From my clutter: virus vexations

Sunday morning, after services on Zoom, the attending members of our church community discussed what the prospects are for gathering in the flesh in the season of the coronavirus. Whatever else may develop, we agreed it would be crazy to pretend the pandemic was over. The virus still lurks among us.

It feels time to unload some of the oddments I've collected from COVID journalism. This thing is a mystery.

Scientists trying to suss the coronavirus out are often reduced to admitting they can't identify patterns, though they can document different impacts.

If you are in Belgium and have COVID-19, your odds are not good: About one in six Belgians who have contracted the disease have died. If you are in Rwanda, a former Belgian colony with a per capita GDP about 1/60th of Belgium’s, your odds are superb. Rwanda has reported 339 cases, and none has even required admission to an ICU. Rwandans are younger than Belgians, but zero is a very small number.

In Switzerland, a country with excellent universal health care, a French-speaking Swiss with COVID-19 is 1.6 times more likely to die than a German-speaking Swiss. An Italian-speaking Swiss is 2.4 times more likely to die than a German speaker. The magnitude of these disparities is comparable to the magnitude of the disparities among white, Latino, and black people in the United States—even though there is no modern history of enslavement and genocide of Switzerland’s Italian-speaking population. (Ticino, the center of Italian-speaking Switzerland, ranks seventh out of 26 cantons in per capita GDP.) You might be tempted to attribute the disparity to the Italian speakers’ connections with the death zone of northern Italy. That could account for the difference in the incidence of the disease—but why the difference in the likelihood that you’ll die, if you already have it?

Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, May 29, 2020

What is documented in San Francisco is that the disease is tearing through Latinx and Black communities and disproportionately killing infected people of various Asian origins, while not being nearly so deadly to white residents.

When our medical system tries to understand the discrepancies, further conundrums arise. The focus of study must look away from individuals to social forces, according to Statnews.

“Policymakers’ natural instinct is to think this correlation is because of income disparities, or having health insurance, or diabetes, obesity rates, smoking rates, or even use of public transit,” [M.I.T. economist Chris] Knittel said. “It’s not. We controlled for all of those. The reason why [Black people] face higher death rates is not because they have higher rates of uninsured, poverty, diabetes, or these other factors.”

The Sutter study, too, adjusted for age, sex, comorbidities, and income; the higher hospitalization rate for Black patients wasn’t explained by any of those.

That leaves other factors. “If I were a policymaker,” Knittel said, “I’d be looking at things like the systemic racism that affects the quality of insurance African Americans have and the quality of the health care they receive.”

The county-by-county analysis of Covid-19 death rates in the U.S. comes as more and more studies shift from the initial focus on individual-level factors that seem to increase people’s risk of dying to population-level ones, too, said experts in public health, demographics, and infectious disease.

In some places, the pandemic has enabled communal violence. Indian novelist, essayist, and activist Arundhati Roy charges that the behavior of her Hindu nationalist government has been genocidal.

... the language being used by the mainstream media against Muslims was designed to dehumanise them. To paint an entire community as “corona jihadis” during this pandemic, when there is a pre-existing atmosphere of violence against Muslims is to create a genocidal climate. 

... It was terrifyingly similar to how, during the rise of the Third Reich, Nazis began accusing Jews of being spreaders of disease, carriers of typhus. And the tone of the media – particularly channels like Zee TV and Republic TV began to sound like Radio Rwanda. These channels are specially rewarded by the [President Nahrendra] Modi coterie, granted exclusive interviews by him and his terrifying home minister. The horror show is ongoing. ...

Meanwhile, in its own casually imperial way, the U.S. government has been contributing to global confusion and likely unnecessary deaths.

US-funded website spreading COVID misinformation in Armenia
Medmedia.am was established with money from the Democracy Commission Small Grants programme, awarded to the NGO by the US embassy in Armenia last year. These grants, intended to “promote democracy”, are worth up to $50,000 a year.

In May, the site’s most-read page called on Armenians to “refuse all potential [COVID-19] vaccination programmes”. It has had 131,000 views and 28,000 social media likes (big numbers in a country with a population of less than 3 million).

The second most popular piece claimed, incorrectly, that a morgue offered 100,000 AMD ($205) to a dead patient’s relatives to sign a document saying the death was caused by COVID-19. Other recent pieces have described COVID-19 as a “fake pandemic”.

Open Democracy, May 28, 2020

After this expose was published, the funding was cancelled. Thank you, alert reporters!

Then there's the mask debate. Scientific American calls out machismo run amuck.

Leaders who are more concerned with preserving a macho public image put our lives at risk as they prove their manhood by showing resistance to experts’ opinions, hypersensitivity to criticism and constant feuding with anyone who seems to disagree with them.

Yes, they call out Trump. After all, they speak science.

Our church is not the only one struggling with how we should go forward in this time. An epidemiologist who has studied airborne transmission of the virus and serves on his church's safety committee urges caution. Scholars of religion are, as is their wont, collecting data on what religious institutions are actually doing in the time of the pandemic. John Turner reports:

As far as I can discern, the vast majority of American congregations have responded in responsible ways and demonstrated a concern for public health. Many congregations, moreover, have continued on with their efforts to feed the hungry and to assist the needy.

He's looking for further contributions for this study which can be uploaded at Pandemic Religion.

Meanwhile, our little church community decided for the moment that we're all in this together, even if we're distancing. We don't want to create risk by "opening" while the danger of infection continues, nor to divide ourselves by various partial expedients. Instead, we want to see if we can equip our people who might need cell phones so they can join us via Zoom. Solidarity trumps the desire to be in the same space, at least for now, and for the foreseeable future.

Father's Day 2020

The label on the snapshot said 1938, nine years before I was born. The beach was probably on Cape Cod, though it could also have been somewhere on the shore of Lake Ontario. The mustache was an uncommon detail; I remember him growing one on brief occasions in my childhood. The sailor hat was his concession to his early developing bald spot. The pipe was his signal of adulthood, constantly fingered, usually unlit.

