Today’s featured image is of Willowemoc Creek. The Willowemoc is a tributary of the Beaver Kill and a top east coast trout stream. It is located in the Catskills in Sullivan county NY.
We start today’s View in Wauwatosa Wisconsin. I’ve covered the saga of Wauwatosa PD officer Joseph Mensah here and here, but there are some new developments to pass along. Mensah, who is black, had been involved in 3 shootings during his tenure as a cop and had been suspended since July. He has now retired from the Wauwatosa PD. Note that there have been multiple investigations into officer Mensah’s actions, and not once has he been charged with a crime.
The next two items are related, so they’re getting mashed together. Pennsylvania Gauleiter governor Tom Wolf issued an expanded masking order for the Keystone state. Basically, you have to wear a mask everywhere, all the time, even in your own home.
He did this on the same day a Danish study on the efficacy of masking in the prevention of Chinese lung AIDS was published. The study, the largest of its kind, was published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
About 4,860 participants completed the study. The researchers had hoped that masks would cut the infection rate by half among wearers. Instead, 42 people in the mask group, or 1.8 percent, got infected, compared with 53 in the unmasked group, or 2.1 percent. The difference was not statistically significant.
For those of you keeping score, thats a .3% difference. The rate of infection in Denmark at the time the study was conducted was about 2%.
A couple of primary education news items popped today.
The Burbank Unified School District has started banning books. Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” Theodore Taylor’s “The Cay” and Mildred D. Taylor’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” are all books that cannot be taught this year. I’ve never read the last two, but the first three? The only one that I would even remotely consider racist is Huck Finn, and only because of the free use of words that have gone out of favor. But even then, Twain is using them to make a statement, not as a racist trope.
The other primary ed news is that the entire New York City public school system is closing starting Friday. The NYCPSD is the largest single school district in the country, with more than 1.1million students in 1700 schools across the 5 boroughs. The reason? The City as a whole has a seven day rolling infection rate of just above 3%. Anyone care to guess what the positivity rate of the schools is? You can give me your guesses in the comments section, and I’ll let you know who gets closest. No cheating. . . .
While I can read, hear and speak several languages, Tagalog is not one, so I can’t tell you what the narration of this video says. However, the rat is all of us this year. . .
Recommended: Quiz: Vietnam War
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