Montgomery City Council votes down mask ordinance, sends doctors out in disgust
Jackson Hospital pulmonologist William Saliski cleared his throat as he started describing the dire situation created by the coronavirus pandemic in Montgomery to its City Council before they voted on a mandatory mask ordinance.
"It's been a long day, I apologize," he said.
"The units are full with critically-ill COVID patients," Saliski said.
"About 90% of them are Black."
He said hospitals are able to manage for now, but it's not sustainable.
"This mask slows that down, 95% protection from something as easy as cloth. ... If this continues the way it's going, we will be overrun."
More doctors followed him to the microphone, describing the dead being carried out within 30 minutes of each other, and doctors being disturbed when people on the street ask them if the media is lying about the pandemic as part of a political ploy.
After they spoke, and before the council voted on a proposal by Councilman C.C. Calhoun to mandate mask-wearing in public in Montgomery, Councilman Brantley Lyons questioned whether masks and six-foot distancing really helps.
They do, the doctors replied.
Lyons was unmoved.
"At the end of the day, if an illness or a pandemic comes through we do not throw our constitutional rights out the window," Lyons said.
. . . .
[T]he council killed the ordinance after it failed to pass in a 4-4 tie, mostly along racial lines, with Councilman Tracy Larkin absent.
Councilman Clay McInnis voted with three Black council members — Calhoun, Oronde Mitchell and Audrey Graham — in favor of the ordinance.
Lyons, Charles Jinright, Richard Bollinger and Glen Pruitt voted against it.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Lawsuit coming? One hopes.
Buffalo protester Martin Gugino has a fractured skull and cannot walk
Martin Gugino, the 75-year-old protester who was pushed by two Buffalo, New York, police officers earlier this month, has a fractured skull and is not able to walk, his lawyer said in a statement provided to CNN on Monday.
"I am not at liberty to elaborate at this time other than to confirm that his skull was fractured," Gugino's attorney Kelly Zarcone said.
"While he is not able to walk yet, we were able to have a short conversation before he became too tired. He is appreciative of all of the concern about him but he is still focused on the issues rather than himself."
The guy is such a lefty he thinks his own victimization by the police is not even part of the issue.
He's white, you know.
Martin Gugino, the 75-year-old protester who was pushed by two Buffalo, New York, police officers earlier this month, has a fractured skull and is not able to walk, his lawyer said in a statement provided to CNN on Monday.
"I am not at liberty to elaborate at this time other than to confirm that his skull was fractured," Gugino's attorney Kelly Zarcone said.
"While he is not able to walk yet, we were able to have a short conversation before he became too tired. He is appreciative of all of the concern about him but he is still focused on the issues rather than himself."
The guy is such a lefty he thinks his own victimization by the police is not even part of the issue.
He's white, you know.
Betty Crocker, you're next
Right after Mrs. Butterworth and Sarah Lee, but before Duncan Hines and Mr. Peanut.
Quaker has bent the knee.
Aunt Jemima brand to change name, remove image that Quaker says is 'based on a racial stereotype'
The Floyd demonstrations have mutated into a rebellion of the racial left that has so far left behind the sexual left.
That won't last.
Quaker has bent the knee.
Aunt Jemima brand to change name, remove image that Quaker says is 'based on a racial stereotype'
The Floyd demonstrations have mutated into a rebellion of the racial left that has so far left behind the sexual left.
That won't last.
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
Antifa in the news
According to Wikipedia, most antifa groups or individuals are committed to criminal actions.
Antifa (short for anti-fascism or anti-fascist) is not an organization but a movement in which numerous groups and individuals participate.
The movement as a whole is extremist, far left, soi-disant revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-government, and all of that is contrary to the official as well as real commitments and ideas of the Democratic Party.
And while of course there are and have always been anti-fascist liberals and anti-fascist conservatives, the antifa movement and ideology rejects, excludes, and opposes both liberalism and conservatism, no matter how anti-fascist.
Paul Waldman notes the Trumpist right has made much of antifa, though their exclamations of alarm are about on a level for stupid mendacity with their idiotic lies about Joe Scarborough murdering an employee, Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor, Ted Cruz's dad killing FJK, and Hunter Biden's criminal activities in Ukraine.
Which is not to say there are no such people, at all.
But it really doesn't come to much.
