HOLY COW!

Published December 20, 2024 by Nan Mykel

It’s fairly well accepted that the contents of a number of nursery rhymes reflect pieces of actual history. Why? Many nursery rhymes originated in times when life was harsh. They often reflected societal issues, such as poverty, disease, and war. The realities of life during these periods influenced the themes of the rhymes. Also, there was no internet nor telephones. So I guess the adults talked to each other. Still, I can’t imagine adults sharing references of that kind with children.

The domain of once oral “folk” material that children have kept alive—folktales and fairy tales; fables, sayings, riddles, charms, tongue twisters; folksongs, lullabies, hymns, carols, and other simple poetry; rhymes of the street, the playground, the nursery; and, supremely, Mother Goose, and other “nonsense” verse, bubbles around us, often forgotten or disremembered.

The idea that little children through the ages may have been parroting references to grizzly actions they surely did not understand is difficult for me to process. I can remember rocking one of my own while singing Bye Baby Bunting, and as a child myself skipping rope to Cinderella and joining hands with friends, singing Ring Around the Rosey, pockets full of posies. I knew nothing of the plague and that posies helped cover the smell of death during the plague. I must have been busy cleaning the blackboard or something, because I can remember only Cinderella…went upstairs to kiss her fellow and Black Sheep, Black Sheep, have you any wool while jumping rope. Maybe a trace of Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear also..

And I kind of always worried about the end of Rockabye Baby. Stay tuned for what’s inside those juicy rhymes.

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WHAT!?

“We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds,” George Packer wrote in The Atlantic this month. “Local news is disappearing, and a much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth.”

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Don’t Know Where I Was when this happened: Odessa, Texas became a national name after its strict anti-trans bathroom ban that allows individual citizens (whether or not they are Odessa or even Texas residents) to sue a trans person for a minimum of $10,000 in damages if they violate it (there is no cap on how large the bounty can be).

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I also didn’t know Musk had a transgender daughter, either, who in her alienation from him exchanges insults, back and forth.

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Louisiana bans staff from helping people get mpox, COVID & flu vaccines

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TOO CLOSE TO HOME

Published December 18, 2024 by Nan Mykel

WOW…and Trump isn’t even president yet….United Health Care is my connection, as well as CareMark. Slipping under my feet, with no suspicions. Will the investigations be dropped under our new president?

I’m referring to news items about…

Earlier this year, a Senate committee investigated Medicare Advantage plans denying nursing care to patients who were recovering from falls and strokes. It concluded that three major companies — UnitedHealthcare, Humana and CVS, which owns Aetna — were intentionally denying claims for this expensive care to increase profits. UnitedHealthcare, the report noted, denied requests for such nursing stays three times more often than it did for other services. (Humana had an even higher figure, denying at a rate 16 times higher.) /unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-thompson

I didn’t bite on Medicare Advantage because it advertised so much.

No one knows how often private insurers like UnitedHealthcare deny claims because they are generally not required to publish that data. People who bought coverage under Obamacare, a government-funded plan, had 17 percent of their care denied in 2021, according to KFF, a health policy group. Other surveys have found that denials are more prevalent among those with private insurance than those who carried government coverage.

UnitedHealthcare, part of the giant conglomerate UnitedHealth Group, reported more than $16 billion in operating profits last year and employed roughly 140,000 people. The company is a frequent lightning rod for criticism over how it handles claims.

Oxycontin misbehavior: This week I read about so much illegal conniving that I got a little depressed, especially about one that detailed oxycontin illegal manipulation in the pharmacy/medical illegal activities. I guess I asked for it–read digitaldefynd.com’s 60 biggest Business Scandals in History for a jolt or

Fraud
2020 National Health Care Fraud and Opioid Takedown

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I GUESS I’M NAIVE –If all conditions are satisfied and the non-monetary terms – which still need to be determined – are finalized, CVS Health has agreed it will pay approximately $5 billion ($4.9 billion to states and political subdivisions and approximately $130 million to tribes) over the next ten years beginning in 2023, depending on the number of governmental entities that agree to join the settlement. (Re the oxycontin scandal).

The agreement would fully resolve claims dating back a decade or more and is not an admission of any liability or wrongdoing. 5 billion for no wrongdoing?

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I REGRET SO MANY suspicions, before Trump is even in office. But, when I read a UnitedHealthcare representative made humanizing remarks about their late CEO, including the statement that

“While the health system is not perfect, every corner of it is filled with people who try to do their best for those they serve.” Who are those they serve? The Stockholders? Grrr, as another blogger said.

