Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, January 10, 2023: National Bittersweet Chocolate Day. If you live near an Aldi’s, and like very dark chocolate (85% and up), the Moser Roth brand sold there is very good and relatively cheap.
It’s also National Oysters Rockefeller Day, Save the Eagles Day, Houseplant Appreciation Day, and, in the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher Day.
They love her there, as she was PM when the UK won its mini-war against Argentina. Here’s a photo I took in Port Stanley (Falklands) of a bust of Thatcher on Thatcher Drive:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 10 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*A special grand jury in Georgia, charged with investigating Trump and his cronies for legal violations connected with attempts to overturn the election, has completed its work. It doesn’t have the power to indict anyone, but its work could lead to that.
“Given the special purpose grand jury’s delivery of its final report, the undersigned’s recommendation, and the Superior Court bench’s vote, it is the ORDER of this court that the special purpose grand jury now stands DISSOLVED,” Judge Robert McBurney, who has been overseeing the Fulton County special grand jury investigation, wrote in Monday’s short court order.
Special grand juries in Georgia are not authorized to issue indictments. But the panel will issue a final report that serves as a mechanism for the special grand jury to recommend whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should pursue indictments in her election interference investigation. Willis can then go to a regularly empaneled grand jury to seek indictments.
Willis has already spent more than a year digging into Trump and his associates, kicking off her investigation in early 2021, soon after a January call became public in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary for Trump to win the Peach State in the presidential election.
Over time, her investigation has expanded beyond that call to include false claims of election fraud to state lawmakers, the fake elector scheme, efforts by unauthorized individuals to access voting machines in one Georgia county and threats and harassment against election workers.
McBurney has scheduled a hearing on January 24 for the Fulton County District Attorney’s office and others to argue whether the special grand jury’s report should be made public. McBurney said that the special purpose grand jury recommended that it’s final report be published.
*Meanwhile in Brazil, the supporters of ex-President Bolsonaro, who tried to take over government buildings in Brasilia, are being arrested left and right, and the wannabee January 6-style insurrection has failed. Here’s the elected President’s tweet, translated by Google as
I was just tonight at the Planalto Palace and at the STF. The coup plotters who promoted the destruction of public property in Brasilia are being identified and will be punished. Tomorrow we resume work at the Planalto Palace. Democracy always. Goodnight.
Estive agora à noite no Palácio do Planalto e no STF. Os golpistas que promoveram a destruição do patrimônio público em Brasília estão sendo identificados e serão punidos. Amanhã retomamos os trabalhos no Palácio do Planalto. Democracia sempre. Boa noite.
📸: @ricardostuckert pic.twitter.com/qkyVZHQQdz
— Lula (@LulaOficial) January 9, 2023
The Washington Post adds this:
. . . and this:
The political movement led by Bolsonaro will remain a significant force but the failed seizure of government buildings by right-wing rioters is a testament to the resilience of Brazil’s democracy and institutions, said Tom Shannon, a former U.S. ambassador to Brazil. “The Bolsonaro people had really studied January 6 and the conclusion that they came to was that Trump failed because he relied on a mob and that he had no institutional support,” Shannon said in an interview. “Because of this, the Bolsonaro people worked hard to try to build that institutional support, but they failed. Which says a lot about Brazilian democracy and Brazilian institutions in a very positive way.” The removal of rioters from the buildings was a humiliation for his supporters, Shannon said, but the former president’s allies in parliament remain active.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro has hied himself to Florida, where he’s reported to be hospitalized with stomach pain.
*The NYT has a 6½-minute video report called “We know the real cause of the crisis in our hospitals. It’s greed.” The crisis to which it refers is the shortage of nursing staff, not skyrocketing prices. But they’re both symptoms of greed, and in the video nurses note that “there’s not a shortage of nurses, just a shortage of nurses willing work work under those conditions.” “Those conditions” are abuse by nearly everyone, low pay, and, above all, understaffing and overwork. The video also notes the frightening statistic that if you’re in the hospital, your chances of dying go up by 7% for every additional patient your nurse must care for. And the stress of the job has resulted in 40% of nurses thinking of leaving the profession.