Like so many young people today, he came into adult life (in the early 1930s) just as his country fell into Depression. In that decade, he never found a coherent career path, bouncing from odd job to job. He didn't really get settled into stable employment for another 15 years. I'm sure that grated on him: he believed his male purpose was to provide.

But here there's a youthful hopefulness in his gaze. He would have been 33. I never knew him looking much like that. By the time I came along, there'd been a terrible war; he was too old to be drafted into World War II, so worked at accounting in a wartime aircraft factory. When I knew him, he seemed to think the world around him a pretty grim place.

But he tried to do what he conceived of as his duty and to be kind. What more can any of us do?

Something to say amid rage and promise

Having made the painful decision to avoid all crowds for fear of COVID, I have nothing to add to this moment of uprising except the heart warming signs created by my neighbors, out and about San Francisco and even beyond.

What I love about this town is that we have something to say and we say it, in whatever media are available.

Behind our gates, flower gardens, and windows, we express care.

Juneteenth is a bittersweet celebration

Let's outsource these thoughts to Jadon-Maurice Forbes who sends me those Indivisible emails I often fail to open:

This is a day that my grandmother taught me to honor as the beginnings of a new life for the African diaspora. She was very close to her African-American heritage and wanted to impart that quality to me. So much so that she would replace my Hooked-on-Phonics books with ones she felt were more suitable -- like Imani and the Flying Africans -- a fantastic tale of a band of Africans taking to the sky to escape to freedom.

When I think of Juneteenth, I often imagine those winged, black faces breaking their chains and finding freedom. But the true American tale of how slaves were freed is more grounded in a nuanced, complicated, and painful struggle for freedom that has continued for 155 years (read: that means ‘til today).

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day the last of the enslaved Africans in America were freed from their chains, having continued to work in bondage for a full two years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

In many ways, Juneteenth is a bittersweet reminder of what was promised but never delivered to Black folks post-emancipation. It's a reminder of delayed justice. Every year, even after my nana passed away, we celebrated this holiday. And every year, we do so in honor of progress as much as for a continually delayed sense of justice and equality.

Dreams, realized and deferred. Struggle is long. That's why they call it struggle.

Friday cat blogging

We heard a meow. How could that be? At present we are bereft of cat, mourning the irreplaceable Morty.

I looked out, and there he was in the front yard:

He didn't seem much bothered by my watching him explore. I've since learned this is Meo who lives two houses over.

Perhaps this visit was an omen that there'll be another cat in this house one day ...

This is not the economy we left behind in March

Welcome to the "omni-crisis." To an extent that's hard to take in, we are living in a different, and far less prosperous world and city.

Noah Arroyo, writing for San Francisco Public Press reports:

Construction sites are coming back to life throughout San Francisco, but the surge in activity may not last long.

Builders pulled 334 permits last week, up from zero 10 weeks earlier as the coronavirus shutdown took effect. That puts construction activity at about 58% of normal. In the year leading up to Mayor London Breed’s mid-March order for construction to cease, City Hall received about 580 permit applications a week.

If you look around, it's obvious that some projects are chugging along -- but also that something is wrong.

For the first time in years, there are "For Rent" signs in Mission District windows.

This month the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco dropped 9.2% from a year earlier, to $3,360, according to apartment-listing site Zumper. It was the biggest decline since 2015.

That's still too much for an awful lot of us. And some of the techies whose affluence drove up property values and rents have figured out they can work from home anywhere, including locations that are much cheaper than the City by the Bay. This won't help a lot of people who are here and trying to stay.

In April, almost 6% of city tenants were unable to pay rent because of financial hardships related to the COVID-19 pandemic and local order to shelter in place, according to an internal survey by the San Francisco Apartment Association. A study by the California Policy Lab found that nearly 18% of the city’s workforce filed for unemployment insurance benefits between March 16 and May 9.

Folks who aren't working aren't going to be able to pay the rent which landlords who acquired their properties at inflated values need to stay in business.

That is, everybody is screwed.

Meanwhile, small quirky retail businesses along Valencia Street are trying to figure out how to make a buck in a diminished retail environment.

Annika Hom has that story at Mission Local. These places are precarious at best. Lisa Sherratt, at Serendipity is a sole proprietor.

Pre-pandemic, Sherratt made between 50 and 100 sales a day, she said as she arranged the store’s brightly colored cards on the shelves. On Monday, she made 10. 

“It used to be perfectly profitable,” Sherratt said.

It’s not only sales that have set her back.  Already, Sherratt missed April and May’s rent. Her landlord cut her June rent by 75 percent and asked her to pay just under half of July’s. Still, she’s uncertain of the store’s future. She is currently the store’s sole employee. 

“Today I am paying $20 an hour for a babysitter and I am not earning anything,” Sherratt said.

We're properly pre-occupied by the horror and the glimpse of opportunity for real change let loose by local and national revulsion at George Floyd's murder. Humanity is enhanced when Black lives matter. And we're still captured within the unabated coronavirus emergency, even though the Quitter in Chief has gone out to lunch on disease response. All this amid this crashed, still not fully revealed, diminished economy.

At BuzzFeed, Tom Gara brings forward a useful description for this new world we inhabit: this is the "omni-crisis" -- three waves of pain and of potential breaking over us concurrently. No wonder we feel dazed. Anxiety is appropriate.

And then there's that election coming up in November ...

Can't we do better than this?

On a walk with a parent in 1940, a curious small child looked at this scene and asked: "What's that?"

"Oh, that's some Boy Scouts with a thing they call a pup tent."

On a walk with a parent in 1990, a curious child looked at this scene and asked: "What's that?"

"That's a back packing tent. When you get bigger, we'll do that one day."

