Maggie's Farm

Anybody who goes to the Emergency Room, or sees a cop car, or goes to the grocery store, or goes to the Pharmacy, or gets their lawn mown and their house built - knows what a crock of putrid sh*t the Teacher's Unions are for claiming they cannot work safely.

That they are not eager to be back at work, trying to salvage and correct the damage in the social and intellectual development of our nation's children should be enough to outrage every single parent. They are professionally corrupt.

They need to be presented with an ultimatum: Report for work or be fired, summarily. No politician can pretend to not to understand the importance of this. No politician has the political courage to stand up to them. The politicians work for the unions and use your vote to get [/i]their[/i] money. Americans continually underestimate the power of their votes. This is an issue that cuts across party lines.

Genuinely fearful.... As if all the grocery workers, doctors, nurses, etc are immune to fear - or maybe, they overcame it in order to eat, and found they could manage after all. That is the essence of the problem, a preference for indulging in their fears.

The lack of ethical concern for their professional remit and their charges is remarkable, given the assumption that their training requires an understanding of critical thinking, and given that there is mostly negative evidence that children are an infectious risk.

I believe this only highlights that incompetent people are in charge of educating our young, and that it's getting more and more obvious.

Schools resumed here in September and parents were given the choice to have their kids attend physically or virtually. This is where the choice should properly lay, in my opinion. Quite a few parents here have already made the change to home schooling or educational collectives, which also seem to work well.

It may be rash to conclude it, but teachers who are treating a return to the classroom as an elective choice that they can defer, seems to be a problem that is more or less limited to Machine Democrat districts that depend heavily on Teacher's Union money. I would be happy to be educated otherwise.

But we've all heard these kinds of COVID stories; nobody is calling it 'unfounded'. This is the problem with COVID, and many other public policy issues today. By using generalizations about COVID to scare the daylights out of everyone, we lose the opportunity to work a resolution of the problem.

How many children have you seen communicate COVID to adults? What does the CDC say about children communicating COVID to adults? What does the scientific data say? Shouldn't this be the start of rational decision-making about schools opening with teachers present?

I know quite a few people that died of heart disease and cancer in the past year, each of which claim more lives every year than COVID - and yet, society is not running in terror to change their lifestyle at all cost, to reduce their risk to these causes of death.

No; I think it is you that needs to review the data and understand it. It comes across as if you think the CDC are idiots and you know better. And I note that you ignored the salient question regarding schools: If teacher's in certain areas are ignoring successful school operations in other regions on the pretext of COVID fears - in order to not return to work - then should they continue to enjoy payroll and benefits while the children suffer developmental impairment? And should a scientific examination of the data on children communicating COVID form the basis of that decision by policy makers, as well as consideration of the impact should school closures continue?

This year, more people will die of COVID but I predict that even more will die of either cancer and heart disease. What terror-driven steps have you taken to eliminate these risks in your own life, that your recommend to others?

I take my health, and the health of my family seriously. I know of people that have died of COVID, that have had it more than once, that still suffer after effects, and that didn't even notice they had it. I've had it myself. The medical community is still figuring it out, but one thing is crystal clear: Treatment regimens continue to improve (outside the COVID political cesspit) and consequently fewer people are dying from it, even those with serious comorbidities. And a vaccine is now available for those that choose to have it.

COVID's death count has been trotted out on a regular basis to strike terror in the land and make political hay, and it is normally done as if the plague is upon us, without providing a meaningful context, which in my view, would start with comparisons to other causes of death that we have come to accept as part of normal life.

It is not unreasonable to point that fact out. COVID is brand-new to humanity, and that has caused quite a bit of irrational fear, which has been unhelpfully amplified. I didn't know where a comparison of COVID's death toll lay until I actually started looking into the actuarial data myself - but that's just a product of the journalism of today.

Saying that, My GOD millions are dying - is just hair-on-fire stuff that is not helpful toward understanding the problem in any way. Medical science is learning at an amazing rate, and treatments are improving by leaps and bounds, and the mortality rates are dropping and that ought to be the focus of the news - not least, because it's good news and will help allay fears.

Who am I accusing of bad motives? I guess I could refer you to the video that is making the rounds today, of school board members conducting a derisive meeting they thought was private? Or the Teachers' Unions in many states, because they have demonstrated an aversion to acknowledging successful school operations in many other states, while attempting to influence policy making at the CDC without disclosing those actions. Isn't that wrong? Don't you think the innovative states that have opened their classrooms safely should be held up as a successful example for others to emulate, outside of a political arena? Isn't the developmental well-being of our children more important than that? I think so.

I'm not seeing your point about generalizing - I thought my points were clearly speaking against using generalization in arguments. You'd just rather kick people. Really?

This article goes quite a long way toward explaining the issues with the Texas grid

https://www.hefner.energy/articles/the-failures-of-government-power

It’s not just the windmills, but it is related to the policy forces that drive decision making toward Alternative Energy with heavy tax credits. I’m all for innovation and accept that society and industry should partner to support it. But the problem with Alternative Energy can best be found looking no further than its name: Alternative – as in Not Primary.