I'm getting a booster. But I feel kind of guilty about it.

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels

With boosters widely approved now, I'm planning getting a booster sometime in the next few days: Today is six months since my last shot, and I've got the comorbidities. But I don't feel great about it. 

NYT: "As the United States prepares to offer Covid booster shots to tens of millions of people, representatives of the World Health Organization continue to sound the alarm over the disparity in vaccine access globally, with the world’s poorest countries struggling to get even a first dose into their citizens’ arms." 

How can I justify benefiting from the disparity? 

My local hospital has been slammed the last few months. Some -- not even close to a majority, but some -- of those patients were already vaccinated. I have friends on staff there. Yes, I'm eager to not get sick (and whispers about a possible new Delta sub-variant in the UK terrify me) but anything I can do to stay out of bed seems like a duty to my community. But it still doesn't feel optimal. 

Common Book: The 'demonic energy' of COVID schadenfreude

Sarah Jones, New York: This happened to me recently when I lost my temper with a woman I’d known in college. She is a nurse and wrote on Facebook that she refuses to get vaccinated. I told her that people like her are the reason my grandfather is dead. That wasn’t exactly true — my grandfather died before the vaccines were available — but her indifference toward the virus had irked me. I don’t think I changed her mind. I felt better for an instant and then I went back to feeling angry, both with her and with myself. Whatever compelled me to comment on her Facebook post could have become much uglier if I had allowed it. On the r/HermanCainAward sub-Reddit, people post screenshots of comments from anti-vaxxers who later died of COVID. To some, death has become a spectacle at which they are entitled to gawk. That’s how demonic energy must feel. Right now, it’s everywhere.

Why I'm in favor of anti-vax stigma

AP has a piece today questioning the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" storyline that has emerged amidst the Delta-fueled COVID surge. Some hospitalized people are vaccinated, after all, but the broader concern seems to be that some medical observers worry about stigmatizing the unvaxxed.

“It is true that the unvaccinated are the biggest driver, but we mustn’t forget that the vaccinated are part of it as well, in part because of the delta variant,” said Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. “The pandemic clearly involves all people, not just the unvaccinated.”

Branding it “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” could have the unintended consequence of stigmatizing the unvaccinated, he added. “We should not partition them as the exclusive problem,” Topol said.

Instead officials should call out vaccine disinformation, said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. A sketchy stream of dubious arguments continues to undermine public confidence.

“We can say that the virus has reemerged in the southern United States, primarily among unvaccinated people, but it doesn’t mean we have to blame the unvaccinated,” Hotez said. “The people we have to target are the purveyors of disinformation, and we have to recognize that the unvaccinated themselves are victims of disinformation.”

Well, yes and no.

I'm all for calling out the purveyors of disinformation, but it's probably important to recognize there's an audience out there for the disinformation. People make choices not just based on correct information, but how they feel about things, and one of the factors that shapes those feelings is whether something is broadly understood -- by the culture, by community, by neighbors and friends -- to be good or bad. 

What's more, the medical community understands this and has used it to further public health goals in this country. Have you seen an anti-smoking ad in the last few years? They can be gruesome beyond belief. 

There is information being conveyed here, yes. But some of the information is designed to make smoking seem, frankly, unnattractive. You don't just see this ad and want to protect your health. You want to make sure you don't end up looking or sounding like this poor woman. The point here is to create visceral disgust -- to create a stigma against the act of smoking.

And these efforts, along with increasingly stringent regulation over decades, has worked.

Adult smoking rates dropped from 42% in 1965 to 14% in 2019, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has not released last year's data but the Quitline report cited U.S. Treasury Department data showing cigarette sales increased 1% in 2020 after dropping 4 to 5% each year since 2015.

"Pandemic of the unvaccinated" is admittedly a broad description, but it also seems to capture the heart of the problem facing the United States: 

By late July, a total of about 26 adults per 100,000 vaccinated people had been hospitalized for COVID-19. That’s compared with about 431 hospitalized people for every 100,000 unvaccinated individuals — a rate roughly 17 times as high as for those who were vaccinated. The data come from 13 states, including California, Georgia and Utah.

