It would be pretty typical for an October storm to lose strength as it crosses the northern Gulf. It's not guaranteed but it's something we've seen quite a few times. Anyway that's what this graphic seems to indicate even though the current status of the storm is freaking people out.
It's possible that over the weekend, some people may have noticed a news item or two indicating that President Trump had checked into Walter Reed hospital where he was treated for COVID-19. It's okay if you missed it. But it's something that people were talking about.
Anyway one of the things that got some attention was the President's treatment regime. He tweeted this afternoon that it involved some "really great drugs and knowledge." Unfortunately the information coming from his doctors is not exactly clear. But, as far as we know, here is some of what that might have entailed.
Trump got one dose of Regeneron's monoclonal antibody cocktail -- a combination of two lab-engineered proteins designed to home in on the coronavirus. He also had received the first infusion of a five-day course of remdesivir, Gilead Science's experimental antiviral drug.
Conley indicated the Walter Reed team was giving Trump a variety of therapies -- an approach many doctors are taking in treating coronavirus patients, who suffer a wide range of symptoms.
"Remdesivir works a little bit differently than the antibodies. We are maximizing all aspects of his care. Attacking this virus in a multipronged approach," Conley said.
"If there was any possibility that it would add value to his care and expedite his care, I wanted to take it."
It's not surprising, said Dr. Seema Yasmin, director of research and education at Stanford University's Health Communication Initiative.
"This is the President of the United States -- he is going to have the kitchen sink thrown at him," Yasmin told CNN.
Multipronged, kitchen sink approach involving all these cutting edge treatments. We really can do remarkable things in health care here in the good ol US of A. It's sure great to the be the President of this country.
It's less great to be in jail in Orleans Parish, though. They treat the COVID differently there, apparently.
And Dixon wasn’t the only one who felt the effects of the pepper spray. It dispersed throughout the rest of the tier, which at the time was housing around a dozen other detainees who had tested positive for coronavirus.
“Yeah it got into our cells,” said the detainee. “All of us were all beating on the doors telling the people we can’t breathe, to open the outside door where they have a rec yard so it can air out. We were telling them we can’t breathe, they were telling us we can’t go outside and air out.”
“By inhaling that stuff, it’s so strong,” he said. “We tested positive for the corona, and it was getting in our system. We were coughing and gagging in our cells.”
Following the incident, according to Dixon and the other inmate, Dixon was returned to his cell on the COVID tier and kept there for several days without being given the opportunity to shower or make any phone calls.
“They put me in the cell with no shower, nothing to clean it off me,” Dixon said.
The only medical attention he received, Dixon said, was being given Tylenol to help with his wrist and ankles, which had become swollen from the cuffs and shackles.
Nowhere to wash off the pepper spray... not even a kitchen sink.
They're going for it. All the mud.
The state is undertaking two “record-breaking” restoration projects aimed at reviving 7 square miles of coastal habitat and bolstering natural storm defenses east of New Orleans and near Venice in lower Plaquemines Parish.
Long planned but now funded with $215 million from money BP set aside after the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, the projects amount to the largest marsh restoration and the largest coastal ridge-building effort the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has ever attempted.
“The only way to describe them is 'massive,'” CPRA Executive Director Bren Haase said. “They’re both record-breaking projects."
The Deepwater Horizon disaster happened 10 years ago. These aren't the first projects that settlement has funded but they do give some idea of how long it takes to put that money to use. Which is a maddening thing to think about when we consider just how late in the game all of this is. This, for example, is from May of this year.
A new study says Louisiana’s coast cannot be saved.
Researchers looked at how the marshes have survived over thousands of years and concluded that they are past a major tipping point and sea level rise will eventually wash the entire coast away.
The study, published today in Science Advances, found that marshes can survive a certain amount of relative sea level rise — about a tenth of an inch per year. Sea levels are currently rising 1 to 2 inches a year in Louisiana due to climate change and subsidence.
