Texas During Snow Storm

Dear Commons Community,

A historic winter storm has killed at least 21 people, left millions of Texans without power and spun killer tornadoes into the U.S. Southeast yesterday.

The brutal cold has engulfed swaths of the United States, shuttering COVID-19 inoculation centers and hindering vaccine supplies. It is not expected to relent until the weekend.

Officials in Texas drew criticism as the state energy grid repeatedly failed, forcing rolling blackouts. Freezing weather stilled giant wind turbines that dot the West Texas landscape, making it impossible for energy companies to meet escalating demand.

DEATHS, NO POWER, VACCINE DELAYS

At least 21 people have died in Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky and Missouri including four killed in a house fire in Sugar Land, Texas, where the power was out, according to police and local media.

President Joe Biden assured the governors of hard-hit states that the federal government stands ready to offer any emergency resources needed, the White House said in a statement.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said at a midday news conference that 1.3 million people in his city remain without power. The city is looking for businesses that still have power to open their doors as warming centers.

“It’s critically, critically important to get the power restored as quickly as possible. It’s priority number one!” Turner said.

Officials in south Texas warned citizens to not bring grills or propane heaters indoors. Hospitals have treated people for carbon monoxide poisoning as they tried to heat icy homes using those items.

Turner said vaccination centers in Houston would remain closed on Wednesday and probably Thursday. The Texas Department of State Health Services said vaccine shipments around the state would be delayed.

“No one wants to put vaccine at risk by attempting to deliver it in dangerous conditions,” department spokesman Douglas Loveday said by email, adding “it is not safe for people to be out across much of Texas.”

In neighboring New Mexico, a state spokesman said by email there were delays in some Pfizer vaccine shipments, which were expected to be brief.

The deep freeze grounded operations at the Houston Ship channel and curbed output in the nation’s largest oil field: the Permian in West Texas. Several oil refineries remained offline.

FREEZE WILL LINGER

Storms dumped snow and ice from Ohio to the Rio Grande through the long Presidents Day holiday weekend, and treacherous weather was expected to grip much of the United States through Friday. Forecasters predicted up to 4 inches of snow and freezing rain from the southern Plains into the Northeast.

“We’re calling it Storm System No. 2, with very similar placement to the previous storm,” said meteorologist Lara Pagano of the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

An Arctic air mass descended over much of the country, pushing temperatures to historic lows on Tuesday, Pagano said. In Lincoln, Nebraska, a reading of minus 31 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 35 degrees Celsius) on Tuesday shattered a record set in 1978 of minus 18F (minus 27C).

In typically toasty Dallas-Fort Worth, minus 1F (minus 17C) broke a record set in 1903 of 12F (minus 11C).

“It’s just dangerous,” Pagano said.

With more than 4.4 million power outages in Texas alone, authorities shut down inoculation sites and scrambled to use 8,400 vaccines that require subzero refrigeration before they spoiled after a backup generator failed, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said. Doses were rushed to area hospitals and Rice University to be injected into the arms of people already at those locations and who did not have to travel on slick roads.

In the Southeast, a low-pressure system that developed along the Arctic front created fuel for storms that unleashed at least four tornadoes, said meteorologist Jeremy Grams of the weather service’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. One ripped through the Florida Panhandle and two through southwestern Georgia on Monday.

The fourth, most severe twister left three dead and homes flattened after it swept overnight through North Carolina’s coastal Brunswick County in the state’s southeastern corner between Wilmington and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the local sheriff’s office said early on Tuesday.

After a brief lull on Tuesday, rough weather including potential twisters was expected to return on Wednesday into Thursday, Grams said.

“Those very same areas could be impacted – that will include tornadoes and damaging winds,” he said.

Our hearts go out to our fellow Americans in the South who have been crushed by winter’s fury!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Anthony Fauci received a $1 million Israeli prize on Monday along with six other researchers who shared two additional $1 million prizes for their contributions to health and medicine.

The Dan David Prize, affiliated with Tel Aviv University, said it honored Fauci for his career in public health and “speaking truth to power” during the politicized COVID-19 crisis.

Fauci “is the consummate model of leadership and impact in public health,” the awards committee said in a statement.

The Dan David Prize, established by the late Italian Israeli philanthropist Dan David, annually awards three prizes of $1 million honoring contributions to knowledge of the past, contributions to society in the present and advances for the future.  The award sets aside 10% of the prize money for academic scholarships in each winner’s field. Fauci gets to determine the nature of the scholarships.

This year the three awards focused on health and medicine.

Historians Alison Bashford of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Katharine Park of Harvard University and Keith Wailoo of Princeton University are sharing a $1 million prize for studying the history of health and medicine. Zelig Eshhar of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, Carl June of the University of Pennsylvania and Steven Rosenberg of the NIH National Cancer Institute are sharing a $1 million prize for pioneering anti-cancer immunotherapy.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is most deserving of this recognition for how he has led us during the scourge of the coronavirus pandemic.