On a walk with a parent in 2020, a curious child looked at this scene and asked: "What's that?"

"Oh, that's a tent. That's where some people who don't have houses sleep. Unless they aren't lucky enough to have a tent. Then they sleep in the doorways."

I'm out most mornings at dawn, running in the Mission District streets. It's not like what I hear the Tenderloin looks like -- so many tents that the sidewalks are impassable to walkers. But many blocks, including the one I live on, host at least one tent. The one pictured is half a block from the police department; don't know if that makes for a danger to its occupants or provides a kind of security. All along Valencia Street, people huddle under blankets in doorways.

Can't we do better than this?

Eating, and not eating, in the time of the coronavirus

This column seems to me an excessively happy assessment of life sheltering-in-place -- as well as very much concerned with a first world problem.

Dietitians report that clients are less interested in dieting, and more interested in sustainable eating patterns that enrich their long-term health. The search term “weight loss diets” fell sharply in March and April, according to Google Trends.

“I have definitely seen less talk and fewer questions about fad diets” says Melissa Nieves, a dietitian with Fad Free Nutrition based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “I think people have rightfully put their attention on their protection, survival and well-being during this pandemic. That also includes eating habits becoming more practical and less centered on what diet culture says we should or shouldn’t eat to reach a socially constructed body ideal.”

Cara Rosenbloom, Washington Post

Well, maybe. Most people in my circles keep groaning about the pounds they have put on, but some probably are acquiring improved food habits. This author reports that 45 percent of us said we were cooking more at home, not surprisingly. And many people report eating better, consuming less salt and sugar while adding fruit and vegetables.

But this picture doesn't catch the other stark reality of this time: with 40 million and counting workers out of jobs, many people simply can't afford to buy food. The Highland Country Press of Hillsboro, Ohio, offered a picture of that reality.

“COVID-19 has created the perfect storm, releasing a downpour of difficulties on Ohio families,” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks. “High unemployment rates and loss of income from jobs has led to a massive surge in demand at our foodbanks at a time when we’re facing significant operational challenges, including declines in volunteers, fundraising revenue and donated foods.”

Foodbanks across the country rapidly shifted operating models to meet skyrocketing demand while mitigating the spread of COVID-19, and they haven’t seen demand ease off for three months. Meanwhile, disruptions to the supply chain have meant fewer retail donations and a surge in food prices putting additional pressure on family food budgets.

“Congress attempted to put an umbrella over families’ heads by means of expanding SNAP aid and increasing unemployment benefits, but it hasn’t been enough,” Hamler-Fugitt said. “The increase in food prices makes the current SNAP benefit amounts even more inadequate to meet basic food needs. Our foodbanks simply cannot keep up with this level of demand – congressional action is needed now.”

Yes, Congressional action is needed -- and Republicans refuse to move on this. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives has sent a proposed relief and stimulus bill to the Senate, but the GOPers there are just sitting on it.

Congress should keep it simple, just give people who are hurting more money. Their well-being was sacrificed to try (largely ineptly) to control the virus for the sake of everyone. The food distribution and supply chains would sort themselves out if people could afford to buy.

The police lack all accountability; it's the money

Emily Galvin-Almanza, a public defender and co-director of Partners for Justice thought she should explain her support for #DefundThePolice to her mom. What follows is an adapted Twitter thread in which she made the case.

[Unless bracketed, all text is by Garza-Almanza.]
... And she asked me a question: how could what happened to Rayshard Brooks [killed last Friday by an Atlanta cop] happen, at this moment, in this uprising? How could police keep...doing this?

So this is what I said.

My mom is not steeped in these issues (I mean, she is more now, because, like, she has to be mother to yrs truly). So this thread isn't intended for folks who are already right there with us. I'm hoping this will be useful for folks who are wondering, and who share her questions.

Killings--murders--have continued, and will continue, because the police lack all accountability. It's not just qualified immunity, which protects them from being found liable for things that would bankrupt/jail the rest of us. It's the money.

Follow the money.

Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd, could *still get his million dollar pension* even if he is getting those checks while serving a sentence for homicide.

Police pensions are...generous. Many are raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, even if they've been dismissed for the kind of misconduct that would throw you or me into a cell. ...

So you can't get sued, you won't lose your $ no matter what you do, and, what's more, you're living in a culture where morality is upside down, bullies rule, and everyone is trained to be both extremely violent and extremely terrified all the time. ...

... Let's talk about overtime.

As a public defender, whenever I got a case that was just especially, stupidly made-up (think someone arrested for dealing drugs who was at home with no drugs, money, scales, paraphernalia, or baggies on them) the first thing I checked was the cop's schedule.

Inevitably--seriously, ask, like, any defense attorney about this--when you got a really stupid arrest, it would be within an hour or so of the end of the cop's scheduled shift.

Shift ends at 6pm? This really bad arrest would be at, like, 5:30.

Why? Well, because processing an arrest takes time, but it's also really easy. So you can make time-and-a-half for sitting in the precinct typing up some papers and waiting to talk to a DA.

This REALLY adds up. Examples...
Defund the Baltimore Police
Detroit Police overtime up 136 percent over 5 years
Police Overtime Running 2x over budget
We Need To Talk About Boston's Police Budget

Let's not forget that the end-of-shift arrest isn't just an inconvenience--arrests cost people jobs, homes, family unity, sometimes unraveling entire lives.

Some of these cops are making close to half a million dollars a year on the backs of the poor and innocent.

So when we look at police budgets that are bloated like this...it's not just military equipment and chemical weapons.

It's public officials lining their pockets with taxpayer money by doing terrible things to the people they're supposed to protect.

And uhhh it's a lot--A LOT--of the taxpayers' money.

So when you hear "defund the police" and you get worried about a world where there's no one protecting the public, please remember that EVERY MODEL for doing this envisions a world where someone is on the other end of the phone when you call 911. ...

