maga2020!

from 2016.

from 2016, a reminder that the CDC hasn't been real great at public health.

Slaoui agreed to sell stock worth $12 million and resign from the board of Moderna, the developer of a leading potential vaccine. But Slaoui insisted on keeping his roughly $10 million stake in his former company, GlaxoSmithKline, another contender in the Operation Warp Speed vaccine race. “I won’t leave those shares because that’s my retirement,” he has said.

The total number of postal workers testing positive has more than tripled from about 3,100 cases in June to 9,600 in September, and at least 83 postal workers have died from complications of COVID-19, according to USPS. Moreover, internal USPS data shows that about 52,700 of the agency’s 630,000 employees, or more than 8%, have taken time off at some point during the pandemic because they were sick, or had to quarantine or care for family members.

no need to click: headline says it all.

friendly reminder that research publications are notoriously biased-- who can pay the most to publish?

wonder what the islamophobic trumpsters think of this nugget.

“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody,” Wooten said, adding that, “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”

“We’ve questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out…That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. I know that’s ugly…is he collecting these things or something…Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taken their tubes out. What in the world.”

“Like poverty and racism, school shootings and police brutality, mass incarceration and sexual harassment, widespread extinctions and changing climate, COVID-19 might become yet another unacceptable thing that America comes to accept.”

Too little too late, but maybe this will help for drug supplies years from now.

FEMA has been untrustworthy since Katrina, but now they’re effectively redefining the word “emergency” to avoid helping anyone but the State.

“On generational wealth. So. We needed to get our home appraised. The appraiser came by and he was immediately unpleasant - making one rude comment after another. He expressed exaggerated surprise when he saw me working at my home office during the walk-through. At the end of it we received an appraisal result that was so low that it was laughable. We appraised far lower than neighboring home sales with fewer bathrooms, fewer bedrooms, significantly lower square footage and half the land.

I knew immediately what needed to happen. We ordered a second appraisal and took down all family pictures containing Black relatives. We took down all pictures of African-American greats that we display to inspire our son. Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison came down from the bookshelves; Shakespeare went up. My son and I took a convenient shopping trip during the appraisal, leaving my white male husband to show the appraiser around, alone.

We appraised $135,000 higher the second time around. The amount of an entire house in some areas.

Racism silently but conspicuously steals wealth. Racism wastes time. Racism raises blood pressure. Racism makes me hate myself for my calm acceptance of what I had to do, and have always had to do, to achieve a fair result. I write this from a place of absolute anguish, to sort through my emotions. I want better for my son. #BlackLivesMatter”

The legal reproduction of white supremacy has always hinged on the violence and exploitation of Black and women of color in particular. There is a legal principle that Black feminist scholars point to in order to ground this claim — it is called partus sequitur ventrem. In Latin it translates to “the condition of the child follows that of the mother.” And though it existed in the U.S. prior to the 1800s, it became especially important after 1808, when the U.S. passed an act prohibiting the importation of enslaved Africans.

Now we know that slavery continued and was not legally abolished until 1865. So, partus sequitur ventrem ensured the enslaved Black people with reproductive capacity, Black women, would continue to reproduce a slave labor force. Put another way, slavery legally required the rape and sexual exploitation of Black and women of color. When we have that as our legacy in this country, it becomes challenging to unequivocally celebrate the centennial as a gain for women. Though Black women were certainly part of the suffrage movement, we have never been fully covered by the legal protections promised and premised by U.S. citizenship.