Items

• 
  2021-04-07

  Brazil is Bearing the Brunt of an Alarming Surge

  MSNBC reports on an alarming surge in Brazil and how it is trying to deal with a local variant and its politicians who still deny the severity of COVID-19.
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  2021-03-12

  Remembering Our Last Lunch

  On Friday, March 13, 2020 it was pouring rain. My co-worker/work wife/love of my life/bestest friend - the Ann Perkins to my Leslie Knope (very accurate if you know us) bought us McDonald’s for lunch. We jokingly called it “the end of the world as we know it lunch” and played REM while drinking Shamrock Shakes. We were in denial about what was happening around us. Two hours later, it was the end. We have not had lunch together, or been physically together, since then. (However, we probably outdo any teenagers in the amount we text each other. We’ve pretty much live tweeted ever minute of our incredibly mundane days to each other throughout all of quarantine.) Today, we both bought McDonald’s separately (for me, only the fifth time having fast food since shut down last March) to celebrate our year-versary of the “end of the world” lunch. One year later, it’s raining again, but it feels so different. A year ago, everything was closing down. Today, everything is opening up. I am thankful we’ve both received vaccination one, and although we are both apprehensive about school reopening in a week, the thought of seeing her face to face (six feet away and in a mask) makes me happy enough to cry. There is nothing I hope more for than for the efficacy of the vaccinations. I can only hope that the second Friday of March 2022 will see us together in my classroom, eating McDonald’s for lunch, talking about how we can’t believe we lived through a pandemic. A rainbow instead of rain would be a nice touch, too.
• 2020-01-09

  THE19 (Metaphor)

  Imagine a hurricane approaches your beachfront community, a beautiful place of both cottages and mansions on heavenly stretching strands of sand and coconut trees. The storm started far out in the ocean as a tropical storm, an abstraction a week or more away. Then it developed into a category 2 as it approached the continent and crossed Cuba, still days away but becoming a concern. Before long, forecasts by experts confidently showed exactly where landfall would occur, the strength of the winds, the height of the surge, the flooding that would accompany it, the millions it would impact, the estimates of the extent of damage and disruption (and death tolls) predictable. You do the right thing and with your family and neighbors evacuate and move inland and find safe shelter. It’s inconvenient and uncomfortable at times, sharing and aiding your fellow refugees. They don’t have the brand of cereal and chocolate milk your kids like. They run out of Coke. But pitching in until it’s safe to go home seems the best and only course. And soon you’re glad you did because by the time the hurricane makes landfall the news come in that it is a Cat 5, indeed, “the second most intense tropical cyclone on record to strike the United States.” Imagine as you watch the pummeling rain and listen to the ominous wind and wait, you already know this story: “In 1969, Hurricane Camille claimed 259 victims along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Most were guilty of only being on the wrong place at the wrong time, unlike twenty who perished while attending a beachfront “hurricane party” beer bash and barbecue. Despite evacuation warnings delivered by vehement emergency teams [experts], their festivities continued unabated. The partygoers definitely declared that the concrete foundations and the second floor location of their party provided plenty of protection from the impending hurricane. Their confidence proved to be tragically misplaced when a twenty-four-foot wave slammed into the apartment, destroying the building and subjecting the partiers to gale-force winds and violent ocean surges. Most of these hurricane worshippers were killed. A few survivors were swept miles away, ….” (The Darwin Awards, 1999) Imagine you know there are old folks in your very own town who chose to stay. Folks who just couldn’t imagine leaving the idyllic homes in their idyllic locations where they have lived in for decades, and who have weathered previous storms and thinking this one too “isn’t that bad,” or thinking. “Unless it has my name on it, it won’t get me.” You pray for them. But you also know some who stayed defiantly, the young and strong, and the middle-aged but “free” who resented being told by anyone what to do--especially by “experts.” And some of those protestors (an alarming number of whom you know) raised the bar, rebelled blithely, partying practically on the beach, posting selfies and videos on Facebook as the storm intensifies--to prove it was safe. As final proof, a video is posted of an engorging wave, a wave as large as any building you could hide in, a dark seething mountain of water. The video records shrill, exhilarating, victorious whoops of glee of the partiers it approaches. Then nothing. Now imagine, immediately you are asked by experts to stay in your shelter a little while longer, not forever, but much longer than you had ever expected to stay. Why? you ask. We’ve been so good. We did everything we were asked. We deserve to go home. We’ve run out of Lucky Charms and Quick and Coke. Despite your pleas and imploring, the experts are firm. Because, they say, a second hurricane is already coming, practically on top of the first. It’s not a Cat 5, yet, but…. This is unimaginable. This wasn’t forecast before. But, it’s here now, the experts nod somberly. Enough is enough. Enough is enough. Enough is enough, you hear yourself say, but…. Finally, imagine, dozens and dozens of your neighbors, even members of your own family, saying, I can’t take it anymore. This is not my life. I haven’t had a beer or a Buffalo Wings in days. You watch them, so impatient and tired of waiting and angry for the fun they miss. You watch them rush back to the beach. W. K. Sheldrake (Wayne) is the author of Instant Karma: The Heart and Soul of a Ski Bum, #1 on Outside Magazine Online’s list of “6 Adventure Books We’d Read Again and Again,” and Foreword Magazine’s ‘Gold Medal’ Adventure Book of the Year (2007). He is recording his pandemic experience of Pandemic Disability in a memoir The19: Confessions of a Mad (American) COVIDodger. He lives in Southern Colorado with his “high risk” wife where there is plenty of wide open space. They do not currently have a dog.
• 2020-09-25