Police as part of LGBTQI celebrations?

This issue is a hardy perennial. Do we save more queer lives by bringing law enforcement along with us or by showing that we reject these racist, homophobic, violent institutions altogether?

San Diego's current Pride organization has come up with a policy statement:

A Path to Healing & Safer Communities

San Diego Pride asks the City of San Diego to stand with us in support of our Black LGBTQ and ally community. We are asking you to join us in support of the following actions as a further step towards unity.

STEP 1: Law enforcement agencies will no longer have contingents in the San Diego Pride Parade or booths in our Pride Festival. This may be reassessed after the completion of Step 4.

STEP 2: The City of San Diego will recognize the San Diego Pride Parade as a free speech event and no longer bill the organization for road closures and safety.

STEP 3: The City of San Diego will immediately adopt the #8CantWait Campaign recommendations [for police reform from Campaign Zero.]

STEP 4: Support a phased approach to policy reform recommendations centering Black LGBTQ San Diegans.

This would not satisfy me if I were a San Diegan, but it sure is a step up from what most Pride committees have chosen to do about police participation in their festivities in the last 30 years or so.

In a survey of LGBTQ resistance to police our parades festivities from June 2019, Black transfolks and gender queers led the opposition.

“Pride began as a protest, and it’s turned into a parade,” said Malkia Devich Cyril, the executive director of MediaJustice and an activist based in Oakland. “I think what’s happening now is simply a return to its roots.”

I first lost a fight about including police without even critique in what I thought was a radical gay/feminist institution in 1982. This will go until we broadly understand that the purpose of police, as constituted in this country, is not "public safety," but repression of Black people, of all people of color, and of anyone who transgresses straight gender norms.

That's one solution: stick a pin in it

Sadly, people with power have given up on curbing the epidemic and its damage to our lives. Nevertheless, medical workers trudge forward, doing their utmost amidst suffering and futility.

“None of us are at peace. We’re sort of bracing for it to come back. All of us are wondering, can we go through this again?”

... "We risked our lives to save as many lives as possible, and people can’t wear a mask — they can’t stay six feet apart.”

The national abdication of leadership in the face of some people's demand to "re-open" leaves each individual responsible for calculating their own risk. We each, individually, are left to decide which constraints we'll place on ourselves. For myself, I'm into masks, getting outside as much as possible, and seeing people only six feet apart. Your mileage may vary.

It's not as if there aren't efforts to envision what we would need as a society for an equitable, effective response to the coronavirus. Here's much to ponder from the Black to the Future Action Fund:

1. Put cash directly into the hands of people
2. Complete cancellation of student loan payments
3. Priority for all Black owned small businesses in the next round of PPP (paycheck protection program)
4. Free testing and coverage of Covid-19 treatments for everyone
5. Increase testing sites in underserved and rural communities
6. Mandatory race, gender, and class specific data collection
7. Cancel rent, mortgages, and evictions + public utilities and internet costs
8. Safe housing options for victims of domestic violence and at-risk family members of essential workers
9. Protect our vote
10. Fund and protect the US Postal Service

And no doubt, defund the police!

As always, it's up to an aroused people to make it so.

Solidarity in the long struggle for justice and freedom

Murder of George Floyd as seen from Mexico

"We, the detained people of dormitories A, B, and C at Mesa Verde ICE Detention Facility, are protesting and on hunger strike in solidarity with the detained people at Otay Mesa Detention Center. We begin our protest in memory of our comrades George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Oscar Grant, and Tony McDade. Almost all of us have also suffered through our country’s corrupt and racist criminal justice system before being pushed into the hands of ICE."

ICE, which runs this jail, tried to say it wasn't so.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement first announced the hunger strike at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, Calif., on Friday, they alleged that detainees were being coerced — both internally and externally — into a hunger strike, and detainees reportedly said they were told that the purpose of the hunger strike was to protest the repetitive cycle of the menu.

Further investigation revealed that detainees began refusing meals as a show of solidarity for Floyd, who died while being detained by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25 and whose death sparked protests against police brutality that continue across the nation.

Video via the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity.

Now I know for sure we're living in a failed state

The Ford Foundation, the occupant of this glowing New York City headquarters, has chosen to issue bonds, payable in the far future, in order to increase its grants in this moment of pandemic, economic collapse, and necessary uprisings. According to the Times:

In 2019, the Ford Foundation handed out $520 million in grants. [Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation,] quickly realized that was not going to be anywhere near enough in this crisis-engulfed year.

His solution: Borrow money, spend it quickly and inspire others to follow Ford’s lead. The Ford Foundation plans to announce on Thursday that it will borrow $1 billion so that it can substantially increase the amount of money it distributes.

Walker has lined up four other old-line, extremely affluent, charitable foundations to follow his lead. This is old money stepping up.

Walker at Ford is doing exactly what every progressive and even conventional economist has urged governments to do since 2008: when interest rates are near zero, borrow and push out that cash to build up social capital as well as needed infrastructure. This is what a functional government would do. Unhappily, Republicans have only been willing to allow the government to borrow to give a $1.4 billion dollar tax cut to their rich buddies -- and to their plutocrat in the White House.

So here we find private wealth doing what government ought to be doing. I guess we're lucky there's a Ford Foundation. (This was something I was less sure about back in the day when I was a supplicant. These institutions are awfully satisfied with their own virtue.) They could be doing far worse things with their $13.7 billion dollar endowment. Hitler-loving Henry Ford must be rolling in his grave. Give some of that money to the people who are setting the agenda in the streets!

Resources for working against voter suppression

A friend asked recently if I could point her to how to work against efforts to suppress voting rights. This is a huge subject. It is complicated by the fact that voting in this country is administered at the state and local level, so one size doesn't fit all. But it seems worth sharing the broad overview I came up with here. There's plenty of scope for any one who wants to work on this. Here's what I wrote:

The go-to source on all matters of voting fairness, voter suppression, and vote by mail is the Brennan Center for Justice.

