Dr William Beaumont: Army Surgeon, Clinical Researcher, fuckin' maniac.
November 21, 1785 – April 25, 1853
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| Father of Gastric Physiology |
hat tip = Reddit - u/Salsal_Azar
Jul 5, 2021
Today I Learned
Too Stoopid Twice
Bob Cesca: "Trump always makes things worse for Trump."
Trump's personal Boeing 757 was always the crown jewel of his wealth -- the ultimate sign that he had made it. He's used it as a backdrop for sleek photo shoots, campaign rallies, VIP tours, for shots of him eating his Big Macs and KFC, plated, with a knife and fork. Trump loved to show it off -- the customized cream-colored leather seats, gilded bathrooms, the seat buckles layered in 24-karat gold.
45* was too stoopid or too stubborn - or too stubbornly stoopid - to get after COVID, making it nearly impossible for him to get re-elected, which made it even more nearly impossible for him to make the money he needs now to keep his sorry ass afloat.
So...
Trump's personal Boeing 757 was always the crown jewel of his wealth -- the ultimate sign that he had made it. He's used it as a backdrop for sleek photo shoots, campaign rallies, VIP tours, for shots of him eating his Big Macs and KFC, plated, with a knife and fork. Trump loved to show it off -- the customized cream-colored leather seats, gilded bathrooms, the seat buckles layered in 24-karat gold.
But today it sits idle on an airport ramp in Orange County, New York, about 60 miles north of Manhattan.
One engine is missing parts. The other is shrink-wrapped in plastic. The cost to fix and get it flyable could reach well into the high six-figures, a price-tag Trump doesn't appear to be dealing with right now. Though the current state of his finances aren't public, the Covid-19 pandemic has taken a toll on the hospitality industry home to so many of his businesses.
One engine is missing parts. The other is shrink-wrapped in plastic. The cost to fix and get it flyable could reach well into the high six-figures, a price-tag Trump doesn't appear to be dealing with right now. Though the current state of his finances aren't public, the Covid-19 pandemic has taken a toll on the hospitality industry home to so many of his businesses.
We All Fall Down
NYT: (pay wall)
Lax Enforcement Let South Florida Towers Skirt Inspections for Years
The collapse of Champlain Towers South has prompted a review of hundreds of older high-rises. Some buildings ignored or delayed action on serious maintenance issues.
Out of the smoke and cinders of a city convulsed by race riots and an immigration crisis, the towers kept rising, each new development remaking Miami’s skyline in the early 1980s and marking an ambitious bet that the battered community would turn itself around.
Over the next 40 years, high-rises like Champlain Towers, in the sleepy, beachfront enclave of Surfside, stood witness to Miami’s remarkable rebound, luxurious, multistory symbols of endurance — of booms and busts but also the harsh South Florida elements: scorching sun and driving rains, battering winds and slashing saltwater.
Florida’s high-rise building regulations have long been among the strictest in the nation. But after parts of Champlain Towers South tumbled down on June 24, killing at least 24 people and leaving 121 unaccounted for, evidence has mounted that those rules have been enforced unevenly by local governments, and sometimes not at all.
Miami-Dade County officials said last week that they were prioritizing reviews of 24 multistory buildings that either had failed major structural or electrical inspections required after 40 years or had not submitted the reports in the first place. But the county’s own records show that 17 of those cases had been open for a year or more. Two cases were against properties owned by the county itself. The oldest case had sat unresolved since 2008.
In the tiny town of Bay Harbor Islands, two teardrops of land in Biscayne Bay that lie just north and west of Surfside, more than a dozen multistory structures or large commercial buildings that had been scheduled to turn in inspection reports had not submitted them as of last week, records show. One property appeared to be more than seven years late in filing.
The city of North Miami Beach had tried and failed for years to bring a 10-story condo building within its borders, Crestview Towers, into compliance with the 40-year recertification requirements. When the building’s condo association finally submitted the required paperwork last week, about nine years late, it documented critical safety concerns, a city spokesman said. Officials evacuated the building on Friday.
Meanwhile, the same local governments were pursuing a haphazard approach to identifying other potentially unsafe buildings across the region, with the age and height criteria that would prompt added scrutiny varying from one place to the next. At least one local government, the village of Key Biscayne, was opting to conduct no extra inspections at all, an official there said.
Even if building auditors focus only on towers of 10 stories or more that were built in the 1970s and 1980s, the task would still be daunting. An analysis of property records by The New York Times shows that at least 270 such buildings dot the skylines of Miami-Dade County’s cities, villages and towns, with dozens more in the county’s unincorporated reaches.
Investigators have yet to determine whether the Champlain Towers South collapse was caused by inherent structural problems, a lack of needed maintenance or some other, unknown factor. They were forced to pause work at the site last week amid concerns that the portions of the building that were still standing had become unstable and could collapse at any time. On Sunday, officials demolished the remainder of the building as a tropical storm bore down on Florida from the Caribbean.
