Our school district cancelled Ace's field trip yesterday due to the state of emergency in San Antonio.
I have yet to quit picking my nose when I'm sitting by myself at the computer.
There are definitely some empty shelves. We got the last two bottles of hand sanitizer at our local wal-mart.
They can pry my boogers from my cold, dead hands.
This not touching my face with my hands doesn't work for me. If I don't hold my head up, it will fall off!
The whole virus thing is still in my mind as "bad thing happening to people somewhere else."
The Arnold Fitness event here is going on but without spectators.
"I think Micah must be confused. Bernie Sanders is Jewish, and many members of his father's family were killed in the Holocaust. He must have misunderstood something his father said."
The worse it gets the worse the recession the less likely Trump! This is a very big silver lining!
2: Indeed. They were going to see the Diamond Princess passengers, but they were all released, so no point.
I'm not sure we have a good fix on the mortality rate yet. I was looking at the Johns Hopkins data tracker, and if you exclude Hubei province and look at the rest of the world (including the rest of mainland China) the mortality rate looks much lower than the 2% number that keeps being mentioned.
15: I saw an ID specialist on TV say that.
He must have misunderstood something his father said
Would you really say that, LB? Micah understood fine!
if you exclude Hubei province and look at the rest of the world (including the rest of mainland China) the mortality rate looks much lower than the 2% number that keeps being mentioned.
Well, yes. Because the total number of confirmed cases isn't the proper denominator to use, because it includes a lot of people who are going to die but just haven't died yet.
14 No mass gatherings, no pogroms.
I feel like I'm being a bad liberal for not catastrophizing everything all the time, but if the mortality rate turns out to be something closer to the normal flu and we're taking much more extreme precautions (travel bans, conventions canceling, school closings) than the minor ones we normally take during flu season, I think the chances of avoiding a disastrous outcome are pretty good.
On the other hand, I'm really fearing 4 more years of Trump. The Democratic party has signaled pretty clearly that it will shiv Sanders if he wins the nomination, and literally anyone except Bloomburg would make a stronger candidate than Biden. So actually there's plenty of scope for catastrophies, is what I'm saying.
19: "Muslims are spreading the virus" -> pogroms.
because it includes a lot of people who are going to die but just haven't died yet
That's what I meant by not having a fix on the rate yet. It won't clear for a few more weeks whether the high mortality in Hubei was anomalous for some reason, like their medical facilities being overwhelmed or undercounting the number of cases.
21: Yeah, but if you thought that wouldn't you stay far from Muslims, so you wouldn't catch the virus? I suppose it's possible that the kind of people that participate in pogroms aren't as perfectly logical as I am.
Would you really say that, LB? Micah understood fine!
"Jews disagree significantly about Palestine. So do non-Jews for that matter." This actually doesn't seem too hard to tackle.
OTOH, it could be used as a pretext to ban anti-CAA protests.
And any Muslim libel could well have a kernel of truth (insofar as that matters) because Iran->Pakistan/GCC->India transmission.
21 All they gotta do is cough to stop the beatings. It's black humor my man.
"You're probably right that Micah's parent are shitheads, but if you want to have more playdates with Micah, you shouldn't say that".
we're taking much more extreme precautions (travel bans, conventions canceling, school closings) than the minor ones we normally take during flu season, I think the chances of avoiding a disastrous outcome are pretty good.
I think this will avoid a disastrous outcome in terms of preventing a lot of deaths by coronavirus. But the measures we need to take are going to shred the economy, and that will cause deaths in its own right.
To a first approximation, isn't the Palestinian debate in America just Jews shouting at each other?
Oh, it's disingenuous. But what you're telling your kid about Bernie is true, and on a grade-school level inconsistent with "Bernie Sanders is mean to Jews." At which point it's hard for Micah to continue the conversation unless he gets into the Palestinian question first, and that's not an argument a grade-school kid is likely to be able to sustain.
Which is the problem with both your response and Heebie's. Micah didn't bring up Palestine, and may not even know that that's what his parents are talking about, so your kid getting into it with Micah is going to be a mess.
Although, come to think of it, nine might be old enough for you to explain what's probably going on with your kid. I'd just advise him to stick with "Huh? Bernie's Jewish," at school unless the conversation gets more explicit.
23: As a filthy sickly baby-murdering Jew you should know better.
Kidding aside, I think 21 is actually very likely. (And not just in India.)
I'd just advise him to stick with
I see. You're thinking of the best thing to say for him to talk to Micah. I'm thinking of the best way to tell him the truth (and troll Micah's parents at a distance). I started to get into the Israel/Palestine thing and Bernie being Jewish, but it was time for school.
A couple of years ago my kid's best buddy was a boy whose dad had run for office as a Republican. One day that year my kid told me that black people have germs. Coincidence? We didn't schedule any more playdates with that kid, in any case. Why are there so many shitheads? Suburbs, I guess. Our precinct was 64-30 Hillary and 51-46 D for Senate.
37. At least the Maine referendum to greatly loosen exceptions to their vaccination requirement lost. My guess is all the Sanders voters who turned out also voted against the referendum. +1 to Bernie.
