Over...

 

Distance...

 

..Mutates...

 

When the coronavirus surfaced last year, no one was prepared for it to invade every aspect of daily life for so long, so insidiously. The pandemic has forced Americans to wrestle with life-or-death choices every day of the past 18 months and there is no end in sight.

Scientific understanding of the virus changes by the hour, it seems. The virus spreads only by close contact or on contaminated surfaces, and then turns out to be airborne. The virus mutates slowly, but then emerges in a series of dangerous new forms. Americans do not need to wear masks. Wait, they do.

Americans are living with science as it unfolds in real time. The process has always been fluid, unpredictable. But rarely has it moved at this speed, leaving citizens to confront research findings as soon as they land at the front door, a stream of deliveries that no one ordered and no one wants.

Is a visit to my ailing parent too dangerous? Do the benefits of in-person schooling outweigh the possibility of physical harm to my child? Will our family gathering turn into a super spreader event?
Living with a capricious enemy has been unsettling even for researchers, public health officials and journalists who are used to the mutable nature of science. They, too, have frequently agonized over the best way to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.

But to frustrated Americans unfamiliar with the circuitous and often contentious path to scientific discovery, public health officials have seemed at times to be moving the goal posts and flip-flopping, or misleading, even lying to, the country.

Most of the time, scientists are “edging forward in a very incremental way,” 
“There are blind alleys that people go down, and a lot of the time, you kind of don’t know what you don’t know.”

Biology and medicine are particularly demanding fields. Ideas are evaluated for years, sometimes decades, before they are accepted.
Not this time, we got no time...    Just a thought.

Unavoidable...

Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan has led to scenes of pandemonium in Afghanistan, with as many as 11,000 Americans and tens of thousands of endangered Afghans scrambling to evacuate the country.

 Scenes of civilians swamping planes on the runway at the Kabul airport, desperate for escape, have triggered bipartisan criticism that the Biden administration handled the hasty exit poorly.

 President Joe Biden stood firm in his defense of the United States' withdrawal, and asserted for the first time that he believes the chaos was unavoidable.

"Now exactly what happened, I've not priced in," he said. "But I knew that they're going to have an enormous  Look, one of the things we didn't know is what the Taliban would do in terms of trying to keep people from getting out.  

What are they doing now? They're cooperating, letting American citizens get out, American personnel get out, embassies get out, et cetera, but they're having -- we're having some more difficulty having those who helped us when we were in there."

Anybody...

 

Ideas...

 

Pulled...

 

Message...

 

Dancing...

 

OutSource...

 

America’s war in Afghanistan presents a mystery: How could so much money, power, and good will have achieved so little? Congress has appropriated almost eight hundred billion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan; a hundred and thirteen billion has gone to reconstruction, more than was spent on the Marshall Plan, in postwar Europe. General David Petraeus, encouraged the practice of pumping money into the economy of Afghanistan. He believed that money had helped buy peace during his command of American forces in Iraq. “Employ money as a weapons system,” Petraeus wrote in 2008. “Money can be ‘ammunition.’ ”

 To minimize casualties, the military outsourced any task that it could: maintenance, cooking and laundry, overland logistics, even security. Since 2007, there have regularly been more contractors than U.S. forces in Afghanistan; today, they outnumber them three to one.

 When a House committee investigated the trucking system that supplied American forces, it found that the system had “fueled a vast protection racket run by a shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others.” Its report concluded that “protection payments for safe passage are a significant potential source of funding for the Taliban.” The system risked “undermining the U.S. strategy for achieving its goals in Afghanistan.”