So I'm fine with continuing to use the label, despite AP's objections. I don't love "stigma" generally. But sometimes it has its uses. 

In Texas, masking and vaccines are a personal choice. The consequences aren't.

AP: "Gov. Greg Abbott appealed for out-of-state help to fight the third wave of COVID-19 in Texas while two more of the state’s largest school districts announced mask mandates in defiance of the governor."

And there you have the "vaccines/masks are a personal choice" argument in a nutshell. Clearly it's not -- if protecting yourself was purely a "personal choice," you'd personally bear responsibility for the outcomes. That's not the case. Your trip to the hospital affects that hospital, clearly, and if enough other people make the same choice, then that hospital in turn needs to call for help from out-of-state nurses. The ripple effects are plain to see.

That's why stuff like this is so silly.

Right now, Abbott is asking Texas hospitals to delay elective surgeries. If you're vaxxed, your choices are constrained by the decisions of the unvaxxed. It's not the worst problem posed by the surge in hospitalizations, of course, but it does mean that the vaxxed can't simply go on their way and disregard what's happening among the unvaxxed. 

One of the things I worry about...

 ...is that our healthcare system might be broken if and when we get to the other side of this.

More than 900 staff members across the Midwest Mayo Clinic system have been diagnosed with Covid-19 over the last 14 days, a spokesperson told CNN "Our staff are being infected mostly due to community spread (93% of staff infections), and this impacts our ability to care for patients," Kelley Luckstein wrote to CNN in a Wednesday email.

God help us

 

Sen. Josh Hawley could make himself really useful....

...by proving his economic populism bona fides and putting real pressure on Sen. Mitch McConnell to do something about this.

NYT:

The Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research warned on Wednesday that there were “significant downside risks” to the nation’s financial stability from the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic and predicted that many households and businesses might be unable to recover without additional government assistance.

The end of the pandemic may be in sight. But we'll get there faster, and with less damage, if we spend a lot of money now.

Bill Barr, civil liberties, and sedition

 It's interesting that this news:

Attorney General William Barr drew criticism after calling lockdown measures aimed at controlling the spread of COVID-19 the worst infringement on civil liberties other than slavery.

Came down at the same time as this news:

William Barr told prosecutors to explore aggressive charges against people arrested at recent demonstrations across the US, even suggesting bringing a rarely used sedition charge, reserved for those who have plotted a threat that posed imminent danger to government authority, according to multiple reports on Wednesday.

Barr's interest in civil liberties is ... situational, shall we say.

There is no right to commit vandalism of and destruction to government property, of course, but there's a reason sedition charges are rarely used: They've often been used in American history to tamp down legitimate dissent.

This was notoriously the case under President John Adams. Jill Lepore, in her book THESE TRUTHS, wrote about his use of a sedition law to punish political opponents:

Sedition laws were also used abusively around World War I.

Though Wilson and Congress regarded the Sedition Act as crucial in order to stifle the spread of dissent within the country in that time of war, modern legal scholars consider the act as contrary to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution, namely to the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. One of the most famous prosecutions under the Sedition Act during World War I was that of Eugene V. Debs, a pacifist labor organizer and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who had run for president in 1900 as a Social Democrat and in 1904, 1908 and 1912 on the Socialist Party of America ticket.

After delivering an anti-war speech in June 1918 in Canton, Ohio, Debs was arrested, tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Sedition Act. Debs appealed the decision, and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the court ruled Debs had acted with the intention of obstructing the war effort and upheld his conviction. In the decision, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to the earlier landmark case of Schenck v. United States (1919), when Charles Schenck, also a Socialist, had been found guilty under the Espionage Act after distributing a flyer urging recently drafted men to oppose the U.S. conscription policy.

I don't envy the politicians who have tried -- not always successfully -- to balance the requirements of public health with the obligations of protecting civil liberties. But they have been working (despite criticisms) to protect public health, not to punish their enemies. Sedition laws are generally used to punish acts committed in the name of some sort of wrongthink. To me, at least, that's a more dangerous kind of civil liberties violation. It also happens to be the kind that Attorney General Bill Barr endorses.