Re 21:
On Saturday, Hungarian government closes its "transit zones," closed camps for asylum seekers along its southern border with Serbia, indefinitely, saying in a statement that "Coronavirus and illegal migration go hand in hand."
I'm thinking of the best way to tell him the truth (and troll Micah's parents at a distance).
Oh man, this is so what I'd want to do, too.
See, I think the faux innocent "I don't understand, Bernie's Jewish" is solid trolling. Assuming Micah is an unsophisticated participant, he might take that back home to get the error straightened out.
Hawaii's teacher got mad at her for saying God casually, as being disrespectful to his beliefs. I'm annoyed at that, but can't figure out a way to troll him that doesn't leave her exposed.
Anyway, she claimed to him that she'd really said gosh, which was probably a baldfaced lie, and he countered that that's close enough to still be offensive, which he probably doesn't believe but was stuck arguing with her. So having her in his class is probably the right amount of trolling as is.
42.2: Hawaii should ask him for a list of words she's not allowed to say, so that she can be sure not to offend him.
42: just substitute "sky fairy" ?
Also, this is cracking me up: Different teacher of Hawaii's, probably conservative but smart enough to mask it. Knows enough to not make a fuss over a student who is LGB, but I wouldn't necessarily trust her on T.
Hawaii's friend has been openly gay for a few years now, at least since maybe 3rd grade, and is in a flirty state-of-like with another girl. They're in 5th. Apparently, on the playground, the teacher walked up just as the friend was saying, "No! I hate it when people say I'm bi. I'm not bi, I'm pansexual!"
(The teacher handled it really poorly and tried to make up a bunch of rules that aren't enforced with straight kids.)
I'm mostly so delighted and amused picturing this teacher trying to keep a poker face and roll with pansexual during 5th grade recess.
45: Pansexual 5th graders! What has the world come to???
I was wondering if the word "bisexual" still existed. If gender is no longer binary, surely it would be strange to be attracted to exactly 2 genders, no more and no less.
46 my nephews class had a trans kid from 4th or 5th grade through middle school (they went to a different high school I think). Didn't phase any of the kids, as far as I know.
Honestly pansexual identiy make as much sense as any other one at that age. Kids will be curious and have crushes, after all.
I'm not fussed by it. I'm just amused that the teacher has to bend her brain.
47: "bisexual" has been retconned to mean your own and other genders, and IMLE it's "pansexual" that is falling into disuse, but otoh I guess the fifth graders are on the vanguard.
It's going to be much more confusing to refer to people who are sexually attracted to goat legs.
One day that year my kid told me that black people have germs.
Technically true!
Black people also have feet and teeth. It's weird!
Actually come to think of it I associate use of "pan-" with hippies, burners, and people who are vocally poly.
And as the setup to the punchline "I'm attracted to all woks of life."
56: I think I have the same associations
My association with pansexual is Janelle Monae.
Mine is the Athen's Boys Choir.
Was there a pan character in Beauty and the Beast?
My son reports that his high school chem class broke out in spontaneous giggling when the teacher introduced the trans- and cis- terminology for molecular structures. Precisely my reaction when I first saw cis- for not molecular structures.
Wait till they get to the backside attack by the homo.
65: When this mechanism was being discussed my first year of grad school, the professor made a very fast-paced aside that these reactions were illegal in Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas. All the US students gasped, totally shocked at the risqué joke, and all the non-US students got these charmingly confused expressions.
It is not impossible that I heard about it from someone who would have been in that very class.
It was memorable! Now I'm curious whether we have mutual friends or whether that joke just recirculated for years.
India, the world's largest supplier of generic drugs, has curbed the export of pharmaceuticals due to fears of coronavirus-related shortages and this has caused "panic" in Europe, the head of the country's top pharmaceuticals export group told Reuters on Wednesday.
22: I've heard speculation that the high death rate in Hubei (& China more generally) is correlated with high smoking rates, and that this is also why men are more likely to die than women, since men smoke (a lot) and women do not.
At this point it is almost all speculation and educated guesses, even by well-informed people.
But do men in Hubei really smoke that much more than men in the rest of China? (If so, why?)
Aspects of the crisis that had not occurred to me.
Does sneezing into your elbow-crotch turn your sleeve into a vector?
It's probably safer to sneeze on the table because someone will clean that and shirts aren't cleaned.
68: I'm remembering grad students that I played soccer with. They were a few years younger than me, so this was probably 2005ish.
Not like we needed any more examples of this, but this whole story is making it clear that people are the problem. "Don't abandon your pets just because their species is capable of carrying the virus." "Censorship is bad, and it's really fucking seriously bad if your government is censoring helpful medical advice because it would be bad press." "Just because bleach is a disinfectant doesn't mean you should drink it."
I can think of several people in public life who could drink bleach with my enthusiastic support.
The kind of bleach used for laundry has additives that may be poisonous.
I get 100% natural bleach from GOOP, so it's totally safe to drink.
84 you're supposed to put it in your cooter
65. There was a math course at my university that covered, among other things, the "cohomology of sheaves." It was a laff riot among the frosh.
81. But aren't Tide Pods good for you? I hear there's even a new variety of them now.