8/28/21 Once Again, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is a COVID19 Super-Spreader

In 2020, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was linked to 649 COVID19 cases in 29 states, a CDC study said. In 2021, the rally did much the same thing.

The rally draws hundreds of thousands of bikers to tiny Sturgis, South Dakota every year -- half a million in 2020. This year the festivities went from August 6 to August 15.

On August 4, South Dakota had 657 cases. On August 25, it was 3,655. That's a 456% increase.

From July 30 to August 6, the state's positivity rate was 10.38%; the week before, it was 6.10%. By mid-August the rate in Sturgis's home county was 34.2%.

The state's Public Health Department spokesman downplayed the statistics. "Our department has only been able to link 39 cases directly to this event," he wrote CBS in an email.

What about screening visitors for vaccinations? "We're not going to start checking papers. I mean, that's not really an American way," said Daniel Ainslie, Sturgis's city manager.

By the city's estimate, the rally brings in some $1.7 million a year for Sturgis, which has fewer than 7,000 residents.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sturgis-rally-2021-south-dakota-covid-19-cases-surge/

https://www.newscenter1.tv/sturgis-considers-financial-impact-of-rally-closure/ Illustration: "Scream for all your worth" by id-iom is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

8/28/21 CDC Chief Walensky Talks Guns and Public Health

There's a reason why the U.S. Centers for Disease Control hasn't studied guns and their effect on the nation's public health: They tried before and suffered a drastic funding cut in 1997, when the National Rifle Association persuaded Congress to cut its funding for gun research.

Now, Rochelle Walensky, the physician who heads up the CDC, is in a position former CDC directors would envy: The National Rifle Association, a political-donation megastar for conservative legislators, is stumbling and relatively weak.

During the Trump years, the NRA got mixed up with a Russian spy, Marina Butino, who was allegedly trying to use the group to set up a connection to the GOP. For the second year, its national is -- or was -- scheduled as Zoom calls. This year's meeting has been canceled altogether. The group has tried to file for bankruptcy, and New York's Attorney General has filed suit to dissolve the NRA altogether.

Oddly enough, the door to gun research was prized open in part by President Donald Trump, who, in 2018, signed a government spending bill that allowed the CDC to pursue gun violence research. Congress followed with $25 million split between the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.

Walensky once mentored a medical student who was affected by the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. That student went on to co-found the Gun Violence Prevention Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. The experience drives Walensky at a deep level.

Walensky is pursuing a broad base of support for the research."Generally, the word gun, for those who are worried about research in this area, is followed by the word control, and that's not what I want to do here," Walensky said. "I'm not here about gun control. I'm here about preventing gun violence and gun death."

She also noted that "We cannot understand the research of firearm violence, firearm injury, without embracing, wholeheartedly, the firearm-owning community."

The CDC is spending $2.2 million to create a surveillance tracker for gunshot-wound cases in hospital emergency rooms that works almost in real time, and it collects data on how the injury occurred: self-inflicted, accidental, or from assault. Walensky, however, wants to pursue the issue on all fronts, starting from the reason people buy guns to begin with.

This summer, an average of 200 people have been killed each weekend by gun use. It's time for gun research.

It's been time for a very, very long time.

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What do you think the CDC should do early in its gun research?

What do you think of Walensky's idea of "embracing, whole-heartedly, the firearm-owning community?" Is $12.5 million each for the CDC and NIH adequate? Is it a good start? 

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/27/health/cdc-gun-research-walensky/index.html Illustration: "Hand Gun" by Lala Photography at JoLi Studios Colchester is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

8/27/21 Dylan Roof's Death Sentence is Upheld

It has been six years since white-supremacist Dylan Roof walked into the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina and murdered nine members during the final prayer of a Bible study. All the victims were Black.

Roof was charged with a federal hate crime. He told jurors "I still feel like I had to do it," and then served as his own attorney during his sentencing.

In 2017, he pled guilty to state murder charges. Apparently, Roof believed that he'd be rescued by white supremacists.

Since then, Roof has been awaiting execution while appeals wound their way through the court system. The basis of his appeals was that he should not have been declared competent to represent himself in court.

All the justices in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recused themselves from the case; one had been a prosecutor. Three judges from other districts stood in for them. They unanimously said that Roof deserved the sentence he got.

“Dylann Roof murdered African Americans at their church ... with the express intent of terrorizing not just his immediate victims at the historically important Mother Emanuel Church, but as many similar people as would hear of the mass murder,” the ruling read. "His crimes qualify him for the harshest penalty that a just society can impose."

This isn't the end of the road for Roof's appeals, particularly because the Biden administration isn't in favor of the death penalty.

However, it's a significant setback for anyone who thinks Roof is not beyond saving.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/25/dylann-roof-death-penalty-charleston-506900  

8/26/21 Black Peoples' Headstones Are Being Used as Riprap Along the Potomac

Outrage

A historic outrage has been lying in plain sight for many years: Gravestones from Maryland's historic Columbian Harmony Cemetery, which was the resting place for Black people for almost exactly 100 years.