The nation's top scholar of these matters is Rick Hasen (UC Irvine). The top voting expansion lawyer these days (Democrat) is Marc Elias. Op-ed's by either are always valuable as are news stories that quote them.

There are many groups, many organized as non-profits, that work to expand the vote. At the moment, the underlying impulse is coming from the Democrats because restricting the franchise has become part of the Republican Party's orthodoxy in a moment when it can't seem to adapt to changing demographics.

Fair Fight is working largely in Southern states, seems competent, and reasonably well funded.

Voto Latino, Black Voters Matter, and Rock the Vote work to get people registered, a major hurdle to voting.

The national ACLU Voting Rights Project has been at this forever.

In California, the ACLU in San Diego has taken the voting rights lead.

This might seem old fashioned, but in may localities, the League of Women Voters still does vital voting rights work.

All of us help by knowing as much about voting systems as possible. It seems that citizens would be familiar with election procedures, but in fact it's all sort of a black box for many people who are afraid they don't know enough to take part. You can help simply by understanding your local procedures, where to register, when elections take place ... etc.

Hope this gives you some leads. I suggest jumping in somewhere. Many of these groups want more than your money, though they all want that too.

Working remotely on the Nevada primary

Yesterday Nevada held its primary election to determine which candidates for local and congressional offices would be the ballot in November. Because Democrats swept the state's offices in 2018, the state had put in place a lot of new election reforms to make voting smoother for all, including online registration, election day registration at the polls, and automatic restoration of rights for released ex-felons.

And then the virus hit. Nevada tried to make this election a largely vote-by-mail affair. Every registered voter was sent a ballot they could return, post paid. As long as their vote was postmarked on or before Election Day -- and properly signed on the outside -- it would count. There were a small number of county drop boxes for the ballots or voters could use the regular mail.

For Californians, this would seem simply a normal election. But voting-by-mail is a novelty in Nevada. Nevadans expect to enjoy about 10 days of neighborhood voting in local supermarkets and libraries before the big day. And the virus made that impossible. So legions of voters found themselves navigating an unfamiliar system if they wanted to vote.

The state Democratic Party used the primary to test systems in case they have to contest the November election in the midst of another wave of the pandemic. (Nevada is one of the states in which cases of COVID are currently rising ...) Erudite Partner and I tested the experience of helping with an election remotely by taking a few shifts answering the NVDems election hotline. The work felt both somewhat worthwhile and quite awkward.

The Dems used Dialpad, a commercial voice-over-internet system, to make and receive calls on the hotline. It worked fine, but its many-featured interface -- an advantage for most business use -- was overkill and confusing for a highly structured volunteer project. You didn't want volunteers clicking around on all those buttons, but it was probably inevitable that some people got lost in them occasionally. And the dialer's functions carried their ordinary labels rather than some customized set that would accord with what we were actually doing. For example, who would expect that to get to a list of recent calls you should click on "English"? For use in the fall with volunteers, systems either need to be customized for function or the training has to be long and detailed -- and even then the learning curve will be steep. (As it was in 2018 on the VAN voter database.)

To capture information about voter calls to the hotline, the Dems used "LBJ," which they claim means "Lawyers Building Justice." Okay, if you say so. Hotline volunteers had to manually transfer reports of each call from Dialpad to LBJ. In the latter system, they had to try to fit that information into a set of categories obviously designed to help election lawyers determine whether a legal irregularity had occurred. Those categories looked sensible to me, good for catching such all too frequent election screw ups as "I wasn't on the list" or "my polling place didn't open." But this wasn't what was happening in Nevada's first vote-by-mail election in the time of COVID. Most of what we encountered was more like "I didn't get my ballot in the mail" or "I've moved; how do I re-register?" Our instructions included useful answers; we could mostly help. But because the system was designed for a different use, what had happened on the call ended up in our own words in the comments boxes, not captured through the system's categories. Since this was a slow moving, low turnout election, the "boiler room" could actually read and digest the information volunteers captured and suggest we call back with additional help to the voter. That was fine this time around, but nobody is going to be able to do that at volume in the November crucible. A pandemic election needs a different data tool, I think.

So how did the Nevada primary go? According to the Nevada Independent, In mostly mail-in election, voters who opt to cast ballot in person face long wait times. They provide a story of long lines at the tiny number of polling locations, mostly consisting of people trying to take advantage of same day registration and re-registration -- an entirely new option for Nevadans. The state DMV where this might have been avoided had been closed since March 13. Doing registration online was unfamiliar. And so these lines defeated the public health purpose.

It's kind of heartening to see that so many wanted to vote in a primary without a presidential draw. Let's hope not many get sick.

For November, there's a huge task ahead of voter and volunteer education ahead.

Weaknesses revealed

Last week Erudite Partner picked up a friend from a hospital who had gone in with a complaint that had nothing to do with the virus. The next day, E.P. herself tripped and had to avail herself of the emergency room for diagnosis of torn muscles and tendons. (This too will pass.) Last night a friend who has been working partially out and about reported she'd decided she needed to be tested for the virus through her regular health care provider.

All these instances suggest that, in this city, the system has begun to overcome and normalize the disruption in healthcare caused by the pandemic. It's a darn good thing too.

Doctors Tomislav Mihaljevic and Gianrico Farrugia suggest that the more than 100,000 people we know have died from infection by the virus in the U.S. may be equaled by the number killed by the disruption of accustomed medical care. Other ailments that might have been treated have been deadly.

The toll from their deaths may be close to the toll from Covid-19. The trends are clear and concerning. Government orders to shelter in place and health care leaders’ decisions to defer nonessential care successfully prevented the spread of the virus. But these policies — complicated by the loss of employer-provided health insurance as people lost their jobs — have had the unintended effect of delaying care for some of our sickest patients. ...

