the residents. This is a long-overdue move, and we are glad to see that we will be able to usher in a new era of the AL Central not having any racist team names. The NL East could do some good if one of their teams also changed its name.
Some people believe books are only for personal enlightenment, and should only be approached with the most scholarly of mindsets. Those who know better will say, in one form or another, reading is reading, regardless of form or how seriously you take the ideas within.
the heat particularly devastating to marine life in the Pacific Northwest. And the continued focus on individual charity and action is still, apparently, an effective smokescreen against getting the people who do the most at one blow to change, or at least have to pay out the nose for their ways. Because while yes, there's individual things everyone can do, there are cowards and chuckleheads in government at all levels that could look the oncoming years square in the eye and do everything they can to avert disaster and that choose not to do anything at all, because their consciences and their duties have been captured by the pomise of lucre. Or because they're not willing to stop being "nice" and "polite" when their opposition has decided that no rules apply to them and all tactics are acceptable to get what they want.
Cockatoos have learned from each other how to open trash bins and then take what they want from them, taking to task an article that suggested cockatoos in Europe had to have come from Australia, when it's much more likely they would have come from the spice islands that were already known to traders and merchants, photographs of lightning rainbows, and Wally the Walrus enjoying the pontoon, after one was made for him and some up close and personal encounters.
Humboldt neighborhood murals and Eliot neighborhood murals,
Despite everything that we've been told, there's still a pandemic on for everyone. Most data suggests that while you can get infected with SARS-CoV-2 even after vaccination, the vaccine will make it significantly less likely that you will have serious complications from it. Assuming that you don't have underlying complications or other reasons why vaccination might not have fully taken with you. Even so, vaccines might blunt the effectiveness of spreading variations like delta, but they won't stop it, so there's still precautions worth taking to reduce transmission, even if you're vaccinated. Especially if you have children, who still do not have an approved vaccine and may be expected to be in proximity to each other. And Delta is definitely not a variant you want to let get out and continue perfecting its craft, so public health measures should essentially be "get vaxxed if you can so you don't have you or your friends getting dead or chronically ill, and everybody needs to continue not doing things that contribute to potential super-spreader events." We need to do what it takes to get all the eligible vaccinated, which means...
Willingness to take vaccine, or to do any other public health measure, seems to be more strongly correlated to whether someone or something is trustworthy, rather than whether something is correct, and while science can give us facts and figures, people are much more likely to be persuaded by someone they trust telling them what to do. Which tracks, basically, with how things are going in trying to get the more reluctant pockets of the population to get vaccinated. Chains of trust are needed, and that makes things much harder when people trust grifters, hucksters, and people who don't actually believe what they're saying, but are saying the things people want to hear.
Unsurprisingly, persons who decide to be dicks about quarantine and infection control measures can expect to be deported from the place they had been granted a temporary entry to. Especially when they brag about doing it.
In technology, Malaysian authorities crushed $1.25 million USD worth of purpose-built bitcoin mining rigs that were feeding off of the power grid without paying for the electricity. The rigs had stolen more than $2 million USD worth of electricity while they were operating. Unfortunately, we can expect to start seeing more operations developing in the United States, where the massive amounts of electricity needed to power the rigs will be available and inexpensive, assuming that it's paid for here.
Last for tonight, when talking about things you want an ADHD person to do, articulate the real reason, instead of the one that judges the ADHDer for being themselves. They're already used to being judged for personal failures, and it's no fun. Take one of my neighbors, who has regularly gone straight to the negative about "pride in home ownership" and possibly calling down the city on me about dandelions growing in the front yard (which turned into an unexpected $600 expense when the city said the pile of material in a driveway needed to be cleared out or face a fine), which does nothing but increase shame and start destructive spirals about what other things might be brought to bear to try and force me into taking on his attitude about what is important. My other neighbor, however, offered to use the edger that he has on my lawn as well as his own, so that it produces crisp lines. What that did, however, was give me motivation to keep the grass mowed and the dandelions cut down so that the effort my neighbor was putting in as a favor to me wasn't going to waste. I end up doing what the other neighbor wants, as well, but he's not the reason I'm doing it. (Also, thing to know: you can be the kindest person every other time we interact, but if you gave me grave insult once, I'm always going to treat you with suspicion because you already showed me that you aren't trustworthy. I may or may not ever tell you that you've insulted me, though, because there's very little good that comes of that.)
