In talking to others, we seem to be noticing some relaxing of the use of social distancing and the use of face masks by residents in IDL. As you probably read, even the White House with daily testing has had staff testing positive for the pandemic virus. There is no safe place. I’ve noticed that people are on the elevator without masks, that people are playing cards four to a table in the Bistro, and that people mingle at the front desk – too close for comfort I’m sure for the staff there.
This is not the time to start relaxing social distancing and masks. We all know that the COVID-19 pneumonia has a mortality of about 20% of people in our age group. And for severe cases in the elderly requiring a ventilator, the mortality is about 90%.
It’s very hard with the isolation to stay vigilant, but let’s not put others at risk. Stay safe and be well.
Ever wonder what our Service pilots experience when flying till they get use to it? Here is a story that captures a novice’s who experienced just such a thing. Below is an article written by Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated…
He details his experiences when given the opportunity to fly in a F-14 Tomcat… If you aren’t laughing out loud by the time you get to ‘Milk Duds’,your sense of humor is seriously broken.
This message is for America ‘s most famous athletes: Someday you may be invited to fly in the back-seat of one of your country’s most powerful fighter jets. Many of you already have. John Elway, John Stockton, Tiger Woods to name a few. If you get this opportunity, let me urge you, with the greatest sincerity…. Move to Guam.Change your name. Fake your own death! Whatever you do. Do Not Go!!! I know.
The U.S. Navy invited me to try it. I was thrilled. I was pumped. I was toast! I should’ve known when they told me my pilot would Be Chip (Biff) King of Fighter Squadron 213 at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach. Whatever you’re thinking a Top Gun named Chip (Biff) King looks like, triple it. He’s about six-foot, tan, ice-blue eyes, wavy surfer hair, finger-crippling handshake — the kind of man who wrestles dyspeptic alligators in his leisure time. If you see this man, run the other way. Fast.
Biff King was born to fly. His father, Jack King, was for years the voice of NASA missions. (‘T-minus 15 seconds and counting’. Remember?) Chip would charge neighborhood kids a quarter each to hear his dad. Jack would wake up from naps surrounded by nine-year-olds waiting for him to say, ‘We have lift off’.
Biff was to fly me in an F- 14D Tomcat, a ridiculously powerful $60 million Weapon with nearly as much thrust as weight, not unlike Colin Montgomerie. I was worried about getting airsick, so the night before the flight I asked Biff if there was something I should eat the next morning.
‘Bananas,’ he said.
‘For the potassium?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Biff said, ‘because they taste about the same coming up as they do going down’
The next morning, out on the tarmac, I had on my flight suit with my name sewn over the left breast. (No call sign — like Crash or Sticky or Lead foot. But, still, very cool.) I carried my helmet in the crook of my arm, as Biff had instructed. If ever in my life I had a chance to nail Nicole Kidman, this was it.
A fighter pilot named Psycho gave me a safety briefing and then fastened me into my ejection seat, which, when employed, would ‘egress’ me out of the plane at such a velocity that I would be immediately knocked unconscious.
Just as I was thinking about aborting the flight, the canopy closed over me, and Biff gave the ground crew a thumbs-up In minutes we were firing nose up at 600 mph. We leveled out and then canopy-rolled over another F-14.
Those 20 minutes were the rush of my life. Unfortunately, the ride lasted 80. It was like being on the roller coaster at Six Flags Over Hell Only without rails. We did barrel rolls, snap rolls, loops, yanks and banks. We dived, rose and dived again, sometimes with a vertical velocity of 10,000 feet per minute. We chased another F-14, and it chased us
We broke the speed of sound. Sea was sky and sky was sea. Flying at 200 feet we did 90-degree turns at 550 mph, creating a G force of 6.5, which is to say I felt as if 6.5 times my body weight was smashing against me, thereby approximating life as Mrs. Colin Montgomerie.
Our 26th-floor observation deck was very comfortable Friday night; ought to be perfect this weekend. Cushions are out but, alas, restoring the shade sail is delayed until June because we didn’t get on the contractor’s list soon enough. A good reason not to take down the shade sail in autumn 2020.
Ed note: I’ve gotten several inquiries about playing “virtual bridge.” Zoom doesn’t work very well for this but there are a variety of on-line opportunities. You can play with a partner or individually. The most popular site appears to be Bridge Base On-Line (BBO). You can play for free or for master points. You can even set up a table with 3 friends as long as you all have logged in with BBO.
Ed note: What a brilliant moment it would be for young people to have the opportunity to serve during this pandemic–and beyond. Not only does society have great needs, but young people need jobs. Now we need the federal government to put programs in place. There’s hope.
