The post Truly this is a holy time appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten. Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never before!!!

– President Donald Trump (4-8-2020)

This week’s featured post is “Republican Shenanigans in Wisconsin“.

This week everybody was wondering if we’ll turn a corner soon

Day by day, it’s striking how little of the news actually seems new. On any given day you’re likely to hear:

• The Covid-19 case and death numbers are higher.
• Healthcare workers are worried about running out of protective equipment.
• Trump said something false about the virus.
• Somebody you’ve heard of died.
• We discovered another warning Trump received (and ignored) in January or December.
• More people lost their jobs.
• There’s a new report about how dysfunctional and disorganized the federal response is.
• The stock market made some big move up or down, — down 2% this morning — for reasons that don’t seem to have anything to do with the economy.
• Trump made some new assault against democracy or transparency.
• Some idiot pastor is gathering his congregation together, in defiance of statewide orders that he’s decided to take personally.
• Trump touted some untested drug as a miracle cure.
• Somebody else you’ve heard of died.
• Some economist insisted we have to “open up” the economy and some public health expert said that would be a disaster, but neither defined what “opening up” actually means.
• Some government expert who contradicted Trump might be fired.

Somebody should turn all these into a daily Bingo card. Fill the square when you hear the story.

So anyway, let’s get started: The numbers are higher. The US has surged past Italy to have the most coronavirus deaths of any country in the world. As of early this morning, we had 560K cases (505K active) and 22K deaths.

Reasons for optimism:

• A model at the University of Washington says that the daily number of new cases in the US peaked April 5-7, and that the number of active cases (infections minus recoveries and deaths) will peak around April 20. Of course, different regions of the country are at different stages, so the peak where you are could be earlier or later.
• Another model says deaths in New York peaked April 9.

Trump’s announcements are meant to sound good in the moment, not to stand up to a month of scrutiny. So it’s practically cheating that NPR took a one-month-later look at the promises made when Trump declared a national emergency. He followed through on a few things, but most of the promises are still hanging. Remember all the big retail chains that were going to offer drive-through testing? And test-yourself-at-home kits? And the Google website that was going to coordinate everything?

A PBS Newshour article takes a similar look at the empty promises.

Two weeks ago, Trump brought word of an innovative diagnostic test that can produce results in minutes instead of days or a week. … New Hampshire, for one, received 15 rapid-test machines but 120 cartridges instead of the 1,500 expected. Only two machines can be used. “I’m banging my head against the wall, I really am,” Republican Gov. Chris Sununu said Wednesday. “We’re going to keep pushing on Washington multiple times a day to get what we need.”

So Easter has come and gone without “reopening the country” as the President was talking about two weeks ago. He’s still talking about it.

A senior White House official said there’s a lot of internal energy pushing for May 1, because that’s the end of the White House’s “30 Days to Slow the Spread.”

But you have to bear in mind that this is Trump; he and his people say stuff because it sounds nice, not because some thought process has led to this conclusion. Undoubtedly that’s the case with Stephen Moore, the guy Trump wanted on the Federal Reserve Board before Republican senators noticed that he’s a complete idiot:

“May 1 has to be a hard deadline for getting things open and running,” said Stephen Moore, an economist and former Trump campaign adviser, who advocated for reopening parts of the country on a rolling basis, beginning with less impacted areas. “There has to be a calibration of the best medical advice plus the best economic advice.”

So far May 1, or whatever date they eventually come up with, is just a number on a calendar. There is no set of criteria that will be met by then, and there is no plan for how to proceed. (Trump is putting together a new task force to make a plan. Reportedly Ivanka is on it, so it’s bound to be an all-star team.)

So at some point Trump will announce with great fanfare that the economy is restarting now. And then nothing will happen, because he’ll be stepping down on a gas pedal that isn’t connected to any fuel line.

To the extent that there’s been real thinking about how to restart the economy, it’s not coming from the administration. Fortunately, a lot of people outside the administration are saying the same things about the conditions that have to be met. (I was one of them two weeks ago. Joe Biden was another yesterday.)

