Category: Politics and Government

In Denial

There are a lot of similarities between the climate change debate and our current pandemic response debate (and I found both debates similarly frustrating).
 
With climate change, one side is right; and, since we won’t know for twenty or fifty years, let us spend the intervening decades arguing over which one of us is right. Now that we’re seeing massive wildfires, hurricanes, etc … well, I’m still hearing a lot of denial and “normal climate variations”. So I guess we’ll wait another decade.
 
The pandemic response attempt at redirection, lying, and denial? It’s such a short term that I don’t see the viability of the climate denial approach. Back when the debate started in March, once side was right. We’ve waited, what, four months? And we’re seeing who that was right, and people are noticing the full ICUs this week. Given how the climate change debate has gone, I expect we’ll spend another four months arguing over who was right. And people will notice the emergency tent hospitals in town squares. When we get to the point almost everyone has a close friend or family member who has died or been hospitalized for three months? Is that when everyone will take the problem seriously?

School Considerations

What exactly are the teachers using to clean the classroom? Stuff like Lysol and Clorox wipes have been on the “back to school” list for years because the school doesn’t have budget for basic classroom supplies.
These kids sitting 6′ apart … where’s that extra space coming from? In our elementary school, the “play” and “group” areas could be removed (no shared toys or sitting on squares together anyway). But kids are going to walk between desks, so you really need 12′ separation to allow a walkway. There’s no way to get 20+ kids into a classroom. And what about upper grades where students move between classrooms? There some large group of new hires disinfecting each desk in the three minutes between classes? Because having the teacher speed clean the desks seems counter-productive.
How do we accommodate both the ‘school shooting safety measures’ like keeping the classroom doors closed and the ‘COVID19 safety measures’ like minimizing contact with high-touch surfaces? The obvious COVID-19 solution is to have all interior doors propped open during school hours and possibly assign an employee to open/close the dedicated ingress and egress doors.
Everyone gets two scheduled times for the bathroom? Or how exactly does that work? Same for recess — hey, it’s your ten minutes to jog around the building. Go!
I’m already being asked to drive the kid to school because they cannot figure out how to bus kids safely. With the ‘normal’ number of kids being dropped off and picked up, there was a queue of cars backed out to the road. How’s this drop-off/pick-up thing going to work with a lot more kids? And what about someone who has kids in more than one school?
A significant part of early childhood education is learning to socialize and interact with others. How much social learning is going to happen this year?
And the biggest question of all — what exactly does the school do when the first person tests positive? The entire class has to be in quarantine for a few weeks? What about kids who have siblings in that class — everyone in their class has to quarantine too? Seems like the first positive test and the whole school needs to be in quarantine.

Marketing Fail

I find it ironic that the Republican, who brought us marketing campaigns such as the “Death Tax” which would cause Paris Hilton to pay taxes on her hypothetical inheritance but didn’t mean jack to 80% of the country seems unable (or, more likely, unwilling) to effectively market pandemic response.
 
Social distancing is a horrible phrase that speaks to isolation. OK, you don’t congregate in one big lump of humanity at the beach or discotheque. Why isn’t figuring out innovative ways to interact a national pursuit? Physically distanced social interactions — either online or in person. A few decades ago, I had friends who would all get on a call to watch a movie or TV show together. Start writing letters again (help out the post office, too). Back in March, when the lock-downs started, I surprised a lady at the grocery store by helping her look for her parent’s preferred type of coffee as I stood on the checkout queue. She didn’t have to get near me, I didn’t have to get near her, but the “social distancing” campaign had her thinking “head down, don’t talk to anyone”. We’ve got patio chairs set up under the big maple tree in our front yard. Two families sitting 10′ apart can easily converse, hang out, enjoy nature, etc. Putting chairs on either side of the fire pit is about 8′ apart too.
 
Then there are the masks. Social trends have convinced people to wear all manner of wild kit. There’s no way it couldn’t have been presented as some awesome fashion trend. I’m curious if it’s *masks* or *orders* that the non-mask wearing public finds so objectionable. Like, would they be down with wearing a confederate flag mask? What about helmets — we can dress up like astronauts, scuba divers, motorcycle riders. I introduced my daughter to pandemic safety by calling it the zombie apocalypse. It’s fun to get the masks and gloves on to take the recycling down the the drop-off point where she stands guard in the car watching for zombies. Or get a superhero cape and mask, adopt a secret identity. Not something I recommend when it’s 95 degrees … but when it cools off again, pretend you’re a less murder-y version of the invisible man with the head wrapping and sun shades.
 
The Republican promotion of preventative actions reminds me of the court-ordered PSA commercials that tobacco companies air. They have technically said what the court has ordered them to say, but there has been no attempt to engage the audience. Or attract attention. White screen, black text, monotone voice-over repeating what the text says.

School’s Out For …

I want to know what schools are going to do in September/November after what they did in August proves to be foolishly optimistic (either ‘the virus will disappear’ or ‘one person will be able to ensure twenty six-year-old kids wear masks and stay 6 feet apart, plus we can have a janitor in each restroom sanitizing after each use’) and they’ve failed to use the intervening 4-5 months to develop a decent online teaching approach.

Ohio Public Health Warning Level

Ohio now has a per-county public health alert level rating that reminds me of the terror alert color-coded system we had after 9/11.

Of course there will be people in red or purple counties heading out to neighboring counties to shop/eat/socialize/party because those neighboring counties are only in orange so they don’t need to wear a mask there. I don’t get why I’ve got to get my car e-checked because my county borders Cuyahoga but we wouldn’t have to wear a mask for the same reason … but it’s a step in the right direction deeming masks mandatory *somewhere* based on *something*.

