Blog Archives - Jay Evensen

Why Sweden's pandemic gamble matters to you

4/29/2020

Sweden is betting the life of my wife’s Uncle Stig that it has a better approach to the novel coronavirus than the rest of us.
Actually, it’s not much of a bet at the moment. While the Swedish government is defensive about its unique approach to the spread of COVID-19, in which much of what has been closed here has remained open there, including schools, it has been candid in admitting it has blown it with the protection of elderly people, especially those in rest homes.
A lot of those people are dying.

Is the wearing of masks a political statement?

4/28/2020

Earlier this week, the bicycle I ride for exercise each day after the daily grind in my basement office needed a minor repair.
A sign on the door of the shop told me to wait outside. Only 10 people were allowed inside at a time. After a while, a young woman opened the door and invited me in.
She was not wearing a mask. Neither was anyone inside. I did, however, sense a conscious effort by myself and others to keep at a distance from each other.

Oil crisis should be a wake-up call for Utah

4/22/2020

In Salina, near the exit to I-70, you could get gas Wednesday for $1.15 a gallon.
That’s according to the website gasbuddy.com. I didn’t actually go to Salina to check it out. Chances are, you didn’t, either. Most of us aren’t going anywhere, which means we’re not even going to our neighborhood gas stations, which in my area were offering unleaded for $1.89.
Low gas prices right now are the equivalent of having the stomach flu as a child and having your parents say you can eat all the candy you want. Great news, but you just don’t have any use for it at the moment.

Is the Constitution a suicide pact?

4/21/2020

Justice John Marshall Harlan was well known in his time for dissenting in U.S. Supreme Court cases that restricted civil rights, such as the infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson decision that, for many years, established the notorious “separate but equal” doctrine allowing widespread racial segregation.
But he didn’t mince words in 1905 when he wrote in favor of letting states force everyone to be vaccinated against smallpox.

Voting by mail isn't a threat to politics

4/15/2020

For many people, the pandemic has led to greater unity -- among friends, within neighborhoods and in families. That’s an encouraging, and perhaps unexpected, side-effect of having to isolate at home.
Politics, however, keeps creeping at its petty pace from day to day, to butcher Shakespeare. The latest absurdity is the notion that voting by mail would lead to an increase in voter fraud. Republicans are making this a sticking point in the approval of more stimulus money. Democrats want to give states money to let people vote in ways that don’t require them to stand next to each other in polling places.

Who is in charge of ending this pandemic?

4/15/2020

If you’re sitting home wondering exactly how you landed in pandemic-land, consider this: Getting out of it is shaping up as an even bigger mystery.
In Washington, the president says he should be the one to control when states reopen their economies. Governors disagree.
Meanwhile, in Utah a completely different variation on that theme may be played soon.
Specifically, some lawmakers want the power to call the shots.

Has the pandemic changed our lives in permanent ways?

4/11/2020

I had a physical exam, of sorts, the other day from the isolation of my basement office at home, and without my doctor coming within two miles of me.
He looked at me through the screen of my mobile phone and asked how I was feeling. I told him I was fine, which was true. This was the kind of regular checkup people my age have from time to time.
But it was my first brush with telehealth, the word to describe remote doctor visits free from the need to confront sick people in a waiting room. It was a rare, pandemic-induced experience.
Or was it?

Try to rewrite Utah's political boundaries - it's not easy

4/8/2020

Have you run out of table space for your pandemic-therapy jigsaw puzzles? Are Rubik’s Cubes just too easy? Already a whiz on every aspect of the $2 trillion congressional stimulus package? Do you find the theory of relativity boringly simplistic?
Are you secretly glad for social distancing because you no longer have to wonder why people avoid you at parties?
Then maybe redrawing Utah’s congressional districts is just what you need to while away the hours in isolation.

Pandemic reminds us of the things that really matter

4/1/2020

I noticed one of those emails the other day; the kind that, a mere month ago, seemed to confront my field of view wherever I looked.
It went something along the lines of “candidate X is lying about subject Y to cover up his misdeeds, blah, blah, blah…” Or perhaps it had an urgent tone to it, warning about impending doom caused by the success of some liberal or conservative agenda. The memory of it is blurry at this point.

weebly statistics

weebly reliable statistics

weebly statistics