In the Opinion Video above, nurses set the record straight about the root cause of the nursing crisis: chronic understaffing by profit-driven hospitals that predates the pandemic. “I could no longer work in critical care under the conditions I was being forced to work under with poor staffing,” explains one nurse, “and that’s when I left.” They also tear down the common misconception that there’s a shortage of nurses. In fact, there are more qualified nurses today in America than ever before, but no positions for them.
To keep patients safe and protect our health care workers, lawmakers could regulate nurse-patient ratios, which California put in place in 2004, with positive results. Similar legislation was proposed and defeated in Massachusetts several years ago (with help from a $25 million “no” campaign funded by the hospital lobby), but it is currently on the table in Illinois and Pennsylvania. These laws could save patient lives and create a more just work environment for a vulnerable generation of nurses, the ones we pledged to honor and protect at the start of the pandemic.
Watch the video; it will make you angry at the greediness of hospitals, which, in the end, are profit-making companies.
*In related news, there’s a huge nurses’ strike in New York City—for the very reasons mentioned above. And this one is serious, as it involves over seven thousand nurses:
Thousands of nurses went on strike Monday at two of New York City’s major hospitals after contract negotiations stalled over staffing and salaries nearly three years into the coronavirus pandemic.
The privately owned, nonprofit hospitals were postponing nonemergency surgeries, diverting ambulances to other medical centers, pulling in temporary staffers, and assigning administrators with nursing backgrounds to work in wards in order to cope with the walkout.
As many as 3,500 nurses at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and about 3,600 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan were off the job. Talks were set to resume Monday afternoon at Montefiore, but there was no immediate word on when bargaining might resume at Mount Sinai.
Hundreds of nurses picketed, some singing the chorus from Twisted Sister’s 1984 hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” outside Mount Sinai. It was one of many New York hospitals deluged with COVID-19 patients as the virus made the city an epicenter of deaths in spring 2020.
“We were heroes only two years ago,” said Warren Urquhart, a nurse in transplant and oncology units. “We was on the front lines of the city when everything came to a stop. And now we need to come to a stop so they can understand how much we mean to this hospital and to the patients.”
Indeed they do. This is more or less a summary of what was in the NYT article:
The nurses union, the New York State Nurses Association, said members had to strike because chronic understaffing leaves them caring for too many patients.
Jed Basubas said he generally attends to eight to 10 patients at a time, twice the ideal number in the units where he works. Nurse practitioner Juliet Escalon said she sometimes skips bathroom breaks to attend to patients. So does Ashleigh Woodside, who said her 12-hour operating-room shifts often stretch to 14 hours because short staffing forces her and others to work overtime.
“We love our job. We want to take care of our patients. But we just want to d it safely and in a humane way, where we feel appreciated,” said Woodside, who has been a nurse for eight years.
*One of the most popular articles in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “When having it all means it’s all falling apart“, recounts tales of woe afflictind those who are well off—woes otherwise known as “First World Problems.” Problems like these:
Sometimes there is a fine line between having it all and it’s all falling apart. After a stretch when many of us labored to be Santa at home and year-end heroes at work, all while facing a tripledemic, we could stand to take a deep breath, shift our perspective and, when all else fails, laugh at the absurdity of it all.
“On your bad days, when nothing is going right, you go, ‘Oh, my God, I’m a horrible parent. I’m a horrible employee. I’m a horrible wife. I’m a horrible everything,’” says Lilian Tsi Stielstra, a mother of two grown children in Vancouver, Wash. The 58-year-old says she still remembers the morning years ago when she confidently marched into her office in her brand-new black power suit only to realize it was adorned with a blob of her one-year-old’s snot.
