Daily Rant

Education leaders need to examine real data and weigh risk. … Risk is involved in everything we do, from learning to ride a bike to riding a rocket into space and everything in between. Betsy DeVos

Do we really want to risk our children and their teachers too? Is this not the most hideous woman in the country? Single handedly bent on destroying our public education system, now she wants to go after the poor children too. DeVos doesn't really care how it gets done either, that is somebody else's problem.

“They must fully open. And they must be fully operational,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said. “And how that happens is best left to education and community leaders.”

You figure it out.

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Interesting article about the rodeo near Phoenix the other day in the NYT. Appears the wranglers aren't really into the mask thing. But the last sentence is what stuck with me... Bit fatalistic if you ask me.

In Eagar, the July Fourth parade that has boasted the likes of John Wayne among its horseback participants in years gone by, will step off at 10 a.m. on Saturday as planned, Bryce Hamblin, Eagar’s mayor, said. The town in eastern Arizona would “err on the side of freedom,” he said, pandemic or no. Thousands of tourists are expected.Mr. Hamblin said he spoke to an aide to Mr. Ducey last week, and said he came away with an understanding of the governor’s guidance. “What I get from his orders is he’s leaving this stuff to our local governments, and he’s not going to affect people’s constitutional rights,” Mr. Hamblin said. “I can’t think of a better example than the 4th of July for celebrating those freedoms.”Of calls he has received urging him to cancel the event, Mr. Hamblin said, “I’ve gotten attention from all around the world and people that don’t have real good things to say,. But I’m not the mayor of the world. I’m the mayor of Eagar, and we’ve got to move on.”Mr. Hamblin said that mask-wearers were, of course, welcome at the event.“I don’t want to be insensitive to the disease and the impact it has on some people, but it’s not going away,” he said. “Everybody’s going to get it.”

Big tough cowboys, say "Why fight it? Just cry uncle. It's inevitable."

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New York Times has another article worth perusing today, Churches were eager to reopen. Now they are a major source of covid. Now I am not a religious man but I do believe that the good lord intended for you to think rationally and keep yourself safe. Not engage in this sort of "if I get it I get it, it is god's will" stuff. Not going to make god real happy.

Mr. Satterwhite, the pastor in Oregon, said that scrutiny had fallen unfairly on churches, while businesses with outbreaks did not face the same backlash. “I think that there is an effort on the part of some to use things like this to try to shut churches down,” he said, adding that he appreciated Mr. Trump’s supportive remarks about churches being essential.When weighing his responsibility as a faith leader, Mr. Satterwhite said, he returned to his beliefs. “My personal belief is, I have faith in God,” he said. “If God wants me to get Covid, I’ll get Covid. And if God doesn’t want me to get Covid, I won’t.”

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Trump said yesterday that 99% of Covid cases are harmless and that the disease will disappear in a couple more weeks. By my count that makes the twentieth time he has said that. And he is wrong on his facts and his math. And we don't have the best mortality numbers in the world. We have the second worst.

At the moment, the data show that slightly more than 4 percent of the cases in the United States have led to death. The count at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which lags behind private data, indicates a death rate of nearly 4.5 percent.Johns Hopkins University, in a comparison of the observed case-fatality rate of the 20 countries most affected by covid-19, calculates that the United States ranked seventh worst, with 4.4 percent. The United States ranks second-worst in terms of deaths per 100,000 people.

Facts. Such curious beasts. This guy lies better than anybody that the world has ever seen. Now he is going after the nation's experts. First throw Fauci under the bus. What does he know? Birx and Redfield are sure to be next.

"I think we are in a good place. I disagree with him," Trump said in an interview on Tuesday when questioned about Fauci's assertion the US is still "knee-deep in the first wave" of the pandemic.Trump accused Fauci of waffling on early decisions in the crisis, saying he was better off ignoring experts and trusting his instincts."Dr. Fauci said don't wear masks and now he says wear them," he told Gray Television's Greta Van Susteren. "And he said numerous things. Don't close off China. Don't ban China. I did it anyway. I didn't listen to my experts and I banned China. We would have been in much worse shape. You wouldn't believe the number of deaths more we would have had if we didn't do the ban."Nonetheless, Trump insisted to Van Susteren that in the next two to four weeks, “I think we’re going to be in very good shape.”

Your mouth to Allah's ear.