ANS -- Sara on Vaccine passports

This, I hope, is the beginning of an important conversation about freedom and protecting ourselves.  It's about the "COVID Passport" concept and true freedom.  I agree with Sara's position: what do you think?

--Kim

Sara Robinson

1h

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Conservative whining about vaccine passports won't change the fact that they're going to be an essential tool for getting past this thing.

I'm in Hawaii right now. Their entire economy depends on, and is being saved by, a very tight passport system that vets everybody coming to the islands. Vaccinated or not, you need a COVID test taken less than 72 hours before you arrive. The tests can only be performed by clinics specifically approved by the State of Hawaii. (Fortunately, the University of Washington clinic where I got my shots is permitted for this, so it was easy.) If you're clear, they e-mail you a PDF of a QR code, which you download to a Hawaii "Safe Travels" app that you carry on your phone.

We had to open the app and show the code -- our passport --when we got on the plane in Seattle; when we got on the inter-island flight from Honolulu to Hilo; when we picked up the rental car; and when we checked into our hotel.

Hawaii County, which covers the Big Island, also tested me again when we landed in Hilo. Evan didn't have to, because he's 2+2 -- but I'm not quite there yet. We're headed for Maui next Monday (the same day I will finally be 2+2), and since Maui County is the strictest of all of the islands, they may well have the same requirement or more.

This is a no-brainer for Hawaii. As an island state that's always brought immigrants and visitors in from all over the Pacific Rim, various plagues have always been a threat. The islands were devastated by measles and pertussis in 1848, which is thought to have played a major role in weakening the monarchy; and again by the Black Death in 1900. This is a vivid part of their history, and they do not mess around -- especially since they're trying to preserve a culture, and need to keep their elders around to do it. They are taking no risks here.

Since there's only one way on or off the islands -- via some kind of air or sea port -- they've also always had the ability to tightly control who arrives and who stays. So a passport system makes perfect sense for them -- a historical, logical, natural imperative that allows them to open up enough to keep their $10B/year tourist economy going.

Compliance isn't even a conversation here. That "freedom" crap you hear on the mainland? Yeah, no. Everybody understands that real freedom is being able to make a living, feed your kids, and live unafraid in your community -- and if one jerk lets up and starts an outbreak that shuts down the islands, they directly threaten everybody else's freedom to do that.

It's also easier because masks aren't required if you're outside and well-distanced; and because it's Hawaii and the weather is perfect, there's a whole lot of life that's lived outside.

Hawaii is showing that we should -- and do -- have a right to cordon off spaces where moral five-year-olds (for whom "freedom" comes down to "Mom's not the boss of meeee!!") are rightly excluded; and where grown-ups can go about their business and relax, knowing that everyone is equally invested in keeping the zone COVID-free.

Getting the damn passport -- test, e-mail, app, filling in all the details to meet the state reporting requirements, pulling out IDs and vaccine records four times in a few hours -- was a time-consuming hassle. But, unlike our recent travels on the mainland, the upshot is that we're having a real vacation here.

Once people start creating similarly safe spaces on the mainland -- where you enter with confidence that everyone is either tested or vaccinated, and life looks more like normal as a result -- I don't know how you put the genie back into the bottle. Conservatives are trying get out ahead of this, passing laws now to ensure that most of us will never get to experience this, and thus get the idea that passports are a good thing. But the coming split in American culture is going to be the widening chasm between those of us with passport documents showing that we've been liberated from the land of plague; and those of us who think living in the valley of the shadow of death, clinging to the right to take other people's lives with stochastic impunity, represents a special and sacred form of "freedom" for both themselves and us.

We deserve to have passports to keep us away from people who stand willing and ready to kill us. As of right now, those people can't come to Hawaii.

ANS -- HCR May2, 2021

Here's another from Heather Cox Richardson.  This one is about Republicans trying to change history -- as taught in schools.  This one isn't written quite as clearly as the rest of them: I had some difficulty in the first half figuring out who the pronouns were referring to.  

--Kim

Heather Cox Richardson

 

4tfSphonshoreedf  · 

May 2, 2021

On Friday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and 36 Republicans sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona accusing him of trying to advance a "politicized and divisive agenda" in the teaching of American history. This is a full embrace of the latest Republican attempt to turn teaching history into a culture war.

