Post by mhbruin on Nov 21, 2021 11:06:22 GMT -8
US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 450 Million Shots (Population 333 Million)
The last time we administered 2 million doses in a day was May 13. However, we weren't doing boosters then.
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Boars on the Run
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It's Harder to Have a Baby In Rural Areas
Shantell Jones gave birth in an ambulance parked on the side of a Connecticut highway. Even though she lived six blocks away from a hospital, the emergency vehicle had to drive to another one about 30 minutes away.
The closer medical center, Windham Hospital, discontinued labor and delivery services last year and is working to permanently cease childbirth services after “years of declining births and recruitment challenges,” its operator, Hartford HealthCare, has said.
But medical and public health experts say the step could potentially put pregnant women at risk if they don't have immediate access to medical attention. Losing obstetrics services, they said, could be associated with increased preterm births, emergency room births and out-of-hospital births without resources nearby, like Jones' childbirth experience.
The dilemma Jones faced is one that thousands of other pregnant women living in rural communities without obstetrics units nearby are encountering as hospitals cut back or close services to reduce costs. Nationwide, 53 rural counties lost obstetrics care from 2014 through 2018, according to a 2020 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which also found that out of 1,976 rural counties in the country, 1,045 never had hospitals with obstetrics services to begin with.
The problem is particularly acute in communities of color, like Windham in northeastern Connecticut, where the population is 41 percent Latino, while the statewide Latino population is only 16.9 percent, according to the U.S Census Bureau. The community is 6.2 percent Black. Local activists say they fear low-income residents will bear the brunt of the hospital’s decision because Windham has a 24.6 percent poverty rate compared to 10 percent statewide, according to the census.
And Driving to the Hospital Will Cost You More
As Thanksgiving and Christmas near, it's not uncommon for consumers to grouse about gas prices. It's as much a holiday tradition as Hallmark movies. But this year, the story is a little different. The last 12 months have seen a spike in gasoline prices as life has returned to something closer to a pre-Covid norm and travel picks up.
A close look at the data shows that Democrats and Republicans may be experiencing this year's pump pain differently, a real-life, unintentional impact of the self-sorting that has come to define modern American politics.
This November the average price for a gallon of gas, $3.38, is the highest it has been since 2013, according to the Energy Information Administration.
That is not the highest price ever for a gallon of gas. In fact, adjusting for inflation, it’s not even close. But, as it so often is with the economy, it's a perception that matters to voters and right now a lot of voters perceive the prices as sky-high. That’s especially true compared to last year when prices were artificially low due to the reduced travel that came with the pandemic’s first year.
Those perceptions vary sharply depending on your politics and where you live, because the GOP has a massive rural footprint. A huge number of self-identified Republicans live in rural, sparsely-populated areas. And when you live a rural lifestyle, a bump in gas prices can cause sharp pain, both because of the amount of driving rural people have to do and the types of vehicles they tend to own.
Of the top 10 states for vehicle miles traveled per capita in 2018, according to an analysis from Sivak Applied Research, a transportation research firm, eight voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020: Wyoming, Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas, Indiana and Tennessee.
The two exceptions are New Mexico, which is a rare heavily rural state that tends to vote Democratic, and Georgia, which President Joe Biden won by only a hair.
Georgia may appear to be a less-rural outlier in the group, but it's in the list in part because the Atlanta metro area is a sprawling behemoth that holds 29 counties. Getting around that area can take a lot of time and a lot of miles, as most metro Atlantans will tell you.
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Fewer Babies and Fewer Immigrants. What Could That Lead To?
More U.S. adults who do not already have children are saying they are unlikely to ever have them, a new Pew Research Center survey finds — findings that could draw renewed attention to the risks of declining birthrates for industrialized nations.
Experts are concerned that the U.S. birthrate, which has declined for the sixth straight year, may not fuel enough population growth on its own to keep the future economy afloat and fund social programs.
Women between the ages of 18 to 49 and men between 18 and 59 who said they are not parents were asked the question, “Thinking about the future, how likely is it that you will have children someday?”
In October, 26 percent of them said it is “very likely,” a six-point drop from 2018, when 32 percent answered “very likely.” Meanwhile, the share of Americans who answered “not too likely” in 2021 grew to 21 percent, compared to 16 percent in 2018.
