Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalNew York Let Residences for Kids With Serious Mental Health Problems Vanish. Desperate Families Call
New York Let Residences for Kids With Serious Mental Health Problems Vanish. Desperate Families Call the Cops Instead.Sara Taylor felt the knot in her stomach pull tighter even before she answered the phone. The call was from the hospital taking care of her 11-year-old, Amari. And she knew what they were going to say: Amari was being discharged. Come pick her up right away.
Taylor was sure that Amari — that’s her middle name — wasn’t ready to come home. Less than two weeks earlier, in March 2020, she threatened to stab her babysitter with a knife and then she ran into the street. Panicked, the babysitter called 911. Police arrived, restraining Amari and packing her into an ambulance, which rushed her to the mental health emergency room at Strong Memorial Hospital, not far from her home in Rochester, New York.
This had all become a sickeningly familiar routine. Amari had struggled since she was little, racked by a terrible fear that Taylor — who is her great-aunt and has raised her for most of her life — would leave her and not come back. She often woke up screaming from nightmares about someone hurting her family. During the day, she had ferocious tantrums, breaking things, attacking Taylor and threatening to hurt herself.
Taylor searched desperately for help, signing Amari up for therapy and putting her on waitlists for intensive, in-home mental health services that are supposed to be available to New York kids with serious psychiatric conditions. But the programs were full, and it took months to get in.
During Amari’s worst episodes, Taylor had little choice but to call 911 — which Taylor, who is Black, said made her nauseous with fear. She and Amari live just a few miles from the block where Daniel Prude, a Black man with a history of paranoia and erratic behavior, was hooded and pinned to the ground by police until he stopped breathing, in a 2020 incident that began after his brother called 911 for help. Prude died days later at the hospital. In 2021, a video went viral that showed Rochester police officers handcuffing a 9-year-old Black girl and pepper-spraying her in the face while she sat, sobbing, in the back of a squad car. Every time police entered her home, Taylor was terrified that Amari would end up hurt or dead.
“We know that Black children with mental illness are criminalized,” Taylor said. “When you have men with guns coming into your house to handle your sick child, that’s frightening.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/mental-health-beds-new-york-children-disappearing
Mental illness in children is REAL
New York Let Residences for Kids With Serious Mental Health Problems Vanish. Desperate Families Call
New York Let Residences for Kids With Serious Mental Health Problems Vanish. Desperate Families Call the Cops Instead.Sara Taylor felt the knot in her stomach pull tighter even before she answered the phone. The call was from the hospital taking care of her 11-year-old, Amari. And she knew what they were going to say: Amari was being discharged. Come pick her up right away.
Taylor was sure that Amari — that’s her middle name — wasn’t ready to come home. Less than two weeks earlier, in March 2020, she threatened to stab her babysitter with a knife and then she ran into the street. Panicked, the babysitter called 911. Police arrived, restraining Amari and packing her into an ambulance, which rushed her to the mental health emergency room at Strong Memorial Hospital, not far from her home in Rochester, New York.
This had all become a sickeningly familiar routine. Amari had struggled since she was little, racked by a terrible fear that Taylor — who is her great-aunt and has raised her for most of her life — would leave her and not come back. She often woke up screaming from nightmares about someone hurting her family. During the day, she had ferocious tantrums, breaking things, attacking Taylor and threatening to hurt herself.
Taylor searched desperately for help, signing Amari up for therapy and putting her on waitlists for intensive, in-home mental health services that are supposed to be available to New York kids with serious psychiatric conditions. But the programs were full, and it took months to get in.
During Amari’s worst episodes, Taylor had little choice but to call 911 — which Taylor, who is Black, said made her nauseous with fear. She and Amari live just a few miles from the block where Daniel Prude, a Black man with a history of paranoia and erratic behavior, was hooded and pinned to the ground by police until he stopped breathing, in a 2020 incident that began after his brother called 911 for help. Prude died days later at the hospital. In 2021, a video went viral that showed Rochester police officers handcuffing a 9-year-old Black girl and pepper-spraying her in the face while she sat, sobbing, in the back of a squad car. Every time police entered her home, Taylor was terrified that Amari would end up hurt or dead.
“We know that Black children with mental illness are criminalized,” Taylor said. “When you have men with guns coming into your house to handle your sick child, that’s frightening.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/mental-health-beds-new-york-children-disappearing
Mental illness in children is REAL
Drew Brees no longer with NBC Sports due to 'lifestyle choice,' chairman says
Drew Brees is officially done at NBC Sports after one year.