SDNY – The Continuing Saga

Looks like Trump’s people assumed Lindsey Graham would rubber-stamp Clayton’s nomination to SDNY without, ya know, actually checking in with Graham. Graham, so far, says he’ll follow the standard process of waiting for blue slips from Gillibrand and Schumer.
 
Personally, I give this above even chances of sticking even after someone explains to Trump what a blue slip is. Trump wants the short-term win, but Graham seems to be looking at long-term strategy. Graham is up for reelection this year … but the presidential race will drive turnout. I can’t see Trump voters abstaining in the Senate race … so Graham can afford some voter outrage from the MAGA extremists. Some centrists could find presidential interference off-putting, and conservative Dems and liberal Repubs would constitute the votes actually up-for-grabs. But, beyond Graham’s possible continued tenure — at *some* point, Democrats will be in charge again, and a lot of Senate traditions cede a significant amount of power to the minority. Upend those traditions for a quick win today, you harm yourself in the future.
 

SDNY

Who can actually fire a US Attorney appointed under 28 U.S. Code § 546 (d) is an interesting question. The text says “district court for such district may appoint a United States attorney to serve until the vacancy is filled”. Filling the position through the ordinary nomination, Senate approval, AG appointment process is an obvious path to replace the person appointed to the position. It’s possible the district court could appoint someone else — letter of the law, I don’t think so. Don’t see anyone else in the list, though. Certainly not AG.

Financial Literacy

I think everyone should have a mandatory year of poverty — it provides essential perspective on financial planning. And social services. And public policy. Throw everything you’ve got in a trust, you’ll get it back after a year. Heck, I’ll spot ’em a copy of the bus schedule, a minimum wage job, and 500$ of their own money to get started. Good luck finding a flat and getting to work on Sunday. Yeah, you work Sunday – your days off are Monday and Thursday this week. Check the schedule to see what your days off are next week. And the boss needs three weeks notice if you want to request a specific weekday off, weekends aren’t available for request until you’ve got two years of service.
 
I had people say that kind of rubbish to me when I was broke — and I’d happily let them run through my budget and find this money I was supposed to be dropping into my “emergency fund”. News flash: eating every couple of days? That’s an emergency. Heat in the winter when it’s 10F outside? Absolute emergency. Rent’s due on the 1st — you got it, another emergency.
 
Sure, you could drop the 20$ a month from the phone bill into a savings account — lose 5$ a month to the service fee since you’ve got no money, but there’s nothing for that until you amass 500$ — and come out with 180$ a year. But I’d get called in for overtime shifts, so saving 180$ in a year cost me a grand.
 
‘t wasn’t my “financial literacy” that caused the problem. It was the lack of income!

Renaming Military Bases

If we’re not renaming military bases because Confederate generals are a part of our history (although it will be interesting to see if Trump gets countermanded again) … can we start applying the same “it’s part of history, so we need to remember it” logic when naming new bases (or ships)? The generally abysmal lack of historic knowledge probably requires very specific locations for the names to be meaningful if we go with Revolutionary War figures — Fort Burgoyne in the Satatoga area, maybe rename a naval base with Arbuthnot. And of course we’d need a Fort Arnold. But why ignore the last 150 years? Have a Fort Wilhelm II. Fort Minh. Fort Sandino. Or combine base renaming with current-day diplomacy. I’m sure Kim Jong-un will be honored when we unveil Fort Kim Il-sung. It’s all part of our history, right?

On a tangentially related note … how many people have actually stopped to look at a statue? Read the name on the statue? Read the blurb about the person? Gone home and spent an hour researching the individual? Does the fact a statue exists at Gettysburg mean the general population remembers Francis Channing Barlow? Are we really in danger of forgetting who Robert E Lee was if statues aren’t standing in our parks?

The Dog Ate My Homework

 
‘The police department acknowledged errors in the report that it said was the result of the reporting program creating a paper file.
 
“Inaccuracies in the report are unacceptable to us, and we are taking immediate steps to correct the report and to ensure the accuracy of incident reports going forward,” the statement said.’
 
Seriously? “Software problem” has become the new ‘dog ate my homework’. Do they actually expect someone to believe the software somehow turned their verbose and well-documented description of what actually happened to “PIU investigation”?! Leaving that element aside …
 
I’ve done software development for some 25 years. From a technical standpoint, incorrect data mapping happens — worked on a bank project once where they had bought a smaller company and mis-mapped previous and current address fields (+ instituted an annual fee — notice of which was sent to your previous address. Along with the first bill on a card you hadn’t used in three years, the next month’s bill with late fee and interest, the next next month’s bill … you get the idea. It was an ugly cleanup process full of angry people who generally didn’t even realize they *had* that card anymore, never mind wanting to pay 30$ a year to have said card).
 
But here’s the thing — you don’t randomly map “forced intrusion == true” to an unchecked box or find a non-null list of injuries and write “none” as a one-off. If they had one data inconsistency and wanted to claim a software bug? Suspect but technically possible — some specific data condition caused a problem generating a paper report. But *this* many errors in the reporting program impact *just* this one report? In the credit card company case, the *only* people who had their current address listed as their mailing address had never moved. 100% of the people with a previous address had that address recorded as their current address. I’ve encountered companies that had problems in specific conditions — everyone in Alaska had a bad address because someone had mapped “AR” to “Alaska” on the input form drop-down.
 
If their software had data mapped wrong in the paper file generation process, it would be generating bad paper files rather regularly. And, honestly, if the department wants to stick with this story … they need to put major time into validating all of the *other* paper files that the software has generated.