When asked for a reason, 56 percent of childless adults who said it is not at all or not too likely they will ever have children said it’s because they just don’t want them. That’s a change from in 2018, when 63 percent of childless adults in these categories said it was because they had no desire for children.
This time around, 43 percent cited other reasons including medical issues, economic or financial reasons, and lack of partner.
Coupled with the recent release of federal demographic data, this poll points to a long-term evolution in parenthood trends in the United States. The spiraling costs of child care, health care and education — along with global instability, including the coronavirus pandemic and climate change — could all be contributing to a broader change in attitudes to marriage and priorities in life.
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I Guess They Couldn't Wait for Black Friday
Dozens of looters descended on a Nordstrom store and stole merchandise Saturday night in a raid that was over within a minute, police in Walnut Creek, California said.
Approximately 80 people rushed into the store in the city’s Broadway Plaza, a spokesperson for the Walnut Creek Police Department told NBC News.
They said that one employee was pepper sprayed, and two others were punched and kicked. All three sustained minor injuries, and were treated and released at the scene, they added.
The suspects were in and out of the store, which was open at the time, within a minute, the spokesperson said, adding that an undetermined amount of merchandise was taken.
Jodi Hernandez, a reporter with NBC Bay Area, was near the store when the raid took place. She tweeted that about 25 cars blocked the street during the incident.
People in the cars rushed into the store and jumped back into their cars before speeding away with goods, she said.
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We Cast Ballots For Bold Biden and Build Back Better
Candidate Biden couldn’t have been clearer about his New Deal-scale ambitions, and he proceeded to win by seven million votes. Though a few cautious members of his party may now be getting nervous, the fact is, we are still in a New Deal moment. We still have a health crisis and accompanying economic crisis, with a climate crisis and a democracy crisis thrown in for good measure.
The American people didn’t just vote for a bland “return to normalcy” (the campaign slogan of Warren Harding in 1920, whose presidency is memorable only for its corruption). They voted for, and deserve, big bold action that will improve their daily lives.
And history shows, this boldness will be rewarded. FDR’s leadership to rebuild the U.S. economy, create jobs and improve Americans’ economic security earned him victory in his first midterm election, adding seats in both the House and Senate — an extremely rare occurrence.
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Justice For Plessy! Yes, THAT Plessy.
The twisted pursuit of racial discrimination once made it a crime to sit in the wrong railroad car.
To test and protest that unprecedented Louisiana law, 29-year-old Homer Plessy volunteered himself for arrest on a June day in 1892. Now, nearly 130 years later, he will be pardoned for his offense. Louisiana’s governor says he will approve an application from descendants of those involved in the legal battle that became known as Plessy v. Ferguson.
Like so much of the racial reckoning now underway, Plessy’s pardon is both atonement and opportunity. Atonement for treating Plessy as a criminal. Opportunity to learn about and honor the long line of 19th century men and women on whose shoulders he stood.
Important to remember: Separation on trains didn’t originate in Louisiana. The pernicious practice began in the North, two decades before the Civil War, at the dawn of the railroad age. It evolved after emancipation, as state legislatures in the South were looking to go beyond the custom of separation and enact laws mandating it.
LONG Before Rosa Parks
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Not So Much Justice Elsewhere
It wasn’t outside of the law for the defense in the Arbery proceedings to seek a mistrial because Black pastors had the nerve to enter the courtroom, or a Black mother cried out with ancestral rage at pictures of her son’s murdered body.
It wasn’t illegal for the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial to prevent the prosecution from calling the two people Rittenhouse killed, and one he injured, “victims,” while simultaneously granting the defense permission to call those protesting a cop shooting Jacob Blake seven times in the back “rioters” and “looters.”
Apparently, it is not out of order for the judge overseeing the civil case against organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville to force Devin Willis, a plaintiff in the case, to give up the names of his friends during cross-examination by Christopher Cantwell, a neo-Nazi defendant who’s acting as his own attorney in the proceedings. These names were then spread across white supremacist chat rooms, along with photos and addresses, literally endangering the lives of yet even more Black people.
