The Daily Parker

You have to see these photos of the dark Sears Tower against the Chicago skyline—a metaphor for 2020 bar none. Also:

• The Chicago Teachers Union has sued the Chicago Public Schools and Betsy DeVos over the treatment of special-education students during the lockdown.
• Alexandra Petri imagines the sad, lonely life of a potato guardian.
• Three Floyds has closed their brewpub indefinitely, another sign of the apocalypse.
• President Trump really does believe his own quackery, though hydroxychloroquine as a dog whistle surely plays a part in it. Maybe he's not actually lying? ("[A]ssuming that all of his pandemic untruths are lies may obscure the degree to which he’s out of his depth.")
• Similarly, is Georgia's Brian Kemp deceitful, incompetent, malingering, racist, or just stupid? Yes.

And oh! My long-running unit test (1575.9 seconds) has finished. I can get up now.

Long day, with meetings until 8:45pm and the current sprint ending tomorrow at work, so I'll read most of these after the spring review:

• Tara Smith warns about the unholy alliance of anti-vaxers and Covid-19 quarantine protesters. Libby Watson calls it a "deranged civil religion."
• You think President Trump firing State Department Inspector General Steve Linick was about walking Mike Pompeo's dogs? Uh, no. It was about the $8 bn arms deal with Saudi Arabia that Linick was about to expose.
• Why is Trump going after Obama again? Jennifer Rubin has a theory. Even Attorney General Bill Barr, no ethical paragon he, shut down the idea of investigating Obama or Biden—probably for no other reason than it would not be good to have that precedent on the books next January.
• In his latest time capsule, James Fallows looks at the past week and can scarcely believe the 5 or 6 scandals that would have been top stories in any other year.
• After we got 200 mm of rain in the last 36 hours, the forecast calls for slightly drier and much warmer weather ahead. The Sears Tower remains without power, however, after police in boats had to rescue homeless people on Lower Wacker Drive. (“Two of the top 5 wettest May days ever were in the past 4 days – no wonder why the flooding is so bad, that is unreal,” [National Weather Service meteorologist Gino] Izzi said.)
• Cranky Flier analyzes Delta's 777 retirement plan.
• Anthony Paletta looks at "why airports die."

Finally, Sheffield, U.K., wildlife photographer Simon Dell built a Hobbiton for the local field mice. It's as adorable as it sounds.

Charlie Pierce, noting that "[p]eople with firearms forced the civil government of the state of Michigan to shut itself down," wants to know in what sense this isn't terrorism. In other fun weekend stories:

• The Illinois Dept. of Employment Security had a "glitch" in their unemployment claims processing app that exposed private information. I'm curious who wrote the software.
• Jared Kushner: evil and stupid.
• Speaking of evil and stupid, the president continues to downplay and undercount Covid-19 deaths because, let's face it, he's responsible for many of them.
• Chicago faces another $1bn budget hole next year.

And it's pouring, and will continue to do so for several more hours.

Today I'll try to avoid the most depressing stories:

• The North Shore Channel Trail bridge just north of Lincoln Avenue opened this week, completing an 11 km continuous path from Lincoln Square to Evanston.
• Experts warn that herd immunity (a) is an economic concept, not a health concept and (b) shouldn't apply to humans because we're not herd animals.
• Wisconsin remains in total chaos today after the state supreme court terminated Governor Tony Evans' stay-at-home order, approximately two weeks before a predictable, massive uptick in Covid-19 cases.
• Delta Airlines has decided to retire its fleet of 18 B777 airplanes years ahead of schedule due to an unexpected drop in demand for air travel.
• The pro-contagion, rabid right-wingers flashing placards saying "Be Like Sweden" clearly have no comprehension of Sweden's efforts to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
• US retail sales declined 16.4% in April, pushing the total decline since February to nearly 25%, the worst decline in history.
• Wired has a portrait of Marcus Hutchins, the hacker who stopped the WannaCry virus from killing us all and then went to jail for his previous activities designing and spreading malware.
• Andrew Sullivan tells the story of Samuel Pepys, "the very first pandemic blogger."

Finally, Vanity Fair has reprinted its 1931 cover article on Al Capone, which seems somehow timely.

The bascule bridge over the Chicago River at Michigan Avenue turned 100 today. The Chicago Tribune has photos.

Also:

• The Tribune explains how the various Covid-19 tests work, and where Illinois is in getting them to people.
• Seems I'm not the only one who thought a combination between GrubHub and Uber might not fit in with US antitrust laws.
• A new book says the US would lose a direct military confrontation with China, because they're set up to fight a different war than we are.
• Turns out, the 4-3 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision yesterday that sent the state's Covid-19 response into chaos may not have been the Republican Party's best move.
• The FBI has seized US Senator Richard Burr's (R-NC) mobile phone as part of an investigation into his alleged securities trading on the nonpublic information he received about Covid-19 in an intelligence briefing in January.
• The full 4th Circuit US Court of Appeals overturned a 3-judge panel from the same court, holding that the president's businesses cannot derive income from foreign governments under the constitution's emoluments clause.

And the New York Times interviewed science-fiction author John Scalzi, whose The Last Emperox came out two weeks ago.

Just when you thought the Republican Party couldn't become more anti-science and pro-profit (at the expense of workers), the Wisconsin Supreme Court just struck down Wisconsin's stay-at-home order on a 4-3 party-line vote.