BRAVO!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I watched Joe Biden’s first town hall event of his presidency last night that was hosted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper.  I found Biden’s personal, folksy demeanor a pleasant change from the in-your-face verbal battles we saw with the former president. Biden demonstrated genuine concern for each of the members of the audience that posed questions to him.  The session went on for about seventy-five minutes. Below are three main takeaways courtesy of The Boston Globe.

Tony

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The Boston Globe

Three key takeaways from Joe Biden’s town hall meeting in Wisconsin

By James Pindell  

February 16, 2021

Joe Biden has been in the White House for nearly a month, but in many ways his presidency begins this week.

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump concluded on Saturday, and with some of his Cabinet members in place, Biden is finally in the full spotlight this week.

On Tuesday night he made his first official trip as president to tape a CNN town hall meeting in Milwaukee.

The location made sense for a lot of reasons. Wisconsin is among the key battleground states that Biden won narrowly that helped make him president—and that he will likely need to win again if he wants to be reelected. It is also a place that features a Republican Senator, Ron Johnson, who is facing a tough reelection bid next year. And, sure, the event could be seen as a makeup of sorts for the Democratic National Convention that was supposed to be held there last year, but ended up going virtual because of the pandemic.

During the 75 minute-long town hall, which was moderated by CNN host Anderson Cooper, Biden fielded questions from real voters about schools reopening, raising the minimum wage, policing, and student loan debt. This might be the first of many stops that Biden will make in order to sell his plan for a COVID relief bill that likely has enough Democratic support to become law, but at the moment doesn’t have a single Republican supporting it.

That could be a problem for a president who campaigned on the theme of being eager to work with Republicans.

Here are three main takeaways from the hour.

1) The number one question in America right now is when and how to reopen schools

The fact that so many public schools around the country remain remote-only or on a hybrid model is bubbling up from a personal frustration to a full-on political problem for Democrats. Teachers have been a backbone of the Democratic Party for decades and all last year Democrats were saying, “listen to scientists.” Those two groups appear to be in conflict over school re-opening.

The opening 10 minutes of audience questions were all about the topic—from a father of four whose children were doing school remotely, to a teacher worried about his safety, to a mom speaking on behalf of her 8-year-old daughter.

Biden repeated that reopening schools is a major focus of his first 100 days. He walked back what his own press secretary said about the goal being for schools to open at least one day a week and said he wanted something more robust. Of course, the question is really up to local school boards and not him.

2) Biden wants to move away from an America obsessed with Trump

Biden once again demurred when asked for his take about Trump being acquitted by the Senate over the weekend, but made a larger point.

“For four years, all that’s been in the news is Trump, the next four years I want to make sure all the news is the American people,” Biden said in response to a question from Cooper about the trial.

Indeed, if there was one thing that was very clear about this presidential town hall, it was how much lower the temperature is with Trump off the stage. When Trump was president, there was a sense that Trump could say anything and he often did. With Biden, it is the opposite: he probably wasn’t going to say anything particularly interesting or new, and he didn’t.

3) America is divided and concerned about it

From race to partisanship to immigration, Biden was peppered with questions about what he can do as president to unite a divided nation.

Answering one Black midwife from Wisconsin who asked about partisan division, Biden rejected her premise: “The nation is not divided, you go out there and take a look and talk to people, you have fringes on both ends, but it’s not nearly as divided as we make it out to be,” said Biden. “And we have to bring it together.”

But the question was a good one, not just because it is true that America is divided, but “healing the country” was the key theme to Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020.

Biden had no real answer how he could personally heal the country as president, but during his first extended remarks since his inauguration, he did make significant progress in making the presidency boring again. Maybe that is how he will do it.

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump launched a scathing salvo at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell yesterday, in response to McConnell’s op-ed in the Wall St. Journal blaming him for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. In the op-ed McConnell stated:  “There is no question former President Trump bears moral responsibility. His supporters stormed the Capitol because of the unhinged falsehoods he shouted into the world’s largest megaphone…His behavior during and after the chaos was also unconscionable, from attacking Vice President Mike Pence during the riot to praising the criminals after it ended.”

In response, Trump stated “The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm,” Trump wrote in a written statement. “McConnell’s dedication to business as usual, status quo policies, together with his lack of political insight, wisdom, skill, and personality, has rapidly driven him from Majority Leader to Minority Leader, and it will only get worse…. [McConnell] is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” and called on Republicans in the chamber to find a new leader.”

The U.S. Senate voted on Saturday to acquit Trump of the charge of “incitement of insurrection” in relation to the siege of the Capitol that followed the former president’s Jan. 6 rally in Washington. While McConnell did not join the seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump, he issued a searing assessment of the ex-president’s behavior in a speech given on the Senate floor and published in the  op-ed yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that laid blame for the violence at Trump’s feet.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin have an article (see below)  in today’s New York Times reviewing the give and take between McConnell and Trump.

Tony

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New York Times

Trump, in Scorching Attack on McConnell, Urges G.O.P. to Replace Him

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin

Feb. 16, 2021

Former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday made a slashing and lengthy attack on Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, calling him a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” and arguing that the party would suffer losses in the future if he remained in charge.