• It’s not enough to flatten the curve or even to see it start to slope downward. The number of cases needs to fall by a considerable amount, so that the health care system has slack to absorb a possible second wave of cases. That slack would include not just beds and ventilators, but also rebuilt stockpiles of protective equipment.
• Testing needs to be so widespread that we find new cases quickly. Things are getting better, but our testing capacity still is nowhere near what it needs to be. We have tested about 8K out of every million people, while Germany has tested 16K per million — and they’re not ready to reopen their economy either.
• The public health system needs to ramp up an enormous bureaucracy to track new cases and find their contacts before they can spread the infection further. In Wuhan, the Chinese government “dispatched 1,800 five-person teams to track down every contact to warn them they were at risk.” Over the whole US, this effort could require tens of thousands of people. But as yet there is no federal effort to do this, and Massachusetts is the only state I’m aware of that has started a program on a realistic scale.
• An antibody test needs to be able to identify people who have recovered from the virus and presumably are immune for some period of time. Those tests are just starting to become available now.

The point is to allow people go out in public and trust that the odds of meeting someone who is contagious are low. The idea that all this can be accomplished by May 1 is just absurd; anyone who mentions a date like that has no idea what they’re talking about and is not worth listening to. June 1? Maybe. We’ll see how things develop.

Once we get to that point, the economy can reopen piece-by-piece, taking baby steps. In China, Starbucks began by allowing one-person-per-table seating. Businesses where everyone has been working from home might allow groups of, say, five people to come in and work in the same office, taking care to avoid contact with other working groups. Each step has to be monitored to see if it starts a new outbreak; if it does, everyone needs to step back and plan again how to take that step forward safely.

Getting “back to normal” is going to require a vaccine, which isn’t happening for maybe a year.

There have been a lot of good what-went-wrong articles. The NYT pulls together the various warnings Trump ignored in January, and then how slowly the White House moved afterward. The New Yorker looks particularly at the protective equipment issue.

As far as I know, there are no national statistics of Covid-19 deaths broken down by race. But the limited statistics we do see indicate that blacks are dying of the virus at a rate much higher than whites. It’s not hard to come up with a speculative list of factors that would make them [I’m uncomfortable classifying blacks as a “them”, but being white, I can’t say “us” either] more likely to be exposed to the disease, and to fare worse once they have it:

• To the extent that black people form an economic underclass, they are more likely to have jobs where they deal directly with people and can’t work from home.
• Being on average more urban and poorer than whites, blacks are more likely to rely on public transportation.
• Being raised in inadequate housing makes them more likely to have a history of asthma.
• Racial disparities in nutrition, health care, and work environments leave more of them with pre-existing conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and heart or lung disease. Worse, those conditions are more likely to be undiagnosed or untreated.
• A combination of poor medical services, distrust of the medical services available, and concerns about expense lead to later and less aggressive medical intervention.

If you’ve ever struggled to understand the term intersectionality, look at that list. Some of it is racial, and some is due to class. Some is structural; some is cultural. Much of the problem is systemic rather than a result of active, conscious prejudice by some individuals against other individuals. But it all works together to achieve a malign result.

With so many people wearing masks, I’ve been joking that this is a good time to rob a bank. Turns out, if you’re wearing a mask and you’re black, that’s not a joking matter. Two black men posted a video of a security officer escorting them out of a WalMart for being masked.

The Denver Post describes how the crisis creates a new avenue for Trump’s corruption:

President Donald Trump is treating life-saving medical equipment as emoluments he can dole out as favors to loyalists. It’s the worst imaginable form of corruption — playing political games with lives. For the good of this nation during what should be a time of unity, he must stop.

Trump prevented Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, from obtaining 500 ventilators, claiming them for the federal government instead. A few days later, incumbent Republican Senator Cory Gardner tweeted that Trump:

has approved National Guard assistance in Colorado in response to #COVID19, following the request of members of the Colorado congressional delegation.

And Trump himself told the Colorado who they had to thank for this “favor”:

Will be immediately sending 100 Ventilators to Colorado at the request of Senator Gardner!

In other words, Colorado is down 400 ventilators in all, but the lack is Polis’ fault for being a Trump opponent, and what ventilators the state does get is due to having a Trump ally as senator. This seems to be a general pattern, which Josh Marshall describes like this:

Basically the White House won’t share anything about what framework is used on the confiscation or distribution side of this equation. The most they’ll say is that they’re using some version of ‘big data’ to do it in a totally coherent, awesome way. But the details we get make it sound like the oldest sort of system: distribution by friendship networks, patronage, the generosity of the powerful in exchange for future considerations. Who knows Jared? Who knows someone who knows Jared? Who’s Trump like? At minimum a significant amount of the lifesaving goods appear to be distributed on that basis.