None of these—or any of the other egregious actions we’ve witnessed in these trials—are outside the bounds of American justice. They are, however, way out of bounds of anything that anyone with a moral compass would define as justice.
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How Bad is the US Economy?
Not Very Bad
A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on Thursday showed that the United States is the only G7 country to surpass its pre-pandemic economic growth. That growth has been so strong it has buoyed other countries.
The administration's work with ports and supply chains to handle the increase in demand for goods appears to be having an effect. Imports through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are up 16% from 2018, and in the first two weeks of November, those two ports cleared about a third of the containers sitting on their docks.
West Texas Intermediate futures, the US benchmark for oil prices, and Brent futures, the global benchmark, are now trading at their lowest levels in six weeks on signals that supply constraints could begin to ease soon. In the United States, prices fell sharply Wednesday after oil inventories at a key hub in Cushing, Oklahoma rose for the first time in weeks.
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Who Won the Week?
America's roads and bridges, which are finally getting fixed, thanks to the Democrats' infrastructure bill
Pete Buttigieg, who now finds himself the most consequential Transportation Secretary in generations
Rural Americans who will soon be getting broadband internet access to their homes; and low income Americans who will get help paying for internet service
The safety of America's water supply, as $55 billion is devoted to replacing lead service pipes across the country
Unions, whose members will be busy, busy, busy rebuilding America's infrastructure in a hundred different ways
America's sea ports, airports, Amtrak, and local public transportation, all getting big shots in the arm from the infrastructure bill
The electric vehicle revolution, with a nationwide network of fully-funded charging stations on the to-do list
President Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, for guiding the infrastructure bill to passage
The House, for passing the infrastructure law's companion---the Build Back Better bill---with votes to spare
All of the above
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The Few, The Proud, The Ignorant
Up to 10,000 active-duty Marines will not be fully vaccinated against the coronavirus when their deadline arrives in coming days, a trajectory expected to yield the U.S. military’s worst immunization rate.
While 94 percent of Marine Corps personnel have met the vaccination requirement or are on a path to do so, according to the latest official data, for the remainder it is too late to begin a regimen and complete it by the service’s Nov. 28 deadline. Within an institution built upon the belief that orders are to be obeyed, and one that brands itself the nation’s premier crisis-response force, it is a vexing outcome.
The holdouts will join approximately 9,600 Air Force personnel who have outright refused the vaccine, did not report their status, or sought an exemption on medical or religious grounds, causing a dilemma for commanders tasked with maintaining combat-ready forces — and marking the latest showdown over President Biden’s authority to impose vaccination as a condition of continued government service.
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My Standard Rant: There's No Natural Immunity. There's No Herd Immunity. There is Resistance.
Republicans fighting President Joe Biden's coronavirus vaccine mandates are wielding a new weapon against the White House rules: natural immunity.
They contend that people who have recovered from the virus have enough immunity and antibodies to not need COVID-19 vaccines, and the concept has been invoked by Republicans as a sort of stand-in for vaccines.
Florida wrote natural immunity into state law this week as GOP lawmakers elsewhere are pushing similar measures to sidestep vaccine mandates. Lawsuits over the mandates have also begun leaning on the idea. Conservative federal lawmakers have implored regulators to consider it when formulating mandates.
Scientists acknowledge that people previously infected with COVID-19 have some level of immunity but that vaccines offer a more consistent level of protection. Natural immunity is also far from a one-size-fits-all scenario, making it complicated to enact sweeping exemptions to vaccines.
That’s because how much immunity COVID-19 survivors have depends on how long ago they were infected, how sick they were, and if the virus variant they had is different from mutants circulating now. For example, a person who had a minor case one year ago is much different than a person who had a severe case over the summer when the delta variant was raging through the country. It's also difficult to reliably test whether someone is protected from future infections.
Meanwhile ...
America’s Covid-19 infections are climbing again, and could soon hit a weekly average of 100,000 cases a day as daily case reports increase more than 20% across the upper midwest.
The fresh worsening of the coronavirus pandemic in the US comes as temperatures cool during the approach of winter, forcing people indoors where the virus is believed to spread more readily and may presage another wave.
