War Is Over

Today would have been Gary Webb's birthday, but the forces of control caught up with him and shot him twice in the head.

Webb was a Southern California investigative journalist, best known for his Dark Alliance reporting. The Dark Alliance series examined the origins of the crack cocaine trade in Los Angeles and claimed that members of the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua had played a major role in creating the trade, using cocaine profits to finance their fight against the government in Nicaragua. It also stated that the Contras may have acted with the knowledge and protection of the CIA. The series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges.

Webb also investigated racial profiling by the California Highway Patrol and racial profiling in traffic stops. He also investigated charges that the Oracle Corporation had received a no-bid contract award of $95 million in 2001.

Webb was found dead in his home on December 10, 2004 with two gunshot wounds to the head. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office, but how the hell does one shoot himself in the head twice? Sacramento County Coroner Robert Lyons confirmed Webb had died by suicide, and said. "It's unusual in a suicide case to have two shots, but it has been done in the past, and it is in fact a distinct possibility." 

One year ago today, NY Mets pitching great Tom Seaver died as a result of the covids and complications from dementia.  Twenty-four years ago today, Princess Diana died in a car crash while trying to flee paparazzi.

The war in Afghanistan ended yesterday at 3:29 pm. Today is the first day in 19 years, 10 months, and 24 days that the United States hasn't been at war in Afghanistan.  It was the longest war in American history, far longer than the protracted defeat in Vietnam or the stalemate in Korea.  After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States and its allies needed less than four years to defeat fascism on three continents. After the secession of Southern states in 1860 and 1861, the U.S. spent slightly more than four years putting down the rebellion. After the first battles at Lexington and Concord in 1775, the colonies needed about eight years to beat the British and create a new nation.

Despite two decades of work and a couple of trillion dollars spent, the Afghan government collapsed in a matter of days. The regime was evidently no more enduring than it had been five years ago, 10 years ago, or back on Dec. 22, 2001, when Hamid Karzai was sworn in as Afghanistan’s first post-9/11 leader.

Across the span of American history, it’s hard to think of another failed project that lasted so long or cost so much. There have been worse injustices and tragedies in this country, but they were usually deliberate. The U.S. has been attempting to win in Afghanistan for nearly the entire 21st century.

In the last 3 weeks, U.S. troops evacuated some 123,000 Americans, Afghans and other civilians in the largest airlift in world history. But refugee groups say hundreds, and possibly thousands, of green-card holders have been left behind. The State Department says remaining Americans remaining in Afghanistan are primarily Afghan-Americans who have been unsure on whether they wanted to leave family behind or not. The administration has been in contact with most of them and promises it will continue to work to evacuate them should they choose to leave.  Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post pointed out that the U.S. evacuated no Americans from the civil war in Yemen in 2015, and only about 167 from Libya in 2011.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson points out that the U.S. withdrawal from its 20 years in Afghanistan began in February 2020, when the Trump administration cut a deal with the Taliban agreeing to release 5,000 imprisoned Taliban fighters and to leave the country by May 1, 2021, so long as the Taliban did not kill any more Americans. The negotiations did not include the U.S.-backed Afghan government. By the time Biden took office, the U.S. had withdrawn all but 2,500 troops from the country. 

That left Biden with the option of either going back on Trump’s agreement or following through with his deal. To ignore the agreement would mean the Taliban would begin attacking Americans again, and the U.S. would both have to deploy a significant numbers of new troops and sustain additional casualties. 

Biden himself wanted out of what had become a meandering, expensive, unpopular war, and on April 14, 2021, three months after taking office, he announced that he would honor the agreement he had inherited from Trump. “It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself,” he said, “but it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something.” He said that the original U.S. mission had been to stop Afghanistan from becoming a staging ground for terrorists and to destroy those who had attacked the U.S. on 9/11, and both of those goals had been accomplished. Now, he said, “our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclear.”

Biden said he would begin, not end, the troop withdrawal on May 1 (prompting Trump to complain that it should be done sooner), getting everyone out by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks that got us there in the first place. He later adjusted that date to August 31.  He promised to evacuate the country “responsibly, deliberately, and safely” and assured Americans that the U.S. had “trained and equipped a standing force of over 300,000 Afghan personnel” and that “they’ll continue to fight valiantly, on behalf of the Afghans, at great cost.”

Instead, the Afghan army crumbled as the U.S began to pull its remaining troops out in July. By mid-August, the Taliban had taken control of the capital, Kabul, after taking all the regional capitals in a little over a week. It turned out that when the Trump administration cut the Afghan government out of negotiations with the Taliban, Afghan soldiers recognized that they would soon be on their own and arranged “cease-fire” agreements, enabling the Taliban to take control with very little fighting.  It wouldn't have made any difference, at least with regard to the Afghan collapse, if Biden had waited until the winter, after the Taliban "fighting season" had ended, to withdraw the American troops as there was already an agreed-upon Afghan surrender.

Just before the Taliban took Kabul, the leaders of the Afghan government fled the country, abandoning the country to chaos. People rushed to the airport to escape, although the Taliban tried to reassure them that their domestic enemies would be given amnesty. In those chaotic early hours, seven Afghans died at the airport, either crushed in the crowds or killed when they fell from planes to which they had clung in hopes of getting out. 

President Biden certainly could have overseen a more successful exit than he did, especially if he had taken the possibility of a rapid Taliban takeover more seriously.  While critics have suggested that America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan will hurt American credibility abroad, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have called for combatting terrorism through financial sanctions, bombing, drone strikes, and by strengthening democracy at home. The administration is shifting its focus from unilateral military might to multilateral alliances to deal with common problems. 

In the past, when American troops were targeted by terrorists, Americans came together to condemn those attackers. Apparently, that's no longer the case.  While world leaders—including even those of the Taliban—condemned the attacks on U.S. troops, Republican leaders attacked President Biden instead. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy blamed Biden for the recent suicide bomber attack and insisted that troops should have remained in Afghanistan under congressional control until all Americans were safely out. Representative Elise Stefanik of NY, who replaced Liz Cheney as the third-ranking Republican in the House when Cheney refused to line up behind Trump, tweeted, "Joe Biden has blood on his hands . . . This horrific national security and humanitarian disaster is solely the result of Joe Biden's weak and incompetent leadership. He is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.”