  College and COVID

  When COVID-19 first appeared in Wuhan, China, I, like many others, thought that it wasn’t going to be a big deal. It would be contained, it wouldn’t spread very far, and the people of China would take the necessary precautions needed to prevent its spread to other countries. Sure, I had heard the jokes of every 20 year in a century having a new plague, but those were just jokes, right? I didn’t know how wrong I had been. As COVID spread, I was still in denial of how bad it would get in the United States. My university, Florida Gulf Coast University, was still intent on staying open through the end of the semester. However, three days after getting back from spring break, the Florida Board of Governors issued that starting Monday, all universities would move to all-online for two weeks. Along with many others, I packed up to go home for two weeks, though I didn’t have much confidence that I would be returning at the end. True to mine and everyone else’s guess, the all-online was extended through the end of the summer. Still having hope that I’d return to campus in the fall, I registered for five in-person classes, finished up my spring semester with all As, and got a job at Culver’s for the summer. I struggled with the mask at first, mainly due to my sensory processing issues, which made it difficult for me to get used to constantly having something over my face. Now, I’m used to it and I wear it whenever I leave my dorm room. Although I returned to campus for the fall semester, it’s due to my on-campus job. All of my classes had been moved to online formatting, which has not been easy. All online classes are typically more work than in-person ones since you have to teach yourself the material. Life during COVID-19 has definitely been interesting, to say the least.
• 
  2020-06-25

  European nations where virus first went mainstream nearly cleared as US cases soar

  Viral tweet today highlights the differences in cases between EU nations which were greatly hit by virus early on and the US. The days case increases of 190 for Italy, 81 for France, and 330 for Spain draw a stark contrast to America's over 33,000 new cases for today. The virus first drew mainstream attention in the west once it left China and started affecting western nations. Italy in particular was an early poster country for the pandemic, but now seems quaint compared the the United States. I included this tweet because it essentially sums up the current status of the virus globally. European nations are almost clear of the virus due to strict pandemic guidelines. Meanwhile the United States has taken the opposite approach and any hope for the pandemic being over soon is officially gone. What struck me about this tweet was remembering the public reaction when Italy was the center point of the virus, and the denial of the US ever getting that bad. Now the story of the pandemic has shifted dramatically.
• 2020-04-17