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When I read that so many wealthy outfits are cozying up to Trump, my blood runs cold.

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I didn’t know there were so many school shootings: This year, nine shooting suspects were female compared with 249 who were male, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.

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Headlines: South Korea’s President Is Impeached After Martial Law Crisis….Maybe this will make Trump think twice before doing it?

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DUMB: To ask folks who survived due to the polio vaccine to wipe out their saviour? {re nytimes post)

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ENOUGH HAND WRINGING — The good lord willing, my next blog will be about nursery rhymes (but not all necessarily happy)….

WEIRD?

Published December 14, 2024 by Nan Mykel

I’m not strange, but maybe a little weird. Or perhaps you do the following also, but don’t notice:

For years I have occasionally woken myself from dreaming by hearing various noises. What’s weird is that the kind of noise adheres to the place I’m sleeping. If I’m living in a house without a doorbell, the noise is knocking at my front door. If my house has a doorbell, it rings. If I have a cell phone that rings.

Once I woke to the sound of a dog in my hallway and went back to sleep, figuring it was my daughter with her dog making a surprise visit. In the morning I found the guest bedroom empty; no dog, no daughter.

Yesterday I woke to what I assumed to be my daughter’s radio alarm. I looked at my watch and it was 9 a.m. She has to be at work at 8:10 a.m., so I called out upstairs to see if she had overslept. When there was no answer I was about to go up to see if she was okay, when I saw that a sweater I had been helping her with the night before was no longer on the arm of the chair, so I relaxed.

After a few minutes puzzling, I realized that I didn’t even have my hearing aids in, so I couldn’t have heard the radio upstairs. Besides, I later discovered she doesn’t even have a radio alarm. Moreover, my short term memory surfaced and I realized I had called out “Mother!” [No wonder there was no answer?]

This dream awakening to match my living arrangements can’t be just old age, because it’s sporadically occurred over 30 years. Last time I had decided that next time I would immediately focus on what I had been dreaming, to see if there was a clue there, but I was too “out of it.”

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BRIEF BRIEFS

Since I’ve already begun being frivolous, here’s something I scribbled going to sleep the other night:

When upset how do you respond?

yell___ curse____ cry____ pout____ throw things____ clam up____ scream____ drink____

snort____ eat____ sleep____ laugh____ hit yourself____ hit others____ pray____ discuss____

write____ sing____ turn on tv____ OOPS, I FORGOT: kill____ swindle___ blackmail____

self immolate____

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DID YOU EVER TRY TO WRITE AN HONEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY?

If you have re-owned traits formerly projected in Jung’s Shadow, how do you handle it? How do you manage to not

sound like making excuses? Or bragging?

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OH PLEASE….

Mr. Trump ultimately sued ABC, accusing Mr. Stephanopoulos of harming his reputation. Shoulda gone to Court. What reputation? The one he usually brags about?

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YAY!

New Jersey’s governor just signed a law banning book bans to ensure kids can “read freely”

The Freedom to Read Act protects both the books and the librarians who curate them.

CLIMATE UNEASE

Published December 14, 2024 by Nan Mykel

And hopefully our new leaders will take the immediate future of our planet seriously.

Definition of a tipping point: According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), tipping points are ‘critical thresholds in a system that, when exceeded, can lead to a significant change in the state of the system, often with an understanding that the change is irreversible.

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Breaking news: President Biden is pardoning nearly 1,500 Americans, a record for one day. (A number of these are reportedly 
on Trump's hit list once he is president). He has also pardoned his son Hunter.  I am glad he and the vice president were polite during
the official meetings with the new regime, but I'm also encouraged to see them fighting fire with fire about more elemental things.

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Today, Erin Reed shared her latest update to her map of anti-transgender risk. The map is well known among activists and transgender people. It shows risks both by state and at the national level. Overall, the news is absolutely not good.

Wish I’d Said That!

