Back To School

Sending children to rot for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week in a cesspool of pus is an incredibly stupid idea that I would not allow any child of mine to participate in (no matter how much they wanted to hang with their friends) and would sue to prevent should the District get insistent. See you in Court Assholes.

Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio likes it because he’s a moron and probably figures you can just hire a ringer like he did Joe Shapiro (I need… A… Jew!) for his SATs. UPenn has a new Lori Loughlin rule by the way and can yank your degree for cheating.

Because he is so dumb he seems to also think that by taking the Rug Rats out of the house people will go back to their 2 or 3 Minimum Wage jobs for exploitation by his Oligarch buddies, the Economy will come roaring back (or at least the Market), and everyone will forget the 200,000 Deaths (easily exceeded by November) and 100,000 New Cases a Day.

He might be right. U.S. Citizens are exceptionally unintelligent (“gullible” is not in the Dictionary, look it up). Think of someone you consider to have “Average” intelligence. You’re probably underestimating them, but at least half of the people are more brainless than that.

Scares the crap out of me.

Trump World on Reopening Schools During COVID: Astronauts Take Risks, Too
Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng, Daily Beast
Jul. 07, 2020

On a call with the nation’s governors Tuesday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos chastised local officials for doing “next to nothing” to provide academic services to students and demanded they reopen schools in the fall regardless of the state of the COVID pandemic.

The issue, DeVos stressed at one point, was merely a matter of calculated risk, nothing all that different from those taken by an astronaut heading into space.

“Education leaders really do need to examine real data and weigh risk,” DeVos said. “They already deal with risk on a daily basis. We know that risk is embedded in everything we do. Learning to ride a bike, to the risk of getting in a space capsule and getting shot off in a rocket into space.”

The remarks by DeVos were part of a larger push on Tuesday by top Trump officials to make the case for school reopenings amid growing health concerns by doctors, scientists and state and local officials. But they also resembled something larger about the president’s approach to a virus that has crippled the country and, in turn, his presidency. Months into the pandemic, the administration has settled into a phase of acceptance even as the coronavirus continues to infect thousands of people each day and overwhelm hospitals in the south and southwestern parts of the country.

It’s been six months since the pandemic first began, with more than 3 million people contracting the virus and an estimated 133,000 people having died from it. In that time, officials and advisers working with President Trump’s coronavirus teams say the administration’s response approach has changed drastically, especially in the last several months.

Trump has privately griped that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious-disease expert, is “very good at scaring people,” according to a source with direct knowledge. And on Tuesday, he made it clear that he harbored no internal debate about the virtue of getting school’s reopened in the midst of a pandemic.

“Now it’s time to be open. Now it’s time to stay open,” the president declared at a separate event on Tuesday geared around schools. “We’re not closing. We’ll never close.”

President Trump has consistently pushed the message that testing is bad for optics—that simply stopping it would result in fewer actual cases. And on Tuesday’s governors call, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told governors that when it came to reopening schools, testing was “not necessary” and said it was a “tool” that states could use to keep students safe if they do choose to allow them back into the classroom this fall.

The emphasis on learning to live with COVID—and downplaying testing concerns along the way there—is a messaging push that, three administration officials told The Daily Beast, had been in the works for weeks. One of those officials insisted it was not fueled by a sense of despair or “defeatism,” but rather by a belief in “American resilience” in the face of great death and tragedy.

But for public health experts, the push has an obvious flaw, one already exhibited during the past half year: opening too quickly is part of what led to new outbreaks.

“We very clearly predicted that if you were cautious and slow you were going to do better. In hindsight, our prediction was true,” said Dr. David Rubin, the director of PolicyLab, a group of doctors and scientists from Pennsylvania that brief the White House’s coronavirus task force on data modeling.

“We’re in limbo right now,” Rubin said. “Everything was predicated on getting our counts down. And there is a sense of like, ‘ok, what do we do now?’ We haven’t really thought about what if there is an epidemic that happens in August. That hasn’t been part of the conversations.”

Through it all, Trump has largely lost patience, regularly complaining that public-health professionals who contradict or complicate his declarations of victories and alleged economic rebirth are causing undue panic. In an interview with Axios last month, he said the country had to “get back to business.” And on the Fourth of July, he falsely stated during a speech that 99 percent of all coronavirus cases are “totally harmless.” Pence, too, has focused some of his latest remarks emphasizing economic considerations over public health ones. In the call with the governor’s Tuesday, the vice president noted that he’d recently read a report by the Council of Economic Advisors—a group of economists who advise the president—that said if every school closed it would cost the U.S. economy tens of billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, the Trump-Pence re-election campaign seems to think the rush to reopen schools during an ongoing pandemic will make for some good electoral politics.

“President Trump understands education is the single greatest equalizer in our society and that we need to get children back into the classroom so they do not fall behind and parents can return to work,” Trump 2020 spokeswoman Samantha Zager said in a statement to The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “Joe Biden puts his loyalty to the teachers union ahead of the well-being of students and families in America.”

Space flight is not “safe”. Ask the crew of Apollo 1, STS 51L, or STS 107. Oh wait. They’re dead.