  Africans In China: We Face coronavirus discrimination

  An article written by the BBC new of African and African Americans who are being targeted as the source of the coronavirus
• 
  2020-04-28

  week of april 27

  Week of April 27, 2020 I am from Myrtle Beach, SC and as most people know South Carolina was one of the first states to open back up after President Trump gave his blessings to each governor to make their own decision regarding how quickly and what to open up and what to restrict. During this entire month, Covid 19 has revealed some uncomfortable truths about America. Every day brings a reminder that we are a country of extreme haves and have nots – and this applies to people have accurate information. We as a country have the most Nobel prizes in science and also the most willfully ignorant people when it comes to understanding science. How else can we explain electing a low information buffoon who pushes bullshit cures and disinformation that will actually kill people. Injecting disinfectant??? Really? Trump knows that there is no disinfectant at stores. But he like many Americans believes that science is just an opinion instead of trying to understand it. These people are far better at dismissing inconvenient science than trying to understand how it will affect their lives. Thinking is hard. Repeating memes is fun. And after all, isn’t not believing in Darwinism really Darwinism? When facts are inconvenient, these folks just scream that “I can’t hear you.” This goes to prove another fact, that America cares more about the corporate health of its companies that the actual health of its citizens. Corporations got most of the bailout cash. And corporations and the politicians corporations pay are behind the “grassroots” push to prematurely open America. Georgia has one of the lowest rates of testing in the country and it is the first to completely reopen. That’s what happens when you make medical decisions for political reasons. Like the mayor of Las Vegas offering to make her city a control group with testing. It would be like a doctor saying they were going to treat cancer with lower taxes. Republican governors believe that sacrifices have to be made for corporate profits. Frankly, I don’t want to be a statistic. And because of trump’s attitude toward this has been that he won’t take any blame, our response to the pandemic has been ad hoc, conflicting, and piecemeal. Some states have had responses founded on research surrounded by states with policies founded on Twitter hashtags. It is amazing to some that viruses don’t respect state lines or how deadly they are. The conflicting responses are like having a no smoking section in my car or a no peeing section in my bathtub. I have to give credit for most of this post to a post I follow on Facebook called Mrs. Betty Bowers. It reflects my feelings and frustrations but says it far better than I could.
• 
  2020-04-28

  Computer Antivirus Mask Meme

  Screenshot from Facebook of meme. Woman is wearing an Antivirus software CD as a face mask with a second image underneath making a joke that her mask is "beyond science".
• 
  2020-03-27

  The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response

  This article talks about Trump's towards the corona virus pandemic and how the denial of science and critical thinking amongst religious ultraconservatives is affecting the American repsonse to the covid 19 outbreak. The article talks about how religious ultraconservative people in America are in denial of the facts about the pandemic because they have a religious response towards the virus which in result causes a lack of concern amongst those groups of people.
• 
  2020-03-29