Published December 12, 2024 by Nan Mykel

The Green Study has been a personal essay blog for the last ten years and the commenting community here is largely made up of smart, thoughtful, respectful, and considerate humans. Despite that, polarization of politics has affected many of us right down to the bone. No matter what side you’re on, heels are dug in, and many of us are not particularly good at engaging on controversial topics, myself included, without reacting with defensive anger. Be that as it may, I still consider this my turf and as such, will curate it to the best of my ability. My guiding principles for the comment section are civility, mindfulness, authenticity, and growth. Civility: No personal attacks, name calling or needless escalation. The use of stereotypes or labels and cutesy insult names are not appreciated. Mindfulness: Not everyone shares your life experiences or perspectives. Don’t assume. Authenticity: Save the talking points for the big dogs. I tune out people who recite memes, fake news, inaccurate science, or try to hawk their own wares. Be you and stick with your own perspective. Growth: Conversations get better when people expand on ideas or give a unique perspective. On that note, I have not always followed these principles myself when writing posts and am trying to be more mindful about that. I still like salty language in context and believe that humor which punches upward has its place. If I do not have the time, energy or wherewithal to curate comments on a post effectively, particularly if it’s controversial, comments will be turned off. Please feel free to send me a message via my contact page and I’ll answer emails as time permits. Thank you. Share this:
Comment Policy

Comment Policy

I Didn’t Know–Did you?

Published December 10, 2024 by Nan Mykel

OECD - Energy Education

I visited Google and saw a number of articles beginning with “OEDC countries,” with no explanation of what they were talking about. I figured OEDC was such common knowledge that I must be a dummy not to know.

Seems it was otherwise. More specifically on Google I learned that The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is a unique forum where the governments of 37 democracies with market-based economies collaborate to develop policy standards to promote sustainable economic growth. Non-OECD countries are called developing economies or modernizing economies. https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/OECD#:~:text

China has been an OECD Key Partner since 2007, alongside Brazil, India, Indonesia and South Africa. Since embarking on a programme of dialogue and co-operation with China in 1995, the OECD has contributed to policy reform in China through the sharing of policy experience. I’m unsure about the count list of member countries, since in one post the U.S. refers to the OECD’s number as “democracies,” yet Russia and China–and I don’t know what other countries would not be considered democracies. Incidentally, not surprisingly it appears the largest countries are not in favor of any international enforceable climate change laws, although its [“our”] response was more than 100 pages long.

REBLOG: HOW OLD IS GENDER?

Published December 9, 2024 by Nan Mykel

Hopefully this reblog from an early post by gendermom.wordpress.com will serve to clarify some lingering transgender questions: Let a Gender Mom address the question: https://gendermom.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/how-old-is-gender/

When did you first know what gender you were? Chances are, by age four or five, you were firmly and comfortably established, for life, as a boy or girl. I know I was. But it’s not like that for everyone.

My recent post on the Bitch magazine blog got a fair number of responses, among them several questioning whether five years old was too young to be talking about gender, let alone to be “allowing” my “male” child to live as a girl. I hear this kind of thing a lot.

I, too, probably would have raised similar questions until my child appeared on the scene and began, as children are so apt to do, to teach me all sorts of things I didn’t know I didn’t know.

According to my child’s preschool teacher, four-year-old children are pretty preoccupied with gender. This is when they’re trying to sort the world out into the categories that we adults are so famously obsessed with. This is when girls become enamored with pink, and when boy decide that it’s all about the trucks and Legos.

Unlike sexual orientation, which does generally develop later, children at age four and five are aligning and identifying with the gender that they will likely carry with them through the rest of their lives.

But, my dear reader, you already know that. You already know that we don’t keep kids in a gender-neutral limbo until adolescence. You know that the parents have already selected the color of the baby shower invitations, decided on a name, and dreamed a thousand gendered dreams for their child based on whether those ultrasound pictures showed what my young nephew Adam calls a “ninky.”

I did this, too. And for this I have to pause for a moment and just say, to my child: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that, before you even breathed on your own, I loaded you up with a big steaming pile of gendered expectations. I’m sorry I didn’t realize until recently how silly this was. I know it could have saved you a lot of angst if I had. (I’ll pay for the therapy, OK?)

So, here’s the deal: If my five-year-old child had a vagina, would anyone be giving me shit for letting her wear dresses and call herself a girl? Would anyone be telling me that “five years old is awfully young to be assigning labels, dear.”

Imagine everyone you know taking a “wait and see” attitude about gender among the four- and five-year-olds you know. Can you imagine that? Let’s take a second and imagine it together: You meet little Ella, your co-worker’s daughter, at the company family picnic. Ella is three or four or five years old. When sweet little Ella is out of earshot, frolicking with the other kids, you quiz her mother: “So, are you sure she’s a girl? I mean, can you really know that already?” Ella’s mom would think you were insane.

But this is exactly the question people ask me on a regular basis.