One lawyer and mother of four in Pennsylvania told me she’d once dropped her child off at soccer practice, then figured out, in the blur of juggling back-to-back calls, she’d dropped the wrong child. A nonprofit executive mistakenly threw the plastic bag containing his homemade lunch in the trash and commuted to the office cluelessly clutching a bag filled with cat poop. One tech leader recounted to me the time she received a text message while stationed in a glass conference room in her bustling office. It was her fiancé, breaking up with her.
Jebus. The cat poop thing is hilarious, but doesn’t the guy have a litter box? At any rate, the paper offers solutions to these life-destroying issues. One is to take a deep breath and prioritize. And here’s another:
See if you can find the silver linings in your busy, complicated days. For example, limited time can force us to be more focused and present, says Dr. Schonbrun, the author of a book about how working parents can manage feeling overwhelmed. Stepping away from work to see our kids or tend to another responsibility can breed bursts of creativity.
Self-help and cut-rate therapy—no wonder the article’s so popular. This is the kind of stuff you buy in an airport bookstore.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili strikes a pose:
A: My little cat, aren’t you possibly a narcissist?Hili: I? Not at all, I’m too beautiful for that.
Ja: Koteczko, czy ty aby nie jesteś narcyzą?Hili: Ja? Skąd, jestem na to zbyt piękna.
******************
From Facebook:
A tweet. It doesn’t end: my boss Dick Lewontin had these dreams in his eighties:
From Jesus of the Day:
From Masih; more protests against impending executions of protestors by Iran:
A huge crowd of Iranians outside Rajaie Shahr Prison protested the upcoming execution of #MohammadGhobadloo & #MohammadBroghani, chanting anti-regime slogans.
“Khamenei will get overthrown in this bloody year”#MahsaAmini
pic.twitter.com/lDl9EX4qJp— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 9, 2023
From Gregory, a tough Ukrainian cat (Matthew worries about its proximity to bombs):
Even Ukrainian cats🐱 are wearing bulletproof vests and fighting together with our army against Russia. But, Germany is still afraid to supply its Leopards🐆 and Fuchs🦊 for the fight. pic.twitter.com/ibmJ9bnQ0x
— Inna Sovsun (@InnaSovsun) January 5, 2023
From Barry, an unbelievable exchange:
I've said it before, and, due to the choices they make, I'll apparently keep saying it forever: creationists are just like people, but worse. pic.twitter.com/uT0IVzctc9
— Take That Darwin (@TakeThatDarwin) January 8, 2023
From Luana: This mirrors the rising anti-Semitism among blacks, which saddens me given the historical amity between the groups:
Stunning statistics about antisemitic attacks in NYC (2018-2022):
-Just 3% of antisemitic attackers since 2018 were white people
-A total of 2 perpetrators went to jail pic.twitter.com/aNRpHW2iDd
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 30, 2022
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a man who died the day after arrival:
10 January 1893 | French Jew Albert Feinstein was born in Jaffa (at the time Ottoman Empire). He was a dentist.
On 30 September 1942, he was deported to #Auschwitz from #Drancy and registered in the camp. He perished there on 1 November 1942. pic.twitter.com/tdDlSxRNwZ
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 10, 2023
Tweets from Dr. Cobb. This rescue of a duck stuck to ice is the Tweet of the Week:
The duck’s little legs flapping in the air, the fireman’s Magic Mike slide across the ice, the fella watching in his helmet… 10/10 for this TikTok, absolutely no notes pic.twitter.com/oXhDva5Atq
— Katie Lowe (@katielowewrites) January 8, 2023
Sound up, and no, we still don’t know why cat chatter (I call it “machine-gunning”) when they see potential prey. (“Typing” is also a good simile.)
Good morning from the tiny typewriter (this is his birdwatching noise) pic.twitter.com/FpNF80xD9r
— Katherine Ibbett eparpillee@mstdn.social (@eparpillee) January 8, 2023
Five out of five: a perfect score!
