As Albert Shanker — former president of the United Federation of Teachers (1964-1984) and the American Federation of Teachers (1974-1997) — used to say: “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.”
One explanation would be that people tagged as COVID victims were on track to die within a year or so anyway.
I looked at COVID death rates for California and found that residents age 80+ are 3% of cases but 43% of deaths. If we go down to age 65+, we see 11% of cases but 76% of deaths. In a large majority of cases, the decedents had one or more comorbidities.
My house is buried in the deepest recess of the forest
Every year, ivy vines grow longer than the year before.
Undisturbed by the affairs of the world I live at ease,
Woodmen’s singing rarely reaching me through the trees.
While the sun stays in the sky, I mend my torn clothes
And facing the moon, I read holy texts aloud to myself.
Let me drop a word of advice for believers of my faith.
To enjoy life’s immensity, you do not need many things.
As I walked out all the streets were empty
The government said everyone should stay home
And they spread fear and loathing and no hope for the future
Not many did question this very strange move
Well, on the government website from the 21st March 2020
It said COVID-19 was no longer high risk
Then two days later Boris put us under lockdown
Then why are we not being told the truth?
By all the media outlets and the government lackeys
Why is this not big news, why is it being ignored?
Why no checks and balances, why no second opinions?
Why are they working, and why are we not?
Why are they working, and why are we not?
Why are they working, and why are we not?
Why are they working, and why are we not?
Why are they working, and why are we not?
Why are they working, and why are we not?
Obviously the media hate Donald Trump but he has been sensational for ratings. Obviously the last four years of screaming partisan trainwreck reportage is interesting to some people.
What will happen when (alleged) president-elect Biden takes over? Will we continue to get the same puff pieces we’ve been getting on him all year? He seems remarkably coherent today. What energy! Look at him go! I think he’s figured out how teleprompters work. Thank god he’s got the keys to the nuclear codes!
Who’s going to watch that nonsense day after day? Nobody, is what I would assume.
Will the press have to turn against Biden just to maintain ratings? I’m interested to see how that will play out.
Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days’ worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.
today’s begging is finished; at the crossroads
i wander by the side of hachiman shrine
talking with some children.
last year, a foolish monk;
this year, no change!
Looking back over 2020, it was a year of fear, suffering, and pain . . . but also a story of courage, compassion, heroism and accomplishment. Do our brains have an automatic negativity bias? It seems we much more easily remember and give attention to bad experiences.
Stop the fucking presses! Follow the science! On the bright side, it may be the only factually accurate story the Times has published in the last four years.
Possible follow-up: Is there scientific evidence that people can also lose weight by eating less?
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Continuing to segregate toys based on gender just works to perpetuate nasty sexist stereotypes, plus it severely limits the development of all young people.
Be sure to engage in a conversation about sexism with your friends and families over the holidays!
“K-12 schools across the country must urgently profess solidarity with Black Lives Matter, vow to dismantle white supremacy and remake themselves into racism-free zones.
“We need to eradicate white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in all of our institutions.”
“‘Heteropatriarchy’?”
“We declare war on the intentional barriers white people have built to harm Black people. We grieve for all of the Black lives taken by white supremacy.”
“Sounds like indoctrination is the key word here.”
“No, it’s an opportunity for engagement. What’s really different now is talking explicitly about whiteness.”
“Parents must be thrilled with the use of words like diversity, equity and inclusivity to group and stereotype human beings by skin color and attribute characteristics to your personality based on skin color, not to mention the anti-white and anti-American messaging.”
“Well, I’m tired of White people reveling in their state-sanctioned depravity, snuffing out Black life with no consequences. They gleefully soak in their White-washed history that downplays the holocaust of Indigenous, Native peoples and Africans in the Americas. They happily believe their all-White spaces exist as a matter of personal effort and willingly use violence against Black bodies to keep those spaces white.
“All white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism. Racism is perpetuated by silence, and silence is complicity. Being ‘colorblind’ often serves as a pretense to downplay the significance of race, deny the existence of racism, and erase the experience of students of color.”
“Getting back to basics for a minute, a significant percentage of young Americans know nothing about geography, science, half the residents of Detroit can’t read and all you can think of to do about it is to teach people to love their hair and tap into a defeatist philosophy fixated on racial oppression, subjugation, injustice and an inability to control your own destiny.
“Almost every important deed in the last 500 years has been accomplished by white men, much to your chagrin I’m sure, but I don’t see how you can escape teaching it that way. Has any great country or society been founded in that time by anyone other than white males? We’d all still be living in mud huts.”
As I understand it, on election night, ballot counters in several states (WI, MI, PA) all got tired at the same time, sent Republicans home, then caught a second wind and found hundreds of thousands of Biden ballots.
If you think of it as a multi-player game where there is an optimal amount of cheating, but the players have no contemporaneous knowledge of one another’s attempts to cheat, and too much cheating by any increases the probability of detection for all, you can rather readily see how we could be left with an embarrassment of cheating evidence, such as Biden getting 80 MILLION VOTES, when the run-up to the election had Trump holding rallies at which 50,000 people stood in line for a mile to get in, while the enthusiasm and excitement for Biden (i.e., none) had him holding rallies that were more like gatherings, where they drew circles on the ground to show everyone where to stand.
I’m spinning in my grave as the United States of America becomes an international laughingstock, where massive voter fraud has become an acceptable form of democracy.
Politics and political office are not and never have been the method and means by which we can govern ourselves in peace and dignity and honor and security, but instead are our national refuge for our incompetents who have failed at every other occupation by means of which they might make a living for themselves and their families; and which as a result we would have to feed and clothe and shelter out of our own private purses and means.
I wanted to remind you that today is “Giving Tuesday,” a day set aside every year to interrupt the Christmas shopping blitz so that Americans like you can give to non-profit causes like attacking free enterprise, capitalism, freedom of expression, religious values, and everything that makes America remarkable.
