47.5% of the civilian US non-institutional population had full-time jobs in February 2021. The average level in 2020 was 47.3%.
Missing full-time in February relative to the 2019 average of 50.4% is 7.5 million.
Relative to the all-time high in 2000 at 53.6%, missing full-time is a whopping 15.87 million.
Daily new cases have dropped dramatically in February 2021, but still average 85,863 per day and remain higher than for any month before last November when the country was still in a fit of hysteria about the pandemic.
Daily new deaths had their third worst month in February 2021 and are still higher than in April last.
Hospitalizations have dropped dramatically in February to 48,871 on Saturday 2/27. Peak Saturday level was January 9th at 130,781. The Saturday peak last summer occurred on 7/25 with 59,301 hospitalized. The Saturday peak last April occurred on 4/18 with 57,761 hospitalized.
The Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic will unaccountably stop collecting such data on March 7th. I say unaccountably because the absolute low in Saturday hospitalizations after the April outbreak was 27,967 on June 20th and the October lows never matched that. We're not even close to those levels yet. It's WAY too early to conclude that data collection should cease when the previous lows haven't yet been taken out.
Meanwhile, the hospitalization data collected by the University of Minnesota continues to show the second wave still in decline at the end of February. The worst states (NY in gray, CA in blue, TX in pink, and FL in green) for hospitalizations are shown in the graphs. The declines are welcome, but levels remain elevated.
Daily new case data in a number of countries, e.g. Brazil, Finland, Hungary, Czechia, France, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, in recent weeks has turned upward to one degree or another. This could be a harbinger of a coming seasonal surge.
Meanwhile about 7.5% of the US is fully vaccinated, and 15% partially vaccinated.
It remains to be seen how effective the vaccines will be against mutations, and how durable the vaccines will be over time.
5.6% of US adults are LGBT, up from 4.5% in 2017.
3.1% of Americans identify as bisexual, 1.4% as gay, 0.7% as lesbian and 0.6% as transgender.
The rise in Americans saying they are bisexual is driven by women:
[O]ver 3% of US adults say they are bisexual (a sexual identity in which someone is attracted to people of their gender or other genders). This is up from just over 1% in 2008. (The GSS allowed individuals to self-classify as “heterosexual or straight,” “gay, lesbian, homosexual,” “bisexual,” or “don’t know.”) An analysis of the GSS data by the sociologists D’Lane Compton and Tristan Bridges shows that the change has been almost entirely due to an increase in the number of bisexual women . . ..
"A close family friend said Woods learned his philandering ways from watching his father have sex with blondes in a Winnebago RV that he parked next to golf courses when they practiced in his childhood."
Florida, Texas and California all lagged the outbreak in New York, but the experience of all four coincide in the second wave, which is clearly now receding.
The Spanish Flu pandemic had three waves.
1918 Pandemic Influenza: Three Waves
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| New York (gray), Florida (green), California (blue), Texas (pink) |
It's good to be a Democrat.
Meanwhile through Feb 20 2,802 people in the US have died of COVID-19 every single damn day in February, the second highest daily death rate measured monthly since the beginning of the pandemic.
Everyone thinks the recent big drop in cases means it's over? What a joke.
New cases in Feb just through 2/20 total 1.873 million, far exceeding May 2020's 1.799 million. The country went into SHUT DOWN mode with far fewer new cases in March 2020: 188,461. In April when so many Americans perished there were just 1.075 million new cases.
It's way too early to stop collecting data, unless of course you have an axe to grind, like the neo-cons did when Goldberg at The Atlantic insisted Iraq had WMD.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Inside the World of Backstreet Castrators, Cutters and Eunuch-Makers :
What a shock, right? Roman Catholic from Brooklyn thinks Methodist hick from Missouri should have been shut up long ago.
Rush Limbaugh’s Complicated Legacy :
By the 1980s it was being argued that the doctrine itself was hurting free speech: It was a governmental intrusion on the freedom of broadcasters, and, perversely, it inhibited the presentation of controversial issues. There were so many voices in the marketplace, and more were coming; fairness and balance would sort themselves out.
In 1987 the doctrine was abolished, a significant Reagan-era reform. But I don’t know. Let me be apostate again. Has anything in our political culture gotten better since it was removed? Aren’t things more polarized, more bitter, less stable?
I’m not sure it was good for America.
Imagine if religion were similarly circumscribed.
From 17 distinct religious groups in 1776 and about 3,200 congregations, today there are north of 300 groups and 300,000 congregations.
The lack of unanimity surely bothers devout believers in one or the other, some of whom are certain everyone else is going to hell, and something should be done to stop it.
I suspect the one true church of Peggy Noonan feels the same way, except its liberalism has invented the half-way house of Purgatory to roast malefactors until ready for Valhalla.
Deal with it, Peggy. It's still a Protestant country.
Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk radio pioneer, dead at 70 :
"We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, Freedom and the pursuit of happiness."
The mistake is fairly typical, both of Rush, and of Rush's audience the Baby Boom for whom basic knowledge of civics had long been in decline. For Rush, and for them, conservatism was always more aspirational than actual, often conflating present perspectives with historical realities.
An example is the Straussians who in our time explicitly argued for the unity of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, giving Thomas Jefferson's more revolutionary, Enlightenment-tinged views in the former too much sway over the interpretation of the latter.
The irony of that fusionism was always that Jefferson sought for the United States "to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them", not the "exceptional" American position touted by Limbaugh as an heir of America's post-war position of global domination.
The Constitution's preamble expressed a matter-of-factly self-interested goal, "to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", a country of Americans, by Americans, and for Americans, not a nation of immigrants, by immigrants, and for immigrants, not a nation of heroes marching forth in search of monsters to destroy. America's founding was above all modest, which is perhaps the surest indicator of its inherent conservatism.
If Rush Limbaugh slaughtered the important details on a regular basis, what made the show so enjoyable was the entertainment, which largely came from the sheer pleasure Rush derived from doing it and communicating it, "having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have". If nothing else, Rush Limbaugh was a conservative of enjoyment, and who doesn't want to be around people having a good time? It is one reason for Rush's tremendous success in a career spanning more than three decades.
Students of conservatism might think this a whimsy, not to be taken seriously, but no less a figure than Russell Kirk devoted a chapter to such conservatism in his "The Conservative Mind". Rush himself, from time to time, in his own non-academic way had observed how liberals are not funny and don't have fun, and in this he was on to something. Generally speaking conservatives possess contentment to a far greater degree than do liberals, derived from a judiciously formed view of the self as sinners saved by grace. It is a freeing thing which allows people to accept things as they are, even as God accepts sinners as they are.
Of course in the post-war there has been a tremendous amount for Americans to enjoy, to the point that we have become completely distracted by this. One may rightly say we have overdone it, and that enjoyment has frankly become conservatives' Achilles' heel. It has produced a myriad of problems, not the least of which has been a failure to reproduce, inattention to religion, and a proclivity for the easy politics of the executive where we look for one man to save us. As America was not built by Protestants enjoying religious entertainments and all-you-can-eat brunches on Sundays, it will not be recovered, if that is still possible, but by serious, religious people who work hard, deny themselves, and save.
Rush Limbaugh was an optimist about America because he still believed there were enough individual Americans remaining who exemplified the old virtues. America's future will depend on Rush having been right.
