[✔️] May 7, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Limits to suffering?, Curriculum for Educators, Home insurance, Great Displacement, XR faces big bank, Gas station in 1940's, asking to stop disinformation

[Richard Pauli]

/*May*//*7, 2023*/

/[ NYTimes question -- we have already asked ]/
*How Miserable Are We Supposed to Be?*
May 5, 2023
By Huw Green
Dr. Green is a clinical psychologist.

In my work as a psychologist for people dealing with the aftermath of 
significant injuries, I am often presented with the question of whether 
low mood in my patients is best understood as a normal reaction to a 
serious health event — it’s reasonable, for instance, to respond to news 
that you may never walk again with questions about how life might be 
different and more challenging — or as clinical depression that should 
be treated. This is an extremely difficult determination to make.

Part of the reason it is so hard is that there are serious disagreements 
about where to draw the line between the two and even whether it can be 
drawn at all. Psychiatry’s guiding paradigm is that some extremes of 
mood are sufficiently severe that they constitute illness. But a 
longstanding criticism of psychiatry claims that the issues it professes 
to treat are just ordinary aspects of the human condition (or “problems 
in living,” as the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, a staunch critic of his 
own profession, would have it) that are being unnecessarily 
pathologized. This argument isn’t restricted to questions about 
diagnoses; a version of it plays out across multiple 
mental-health-related debates. At first glance, these can look like 
separate discussions, but they tend to boil down to the same central 
questions: Is happiness always the goal of mental health treatment? How 
can we know when we’re happy enough? How miserable are we supposed to be?

This debate is perhaps at its fiercest when it involves discussions 
around psychiatric medication. The generation of antidepressants that 
were introduced in the 1980s were initially hailed as miracle drugs that 
could help patients feel, as one psychiatrist put it, “better than 
well,” improving their personalities and resolving depression. In time, 
however, concerns developed that such medications blunted people’s moods 
or numbed them. Today clinicians and researchers argue interminably 
about the minutiae of whether antidepressants really address a brain 
chemistry issue or they work by dampening emotions. Are we treating 
people who need help or sedating them through the highs and lows of life?

Emotions run particularly high around medication, and the same questions 
arise in the field of psychotherapy. The intervention being debated in 
this case is slower moving, but clinicians still disagree about the 
fundamental purpose of the talking cure.

For those operating in the tradition of cognitive behavioral therapy, 
the goal is something like symptom reduction. Moods can be measured and, 
with the right approach — by adjusting distorted patterns of thinking, 
for instance — improved.

Existential and psychodynamic approaches to psychotherapy frame things 
differently, placing understanding and meaning making at the center. 
Freud provided a sense of the mission early on with his comment that the 
goal of psychoanalysis is to transform symptoms into “ordinary human 
misery.” The psychologist George Prigatano, in his book about the 
psychological treatment of neuropsychological disorders, baldly states 
(quoting Charlie Chaplin) that “the theme of life is conflict and pain.”

The basic fault line that runs through various mental health 
controversies has to do with the role of misery in our lives. Misery is 
inevitable, but we also have a sense that there can sometimes be too 
much of it. We don’t want to eliminate misery; that seems somehow 
morally dubious and practically impossible. But nonetheless, it 
sometimes strikes us that we could be happier than we are. One way of 
dealing with this problem is to think in terms of illness — and, 
certainly, misery can become so profound that it starts to resemble an 
illness.

Pinning down the broader tensions in these disputes can help explain 
what we’re really arguing about. Because these discussions often happen 
among clinicians and scientists and because they often take place in 
peer-reviewed journals, they have the appearance of technical debates. 
The hope appears to be that, with enough care, we could land on a 
successful definition of mental disorder, the correct psychotherapeutic 
protocol or set of guidelines for prescribing. This hope is misguided. 
When we argue about definitions, therapy and medicines, we are often 
arguing about something more significant and overarching.

How miserable are we supposed to be? It is extremely difficult to know 
when low mood trips over into depression or when people’s thoughts about 
their lives are distortions. When does emotional dysregulation become 
mania? When do idiosyncrasy and magical thinking become psychosis? This 
difficulty is what leads us to outsource such determinations to 
clinicians and other assorted experts. Those experts are then imbued 
with significant power. They assess and diagnose us and reflect for us a 
view of how maladjusted we are. Concerns about this power have made 
mental health such a fraught topic. We want clinicians to have some 
power, but we worry about it.