There is now a vast army of young people ready and yearning to serve their country. There are college graduates emerging into a workplace that has few jobs for them. There are more high school graduates who suddenly can’t afford college. There are college students who don’t want to return to a college experience. This is a passionate, idealistic generation that sees the emergency, wants to serve those around them and groans to live up to this moment.
Suddenly there is a wealth of work for them to do: contact tracing, sanitizing public places, bringing food to the hungry, supporting the elderly, taking temperatures at public gathering spots, supporting local government agencies, tutoring elementary school students so they can make up for lost time.
The obvious imperative right now is to join workers with the work. It’s to expand national service programs to meet the urgencies of this moment.
There’s a good bill winding its way through the Senate to do precisely that, led by Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware. Coons was born to service and came to maturity doing service. His dad grew up in Boston and said that he never really understood the fullness and meaning of America until he commanded troops from all over the country in the Army in the 1950s.
As a young man, Coons launched one of the first AmeriCorps programs, leading 150 members in 15 cities who tutored students in inner-city schools. Later, he created another AmeriCorps program with a local volunteer fire department in Delaware. “It was the most inspiring thing I’ve ever been a part of,” Coons told me.
His bill would double the current number of AmeriCorps volunteers in its first year, from 75,000 to 150,000. Then for years two and three it would double the number again, to 300,000. It would also increase AmeriCorps stipends, which are now as low as $15,000 a year, so the volunteers can have a living wage.
The Coons bill is an excellent start. But it needs to be bigger and bipartisan. Under AmeriCorps, the federal government provides money for the volunteers, matched by private funding. State commissions supervise most programs, and the volunteers work through nonprofits and local agencies. The downside is that the big, well-established nonprofits have a significant advantage when it comes to receiving AmeriCorps volunteers.
There are a lot of great smaller organizations that just don’t have the organizational infrastructure to take part. There are many parts of the country, especially in rural America, where volunteers are relatively thin on the ground. National service has never had confident bipartisan support because Republicans don’t have constant contact with volunteers in their own districts.
John Bridgeland, who ran George W. Bush’s Domestic Policy Council, and Alan Khazei, who co-founded the nonprofit City Year, suggest that the Coons bill be supplemented with a provision to create 250,000 “service year fellowships.”
Young people would get the fellowships directly and could serve in any nonprofit certified by their state commission. The fellows would have much more flexibility to choose local, community and faith-based organizations, without the administrative burden that AmeriCorps entails.
Service year fellowships, which were recently endorsed by a congressionally chartered commission, would give Republicans a piece of the bill to champion, so they’re not just signing up for a Clinton initiative. It’s the best way to quickly expand the volunteer force so that it’s equal to the needs of this moment.
There’s no reason this shouldn’t happen. Eighty-eight percent of Democrats and 74 percent of Republicans support voluntary national service. According to a Columbia University study, every dollar invested in national service produces about $4 in benefits. The number of young people who want to take part in national service always vastly exceeds the number of slots.
And as we all know, the benefits of the program accrue not only to those being served but also to those doing the serving. What would it mean to the future social cohesion of this country if a large part of the rising generation had a common experience of shared sacrifice? What would it mean to our future politics if young people from Berkeley spent a year working side by side with young people from Boise, Birmingham and Baton Rouge?
On the other hand, has any nation prospered that did not encourage in each new generation the habits of work, the taste for adventure, a sense of duty and a call to be of use to neighbors and the world?
We Americans suck at regimentation and blindly following orders from the top down. But we’re pretty good at local initiative, youthful dynamism and decentralized civic action. We need a Covid response that fits the kind of people we are. National service is an essential piece of that response.
As my mentor William F. Buckley once put it, “Materialistic democracy beckons every man to make himself a king; republican citizenship incites every man to be a knight.” We have a generation of knights in waiting.
Posted inEssays, Social justice|Comments Off on We Need National Service. Now. — David Brooks
This is from a column in the Sydney Morning Herald
If Trump was captain of the Titanic:
• There isn’t any iceberg
• There is an iceberg but it’s small and in another ocean
• The iceberg is in this ocean, but it’s small and will melt in
about three days
• There is an iceberg but we didn’t hit the iceberg
• We hit the iceberg but the damage will be repaired very shortly
• I didn’t know how big the iceberg was until a week ago
• The iceberg is a Chinese iceberg
• We aren’t taking on water, but every passenger who wants a
lifeboat can get a lifeboat and they are beautiful lifeboats because we make
the best lifeboats in the world
• Look passengers need to ask nicely for lifeboats if they want
them
• We don’t have any lifeboats, we’re not lifeboat distributors
New York, NY – Declaring the COVID-19 pandemic the
ultimate failure of our world’s leaders to address our greatest collective
threats — including deadly pandemics, climate change, ecosystem destruction,
and proliferating weapons of mass destruction — citizens of 35 countries have
come together to form www.OneShared.World.
