Today isn’t quite as hot as yesterday’s scorching heat, when I decided to use the 13′ ladder and replace the coaxial cable on the antenna for the porch TV. The old cable is white, and after four years it’s covered in spots of black mold. I’m not sure how much shielding it has, so I replaced it with a black, quad-shielded RG6 cable. Look carefully, and you’ll see there are actually two antennas in this picture.
With that latest frivolous project out of the way — the house has many other, much bigger, ones that need attention — my thoughts are returning to these unprecedented times. There seems to be an underlying expectation by Trump’s hardcore supporters that everything will return to normal, if we would only let the coronavirus play itself out. Doing that would crush hospitals and result in an even more significant culling of the elderly population, along with people suffering from a compromised medical condition. The same crowd that claimed Obamacare would have death panels and “kill grandma,” are now saying “let grandma die.”
In yet another bizarre bit of irony, Trump is touting the promise of a vaccine to his anti-vax followers! America has yet to get a grip on the pandemic, and the ongoing anti-science nonsense is one reason why. William G. Kaelin Jr., 2019 Nobel laureate in Medicine, expresses his opinion on the need for facts in The Boston Globe. These are his concluding remarks:
I saw an Internet meme that said, “Having some states locked down and others not locked down is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.” It’s true. We are all in this together, and the current coronavirus case spikes in other parts of the country will eventually harm both our health and the economic recovery.
Our fragmented and uneven response to COVID-19 is an unintended consequence of the war on science. We must make decisions based on the best scientific advice available, not on wishful thinking and hunches. It is our best hope for dealing with this crisis.