Coronavirus, Education, Laws/Regulations, Public Health, School District
Whitewater School Board Meeting, 9.23.20: 5 Points
by JOHN ADAMS • • 5 Comments
The particular path of the pandemic – involving in Whitewater countless thousands of daily interactions between people – is understandably difficult to predict. Nine days after deciding unanimously to resume face-to-face instruction beginning 9.28.20, Whitewater’s school board decided to begin face-to-face instruction on 9.28.20 only for elementary school students, with a hybrid model of instruction for secondary school students beginning on October 12th.
(Secondary school students who are now in a district-directed program would continue in that method until October 12th. Secondary students who have selected a virtual model would continue with their instruction, unless they chose to return to district-directed instruction.) The approved motion included a board review of these instructional plans on October 26th (with revisions, if any) to be implemented on November 2nd.
The board approval of this course of action, on a 4-3 vote, establishes classroom-specific and school-specific metrics for monitoring or responding to COVID-19 cases within the public school system. The effect of this decision was to set aside a case-incidence measurement with series of color-coded tiers for determining school closures or instructional plans.
In this way, the Whitewater Schools have moved from relying primarily on measures of COVID-19 cases in the community to relying on the actual presence of COVID-19 within the schools for determining school closures or instructional plans. (In all of this, Whitewater’s school board could meet again and lawfully revise timelines or closure protocols.)
A few remarks —
1. Uncertainty. Once the novel coronavirus became widespread in communities across America, specific predictions about particular institutions’ ability to carry on were destined to be unreliable. The level of overconfidence about particular outcomes was always ridiculously unsound.
Far too many laypeople in Whitewater have played at amateur epidemiologist – and for it all, the community still needs (understandably) revisions to its plans.
Amateur epidemiology is something like alchemy or astrology – it’s only reasonable to the unreasonable.
An obvious point: if this administration and this board – professionals all of them – discuss their consulting epidemiologist’s use of data, they should be speaking on the record with him or reviewing an opinion letter from him. One doesn’t question his analysis, but then one can’t even review his analysis if it is not presented in his own words (in this case, his analysis on disaggregation). There is not a single professional in this district or on this board who would have presented a thesis or dissertation without review. The district should have, at least, offered at the meeting an opinion letter from the epidemiologist for review.
2. Sound Assumptions. From an earlier post on the 9.14.20 board meeting: “There are, however, two sound assumptions that require no training at all: parents will be unforgiving about injuries to their children and the true test of all past and current estimates begins now that school returns to session (for K12 and for the local college campus).”
3. What Happens Next. It’s what happens when many are back that matters most. So much talk, and yet so little actual experience in the classroom…
4. Getting Parents Back to the District. Over 200 students have enrolled in other districts, and there is a hope that they will return to Whitewater when face-to-face instruction (even as a hybrid model) begins. One of the board members mentioned the importance of reversing this outbound trend, and no doubt it weighs on others’ minds, too.
And yet, and yet — the cultural evolution of the communities within the district has made it less likely each year that all these families would remain in the district. Even without the pandemic, the diverging cultural and social paths of Whitewater and the smaller towns that comprise the rest of the district will lead to more departures. It’s not that others want these families to leave — it’s that some parents, themselves, will want to leave.
Economically, the district benefits from many families, but the present boundaries of the district no longer represent communities so alike that they want to follow with all others “every day…in a unified way.”
No culturally insightful person drawing the boundaries of the district today would have chosen to group Whitewater and these several smaller communities together. The present boundaries look like a 19th century Englishman’s idea of drawing lines across Africa without regard to indigenous cultures.
This grouping may seem like a permanent economic necessity, but a nearly-inexorable, slow drifting in different directions will work its will over the next decade or two. Even if the district remains unified formally, it will become less so in practice.
This will be a hard subject locally, but some trends are impossible to ignore.
5. Asides.
PowerPoint slides that list options should have titles so different from each other that there’s no doubt for residents about which options are being considered. No one should be asking what ‘Option A,’ for example, means. Taking notes during the meeting avoids this problem, but a presentation should be plain enough that notes are not necessary for residents.
Board members’ anecdotal accounts of instructional methods during the pandemic are interesting but so limited that they account for only a tiny portion of the overall daily instructional experience.
Accounts of being swayed by heartfelt letters, with no details about the letters’ content, are unpersuasive as a basis for sound policy. It matters more for a board member to reason well than to make an emotional appeal (see point 2, above). The decisions are hard, yet it’s not an emotional bond between board members or administrators and parents but a practical outcome that matters.