NBC Sports chairman Pete Bevacqua said in a phone interview with The Associated Press that Brees will not be a part of the network's NFL and Notre Dame coverage this year. The New York Post reported last month that the former quarterback would not be coming back as a studio or game analyst.
Following that report, Brees took to social media and said he had not decided his future.
Bevacqua said conversations with Brees have centered around him wanting to spend more time with family.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2022/06/08/brees-wont-return-for-nbcs-nfl-and-notre-dame-coverage/50342895/
Apparently you're supposed to sell your soul to the network? Although spousal unit says his true problem was a wooden on-air personality.....
The way the United States pays for nurses is broken
The pandemic made a long-simmering problem in hospitals impossible to ignore: We desperately depend on nurses to deliver quality health care, but the American health system does not properly value the work that they do — in the most literal sense.
Most US hospitals run under a fee-for-service system: They make money by billing for individual services. Doctors, in this universe, are a revenue generator. They order tests to be run, imaging to be taken, medication to be administered. They conduct surgeries and exams. The hospital can charge for each of those individual services, and patients see them on their bills.
Nurses are essential to each of those services. But because hospitals don’t bill insurers for the care that nurses provide to support a doctor’s orders, they end up on the other side of the balance sheet as a labor cost. Patients end up charged for nurses’ work in the same way they are for housekeeping or Jell-O, as part of the cost of a hospital room.
The work that they do — checking on patients, inserting an IV line, assessing patients for infections, teaching patients how to care for themselves — is not considered a billable service under the current fee-for-service payment model.
“All of that work is invisible, except for maybe the supplies that I used,” Matthew McHugh, professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “The invisibility of nursing work, the inability to put a value on it ... is not in line with how any other kind of professional service would operate.”
This means hospital systems have an economic incentive to keep their nursing staff as small as possible. US hospitals, on average, employ fewer health care staff per capita compared to hospitals in other wealthy countries, most of which have universal health systems that do not rely upon fee-for-service reimbursement.
And when their finances become tight — such as when a global pandemic forces them to cancel moneymaking elective services — nursing and other labor costs are often targeted for cuts. That’s why US hospitals were furloughing nursing staff shortly before they became flooded by Covid-19 patients.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23076581/us-covid-health-care-nurses-pay-salary
Brothers and sisters, this is the fcuking TRUTH!
The way the United States pays for nurses is broken
The pandemic made a long-simmering problem in hospitals impossible to ignore: We desperately depend on nurses to deliver quality health care, but the American health system does not properly value the work that they do — in the most literal sense.
Most US hospitals run under a fee-for-service system: They make money by billing for individual services. Doctors, in this universe, are a revenue generator. They order tests to be run, imaging to be taken, medication to be administered. They conduct surgeries and exams. The hospital can charge for each of those individual services, and patients see them on their bills.
Nurses are essential to each of those services. But because hospitals don’t bill insurers for the care that nurses provide to support a doctor’s orders, they end up on the other side of the balance sheet as a labor cost. Patients end up charged for nurses’ work in the same way they are for housekeeping or Jell-O, as part of the cost of a hospital room.
The work that they do — checking on patients, inserting an IV line, assessing patients for infections, teaching patients how to care for themselves — is not considered a billable service under the current fee-for-service payment model.
“All of that work is invisible, except for maybe the supplies that I used,” Matthew McHugh, professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “The invisibility of nursing work, the inability to put a value on it ... is not in line with how any other kind of professional service would operate.”
This means hospital systems have an economic incentive to keep their nursing staff as small as possible. US hospitals, on average, employ fewer health care staff per capita compared to hospitals in other wealthy countries, most of which have universal health systems that do not rely upon fee-for-service reimbursement.
And when their finances become tight — such as when a global pandemic forces them to cancel moneymaking elective services — nursing and other labor costs are often targeted for cuts. That’s why US hospitals were furloughing nursing staff shortly before they became flooded by Covid-19 patients.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23076581/us-covid-health-care-nurses-pay-salary
Brothers and sisters, this is the fcuking TRUTH!
Amazon fired Chris Smalls. Now the new union leader is one of its biggest problems.
A year ago, Chris Smalls couldn’t get politicians to return his calls.
But on a muggy morning in late April, two of the biggest names in politics — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — were making a special trip to Staten Island, New York to visit with the 33-year-old former Amazon warehouse process assistant, father-of-three, and leader of a resurgent labor movement sweeping the country.
Smalls and his former colleagues, organizing under the banner of the newly formed Amazon Labor Union, or ALU, surprised the world in early April by doing what many thought was impossible: leading the first successful US union campaign at Amazon, a tech giant that has long viewed worker organizing as an existential threat to its business, and done virtually everything in its enormous power to stop it.
