Comin' 'Round to Lovin' It
Comin' 'Round to Lovin' It - 23 short stories out of 99 billion served
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RIP RBG
Everyone is piping in about this particular political excitement, so I'll add my two cents.
First, she was a great person, and it's sad to wait until her death before everyone says it. She was a champion of the good things - women's rights, equality, dignity and freedom. We will miss her.
Second, Republicans already showed their hand when they illegally stalled the nomination of Merrick Garland for nine months back at the end of the Obama administration. "Wait until the people weigh in," they all said, and the people voted with over a million plurality to put Hillary in there, but Trump won the Electoral College. If you wanted the people's will, you should have just followed the law, done your job, and approved Garland. I think Democrats rightly will never forget that hijacking of the Constitution and of the people's rights. This nomination would not be a problem if it could just be done fairly, but the last one makes this one much more prominent. Now, it's a month before the election. Now, the Republicans are going to lose in a landslide. Now, all there is for it, is for Dems to enlarge the Supreme Court after the election, to eliminate the majority conservative bent. And that they will almost certainly do; who can blame them?
What is surprising is that it seems so likely that Dems will flip the Senate too. People are sick of this crooked, corrupt administration and all its enablers, and rightly so. People it seems to me just want Trump out of there, but they're willing to throw a whole host of his enablers out with him. I hope they all take a bath: Joni Ernst, Cory Gardner, the whole lot of them. They have blood on their hands.
The fact that the hurricanes have run through the entire alphabet, now I hope that doesn't go unnoticed either. The problem is that if the earth goes, we all go. And that may be bigger than covid in the end, bigger than the Supreme Court or any of the fallout from the rapes and the crooked shenanigans. If we don't get a handle on climate control, we're doomed. And the different countries of the earth have to work together to do it; there is no longer any question.
I've always been one to see the earth having its own agency. It can see that if we don't get Trump out of there, it's doomed. It can see this is its last chance. It knows to shake things up, to blow some holes in the Arctic, to run an alphabet of hurricanes up into the Gulf. It's doing what it has to do. We all have to survive on this earth, and we need this earth to survive. That I think is our first priority. Vote the weasel out of there. Get the human race back into balance.
covid comes to college
I am especially interested in how colleges and universities handle the likelihood that a hundred or thousand of their students come back with a deadly disease. I can't say I'm an expert, but I knew it was a huge mess from the start. There are a lot of complicating factors, not the least of which is that colleges and universities have to survive too.
Starting at the beginning, the obvious first step is testing everyone on their arrival and knowing exactly who is carrying it from the start. Some I believe are not even doing that. I guess they figure what happens, happens. Well, it'll happen, I guarantee that. But it seems to me that if you know they are infected upon their arrival, you can at least tell them and hold them responsible for staying in their room for two weeks or whatever.
Second is making it possible for those who value the safety of their parents, family and loved ones to still get an education of some kind. It is well known that online is not as fun as in-person. Significant numbers of people demand in-person regardless of the possibility of infection. But those who value their lives and those of their parents, over the long haul, are going to need to withdraw from some of these in-person activities. Such things as band, football, etc. will simply have fewer people as the ones who value their continued existence go in other directions. All classes should be encouraged to be online or at least make it possible for people online, at least for the fall semseter, so that those who want to survive can still carry on. Make routes to stall such things as labs and hands-on components, so that they can do them later. This won't last forever though it might last through the winter.
And meanwhile what we will see is huge spikes in infection in the college towns. No big surprise. You close the bars, and they have house parties. It may be that college students, being young and in great shape and all, will have less than the 1% death rate that the rest of us have. It may be that their parents have slightly more, having raised teenagers and all. But there will be a toll, and the real question is how responsible the college is for what happened. They are, after all, responsible for the minors in their charge.
One of my alma maters, University of Iowa, is sitting in the worst town in the world at the moment. That could be because after 30,000 students came back they found over a thousand positives. In some states like Iowa over 3% are infected already and it's going to be slightly higher for students than for others because they're younger and they get around more. We are lucky that the predominant strain these days, though more infectious, is actually less deadly than what we started out with (I read that somewhere, can't remember where, not sure about its accuracy). But I can practically see these 30,000 crowding the streets infecting the rest of the town as they buy their supplies, go drinking, fix a flat tire, whatever. It's not good for the town. It's everyone for themselves and it's a jungle out there.
Another school I'm associated with is University of Kansas, where my daughter works. They reopened and brought about 30,000 back, and got quite a few cases. At least they tested them the minute they got there. A minority of students want them to close down. The school of course wants to lock in tuition and just get through the semester. They have warnings out: they want students to social distance. HA HA. They want them to not drink too. Especially not, whole bottles of whiskey in one gulp.
What is a solution for a school like this? Or like Alabama, over a thousand cases? You are in a state where it's already run rampant. You know one out of a hundred, roughly, will die. But you have to carry on because school is an experience where your community goes through things together.
That last part is key. You have online classes, and presumably online activities. You have to develop online social experiences too, and some kind of social interaction that can glide you through isolation. I have a son who enrolled in New Mexico State, a fairly typical university. Everyone came back to Las Cruces; hundreds of cases, not even sure how many. He chose to stay home and they let him take all online classes. Now he's depressed (understandably) because college is social experience and he's losing out. How can we get him through the fall? I'm not sure but I want him to still be alive in January, so that, if he goes to college, he has a chance. But it's important to me that
I stay alive too, and his mother, so that we can continue raising his brother and sisters. He's still part of this family. He will still come back holidays even if he moves away for a while. We as a family need to ensure our own survival.
And that's why I think the college did the right thing to at least act to ensure his own survival. To some degree, spreading infectious disease is like drinking too much whiskey - you can't stop people from doing it. Life has to adjust so that people who are determined to get out there, can, and the rest of us can go on living. I read about people who are determined to not be afraid, to get out there, to run around; let them. I think we should concentrate on sustainable ways of surviving, so that when the dust clears, we'll know how to educate our kids without killing them.
Reject Trump's Race War
It was Kellyanne Conway (sp?) who put it best. Stirring things up will help our campaign, she said. If Trump can get Black Lives Matter angry, and then get them violent, and then get the white supremacists in there, and get
them violent, he'll win.
Sounds like a good strategy? No. While it's true that the Repubs have always been more into "Law and Order," and people fear the disorder brought on by the Dems, supposedly, it's Trump that's causing disorder here. We in the nation don't want disorder. We are fine with getting along with each other, if he'll just keep the federal troops out of the cities, and mind his own business.
He has the power of the federal government to start riots, start trouble, start people killing each other. If they start, and he can back off and not appear to have caused it, he can at least appear to deal with it strongly.
But I don't think we'll fall for it. For one thing, we're not in the mood for a race war. For another, we're tired even of the
divisions he's stoked, so we're not really in the mood for
any war. And finally, the darn virus has got us all cowed. But we're in the mood to help each other, not just go out and throw bricks.
He tries to look strong, like the granite on Mt. Rushmore. That's not going to work either. Even if his people vote twice, they still won't have enough.
