03-04-2021, 01:20 PM
We did pass Fresno, America's 34th-largest city. Death totals are starting to abate as new cases diminish. This said, it is still too early to relax the needful preventive measures. The inoculations are finally reaching more people, but the other plague (human stupidity) isn't.
I have been slowing on reporting cities that the death toll progresses because the cities are thinning out. Tucson, the 33th-largest city in the US, has about 16,500 people more than Fresno and would be reached in about four days at recent days of peak death. America has 314 defined cities in its 50 states and DC, five such cities in Puerto Rico, and eight census-designated places with more than 100,000. 16,500 people is roughly the difference between 314th (Bend, Oregon) and 244th (Clearwater, Florida) at the 'low end'.
(I was wrong when I said that Arlington, Texas was America's largest suburb. Mesa, Arizona is... and is much bigger than Arlington).
28 cities used to be over 100,000 and either have been absorbed into another city (Brooklyn into New York City; Allegheny into Pittsburgh), Niagara Falls is now the smallest such city; Youngstown has taken the biggest percentage and numerical fall from its height: Gary, Indiana (hint: Rush Limbaugh has made it to such a place): Flint, Michigan; and Youngstown, Ohio have all lost over 100,000 people mostly due to economic distress.
If this is a grisly comparison, then so be it. That people sanitize death bugs the Hell out of me. I can understand devout people using such terminology as "was taken to Jesus". I do not see violent death (which includes deaths in vehicle crashes, building collapses, and being killed in action in war) as "passing away". The worst, of course, was Josef Stalin saying that one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic. We are halfway to Stalin's "statistic".
Do you know what is really grisly? COVID-19!
I have been slowing on reporting cities that the death toll progresses because the cities are thinning out. Tucson, the 33th-largest city in the US, has about 16,500 people more than Fresno and would be reached in about four days at recent days of peak death. America has 314 defined cities in its 50 states and DC, five such cities in Puerto Rico, and eight census-designated places with more than 100,000. 16,500 people is roughly the difference between 314th (Bend, Oregon) and 244th (Clearwater, Florida) at the 'low end'.
(I was wrong when I said that Arlington, Texas was America's largest suburb. Mesa, Arizona is... and is much bigger than Arlington).
28 cities used to be over 100,000 and either have been absorbed into another city (Brooklyn into New York City; Allegheny into Pittsburgh), Niagara Falls is now the smallest such city; Youngstown has taken the biggest percentage and numerical fall from its height: Gary, Indiana (hint: Rush Limbaugh has made it to such a place): Flint, Michigan; and Youngstown, Ohio have all lost over 100,000 people mostly due to economic distress.
If this is a grisly comparison, then so be it. That people sanitize death bugs the Hell out of me. I can understand devout people using such terminology as "was taken to Jesus". I do not see violent death (which includes deaths in vehicle crashes, building collapses, and being killed in action in war) as "passing away". The worst, of course, was Josef Stalin saying that one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic. We are halfway to Stalin's "statistic".
Do you know what is really grisly? COVID-19!
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.