“If Republican senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again,” Mr. Trump said.

The 600-word statement, coming three days after the Senate acquitted him in his second impeachment trial, was trained solely on Mr. McConnell and sought to paint Mr. Trump as the best leader of the G.O.P. going forward.

The statement did not include any sign of contrition from Mr. Trump for his remarks to a crowd of supporters who then attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. Nor did it include any acknowledgment of his role during the violent hours in which his own vice president and members of Congress were under threat from the mob of Trump supporters.

Rather, Mr. Trump chose to focus on Mr. McConnell as he broke an unusually lengthy silence by his standards, after being permanently barred from his formerly favorite medium — Twitter — last month because of tweets that he posted during the Capitol riot.

Mr. McConnell’s office declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s attacks on Tuesday, but the senator has left little mystery about his contempt for the former president. Shortly after he joined the majority of Republican senators on Saturday in voting to acquit Mr. Trump on the House impeachment charge of “incitement of insurrection,” Mr. McConnell excoriated Mr. Trump, laying the blame for the deadly riot at his feet and suggesting that further investigations of the former president could play out in the judicial system.

“There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” Mr. McConnell said in remarks on the Senate floor.

His comments were widely interpreted as an attempt to minimize Mr. Trump’s brand of politics within the Republican Party and to appeal to donors who have said they are rejecting the party after some senators voted against certifying President Biden’s victory.

Mr. McConnell wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed article and gave an interview to the paper’s news section suggesting he might get involved in primaries for 2022 as part of an effort to win back the majority.

In private, Mr. McConnell has said he believed the impeachment proceedings would make it easier for Republicans to eventually purge Mr. Trump from the party. And he expressed surprise, and mild bemusement, at the hatchet-burying mission made to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private

In public, Mr. McConnell has sharply criticized Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist freshman and Trump devotee from Georgia, while defending Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming after her vote to impeach the former president.

What Mr. McConnell has not done, though, is openly declare political war on Mr. Trump in the fashion that the former president did to him on Tuesday. While telling associates he knew he would have to oppose the former president in some primaries next year, he had hoped to unify his caucus by turning attention to Mr. Biden.

But if Mr. McConnell wasn’t eager to begin an open and protracted feud with Mr. Trump, at least not yet, the freshly acquitted, ever-pugnacious and newly deplatformed former president was happy to do so. One person close to Mr. Trump said his initial version of the statement was more incendiary than what was released publicly.

In the statement, Mr. Trump resorted to insults about Mr. McConnell’s acumen and political abilities, and faulted him for Republicans’ loss of their Senate majority.

“The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm,” Mr. Trump said. “McConnell’s dedication to business as usual, status quo policies, together with his lack of political insight, wisdom, skill, and personality, has rapidly driven him from majority leader to minority leader, and it will only get worse.”

Mr. Trump offered up some new taunts: “The Democrats and Chuck Schumer play McConnell like a fiddle — they’ve never had it so good — and they want to keep it that way!” he said. “We know our America First agenda is a winner, not McConnell’s Beltway First agenda or Biden’s America Last.”

While Mr. McConnell has faulted the former president for the party’s losses last month in both Senate races in Georgia, Mr. Trump maintained that it was because Republican voters were angry that the party’s officials had not done more to address his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

Mr. Trump claimed credit for Mr. McConnell’s victory in his own Senate race last year and took a swipe at Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who worked for the Trump administration as the transportation secretary.

“McConnell has no credibility on China because of his family’s substantial Chinese business holdings,” Mr. Trump said. “He does nothing on this tremendous economic and military threat.”

“He will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our country,” Mr. Trump said, adding that “where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First.”

After Mr. Trump made his statement on Tuesday, some of Mr. McConnell’s longtime supporters suggested that they knew bait when they saw it.

“Trump going total mean girl ought to feed the cable beast for weeks,” Janet Mullins Grissom, the senator’s first chief of staff, wrote on Twitter.

Others in Mr. McConnell’s intensely loyal circle of advisers, however, did not want such a bald attack to go unanswered.

“It seems an odd choice for someone who claims they want to lead the G.O.P. to attack a man who has been unanimously elected to lead Senate Republicans a history-making eight times,” said Billy Piper, another former top McConnell aide. “But we have come to expect these temper tantrums when he feels threatened — just ask any of his former chiefs of staff or even his vice president.”

Mr. Trump’s reference to Ms. Chao’s family was also a line of attack that Mr. McConnell and his inner circle have long denounced as racist when it comes from Democrats.

The former president’s statement was the longest one he has issued since leaving office on Jan. 20. He has been mindful that he is the target of multiple investigations, people close to him said, and has been advised against appearing to taunt prosecutors or people who might sue him in civil courts. Still, Mr. Trump’s ability to stay silent through situations that anger him tends to last only so long.

