DOOMS

Due to concerns over the rising number of covid cases and following recent CDC guidance, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the mayor of the City of Atlanta, has issued an Executive Order requiring all persons in a public place, including private businesses and establishments, to wear a mask or a cloth face covering their nose and mouth when indoors.

Despite the availability of vaccines, variants (genetic mutations) of the covid virus have evolved among the unvaccinated.  The Delta variant, now the most common form of the covids in America, is more readily transmissible, and while it doesn't pose a greater health risk to the vaccinated, it appears to be capable of being transmitted by both the vaccinated and the unvaxxed.

Only 38% of all Georgians are fully vaccinated (48% of those 18 and older), one of the worst rates in the country.  Nationwide, only 60% of those 18 and older are now vaccinate (at a minimum, 70% of the entire population theoretically needs to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity).  New variants of the covids are going to evolve among the unvaccinated, and some variant eventually is going to be immune to the vaccines, and possibly more fatal.

We're doomed.  We're all going to die.

The hot weather that has plagued much of the country this summer has finally arrived in the Southeast.  Today, the high temperature is forecast to reach 97 degrees, but with the high humidity, the heat index value is 105º (106⁰ tomorrow).  It's late July, and these temperatures are not uncommon for Georgia, but that doesn't make suffering through them any more tolerable.  

They are uncommon for other parts of the United States that's suffered through them this summer, and with the changing climate, we will continue to experience more extreme heat waves, droughts and floods, forest fires, and hurricanes.  The conditions climate scientists have been warning us about for decades are finally here, and it's arguably too late to turn back the clock.

We're doomed.  We're all going to die.

Georgia, Texas and several other states have taken advantage of the repeal of the Voting Rights Act and have passed or are in the process of passing measures to suppress voting by making it more difficult to cast a ballot.  More disturbingly, some of the legislation affects the way votes are counted, and takes oversight of elections away from local jurisdictions and elected officials and gives it to political appointees selected by Governors.  That way, should a future president call and say, "I need 11,000 more votes," the mechanism will be in place to allow that to happen.

We're doomed.  Democracy is going to die.

Impermanence is swift.  What was here yesterday is gone tomorrow.  We should never let this thought be far from our minds.