It is also happening ahead of the Thanksgiving national holiday where tens of millions of Americans are expected to travel all over the country as families gather together in homes for the annual feast.
With medical authorities struggling to get adult vaccination rates above 60% nationally, the states first to experience the onset of winter – Michigan and Minnesota – lead the country “by a significant margin in recent cases per capita”, according to analysis by the New York Times.
The seven-day moving average for the US was 93,196 on Friday. On October 25 it had been 70,271.
And ...
The number of U.S. Covid-19 deaths recorded in 2021 has surpassed the toll in 2020, according to federal data and Johns Hopkins University, demonstrating the virus’s persistent menace.
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The Taliban Will Kill You For Playing Music at a Wedding, But This Seems to Be OK With Them
8 years old and sold for marriage: Desperate Afghan families sell their daughters for cash.
Bashful, with long locks of rust-colored hair dyed with henna, Benazir fidgets with a handful of gravel when the topic of her marriage comes up.
She looks down at the ground and buries her head in her knees when asked if she knows she’s been promised to another family to marry one of their sons.
Her father says he will receive the equivalent of $2,000 for Benazir, but he hasn’t explained the details to her or what’s expected of her. She’s too young to understand, he says. Benazir is 8 years old.
It is traditional for families here to pay a dowry to a bride’s family for a marriage, but it is extreme to arrange a marriage for a child so young. And the economic collapse following the Taliban’s takeover in August has forced already poor families to make desperate choices.
The days are filled with hardships for children here in Shaidai, a desert community on the mountainous edge of Herat in western Afghanistan.
Children like Benazir and her siblings beg on the streets, or collect garbage to heat their simple mud homes, because they don’t have enough money for wood.
Her father, Murad Khan, looks much older than his 55 years — his face worn with worry. A day laborer who hasn’t found work in months and with eight children to feed, his decision to sell Benazir to marriage at such a young age comes down to a cold calculation.
“We are 10 people in the family. I’m trying to keep 10 alive by sacrificing one,” he said in Pashto.
Khan said the arrangement is for Benazir to be married to a boy from a family in Iran when she reaches puberty. He hasn’t received the money yet for her dowry, and said as soon as he does, Benazir will be taken away by the man who bought her.
This is Just Child Sex Trafficking
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The last time we administered 2 million doses in a day was May 13. However, we weren't doing boosters then.
Doses Administered 7-Day Average | Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses | Number of People Fully Vaccinated | New Cases 7-Day Average | Deaths 7-Day Average | |
| Nov 21 | |||||
| Nov 20 | 2,136,513 | 229,837,421 | 196,128,496 | ||
| Nov 19 | 1,952,717 | 229,291,004 | 195,920,566 | 92,852 | 1,047 |
| Nov 18 | 1,870,564 | 228,570,531 | 195,713,107 | 94,260 | 1,069 |
| Nov 17 | 1,811,047 | 228,175,638 | 195,612,365 | 88,482 | 1,032 |
| Nov 16 | 1,608,906 | 227,691,941 | 195,435,688 | 85,944 | 1,028 |
| Nov 15 | 1,582,519 | 227,133,617 | 195,275,904 | 83,671 | 1,029 |
| Nov 14 | 1,375,998 | 226,607,653 | 195,120,470 | 80,823 | 1,043 |
| Nov 13 | 1,370,279 | 226,157,226 | 194,951,106 | 80,590 | 1,049 |
| Nov 12 | 1,335,066 | 225,606,197 | 194,747,839 | 78,552 | 1,038 |
| Nov 11 | No Data | 73,218 | 999 | ||
| Nov 10 | 1,316,294 | 224,660,453 | 194,382,921 | 76,458 | 1,051 |
| Nov 9 | 1,316,228 | 224,257,467 | 194,168,611 | 74,584 | 1,078 |
| Nov 8 | 1,300,925 | 223,944,369 | 194,001,108 | 73,312 | 1,078 |
| Nov 7 | 1,265,361 | 223,629,671 | 193,832,584 | 71,867 | 1,068 |
| Nov 6 | 1,254,975 | 223,245,121 | 193,627,929 | 71,327 | 1,079 |
