Articles in The New Yorker online by Masha Gessen and others on July 25 demonstrate with shocking clarity how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was designed to become the strong arm of a police state. First, the very word “Homeland” evokes terror by describing our country as an endangered nation, beset by enemies from within and without.
This essay in The New York Times Magazine from April 10, 2016 explains that “The word points to a world of solidarity forged through blood ties, through ancient ritual and legend.” The “homeland” is not just our country– it is the white nationalist conception of a homogenous, race-limited nation that belongs to people who look like the Europeans who first colonized the Americas in the early 1500’s.
The DHS was designed to bring together all the agencies that defended the “homeland” from individuals who have bad intentions, infiltrators with designs to do harm. First, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was changed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with “naturalization” (bringing in and adding members to our country) removed.
Masha Gessen’s article specifically compares the US today to the USSR of his birth and early life. The KGB is the closest parallel to DHS now. Born of fear, it attempts to engender fear in those it designates as “enemies”– in Portland, they are the demonstrators who attack the federal courthouse. When they are together, they are too strong to oppose. So the agents wait until the protestors are alone, dispersing to their cars.
Using unmarked, rented vehicles, dressed in anonymous “military” fatigues without identifying marks except for the word “Police”, they have kidnapped individual protestors and held them without charge. They are released when the agents realize that there is nothing that they can “pin” on them and they can’t be intimidated into snitching on their comrades.
The leaders of these agencies are “acting” political appointees who are unaccountable to anyone except the president. They are loyal and believe in what they are doing. They are, technically, illegal– because they have been serving too long under statute and are supposed to be confirmed by the Senate.
Yet the law that governs their appointments cannot be enforced. No-one will hold them to account. Masha Gessen concludes:
… we are watching the perfect and perhaps inevitable combination of a domestic-security superagency and a President who rejects all mechanisms of accountability, including the Senate confirmation process. What we are also seeing is a perfect storm of fear: the legacy of fear cultivated in the wake of 9/11, and the fear that Trump campaigned on in 2016 and continues to campaign on now.
The fear of that “other”– the nineteen hijackers who commandeered four airplanes and steered them into three buildings– permeated the atmosphere that led to President Bush creating the DHS. We must reject fear. We must stand up for the rights of individuals to band together and act fearlessly to stop the aggression that tries to destroy what we have built.
Just as the passengers of Flight 93 banded together to stop the four hijackers, we must band together and stop the hijacking of our country by fear that leads to police statism. I advocate for “defunding” DHS. We must reduce its funds and redirect most of them to a better purpose: building our country better. We must not give in to fear by letting the bullies take control.
Surely, the DHS could serve as a coordinating agency instead of a secret police force. There’s no reason to think that we need a superagency that takes over control of our most important functions and perverts them into a police state.
To take the example which was used when DHS was created, a ship that sailed into US waters could be stopped by the Coast Guard. But the people on board had to be dealt with by INS; the potentially dangerous cargo had to be inspected by the Agriculture Department or Customs and Border Protection. All DHS has to do is coordinate the activities of these agencies. There is no need to create an agency which replaces them all.
We don’t need a KGB that can be driven by politicians who want to make points with fearful voters by “othering” people who are simply trying to express dissent. That’s what we have right now in DHS, and [redacted] is using it to vilify dissenters. The US Marshal’s Service by itself can protect the federal courthouse from vandalism. The local police can control crowds without resorting to weaponry that is designed to maim or choke people.
We need to go in a different direction. We need to protect the rights of everyone in this country, natives and foreigners alike, to speak up and demand change. We can do it. Here are a few often-spoken words from leaders of the past: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” And (a paraphrase): “If we are willing to give up liberty for the sake of a little security, then we deserve neither.”
sars-cov-2 budding from apoptotic cells–EM by NIAID
Media Matters and CNN report (updated July 25) that local news stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting intend to air a segment of “America This Week” hosted by Eric Bolling that will interview Judy Mikovits, a former virology researcher and discredited conspiracy theorist who is the brains behind the crazy video “Plandemic.”