On April 19, the Department of Education called for public comments on two priorities for the American History and Civics Education programs. Those programs work to improve the "quality of American history, civics, and government education by educating students about the history and principles of the Constitution of the United States, including the Bill of Rights; and… the quality of the teaching of American history, civics, and government in elementary schools and secondary schools, including the teaching of traditional American history."

The department is proposing two priorities to reach low-income students and underserved populations. The Republicans object to the one that encourages "projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives into teaching and learning."

History teaching that reflects our diverse history and the way our diversity supports democracy can help to improve racial equality in society, the document states. It calls out the 1619 Project of the New York Times, as well as the resources of the Smithsonian's new National Museum of African American History, to note how our understanding of diversity is changing. It notes that schools across the country are teaching "anti-racist practices," which it follows scholar Ibram X. Kendi by identifying as "any idea that suggests the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences—that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group."

The Education Department invited comments on these priorities. The department does not have much at all to do with local school curricula.

McConnell's letter in response to this call for comments is disingenuous, implying connections between the teaching of a diverse past, the sorry state of history education, and the fact that "American pride has plummeted to its lowest level in 20 years." There is, of course, no apparent connection between them.

He complains that Cardona's "proposal"—it's a call for comments—would "distort bipartisan legislation that was led by former Senators Lamar Alexander, Ted Kennedy, and Robert Byrd." That legislation was indeed landmark for the teaching of American history… but its funding was cut in 2012.

What McConnell's letter is really designed to do is to throw a bone to Trump Republicans. On Thursday, Trump called for Senate Republicans to replace McConnell with a Trump loyalist, and embracing their conviction that our history is being hijacked by radicals is cheap and easy.

The prime object of Republican anger is the 1619 Project, called out in McConnell's letter by name. The project launched in the New York Times Magazine in August 2019 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first landing of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans at the English colony of Virginia. Led by New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project placed race and Black Americans "at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country."

The 1619 Project argued that the landing of the Black slaves marked "the country's very origin" since it "inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years." From slavery "and the anti-black racism it required," the editors claimed, grew "nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day."

Their goal, they said, was "to reframe American history," replacing 1776 with 1619 as the year of the nation's birth.

The most explosive claim the project made was that one of the key reasons that the American colonists broke away from Britain was that they wanted to protect slavery. Scholars immediately pushed back. Northwestern University's Dr. Leslie M. Harris, a scholar of colonial African American history, wrote: "Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war." The project tempered its language over that issue but stood by its larger argument.

Trump Republicans conflated this project with so-called "Critical Race Theory," a related scholarly concept that argues that racism is not simply the actions of a few bad actors, but rather is baked into our legal system, as well as the other institutions that make up our society. This is not a new concept, and it is not limited to Black Americans: historian Angie Debo's And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes launched this argument in 1940 when it showed how Oklahoma's legislators had written discrimination against Indigenous people into the law. But the idea that white people have an automatic leg up in our country has taken on modern political teeth as Trump Republicans argue that Black and Brown people, among others, are at the bottom of society not because of discriminatory systems but because they are inferior.

The former president railed against recent historical work emphasizing race as "a series of polemics grounded in poor scholarship" that has "vilified our Founders and our founding." Calling them "one-sided and divisive," he opposed their view of "America as an irredeemably and systemically racist country." He claimed, without evidence, that "students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains." He said that "this radicalized view of American history" threatens to "fray and ultimately erase the bonds that knit our country and culture together."

On November 2, 2020, just before the election, former president Trump established a hand-picked commission inside the Department of Education to promote "patriotic education" in the nation's schools, national parks, and museums.

The commission released its report, written not by historians but by right-wing activists and politicians, on Martin Luther King Day, just two days before Trump left office. "The 1776 Report" highlighted the nation's founding documents from the Revolutionary Era, especially the Declaration of Independence. It said that the principles written in the declaration "show how the American people have ever pursued freedom and justice." It said "our history is… one of self-sacrifice, courage, and nobility." No other nation, it said, had worked harder or done more to bring to life "the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent."

