Routine Revelations

The President of the United States is the chief administrator of the U.S. Government, as established by the U.S. Constitution. Trump may be right in that he was given a set of circumstances but he, as chief administrator of the U.S. Federal government is responsible for how the Federal government reacted and continues to react to those circumstances.

And when time comes for Trump to face election and whoever runs against him raises his actions in response to this crisis as measure of why he should not be elected, NOBODY, whether Republican or Democrat should cry foul on that issue being raised!

Michigan coronavirus cases now stand at 65.

So the U.S. government might send all of us a check that we will need to cash to use. Does anyone not see the problem with this scenario?

I think the hygiene recommendations in the last slide shown on this page does a good job of clarifying when you should wash your hands. When someone hears “wash your hands” I think they tend to think “after I use the restroom” but really it’s “wash your hands more!” How many of us wash/sanitize their hands immediately after getting their credit card back after it is given to a cashier? That’s what we are talking about.

Wash your hands more!

Republican hubris

Aren’t Coronavirus tests point in time tests? If I am tested today and found negative, can’t you test me next week and find me positive? Seems we not only need to start testing but to keep testing, over and over again.

One addition I would make to the notes Dave wrote here is that Trump and his entire administration must be held accountable to the consequences of their decisions that caused the slow and ineffective response that resulted in loss of life and damage to the economy. The Republicans will do everything and say everything to make sure Trump is not to blame. Only one Republican, Mitt Romney, appears willing to do what is right for the country rather than what is only right for themselves.

Also, note, the problem here isn’t really with Trump, it’s with the people in the Republican party who enabled Trump to win their primary and be elected. Unless Republicans, starting with Republican Senators, start to publicly stand up against Trump and LEAD, they should all be held accountable. It’s time for Republicans to decided whether or not they are true Americans and true patriots. I so wish John McCain were still alive!

I am really curious to see what conclusions might be drawn by all the video conferencing being used for teaching during the pandemic. A bit potential problem is the digital disparity between affluent and impoverished communities.

Forget the TP, I need more hand cream due to all this washing of the hands.

Kottke.org, The Power of the Individual in an Exponential Crisis

The difference is stark. If you act today, you will have averted four times as many infections in the next month: roughly 2,400 averted infections, versus just 600 if you wait one week. That’s the power of averting just one infection, and obviously we would like to avert more than one.

At times I think to myself, maybe now Presidenial elections in the United States will stop being a popularity contest and start becoming a job interview. But then I recall how we thought things would change after 9/11 only for all the lessons to become soon forgotten months afterward.

Michigan is up to 53 positive cases as of 9 AM 3/16. 14 in Oakland County, who hasn’t updated their site listings in a while. Bars and restaurants are closing in Michigan. Now I expect to really starting seeing the complaints on my Facebook feed.

And when state governments start closing down the bars and restaurants, I wonder how people are going to react.

I’ve created a page of links to information about the response to COVID-19, starting selfishly with locations closest to where I live.

Does this ring true right now? It’s a consequence of being intentionally divided.

“In one study, Dominic Abrams and his colleagues divided groups of participants into smaller groups based on trivial categories (e.g., groups based on numbers that were randomly assigned to them). Then participants were asked to complete a difficult perceptual task while receiving helpful information from members of either their ingroup or outgroup. They found that participants did not rely on input from outgroup members even when it would have been useful for them to do so. Instead, they toiled on alone. Abrams and colleagues wrote, “[ Participants] resisted information purely on the basis that it was derived from a category of person to which they did not belong.”” (Emphasis added)

— Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart by Christena Cleveland a.co/55Fi0yS

Panic shopping

“You don’t have to have scriptural or religious teaching. It’s just the truth: You can’t survive on your own. If you say you are going to be totally selfish, in next to no time the person who is totally selfish goes under. You need other people in order to be human. That’s why when they want to punish you they put you in solitary confinement. Because you can’t flourish without other human beings. They give you things that you cannot give yourself, no matter how much money you have. And so we speak of Ubuntu. A person is a person through other persons. And there must have been some people who said, ‘Ah, what a primitive way of thinking.’ It’s the most fundamental law of our being. We flout that—we flout it at our peril.”

— The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World by Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, et al. a.co/ev9u1va

What we ought to learn from what we are now experiencing is how truly interconnected we all are. It is foolish to think what occurs on the other side of the globe cannot affect us. We are all together on this rock hurling through space and we can thrive together or die together and never truly apart.

Farmington Hills teacher tests positive for COVID-19 It is getting closer to us.