The Constitution is not a suicide pact. The MAGA-NO line is. You can help. Just do what they fear and hate most: Keep up the deepest, darkest conspiracy known to MAGA-Unkind—Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth, and vote in the majority. Meanwhile they are doing to themselves, everything that they rage about us doing to them. This has been going on for ages. Now there is vastly more of it, and yet more every day.
I have been telling pieces of this story ever since I learned about Dying of Whiteness, by Jonathan Metzl. Now we know much more. I am going to take an expansive view of the whole business here.
Murder
But not interracial marriage like his own, even though it stands on the exact same legal footing.
But...Reality doesn’t care what you have blind faith in.
WARNING
This is what they are encouraging.
Suicide
As I said before, the GOP is falling apart, we are slowly but surely whittling them down.
Gnusie Jessiestaff
As I said before, they are slowly but surely whittling themselves down.
Births
Despite right-wing panic about the plummeting birthrate, Republicans are lining up against Biden's pro-family 'human infrastructure' push
The Red states have the highest numbers of births in the country, but Whites have the lowest fertility rate, at 1.6, far below replacement. Fertility is significantly higher among Black (2.2) and Latina women (1.9).
Birth Rate by State 2022
Total fertility rate in the United States in 2019, by ethnicity of mother
(births per 1,000 women)
Deaths
Deaths are up among Whites from
- Drugs, including fentanyl, prescription opioids, methamphetamine, and others.
Drug Overdose Death Rate (per 100,000 population) by Race/Ethnicity Whites, 62,786, four times the rate for Blacks, whom they have been demonizing for ages. Florida and Ohio have the highest rates.
- Guns, especially in states with the most lax gun safety laws, and those neighboring such states where guns flow across state lines. See East Chicago IN and Chicago IL, for example. For a long time DK had a series of Gun Fail diaries detailing deaths and injuries from dropped weapons and guns accessed by children, and so on. Also our depressing strings of mass shootings with Suicide by Cop, and police murders.
Deaths Due to Firearms per 100,000 Population by Race/Ethnicity
Blacks have a death rate from guns several times higher than Whites, but the White rate is rising.
- Denying whole states Medicaid expansion. In Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland Jonathan Metzl detailed conversations with Whites in Red states who voted against it, even though they were sick themselves and would have benefited from it.
- Outright suicide. The highest suicide rate is among Native Americans, with Whites next. At the time of publication of Dying of Whiteness, in 2019, the White suicide rate began to fall, but it is still not down to its 2011 level.
Racial and Ethnic Disparities
Abortion
Blacks have higher abortion rates than Whites across the country. This can be attributed to failures in education, healthcare, social services, and attitudes to government in the states with the largest Black populations, especially in the South. IOW, Systemic Racism.
Also to White hypocrisy.
What the data says about abortion in the U.S.
Guttmacher recorded more than 1.5 million abortions in the U.S. in 1991, about two-thirds more than the 930,160 it reported for 2020.
There have been occasional breaks in this long-term pattern of decline – during the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, and then again in the late 2010s.[Under W and Trump. The rate went down under Clinton and Obama.] The CDC reported modest 1% and 2% increases in abortions in 2018 and 2019, respectively, while Guttmacher reported an 8% increase in abortions over the three-year period from 2017 to 2020.
In 2017, there were 1,587 facilities in the U.S. that provided abortions, according to Guttmacher. This included 808 clinics, 518 hospitals and 261 physicians’ offices.
In the District of Columbia and 47 states that reported data to the CDC in 2019, the majority of women who had abortions (57%) were in their 20s, while about three-in-ten (31%) were in their 30s. Teens ages 13 to 19 accounted for 9%of those who had abortions, while women in their 40s accounted for 4%.
Restrictive laws concerning abortion are widely blamed for increased maternal death rates.
Driving Out Their Children
Chasing Away Allies
All but the most conservative Latinxs and AAPIs.
Abbott wins the support of men 59 - 33 percent, while O'Rourke wins the support of women 52 - 38 percent. Abbott wins the support of white voters 63 - 30 percent, while O'Rourke wins the support of Black voters 73 - 11 percent and Hispanic voters 50 - 41 percent. O'Rourke leads among voters 18 - 34 years old (56 - 35 percent), while Abbott leads among voters 35 - 49 years old (50 - 38 percent) and voters 50 - 64 years old (57 - 37 percent). Among voters 65 years of age and over, Abbott receives 50 percent, while O'Rourke receives 45 percent.
Many years of getting Latinxs to apply for citizenship and register to vote are paying off. Our efforts were aided back in 2016 when it was reported that many of them went through all of that just because they wanted to vote against Trump. It wasn’t enough then, but it could well be now.
Relative to the last presidential election, in 2016, the total number of ballots cast by AAPI voters increased by over 47%. For context, the total turnout for all other voters increased by only 12%.”
Moreover, these voters made a big difference in key states such as Georgia, Arizona and Nevada: “AAPI turnout in Georgia increased by almost 62,000 votes over 2016. Considering that the Biden-Harris ticket carried the state by fewer than 12,000 votes, the AAPI surge was clearly decisive." Arizona and Nevada also enjoyed a surge in AAPI voting. “Across all of the presidential battleground states, AAPI turnout increased by 357,969 votes, a breathtaking 48% increase in turnout,” TargetSmart reported.