Mikovits and her attorney, Larry Klayman, apparently plan to sue Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID (the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases) for… a RICO (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) violation (seriously?)
One of her most insane claims is that Dr. Anthony Fauci is responsible for manufacturing SARS-COV-2 in the US and that he transported it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As noted elsewhere, there is no evidence for the claim that the virus was somehow man-made. All responsible scientists with any expertise in the field agree that the virus is a natural development through random mutation and “survival of the fittest”– which makes it even more dangerous than if it were man-made.
I won’t go into all (or even any) of the other false statements that she makes and the misrepresentations of her credentials. I have discussed some of them on previous posts on this blog. I will say that this is one of the most insane and dangerous conspiracy theories out there, almost as bad as those behind QAnon (which is saying a lot.)
Mikovits and lawyer Klayman make many allegations which have been debunked, for example, by FactCheck.org here on May 8. Another post debunking many (if not all) of the allegations was this one by Science on their sciencemag.org website.
The host of the program, Eric Bolling, claims to be skeptical and doesn’t actually endorse the theories of this Judy Mikovits. He does give her airtime to make her claims and doesn’t come right out and say “you’re crazy.” Just having her on the air and interviewing her will spread her conspiracy theories.
No-one who understands the way this craziness spreads would invite her to speak and insert doubt into the minds of naive and gullible viewers, without a full-on denunciation of everything she says.
To avoid making this insane point of view more popular, we should avoid it and its adherents like the plague. The people who run “America This Week” want to draw more viewers by airing controversial viewpoints, but this is too dangerous to even mention on the air.
The very business model of these companies (Sinclair Broadcasting and Facebook, to take two examples) relies on the airing of extreme, controversial statements to draw attention and views. Apparently people like to be shocked, and some of them believe the crazy.
We might as well give airtime to people who say “the world is flat” and “the noise from windmills causes cancer”– oh, wait, we already do that. Isn’t this something like shouting “Fire” in a crowded theatre when there is no fire? The First Amendment doesn’t cover that.
My big question: who is bankrolling this? Who is paying the expenses for Ms. Mikovits and her lawyer? Who convinced Sinclair Broadcasting to air this interview? If they are Americans and not Russians, then they are traitors to this country because they are only making things worse for all of us.
photo by arek socha courtesy of pixabay.com
I have some bad news. It’s not about a virus. This comes from ProPublica, a web site devoted to bad news, and was published July 23. It is titled, “Where Will Everyone Go?” and it was developed by The New York Times Magazine with support from the Pulitzer Center. Basically, what it says (in a very long essay) is that, as the climate gets hotter, people who are forced out of Central America by drought will try to come here to the United States. People who are forced out of Texas will try to go to Minnesota, and so on.
There are two ways to respond to this. The first is to give development aid to the affected countries (especially places like El Salvador) to promote their resilience. The second is to build walls to try to keep them from coming here.
If you try to stop them from coming, many of them will die. The ones who don’t will be so desperate that they will eventually overwhelm the walls and come here anyway. The situation will get worse with time.
That’s the gist of it. To make this argument, the writers have developed mathematical models that show how people will respond to the climate change (global warming) by urbanizing as the land they live on becomes unable to support them. Urbanized people will become more desperate and start to move north. They have been doing it on a small scale for years, and the scale will gradually get larger. The only uncertainty is how long it will take and how many of them will come.
I can’t make this up, it’s the stuff of horror movies, the kind that involve zombies and apocalypses. Day of the Dead comes to mind. But unlike a horror movie, it’s real. It just unfolds over a long, slow period of time, which makes each horror more visceral, more painful, and less cinematic.
The only logical way to respond to this threat is to get a government in place that can deal with it. First, we have to allow a certain number of people to come to this country. After all, if we don’t allow immigration, our population will shrink– this is literally true, there are fewer native Americans being born every year than are dying. We have to provide for immigration on a measured basis to make up for population loss and create opportunities for economic growth.