And how examining historical polyamory or polyamorish kinds of relationships can provide useful information about how those kinds of relationships work for people of our era attempting to do the same. Like the suggestion that polycules forming might have long periods of conflict as they work out their explicit norms for what will eventually be the relationship in question.
Next, If at any point in 2021 you drew unemployment benefits in the United States, you can use the health insurance exchanges to get good coverage for exceptionally good rates. But you'll have only until the end of July to make the changes, and you have to go through the entire application process to tick the correct box that gets you the good rate.
Starting training young for gymnastic athletes might mean getting them to the top of their peak on time, but it also mean setting them up for an entire lifetime of worry about whether their best days are behind them. The story here is for a rhythmic gymnast, who peaked at 9 years of age and was done by 12. In an environment of sport that provides both punishing feats of athleticism and the requirement that someone look delicate and beautiful while doing so. And while you can applaud Oksana Chusovitina competing in a record 8th Olympic Games in artistic gymnastics at 46 years of age, it's very clearly the case that nobody expected her to be a medal contender. Which is not to say she isn't good, because she still qualified for the Olympic games, but I doubt anyone was thinking of her as anything but the novelty of the gymnast still competing after 40. I have to wonder how many of the disciplines on the Olympic program are the kind of thing that someone can compete well into their middle ages and still be a medal threat. (Not to mention the question of how many items on the Olympic program are the kinds of things where you can make a career out of training to be an Olympian and competing with others.)
Elsewhere, P!nk offered to pay the fine assessed to the Norwegian Beach Handball team for choosing to wear shorts rather than more revealing bottoms. The governing body assessed the fine because the shorts are not part of the regulation uniform, and because the governing body chose to table the discussion until the first available meeting or the newly elected body. Which is both how rules get weaponized against women and how entities with structural power refuse to take responsibility for the harms they are causing by pointing at "the rules" and saying that changes have to be done by policy. Fine. But the governing body presumably has discretion about assessing that penalty, especially if the change doesn't produce any sort of competitive advantage. Since the fine was assessed, the body assessing it has been rightly mocked for requiring the women to play 'in their panties' in the words of one of the fined players.
Several Westminster parliamentary systems use their normalization of masculinity and masculine behavior to harass the women MPs, with techniques that should sound very familiar to people who are in places that claim to be neutral and that privilege the way that men behave around each other. Which results in situations where telling the truth about a Prime Minister's lies gets the truth-teller ejected because it was against the rules of decorum. Which should also sound familiar to people who work in places where being nice is enforced by unofficial policy and prized over more important things, like getting people who are abusers and liars out of the organization. Or to people who are constantly confronted with the made up and ableist image of a survivor of trauma and abuse who has been able to put it behind them, a distant memory, all fixed now, since most of us here in reality end up seeing and reliving and having to navigate a system that carries many of the same systemic biases as the world outside.
Dudes who have the protector fantasy involving guns and armed intruders and hero scenarios are, realistically, deluding themselves. The actual work of keeping people safe involves a lot less visible heroics and a lot more of following hygienic practices and picking up and getting good at domestic skills. Sorry, dudes. (Also, sorry brain that really wants to achieve semi-immortality through heroism. You're probably going to be more famous for scamming people about copper.)
Julian Assange's Ecuadorian citizenship has been annulled, clearing one more hurdle toward his extradition for trial in the United States. Not that Assange was a particularly good houseguest when he was in the embassy, either.
The Cleveland Major League baseball team will change their name to the Cleveland Guardians starting with the 2022 MLB season, naming themselves after the art deco statues in the city that are iconic and easily recognizable by any of the residents. This is a long-overdue move, and we are glad to see that we will be able to usher in a new era of the AL Central not having any racist team names. The NL East could do some good if one of their teams also changed its name.
Some people believe books are only for personal enlightenment, and should only be approached with the most scholarly of mindsets. Those who know better will say, in one form or another, reading is reading, regardless of form or how seriously you take the ideas within.
the heat particularly devastating to marine life in the Pacific Northwest. And the continued focus on individual charity and action is still, apparently, an effective smokescreen against getting the people who do the most at one blow to change, or at least have to pay out the nose for their ways. Because while yes, there's individual things everyone can do, there are cowards and chuckleheads in government at all levels that could look the oncoming years square in the eye and do everything they can to avert disaster and that choose not to do anything at all, because their consciences and their duties have been captured by the pomise of lucre. Or because they're not willing to stop being "nice" and "polite" when their opposition has decided that no rules apply to them and all tactics are acceptable to get what they want.
