White Privilege is refusing to wear a mask in public or abide by Covid regulations but being the first to yell, “He should’ve complied!” after a police shooting.
— JB (@goosenotter) September 15, 2020
Sally appears to have come ashore in Alabama near the Florida border (figure 1).
Fig. 1. 72-hour gif of satellite imagery for the Eastern U.S. and Gulf of Mexico, September 16, 8:01 am.
Apologies to Eric Clapton for this post’s utterly appalling and inexcusable title.
Fig. 1. 72-hour gif of satellite imagery for the eastern U.S. and Gulf of Mexico, as of September 15, 2020, at 8:01 pm EDT.
Right now, it looks to me like Sally is taking aim at the Mississippi-Alabama border.
Fig. 1. 72-hour gif of satellite imagery for the eastern U.S. and Gulf of Mexico, September 15, 2020, at 8:01 am EDT.
So a bunch of schools ignored the advice that they needed to remain on-line only.[2] It’s pretty rapidly gone wrong, at least at some of the schools that returned to in-person instruction in August, pretty much as had been predicted.[3]
[T]he University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and East Carolina University all moved to remote instruction after just a week of classes. Michigan State University canceled most in-person instruction less than two weeks before the semester began. Many institutions may make similar decisions as the realities of [COVID-19] viral infection collide with their in-person ambitions.[4]
And, of course, that’s gonna cost the universities money but maybe not as much as you might think: In many cases, these reversals occurred too late for students to get their money back. The predictable cynicism ensues but it’s possible hubris and a desperation to maintain enrollment have as much to do with the decisions to resume in-person instruction as greed.[5]
A personal note, here: Even before I had finished my bachelor’s degree (this was late 2005), I was starting to see a lot of hubris on the campus (California State University, East Bay) I attended. Certainly, I see a lot of hubris emanating from Saybrook University now, which having destroyed its human science program, has lost its curricular grounding and—this is painful—seems to be going entirely woo woo.
Hubris is real. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t.
I’m seeing a lot of masked students now on the streets of Oakland, a neighborhood in Pittsburgh where (very roughly west to east) Carlow University, University of Pittsburgh (“Pitt”), and Carnegie-Mellon University have their main campuses, side-by-side, and also where University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) has three major hospitals. I’m also seeing that at least some K-12 schools are back in session. So far, from the notifications I’ve been getting on my phone, the bump in COVID-19 case counts in Allegheny County has been small. I’m hoping this works out but it’s still awfully early.
So it’s another $1000+ going into my car in an already expensive year. Tires and front rotors, this time. The front end work earlier this year that, with an inspection and engine fan repair, came to around $1900, was due to Pittsburgh road conditions. I only got about 21,000 miles out of this last set of tires, also largely due to Pittsburgh road conditions. I’m cutting the wheel alignment check interval to 90 days (I put on about 63,000 miles per year), but basically, I’m losing my ass here and because so much of it is due to Pittsburgh road conditions, I really can’t blame the car. I can only blame the ridesharing driving. The trouble is that, even with a Ph.D., I have no choice.[6]
Paula Reed Ward, “Federal judge rules Gov. Wolf’s shutdown orders were unconstitutional,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, September 14, 2020, https://triblive.com/local/regional/federal-judge-rules-gov-wolfs-shutdown-orders-were-unconstitutional/
The Colorado federal judge did not mince words about the false mailings Dejoy had @USPS send out. pic.twitter.com/YdnRRGG8Jh
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) September 13, 2020
There is a new blog post entitled, “On ‘freedom.’”
“In Colorado, every registered voter is sent a ballot without having to make a request and voters are urged to return ballots by mail sooner than seven days before the election. My office asked USPS officials to delay or not send the mailer in Colorado, but they refused to commit to that,” said [Colorado Secretary of State Jena] Griswold. Voters in states with similar vote-by-mail, such as California and Washington, could also be misled by the postcard’s recommendations.[3]
I had thought the card was pretty germaine, but given its obvious significance in this election, took the precaution of scanning it in (figure 1) before, as I do with nearly everything, shredding it:[4]
Fig. 1. Scan of card received by author on September 11, 2020, from the U.S. Postal Service.
