The messaging around Covid is wrong.

I read this article about the Covid messaging, and, yeah, Our messaging is totally flawed. 

https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/26/covid-19-messaging-is-wrong-americans-arent-listening/

But here's the funny thing: as I look back to March, when we first got sent home in order to "flatten the curve," the rational part of my brain knew this was just to get us on the right path. It wasn't the final answer, and there was still work to do. 

But the emotional part, that feeds on stories, news, and my own desires to go about my life saw it differently. Sure, we'd still have things in place, but we'll come up with better methods for testing and tracing and be able to balance. 

And as I look back, I realize that the emotional part was a little wishful - at least in part because of the messages we were getting. 

My rational brain kept telling me that we were in this for the long haul. And people are inherently selfish and stupid. And there was nothing whatsoever being done to effectively manage the spread. 

And I can see why people don't get the science part. It's an unseen "enemy" and their odds are generally good. And there's no sensational story here. No villain to hate. So it's easy to go with the emotional idea. Reopen the economy! It's a hoax anyway!

But I keep going back to the realization that a plane disappears with 150 people on board and it's a mystery that captures everyone around the world. Around 4,000 people died on 9/11. And we changed security and people were okay with it. 600,000 Americans died in WWII and we were motivated to deliver, to ration, to work toward something. 

We're at just under 200,000 dead from the virus. 10s of Millions infected. 

And we're arguing over whether we should wear a mask. 

You bet messaging is wrong. 

A follow up about religion

When my dad died a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about religion and how there is surely no merciful god.

Today, the husband of an aunt died. He had an untreatable form of cancer, and was dealing with it as best he could.

He was a good man. He gave of himself and lived his life righteously. People loved him, and sort of like my dad, people were inspired by him. 

And here's the thing. He was a man of god, and considered himself to be a good Christian.

And yet he got sick. He suffered. And he passed away.

Meanwhile, there are unhinged narcissists who live on. Without suffering.

So if you still believe in this god, then you've been duped.

This is not a merciful god. And the jokes on you.

Fuck that noise.

The GOP, Trump, and the election

Sometime in early 2017, the GOP agreed to fold its campaign role into the Trump campaign. So essentially they act as one unit. 

It makes sense in some ways, I'm sure. One go-to place to collect campaign funds and coordinate election efforts  

But, it's much deeper than that. Now, all the money, all the data collection efforts, and the mechanics of a party are controlled by the trump campaign. 

To a large degree, this explains why the GOP is so complicit with the guy:  their re-election hopes, and the ability to manage voter information and open up "the war chest" belongs to Trump. As we know, he only helps people who kiss the ring. So they are, for lack of a better way to say it, tethered to him. 

And there's a few interesting little things about this Trump campaign running things. First, and most importantly, this is what Brad Parscale setup for him. And when he left, mr-fix-it jack-of-all-trades Jared Kushner took over. They manage all of it, using whatever they feel is right, whoever they want to hire. 

So when the "tik tok kids" took on the campaign before the Tulsa rally and screwed up their data collection efforts, it not only affected Trump - it also messed with the GOP. No wonder he wants to ban tik tok. 

But therein lies the bigger problem. If their "solution" to have really bad data is to simply ban a platform, then they they don't understand the internet and ergo likely don't understand what they have. 

In recent months, we've heard rumblings that the GOP isn't happy with the opaque nature of the Trump campaign. They aren't allowed to see anything and don't know how it's running. All they know is that they are given money at times. 

Since Trump is nothing more than a common criminal but with his hands in bigger pockets, you have to figure that he's using data collection for his personal causes. And I would guess that the money is being mismanaged in any and every way possible to ensure he gets most of it, personally. 

So here comes the election. If he wins, then he controls all the efforts in perpetuity and gets wealthy. 

Assuming trump loses, do you think he'd simply give all that up? I doubt it. He'll either tell the GOP to fuck themselves or he'll sell it to them for large sums of money. 

But since no one in the gop has any real insight into what it looks like, it could be complete crap. He could be selling vapor ware. Or he may sell a package that gives them things piecemeal and He gets rich. 

So they have to know that if he loses, they are screwed. 

So why govern at all? 

...which of these outcomes better suits him? Hard to say.  He stands to get wealthy in either case - and can totally screw with his enablers on a whim if he so chooses. 

As I've said before, I don't think he ever wanted to win. And while he is not the kind of person who would simply quit, if he did, then he hasn't a different kind of outcome. 

It might be better to just exclaim that everyone is mean to him, or have a "health issue" and just quit. 

