No. 129: Veteran Valor

Good morning, everyone.

They say to never tell a fishing tale or war story in the same room as someone else who was there. For some, the stories never receive airtime regardless of the people in the room. It is a rare occurrence to coax an American Veteran to divulge his or her war story at all.  In an America that reinforces the victimhood mentality and encourages merit based on chalking up your score on an intersectionality chart to calculate your degree of disadvantage, don’t be fooled. The silent dignity of personal sacrifice still courses through the veins of this nation, and no one has to affirm it with a pat on the back. The truth can remain unspoken and still ring true—no press or PR campaign required.

Veteran’s Day is a reminder to honor America’s silent minority (there are around 18 million veterans in America). It is also a time to reflect on what the cost of sacrifice truly looks like. The silence of our veterans goes beyond just refraining from rehashing war stories; American Veterans have a suicide rate twice as high as American civilians.  

Thanks for reading, and Happy Veteran’s Day to all who served.

⏣ EMISSION SUBMISSION

Beginning in 2022, five counties surrounding Davidson County—Hamilton, Rutherford, Sumner, Williamson, and Wilson—axed emissions testing. Later this month in Nashville, the Metro Council will take up its own ordinance to end emissions testing in the city. Councilmember Kevin Rhoten filed the resolution citing the surrounding five counties that ended their testing protocols after receiving approval from the EPA. It's a ritual that we'd all be glad to get rid of, but as we know, somewhere deep in the bowels of city government, there lies some pesky bureaucrat ready to make the case for why we still need them.

DEVELOPMENT

• Ballpark-area property sells for $5.2M (Post)
• Church On Dodson Chapel Road Slated For 310-Unit Development In Hermitage (Now Next)
• Mixed-use project planned for Germantown (Post)
• Dickerson Pike property sells for $8.5M (Post)
• East Nashville targeted for apartment building (Post)

⌘ MASKS DURING WARTIME

A question that lingers in the air as the Covid-19 hysteria funnels into the next inevitable crisis is, "What will remain after this is all over?" The New Normal we constantly hear about seems less a material result of a viral pandemic and more like the political platform of an opportunistic elite looking to roll out whatever half-assed policy initiatives their think tank flunkies forward them in an email. These are the kinds of ideas that bubble forth in speech's like Nancy Pelosi's at this year's COP26 wherein she drew a connection between "climate change" and "gender equality".

In Covid-19 parlance, we've become familiar with "healthy equity" and "equity investment" best expressed through Biden's $1.9T Covid bill which parceled off aid loans to Black farmers, but none to White farmers.

What do these things have to do with Covid or Climate Change? Nothing.

The policies that arose to directly deal with Covid-19 were mask mandates, lockdowns, social distancing, and vaccination mandates. From this corpus of laws and suggestions comes the core component of "Covid-19 Policy". Our question then is which of these initiatives will remain after the dust has settled.

Masks seem the most likely candidate. After 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA got a major facelift and fresh funding to prevent future terrorist attacks. No longer could citizens do simple things like meet passengers at their gate to receive them. "Going through security" evolved into an elaborate humiliation ritual where 80-year-old War Veterans in wheelchairs had to volunteer themselves to metal detectors and fleece-downs. Today, part and parcel with the airport experience are masks—a fixture unlikely to disappear anytime soon. After all, what more potent vector of viral transmission is there than a flying, pressurized tube packed full of people?

In LA, a new city ordinance declares that in order to lift a mask mandate, the city must witness 3 weeks of low transmission (defined as less than 50 new weekly cases per 100,000 residents) and fewer than 600 Covid-19 hospitalizations per day, an 80% vaccination rate, and the appearance of no new variants. For indoor events with fewer than 1,000 people, a mask mandate is unnecessary only when 100% of the crowd is vaccinated.

Across the entire US, very, very few counties meet these qualifications at present which the CDC defines as low or moderate transmission zones. In other words, in LA County, masks aren't going anywhere anytime soon. The county supervisor even indicated as much, saying, "I think we're kind of getting used to wearing these masks and even feeling safer. We can disagree — some people hate it — but it just seems like not such a big deal when we still need to be protected."

HEADLINES

• Inflation Surges in October, Surpassing 31-Year High (NRO)
• Kyle Rittenhouse testifies at his murder trial (CBS)

THINGS TO DO

🖼 Medieval Bologna: Art for a Universal City opened at the Frist on Friday. It's the first museum exhibition in the United States to focus on medieval art made in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Home to the oldest university in Europe, Bologna fostered a unique artistic culture at the end of the Middle Ages (Info)

Tonight
🎤 Fisk Jubilee Singers @ Ryman, 7:30p, Info
🎸 Jake Shimabukuro @ 3rd & Lindsley, 8p, $35, Info

Around the Web

❁ Emily Ratajkowski’s empty feminism There's nothing empowering about fellating lollipops

► Laughter in the Time of Cholera Political instability, popular unrest, and an impending pandemic? Welcome to France in the early 1830s.

✘ Does Sustainable Investing Really Help the Environment? Tariq Fancy, formerly the sustainable-investing chief at BlackRock, argues that the investment sector is doing more good for Wall Street than it is for the planet

Words of Wisdom

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

Heraclitus