Second, we have to send development aid– not just money, but experts who can help set up greenhouse growing facilities and dig wells. Don’t just send money, it will simply add to the corruption.
Third, we have to work on reversing our carbon dioxide problem. Solar power, wind power, even nuclear power (although that’s just too expensive, really), electric cars, electric everything. Phase out the internal combustion engine and replace it with the electric engine. This is sure to give our economy a chance to really grow through innovative development.
We have to do all these things, because if we don’t, it will become just another horror movie– only it will be real and it will be here.
(You can look up ProPublica yourself and read the article on their website. I read it on my cellphone and I don’t have the time right now to build a link for you. Maybe tomorrow.)
(image courtesy of pixabay.com and Gerd Altmann)
This paragraph from a New York Times article stuck out at me:
Public health experts say detailed local data on where people are hospitalized — a real-time measure that does not depend on levels of testing — is crucial to understanding the epidemic, but federal officials have not made this data public. The New York Times gathered data for nearly 50 metropolitan areas, including 15 of the 20 largest cities in the country, from state and local health departments to provide the first detailed national look at where people are falling seriously ill.
According to the article, the data “show a far-reaching crisis” extending into Tulsa, OK, Las Vegas, NV, and Nashville, TN. Places like the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio, both in Texas, have seen big jumps in cases in the last week. But hospitalizations in Galveston, Corpus Christi, and Galveston TX have also increased dramatically even though cases are not rising so much. St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida hospital cases are also going up fast, whereas other cities in Florida like Orlando and Jacksonville are not so bad. There are details in the article for fifty large cities across the US.
Information like this could be very useful for the general public, especially those who are not convinced that there is a problem out there. Why is this not being made public? This is just another example of the fragmented federal response which has no overall coordination and no sense of urgency. It’s not all due to a desire for secrecy. Some of it is incompetence, some is lack of direction from the top, and some of it is political. All of it is making us as a country look like fools to the rest of the civilized world.
Contrast this with the crackdown on “anarchy” that is going on in Portland and soon coming to other large cities. The president, desperate to find an issue that will build political support for his re-election has seized upon “law and order” (meaning suppression of demonstrations) as a wedge issue. There is no more polarizing position than one that claims that everyone who protests against police brutality is a traitor.
The president is a racist, authoritarian, sociopathic, narcissistic man who has no concern for the poor and downtrodden people of this country and is only interested in concentrating power in his own hands. The book by his niece reveals that he was brought up this way by a racist, authoritarian, sociopathic, mean old man who destroyed the president’s older brother because he wouldn’t go along.
I can only hope that enough people will be aware of his true nature to get out and vote against him and provoke a landslide defeat in November. Anything less will tempt him to fight dirty in an attempt to overturn the majority and retain power. We are going to be in very bad trouble if there is not an overwhelming majority vote against him.
George Floyd photo by CNN
According to a paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) dated “June 2020” (assembled after June 20, the end date of the collected data) the nationwide street protests/demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd did not result in an increase in COVID-19 cases. The results of this study directly contradict the assertions of right-wing media, political figures, and a certain president whose name will not be used.
According to the abstract:
Event-study analyses provide strong evidence that net stay-at-home behavior increased following protest onset, consistent with the hypothesis that nonprotesters’ behavior was substantially affected by urban protests.
…we find no evidence that urban protests reignited COVID-19 case growth during the more than three weeks following protest onset.
Whether the protests themselves caused an increase in SARS-COV-2 transmission but they were counterbalanced by “stay at home” behavior, or there simply was no increase, is not clear. The paper describes a complex analysis of behavior informed by cell-phone data and county-by-county daily COVID case counts.
The net result, however, was that cases did not increase in the worst-affected state, Minnesota, but cases did increase in the least-affected state, Florida. This is shown by the daily case-count graphs for Minnesota in the New York Times, in which the date of the murder, May 25, was followed by a sustained decrease in case counts which did not pick up again until June 17-19 and did not exceed the case count on May 24 until July 11.
