As we have been spending much time separated from each other, I’ve had lots of time to surf the web. As a result, I’ve become enamored with beekeeping videos. There is one thing that the bees have taught me that gives me hope. There is an invasive species of hive beetles that came over from Africa. African bees are meaner and they can kill hive beetles pretty easily, but our tame honeybees can’t do that. Are they defenseless? No. When a hive beetle shows up, the honeybees will work together to corner that SOB and wall it in with propolis so it starves.
I don’t know if we will be able to get the Mitch McConnells out of our beehive, but we can work together to make him starve alone in a corner.
I apologize that quite a few of these links are behind paywalls. I tried to present as much of the content as possible without bending Fair Use too hard. My personal solution to paywalls is just to register and pay. Newspapers are starving right now, so it’s a good cause.
Good News from Florida that is certain to annoy Trump
Masks will be required at the RNC convention in Jacksonville
Republicans moved their national convention to Florida to avoid social distancing measures and masks, but officials in Jacksonville are mandating new precautions as coronavirus infections surge.
Masks will be required in indoor public places and in any other gathering spots where social distancing is not possible, Jacksonville officials said. It is unclear how long the mask order will be in place, but it will presumably apply to the 15,000-seat VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena, where three nights of convention speeches, including Mr. Trump’s, are scheduled for Aug. 24-27.
In addition to dealing with virus this year, Jacksonville has also become a microcosm of how the nation has been forced to confront systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. African-Americans make up nearly a third of Jacksonville’s population of 912,000 but have been historically excluded from power in local government.
The challenge of confronting the virus and Jacksonville’s racist history while a national political convention comes to town has troubled the city’s business elite from the start, said Nate Monroe, metro columnist for The Florida Times-Union newspaper, with the crush of new infections only intensifying those concerns.
“Lenny Curry [the mayor of Jacksonville] is not a man known for changing his mind very often,” Mr. Monroe said. “I don’t know what could possibly derail the convention.” Gee, what could possibly derail this convention? Got me.
When Missouri allowed hair salons to open, these Great Clips hairdressers were happy to get back to work even while wearing masks. But after giving haircuts to 140 people who were also all wearing masks, the hairdressers started feeling symptoms. They got tested and yes, they were positive. Contact tracing followed up on the 140 well-coiffed subjects, but after 14 days, none of them tested positive.
“The result appears to be one of the clearest real-world examples of the ability of masks to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus,” reported The Washington Post.
And as long as we are talking about hair ...
Wear your crown, because change is coming': Virginia joins states banning hair discrimination
Honestly I had no idea natural hair was cause for discrimination. Turns out, there is a lot we white folks didn’t know.
“Society overall frowns upon Black hair, but here it can still be uncommon for people to embrace it because of judgment or just the every day exhaustion of having to explain your Blackness,” [Carmen Davis, natural hair stylist,] said.
Now they won’t have to. Virginia became the fourth US state, and the first in the south, to pass legislation banning hair discrimination based on racial identifiers including hair texture and hair type, as well as “protective hairstyles such as braids, [locs] and twists”. The law, known as the Crown Act, goes into effect on Wednesday.
Kentucky Good News that doesn’t involve turtles
Or maybe it does. Lots of animals are returning to Kentucky these days.
Elk return to Kentucky, Bringing Economic Life
When Daniel Boone wandered through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky in the late 1700s, the state was filled with wildlife. In his written account of this journey, Boone recalled finding “everywhere abundance of wild beasts of all sorts, through this vast forest.”
That was before strip mines came to Kentucky. “But in less than a century, land development and hunting decimated or eliminated buffalo, turkey, whitetail deer, river otters, bald eagles, quail and other animals. Elk — their presence enshrined in place-names like Elk River and Elkhorn City — were among the first to go; the last one was killed before the Civil War. By the 1900s, few residents remembered there had once been elk in the state.”
When the coal gave out, it left a destroyed environment and devastated economy.
“In 1944, the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources was established and charged with reintroducing animals of all kinds and regulating their numbers for hunting and conservation.”
The Department successfully reintroduced Red Deer, Elk and other animals to the recovering mine sites and there are now over 13,000 elk in Kentucky, which you can purchase a license and go shoot. Well, not all the news is great, but when in Kentucky, you take what you can get. Anyway, yay for Kentucky elk!
From the article:
Democrats won a special election to fill a vacant Kentucky state Senate seat this week, flipping a district Republicans held for decades and signaling that the suburban shift that helped create a blue wave in 2018’s midterm elections may continue in 2020.
Dr. Karen Berg defeated Republican candidate Bill Ferko by 14 points to win the race to replace longtime GOP state Sen. Ernie Harris, who retired in April after holding the seat in suburban Louisville for 25 years.