Sure enough, there is specific advice there that could conflict with some states’ rules. And it really wouldn’t have taken a lot of rephrasing to mollify Jena Griswold and her colleagues from, she says, at least five other states.[5]
Jake Johnson, “Condemning ‘Attempt at Voter Suppression,’ Colorado Sues DeJoy Over Misleading Postal Service Mailers,” Common Dreams, September 12, 2020, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/12/condemning-attempt-voter-suppression-colorado-sues-dejoy-over-misleading-postal
Colleen Flynn and Evan Kruegel, “TRO against USPS granted in lawsuit filed by Colo. Sec. of State Jena Griswold,” KDVR, September 12, 2020, https://kdvr.com/news/tro-against-usps-granted-in-lawsuit-filed-by-colo-sec-of-state-jena-griswold/
Kimberly Kindy, “More than 200 meat plant workers in the U.S. have died of covid-19. Federal regulators just issued two modest fines,” Washington Post, September 13, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/osha-covid-meat-plant-fines/2020/09/13/1dca3e14-f395-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story.html
Fig. 2. 72-hour gif of satellite imagery for Eastern U.S. and the Gulf of Mexico, as of September 14, 2020, at 2:02 am.
There is a new blog post entitled, “It is now too late.”
David Wallace-Wells, “California Can’t Afford to Wait for Climate Action,” New York, September 11, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/california-cant-afford-to-wait-for-climate-action.html
It’s a truly bizarre platform under the circumstances, but as is typical for neoliberals, utterly and willfully ignorant of reality:
Dems killed M4A (during a pandemic) the green new deal (as hurricanes and wildfires cover the earth) and criminal justice reform (while cops murder & beat the shit out of people nationwide) but the only people who have a problem with this are russian agents, do i have that right?
— Gallifreyan Jedi (@JediofGallifrey) September 12, 2020
“M4A” means Medicare For All.
I have added a note to a previous blog post:
I am remembering a previous blog post in which I witnessed a local cop (in the Pittsburgh area) allowed his dog to bark viciously and persistently at a Black man who was doing nothing more than walking across a parking lot. Instances such as these, this one that I personally witnessed,[1] the one Ryan Devereaux describes,[2] and, of course, the disproportionate killings of Blacks,[3] virtually erase the distinction between police and white supremacist militia, transforming it to a distinction between regular (official) and irregular (unofficial) white supremacist militia. I don’t know how you conclude otherwise.[4]
A couple years ago, I took a trip down to the Los Angeles area to be trained for my ill-fated stint with the U.S. Census Bureau.
I lost my identification at the front desk of the hotel. No credit or debit cards were involved; I kept those separately.
When I returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, I did all the appropriate stuff, moved on, and mostly forgot about it.
Today’s been one of those days. I should be out working already but there was an oil change and two grocery deliveries to deal with. At the end of it, I bought gas, got the car washed, and stopped by my mailbox to pick up some packages that had arrived yesterday.
I knew about four of them; in fact, there were six, including one from my old mailbox in Sebastopol (they forward my mail to me weekly). The latter included an envelope from the U.S. Postal Service marked, “Found Loose.”
I opened it and found the old identification wallet I’d lost in Los Angeles. The identification mostly—not entirely—had been superseded, first by replacement documents, and second, when I moved to Pittsburgh. But there is the sentimental value of that wallet.
A little over twenty years ago, I started working for Linuxcare as a contractor. Eventually they hired me on as an employee. This is the one real job I’ve ever had my life. It actually began to pay me what, for San Francisco even at that time, was a livable salary. But when they hired me, they gave me a few things—“tchotchke” in industry parlance. The tee shirt has long since worn out and disappeared. But this wallet I used for identification, embossed with “Linuxcare,” was the one I had lost in Los Angeles.
I don’t know precisely where that wallet has been all this time. I assume a mailbox someplace. But I also have to wonder what would have happened to it had it been turned into what neoliberals want to replace the Postal Service with, an outfit like FedEx or the United Parcel Service.
The Postal Service returned it to me. I doubt those other outfits would have.
So a note of appreciation is in order here for the Postal Service and whoever dropped that wallet in some Postal Service receptacle somewhere. Thanks!
So here I was, stopped somewhere for lunch, checking my email. I got to a Washington Post newsletter and found this (figure 1):
Fig. 1. Map of fires out west since August, from the Washington Post, September 10, 2020.
I hadn’t realized just how much territory had burned. I’ve been focused on the Walbridge Fire, for which I received notifications the other day that the last evacuation warning zones had been cleared, because it’s closest to my mother’s house. As terrible as that fire was, others have covered much more territory. There are active major fires burning in California, Oregon, and Washington.
The text originally here has been reworked into a new blog post entitled, “Bob Woodward’s book won’t matter in November.”
Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, “Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans,” Washington Post, September 9, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bob-woodward-rage-book-trump/2020/09/09/0368fe3c-efd2-11ea-b4bc-3a2098fc73d4_story.html
Rosa Brooks, “Woodward’s ‘Rage’ is a damning account of Trump’s cowering sycophants and enablers,” review of Rage, by Bob Woodward, Washington Post, September 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/woodwards-rage-is-a-damning-account-of-trumps-cowering-sycophants-and-enablers/2020/09/10/dab8917a-f2d6-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story.html
