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a climate impact on mortality in southeastern USA

This YouTube video reveals a very interesting discovery about our population living near the southeastern (and northeastern) coastlines of the USA. In maps of the USA, the southeastern states almost always feature heavily in the least-well-off areas of the nation. There were (and still are) good reasons to blame their socioeconomic policies for that big discrepancy. Researchers, however, have found a climate connection that was on nobody's radar as a possibility.

These researchers from University of California, Berkeley, tried for 5 years to find a flaw in their research, because the results were so surprising. After each and every hurricane that reaches these areas, there is a persisting health deficit that lingers in the area, even amongst people who were not born at the time of the hurricane. This deficit persists years afterward, peaking about 6 years (68.6 months) after the initial landfall event. It is cumulative with additional hurricanes that may arrive later, so more hurricanes means even more excess total deaths later. These less-visible indirect deaths eventually affect 300X more people than the direct deaths caused by the hurricane itself. The reasons for these excess deaths? State and local governments have reduced capacities after each storm, individuals have less spare money after repurchasing and rebuilding after each storm, and stress is always bad for health, regardless of circumstance.

Watch on YouTube

It's a fascinating 14 minutes, if you can spare the time to watch the whole video. Here's the Nature article, if you prefer text and graphs.

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minneapolis

Minneapolis utility bill payments

Here's a quick Public Service Announcement for anyone who lives in the city of Minneapolis. Check online for your utility bill. Minneapolis changed their billing system, and old autopay settings are no longer functioning.

Apparently they've been emailing me to pay my bill recently, but those emails go to a Yahoo account. Yahoo changed their email interface a while back, and it's awful. I have a difficult time finding things that formerly were easy to find. Tonight, I got an automated phone call about paying my bills. Good thing. I checked online, and I discovered I needed to set it up all over again for autopay... and pay my accumulating bill.

So... go check your account.
https://ub.minneapolismn.gov/iwr/

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civil war,
moodday

(no subject)

True, it's not MoodyMonday, but it's in the same vein, and it's getting harder to compartmentalize the various atrocities on the news these days

Last week, Brian Kilmeade of Fox News recommended killing homeless people. Media likes quoting the phrase "involuntary lethal injection", but the true meaning was just a few words later when Kilmeade finished with, "just kill them".

This week, I don't think it's making national news, but Minneapolis had 2 more mass shootings. At 2 different homeless camps. I just watched this news channel's story about it. Not once did I notice anyone mention Kilmeade. According to the story, these shootings are clearly the fault of homeless people and their sympathizers. As far as I know, nobody knows the shooters' motivations, because we don't know who shot all of those people. Kilmeade, though, clearly moved that Overton window and shifted expectations. Stochastic terrorism is a term that I keep seeing reasons to mention.

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so much drama

There are far too many relevant topics for Moody Monday, and there is far too little time to actually delve into them.

Here's the abridged version of most of the important things in my brain during this past week.

Click here to read the 7 items...

