All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

The Road Before Us #poetry #uganda

wonderful

penned in moon dust

Looked over my shoulder to yesterday

time passed in the blink of an eye

the people and memories faded

I never bid them goodbye

I look to the left on this day

all that there is to do

wrap arms around you dear

memory’s time, make a few

I look at the road laid before me

tomorrow’s a wide open land

promise me you will go with me

orange love covers our hands

The unedited photo of Northern Uganda shows a panorama that is rich with children, mamas, papas, grandmothers, grandfathers.

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Another 10,000 COVID-19 cases pushes Florida past 200,000 | Miami Herald

As of Sunday’s Miami-Dade County New Normal Dashboard update, the county was in the red flag zone in three categories: trajectory of daily case counts over a 14-day period, two consecutive weeks of a 14-day rolling positive test rate under 10% (22.10%) and 30% of Intensive Care Unit bed capacity available (23.73%). All numbers have gotten worse this week.

While there’s been an increase in testing over the last week, there’s also been a massive leap in the positive test rate. The average daily positive test rate from June 21 through Jun 27 was 9.94%. The average for the next seven days: 14.47%.

 

Source: Another 10,000 COVID-19 cases pushes Florida past 200,000 | Miami Herald

Tehachapi Loop in Tehachapi, California

Tehachapi Loop is an amazing feat of ingenuity to raise or lower a train a significant elevation in a very short distance. The project was completed in 1876, and has remained largely unchanged today. 

When the train is going downhill, or generally to the northwest, it begins a descending arc in a clockwise direction. As it goes over a tunnel, it starts a 0.73-mile loop, tightening its spiral to encircle a hillock. As it completes the loop, 77 feet lower, the train circles under itself—through the tunnel that a long train might still be passing over. If the train is going uphill, or to the southeast, the process is reversed, with the engine entering through the tunnel, making the loop counter-clockwise.

If you don’t see a train immediately, have a little patience. An average of 36 trains per day use the loop. 

Donald Trump launches baseless attack on Bubba Wallace over noose ‘hoax’

Full on racism by the President

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Donald Trump has launched a baseless attack on Bubba Wallace, Nascar’s only black driver, over an incident in which a noose was found in his team garage last month.

“Has @BubbaWallace apologized to all of those great Nascar drivers & officials who came to his aid, stood by his side, & were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another HOAX?” wrote the president on Monday morning. “That & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!”

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The black lives matter backlash is generating its own fake culture war | Chaminda Jayanetti

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A panicked right spurs controversy where there is none in order to discredit a perfectly reasonable set of demands

Pity the poor culture warrior, their mental gymnastics burning far more calories than pre-corona gym sessions ever could.

A statue was torn down, and they demanded people follow the proper channels. Statues were taken down via the “proper channels”, and they decried the panicked response. Reviews were announced to avoid a panicked response, and they raged against the reviews. When all else fails, they just conjure controversy out of thin air.

Take the Telegraph. Last week it claimed that the future of a 22-year-old statue of the Roman emperor Constantine outside York Minster was being “looked at”, after church officials “received complaints that the Roman emperor supported slavery”. The story was then picked up by the Daily Mail.

There was one problem. York Minster swiftly clarified it had not received a single complaint about the statue, and ruled out removing it.

This is part of a pattern. Shortly after Edward Colston’s statue was torn down in Bristol, Boris Johnson played up the threat to the Westminster statue of Winston Churchill. Hardly anyone was calling for its removal, but Johnson made it the centre of his response to the Black Lives Matter protests, and the Telegraph duly plastered it across the front page.

Write-ups of the Churchill statue also focused on the role of London mayor Sadiq Khan, a go-to hate figure on the nationalist right. This tactic was repeated recently, when newspapers roped Meghan Markle into their coverage of Prince Harry’s “support for a ban” (actually a review that almost certainly won’t lead to a ban) of the song Swing Low, Sweet Chariot by the Rugby Football Union.

The drivers of this dynamic are not hard to identify. Black Lives Matter is a movement, larger and broader than the organisations that bear its name. It challenges the privileges of the majority who do not experience racism, and the image that majority has of Britain and its history. And some of that majority take at least some of the movement’s arguments on board – while others lash out against it.

Those who lash out are less numerous than you might imagine. Polling conducted days after Colston’s statue was removed found most respondents agreed with the stated aims of the Black Lives Matter movement. Only 15% disagreed – around one in seven. Respondents were more evenly divided on the removal of slavery-related statues, and displayed outright hostility to removing Westminster’s Churchill statue.

But the one in seven who oppose even Black Lives Matter’s broad aims are overrepresented in the rightwing press, on talk radio and the broader network of rage merchants on social media. The organisations they work for claim to represent the unheard British majority, but they do not. They are aghast at the concept of structural racism, which implicates people and institutions far beyond their comfort zone of condemning neo-Nazis and football thugs.

Their interests are not served by tackling racialised economic inequality. The notion that unequal outcomes have structural causes affronts their smug certainty that it’s all about “personal responsibility”. And, of course, their bottom lines are not harmed by whipping up rage.

The problem is that they cannot win fighting against the basic principles of this movement because the public are broadly in favour of them. So their answer is to focus on what people are against, find examples of that, no matter how tenuous, and use them to discredit an entire political project.

The irony is that these critics of Black Lives Matter call it divisive. Given that the campaign challenges Britain’s self-image, its understanding of its history, and structural discrimination against a minority, what is notable is how little division it has provoked – contrast the support for BLM in both the US and the UK to the widespread antipathy towards Martin Luther King in the United States of the 1960s. It makes angry people very angry, but they are in the minority.

Instead, it is supporters of the populist right who are desperate to stoke division by reducing issues of fundamental importance to ephemeral noise and fake news. Their careers, and their ideology, depend on it.

• Chaminda Jayanetti is a journalist who covers politics and public services

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Seven staff test positive to coronavirus at Melbourne’s Northern Hospital in past five days – ABC News

  • All staff in the hospital’s emergency department will be tested as a precaution
  • Sources from the hospital told the ABC only ambulances with code one emergencies were being taken to the hospital’s emergency room

Source: Seven staff test positive to coronavirus at Melbourne’s Northern Hospital in past five days – ABC News

Residents of Mexican town block Americans from entering – POLITICO – Covid-19 in Arizona

Residents of the town of Sonoyta, across from Lukeville, Arizona, briefly blocked the main road leading south from the U.S. border over the weekend over fears of coronavirus outbreaks.

Sonoyta Mayor José Ramos Arzate issued a statement Saturday “inviting U.S. tourists not to visit Mexico.”

Local residents organized to block the road with their cars on the Mexican side Saturday.

Source: Residents of Mexican town block Americans from entering – POLITICO

Coronavirus: Doctors show concern for pregnant Hispanic women – Southwest Ohio

The dozen-plus hospitals and hospital groups in that area served by neonatologists at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center had a total of 150 mothers from all races and nationalities test positive for the virus, said Dr. Scott Wexelblatt, the medical director of Regional Newborn Services for Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

“But when you look at our number of mothers that were Hispanic, we actually had 67,” Wexelblatt said this week. “So 45 percent of our mothers are of Hispanic origin.”

Source: Coronavirus: Doctors show concern for pregnant Hispanic women