December 20

Well it has been one heck of a ten day stretch. Some of it has been much more fun to watch than to comment on--at least at the time. A week ago last Friday the FDA gave emergency use authorization to the Pfizer vaccine and all weekend the news was about the preparations to roll it out.  I think the reaction of the reporters, the Pfizer employees packing up the vaccine doses for shipment, the doctors and others interviewed for the story indicates exactly how much stress this pandemic has caused. Everyone was euphoric. I was glad to see it though my thoughts were tinged with both a sense of realism and skepticism. I am not in the first tiers of people to receive it as I am not in a congregate care facility and my only (known) conditions that would make me somewhat susceptible to a bad case are age and obesity. Mom is in the same situation with her age and her history of hypothyroidism. We wear our masks, avoid crowds and maintain our distances, and are washing our hands more often that we used to. We don't expect to be offered the vaccine before summer. In case anyone thinks I am complaining, I am not. The procedure outlined for the distribution of the vaccine made sense which is a surprise given how inept this administration has been. That led to my skepticism and that skepticism was rewarded when the first snafu arose in the distribution and the states found their allotments suddenly and without explanation radically reduced. Pfizer blamed the government and the government blamed the company. Now the Moderna vaccine has been given emergency approval and, though the euphoria is a bit less, it has also been greeted enthusiastically. Other vaccines are in the pipeline so we might have a number of effective possibilities but the time line is still for another year of social distancing and mask wearing.

On the political front, #45 still insists he won the election even though he clearly didn't and still insists that there was widespread fraud though no one has found any fraud that would change enough votes to allow him to actually win. He tried to get the elected officials in the swing states that gave Biden his victory to seat an alternate set of electors to vote for him (didn't work), hoped for "faithless electors" tp over-rule the voters (didn't happen), and is now pinning hopes on the January 9 joint session of congress that has to accept the electoral college vote to somehow negate the result. It is interesting how the benchmarks  changed throughout as each one came and went without changing the results. Now there is talk of martial law and the seizure of voting machines somehow infected with the ghost of Hugo Chavez so the military can supervise new elections.  In a often quoted bit from Benjamin Franklin when he was asked what sort of government the Constitutional Convention had given us: a republic, if you can keep it. The key part there is the "if you can keep it." And watching not just #45 but all of his minions trying to subvert the electorate I wonder if we will keep it much longer.

Then our internet and cable went out late Wednesday morning and we didn't get it back until early Friday afternoon. I am always amazed by how much those two services have become deeply embedded in our lives. I was able to read on my iPad and did quite a bit of stitching. Mom was able to find an unsecured network could piggyback on to continue to use the internet. I couldn't get on it. I don't use the cloud for my e-book library because if the internet is our I can't get access to those books that might be on the cloud. Then we had some difficulty after service was restored because I couldn't get back on. That had me in a screaming rage. We finally got everything back but I wonder if perhaps I shouldn't find a way to limit how much I depend on the internet.

Perhaps other institutions and various governments should also think about that given the massive hack on major companies and government departments/agencies. Even though most intelligence agencies and experts attributed the hack to Russian spy agencies #45 simply can't accept that his good buddy Vlad would do such a dastardly thing. It must have been the Chinese, of course, and it wasn't that bad anyway. What really flummoxed me was the story of how they got in--by using a third party security firm whose password was simply the company name followed by 1234. No one knows how deep the Russians went, what they may have gotten, or what they may have left behind. For anyone who thinks they can't do much I suggest two books: Ted Koppel's Lights Out and Countdown to Zero Day by Kim Zetter.