Good morning, RVA! It's 64 °F, and we did it. We made it through the heat and humidity to place of temporary relief. Today you can expect highs in the upper 70s and, more importantly, a break from the humidity. Temperatures will heat up over the weekend—but not to any of those triple-digit Feels Likes of the last couple of weeks.
Water cooler
Not the best news morning to wake up to, with historic rain in the Northeast, flooding in New York City, and the Supreme Court gutting Roe v. Wade in the middle of the night.
It's hard to be chipper up there in the weather paragraph when the same hurricane remnants that brought us a dip in humidity unleashed record-setting rain in Central Park, smashing an all-time record set way back in...last week when Tropical Storm Henri rolled through. The New York Times reports that the flooding has killed eight people, which, I think, is more than the number of people who died when Ida made landfall in Louisiana. All of this, while multiple wildfires in the west burn out of control, and Apple News just showed me a Wall Street Journal article about the best air purifier for ridding your home of wildfire smoke (whatever your budget!). Things are bad, and our legislators and other elected officials—at the local, state, and federal levels—remain unserious about climate change and continue to fund highways to the tune of billions of dollars. Locally, on September 13th, Richmond's City Council will take up non-binding RES. 2021-R049, which would declare the existence of a climate and ecological emergency. It's definitely a step in the right direction, but it's, by any measure imaginable, six or seven magnitudes of not enough.
If the existential dread of living through a climate crisis wasn't enough to unfocus your eyes, chill your guts, and numb your extremities, last night the United States Supreme Court "refused to block one of the nation's most restrictive abortion laws, a unique Texas statue that bans the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy." People way smarter than I have weighed in, but this piece from @nycsouthpaw had just enough lawyerly stuff to make me feel like I understand what's going on—which is that things are bad. Here's a quote from the piece: "The majority’s sidestep from the constitutional merits to rank proceduralism should be recognized for what it is: a shabby dodge permitting the majority Justices to disable Roe—withholding for the first time the Court’s 48 year protection for the rights of millions of women—without officially overruling the precedent. By resorting to this dodge, the Justices have potentially ushered in a new era of mischief from the states." It's this last sentence that matters locally. You can bet that this morning finds every Republican state legislator across American dutifully copy-pasting Texas's de facto abortion ban and getting ready to bill-becomes-a-law it at the soonest possible moment. November's elections in Virginia are extremely important to keep this from happening here. Please vote! Please register to vote! Please tell everyone you meet to vote!
The Richmond Times-Dispatch's Jessica Nocera reports that Chesterfield County Public Schools, which opened up for in-person learning last week, has seen 204 COVID-19 cases. Almost 200 kids sick with COVID-19 is not great, but I think we need some context for what that number means. Prepare for some bad math that you should take with a grain of salt! The CDC's Data Tracker says that the 7-day average of total cases per 100,000 people in Chesterfield County is 317.46. That means, if you grabbed 100,000 people off of the street in Chesterfield over the course of a week, you'd expect 317 (and a half) of them to test positive for COVID. Doing a bit of dividing and multiplying, that means if you grabbed 62,000 Chesterfieldians (the size of the County's student body), you'd expect 196 of them to test positive. 196 is pretty close to 204. I think what this admittedly bad math which doesn't take into account a million things should show you is there are a lot of people out there with COVID-19. When you invite thousands of kids back into school buildings, some of them will have this disease and will bring it with them. This is important for me to remember: Not every positive case in a school is a sign of some systemic failure. I don't think it's reasonable to keep COVID-19 100% out of schools, but we do need to do everything we can to limit the spread of COVID-19 within schools. As we work our way through the Fall of Uncertainty, keep your eyes on the painfully slow-updating outbreaks dashboard. It updates tomorrow, so we should learn more about how the disease is impacting the County's schools then.
Also in the RTD, Kenya Hunter reports that Richmond Public Schools managed to issue an RFP for a replacement to George Wythe High School by the School Board's (unrealistic) deadline. Good work everyone, but I'm glad the administration can now turn their full focus back to open schools to students for the first time in over 500 days.
Ben Paviour at VPM reports on the proliferation of delta-8, which is not a new coronavirus variant, but, in fact, a chemical sibling to THC derived from the (legal) hemp plant. You can buy delta-8 right now in Richmond, and it will get you high. But get high while you can, because it sounds like Del. Dawn Adams will introduce some sort of regulations, saying "It's proliferated at some lightning speed...I've never seen anything take on a life so fast, not even kombucha." To be an old man about it, I think I'm with Adams on this one. We do probably need some sort of regulations to at least help keep people safe.
Today was a lot. Here's 50 pictures of skateboarding over the years via the RTD to act as a palate cleanser.
This morning's longread
How Target Got Cozy With the Cops, Turning Black Neighbors Into Suspects
This stuff about the business community (led by Target) working with police to geofence people out of a downtown—where the jobs and social services are!—is absolutely bananas.
Beneath the gleam and the paint, tensions linger. A lot of U.S. companies are evaluating their relationships with the Black community, but Target is grappling with a particularly raw set of challenges, especially in its hometown of Minneapolis. In a city with a legacy of racial segregation and police brutality, a yawning income gap between White and Black residents, and disproportionately high rates of arrest and incarceration of Black men, the unrest was in part born of a deeper pain that began well before a police officer took Floyd’s life—and that pain bears Target’s label as well, say community activists, academics, and even some former law enforcement and city officials.
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