In Florida, new cases started to increase on June 3 and continued without let-up until a peak on July 12. Since that date, there has been a relative plateau in new cases. Texas, which had few protests, showed an increase in daily cases in late May, which accelerated in June. In Tennessee, which saw early protests in Memphis, new case daily rates did not increase until late June.
In any case, as shown by the figures in the paper, protests occurred in every state with a large population, so statewide data are insensitive (except perhaps for Minnesota, which has almost all of its population concentrated in a few cities.)
The NBER study used anonymous cell-phone tracking data to examine people’s movements and ” we demonstrate that cities which had protests saw an increase in social distancing behavior for the overall population relative to cities that did not…”
They evaluated the rate of new cases identified by testing in 315 cities larger than 100,000 population, of which 284 had protests and 31 did not. The first large cities that experienced demonstrations were Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Memphis, Tennessee. Cities that did not have protests included Aurora, Colorado, Hialeah, Florida, and Irving, Texas.
Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was arrested on Tuesday morning, hours ahead of a planned announcement of a $60 million bribe investigation by federal prosecutors. Householder is seen here in March 2019. Associated Press
The NPR (National Public Radio) website published an article July 21 about this man, who was arrested along with four others by the FBI this morning “in connection with a $60 million bribery scheme allegedly involving state officials and associates.”
The scheme involved Generation Now, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit secretly controlled by Mr. Householder, which obtained nearly $2 million from a company described in the indictment as “Company A”, which in fact is “Energy Harbor” (previously FirstEnergy Solutions) to support his and the others’ candidacies for State House seats.
The money flowed between March 2017 and March 2020. Some of it was also spent on personal expenses by the alleged offenders. An opponent of the bill estimated the actual cost to have been $15 million.
After obtaining the Speakership, Mr. Householder pushed through a law that provided “bailout” money to the company, which operated nuclear power plants, and gutted subsidies to renewable energy projects:
Last year’s nuclear bailout law tacked on a charge to residents’ power bills, sending $150 million a year to the nuclear power plants. They are owned by the company Energy Harbor, which was previously known as FirstEnergy Solutions. The law also included an additional subsidy for two coal plants.
By the way, Mr. Householder is a Republican. Company A is expected to be indicted in the near future.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Lobbyists for numerous companies operate hand-in-glove with government regulators. For example, Polaris, a company which makes off-road vehicles, engaged in a scheme with lobbyists that involved federal officeholders (elected by the people) who made personal appeals to regulators who eventually provided them with exemptions from tariffs for parts such as aluminum wheels (which could have been made in the US) imported from China.
The scheme by Polaris is apparently perfectly legal, but involves people like Democratic Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, who personally contacted the office of the US Trade Representative to obtain special treatment for Polaris. Others, like Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who opposes tariffs, wrote numerous letters on behalf of other companies seeking relief.
The reason for this activity? Campaign donations from the companies involved. A quid pro quo cannot directly be established, so laws do not appear to have been broken. This is the process of lobbying for one’s constituents that is a large part of Congress-people’s work. People who make large monetary contributions to political campaigns receive special favors, while those who cannot afford to pay get little or no attention.
This is a perversion of the process of representation which is so common that it is impossible to control by investigating individual cases. There is a cost to this form of government: the people elected to high office, whether state or federal, do nothing for people who cannot afford to contribute to their campaigns. As a result, the voters receive nothing but good wishes from the people they elect, and the rich people and companies who bankroll their campaigns get special treatment, including relief from taxes and “burdensome” regulations.
This is why poor people and minorities still suffer at the hands of those who are supposed to take care of them. One possible answer? Public financing of election campaigns, free airtime for people who qualify in low-level contests like primaries, and prohibiting contacts between regulators and Congress-people. We will soon discover what laws, regulations, and taxes really do when they are applied equally across the board to all citizens and companies. Perhaps equal treatment would induce Congress to pass laws that equally affect everyone.
photo by William Iven via pixabay.com
There does seem to be a reduction in the increase lately, although that sounds stupid. An increase is an increase, but if there’s an exponential increase rather than a linear increase, that’s not as bad. Look at this chart from “Our world in data” that shows the biweekly trend of daily positive cases. Back in June, between June 13 and June 17, the daily case count remained the same for several days (this was after a drop in the daily case count in May.) Then, until July 6, the daily case count increased and peaked on that day at 80% more than before. After that, the increase gradually dropped to today, where the daily new case count is “only” up by 42%.
