When the dealer stacks the deck in advance

I finished the book The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Yes, the main character and narrator was created by Mark Twain. No, Twain did not write this book. Greg Matthews did. The copyright is 1983, I see that is almost 100 years since the original was published. I’ve had this hardcover edition sitting on my to read shelf for probably a couple decades at least. I don’t remember why I bought the hardcover instead of paperback. This thing is 500 pages (the original is just over 300), which is a good reason why it sat on the shelf. The story begins shortly after the previous one ends. Huck and Jim are wondering what to do next. Huck visits Judge Thatcher (Becky’s father) and finds he was recently murdered. Huck picks up the murder weapon just as other people burst into the room. Huck has help breaking out of jail and he and Jim head west. It is 1849 and gold has been discovered in California. A good place to hide himself. More than half the book is about the trip. But Becky has hired a very good detective who pops up regularly to attempt to haul Huck back to Missouri to face murder charges. The important question is whether this is a worthy successor to the original Great American Novel. One reason why I bought it as a lot of reviews said it is. But it has been too many decades since I read the original for me to compare. This one is indeed a good story. It continues Twain’s efforts of writing in the dialect of the characters, which can get strange since this character is fourteen and hasn’t had much education. Words routinely get mangled. It also continues Twain’s attempts to highlight the racism of the time. Huck treats Jim as an equal friend, not as a black man or slave, though everyone else tries to. The story highlights the poor treatment of the natives – the Injuns – and the Chinese and Spanish in California I’m sure an aspect of Huck that is in the original and continued here is he is a very good liar, though one who knows he is lying. He spins some good yarns. Many times it is of necessity – by the time he gets to St. Joseph and the Missouri River, there are wanted posters with his name. He also spins some good yarns when trying to explain things to Jim, such as combining Richard the Lionheart with Rapunzel. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. In new cases per day, the peak at the end of December has been revised up to 18,330. The peak in the first week of January was revised up to 24,225. The peak in this last week was 19,234. The peak in early January is about three times the peak last April and not quite three times the peak of two weeks before – omicron is spreading fast. Starting the last week of December and going for ten days the deaths per day has been in the 79-89 range. Data more recent probably isn’t reliable yet. Last week I mentioned death data without dates. I figured these deaths would be assigned to a date as more data is processed. That didn’t happen, at least not yet. The number of deaths without date rose by a handful to 1162. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported Schumer had planned to hold votes in the Senate on the voting rights bills on Martin Luther King Day, which is Monday. Between senators out with COVID and a looming snowstorm (and recalcitrant Democrats), Schumer said the Senate will not work over the weekend. Attempts to hold a debate on the bill will resume on Tuesday. The Supreme Court issued a ruling on Biden’s attempt at mandating vaccines in workplaces with more than 100 workers. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that in a 6-3 ruling the justices said the mandate was not permitted, that OSHA didn’t have the authority to issue it. The justices did it in a way that may essentially abolish OSHA. Wrote Sumner:

In this ruling, the Supreme Court is explicitly saying that COVID-19 isn’t an “occupational hazard” because it can also occur outside the workplace. Which provides every employer, every conservative organization, and every Republican attorney general the perfect opening to destroy safety regulations across the board. ... The test the Supreme Court appears to be setting up with this ruling is that, in order to be regulated under the authority of OSHA, a hazard must be a threat that takes place in the workplace, but also one unique to the work environment. For example, workplaces might still be required to regulate the operation of heavy equipment, but passenger trucks … hey, people have them at home, at sporting events, etc. Lifting of heavy objects? That’s certainly something that people do away from the workplace. So is the use of power tools. Exposure to loud noises is something that happens in everyday life. ... What the ruling is spelling out here is an explicit gutting of OSHA’s authority to regulate safety in the work environment. It’s a ruling that will become a touchstone for anyone seeking to bypass safety requirements big and small. It’s a get-out-of-jail-free card for placing workers at risk, one that essentially eliminates authority to oversee worker health and safety.

The ruling said that vaccines are required for health care workers because dealing with COVID patients is unique to the work environment. Or maybe the justice kept it because, while they don’t go into factories, they do go to the doctor. Leah Greenberg tweeted:

just a reminder that the Supreme Court made everyone involved in hearing the vaccine mandate case take a PCR test in advance, guaranteeing a level of protection that is wildly out of reach for nearly every worker affected by this decision

Lucy Lipiner tweeted a response to someone who equated a vaccine requirement to the Holocaust:

Holocaust survivor here. Vaccine mandates are not comparable the Holocaust. Showing a vaccination card is nothing like being starved, uprooted from your home, beaten in the streets, having your houses of faith set on fire, then deported and murdered. Please stop.

Ben Collins of NBCNews tweeted his encounter with Denise Aguilar, who runs Mamalitia and Freedom Angels. He met her when she was protesting vaccines at a school board meeting in Stockton, CA. Collins also saw her at the Board of Ed of San Joaquin County. She doesn’t have children in either district. After she spoke at the San Joaquin board meeting, two parents echoed her fraudulent claims. The board sided with these parents (I would guess they were already inclined to agree). Wrote Collins:

This is how militias and domestic extremist groups are winning since January 6th. They’ve evolved, encouraging local action at school boards and city councils, while recruiting and spreading their messages through culture-war debates like vaccines, race and education. ... By the way, after the vote, I asked Aguilar if she would put her kids in public school now that the school board voted in her favor. “No,” she said, firmly. “Schools are a dangerous place.”

I had reported that Ohio citizens voted for new provisions in their state Constitution to lessen gerrymandering. I also reported that when state Republicans drew new legislative and Congressional maps last year they completely ignored those provisions and made gerrymandering worse than the maps for the previous decade. Democrats were unanimous on voting against the maps and took the maps to the state Supremes. Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor is a moderate and sided with the Democrats in a 4-3 decision that told the legislature to produce more balanced maps. The ruling included this: “When the dealer stacks the deck in advance, the house usually wins.” Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Dan Froomkin of Press Watch:

The current push to pass ambitious voting-rights and election-protection legislation may be the last chance our republic has to bolster our democracy before it takes some serious damage. But top news outlets have been covering it like any other partisan dogfight — without any sense of urgency, without crucial context, and without even explaining what’s in the bills in question. They have, consequently, failed to explain why those provisions are there, why they are essential, how commonsensical they are for the most part, and how opposition to them is based solely in the Republican Party’s preparations to rule as a permanent, authoritarian minority government.