Monday, November 02, 2020
Texas Averaged 4891 Cases and 74 Deaths Daily In October
The charts above relate to COVID-19 in Texas. The orange chart shows the daily number of new cases, while the red chart shows the daily number of new deaths due to COVID-19.
For the month of October, Texas had 151,629 new cases (a daily average of 4891.3).
For the month of October, Texas had 2,313 deaths (a daily average of 74.6).
Former Opposing Litigants Unite To Support Joe Biden
They have become friends, and although they are in different political parties, they united to write an op-ed for CNN.com in support of Joe Biden's candidacy for president.
The following is just a part of their op-ed:
History will likely remember us mostly for opposing each other in Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 US Supreme Court case that ultimately granted marriage equality to all Americans. Then, we were on opposite sides in a case that made national news. One of us is a lifelong Democrat, the other a lifelong Republican.
But in the more than five years since our case, we have found each other in the middle and have become friends -- something that politicians in Washington DC used to do. Our political differences do not change our friendship because we both believe that the other deserves dignity and respect.
Like many SCOTUS decisions pertaining to marginalized groups, our case recognized that same-sex couples were entitled to the freedom and equal dignity of marriage and "would pose no risk of harm to themselves or third parties." And, according to a new survey, 70% of Americans think doing so was a good idea.
Today, many of those rights are at risk. The Donald Trump-Mike Pence administration has been hard at work, tearing away at the rights of oppressed groups and marginalized communities. Only days before the election, they installed a new Supreme Court Justice -- Amy Coney Barrett -- who, as a law professor, criticized Chief Justice John Roberts' decision upholding the Affordable Care Act. And we are in the middle of a deadly pandemic that's killed more than 229,000 Americans and infected more than 9 million. This is not normal, and it is unacceptable.
For these and many other reasons, we fear that the reelection of President Trump on November 3 would take our country down a path toward the darkest days of our history -- one from which we may never return. These are hyper-polarized times, but this election is not between the lesser of two evils. There are two distinct paths before us, and they could not be more different.
One candidate is a rational, principled, empathetic and competent leader. The other is not. One respects the office of the presidency and has genuine concern for the people whom he serves. The other does not. One has a plan to forge a way out of the dark times we face. The other has never offered a national strategy or plan on Covid-19.
While we may not agree with every single component of Joe Biden's plans, we agree with where he's headed. There is simply nothing more to Trump's campaign than a desire to divide us against each other. Biden seeks, more than anything, to bring us together. To get past the challenges we face today, that's what we'll need.
Our system of government is designed to give everyone a voice and to create compromise. However, this President and his enablers seem to have no issue with showing total disregard for the agreed upon norms and traditions of our democracy. This could not contrast more starkly with Biden's long record of working with both parties to accomplish real and lasting change, both as a US senator and as vice president.
And while no person is perfect, we can count on Biden to listen, learn and grow from experience. Imagine how many more of us would be alive today had someone with that kind of humility and bravery -- and deference to public health experts -- been at the helm when the pandemic began. . . .
Together, whether you are Republican, Democrat or Independent, we ask you to vote for Joe Biden.
Sunday, November 01, 2020
Texans Smash Voting Record (w/o Election Day Count)!
The chart above shows the total number of voters that voted in presidential elections in Texas. The record number of voters was set in 2016, when 8,969,226 people voted.
That record has already been surpassed, and we haven't even gotten to Election Day yet. According to the office of the Texas Secretary of State, 8,698,233 people voted early in person and 971,013 mail-in ballots have been received. That's a total of 9,669,246 people who have already voted -- hundreds of thousands more than the old record for total votes. And when the Election Day voters are added, the old record will be surpassed by several million.
I don't know who those people voted for, but it's obvious that Texans are enthusiastic about voting this year.
Fox News Poll Verifies Biden Has A Significant Lead
The chart above reflects the results of the newest Fox News Poll -- done between October 27th and 29th of a national sample of 1,318 registered voters, with a 2.5 point margin of error.
Is The United States On The Verge Of A Second Civil War?
The top chart shows the lack of cohesion in a country. The second show the build-up of stress factors causing the first Civil War -- and the current build-up of those same stress factors.
Will our democracy be saved and unity restored if Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress is elected? That is the hope of many of us, but it may not be true. There are stress factors in our country that may cause the opposite to happen -- maybe even a second Civil War.
The following is a small part of a thought-provoking article at BussFeedNews.com:
Many Americans are clinging to the idea that if Joe Biden wins the presidential election, calm can return to a nation riven by protests and rattled by President Donald Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric.
Not so fast, caution two academics who claim they have devised a measure of political instability that shows that the nation will still be a powder keg that is waiting to blow, even if a Biden landslide means that Trump has little choice but to step aside.
“The tendency is to blame Trump, but I don’t really agree with that,” Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut who studies the forces that drive political instability, told BuzzFeed News. “Trump is really not the deep structural cause.”
The most dangerous element in the mix, argue Turchin and George Mason University sociologist Jack Goldstone, is the corrosive effect of inequality on society. They believe they have a model that explains how inequality escalates and leads to political instability: Worsened by elites who monopolize economic gains, narrow the path to social mobility, and resist taxation, inequality ends up undermining state institutions while fomenting distrust and resentment.
Building on Goldstone’s work showing that revolutions tend to follow periods of population growth and urbanization, Turchin has developed a statistic called the political stress indicator, or PSI. It incorporates measures of wage stagnation, national debt, competition between elites, distrust in government, urbanization, and the age structure of the population.
Turchin raised warning signs of a coming storm a decade ago, predicting that instability would peak in the years around 2020. “In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt,” he wrote, in a letter to the journal Nature. “Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability.”
Today, with the nation in turmoil, Turchin’s prediction seems remarkably prescient. We live in a pandemic hellscape that has disproportionately harmed Black and brown Americans and those living in poverty. We have widespread civil unrest over racial injustice. And we are hurtling toward an election in which Trump is stoking unfounded fears of voter fraud and refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power.
In August, Turchin gave himself a pat on the back for his predictive ability with an analysis showing a significant rise in political demonstrations and violent riots over the last 10 years. But he and Goldstone fear that much worse is to come.
When Goldstone talks about America’s darkest days in the 1860s, he provocatively calls it the “First Civil War.” He fears that we may be on the way to a second one, with the 2020 election serving as a potential “fire-starter” event. . . .
Turchin said people who rule out the possibility of serious political violence in the US based on “the strength of American institutions” are being “unduly optimistic.”
“The social system that we live in is extremely fragile,” Turchin said.
Other social scientists consulted by BuzzFeed News were skeptical that the US is on the brink of a civil war. But they were concerned about the trends highlighted by Goldstone and Turchin, and worried about the potential for violence around the coming election — especially from right-wing militia groups if Trump loses and contests the result.
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