Then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted that multiculturalism [is]... not who America is." It "distort[s] our glorious founding and what this country is all about." Hannah-Jones retorted: "When you say that multiculturalism is 'not who America is' and 'distorts our glorious founding' you unwittingly confirm the argument of the 1619 Project: That though we were ... a multiracial nation from our founding, our founders set forth a government of white rule. Cool."

On his first day in office, President Joe Biden dissolved the 1776 Commission and took its report off the official government website.

But the fight goes on. The Pulitzer Center, which supports journalism but is not associated with Columbia University's Pulitzer Prizes, produced a school curriculum based on the 1619 Project; Republican legislators in five states—Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, and South Dakota—filed virtually identical bills to cut funding to any school or college that used the material. Other Republican-led states have proposed funding "patriotic education." In Mississippi, Governor Tate Reeves called for a $3 million fund to promote teaching that "educates the next generation in the incredible accomplishments of the American Way" to counter "far-left socialist teachings that emphasize America's shortcomings over the exceptional achievements of this country." South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem proposed a curriculum that explains "why the U.S. is the most special nation in the history of the world."

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ANS -- It’s Time To Blow Up the Maskholes' Sick and Twisted Plan

This is an intriguing idea from Thom Hartmann.  What do you think?

Find it here:  https://hartmannreport.com/p/its-time-to-blow-up-the-maskholes?r=nl8r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR3-rD5_LS3kAFEpPp0sI0G_NNH5uYKDjIDuo0EGeUh9dbB8fjFyuubQehk 

--Kim

It's Time To Blow Up the Maskholes' Sick and Twisted Plan

For businesses wanting a competitive edge, a "let's all live" marketing strategy is the opportunity of the decade!

Thom Hartmann Apr 24 17 7

Photo by Dim Hou on Unsplash

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Well, it's started. The United States has reached the point, in many parts of the country, where there are more vaccines available than there are people willing to take them.

Most of this so-called "vaccine reluctance" is driven by pure politics.

Donald Trump's visceral hatred of Joe Biden, who beat him like a drum in the last election, and the Republican party's commitment to raw power over anything that may help Americans, have brought us this crisis.

If Trump, Fox and the GOP can convince the people who follow them that they shouldn't get vaccines, they can prevent President Biden from getting this pandemic under control. 

If they can prevent Biden from getting the disease under control, they also prevent him from getting the economy back in shape.

And - Bingo! - if they prevent him from getting the economy back in shape, Republicans see victories in the 2022 midterm elections and might even take back the White House in 2024. 

This is their simple but brutal math, and they frankly don't care who it kills. The more the better, in fact, because chaos hurts the (Democratic) party in power. After all, they've already shown us they're willing to let die unnecessarily a half-million Americans just to try to win the last election.

And, as village idiot and GQP Senator Ron Johnson said yesterday as he was discouraging general consideration of vaccine documentation, "Why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine, to the point when you better impose it, you're going to shame people, you're going to force them to carry a card to prove that they've been vaccinated so they can just stay in society? I'm getting highly suspicious of what's happening here."

Right. It's just a public health emergency that's killed a half-million Americans. No big deal for rich Republicans.

So it's up to us to blow up their plan. And if enough of us take one small, simple step we may be able to pull it off. Here's how:

I'm calling restaurants, bars, stores, and other places of business that I've patronized over the past couple of years. Taking it slow, just one or two a day. Casual.

My conversation goes something like this:

Me: "I see we're getting close to the point where the economy can open back up. I'm so excited about coming back to your (restaurant, store)! I love your (mention dish or product so they know I'm a real customer)! I just wanted to make sure, first, that you're requiring proof of vaccination before you let people in?"

Them: "We don't have any specific policy about that, but you're more than welcome to come. All of us who work here are vaccinated!"

Me: "Well, let me give you my name and phone number and you can call me if you decide to change your policy. For at least the next year, I'm only going to patronize businesses that require proof of vaccination to get in the door. Even though I'm vaccinated, I don't want to be exposed to someone who's not and who might be carrying around one of those weird variants."

Them (usually sounding a bit rattled): "I'll be sure to tell the manager that you called..."

This can work.