Parents’ feelings for their own children will, understandably, obscure any feelings they might have for officials.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 9.24.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 6:46 PM, for 12h 00m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 54.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified School District’s Distinctions Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 2 PM, and the Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1789, Congress passes the Judiciary Act, creating the office of the Attorney General and federal judiciary system and ordering the composition of the Supreme Court.
Recommended for reading in full —
Colby Itkowitz reports Trump won’t commit to a ‘peaceful transfer of power’ if he loses:
“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster —” Trump began when asked during a White House press briefing if he would ensure a peaceful transition.
“I understand that, but people are rioting; do you commit to making sure that there’s a peaceful transferral of power?” the reporter pressed, appearing to refer to incidents of violence that have broken out during some protests.
“Get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very — we’ll have a very peaceful, there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation,” Trump said.
See generally Parsing Trump’s ‘there won’t be a transfer’ comments.
Barton Gellman writes The Election That Could Break America (‘If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?’):
Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.
….
Nineteen summers ago, when counterterrorism analysts warned of a coming attack by al?Qaeda, they could only guess at a date. This year, if election analysts are right, we know when the trouble is likely to come. Call it the Interregnum: the interval from Election Day to the next president’s swearing-in. It is a temporal no-man’s-land between the presidency of Donald Trump and an uncertain successor—a second term for Trump or a first for Biden. The transfer of power we usually take for granted has several intermediate steps, and they are fragile.
The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by law. Among them are “the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,” this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; “the 3d day of January,” when the newly elected Congress is seated; and “the sixth day of January,” when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones, irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.
How an Oregon Wildfire Became One of the Most Destructive:
more >>Conflicts of Interest, Corporate Welfare, Corruption, Economy, Recession, Trump
Not for Us
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
2020 Presidential Election, Conspiracy Theories, Disinformation, Facebook, Justice, Law, Presidential race 2020, Social Media
Meanwhile, on Facebook…
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Jeremy B. Merrill and Jamiles Lartey report Trump’s Crime and Carnage Ad Blitz Is Going Unanswered on Facebook (‘The president has spent millions on misleading Facebook ads targeting undecided voters, while Joe Biden has been virtually silent’):
With unprecedented protests around race and policing dominating the news all summer, it was all but certain criminal justice would emerge as a key issue in 2020’s presidential campaign. The question was how the political messaging would play out. Would Joe Biden and Kamala Harris cast themselves as the torch-bearers for a new mainstream acceptance of Black Lives Matter? Would Donald Trump—who has flirted with branding himself a criminal justice reformer—return to the tropes of “American carnage” that characterized his 2016 run?
To understand how Republicans and Democrats are using criminal justice issues to reach voters, The Marshall Project analyzed hundreds of thousands of political campaign advertisements on Facebook from December 2019 to this month. Arguably the most powerful political messaging platform in history, Facebook allows candidates to micro-target tailored messages to demographic groups and even to individual voters by name. Probing that data lets us see how candidates reach voters, with a level of detail that earlier generations of strategists and political pundits could only dream of.
Our analysis found that of the $82 million Trump’s reelection campaign has spent on Facebook ads this year, $6.6 million paid for ads about crime and policing—a top focus of his Facebook campaign. Almost all of it came since George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis in May. More than one-third of those ad buys were aimed at key battleground states and many sought to persuade specific undecided voters, and married women in particular. The Biden campaign? It didn’t spend a cent on criminal justice ads on Facebook until late August, choosing instead to focus on the COVID-19 pandemic and economic recovery. Yet Biden had, during the Democratic primaries, articulated a more progressive criminal justice platform than any of his party’s recent nominees.
While Merrill and Lartey report that the Biden campaign has begun to respond with its own ads, Facebook is – and has been – a favorable field for the Trump campaign. See generally Facebook Discussions as Displays of Ignorance, Fallacies, and Marginal Literacy and Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeable.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 9.23.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 6:48 PM, for 12h 03m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 43.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified District School Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1846, Astronomers Urbain Le Verrier, John Couch Adams and Johann Gottfried Galle collaborate on the discovery of Neptune.
Recommended for reading in full —
Tory Newmyer reports Global banks process trillions in dirty money despite suspicions, investigation finds:
Trillions of dollars in money connected to criminal activity are sloshing through global banks. The banks and U.S. authorities know it, and they’re not doing nearly enough to stop it.