But the power to make determinations about when we are ill and what 
constitutes too much distress is actually a power that still resides, to 
a great extent, with the general public rather than specialists. 
Psychiatrists have tried in various ways to develop a definition of 
mental disorder. These can be based on statistical notions of normality 
or on theories of mental dysfunction that are grounded in what is 
considered natural. Such definitions fall down, though, as pointed out 
by the philosopher Derek Bolton, because statistical rarity by itself 
does not entail aberration. And determining mental dysfunction is 
impossible, given that it’s apparently hard to agree on how our minds 
ought to function: Are we supposed to go through periods of intense, 
crippling sadness, or are we not?

Dr. Bolton resolved this by deciding it was impossible to ground our 
notion of disorder in any set of biological or statistical facts. Mental 
disorder, he concluded, is more or less whatever a community decides it 
is. If you start behaving in ways that are uninterpretable by your 
community, you might find yourself in front of a psychiatrist. The 
extent to which we are mentally unhealthy is a function of what starts 
to seem unhealthy in the context of people who know us well and are 
trying to get along with us. As the psychoanalyst John Rickman 
succinctly put it, “Madness is when you can’t find anyone who can stand 
you.”

To navigate the question of who should be referred to treatment for 
their misery, I need to be guided by medical definitions of depression. 
These definitions are what we’ve used to test the efficacy of 
treatments, and they translate our idiosyncratic preferences as 
clinicians into the professional standards of our peers. If patients 
seem sad but still basically engaged with life, I might aim to support 
them in navigating their experience of loss and change through therapy. 
If their low moods are persistent across several weeks and they are 
consistently hopeless, with disrupted sleep, guilt and negative 
thoughts, I might refer them to a psychiatrist to consider medication.

My thinking about this process has changed. Earlier in my career, I was 
concerned about missing “true” cases of depression. Now I take a more 
pragmatic attitude. If I refer patients to a psychiatrist, it is not 
that I think the underlying fact of the matter is that they are 
depressed. Rather, I am aware that some people are able to benefit from 
antidepressants — that their lives can plausibly be made better — and 
that my patients, because they resemble other such individuals, may be 
such people.

When I ask myself some version of “Are these people more miserable than 
they’re supposed to be?” my clinical judgment comes to resemble 
something more commonplace than a medical diagnosis. Not detached from 
the standards set by my professional peers but now more grounded in 
practical considerations about the intelligibility of a person’s 
feelings, rather than abstract technical notions of pathology and 
treatability.

The value of this reframing is that it has a sort of democratizing 
power. It gives more weight to people’s priorities and their life 
contexts alongside the definitions created to guide expert diagnosis. I 
am not deciding that they are depressed; we are deciding together, 
alongside the community at large, that the misery has become too much to 
bear.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/opinion/depression-misery-psychiatry-mental-health.html?unlocked_article_code=l7luhEP1X9H7lNrKOagCR5RTlWf2W9Hl28F-mwaAmGU5csAZ7ISoCLc17tofYQKL5OQ7wrd0zYkJbyOd2BGmr_AFSELS4b--Bp_r8NwEl9WFPbJs_F1_OmEoBgNH2PRUY0q91SqAiulXWqEQe5KLRM1hp8ProQ_zz_37dgD8cHhE0fHGApyFz_RNgsyF1GeWQdSMv9w5_sR8bmgV_OHZZ_JZRvEAU8OEXdkTe1uLJ_WAViiP0-clz4yxFSurRogz1Wosq0d5Xamit8p8Q9qHSAFBz8qkCDzs2vMLhZ7eRS1otFlT9X1X5Eo9uLpBw16WD9cV5nTH9RvP1f_YR_t3ipBJLHqbftI5A3QTCha1yNCqPjmB&smid=url-share



/[  Share this link with a teacher or parent - devised by Yale Climate 
Communications ] /
*For Educators: Grades 6-12*
Climate change is a complex topic to teach. In addition to teaching the 
science behind climate change, it is critical to help students become 
effective climate change communicators.

