The Daily Parker

I read three things to reinforce this today. First, National Geographic acknowledges the global mental health crisis, and how we're procrastinating more as a result:

People don’t necessarily procrastinate because they are lazy. Procrastination has roots in our evolutionary development, with two key parts of the brain vying for control.

“Procrastination is an emotion-focused coping strategy,” says Tim Pychyl, a psychology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, and author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle. “It is not a time-management problem; it is an emotion-management problem.”

Experts who study procrastination define it as the voluntary delay of an intended act despite the fact that you can expect to be worse off in the long run by putting off the task. We know the task doesn’t go away, but sometimes we let our emotions get the best of us. Our “present self” calls the shots, and our “future self” suffers because of it.

Neuroscientists have found that procrastination is a battle between an ancient part of the brain called the limbic system and a relatively younger part known as the prefrontal cortex.

However, when strong emotions such as anxiety and fear become overwhelming, the impulsive limbic system can still win out.

Paul Krugman today describes another form of insanity, in which the states of Texas and Mississippi (34th and 46th in public education rankings, respectively) have consigned a non-zero number of people to death because of the politics of masks:

Wearing a mask in public, like holding it in for a few minutes, is slightly inconvenient, but hardly a major burden. And the case for imposing that mild burden in a pandemic is overwhelming. The coronavirus variants that cause Covid-19 are spread largely by airborne droplets, and wearing masks drastically reduces the variants’ spread.

So not wearing a mask is an act of reckless endangerment, not so much of yourself — although masks appear to provide some protection to the wearer — as of other people. Covering our faces while the pandemic lasts would appear to be simple good citizenship, not to mention an act of basic human decency.

Refusing to wear a mask has become a badge of political identity, a barefaced declaration that you reject liberal values like civic responsibility and belief in science. (Those didn’t used to be liberal values, but that’s what they are in America 2021.)

I don’t know how many people will die unnecessarily because the governor of Texas has decided that ignoring the science and ending the mask requirement is a good way to own the libs. But the number won’t be zero.

Finally, I got a lengthy email today that someone sent through Weather Now, for some reason, warning me of the dangers of vaccination:

I was praying and fasting, regarding the Covid-19 vaccine during the time I’ve received this dream:

In my dream, God took me into the near future of America. I was overlooking America (like a birds eye view), and I looked to my right of America (the Eastside) and was overlooking New York State as well.. And I saw millions of people in America, had received the Covid-19 vaccine.

And also throughout America, I could see 5G towers monitoring VERY closely the covid-19 vaccinated individuals (victims).

When I saw this, I immediately asked God, “How are they completely connected to these 5G towers and the towers to them?” Right after I asked God this, He took me to a hospital in New York. There, I saw a doctor giving a patient, the covid-19 vaccine. (The doctor and patient couldn’t see me.)

But while the doctor was injecting into the patient’s arm, the covid-19 vaccine shot.. I saw hundreds/thousands of little specs of microchips, [nanobots] INSIDE the covid-19 vaccine, flowing through the shot, and into that individual.

The email went on like this for five pages. I selected only the most coherent bits for this message. I should point out, however, that the IP address from which the message originated is in Vietnam, so I'm not too worried there's an unhinged fundamentalist trying to save my soul through a weather application's feedback page. I am worried that fear leads to stupidity (a crucial step Yoda forgot to mention) and stupidity leads to people believing crazy things.

Craziness usually follows plagues. Let's hope we get through our crazy period as rationally as we can.

I'm once more back in my downtown office, and today spotted one of my co-workers: an IT guy who's been here the whole time. I didn't see him Monday because he works on a different floor, and management discourages us from leaving our own these days. But like seeing a crocus sticking out of the snow, saying hello to another human being at work felt like a sign of spring, especially since it's Day 350 since the pandemic first sent everyone home.

And because in the spring, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of...baseball? I can't remember, not being a young man anymore...here is a BBC article from last month on historical romances:

He had good posture and pale skin, perhaps reddened slightly with sunburn. Around one of his thick, muscular biceps he wore bracelet of eagle-talons. She was an early modern human, clad in an animal-skin coat with a wolf-fur trim. She had dark skin, long legs, and her hair was worn in braids.

He cleared his throat, looked her up and down, and – in an absurdly high-pitched, nasal voice – deployed his best chat-up line. She stared back blankly. Luckily for him, they didn’t speak the same language. They had an awkward laugh and, well, we can all guess what happened next.