Across the country, we have seen sizable decreases in new cancer diagnoses (45 percent) and reports of heart attacks (38 percent) and strokes (30 percent). Visits to hospital emergency departments are down by as much as 40 percent, but measures of how sick emergency department patients are have risen by 20 percent, according to a Mayo Clinic study, suggesting how harmful the delay can be. Meanwhile, non-Covid-19 out-of-hospital deaths have increased, while in-hospital mortality has declined.

It's not just gyms and movie theaters that we're afraid to venture out to -- it's also our doctors and medical centers.

The pandemic reveals the fragility of our civilization, less dramatically, but as surely, as Officer Derek Chauvin's crime captured on video.

Both were preventable disasters. "Preventable" seems to be my word for this season.

Unwelcome letter from the IRS

This ugly item turned up in the mail today. That man sure has a messy mind -- and wields a messy Sharpie.

As happened for most(?) of us, the stimulus money turned up weeks ago and went right out again. We were fortunate enough to be able to do some passing on. Democrats darn well better play hard ball and pry more stimulus from the GOPers; eventually we're all going to notice that all of us suffer when nearly one quarter of us are out of work.

This was preventable.

A preview of the next wave of COVID-19

When the original Obamacare website failed abysmally on its launch in 2013, Andy Slavitt was the tech health entrepreneur brought in to turn things around. Subsequently he served in the Obama administration as Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). He's a guy who fixes things.

Many more functional federal and state public health officials have been consulting Slavitt as we have blundered through the current emergency.

Yesterday Slavitt offered a grim prognosis for the pandemic's course among us in a twitter thread I'm excerpting here.

I talked to today [with a health leader in a state] that has one of the biggest growth in cases in the country. There are some big differences with states that were hit hard with the virus in March or April. ... when we see high case growth in Southern states and Western states, it is not the same as when we saw it happen in NY. ...

The [unnamed] Health Secretary told me that some county health officials are being prohibited by local leaders from increasing testing so as not to perpetuate the “hoax” against president Trump. For the last few weeks, cases in this state have gone up. But at first it was waved off. Testing was higher. Cases were inevitable. But more recently, perhaps reflecting the opening of that state, hospitalizations started to increase. This was of course after the state had been closed down for a number of weeks in April with the rest of the country to prevent the virus from taking hold there. Saving lives but trying the patience of many in the state.

And here we come to crux of what he fears will be the situation in many places in the fall of this year:

If things get worse, the reservoir of will in this state to do anything resembling another shut down is gone. Many people have been told they sacrificed for nothing. The state officials know they just dodged a bullet but that the virus would eventually come. But now their political capital is spent.

The good news is they are more prepared than early states were. Older people who can are presumably being more cautious. Hospitals have PPE and plenty of beds & infection controls in place. The death rates should be lower. ...

But the political capital is already spent. Closing businesses isn’t an option even if things get worse. And the more politically conservative the part of the state impacted, the fewer the options. ... They believe that even a high death toll wouldn’t be enough to take action since the Coronavirus has become such a political hot potato. ...

States that were spared early are nervous & are left with fewer options to respond given the state of the politics. The virus is enough to battle. ...

Slavitt adds that he can't report who he was talking with or where because "I’m trying to help them right now & that won’t help."...Two points to never let go of as the disease cuts its swath through us:

• Unless something changes drastically, Black and Latinx people will almost certainly be the largest fraction of those who sicken and die. This is what our racism has wrought.

• This was preventable. Trump's ignorance and self-absorption impeded the public health response which is the most basic responsibility of government. And his political party played along, as always.

A long walk through time and troubles

My prior familiarity with Timothy Egan was as an oped columnist for the New York Times who brought a western, Montanan, sensibility to the paper. I sometimes liked his writing. So when I learned he'd written an account of his traverse of the ancient Via Francigena, I knew A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith was a book I wanted to read.

This turns out to be at least two books in one. The first is the historical travelogue. Unlike the Camino de Santiago in Spain (which E.P. and I walked in 2017), the Via Francigena is not well-marked, richly documented, nor overrun with pilgrims. Egan did the research to explicate the many artifacts of a complex Christian history along the way; this is story at its most vivid: monasteries, massacres, mysticism, miracles and all.

But what gives the book its heart is its exploration of what a Roman Catholic faith formed in the United States might mean to him today. That's not an easy cultural or spiritual position to occupy -- but neither is his heritage something that any Irish-American can lightly slough off. One expression of the anguish that grips him and his fellows is exemplified by this April 28 lament from an editorial by the National Catholic Reporter:

The capitulation is complete. Without a whimper from any of his fellow bishops, the cardinal archbishop of New York has inextricably linked the Catholic Church in the United States to the Republican Party and, particularly, President Donald Trump. ... The Catholic voice, capable of a priceless contribution to the public conversation, has been sold for cheap to political hucksters.

Egan goes on pilgrimage to try to figure it all out, what he can retain and what he must lose. He writes:

I'm a skeptic by profession, an Irish Catholic by baptism, culture, and upbringing--lapsed but listening, like half of all Americans of my family's faith. I'm no longer comfortable with the squishy middle; it's too easy. ... It's time to force the issue, to decide what I believe or admit what I don't.
... I start as a father, a husband, an American deeply troubled by the empty drift of our country. And for the next thousand miles or so, I will try to be a pilgrim.

Egan's pilgrimage was hard, materially, and physically, as well as spiritually. There were long days walked in nasty weather and uncertainty about whether he'd find somewhere to stay in the next town. He tore a tendon and limped on. There was a climb over snowy Alps that this very fit almost-elder found daunting. There were disabling blisters. And finally there was a gorgeous welcoming Italian landscape, where Egan speaks the language. To his own surprise, he begins to wonder whether there might be something miraculous locked away in a Catholic piety whose bloody history and abusive betrayals, he knows too well. And finally, he limps into Rome -- not snagging the papal interview his journalist self had hoped for, but carrying away his stamped pilgrim's passport proving he'd completed this long journey.

