I mostly lurk here, but I think this might be a good place to get help with a question. Here in Arizona, one of the three benchmarks for re-opening schools, businesses, gyms, etc. is the percent of positive tests. It is often reported that a high percentage (above 5% is the benchmark in AZ) shows that there isn’t enough testing available and that the virus is not under control. I could understand the purpose of this benchmark if the state were either a) testing everyone they could get their hands on and/or b) testing a random sample in a community, not just people who self-select to test.

In Arizona, there is surely not a lack of available testing. That may have been true six weeks ago, but not now. This is widely reported (not enough people showing up for tests), but I’ll share my own anecdote.

What is the COVID response endgame in your state? Does anybody know? Ricochetti have discussed at length the issue of the moving goalposts since the implementation of a two-week curve-flattening. But where are we now?

The politics of the matter are increasingly detached from the relative effectiveness of past and present official actions and policies and especially detached from the actual state of the pandemic. So now, under what circumstances can officials foster an impression of success, take credit for it and stop saving us?

About twenty years ago my wife and I went on vacation in the Caribbean – St. Thomas, I think. We were traveling on a budget. Our ‘resort’ had a tennis court covered in a few inches of mud, a dining room which had been closed for years because the roof had fallen in, we had cockroaches in our room, and I had to repair our toilet myself. But the swim-up bar was functional, so we were happy. It was cheap, so at that point in our lives, everything was fine from our perspective.

One afternoon, we saw a paper stapled to the bulletin board advertising ‘Calypso Night,’ with steel drums and rum drinks, right on the beach. Sounded fun, we thought. After all, neither of us had ever experienced a Calypso night. The Caribbean was such fun! So we went to the beach that night, and there was this chubby older black guy with a steel drum and a small boom box. He would play a tape of Caribbean music on his boom box, and accompany it on his steel drum. It sounded really good. And the more rum I drank, the better it sounded.

He left the case to his drum open, and we tourists would tip him from time to time. The more we drank, the better he sounded, the more we tipped. I had been working too much and I really needed to get away from medicine for a while. And for a few hours, I really felt like I was somewhere other than a hospital or a doctor’s office. It was exotic, new, and exciting. I had a wonderful time.

I was thinking about where the country seems to be going on my morning run when I stopped and took a picture of a road sign at the end of a long bridge. The dew-bejeweled spider web that had been carefully crafted beneath the sign seemed apropos for a metaphor about American politics.

School districts across the country are facing an exodus of students to private schools opening for in-person learning and homeschooling. Corey DeAngelis, the Director of School Choice for the Reason Foundation, has been following the data and it doesn’t look good for public schools. Over the weekend he reported that homeschool filings are up 129% from last year in Loudoun County in Virginia and 128% in the state of Wisconsin. This exodus in students is also an exodus in dollars for a lot of school districts that have their funding directly tied to their enrollment numbers (which is why I suggested pulling out of public schools as a protest if you didn’t like their reopening plan for the Washington Examiner). A little too late in the game, public schools are realizing that their captive audience isn’t so captive when they don’t, you know, actually teach.

Falls Church City Public Schools:

Sir Isaac Newton “stood on the shoulders of giants” so that he could see farther and increase his and mankind’s knowledge of the world. Today’s Left stands on the shoulders of giants so that they can sneer at them. But they can only sneer from the perch created by the giants – from the heights of the visions and ideals that evolved under the aegis of Western Civilization.

For what sins does the Left condemn Western Civilization?

Note: I’m going through old drafts, trying to clean them up. Here’s one. It doesn’t look worthless enough to pitch, nor bad enough to say, “I think I’ll save this one, and clean it up sometime in the future”. I’ll just mash the Publish button, and have one less box of stuff in my Ricochet basement.

To be honest, I’m afraid that I’ve actually published it at some point. I don’t care. It’s not staying in the basement.

This is a “hot take” from scanning my Facebook newsfeed: We are headed for serious meltdown nationally. I don’t know how this plays out but the nation is experiencing different realities. This isn’t the normal “everybody sees what they want to see” fracturing of reality. That is normal. It’s what fuels everyday life. What I am talking about is the aggregation of shared realities into roughly two different and conflicting camps. The type that sees one reality as “true” and the other as “false” with severe consequences for the triumph of one reality over the other.

For as long as polling has been around, it has been a technique for measuring how many contending realities there are and which realities were ascendant. “Push polling” was a technique developed to nudge realities in one direction or the other. Social media is a persistent and constant push poll for conflicting realities. Depending on which social media you choose and the “friends” you accept, that is the reality you will see and be “pushed” into. I happen to have a lot of “friends” on my Facebook account who are connected via a specific hobby. That hobby attracts people from across the political spectrum. So when they post or “share” political content rather than hobby content it reveals the chasm between the contending realities.

Nasiim Taleb’s book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, defines the following words:

• Fragile: A thing or system that breaks under stress.
• Robust: A thing or system that bears stress but does not break.
• Antifragile: A thing or system that not only survives stress but is strengthened by it.

We’re all familiar with objects that are fragile and robust, but “antifragile” is a new word that Taleb coined. Perhaps the best example of an antifragile system is the human body. Stress its muscles and they get stronger. “Feed” its immune system with small doses of bacteria and allergens and it also grows stronger. Put the human brain under stress, and the person to which it’s attached becomes more resilient.

Conservatives love higher education. The whole point of conservatism is to attempt to give all American citizens equal opportunities. So affordable higher education is important. And Republicans like the economy to grow. And if you understand the value of engineers, doctors, computer programmers, and so on, a good way to get more of those is to subsidize their education. So subsidizing higher education makes sense, from a conservative point of view. It grows the economy while helping young people of modest backgrounds improve their lives. For a conservative, that’s a win-win.

Until you stop choosing the smartest and hardest working college applicants, and start selecting students based on other criteria, like skin color or 40-yard dash time. And then, of course, most of the students who aren’t capable of majoring in chemical engineering start majoring in Psychology or something. And things continue to deteriorate over the years, so now they have to invent new areas of study for this ever-growing influx of “students” who wouldn’t even have been in college a few decades ago. So pretty soon half the college is majoring in Petty Jealousy Studies (PJS).

And then the chemical engineering majors start to wonder why they’re studying 80 hours a week to try (and often fail) to keep a “B” average, while they lose out on all the academic awards to PJS majors with 4-points. So more and more STEM majors switch to various grievance studies departments, and understandably so. So now, a large majority of the college is engaged in activity which is far, far removed from the original goals of the university.

If the Senate GOP’s belated investigations into the Russiagate abuse of power are to be useful, they might want to shift gears and instead focus on who revealed what to which reporters. Reporters should not be expected to reveal sources but there is no bar against compelling a source to reveal to whom and what he or she divulged to reporters.

The staffs of the Washington Post and New York Times shared the 2017 Pulitzer of National reporting for their coverage of the bogus Russian interference/conspiracy charges leveled against Trump. They produced multiple stories that collectively contained not the slightest indication that this attack was done entirely in bad faith by the very people they likely relied upon as their principal sources.