The patchwork response to the Champlain Towers South collapse, and lack of answers about what caused the building to fall, were doing little to ease the minds of South Florida condo residents, some of whom had begun to eye their waterfront homes with sudden fear. Such concerns only intensified over the weekend after local officials evacuated a second building, this time a three-story structure in Miami Beach with 24 condo units, after the authorities found a failure in the flooring system and “excessive deflection on an exterior wall.”
“Every time there is a noise or a rumble, you start to think, How safe is this building?” Albert M. Barg, 77, said of his 23-story condo building in Sunny Isles Beach. The answer, he added, was “I don’t know.”
Dyann Piltser, 49, said she had put her Sunny Isles Beach condo up for sale. “I just don’t want to live in such a large building,” she said, “with so many elements beyond your control.”
Built Amid Turmoil
Miami is packed with multistory buildings that have spent decades exposed to sun, rain, winds and saltwater.
Some went up during Miami’s Art Deco heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Others rose during an era of explosive growth in the 1950s and 1960s. Records show that more than 57 high-rises were built on barrier islands surrounding the city from 1970 to 1979.
The buildings of the early 1980s took shape against a backdrop of turmoil and economic uncertainty. In May 1980, rioters looted and burned large areas of the city, enraged at the acquittal of four police officers who had beaten an unarmed Black man to death during a traffic stop. Scores of Cubans and Haitians were coming ashore each day in a mass immigration event that would leave Miami’s public safety and social service agencies overwhelmed under the weight of some 150,000 new arrivals.
The combined effect was an exodus that pushed down property values in the city and surrounding communities, which had their own problems. South Beach was so awash in crime in 1980 that many were afraid even to walk its streets, said Merrett R. Stierheim, who was the county manager at the time. “I remember putting my feet on the floor and asking myself, ‘What in the hell is next?’” Mr. Stierheim recalled of those days. “It was a long struggle for Miami-Dade and all our cities to get a handle on this.”
In 1981, the year the Champlain Towers buildings were completed, Time magazine published a cover story titled, “Paradise Lost?” that singled out South Florida for its high rates of violent crime and drug smuggling.
The project’s developer, a Toronto lawyer and businessman named Nathan Reiber, who died in 2014, had run afoul of Canadian tax authorities before moving to Florida in the 1970s, and he eventually would plead guilty to a tax evasion charge in Canada, The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario reported. While the Champlain Towers were being built, other developers criticized city officials for accepting campaign contributions from the project in exchange for helping it along.
Grand jury inquiries through the 1980s and 1990s documented slipshod work by Miami-area building inspectors, though much of that scrutiny focused on inspections of single-family homes. Other criminal investigations have singled out government employees for taking gifts from developers, including, most recently, the top building official in Miami Beach.
Still, there was no evidence that high-rise buildings constructed during that era have been any more prone to problems than others, engineering experts and builders said.
Residents and visitors of older buildings across the Miami area in recent days have posted photos and videos of failing concrete and other problems on social media, but such defects are often superficial and not cause for alarm. “All concrete cracks — it’s made to crack,” said Allyn E. Kilsheimer, a structural engineer hired by Surfside to help investigate the Champlain Towers collapse. “The issue is to understand what the crack is, what might have caused it if anything, and then making sure it doesn’t cause more problems.”
Property data shows that more than 30 high-rises were built in coastal Miami areas from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, and records and interviews suggest that their states of repair vary widely from building to building.
Eleven of those towers were 12 stories or higher and built in the three years preceding the construction of Champlain Towers South. All are now past the age at which they should have submitted reports proving they had been scrutinized by an engineer for structural and electrical problems.
In one such report, an engineer noted last year that several concrete support columns had deteriorated in the parking garage of Winston Towers 700, a 23-story condo building in Sunny Isles Beach built in 1980. The problem most likely occurred as a result of pool chemicals leaking onto them from above, the engineer wrote, noting that while the columns appeared to have been properly shored up, they would have to be repaired before he would certify the building as safe. It was not clear whether the work was completed.
In another report, for the 19-story Bal Harbour 101 on Collins Avenue, less than two miles north of where the Champlain Towers stood, the engineering inspector documented a need for concrete repairs to the pool deck and waterproofing of the building’s north deck but concluded that the overall building structure was in good condition. Even so, he noted, concrete spalling and corrosion of reinforcement metal in the pool’s pump room would require significant structural repairs.
Recertification regulations required the building to complete an inspection report around 2018, when the building turned 40. But the process lagged, and records show that the village did not certify that the high-rise was in compliance until July 1 — a week after the Champlain Towers South collapse.
The condo building’s manager, Igor Bond, said Friday that he had been getting calls from concerned residents for a week. “They’re asking me about how safe the building is,” Mr. Bond said, “and we’re telling them, ‘Absolutely!’”
