Check out these interviews with representatives of various professions! Can YOU guess which professional representative made the statement I made the title of this post?

Are there studies on the limitations of cloth masks? After what kind of time exposure indoors do they really diminish in effectiveness? (For example, a full day at elementary school...) Were the studies done on 15 minute intervals and measuring aerosol droplets that permeate? Or were they looking at how breath circulates in a closed room over the course of an hour?

Whenever I google, I get a bunch of stuff from April and June trying to convince me that I really should wear a mask. I got that.

So wait: police killed the guy they're trying to arrest for killing a guy who showed up to a rally to kill protesters who were protesting police killing too many guys?

It feels like the police are doing a thing I never understand: when you're under huge scrutiny, and maybe you don't think it's fair, you can (1) go on your best behavior and show everyone your best angle, or (2) double down on the behavior that you're getting scrutiny for. My reaction is always, "You can't even reign it in when you know everyone is watching?!" and the inescapable conclusion is "you are doubling down because you think you're fundamentally right and you're angry that anyone would try to get you to dial it back." These police officers do think that it's okay if someone gets killed as they go about enforcing the law, and they don't see a pattern of which people get killed. (It's possible that we've covered this ground already, this summer. Sorry. These things keep happening!)

Also the death of Daniel Prude is horrendous, and I'm glad the family released the footage and it's making the news.

How about this can just be a general WTFuckery thread, and we can include all the latest ghastly shit the diarrhea-mouth has burbled.

Ok: I need to game out if there's any place where I should accept the argument that a F2F mandate is appropriate for students during a pandemic.

Specifically, first, science-types: how badly compromised is an undergraduate lab learning experience if instructors have to figure out a way to give it remotely? A few different scenarios that I'm curious about: (1) all students remote, (2) some portion of the students remote each day, partnered with a friend with a camera who is in the lab, and (3) the remote students in a partner-pair are remote for the entire semester, and not ever coming to campus. Is it a trade-off with money, ie the answer is "Fine, but you're going to have to spend a lot of money to avoid compromising the instruction"? Similar question for music and studio arts, although the arguments are not being posed to me as forcefully there. What about nursing students - does anyone have experience with that kind of curriculum? This is the area where a F2F mandate seems most sympathetic to me. If you need to learn how to run a picc line, surely I don't just want you watching someone over a GoPro.

I had an extremely unpleasant dream the other night. I seemed to be stuck inside of Zoom, but not the way that you'd be stuck in a sci-fi movie. Rather, I was in Zoom, and I was trapped in the process of downloading and re-uploading videos so that they'd be available for my students. There was dread and urgency to getting this process done, but it was a huge task that was nowhere near completion.

Finally, the videos that I was trapped in were footage of my empty office. So I was bored and lacked anything to do, because I was in the video, not able to, say, read my email as if I were in my office. Bored, stressed out, with unending tedious tasks left, and my students will be let down if I don't get it done.

The dominant emotion was a blend of monotony and stress. My dream meanings aren't particularly cryptic.

Are things going so badly at universities that it will cause them to close down? Or are things going badly slowly enough to stay under the level of complacency?

I have the same questions about k-12: Is this going badly, fast? Or going badly, slowly?

Here's another version of the same question, in both settings: Are we getting clear enough evidence to condemn the entire concept of F2F instruction during an uncontrolled pandemic? Or is it going to be a spotty whack-a-mole game, where individual schools or districts shut down, and maybe reopen after some disinfectant theater, forever and ever?

I find myself perversely hoping that conditions tank hard and fast, so that it will be clear and indisputable. I am worried about the murky middle, where it's ambiguous and motivated administrators see paths forward where they want to.

I am also concerned about how there's no fucking money and all these higher ed institutions are in dire straits if they shut down and lose the dorm money.

And also concerned about how our local k-12 district is mostly transmitting fear and panic about the state assessment testing that will come in the end of the year, and the consequences for low test scores. It's despicable that the state is prioritizing these dubious markers (read: Pearson's profits) this year.

1. Are there any more details known about how the killing of the rightwing nutjob in Portland went down?

2. I think by far, Biden's strongest line of attack is the "The violence we're seeing is in Donald Trump's America" one. It's ludicrous that Trump should be able to sell himself as the president that will restore peace and harmony, but it has to be pointed out in a concise sound-bite-y way. I could imagine a Kerry campaign or something thinking that it's better left unstated. (yeah yeah Kerry was many lifetimes ago and it doesn't make sense to plop that campaign down in 2020.)

My niece had her zoom-bat mitzvah this past weekend, and it occurred to me that coming-of-age ceremonies serve a nice purpose to offset marriages and births. First you are born, and society cheers. Then you are One Adult, and society cheers. Then you are Two Adults, and society cheers. (Then you are Done, and society mourns.)

I did not have any sort of coming-of-age event, and it does seem sometimes a bit weird that your wedding is the most important thing about your life, the one overwhelming day when everyone you love, from many different contexts, flies in from afar to celebrate. It's fine, but it's the only milestone that has ever had that pomp for me. It does make a little more sense to be one of a series of events.

Now, you can still contest the choice of what to celebrate, and how it's certainly a relentless heteronormative procession towards reproduction as the end-all-be-all, and you could argue that maybe we could just scale back weddings to be more like a nice dinner with some dancing, and I won't fault you for any of that. I'm just saying that weddings, as a large celebration, make a little more sense as life touchstones if they are part of a series of such events.

(This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while.)

Clearly I cannot keep this simple thing together. Maybe I'll just aim to keep one on the front page at all times.

Episode 43.