Had a power outage last night

[conuly]

Joy.

(Finn is scared of the dark. I ended up having to take him on a walk to some other, well-lit block.)

***************

Poop Visible From Space Helped Scientists Find a Remote 'Supercolony' of Penguins

The resurgence of pinball has allowed one lapsed fan to return to the classic arcade games of his youth—and the sense of euphoria they once inspired.

A Short List of Shenanigans My Parent’s Dog Has Engaged In

In Nairobi’s Largest Slum, These Young Ballerinas Dream Big

New Guidelines Establish The Rights Of Women When Giving Birth

How the 1918 Flu Pandemic Helped Advance Women’s Rights

How Photographs Printed on Paper Changed 19th-Century America

The Enigma of Edinburgh’s Miniature Coffins

Beijing official urges efforts for Xi's 'Chinese Dream'

Canine war heroes mistreated by U.S. Army: Pentagon report

Russian trolls shared some truly terrible climate change memes

Study: Snowpack has declined dramatically across US West

The Case Against Google (More over at Metafilter)

Love-struck hero or creepy harasser? Suddenly we’re seeing our favorite rom-coms in a new light.

Delta reviewing ties with all 'politically divisive' groups after NRA controversy

Heavy Metal: Your Protein Powder May Contain Lead Or Arsenic

Study: Food stamp benefits are already too low in 99 percent of U.S. counties

Kentucky tests how much to demand of Medicaid recipients

A frightened child in Chicago and an immigration policy unbecoming of America

World Trade Organization warns that Trump risks trade war

How Liberals Amped Up a Parkland Shooting Conspiracy Theory

A Gangster Place in the Sun: How Spain’s Fight Against the Mob Revealed Russian Power Networks

The unwelcome revival of ‘race science’

All Talk, No Bolt-Action: Gun Injuries Drop During NRA Conventions

The president is calling a sheriff’s deputy who failed to confront an active shooter a coward — a word seldom applied to officers who choose to protect themselves by shooting.

A new, huge review of gun research has bad news for the NRA

How did the NRA become an enemy of law enforcement?

Some of those hardest hit by the opioid epidemic are not rural, white Americans

Guantánamo, Forever

Report: Media Largely Ignored Unprecedented Anti-LGBTQ Violence of 2017

Comments

[wendelah1]

Have I read much journalism on the topic? No. It hits a bit too close to home. My brother's stepson is a heroin addict, as is the stepson's dad, my brother's wife's ex. That's a long, sad, never-ending saga. One of my sister's close friends, a teacher at the school where she teaches, died of a heroin overdose last year. He was shooting up at school. When my sister discovered this, she had to report it to the school district. He lost his job, needless to say. My sister blames herself for not seeing what was happening to John before it was too late. Anyway, sorry, no, I am not doing much reading. People in crisis need treatment. Regardless of where they live or what race they are. It is already hard to keep clinics and hospitals open in rural counties, and I know that the Republicans in Congress want to cut the funds. And I don't think funding for addiction medicine is going to improve anywhere under the current administration, no matter how many articles get written.

The last article I read profiled a hospital in West Virginia. The baby was white, as are 95% of the people in the state. West Virginians also have the highest rate of deaths from drug overdose in the country, two and a half times higher than the national average.

[conuly]

Have I read much journalism on the topic? No. It hits a bit too close to home.

*hugs*

I will sum up. Poor white farmers get a hell of a lot more sympathy than black people from the inner city, and the majority of these articles focus on them, with a significant minority focusing on whites (poor or struggling) from the suburbs.

On the one hand, this is why the response has been "let's help those people!" rather than "lock 'em all up!", but it's shitty. And that's the point of the article.

And I don't think funding for addiction medicine is going to improve anywhere under the current administration, no matter how many articles get written.

Things could get a hell of a lot worse.

[siderea]

I have a hypothesis. The hypothesis is that the overwhelming majority of opioid addicts have always been white. The association of drug addiction with African Americans has always just been straight-up racism in the media and public policy, of a sort you could get away with when there wasn't internet and cell phones.

What's changed isn't "now it's white people", it's "now they can't lie and claim it's just back people."

[conuly]

The hypothesis is that the overwhelming majority of opioid addicts have always been white.

Well, it'd be surprising if they weren't. I mean, the demographics just aren't there. But it's even less likely now than then that they're overwhelmingly rural, just looking at the numbers.

[siderea]

I'm not convinced that's different either. Characterizing cities as cesspools of crime and sin is a 2,000 year old sport, and the white-flight of the 1970s conflated the categories "urban" and "black" in the media.