Although President Biden took full responsibility for his decisions and insisted that "the buck stops here," Tucker Carlson told his Fox News audience that no leader had apologized for “these terrible decisions” in Afghanistan. “This can’t go on,” he said. “When leaders refuse to hold themselves accountable, over time, people revolt . . . We need to change course immediately . . . or else the consequences will be awful.”  The images on the screen behind Carlson were of Biden, Blinken, Defense Secretary Austin, and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley. 

For better and worse, America’s longest foreign war is finally over.  Republicans seem intent of bringing it home.

Happy Desolation Day

We've got birthdays: today is the birthday of businessman Warren Buffet, cartoonist Robert Crumb, comedian Lewis Black, former Boston Celtic forward Robert Parish, and actress Cameron Diaz. Sadly, today also marks the 1979 death of the actress Jean Seberg (Breathless).

Bob Dylan's album Highway 61 Revisited was released on this date in 1965.  Containing classic songs such as Like A Rolling Stone and Ballad of a Thin Man, as well as the nearly 11-and-a-half-minute, stream-of-consciousness epic, Desolation Row, the album captured the chaotic political and cultural gestalt of the times.  Author Michael Gray has argued that, in a certain sense, the "1960s" started with this album.

Thirty-four years later, the world premier of the movie Fight Club was held on September 10, 1999. With a theme of conflict between Generation X and the value system of advertising, Fight Club was cited as one of the most controversial and talked-about films of 1999.  The Guardian saw it as an omen for change in American political life, and The New York Times dubbed it the "defining cult movie of our time."

Instead of Labor Day, perhaps we should commemorate these two definitive 20th Century artworks documenting class struggle and alienation with a combined holiday on the last Monday of each August.

Pascagoulastan

Today is the 16-year anniversary of landfall of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, killing up to 1,836 people and causing $125 billion in damage.  Today, on this grim anniversary, winds and rain and storm surge from Hurricane Ida are lashing the Louisiana coast.

Sixteen years ago, I had spent most of the summer of 2005 working at an oil refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, only about 100 miles from where Katrina made landfall (although Pascagoula was pretty well devastated by the storm as well).  I would spend the week in Pascagoula, and then fly back to Atlanta from the Mobile, Alabama airport for the weekend.  The Friday before Katrina hit, my client in Pascagoula told me not to return that next Monday until I got an "all clear" call from him after the hurricane had passed.

I didn't hear from him for almost three months.   I honestly didn't know if he was dead or alive, as well as several other friends I had met that summer in Mississippi. Fortunately, everyone I knew survived, although unfortunately, all those survivors lost someone they knew in the storm.

Ida is now an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane.  Rapid weakening is expected during the next day or so, however Ida is forecast to remain a hurricane through late tonight. A Florida Coastal Monitoring Observation Tower at South Lafourche Airport reported a sustained wind of 70 mph and a wind gust of 102 mph.  A sustained wind of 47 mph and a gust of 63 mph were recently reported at Lakefront Airport in New Orleans.

As noted yesterday, prior to having to worry about wind and rain and water from Ida, Louisiana had plenty to worry about with the covids. In addition to having the country's third-highest per-capita rate of new cases per day, Louisiana has the third-highest death rate, and the fifth-highest hospitalization rate.

People living on the Gulf Coast from Lake Charles, Louisiana to Pensacola, Florida are being encouraged to evacuate and relocate to Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, and here in Atlanta, Georgia.

On top of having to manage the covid pandemic and the crisis from Hurricane Ida, President Biden is also coping with America's withdrawal from Afghanistan.  I'm no expert on Afghanistan, but I have played over 90 hours of Metal Gear Solid V, which is set in 1980s Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, so I do know a thing or two about the country.  Just kidding - that's meant as a commentary on all of the sudden Central Asian "experts" popping up on social media and talk shows.

For the record, I was against going to Afghanistan in the first place, much less staying there for 20 years.  Not only am I against war in general, but on September 11, 2001, I was on Day 4 of a 7-day mediation retreat, and had a slightly different reaction to the news than most of the rest of the country.  I stayed at the retreat, and missed seeing the continuous footage of planes hitting the World Trade Center on cable news over and over again, missed the vitriolic, Islamophobic rhetoric, and was out of touch with the predominant American opinion that it was time to kick some butt and bomb somebody.  But anyway, I thought then and I still believe now that it was a mistake going in, and anyone thinking there would be a "Farewell Victorious Conqueror" celebration by the Afghans when we left was delusional.

But George W. Bush and successive presidents, both Obama and Trump, wouldn't pull us out of Afghanistan, not because they liked the war or thought it was necessary, but because they didn't want the blame over the inevitable messiness of the withdrawal to fall on them, or their party, or the polling on the next electoral cycle.  Whatever else you might say about Biden's decision-making, at least he realized he had to do what had to be done, regardless of the short- and possibly long-term political price, and has accepted full, "the buck stops here" responsibility for the consequences.

But, still.  It was Trump who bypassed the Afghan government and negotiated directly with the Taliban, agreeing to pull out of Afghanistan by May 2021 and freeing some 5,000 prisoners in exchange for a promise not to fire on any American troops.  Biden could have reversed Trump's policy like he had with others, although there was no putting the genie of the 5,000 free prisoners back in the bottle, but he decided to finally get us out of that country, first by 9/11 and then later by 8/31.

Leaving a war we didn't win is always going to be a messy and dangerous proposition, and if there were an easy or an obvious way to do it, it would have already been done a long time ago.  There are those saying we should have waited until the winter, when Taliban troops can't fight in the snow-capped mountainous terrain, but this misses the fact that there was virtually no fighting during the Taliban's takeover - Afghan forces in many cases simply surrendered without first firing a single shot.  Strategic battle advantage had no role in the collapse or the Afghan defeat, Metal Gear Solid players, and besides, had we stayed, there would inevitably have been some loss of American lives, and how many more troops need to die to fit the Monday morning quarterbacks best-case scenarios?

Abandoning Bagram Air Force Base before full withdrawal was a miscalculation based on the assumption that Afghan forces would at least hold Kabul until all Americans and allies had been evacuated (they didn't).  A withdrawal is always going to be messy no matter what, and hindsight is always better than foresight, but despite the messiness and the hostility and the sudden loss of Afghan support, we've still managed to extract over 100,000 people (and counting) from Afghanistan.  Yes, we were attacked by ISIS terrorists during the process, but we've retaliated so far with two successful drone strikes, one vengeful and the other preemptive. 