Mr. Trump’s advisers are discussing backing nearly a dozen candidates in primaries against the Republicans who voted in favor of impeachment, a move that would only deepen Mr. Trump’s friction with Mr. McCarthy. Not all of Mr. Trump’s aides think this is a wise course of action.

Dear Commons Community,

Anyone who has been in New Orleans in the days leading up to Mardi Gras have had their senses filled with colorful floats, music and great food.  This year because of the pandemic, Mardi Gras is much more subdued but just as exhilarating.   Rather than floats and bands, residents of this great city have been decorating their houses in colorful patterns.  Visitors can walk through the city and see all kinds of reminders of the Mardi Gras celebration.  On this post are examples of what you might see if you were New Orleans this year.  You can take a 30-minute virtual tour here.

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler – let the good times roll.

Tony

Governor Andrew Cuomo

Dear Commons Community,

I have been following the issue of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s reporting of the deaths of nursing home residents due to the coronavirus. I have several takes on this: one is that everyone agrees that the number of deaths reported are accurate but that where they occurred is the question.  Secondly, what role did the Cuomo administration play in moving or keeping coronavirus patients in nursing homes where there would be less effective treatments.  Third, was there a cover-up in reporting where deaths occurred.  Here is a recap of this story courtesy of the Associated Press.

“Under fire over his management of the coronavirus’ lethal path through New York’s nursing homes, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday the state didn’t cover up deaths but should have moved faster to release some information sought by lawmakers, the public and the press.

“All the deaths in the nursing homes and hospitals were always fully, publicly and accurately reported,” the Democratic governor said, weeks after the state was forced to acknowledge that its count of nursing home deaths excluded thousands of residents who perished after being taken to hospitals. He explained the matter Monday as a difference of “categorization,” with the state counting where deaths occurred and others seeking total deaths of nursing home residents, regardless of the location.

“We should have done a better job of providing as much information as we could as quickly as we could,” he said at a virtual news conference. “No excuses: I accept responsibility for that.”

Cuomo, who has seen his image as a pandemic-taming leader dented by a series of disclosures involving nursing homes in recent weeks, said he would propose reforms involving nursing homes and hospitals in the upcoming state budget, without giving details.

But he continued to blame a “toxic political environment,” and “disinformation” for much of the complaints surrounding his administration’s handling of the issue.

The governor’s comments didn’t satisfy state Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Democrat and outspoken critic of the administration’s approach to nursing homes during the pandemic. Kim’s uncle died of a presumed case of COVID-19 in a New York nursing home in April.

“I didn’t think it was much of an apology,” Kim said. “It doesn’t pass the smell test.”

“But what gets lost, ultimately, is: If they were transparent, if they did disclose everything in real time, we could have had different policies … and that would have had a different outcome in how we protected our communities.”

The head of a major association of New York nursing homes said the state erred by focusing too much on hospitals early in the pandemic and leaving nursing homes “scrambling to safeguard their residents and staff.”

“Policymakers and legislators must stop the blame game” and work more closely with nursing homes, said Stephen Hanse, CEO of the New York State Health Facilities Association and New York State Center for Assisted Living.

State lawmakers have been calling for investigations, stripping Cuomo of his emergency powers and even his resignation after new details emerged this week about why certain nursing home data wasn’t disclosed for months, despite requests from lawmakers and others.

First, a report late last month from Democratic state Attorney General Letitia James examined the administration’s failure to tally nursing home residents’ deaths at hospitals. The state then acknowledged the total number of long-term care residents’ deaths is nearly 15,000, up from the 8,500 previously disclosed.

Next, in reply to a Freedom of Information request from the Associated Press, the state Health Department released records this week showing that more than 9,000 recovering coronavirus patients in New York were released from hospitals into nursing homes in the pandemic’s early months — over 40% higher than the state had said previously, because it wasn’t counting residents who returned from hospitals to homes where they already had lived.

Cuomo and his administration have maintained that the hospital patients didn’t drive nursing home outbreaks, saying the patients likely weren’t contagious anymore and virtually all the homes that admitted them had cases already. Still, the governor stopped allowing such admissions in May.

Late this week, it emerged that top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa had told Democratic lawmakers that the tally of nursing home residents’ deaths at hospitals — data that legislators had sought since August — was delayed because officials worried that the information was “going to be used against us” by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice.

Echoing an explanation DeRosa gave Friday, Cuomo said the state was slow to respond to the lawmakers because officials prioritized dealing with requests from the Justice Department and were busy dealing with the work of the pandemic: “It’s not like people were in the South of France,” he said.

“When we didn’t provide information, it allowed press, people, cynics, politicians, to fill the void,” he said, and “it created confusion and cynicism and pain for the families.”

“The truth is: Everybody did everything they could.”

But nursing home residents’ advocate Richard Mollot said the state has fallen short for years on overseeing nursing home care.

“The governor has the power to take the steps necessary to ensure that nursing homes dedicate the resources needed to ensure safety,” said Mollot, the executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition. “Every day of delay is another day of unnecessary suffering.”