We have developed materials for teachers who are interested in using our 
resources in their classrooms, such as the Yale Climate Opinion Maps and 
Yale Climate Connections. These materials were developed based on 
recommendations from educators across the United States. They aim to 
immerse students in climate change issues in an accessible, digestible, 
and interactive way. While these NGSS and Common Core-aligned activities 
were designed for middle and high schoolers, you can easily convert them 
to Word documents using free platforms like https://simplypdf.com/ so 
that you can customize them for your students. We’d also love to hear 
about your experience using our materials with your students! Please 
fill out this brief survey.

*We are thrilled to announce the launch of the “For Educators: Grades 
6-12” section of our website. There, you’ll find free resources that:*

    --  Utilize current YPCCC data, as well as stories, about Americans’
    climate change attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs.
    --  Enable students to engage with climate change topics in an
    accessible, digestible, interactive way.
    -- Can live in classrooms across grade levels and content areas -
    since climate change is and will continue to impact all areas of our
    lives, learning about it shouldn’t be limited to high school science
    classrooms!
    -- Are NGSS and Common Core-aligned.
    -- Can be used in the classroom the very next day without
    modification (some of the lesson plans can be modified for
    elementary classrooms).
    -- Come with instructions for teachers so that everyone is set up
    for success.
    -- Challenge students and teachers to approach climate change
    through a variety of skills, including critical thinking,
    communication, and data analysis.
    -- Have been piloted in middle and high schools across the U.S.
    -- Can be adapted to fit the needs of students and teachers. For
    example, a Brooklyn biology teacher facilitated an extension of one
    of our activities in which she had her students depict Global
    Warming’s Six Americas as CareBears.

Please tell the teachers in your life about these lesson plans.  If you 
are a teacher, try out our resources with your students and learn how to 
communicate impactfully about climate change. We can’t wait to hear what 
you think!
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/for-educators/



/[  Moving out, paying up ] /
*Home Insurance Premiums Rise as Americans Flock to Weather-Worn States*
By Debra Kamin
May 5, 2023
The News
Home insurance premiums are on the rise, and a key driver for the price 
increase is climate change. Yet, Americans are moving fastest to 
Florida, Texas and other states most at risk for climate-related natural 
disasters, according to a new study from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a 
data and analytics provider.

Since 2015, the average homeowner has seen the bill for their property 
coverage grow by roughly 21 percent. But in Florida and Texas, the two 
states with the highest population gains in 2022, rates have climbed 
significantly more — 57 percent in Florida and 40 percent in Texas.

Those states are also experiencing extreme weather: Hurricanes like Ian, 
Nicole and Fiona, as well as record heat, ice and snow storms, wrought 
billions of dollars of destruction in 2022 and killed nearly 500 Americans.

“The states where climate tends to impact the world more strongly are 
seeing a bigger jump in population,” said George Hosfield, LexisNexis 
Risk Solutions’s senior director of home insurance. “We put two and two 
together, and it seems to be creating a perfect storm — no pun intended.”
Scientific research provides a clear link between climate change and an 
uptick in extreme heat, flooding, wildfires and coastal sea level rise 
across the United States.

The risk is highest in the Sun Belt region, which is experiencing rapid 
growth, yet Americans are moving directly into areas of danger. 
Hurricane Ian alone killed more than 150 Floridians, knocked out power 
for 2.6 million residents and left Florida with a bill of nearly $113 
billion in its wake.

Many new residents cite cost of a living as a key factor behind their 
moves, but home insurance costs are rising faster there than the 
national average, meaning homeowners should brace for sticker shock.

In Florida, the average home insurance premium in 2019 was $1,988. 
Today, it’s $2,714 — an increase of $726.

Background: Florida and Texas saw the highest population gains in 2022.
Florida grew by more than 318,000 new residents in 2022, accounting for 
a population increase of 1.9 percent last year — the largest uptick in 
the nation. Texas, with more than 230,000 new residents, was right on 
its tails.

