Oath Keepers on trial – A fishy competition – Oncoming economic crisis in Turkey – The lifting of travel health notices – The end of the pandemic in sight, at least officially – Evening statistics
Another day of rain, the third one in a row, and on this day I went on no hike and indeed hardly ventured out at all. The weather and the inactivity have affected my mood, for even the news that five members of the Oath Keepers are formally charged with sedition, which ordinarily would have been a source of great gratification, has aroused little more than a passing interest. I suppose that all of the arraigning of Trump’s minions on various charges of increasing severity will slowly erode the grip he has been exerting upon the American political scene since 2016, but the operative word in that sentence is “slowly.” When, oh when, will Trump be formally be charged in his own person? I realize that he is a former President and that for that reason the cases against him (for there are several) must be carefully prepared, but I have seen glaciers move more rapidly than the district attorneys who claim to be on the verge of arraigning him.
However, at least some of the headlines are less somber. Jason Fischer, director of the Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament, a fishing competition in Ohio (it must be admitted that his surname is curiously appropriate for such an enterprise), immediately became suspicious when one team turned in fish that weighed nearly twice as much as their size would have indicated. When he inspected the fish he felt hard objects inside them. A closer inspection showed that the team stuffed the fish that they caught with lead weights and fish fillets. One would think that so obvious a subterfuge would be easily detected; but Jacob Runyon and Chase Cominsky, the two team members, have won several similar tournaments in the past, which suggests that most tournament directors can be duped fairly easily.
Turkey is on the verge of an economic crisis similar to that of Germany in the years after World War I. It now has an inflation rate of 83%, the highest it’s been in a quarter of century. As the value of the lira plummets, imports such as gas and fertilizers for producing goods (which form a critical portion of Turkish national economy) become prohibitively expensive for the farmers who use them. It’s all due to President Erdogan’s stubborn insistence on cutting interest rates in an effort, he says, to boost the economy; though, as the majority of the populace are already driven to such straits as cutting down on the amount of food they eat and more than 20% of young men in Turkey are unemployed, he cannot fail to leave them in a more impoverished condition than he found them.
The CDC is dropping the country-by-country COVID-19 travel health notices that it began issuing early in the pandemic. CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said the agency will only post a travel health notice for an individual country if a situation such as a troubling new variant of the virus. Many countries are no longer testing for the virus or reporting the number of COVID-19 cases, which means that the CDC has no longer has the means of calculating the risk of traveling to them. This is reassuring news in one sense – it means that the logistics of travel become less complicated – but it also means that one could very easily travel to a country that consistently under-reports its mortality rate (Mexico and Brazil come to mind) and thereby land into a hotbed of infection.
COVID’s classification as a state of emergency may be seeing its final days. The national state of emergency still remains in effect, but on a state-by-state basis only the following states still give COVID an emergency status: Washington, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Texas, Illinois, Georgia, West Virginia, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. For most of these, COVID;s emergency status will come to an end by October 31st or sooner. Only California, Kansas, and West Virginia will wait longer. If the national declaration of the state of emergency is not renewed after October 13th, of course, then the pandemic may be said to be officially at an end.
Today’s statistics as of 9:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 623,654,574; # of deaths worldwide: 6,551,590; # of cases U.S.: 98,270,417; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,084,961. The statistics seem to bear out that the disease is becoming endemic. Today’s death toll among Americans was well under 100 and the number of new cases is less than 10,000.