It's a sad day when U.S. forces abroad get attacked by terrorists.  It's almost as sad when, instead of expressing support for the surviving troops and celebrating our success at striking back, the opposing political party instead calls for resignation or impeachment of the President, the Vice-President and the Secretary of State. It's sad when some people are so obsessed with their political rivalries, they put those feelings ahead of those for the people who are actually trying to kill us.

Hushpuppy Beware

Today is actor Quvenzhané Wallis' birthday.  She was the child star of the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, which presented a poetic, joyous, and almost ethno-anthropologic portrait of life in the lowest of Louisiana low-country bayous.  The film also revealed the impacts of climate change on their lives and culture, and the effects of displacement caused by hurricanes and flooding.  Quvenzhané turns 18 today.

In real life, Hurricane Ida's growing into a monster.  It already has maximum sustained winds near 105 mph, with even higher gusts. The storm will strengthen even more in the next 12 to 24 hours and by the time Ida makes landfall tomorrow, it is expected to be an extremely dangerous Class 4 hurricane, although it will quickly weaken as it travels inland.

Hurricane Ida should hit the Louisiana coast exactly 16 years to the day after Katrina, but this year's storm is also making landfall right near the epicenter of the current covid pandemic. Atlanta experienced a significant influx of New Orleans transplants after Katrina, refugees from climate change, and if they arrive here again but this time with a high covid infection rate, that could spell a double disaster.

But at least the current track for now has the storm passing to the north of Atlanta. That's terrible news - the worst news - for rain-soaked central Tennessee after this week's floods, but it's a relief to me.

Best wishes to the Hushpuppies down in the bayou, and the folks still drying out in Tennessee.

On this date, August 27, in 1990, a Monday, I heard on the radio that a helicopter heading for Chicago's Midway International Airport had crashed.  The flight was coming from a blues festival at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin. Initial reports still weren't certain as to who had died in the crash, but based on the performers at the show, it appeared that it was either Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughn. 

I was praying that it was Eric Clapton.

By 1990, whatever rock 'n' roll cred Clapton had garnered with the bands Cream and Blind Faith had long since dissipated, and adult-contemporary radio was overplaying his sappy, middle-of-the-road pop ballad Wonderful Tonight.  And then, on August 5, 1976, a visibly drunk Clapton declared on stage: 

"Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. So where are you? Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country. I don't want you here, in the room or in my country . . . Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the w*gs out. Get the c**ns out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man. Fucking w*gs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard w*gs . . . The black w*gs and c**ns and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans don't belong here, we don't want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don't want any black w*gs and c**ns living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. This is Great Britain, a white country, what is happening to us, for fuck's sake? Throw the w*gs out! Keep Britain white!

The reference to Jamaicans is particularly ironic, as one of Clapton's first solo hit singles was a white-boy, soft-rock cover version of Bob Marley's I Shot the Sheriff.  The song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and Clapton made a fortune off of a Jamaican song, yet still hurled racial epithets and "Get Out!" warnings toward Jamaicans from the stage. What an asshole!

But it wasn't Clapton who died on this date.  It was the at-the-time underrecognized blues guitar genius Stevie Ray Vaughn who died in the crash.  Vaughn had a flamboyant style in both fashion and music, and could cover Jimi Hendrix solos note for note and play them as well, if not better, than Hendrix himself.  I  was lucky enough to have seen Vaughn perform a couple of times at the Saratoga Spring Performance Center in upstate New York, but many people only heard of Vaughn for the first time after the helicopter crash.  

Stevie Ray Vaughn died for Eric Clapton's sins.

As predicted, Tropical Storm Nine has become a hurricane, and has been given the name Ida.  And also as predicted here, its projected course is starting to veer eastward and Atlanta is currently within the cone of its probable path.  In other words, we've got yet another hurricane heading toward Atlanta next week.

I hate being right about these things.

Nine

Reginald Stanley Bartholomew was the United States Ambassador to Italy from 1993 to 1997. Prior to Italy, he was the ambassador to Lebanon, stationed in Beirut. The day after his October 1983 arrival, the Marine barracks were bombed by terrorists, killing 241 people. Bartholomew toured the scene the next morning, his first full day on the job.  The bombing convinced President Ronald Reagan to pull the U.S. troops stationed there, although Bartholomew persuaded him to delay withdrawal until February 1984. That September, terrorists bombed the newly constructed embassy annex near East Beirut, which had been built to replace the one bombed the year before. Nine people were killed and Bartholomew had to be pulled from the rubble. Although he was not seriously wounded, he needed stitches and a cast on his arm.  Bartholomew was later appointed ambassador to Spain in 1986, and then to Italy in 1993. Upon retirement, he joined Merrill Lynch Investment Banking as Vice-Chairman Europe and Chairman Italy. Bartholomew died on this date in 2012 in New York City, aged 76, from cancer.  Impermanence is swift.

Two suicide bombers struck near a main gate amid crowds gathered outside the Kabul International Airport in Afghanistan today, making an infernally difficult situation that much more complicated.  As I write this, it's still an ongoing situation, but it appears that 12 U.S. Marines are among the dead, the first American casualties there in almost 16 months.  The Islamic State (aka ISIS, or ISIS-K) has claimed responsibility. There will be plenty of time to assign blame later, once we know more about what actually happened, so I've nothing more to say on the matter at this time other than to remind you again of the swiftness of impermanence.

I'm still watching those three storms out in the Atlantic and Caribbean.  The one storm that was off the Venezuela coast is now Tropical Depression Nine, and is expected to develop into a full-blown hurricane, make landfall on the Louisiana coast, and then track up the Mississippi River.  I would not be at all surprised if it doesn't change course and head for Atlanta, as most hurricanes seem to do this year.

My deepest condolences to those Marines who died today and to their families.  About 54 people in the U.S. lose their lives each day from gun violence, and on average, the covids is killing about 1,100 people per day.  Now I need someone to explain to me how the tragedy in Kabul is worse than the 22 people who lost their lives in Tennessee last week from climate-change induced flash flooding.

Through The Telescope

Today is the 25th day of August 2021, the 237th day of the year.  On this date in 1609, Galileo demonstrated one of his early telescopes, with a magnification of about 8 or 9, to Venetian lawmakers. Telescopes were a profitable sideline for Galileo, who sold them to merchants who found them useful at sea.