Starting to sense a pattern among Republican presidents

 Remember this?

History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

“Just because I have a car doesn’t mean I have enough money to buy food.”

NYT: “I want people to understand, the face of the needy is different now,” said Ms. Cazimero, who has joined a new class of Americans who never imagined they would have to take a spot in a modern-day bread line. “Just because I have a car doesn’t mean I have enough money to buy food.”

I don't have much to say about this, except the need for a more robust safety net seems both obvious and unreachable for America, and it's aggravating. And I'm old enough to remember stories like this.

One in eight Americans receives food stamps One in four American children now depends on food stamps. Among all Americans, one in eight is receiving food stamps, and as unemployment drops middle-class people into poverty, 20,000 additional people are signing up each day.

That's from 2009. Seems we should have learned a lesson during the Great Recession that we didn't.

President Trump wants to know: Are you ready for some football?

 

Millions of Americans face potential eviction. Businesses are failing. The COVID-19 death rate is now north of 180,000 souls. Racial unrest is percolating across the land. And this is President Trump's priority:

Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren had a telephone call with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, after a White House representative reached out about having discussions concerning how the conference can return to playing college football as soon as possible.

"I think it was very productive about getting [the] Big Ten playing again and immediately," Trump said. "Let's see what happens. He's a great guy. It's a great conference, tremendous teams. We're pushing very hard. ... I think they want to play, and the fans want to see it, and the players have a lot at stake, including possibly playing in the NFL. You have a lot of great players in that conference.

How very small of him. How very bread and circuses of him.

It's better to do too much to battle the Pandemic Depression than do too little. But we're headed toward doing too little.

 Just to follow up on this post: I'm not sure I'm a believer in modern monetary theory, though I'd like to be -- the idea the federal government can just magically pay for everything forever without restraint is tempting! I can't escape the feeling, though, that the theory is ironic foreshadowing for the collapse of American finance. I admit to the possibility of being an economic simpleton. It's not one of my strong suits.

That said: Even if I were a deficit hawk, I would not be one at the present moment -- I am not one at the present moment. America is facing a unique challenge to public health and prosperity. Battling it successfully will be quite expensive. The upside is that if we manage to do it, many lives will be preserved. The downside is that if we fail, many lives will be lost. So why the amount of money that's being thrown at this is huge -- a trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon we'll talk about real money -- it sure seems that this is the moment to risk doing too much. This is no time to be stingy. Let's throw cash at the problem now and figure out how to pay the bills later.

We're facing the biggest threat to American health and prosperity in a century, but we don't want to do *too* much about it.

 My senator:

(Sigh.)

No, teachers are not the same as nurses (Or: Let's talk about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs)

Kristen McConnell writes at The Atlantic this morning that schools should reopen, because, well ... the title says it all: "I’m a Nurse in New York. Teachers Should Do Their Jobs, Just Like I Did."

What I don’t support is preemptively threatening “safety strikes,” as the American Federation of Teachers did in late July. These threats run counter to the fact that, by and large, school districts are already fine-tuning social-distancing measures and mandating mask-wearing. Teachers are not being asked to work without precautions, but some overlook this: the politics of mask-wearing have gotten so ridiculous that many seem to believe masks only protect other people, or are largely symbolic. They’re not. Nurses and doctors know that masks do a lot to keep us safe, and that other basics such as hand-washing and social distancing are effective at preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

Instead of taking the summer to hone arguments against returning to the classroom, administrators and teachers should be thinking about how they can best support children and their families through a turbulent time. Schools are essential to the functioning of our society, and that makes teachers essential workers. They should rise to the occasion even if it makes them nervous, just like health-care workers have.