Overreach
On everything they fear and hate, thus activating our dragon ladies.
Abortions and gun safety, plus all of their bogus immoral panics on everything else they don’t want to hear about.
Grokking Trumpists: White Fragility
- The 1619 Project
- CRT
- LGBTQ rights
- Reparations
- Fascism
- Tens of thousands of lies from their Fearful Leader
- Endless grifting and other criminality, including sex crimes
- Insurrection
Further Notes
For example:
Tuesday 1/6 Committee Hearing
Oh, Lordy!
It’s raining subpoenas.
Rachel Maddow
As the assistant to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson was there, just down the hall from the Oval Office, before, during, and after 1/6.
Ouch. Even Fox's talking knuckleheads looked stunned by Cassidy Hutchinson's Jan. 6 testimony
See also Jack Ohman’s cartoon below, in Funny or Cry.
In Other News
Ukraine update: Turkey relents, Finland and Sweden to join NATO
Yup. Diplomacy prevails. They mostly had to agree to round up and extradite Kurdish terrorists from among the refugees they have welcomed. Their courts will get to decide who is who, in accordance with current international treaties.
BTW, the most popular language being learned on Duolingo in Sweden is Swedish, mostly by refugees. Have I mentioned that I am halfway through the Duolingo Ukrainian course? Слава Україні!
Science! Animals! Weirdness!
Webb’s NIRISS Ready to See Cosmos in Over 2,000 Infrared Colors
One of the James Webb Space Telescope’s four primary scientific instruments, known as the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph instrument (NIRISS), has concluded its postlaunch preparations and is now ready for science.
This mode will be specifically used to probe the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets, i.e., planets that happen to eclipse their star periodically, momentarily dimming the star’s brightness for a period of time. By comparing the spectra collected during and before or after a transit event with great precision, one can determine not only whether or not the exoplanet has an atmosphere, but also what atoms and molecules are in it.
Astronomers will also get pure spectra from the star when the planet goes behind it.
With NIRISS postlaunch commissioning activities concluded, the Webb team will continue to focus on checking off the remaining five modes on its other instruments.
First Light images will be released, one an hour, starting on July 12. I will be here on the 14th to tell you about the first batches in glorious variety, along with the first data extractions. Or maybe we can have a live blog on the 12th.
Hungry sea otter eats prickly sea urchin
I won’t put the video here, just that link..
New Sri Lankan law bans drunk driving while riding elephants
No more seeing pink elephants for Sri Lanka’s mahouts.
Actually, contrary to Pink Elephants on Parade in the Dumbo movie, you don’t get delirium tremens/the DTs when you’’re drunk. You get them when you’re drying out after a long time being soused.
In colorful avian world, hummingbirds rule
There are nearly 10,000 bird species across the globe. The 184 species of hummingbird have more colors than all the rest put together.
Yale ornithologist Richard Prum has spent years studying the molecules and nanostructures that give many bird species their rich colorful plumage, but nothing prepared him for what he found in hummingbirds.
The range of colors in the plumage of hummingbirds exceeds the color diversity of all other bird species in total, Prum and a team of researchers report June 23 in the journal Communications Biology.
Birds have four types of color cones that are sensitive to red, green, blue, and ultraviolet/violet colors. So birds can see all the colors visible to humans. But they can also see a host of other colors that humans cannot see, including ultraviolet, and mixtures of ultraviolet with other hues, like ultraviolet-yellow and ultraviolet-green. These colors are as different from yellow or green as purple is from blue or red. One of the ways that hummingbirds add to avian color diversity is by producing more of these combination colors than other birds.
Meet the 'zombie star' that survived a supernova blast
This star is helping scientists better understand what are called "type Iax" supernovae. In these, a white dwarf experiences runaway nuclear fusion of carbon and oxygen after gaining matter relatively quickly, as this one did by stealing from its companion. But the explosion does not destroy the white dwarf, leaving behind an "undead" remnant.
Scientists to date have detected about 50 of this type of supernova but until now were unable to pinpoint the surviving "zombie star" white dwarf.
Type Ia supernova
It has been proposed that a group of sub-luminous supernovae that occur when helium accretes onto a white dwarf should be classified as Type Iax.[35][36] This type of supernova may not always completely destroy the white dwarf progenitor, but instead leave behind a zombie star.[37]
Segue
Aw, I was hoping for him riding a full-size bicycle on a seriously weird pizza.
Anybody remember this?
- the poiuyt
- the blivet
- the Foithboinder bracket
- the Devil's tuning fork
See also the similarly constructed Shepard Elephant in Mind Sights: Original Visual Illusions, Ambiguities, and Other Anomalies, With a Commentary on the Play of Mind in Perception and Art Paperback – August 1, 1990
Funny or Cry
“Innocent” characters are a regular feature in Kelly.
“Kelly” is drawn by Ward Sutton.
I don’t know either. An image search only gives hits on Twitter.