While we will never know what really happened in this encounter – or others like it – what we can be sure of is that such a couple did get together. Around 37,000-42,000 years later, in February 2002, two explorers made an extraordinary discovery in an underground cave system in the southwestern Carpathian mountains, near the Romanian town of Anina.

That's right, the BBC has summarized everything you wanted to know about sex between modern humans and Neandertals. Share and enjoy.

A local Vietnamese restaurant—only a few blocks from me, in fact—had to pay $700,000 in back wages to its workers after a Department of Labor investigation that ended in October:

Tank Noodle has been forced to pay nearly $700,000 in back wages after making some of its employees work only for tips, according to the U.S. Deptartment of Labor.

The popular Vietnamese restaurant at 4953 N. Broadway withheld wages and used illegal employment practices for 60 of its employees, a labor department investigation found. Some employees were owed more than $10,000 by the restaurant.

The investigation found some servers at the restaurant worked only for tips, a violation of federal work laws. Tank Noddle also shorted servers when the business pooled tips and divided the money among all staff, including management, another federal work violation.

Tank Noodle violated overtime laws and sometimes paid staff flat fees for a day’s work regardless of the number of hours worked, according to the labor department.

There's the setup. Now the punchline:

[Tank Noodle's] owners attended a Jan. 6 rally in support of former President Donald Trump that ended in the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

The Ly family, which owns Tank Noodle, posted photos from the rally, which were widely circulated on social media.

Too bad for the Ly family that the neighborhood has about two dozen other places with better phở.

Just a few stories:

• President Biden declared that the US is on track to have enough Covid-19 vaccine to jab every adult in the country by the end of May.
• That did not stop Republicans in Texas and Mississippi from ending mask mandates and other Covid-19 safety measures.
• The House of Representatives may pass a major election reform bill that could give Senate Democrats the impetus to kill (or at least maim) the fillibuster.
• The Chicago Tribune spent some time on a retrospective of our winter weather statistics.

Finally, it only took 375 years and satellite imagery, but geologists have demonstrated that New Zealand is on its own continent.

So says Josh Marshall who, after five years of being obligated by his job to listen to the XPOTUS's speeches, finally turned him off this week:

Part of this may be fatigue. I want to be done with this guy. But I don’t think it was mainly that. I’ve wanted to be done with him for years. The centrality of Trump, what’s held so many of our attentions for years is the inescapable reality that he was President. He controls the FBI, the DOJ, the military, what other countries sometimes call the ‘power ministries’. He’s got the nukes. However terrible and absurd he may be what he says and what he thinks and even his mood really matters because of the awful powers he had acquired by being elected President.

Many times I’ve analogized the Trump presidency to living in a household with an abuser. Part of that experience is hyper-vigilance and attention to the actions and moods of the abuser. That person has the power. That person controls the violence. Absent that power, though, Trump’s lies and general crap don’t really matter to me as much. Absent that power, he’s just another entitled jerk who wants space in my head.

Josh, I turned him off years ago. But it's nice that no one has to listen to him any more.

Just a couple passing stories this afternoon:

• Chicago lost another pair of major conventions this summer due to Covid-19. In the past year, organizers have cancelled over 200 events representing nearly a million visitors to Chicago. At least the end is in sight.
• The right-leaning US Supreme Court signaled it might allow states to further restrict voting rights. Since the Republican Party can no longer win elections on policy or popularity, voter suppression, such as the list of restrictions passed by the losing party in Georgia this week, remains their only hope of retaining power.
• Former French president Nicholas Sarkozy has been sentenced to jail for corruption. What does that signal to the XPOTUS?
• Illinois had a wild February, according to the Illinois State Climatologist, capping off an otherwise mild winter.

Finally, Merck and Johnson & Johnson announced a plan to combine production of Covid-19 vaccines, an "unprecedented" collaboration between competitors.

I'm back in my downtown Chicago office after working at home every day for almost exactly four months. It's weird, as I'm once again the only one on the floor, but that will change pretty soon. And I'll still be working from home three days a week.

I did miss the view.

I think we can all appreciate the novel and—can I just say?—courageous interpretation of the National Anthem that not even the lads from the Anacreontic Society could have managed when they penned the tune lo these many centuries past.