She adds: "I can understand that teachers are nervous about returning to school. But they should take a cue from their fellow essential workers and do their job. Even people who think there’s a fundamental difference between a nurse and a teacher in a pandemic must realize that there isn’t one between a grocery-store worker and a teacher, in terms of obligation. "

But of course there's a difference. Let's turn back to our high school psychology class, and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, to understand why. Wikipedia explains the fundamental concept pretty well:

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid with the largest, most fundamental needs at the bottom and the need for self-actualization and transcendence at the top. In other words, the theory is that individuals' most basic needs must be met before they become motivated to achieve higher level needs.

Right. 

So. The very act of staying alive today is the most elemental consideration that humans have. Doctors and nurses do the job of keeping sick people alive today. If they don't do their jobs, all other considerations are moot. Similarly, the act of staying alive today and beyond today is pretty elemental: If grocery store workers -- and my wife is one, and it makes me nervous as hell -- don't do their jobs, people will starve. (Protections for those workers should be as stringent as possible, obviously.) Without nurses and food producers continuing their work, many of us die. It's that simple. We shouldn't take those folks for granted. They're keeping us alive.

Teachers are important. But their work takes place on a somewhat higher level of need. If a kid isn't schooled today, that kid will live. But if a kid goes to school today ...well, the kid will probably live. But we're not quite as sure about their parents or teachers. Just this morning, I've read about a school district in Georgia that has had to quarantine 260 employees while it tries to reopen. Closer to my home, Kansas educators who went on a leadership retreat to plan for reopening ended up spreading the virus among themselves -- and one of them is in an ICU.

So maybe, as McConnell says, districts are "fine-tuning social distancing measures," but there's a growing amount of anecdotal evidence they're not succeeding. 

McConnell writes: "What do teachers think will happen if working parents cannot send their children to school? Life as we know it simply will not go on." That's an important consideration. But guess what? Life as we know it simply isn't going on right now, and probably won't for awhile -- if ever. We have to adjust to that, not wish it away -- particularly if it means harming more people as a result. 

Is Trump burning everything down?

Back in 1991, as the Iraqis were being routed from Kuwait by US and coalition forces, they set fires to a number of oil wells along the way. There was not strategic purpose to that action, as far as I can tell. It was simply a churlish and cruel decision that signaled: "If Saddam can't have this, nobody can."

Which brings me, naturally, to Donald Trump.

Big story in the NYT this morning asks: "Does Trump Want to Save His Economy?" It tries to explain the seemingly inexplicable -- while this president is dithering on getting a new economic package passed for Americans who have lost their jobs and face losing their homes because of the pandemic.

Lobbyists, economists and members of Congress say they are baffled by Mr. Trump’s shifting approach and apparent lack of urgency to nail down another rescue package that he can sign into law.

The president’s strategy to help the economy “is hard to decipher,” said Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has urged Congress to provide more aid to people, businesses and hard-hit state and local governments. “It seems to me there isn’t a clear strategy to support the economy right now coming from the White House.”

Perhaps -- as this story suggests -- Trump is just engaging in another round of magical thinking, believing that if he speaks a recovery into existence without doing the hard work of actually making a recovery happen. Donald isn't big into hard work, after all.

But what if Trump -- dispirited by polls that show him losing badly to Joe Biden -- has simply decided to burn things down?

There is one rule we can be certain of with this president: He does not do anything for the greater good, only for his own benefit. He is entirely transactional, and only in the most material sense -- he doesn't seem to have a sense of enlightened self-interest. It's why he can't see the harm done by accepting and soliciting assistance from foreign countries, for example. It's why -- as Vanity Fair reported yesterday -- administration officials were happy to let the coronavirus rage as long as it was contained to blue states. 

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

So it's not unreasonable, I think, to speculate that Trump has forseen he may soon no longer derive benefits from being president. In that scenario, he might decide -- or instinctively move -- to use his remaining power and platform to set fire to American institutions. He's not the kid who takes the ball and goes home. Worse. He's the kid who takes your ball and chucks it into the river.

If you contemplate the "burn it all down" strategy, it becomes easier to understand why Trump seems uninterested in the economy, or why he continually tries to undermine confidence in elections, or why -- even now -- he does so little to combat the pandemic. He never had much interest in the governing part of being president, anyway, as far as I can tell. 