| Nov 5 | 1,283,684 | 222,902,939 | 193,425,862 | 71,517 | 1,071 |
| Nov 4 | 1,188,564 | 222,591,394 | 193,227,813 | 71,241 | 1,102 |
| Nov 3 | 1,068,184 | 222,268,786 | 192,931,486 | 70,431 | 1,109 |
| Nov 2 | 1,112,624 | 221,961,370 | 192,726,406 | 71,029 | 1,130 |
| Nov 1 | 1,243,313 | 221,760,691 | 192,586,927 | 74,798 | 1,190 |
| Oct 31 | 1,203,517 | 221,520,153 | 192,453,500 | 71,207 | 1,151 |
| Oct 30 | 1,114,502 | 221,221,467 | 192,244,927 | 71,690 | 1,156 |
| Oct 29 | 1,008,247 | 220,860,887* | 191,997,869 | 69,197 | 1,104 |
| Oct 28 | 1,086,543 | 221,348,530 | 191,242,432 | 68,177 | 1,086 |
| Oct 27 | 959,348 | 220,936,118 | 190,990,750 | 68,792 | 1,129 |
| Oct 26 | 796,148 | 220,648,845 | 190,793,100 | 68,151 | 1,098 |
| Oct 25 | 786,321 | 220,519,217 | 190,699,790 | 65,953 | 1,159 |
| Oct 24 | 768,503 | 220,351,217 | 190,578,704 | 59,129 | 1,122 |
| Oct 23 | 772,744 | 220,145,796 | 190,402,262 | 64,096 | 1,188 |
| Oct 22 | 770,307 | 219,900,525 | 190,179,553 | 70,153 | 1,277 |
| Oct 21 | 795,156 | 219,624,445 | 189,924,447 | 71,550 | 1,257 |
| Oct 20 | 831,213 | 219,381,466 | 189,709,710 | 73,966 | 1,257 |
| Feb 16 | 1,716,311 | 39,670,551 | 15,015,434 | 78,292 |
| At Least One Dose | Fully Vaccinated | |
| % of Total Population | 69.2% | 59.1% |
| % of Population 12+ | 80.1% | 69.1% |
| % of Population 18+ | 82.0% | 70.9% |
| % of Population 65+ | 99.9% | 86.3% |
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Boars on the Run
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It's Harder to Have a Baby In Rural Areas
Shantell Jones gave birth in an ambulance parked on the side of a Connecticut highway. Even though she lived six blocks away from a hospital, the emergency vehicle had to drive to another one about 30 minutes away.
The closer medical center, Windham Hospital, discontinued labor and delivery services last year and is working to permanently cease childbirth services after “years of declining births and recruitment challenges,” its operator, Hartford HealthCare, has said.
But medical and public health experts say the step could potentially put pregnant women at risk if they don't have immediate access to medical attention. Losing obstetrics services, they said, could be associated with increased preterm births, emergency room births and out-of-hospital births without resources nearby, like Jones' childbirth experience.
The dilemma Jones faced is one that thousands of other pregnant women living in rural communities without obstetrics units nearby are encountering as hospitals cut back or close services to reduce costs. Nationwide, 53 rural counties lost obstetrics care from 2014 through 2018, according to a 2020 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which also found that out of 1,976 rural counties in the country, 1,045 never had hospitals with obstetrics services to begin with.
The problem is particularly acute in communities of color, like Windham in northeastern Connecticut, where the population is 41 percent Latino, while the statewide Latino population is only 16.9 percent, according to the U.S Census Bureau. The community is 6.2 percent Black. Local activists say they fear low-income residents will bear the brunt of the hospital’s decision because Windham has a 24.6 percent poverty rate compared to 10 percent statewide, according to the census.
And Driving to the Hospital Will Cost You More
As Thanksgiving and Christmas near, it's not uncommon for consumers to grouse about gas prices. It's as much a holiday tradition as Hallmark movies. But this year, the story is a little different. The last 12 months have seen a spike in gasoline prices as life has returned to something closer to a pre-Covid norm and travel picks up.
A close look at the data shows that Democrats and Republicans may be experiencing this year's pump pain differently, a real-life, unintentional impact of the self-sorting that has come to define modern American politics.
This November the average price for a gallon of gas, $3.38, is the highest it has been since 2013, according to the Energy Information Administration.
