Yes, It Is Hot Outside

Good afternoon, everyone.

Beat the heat with us tomorrow evening at Bar Hours. All attendees will get a firm handshake from yours truly and, if you’re nice, a compliment on your appearance. RSVP here to get the location.

Speaking of heat, was doing some digging yesterday on the adverse effects of prolonged exposure to seasonal extremes and came across this interesting bit of information. According to New York clinical psychologist Joseph Taliercio, almost all psychotropic medications, except for benzodiazepines, can impair the body’s ability to handle heat, raising the risk of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. One-sixth of Americans are on these medications. Heat strokes kill nearly two- thirds of those who suffer it.

Unsurprisingly, there’s no shortage of articles warning about how much more dangerous heat waves are getting because of climate change; yet, until now,  I’ve never seen anything about how medication could  interfere with one’s ability to self-regulate when it’s hot outside.

In her wonderful piece on air conditioning, Mary Harrington highlights one of the main contradictions of climate change. As the Earth gets warmer, she writes, it will require more air conditioning to protect people from the heat, and, in the process, will draw more power, materials, and resources from the grid, which is blamed as the source of the warming phenomenon.

Yes, maybe the grid gets “greener” in the meantime, but powering massive amounts of air conditioning with wind and solar won’t just leave a blight on the Earth, but also require massive amounts of material that don’t fall easily under the narrow environmental focus on climate change. There’s more to the environment than just the “climate.”

Onward.

💋 Misconduct of the Bad Variety Back in June, the Community Review Board began drafting a Zero Tolerance Sexual Misconduct Policy for MNPD. This Monday, the board’s proposed procedure passed, with all seven members in attendance. While the changes only function as suggestions, the board voted to forward the language onto the MNPD, the mayor, and the Metro Council.

Though the board unanimously backed the initiative, appointed member Mark Wynn called attention to the delicate relationship between police departments and direct victim service providers. “It depends on trust,” Wynn said, before explaining that in the past, it was advocacy groups who lobbied for legislation mandating certain protocols for police investigations involving sexual misconduct. Now, says Wynn, these groups’ desire to change internal affairs puts police officers in a difficult position. “It sets up an adversarial relationship with an advocacy group when they demand that…officers in their department be dealt with the same as the public,” he explained. “They're asking [officers] to stand in front of a television camera and say, ‘We need a sexual assault misconduct policy against my trusting partner I've worked with.’” MEGAN PODSIEDLIK