New Neighbors

We have seen an increase recently in the numbers of free-range cats.  This young one and a sibling live across the street, but seem to prefer our yard.  

They don't appear to know much yet about dogs and traffic.

Don't forget to vote.

  It might be your last chance.

 

It's Not Over 'til It's Over

 New Mexico COVID-19 update: 6 deaths, 104 hospitalizations, 356 cases.

CDC

Facts Matter

Economist, Robert Reich, does an excellent job in his Guardian column of calling out the Republicans on their three big talking points in the upcoming election.  The most hypocritical and easiest to recall and refute is their criticism on taxes.  Trump and McConnell gave a huge tax break to the richest Americans.  The idea they are champions of average Americans is ludicrous.

Winding up.

 Not much new in the last of the Jan.6 Committee Hearings today.  However, I thought they did a nice job of summarizing the year of work by the committee.  It was interesting to see the clips of the Congressional  leadership during the siege.  Pelosi and Schumer were cool and effective in a very tense and uncertain situation.

I am skeptical that the House will support the effort to force Trump to testify, even if the Dems narrowly retain control.  Even if everything went as desired -- even if Trump dropped dead today -- we would still be facing the massive damage Trump has done by putting his supporters in office at all levels of government, including the retrograde Supreme Court.

It seems unlikely Trump will be able to run again; none of his aspiring lookalikes wants to see him on the ticket, let alone the rest of us.  But all the issues are still going to be in place including the undermining of elections and abortion rights for the 2024 contest.  There is certainly a good chance that someone with Trump's authoritarian bent but smarter could take the top spot.

Mental Health

There is an excellent article in The Guardian by Rachel Aviv, Psychiatry wars: the lawsuit that put psychoanalysis on trial. The author relates the history of an individual with an array of personality disorders. It is not a story with a happy ending, but it does throw some light on practices of psychotherapy and how they have changed over the last century, particularly in regard to psychoanalytic techniques and medication-based therapies. The lawsuit did not resolve the debates over the values of different modalities of treatment, but it did establish a standard for accountability in regard to claims of effectiveness.

Aviv's article got me to reflecting on my own observations of behavioral and mental health issues. I worked in New York as a welfare department caseworker and in San Francisco and Spokane in the Food Stamps program.  In Spokane, in addition to the food stamps eligibility work, I was also often called on to help out in adult protection services. In Las Cruces, New Mexico, I supervised adult in-home care services for the elderly in a city-run senior services program, and later in a guardianship agency. All of those jobs frequently brought me into contact with individuals with behavioral and mental health issues.

When faced with an individual in a crisis involving their mental condition my first effort was often to call on the services of the community mental health agencies.  The test applied at that point by the mental health crisis worker was to determine if the person's state of mind and behavior constituted an imminent threat to self or others. 

I recall one such crisis in Spokane in which one of my food stamp clients threatened to kill himself. Because he seemed very distraught and persistent in his assertions of self harm, I talked the young man into letting me take him in my car to the community mental health center in town.  We were invited into an office for an interview, and when my client was asked about what his problem was he pulled out a switch-blade knife and began waving it around as he talked. I told him that displaying the knife was not going to help improve things and managed to get him to hand over the weapon to me. The interviewer summoned a burly assistant and I was allowed to depart.  I never learned what kind of help the fellow got in the end, but I felt that I had been able to at least initiate an effort to move the situation in the right direction.

More often than not, however, people who seemed to be experiencing a crisis did not pass the imminent harm test. I am reminded, for instance, of the case of an elderly woman who had applied to me to receive food stamps. In addition to experiencing mental and physical health problems, she was living in a chicken coop. Since the mental health agency would not intervene, I made various suggestions about where some emergency services might be had, but she seemed not to have adequate mental resources to explore the possibilities for  assistance, and I was in no position to devote the necessary time to helping in any significant way.

In my work in senior services and guardianship in New Mexico I had somewhat more latitude in getting out of the office setting to serve as an advocate in crisis situations. Social services for the elderly were generally more accessible than for younger people and I made an effort to cultivate relationships with people responsible for providing mental health and medical care. While I thus made an individual effort to perform in a coordinating case management role, the agencies I worked for were not sufficiently invested in that effort to be really effective.

Faced now with epic problems of homelessness, some cities, including Albuquerque, have started to undertake crisis intervention services with teams of workers who go onto the streets, often as an alternative to police intervention. While that strategy seems somewhat promising it likely will not receive the funding needed for real effectiveness, and it is not in any case answering the underlying economic and housing issues. New Mexico is currently also facing the task of rebuilding behavioral health services after the previous Republican governor brought forth baseless allegations of financial improprieties and imposed crippling funding cuts.

Balloon Fiesta 2022

 The rain and wind let up by 8:00 AM on the last day of the event, allowing the mass ascension to take place.  A light wind from the north pushed the balloons south, and then the wind switched direction and pushed them back for landings close to the take-off point.

Beaming Down

 I mentioned watching Star Trek in the 1970s in a recent post along with the thought that the money spent on putting humans in space would be better spent on the ground.  Now I see that, rather surprisingly, William Shatner seems to be in agreement with that idea.  He has a new book out, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, with essays about his life including his thoughts following his recent brief trip into the stratosphere. What he says about the perspective he gained from the experience seems to go against the image I had formed of him as a promoter of big tech and spaceflight enterprises.  

The excerpt from the book, was posted on Slashdot and the responses were generally favorable; also a little surprising given the appeal of that site to the tech nerds, nihilists and anarchists.  There is a co-author, Joshua Brandon, so it is not possible to know how much of the writing was actually penned by Shatner.  However, Shatner is clearly endorsing the content.

National Air and Space Museum model

Levi Platero

I caught the Levi Platero blues/rock group playing at the Gazebo in Old Town.

They will be in Phoenix on Monday, the 10th of October.

Looks like the Balloon Fiesta will be grounded by the weather for the rest of the week.  Hopefully, the afternoon entertainment in the Plaza Vieja will make all those $500 nightly hotel bills seem worth the price.

Designs for Reality

 A large part of the pleasure to be had from using vintage film cameras can be attributed to their tactile qualities, particularly in the compact models.  Holding an example of precise mechanical design in the palm of your hand is an experience which is not available from most modern consumer items like cell phones.

The weight, along with the placement and operation of the controls, communicates the functional potential of the mechanical device as well as engaging the imagination.

With negligible weight, no moving parts and menu-driven controls the cell phone or a tv remote connects you to an abstraction of reality.  The hand-held mechanical devices on the other hand are designed to operate on and manipulate parts of the real physical world.

I was reminded of all that recently when I was preparing to renew my passport.  When I pulled the envelope containing my passport out of a drawer I found that it also held a compact Braun 370 shaver that I had put away with the passport after returning from Greece seventeen years ago.

The little Braun shaver runs on a pair of Double-A batteries.  It is easily cleaned after use and it does a great job in operation, easily comparable to the performance of full-size models costing many times as much.

An online search reveals that compact Braun shavers similar to the 370 are still being sold.  I found an ad for the modern version selling at Walmart for $16.90.

The little Kodak Flash Bantam is one of my favorite cameras.  It uses 828 roll film, fits easily in a pocket  and needs no batteries.

End of an Era

 I've watched the restoration of 2926 since we came to Albuquerque nearly fifteen years ago.  I was unable to visit the site during the Covid years, but the work went on and now seems complete.

I'll hope to get some shots of the locomotive out on the tracks.