It's Wayne Shorter's birthday! "Mr. Gone" (aka "The Newark Flash") turns 87 today.

Shorter came to prominence in the late 1950s as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. From 1964 to 1968, he was a member of the legendary Miles Davis Quintet, and later co-founded the jazz fusion band Weather Report. 

Shorter played tenor and soprano sax and was a notable composer.  Among many other compositions, he wrote the titular song for Miles' 1968 album Nefertiti. On the track, the horn section repeats the melody numerous times but without individual solos.  The recording leaves a lot of open space between the instruments, and the rhythm section can clearly be heard improvising beneath the horns.  Those underlying layers of piano, bass, and drums are the more compelling and interesting part of the composition, reversing the traditional role of a rhythm section, and it's easy to get lost in the layers, especially if you've smoked marijuana before listening.  As much as any other single track, Nefertiti can be viewed as the transition from the bop and hard bop of the 40s through 60s to the post-bop of the late 60s and 70s.

Looking through the other end of the telescope, the yin to Wayne Shorter's yang, Air Force intelligence captain and OSS agent John Birch was killed in a confrontation with Chinese Communist soldiers on this date in 1945.  Coincidentally, George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, was shot and killed on this date in 1967. 

Speaking or right-wing extremist assholes, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis' Florida is leading the nation in new covid cases per day (21,263), hospitalizations per day (17,225), and deaths per day (227).  I'll go out on a limb here and say that it looks like DeSantis' anti-mandate policies, for both masks and vaccines, isn't working.  He's the only Governor in the U.S. with more current new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths per day than at any prior point during the pandemic.

He may not care. I fear that his strategy is to establish himself as the heir apparent to the Trump tradition, and that when it's time for his re-election or (shiver to imagine) next presidential election, enough people will have forgotten the body count and think, "Yeah, DeSantis.  The new Trump. He's my guy."  To put it ore bluntly, DeSantis is letting Floridians die so that he can burnish his conservative credentials.

I hope he catches the virus and has a particular painful illness. I don't want him dead, because it's actually worse for him to survive with a case of long-haul covids and the memory of his suffering, and to be haunted by the ghosts of those he let die. What a piece of shit!

Sharpiegate

"Let's talk about socialism. I think it's very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country. Socialism basically said, hey, let's have a kinder, gentler society. Let's share things. Let's have an economic system that produces things not because they're profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism." - Howard Zinn (2009)

Today is Howard  Zinn's birthday!  Born in 1922, Zinn was a professor of history at Spelman College in Atlanta from 1956 to 1963.  At the end of the academic year in 1963, Zinn was fired from Spelman for insubordination by Albert Manley, the first African-American president of that college, who felt Zinn was radicalizing Spelman students.  In 1964, Zinn accepted a position at Boston University. A professor of political science, he taught at BU for 24 years before retiring in 1988. His classes on civil liberties were among the most popular at the university with as many as 400 students subscribing each semester to the non-required class. 

I took Poly Sci 101 at B.U. in 1977 under Murray Levin, a close associate of Zinn's (Levin's office was located right next door to Zinn's in the Political Science Department building). A progressive who once had been a member of the Communist Party, Levin was an unreconstructed radical throughout his academic career.  Levin specialized in teaching Marxist political theory to both undergrad and graduate students.  While attending Levin's twice-weekly classes, I also audited Zinn's weekly lectures on civil liberties.

Murray Levin passed in 1999 and Howard Zinn in 2010.  Impermanence is swift.  But Professors Levin and Zinn tuned my political sensibilities in ways similar to how R.D. Laing's Politics of Experience made me aware of the role psychedelics and mysticism can play in a balanced modern life.  

Side Bar: While at B.U., I had a student job in the College of Liberal Art's Administrative and Payroll Department.  Most of the time, I worked as a courier, delivering interdepartmental mail to the various offices around campus (which is why I'm aware of the proximity of Levin's office to Zinn's). But one day each month, Pay Day, I sat at the payroll desk and handed out the paychecks to each professor.  This was the 70s, years before direct deposit was common practice, and I had a smug sense of irony when my Marxist professors rolled by to pick up their monthly paychecks.  

Annals of Infrastructure: The local news confirmed that Sunday's power loss and downed electric lines were due to a red Jeep hitting the power pole early Sunday morning (i.e., late Saturday night).  But the repairs the work crews did on Sunday afternoon didn't hold, and the lines came back down again last night. Rolling over in bed shortly before the alarm clock was supposed to go off this morning, I noticed the digital display was flashing.  It appears the power was off for less than a hour sometime between 4:00 and 5:00 am.  I'm sure a lot of my neighbors were late for work this morning when their alarm clocks didn't go off at the appointed times. And now Collier Road is blocked to traffic again as repair crews are once again trying to fix the poles and lines. so they're going to be even later. It's local Work-From-Home Day!

From the Weather Desk:  With Henri still lingering over New England, the 2021 hurricane season is showing no signs of abating.  We now have three separate systems to watch, any of which might form into a tropical storm or hurricane, any of which might find a way to reach Atlanta.

The Politics of Experience

One of the problems with the modern scientific study of consciousness is that scientists tend to consider only the objective - sets of specific measurements and observations that can be precisely recorded, and carefully controlled experiments that can be repeated and validated by others.  The subjective, how the scientist feels about the topic, has no place in scientific methodology.  That isn't a criticism of the scientific method - I'm very, very pro-science - but consciousness is precisely that subjective, internal experience of the self.  Objective study of consciousness - EKG and CAT scans of the brain, observing subjects in psychological experiments, and so on - tends to reduce the study of consciousness to mere behaviorism.  It misses the mark in the same way that examination of an elephant's tracks misses the elephant itself.

When is was in high school, I read a book called The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise by  the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing.  I didn't read it as part of a class assignment; I read it because reading books was something people still did back in the early 1970s.  The book had a profound effect on my thinking that's lasted to this day.  Laing wrote extensively on mental illness, but not from the point of view of doctors observing sets of symptoms.  Laing was more interested in the actual experience of psychosis as described by the patient.  He took the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of their personal experience, rather than simply as symptoms of mental illness. 

His views on the causes and treatment of psychopathological phenomena ran counter to the chemical and electroshock methods that had become psychiatric orthodoxy. Laing refused to treat patients with drugs or electric shock unless they requested them. His best-known practical experiment was to establish Kingsley Hall, a London hostel for schizophrenics, where he pioneered therapeutic use of mescaline and LSD.  “His policy was to have people staying there to go through madness as a self-healing process,” his son said. Laing tended to view the mad as explorers of their own inner world.