The Via Francigena is a trail of ideas, and it helps to walk with eyes open -- otherwise you miss the breadcrumbs of epiphany along the way. There's no Testimonium for the memories I'm loaded down with here at the pathway's end, but my passport is full. ... There is no way. The way is made by walking. I first heard that in Calais, words attributed to a homeless man, the patron saint of wanderers. I didn't understand it until Rome.

If the history of European Christianity, or the travails of American Roman Catholicism, or the possibilities of pilgrimage call you, they are all here and well worth wandering through.

Wisdom for this moment and for the long struggle ahead ...

Rachel Herzing, director of the Center for Political Education and one of the founders of the prison abolitionist movement Critical Resistance, passed along thoughts for A Time of Rebellion. Here are some excerpts.

As thousands of people across the world protest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis cops, it’s clear that we need the both the expressions of rage and frustration, and solidarity and care that have been communicated by the uprisings. We also need continued political education. ...

None of us is born already understanding how to do all this. We learn how and improve our practice by trial and error (which is a form of study), but also by paying attention to what others around us do, in conversation with people with more experience, by reading things in formal educational settings and many other ways. None of these methods is the single best way and none of them are bad ways if we’re gaining knowledge and skills that help us make our work more effective. We join struggles already in motion. Being curious about what has already happened and why helps us avoid repeating old errors. It also helps us build off previous momentum, connect our actions to a lineage of fight back, and acknowledge those who have helped our struggles develop. ...

Right now there is a cacophony of opinions trying to lead us, get our attention, and provide us with the “correct” ideas. Being able to make sense of our own opinions in relationship to what’s out there and deciding what to keep and what to ignore requires developed skills of analysis. When Attorney General Bill Barr says he will bring federal charges against people crossing state lines to “riot” we benefit from understanding what’s underneath this threat—the long legacy of state actors suggesting that “outside agitators” are always behind protests as a way of discrediting dissent, the weight of federal charges versus local ones, and the contradiction of this statement on the heels of right-wing “open up” protestors amassing to challenge COVID-19 public health orders.

... When groups promote demands, it’s important that we understand them and take the time to consider if we agree with them before signing on or circulating them. It’s not enough to just take in these pieces of information, we need to sharpen our skills to make meaning from them.

[She explains some points for this moment:]

• Don’t fall for the myth that study is the enemy of action. ...

• Avoid false distinctions between thinkers and doers. ...

• Put effort into locating and using the many, many good resources already out there ...

• If you find something that is useful but not 100% perfect for your situation, credit it, adapt it, and circulate it. ...

• Be accountable for your own learning and develop something on your own or with others and then test it out. ...

• The time when you think you’ve got it all figured out is probably the time you need to push yourself to learn even more. ...

Political education isn’t just education about politics. It’s education for the specific purpose of making our politics more powerful. It is front line work. It is core to advancing our struggles, not the “extra” activity we take up after the struggle is over or for recreation. ...

Now go read it all.

The virus and the climate: all of us or none of us

Eve Andrews, the advice columnist at Grist spells it out.

COVID-19 could have popped up at any time, as viruses do. The degree to which it’s ravaged American society, however, has little to do with the virus itself. Other countries such as New Zealand and South Korea, faced the same disease and came out the other side with far fewer deaths and less severe economic devastation. This is, to a significant degree, about governance and leadership.

It’s also a preview of what climate change can do. A very contagious respiratory virus is an unfortunate fact; it’s not going away, and it is a challenge to be dealt with. Climate change, just the same, is coming whether or not we pay attention to it. Communities, cities, and states are going to have to put measures into place to ensure that it doesn’t literally kill us all. That’s what adaptation means, and that’s why people talk about things like seawalls and tree cover and managed retreat.

But creating a climate-resilient society requires a lot more than just building or planting stuff! This is where I would normally tell you to vote for leaders who support all that building and planting and, more importantly, cutting carbon emissions in the first place. Yes, do that. And additionally, vote for leaders who will feed our starving public systems to make it so they actually support the people who need them. Vote for those who understand and want to change what non-white people experience, what poor people experience, what immigrants experience. Without all of these things, there cannot be a climate-resilient civilization.

Without more justice for all, nobody makes it.

Public health trumps Trump

We're living a strange moment when any elected official simply doing their job seems a kind of hero. It should not be that way, but it is.

With this in mind, we can say "Well done!" to North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper.

Before there was COVID, back when 1000s of boisterous Republicans looked like an economic boon to the city of Charlotte (the state's largest city), the national Republican convention was to take place there in late August. Like pretty much all large cities, Charlotte is run by politicians who tend to be Democrats. But the city was pleased at the prospect. After the coronavirus shut down, the convention seemed a life saver.

Many businesses, particularly in the hard-hit hospitality industry, see the convention as a lifeline. At one point officials expected it to draw 50,000 people to Charlotte.

The state health authorities pointed out that the coronavirus has made the gathering dangerous to both assembled participants and to the North Carolinians who would be working it. They suggested modifications; they asked the Republicans to propose rules for masks, social distancing, and other safety precautions.

Not good enough for Donald Trump. He demanded that he should be allowed to deliver his acceptance speech in the form of one of his packed, raucous stadium rallies. Little Orange Caesar must play on his unmodified stage.

Governor Cooper stuck up for the public health and science. He refused to bow to bluster. He insisted the convention observe safety precautions. Trump tantrumed and tweeted; he wanted his spectacle. At length Republicans have pulled back:

Republicans said Tuesday night that they were moving President Trump’s convention speech out of Charlotte, N.C., and to another city, after coming to a stalemate with Democratic officials in the state about safety and crowd size restrictions because of the coronavirus.

