caulfield12

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/508623-tea-party-rises-up-against-mcconnells-1-trillion-relief-plan Shocking...

You can’t take a one year or semester leave from coaching? Position lost permanently? Guess it depends on how aggressive other candidates are about the position, and financial/safety issues as well. Also, what’s the current plan for HS football in Texas? Unlikely to play this fall...?

My cousin who teaches and is an instructional coach in Plano shared this on FB “I know there are A LOT of people with mixed emotions about starting the school year remotely. It’s hard. Every option at this point is hard. My job title has been Instructional Coach/Title 1 for the past few years. While I haven't had my own classroom since 2015, I have worked closely with many teachers and many students. From March to May, I saw classroom teachers work day and night trying to make their virtual classroom as effective as possible for their students. It breaks my heart to hear people claim that teachers had the last few months of the school year off. If I can make one general statement about teachers, it’s that they ARE NOT lazy. They ARE NOT paid by the hour, yet many work nights and weekends to squeeze as many difference making opportunities as possible into each 7 hour school day. Just as many have shared, neither remote learning nor “in-person spaced-out mask-wearing pandemic style” learning is a teacher’s preference. They want their small groups back. They want NORMAL social interaction back not only for themselves, but more importantly for your children. They want hugs back. And, most importantly, they want to help your kids grow as much as possible. While neither choice is optimal, what I wanted to share today is my opinion on virtual learning. I wasn’t planning on teaching summer school this year. I had vowed to take the summer off for the first time in 12 years. I was going to focus on my 1 year old, take him on playdates, make memories, maybe travel. All of those plans changed with COVID. I decided that teaching summer school was something that I just had to do. I wanted to see what it was like to have my own class of students in a virtual setting. I wanted to be able to help teachers with the virtual platform this fall, and that’s really hard to do without real, first hand experience. The days leading up to our 1st EVER virtual SS, I questioned my decision. I had convinced myself I made a mistake. I had NO IDEA what I was doing. I had zero experience teaching live-virtual lessons. I had joined Zooms with students and hosted Zooms with my teammates, but I had ZERO experience leading a zoom with my own students. While fear consumed me at the beginning, I always tell my students, “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.” Last Friday was my last day of summer school with my 4th graders, and I seriously had to fight back tears saying good-bye to the kids. In the fourteen days of summer school, I got to know these ten year olds in such a different way than students in the past. They learned from me, and I learned from them. I learned about their favorite foods, hobbies, past teachers, personal virtual learning experiences, siblings, pets, and favorite super heroes. They taught each other concepts. The students would help explain technology solutions to their peers using personal experience from the student viewpoint. When a student asked a question in the comment section on Google Classroom, their classmates would reply with feedback before the teachers even saw the comment. Whoever says that students can’t collaborate virtually, hasn’t seen a virtual classroom. When it came to technology, we ALL (teachers and students) learned together. Our mistakes enabled the students who might be afraid of being wrong to see that we ALL have a learning curve (and that’s ok). We stressed that we might not always have the answer, but the learning is in the trying. As my teammate would frequently tell the kids, “Practice makes progress!” Last Thursday I was leading a Guided Reading group when my computer suddenly died. As quickly as humanly possibly, I grabbed my charger, restarted my computer, logged into Google Classroom, and clicked on the link to the reading session. I expected the students to have left (we were near the end of the session anyway). What I saw when I logged back in is something that will stay with me for a long time. Not only were all the students still on, but one of the kids had become the host (it automatically assigned him host-status when I was booted off). This particular student had divided the students into break-out sessions to discuss whether or not their previous predictions were accurate. When I logged back on, he had just ended the break-out rooms and the kids were reconvening on their partner turn-and-talk discussions. Seriously?! Yeah- a 4th grader. I know I am BY NO MEANS an expert (NOT EVEN CLOSE), but my virtual classroom/ live-learning experience was one of my favorite teaching experiences to date. I will genuinely miss the connections we made with each other and how much we ALL learned together. I also know it’s not just me who feels this way. Our principal led a SS wrap up Zoom last week, and the teachers K-5 reiterated those same feelings. Out of the two fourth grade classrooms, there was only one student I have actually met in person. To make such strong connections with a group of people who (for the most part) have NEVER MET EACH OTHER is amazing to me. I know the state of the world is scary right now, but there are also really amazing things coming out of this. We are becoming more technologically advanced, real-world problem solvers (students and teachers alike). So I, for one, can’t wait to see what comes out of remote learning this year (for whatever amount of time it consumes our teaching). From March to May we were all in survival mode. We were living day to day, week to week. We learned a lot, but we were just getting the hang of it when the school year ended. I am predicting big strides for remote learning across the nation. Whatever happens, just know there are a lot of anxious students and teachers out there who genuinely want the best learning experience possible. Support the people around you. Be kind. Be patient. And remember, “If it doesn’t challenge us, it doesn’t change us.”