That is not the highest price ever for a gallon of gas. In fact, adjusting for inflation, it’s not even close. But, as it so often is with the economy, it's a perception that matters to voters and right now a lot of voters perceive the prices as sky-high. That’s especially true compared to last year when prices were artificially low due to the reduced travel that came with the pandemic’s first year.
Those perceptions vary sharply depending on your politics and where you live, because the GOP has a massive rural footprint. A huge number of self-identified Republicans live in rural, sparsely-populated areas. And when you live a rural lifestyle, a bump in gas prices can cause sharp pain, both because of the amount of driving rural people have to do and the types of vehicles they tend to own.
Of the top 10 states for vehicle miles traveled per capita in 2018, according to an analysis from Sivak Applied Research, a transportation research firm, eight voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020: Wyoming, Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas, Indiana and Tennessee.
The two exceptions are New Mexico, which is a rare heavily rural state that tends to vote Democratic, and Georgia, which President Joe Biden won by only a hair.
Georgia may appear to be a less-rural outlier in the group, but it's in the list in part because the Atlanta metro area is a sprawling behemoth that holds 29 counties. Getting around that area can take a lot of time and a lot of miles, as most metro Atlantans will tell you.
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Fewer Babies and Fewer Immigrants. What Could That Lead To?
More U.S. adults who do not already have children are saying they are unlikely to ever have them, a new Pew Research Center survey finds — findings that could draw renewed attention to the risks of declining birthrates for industrialized nations.
Experts are concerned that the U.S. birthrate, which has declined for the sixth straight year, may not fuel enough population growth on its own to keep the future economy afloat and fund social programs.
Women between the ages of 18 to 49 and men between 18 and 59 who said they are not parents were asked the question, “Thinking about the future, how likely is it that you will have children someday?”
In October, 26 percent of them said it is “very likely,” a six-point drop from 2018, when 32 percent answered “very likely.” Meanwhile, the share of Americans who answered “not too likely” in 2021 grew to 21 percent, compared to 16 percent in 2018.
When asked for a reason, 56 percent of childless adults who said it is not at all or not too likely they will ever have children said it’s because they just don’t want them. That’s a change from in 2018, when 63 percent of childless adults in these categories said it was because they had no desire for children.
This time around, 43 percent cited other reasons including medical issues, economic or financial reasons, and lack of partner.
Coupled with the recent release of federal demographic data, this poll points to a long-term evolution in parenthood trends in the United States. The spiraling costs of child care, health care and education — along with global instability, including the coronavirus pandemic and climate change — could all be contributing to a broader change in attitudes to marriage and priorities in life.
-------------
I Guess They Couldn't Wait for Black Friday
Dozens of looters descended on a Nordstrom store and stole merchandise Saturday night in a raid that was over within a minute, police in Walnut Creek, California said.
Approximately 80 people rushed into the store in the city’s Broadway Plaza, a spokesperson for the Walnut Creek Police Department told NBC News.
They said that one employee was pepper sprayed, and two others were punched and kicked. All three sustained minor injuries, and were treated and released at the scene, they added.
The suspects were in and out of the store, which was open at the time, within a minute, the spokesperson said, adding that an undetermined amount of merchandise was taken.
Jodi Hernandez, a reporter with NBC Bay Area, was near the store when the raid took place. She tweeted that about 25 cars blocked the street during the incident.
People in the cars rushed into the store and jumped back into their cars before speeding away with goods, she said.
-------------
We Cast Ballots For Bold Biden and Build Back Better
Candidate Biden couldn’t have been clearer about his New Deal-scale ambitions, and he proceeded to win by seven million votes. Though a few cautious members of his party may now be getting nervous, the fact is, we are still in a New Deal moment. We still have a health crisis and accompanying economic crisis, with a climate crisis and a democracy crisis thrown in for good measure.
The American people didn’t just vote for a bland “return to normalcy” (the campaign slogan of Warren Harding in 1920, whose presidency is memorable only for its corruption). They voted for, and deserve, big bold action that will improve their daily lives.
And history shows, this boldness will be rewarded. FDR’s leadership to rebuild the U.S. economy, create jobs and improve Americans’ economic security earned him victory in his first midterm election, adding seats in both the House and Senate — an extremely rare occurrence.