“Previous investigations have suggested that marshes can keep up with rates of sea-level rise as high as half an inch per year, but those studies were based on observations over very short time windows, typically a few decades or less,” said Torbjörn Törnqvist, Lead researcher and Tulane University earth and environmental science professor.
He said officials have perhaps been too optimistic: “Unfortunately we have already reached the tipping point for marsh drowning in Louisiana. There is no way back anymore.”
Yeah... but you gotta do something. And since we do have some money to throw around right now, we might as well throw at something at least a little bit useful. And these "record breaking" projects do sound a little bit useful. One project aims to save and reinvigorate 3,000 acres of marsh around Lake Borgne.
Restoring marshlands in Lake Borgne, actually a large saltwater bay, is part of a wider effort to rebuild wetlands in the Pontchartrain Basin for both ecological and storm protection functions. Like much of the coast, the basin has been rapidly losing land from erosion, storm surges, rising seas and subsidence, the natural compacting and sinking of the soil.
A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assessment found that boosting the marshlands in Lake Borgne could provide significant storm surge protection for New Orleans.
See, that helps. Now, if they could get all of this done by, say, Thursday evening that would be great.
Tropical Storm Delta was strengthening in the Caribbean Monday morning and is expected to become a hurricane Tuesday on its path toward Louisiana, forecasters said.
The current track from the National Hurricane Center has Delta making landfall Friday as a Category 2 hurricane in southeast Louisiana, but the track has an average error of 160 to 200 miles this far out.
Here is Delta's track which, appropriately for something called that, is still subject to change.. but.. yikes!
We're in the Greek alphabet for only the second time in history. That other time was, of course, the infamous 2005 season when we got all the way up to Zeta. Just a couple more to go now and maybe we can break that record too.
While the New Orleans Saints wait for approval to have fans in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, Lafayette Mayor-President Josh Guillory on Friday suggested Lafayette would be happy to host the next game — with fans — at the Cajundome.
"If @mayorcantrell will not allow fans in the stands of the Superdome, you are more than welcome to play your home games here in Lafayette. We can have fans safely attend the game. Cajun Field would be a great venue!" Guillory wrote Friday morning on Twitter.
We touched on this in the last post but the primary consideration here is obviously not safety. It isn't even trolling, really. Instead it is a deliberate effort to force people to accept the shitty conditions of a post-COVID existence. The virus hasn't been stopped or vaccinated and it may never be. We could think about ways to prevent 200,000 people from dying over the course of six months, or we could just tell everyone to get used to it. The bosses have determined you are to get used to it. And that means, among other things, pretending it is safe to do all the things we normally do.
Dr. Alex Billoux is stepping down as the state Office of Public Health's point person on coronavirus response. Yesterday, he had some parting thoughts on the wisdom of gathering large crowds together to watch football under the current circumstances.
“In the grand scheme of things, it’s kind of ridiculous,” Billioux said. “If this were a story 100 years from now and I said, 'Listen, you know, people were willing to have three to five people die for a football game every week, because it was that important to them … people were willing to sit next to people with a tremendously infectious disease that kills people because they weren’t willing to go a single season without going to a football game.'”
What kind of an idiot needs to be at a football game right now? I can say this speaking specifically as the kind of idiot who loves watching football very much. I love going to the Superdome and watching football. I love going to Tiger Stadium to watch football. I love going to a crowded barroom, or, on occasion, a crowded art gallery or street party to watch football. I am a complete idiot and yet even I do not think any of those things is worth endangering my or anyone else's life right now.
Guillory's "offer" (I don't know if we can consider it an actual good faith offer) to host a Saints game flies directly in the face of Billoux's comments. It doesn't help that the Saints are also applying pressure themselves to bring more fans into the dome. It would be putting it charitably to say they are being selfish. More accurately, they and Guillory are engaging in a deliberate ideologically driven campaign to end the Governor and Mayor to end their emergency precautions.