The condo association’s president did not respond to a request for comment.
Uneven Enforcement
Unlike the standards for single-family homes, which were blasted by critics after entire neighborhoods were wiped out by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the regulations for multistory structures have been among the toughest in the nation since the 1950s, builders and engineers said. One major reason: Many of the area’s first high-rises went up along the ocean, and officials wanted to be sure they could stand up to hurricane winds, flooding and rain.
“Permits and the codes were always tough in South Florida,” said Oscar Sklar, an architect and builder who helped complete Champlain Towers East in Surfside in 1994. “I don’t think it was any more lenient before than now.”
The regulations became even tougher in the 1970s, when the collapse of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration building led to the 40-year recertification requirements.
They were strengthened once more in the mid-1980s, after a condo complex in Cocoa Beach, which is about 60 miles east of Orlando, collapsed during construction, killing 11 workers. That change required developers to hire independent inspectors to monitor the structural integrity of multistory development projects as they progressed, but it was not in effect when Champlain Towers South was going up in 1981.
Even so, buildings across the region have racked up histories of violations, allowed to linger in some cases as a result of spotty compliance and enforcement.
Bay Harbor Islands, for one, has struggled to bring all of its buildings into compliance with the tough recertification rules. Fourteen structures were supposed to submit 40-year inspection reports in 2020.
Six of those never responded to notices, records show. The town sent certified letters to three property owners, but the letters were returned. Four other buildings submitted reports but were rejected because the buildings needed to do more work.
As of last week, town records listed only one building as having successfully completed the process.
“The small number of buildings that have yet to comply with the 40-year inspection have already received a notice of violation, and they are subject to fines if they do not timely comply with the certification process,” Maria Lasday, the town manager of Bay Harbor Islands, said in an email.
In North Miami Beach, where Crestview Towers was evacuated on Friday, the city said it had fined the building for noncompliance repeatedly, though it was not clear whether it had ever collected any money from the property.
It was only after the Champlain Towers collapse that Crestview turned in its 40-year recertification report, which had been completed in January. A lawyer for the condo board said the board had assumed the engineer conducting the inspection had shared findings with the city, but that was apparently not the case.
“The very first page of the report, once we got it, said, ‘This building is unsafe,’” said Willis Howard, the spokesman for North Miami Beach.
Holman J. Pérez, who had to leave his eighth-floor apartment on Friday night with his wife and two children, faulted the building’s management but also the city.
“Why did the city allow this?” he said, standing outside the building. “How can they have a report that was made in January and just not turn it in to anyone? Aren’t they the ones in charge of this?”
Unfortunately, this may turn out to be a very good example of why you don't want "the free market in charge of things".
First, because any correction is always after-the-fact - after people have been hurt and killed.
And second, because "the free market" will now begin the process of ducking responsibility - trying to lay it off on the other guy - or more probably blaming "bad government", as if the rent-seekers haven't been busily fucking up the government all along, intending to make it bad - so they'd have a patsy they could blame when the shit went down.
COVID-19 Update
World
USA
GOP governors implored their residents on Sunday to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, as polling shows that vaccine hesitancy has been driven by Republicans and as the virus’s new, more contagious delta variant has caused recent upticks in covid-19 cases in areas with low vaccination rates.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) on Sunday expressed concern about possible “trouble” ahead for Arkansans if the state did not accelerate its vaccination rate. In Arkansas, about 53 percent of adults have at least one dose of the vaccine, compared with about two-thirds of adults nationally. The state has seen a recent spike in covid cases and hospitalizations, driven mostly by the delta variant.
“The solution is the vaccinations,” Hutchinson said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that while many of the state’s senior citizens have gotten vaccinated, the delta variant was now hitting Arkansas’ younger, unvaccinated adults. “It is a great concern.”
Hutchinson avoided saying whether he would reimpose mask mandates if the state’s numbers did not improve and also stopped short of saying Arkansas was about to experience a third wave of covid cases and deaths.
However, he did emphasize that the state would continue to make vaccines accessible — including, for example, offering free shots at the state’s July Fourth “Pops on the River” celebration on Sunday.
“We are in a race,” Hutchinson said. “And if we stopped right here, and we didn’t get a greater percent of our population vaccinated, then we’re going to have trouble in the next school year and over the winter. So, we want to get ahead of that curve. Working very hard to do that.”
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll showed 74 percent of people who haven’t been vaccinated say they probably or definitely won’t get vaccinated — and that the divide fell sharply along party lines. According to the survey, 86 percent of Democrats have received at least one vaccine shot compared with 45 percent of Republicans. Only 6 percent of Democrats said they are not likely to get vaccinated, compared with 47 percent of Republicans, including 38 percent of Republicans overall who said they definitely will not get the vaccine.
Hutchinson alluded to some of that partisan divide Sunday when asked about why it had been so difficult to increase Arkansas’ vaccination rate.
