8.16.2021

Random Monday Morning Thoughts




It's true.

  • On Friday, we eclipsed the total hospitalizations number of the first surge. The daily increases over the weekend weren't major, but they were still on the rise. This week will be interesting. 

  • Decatur COVID related news. 

  • It almost did turn into Saigon yesterday, but as bad as the optics were -- and they were really bad --  the Americans got out. It's been 20 years of bad decisions, and all are to blame.

    • Those bad decisions: Bush going in initially, Obama doubling down, Trump meeting with and giving credibility to the Taliban, and Biden completely wrong that Afghanistan would fall at all.

    • But let's not revise history: 90% of Americans supported the invasion in 2001.
    • We spent more than $88 billion to train and equip Afghanistan's army. And the only result was that the private sector of the Military Industrial Complex got rich  -- which seems to be the only modern purpose of war. 
    • I didn't understand everyone wanting to hang all of Afghanistan around Biden's neck yesterday. Blaming a guy who was ending a 20 year old nightmare doesn't make sense. Do you know who was President when Saigon happened? LBJ? Nope. Nixon? Nope. It was Gerald Ford. 
    • I bet this is right:

    • On second thought, maybe it is an actual Saigon. This happened after we went to bed.  Video.  

    • This is a wild ass video. And if this video is accurate, at least one person who hung onto the plane fell out of the sky. Oh, my. 

  • Legal nerd stuff. The state of masks in schools is very confusing in Texas. Ultimately, no school will able to legally implements a mask policy, but that's no the case at this moment. Here is an explanation as to what is going on right now:
    • Dallas County:  It's important to note that Dallas County government (think Clay Jenkins and not the ISD) sued the Governor over his no-masks emergency order. Jenkins won at the district court and at the Dallas Court of Appeals, and a TRO was issued against the Governor's order. The Texas Supreme Court overturned those decisions late yesterday but here is the limited ruling: The underlying order enjoining the Governor's order as it applied to Dallas County government was set aside. Dallas County government must comply.
    • Dallas ISD, however, then announced they would continue to implement it's no mask policy. How? There's been no court order to tell them to the contrary. They weren't a party to the Clay Jenkins lawsuit. The Texas Supreme Court ruling applied to Dallas County government and, technically, no one else. 
    • Now would the Texas Supreme Court rule the same as to any case brought by or against Dallas ISD or any other ISD? Sure. But it hasn't happened yet.
    • Compare Fort Worth ISD. There some private individuals sued the school district and won in district court on Friday. The result: Fort Worth ISD was enjoined from enforcing it's put on a mask policy. The school appealed it to the Fort Worth Court of Appeals but that court didn't rule over the weekend. 
  • I've got to make a quick comment about the Fort Worth ISD case because I actually watched the hearing by Zoom on Friday afternoon before Judge John Chupp.  That guy was clueless. He didn't care about the text of the emergency order, he didn't care about statutory construction, and he didn't care that the Plaintiffs had to show irreparable harm if they were forced to wear a mask. Nope. Instead he acted like Judge Judy if Judge Judy was a simpleton. It was amazing. Here's an excerpt:

  • A metaphor for Texas:


  • County Judge J.D. Clark told me that we've got a heck of a find as the courthouse renovation begins to take shape. A metallurgist/restoration expert has found that a vault door in front of the current district judge's office has an oil painting and a gold inlet around the edges. It was, for some unknown reason, painted over decades ago. The guy will restore it like he did in Navarro County which is probably pretty close to what the door will look like:

  • Decatur's own Bryce Elder continues to dominate in Double AA for the Mississippi Braves. He's now 7-1 with a 3.21 ERA. In his last start, he went six innings and gave up no runs, no walks, and struck out nine. 

  • I saw the Internet from Vyve in action at a home in Bridgeport this weekend, and I can't believe what I saw. It's amazing. It uses, surprisingly, Bridgeport's old cable TV lines. An old fashioned coaxial cable goes into the back of the modem/router.  

at 8:29 AM

8.13.2021

It's Friday -- Let's Get Out of Here

at 2:30 PM

Random Friday Morning Thoughts




Topical.  

  • Still rising. 

  • If my Bridgeport ISD book-learning hasn't failed me, 44.7% of all Texans vaccinated computes to 53.8% of all eligible Texans being vaccinated. That also equates to 11.1 million Texans who are old enough to get vaccinated but have not. Incredible. 

  • This is wild. The government in Texas, the TABC specifically, is actually threatening a private business with retaliation for requiring its customers to have a vaccination in order to enter. What exactly is a "conservative" these days? 

  • Detailed Census details were released yesterday. Tidbits:
    • Wise County numbers:

    • In Texas, it's dead even between Whites and Hispanics, 39.8% to 39.3%. (10 years ago it  was Whites with 45.3% and Hispanics at 37.6%)
    • The truth behind the shift is that Whites aren't repopulating in Texas very quickly. In Texas, they just increased in numbers in the last 10 years by a measly 187,252.  By comparison, Hispanics increased by 1,980,796 in 10 years.  That's the real story. 
    • But that is not as crazy as the nationwide reproduction rate for Whites. For the first time since 1790, the number of Whites fell overall from the number ten years previously by losing 5.1 million people (despite Texas' modest addition). Simply put, more Whites are dying in America than being born.

