So there’s a story I’ve been meaning to get to this week. This will have to be a sort of placeholder for something longer. While there’s a lot to say, the particular outrage can be summed up in this comment by Esther Lucero from the Seattle Indian Health Board:
Jesus fuck.
Other people will say that I should be fucking heartened by this:
On May 7th, 2020, the GBI arrested Gregory McMichael, age 64, and Travis McMichael, age 34, for the death of Ahmaud Arbery. They were both charged with murder and aggravated assault. The McMichaels were taken into custody and will be booked into the Glynn County Jail.
But I’m not. Read further:
I am not heartened.
Yes, I read what it said. I understand what it said. But I also read further:
On May 5th, 2020, District Attorney Tom Durden formally requested the GBI investigate the death of Ahmaud Arbery. The Kingsland Office initiated an investigation on May 6th, 2020.
and I am not heartened.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown, as the character of the vice-principal from The Breakfast Club, takes down Judd Nelson’s bad boy character, hard.
In a case that can’t seem to get appropriate coverage inside the USA, Canada and the UK are publishing important stories detailing the lynching of a Black jogger by a white ex-cop and his son just as fast as any published by the national press inside the USA. The best review of the footage of the actual killing is probably in this story, by a local news station in Jaxonville.
So what happened here, why are prosecutors declaring this behavior acceptable, and why do I call it a lynching?
So, PZ has planned a hangout for Patrons this Sunday where scientists will be talking about debunking pseudoscientific nonsense. Of course, this doesn’t come up out of nowhere, it’s obviously in response to the misinformation woo-peddlers and right-wingers spew generally and the misinformation that Trump is spewing about Coronvirus “cures” more specifically. All of which makes this meme not only funny, but tragically relevant to our current moment:
So many sources have shown total deaths in the USA to have already surpassed 50k. Now, even those sources are undercounts, we are sure. (NYC has experienced 4000 deaths more than would be expected for the period of the pandemic even after subtracting deaths confirmed to be a result of COVID-19.) Nevertheless, data collated by the European Center for Disease Control & Prevention are considered just as “official” and yet aren’t the same as those presented by the USA CDC. Since I started off with the ECDC data, I have to continue to use it for consistency’s sake, but it is interesting to note that it appears to be somewhat behind.
Presented without comment:
Tweet from Conal Pierse
Hey, don’t praise me. Go to youtube and leave a comment for the guy and his crowdsourced chorus.
Well, despite my dramatic and terrifying underestimate of how US residents would pull together and alter their behavior to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, there are still many COVID-19 deaths happening around the USA. Looking at graphs, the growth of the disease looks a lot more linear than exponential lately, and that’s a very, very good thing. With linear growth, each doubling takes twice as long as the last doubling, which means that we buy ourselves lots and lots of time to make vaccines and take more preventative actions before reaching megadeath-scale numbers. Of course, this is still much worse than negative growth rate in COVID-19 deaths or just stopping the disease in its tracks, but when the choice is between linear growth and exponential growth, as it was for the USA at the end of last month, you have to choose the former.
Photo by Teo Chin Leong for the Mind’s Eye Photo Awards
Photo by Teo Chin Leong for the Mind’s Eye photo competition.
I swear my next Villains & Vigilantes superhero is going to be modeled after this frog.