The new global social movement and political force, announced today, is
building a global constituency demanding that leaders at all levels take
immediate steps to address our greatest shared challenges.
Seeking to fundamentally alter the global power structure
so that the most pressing common needs of all people can be collectively
addressed, OneShared.World will drive tangible progress toward addressing our
greatest common existential challenges and improving the lives of everyone on
earth, particularly the most vulnerable. The global democratic movement aspires
to augment and inspire, but not supplant, existing national governments and
international institutions.
“The ultimate problem we face today is not the coronavirus, or deadly pathogens, or any other single one of these threats. It is our inability to solve most any global existential challenge we collectively face,” said movement founder Jamie Metzl. “In each of these areas, the narrow interests of our specific nations overpower our collective needs as members of one species sharing the same planet. Unless we solve that problem, we’ll keep jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
Posted inAdvocacy, Education, Politics, prayer, Social justice|Comments Off on DECLARING OUR WORLD BROKEN, CITIZENS OF 35 COUNTRIES FORM GLOBAL MOVEMENT TO SAVE HUMANITY AMID PANDEMIC
For the rest of the beautiful pictures click here. Thanks to Sybil-Ann for finding these!
As a real Dutchman, I am a big fan of our flowers. And as a landscape photographer, I enjoy our beautiful spring each year in which I always find time to photograph the flowers and show the beauty of the Dutch flowers to the whole world. Most of you probably know the world-famous Keukenhof, the most beautiful tulip garden in the world. Every year millions of tourists visit this garden. That’s a huge lot considering the garden is only open in spring! Every year, a hard-working crew makes sure the garden looks as good as ever, including this year!
This year is ‘special’. Keukenhof is closed, for the first time in 71 years. But that doesn’t mean there are no flowers. On the contrary; the flowers look incredible and get as much attention and care as always. All the passionate gardeners do their work as they’re used to. Because even without people, nature and the show of the garden goes on.
I’ve been photographing the tulips since forever, mostly in the countryside. I photographed them from all angles you can possibly imagine, but there was one thing that I still wanted to capture one time in my life: Keukenhof without any other people. This seemed impossible, until this year’s April 2020. With the COVID-19 virus keeping everyone at home and tourists away, I knew this was my only chance of making this happen. I contacted Keukenhof explaining what I had in mind and they were so kind to let me photograph the garden for a day.
When I visited the park it looked at its best. Interestingly enough, we have experienced the sunniest April EVER in the Netherlands, making all the flowers pop very fast. Photographing in broad daylight with the strong sun was a challenge. But forget about the photography for a moment: walking around there all alone, with only the sounds of birds and the incredible smell of all these flowers, is an experience by itself. I sometimes just sat next to the flowers and the water, enjoying nature for 30 minutes long. It was just a magical experience. Having no people in the park allowed me to photograph paths and angles in a certain way that you normally don’t get to see because of the crowds.
This photo series is an initiative from myself in collaboration with Keukenhof. We aim to show the beauty of the park through these images. Too bad there’s no smell involved.
If you think back to the beginning of the year, you probably never dreamed that your life could change so quickly. The things we all take for granted—travel, dinner with friends, and even haircuts—are now canceled (or at the very least, postponed) because of the coronavirus. Comedian Julie Nolke perfectly conveys the bizarreness of this moment in time in her hilarious video, Explaining the Pandemic to My Past Self.
In the three-minute-long piece, “Julie from four months in the future” sits across a table from herself in January 2020. “Because of the butterfly effect,” Future Julie explains, “I can only give you some loose details, but we’ll go through the basics.” She begins with the good news—in regards to climate change, things have improved. Past Julie is happy to hear it, especially in light of the Australia fires, which she predicts will “define 2020.” Future Julie warns her, “Your definition of a ‘pretty big deal’ is going to change.”
Posted inHealth, Humor|Comments Off on Explaining the epidemic to my past self
To help keep you informed and engaged during this stay-at-home time, Seattle CityClub is partnering with Town Hall Seattle and Seattle Channel to present Civic Cocktail as a free, live, digital event!