In Colorado, where home insurance costs are up 41 percent over the last 
eight years, 5,376 new residents arrived last year, accounting for half 
a percentage point uptick in its population. In South Dakota, 8,424 new 
residents moved into the sparsely populated state in 2022, while 
insurance costs have jumped 39 percent since 2015. In dry, sunny 
Arizona, where nearly 71,000 new residents flocked in 2022, costs grew 
28 percent.

Conversely, states that lost significant numbers of residents saw 
insurance rates rise much more gradually. New York lost the most 
population in 2022 — nearly 300,000 residents — but saw home insurance 
jump only 17 percent, several points below average. Louisiana, West 
Virginia and Illinois, which took the next three spots in terms of 
population loss, also saw slower rate increases.

California bucked the trend in several ways. Despite being battered by 
wildfires and extreme storms in recent years, home insurance rates there 
grew by only 25 percent, below the increase in other coastal states. 
California lost 343,230 residents, accounting for a 0.3 percent dip, 
last year.

What’s next: Rising costs could compel Americans to forgo risk protection.
With two out of every three homes in America already underinsured, 
skyrocketing prices may tempt homeowners to cut back even further on 
disaster coverage, putting them at significant risk when severe weather 
strikes.

They may also forgo additional coverage that they need more than ever. 
While mortgage lenders typically require homeowners to carry home 
insurance, most policies do not cover floods. With budgets tight, Mr. 
Hosfield anticipates that more homeowners will opt out of insurance for 
flood damage. “And that puts them in a pretty bad spot,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/realestate/home-insurance-climate-change.html

- -

/[ Listen to this author's interview - The Great Displacement... not 
when, but where  ]/
*How Climate Change Will Reshape Where Americans Live | FiveThirtyEight 
Politics Podcast*
FiveThirtyEight
May 4, 2023  FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast
For decades, Americans have been moving south and west. That migration 
pattern become apparent in American politics, when seven congressional 
districts moved states after the 2020 census, and it continues to be 
visible in the booming construction and job markets in cities across the 
Sun Belt.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen 
speaks with author Jake Bittle, who argues that it’s only a matter of 
time before those trends reverse, or at least shift. Although, this 
time, he writes in his new book "The Great Displacement," it won’t be 
cheap housing, low taxes and plentiful jobs that attract people to new 
places. It will be a worsening climate that pushes them away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcYMH35Hqog



/[ XR faces the Big Bank  - 5 min video of the question -- ]/
*Zoe Cohen questions @BarclaysUK chairman Nigel Higgins | 3 May 2023 | 
Extinction Rebellion UK*
Extinction Rebellion UK
May 5, 2023  QUEEN ELIZABETH II CENTRE
Filmed at Barclays AGM, Queen Elizabeth II Centre, London on the 3 May 
2023.

Help XR mobilise and donate: https://chuffed.org/xr/uk

Extinction Rebellion UK: https://extinctionrebellion.uk/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/xrebellionuk
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/XRebellionUK/
Map of UK XR groups: https://map.extinctionrebellion.uk/
International: https://rebellion.global/

    1. Tell The Truth
    2. Act Now
    3. Decide Together

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecy0NpU4Xxk



/[ Real old footage -- the late 1940's History of Gas Stations. ]/
*" WORKING FOR SHELL " 1940s SHELL OIL CO. GAS STATION OWNERSHIP / 
FRANCHISEE PROMO FILM 13724*
PeriscopeFilm
7,470 views  May 5, 2023

This mid-1940s film was created by Shell Oil to promote careers in the 
service station industry, and tells a sort of American rags-to-riches 
story. The film follows the story of a U.S. Army veteran named Bill, who 
works himself up from a mere gas station employee to becoming a 
franchisee who owns a station of his own. The footage is mainly of 
conversations as well as cars being maintained at full service Shell Gas 
stations. The services offered in this era included complimentary gas 
fill ups, tire pressure checks, oil checks, and cleaning. The film was 
likely shown to people interested in entering into a franchise agreement 
with Shell, and probably also shown at local meetings of organizations 
like the Chamber of Commerce or Kiwanis. Note: this print is missing the 
main title and credits, so we don't know the exact name of the film or 
who stars in it.