The cemetery no longer exists. In 1960, commercial development seemed more important, even though 37,000 people were buried there. Among them were two sons of Frederick Douglass, Phillip Reid, who helped create the statue of Freedom that tops the US Capitol building, and Elizabeth Keckly, a confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln.

But in the name of commerce, the bodies were moved to another location. Now, a metro station stands where the cemetery used to be. The gravestones didn't make the journey. They were taken away and used as barriers to shore up eroding shorelines, as if they were blocks of cement, but cheaper.

Unbelievable -- but it happened.

This travesty only got serious attention when a white man, a Virginia state senator, encountered several gravestones on a ramble with his wife on property they had bought along the Potomac shore in 2016. They enlisted Virginia's governor, Ralph Northam, who in turn enlisted historians and volunteers who tracked down the place where the gravestones used to be.

Why did it have to be a white man? Why did it have to be a politician?

On Monday, a memorial park opened with 55 gravestones from the original cemetery, with the white dignitaries and some of the descendants of people who were buried in Columbian Harmony. One of them is a descendant of a Howard University professor who bears his name, William Hart. Hart said that his overwhelming emotion was of happiness and encouragement. He thanked the crowd, including the governors and other attendants for "honoring [his] family with [their] presence."

He's a better person than I am.

Eventually, the gravestones will be part of a one-acre memorial garden in Landover, MD. 

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/us/harmony-cemetery-gravestones-repatriated/index.html

Illustration:  "Scream for all your worth" by id-iom is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

8/28/21 Most American Adolescents Report Recent Suicidal Thoughts or Self-Harm

So you think the pandemic is hard on you? Imagine being one of the 54% of U.S. kids 11 through 17 who have been dealing with frequent suicidal thoughts or committing self-harm in the last two weeks. You've had decades to develop coping strategies; they've just started.

The figures are from Mental Health America, which has run the survey since 2014. The organization provides a wealth of resources for those dealing with troubled teens. The link at the bottom of this post is a good place to start.

One top intervention strategy is getting kids involved in programs with other kids. "Mental health isn't always about seeing a therapist or a psychiatrist," says the director of counseling at Montclair State University in New Jersey. "Sometimes it's about becoming involved in your community. It's about making those connections, feeling that you belong."

Parents, teachers, aunts, family friends, and neighbors: Please keep an eye out for adolescents who need help.

Here's a good place to look for resources: https://mhanational.org/depression-teens-0

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mental-health-teens-covid-19-pandemic/

Illustration: "Broken Heart Grunge" by Free Grunge Textures - www.freestock.ca is licensed under CC BY 2.0

8/27/21 Texas Supreme Court Follows Governor Over a Cliff

It has been another can-you-top-this day in Texas -- in this case, a Texas Supreme Court decision that upheld Governor Greg Abbott's order forbidding just about any organization in Texas from imposing a mask mandate. No school, institution, company, grocery store, cigar store, or shootin' match in the sunstruck state can keep out a knucklehead too contrary to put on a mask.

The Court had approved Abbott's decision once already. Then a judge in Bexar County, home to San Antonio and the Alamo, upheld a ban of the ban; that is, the judge said it's okay for schools to require kids and grownups to wear masks.

Yesterday, the Court said, “The status quo, for many months, has been gubernatorial oversight of such decisions at both the state and local levels.”

I'd rather see the governor's desk occupied by a longhorn steer than by Greg Abbott. A steer knows to get out of the rain if there's a roof nearby. In a thunderstorm, the governor and his justices would probably opt to take a swim, and expect everybody else to join them.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/569587-texas-supreme-court-sides-with-abbott-in-blocking-san-antonios-school?rl=1

Art: https://openclipart.org/detail/285858/texas-state-flag-map

8/26/21 Have We Made Progress in Racial Justice? Not in Louisiana

If you want to believe that racism is retreating into the past, this incident will remind you that we've only just started to leave that past behind.

Aaron Bowman, a Black man, was forced out of his car after a traffic stop in May 2019. He was already on the ground when a white policeman named Jacob Brown came by, got out of his cruiser, and pounded Bowman with a flashlight 18 times in 20 seconds. Bowman wound up with a broken jaw, three broken ribs, a broken wrist and a bloody gash on his head that required six staples.

"I kept thinking I was going to die that night," Bowman told the Associated Press.

Brown had been reported for 23 use-of-force incidents going back to 2015 -- about every two months for four years. Brown resigned this January.

Police stonewalled inquiries about the footage for more than two years, but now, Brown is under federal investigation along with Louisiana police as a whole, and he has been charged with battery and malfeasance in Bowman's beating -- as well as facing charges in two other violent arrests of Black drivers. In one case, he bragged in a troopers' group chat that "it warms my heart knowing we could educate that young man."

This scum-sucking dirtbag belongs in jail -- along with the people who let him get away with this behavior for four years. The kicker to this despicable incident was that it occurred only three weeks after another Black driver was killed by the side of a Louisiana road -- again after a traffic stop, again after a savage beating by police.

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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aaron-larry-bowman-louisiana-police-trooper-video-pummel-black-man-flashlight/ Illustration: "Scream for all your worth" by id-iom is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0