Wonder how other countries are seeing the United States now? Here’s a view from India.

Mira Johnson recounts her family’s flight from the virus in a graphic short story.

and talking about the end of the Democratic nomination race

Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign Wednesday, leaving the nomination to Joe Biden. Biden’s path to the nomination has been an odd one, resembling John McCain’s in 2008: He was the early front-runner, then looked like he was going to fall out of the running, and finally came back to win. The difference from McCain is that Biden is trying to oust an unpopular president. McCain was trying to keep the White House Republican in spite of an unpopular president. Where the economic disaster of 2008 worked against McCain, the current economic/public health disaster should favor Biden.

I keep meaning to do a what-we-learned-from-the campaign article, but other stuff keeps getting in the way. But a number of good articles came out about why the Sanders campaign failed to win the nomination: in Vox, 538, Washington Post, New York Times, and Washington Monthly.

A few things stand out to me:

• Sanders over-estimated his support in 2016. He got a lot of anti-Clinton votes that he interpreted as endorsements of his policies.
• He under-estimated the loyalty that black Americans, especially older ones who remember the Civil Rights era, feel towards the Democratic Party. Villainizing the Party was not a good move. He should be trying to move the Party left, not burn it down.
• His belief that class interests trump everything else just didn’t pan out. A lot of the working-class rural whites who supported him when he was running against a woman voted for Biden this time.

I can never tell how typical the Sanders supporters on my Facebook feed are. But I’m struck by the amount of denial of the fact that the voters did not agree with them. I see a lot of conspiracy theorizing about the DNC and the big donors and so forth. But if Sanders had gotten the votes, he’d have gotten the nomination. He didn’t get the votes.

Biden holds a pretty solid lead over Trump in national polls, but the race looks closer when you look at the Electoral College. Biden needs to take either Wisconsin (where he currently has a 1-point lead) or Florida (currently 1 point behind).

Here’s how Matt Yglesias analyzes Biden’s VP options, given that Biden has already said he wants to pick a woman. I think a non-white woman would be better, given the necessity of motivating a high non-white turnout.

The WaPo’s Aaron Blake rates the 11 most likely choices and has Whitmer as third, with Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar more likely.

and the flap between Captain Crozier and Navy Secretary Modly

It ended on Tuesday with both of them having lost their jobs. Modly relieved Crozier of command of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt on April 2, a few days after a letter Crozier had written (reporting the Covid-19 outbreak on his ship) appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. Modly then flew to Guam to address the TR’s crew on Monday, saying that if Crozier thought his letter wouldn’t leak, he had been “too naïve or too stupid to be a commanding officer. … The alternative is that he did this on purpose.” Modly described that possibility as “betrayal”.

The uproar against Modly’s speech was immediate. He apologized (sort of) Monday evening, and then resigned on Tuesday.

This case is tricky to adjudicate properly. The first thing to emphasize is that Crozier’s heart was in the right place: He was protecting his sailors. The virus was spreading rapidly on the TR — we now know of 416 TR-coronavirus cases, including Crozier himself — and getting the ship to port, off-loading the infected sailors, and quarantining the rest was absolutely the right thing to do. “We are not at war, and therefore cannot allow a single Sailor to perish as a result of this pandemic unnecessarily,” Crozier’s letter said.

It’s also important to put Crozier’s actions in the context of the fundamental social contract of the US military (which was explained to me a few years ago by my friend from high school who at the time was a warrant officer in the Marines): Members of the military agree to follow their commanding officer’s orders even at the risk of their own lives, and in return the commanding officer acquires the responsibility to take care of those lives as best he can, given the mission he’s been assigned to carry out.

An officer, then, has to balance his pledged obedience to his commanders against his responsibility to his subordinates. There is a sparse, but also long and honorable, history of US officers risking their careers by defying foolish orders or otherwise crossing a line (like expressing a concern in a way likely to leak out to the public) to protect the people whose lives are in their care. So it’s no wonder that Crozier got such an emotional send-off when he left the ship, and I imagine his sailors will be drinking toasts in his name for decades to come.