This makes it appear that the increase is decreasing. Not good news, but not as bad as two weeks ago.
Here are the state numbers for the worst-affected states:
Now look at the new case rate in Arizona. After a peak on June 30 of 4,797 new cases, the number has dropped and yesterday was only 1,676 new cases. The 7 day average has shown this drop since peaking on July 6. So that’s a thing. The new deaths peaked on July 18 at 138 and has been less the last couple of days. You’d expect the deaths to peak a couple of weeks after the peak in new cases, so that looks reasonable.
In Florida, new cases peaked at 15,300 on July 12. The 7 day average peaked on July 16. There has been a slight downward movement since then. New deaths peaked at 156 on July 16. New deaths have dropped, but the 7 day average is still high– until July 23, we won’t be past the peak on July 16 so don’t expect much improvement yet.
In California, new cases peaked at 10,387 on July 14, only slightly higher than the rate on July 7: 9,897. The daily death rate has plateaued since July 11.
In Texas, the new cases peaked at 15,038 on July 16 and dropped every day, to 7,636 on July 20 (about half that of four days earlier.) New deaths peaked at 154 on July 16 but were high again yesterday at 127.
Louisiana is getting worse, with two big numbers of new cases in the last two days (I’ll leave off the details– too depressing.) I think you can expect Louisiana’s deaths to be much higher in about two weeks– as high as they were after the peak of new cases on April 2 (which was not as high as the peaks now.) (Mardi Gras was February 25 this year– how that relates to the peak of cases in Louisiana is problematic, since that was over a month later…)
Mississippi is also getting worse; they didn’t have a peak in April.
Georgia peaked at 4,904 on July 10 and again on July 18 at 4,074. The last couple of days have been much less: 2,453 on July 19 and 1,994 yesterday. It’s impossible to say if they’re getting better or not after only two days.
(All the above state level numbers are from the New York Times interactive web pages.)
I’ll leave the other states to you to explore if you’re interested. The bottom line: most of these states, except California, have only required masks for the last week or so; Georgia still doesn’t require masks except for Atlanta (and that’s being fought in court.)
What does this mean? Will there be a reprieve this summer?
What will lead to a reduction in new cases? I don’t know, but I’m guessing whatever it is, it started two weeks ago and is beginning to take effect in most places where the virus has been spreading out of control since the middle of June. Maybe it’s the mask mandate, maybe it’s fear of the virus finally taking hold in the South. We will know in a couple of weeks.
Then when school starts, if it starts with all the kids congregating in schoolhouses the way it normally does, the virus will spread again rapidly. That’s how it normally works every year: as soon as school starts, the colds and flu start spreading. Kids are highly susceptible to coronaviruses and influenza viruses and every other infectious organism (they don’t get very sick, but they are highly contagious.)
When kids get it, they take it home and everyone in the household gets it– not right away, but soon enough. So I’m saying we should not let kids go back to school this year. I know it’s bad for their education, but we should put our money into improving online school with better web access and better laptops for the poor kids. If we make them go back to school, this whole nightmare will just get worse.
EM of coronavirus by NIAID
JAMA on July 10 reported a study done at St. George’s University Hospital, London, that found an increase in stillbirths during the pandemic (none of the mothers with stillbirths had symptoms of COVID-19):
We compared pregnancy outcomes at St George’s University Hospital, London in 2 epochs: from October 1, 2019, to January 31, 2020 (preceding the first reported UK cases of COVID-19), and from February 1, 2020, to June 14, 2020.
