"There is nothing wrong with Godly principles...."

The radical left is upset that President Trump and Dr. Ben Carson requested a #NationalDayOfPrayer.

Dr. Carson, "There is nothing wrong with Godly principles no matter what your faith is."

Will you Pray with President @realDonaldTrump & @SecretaryCarson? 🙏 pic.twitter.com/F7VZDr3OEj

— Big Dan Rodimer for Congress-Nevada's 3rd District (@DanRodimer) March 14, 2020

"He stopped all conventional advertising of his apparel and devoted his entire ad budget to public service announcements...."

"The second campaign urged people to vote by showing footage of Hitler and suggesting that voting was the way 'to keep fools like these out of our government.'"

From "Herb Goldsmith, the Man Behind the Members Only Jacket, Dies at 92/An aggressive marketer, he used celebrities to promote his brand. Frank Sinatra, Johnny Carson and two presidents wore his jackets" (NYT).

On a trip to Germany in 1978, he saw a jacket with epaulets and a Nehru collar. Using a shiny chintz fabric from Japan, he designed his own version of it, with a slim fit, knitted ribbing at the waist and cuffs, and a strap at the collar. He offered it in a rainbow of colors, though he was colorblind, with a discreet “Members Only” tag stitched below the breast pocket....

“Our philosophy was to associate the brand name with a company that cared about critical issues,” Mr. Goldsmith wrote. “The results proved that we were right.”

Can we get the coronavirus from eating food that contains the virus?

I wondered, as I was reading about people who are dealing with the social distancing by avoiding restaurants — whether they might inhale the virus — but getting food made in restaurants delivered to their house? I found this answer at the Harvard Medical School website:

Can I catch the coronavirus by eating food handled or prepared by others?

"Effective as of 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 14, 2020, and continuing until further notice, public and private Mass Gatherings, defined below, are hereby prohibited in the City of Madison and Dane County."

We here in Madison have been ordered not to go to church.

For purposes of this Order, a “Mass Gathering” is any event or convening, subject to the exceptions listed below, that brings together or is likely to bring together two hundred fifty (250) or more people in a single room or single confined or enclosed space at the same time, such as, by way of example and without limitation, an auditorium, stadium, arena, conference room, meeting hall, theater, exhibition center, museum, places of worship and religious gathering centers, and any other space where people are present and they are within arm’s length of one another for more than ten (10) minutes.

This presents a problem under state and federal freedom of religion provisions, especially considering that there is a list of exceptions, including...

Retail food establishments (grocery stores, convenience stores, farmer’s markets);
Shopping malls and other retail establishments where large numbers of people are present but are generally not within arm’s length of one another for more than ten (10) minutes...
Health, fitness and recreational centers (not including meeting facilities, conference rooms, event spaces, or banquet halls);
Restaurants and Bars (not including meeting facilities, conference rooms, event spaces, or banquet halls)...

I'm not offering a legal opinion that banning religious meetings is unconstitutional, just observing that this is a problem. I think the religious organizations should voluntarily stop meeting — even if they draw less than 250 people — but I am disturbed to read that the government is ordering religious groups not to meet. There should be a compelling government interest behind such an order, and I believe there is, but the exceptions undercut the argument that the interest is compelling. If the situation is what you say it is, why aren't you closing down the restaurants and health clubs too?

It's too late to work on your restaurant racism, but not too late to tweak AOC.

Should we still PATRON Asian restaurants though? ...or no? pic.twitter.com/0ooMFy0R2i

— Tara LaRosa (@TaraLaRosa) March 15, 2020

"Ms. Regan’s 8 p.m. program, 'Trish Regan Primetime,' is “on hiatus until further notice,' Fox Business said..."

"Fox Business attributed the move to 'the demands of the evolving pandemic crisis coverage,' saying it was shifting resources toward daytime coverage of the pandemic and global markets. Both 'Trish Regan Primetime' and its follow-up at 9, 'Kennedy,' will be replaced by general-interest programs. Still, the abrupt removal of Ms. Regan — a reliably pro-Trump personality who has twice interviewed the president — came as right-wing media stars have faced growing scrutiny for commentary that played down fears about the coronavirus and suggested that the illness had been overhyped by President Trump’s critics."

From "Fox Business Benches Trish Regan After Outcry Over Coronavirus Comments/The host of 'Trish Regan Primetime' told viewers this week that concerns about the coronavirus were 'yet another attempt to impeach the president'" (NYT).