This guy is trying to round up five tiny kittens who were just abandoned 🙏 @dogrescueserbia pic.twitter.com/fiFSbTUIw3
— The Dodo (@dodo) January 8, 2023
On this day:
49 BC – Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, signalling the start of civil war.
1776 – American Revolution: Thomas Paine publishes his pamphlet Common Sense.
1863 – The Metropolitan Railway, the world’s oldest underground railway, opens between Paddington and Farringdon, marking the beginning of the London Underground.
1901 – The first great Texas oil gusher is discovered at Spindletop in Beaumont, Texas.
1920 – The Treaty of Versailles takes effect, officially ending World War I for all combatant nations except the United States.
1946 – The first General Assembly of the United Nations assembles in the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster. Fifty-one nations are represented.
1980 – The New England Journal of Medicine publishes the letter Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics, which is later misused to downplay the general risk of addiction to opioids.
Births:
1900 – Violette Cordery, English racing driver (d. 1983).
1903 – Barbara Hepworth, English sculptor (d. 1975).
1904 – Ray Bolger, American actor and dancer (d. 1987). [Altogether now: “If I only had a brain!”] .
1943 – Jim Croce, American singer-songwriter (d. 1973).
1945 – Rod Stewart, British singer-songwriter.
1949 – George Foreman, American boxer, actor, and businessman.
1953 – Pat Benatar, American singer-songwriter.
Off the twig:
1552 – Johann Cochlaeus, German humanist and controversialist (b. 1479).
1654 – Nicholas Culpeper, English botanist, physician, and astrologer (b. 1616).
1778 – Carl Linnaeus, Swedish botanist and physician (b. 1707).
1917 – Buffalo Bill, American soldier and hunter (b. 1846).
1951 – Sinclair Lewis, American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1885).
1971 – Coco Chanel, French fashion designer, founded Chanel (b. 1883). [Don’t mention the war…]
1976 – Howlin’ Wolf, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1910).
2016 – David Bowie, English singer-songwriter, producer, and actor (b. 1947) [It was the anniversary of his birth on Sunday.]
“Alea jacta est!”
… is how my electronic diary puts it too.
This made me interested in dice. If they were around 2,000 years ago, how long have they been around. Answer: oldest dice so far discovered are bone dice from Sara Brae, Scotland dated to 3,100-2,400 BCE. But they’ve discovered dice almost as old in Iran. So obviously humans invented them separately…cultural co-evolution? I wonder if they were invented for the same purpose though. 🤔
r|u
C-t
…. anyone, anyone?
Control-t to … anyone?… _transpose_ r and u, _transpose_
[ chalkboard sounds “ksh k-ksh kshhh” ]
… anyone? … anyone?..,
“…about to fail a class I forgot about”. I also sporadically have that nightmare …maybe once a year or 18 months or so. It is always in grad school environmrnt (I am now 74). I never knew it was a “thing” but am pleased to know that I share this quirk with Prof Lewontin. It would be interesting to have an informal poll here from others here who have shared this nightmare.
About the same frequency here, though it’s often about a final exam or assignment I’ve forgotten.
Mine is that I suddenly remember I have cats that I’ve forgotten to feed for days. I think it’s basically the same dream. I haven’t had any pets for 22 years.
Ooops.
[sound of plants being watered]
Count me as one who shares this nightmare.😱
“nightmare”
I accept them as _motivation_
… on waking I realize, I can _do_ something about it….
in a way that no “motivational” poster can _ever_ achieve.
Me, too, but more frequently I’m a teacher and can’t remember what class I’m supposed to teach, and usuall have the wrong notes. I also dream I can’t remember my locker combo (and I haven’t had a locker since 8th grade…)
I read somewhere that these dreams tend to happen when there’s some particular stress or concern preoccupying the dreamer during waking hours. They mean there’s something you’re worried about.