…
There were 1681 births (1631 singleton, 22 twin, and 2 triplet pregnancies) in the prepandemic period and 1718 births (1666 singleton and 26 twin pregnancies) in the pandemic period. There were fewer nulliparous women in the pandemic period than in the prepandemic period (45.6% vs 52.2%; P < .001) and fewer women with hypertension (3.7% vs 5.7%; P = .005) in the pandemic period than the prepandemic period, and there were no significant differences in other maternal characteristics (Table 1).
The incidence of stillbirth was significantly higher during the pandemic period (n = 16 [9.31 per 1000 births]; none associated with COVID-19) than during the prepandemic period (n = 4 [2.38 per 1000 births]) (difference, 6.93 per 1000 births [95% CI, 1.83-12.0]; P = .01)
The study reported a total of 19 mothers with COVID-19 in the delivery ward during the pandemic.
This might, at least partially, account for the decrease in preterm deliveries that I posted about yesterday– although the number of stillbirths was small (16 during the pandemic) in comparison to the potential number of premature babies. As I noted yesterday, there is as yet no obvious explanation for the observed decrease in prematurity. However, this just adds another layer of uncertainty because there is no obvious explanation for an increase in stillbirths either.
There were limitations in the study, most notably that the mothers with stillbirths were not specifically evaluated for presence of SARS-COV-2 RNA by nasopharyngeal swabs; the study noted that as many as 90% of mothers in another study were asymptomatic despite having positive tests. They did note that there was no pathological evidence of viral infection in the placentas or fetal tissue, although it doesn’t appear that virus RNA was specifically looked for.
The authors speculated that mothers with warning signs, such as cessation of fetal movement, may have hesitated to come to hospital emergently because of the pandemic and fear of being infected. Reduced attendance at prenatal clinics or reduced use of ultrasounds might also have played a role. None of these things was specifically evaluated.
In addition, the number of premature deliveries at this hospital was not evaluated. This information could have been valuable.
We are left with more questions than before. Why more stillbirths at this one hospital? Was it chance or the pandemic? Why fewer premature births at other hospitals?
Coronavirus studies by Engin Akyurt via pixabay.com
The New York Times (NYT) published an article on July 10 about a study published in MedRxiv on July 8 that showed that a much higher proportion of pregnant women who identified as Black or Hispanic were SARS-COV-2 antibody positive than of women who identified as White. The study was performed on de-identified blood samples taken from 1,293 pregnant women who presented for delivery at two Philadelphia hospitals between April 4 and June 3. The hospitals together deliver about 50% of all women in the Philadelphia area.
The results show that there were significant race/ethnicity differences in seroprevalence rates with higher rates in Black/non-Hispanic (9.7%) and Hispanic/Latino (10.4%) women and lower rates in White/non-Hispanic (2.0%) and Asian (0.9%) women. The number of Asian women in the sample was probably too small to allow conclusions about the significance of their low positivity rates. Overall, 80/1293 (6.2%) of samples were positive for IgG or IgM antibody (or both.)
In addition, nasopharyngeal swab specimens were obtained from 1,109 (85.8%) women who were also tested for antibodies; however, these were obtained at various times before delivery so they could not be directly compared with the antibody tests. “We found that 46 of 72 seropositive women (at the time of delivery) who were NP tested had a SARS-CoV-2 positive PCR result (at some point during their pregnancies), whereas only 18 of 1,037 seronegative women (at the time of delivery) who were NP tested had a SARS-CoV-2 positive PCR result” (at some point.) Thus, the 18 positive PCR tests were in some sense discordant with the antibody tests.
What was striking, however, was the difference in seropositivity between Black or Hispanic women and the White women– about five times as many of the Black or Hispanic women had positive antibody tests. It seems that there is much greater exposure to the virus among these ethnic groups.
The data should be compared to information in another NYT article published July 5 based on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The CDC data revealed by the lawsuit provides “detailed characteristics of 640,000 infections detected in nearly 1,000 U.S. counties.” That data says that three times as many Black or Hispanic people per 10,000 population were infected with the virus as White people and that twice as many died. “For people who are Asian, the disparities were generally not as large, though they were 1.3 times as likely as their white neighbors to become infected.”