Cockatoos have learned from each other how to open trash bins and then take what they want from them, taking to task an article that suggested cockatoos in Europe had to have come from Australia, when it's much more likely they would have come from the spice islands that were already known to traders and merchants, photographs of lightning rainbows, and Wally the Walrus enjoying the pontoon, after one was made for him and some up close and personal encounters.
Humboldt neighborhood murals and Eliot neighborhood murals,
Despite everything that we've been told, there's still a pandemic on for everyone. Most data suggests that while you can get infected with SARS-CoV-2 even after vaccination, the vaccine will make it significantly less likely that you will have serious complications from it. Assuming that you don't have underlying complications or other reasons why vaccination might not have fully taken with you. Even so, vaccines might blunt the effectiveness of spreading variations like delta, but they won't stop it, so there's still precautions worth taking to reduce transmission, even if you're vaccinated. Especially if you have children, who still do not have an approved vaccine and may be expected to be in proximity to each other. And Delta is definitely not a variant you want to let get out and continue perfecting its craft, so public health measures should essentially be "get vaxxed if you can so you don't have you or your friends getting dead or chronically ill, and everybody needs to continue not doing things that contribute to potential super-spreader events." We need to do what it takes to get all the eligible vaccinated, which means...
Willingness to take vaccine, or to do any other public health measure, seems to be more strongly correlated to whether someone or something is trustworthy, rather than whether something is correct, and while science can give us facts and figures, people are much more likely to be persuaded by someone they trust telling them what to do. Which tracks, basically, with how things are going in trying to get the more reluctant pockets of the population to get vaccinated. Chains of trust are needed, and that makes things much harder when people trust grifters, hucksters, and people who don't actually believe what they're saying, but are saying the things people want to hear.
Unsurprisingly, persons who decide to be dicks about quarantine and infection control measures can expect to be deported from the place they had been granted a temporary entry to. Especially when they brag about doing it.
In technology, Malaysian authorities crushed $1.25 million USD worth of purpose-built bitcoin mining rigs that were feeding off of the power grid without paying for the electricity. The rigs had stolen more than $2 million USD worth of electricity while they were operating. Unfortunately, we can expect to start seeing more operations developing in the United States, where the massive amounts of electricity needed to power the rigs will be available and inexpensive, assuming that it's paid for here.
Last for tonight, when talking about things you want an ADHD person to do, articulate the real reason, instead of the one that judges the ADHDer for being themselves. They're already used to being judged for personal failures, and it's no fun. Take one of my neighbors, who has regularly gone straight to the negative about "pride in home ownership" and possibly calling down the city on me about dandelions growing in the front yard (which turned into an unexpected $600 expense when the city said the pile of material in a driveway needed to be cleared out or face a fine), which does nothing but increase shame and start destructive spirals about what other things might be brought to bear to try and force me into taking on his attitude about what is important. My other neighbor, however, offered to use the edger that he has on my lawn as well as his own, so that it produces crisp lines. What that did, however, was give me motivation to keep the grass mowed and the dandelions cut down so that the effort my neighbor was putting in as a favor to me wasn't going to waste. I end up doing what the other neighbor wants, as well, but he's not the reason I'm doing it. (Also, thing to know: you can be the kindest person every other time we interact, but if you gave me grave insult once, I'm always going to treat you with suspicion because you already showed me that you aren't trustworthy. I may or may not ever tell you that you've insulted me, though, because there's very little good that comes of that.)
And how examining historical polyamory or polyamorish kinds of relationships can provide useful information about how those kinds of relationships work for people of our era attempting to do the same. Like the suggestion that polycules forming might have long periods of conflict as they work out their explicit norms for what will eventually be the relationship in question.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-29 06:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-29 06:59 am (UTC)Or possibly come back after a case of the twisties or the yips.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-29 12:22 pm (UTC)(The horses have a narrower age band: they have to be 9 to compete, and usually compete into their mid-late teens.)
Horseback riding is also one of the few sports where there's no gender division in competition.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-29 02:15 pm (UTC)