Sometimes I dream that I’m writing an essay exam — and I’m actually mentally writing that exam, with notes and paragraphs and words I’m trying to substitute for other words. The more detailed it gets, the more it starts to occur to me that maybe this is a dream and I don’t need a second reference. Waking up is a kind of victory. I don’t have to finish it..
Yeah, that sounds right. When I was in law school, during “reading week” before finals, I’d have the recurring dream that I was tending bar again, that I was working alone, that it was a huge rectangular bar with all the stools full and people waiting three deep behind them, and that everyone was ordering chi-chi blender drinks.
Then, after law school, when I was preparing for a trial, I’d have the recurring dream that it was the last semester of school, that I signed up for course, that I forgot about the course until the day before the final, that I needed the credits to graduate, and that I was running around trying to find the textbook or a fellow student’s notes or a study guide or a hornbook or anything I could use to cram enough somehow to pass the test. (I’d also occasionally still have the bartender dream, too.)
I once dreamt I was being shot at. I was lying on a sandy riverbank and rolled towards a nearby rock. In the real world, I rolled off the bed and hit the floor with a dull thud. I woke up right away 🙂
I have a similar recurring dream, where I am back at my old college working for some unspecified qualification. It is years since I have been in a lab, and I have forgotten how to design and perform an experiment. I have to hand in my thesis, but I have done no work and got no results.
Usually I wake up around then, but it sometimes takes me some little time to realise that it was all a dream.
Yes. The scary thing about it is that it is so realistic. The dream typically has an elaborate reconstruction of why this odd course was something so easily forgotten about, yet signed up for in the first place. Retired for 6 years, I still have it.
It’s way more common for me than the dream of going to work naked. Perhaps because the latter wouldn’t have bothered me nearly as much as failing to do any work for an academic course. We have standards, you know….
“We have standards you know”…funny! Thanks…jim
Mine was similar: I dreamt I was about to take a final exam but had not read any of the assigned books. As for black anti semitism, it has been a fact for decades, and inexplicable inasmuch as Jews were their strongest allies in the civil rights battles, and two young Jewish students (Goodman and Schwerner) literally gave their lives in the civil rights cause. My conjecture: blacks are trying to displace the holocaust with their own slavery history and resent the continued references to and remembrances of the holocaust. Just a theory.
I’ve had it too, even more frequently than the “I overslept and am late to work (while I’m on vacation)” dream…
I’m a welder and haven’t been to college in nearly twenty years.
Nurses here in the UK are also hugely underpaid by the non profit NHS. The problem is deeper. It seems to me that the two critical female majority professions—nursing and primary/secondary teaching—are not respected. Nothing new.
Time was, Republican presidents would sample John Winthrop, sampling the Sermon on the Mount, by proclaiming the USA to be a shining city on a hill for the rest of mankind. Now, the most recent one exports quasi-fascism.
I had been reading about the attempted coup in 1934, following the election of FDR. That one was even more scary in many respects. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/01/13/fdr-roosevelt-coup-business-plot/
Retracting one’s pledged troth by text is uncool.
I’m confident Miss Manners would agree.
I agree. The only POSSIBLE excuse is if this was literally the only way the recipient could usually be reached…which would make it particularly pertinent.
I was struggling to think why 10 January was Margaret Thatcher Day in the Falklands (it doesn’t coincide with her birth or death and the Falklands War took place between April and June 1982). It turns out that it commemorates Thatcher’s first visit to the islands in January ’83, six months after the British victory.
The tweet stating that the vast majority of anti-Semitic attacks in NYC were made by non-whites shows an infographic as part of a report issued by a group called Americans Against Anti-Semitism. An article in the Jewish News Syndicate summarizes what the report is saying.
• “The vast majority—151 assaults—occurred in just four neighborhoods, all in Brooklyn: Williamsburg (29%), Flatbush/Midwood (29%), Crown Heights (25%) and Boro Park/Kensington (14%).”
