Greets and saluts from the NYC metro area. We’re already at our quota for 90 degree days for the summer with 2 months to go. Woo.

I hate these humid days with a passion. But it’s not like I can or should go somewhere else to cool off. Pool is closed. Malls are “open” but I wouldn’t go. Closest I get to shopping normally is going to costco about 1x every 2 months to stock up. Online purchases and curbside pickup are the name of the game. Online purchases and delivery. I don’t think I’ll need to step into a store to buy clothes for myself again. I don’t need to go to a barber except for special occasions since I bought myself a clipper a few months back.

I’m ordering in food. I wont step foot and eat inside a restaurant, not when I see people ignoring the rules or know that I don’t know where those folks have been. I don’t know when I’ll ever return to my office except as to pick up my personal belongings.

I don’t think I’ll need to ride NJ transit except in special circumstances going forward.

But yeah, Trumpists think that we’ll be returning to normal and ready to open schools even as states are seeing increases in cases and Rx and deaths.

Oh, and European countries are starting to see rises in cases again as they reopen, which is troubling. We saw Israel reopen schools too fast, and it caused cases to spike out of control.

We see baseball players getting sick, some with serious complications from covid19. These are millionaire players and they’re not masking or paying heed to the precautions. How in the fuck can we assume that students from K-12 will do any better than baseball players who have medical personnel traveling with them and advising them? And what happens if a student or faculty get diagnosed with covid19? Does the entire class have to quarantine and get tested regularly? Shut down the entire school? There’s so many permutations to all this, and yet the one question that can’t be adequately addressed is why reopen the schools into an out of control pandemic except for businesses to try and make more money even though majority of people see the folly in this.

Yet, there’s one thing that would help all facets of the economic recovery and it has nothing to do with tax breaks. It’s wearing a fucking mask. Mandate it. Mandate social distancing, and shut down businesses that refuse to comply. That’s how we get this under control and we can get the economy rolling again. Everything else is a stopgap for a vaccine that isn’t a guarantee to happen anytime soon no matter how many glowing pressers pharma companies present or Trump says they’re coming.

As we see, Trump’s baffling with bulkshit, and claiming that the military would help dispense vaccinations, even though the military has no fucking clue what Trump’s even talking about. This is how they’re running the pandemic response. Clueless, incompetent, and chaotic with listening to demon sperm doc and know nothing incompetents like Jared and Pence all while sidelining actual experts like Fauci. Then you have experts like Birx who have gone in on telling Trump what he wants to hear, not what he needs to hear. It’s just an absolute shit show, and Trump’s using this to advance other parts of the right wing agenda, like destroying environmental protections and rolling back rights and protections under the law.