I would add to the above my experience with my mother who was in a nursing home and completely unable to take care of herself in the late 1980s.  She was regularly being transferred back and forth to a hospital whenever she developed some serious ailment.  On my weekly visits,  I remember having to check with the nursing home as to where she might be on these occasions.  It seems that this practice has not changed much in the past thirty years. It seems that the entire state health apparatus as well as the nursing home industry are as much the prime players here as Governor Cuomo.

Tony

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Dear Commons Community,

While there have been many concerns expressed about opening our schools and colleges since the pandemic rear its ugly head last winter, Viet Thanh Nguyen, a professor of English at the University of California, admits what many faculty at colleges and universities are finding, that they actually like teaching remotely using Zoom or other videoconferencing platforms.  In a New York Times op-ed, he makes his case that while there may be less human warmth teaching remotely there can be more human connection. 

Professor Nguyen makes a number of excellent comments about why Zoom works well for him and his students.  For instance:

“More important, with my smaller graduate classes of 10 to 20 students, I have noticed little falloff in intellectual quality. Looking at 10 or 20 faces on a screen is manageable, and the experience is a pretty faithful replication of a real-world seminar. Breakout rooms for smaller discussions are simple to arrange, and they lack the cacophony of overheard conversations in live settings. My teaching evaluations have been positive if a little less effusive than usual, perhaps because of the lack of human warmth that being face to face makes possible.

Videoconferencing also allows for meetings with far-flung participants elsewhere in the country — or in other countries — that would have been too expensive and environmentally wasteful to convene in the live era. Now it’s customary to have a visitor call in from across the country or an ocean and to conduct seminars with colleagues from around the world. Less human warmth, but more human connection.

I am now teaching about a hundred undergraduate students in a class on the American war in Vietnam. If a lecture is only someone talking for an hour, that can indeed be stultifying on video — but that would also be true in a classroom. Back in the live era, I did my best to animate my lectures by roaming the lecture hall, memorizing the students’ names so I could call on them, encouraging questions and using PowerPoint slides replete with photos, historical quotations and clips of movies and documentaries. Teachers who haven’t done multimedia lectures might reasonably experience an extra burden of work preparing them for Zoom.

But multimedia lectures work easily and even better on Zoom. I no longer have to memorize students’ names — their names are listed underneath their faces. And on Zoom, the students get a close-up of the photos and video clips, and with the lectures automatically recorded, they can review them or, if they miss a lecture, listen to them later.”

His conclusion:

“We are all now participants in a forced experiment in mass online teaching. Many might go back with relief to in-person teaching after the pandemic, but it seems likely that some of video conferencing’s benefits will remain, and that both teachers and students might want to be given a choice about how to mix online with face-to-face learning.”

I agree fully with Professor Nguyen.  In fact, I will go a step further, blended or mixed learning environments will become the new normal for many college professors and students after  we have rid our country of the pandemic.  At the Online Learning Consortium’s INNOVATE Conference next month, there will be a Blended Learning Summit discussing this very issue.

Professor Nguyen’s entire op-ed is below.

Tony

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New York Times

I Actually Like Teaching on Zoom

By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Mr. Nguyen, a contributing opinion writer, is the author of the novel “The Sympathizer” and its forthcoming sequel, “The Committed.” He is a professor of English, American studies and comparative literature at the University of Southern California.

Feb. 15, 2021

Here’s an unpopular opinion: I like teaching on Zoom.

Many accounts of teaching on Zoom or other online platforms recount its horrors. And much is horrible: teachers and students without stable internet connections or adequate technology; too much intimacy, with overcrowded homes that teachers or students might find embarrassing for others to see; and not enough intimacy, with the human connection attenuated online.

As a college professor, I, too, miss some of the elements of teaching in a classroom, including the intellectual energy that can flow around a seminar table, the performative aspect of lecturing to a large audience and the little chats that take place by happenstance during breaks or after class with students.

What I don’t miss is my 10-mile drive to campus and back. I don’t miss pondering my wardrobe choices in the morning. The relative informality of the Zoom era means that I would feel overdressed if I wore a blazer to teach. And if I don’t wear a blazer, I don’t have to wear slacks. Or put on shoes. Why would I wear shoes inside my house, anyway?

More important, with my smaller graduate classes of 10 to 20 students, I have noticed little falloff in intellectual quality. Looking at 10 or 20 faces on a screen is manageable, and the experience is a pretty faithful replication of a real-world seminar. Breakout rooms for smaller discussions are simple to arrange, and they lack the cacophony of overheard conversations in live settings. My teaching evaluations have been positive if a little less effusive than usual, perhaps because of the lack of human warmth that being face to face makes possible.

Videoconferencing also allows for meetings with far-flung participants elsewhere in the country — or in other countries — that would have been too expensive and environmentally wasteful to convene in the live era. Now it’s customary to have a visitor call in from across the country or an ocean and to conduct seminars with colleagues from around the world. Less human warmth, but more human connection.

