Neanderthal-ish.
Neanderthals for the Win!
Remember when President Joe Biden called Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s elimination of the state’s mask mandate and business capacity restrictions the result of “Neanderthal thinking?” Here’s a bit of what I wrote about that, back in early March:
In a complex but improving environment in which experts and governors and presidents and everyone else have gotten things wrong, it’s not Neanderthal thinking to allow people to make more decisions for themselves. It’s the type of thinking all of our leaders should be engaged in right now. We don’t know if Texas and Mississippi have moved too far, too fast, but it would be great news for everyone who doesn’t delight in controlling the lives of other people if those clinging Neanderthals down south got this one right.
Well, it turns out Texas’s Covid case count has in fact gone down since Abbott lifted the mandates:
(Image courtesy Texas Dept. of State Health Services and Bloomberg).
Case numbers can decline because fewer people have COVID, or because there are fewer tests being performed. In Texas, the number of tests have declined since early March, but so has the test positivity rate.
Similarly, Mississippi case numbers have declined since its mandates were lifted. Meanwhile, case numbers in some states with strict restrictions, including Oregon, have increased over the same timeframe.
Does this mean that the Neanderthals got it right? Not necessarily. There are, apparently, a lot of factors that go into the ebbs and flows of COVID numbers aside from regulations, including weather. Maybe TX and MS have just gotten lucky so far, and they’re in for another surge too. But we can say pretty definitively that the numbers do not, yet, demonstrate that the Neanderthals deserved the scorn leveled upon them by President Biden. I’m sure an apology is forthcoming.
Teachers Union Boss Visits Bend
The other day, Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union in America, came to little old Bend, Oregon. She came to celebrate a new contract reached between newly unionized medical technicians and the local hospital system.
For some reason, the Oregon Roundup was left off the AFT’s press release list for the trip. I first found out about it because some people online noted Weingarten appeared to travel from Portland to Bend via private jet. It turns out that’s incorrect - Boutique Air is a small, boutique propeller plane service.
You may have heard about Weingarten recently due to her, um, interesting comments made to the Jerusalem Post about American Jews who have criticized teachers unions from slowing school re=opening:
[Jerusalem Post]: I think some people are very skeptical of the power that they perceive teachers unions to have. They look at, for example, the ongoing struggles in Los Angeles, where they see this big dollar figure of aid being given for school reopening and are baffled by the perceived resistance of teachers to going back to work.
[Weingarten]: I have a very pointed response here for Jews making this argument.
American Jews are now part of the ownership class. Jews were immigrants from somewhere else. And they needed the right to have public education. And they needed power to have enough income and wealth for their families that they could put their kids through college and their kids could do better than they have done. Both economic opportunity through the labor movement and an educational opportunity through public education were key for Jews to go from the working class to the ownership class.
What I hear when I hear that question is that those who are in the ownership class now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it. Am I saying that everything we do is right? No. Are people in Los Angeles fearful? Yes.
Got that? People who’ve achieved the “ownership class” shouldn’t criticize the role of teachers unions in keeping schools closed for much of the past year because to do so is to take away the “ladder of opportunity” away from others who want to follow their lead.
I don’t even know where to start with this, but let’s start with definitions. By “ownership class,” Weingarten presumably refers to Marxist class theory, which divides people up into the bourgeois, who own stuff and hire people, and the proletariat, who sell their labor to the bourgeois, or ownership class.
Weingarten notes, correctly, that many people in the ownership class didn’t start there, and climbed to their position by going to public school. However, she then implies that to want public schools open is to be against public education, to “take that ladder of opportunity away.”
She has this exactly backwards. The people in the ownership class or working class or whatever who want public schools open want it, in part, to keep the ladder in place. Kids from lower-income families have fared far worse as a result of school closures than kids from higher-income families. Keeping schools closed is what really takes the ladder away from the kids who need it most.
Correction: An earlier version of this newsletter incorrectly stated that Weingarten flew from Portland to Bend on a private jet. She did not. Boutique Air, the owner of the plane in the photo above, is a small, boutique propeller plane service. I regret the error and thank the astute reader who pointed it out to me.
Neanderthals: an ode
There once was a president named Joe
Who thought Repubs too dumb to know
To keep numbers sinking
No Neanderthal thinking!
C’mon, man, SCIENCE says otherwise though.
Programming Note
I’ve opened up comments to all recipients, not just paid subscribers. Have a great week!
Boutique Air is a commercial air service, not a private jet by a long stretch.