Did I go out over the weekend to see the comet? Of course I did! My brother and I went out Friday night to a dark spot near Palomar Mountain, and we were lucky that the sky was exceptionally clear and still. A little after 9:00 we stopped to get our bearings and to check on whether we could see anything—and we could, though only barely. Here’s a full-frame picture that’s pretty close to what you can see with your naked eye. Neowise is at the bottom center:

I amped up the contrast a little bit to make Neowise more visible in the picture. In real life, I could make it out if I turned by head left and right slowly, but if I just looked straight at it I couldn’t really see anything. My brother brought a pair of binoculars, and those made Neowise clearly visible.

Having done that, I kept driving into darker territory and took a better picture at about a quarter to ten:

This is cropped, and with a longer exposure time than the first picture. I also fiddled with the contrast in Photoshop a bit more. In any case, Neowise is very clearly visible, and you can get a sense of its size by comparing it to the telephone poles.

So that’s that. I’ve now seen a comet and I can cross it off my bucket list.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 19. As usual, weekend activity was low.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

After I took all the pictures for Friday’s cat blogging, Stripey jumped into our apricot tree. When I came over, he wanted to attack my camera. Thwap, thwap, thwap. Bad camera! So here is Stripey, thwapping my camera.

Meg Mclaughlin/Dispatch Argus via ZUMA

I’m a writer. Words are all I have to express myself. So what do you do when words literally fail you?

Trump administration pushing to block new money for testing, tracing and CDC in upcoming coronavirus relief bill

The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.

….One person involved in the talks said Senate Republicans were seeking to allocate $25 billion for states to conduct testing and contact tracing, but that certain administration officials want to zero out the testing and tracing money entirely….Trump and other White House officials have been pushing for states to own more of the responsibility for testing and have objected to creating national standards, at times seeking to minimize the federal government’s role.

This is . . . what? Insanity? At a time when cases are rising, deaths are rising, and people are waiting up to a week to get testing results back, it flatly makes no sense. I can’t even think of anything to say about this. It’s beyond words.

POSTSCRIPT: Does this have something to do with Trump’s apparent belief that if we don’t test, we’ll have fewer cases? Are White House aides not even willing or able to push back against craziness of this magnitude anymore?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 18. The US mortality rate continues to creep upward.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

A headline in the Washington Post today is stark:

Black people — many of them immigrants — make up less than 2 percent of Maine’s population but almost a quarter of its coronavirus cases

We’ve seen the same thing throughout the country, so this is not too surprising. But this is:

Two of the state’s 115 coronavirus deaths have been among black Mainers, who health officials said tend to be younger and less likely to exhibit symptoms of the virus’s disease, covid-19….The most recent state data show that at least 836 of more than 3,600 Mainers who have had the coronavirus are black.

Two deaths out of 836 cases? That’s a case fatality rate just barely over 0.2 percent. That’s 20x lower than the 4 percent rate for both the rest of Maine and the United States as a whole. Is this solely because Maine’s mostly immigrant black population is that much younger than Maine’s white and Hispanic population?

Whatever it is, it sure begs for an explanation.

This post has been revised.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 17. No changes since the day before.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Blogging has been slow for the past few days because my mother is now home from the hospital and I have taken up a second career as an eldercare nurse in training. This mostly means running around between doctors, making sure mom eats, and bullying her into doing some physical therapy. And to be honest, judging from my quick glances at the news, I don’t think I’ve missed much aside from the usual Trump idiocies.

This does leave me with little bits of free time here and there, which I’ve naturally spent taking pictures of the cats. And since I’m dedicated to bringing you the finest in cat blogging, here they are. First up are the two kittens, Stripey and Blackie, curled up together in the backyard:

This is Luna. She is a shy cat, and you can see that she is eyeing me dubiously from on top of the wall:

Here is his majesty Tillamook, master of the household and not to be trifled with:

And her majesty Meowser, who is constantly trifled with by her children:

Here are Meowser and Stripey gazing forward to their glorious feline future:

This is the mysterious white cat with the beautiful blue eyes. This is not actually one of my mother’s cats, but it pops by now and again to raid the food bowl:

And this is Blackie, looking ever so serious amidst all the potted plants:

Kevin Drum

Over at National Review, David Harsanyi points out that the federal government probably doesn’t have the authority to force everyone in the country to wear masks. Fair enough. But then he goes further:

Mask wearing has become just another stupid front in our partisan war. The fact is that whenever Donald Trump fails to engage the federal government in ways that Democrats demand, they claim he is negligent; and whenever he uses the federal government in ways they oppose, they rediscover the Tenth Amendment and accuse him of being a dictator. Trump could no more declare a no-mask mandate than Biden could force the entire country to wear masks. It’s all just political theater.

No, no, no. Maybe Trump can’t mandate mask wearing, but this is the farthest thing in the world from political theater. It might be the most important thing in the country right now, and Trump’s bully pulpit is, by far, the most effective way of promoting it. He’s the one who made this into a culture war issue, and he’s the one who can stop it. If Trump declared that masks were important, Fox News would follow along, talk radio would follow along, and red-state governors would start putting in place mask mandates at the local level. On a personal level, the people who are refusing to wear masks are precisely the people who would be most swayed by hearing from Trump himself that mask wearing is important.

If Trump did this, thousands of lives would be saved. That’s no political theater.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 16. We’re still puttering around at 2 deaths per million.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.