The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise consists of two parts - the Politics part, a collection of previously published articles discussing his views (the objective approach), and the Paradise part, a free-flowing stream-of-consciousness quasi-autobiography in prose and poetic form (a subjective approach).  The book examines the nature of human experience from a phenomenological point of view, as well as the possibilities for psychotherapy in an existentially distorted world. Laing challenged the idea of normality in modern society, and argued that it is not merely people who are mad, but the world as well. He presented psychosis as "a psychedelic voyage of discovery in which the boundaries of perception were widened, and consciousness expanded."  In later life, Laing became interested in Zen Buddhism and published transcripts of conversations between himself and his children.

R.D. Laing died while playing tennis with his son in St. Tropez on this date, August 23, in 1989.  Impermanence is swift.

Speaking of impermanence, on average, about 1,000 people are dying in the U.S. each day from the covids, about 350 of those in the states of Texas and Florida alone.    While it appeared for a while there that we were turning a corner and beating back the virus with vaccines, a combination of vaccine hesitancy and the Delta variant has caused the number of new cases each day to reach levels we haven't seen since January 2021, before the vaccines were widely available.  As a result, after a lovely but brief period where it seemed like life could return back to normal, at least for the vaccinated, we're back to mask wearing and social distancing again, and going to hear live music at small, sweaty venues no longer seems like a wise lifestyle choice.

Most venues here in Atlanta are now requiring proof of vaccination or a recent negative covids test, which helps. But when you're in one of the most highly infected states in the country, going to a crowded show in a tiny venue at this time seems like a luxury you have to take a pass on.  

Yesterday, the popular band Nine Inch Nails, which can sell out large arenas, announced they were suspending their current tour due to the covids.  Today, the indie singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers said the show will go on, but she's moving all indoor shows to outdoor venues, and will only play at outdoor sites until all of this passes.  That seems like a wise choice, although there aren't many small outdoor venues here in Atlanta (I can't think of one off the top of my head).  There are a couple large outdoor amphitheaters, but typically only top pop acts and big national touring bands can sell enough tickets to afford them.  

I passed on going to see the band Bully at The Earl last weekend to protect myself from possible covid infections, despite the vaccination and mask mandates, but I would have gone had the show been on an outdoor stage.  I think there's a real niche market right now for some enterprising promoter to open a small- to medium-sized outdoor venue. The venue could still operate profitably even after the pandemic passes (if the pandemic ever passes).  The only real problem would be all those rainy nights in Georgia Ray Charles kept singing about.

The Blue Sturgeon Moon

With so much to talk about today, let's start by acknowledging that on this date in 1989, Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton was murdered in Oakland by Tyrone Robinson of the rival Black Guerrilla Family. I stayed up and watched the movie Judas and the Black Messiah last night, so now I'm an expert on the Black Power movement of the 1960s and '70s (grin), so if you have any questions, DM me.

Meanwhile, behold the moon - it's full tonight, the August Blue Sturgeon Moon.  It's not named for a blue-color fish or a depressed sturgeon. The title is an amalgam for the Full Moon of August, a Blue Moon, and the Sturgeon Moon. While the term "Blue Moon" is commonly reserved for the second full moon of a calendar month, August's Full Moon is considered a Blue Moon based on an older definition of the term, which represents the third full moon that occurs in a single season — in this case, summer. According to the Farmers' Almanac, August's Full Moon, whether Blue or not, is traditionally called the Sturgeon Moon, after the giant sturgeon of the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, which were most readily caught at this time of the summer.  The August Full Moon was called the Flying Up Moon by Ontario Cree as August was the time of the year when young birds are finally ready to learn to fly. Other names include the Corn Moon, the Harvest Moon, the Ricing Moon, and the Black Cherries Moon, each of which represents various seasonal changes, or maturing crops, and originate from different cultures. 

Today is Carl Yastrzemski's birthday! Yaz turns 82 today, but Red Sox Nation won't be able to see the Blue Sturgeon Moon tonight because of Tropical Storm Henri (it was only a hurricane for less than a day).  Tropical Storm Henri made landfall today on western Rhode Island, missing Manhattan Island and most of Long Island except for the easternmost tip, and is now taking its leisurely stroll across New England. Today's Red Sox-Rangers game at Fenway was postponed due to weather.

Henri is the first hurricane to make landfall in New England in nearly 30 years.  According to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, not only will the percentage of high-intensity hurricanes become higher as the planet warms, but they will track further north more often and have slower translation speeds. So New England can expect more storms like Henri, or at least more than one every 30 years.

As I write, Rhode Island is seeing wide-spread power outages, and the storm has already cut power to some 115,000 residents from New Jersey to Maine and forced cancellations at New York airports. A record 4.45 inches of rain fell in Central Park yesterday, including 1.94 inches of rain between 10 and 11 pm alone, the most rain in a single hour at that location “since record keeping began” in the 19th century, according to the National Weather Service.  

Meanwhile, in McEwen, Tennessee, 17 inches of rain fell on Saturday in rainstorms totally unrelated to Henri.  The National Weather Service acknowledged that the rain would set a record for the most rainfall in a 24-hour span in Tennessee if preliminary estimates were confirmed. The previous record, set in Milan, Tennessee in 1982, was 13.6 inches.  Tragically, at least 22 died and 50 were injured in the flash floods that followed. Among those killed were several children, including twin 7-month-old infants. At least 4,200 people across the state had lost power, according to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. 

I lost power this afternoon, but that wasn't related to Tropical Storm Henri or the Tennessee (or any other) thunderstorms.  Everything was normal - I was eating a sandwich on a hot, humid Georgia afternoon, when the power suddenly shut off. This happened Thursday night, with a distant but audible pop of a power transformer, but the power almost immediately came right back on.  I didn't hear a transformer blow this time (or a tree fall), but I finished my sandwich to see if the power would come back on.  When it didn't, I ventured outside to investigate.

The power lines leading to my house were still up, so that wasn't it.  I didn't see any neighbors out of doors, but walking through the neighborhood, I didn't see any lights on or other indications that they had power.  No trees were down.  I got in my car to investigate further.