This might not be a correct take on the president's behavior. But again: He does so little for the good of the country. But I think we start with the idea that his behavior is selfish, and seek explanations from there.

Happiness is a warm gun

AP:

When it comes to states’ rights, President Donald Trump is all over the map.

To battle the coronavirus, he’s told states they’re largely on their own. But when it comes to stamping out protests in cities led by Democrats, Trump is sending in federal troops and agents — even when local leaders are begging him to butt out.

“After seeing Trump in the White House for three and a half years, anyone expecting to find classical ideological consistency is bound to be mistaken,” said Andrew J. Polsky, a political science professor at Hunter College. “All of this is done for partisan political purposes with an eye toward the election.”

This is true. Trump does whatever maximizes his authority while avoiding responsibility. 

But the other through-line in this is a characteristic Trump shares with a lot of conservatives: At his core, he believes the answer to most issues is being -- or, perhaps more precisely, being seen -- as tough.

The virus is very difficult to be "tough" against. It has no emotional response to anything. It just does what it does. That hasn't stopped the president from trying to out-tough it, by calling himself a "wartime president" and refusing to wear a mask until he wore one. Even the ramped-up tensions with China in the pandemic's wake can probably be seen not just as scapegoating -- though it is certainly that -- but as a function of the need to be seen "cracking down" on something in response to the crisis.

With protesters, though, it's pretty easy to be tough. Just lob tear gas and rubber bullets at them.

The problem, though, is that even where toughness produces something like results -- a change in the situation, kinetic displays -- it doesn't always, or even often, produce good results. Doesn't matter. Trump and his allies aren't concerned with effectiveness. It's showing the iron fist that matters. Federalism doesn't really matter to the question.

Donald Trump is holding our children hostage to his narcissism

Oh boy:

As I mentioned earlier today, we've already decided to keep our son at home this fall. You know why we made that decision? Well, it had nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Taking this tweet at face value, it means that the president of the United States cannot conceive of reasons why schools and parents would not want to fill up the classrooms this fall -- unless it's to make him look bad. He is so self-centered that the idea that people don't want to die, or that schools don't want to risk their students or be liable for that risk. He can only conceive of how that reflects on him.

Let me be clear: I wouldn't be sending my son to school this fall even if it meant that going or not going could guarantee Joe Biden's presidential victory. Again: Our decision had nothing to do with Donald Trump. But Trump cannot understand a universe in which he is not the center, in which people make decisions based on their own interests instead of how it affects his. His narcissism has always been one of his most terrible qualities. Now it could be positively lethal.

We are keeping our kid home this fall

We officially made the decision this week: Our son -- a rising seventh grader -- will be learning from home this fall.

We don't love this decision. The boy is better at learning in a classroom setting than in digital, distanced-learning environment. He would love to see his friends again. But despite President Trump's constant pressure on schools to reopen, I'm just not comfortable that sending him back to school is the best decision -- for his health, for the health of anybody working at the school, or for us in his family.

And there's stuff like this:

An overnight summer camp in rural southwestern Missouri has seen scores of campers, counselors and staff infected with the coronavirus, the local health department revealed this week, raising questions about the ability to keep kids safe at what is a rite of childhood for many.

Missouri is one of several states to report outbreaks at summer camps. The Kanakuk camp near Branson ended up sending its teenage campers home. On Friday, the local health department announced 49 positive cases of the COVID-19 virus at the camp. By Monday, the number had jumped to 82.

I realize that keeping our son home is a privilege. His mom and I both do most of our work from home, anyway. And we have wifi, as well as a school district willing and able to provide online learning. Not everybody does. As I said in THE WEEK a few weeks back:

Parents understandably worry that lost classroom time means their kids will fall behind. Others may not have access to the technology needed for remote learning, or they may need the schools to provide meals to their children. More than a few parents need schools to reopen simply so they can have some daytime childcare. Nothing about this is easy. It will be a good day when schools can reopen safely.

But parents should be wary of risking their children's health to buttress the president's vanity and image. If schools reopen this fall, there is a good chance my child won't be in attendance.

Well, the choice is officially made. 