The flip side of that, though, is that a career-risking move really does need to be career-risking. The military would fall apart if every officer felt free to appeal to the public whenever he disagreed with some order or policy. The logic here is similar to civil disobedience in the civilian world: I may approve of you protesting some injustice by blocking traffic. But if I am a policeman, it’s still my responsibility to arrest you. There has to be a cost to breaking the law, or else we don’t have laws at all.

So I agree that Brett Crozier is a hero for putting his career on the line to save his crew. And I also think he should have paid a price of some sort. Relieving him of command is maybe a high price, but it’s not unreasonable.

Where Modly went completely off the rails, though, was in going to the TR and denouncing Crozier to his former crew in such terms. (This is, in my mind, a typical Trump-administration stunt. They can’t just win and move on; they have to issue a fuck-you to anyone who got in their way.) He could have stayed in Washington and said nothing. He could have gone to Guam and humbly explained the situation the way I just did: “You are absolutely right to admire Captain Crozier, but I had to fire him anyway to maintain the discipline of the Navy. You will have a new commander now, and I expect you to give him proper respect.”

So while I harbor some reservations about Crozier losing his command, and I hope he lands on his feet somewhere else in the Navy, I have no reservations at all about Modly losing his job. I just wish I believed someone better would get the position next. However, that seems not to happen in this administration. Like Bill Barr replacing Jeff Sessions, Mark Meadows replacing Mick Mulvaney who replaced John Kelly, or Kayleigh McEnany replacing a long line of press secretaries back to Sean Spicer, each new person somehow manages to be even worse than the last one.

and you also might be interested in …

Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general, who forwarded to Congress the whistleblower report that eventually led to Trump’s impeachment, and whom Trump recently fired in apparent retaliation:

It is hard not to think that the President’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General, and from my commitment to continue to do so

The administration wants public money to bail out airlines and hotels, but not the Post Office.

A US Court of Appeals says that Donald Trump’s accountants must turn over the eight years of tax returns subpoenaed by a Manhattan district attorney. Of course Trump will appeal to the Supremes, and since the case presents a clear choice between the Leader and the Law, God only knows what they’ll do.

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow reacts: “The issue raised in this case goes to the heart of our republic. The constitutional issues are significant.” You got that right, Jay. The issue is whether there is any way to control corruption, once it reaches the presidency.

One important thing to note is that the case is not about making the tax returns public. If nothing in the returns is relevant to a prosecutable crime, the DA is obliged to keep them confidential. If some part is relevant, it might be quoted in an indictment or appear as evidence in a trial. (I am not sure what the rules are if the returns reveal some other crime within the DA’s jurisdiction.)

So far, for example, we don’t even know exactly what investigation this pertains to. In the decision, writing for the three-judge panel, Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann tells us only that it concerns “potential criminal conduct within the District Attorney’s jurisdiction”. The nature of the subpoena itself indicates that it has something to do with the “hush money” paid to two women, and whether the Trump Organization finagled its accounting to hide those payments.

This section strikes me as the heart of the decision:

The President relies on what he described at oral argument as “temporary absolute presidential immunity” — he argues that he is absolutely immune from all stages of state criminal process while in office, including pre-indictment investigation, and that the Mazars subpoena cannot be enforced in furtherance of any investigation into his activities. We have no occasion to decide today the precise contours and limitations of presidential immunity from prosecution, and we express no opinion on the applicability of any such immunity under circumstances not presented here. Instead, after reviewing historical and legal precedent, we conclude only that presidential immunity does not bar the enforcement of a state grand jury subpoena directing a third party to produce non-privileged material, even when the subject matter under investigation pertains to the President.

Further:

Assuming, again without deciding, that the President cannot be prosecuted while he remains in office, it would nonetheless exact a heavy toll on our criminal justice system to prohibit a state from even investigating potential crimes committed by him for potential later prosecution, or by other persons, not protected by any immunity, simply because the proof of those alleged crimes involves the President. Our “twofold aim” that “guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer”, would be substantially frustrated if the President’s temporary immunity were interpreted to shield the conduct of third parties from investigation.

I interpret much of this as Katzmann feeling the Supreme Court looking over his shoulder. He writes nothing inflammatory or polemic, and repeatedly emphasizes the narrowness of his panel’s decision. (“We express no opinion on … circumstances not presented here.”) If the Supreme Court’s partisan Republican majority wants to reverse this decision, Katzmann can’t stop them, but he is going to give them as little as possible to grab hold of.

