I need to vent: 1. You don't need a vaccine card to go to the grocery store or "freely move about society".
2. We require licenses, proof of insurance, registration, inspection stickers, business licenses, event permits, visitor passes, etc. for any manner of venues.
3. We've required shot records for schools, some hospital wards, and we restrict visitors, enforce quarantines for international visitors, migrants and goods from other countries going back to Ellis Island.
Public health has always existed in dynamic tension with personal freedoms & the only reason that tension persists is that pandemic disease requires collective action to combat.
No-one likes it, but we do it because of what it can accomplish in the long run.
There's a fine line between "standing up for your rights" and "destructive selfishness in the face of a collective threat".
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About 120 million years ago in what would become North Texas, a herd of sauropod dinosaurs, adults with their young, wandered along a coastal river delta, leaving footprints in the wet lime sediments.
At a later time, a group of theropods or carnosaurs followed the same path.
Silts and clay filtered in and filled the tracks, hardening into two layers of limestone & shale sediments. The Paluxy River unearthed the preserved trackways about 1 million years ago.
The area is now Dinosaur Valley State Park, one of the best preserved trackways from the Cretaceous. You'll need to wade out to see some of the tracks in the Paluxy, some as big across as 3 ft (1 m).
I have a theory about the sculpture of Michelangelo I want to share. Many of his sculptures interpose various characters or aspects of a story.
Example: His statue of David depicts a shepherd boy, a haughty king, and a giant all rolled into one. The whole story in 1 figure.
Look at the scale of David: he's enormous.
Look at the expression in the eyes. Is he a youth (11-13) or a mature man? Is he smirking or humble?
Do you get a sense of pending combat, or repose?
'La Pieta' is another great example. Look at Mary's face. Is she ~65 years old? Or a new mother cradling a baby she knows is destined for death on the cross?
Is she holding a 200 lb man, or a baby in her lap, based solely on her body position?
"Magicians are the most honest people in the world; they tell you they're gonna fool you, and then they do it."
- James "The Amazing" Randi
James Randi has always appeared to me that he was born old, but here he is in his prime as an escape artist and illusionist.
Born in 1928, he literally ran away to the circus as a teenager, and began performing escape acts like this one, suspended above a city street (date and location unknown to me).
If you've ever had a flight connect at DFW airport, you may have seen this mural, depicting my beloved Caddo Lake, created by Dallas artist Arthello Beck Jr.
Beck was the first African-American to own & operate an art gallery in Texas & launched careers for many Texas artists.
He grew up in Oak Cliff in Dallas, received no formal training beyond art class at Lincoln High School. He worked as a postal worker, a driver for Dallas MHRC, but always he was at the Dallas Public Library, looking at art.
He had a speech impediment, so art was his language.
His art depicts life growing up in Jim Crow Texas (he was born in 1941), through segregation, and he believed in grassroots and Black liberation.
He opened his gallery in 1973, mostly with his own paintings, but featuring other Black artists from the area.
Look, nobody likes hearing it, but #DaveGrohl was a full-blown AIDS denialist & has never apologized for or acknowledged his support for a movement that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. medium.com/the-monthly/th…
Yes he was young and idealistic, but it's the absolute silence on the subject in the years since.
He watched the last member of the Alive and Well With AIDS denialist organization die, and a few months later, quietly removed all references to them from the Foo Fighters webpage.
They did concerts, benefits for anti-vax and AIDS denialist groups. They gave contributions. They appeared in propaganda films, telling people not to take life-saving medicine prescribed by their doctor.