On Trump's hope Americans will "grow numb" to death

WaPo:

The goal is to convince Americans that they can live with the virus — that schools should reopen, professional sports should return, a vaccine is likely to arrive by the end of the year and the economy will continue to improve.

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar with the White House’s thinking, who requested anonymity to reveal internal deliberations. Americans will “live with the virus being a threat,” in the words of one of those people, a senior administration official.

I believe President Trump's political prospects are being kept alive by two groups at this point: Racists and pro-life evangelicals.

I have some sympathy for the latter group. I grew up with them, went to a conservative evangelical Mennonite college where almost everybody was pro-life. I knew four people on campus who admitted to voting for Bill Clinton in 1992, and I was one of them. I don't agree with all those folks on much these days -- but I love them still.

Admittedly, the abortion issue is a close moral call for me. I think that unborn children exist on a spectrum of bearing moral worth -- but I also think real questions of women's health and freedom is bound up in the all of this, and, for me, that settles the issue in favor of a pro-choice position. But I know a lot of people who come down on the other side, and I respect that for the most part. When I don't, it's because their acts and positions suggest to me that they're more interested in power over women than they are in saving lives.

I can kind of understand, then, why evangelicals support Trump despite his manifestly un-Christian bearing. He's giving them the judges they want to undo -- either by overturning or neutering -- Roe v. Wade. A good friend of mine once told me he was disgusted by Trump, but also felt like he should thank him. I wonder, though, how they can sustain their pro-life witness and continue to back this president.

I mean, consider again these words:

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll...

Why? Well, because trying to save all those lives is hard. And (Trump believes, I think wrongly) that the economy will bounce back if Americans decide to live with the virus and the damage it does.

Pro-lifers tend to reject -- and can even be contemptuous of -- the many women who argue that they are unable to bring an unborn child into the world because they don't possess the economic resources (or other resources) to support that child. For pro-lifers, life trumps any economic argument.

But not now.

If Americans grow numb to death, I wonder how pro-lifers can defend the fact the president they support is OK with your grandma or spouse or child or other loved one dying or being disabled by the virus? Do they think that engenders a "culture of life?"

Maybe there's an argument that COVID was inflicted by nature, while abortions are an active choice. But when you look at America's climbing coronavirus cases and compare them to other developed countries not run by right-wing populists, it's is clear that allowing widespread death in America is a choice being made by the president and his accomplices.

Can you be truly pro-life and support President Trump? We all make moral compromises when we do politics -- purity is for the ineffective and impotent. But at some point, maybe the compromises become too much. Maybe they start to work against your professed values. I think that may be what is happening to pro-lifers right now. No one can say they weren't warned.

You can't say #BlackLivesMatter and play college football this year

Slate's Joel Anderson offers up some chilling statistics:

This week, players returned to campuses all around the country preparing themselves for a season that almost certainly shouldn’t be played. Just look at the early numbers. Two weeks ago at Oklahoma State, three players tested positive for the virus. Last week, the University of Houston suspended workouts after six players tested positive. And Thursday at the University of Texas, news reports emerged that 13 players tested positive — an uptick from the six reported the day before.

I've long predicted that American sports leagues probably will try to resume playing soon, but that somebody will get sick, and everybody will shut down for the rest of the year. But it's ironic that efforts to resume sports are happening at the same time as the "Black Lives Matter" protests -- which started out as a policing issue, but have spread to hard discussions about racism and the exploitation of Black people in all sectors of society.

College sports should be one of those sectors. In the major sports, black and other minority athletes provide disproportionate share of the labor with relatively little compensation, considering the money they're generating for their schools. It's already an exploitative system. But now there's a chance that exploitation will lead to illness and, possibly, death. The excuse that young, healthy people don't face as much danger from the coronavirus, but the truth is there's still a lot we don't know -- and we're learning all the time that asymptomatic carriers of the virus might also face long-term health problems.

The coaches and other university officials need to stop this, now, or their words of racial harmony will ring especially hollow. You can't say that "black lives matter" and keep playing the games. Not this year.