The news media is still trying to work out the right way to cover a President who will predictably misinform and lie to the public whenever a camera is pointed at him. Former NBC News executive Mark Lukasiewicz makes some suggestions in Columbia Journalism Review:

Try covering more of what they do, and less of what they say. What President Trump says he has done, or will do, about ventilator shortages is likely untrue and largely irrelevant. What he says someone told him about the situation in New York is equally irrelevant. What is actually happening in New York, what Trump has actually done … these are facts—knowable facts—and these are what matter.

Let truth-telling be a prerequisite for appearing on live TV. Repeat offenders who lie or obfuscate with abandon, no matter their position, should not be put on live again.

As for Trump officials like Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller, Lukasiewicz went on to tell Rolling Stone:

Putting people on live television who you know are going to lie, it seems to me, is journalistic malpractice. I don’t think — for want of a better word — a “traditional” journalist would be sitting at their computer going, “Gee, I need an expert on biomedicine. I think I’ll call that guy who’s lied to me 10 times before and see what he has to say.” No, you wouldn’t call that guy.

Yet there are people who lie to Chris Cuomo or lie to George Stephanopoulos or lie to Chuck Todd and they’re back and they’re back again. There’s something profoundly wrong with that equation.

In the last two weeks, two of my friends (who don’t know each other) have told me about robot projects they’re working on: One is part of a team developing robots that deliver packages. Another is working on robots to replace the pickers who assemble your order at the Amazon warehouse.

Both projects share a vision of goods arriving at your door untouched by human hands. Once that seemed creepy, but a viral pandemic makes it much more appealing. The NYT is seeing the same things I am:

Before the pandemic, automation had been gradually replacing human work in a range of jobs, from call centers to warehouses and grocery stores, as companies looked to cut labor costs and improve profit. But labor and robotics experts say social-distancing directives, which are likely to continue in some form after the crisis subsides, could prompt more industries to accelerate their use of automation. And long-simmering worries about job losses or a broad unease about having machines control vital aspects of daily life could dissipate as society sees the benefits of restructuring workplaces in ways that minimize close human contact.

What this does to employment is a good question.

Actual Trump tweet: “HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY TO ALL!”

Do you think he knows what Good Friday is about? Maybe in November he’ll wish Jews a “joyous Kristallnacht”. Tomorrow is the 155th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. Let’s have a party!

World-renowned mathematician John Conway died of Covid-19 on Saturday. I never met Conway, but he and I were on the same side in a mathematical controversy in the 90s: A Berkeley professor claimed to have proved the Kepler Conjecture (about the tightest way to pack identical spheres in an infinite space), and we believed (correctly, as it turned out) that there were holes in his proof. I had to search a little to find a reference to the letter we wrote to the Mathematical Intelligencer. [J. H. Conway, T. C. Hales, D. J. Muder, and N. J. A. Sloane, On the Kepler conjecture, Math. Intelligencer 16, no. 2 (1994)] One of the other names on that letter (Tom Hales) actually did prove the Kepler Conjecture a few years later.

Conway is most famous to the larger scientific public for inventing the Game of Life, which was a landmark in the development of cellular automata.

but some of you are probably still wondering about my Covid-19 status

Last week I wrote about my week of quarantine and getting myself tested. (Yes, that turned out to be possible.)

Tuesday, my test results came back negative. A number of people have warned me about the test’s false-negative rate, and suggested I continue to act as if I were contagious. However, by the time the test came back, I had gone three days without the original symptom (low-grade fever), or any other symptom I don’t ordinarily have. (I always wake up congested, and cough in the morning.) My doctor and I discussed false negatives, and agreed that my symptoms (which had never amounted to much, even before they went away) did not justify continued quarantine.

In the days since, I continue to suffer the effects of stress and worry, like everybody else. But my temperature is back to its usual sub-normal.

I can report two things about a week of quarantine: First, if you’re already fairly reclusive and live a lot of your life inside your head, quarantine is not that difficult, especially if you have a support crew living somewhere else in the house. (Thanks, Deb and Dawn.)

Second, when I found out I could leave, my reaction surprised me: Rather than bursting out, I felt some reticence I had to overcome. “Is this OK? Am I safe?” After talking to my doctor, I finished the last ten minutes of the basketball game I’d been watching (the final game of the 1977 NBA championship series), called my wife to tell her I was coming, and then warily made my way downstairs.