Almost immediately, I came across the problem:

According to the contractors, a car hit the power pole sometime earlier today or possibly last night, and they had to turn off the power to replace the pole and restring the lines.  My guess is that it was a drunk driver either late last night or early this morning - it wouldn't be the first time. The curves on Collier Road have a way of surprising inebriated motorists speeding down the road at night. During the day, stop-and-go traffic from Piedmont Hospital slows things down to a crawl, so people have no way of anticipating the centrifugal forces along the curves when driving at 60 mph on the empty nighttime streets.

The takeaway here is I lose power during the increasingly frequent thunderstorms, tropical storms, and hurricanes passing through Atlanta, when trees randomly fall across power lines, even when there aren't any storms, and when drunk drivers miscalculate their chances of dodging power poles.

Bullies

While in exile, Leon Trotsky and his wife were deported from Norway on December 19, 1936, and put on an oil tanker, The Ruth.  They arrived in Mexico on January 9, 1937, and moved into La Casa Azul (The Blue House), the home of the painter Diego Rivera and Rivera's wife and fellow painter, Frida Kahlo, with whom Trotsky had an affair. After quarreling with Rivera, Trotsky moved to his final residence in Mexico City in April 1939. 

On May 24, 1940, Trotsky survived a raid on his villa by armed assassins led by agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police agency, a forerunner of the KGB.  A young assistant and bodyguard of Trotsky disappeared with the attackers and was later found murdered; it is probable that he was an accomplice who granted them access to the villa. 

On August 20, 1940, Trotsky was attacked in his study by Spanish-born NKVD agent Ramón Mercader, who used an ice axe as a weapon.  A mountaineering ice axe has a narrow end, called the pick, and a wide, flat end called the adze. Although it's commonly said that Trotsky was killed with an ice pick, it was actually the adze end of the axe that struck Trotsky, fracturing his parietal bone and penetrating 2.8 inches into his brain.  The blow failed to kill him instantly. Witnesses stated that Trotsky spat on Mercader and began struggling fiercely with him. Hearing the commotion, Trotsky's bodyguards burst into the room and beat Mercader nearly to death, but Trotsky stopped them, laboriously stating that the assassin should be made to answer questions. Trotsky was then taken to a hospital and operated on, surviving for more than a day, but dying, at the age of 60, on this date, August 21, in 1940. Impermanence is swift.

Good day.  It's the birthday today of actor, director, and screenwriter Melvin Van Peebles (age 89).  

After a lot of long, difficult consideration, I finally decided not to go to tonight's show at The Earl by the band Bully, even though I already have tickets (purchased back in April).  Georgia seems to be setting a new record for the number of new covid cases every couple of days, and it's clear that we're now in a fourth wave of infection every bit as bad, if not worse, than the previous ones.  Sure, I'm vaccinated, but evidence indicates that even vaccinated people can contract and spread the virus, even if they don't suffer serious illness themselves.  It's a sold-out show, so The Earl will be at full capacity, and a crowded show in a small, moderately ventilated facility is not the best setting to avoid the virus.  Add to that a cheering audience exhaling onto each other, and moshers and crowd surfers climbing all over each other, and you've got the perfect recipe for exchanging microbes.  

The band is insisting that all attendees show proof of vaccination and wear masks, but it feels like voluntarily putting myself into such a precarious setting as a small, sweaty club is just an unnecessary risk at this place (Georgia, with its abysmally low vaccination rate) and time (the middle of the fourth wave of infection).

I was about to give my tickets away for free on line, and then realized that if I really wanted to protect others, I shouldn't add two more bodies to the sold-out show.  The band will still get to keep my money even if I'm not there, so I'm still supporting the arts, but it's probably better for everyone if there were two less sets of lungs at the show.

Please batten down your hatches if you're in the Northeast U.S. - Henri is coming and it looks more and more like it's going to cause major damage as it leisurely strolls across Long Island and the New England states.  Please take this threat seriously and prepare for the worst.  You've got about 12 hours left to buy some drinking water, batteries, candles, and easy-to-prepare, no-cook food.  The coast will be clear again (literally) by Tuesday.

Bellwood

Today is boxing promotor Don King's birthday.  The beloved sports figure turns 90 today.  

On this date in 1858, Charles Darwin first published his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. Darwin's The Origin of Species was published the next year, 1859, on November 24.

More years have passed between today and Don King's birthday than between Don King's birthday and publication of Darwin's theory.

Eight years ago today, all in one day, the world lost crime novelist Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, Touch, Maximum Bob, and Rum Punch, the source for Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown), jazz pianist Marian McPartland, jazz saxophonist Don Hassler, General John W. Morris, director and screen writer Ted Post,  South African singer-songwriter Sathima Bea Benjamin, and Indian author and activist Narendra Dabholkar. Impermanence is swift.

And in the here and now, now here comes Henri. The eighth named storm of the year, Henri, which seemed to be content cutting donuts in the Saragossa Sea circling Bermuda, is now heading north-northwest at 7 mph. A turn toward straight north is expected tonight, and Henri is forecast to accelerate in that direction through early Sunday.  

Henri is still technically a tropical storm, but is widely expected to gain strength and become a full-blown hurricane before making landfill, and a Hurricane Warning is in effect for the south shore of Long Island (my old home from 1973 to 1976), as well as the north shore (my even older home from 1964 to 1970). After that, Henri will move very slowly across New England (my old home from 1976 to 1981). The Sixth IPCC Assessment Report calls slow travel along a hurricane's pathway "slow translation speed," and predicts that while hurricanes won't become more frequent, they will become more intense and have slower translation speeds.  Heavy rainfall as Henri trudges along could result in considerable flash, urban, and small-stream flooding, along with the potential for widespread minor and moderate river flooding. Winds will damage buildings, take down trees, and knock out electrical power for many.  Good times . . . 

Down here in Atlanta, we're at least temporarily free from hurricanes and to celebrate, we have the grand opening of a brand new city park - Westside Park, now the largest park (280 acres) in Atlanta. Still, Manhattan's Central Park is 843 acres.  The park is the site of the former Bellwood Quarry, probably most famous as the setting for several scenes in Season 1 of both The Walking Dead and Stranger Things.

Bellwood Quarry was the former crushed-rock and "granite" source for Vulcan Industries (the rock is "granite" in the decorative sense only; the rock is actually metamorphic schists and gneisses). During the early 2000s planning for the Atlanta Beltline, it was noticed that old, abandoned railroad tracks that circled the city could be made into a combined transit and multi-use trail system, and that the combined transit and multi-use trail system passed very close to several of the City's existing parks and greenspace.  The Beltline could therefore become an "Emerald Necklace" circling the city and connecting the parks. 