-------------
Justice For Plessy! Yes, THAT Plessy.
The twisted pursuit of racial discrimination once made it a crime to sit in the wrong railroad car.
To test and protest that unprecedented Louisiana law, 29-year-old Homer Plessy volunteered himself for arrest on a June day in 1892. Now, nearly 130 years later, he will be pardoned for his offense. Louisiana’s governor says he will approve an application from descendants of those involved in the legal battle that became known as Plessy v. Ferguson.
Like so much of the racial reckoning now underway, Plessy’s pardon is both atonement and opportunity. Atonement for treating Plessy as a criminal. Opportunity to learn about and honor the long line of 19th century men and women on whose shoulders he stood.
Important to remember: Separation on trains didn’t originate in Louisiana. The pernicious practice began in the North, two decades before the Civil War, at the dawn of the railroad age. It evolved after emancipation, as state legislatures in the South were looking to go beyond the custom of separation and enact laws mandating it.
LONG Before Rosa Parks
-------------
Not So Much Justice Elsewhere
It wasn’t outside of the law for the defense in the Arbery proceedings to seek a mistrial because Black pastors had the nerve to enter the courtroom, or a Black mother cried out with ancestral rage at pictures of her son’s murdered body.
It wasn’t illegal for the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial to prevent the prosecution from calling the two people Rittenhouse killed, and one he injured, “victims,” while simultaneously granting the defense permission to call those protesting a cop shooting Jacob Blake seven times in the back “rioters” and “looters.”
Apparently, it is not out of order for the judge overseeing the civil case against organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville to force Devin Willis, a plaintiff in the case, to give up the names of his friends during cross-examination by Christopher Cantwell, a neo-Nazi defendant who’s acting as his own attorney in the proceedings. These names were then spread across white supremacist chat rooms, along with photos and addresses, literally endangering the lives of yet even more Black people.
None of these—or any of the other egregious actions we’ve witnessed in these trials—are outside the bounds of American justice. They are, however, way out of bounds of anything that anyone with a moral compass would define as justice.
-------------
How Bad is the US Economy?
Not Very Bad
A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on Thursday showed that the United States is the only G7 country to surpass its pre-pandemic economic growth. That growth has been so strong it has buoyed other countries.
The administration's work with ports and supply chains to handle the increase in demand for goods appears to be having an effect. Imports through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are up 16% from 2018, and in the first two weeks of November, those two ports cleared about a third of the containers sitting on their docks.
West Texas Intermediate futures, the US benchmark for oil prices, and Brent futures, the global benchmark, are now trading at their lowest levels in six weeks on signals that supply constraints could begin to ease soon. In the United States, prices fell sharply Wednesday after oil inventories at a key hub in Cushing, Oklahoma rose for the first time in weeks.
-------------
Who Won the Week?
America's roads and bridges, which are finally getting fixed, thanks to the Democrats' infrastructure bill
Pete Buttigieg, who now finds himself the most consequential Transportation Secretary in generations
Rural Americans who will soon be getting broadband internet access to their homes; and low income Americans who will get help paying for internet service
The safety of America's water supply, as $55 billion is devoted to replacing lead service pipes across the country
Unions, whose members will be busy, busy, busy rebuilding America's infrastructure in a hundred different ways
America's sea ports, airports, Amtrak, and local public transportation, all getting big shots in the arm from the infrastructure bill
The electric vehicle revolution, with a nationwide network of fully-funded charging stations on the to-do list
President Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, for guiding the infrastructure bill to passage
The House, for passing the infrastructure law's companion---the Build Back Better bill---with votes to spare
All of the above
-------------
The Few, The Proud, The Ignorant
Up to 10,000 active-duty Marines will not be fully vaccinated against the coronavirus when their deadline arrives in coming days, a trajectory expected to yield the U.S. military’s worst immunization rate.
While 94 percent of Marine Corps personnel have met the vaccination requirement or are on a path to do so, according to the latest official data, for the remainder it is too late to begin a regimen and complete it by the service’s Nov. 28 deadline. Within an institution built upon the belief that orders are to be obeyed, and one that brands itself the nation’s premier crisis-response force, it is a vexing outcome.