I just have one question, and it's not answered in the article: Why did they take down Kennedy? Must Kennedy pay for Trish Regan's sins?

This is the first time I've used my tag "Trump derangement syndrome" to refer to someone who is pro-Trump. Is it unfair? Check out the Regan rant in question:

You gotta watch this, I mean........you just gotta watch pic.twitter.com/x2ZsayVrmv

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) March 10, 2020

"What does all of this mean for colleges suddenly forced to move online because of the coronavirus pandemic?"

"The only thing they can create right now is distance.... They do not have the time or resources necessary to map out the rest of their courses and build online versions on the fly that can accommodate large numbers of students. They will not be able to train their teachers how to teach or their learners how to learn. There will be little personalization.... [I]t’s a mistake to say that colleges will be 'moving to online education.' All they’ll really be doing is conducting traditional education at a distance. That will be hard enough."

From "Everybody Ready for the Big Migration to Online College? Actually, No/One consequence of coronavirus: It will become more apparent that good online education is easier said than done" by Kevin Carey (NYT).

Carey is the author of "The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere" (2016). He's for on-line education.

"Isolation and other shifts in behavior during the coronavirus outbreak could also alter our greenhouse gas emissions. But will the changes stick?"

Wonders John Schwartz (in the NYT).

The strategies of avoiding coronavirus — staying home, not flying and driving, using on-line shopping — also reduce your carbon footprint. This social distancing is a green new deal... if it persists. Ever start something for one reason and then continue it for another?

Charles Duhigg, the author of “The Power of Habit” and a former New York Times reporter, said habits built over lifetimes are hard to shake. “As soon as the environment becomes stable again, the habit starts to reassert itself” unless there is a “powerful reward” to the new behavior.

Mr. Duhigg said that while there is no set time for a habit to form or change, some cultural habits could, if the pandemic response lasts long enough, take hold. One example: shaking hands. “I could see other kinds of behavior replacing that habit, or maybe just diminishing,” and wondered aloud whether his own children might one day think “hand shaking is a weird, old-timey thing.”

Yeah, but shaking hands didn't affect your carbon footprint (handprint?).

Some practices, like videoconferencing and telecommuting, may gain ground, Mr. Duhigg said, for a reward of saved time and trouble. He expressed doubts, however, that leisure travel behavior would see a similar shift. “It seems unlikely to me that people will say, ‘You know, I loved not taking vacations. I learned staying at home with my kids is so rewarding!’”

Oh, the sarcasm! What I'm picturing is a married couple where one of them says I loved staying home, and the other is massively alarmed if not angry. The one then adds the climate change factor to his (and I do mean "his") side of the argument, and the other explodes in a confetti burst of wokeism. Ha ha, the anti-travelist wins! The erstwhile bucket list kicks the bucket, and the forced stay at home goes on and on... until death comes to take that frustrated travel bug on that long-anticipated, truly exotic trip — out of the world altogether.

"It was the dawn of the psychedelic 1960s, and she saw that she could create herself in a new form, as an alter ego she called Genesis P-Orridge...."

"After art school she formed a confrontational performance group called COUM Transmissions, which shocked the British art world with a 1976 exhibition called 'Prostitution' at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. The exhibition included pornography, strippers and used tampons, and led one member of Parliament to call the group 'wreckers of civilization.' The core members of COUM morphed into Throbbing Gristle, an often abrasive experimental band that coined the term 'industrial music' to describe its repetitive, amelodic soundscapes. As with COUM, performances might involve nudity, self-mutilation, dead animals and Holocaust imagery; the band’s best-known single [was] 'Zyklon B Zombie'....  [I]n 1991... Genesis relocated to Kathmandu with her first wife, Paula, and their daughters, Genesse and Caresse.... There, as Genesis’s first marriage unwound, she found another unlikely identity, as a single father of two girls, attending P.T.A. meetings in a silver miniskirt and thigh-high boots.... On a trip to New York, she met Jacqueline Breyer, a dominatrix and nurse. Their love was so consuming that they wanted to fuse into a single entity, freed from the binary divisions of gender.... They got matching breast implants.... 'We’d go to our plastic surgeon and say, what else can we do now to look more alike?'"

From the NYT obituary for Genesis P-Orridge, nee Neil Andrew Megson. The cause of death, at age 70, was leukemia.