It was also noticed that the "Emerald Necklace" passed close to Bellwood Quarry, which was set to close in 2006.  It wasn't a park yet, but the Beltline visionaries proposed that the city buy the property and make it into new parkspace.  Then some pragmatists in the Watershed Department looked at the property and realized the empty quarry would make an ideal short-term reservoir for treated City water.  The current Water Works reservoir is set in a now-heavily-urbanized area and only holds about three to five day's worth of water.  A major failure in the treatment or distribution system could leave Atlanta without water very quickly.  The Bellwood quarry holds over two billion gallons of water and could last 30 to 90 days, if needed.

These ideas then all came together and the Bellwood quarry was developed into a large Beltline park around a new reservoir.  Machinery and other pollutant sources were removed from the quarry floor and it was allowed to fill with water.  New tunnels were bored to deliver the stored water to the City's distribution system (the boring machine was named "Driller Mike" in honor of Atlanta rapper Killer Mike). For a brief while there, the rare guided tours of the tunnels were coveted by the geology community (the tunnels are de facto cross-sections exposing the bedrock geology of Atlanta).  I never got a tour, but then again, my bona fides for academic bedrock geology are pretty tenuous. But I did manage to make it to the quarry several times back in the 1980s when it was still operational.

I'm not sure I understand why it took 16 years to develop a giant hole in the ground into a reservoir and City park, but after years and years of waiting, it's finally open.  The grand-opening, ribbon-cutting ceremony was scheduled to be on Tuesday, August 17, but Tropical Storm Fred pretty much fucked up those plans, but I understand the park in now open to visitors.

I haven't been there yet, but here are some pictures harvested from social media. Sorry about the lack of attribution; if it's any consolation, I tried.

The Lion

And now it's August 19, the 231st day of the year.  It's Bill Clinton's birthday - the 42nd President of the United States of America turns 75 today.  On Bill's 31st birthday back in 1977, Julius Henry Marx - better known to the world as "Groucho" - passed away, age 86. Impermanence is swift.

Ironically, today is Afghan Independence Day, commemorating the day in 1919 that Afghanistan was granted independence from Britain.  The repressive Taliban regime has now retaken control of the country after 20 years of American occupation (following 10 years of Soviet occupation) and  even as the U.S. scrambles to get its citizens and Afghan allies out of the country, the regime is replacing the liberty and freedom of Independence Day with Sharia Law and religious fanaticism.  

Let's see, what else?  On this date in 1955, Hurricane Diane caused severe flooding in the northeastern United States, killing 200 people. Today, the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred are passing over New England, with forecasts of 1 to 3 inches of rain, with isolated storms locally dropping as much as 5 inches  of rain.  

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Henri has stopped circling the island of Bermuda and is heading toward New England.  Henri is expected to become a hurricane sometime on Friday, and pass over Cape Cod and southeastern Massachusetts sometime early Sunday morning. 

But the news I want to talk about today is the decision by the City of Atlanta to remove the statue commemorating 90 unknown Confederate soldiers from the city's historic Oakland Cemetery.  The statue, popularly known as "The Lion," is one of many Confederate monuments the city is trying to decommission.

My problem is that I kind of like the statue.  I certainly don't like it's depiction of a Confederate flag, or its symbolic glorification of the CSA, slavery, and institutional racism. No, for all those reasons and more, the statue has to go and the City made the right decision.

I've visited Oakland cemetery many times. Perhaps I've gotten kind of used to seeing the statue, because its shock value has worn off on me.  I enjoy the peacefulness of the cemetery, the artistic statuary, and the history.  Yes, there are Confederate generals buried there, but also six Georgia Governors, 27 Atlanta mayors (including Maynard Jackson, Atlanta's first black mayor), writer Margaret Mitchell, and golfer Bobby Jones.  On Britney's first visit to Atlanta, I took her to Oakland Cemetery and shot the picture of The Lion shown above.

The lion  is near the main entrance to Oakland Cemetery and is one of the first major sculptures one encounters there.  It makes a dramatic first impression - the detail in the curly mane, the chiseled abs in the midriff, the dangling paw.  Is it dying or already dead?  With time one forgets what it represents.  And even though they were on the wrong side of history and morality, there's still the tragedy of the 90 dead soldiers buried there who've never even been properly identified. 

Yes, it has to go, but is it wrong for me to miss it, not because of the vile things it represents, but due to some combination of artistic appreciation and nostalgia?

August 18

 

Today is August 18, 2021, the 230th day of the year.   On this date in 1983, Hurricane Alicia, a Category Three major storm, struck the Texas coast near Houston, killing 21 people and causing over one billion dollars in damage.  Alicia was the first hurricane to make landfall on the United States since Hurricane Allen struck South Texas in August 1980 over three years earlier, ending the longest period of the Twentieth Century without a hurricane making landfall on the U.S. coast. 

Tropical Storm Fred obviously didn't cause nearly as much damage.  According to the National Weather Service, it dropped 2.86 inches of rain on the NWS station at Peachtree City (about 35 miles south of Atlanta), beating the all-time record for this date (2.49 inches) set all the way back in 1939.  It didn't drop any trees on my house or on my block, but today I learned that a fallen tree did manage to take down power lines about a ¼ mile east of me on the other side of the park.  If a falling tree doesn't take down some power lines somewhere, is it even a storm?  If a falling tree doesn't make any sound, well, you get the idea.

Of course, my complaints are nothing compared to the suffering right now in Haiti.  The death toll from last weekend's magnitude 7.2 earthquake is now over 1,900 people with over 10,000 injured, and then Tropical Storm Grace hit the area with sustained 40 mph winds and over 10 inches of rain.  More than 7,000 homes were destroyed and nearly 5,000 were damaged. Hospitals, schools, offices, and churches were also affected.

Imagine the condo building collapse in Miami, and then multiply that by 7,000.  Then imagine a hurricane making landfill just as the rescue effort is getting underway.  Add to that picture gang violence in the surrounding area preventing humanitarian relief from reaching the area.  Due to entrenched poverty and political upheaval, the situation right now in Haiti is even worse than all that.

