August 18, 2021 12:20 PM
Lunchtime Reads for National Fajita Day (August 18)
Happy Wednesday, everyone! And a happy National Fajita Day to you all! I didn’t find a list of deals, but let’s be real: The only proper ways to enjoy fajitas are when you make them yourself or when you order them at your favorite local Mexican restaurant. Right?
Let’s get to the news.
Pat Conroy
- Georgia has surpassed one million COVID cases since the beginning of the pandemic.
- Dozens of children have been hospitalized with COVID across the state, including two newborns in Savannah.
- 101,000 Georgians’ voter registrations were removed from the rolls due to inactivity in the latest purge. (Alternate link.)
- The Georgia State Elections Board took steps Wednesday toward a takeover of the Fulton County Board of Elections.
- Fred has left the state, but he caused flooding and tornadoes during his stay.
- In perhaps the best decision made by the Public Service Commission in the past decade, Georgia Power is now under a stipulation order regarding new spending on the two Vogtle reactors under construction.
- Georgia is open to accepting Afghan refugees, per Governor Kemp. (Alternate link.)
Alice Walker
- Health officials are recommending COVID booster shots for all adults eight months after receiving their second dose.
- The Centers for Disease Control’s ongoing data problems created an unrealistic picture of COVID numbers in the late spring and summer. (Alternate link.)
- Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook has removed 18 million pages due to vaccine misinformation, but he won’t say how many people viewed them.
- A Chicago pharmacist has been charged with stealing official COVID-19 vaccination cards and selling them on eBay for around $10 each.
- A Texas school system has made masks part of its dress code to get around Governor Abbott’s mask ban.
- The California recall election polls suggest it’s going to be close. (Alternate link.)
- For the first time ever, there’s a water shortage along the Colorado River.
- American teachers are exhausted by the culture wars. (Alternate link.)
- In the run up to our Afghanistan withdrawal, U.S. intelligence reports were forthcoming about the Afghan army’s fragility.
- The Taliban have fired shots at protesters who are against flying the Taliban flag.
- Members of the U.K. Parliament are not happy about how the withdrawal from Afghanistan has gone. (Alternate link.)
- The death toll in Haiti has surpassed 1,900. (Alternate link.)
- Over 1,000 people have been killed since the military took over Myanmar.
- Israel is now requiring proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to people as young as three years old to enter most indoor spaces.
Flannery O’Connor
- A cat in Cornwall, England, led a rescue team to where an 83 year-old woman had fallen into a ravine.
About Author
Holly Croft
Holly is an archivist at one of Georgia's institutions of higher learning. In a past life, she was a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill. She cares a lot about records management, open records laws, and privacy laws. Political persuasion? It's complicated. What's not complicated is that she's proudly equal parts Bulldog and Tar Heel.
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Good editorial.
“Sane America has had enough.
After almost two years of a horrific pandemic that’s killed almost 620,000 Americans — with nearly 20,000 of them from Michigan — and deadly, faster-spreading variants emerging because selfish and ignorant people refuse to get vaccinated — those of us who have tried to do everything right have no more f–ks left to give.
Anti-vaxxers, COVID conspiracy theorists and right-wing politicians have made the pandemic far more hellacious than it ever needed to be. We have been lectured endlessly by pundits and attention seekers on social media that we mustn’t ever make them feel bad about their awful choices — no matter how many public, violent scenes they cause over health rules, heavily armed protests they organize to intimidate us and how much the death toll soars.
Their feelings have been deemed more important than the health and well-being of our families, because somehow if we kowtow to the worst people in our society, a few will supposedly be nice enough to get vaccinated or wear masks.
Nope.
If you refuse to get vaccinated — and this goes double if you are someone with enough of a platform to influence others — you are to blame for the fourth wave. You are the reason why more children are being hospitalized, so spare me your family values bloviation. You are why good people who have done their part and gotten their shots are getting breakthrough cases.
I am tired of sugarcoating it. I am tired of the perennial hectoring to “both sides” the pandemic like we mindlessly do with political coverage.
The 40% who can’t be bothered to get jabbed because they know more than doctors or they understand freedom better than the rest of us or just know that the magnetic 5G is gonna be injected in their veins are why people continue to needlessly die. And they are why life continues to be hell for the rest of us.
Yes, there is a political divide in vaccination rates — and Republicans are on the wrong side of it. Let’s stop denying the obvious or making excuses for a party whose pandemic response has been a mix of crass pandering to their base and sociopathic stupidity.”
The rest is at the link.
https://georgiarecorder.com/2021/08/11/opinion-weve-coddled-ignorance-for-years-now-were-all-paying-the-price-with-covid/
Neoliberalism failed to prepare for, prevent, and deal with a pandemic. If only there had been some way for the richest country in the history of the world to see this coming…