Grab a beverage, a bite, and a comfy seat in your own home as journalist Joni Balter interviews Vice Admiral (ret.) Raquel Bono, the Director of Washington State’s COVID-19 Health System Response Management team, and Gary Locke, who’s been the Governor of Washington, Ambassador to China, and U.S. Secretary of Commerce and is currently the honorary chair of the King County Complete Count Committee.
Presented by CityClub, produced by Seattle Channel, and broadcast by Town Hall Seattle, join us TONIGHT, May 6, from 6 – 7 p.m. (moderated chat starts at 5:30). Click here to register for free through Town Hall Seattle.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on TONIGHT: Locke, Bono at Virtual Civic Cocktail!
The legendary thinker and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog raises a public conversation about end-of-life care during the Covid-19 pandemic.
From Wired: Brand is a legendary writer and thinker, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and cofounder of the Long Now Foundation. He is also 81, and his tweet Fwas a way of opening a conversation on a subject that was impossible for him to avoid during the Covid-19 pandemic: When is it time to say no to treatment?
This end-of-life question didn’t arrive with the new coronavirus. For people who are older or have serious medical conditions, the possibility of having to make frightening health decisions in an emergency always lurks in the back of the mind. Covid-19 drives those dark thoughts to the foreground. While the virus is still a mystery in many ways, experts have been consistent on at least one point: It hits older people and those with preexisting medical conditions the hardest. And one of the worst complications—acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)—can come on suddenly, rapidly accelerating to the point where treatment dictates admission to an intensive care unit.
Brand now was posing a question: Should you just not go there? That’s when he opened it up to Twitter. “The main thing I’m looking for is data,” he wrote. “Anecdotes. Statistics. Video. INFORMATION … The stuff that good decisions are made of.”
Supporting his quest was Brand’s wife, Ryan Phelan, who has a background in health care. (She founded a consumer health website that was acquired by WebMD in 1999 and later founded DNA Direct, a consumer genetics company, which Medco Health Solutions bought in 2011. )
Experience some of America’s greatest songs in the context in which they were written. From “God Bless America,” to “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “White Christmas,” “Always,” and so many more… in a musical event that has been performed in theaters throughout the nation and abroad. Relive this smash-hit performance—last seen at Seattle Rep in our 2017/18 season—or witness for the first time Hershey Felder’s stellar turn as one of America’s most beloved songwriters.
TICKET SALES CLOSE THURSDAY, MAY 7 AT MIDNIGHT
VIEWING INFORMATION
Live Performance on Sunday May 10, 2020 (Mother’s Day) 5 p.m. PT, 7 p.m. CT, 8 p.m. ET
Viewing will be available for an additional 72 hours post live performance
Viewing Price: $50 per household, for viewing on smart TV, computer, smartphone or tablet
Please ensure in advance of your purchase that you can view Vimeo videos on your device. Once your purchase is confirmed, you will receive a confirmation email followed by a reminder email on May 8 with a viewing link and an instructional video for viewing on your device.
PLEASE NOTE: BECAUSE THIS IS A BENEFIT EVENT, DISCOUNTS OR ACCOUNT CREDITS CANNOT BE APPLIED.
Posted inEntertainment, Music|Comments Off on Hershey Felder performs for Seattle Rep Benefit
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert, spends 19-hour days helping to lead the fight against the coronavirus.
To relieve the stress, he runs daily. But what he really wants, like so many sports fans, is just to go to a baseball game.
“I don’t think there’s any place that I relax more than sitting in Nats Park and watching my now world champion Nats play a game,” Fauci, 79, who grew up in Brooklyn rooting for the Yankees and is now a Washington Nationals fan, said in an interview this week.
But the person with the avuncular demeanor delivering such sobering news as well as practical advice with his Brooklyn accent at news conferences is a superfan with deep knowledge of baseball history.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, grew up in an Italian enclave in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, during what is known as the golden age of New York baseball. In every season from 1947 to 1957 except one (1948), at least one of the city’s three major league teams — the Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants — played in the World Series. The Yankees won seven titles in that span.
Fauci said playing baseball in Brooklyn’s sandlots, which produced future major league stars like Joe Pepitone and Sandy Koufax, was better than high school baseball. He adored the Yankees, whose home was in the Bronx, even though the Dodgers played at nearby Ebbets Field before their 1958 move to Los Angeles.
“People don’t realize that half of the people in Brooklyn, half of the kids in the street like me, were Yankee fans and half were Dodger fans,” he said, adding, “And we used to spend all of our time arguing who’s better: Duke Snider or Mickey Mantle? Yogi Berra or Roy Campanella? Pee Wee Reese or Phil Rizzuto?”
