April 8 Reads

The big story of the day affecting me is Governor Kate Brown of Oregon has decided to close all public schools for the remainder of the school year, following the lead of California, which closed schools for the remainder of the year some time ago.

I am going to be tutoring kids in math in a couple of weeks, once I get the materials.  It won't be that many hours of the week, but I get paid my regular hours regardless.

Story

She also endorsed Joe Biden for president.
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Obituary:  Good fucking riddance:

Linda Tripp, whistleblower in Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal, dead at 70

Her son-in-law confirms, says he wants her remembered as 'a special person and fantastic grandparent' after 'sudden' death

It was not #coronavirus related, he says https://t.co/iXR44lf8jP via @nypost

— Steven Nelson (@stevennelson10) April 8, 2020

I don't wish pancreatic cancer on anybody, but she was a piece of shit.

Details are here.

Meanwhile, I never knew Julie Hiatt Steele, a hero in the Clinton impeachment saga, had passed away last year:

To all of Julie’s Twitter friends: Julie Hiatt Steele passed away on Thursday, March 14, 2019. Her passing was peaceful. Her family requests that anyone wishing to honor her memory please consider donating to the Innocence Project in her name: https://t.co/05yFX6ahWA

— Julie Hiatt Steele (@jhiattsteele) March 16, 2019

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Glad I never had children.
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As if we need anymore evidence about Trump's unfitness for the presidency.

Yes, I was both glad and sad to see them, for while they raise a critical issue, without expert input, underestimation and normalization are still the result. There were two articles in the New York Times, one describing pathological narcissism and the other sociopathy, both eloquent but with little understanding of these conditions. The earlier one calls mental health professionals merely "impassioned" — citing a political super PAC, when political activity actually forfeits professional status — while referencing attorney George Conway as the authority. The latter article did not seem to recognize that it was describing a mental health condition.

This is our predicament during a "death of expertise," as Tom Nichols names his book. I asked Conway repeatedly to defer to experts, as legal professionals and courts are exemplary at doing, but he cited neither me nor the book he extensively drew from for his article. Imagine if I were to take up a legal topic, studied it a fortnight, and called myself an expert. It does not work, since you have to have an appreciation of what the topic means in context. I would not dare do it without full training, even though I have been teaching at a law school for 17 years. To be able to diagnose a mental health condition, you have to know about neurology and physiology and all the other conditions that could go into a person looking that way. It is not as simple as a checklist. And diagnosis is not the point to begin with. Hence, while our country has some of the best mental health experts in the world, we are dying from a lack of access to that knowledge. Maybe the next book can be titled, "Death From Denial of Expertise."

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Coronavirus massacre is right on the money.