In a letter to the mayor they publicized today, the Saints claim their health and safety plan "was touted as one of the best and most comprehensive with the ability to safely adapt to numerous seating capacities based on local and state governmental guidance." They don't say by whom the plan was touted. Nor do they specifically say what the expectation should be that it would actually mitigate transmission of the virus. But it's a mystery why anyone should think they've got any credibility in that regard.
Not sure if it's really sinking in for people yet, but "the economy" on the other side of COVID just isn't going to have as many full time jobs as it did before.
There are still 10.7 million fewer people with jobs than there were in February before the pandemic, although just over half of the jobs lost in March and April have now been recovered. At this rate, it would take the economy another 16 months to gain back those jobs, although economists say that job gains get more difficult for every month that the recession lasts.
All 10.7 million of those jobs are not coming back. That isn't part of the plan. The bosses have already won the pandemic and are going to be fine without most of us.
We aren't in the early, completely catastrophic early days of the crisis anymore. People making above $60k are basically back to work, according to the Opportunity Insights Data. The group that is still badly struggling is low-wage service workers. pic.twitter.com/XSRhjokFTc
— Jordan Weissmann (@JHWeissmann) October 1, 2020
What's left to do now is for the rest of us to "just get used to" the new slightly shittier normal. Which is why, even today, as the nation woke up the news that the President himself has tested positive for the virus, the push is on to end the emergency and impose a sense that the current state of affairs is just the way we live now and that it's time to get on with that.
Which is why, despite Nancy Pelosi's performative "optimism" that the Trump diagnosis changes the political dynamic, the thing to understand is that help is not on the way. The US economy... insofar as what it can produce for the benefit of poor and working class people... slid completely off the edge of help in 2008 and has not been brought back from that. The pandemic is just another step in normalizing the status to which most of us have been relegated. We're never coming back from this. We aren't really even expected to.
Amazingly, it is New Orleans and Co.
Facing a collapsed tourism industry due to the coronavirus pandemic, two publicly-funded tourism agencies in New Orleans have cut funding for supplemental security and infrastructure improvements in the French Quarter. And one of them is trying to take back millions of unspent funds it’s contributed in years past.
The agencies in question are the Ernest N. Morial New Orleans Convention Center — a public body — and New Orleans and Company, a private nonprofit group that serves as the marketing agency for the city’s tourism industry. Both organizations had signed agreements with the city that will expire in a few months.
New Orleans and Company, however, has already cancelled one of its contracts with the city.With the end of the agreements, the city stands to lose roughly $5.7 million that it had in 2019 for French Quarter security and improvements. The biggest chunk of that money, $2.5 million per year, has gone to pay for Louisiana State Police patrols in the French Quarter. Another $1.2 million per year went to the French Quarter Task Force — an initiative originally created by entrepreneur Sidney Torres that pays off-duty NOPD officers to patrol the quarter in blue-light Smart Cars.
Okay so it is the Convention Center and NO & Co. For its part, the Convention Center says they are all paid up and the deal that created this fund is expiring, all of which seems to be true. But also they have to decide how much money they want to give away to Ron Forman so you can see why that might be a priority.
But NO & Co. is the agency that is actually trying to take some of the money back... although it will surprise no one to know that the city disputes the amount they've actually paid and says also that they may in fact be behind on these obligations.
While New Orleans and Company believes that the money should be returned, the city has recently argued that New Orleans and Company actually owes additional money to the improvement fund. At a June FQMD board meeting, Smith stated that “the City is still missing the New Orleans & Co. 2019 remittances that came to about $2,000,000.00 and they have been attempting to collect these since February,” according to meeting notes.
Disputed U-O-MEs notwithstanding, why not just let the thing drop? It's time to start de-funding the police/surveillance state and the French Quarter is the most overly-policed and heavily surveiled neighborhood in our city. Sounds like a great place to start.
Not sure that's the city's plan, though. A .25 cent sales tax renewal on the ballot in December would continue supplemental patrols there. The only question, it seems, is who will be doing the patrolling.