Michael Ahrens, communications director of the Republican National Committee, said that “the celebration of the president’s acceptance of the Republican nomination will be held in another city.” But Republican officials also said they could still hold other convention business in Charlotte, so as not to break a formal contract they signed with the city more than two years ago.

It shouldn't require even a small measure of heroism to ask sacrifices for the common good. But in these degraded times, doing the right thing can become an arduous act of political audacity. Every little bit helps.

This uprising is on the Island

The good people of Martha's Vineyard raise their voices too.

In the town of Oak Bluffs last Sunday, Ebony Goldwire explained why she could not be silent.

“I have actually not been able to watch George Floyd’s murder in its entirety. I have not been able to stomach it. I’ve only been able to watch clips. And it was Thursday morning [when] I was finally able to see the clip when he cried out for his mother. And in that moment I saw my son and I promised myself that would not be his reality.”

On Monday, some 300 people rallied at the intersection of Fives Corners where the intra-Island public life happens.

All items via MV Times.

This uprising has reach

Erudite Partner's social network, Ravelry, a worldwide "knit and crochet community," is on it.

We support the protestors who are out on the streets calling for justice and an end to state-sanctioned violence against Black people.

... We are matching donations, up to a total of $13,000, made to Black Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, the Philando Castile Relief Foundation, and Know Your Rights Camp.

UPDATE: We've matched all $13,000 in under 6 hours. Thank you everyone!

The movement for justice for all of us requires all of us, from our different situations. Bravo to the knitters!

How the credibility gap became a chasm in the age of Trump

... And a new generation gap grew wider

Writing before George Floyd was nonchalantly strangled on video by a cop, Erudite Partner explores how different experiences separate generations. Her college students live in a far tougher world than she came up in -- and that was tough enough. The coronavirus divides us by age yet more.

Might outrage in response to murder on the street bring caring people closer again?

EP's article is thought provoking, as her offerings always are.

Times they are a changing?

Morning Consult poll, May 29-June 1, 2020

I am astonished by what this poll seems to show. Can it be that majority of the people in this country have come to see what our heritage of white supremacy would hide from us? Not everyone, but you don't win over everyone ...

As long as the media continue to report reasonably accurately what police do -- to protesters in this moment and every day to Black and brown people -- we have a chance to recreate the terrain of struggle. And as police turn their fury at losing legitimacy against the media, some tough reporting squeezes through the conventional racist filters.

Brave people in struggle take most of the casualties -- but these same brave people are carrying the day. So much pain along the road.

A love story

For their fortieth wedding anniversary, Dick and Robin joined a photography trip to France, a couple of happy empty-nesters contemplating immanent retirement and vigorous further exploration of their art form. Within a month of returning home, Dick fell ill and was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a fatal brain cancer that allowed them only a short, uncertain future of unknowable duration. Robin Gross' memoir, Through the Lens of Love: Facing Terminal Illness, recounts Dr. Gross' professional life and accomplishments, the course of his illness, and the community that formed around them and held them tight over the two years of Dick's survival and gradual waning.

Above all this is a love story. These two had found their perfect soul mate in each other.

Dick's diagnosis naturally threw Robin into a panic.

How would I survive without him? We were a team. I could never go on by myself. ..

A friend who had known loss offered advice.

Gena’s letter reminded me that we still had each other and could talk about our lives together, share our love, experiences, and memories, and comfort one another through this difficult journey.

And this they did. Dick retired abruptly, struggled to hand off his patients responsibly -- and then turned to caring for how Robin would live after he would be gone. He insisted on their moving to a smaller place in an elder condo community in a nearby town, a residential development with plenty of community facilities and a lively Jewish community with which they could affiliate. And, somehow, they got the move done and all the little details of set up and decorating in the new place completed before Dick deteriorated so much as to be unable to help.

And meanwhile, in the short time they had left, they lived.

[A counselor] wanted to know if Dick was experiencing some kind of euphoria or if this was his normal personality. I assured her it was just who he was. He certainly understood the reality of his terminal illness, but he was not going to waste time getting angry or depressed over it. He wanted to live life. He wanted to enjoy the good times. He saw the best in everyone and everything. He was truly grateful for every day.

... we loved jumping headlong into enjoying the moment. This was our new philosophy of life. Although there were often challenges, we didn’t waste time worrying about the elements and the logistics. We just said yes.

They had always loved travel and though they no longer attempted international jaunts, they still flew about the country visiting friends and family and enjoying theater and concerts.

And they found joy in the community that gathered to assist them.

Through the two years of Dick’s illness, we witnessed the hand of God in the people who helped us. I was constantly amazed at the outpouring of love and assistance from family, friends, patients, and acquaintances. I began to form a new understanding of God as residing in people. The power of goodness was so strong, it felt tangible.

... I did not get the miracle I prayed to God for in those first nights of diagnosis. But I got miracles of a different sort: a miraculous husband who accepted his prognosis with courage and grace and focused his energy on making life the best it could be, and a miraculous community of people who carried us through our journey.

Inevitably, eventually the cancer won. Dr. Richard Gross died at home with Robin, surrounded by family, two years after they had discovered the tumor.

Robin's story is harrowing -- and oddly inspiring. ...
This is not, perhaps, a book for everyone. Dick and Robin, as she portrays them here, lived in an apparently untroubled, upper middle class white suburban world. They performed traditional gender roles apparently without questioning. They seem utterly conventional. Yet Robin has shared a portrait of a relationship that feels exceptional in its depth, bravery, decency, and imagination.

I met them through unlikely happenstance. Robin and Dick were members of our party when we hiked Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2002. Robin tells something in her memoir of how Dick saved the life of a Tanzanian porter during that high altitude ascent; I've told my version as well. Dick was a very special person -- blessed with a partner equal to him in the pain and joy of love.