    0:08 A U.S. Army veteran named Bill sits at the dinner table with
    his parents about his post-war career 1:50 Bill kisses his
    girlfriend and then they have a conversation about the future 4:51
    Bill walks towards a Vocational Guidance Office and meets a friend
    of his who dismisses the counselor's advice 5:09 Bill talks to a
    guidance counselor, 6:35 the counselor suggests different jobs all
    of which Bill does not like 7:11 the guidance counselor offers Bill
    a cancer causing cigarette, 8:16 Bill walks into an office of the
    Shell Oil Company and speaks with an employee there, 9:21 Shell
    employee begins explaining the company with footage of oil fields,
    refineries, storage depots, trucks, and scientists working in a lab,
    10:32 a series of different Shell publicity material shots, 11:10
    Bill and the Shell employee are back in the office and still
    talking, 12:20 Bill shows up at a Shell gas station and begins
    talking to the manager who gives him a job, 13:50 Bill starts his
    job at the gas station and looks under the hood of a car with the
    manager, 14:19 Bill services a car with a well-dressed man sitting
    in it while the manager observes, 14:56 Bill services another
    customer, 15:28 the manager is on the phone and then begins talking
    to Bill, 16:42 Bill accidentally runs gas over the back of the car
    of a well-dressed rich woman and begins cleaning her windshield,
    17:51 Bill attempts to put a parcel in the trunk of the car and the
    woman gets progressively more annoyed, 19:14 Bill’s friend pulls up
    in an older car and Bill begins servicing him while they have a
    conversation, 20:37 Bill puts money in the cash register and begins
    talking to the manager, 21:06 Bill and his girlfriend go to dinner
    and the manager’s very fancy house, 21:41 the manager introduces his
    wife to Bill and his girlfriend, 22:08 Bill and the manager drink
    beer together and talk in the living room, 24:20 Bill is working at
    the service station while a calendar is switching in the background
    to show how long he has been there, 24:48 a family car pulls up and
    Bill talks with a kid in a scout uniform and his father, 26:13 Bill
    is woken up in the middle of the night by the phone ringing, 26:37
    Bill puts a new tire on for the well dressed customer he had at the
    start of the film, 27:20 the Shell employee that spoke to Bill shows
    up at the gas station and talks to him, 28:16 Bill and his
    girlfriend run out of their house into a nice car as newlyweds,
    28:48 Bill is shown working at Shell Gas station with his name on
    it, 29:46 several faster paced scenes showing bill filling up cars,
    cleaning windows, filling new oil, checking tire pressure, and
    talking to customers, 30:18 slow pan of a letter to Bill from the
    “Businessmen’s Lunch Club” inviting him for lunch, 30:25 Several
    shots of well dressed men including Bill eating at the club, 30:52 a
    man in an old car pulls up and hands over a present to Bill and they
    talk, 32:10 the present is a statue of Mary, 33:10 Bill fills up a
    fancy Cadillac car and talks with the owner while he smokes, 33:49
    Bill answers the phone, 34:29 Bill continues talking to the customer
    in the Cadillac, 35:29 Bill begins talking to the camera, 35:54
    Title with “The End”

We encourage viewers to add comments and, especially, to provide 
additional information about our videos by adding a comment!  See 
something interesting?  Tell people what it is and what they can see by 
writing something for example: "01:00:12:00 -- President Roosevelt is 
seen meeting with Winston Churchill at the Quebec Conference."

This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest 
historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage 
collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available 
for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit 
http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5kGDRXdBGY



/[The news archive - looking back -- when politics pushed back the river 
of reality. ]/
/*May 7, 2010*/
May 7, 2010: Noting that the journal Science has published a letter from 
255 members of the National Academy of Sciences, calling for an end to 
the right wing's war on climate science, Rick Piltz of Climate Science 
Watch observes:

"Apparently, a strongly worded statement from many of our most esteemed 
scientists, about climate science and a controversy that is very much in 
the news and fundamental to our future, is considered unworthy of space 
in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. 
All three rejected the 700-word, op-ed length letter before it was 
published [in] Science."

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2010/05/07/letter-from-255-national-academy-members-on-climate-change-and-the-integrity-of-science/



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