He was the captain of the basketball team at Regis High, an elite Jesuit school in Manhattan. “He was a little on the short side for the N.B.A., but he was talented,” President Trump said of Fauci at a news conference in early April.Sign up to receive an email when we publish a new story about the coronavirus outbreak.Sign Up
“I like all sports,” Fauci said recently, “but I’m really much, much more of a baseball fan.”
After college, medical school and hospital work, Fauci carried his Yankees fandom to Washington. He didn’t care much for the Senators, an expansion team that left Washington to become the Texas Rangers for the 1972 season. He tried becoming a Baltimore Orioles fan, he said, but “that’s tough when you live 40 minutes away.” But when the Montreal Expos moved to Washington to become the Nationals in 2005, Fauci was hooked.
“It kind of triggered in me that kind of fierce affection for a team that I hadn’t had since I used to idolize all the Yankees,” he said. “I just fell in love with the Nats. I don’t consider that I’m being disloyal to the Yankees. I consider it as sort of a replacement for my boyhood love for baseball, which I still have.”
It shows. On Tuesday, Fauci was interviewed by the Nationals’ longtime mainstay, first baseman Ryan Zimmerman, for the team’s website. They talked about potential scenarios in which Major League Baseball could resume play after stopping spring training in mid-March. Zimmerman offered him tickets. Fauci giddily said he had been a fan of Zimmerman’s since he was drafted by the Nationals out of the University of Virginia in 2005.
In a subsequent interview with the The New York Times, Fauci painted a cautious picture about when baseball could return. Although he said sports could provide a distraction for the public, he conceded that the needed testing wasn’t available yet and warned against a premature reopening of the country.
“There are certain parts of the country — in the Mountain region and in the Midwest and in some of the places where there is very little infection and they’re developing the capability of responding — I think they’re getting back to some form of more normality,” he said. “That’s much, much different than putting somebody in Madison Square Garden to play a Big East game.”
Despite his hectic schedule, Fauci has still found some time for his other passion, running, to boost his mental and physical health. Before the pandemic, his daily routine consisted of eating yogurt for lunch and going on a seven-mile run on the Bethesda Trolley Trail near his office at the National Institutes of Health.
(Although Fauci called it running on Tuesday, he admitted during an appearance on Barstool Sports’ “Pardon My Take” podcast in March that he does more “power walking” because the pounding of a faster pace hurts his back.)
His lunchtime runs are down to about three and a half miles and are no longer daily. To make up for it, he said he and his wife, Christine, have added an evening jaunt around their neighborhood in Washington a few times a week. They have still preserved their weekend runs along the Potomac River.
Fauci, who has run four marathons and about 50 10Ks in his life, said he looked forward to getting the spread of the coronavirus under control so he could return to his usual daily exercise routine. By then, his beloved baseball, warts and all, could also be back.
“I like the rhythm of the game,” he said. “Some people think the game is too slow. But to go to Nats Park to sit down and have a hot dog and a beer and just watch things go along slowly and then all of a sudden explode with a couple of line drives off the wall followed by a couple of home runs and then — bingo — your adrenaline goes up tenfold.
“That is a catharsis for people who have a stressful life like I do.”
Washington, Oregon and California have banded together to coordinate policies for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, as have states in the Northeast. Meanwhile, several states in the South and the Mountain West have gone rogue, relaxing social distancing rules and allowing massage parlors, barbershops, bowling alleys and beaches to open up for business.
It is easy to interpret these contrasting approaches merely as red states and blues states running off in predictably opposite directions. However, the way regions of the country have responded differently to the current national health crisis may be evidence of enduring cultural values that go far deeper — as far back as the first colonies in North America and even to the English Civil War.
In his 2011 book, “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America,” journalist and historian Colin Woodard notes that the United States is not just one big, homogenous cultural lump. Similarly, journalist Joel Garreau wrote in “The Nine Nations of North America,” the continent could easily be divided into nine distinct countries, including a cohesive coastal society running from San Francisco up through Seattle to Vancouver and beyond. Garreau called that elongated land Ecotopia. Woodard identifies the same area as the Left Coast, but he takes his premise beyond Garreau’s observations into recurring patterns of history.
Woodard’s central premise is that the founding cultures that colonized North America have not vanished in the American melting pot. By his reckoning, the diverse philosophies and ways of organizing society that guided European settlers as they established communities in the New World still drive powerful undercurrents in our fractured federation.
![Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession by [Erma Bombeck]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51fBrK7lfoL.jpg)