“Well, in a rural state, in a conservative state, there is hesitancy. And you’re trying to overcome that,” Hutchinson said. “We got the early vaccinations out because people were anxious. They were in a very vulnerable population. Our cases went down dramatically. And that slowed the vaccination rate. The urgency diminished. And now it’s picking up again.”
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) had blunter words Sunday when asked about vaccine hesitancy, particularly among young people, despite the incentives states are offering that include lottery prizes and college scholarships.
“The red states probably have a lot of people that are very, very conservative in their thinking and they think, ‘Well, I don’t have to do that.’ But they’re not thinking right,” Justice said on ABC’s “This Week.” The governor has aggressively urged his residents to get vaccinated for months, and West Virginia has been offering everything from college scholarships to free hunting and fishing licenses as incentives.
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New Cases: 330,007 (⬆︎ .18%)
New Deaths: 6,168 (⬆︎ .15%)
USA
New Cases: 4,169 (⬆︎ .01%)
New Deaths: 38 (⬆︎ .01%)
Yesterday, July 4th, 2021
0 Vaccinated people
and
6,168 Un-Vaccinated people
were killed by COVID-19
182.4 million vaccinated
Including more than 157.3 million Americans who have been fully vaccinated.
In the last week, an average of 1.04 million doses per day were administered,
a 25% increase over the week before.
And now - finally - Republican governors are getting on board, urging their residents to get vaxxed.
To be fair, some of these guys haven't been following the standard GOP bullshit, even though they've also not exactly been overly vocal in pushing for the appropriate protocols like masks and distance and closings, etc. But now they're out there talking like they shoulda been talking 16 months ago. 16 fucking months.
But also too - these 3 GOP Governors in particular have been among the reasonable ones who, while not exactly qualifying for any Profiles In Courage laurels, at least haven't been leading-by-the-stoopid.
GOP governors implored their residents on Sunday to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, as polling shows that vaccine hesitancy has been driven by Republicans and as the virus’s new, more contagious delta variant has caused recent upticks in covid-19 cases in areas with low vaccination rates.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) on Sunday expressed concern about possible “trouble” ahead for Arkansans if the state did not accelerate its vaccination rate. In Arkansas, about 53 percent of adults have at least one dose of the vaccine, compared with about two-thirds of adults nationally. The state has seen a recent spike in covid cases and hospitalizations, driven mostly by the delta variant.
“The solution is the vaccinations,” Hutchinson said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that while many of the state’s senior citizens have gotten vaccinated, the delta variant was now hitting Arkansas’ younger, unvaccinated adults. “It is a great concern.”
Hutchinson avoided saying whether he would reimpose mask mandates if the state’s numbers did not improve and also stopped short of saying Arkansas was about to experience a third wave of covid cases and deaths.
However, he did emphasize that the state would continue to make vaccines accessible — including, for example, offering free shots at the state’s July Fourth “Pops on the River” celebration on Sunday.
“We are in a race,” Hutchinson said. “And if we stopped right here, and we didn’t get a greater percent of our population vaccinated, then we’re going to have trouble in the next school year and over the winter. So, we want to get ahead of that curve. Working very hard to do that.”
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll showed 74 percent of people who haven’t been vaccinated say they probably or definitely won’t get vaccinated — and that the divide fell sharply along party lines. According to the survey, 86 percent of Democrats have received at least one vaccine shot compared with 45 percent of Republicans. Only 6 percent of Democrats said they are not likely to get vaccinated, compared with 47 percent of Republicans, including 38 percent of Republicans overall who said they definitely will not get the vaccine.
Hutchinson alluded to some of that partisan divide Sunday when asked about why it had been so difficult to increase Arkansas’ vaccination rate.
“Well, in a rural state, in a conservative state, there is hesitancy. And you’re trying to overcome that,” Hutchinson said. “We got the early vaccinations out because people were anxious. They were in a very vulnerable population. Our cases went down dramatically. And that slowed the vaccination rate. The urgency diminished. And now it’s picking up again.”
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) had blunter words Sunday when asked about vaccine hesitancy, particularly among young people, despite the incentives states are offering that include lottery prizes and college scholarships.
“The red states probably have a lot of people that are very, very conservative in their thinking and they think, ‘Well, I don’t have to do that.’ But they’re not thinking right,” Justice said on ABC’s “This Week.” The governor has aggressively urged his residents to get vaccinated for months, and West Virginia has been offering everything from college scholarships to free hunting and fishing licenses as incentives.
Despite that, only 52 percent of adults in West Virginia have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine. Justice expressed frustration with the stalled efforts, particularly with getting young people “across the finish line.”
“When it really boils right down to it, they’re in a lottery to themselves,” he said. “We have a lottery that says if you’re vaccinated we’re going to give you stuff. Well, you’ve got another lottery for them, and it’s a death lottery.”
Justice added that he thought the only thing that would compel some holdouts to get vaccinated would be the deaths of friends and family.