The holdouts will join approximately 9,600 Air Force personnel who have outright refused the vaccine, did not report their status, or sought an exemption on medical or religious grounds, causing a dilemma for commanders tasked with maintaining combat-ready forces — and marking the latest showdown over President Biden’s authority to impose vaccination as a condition of continued government service.
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My Standard Rant: There's No Natural Immunity. There's No Herd Immunity. There is Resistance.
Republicans fighting President Joe Biden's coronavirus vaccine mandates are wielding a new weapon against the White House rules: natural immunity.
They contend that people who have recovered from the virus have enough immunity and antibodies to not need COVID-19 vaccines, and the concept has been invoked by Republicans as a sort of stand-in for vaccines.
Florida wrote natural immunity into state law this week as GOP lawmakers elsewhere are pushing similar measures to sidestep vaccine mandates. Lawsuits over the mandates have also begun leaning on the idea. Conservative federal lawmakers have implored regulators to consider it when formulating mandates.
Scientists acknowledge that people previously infected with COVID-19 have some level of immunity but that vaccines offer a more consistent level of protection. Natural immunity is also far from a one-size-fits-all scenario, making it complicated to enact sweeping exemptions to vaccines.
That’s because how much immunity COVID-19 survivors have depends on how long ago they were infected, how sick they were, and if the virus variant they had is different from mutants circulating now. For example, a person who had a minor case one year ago is much different than a person who had a severe case over the summer when the delta variant was raging through the country. It's also difficult to reliably test whether someone is protected from future infections.
Meanwhile ...
America’s Covid-19 infections are climbing again, and could soon hit a weekly average of 100,000 cases a day as daily case reports increase more than 20% across the upper midwest.
The fresh worsening of the coronavirus pandemic in the US comes as temperatures cool during the approach of winter, forcing people indoors where the virus is believed to spread more readily and may presage another wave.
It is also happening ahead of the Thanksgiving national holiday where tens of millions of Americans are expected to travel all over the country as families gather together in homes for the annual feast.
With medical authorities struggling to get adult vaccination rates above 60% nationally, the states first to experience the onset of winter – Michigan and Minnesota – lead the country “by a significant margin in recent cases per capita”, according to analysis by the New York Times.
The seven-day moving average for the US was 93,196 on Friday. On October 25 it had been 70,271.
And ...
The number of U.S. Covid-19 deaths recorded in 2021 has surpassed the toll in 2020, according to federal data and Johns Hopkins University, demonstrating the virus’s persistent menace.
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The Taliban Will Kill You For Playing Music at a Wedding, But This Seems to Be OK With Them
8 years old and sold for marriage: Desperate Afghan families sell their daughters for cash.
Bashful, with long locks of rust-colored hair dyed with henna, Benazir fidgets with a handful of gravel when the topic of her marriage comes up.
She looks down at the ground and buries her head in her knees when asked if she knows she’s been promised to another family to marry one of their sons.
Her father says he will receive the equivalent of $2,000 for Benazir, but he hasn’t explained the details to her or what’s expected of her. She’s too young to understand, he says. Benazir is 8 years old.
It is traditional for families here to pay a dowry to a bride’s family for a marriage, but it is extreme to arrange a marriage for a child so young. And the economic collapse following the Taliban’s takeover in August has forced already poor families to make desperate choices.
The days are filled with hardships for children here in Shaidai, a desert community on the mountainous edge of Herat in western Afghanistan.
Children like Benazir and her siblings beg on the streets, or collect garbage to heat their simple mud homes, because they don’t have enough money for wood.
Her father, Murad Khan, looks much older than his 55 years — his face worn with worry. A day laborer who hasn’t found work in months and with eight children to feed, his decision to sell Benazir to marriage at such a young age comes down to a cold calculation.
“We are 10 people in the family. I’m trying to keep 10 alive by sacrificing one,” he said in Pashto.
Khan said the arrangement is for Benazir to be married to a boy from a family in Iran when she reaches puberty. He hasn’t received the money yet for her dowry, and said as soon as he does, Benazir will be taken away by the man who bought her.
This is Just Child Sex Trafficking
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