A few months ago, I found myself at the county courthouse, waiting for the judge to finalize my divorce, and hanging out with my attorney, a smart and ambitious lad in his early thirties. I told him about my child, and how she had recently transitioned to a female identity, after months and months of agonizing on my part about whether this was the right path to take.

He then told me that his wife was pregnant. “It’s a boy!” he said as we walked out of the courthouse.

I hesitated. Should I say this?

“Or so you think,” I said, giving him a playful nudge on the shoulder. We both laughed.

But I really hope I made him think.

DOWN TO BRASS TACKS?

Published December 7, 2024 by Nan Mykel

HOPEFULLY: Legal expectations and consequences for nations who ignore or do not follow through on climate responsibilities are being currently thrashed out at the International Justice Court in the Hague now. The hearing is in response to a filing from the republic of Vanuatu, an archipelago with 80 islands. Before its independence in 1980, Vanuatu was jointly administered by France and the U.K., and known as the New Hebrides for 74 years. Today Vanuatu is a republic with a non-executive presidency. nytdirect@nytimes.com

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Romanian Court Annuls Presidential Election Results and Orders a New Vote The decision came days after the government asserted that there had been “cyberattacks” meant to undermine the vote and security council documents indicated possible Russian meddling. Imagine that!

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POETRY CORNER

An Up Poem

Let’s see…balloons go up,

tempers go up,

phalluses go up

And hopes do too.

We get up each day,

sometimes snuggle up,

soprano voices go up

and Subway’s prices too.

Pets lap up good food,

we snap up good deals,

nightmares wake us up

and sweethearts pucker up.

Some sofas fold up.

grads’ caps fly up,

good coffee is drunk up

while UFOs get a look up.

Age of my friends goes up

some stand up to Key’s song;

for some, heaven is up

and drunkards still throw up.

The toilet may stop up,

robbers may hold up.

fish gobble up worms while

good computers back us up.

Surprises sneak up,

sanitary engineers pick up,

earthquakes shake up

and braggarts puff up.

There’s dictionary look ups

and brazen hookups,

too many lock ups and

much too many f-ups

Some poets know not

when to shut up

but wait until they have

cheered up. Time’s up.

NOW!

(I drowned the DOWN poem) Nan

Shrinking populations

Published December 5, 2024 by Nan Mykel

Fertility Rate Continues To Fall: How Governments Could Prepare

Tara Haelle reports on Earth’s shrinking birthrate as of March 20, 2024.

The global fertility rate will gradually decline from now through 2100, continuing a trend since 1950, driven largely by female educational attainment and contraception access, according to newly published projections from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). Accompanying that decline will be dramatic shifts in the distribution of births throughout the world, with the majority of children being born in some of the poorest parts of the world.

“By the end of the century, over three-quarters of global births will happen in low- and lower-middle income countries, which also happen to be places that are going to be under heat stress and vulnerable conditions—food insecurities, economic challenges, environmental challenges—all piling up on top of having still-high fertility rates,” says Natalia Bhattacharjee, an IHME researcher and colead author of the study. High-income countries, meanwhile, will face other challenges, such as maintaining their workforce and managing an aging population’s health care and social security.

“We want to bring these trends to the attention of national governments so they can plan for emerging problems in the economy, environment, and geopolitical securities that should be addressed,” Bhattacharjee says. The projections are an opportunity to give people “a chance to see what the future would probably look like.”

What They Found

The world’s total fertility rate has more than halved since 1950, falling from 4.8 children per childbearing person then to about 2.2 today across 204 countries and territories. That’s just barely above a stabilizing population replacement rate of 2.1,

The researchers predict that the rate will continue to decline to 1.8 in 2050, when roughly a quarter of the world’s countries will have fertility rates higher than the replacement rate, and then to 1.6 in 2100, when only six countries will.

Everyone will have full access to contraception by 2030; “pro-natal” policies are enacted to create supportive environments for those giving birth; and all three of these are achieved. Examples of pro-natal policies include childcare subsidies, extended parental leave, broader access to infertility treatment, and other forms of support for childcare. Even in the scenario when all three of these occur, however, the global fertility rate would still decline to 1.6 by 2100.

“These fertility trends have very far-reaching implications, from economic, climate change, and labor force points of view,” says Randi Goldman, an OB/GYN and program director of the Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility Fellowship at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in New York. “It’s going to be really critical that we have well-informed proactive policymakers who can address some of the upcoming challenges that come from this change in the global fertility rate.”