“What would put them over the edge is an awful lot of people dying,” he said. “The only way it’s really going to happen is a catastrophe that none of us want. We just have to keep trying.”
On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Gov. Spencer Cox (R-Utah) explained that his state’s lower vaccination rate was partly the result of having the country’s youngest population, adding that adults in Utah are getting vaccinated at the same rate as rest of nation. He called the vaccination gap among Republicans “troubling” and said “hopefully reason will rule.”
“When it really boils right down to it, they’re in a lottery to themselves,” he said. “We have a lottery that says if you’re vaccinated we’re going to give you stuff. Well, you’ve got another lottery for them, and it’s a death lottery.”
Justice added that he thought the only thing that would compel some holdouts to get vaccinated would be the deaths of friends and family.
“What would put them over the edge is an awful lot of people dying,” he said. “The only way it’s really going to happen is a catastrophe that none of us want. We just have to keep trying.”
On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Gov. Spencer Cox (R-Utah) explained that his state’s lower vaccination rate was partly the result of having the country’s youngest population, adding that adults in Utah are getting vaccinated at the same rate as rest of nation. He called the vaccination gap among Republicans “troubling” and said “hopefully reason will rule.”
"...hopefully reason will rule." ? With Republicans?
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Today's Keith
Here's Keith Olbermann, being very Keith Olbermann-ey, but with a very good point: We deal with this shit now - even though "the racism thing" is hard to grapple with - or we deal with it later, when the racism thing is outa hand and damned near impossible.
Watchdog groups warn that Patriot Front’s march through Philly reflects increasing recruitment, activity in the region
Armed with shields, smoke bombs and banners touting “Reclaim America,” a white supremacist group marched through Center City late Saturday into early Sunday, clashing with a few counterprotesters before leaving as abruptly as it arrived.
A Philadelphia police spokesperson said Sunday that there were no arrests or reports of vandalism from a demonstration by Patriot Front. The group of about 200 marched down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway toward Penn’s Landing, where members had parked a few rented Penske trucks.
Still, organizations monitoring extremist groups and hate speech are troubled by the appearance of a large contingent of Patriot Front members in such a public manner on Independence Day weekend. They say the group — which traces its roots to the violent 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Va. — has become increasingly active in Pennsylvania in recent months, and is staging actions such as Saturday night’s march in Philadelphia in an attempt to spread its message and bolster its ranks.
Shira Goodman, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Philadelphia chapter, said Patriot Front has embarked on an aggressive propaganda campaign, distributing leaflets, posting stickers, and spraying graffiti throughout the Philadelphia suburbs and Lehigh Valley, as well as conducting flash mob-like meetings with their members that they later post on social media to use as a recruitment tool.
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Remember Karl Popper:
And btw, appeasement of these assholes - looking the other way and just shrugging it off - will only get us a bunch of even more dangerous assholes. It's happening now, and this ass-hat parade in Philadelphia shows the problem is metastasizing.
Watchdog groups warn that Patriot Front’s march through Philly reflects increasing recruitment, activity in the region
Armed with shields, smoke bombs and banners touting “Reclaim America,” a white supremacist group marched through Center City late Saturday into early Sunday, clashing with a few counterprotesters before leaving as abruptly as it arrived.
A Philadelphia police spokesperson said Sunday that there were no arrests or reports of vandalism from a demonstration by Patriot Front. The group of about 200 marched down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway toward Penn’s Landing, where members had parked a few rented Penske trucks.
Still, organizations monitoring extremist groups and hate speech are troubled by the appearance of a large contingent of Patriot Front members in such a public manner on Independence Day weekend. They say the group — which traces its roots to the violent 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Va. — has become increasingly active in Pennsylvania in recent months, and is staging actions such as Saturday night’s march in Philadelphia in an attempt to spread its message and bolster its ranks.
Shira Goodman, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Philadelphia chapter, said Patriot Front has embarked on an aggressive propaganda campaign, distributing leaflets, posting stickers, and spraying graffiti throughout the Philadelphia suburbs and Lehigh Valley, as well as conducting flash mob-like meetings with their members that they later post on social media to use as a recruitment tool.
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Jul 4, 2021
It's The Love, Stupid
People tell us "love hurts", but that's not true.
Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Envy & jealousy hurt. Losing someone hurts.
Who Ya Callin' Snowflake?
The nation’s summer holiday season was refreshed this year with the addition of Juneteenth National Independence Day a few weeks before the Fourth of July. The day symbolizes the end of enslavement in the United States, and its place on the federal calendar was won in large part thanks to the energy of the broad movement that emerged last year in response to the murder of George Floyd.