“I want you to know that what you did is extraordinary,” said Sen. Sanders, who along with AOC, was having a closed-door strategic meeting with the core ALU organizing team. The politicians were there to discuss the union’s plans for expansion a day before its second vote at a Staten Island warehouse called LDJ5.
Sen. Sanders continued, “All over this country people are working crazy hours, with terrible working conditions, inadequate wages, poor benefits…and what you have done is to take on one of the most powerful corporations in America owned by the second wealthiest guy in this country.”
https://www.vox.com/recode/23145265/amazon-fired-chris-smalls-union-leader-alu-jeff-bezos-bernie-sanders-aoc-labor-movement-biden
Bosses using the same dirty tactics as in the 1930s. History repeats. Over and over....
A 17-Year-Old Processes Police Sexual Violence in One of the Summer's Most Anticipated Novels
In May 2016, a secret within the Oakland Police Department exploded into the public eye: Multiple officers were under investigation for sexually exploiting the teen daughter of a 911 dispatcher, including trafficking her when she was underage. The news sent shockwaves across the city, as residents learned that department higher-ups had known about the misconduct for months. The teen, a sex worker known as Celeste Guap, told reporters she had sex with more than two dozen cops in the Bay Area—for money, protection from arrest, and tips about undercover raids. In interviews, she wavered between self-blame and acknowledging the abuse. “Thinking back at it, yeah, you know, I do now see myself as being a victim,” she told one reporter. “Because I do feel I was taken advantage of.” (Four of the officers ultimately pleaded no contest to charges; other charges were dropped and Guap received a settlement from the city.)
To Leila Mottley, a 13-year-old budding poet and writer watching the news from her East Oakland home, Guap’s story was a revelation. Since Mottley was 11, she had been dealing with unwanted attention from men on the street—men who catcalled or whistled at her or even cornered her as she walked home from her bus stop in the rain. As she watched Guap say, “These men preyed on me,” Mottley recalls, “I remember being really struck by it as a young teenager, existing in this city where I had experienced the ways that my body was vulnerable, but didn’t often see it reflected back to me, or even acknowledged.”
Mottley, who is Black, had long listened to warnings about cops from her father, who grew up amid the protests of 1960s Detroit. He told stories about being detained without cause, and “all the ways that we can and cannot operate when the police are around, or white people are around.” But “my talks around policing as a kid were never about what policing looks like for women, or sexual harassment,” Mottley says. “No one gets that talk…I think, because, what would you say?”
Six years later, Mottley—now a self-assured 19-year-old with piercing green eyes, a nose stud, and a sprig of lavender tattooed on her arm—has answered her own question with Nightcrawling. The debut novel imagines the inner life of Kiara Johnson, a 17-year-old who becomes a sex worker to afford a rent increase and ends up trafficked by Oakland cops, only to be thrust into a public spotlight when the scandal goes public, just like Guap. Deeply rooted in East Oakland—“where we keep our buildings low to the ground and our feet to the sidewalk”—the novel explores Kiara’s joy and grief and search for belonging in the city she loves. Mottley completed it at 17, immediately after graduating high school early. The Black Southern writer Kiese Laymon has called it “the most compelling book written by an American teenager in my lifetime.”
https://www.motherjones.com/media/2022/06/leila-mottley-nightcrawling-police-sex-ring-oakland-youth-poet-laureate/
On my TBR list!
The Special Olympics blew its chance to stand up to America's biggest bully
On Friday, the Special Olympics announced that it had lifted its vaccine mandate after Florida’s Department of Health threatened to impose a $27.5 million fine for having it in place. By doing so, the Special Olympics shamefully capitulated to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the most effective extortionist in the Republican Party, and in doing so put the very people whose well-being the Special Olympics are supposed to promote at risk of getting Covid-19. The games began Sunday and are scheduled to run through June 12.
DeSantis has positioned himself as the leading opponent of any kind of collective action to mitigate Covid-19: He’s frequently boasted that he kept Florida open while other states imposed stay-at-home orders at the start of the coronavirus pandemic (even though he briefly closed the state), opposed mask mandates and signed legislation that allows workers to opt out of private employers’ vaccine requirements. He’s tried to make his state a magnet for anti-vaxxers by offering a $5,000 bonus for police who refuse vaccines, argued that “clearly the vax has not stopped people from being infected with omicron” and refused to say whether he is boosted, making him further to the right than Donald Trump on vaccines. To borrow from his 2018 challenger Andrew Gillum, who was speaking of his opponent’s attraction to racists, I’m not saying DeSantis is an anti-vaxxer; I’m simply saying that the anti-vaxxers believe he’s an anti-vaxxer.
