Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Once they can claim this in actual patients instead of a lab glass, then we can start talking about it being a game-changer.

 

we'll see

March 23, 1989: Cold Fusion Gets Cold Shoulder

 

The company seems legit, but I wonder why they released it exclusively for Fox News and a corporate spokesman is not returning calls to other outlets as of 3 pm.

 

Around 14 %.

 

I always remember the episode where Beaver gets invited to a girl's birthday party and accepts. Then he goes around school, finds out his friends aren't invited, and that he's the only boy invited. Ward and June insist that he already promised to go, so he has to go. Then they find out from one of Beaver's friends that he's the only boy invited, and they feel lousy about forcing him to go.

Then Beaver's at the party, bored, when the girl's father sees him, and invites him into another room, where he has ... a gun collection. Beaver enjoys his time talking guns with the dad, and, when he gets back home, tells the apologetic parents that he had a great time.

Imagine an episode like that in today's political world.

 

Funny how we haven't heard a peep about hydroxycholorquine from Trumpists in the last few weeks or so.

 

Jerry-atric talked three posts before mine about going to an NFL game.

 

I said I would not go to an NFL game.

 

Here's where having Trump as prez hurts us: The schools.

The schools should have probably reopened in some places, or, perhaps not closed. But, all in all, we could live with the last two months, more or less. Teachers hated it. Students were disengaged. Parents, not sure how they did it, but it seems to have been a survival there nationwide. Next fall? Next fall should be a no-brainer. We need in-person school in as many places as possible. Without a doubt. And there a lot of parts of the nation either very unsure of that or teetering about on the matter.

And if we had a calmer, more organized, less insecure, more confidently-prepared president, I don't there'd be any teetering. I think that person would have said "hey, however we have to do it, a great deal of energy needs to be put toward getting that done by fall. It needs to be a national priority and the buck will stop with me on making that happen," you'd see governors, mayors, school districts, principals, line up behind that. unless the Kawasaki thing is some widespread killer that it has not yet proven to be. You'd see most of the media do the same. There, I think, you could see a lot of factions come together, because most people, outside of the deeply-almost-unaccountably-afraid, can see the value of their kids in school. It could be something we said we did, too, if nothing else - protect the learning environment for the "future," instead of being fixated on death.

But I don't think Trump's the kind of guy who can take on the shit that invariably comes with such an initiative. Because there'd be screamers, doomy scientists, and you'd have to dial back the urge of your top scientists to do every interview on the docket, and you'd have to get some governors and mayors in gear, and it'd be tough. Especially for a guy like Trump. His biggest weakness might be his innate inability to ever be responsible for an actual failure, or, even more importantly, cover for someone else's fuckup. (Which good presidents must sometimes do.) He inspires no confidence, makes few real concrete decisions for fear of consequences traced back to him, and thus, pushes all the decision-making down the trough, again and again, further and further into our various bureaucracies where - and I mean this as sharp criticism with a dose of real empathy - there are people who are where they are, in the station they're at, because their lack of dynamic intellect or extra moral cowardice have limited them to that station, and given latitude to make bold, hard choices, will almost always opt for safe, quasi-draconian solutions that have zero trust in the people they govern and advise and are akin to send a child to her room for as long as they can get away with because mom/dad needs to think. Trump's selfish brand of leadership actually empowers those kinds of folks, who damn well know they won't get a lick of cover from Trump.

I wish we had more effective local leaders around the nation, who weren't so scared of what local (or national) media says, or Twitter says, or didn't have staffs who were, and I wish we had higher learning institutions that did a better job of framing decision-making as something more than watching out for the most vulnerable denominator, as if policy is a religious text that must have secular, virtue-signaling piety at the forefront of goals. But we don't. They need better cover from a president who won't give it to them. And so you have career superintendents and ed commissioners and public health types weighing the value of education against whether or not Vox or some other online news outlet will have a shitfit over 5 cases of coronavirus, or somebody's grandmother's brother in a nursing contact tracing back to the fifth-grader whose friend's dad works at the packing plant.

Trump could lead there. In theory. But he can't. He wouldn't, but, beyond that, he lacks the ability.

 

This is going to sound very crass, and I apologize, but the political risk for the decision-makers about schools of one or two dead kids is greater than that of the epidemic ravaging five nursing homes.

 

A lot of investor message boards are calling it a ploy to simply bump the stock price, which did happen the last time I looked.

 

Plus there's the whole GOP angle of hating the Department of Education and wanting to turn control of schools over to the locals.