One Republican who paid close attention to the rise in distrust of science among the party’s base was Donald Trump, to whom the language and concepts of anti-scientific thought have come naturally. He has always arrived at his beliefs by intuition, rumor, and anecdote rather than any respect for evidence and study. During his career as a free-form pundit and huckster, Trump related naturally to the right’s suspicion of scientific authority — not only the concept but the language. Trump has frequently rejected not only the consensus view on scientific matters but also the very idea of expertise. Sometimes his source would be a “report.” (“I saw a report the other day, you may get AIDS by kissing,” he told Howard Stern in 1993.) More often, he would cite unidentified people. “I think the vaccines can be very dangerous,” he said in 2009. “And obviously, you know, a lot of people are talking about vaccines with children with respect to autism. And every report comes out, like, you know, that does not happen. But a lot of people feel that the vaccines are what causes autism in children.” He has denounced wind turbines on the grounds that “they say the noise causes cancer.” Trump recognized the financial possibilities of exploiting medical illiteracy as early as 2009, when he signed up to be a pitchman for a vitamin business, which was then renamed “the Trump Network.” Vitamins are unregulated by the FDA and are thus a lucrative opportunity for hucksters, who can sell billions of dollars in nutritional supplements to customers who — by and large — don’t need them. (The vast majority of people can get all the vitamins they need from a healthy diet.) The Trump Network took the basic vitamin scam and piled additional scams on top of it. The network sold a kit for $139.95 that would supposedly test customers’ urine, and the Trump Network used the results of the test to tell customers which pills they needed to buy from the Trump Network for another $69.95 a month, plus $99.95 every six months for additional testing. “They make an outrageous statement, which is that this testing and supplement regimen, this process, are a necessity for anyone who wants to stay healthy,” Dr. Pieter Cohen told Stat news four years ago. “That’s quite insane.” For good measure, the Trump Network created a multilevel-marketing structure — the colloquial term for this arrangement is pyramid scheme — to attract sales-people. “With cutting-edge health-and-wellness formulas and a system where you can develop your own financial independence, the Trump Network offers people the opportunity to achieve their American Dream,” he promised in a videotaped pitch. https://medium.com/new-york-magazine/american-death-cult-6e36338271bb American Death Cult from New York Magazine

Guerrero just doesn’t have enough movement on his pitches to get away with that to a FB hitter like Arcia.

Not happening. Madrigal, Collins and Dunning will get their chances, though.

Didn’t realize Benetti was also doing KBO broadcasts in the middle of the night. That dude is always working, pretty much year-round.

Robert is going to get a stead diet of fastballs boring in on his hands or just under. That’s the supposed weak spot. We’ll see how quickly he can make adjustments. Was happy he at least made contact and almost beat it out when Gyorko took an extra beat getting up and set to throw.

Don't bully us into liking him, :-). Just ask nicely...