  Diary Entry

  The ”lay off” Day 7 Whatsthisday, the 307th of Archpril The clocks changed tonight. I only know because I happened to be awake when they switched. An odd experience. One minute it’s 01:59 and the next 03:00. Yesterday was Earth Hour I’d missed that too, but Magdalena remembered and we spent a sleepy hour reading by candle and lamplight before heading to bed at 21:15. It’s a sort of tradition now. I missed both of these events because the available bandwidth to process news is simply overwhelmed with Covid-19. For a microscopic virus, it’s footprint in the macro world has become gargantuan, undeniable. Even for those for whom denial had become a way of life. I went to bed too early and now I can't sleep, so I’m browsing The Guardian and eating Clementines. We used to call them Mandarin oranges when I was a kid, but in Sweden, they call them Clementines for some reason. The US news is just apocalyptic. That’s a word I use far too much, but it really is the only one that fits now. Multiple, simultaneously accelerating sites of infection, the death rate approaching a thousand a day and the federal response remains jerky, incoherent, contradictory. At every news conference, Trump is like a bear in a trap, enraged, striking out blindly, snout spraying foam and blood with every snarl. He seems to sense a looming future that involves piano-wire and a sturdy lampost on some broad american boulevard. The lunacy is incomparable, without precedent in my lifetime. We are watching the Suez-cide of an empire in real time. In Sweden, things remain comparatively calm, but the undercurrent of concern is electric. We all feel it. We all know the exponential curve is on the way for us too. Our own local "Empire", the EU, is under tremendous strain as well, but here at least the causes remain pedestrian and institutional: the predictable outcome of a deliberately weak central authority rather then some bloated Nero. When this is over, we need to take a closer look at that. The house is cold – I’ve turned off the electric heating as spring pushes the temperatures higher, but it’s 0 degrees out there – so I creep down to start a fire. This is a delicate business at 03:30 in the morning or 02:30, whatever. The point is, it’s the middle of the night, and starting a fire tends to be a noisy obtrusive business, what with the roaring blaze, cast iron stove and so forth. I manage to get it just right, a minimum of metallic pings and ticks, the air flow turned down low to throttle brighter flames but not the coals. Satisfactory. I get back to writing. We’ve been in voluntary lockdown for about 2 weeks now. The first week was just a conventional work from home and then the layoff came. That was week 2. Today/Tonight/This morning, we are heading into week 3. That doesn’t mean we don’t do anything and I’d planned a series of activities with a minimum of social interaction for Saturday. Two things actually, a trip to hand stuff in to the 2nd hand place (Vinden which literally translates as Attic) and the open air recycling center. The fruits of a week with too much time on my hands. To that we've added a trip to ICA Maxi for a final round of supplies buying. The handoff at Vinden was perfect. There were some other people dropping stuff off, but we waited in the car for them to finish and then dumped our stuff. Eight bags of assorted clothes, utensils and older electronic odds and ends. Social interactions? Zero. Then we headed to Maxi. It’s dawning on me that this isn’t ideal. I’ve had misgivings about heading into an enormous shopping center in the middle of a global pandemic. Shopping should really be done only during off peak times and Saturday morning is about as on peak as you can get. This is feeling more and more like an avoidable error. I clutch my hand sanitizer and pull on my gloves. However, when we finally pull into the parking garage I’m encouraged. There are very few cars. We don’t need that much stuff, so instead of a trolley we get one of those rolling baskets and head in. There are plenty of people about, but Maxi (as the name suggests) is very large. It has acres of floor space and I can immediately see that people are distributed for maximal social distancing. There is a weird synchronicity to their movements, as if everyone is generating a repelling magnetic field, they slide past each other with meters of clearance. Even when people are speaking to each other or staff, they seem to be standing on either side of a 2 meter gorge. We pinball our way to the cat food (these goddam cats will be the death of us), traversing a wide arc through pet toys and obscure cleaning products, it’s a very lightly trafficked part of the store and we meet no one. Then down into fruit and vegetables to pick up oranges, clementines, apples and bananas. I read somewhere you can freeze fresh fruit and I want to try it. Magdalena has more practical goals in mind and selects the ingredients for a salad. In the fruit and veg section we actually bump into our handyman, Lars. Not literally of course. He has a heart condition and we don't want to kill him, so we stand either side of the gorge and shout pleasantries. Then onto dairy for milk (reason number two, after cat food, we are here at all) and two big plugs of cheese. Then I decide I want to get a loaf of freshly baked bread, but it’s a dilemma. No packaging. If I touch the bread with my gloves, anything on the gloves will transfer and then I’ll shove that material into my stupid fat face when we get home. I opt to remove the gloves, sanitize, pop the bread into the bags provided, then put the gloves back on. A month ago this aberrant, peculiar behavior would have attracted stares. Today, not the merest ripple of interest. The world has moved on. We head to the check outs. They are well manned and we immediately find one with a single shopper finishing up. I realize then we should have self-scanned all this crap. Now the checkout person is going to touch all our stuff, breath on it and so forth. While they contaminate everything I’m blipping my card. The blipping is great because you just hover the card over the reader. Nothing actually touches anything. You still have to punch in the code on the keypad (I shudder at this even though I’m wearing gloves) but the whole business is so much superior to the epidemiological nightmare of handing physical cash back and forth. Uuurgh. Cash. Filthy lucre. What a mad unsanitary idea cash is. Or more correctly in Sweden, was. Another big plus in Sweden’s fight against the spread of the virus. Cash is no longer king. It’s not even a local warlord and all its Statues were pulled down years ago. We head out to the car, sanitize, and home. Social interactions? Two.
• 
  2020-03-28

  COVID-19 Brings Out Al the Usual Zombies

  Opinion piece on why virus denial resembles climate denial.
• 
  2020-04-05

  How Zombie Films Reveal the True Dangers of COVID-19

  Essay likens COVID-19 virus to Zombies, because both infect a host to become viable.
• 
  2020-04-04

  "REL-The extremists of Christianity"

  The rightwing Christian preachers in deep denial over Covid-19's danger
• 
  2020-01-22

  President Trump’s Statements about the Corona Virus

  Excerpts of President Trumps speeches about the handling of the Corona Virus