Charlie Kirk's apparent political assassination:
A whole lot of people are putting words into other people's mouths. Here are the things that Charlie Kirk said (free archive copy), that political leaders said, and that actual progressive commentators said. In that last video, skip to the 12-minute mark to hear what I hope is wise advice for how to responsibly prepare your mind to watch violent war footage, if you choose to do so. I haven't watched the snuff video. I have enough exposure to violence where I'm at, thanks.
The USA President's health and ego:
So, Trump disappeared for a week, which is highly unusual, then returns with a droopy half-face (at least temporarily), looking exactly like he had some kind of stroke. Then during his speech against the "radical left", Trump publishes a video where his hands and fingers glitch visually. According to this review of it, that video was not AI generated, merely badly edited. Both the editing (at all) and the quality (poorly done) are bothersome concepts in this context. Separately, there's a detail that is nagging at my brain. According to this story, the accused killer was caught at 10pm Thursday night. But what was the very first mention to the public of this apprehension? I cannot find a solid answer. It seems (without solid proof) that news was deliberately withheld from the USA public until Trump could go on Fox News on Friday morning and claim he was told about it just "5 minutes before I walked in." Oh, pleasant coincidence? Only after his statement, from what I can find, did other press conferences happen that morning. I want to be wrong about this obscure detail of timing, because that level of national manipulation for Trump's personal benefit is just... unconscionable. Why was the USA kept ignorant overnight on what is obviously an issue of national importance... until Trump gets to play the role of important political strongman revealing such significant news in person to Fox & Friends? We got news about Luigi Mangione seemingly every hour for days. Please, prove me wrong on this issue.
The ongoing USA civil war:
I've mentioned stochastic terrorism on this blog several times in recent years. I think we will not properly address violence in the USA until we get a national legal definition of stochastic terrorism, so it can be objectively identified and punished in court. It will need to clarify what is not protected by the 1st Amendment. Likewise, I've said before that we need clarified what is not protected by the 2nd Amendment. Towards a solution for that problem, I think more states need state defense forces which cannot be controlled by the federal government. (Florida also started one recently.) Why? I think that federal law should require that all citizens be active members of those state forces, or members of federal military units, before they're allowed military weapons. Not everyone (and literally their children too) should have them. Make actual military units (which any citizen can potentially join) responsible for the use of their weapons. I think that culpability would put a quick end to idiots taking weapons whenever they want and firing them whenever they want. Possession of any military weapon without a military unit's explicit orders would be a punishable offense. That still leaves handguns (and 3D-printed ones) out there for potential misuse, but we have to start somewhere. It will require new constitutional amendments to make those changes. We should've started that process after Columbine. Until adoption of these (and other) new amendments, so-called blue states could financially starve and delay fascist government by pursuing economic secession.
Ukraine:
I agree with this vlogger who says that Russia is sending drones into NATO countries, not because Putin thinks NATO will react. Putin knows NATO will not react. Instead, Putin does it because triggering worries in those populations might convince them to hoard their defense supplies instead of sending them to Ukraine. That's actually a shrewd military plan. I hope the NATO countries don't succumb to it.
Climate change:
We're supposed to be in the midst of a La Niña year, but temperatures didn't really cool off globally. In addition, we're learning that very unusual breaks are happening in air and water and species migration patterns. We've got 1 more year expected of this La Niña, then 2027 (or late 2026) should shift back to El Niño, when things start heating up again. The last El Niño set some bad global records, but we'll start next time from another high point.
Privacy:
I've tried explaining before that the only privacy that matters is what happens inside your own brain. We keep getting better at decoding brainwaves. We need a guarantee of absolute, inviolable (under any imagined emergency circumstance) privacy within our own bodies, and it needs to be encoded directly into the national constitution as a new amendment. Urgently. I think maybe I'm prepared for technological telepathy, but I'm increasingly sure that the rest of humanity is not capable of resisting the allure of knowing what other people think... or enduring the consequence of actually knowing those thoughts.
UFOs:
I still feel a bit of embarrassment (I think it is) at my mention of supposedly-trustworthy news 2 years ago about an archaeological find in Peru, which turned out to be false. So I've been more guarded than usual on any UFO news. There was new testimony at the U.S. Congress last week. Apparently-reputable people testified where there are very real legal consequences, so I'm trusting one particular story as accurate first-person information. Like this video (MSN.com) of an Air Force veteran describing what sounds very much like stealth technology. A practical invisibility screen that can be turned on and off at will, not just difficult-to-radar surfaces. There's a longer video here (YouTube) of the Congressional testimony with even more footage of another flying craft. That UFO takes a missile hit, survives, appears to start tumbling, yet it and shrapnel pieces near it keep flying on the same trajectory, not falling down at all. That is not aerodynamic propulsion. That is something new. Given how easily our tools (including AI tools) can generate false text, images, speech, and video, it's important to stay skeptical, especially if somebody's selling something. I don't know what's going on, but I'm certain that my government is lying to the public and to Congress, which is supposed to have regulatory oversight of the military forces of the USA.

Strange times. So much distracting drama.

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music

theme song: Ballad of Paul and Sheila

It has been nearly a quarter-century since progressive U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash in northern Minnesota, but his influence still affects Minnesota politics today. I've even used his phrase "We all do better when we all do better" in conversation at work myself. Paul Wellstone originally used it in 1999 during a speech to the Sheet Metal Workers Union.

This song is very "situational" and not relevant for most situations, but it's a nice counterpoint to tomorrow's post for Moody Monday.

Watch on YouTube

The lyrics are simple and short, about that married couple's death. It begins with these words.

October morning, little plane on the forest floor,
Up on the TV between a rerun and another war.
Here in a hotel, trying to make some sense of this.
Two thousand miles from my family in Minneapolis.

Hey Senator, I wanna say,
All the things you fought for did not die here today.
Hey Senator, I'm gonna do
All the things I can to live my life more like you lived.

So... that's the theme song for today.

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animal

chicken eyes

I'm watching more YouTube (free) lately, because I cancelled subscriptions to all of my major online channels. I realized that I wasn't finding enjoyable things to watch perpetually on them, beyond whatever titles enticed me originally to subscribe. So Disney and HBO/Max were gone. For months, I had been unable to stream Viki from my phone to my television, and I just wasn't watching the many Boy Love dramas on the webpage as a workaround, so Viki was gone. Which left YouTube, where I still am not a paying subscriber... yet.

This 7-minute video is chock full of interesting details about chickens. Specifically, about chicken eyes. Chickens have tetrachromatic vision (including ultraviolet), double cone photoreceptors (sensitive to movement and polarization), double fovea (areas of high visual acuity, one for close-up and one for distant vision), 300-degree field of view, and independently controlled eyeballs. Their big downside? Terrible low-light vision due to fewer rods than humans.

Here's a 7-minute YouTube video from a homesteader (and self-described conservative), talking about the science of chicken eyes. Science and observation is a good thing to see and to encourage, so I was happy to add my view and my Like to a video on a channel I wouldn't normally watch.

Watch on YouTube

Chickens are much more interesting than I knew.