I can only imagine how people must feel when they get out of prison. It must take an enormous amount of adjustment.

and let’s close with a melancholy tribute

Here’s to John Prine, whose songs have entertained us for decades. John died Tuesday of the coronavirus. He’s most famous for “Angel from Montgomery“, though I first heard one of his songs when John Denver covered “Blow Up Your TV”.

In this less well known piece, “The Lonesome Friends of Science“, Prine sings “I live down deep inside my head.” From now on, he’ll have to live inside the heads of the rest of us.

How much are Republicans willing to disrupt democracy to maintain their power? We’re starting to find out.

This week, partisan majorities in the Wisconsin legislature, Wisconsin Supreme Court, and US Supreme Court combined their power to rig Tuesday’s election, with the goal of safeguarding the Republican majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court against possible interference by the voters. The cost of this exercise of raw power was both the disenfranchisement of large numbers of Wisconsin citizens and an increase in the spread of Covid-19 in the state. As a result, both votes and lives will be lost.

Wisconsin’s pre-existing condition: an ailing democracy. Before we get into the details of how Tuesday played out, it’s worth noting that Wisconsin’s claim to have a democratic form of government was already shaky. Elections are still held, but the state has been gerrymandered to the point that large Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature are just about impervious to the will of the People. Republicans have power because they have power, not because the voters of Wisconsin want them.

2018 election results in Wisconsin.

The election of 2018 proved that point: Democrats won all the statewide offices, including the governorship. Together, Democratic candidates for the lower house of the legislature — where all the seats were up for election — got 200,000 more votes than Republicans. And yet Republicans won not just a majority of the seats, but close to a supermajority: 63 out of 99.

That advantage comes on top of the unfair advantage Republicans get from voter suppression. They lost among the people who managed to vote by 200K. If voting were easier, they probably would have lost by much more.

How do they get away with that? Well, one reason is that the Wisconsin Supreme Court doesn’t protect the right of Wisconsin voters to control their government, at least not when that government is Republican.

But Supreme Court justices are elected in Wisconsin, so if Wisconsinites want their democracy back, they can vote out the Republican judges who stand in their way. At least in theory. That theory was being tested Tuesday.

What the election was going to be about. Outside of Wisconsin, Tuesday’s election mainly had been getting attention as a presidential primary. Joe Biden held a substantial delegate lead, but Bernie Sanders was still running, and Sanders had beaten Hillary Clinton soundly in Wisconsin in 2016. The recent polls weren’t looking good for Sanders this time, but if he could pull off a result similar to his 2016 victory, things might yet get interesting.

Inside the state, though, the election was about judgeships, particularly a seat on the state’s highest court. Politico explains:

The high court has played a pivotal role in upholding major pieces of GOP legislation including Act 10 in 2011, which limited public employee collective bargaining rights. The court, which now has a 5-to-2 conservative majority, also shut down a long-running investigation into the campaign of former Governor Scott Walker for campaign finance violations, and upheld the GOP Legislature’s move to limit the powers of incoming Democratic Governor Tony Evers after his defeat of Walker. The court will also play a decisive role in the upcoming fight over redistricting as well as a host of hot-button social issues such as abortion and religious liberty.

Also at stake: “three seats on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, over 100 other judgeships, over 500 school board seats, and several thousand other positions”.

The judicial elections happening simultaneously with the primary seemed like a misfortune to Republicans, though, because (since Trump is running unopposed) more Democrats seemed likely to turn out than Republicans. If only there were some way to keep turnout down across the board …

The coronavirus election. Then coronavirus happened. Showing up to vote is a risky thing during an epidemic, especially if you have to wait in long lines with other people, some of whom are bound to be carrying the virus. Other states have recognized this problem and so a series of primaries have been postponed. In all 16 states have delayed their primaries.

Democratic Governor Tony Evers thought Wisconsin should do the same. He already had issued a stay-at-home order on March 24, and reasoned that it made little sense to tell people both to stay home and to go out and vote. On April 3 he called the legislature into special session to delay the primary. Evers wanted to convert the primary to a vote-by-mail format, and allow voters to return their ballots anytime until late May.