These revelations come from the bombshell leak of more than 2,500 secret documents, most of which banks provided to the federal government over the past two decades.
BuzzFeed got hold of the records — the so-called “FinCEN Files,” referencing the nickname for the U.S. Financial Crimes Investigation Network, the Treasury Department office that collected them in the first place. The outlet then shared them with 108 other news organizations around the world.
Taken together, the files depict a stunningly widespread phenomenon of criminals, corrupt officials and terrorists taking advantage of lax banking oversight. “These documents, compiled by banks, shared with the government, but kept from public view, expose the hollowness of banking safeguards, and the ease with which criminals have exploited them,” BuzzFeed’s team writes. “Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.”
And five banks in particular — JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — “kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money,” the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists writes.
(Emphasis in original.)
John Cassidy writes How Boeing and the F.A.A. Created the 737 MAX Catastrophe:
The basic outlines of the Boeing 737 max tragedy are already well known—or should be well known. Even so, a detailed new report that the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure released on Wednesday morning is a remarkable document. In two hundred and thirty-eight pages of clearly written prose, it goes a long way toward explaining not only what went so wrong at Boeing but what has gone badly askew with the American corporation in general, and with American governance.
….
Thanks to the official crash reports and some excellent investigative journalism, this much we already knew. Based on an eighteen-month investigation, the new report adds a wealth of new details—and it points the finger in the right places. It illustrates how Boeing’s management prioritized the company’s profitability and stock price over everything else, including passenger safety. Perhaps even more alarmingly, the report shows how the F.A.A., which once had a sterling reputation for independence and integrity, acted as a virtual agent for the company it was supposed to be overseeing.
In 2011, when Boeing’s board of directors approved the development of the 737 max, the company was racing to compete with Airbus’s A320neo, an innovative and fuel-efficient line of aircraft that had been launched the previous year.
Tour de France under a cloud after new allegations of doping emerge:
more >>Biden-Harris, Joe Biden
Top Moments from Joe Biden at a Recent Town Hall
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
City, Coronavirus, Local Government, Public Health, School District, University
September Arrives: Consequences Will Settle Claims
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Posted originally on 9.1.20 — A reminder that, for a thousand discussions, predictions, warnings, or assurances — “what has been predicted about the pandemic & economy will prove true or false as against daily events and their consequences.”
Original post follows —
September arrives. Small-town Whitewater, like all America, wrestles with a pandemic and a recession. In the spring and summer, one often heard that we would know more about the coronavirus and the economy in the fall. Fall now arrives.
There have been, and will continue to be, officials’ claims about how the city, university, and school district are faring.
All these claims face the test of consequence – what has been predicted about the pandemic & economy will prove true or false as against daily events and their consequences.
Many – who have no training whatever – have in Whitewater and elsewhere pored over epidemiological metrics with the apparent anxiety of an elderly person’s preoccupation with obituaries. These metrics should be left to professional evaluation. There’s no more instructive example than the sad case of The Biggest Fool in America.
Will the city’s, university’s, and school district’s respective approaches prove wise or foolish? The interaction and conduct of thousands of residents each day will decide that question. It’s conduct, not official claims, that matters.
We’ll have an answer soon enough.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 9.22.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Fall in Whitewater begins with sunny skies and a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:50 PM, for 12h 06m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 32.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1979, a bright flash (the ‘Vela Incident’), resembling the detonation of a nuclear weapon, is observed near the Prince Edward Islands. Its cause is never determined.
Recommended for reading in full —
Aaron Gregg and Yeganeh Torbati report Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks and swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor:
A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country’s supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used for making things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.
The change illustrates how one taxpayer-backed effort to battle the novel coronavirus, which has killed roughly 200,000 Americans, was instead diverted toward patching up long-standing perceived gaps in military supplies.
The Cares Act, which Congress passed earlier this year, gave the Pentagon money to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” But a few weeks later, the Defense Department began reshaping how it would award the money in a way that represented a major departure from Congress’s original intent.
The payments were made even though U.S. health officials believe there are still major funding gaps in responding to the pandemic. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in Senate testimony last week that states desperately need $6 billion to distribute vaccines to Americans early next year. There remains a severe shortage of N95 masks at numerous U.S. hospitals. These are the types of problems that the money was originally intended to address.
