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- Wise County: Who knows. It was 30 active cases the last time we got any numbers.
- Texas:
- I'm pretty sure we've peaked with new cases this time around, but deaths are still at a new high. (Deaths always trail new cases so we should see those go down over the next two weeks at well.)
- This decline all corresponds with the mask mandate on July 2nd: Wear a mask and close things like bars, and then the cases go down.
- Even if we see a steady decrease in all of the charts over the next four weeks, every daily number dwarfs what was happening in April and May.
- If schools reopen, we'll find out pretty quickly if that was a good idea or not.
Deaths
Hospitalizations (probably 15% under-reported due to the new rules.)
New cases. - Breaking minutes ago: MLB's season is in big trouble after one week. We've got a cancellation. (Maybe I was too optimistic.) Uh, Canada, knew better after all.
- It finally dawned on me what a bind parents are in if they have elementary school children if schools don't open up this Fall.
- Financial: Let's face it, schools serve as daycare for elementary school kids. Two-earner families make up almost all of America. Those families with elementary age children get by with no school in the summer by forking over dollars they don't have for daycare and then relying upon camps and extended family for the other weeks. Then when school comes, they can get their feet back underneath them. That is, unless there is no in-person school.
- Practical: It's one thing to plop a high schooler in front of a computer to do their thing for online learning, but if you've seen the new expectations on elementary school kids for virtual learning, it's a whole different ballgame. At least one of the parents is going to have to go to computer school with them everyday. This isn't the same virtual learning "program" that we had in the Spring when schools were caught off guard and just winged it for a couple of months. This will be a regimented schedule. So if the already financially strapped parent thought they had a work around by working from home, that idea just got harpooned.
- I don't know if in-person school is a good health decision or not. I'm just saying we've got a ton of Americans who are going to be in dire straights if we don't go back, and we might have a ton of deaths if we do. We might want to cut those in responsible for having to make these decisions a bit of break.
- A judge on the Dallas Court of Appeals was killed in a wrong way driver on I-30 east of Dallas. A car in front of him had a dashcam rolling. If you haven't seen it, it is chilling.
- I've always thought the "open carry" guy with the itchy trigger finger is likely to kill someone one of these days, but I've never really thought about how that guy was putting his own life in danger, too. If he were to make an aggressive move towards someone, even if the gun remains at his side, and ends up dead, the shooter is always going to have a pretty good "I felt my life was threatened" defense.
- That happened this week in Austin when a car first moved aggressively into a BLM protest and one of the marchers ended up dead as he quickly approached the vehicle while holding what he had called an "AK-47." Video. (Everyone is analyzing it like the Zapruder film because you hear five shots, then a pause, then three shots.)
- Speaking of Zapruder films, a Weatherford "good old boy" slugged a BLM protester (video) in the streets near the courthouse but, as can be expected, it turned into a cesspool of "they started it!" online. Here another angle of it which, regardless of what happened before, sure looks like the implementation of the ol' sucker-punch-and-run technique. The "counter-protesters" (I've never understood what they are counter-protesting) weren't exactly welcoming of people different than them.
The guy in yellow shirt is the center of controversy.
Lots of Confederate flags showed up.
We're all doomed. - Seems like a good time to mention that the worst painter in the world released a new one last week.
- Speaking of the Open Carry craze, take a look at it when a bunch of black guys figured out it was perfectly legal in Kentucky. It shouldn't make you feel one bit of difference if you're part of the Come and Take It crowd.
- The Supreme Court on Friday, in a 5-4 vote, refused to strike down a Nevada coronavirus order that was more restrictive of churches than casinos. I'm with the conservatives on this one. I've always thought, without any case to really back me up, that the the Free Exercise Clause was as about as close to an absolute right as anything we have. (That's my Libertarian streak coming out in me - "shall make no law respecting" seems pretty absolute to me.) Gorsuch, who I like, wrote his own dissent, but I thought he got a little petty.
- Mike Huckabee wrote that Chief John Roberts should "repent" for being in the majority in that case.
- He's too busy.
- A crazy picture from the weekend.
- The Messenger's history columnist, Joy Burgess-Carrico, focused last weekend on the Klan's activity in the 1920s in Wise County. Man, they were big players. She teased that her next column will concern Klan activity in the 1990s. I can remember a Klan rally in Bridgeport around 1995, and then there was the Klan connection to bizarre bombing plot around the same time. Texas Monthly had a story about the the latter.