Antifa (short for anti-fascism or anti-fascist) is not an organization but a movement in which numerous groups and individuals participate.
The movement as a whole is extremist, far left, soi-disant revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-government, and all of that is contrary to the official as well as real commitments and ideas of the Democratic Party.
And while of course there are and have always been anti-fascist liberals and anti-fascist conservatives, the antifa movement and ideology rejects, excludes, and opposes both liberalism and conservatism, no matter how anti-fascist.
Paul Waldman notes the Trumpist right has made much of antifa, though their exclamations of alarm are about on a level for stupid mendacity with their idiotic lies about Joe Scarborough murdering an employee, Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor, Ted Cruz's dad killing FJK, and Hunter Biden's criminal activities in Ukraine.
Which is not to say there are no such people, at all.
But it really doesn't come to much.
Shooting in New Mexico
City of Albuquerque removes statue of Juan de Oñate
I do not support the taking down of this statue, statues of Columbus, or other statues erected essentially to celebrate the European peopling of the US and the Americas.
The indigenista Children of Zinn consider the white settling of the Americas to be an atrocity and racist crime all by itself, and insist there was a general white genocide of the natives though Indians are far more numerous today than ever in the past.
I don't endorse or in the least accept their view of this history.
All the same, it ought to be illegal to show up at any demonstration with a weapon.
Demonstrators illegally defaced and attempted to tear down a statue in an act of race hatred and a man attempted to stop them with physical intervention.
Shoved to the ground, he took out a gun and shot a demonstrator.
He was then surrounded by armed militia in camos and wearing riot gear.
The man was arrested.
There is some dispute about whether he was a member of the militia, who are being described in the media as vigilantes who showed up armed to prevent the crowd harming or taking down the statue.
The Republican Party continues to exist because white Democrats have no balls.
Republicans, on the other hand, have no brains.
The Republican Party continues to exist because white Democrats have no balls.
Republicans, on the other hand, have no brains.
A beautiful day in the neighborhood
Drove to the South Hills Village where I parked at the Food Court.
Took a walk outdoors, circumnavigating the parking lot.
Then drove to Riverside Park on the South Side on the Mon and parked in the shade of a tree with a view of the road, the river, and the Birmingham Bridge.
Read for a bit more than an hour, Camus, La Peste.
It was Tarrou's autobiographical speech about his rejection of killing and his bonding swim with Doctor Rieux.
Took a walk outdoors, circumnavigating the parking lot.
Then drove to Riverside Park on the South Side on the Mon and parked in the shade of a tree with a view of the road, the river, and the Birmingham Bridge.
Read for a bit more than an hour, Camus, La Peste.
It was Tarrou's autobiographical speech about his rejection of killing and his bonding swim with Doctor Rieux.
Monday, June 15, 2020
Why do so many people run from the police?
A drunken black fellow in Atlanta fell asleep in his car in a Wendy's drive-through.
He resisted the police, fought them, stole a taser from one of two officers, fired the taser at a pursuer as he fled on foot, and was then shot dead on the run.
Not that the shooting was justified. It was not.
But nothing this drunk did was justified, and it was none of it the least prudent, either.
Just the other day a white guy led police attempting a traffic stop in a high speed chase and then a chase on foot, finally jumping into a lake wherein he finally drowned.
Why he fled a traffic stop in the first place was never explained.
He resisted the police, fought them, stole a taser from one of two officers, fired the taser at a pursuer as he fled on foot, and was then shot dead on the run.
Not that the shooting was justified. It was not.
But nothing this drunk did was justified, and it was none of it the least prudent, either.
Just the other day a white guy led police attempting a traffic stop in a high speed chase and then a chase on foot, finally jumping into a lake wherein he finally drowned.
Why he fled a traffic stop in the first place was never explained.
Outbreak in Beijing, market implicated
China's new coronavirus outbreak sees Beijing adopt 'wartime' measures as capital races to contain spread
Beijing is reintroducing strict lockdown measures and rolling out mass testing after a fresh cluster of novel coronavirus cases emerged from the city's largest wholesale food market, sparking fears of a resurgence of the deadly outbreak.
The Chinese capital reported 36 new Covid-19 cases on Monday, bringing the total number to 79 since a locally transmitted infection was reported on June 12 for the first time in nearly two months, according to the National Health Commission.