1) Not having any fans in the stands, I think having broadcast before....psychologically, you start feeling this subconscious need to be even more entertaining or interesting/funny to make up for that ambient background noise. It's like going from a regular classroom and talking to yourself (unless students have cams and microphones on) through an online classroom, you're just getting almost no feedback and it feels just "off." 2) Benetti is much better on college basketball and even the random college FB games from the Southeast he was assigned. He's still deferring way too much, and he just doesn't have a natural feel for the sport like he does with basketball or even football. Most would argue NCAABB is his best skill. 3) The "insider-ish" stuff about being around the team and being a fanboy needs to end. He needs to have a little more professional distance. It's like he admires them too much...like the young impressionable high schooler or university student granted access to the clubhouse when he didn't/couldn't make it as a player. That's fine, some of the best broadcasters in history weren't excellent athletes, but if you grew up with guys like Scully and Harwell, or Jack Buck....I'll just say he has a long ways to go in terms of telling the baseball stories and lore behind the game that Hawk excelled at. Benetti is from a different generation, he doesn't have that fondness or reference for the 1950's, 60's and 70's that the older generation carried forth until retirement. It's ironic, because we complain about too much "sabes" and analytics, but he's the broadcasting equivalent. I'm almost to the point where I would rather hear him simply do PBP and not so much schtick. Farmer and DJ had that same problem as well, but they genuinely likely each other and had the mutual respect across two generations of MLB. Benetti is still an outsider attempting to fit or belong in the insider's club.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2020/06/05/mlb-biggest-sports-loser-during-covid-19-pandemic/3154841001/ I actually think (televised) baseball will be fine. It works better than FB and BB without massive crowd noise, and the amount of physical contact is so much less than those two sports...plus the huge number of players/coaches/staff required for football. They’re already cancelling non-conference games like Iowa-Iowa State. There’s really a huge hunger for any type of live sports now, the golf challenge with Woods/Mickelson/Brady/Manning just reinforced that. Golf is also well-suited, imo. “A polite ovation of golf claps is in order as the PGA Tour's Memorial Tournament, which won a quiet Sunday night in the ratings. The tournament, which aired on CBS, delivered a 0.5 in the adults 18-49 demographic and 5.25 million viewers.“

This Hospital Cost $52 Million. It Treated 79 Virus Patients. Brian M. Rosenthal New York Times July 21, 2020, 7:13 AM https://www.yahoo.com/news/hospital-cost-52-million-treated-121337052.html

I’ll give another example. 90% of Thais were surveyed recently and answered they prefer foreign tourists (majority are Chinese) to enter their country. Keep in mind, Thailand’s tourism sector is roughly 20% of their economy, and they have super-close (some would say incestuous) ties with China over the last five years, not to mention Belt & Road projects like a railway. Yet they are still afraid of the consequences of another shutdown. Right now, it’s not even certain we will be able to leave for October (national) holidays, and arguably many simply won’t want to deal with the increased hassles. You’ve got major airlines (Quantas) not expecting anything like normalcy before next summer, and Australia and NZ have come out of this extremely well so far. HK/Cathay have been decimated, and that’s one of the biggest Asian hubs, along with Bangkok, Seoul and Tokyo. More and more, outside of European cooperation, it feels like every country is pretty much on its own, and that’s truly unfortunate consequence for our children and grandchildren, to essentially be cut off from discovering the world for themselves . IMO, we are headed towards increasing isolation (because of our Covid response and general belligerence)...fortunately, China has overplayed its hand (and too early), so the pushback is already coming from around the world. It’s hard to imagine two such diametrically opposed superpowers being able to tolerate with each other for more than the next 10-15 years. On top of all that, international efforts to cooperate and collaborate through entities like the WHO, UN, NATO and the World Bank are at risk...not to mention key areas like climate change and global trade that are increasingly veering towards an “every an country for itself/survival of the fittest mindset”. No matter what happens in November, you’ll still have an American society increasingly at odds with itself unless bold, transformative leadership emerges to meet the challenge.

Getting both wasn’t completely realistic in the first place. Whoever really wants to be with the White Sox and his fellow countrymen the most will undoubtedly sign. Most signs point to Colas in terms of that.