We'll see. But it makes me laugh because these dumbasses in the GOP brought most of this on themselves. 

Good analysis here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/us/trump-campaign-brad-parscale.amp.html

This Speech Will Change Your Life | Carl Sagan

Pences speech



In a way it was inevitable, school edition

I remember hearing something on NPR years ago about progress made as a society.

They posited that if you were a doctor in the 1800s and got transported to (what was then) today into a modern operating room, you'd be lost. There would be no way to understand medicine or technology. And it's that way for many professions or occupations. The advances we've made would render most people unable to do their job.

But not so for teachers. If you took a teacher out of a classroom in the 1800s and moved them to today, it would be familiar. You still interact with students, still administer tests, and so on. Sure, the materials themselves may be unfamiliar and there could be a computer in use. But by and large, they could manage.

In the time between when I heard the story and today, little more has changed.

So in the spring, we had a pandemic and classrooms were closed and students switched not-at-all seamlessly to online education. It was hit or mostly miss. But the technology allowed for it.

And now here we are 6 months later. No one gave any thought to what we do when it was school time again. No one committed effort, money, or time to the problem.

Instead many just wanted us to return to school basically as it was around February. And with no thought given to how to keep kids safe.

Surely there were things that could have been implemented...but if we use the shooting in parkland a few years ago as a test case, that seemed unlikely. The simple answers - fences and more police - don't solve anything, they just sound nice and make politicians feel good about themselves. And because you can't just put a virus fence up, there is really nothing simple they can apply. 

And given that in nearly 200 years, teaching hasn't evolved at all, really, then 6 months was never going to cut it in terms of finding practical solutions for teaching during a pandemic.

We're so stuck in doing things the same, we have no interest in funding education, and the politics of the situation (from large scale, to unions, to the school itself) mean that there's really no possible outcome *today* that's going to be good.

It's going to take a serious overall of education that perhaps starts with private enterprise (much like NASA is now letting private companies launch rockets) take on the less bureaucratic nature of enhancing, well maybe reinventing, education.

Hopefully it starts to happen soon.

We started school today and it's marginally better than it ended last school year. But this isn't the answer. And neither is going back to exactly what we had before.

Photo from Teacher Magazine

Religion

I've been giving a lot of thought to religion lately. As Karl Marx said at one point "religion is the opium of the people" because it gives some comfort in the face of difficult circumstances.

And surely he's right. People would rather rely on a higher power and look for some kind of divine intervention than have to think for themselves.

My dad passed away last week. He was a good guy. Never sought attention, fame, or glory. His own brothers-in-law had no idea he invented the things he did, because he didn't brag about it.

He constantly taught and mentored. He gave of himself. And yet he was stricken with this disease and lost the essence of what he was, and died relatively young.

Meanwhile, you have people like the orange menace in the White House who have lied, cheated, stolen, lived on vanity and sought fame, never giving back to anyone. And people like him don't suffer through things like this.

So you talk to religious folks and they talk about god working in mysterious ways, or there being some grand plan, or there's scripture that explains it.

Fuck that.

That's just noise. If that's your religion. If that's how your god works, then you are being ridiculous. There's no mercy in that. There's no thinking that god is trying to do anything good for humanity that he supposedly created. And if the Bible is to be believed, and god cast out sin with the story of Noah, then why do good people die and narcissists live on? Seems backward to me.

And then there's the second piece to my puzzle. My dad was surely not religious. He was born to a Jewish mother and never had religion growing up. Then, as an adult, he looked for a religion that worked for him. We went to a fair number of churches and he found that they were all about profit, rather that prophet.

At one point, just to prove a point, my dad became an ordained minister from some church. All it took was a few bucks and he mailed away for a certificate. No training. No religion required. If memory serves, the only thing they encouraged him to do was set up his own church ministry and contribute to them.

That was the end for him. He never again considered religion as meaningful. Now, I said that he got engaged with things because his sons did. And that's true.

When it was time for me to go to high school, my parents decided the best education for me was catholic high school. So I went there. And to save a few bucks on the tuition, we started attending sunday services and making a minimum donation to the church.

In a way, my dad went *for me* and not for himself. He never believed nor cared. And he actually never went back as I entered my senior year.

So it's an enormous joke that's being perpetrated here at the end.

You see, my mom has several fairly religious siblings. And she asked one who's a minister at an evangelical church to hold a service.

It annoys me to no end. But I suppose ultimately the joke is on him, my dad would actually laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Now I just need to think of the right words to say if I'm asked. Snarky but truthful.