• “Visibly identifiable Jews are suffering through the brunt of the assaults, according to the report released last week. Of those attacks over the last four-plus years, 52% of victims were Chasidic and 42% were non-Chasidic Orthodox, with just 4% secular, 2% modern Orthodox, 0.5% Reform and 0.5% being Israeli Jews.”
This is a very rapid demographic change.
https://www.jns.org/other-minorities-committing-vast-majority-of-antisemitic-assaults-in-nyc/
Next, I found the ethnic breakdown of one of the Brooklyn neighborhoods: Crown Heights. A very interesting statistic emerged. In 2001, the neighborhood was 78.1% black. In 2019, it was 48.8%. In 2001, the white population was 7.4%. In 2019 it was 30.8%.
https://furmancenter.org/neighborhoods/view/crown-heights-prospect-heights
In the Williamsburg neighborhood there was a similar shift, but not quite as dramatic as Crown Heights. But, this time it was between Hispanics and whites.
https://furmancenter.org/neighborhoods/view/greenpoint-williamsburg
I have not been able to find what percentage of whites in Crown Point is orthodox Jewish, but undoubtedly it is very large. So, what is going on in Crown Point seems clear. One group (Blacks) perceive its neighborhood being “taken over” by another group – orthodox Jews that dress and talk differently and seem to be clannish. Such a situation is the perfect recipe for the “invaded” to lash out against those they perceive as changing their neighborhood. It is not a surprising reaction – it has happened countless other times in history. The lesson I draw is that it is very difficult for ethnic groups that differ greatly to live in harmony. Such conflicts are likely to increase as long as the “melting pot” ideal of the country is demeaned.
Dunno about those Leopard main battle tanks, but I should hope Germany still has some Fuchs to give.
LOL!
It seems that countries with their own Leopard main battle tanks can’t supply them to Ukraine without the permission of the Germans. However, German reluctance may be overcome if allies agree to supply similar materiel, at which point the German refusal will become difficult to defend.
I did part of my medical training at Montefiore, and I have to say, I can’t even IMAGINE what it must be like there with so many nurses on strike. I’m sure the house staff and the medical students are going to be run even more ragged than they usually are, but hopefully, this will help them–and everyone else–to recognize how important and (pardon the overused term) underrated nurses are. The real tragedy is that people WILL die as part of making this point…but on the other hand, people are dying all the time BECAUSE of the underappreciation of the value of nurses, it’s just that those deaths are lost in the background noise. This is all another reason for me to hope that Dickless Scott (aka Senator Voldemort) from Florida never is a serious contender for president.
>”The nurses union, the New York State Nurses Association, said members had to strike because chronic understaffing leaves them caring for too many patients.” [emphasis added]
Is this a correct citation of causal determinism? Or is it like the hostage taker who tells the police, “If I have to kill any hostages, the blame will be on you.”?
For what it’s worth, the free systems in Canada and the UK where hospitals can’t run deficits but can’t make profits, either, are getting pretty ragged, too. No nurses have ever struck in Canada, though. A lot have just quit. The scope of modern health care, where everything is cast as a disease that needs professional insurance-paid intervention, may just require more people than are really dedicated enough to do it under the conditions offered. This may be sunset time.
Re: bag of cat poop. In our house, with two growing teenage boy kitties using the same litter box, we have to clean it out daily. This results in a bag of cat poop heading out to the trash. No lunch mistakes made yet, and none anticipated.
In other news, it appears President Biden now has a classified documents scandal of his own, the investigation of which started before the mid-terms but has just been made public. Not a great look. He’d better get out in front of this.
Scandal? Only in the twisted minds of conspiracy theorists. If it weren’t for Trump’s serious crime of stealing 26 boxes of classified documents and storing them hither and thither, this wouldn’t even had made the news.