The speed and virtual unanimity with which June 19 joined July 4 might seem to foretell a new reckoning with America’s brutally racist past, spurred on by 2020’s push to confront injustice. Yet instead of a new era of honesty and critical inquiry, the United States is being dragged into a moral panic about anti-racism itself, as agitated parents, right-wing activists and red-state lawmakers rail against their version of critical race theory. Their assault would allow only for a “history” that holds no contemporary consequences; racism ended in the past, according to the developing backlash, and we would all be better off if we didn’t try to connect it to the present.
So in the same week when Juneteenth became a national holiday, schoolteachers in Texas, where the commemoration originally marked the end of slavery in that state, could teach about these events only at their peril: Texas now precludes any teacher from exploring the state’s own history of enslavement if any student should “feel discomfort, guilt, [or] anguish . . . on account of the individual’s race or sex.” On the federal level, the same Republican senators who voted for the Juneteenth holiday also demanded that the Education Department end its effort to encourage schools to fully explore the history of enslavement, saying the push involved “divisive, radical, and historically-dubious buzzwords and propaganda.”
In Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an ill-conceived, overbroad bill that chills the long-overdue reckoning with the Tulsa Race Massacre — a vicious orgy of racist violence carried out in 1921 against one of the nation’s most affluent African American communities. This new law, passed under a special emergency provision, bans the teaching of “divisive concepts” implying that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”
Texas and Oklahoma join a list of six states that have ratified such legislation, with more than a dozen others considering it. These laws cut off the necessary classroom discussion of racial justice and reconciliation taking shape in Tulsa, Houston, Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta, Chicago and other communities across the country inspired by and responsive to #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName.
Banning ‘critical race theory’ would be bad for conservatives, too
Proponents of such reactionary legislation insist that nothing in the laws bans teaching about historical racism. Technically, that’s true: The text of these laws does not necessarily mention particular historical events, critical race theory or the 1619 Project. That would be far too obvious.
Instead, the laws’ language — often eerily identical — is even more insidious: It explicitly sets out to sanction certain feelings as part of a disingenuous crackdown on racial division. In closing off room to explore the impact of America’s racist history by citing “division” — a subjective condition that turns on any student’s (or parent’s) claim to feel resentment or guilt — the laws directly threaten any teacher who pursues a sustained, critical understanding of the deeper causes, legacies or contemporary implications of racism in fomenting uncivil discord.
The hysteria about this putatively un-American inquiry is possible in part because Americans are not often taught about the policies and practices through which racism has shaped our nation. Nor do we typically teach that racist aggression against reform has been repeatedly legitimized as self-defense — an embodiment of an enduring claim that anti-racism is racism against White people.
The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy
This pattern of defending white supremacy by resorting to group interest embodies the very opposite of the individualism so frequently touted in conservative politics. Very few Americans learn that just after the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson vetoed legislation protecting the civil rights of newly freed African Americans, essentially claiming such laws to be preferential treatment for Blacks and reverse discrimination against Whites. Nor is there much candid discussion today about how the wave of White racial terrorism that destabilized Radical Reconstruction in the South was framed as self-defense. This was followed by White segregationist rule for the better part of the 20th century, buttressed by the acquiescence of the Supreme Court and the supposed greatest legal minds of the era.
The reverse-racism trope emerged again after World War II, when segregationists denounced the simple demands for nondiscrimination in public accommodations as assaults on Whites’ civil rights. Likewise, the Southern Manifesto against school desegregation, signed by dozens of White lawmakers, framed widespread resistance to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in terms of defending White heritage and the well-being of vulnerable White schoolchildren. Unsurprisingly, White children are once again the front line in this current war against critical race theory in the classroom — it’s a tried-and-true method of racial retrenchment.
But the comfort of a ban on whatever conservatives imagine critical race theory to be will further deny students and scholars the chance to understand the past. The massacre in Tulsa a century ago is just one telling example of how the convergence of law, institutions and individuals enabled diabolical attacks on American citizens. Examining Tulsa through the prism of the real critical race theory, which I’ve been a leading scholar in developing, would involve unearthing the conditions that allowed White institutions and leaders of the time to mobilize the law to set a massacre of hundreds in motion, and uncovering the long-term consequences. The legal dimensions would include the formal deputizing and arming of White citizens, the rounding up and interning of survivors, and the filing of charges against victims for inciting violence. Oklahoma’s new law and the others around the country would apparently forbid a close look at the massacre’s legal aftermath — namely, the failure to indict or prosecute anyone. Teachers would be further discouraged from mounting a broader inquiry into the massacre’s legal backdrop — the laws that corralled Blacks into certain neighborhoods and that shored up the economic segregation of professions. The prohibition of any discussion suggesting that there are contemporary responsibilities shared by society as a whole precludes consideration of what a long-overdue commitment to justice might entail.
What is critical race theory and why did Oklahoma just ban it?
We know from the history of race in America just where sanitized and whitewashed versions of our past lead — to assumptions that yawning inequalities in health, wealth and a range of other areas are simply inherent features of American life. The fact that the 1921 Tulsa Massacre happened was always knowable — a few survivors are still alive — but without a critical confrontation with our history, the long-term impact of the massacre fades into a bloody mist.
