Monday, May 3, 2021

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The backlash against the idea that America is structurally racist is now in full force, with white Republicans going to the mats to destroy any hint of critical race theory being taught to anyone.
 
Nine months after officials in the affluent Carroll Independent School District introduced a proposal to combat racial and cultural intolerance in schools, voters delivered a resounding victory Saturday to a slate of school board and City Council candidates who opposed the plan.

In an unusually bitter campaign that echoed a growing national divide over how to address issues of race, gender and sexuality in schools, candidates in the city of Southlake were split between two camps: those who supported new diversity and inclusion training requirements for Carroll students and teachers and those backed by a political action committee that was formed last year to defeat the plan.

On one side, progressives argued that curriculum and disciplinary changes were needed to make all children feel safe and welcome in Carroll, a mostly white but quickly diversifying school district. On the other, conservatives in Southlake rejected the school diversity plan as an effort to indoctrinate students with a far-left ideology that, according to some, would institutionalize discrimination against white children and those with conservative Christian values.

Candidates and voters on both sides described the election as a "fork in the road" for Southlake, a wealthy suburb 30 miles northwest of Dallas. "So goes Southlake," a local conservative commentator warned in the weeks leading up to the election, "so goes the rest of America."

In the end, the contest was not close. Candidates backed by the conservative Southlake Families PAC, which has raised more than $200,000 since last summer, won every race by about 70 percent to 30 percent, including those for two school board positions, two City Council seats and mayor. More than 9,000 voters cast ballots, three times as many as in similar contests in the past.

Hannah Smith, a prominent Southlake lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, defeated Ed Hernandez, a business consultant, to win a seat on the Carroll school board. In a statement to NBC News on Sunday, Smith, who is white, said the election "was a referendum on those who put personal politics and divisive philosophies ahead of Carroll ISD students and families, and their common American heritage and Texas values."

"The voters have come together in record-breaking numbers to restore unity," Smith said. "By a landslide vote, they don't want racially divisive critical race theory taught to their children or forced on their teachers. Voters agreed with my positive vision of our community and its future."

Hernandez and other candidates running in support of new diversity and inclusion programs said they were not particularly surprised by the outcome in a historically conservative city where about two-thirds of voters backed President Donald Trump last year, but they were dismayed by the margin of their defeat.

Hernandez, an immigrant from Mexico, said he worries about the signal the outcome sends to dozens of Carroll high school students and recent graduates who came forward with stories about racist and anti-gay bullying over the past two years. To demonstrate the need for change, members of the student-led Southlake Anti-Racism Coalition collected more than 300 accounts from current and former Carroll students last year who said they had been mistreated because of their race, religion or sexual orientation.

"I don't want to think about all these kids that shared their stories, their testimonies," Hernandez said, growing emotional Saturday moments after having learned the election results. "I don't want to think about that right now, because it's really, really hard for me. I feel really bad for all those kids, every single one of them that shared a story. I don't have any words for them."

The fight in Southlake dates to the fall of 2018, when a video of white Carroll high school students chanting the N-word went viral, making national headlines. In the aftermath, school leaders hosted listening sessions with students and parents and appointed a committee of 63 community volunteers to come up with a plan to make Carroll more welcoming for students from diverse backgrounds.

 

Declaring war on "Critical Race Theory" is the new in thing for the GOP, and it will be attacked, denigrated, and criminalized until us Blacks back down and shut up, I guess. Black Lives Matter, but only if it's convenient for white folks to say so. 

 
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday he doesn’t think 1619 is one of the most important points in U.S. history.

That's the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to and sold in the Virginia colony, a point often considered as the beginning of American slavery.

“I think this is about American history and the most important dates in American history. And my view — and I think most Americans think — dates like 1776, the Declaration of Independence; 1787, the Constitution; 1861-1865, the Civil War, are sort of the basic tenets of American history,” McConnell said during an appearance at the University of Louisville.

“There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history. I simply disagree with the notion that The New York Times laid out there that the year 1619 was one of those years.

“I think that issue that we all are concerned about — racial discrimination — it was our original sin. We’ve been working for 200-and-some-odd years to get past it,” he continued. “We’re still working on it, and I just simply don’t think that’s part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about.
 
Black lives matter only if white folk give us permission to matter. Same goes for Black history, Black culture, Black labor, Black pain, Black everything. Otherwise, we should just "get past it" and "Lose the victim mentality" and "Be grateful we're in America".
 
You know, while they kill us.
 
We should be grateful for that, because it could be worse.
 
Worse than killing us.
 
Think about that.

 

 

A Herd Of Toddlers With Immunity To Reason

The CDC no longer believes COVID-19 herd immunity is possible here in the US, given the fact that 40% of American adults refuse to take the vaccine and never will. What it means is we'll be living with yearly variants of the virus for years to come, and infection spikes that will kill tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands annually.

 

Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

Continued immunizations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe.

“The virus is unlikely to go away,” said Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “But we want to do all we can to check that it’s likely to become a mild infection.”

The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for public health authorities. The drive for herd immunity — by the summer, some experts once thought possible — captured the imagination of large segments of the public. To say the goal will not be attained adds another “why bother” to the list of reasons that vaccine skeptics use to avoid being inoculated.

Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.

“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,” he said.

“That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense,” he added. “I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.” 
 
The shift now is to triage, and to your annual COVID vaccinations for this year's variants in the years ahead, because Americans are petulant, selfish kids. Meanwhile, people will end up in hospitals and die from the disease, and tens of millions of us will still refuse the yearly variant as well. Some of them will get sick. Some will end up in the hospital on a respirator. And some will end up on a morgue slab.

The new normal, indeed.

The Mess In Texas

Democrats better figure out what's wrong in Texas and fast, because they are basically at the point of not even being able to field a primary runoff candidate in Texas's 6th District special election.


Republicans Susan Wright and Jake Ellzey will advance to a runoff in the special election for Texas' 6th Congressional District.

CNN projected Wright would take the first spot in the runoff, but Ellzey and Democrat Jana Lynne Sanchez had been locked in a tight race for second.

Sanchez conceded the race on Sunday, thanking volunteers, staff and supporters in a statement posted on social media.

"Democrats have come a long way toward competing in Texas but we still have a long way to go. Unfortunately, tonight we came up short, and two Republicans will be competing to represent this Congressional district," Sanchez wrote. "We'll keep fighting for a healthier, equitable and prosperous Texas and to elect leaders who care about meeting the needs of Texans, although it won't happen in this district immediately."

It won't happen in 2022 either. Another round of GOP-controlled Census redistricting in states like Texas, Georgia, Florida and Ohio will put dozens of House seats out of play for the Democrats come 18 months from now, and it will take a miracle for the Dems to hold on to the House in a second half of a Biden term.

And at this point, before that's all even happened, we can't even bother to bring enough voters to the table to get a candidate on the ballot. Trump waltzed right into the race and locked it down.

I know Democrats are busy governing, but they can't govern if they don't win, and they can't win if they can't even get on the goddamn ballot.

I expect to see that level of Democratic party incompetence here in the OH/IN/KY Tri-State, but in Texas it's a threat to the entire country.

Do better, guys.

StupidiNews!