Yes, I know, it’s Tuesday and y’all are thirsty but can I just say something first?
Who told this Damn Fool that anything about this so-called “photo op” that brought him out of his bunker yesterday afternoon projects strength?
First of all, you had to teargas protestors and clergy people to even be able to walk so much as a city block.
Then you gangsta a church property without the property owners permission.
And the pictures and videos themselves are really, really sad.
I mean, I know and have been in this part of DC. As a rule, this place where The Damn Fool is walking is usually pretty clean.
All that graffiti profaning him; Donald Trump created that. He projected that on the American society.
This is what happens when enough people in the right places want to hire a real-estate developer whose home and resort is best known for having bedbugs and spreading possibly deadly viruses.
Fuc*ing slumlords, all of ‘em.
Let’s read some pundits.
Emily Stewart/Vox
Floyd, 46, had lost his job as a restaurant bouncer due to stay-at-home orders in his state. Of the millions of Americans laid off or furloughed during the coronavirus crisis, black workers are likelier to be affected than white workers.
The medical examiner who examined Floyd’s body said that “underlying conditions” likely contributed to his death, which came after now-former police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd to the ground with his knee for several minutes. They are among the underlying health conditions that black Americans disproportionately suffer from and that have contributed to higher rates of illness and death from Covid-19.
Centuries of racism and systemic inequality continuously disadvantage, disrupt, and cut short black lives in the United States. Currently, black Americans are experiencing multiple crises layered on top of one another. Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and, most recently, Floyd have lost their lives to white violence and police in recent weeks. Now mass protests are sweeping the country as a pandemic is wreaking havoc on black communities, in terms of both health and economics.
To be brutally honest with you, I have gotten sick and tired of some of the concern trolling that I have seen here at Daily Kos about protesting in the time of a raging global pandemic. Lauren Powell, writing for STATnews, gets it.
Protesting racism is necessary. Doing it during a pandemic, however, is my deepest public health nightmare. It’s nearly impossible to stay 6 feet apart in a crowd and there’s an increased chance of person-to-person Covid-19 transmission in a crowd that is already at heightened risk.
There will never be a convenient time to dismantle racism. Protests of the civil rights movement came with the risk of beatings, water hoses, and deadly force — not unlike what we’re seeing today. But the stakes are even higher in the center of a deadly and insidious pandemic. Protester or not, all of us can take action to protect the safety and health of the Black community and stand in solidarity in this pivotal moment.
If you choose to protest publicly, wear masks and gloves, especially if the march or demonstration involves holding hands. Carry hand sanitizer and try your best to keep 6 feet of empty space between you and others, even while marching. When you get home, immediately wash your clothes and take a shower.
State and local leaders should prioritize safety and equity for Black communities in their Covid-19 response. They should reconsider the use of pepper spray, since the coughing it provokes increases the risk transmitting Covid-19. Law enforcement officers should be trained in equity and de-escalation tactics.
Racism in America has not taken a day off in American history ever.
Nor does racism take sick, vacation, or personal days simply because there’s a local, national, or global pandemic on the loose. Racism is a whole lot of extra— and then some— added to the daily problems. issues, and other -isms that all human beings have.
Melody Cooper, brother of Christopher Cooper, the black birdwatcher who was subjected to a false and racist 911 call in Central Park, has some thoughts of her own about everything that has happened since./ New York Times
Racism affects all black people — men, women, boys, girls, gay, straight, nonbinary — no matter their state of employment or where or if they went to college. I have no doubt that if the police had showed up in the Ramble, a wooded area of the park where Chris had gone bird watching, my brother’s Ivy League degree and impressive résumé would not have protected him. Yet the Good Negro narrative has long allowed white people to feel comfortable speaking out against the mistreatment of particular black people: “He is just like us.” “She is a good one.” Every black person subjected to this kind of hatred needs recognition, justice and support.
I asked my brother for permission to post the video on Twitter, and I didn’t expect more than 100 responses since it was Memorial Day. I was shocked it struck such a chord. The post has now garnered more than 40 million views and hundreds of thousands of likes from all over the world. In the responses, I saw anger and calls for social action, as well as expressions of joy that my brother had not been harmed, at least not physically.
When I’ve checked in with him over the past few days as we’ve fielded interviews and messages, I’ve asked “Are you, OK? How are you feeling?” Because even though he walked away, and even though I’m relieved, there still has been a toll. We felt it even before the incident with Amy Cooper. Every time we walk out of our door, we have cause to worry. My brother worries when he sneaks through the trees to catch a glimpse of a beautiful warbler. I worry when I check in late to an Airbnb, and every time my son gets in the car. Others wonder if a trip to the corner store or gas station might result in a phone call that will end their lives. So many of us in cities and towns across America are done with having to wonder if we’ll be put at risk by our mere existence.
Ah, “The Good Negro.” I know a little bit about that. I’ve even gotten that “Good Negro” treatment from cops throughout my life. So far.
Martin Longman of Washington Monthly wants The Damn Fool to simply resign.