I am now teaching about a hundred undergraduate students in a class on the American war in Vietnam. If a lecture is only someone talking for an hour, that can indeed be stultifying on video — but that would also be true in a classroom. Back in the live era, I did my best to animate my lectures by roaming the lecture hall, memorizing the students’ names so I could call on them, encouraging questions and using PowerPoint slides replete with photos, historical quotations and clips of movies and documentaries. Teachers who haven’t done multimedia lectures might reasonably experience an extra burden of work preparing them for Zoom.

But multimedia lectures work easily and even better on Zoom. I no longer have to memorize students’ names — their names are listed underneath their faces. And on Zoom, the students get a close-up of the photos and video clips, and with the lectures automatically recorded, they can review them or, if they miss a lecture, listen to them later.

Surprisingly, the discussions in my video classes have been better than those in the live era. I don’t need to look out at a sea of a hundred stone faces or a hundred blank boxes. Instead, I ask a half-dozen students to participate in a student panel for each lecture; I call on them and ask them questions throughout the lecture, which means the class doesn’t have to listen to just me all the time. It turns out that the students are much less shy speaking on video than they might be before a live audience. Less human warmth, but less stage fright.

Student chatter in class is now also fun. I wouldn’t want students chatting in a live class, but I like seeing their occasional exclamations in the chat window, as when one amazed student said of Country Joe and the Fish’s 1965 song “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” that “this song kind of slaps.”

Polling students’ opinions is easy, too. I tried to do this with hand-held clickers years ago; the technology was costly and cumbersome.

There are also some environmental benefits to video teaching. Though digital interfacing still has a green cost (a fact that many people overlook), it can be less than that of physical interfacing. As I write this during my office hours, for which no student has ever shown up, I take comfort in knowing that I did not have to drive to campus to sit in an office waiting for no one to come.

To be sure, I’m a college professor: I don’t assume that what’s true for me is true for, say, elementary-school teachers. It’s no doubt true that smaller children need less screen time and benefit from being in one another’s company, while being forced into isolation at home has been damaging to many.

I’m also aware that whether or not one enjoys video teaching as a teacher or student is saturated with issues of temperament, learning preference or ability, access, space, student-teacher ratio and quality of technology (and comfort with using it). But those issues affect live classrooms as well, which means that technology or the lack of it, Zoom or no Zoom, is perhaps less important to a good educational experience than socioeconomic equity, the competence of teachers and the willingness of students.

Finally, I’m mindful that many college teachers are already underpaid, have too many students, are always on call and have no job security. It’s easy to imagine a situation where video conferencing allows for even greater demands on overworked teachers. But again, the problem is not so much with the technology as with an exploitative academic marketplace where the majority of college teachers are not on the tenure track and have become “freeway fliers,” driving from one gig to another on different campuses. At least with Zoom, they don’t have to drive to be exploited.

We are all now participants in a forced experiment in mass online teaching. Many might go back with relief to in-person teaching after the pandemic, but it seems likely that some of video conferencing’s benefits will remain, and that both teachers and students might want to be given a choice about how to mix online with face-to-face learning.

Regardless of what impact videoconferencing will have on our teaching after the pandemic, I am sure college professors can all agree on one thing: We should never, ever have in-person faculty meetings again.

Dear Commons Community,

Today we honor our country’s presidents particularly George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who led us well through perilous times.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press is reporting this morning that supporters of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny came out to residential courtyards and shined their cellphone flashlights Sunday in a display of unity, despite efforts by Russian authorities to extinguish the illuminated protests.  As reported.

Navalny’s team sent photos of small groups with lit-up cellphones in cities from Siberia to the Moscow region. It was unclear how many people participated overall.

No arrests were immediately reported. However, police detained nine people at a daytime demonstration in the city of Kazan calling for the release of political prisoners, according to OVD-Info, a human rights group that monitors political arrests.

The group said security guards at Moscow State University recorded the names of people leaving a dormitory to take part in a flashlight rally there.

When Navalny’s first team urged people to come out to the cellphone protests, many responded with jokes and skepticism. After two weekends of nationwide demonstrations, the new protest format looked to some like a retreat.

Yet Russian officials spent days trying to blacken the protests. Officials accused Navalny’s allies of acting on NATO’s instructions. Kremlin-backed TV channels warned that flashlight rallies were part of major uprisings around the world. State news agencies cited unnamed sources as saying a terrorist group was plotting attacks during unapproved mass protests.

The suppression attempts represent a change of tactics for Russian authorities, who used to ignore Navalny.

Kremlin-controlled TV channels used to not report about protests called by Navalny. Russian President Vladimir Putin has never mentioned his most prominent critic by name. State news agencies referred to the anti-corruption investigator as “a blogger” in the rare stories when they did mentioning him.

“Navalny went from a person whose name is not allowed to be mentioned to the main subject of discussion” on state TV, said Maria Pevchikh, head of investigations at Navalny’s Foundations for Fighting Corruption.