“Nationwide, the Republicans are in great danger of losing the upper-status professionals who used to side with them,” said Stephen Voss, a University of Kentucky political scientist who specializes in voter behavior and election patterns. “If that realignment in those voters becomes permanent, then the Republican Party is in trouble.”
This Tattoo Shop Is Covering Up Racist Tattoos For Free
But sometimes it’s not just an opinion that needs to change. How about an oppressive belief expressed prominently ― and permanently ― on someone’s body?
The artists at Gallery X Art Collective, a tattoo shop in Murray, Kentucky (“the friendliest town in America,” according to tattoo artist Ryun King and USA Today), have a solution: covering up those hateful tattoos. And they’re offering to do it for free.
“It’s like they leave as a different person,” [King] said. “They see the hate gone, the love of a new tattoo, and it was really the last thing holding them back. I have a lot of pride that I get to help those people. I get emotional, I have to look away because I’ve started tearing up. We just care about the people and our community.”
I’ve been wondering about this too, but this author has a great idea. Quit maintaining it and nature will cover it up.
It is too big to just tear down, like they are doing with statues in Richmond and elsewhere, but something is going to happen with it eventually. Anti-racist sentiment is growing, and the makeup of Georgia’s population is changing so fast that some kind of modification is inevitable.
State law protects the sculpture from destruction but does not require it to be clean. It remains clear of vegetation only through effort and expense. Trees and plants grow easily from the mountain’s other cracks and crevices. We should allow growth to also overtake the sculpture’s many clefts and crinkles as they naturally collect organic material and allow moss and lichen to obscure its details. We should blast it with soil to encourage such growth and consider this new camouflage as a deliberate creative act, transforming the sculpture into a memorial to the end of the war – not to the traitors who led it.
Good News from my hometown
I live in San Bernardino. We are near the mountains, near the deserts and near the beaches, but the city itself rarely has much to crow about. But I do try to find some good news from my hometown every Roundup. Here are some good things happening in San Bernardino this week —
Turning a dirty alley into a mural for change
Black Lives Matter mural finds home in downtown…
A lot of our city is still boarded up from riots and mischief from one bad night a month ago, but we are coming back.
Not far from statues in downtown San Bernardino of civil rights icons Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks is a new memorial to the fight for the equal treatment of Black people.
On Saturday, June 20, a community united against police brutality and systemic racism convened in an alleyway on E Street to outline and paint a Black Lives Matter mural dedicated to Tyisha Miller, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and all other Black lives lost unjustly.
Billed as a new, socially-distanced way to watch movies outside the home during the coronavirus pandemic, Drive-in Movie Night! is a hit — in of all places — an airport parking lot.
The series, new this year, is so popular that when tickets are announced, they sell out in minutes. Tickets are free, but every car must have a reservation.
The slick racing-car movie with Inland Empire ties, “Ford v. Ferrari,” brought several hundred cars to Ontario International Airport on Friday night, June 19. People watched the 2019 motion picture on two 50-foot screens from inside their vehicles.
Good News confetti
This is my version of the list of links that didn’t fit in the Roundup. Some Gnusies call this the Lightning Round. Other call it the Hot Lynx. I think of it as confetti — little bits of joy to be tossed into the crowd.
Rachel Bitecofer, aka The Election Whisperer has a new video out
The Legal Eagle dissects the John Bolton book
And! He's suing the government to get the bits that were redacted out of the book!
Hillary Clinton is a Twitter whiz.
Ever see some dolphins meet up with a sloth? It’s the best! The video is at the end of the article.
Fox News host tries to tell Trump “Masks Are Great Again”
Facebook bans hundreds of accounts related to the Boogaloo extremist movement
Not going to attend the viruspocolypse in North Dakota* this July 4? Look up in the sky anyway, for a lunar eclipse
*pucklady was just informed that Mt Rushmore has been relocated to South Dakota! Why am I always the last to know these things?
Remember that Confederate statue they took down in Raleigh, North Carolina last week? What do you know, they found a time capsule!
The Hubble Telescope launched 30 years ago. Here are 30 years of surprises
Carl Reiner’s key to living a long, funny life? Never stop having something to say.
In a conversation with his good friend Mel Brooks, he said
“While you’re alive, you can laugh. When you’re dead, the laughter is so difficult. So difficult.”
He had things to say up until the end. His final tweet was just hours before he died. He tweeted
As I arose at 7:30 this morning, I was saddened to relive the day that led up to the election of a bankrupted and corrupt businessman who had no qualifications to be the leader of any country in the civilized world...
Now let’s go push some Republicans into the corner to starve.