Beijing is reintroducing strict lockdown measures and rolling out mass testing after a fresh cluster of novel coronavirus cases emerged from the city's largest wholesale food market, sparking fears of a resurgence of the deadly outbreak.
The Chinese capital reported 36 new Covid-19 cases on Monday, bringing the total number to 79 since a locally transmitted infection was reported on June 12 for the first time in nearly two months, according to the National Health Commission.
The cases are linked to Xinfadi market in the southwest of the city, which supplies most of the capital's fresh fruit and vegetables.
The market, which also sells meat and seafood, has been shut down since Saturday.
The outbreak has already spread to the provinces of Liaoning and Hebei, where a total of five new cases were found to be close contacts of patients in Beijing.
. . . .
Beijing authorities are still trying to trace the source of the latest outbreak, however, pledging to conduct "the strictest epidemiological investigations."
Zhang Yuxi, the market's chairman, told the state-run Beijing News on Friday that the virus had been detected on a chopping board used by a seller of imported salmon at the market, leading to fears of wider contamination.
Several supermarket chains have since removed salmon from their shelves, according to Beijing Daily.
While investigations are still underway, a researcher with the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control said genome sequencing indicated the virus found in the market is similar to strains normally found in Europe.
"But it is still uncertain how the virus originated. It could have come from contaminated seafood or meat, or been transmitted by people who have come into the market via their secretions," Yang Peng, the researcher, told state broadcaster CCTV on Sunday.
Surprise!
Supreme Court says federal law protects LGBTQ workers from discrimination
Happening now.
Gorsuch and Roberts hand the liberals a surprise win on LGBT rights.
Federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender workers, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The landmark ruling will extend protections to millions of workers nationwide and is a defeat for the Trump administration, which argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination based on sex did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation.
The 6-3 opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's four liberal justices.
Happening now.
Gorsuch and Roberts hand the liberals a surprise win on LGBT rights.
Federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender workers, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The landmark ruling will extend protections to millions of workers nationwide and is a defeat for the Trump administration, which argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination based on sex did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation.
The 6-3 opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's four liberal justices.
This outcome is all the more odd as the government's reading of the portion of the law prohibiting discrimination based on sex as prohibiting only discrimination against an employee or job applicant on account of being male or not being male, or on account of being female or not being female - is surely correct as a fair reading of the actual wording of the thing, understood as it normally would have been at the time of adoption, and indeed as it normally would be understood even today.
That fact, generally urged by conservatives, is nevertheless flatly denied by liberals.
(Don't you love it when liberals piously insist everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not his own facts?
Or when they with equal piety - but still falsely - protest that alternative facts are not facts but untruths?)
(Don't you love it when liberals piously insist everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not his own facts?
Or when they with equal piety - but still falsely - protest that alternative facts are not facts but untruths?)
So Gorsuch and Roberts?
Neil Gorsuch, one of the Trump appointees, wrote the sweeping decision that extended federal employment protections to gay and transgender workers.
He is proving to be more of an ideological wildcard than many on the left expected.
Chief Justice John Roberts, another Republican-appointed justice who has at times defied predictions, joined to give the ruling a comfortable 6-to-3 margin.
Both are sure to face an uproar from conservatives quarters.
It's difficult to overstate the significance of the decision.
While the court is establishing a long history of decisions expanding gay rights, this is the first time it spoke directly about the legal protections for transgender individuals.
That the ruling comes out just days after the Trump administration announced it was removing transgender health-insurance protections only puts the issue in stark relief.
Transgender rights is becoming a political battlefield, and a majority of the Supreme Court just announced which side it's on.
Update later that same day.
MSNBC reports Gorsuch wrote that though protection of homosexuals and trans people was doubtless not the intention of the congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that doesn't matter because according to the meaning of the words discrimination on account of sex covers discrimination on account of sexual orientation or trans status.
CNN
"An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids," Gorsuch wrote.
"There is simply no escaping the role intent plays here: Just as sex is necessarily a but-for cause when an employer discriminates against homosexual or transgender employees, an employer who discriminates on these grounds inescapably intends to rely on sex in its decisionmaking," the opinion read.
. . . .
But the ruling was also sharply criticized by the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, whose president issued a blistering statement about Gorsuch, who replaced the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
"Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today, for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards," said Carrie Severino, a former clerk of Justice Clarence Thomas.