Pevchikh credited Navalny’s latest expose for the sudden surge in attention. His foundation’s two-hour video alleging that a lavish palace on Black Sea was built for Putin through corruption has been watched over 111 million times on YouTube since Jan. 19.

The video went up two days after Navalny was arrested upon returning to Russia from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. The Russian government denies involvement and claims it has no evidence that Navalny was poisoned.

While the high-profile arrest and the subsequent expose were a double blow to authorities, political analyst and former Kremlin speech writer Abbas Gallyamov says that keeping Navalny and his protests off the airwaves to deprive him of additional publicity no longer makes sense.

“The fact that this strategy has changed suggests that the pro-government television audience is somehow receiving information about Navalny’s activities through other channels, recognizes him, is interested in his work, and in this sense, keeping the silence doesn’t make any sense,” Gallyamov said.

The weekend protests in scores of Russian cities last month over Navalny’s detention represented the largest outpouring of popular discontent in years and appeared to have rattled the Kremlin. Police reportedly arrested about 10,000 people, and many demonstrators were beaten, while state media sought to downplay the scale of the protests.

TV channels aired footage of empty squares in cities where protests were announced and claimed that few people showed up. Some reports portrayed police as polite and restrained, claiming officers had helped people with disabilities cross busy streets, handed out face masks and offered demonstrators hot tea.

Once the protests died down and Navalny ally Leonid Volkov announced a pause until the spring, Kremlin-backed media reported that grassroots flash mobs titled “Putin is our president” started sweeping the country. State news channel Rossiya 24 broadcast videos from different cities of people dancing to patriotic songs and waving Russian flags, describing them as a genuine expression of support for Putin.

Several independent online outlets reported that instructions to record videos in support of Putin came from the Kremlin and the governing United Russia party and that people in some of the recordings were invited under false pretenses.

The Russian president’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the Kremlin had nothing to do with the pro-Putin videos.

After Navalny’s team posted its video involving the palace allegedly built for Putin, state channel Rossiya aired its own expose of Navalny. Anchor Dmitry Kiselev claimed in Germany, Navalny lived “in the luxury he so much despises.”

The reporter filmed inside a house Navalny rented but failed to capture any high-end items in the two-story building, which featured several bedrooms and a small swimming pool.

She pointed to “two sofas, a TV, fresh fruit on the table” in the living room and “a kitchen with a coffee machine,” and described a bedroom as “luxurious” even though it looked a a business hotel room.

In recent days, official media coverage focused on the flashlights-in-courtyards protest, accusing Navalny ally Volkov of acting on instructions from his Western handlers.

The political talk show “60 Minutes” devoted nearly a half-hour to the topic, calling the flashlight rally an idea from a handbook on revolutions. It aired footage of protesters shining flashlights during the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine, mass rallies in Belarus last summer and other uprisings.

On Thursday, state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti, citing anonymous sources, claimed that a terrorist group from Syria was training insurgents for possible terrorist attacks in Russian cities at “mass rallies.”

“The Kremlin is awfully scared of the flashlight action,” because such a peaceful, light-hearted event would allow the opposition to build a rapport with new supporters who are not ready to be more visible, Volkov said in a YouTube video.

He suggested the heavy-handed response to the announcement actually helped dispel skepticism about the courtyard demonstrations.

“I saw many posts on social media (saying) ‘When Navalny’s headquarters announced the flashlight rally, I thought what nonsense… But when I saw the Kremlin’s reaction, I realized they were right to come up with it.’”

What a peaceful display of outrage!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, reviews Donald Trump’s behavior both past and in leading up to his second impeachment.  Entitled, Trump’s Taste for Blood, Dowd proposes that Trump takes pleasure in violence and comments:

“And everything bloodcurdling that happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 flowed from his bloodthirsty behavior. He had always been cruel and selfish, blowing things up and reveling in the chaos, gloating in the wreckage. But it was only during his campaign that he realized he had a nasty mob at his disposal. He had moved into a world that allowed him to exercise his malice in an extraordinary way, and he loved it.”

She concludes: 

“The Democrats put on an excellent case, and they were right to impeach Trump. But if the Republicans won’t convict him, then bring on the criminal charges. Republicans say that’s how it should be done when someone is out of office, so let’s hope someone follows through on their suggestion.”

I agree fully!

Dowd’s entire column is below.

Tony

————————————————————

Trump’s Taste for Blood

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

Feb. 12, 2021

WASHINGTON — Every scene in “Lawrence of Arabia” is perfect, but there’s one I find especially haunting.

Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence returns to Cairo after successfully leading the Arabs in battle against the Ottoman Empire and tells a military superior that he does not want to go back. Slumping in his Bedouin robes, looking pained, he recalls that he executed an Arab with his pistol.

There was something about it he didn’t like, he says.

The irritated general tries to brush it off, assuming the erudite Lawrence is upset at killing a man.

“No, something else,” Lawrence explains. “I enjoyed it.”

The first time I realized that Donald Trump took pleasure in violence was back in March 2016. In an interview, I asked him about the brutish rhetoric and violence at his rallies and the way he goaded supporters to hate on journalists and rough up protesters. Even then Mitch McConnell was urging Trump to ratchet down the ferocity.