Tim Weiner poses The unanswered question of our time: Is Trump an agent of Russia? (Neither Mueller nor the FBI took it on. It’s crucial someone does. This is a case for super-secret mole hunters’):
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA station chief in Moscow who worked on the epic mole hunts that captured the American turncoats Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, told me that Trump has the classic vulnerabilities that Russian intelligence could and would exploit: his greed, his corruption, his trysts and above all his ego. Trump openly courted Putin. (A 2013 tweet: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?”) In turn, Putin, a veteran KGB officer trained to manipulate people, flirted with Trump and flattered him. Putin and his social media minions supported him openly — and with secret political warfare operations. So perhaps Putin had only to influence Trump to win influence in return.
Mowatt-Larssen wonders whether that’s all there is to it. “Is it only because Putin is such a master manipulator and that Trump is so vain that he loves it?” he asked. “Because I could never have imagined that an American president could — whether it’s witting or unwitting — betray American interests so thoroughly to the Russians as has occurred in the last four years.”
Ibex defies gravity and climbs a dam:
more >>Biden-Harris, Coronavirus, Joe Biden, Trump
In Manitowoc, Joe Biden assigns Trump’s ‘lies and incompetence’ responsible for coronavirus toll
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Music
Monday Music: A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 9.21.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:52 PM, for 12h 09m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1780, Benedict Arnold gives the British the plans to West Point.
Recommended for reading in full —
Sam Levine and Adam Chang report Revealed: evidence shows huge mail slowdowns after Trump ally took over:
The United States Postal Service (USPS) saw a severe decline in the rate of on-time delivery of first-class mail after Louis DeJoy took over as postmaster general, according to new data obtained by the Guardian that provides some of the most detailed insight yet into widespread mail delays this summer.
Shortly after taking the helm, DeJoy – a major Republican donor with no prior USPS experience – implemented operational changes he said were intended to make the financially beleaguered agency more efficient. Those changes, which included an effort to get postal trucks to run on time, led to severe delays and widespread public outcry this summer.
In late August, DeJoy announced he was putting the changes on hold until after the election, and last week a federal judge in Washington blocked USPS from implementing them. The changes were clearly aimed at “voter disenfranchisement”, given the increased role USPS will play in this year’s presidential election, the US district judge Stanley Bastian wrote in his ruling.
“It is easy to conclude that the recent Postal Services’ changes is an intentional effort on the part the current Administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state, and federal elections,” Bastian wrote.
Jamie Ross reports U.S. Admits That Congressman Offered Pardon to Assange If He Covered Up Russia Links:
Lawyers representing the United States at Julian Assange’s extradition trial in Britain have accepted the claim that the WikiLeaks founder was offered a presidential pardon by a congressman on the condition that he would help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee.
Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer, told the court that she had attended a meeting between Assange, then Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and pro-Trump troll Charles Johnson at Assange’s hide-out, the Ecuadorian embassy in London, on August 15, 2017.
Robinson said the two Americans claimed to be emissaries from Washington and “wanted us to believe they were acting on behalf of the president.” The pair allegedly told Assange that they could help grant him a pardon in exchange for him revealing information about the source of the WikiLeaks information that proved it was not the Russians who hacked Democratic emails.
“They stated that President Trump was aware of and had approved of them coming to meet with Mr. Assange to discuss a proposal—and that they would have an audience with the president to discuss the matter on their return to Washington, D.C.,” Robinson said.
The White House has denied that Trump took part in any such plan.
….
After Robinson read her testimony in a London courtroom on Friday, lawyers representing the U.S. accepted the witness statement as accurate and confirmed they had no intention of cross-examining the claim. They did dispute, however, that President Donald Trump gave his blessing for the pardon offer.
Video shows federal agents detained people in Portland based on inaccurate, insufficient information:
more >>City, Film
Film: Tuesday, September 22th, 10 AM or 1 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Little Women
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
This Tuesday, September 22th at 10 AM or 1 PM, there will be a showing of Little Women @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
(Drama/Romance)
Rated PG2 hours, 15 minutes (2019)
Based on the classic Louisa May Alcott novel, this is the sixth film version of the beloved story of the March sisters: four young women determined to live life on their own terms, in the years following the Civil War. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, and Timothée Chalamet. Directed by Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, 2017).
Masks are required and you must register for a seat either by calling, emailing or going online at https://schedulesplus.com/wwtr/kiosk. There will be a limit of 10 people per movie time slot. No walk-ins.
One can find more information about Little Women at the Internet Movie Database.
Enjoy.