Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 33. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 02m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1903, the Wright brothers make the first controlled powered, heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Jim Swift writes The Show-Me State Decides to Hide COVID Numbers (‘A state AG runs in a MAGA primary, and suddenly some Missouri counties stop collecting COVID data’):
On its flag, Missouri quotes Voltaire: Salus populi suprema lex esto, which, roughly translated, means let the welfare of the people be the highest law.
Those two tenets of what it means to be a Missourian are sort of in conflict these days, as the state competes with other red states to demonstrate how conservative they are, even if it kills people.
Incumbent Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a U.S. Senate hopeful, is using his office (as Josh Hawley did before him) to climb up the political ladder. But what Schmitt is doing will almost certainly result in people dying:
Following a ruling by a Cole County Circuit Court last week, Schmitt, a Republican running for U.S. Senate in Missouri, said the ruling determined mask mandates, quarantines and other public health orders are illegal.
He then sent letters to dozens of county health departments and school districts. The letters demanded that districts drop any mask mandates and other COVID-19 related protocols. Schmitt also warned of legal action if they ignored his requests.
….
As part of compliance with Schmitt’s letter, the local public health agencies in the above counties will stop “case investigation, contact tracing, quarantine orders, and public announcements of current cases/deaths, etc.”
Which means that we may well see case numbers in Missouri dropping—not because fewer people are infected with COVID, but because Eric Schmitt’s political ambitions are causing local governments to stop counting COVID infections as a way of bowing to his MAGA bona fides.
This abject refusal to acknowledge reality would be pathetic, if it weren’t so dangerous.
(Emphasis added.)
Missouri: where data are unlawful. The corrupt concept: if there’s no record of a problem, then there’s no problem.
(Another avenue for deceit would be to impair the accurate collection of data, so that any information still presented would be a mere shadow of the truth.)
Lies of omission are still lies.
Once a politician, appointed official, or institution adopts a practice of concealment, there’s no way back. One self-serving lie begs for companions…