The primary imperative of every business is something called "differentiation." When I taught marketing and ran an advertising agency in Atlanta, I'd always ask, "What makes you different from your competitors? What is it you're offering that they aren't or can't? Simply put, 'what is your unfair competitive advantage?'"

More often than not, the answer to that question became the focus of a great marketing campaign.

America is experiencing a mind-boggling amount of pent-up demand right now. People want to go out and eat, drink, celebrate, dance and buy things. But many, almost certainly a majority, want to do so safely.

So, if even a small but meaningful percentage of businesses decide it's good marketing to cater exclusively to people who've taken the time and trouble to get vaccinated, it'll create a social and economic pressure that will begin to wear down those folks Republican politicians and Fox News have convinced that the virus is no big deal.

But big deal or no, they still want to get into the restaurant! And that could get us to the 75%-85% vaccinated herd immunity threshold we need for a safe country regardless of Trump's or Johnson's inane sputtering or Tucker's smarmy "questions."

Back in the 1980s a dear friend of mine, owned one of the finest high-end restaurants in Boston. Every restaurant in town at that time had both smoking and no-smoking sections, but he was committed to serving extraordinary food in a clean environment where you could actually smell and taste the flavors his chefs so meticulously curated. 

So in 1986 he banned all smoking even in the bar and the bathrooms: his was the first consequential restaurant in Boston, and one of the first in the nation, to do so.

I remember when he made the decision. We discussed it quite a bit, in fact. I was fully expecting he would lose business, but instead, as word spread, his business continued to grow! 

The restaurant got enormous publicity (it was picked up by the AP nationwide!), their non-smoking customers became fanatically loyal, and the few hard-core smokers they lost were insignificant to their business.

As an added bonus, restaurants around the country, reading about his experience, started emulating him. Non-smoking restaurants became a thing in 1986, and within a few years became the norm. Even Boston's Newton-Wellesley Hospital went smoke-free, the first hospital to do so in the area, citing his restaurant as an example.

There are a lot of us out here who don't want to be exposed to GOP- and Fox News-maskholes and the viruses they may be carrying.

They're this generation's version of the selfish smokers in the 1980s, and we're the health-concerned non-smokers. We would very much like safe spaces to enjoy shopping, dining or other activities without smoke or germs being blown on us by inconsiderate people.

For businesses looking for a competitive edge, this "let's all live" marketing prescription is the opportunity of the decade!

And with just a few simple phone calls, you can help make it happen. 

ANS -- Just for fun. HCR May 1, 2021

This one is just for fun.  It's another from Heather Cox Richardson, but it's about famous horses.  Enjoy.  

--Kim

Heather Cox Richardson

 

4tShhpuonsogred

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May 1, 2021 (Saturday)

In honor of this year's Kentucky Derby (won today by Medina Spirit), I'm posting a piece my friend Michael S. Green and I wrote together a number of years ago on Ten Famous American Horses. It has no deep meaning... it's just fun. It remains one of my favorite things I had a hand in writing, and I'm pleased to have an excuse to share it.

I'll be back on the usual beat tomorrow.

1) Traveller

General Robert E. Lee rode Traveller (spelled with two Ls, in the British style) from February 1862 until the general's death in 1870. Traveller was a grey American Saddlebred of 16 hands. He had great endurance for long marches, and was generally unflappable in battle, although he once broke both of General Lee's hands when he shied at enemy movements. Lee brought Traveller with him when he assumed the presidency of Washington and Lee University. Traveller died of tetanus in 1871. He is buried on campus, where the safe ride program still uses his name.

2) Comanche

Comanche was attached to General Custer's detachment of the 7th Cavalry when it engaged the Lakota in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The troops in the detachment were all killed in the engagement, but soldiers found Comanche, badly wounded, two days later. They nursed him back to health, and he became the 7th Cavalry's mascot. The commanding officer decreed that the horse would never again be ridden, and that he would always be paraded, draped in black, in all military ceremonies involving the 7th Cavalry. When Comanche died of colic in 1891, he was given a full military funeral (the only other horse so honored was Black Jack, who served in more than a thousand military funerals in the 1950s and 1960s). Comanche's taxidermied body is preserved in the Natural History Museum at the University Of Kansas.

