Author Archives: helenaworthen

It’s summer, schools no longer sending out lessons, and kids are starting to run out patience with being cooped up. Also, they miss each other. Small pods of them are starting to show up in parks. I was up in Cordonices Park today, a beautiful park with a large flat grassy picnic area bordered byContinue reading “Play vs no play”

Big march in Oakland In honor of Juneteenth the ILWU has shut down the ports on the West Coast and there is a Black Lives Matter march from the Port of Oakland into central downtown. Thousands of people, as far as I could see. Very much in the spirit of Occupy. It’s possible that IContinue reading “Juneteenth in Oakland, retail social distancing and BLM in a nearby park”

Drove into Oakland today, my first venture out of my bubble since March 9, so that’s 3 months. A friend who came over a few nights ago said that since the protests, “Oakland is just one great art gallery.” Downtown Oakland businesses have boarded themselves up, and now the muralists are out painting on theContinue reading “Hindsight is 20-20”

When this was just a medical crisis, sheltering-in-place was the fix, because it would protect our healthcare system from being overwhelmed. Then we realized that just having enough ventilators wouldn’t keep us from getting sick, so we acknowledged that, great, the healthcare system is OK now, how about us? We’d probably be wearing masks untilContinue reading “No “back to normal””

Watched Stephen Colbert interview Biden: For the first 20 minutes or more, Biden seems to be still on the debate stage, running against Trump, not leading the opposition. He begins to gather himself after that. But then Colbert asks him one question after another about what his plan is — for infrastructure, for jobs, evenContinue reading “Time to pivot”

Biden won the Hawaii Democratic primary today, 63% to 37% for Bernie, with Bernie not even running. Biden picked up 16 delegates and Bernie got 8, making Biden 1566 delegates so far. https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3085814/joe-biden-wins-hawaii-presidential-primary-delayed The paper that reported this didn’t bother to mention how many delegates Bernie has: it’s 1007 as of today. There are aboutContinue reading “A Ride Around the Block”

83,000 dead in the US; none in Vietnam. The figures from Vietnam are credible; they’ve been subjected to a lot of international scrutiny and people agree that they’re good. Moving right along: All of America on one stage, celebrating, circa 1943 This is from a book by Robert McCloskey. You may recognize the hand ofContinue reading “Utopia, Eutopia, Labor Relations Sci Fi and Bernie and Biden’s Task Force”

An article in the New Yorker describes the fractured supply chain for medical supplies and the obstacles to getting approval for tests, apparently because if you test, you find out how many people have got it. If what you find out is that a lot of people have it, then you have to make aContinue reading “May 8, 75,000 deaths”

This is our friend Beverly Stewart, at the time President of the Roosevelt Adjunct Faculty Organization (RAFO), an NEA local, telling the story of Haymarket at the statue on the site of the massacre. This is Chicago, about 2008. She is addressing the women at a Polk Conference. You can see that the statue, whichContinue reading “May Day 2020”

We’re at about 55,000 deaths, but I don’t know if that includes nursing home deaths, where about a third of the people in them appear to be dying. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200430-sitrep-101-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=2ba4e093_2 Vietnam: Zero deaths Vietnam appears to have experienced no deaths from COVID-19. Zero. I first heard this from friends there, then it showed up on theContinue reading “Numbers”