I told Trump that I had not seen this side of him before and that he was going down a very dark path. With his denigrating mockery of rivals and critics, he had already taken politics to a vulgar place, and now it was getting more dangerous.

Shouldn’t parents be able to bring children to rallies without worrying about obscenities, sucker punches, brawls and bullying, I wondered?

He brushed off the questions and blithely assessed the savage mood at his rallies: “Frankly, it adds a little excitement.”

A couple of weeks later, I pressed him again on his belligerence and divisiveness, and, with utter candor, he explained why he was turning up the heat.

“I guess because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1 and I said, why don’t I just keep the same thing going?” he said. “I’ve come this far in life. I’ve had great success. I’ve done it my way.” He added, “You know, there are a lot of people who say, ‘Don’t change.’”

And everything bloodcurdling that happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 flowed from his bloodthirsty behavior. He had always been cruel and selfish, blowing things up and reveling in the chaos, gloating in the wreckage. But it was only during his campaign that he realized he had a nasty mob at his disposal. He had moved into a world that allowed him to exercise his malice in an extraordinary way, and he loved it.

He became his own Lee Atwater, doing the dirty stuff right out in the open. He embraced the worst part of his party, the most racist, violent cohort.

The faux-macho, Gotti-esque air of menace he cultivated as a real estate dealer, the Clint Eastwood squint, just seemed like performance art; mostly he was around New York, acting genial at parties and courting the press. He would say stuff sometimes; after Sacha Baron Cohen pulled a prank on Ryan Seacrest at the Oscars, Trump said that Seacrest’s security guard should have “pummeled” and “punched” Baron Cohen “in the face so many times” that he’d end up in the hospital.

But once Trump got into politics, he realized, with growing intoxication, that the more incendiary he was, the more his fans would cheer. He found that he could really play with the emotions of the crowd, and that turned him on. Now he had the chance to command a mob, so his words could be linked to their actions.

Trump never cared about law and order or the cops. He was thrilled that he could unleash his mob on the Capitol and its guardians, with rioters smearing blood and feces and yelling Trump’s words and going after his targets — Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence.

It was Manson family-chilling to watch the House impeachment managers’ video with a rioter hunting for the House speaker, calling out: “Where are you, Nancy? We’re looking for you, Na-a-ncy. Oh, Na-a-ncy.”

It was like watching his vicious Twitter feed come alive. Others were chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” even as a gallows, complete with noose, was erected on the lawn. Watching those shivery videos, it hit home how Pelosi and Pence could have been killed and the melee could have turned into a far worse blood bath.

Trump not caring about the fate of his vice president was the inevitable sick end of the pairing of the Sociopath and the Sycophant.

As The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey wrote in a tweet Friday, recapping his reporting with Ashley Parker: “Pence’s team does not agree with the Trump lawyer’s assessment that Trump was concerned about Pence’s safety. Trump didn’t call him that day — or for five days after that. No one else on Trump’s team called as Pence was evacuated to one room & another, with screaming mob nearby.”

Trump’s whole defense in the impeachment trial was like a low-budget movie trailer, cornier than the new Louise Linton flick. It was just another Trump flimflam reality TV show, meant to prove how he was wronged, not how he wronged the country.

Trump’s lawyers showed a video of myriad Democrats using the word “fight,” as though that was the equivalent of what Trump did.

If he’d had better lawyers and a real strategy in the effort to purloin the election, or if a few brave Republicans like Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, had not stood up to him, he might have succeeded.

Certainly, opportunism has always run rampant in Congress. But most Republicans, who continue to tremble before Trump even though he devoured and destroyed their party, turning its traditional values upside down, are plumbing new cowardly depths. They are mini-Trumps, making decisions solely on self-interest.

CNN reported Friday night that Kevin McCarthy called Trump during the riot, telling him the mob was breaking his windows to get in. The then-president told him: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” The conversation ended in a shouting match. Yet McCarthy still voted against impeaching the president.

These dreadful Republicans are all Falstaffs, trampling the concept of honor, blowing it off as a mere airy-fairy word, not worth sacrificing anything for, not worth defending your country for. “Honor is a mere scutcheon,” Falstaff scoffed.

McConnell and the other craven Republicans realize now that they should not have played along with Trump as long as they did, while he undermined the election. But they still refuse to hold him accountable because he controls their voters.

The Democrats put on an excellent case, and they were right to impeach Trump. But if the Republicans won’t convict him, then bring on the criminal charges. Republicans say that’s how it should be done when someone is out of office, so let’s hope someone follows through on their suggestion.

A few days ago, prosecutors in Georgia opened an investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election there. Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance could drag Trump into court on tax and fraud charges. Karl Racine, the attorney general for D.C., has said that Trump could be charged for his role in inciting the riot.

Maybe a man who gloated as his crowds screamed “Lock her up!” will find that jurors reach a similar conclusion about him.