On the topic of chocolate: I hear there’s concern about lead and cadmium in chocolate. (They focus on *dark* chocolate simply because there’s a higher fraction of cocoa than milk, but presumably the problem is there, too. https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-cadmium-in-dark-chocolate-a8480295550/
I’ll take my chances with a bit of lead, thank you very much. I ain’t giving up dark chocolate for nobody nor nothing.
By the way, I prefer Lidl’s brand over Aldi’s. While the latter’s price is lower most of the time, I just prefer the taste of the other. Both are excellent.
Thanks
But
Where are the materials and methods?
Where are the error bars?
Can the samples interfere with lead or cadmium tests? What are the quantitations actually designed for? Or is it an off-the-shelf 3M test that can be purchased by anyone at the local home center?
How can products be sold with high lead or cadmium in the U.S. without California Prop 65 warnings (such as seaweed, anchovies, or some bottles of Balsamic vinegar – all of which I can produce as evidence)? Or the FDA be completely unaware?
Some of the percent content appear anomalous – over 200%? Percent of _what_?
…. I apologize, but in short, where is the work?
I don’t have the numbers (they’re rarely publicized, and almost never by the NYTimes) but anecdotally there have been many attacks by black men on Orthodox Jews in the Hassidic areas of Bkn in the last few years. It is a big thing out there actually.
Not a fake story like the “Anti Asian Crime Wave” the media love. https://democracychronicles.org/on-the-anti-asian-hate-crime-wave/ (my article)
Which has, apparently, 70% of NYC Asian women frightened needlessly.
The local liberal media in NYC go very slow on reporting any crimes by black people with the right wing media making almost a hobby of publicizing them.
D.A.
NYC
(lifelong leftist, anti-woke)
The New York Times video on hospital greed is paywalled but the URL shows it to be a year old. I have a hard time seeing the issues splashed there in stark white on black — GREED!! — as relevant to the current nurses’ strike.
The two hospitals being struck, Montefiore and Mt. Sinai, are both charitable organizations run as non-profits. Everyone in medicine knows they are truly world-class institutions. They describe their last wage offer to the nursing union as identical to the offers accepted at “our more wealthy” partners in the New York City hospital landscape, which I presume to mean greedy for-profit hospitals.
Now, I know nothing about how American non-tor-profit hospitals are run. They certainly can’t make big losses, nor can Canadian hospitals who get a global budget. Do executives get big bonuses for managing to balance the budget with no deficit even in challenging times providing large volumes of uncompensated care? I don’t know. But the opportunity for greed in the culture of these renowned philanthropic institutions seems a stretch, unless greed has just infected everyone, including nursing unions. Is it payback time for the stresses of the pandemic, which hit the Bronx particularly hard?
The nurses have a difficult public relations problem. They seem to be most upset at the working conditions — not enough nurses to make care “safe” for patients — but if the hospitals pay them more to do it, well, they’ll put up with it. Sure, they want more nurses hired, but when you get down to brass tacks, hiring more nurses means paying them all less unless you can somehow bring in more revenue and lose less money on things like emergency visits….or unless the reason for the short staffing is that too few will work at the wages offered, or if the executives and managers take the kind of pay cuts that will have them looking elsewhere. Yet the other NYC hospitals have settled on the same terms that the Montefiore and Mt. Sinai nurses have rejected. If revenue can’t be increased, it’s a death spiral as nurses quit and staffing levels drop even further.
It’s not clear from the NYT and other stories how patients in ICUs and acutely ill in inpatient units and needing emergency surgery are being cared for. They cannot be abandoned. If the nurse who was supposed to come in for the a.m. shift doesn’t show because she’s on strike, the nurse who was there that night can’t just walk out.
I also have the dream in which I am sitting in a classroom, taking a final exam, & realize that I forgot to go to class or crack open the textbook. Then I wake up & remember at least two times when something like that actually happened.