We’re also not considering the impact of it hitting South Africa full bore at the moment and running out of control throughout the rest of sub-Saharan Africa... “While South Africa is experiencing a very, very severe event, I think it is really a marker of what the continent could face, if urgent action is not taken to provide further support,” Dr. Mike Ryan, director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, said Monday during a media briefing in Geneva. South Africa has the fifth most confirmed Covid-19 infections in the world, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Ryan said South Africa is experiencing an acceleration in Covid-19 cases, which have increased by about 30% in the last week. “Sometimes, this disease can take off very quickly,” Ryan said. “And sometimes, in other situations, it takes off more slowly, and then accelerates – and it's difficult to understand fully why that is the case.” Ryan noted other countries in the region have seen Covid-19 increases, though their total case counts are still lower than South Africa’s. In the past week, cases in countries such as Madagascar, Namibia and Botswana have increased by 50%, 69% and 66%, respectively, according to Ryan. “I'm very concerned right now that we're beginning to see an acceleration of disease in Africa,” Ryan said. “And we all need to take that very seriously and show solidarity and support to those countries who may now be experiencing increasing numbers of cases and deaths.”

Can essential child care during Covid-19 offer a model to schools this fall? https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/20/us/child-care-for-essential-workers-lessons-wellness/index.html

Between Oxford/AstroZeneca, Sanofi (French company), Johnson & Johnson, Gilead, Moderna, the 3 major Chinese efforts, the Gates Foundation...Abbott, Pfizer, Glaxo, etc., who's the best positioned right now? Not for investment purposes, because that's completely an overinflated/over-speculated bubble right now, but more from who's likeliest to succeed and for it to "stick"???

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/07/01/june-brought-more-layoffs-and-growing-faculty-pushback/#3aba1d61fcae University teachers/professors are being laid off across the country...and K-12 won't be far behind. There was another more recent article which quoted huge losses/consolidation at the University of Akron, smaller/private liberal arts school and larger/research-based public universities. Cuts across the University of Michigan system, Northern Arizona, etc. Can't seem to find that particular, but the general point remains. The knock on will be the increase in private tutoring/online/one-on-one instruction, with MANY K-12 teachers retiring early and/or not being replaced as class sizes increased with more and more accommodated by online instruction, which doesn't have limits like a unionized high school class typically would (let's say, 33-35 students per room without a special/emergency provision granted to increase those numbers.) Obviously, Balta has already written about this extensively. And, there's that other side of this with teachers/families losing critical health care coverage for their families as well.

Not too fun turning out to be the s-hole country...but any reasonable country in the world, whether Mexico, Japan, South Korea, the DR or Cuba would make the exact same health care decision. Why would you out the lives of thousands of citizens at risk for a sport ruled by billionaires and played by deca millionaires?

Or the broken clock is precisely correct two times per day analogy. Wonder how many others will join Dwight Howard in the “not believing in either masks or vaccinations crowd“? Kyrie Irving? Carl Everett? https://www.yahoo.com/sports/los-angeles-lakers-dwight-howard-coronavirus-covid19-pandemic-mask-nba-bubble-disney-world-antivax-vaccinations-225303804.html

There’s no incontrovertible law that says EE will still be around next season.

50 is expecting a bit too much. Let’s just go with 35 to low 40’s per season...those would still be a HoF trajectory, with all the other tools he brings to the table.

By this same argument, Tatis will be better than Acuna. How old were Pujols or Frank Thomas when they debuted? 21 and 22.

Potential. And it still took Moncada over two seasons to come into his own at the big league level...

Robert...because of CF’s critical nature, will pick up more stolen bases, and, knock on wood, likelier to stay healthy. Of course, you cringe when you see the play from the other day, where he almost screwed up that wrist again. But the confidence is just oozing with these young players...and then you have the three veteran leaders to pair with Anderson, Moncada, Robert, Jimenez, Vaughn and Madrigal.