One of the two plans comes from Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who wants to use the money to fund a new security team made up of a mix of police officers and civilians. The other is being championed by the French Quarter Management District — a state created body whose board is largely made up of appointees from tourism industry groups and French Quarter business and neighborhood groups. It hopes to use the money to expand an existing security detail made up of off-duty New Orleans Police Department officers.
It seems like the dispute here is really about control over turf. While FQMD's plan is to keep paying the task force (famously founded by Sidney Torres) the mayor wants to give it to something called a "Grounds Patrol" operated by the city's Homeland Security department. The key difference is that the Grounds Patrol would deputize civilian "quality of life" officers relegated to code enforcement which, the claim is, would free up NOPD to focus on real police work. This sounds dubious. In fact, The Lens points out in that article that model is very much along the lines of a failed Landrieu Administration experiment known as NOLA Patrol which had to be discontinued after the citizen deputies were found out to have been issuing traffic tickets.
Again, it would appear that this dispute isn't so much about how best to spend a shrinking pot of policing money. It's about who controls the pot and how much extra patronage they can wring from it.
But even if the tax is renewed, the city is projecting that collections will be significantly lower than in years past due to a shrinking tourism industry brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Current projections for 2021 are $1.8 million, compared to $3 million last year.
But that level of funding would expand the current size of the French Quarter Task force if all the revenue is dedicated to FQMD, even if New Orleans and Company ceased their $1.2 million contribution to the French Quarter Task Force.
Under Cantrell’s plan, the first $1.3 million raised by the sales tax would go to the Unified French Quarter Patrol along with an additional $1.5 million in funding from the French Market Corporation.
The remainder of the sales tax, estimated to be $500,000 in 2021, would be administered by a newly created French Quarter Economic Development Oversight Committee. That extra money would be used for other public safety and quality of life initiatives within the French Quarter.
"Other public safety and quality of life initiatives" = what, exactly? Well, that's for you to find out. Suffice to say anytime you see something disbursed in the name of "economic development" in this city, you can begin looking for the crony capitalists right then and there.
More to the point, though, all of this petty squabbling and attendant corruption could be avoided (and patrons of French Quarter businesses could get a sales tax break) if we would just agree to de-fund the wholly unnecessary police-surveillance apparatus altogether. But for some reason nobody is talking about doing that except the tourism agencies. Never thought we'd see the day.
Seems like the stimulus deadlock should be a perfect opportunity for Democrats to speak clearly to voters about the stakes of the election. We want to give you a stimulus check. We want you to have full unemployment benefits. We want to rescue your states and cities. Elect us so we can tell Mitch McConnell to fuck off and do these things for you.
Is that their message, though? It doesn't seem that way.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi was highly pessimistic Thursday about the chances of clinching a coronavirus relief deal with the White House, leaving House Democrats on a path to approve their own stimulus package and head home to run for reelection.
Pelosi cast serious doubt on the likelihood of an agreement during a private call with House Democrats Thursday, stressing multiple times that Republicans don’t “share our values” on the need to provide trillions of dollars in health and economic relief to Americans impacted by the pandemic.
"Republicans don't share our values" sounds like a good start to what they could be saying. But, next, comes the pitch. Tell voters to get them out of the way so we can help you. But that's not the pitch at all. Instead, it is this.
Moderate Democrats had been pushing Pelosi for months to put another bill on the floor — one that could be used to further pressure the GOP into negotiations, while also demonstrating to voters back home that they were still seeking compromise with Republicans.
Some members of the caucus grumbled about the end result, arguing that Democrats were simply negotiating against themselves, and that there was no point in approving a bill that included even less funds than the May version. But centrist Democrats argued that it was crucial to demonstrate that their party was still negotiating, while the White House and Senate Republicans were in no rush for a deal.
Voters! We are trying very hard to work with Republicans so we can give you less help! Not sure what that asks voters to do, exactly. I guess... be less mad about the impotence?