If only that were all:

• Jennifer Rubin points out that "Trump's abject hypocrisy shows us where he's failed."
• Not only has Trump "lost the plot," he "has no plan," according to two articles this week in The Atlantic. How is this news cycle different from all other news cycles?
• The US Supreme Court listened to arguments this week about the electoral college and Trump's tax returns. It seems likely the nation will lose both cases.
• The judge presiding over Michael Flynn's case has asked a retired judge to brief him on whether to hold Flynn in criminal contempt for perjury, after the Justice Dept. sought to end its prosecution of Flynn.
• The City of Chicago has ordered food delivery services to disclose the fees they charge restaurants so consumers have more transparency. Restaurants have complained about price-gouging from GrubHub and others.
• Meanwhile, Uber is in talks to buy GrubHub. If we had a functioning FTC, this would never happen.
• David Kamp brings back my childhood with his paean to Zoom, the children's television show I watched religiously when I was a kid.
• Anthropologists have found a 45,000-year-old midden containing homo sapiens tools, bones, and jewelry in a cave in Bulgaria. It's evidence of the earliest modern humans in Europe.
• The New York Times has an oral history of Mad Max: Fury Road, which the author calls a "modern action classic." (It's one of my faves as well.)

Someday, we'll all look back on this time, laugh nervously, and change the subject.

My day kept getting longer as it went on in a way that people living through the pandemic will understand. So I didn't have time to read any of these yesterday:

• The Chicago Tribune produced six charts that explain the pandemic's economic effects.
• Rolling Stone identifies the four men most responsible for our current calamity.
• The Washington Posts lists six takeaways from Dr Anthony Fauci's testimony before the Senate today.
• Consumer Reports helps you avoid Zoombombing.
• The New Yorker describes the secret lives of fungi.

Finally, Jon Oliver has put out a line of Last Week Tonight stamps to help support the US Postal Service. So naturally I bought some.

Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Julia Marcus argues that "quarantine fatigue is real," and it may be healthier to start relaxing self-isolation (for many people) than to continue it:

Public-health experts have known for decades that an abstinence-only message doesn’t work for sex. It doesn’t work for substance use, either. Likewise, asking Americans to abstain from nearly all in-person social contact will not hold the coronavirus at bay—at least not forever.

I’m not talking about the people who are staging militaristic protests against the supposed coronavirus hoax. I’m talking about those who are experiencing the profound burden of extreme physical and social distancing. In addition to the economic hardship it causes, isolation can severely damage psychological well-being, especially for people who were already depressed or anxious before the crisis started.

[T]he choice between staying home indefinitely and returning to business as usual now is a false one. Risk is not binary. And an all-or-nothing approach to disease prevention can have unintended consequences. Individuals may fixate on unlikely sources of contagion—the package in the mail, the runner or cyclist on the street—while undervaluing precautions, such as cloth masks, that are imperfect but helpful.

[A]s years of research on HIV prevention have shown, shaming doesn’t eliminate risky behavior—it just drives it underground. Even today, many gay men hesitate to disclose their sexual history to health-care providers because of the stigma that they anticipate. Shaming people for their behavior can backfire.

Scientists still have a lot to learn about this new virus, but early epidemiological studies suggest that not all activities or settings confer an equal risk for coronavirus transmission. Enclosed and crowded settings, especially with prolonged and close contact, have the highest risk of transmission, while casual interaction in outdoor settings seems to be much lower risk. A sustainable anti-coronavirus strategy would still advise against house parties. But it could also involve redesigning outdoor and indoor spaces to reduce crowding, increase ventilation, and promote physical distancing, thereby allowing people to live their lives while mitigating—but not eliminating—risk.

Of course, the Trump Administration's abject failure to provide adequate testing and safety guidance will only prolong our anxiety and isolation. But right-wing governments never make the trains run on time, no matter what their propaganda says.

I read the news today, oh boy:

• Close to 2,000 former Justice Department and FBI officials called on Attorney General William Barr to resign, which he won't do because he's this close to total world domination.
• Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary McCord agrees.
• Chicago will open six new Covid-19 testing sites around the city in an effort to get to 10,000 tests per day.
• Pilot-journalist James Fallows says "air travel is going to be very bad, for a very long time."
• Cranky Flyer agrees, pointing to United's short-sighted efforts to preserve cash.
• Will white-collar companies ever re-open offices? Maybe, but with differences.

Finally, the USS Nevada, a battleship that survived World War I and Pearl Harbor until the Navy scuttled her in 1948, has been found.

So believes NYU media professor Jay Rosen about how President Trump will try to win this fall:

The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence.

Stated another way, the plan is to default on public problem solving, and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default. ... The manufacture of confusion is just the ruins of Trump’s personality meeting the powers of the presidency. There is no genius there, only a damaged human being playing havoc with our lives.

In other fun stories:

• Adam Serwer argues that "the coronavirus was an emergency until Trump found out who was dying."
• Jake Bittle explains "why conservatives dismiss the dangers of the coronavirus."
• Chicago has its own plan to reopen, and it has some differences with the Illinois plan.
• Once things do open up, The Atlantic describes how you can stay safe.
• While you wait for that, check out this excellent set of graphics about how Covid-19 mitigation is progressing in states and countries.
• The city of Palm Beach, Fla., has had just about enough of its most famous resident—starting with the fact that he isn't even allowed to reside there under a 1996 agreement.
• Chicago's police union has just elected a right-wing Trump fan, which we knew would happen because his opponent was also a right-wing Trump fan.
• In June 1965, six English boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island near Tonga and didn't kill each other before (or after) their rescue on 11 September 1966.
• Unrelated to anything corona, C# 8 will have doubly-linked lists. Finally.

Oh, and 151 years ago today, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads completed the Transcontinental Railroad.