Already impeached in the House and credibly prosecuted in the Senate, Trump faces a nation that has lost more than twice as many citizens to COVID-19 in two and a half months as President Johnson lost in Vietnam in five years. Of course, 1968 was the deadliest year of the Vietnam conflict, costing us almost 17,000 lives. Overall, about 48,000 Americans died in Vietnam on LBJ’s watch. The official coronavirus death count surpassed that number in the week of April 18-24.
Meanwhile, the official unemployment rate for April reached 14.7 percent. Bloomberg estimates that unemployment might have reached 20 percent in May, with payrolls nationally down about 29 million since the outbreak of the pandemic.
There are protests in nearly every city in the country, and widespread looting and disorder in most major metropolises. This trend will exacerbate both the viral outbreak and the staggering levels of job loss.
There is zero chance that Trump can set things right. His own White House advisers don’t even want him to try.
And, as Robin Wright of The New Yorker reports, world disillusionment with the United States continues to deepen and The Damn Fool can’t fix that either.
The outrage about the lack of decency and the American double standard has now gone global in everyday life, including sport. In Germany, where a soccer league recently became the first in Europe to resume play (albeit without fans), four players individually expressed their anger in matches over the weekend. After scoring his first career hat trick, Jadon Sancho, of Borussia Dortmund, pulled off his yellow shirt to reveal another shirt underneath, with a handwritten message in black letters: “Justice for George Floyd.” He was willing to take a yellow card for misconduct, for playing politics on the field. He later tweeted, about scoring, “A bittersweet moment personally as there are more important things going on in the world today that we must address and help make a change.” His teammate Achraf Hakimi followed suit after he scored, later in the game. In another match, a player took a knee after scoring, the same symbolic move made famous by the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. What is striking about the protest signs and the body language, whatever country they’re in, is that they are almost all in English or use symbols from the American experience. The message in so many lands—that America has failed its people—is meant for American ears.
Optimus has a B/C rating at 538 and an R +1.4 Mean Reverted Bias.
I did go digging into some of the toplines and one of them really screamed at me.
Perry Bacon, Jr. at FiveThirtyEight notices what I notice: The protests over the murder of George Floyd are far from all-black events.
White Americans, particularly those who are younger, college-educated or liberal-leaning, have shifted their views on racial issues in the last several years, increasingly saying that they view the United States and many of its policies as discriminatory against black people.
This shift didn’t happen in the last few weeks — FiveThirtyEight wrote about it in early 2018, for example, and Vox dubbed it “the Great Awokening” about a year later. But these protests and the white presence at them are another point in the growing body of data that shows many white Americans have become increasingly conscious of discrimination against black Americans — particularly in the years since Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in 2012 and Michael Brown was shot and killed in 2014.
Here are some of the most important findings from recent polls about the racial views of white Americans in particular, but also other Americans, and how those views have shifted over the last several years.
Yes, that is a good and positive trend. But remember: just as racism doesn’t take a day off for any reason, neither does white privilege is all that many of us are saying.
John Hewko and Peter J. Hotez , for CNN, wonders if a future COVID-19 vaccine will signal the end of the anti-vaxx movement.
Yet, in the face of extensive regulatory measures and an abundance of evidence proving the safety and efficacy of vaccines, even before coronavirus struck, vaccine-preventable diseases, including measles and flu viruses, were already resurging in the US.
These resurgences have materialized in part because of falling vaccination rates. A Health Testing Centers study last year found that more than half of US states have experienced a decline in kindergarten vaccination rates over the past decade.
In 2015, polio vaccination rates for kindergartens in Washington state was 88.4%, lower than the rates for 1-year-olds in Rwanda and Yemen, according to data from WHO.
The phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy — the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines — is of global concern.
For some parents, vaccines are no longer a natural part of pediatric care. For some, their rejection of life-saving medical innovations reflects a broader post-war cultural phenomenon according to historian Elena Conis, of "antipathy toward big industries; ambivalence toward modern medicine, doctors, and the health care system; and rejection of longstanding institutions of cultural authority."
Finally today, Helen Branswell of STATnews talks to National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci about a few things but mostly about the prospects for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Let’s talk a bit about what you’ve seen so far in terms of data. When Moderna recently released some the information on the vaccine they are developing with NIAID, they showed neutralizing antibodies in eight people. Are there more data? And what are the antibody levels like? Because they didn’t give us any kind of scale against which we could assess what they were saying.
I know. I didn’t like that. What we would have preferred to do, quite frankly, is to wait until we had the data from the entire Phase 1 — which I hear is quite similar to the data that they showed — and publish it in a reputable journal and show all the data. But the company, when they looked at the data, as all companies do, they said, wow, this is exciting. Let’s put out a press release.
The thing that made everyone be cautiously optimistic is that we didn’t just see binding antibody. It was clearly antibody that was neutralizing live virus, at levels that you would predict would be protective — if in fact neutralizing antibody, which is a reasonable assumption, is going to be a correlate of immunity.
Everyone have a good morning!