The Time of Cholera: As the coronavirus spreads, Miami-Dade County is closing restaurants and gyms, Harvard says most of its undergraduates will have to study remotely, and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced that she has tested positive for the virus but had no symptoms. 

  In just another day of pandemic, epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci said the US is still “knee-deep in the first wave.”  Fauci said yesterday that the resurgence of infections is “superimposed upon a baseline that really never got down to where we wanted to go.”

  Arizona,  where cases have doubled within the last two and a half weeks, passed the 100,000 mark yesterday. Texas and Florida are both over 200,000 total cases.

  After suing the centers for Disease control to release the statistics, The NY Times confirmed what had been suspected; black and Latino Americans have been disproportionately affected by the virus. The paper reports that, “Latino and African-American residents of the United States have been three times as likely to become infected as their white neighbors.” The paper says, “Black and Latino people have been nearly twice as likely to die from the virus as white people, the data shows.”

  This morning, the US has average 43,000 new cases over the past seven days, now approaching 3 million with 130,306 deaths.

The Siege of Atlanta: Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has declared a state of emergency and called out  1,000 members of the National Guard to quell “weeks of dramatically increased violent crime and property destruction in the City of Atlanta.”

  The governor’s statement said more than 30 people were shot over the holiday weekend, and five were killed, including an 8-year-old girl hit while riding in a car with her mother and another person. 

   Atlanta is not the only city to have a surge of violence. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said the city has had more than 75 shooting in the past several weeks, an outbreak believed to be a side effect of protests, looting, and violence following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Stars and Bars: While the Pentagon is considering banning the Confederate flag from military bases, President Trump is criticizing NASCAR from barring the flag from all its events. He has also threatened to veto the defense appropriations bill if it includes a clause requiring a change of names for bases named after Confederates. Ft. Hood in Texas is one of them, named after John Bell Hood, who not only was a traitor but a general who led his troops to be massacred.

 White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said yesterday that President Trump is “neutral” about the question of flying the Confederate flag. In fairness to the President and McEnany, The Washington Post  online headline says “McEnany defends Trump’s view on Confederate flag by claiming he doesn’t have one.”

  We can’t find where she said that in her press briefing.

  Shortly after McEnany fielded multiple questions about Trump and the Confederate flag, Trump tweeted up about the controversy over the names of professional sports teams: “They name teams out of STRENGTH, not weakness, but now the Washington Redskins & Cleveland Indians, two fabled sports franchises, look like they are going to be changing their names in order to be politically correct,” Trump wrote. “Indians, like Elizabeth Warren, must be very angry right now!”

Statues of Limitations: Memorials to both the heels and the heroes of American history are under attack these days. A statue of the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass installed in 2018 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of his birth, was ripped from its pedestal in Rochester, NY on Sunday, the 168th anniversary of one of his most famous speeches.

   In his address “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” delivered in Rochester on July 5th, 1852, Douglass asked  “Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” 

  The statue of Douglass was left near a ravine.

The Bulletin Board: The National Hockey League … yes, hockey … announced that it will resume play on August 1^st. — The tell-all book by Trump niece Mary Trump will be released July 14^th, two weeks ahead of schedule her publisher said. — Amy Cooper, the New York woman denounced as a “Karen” for calling the cops on a black bird-watcher who asked her to leash her dog, has been charged with filing a false police report. – A headline on the BBC website says, “Italian beach nudists fined as police crack down.”

Speechless in Seattle: In a decision that has shaken the guardians of words and language, Merriam-Webster has recognized “irregardless” as an actual word even though it can’t get past a high school English teacher.

  “Irregardless” has long been considered irreilliterate.

  In defense of his dictionary, Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski tweeted that, “The trick is to remember that acknowledging existence and endorsing worth are not the same thing.”

The Obit Page: Country music singer Charlie Daniels has died at age 91. His big hit was The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Here’s a bit of it: 

“Now you play a pretty good fiddle, boy, but give the Devil his due
I’ll bet a fiddle of gold against your soul ’cause I think I’m better than you”

Covid Capitalism. The Ayn Rand Institute received a federal paycheck protection loan of between $350,000 and $1 million. When asked why, Atlas shrugged.