Those who want to expand our nation’s literacy about our racial past and those who wish it to remain illegible to all but a determined few do agree on one thing: that examining our history has consequences. The disagreement becomes volatile when those who embrace America’s promises ask that we take up the truths of our history, while critics claim it is only patriotic to perpetuate a lie. (Martin Luther King Jr. warned of just this sort of turn more than 50 years ago, in “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,” his final book before he was murdered: “In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character.”) Theirs is not a debate about ideas but rather an attempt — on behalf of the racially inequitable status quo — to shut down debate altogether.
The impulse to quash discussion of racism comes out of the same political movement that believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election — and that mobs ransacking the Capitol on Jan. 6 were justified in their bloodthirsty assault on democracy because they contend they were there to save it. Understood in context with parallel efforts to suppress democracy and protest, it should be clear that the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Indeed, beyond this incendiary 2022 campaign strategy lies the future of America. We cannot fight to realize our loftiest values if past and present injustices are made unspeakable. This is why anyone who marched for justice for George Floyd or Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor, anyone who can acknowledge that a sanitized history of the Civil War and Reconstruction led to nearly a century of segregation, anyone who does not want their children insulated from our nation’s past, anyone who is concerned about a creeping authoritarianism and the myths of the past that abet it, and anyone who believes in a truly multiracial democracy should be relentless in opposing the new efforts to banish anti-racist thought and speech from public institutions.
When it comes to racial reckoning, the future of our country depends not on whether we litigate who among us is guilty but whether we all see ourselves as responsible. Let us together stand up to these cynical attacks — we have seen them too many times before to fall prey to another cycle of race, reform and retrenchment.
Buncha whiny-butt pussies.
Today's Tweet
Perspective, bitches.
It's just a couple of million in tax evasion, it's not like he tried to pass a bad twenty or something.
— Fred Harding (@OPCGhost) July 4, 2021
COVID-19 Update
World
USA
"When it does, it mutates, and it could throw off a variant mutation that is even more serious down the road."
All viruses mutate, and while the coronavirus is not particularly mutation-prone, it does change and evolve.
Most of the changes mean nothing to the virus, and some can weaken it. But sometimes, a virus develops a random mutation that gives it an advantage -- better transmissibility, for instance, or more efficient replication, or an ability to infect a great diversity of hosts.
Viruses with an advantage will outcompete other viruses, and will eventually make up the majority of virus particles infecting someone. If that infected person passes the virus to someone else, they'll be passing along the mutant version.
If a mutant version is successful enough, it becomes a variant.
But it has to replicate to do that. An unvaccinated person provides that opportunity.
"As mutations come up in viruses, the ones that persist are the ones that make it easier for the virus to spread in the population," Andrew Pekosz, a microbiologist and immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told CNN.
"Every time the viruses changes, that gives the virus a different platform to add more mutations. Now we have viruses that spread more efficiently."
Viruses that don't spread cannot mutate.
Variants have arisen all over the world -- the B.1.1.7 or Alpha variant was first seen in England. The B.1.351 or Beta variant was first spotted in South Africa. The Delta variant, also called B.1.617.2, was seen first in India. And the US has thrown up several of its own variants, including the B.1.427 or Epsilon lineage first seen in California and the B.1.526 or Eta variant first seen in New York.
Already, one new variant has swept much of the world. Last summer, a version of the virus carrying a mutation called D614G went from Europe to the US and then the rest of the world. The change made the virus more successful—it replicated better -- so that version took over from the original strain that emerged from China. It appeared before people starting naming the variants, but it became the default version of the virus.
Most of the newer variants added changes to D614G. The Alpha variant, or B.1.1.7, became the dominant variant in the US by late spring thanks to its extra transmissibility. Now the Delta variant is even more transmissible, and it's set to become the dominant variant in many countries, including the US.
The current vaccines protect well against all the variants so far, but that could change at any moment. That's why doctors and public health officials want more people to get vaccinated.
"The more we allow the virus to spread, the more opportunity the virus has to change," the World Health Organization advised last month.
Vaccines are not widely available in many countries. But in the US, there is plenty of supply, with slowing demand. Just 18 states have fully vaccinated more than half their residents, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Currently, approximately 1,000 counties in the United States have vaccination coverage of less than 30%. These communities, primarily in the Southeast and Midwest, are our most vulnerable. In some of these areas, we are already seeing increasing rates of disease," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told a White House briefing Thursday.
"Every time we see the virus circulating in the population, particularly a population that has pockets of immune people, vaccinated people, and pockets of unvaccinated people, you have a situation where the virus can probe," Pekosz said.
If a virus tries to infect someone with immunity, it may fail, or it may succeed and cause a mild or asymptomatic infection. In that case, it will replicate in response to the pressure from a primed immune system.