In his effort to seize the mantle of white Christian Republican grievance from Trump, DeSantis has shown an unchecked willingness to bully organizations that do not subscribe to his brand of right-wing politics. On Friday, he used his line-item veto powers to block state funding for a $35 million training facility for the Tampa Bay Rays after the team spoke out on gun violence in response to the shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York. Using public money to pay for private sports teams is a massive waste of taxpayer dollars, but DeSantis blocked the Rays’ funding to show he can “own the libs” harder than anyone else. He signed a bill stripping Disney’s special tax status after its chief executive said the company would pause all political donations in the state after DeSantis signed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which in and of itself was another example of his bullying, in this case, the bullying of LGBTQ+ people.
Rather than let itself be bullied, too, the Special Olympics should have stood up against DeSantis, especially considering that it specifically serves athletes with intellectual disabilities, who are especially vulnerable to Covid-19. When DeSantis gloated in a press conference about the Special Olympics caving, he played coy with why a vaccine mandate matters.
“What connection that has to competing, I don’t understand,” he said. “We’ve never seen something wielded like this vaccine to try to marginalize disfavored people.”
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/special-olympics-succumbs-desantis-threat-over-covid-vaccine-mandate-n1296016
Un-fcuking-believable. Eunice Kennedy Shriver should rise up out of her grave and smite him.
We need to focus on the real fight against 'great replacement' theory
t is common in left-of-center circles to refer to the white supremacist "great replacement" theory — the nonsensical and racist claim that white Americans are deliberately being "replaced" by nonwhite immigrants — as a conspiracy theory. But a striking new poll suggests the left is better off focusing on the racist and antidemocratic principles behind the claim rather than trying to dismiss it primarily as disinformation.
A survey released by the Southern Poverty Law Center last week had an eye-popping finding: An overwhelming majority of Republicans report believing in key tenets of “great replacement” theory. According to the poll, which was conducted with Tulchin Research, a Democratic polling firm, via online panel in late April, 68 percent of Republicans agree with the statement that “the recent change in our national demographic makeup is not a natural change but has been motivated by progressive and liberal leaders actively trying to leverage political power by replacing more conservative white voters.”
Gulp.
It seems that efforts by “great replacement” theory-backing pundits and politicos like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and No. 3 House Republican Elise Stefanik of New York are paying off; the idea that liberals are seeking to remake American political and cultural life by replacing white people appears to be not just mainstream, but in fact dominant on the right.
(snip)
The reality we have to face is that these ideas that originate on the white supremacist right really are going more mainstream. That means showing careful judgment in fighting them. And the fundamental threat of “great replacement” theory isn’t disinformation. It’s rotten, racist values.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/how-fight-great-replacement-theory-support-among-republicans-n1295994
Police driving practices under scrutiny as crashes kill officers, bystanders
Emergency driving is an often dangerous part of modern policing. Even though police departments in recent decades have sought to restrict the deadliest kind — pursuits — hundreds of fatal chases involving police officers are recorded every year across the U.S., and many victims are innocent bystanders, experts said.
According to Chicago Police Department data NBC News obtained through public records requests and first reported, the city has seen a significant amount of wreckage from police pursuits and emergency response crashes.
From August 2017 to the end of last year, the department recorded two dozen fatal chases and 617 crashes during pursuits, the data show.
Fatal pursuits in Chicago far outnumbered those reported during the same period in the country’s two largest cities — six in Los Angeles and two in New York City — according to Fatal Encounters, the independently run database that tracks every deadly interaction with police in the country. (The New York Police Department didn’t respond to a request for confirmation. A Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson referred to the department’s public records unit, which hasn’t yet provided data.)
During the same period, data show, Chicago police recorded 729 emergency response calls that resulted in crashes. Twenty-one civilians and 225 officers were injured.
It’s harder to determine how often officers responding to emergency calls are involved in fatal crashes. No agency tracks nationwide data, said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. But there are examples of officers’ fatally striking people while responding to these calls.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/police-driving-practices-scrutiny-crashes-kill-officers-bystanders-rcna30416
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A year and a half ago, a man was killed in Knoxville TN by a cop speeding w/o lights or siren, as he pulled out from a stop sign and the cop came around a blind curve. It was 3 am and foggy. Believe it or not, the man was cited for "failure to yield" and the cop was exonerated. 
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