    • Where the city limits are drawn has a lot to do with the following numbers. 

    • Wichita Falls lost 10,000 people. That's a trend nationwide as rural areas saw a decrease in population while the big cities and their suburbs rapidly increased.
    • Fun fact:

  • The Taliban has now taken Kandahar in the last 24 hours. They U.S. better get our embassy evacuated or we are going to have another Saigon at best and an Iranian hostage situation at worst. (To be clear, I support the pulling of all troops out of Afghanistan and have been advocating for it for over a decade as evidenced above. This end was inevitable unless we wanted a perpetual occupation.) 
    Yesterday

    Saigon.

  • Handcuffed man in Oklahoma led cops on a chase on a four-wheeler. For a while. Video link.


  • A real estate story in the Morning News today focuses on the rising prices of townhomes and condos which have even outpaced crazy single family home prices. It's in a hip area, but do you want to pay $260,000 for a 590 square foot condo in Uptown? It has a cool view but has a pull down bed. 

  • R.I.P. to the only Official Liberally Lean Baseball Player I have ever had.  What a wild career. An ultimate spare in Texas, traded to the Orioles where he had 4 years which any Hall of Famer would want, became filthy rich with a new contract, and then whose ability just fell off a cliff never to return. 

  • A faithful reader just sent me this which was found while cleaning out his grandmother's house. He thought I'd find it interesting, and I do.  A vaccination passport request back in 1918:

    "Dr. Evans, Smallpox has broken out here in the schools
    and my children have to have a certificate to show that they
    have been vaccinated for smallpox. Roy and Eva Fell. They
    can't go to school without and have to have it by Wednesday so
    please sent it at once and much oblige."
    Mrs. Ada Hoffman
    401 Andrew St.
    Winfield, Kansas

    • Just for fun, I had to look up that address. (I'm pretty sure the address above is 401 and not 408). History in America, with very rare exception, is eventually bulldozed away. 

  • Random Decatur ISD complaint I received yesterday: The air-conditioning in several rooms at Carson Elementary is atrocious and not a single lawn of any school had been mowed for opening day. 
  • Man, a lot of people dogged on Field of Dreams yesterday and it did my heart good. That being said, the players entrance for last night night's game was really great. Video.

  • Time which has passed since the Wise County Sheriff's Office has failed to solve the murder of Lauren Whitener in her home at Lake Bridgeport: 770 days.
  • Messenger: Above the Fold (with a pretty wild story of DNA and familial DNA tracing leading to a California killer from 40 years ago found in a grave in Wise County.)

at 8:32 AM

8.12.2021

Random Thursday Morning Thoughts




The Messenger was doing features on interesting people in Wise County back than and wrote one on Jim Marrs.  When I was re-watching the crazy "JFK" movie the other day, his name prominently showed up in the opening credits.    (I had highlighted the "all tell" in the story because there's no way that's true.) He died in 2017.

  • Last summer's peak was 10,893.

  • Clay Jenkins new county order is the biggest defiance of Gov. Abbott's edict yet because it's not a another governmental entity (like a school) telling the governor that they will require masks on its own government premises. Nope, it's a local governmental entity telling a private business to require masks. I'm actually torn when it goes that far. 

  • This is dumb. It isn't at all like Wendy Davis successfully running out the last 13 hours of the clock back in 2013. Right now there's still 25 days left in the current special session.

     
  • What a weird "official" update from the Cowboys.

  • You have to be ridiculously sloppy in data transfer in order for this to happen. If I had to guess, I bet its video files (bodycam and dashcams) and phone dumps that comprise the majority of the lost data.

  • The QAnon nuts always look normal.  And the story is as crazy as the headline. He also bought into the Illuminati stuff as well.  


  • I normally ignore Trump these days as he slips towards irrelevance, but this statement yesterday is really insane. He loved January 6th and thought it was justified (see use of the word "murdered). He wants a race war (see use of the worth "other side" in quotes no less). He wants another insurrection (see use of the words "cannot be allowed").  . And the chilling statement of "We know who is" invokes images of Hitler's night of the long knives. He was never good at hiding his Nazi tendencies, and he's not getting any better. 

  • I still predict some weird background information between the suspect and those in the victim's home is going to come out.  But so far I've heard nothing new. 

  • The Taliban has basically created a large circle around Kabul and there's a 100% chance it will be taken. Thus, it looks like we can officially update Bill Murray's line in Stripes where he tells his cohorts that we've been kicking arse for 200 years and we are "10 and 1."  Now make that a "2". (It really is amazing that that both the powerful Soviet Union and the United States have invaded a country full of nothing and can't hold it.) 

  • Sure they had to tear up a few pages where Tennessee took up arms against the United States because they were more faithful to money derived from slave trade but, you know, "exceptionalism" is relative. 

  • I repeat it again: Field of Dreams has a horrible conclusion and moral lesson. Let's take a magical place and turn it into an amusement park with a paid admission. I would be hard to write something worse. 

  • Related:

  • Why was the interim school superintendent for Decatur ISD openly bad mouthing the Messenger at the convocation? Isn't it normally the job on interims to calm the waters and steer the ship forward? 


at 8:31 AM
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