More than half the world’s population will be born in sub-Saharan Africa by 2100, with just 1 in 10 children born in what are high-income countries today. On the one hand, the falling fertility rate could help reduce carbon emissions and “alleviate some strain on global food systems, fragile environments, and other finite resources,” the study authors write. At the same time, however, most children will be born in parts of the world with the least health-care infrastructure and “most vulnerable to climate change, resource insecurity, political instability, poverty, and child mortality.”

The potential silver lining of the decline is that fewer people use fewer resources. Nonetheless, Goldman says, “I’m not sure those benefits are going to offset the risks having lower fertility rates worldwide with all the other implications.”

In today’s high-income countries, the shrinking fertility rate will mean a shrinking labor force, with fewer working-age adults available to support a larger aging population that will be living longer. Policymakers will therefore need to plan for the increased pressure on health insurance, social security, and health-care infrastructure, the study authors note.

Better and more open immigration policies can be part of the solution for high-income countries, Bhattacharjee says. Immigration, though, is also a very complicated potential solution, Goldman adds. Immigration policies to address future low-fertility challenges should be implemented thoughtfully and ethically, she says, both in terms of nonexploitative policies concerning the immigrants and given the risk of brain drain.

Perhaps the biggest demographic shift will be the anticipated explosion of births in sub-Saharan Africa. Births there currently account for nearly 30% of the world’s population today, but are expected to increase to more than half (54%) in 2100. Even then, however, the overall fertility rate of sub-Saharan Africa will likely fall below replacement levels at about 1.8 per childbearing person.

Making Sense of Falling Fertility : The authors caution that their prediction of declining global fertility “should not be used to justify more draconian measures that limit reproductive rights,” such as restricting access to contraception or abortion, both because these are fundamental rights that should be available to all people and because of the negative impacts such restrictions have on individuals and society as a whole. They point to the example of Romania in the 1960s through the 1980s, when severe restrictions on contraception and abortion resulted in high maternal mortality rates, growth in orphanage populations, and long-term harmful effects on overall educational outcomes and the labor market.

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CLONING, ANYONE?

Published December 3, 2024 by Nan Mykel

ERRONEOUS FANTASIES

Somehow, when I formerly considered cloning, I imagined two identicals, maybe enjoying each other’s company. Wiser now, I realize one is mother to the other, and at least sometimes (if not always) the clone gets a “surrogate mother.” I didn’t know fifteen species have been cloned; many pets also, at the request of their owners.

Even wiser now, I read that Dolly had three mothers: one ewe for the DNA, another for the egg into which the DNA was injected, and a third to carry the resulting cloned embryo.

I knew many secretly fantasized about cloning humans, but there was an ethical, maybe legal barrier. I just discovered the basis…or at least one concern is that with each cloning there are apparently many failures, and misfires with damaged results. Dolly, the first cloned sheep, was named after Dolly Parton and produced in Scotland by Ian Wilmut, head of the original cloning team after 434 attempts (a success rate of 0.2 percent.) She lived from July 5, 1996 until she was euthanized on February 14, 2002, due to an incurable lung tumor. She had also been treated for arthritis.

Dolly led to concerns about cloning a human being — a thought that reportedly horrified Wilmut, originally. This concern spurred policy makers everywhere to action. Indeed, the United Nations (UN) spent 3 years trying to negotiate an international ban on human cloning. Bogged down by differing views on the ethical acceptability of “therapeutic cloning,” in 2005 the UN General Assembly settled on an ambiguous non-binding Declaration that calls upon countries to prohibit all forms of human cloning that are “incompatible with human dignity.”

And I just learned from David Barash’s book The Whispering Within, that human clones, even [horrors] “successful” ones are not expected to naturally be “buddy buddy,” since as he wrote, “A gene that instructed its body to ‘be nice to your clone’ probably was not very strongly favored by natural selection during our evolutionary history.” (And haven’t you heard people complain, “I’m getting to be just like my mother”?)

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I DIDN’T KNOW THAT: Certain groups, and particularly minoritized racial and ethnic groups, were impacted much, much, much more dramatically by COVID, although everybody had a negative experience… https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/podcasts

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Roles for In-Laws: Trump tapped Massad Boulos, the father-in-law of his daughter Tiffany, as a senior adviser covering Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. He also picked Charles Kushner, his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law, as ambassador to France.

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Sign on the Christian Fellowship Church: CHURCH PARKING. trespassers will be baptised.

Sign on the South End Baptist Church: WHOEVER IS PRAYING FOR SNOW, PLEASE STOP

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I wouldn’t want a god who made others lose so I could win.

(At least not all the time).

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