"This was not judging, this was legislating -- a brute force attack on our constitutional system."
So Gorsuch simply drank the liberal Kool-Aid on the language of the statute.
Alito and Thomas call bullshit.
Kavanaugh is not impressed, either.
Surely a novelty is the spectacle of a conservative judge so egregiously violating his own alleged principles not in order to reach a result required by conservative ideology - as Scalia himself so often did - but to reach one condemned by it and required instead by liberal ideology.
Neil Gorsuch, one of the Trump appointees, wrote the sweeping decision that extended federal employment protections to gay and transgender workers.
He is proving to be more of an ideological wildcard than many on the left expected.
Chief Justice John Roberts, another Republican-appointed justice who has at times defied predictions, joined to give the ruling a comfortable 6-to-3 margin.
Both are sure to face an uproar from conservatives quarters.
It's difficult to overstate the significance of the decision.
While the court is establishing a long history of decisions expanding gay rights, this is the first time it spoke directly about the legal protections for transgender individuals.
That the ruling comes out just days after the Trump administration announced it was removing transgender health-insurance protections only puts the issue in stark relief.
Transgender rights is becoming a political battlefield, and a majority of the Supreme Court just announced which side it's on.
Update later that same day.
MSNBC reports Gorsuch wrote that though protection of homosexuals and trans people was doubtless not the intention of the congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that doesn't matter because according to the meaning of the words discrimination on account of sex covers discrimination on account of sexual orientation or trans status.
CNN
"An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids," Gorsuch wrote.
"There is simply no escaping the role intent plays here: Just as sex is necessarily a but-for cause when an employer discriminates against homosexual or transgender employees, an employer who discriminates on these grounds inescapably intends to rely on sex in its decisionmaking," the opinion read.
. . . .
But the ruling was also sharply criticized by the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, whose president issued a blistering statement about Gorsuch, who replaced the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
"Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today, for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards," said Carrie Severino, a former clerk of Justice Clarence Thomas.
"This was not judging, this was legislating -- a brute force attack on our constitutional system."
So Gorsuch simply drank the liberal Kool-Aid on the language of the statute.
Alito and Thomas call bullshit.
Kavanaugh is not impressed, either.
Surely a novelty is the spectacle of a conservative judge so egregiously violating his own alleged principles not in order to reach a result required by conservative ideology - as Scalia himself so often did - but to reach one condemned by it and required instead by liberal ideology.
Sunday, June 14, 2020
Wow. That's pretty gay.
The other day I read Plato's Symposium for the first time in some fifty years, and was quite taken aback.
I had entirely forgotten how gay and even enthusiastically pro-pederasty that dialogue is.
The dialogue is about love, a topic Plato's Socrates claims in the dialogue is the only thing he actually knows about.
A claim that lends additional weight to the philosophical content of Socrates' speech on the subject, on the whole just as gay as those of the others.
And that comprises the ideas of the philosopher as one who loves and pursues but does not have wisdom, of the philosopher actually achieving intuition of the Form of Beauty itself, and of the philosopher's special claim to political insight.
Alcibiades' speech comes last, right after Socrates', and paints him as having been - with Alcibiades, anyway - an annoyingly chaste homosexual lover of beautiful male youths.
It is interesting that the Catholic clerics of the Middle Ages preserved Plato, the enthusiastic advocate of pederasty, but lost the not so gay (if at all) Aristotle and pretty much stamped out the anti-sex Epicurus.
If I have that history right.
I had entirely forgotten how gay and even enthusiastically pro-pederasty that dialogue is.
The dialogue is about love, a topic Plato's Socrates claims in the dialogue is the only thing he actually knows about.
A claim that lends additional weight to the philosophical content of Socrates' speech on the subject, on the whole just as gay as those of the others.
And that comprises the ideas of the philosopher as one who loves and pursues but does not have wisdom, of the philosopher actually achieving intuition of the Form of Beauty itself, and of the philosopher's special claim to political insight.
Alcibiades' speech comes last, right after Socrates', and paints him as having been - with Alcibiades, anyway - an annoyingly chaste homosexual lover of beautiful male youths.
It is interesting that the Catholic clerics of the Middle Ages preserved Plato, the enthusiastic advocate of pederasty, but lost the not so gay (if at all) Aristotle and pretty much stamped out the anti-sex Epicurus.
If I have that history right.
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