In Missouri, for example, “40 percent of those infected are Black or Latino even though those groups make up just 16 percent of the state’s population.” Native Americans were far more likely to be infected as well. Another example: “In Kent County, which includes Grand Rapids and its suburbs, Black and Latino residents account for 63 percent of infections, though they make up just 20 percent of the county’s population.”
The test results revealed by the CDC are incomplete; of 1.5 million positive antigen tests, only 640,000 had information as to the subject’s ethnicity.
For age-specific test results, the disparities in death rates were even greater:
Latino people between the ages of 40 and 59 have been infected at five times the rate of white people in the same age group, the new C.D.C. data shows. The differences are even more stark when it comes to deaths: Of Latino people who died, more than a quarter were younger than 60. Among white people who died, only 6 percent were that young.
Whether people in these ethnic groups were infected because they were among “essential” workers who were exposed on the job or because they were in households that had greater exposure (or both) is unknown. Either way, Black or Hispanic people are being infected at about three to five times the rate of White people. They are also more likely to get sick or die because so many of them have “co-morbid” medical conditions. Does this have anything to do with the widespread denial of the impact of the virus among Republicans?
It is no wonder that public anger over the murder of George Floyd has become so prevalent in the last two months. Black people are being struck down by the virus and are being brutalized by the police at the same time. They have a right to be angry.
Be Here Now– photo by Harald Lepisk courtesy of pixabay.com
Most of my blog posts are about medical things, or at least things that have something to do with things that are medical. That’s because my training was in medicine and that was my experience for 27 years. So I have some expertise in that.
I’m taking this opportunity to ask you what kinds of posts you want to see on this blog. The reason I’m asking is that I appear to have more people actually reading, or at least clicking on, my posts. I could write about anything, but I don’t want to just repeat what other people are saying or just vent about whatever obsesses me. If you search, you can find people writing about almost everything, from every point of view. I don’t want to duplicate what other people are saying.
I don’t get many comments. I don’t know if that’s because you agree with me or you’re just apathetic, or too depressed to do anything. Remember “learned helplessness”– it affected Mary [redacted], and it could be affecting you, too… so here’s your chance to break through the helplessness with something that would make a difference.
“What have you got to lose?” Remember that statement? It was said by a certain president who shall remain unnamed. It applies to a lot of things. He applied it to African/Caribbean-Americans voting for him. He thought it was funny. It’s not.
You could lose your life from voting/not voting, especially this year. Some people have already died because of him.
On a personal level, though, I have little left to lose. I am living on a pension from Social Security. They most likely, probably can’t take it away from me. I can’t get fired for what I say or write. But I could be killed. I can’t make any money because it would probably be taken away from me. But I could be killed. So for all the mistakes and stupid things I’ve done, I say, it doesn’t matter any more. I can’t do anything about the harm I’ve caused. The good I’ve accomplished has faded away. It doesn’t matter any more. But I can still write.
Why do I keep writing? I’m outraged, on an almost hourly basis, by things that happen.
I’m outraged today by the report that people are being swept up in unmarked vans full of un-identified federal “police” who are just taking people off the street for exercising their right to protest. Because somebody in the crowd is throwing things, or writing graffiti on federal buildings, or trying to burn police stations.
I’m disturbed that the people in the “Justice” Department are taking this opportunity to judicially murder people who are dying already from the effects of incarceration. They did awful things, but I don’t believe that gives anyone the right to kill them in cold blood. They’re not doing anything to right the wrongs that caused the deaths in the first place. They’re just satisfying their urges to exercise their power and wreak revenge on helpless miscreants.
I’m dismayed by the results that we’ve seen another high in new cases: over 70,000, some say over 75,000. Different web sites say different things, but most are over 70,000.
So, there’s a lot of things I could write about. Please write a comment if there’s something in particular that you want me to write about.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 