Our beautiful October – Increases in COVID – Another rioter sentenced – A would-be Senatorial nonagenarian – Lindsay Graham urges truthfulness for everyone except himself – Draft-dodging in Russia – Evening statistics
We have been having a splendid autumn. Day after day the weather has been wonderful, air without any trace of the haze one sees in the summer months, so that everything is bathed in sunlight. Today I was outside mainly for the purpose of running errands, but the foliage was so magnificent that I was stopping continually to gaze on the splendid array of scarlet, crimson, burgundy, orange, coral, gold. It was rather breezy, but not at all cold, such a contrast to the heavy, stagnant air of this past July and August.
Alas, there is a downside to this shift in weather. COVID hospitalizations are on the rise. There were about 1,100 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in New York City on Oct. 24, up from 750 in mid-September. Influenza and RSV cases have increased as well. Over the past two years, when people were wearing facemasks as a matter of course, the case rate for influenza had been significantly lower than usual during the winter season, but as people are becoming less cautious the case rates threaten to be at the usual level this year.
Albuquerque Head has been sentenced to 7½ years in prison, one of the longest terms handed down to the January 6 rioters, but not one iota less long than it should be. He is the man who grabbed Officer Michael Fanone and threw him to the mob that beat him to such a degree as to cause Fanone to undergo a heart attack and severe brain injury.
Iowans are facing a momentous decision in the upcoming election: namely, whether or not to send Republican Chuck Grassley back for an eighth term in the U.S. Senate. He has served in the Senate since 1980 – that is to say, for 42 years – and is now 89 years old. If he were to win, he would be 95 by the end of his next term. No one seems to consider his age to be an issue. That his own party would brush it aside as a trifle of no importance is hardly surprising; but, amazingly, the Democratic party is equally reticent on this point. Hardly anyone in the opposition has touched upon it at all. The phrase “term limits” is clearly anathema to both parties.
Another senatorial election is also of interest. Hershel Walker, the Republican candidate in the upcoming Georgia election, is a firm anti-abortionist. Two women have come forward during the campaign to say that in the past Walker impregnated them some years ago and then pressured them afterwards to abort the child. He has denied both allegations. The salient point of this episode is not the allegations themselves – whether or not they have any validity I have no way of knowing, nor do any of the voters in Georgia – but the fact that Lindsay Graham has sprung to his defense by saying, “If you’re a conservative, they don’t give a damn about the truth. They’re trying to destroy his life 13 days before the election.” Considering that Graham has just induced a Supreme Court Justice to relieve him from the responsibility of complying with a subpoena to testify in grand jury investigation, I would say that concern for truth is not one of his strong points.
Young and not-so-young Russian men are adopting an unusual strategy of avoiding the draft; they are pretending to be stricken with HIV or, failing that, with hepatitis. Putin announced on September 21st that he would draft 300,000 new soldiers, the Internet in Russia has abounded in scams offering potential draftees certificates for either of these ailments for prices in the $600-$900 range. The falsified HIV and hepatitis diagnoses can be paid via Bitcoin and come alongside forged government documents and currency exchanges. The buyers are running a considerable risk; if they are discovered to have falsified documents in order to avoid military service, they can be sentenced to up to ten years in prison.
Today’s statistics as of 8:30 PM – # of cases worldwide: 634,509,461; # of deaths worldwide: 6,589,153; # of cases U.S.: 99,278,236; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,094,562 .