The obituary closes with this quote from Genesis: "Some people take their lives and turn them into the equivalent of a work of art. So we invented Genesis, but Gen forgot Neil, really. Does that person still exist somewhere, or did Genesis gobble him up? We don’t know the answer. But thank you, Neil."

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

"That is science."

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w r o n g n e s s

A post shared by Strange Planet (@nathanwpylestrangeplanet) on Mar 14, 2020 at 6:29am PDT

Today's coronavirus press conference — quite good, I thought, in content and tone.

COVID-19 UPDATE https://t.co/xzSHlNiS9K

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 14, 2020

"Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each..."

"...  he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.) Current price-gouging laws 'are not built for today’s day and age,' Mr. Colvin said. 'They’re built for Billy Bob’s gas station doubling the amount he charges for gas during a hurricane.' He added, 'Just because it cost me $2 in the store doesn’t mean it’s not going to cost me $16 to get it to your door.'"

From "He Has 17,000 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them/Amazon cracked down on coronavirus price gouging. Now, while the rest of the world searches, some sellers are holding stockpiles of sanitizer and masks" (NYT).

ADDED: Colvin acquired his stash by taking "a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck" with what he found in "little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods." The commenters at the NYT are letting him have it, saying he's clearly much worse than the man he calls "Billy Bob."

"In Siena, the city to which I am very attached, you stay at home but sing together as if you were on the street."

A Siena, città alla quale sono molto legato, si sta in casa ma si canta insieme come se si fosse per la strada. Mi sono commosso pic.twitter.com/IDPqNEj3h3

— David Allegranti (@davidallegranti) March 12, 2020

"Metropolitan Opera, After Shutting Its Doors, Will Offer Free Streams From Live in HD Catalog."

Playbill reports.

The performances, originally captured as live broadcasts in movie theatres worldwide, will begin at 7:30 PM [March 16th] on the company's website.... [T]he videos in the nightly series will be made available for free for 20 hours following the initial stream.

The lineup seems designed to welcome opera beginners. It begins with "Carmen," and the next night is "La Bohème."

This is great. I love seeing the silver lining. People are stuck without things to go out and do, but they can watch streamed video, and the public's need for entertainment can be met, and the forced seclusion can be used to build new interest in the best of performance arts.

I remember taking my sons to see "Carmen" when they were very young — the story and the music are so accessible and enjoyable to almost anyone.

(I'm not seeing where you need to click to get to the live stream, but we should be able to find that out by March 16th.)

If social distancing works to "flatten the curve," that will be great, but I'm wondering how long we will need to keep doing it.

Here at Meadhouse, we started our self-isolation around February 28th, a bit loosely, and then tightened it up by March 6th. I'm mostly visualizing it in terms of the next month, maybe the next 2 months, and I'm hoping America shapes up and does a great job of achieving the flattened curve that preserves access to healthcare services. That's the prime goal right now, and people are stepping up to it.

But I'm not hearing much talk about the next phase. Maybe you can point me to some articles on this subject. When do we reemerge? What are the possibilities? My rough understanding is that if we had not taken on this curve-flattening strategy, the virus would have hit like a tsunami. Trump used that water metaphor in his speech yesterday:

Some of the doctors say it will wash through, it will flow through. Interesting terms and very accurate. I think you’re going to find in a number of weeks it’s going to be a very accurate term.

That made me think: So the same amount of "water" is going to get in, but it will hit much more gently, more slowly. And it would speed up again if we returned to normal life, I take it, unless we do social distancing until the flow-through process is complete. My unscientific sense of what needs to happen is that large numbers of Americans need to slowly get the disease and recover with acquired immunity before we can resume normal life. We just need to make that process happen slowly.

Perhaps we can't know how long social distancing will be needed until we see how much we've managed to slow the process down. Maybe the process will be calibrated by increments of ending social distancing. And some of the distancing may never end — should never end. I know I stopped touching doorknobs in public places decades ago. Thinking about what you are touching, washing your hands and not touching your face, covering coughs and sneezes, and getting 6 feet away from anyone who acts sick — these are things we will do well to make a permanent part of life.

Maybe social distancing will balance out in the next 2 months, with many precautions feeling normal and extreme aspects of social avoidance gradually seeming less important.

But I anticipate looking back at this post in 2 months — and I am planning to live — and thinking oh, if you only knew! 2 months?!! Ha ha. No wonder they didn't tell you how long this would take! 

But there, now, I've said it. Message to future me: See? I wasn't naive. I knew.