Speaking of humanitarian crises on a global scale, the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan will cause much misery, especially for women.  The misery has probably already started.  Finger-pointing and political gamesmanship has already begun here in the U.S. - who's to blame, what should have been done differently, how can I use this tragic situation to benefit the cause of my party?  Many Republicans are complaining that the U.S. should have been more diligent in getting our Afghani allies and friends out of the country before the government fell and I don't disagree with that sentiment, but I will point out that the following 16 U.S. congresspersons voted against an act that would have expedited visas for selected Afghani citizens, because, you know, immigration:

THE HALL OF SHAME:

• Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona
• Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado
• Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama
• Rep. Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee
• Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina
• Rep. Bob Good of Virginia
• Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona
• Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia
• Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma
• Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia
• Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky
• Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama
• Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania
• Rep. Bill Posey of Florida
• Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana
• Rep. Chip Roy of Texas

They were the only 16 members of Congress to vote against the act, and every single one of them is a Republican.  They're part of the problem, not the solution.  If any one of them complains about U.S. treatment of Afghani citizens, please kindly tell them to (repeat after me) "Shut the fuck up."  

Thoughts and Prayers

 

"It strikes me that some of the same people currently expressing concern over the fate of Afghanistan’s women and girls work quite happily with Saudi Arabia, which has its own repressive government, and have voted against reauthorizing our own Violence Against Women Act. Some of the same people worrying about the slowness of our evacuation of our Afghan allies voted just last month against providing more visas for them, and others seemed to worry very little about our utter abandonment of our Kurdish allies when we withdrew from northern Syria in 2019. And those worrying about democracy in Afghanistan seem to be largely unconcerned about protecting voting rights here at home. 

Most notably to me, some of the same people who are now focusing on keeping troops in Afghanistan to protect Americans seem uninterested in stopping the spread of a disease that has already killed more than 620,000 of us and that is, once again, raging."

~ Heather Cox Richardson

Today is August 17, the 229th day of the year 2021.  On this date in 2019, an ISIS suicide bomber blew himself up at a wedding in Kabul, killing 63 people and injuring 182.  Today is also Robert De Niro's birthday.

After a largely sleepless night, I woke up this morning at 5:45, 15 minutes before my alarm clock was set to go off, to the pounding sound of intense rain on my roof.  Tropical Storm Fred (it never achieved hurricane status) was directly overhead. Despite some projections from last week that had it tracking over Alabama, I always knew it has headed directly for Atlanta, and sure enough, the center of the storm passed right over my fair city this morning.

Photo by @everydaydroneguy

It was, as forecast, an asymmetrical storm, not a perfectly spiraled hurricane, and the most intense damage was on the east side of the storm.  The one advantage of having the storm pass directly overhead was that Atlanta was at least spared the worst of the damage.  However, numerous tornados were reported in eastern Georgia, and more than 17,000 homes are without power across the state, including 3,6000 here in metro Atlanta. 

The hard, driving rain continued for at least five hours, and it was only around noon that it started to let up.  It's still drizzly outside as of 3:30 pm, but fortunately no trees came down on my house (yet) or in the neighborhood (yet), and I didn't lose power (yet).  Trees still manage to fall after a storm passes due to soft, saturated soil and from poor drivers skidding on rain-soaked streets, so there's still opportunities for power outages.  

But the news here is that I survived Fred.  No trees down, onto my house or elsewhere on my property, and the lights stayed on.  And with Fred now passed, Grace apparently heading to Mexico, and Henri turning circles in the mid-Atlantic around the island of Bermuda, there are no hurricanes or tropical storms currently on the radar to worry about, so we can now return our focus back onto the covids.

Yesterday, August 16, there were an astonishing 19,069 new covid cases reported in Georgia.  Other than an October 5, 2020 data anomaly, when suspect cases (symptoms, but no confirming laboratory test) were added to the total, that's the single-highest number since the pandemic began.  It's probably something of an anomaly itself and likely represents two days, not one - "zero" new cases were reported the previous Sunday (August 15).  But even if that figure represent the sum of two days, that's around 9,500 new cases each day, which would still put the two days among the 10 worst in state history. And this after we were down to less than 200 cases per day as recently as late last June.

Dozens of children have been hospitalized during this surge, a demographic change from he previous waves of infections.  According to the local Fox News affiliate, the hospitalized children including two new-born infants.

Counties in the metro Atlanta region have the most new cases per day, but largely because they're by far the most populated.  However, in terms of cases per capita, Atlanta's Fulton County has only 41 cases per 100,000 residents, well below the statewide level of 62 per 100,000. The  worst-hit county is Tift in the southwest part of the state with 210 new cases per 100,000 residents (0.2% of the entire county infected).

This dramatic increase - with no end in sight - is due to the combined effect of vaccine hesitancy and the delta variant, and the spread of the latter is a direct result of the former. The City of Atlanta has a mask mandate for indoor public spaces, but it's not enforced and is widely violated.  Schools are open, except for some of Georgia's worst-ravaged counties in the southeastern part of the state.  Republican Governor Brian Kemp is strangely quiet and out of the public eye, as he clearly has no idea what to do about the problem other than ignore it and hope that he wins the election based on "culture war" issues (and voter suppression, which worked for him against Stacy Abrams last time around).

But what can Kemp do? For the health - if not the very life - of us Georgians, what should Kemp do? Three things come to mind:

1. Follow President Biden's leadership regarding Federal employees and require vaccination for all State employees, from the DMV on up to the Governor's mansion itself.  Exceptions can be granted to those with documented underlying medical conditions that prohibit vaccination or those with legitimate and documented religious or ethical objections (but they should be tested at least weekly to come to work).
2. Promote a campaign to encourage vaccination of non-State employees, including television commercials, social media, speaking tours, celebrity endorsements, and incentives (tax credits, lottery tickets, cash prizes, Georgia produce, etc.).
3. Mandate masks in indoor public spaces for those counties with new cases above the statewide average, and close the schools (remote learning) in, say, the worst-hit 10% of counties. The mandate can be lifted as soon as they reach their statistical goals, giving them incentives to comply.

I'm tempted to add a fourth suggestion - don't be a dickhead - but didn't want to mar the list above with partisan opinions.  But for Christ's sake, Kemp, stop limiting Medicare eligibility and unemployment benefits, and don't outlaw mandates like Florida and Texas did.  Pretend to be a doctor and pledge to first do no harm, and then put your ass to work and start actually making things better.