Wetand News

Our democracy is threatened. It is threatened by rioters using violence as a political tool, by individuals intimidating politicians through aggressive home visits, by Presidential debates where name calling and incivility rule, by the loss of a sense of physical safety that is a necessity for a civil society, by destructive hyper-partisanship, and by the suppression of freedom of speech and diversity of viewpoints . There are few better examples of the suppression of freedom of speech and viewpoint diversity than the recent partisan actions by the management of KNKX, and this blog will review this issue.  I will discuss the termination of my weekly weather segment because of KNKX management’s unhappiness with my personal political free speech in social media.  And I will demonstrate the extreme hypocrisy of their actions, with their leadership’s use of nearly identical language for their own political advocacy. Freedom of speech and respect for viewpoint diversity is the foundation of

The coronavirus crisis is one of the most disruptive events to hit the U.S. in a very long time. Major sectors of the economy are being shuttered, people lives are being altered in the most profound ways, and the nation is facing extreme stress, the implications of which we do not understand. Extraordinarily serious decisions are being made without key information:  how many individuals have active infections?  How many have had the virus and now have immunity?  What percentage of infected individuals have few or no symptoms?  Who is currently infected and needs to be quarantined?  Is the current reduction in cases in Washington and elsewhere mainly the result of social distancing or the herd immunity of an increasing number of individuals that have had the virus? For all these questions, we do not know the answer.  Our best medical scientists and epidemiologists, including a highly respected group at the University of Washington, are making projections of the future progressio