Like a bank robber whose picture is on wanted posters everywhere, the virus that succeeds will be the virus that makes a random change that makes it look less visible to the immune system.
Those populations of unvaccinated people give the virus the change not only to spread, but to change.
"All it takes is one mutation in one person," said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and immunologist at Boston College.
New Cases: 381,276 (⬆︎ .21%)
New Deaths: 7,214 (⬆︎ .18%)
USA
New Cases: 7,978 (⬆︎ .02%)
New Deaths: 93 (⬆︎ .02%)
Yesterday, July 3rd, 2021
0 Vaccinated people
and
7,214 Un-Vaccinated people
were killed by COVID-19
182.1 million vaccinated
Including more than 157 million people who have been fully vaccinated in the United States.
In the last week, an average of 1.12 million doses per day were administered, a 46% increase over the week before.
The stoopid behavior of presumably smart people is making this worse and prolonging the difficulties.
CNN:
Unvaccinated people are "variant factories," infectious diseases expert says
Unvaccinated people do more than merely risk their own health. They're also a risk to everyone if they become infected with coronavirus, infectious disease specialists say.
That's because the only source of new coronavirus variants is the body of an infected person.
"Unvaccinated people are potential variant factories," Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told CNN Friday.
"The more unvaccinated people there are, the more opportunities for the virus to multiply," Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said.
Unvaccinated people are "variant factories," infectious diseases expert says
Unvaccinated people do more than merely risk their own health. They're also a risk to everyone if they become infected with coronavirus, infectious disease specialists say.
That's because the only source of new coronavirus variants is the body of an infected person.
"Unvaccinated people are potential variant factories," Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told CNN Friday.
"The more unvaccinated people there are, the more opportunities for the virus to multiply," Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said.
"When it does, it mutates, and it could throw off a variant mutation that is even more serious down the road."
All viruses mutate, and while the coronavirus is not particularly mutation-prone, it does change and evolve.
Most of the changes mean nothing to the virus, and some can weaken it. But sometimes, a virus develops a random mutation that gives it an advantage -- better transmissibility, for instance, or more efficient replication, or an ability to infect a great diversity of hosts.
Viruses with an advantage will outcompete other viruses, and will eventually make up the majority of virus particles infecting someone. If that infected person passes the virus to someone else, they'll be passing along the mutant version.
If a mutant version is successful enough, it becomes a variant.
But it has to replicate to do that. An unvaccinated person provides that opportunity.
"As mutations come up in viruses, the ones that persist are the ones that make it easier for the virus to spread in the population," Andrew Pekosz, a microbiologist and immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told CNN.
"Every time the viruses changes, that gives the virus a different platform to add more mutations. Now we have viruses that spread more efficiently."
Viruses that don't spread cannot mutate.
Variants have arisen all over the world -- the B.1.1.7 or Alpha variant was first seen in England. The B.1.351 or Beta variant was first spotted in South Africa. The Delta variant, also called B.1.617.2, was seen first in India. And the US has thrown up several of its own variants, including the B.1.427 or Epsilon lineage first seen in California and the B.1.526 or Eta variant first seen in New York.
Already, one new variant has swept much of the world. Last summer, a version of the virus carrying a mutation called D614G went from Europe to the US and then the rest of the world. The change made the virus more successful—it replicated better -- so that version took over from the original strain that emerged from China. It appeared before people starting naming the variants, but it became the default version of the virus.
Most of the newer variants added changes to D614G. The Alpha variant, or B.1.1.7, became the dominant variant in the US by late spring thanks to its extra transmissibility. Now the Delta variant is even more transmissible, and it's set to become the dominant variant in many countries, including the US.
The current vaccines protect well against all the variants so far, but that could change at any moment. That's why doctors and public health officials want more people to get vaccinated.
"The more we allow the virus to spread, the more opportunity the virus has to change," the World Health Organization advised last month.
Vaccines are not widely available in many countries. But in the US, there is plenty of supply, with slowing demand. Just 18 states have fully vaccinated more than half their residents, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Currently, approximately 1,000 counties in the United States have vaccination coverage of less than 30%. These communities, primarily in the Southeast and Midwest, are our most vulnerable. In some of these areas, we are already seeing increasing rates of disease," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told a White House briefing Thursday.
"Every time we see the virus circulating in the population, particularly a population that has pockets of immune people, vaccinated people, and pockets of unvaccinated people, you have a situation where the virus can probe," Pekosz said.
If a virus tries to infect someone with immunity, it may fail, or it may succeed and cause a mild or asymptomatic infection. In that case, it will replicate in response to the pressure from a primed immune system.
Like a bank robber whose picture is on wanted posters everywhere, the virus that succeeds will be the virus that makes a random change that makes it look less visible to the immune system.
Those populations of unvaccinated people give the virus the change not only to spread, but to change.
"All it takes is one mutation in one person," said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and immunologist at Boston College.
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