3) Beautiful Jim Key

Beautiful Jim Key was a performing horse trained by formerly enslaved veterinarian Dr. William Key. Key demonstrated how Beautiful Jim could read, write, do math, tell time, spell, sort mail, and recite the Bible. Beautiful Jim performed from 1897 to 1906 and became a legend. An estimated ten million Americans saw him perform, and others collected his memorabilia – buttons, photos, and postcards – or danced the Beautiful Jim Key two-step. Dr. Key insisted that he had taught Beautiful Jim using only kindness, and Beautiful Jim Key's popularity was important in preventing cruelty to animals in America, with more than 2 million children signing the Jim Key Band of Mercy, in which they pledged: "I promise always to be kind to animals."

4) Man o' War

Named for his owner, August Belmont, Jr., who was overseas in WWI, Man o' War is widely regarded as the top Thoroughbred racehorse of all time. He won 20 of his 21 races and almost a quarter of a million dollars in the early twentieth century. His one loss – to "Upset" – came after a bad start. Man o' War sired many of America's famous racehorses, including Hard Tack, which in turn sired Seabiscuit, the small horse that came to symbolize hope during the Great Depression.

5) Trigger

Entertainer Roy Rogers chose the palomino Trigger from five rented horses to be his mount in a Western film in the 1930s, changing his name from Golden Cloud to Trigger because of his quick mind and feet. Rogers rode Trigger in his 1950s television series, making the horse a household name. When Trigger died, Rogers had his skin draped over a Styrofoam mold and displayed it in the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in California. He also had a 24-foot statue of Trigger made from steel and fiberglass. One other copy of that mold was also made: it is "Bucky the Bronco," which rears above the Denver Broncos stadium south scoreboard.

6) Sergeant Reckless

American Marines in Korea bought a mare in October 1952 from a Korean stable boy who needed the money to buy an artificial leg for his sister, who had stepped on a land mine. The marines named her Reckless after their unit's nickname, the Reckless Rifles. They made a pet of her, and trained her to carry supplies and to evacuate wounded. She learned to travel supply routes without a guide: on one notable day she made 51 solo trips. Wounded twice, she was given a battlefield rank of corporal in 1953 and promoted to sergeant after the war, when she was also awarded two Purple Hearts and a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal.

7) Mr. Ed

Mr. Ed was a talking palomino in a 1960s television show by the same name. At a time when Westerns dominated American television, Mr. Ed was the anti-Western, with the main human character a klutzy architect and the hero a horse that was fond of his meals and his comfortable life, and spoke with the voice of Allan "Rocky" Lane, who made dozens of "B" westerns. But the show was a five-year hit as it married the past to the future. Mr. Ed offered a gentle homely wisdom that enabled him to straighten out the troubles of the humans around him. The startling special effects that made it appear that the horse was talking melded modern technology with the comforting traditional community depicted in the show.

8 ) Black Jack

Black Jack, named for John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, was the riderless black horse in the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Douglas MacArthur, as well as more than a thousand other funerals with full military honors. A riderless horse, with boots reversed in the stirrups, symbolized a fallen leader, while Black Jack's brands – a US brand and an army serial number – recalled the army's history. Black Jack himself was buried with full military honors; the only other horse honored with a military funeral was Comanche.

9) Khartoum

Khartoum was the prize stud horse of Jack Woltz, the fictional Hollywood mogul in Mario Puzo's The Godfather. In one of the film version's most famous scenes, after Woltz refuses requests from Don Vito Corleone to cast singer Johnny Fontane in a movie, Woltz wakes up to find Khartoum's head in bed with him…and agrees to use Fontane in the film. In the novel, Fontane wins the Academy Award for his performance. According to old Hollywood rumor, the story referred to real events. The rumor was that mobsters persuaded Columbia Pictures executive Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. As Maggio, Sinatra revived his sagging film career and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

10) Secretariat

Secretariat was an American Thoroughbred that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown winner in 25 years. His records in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes still stand. After Secretariat was stricken with a painful infection and euthanized in 1989, an autopsy revealed that he had an unusually big heart. Sportswriter Red Smith once asked his trainer how Secretariat had run one morning; Charlie Hatton replied, "The trees swayed."