Not much of an April Fool’s Day today. I tricked the child in a small way in the morning, and they said something in their before-school conversation in their teleschool space. (I’ve been growing increasingly fond of “teleschool”. It puts the current process on the level of television and telephone and at the same level of sophistication. Their school is communicating through the internet, but it’s pretty hard to call it instruction or education except insofar as everything learned is education.) They said they had gotten a particular video game console but then —LOL— they hadn’t actually. That’s about all I saw except for one tweet that seemed to be of someone who had told their children they were going back to school today. Rather on the cruel side, like the Tonight Show (Leno era?) bit where people told their kids they had to give up all their Halloween candy. What’s the point of treating children this way? What are the consequences?
Apparently the executive branch of the federal government is now talking about as much as 200K dead. My guess is that means they are actually being told that it will be higher and they have ways of making officials not talk. But what we hear and what we see done is what we have to go on. There are reports that some states are being treated more favorably by the executive branch when it comes to receiving requested aid from the feds. Not a surprise, but the usual sleazy behavior continues to make me feel awful.
There’s a recurring comment in the twittersphere whenever he does this week’s (day’s) egregious thing, along the lines of “This is what banana republics do.” It’s an offensive phrase, even though at its origin it’s about American corporate imperialism and corrupt elites and not a comment about the country as a whole subject to the corporate imperialism. Still, I do think some of us who have not previously personally felt this way about the US and its government are getting a glimpse of what the runup to dictatorship is like and what life under a dictator is like. It’s American-style, to be sure — no disappearings (yet), no overt control over the press by the government (yet), no making the opposition political party illegal (yet) — but that just means the ideology is oligarchy and profit, and the oligarchs need to keep some veneer of democracy for now.
Connecticut has set up a handful of mobile hospitals in places closest to current outbreaks, expecting the hospitals to get overrun as they have been in other countries.
The current peak in Connecticut (apologies, I forget the source) is supposed to trail New York’s by more or less two weeks, moving east more or less along the major highways. Meaning late April is when the wave crashes. It’s going to continue to be hard to quarantine when quarantine partly means waiting for the infection count to rise and trying not to be part of that future rather than seeing a high infection count and trying to stay away from it.
Grocery delivery order is coming tomorrow, with a tab significantly larger than it’s been for a while. Nearly a quarter of it is a 20# bag of rice and a box of protein bars. The rice is because they didn’t have the right size of any other kind of rice I wanted; I’ll use it up sure enough, though. The protein bars are because I keep thinking I should be taking in more nutritious calories and can’t see my way to getting a powdered meal supplement. Feels much more like a platehead thing to do.
I barely went outside today, which is not good. On the morning walk the child and I take as part of helping them transition to teleschool, they came up with a game, the Risk Raffle. You pay to get tickets, and the drawn ticket gets to stick their hand in a jar with greenbacks in it and pull one out. It might be a $1, it might be a $20 (I think that’s the biggest one they said would be in the jar). Congratulations, junior, you’ve invented America.