That, of course, would raise turnout, which is seen as a partisan issue in Wisconsin, and across the country. (If you want a lot of people to vote, you must be a Democrat.) But the gerrymandered Republican legislature could have proposed its own plan to postpone the primary, and Evers would have found himself under considerable pressure to go along with it.

Instead, the legislature came up with the best voter-suppression plan of all: Let’s make people risk their lives in order to vote! The leaders of both houses issued a joint statement: “Our Republic must continue to function.” The primary would go on as scheduled.

This looked like a trainwreck-in-the-making to Governor Evers, whose main job these days is to convince his citizens to stay home and not spread the virus. So the day before the primary — right after the legislature adjourned his special session without acting — he issued an order delaying the primary until June 9, noting the risk not just to the voters, but even moreso to the poll workers who “come into close proximity with dozens, if not hundreds, of voters”.

Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos and state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald immediately challenged that order in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which — surprise! — supported them 4-2. Vos and Fitzgerald rejoiced:

We continue to believe that citizens should be able to exercise their right to vote at the polls on Election Day, should they choose to do so … this election will proceed as planned.

What about voting absentee? OK, there’s an election. But that doesn’t mean you have to go to the polls to vote. The decision that the show must go on produced a predictable avalanche of absentee-ballot requests. Last year, when there was a spring election but not a presidential primary, 167,832 absentee ballots were requested. For the 2016 general election there were 595,914 requests. This year? 1,293,288. About 200,000 of those ballots were not returned in time to count, compared to just 30,000 in the 2016 general election.

The office that distributes absentee ballots wasn’t set up to deal with such a deluge of last-minute requests, so it soon became apparent that some number of legitimate Wisconsin voters wouldn’t get their ballots before election day.

A collection of (mostly Democratic) voters and groups sued to get an extension for absentee voters to return their ballots. A federal district court ruled in their favor, extending the deadline from election day to today, nearly a week later. The election commission was also enjoined from releasing results until then.

That ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court’s Republican* majority: Votes could continue to be counted until today, but they had to be postmarked by election day. That decision is unsigned. It mentions the problem that voters may not have received their ballots (which the lower court held was an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote), but then completely ignores it, comparing the situation to normal elections where people who request a ballot at the last minute may not have much time to fill it out and mail it. (It’s worth pointing out that the undelivered-ballot question is not just theoretical. “Three tubs of ballots for Oshkosh and Appleton have been discovered at a mail processing center in Milwaukee, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and a state senator.”)

Justice Ginsberg’s dissent asks a simple question:

If a voter already in line by the poll’s closing time can still vote, why should Wisconsin’s absentee voters, already in line to receive ballots, be denied the franchise?

The majority opinion doesn’t answer that question, because there is no answer.

Election day. The NYT’s Linda Greenhouse, in a column blasting the Supreme Court’s Republican majority, (and in particular skewering the majority’s use of the word “ordinarily”, as if anything about this situation were ordinary) summarized the election-day conditions.

Milwaukee voters are not ordinarily reduced to using only five polling places. Typically, 180 are open.

In a stunt that probably wasn’t as effective as he planned, Speaker Vos himself worked as an election inspector. Covered in protective equipment, he assured the public that “You are incredibly safe to go out.”

Implications for future elections. In the back of everyone’s mind is the question: What if Covid-19 turns out to have a seasonal factor? It almost certainly won’t go away completely in the summer — it’s summer all year round in Florida, and they’ve had nearly 20,000 infections — but what if it diminishes, and then comes roaring back in the fall? Or what if we re-open the economy too quickly and get a fall resurgence that way?

In either case, it’s not impossible to imagine that the general election in November could take place under very similar conditions to the ones in Wisconsin on Tuesday. Wouldn’t it be nice to make a plan for that now, rather than go through last-minute drama and see large numbers of Americans disenfranchised?

You know who has a plan for that? Elizabeth Warren. Her plan calls for online voter registration, a vote-by-mail option, and at least 30 days of early voting. Radical stuff like that.

The problem with all those ideas, of course, is that they encourage people to vote. Or at least Republicans see that as a problem. They talk a lot about fraud, which is their usual excuse for voter suppression, but that’s not their real issue. (Washington state votes entirely by mail and has for years. Voting by mail is the standard thing for our overseas military. Fraud has not been a problem.) Their issue is that if you make voting easy, more people will vote. Marginal voters tend to vote Democratic, so it’s important to make voting as hard as possible.

* Typically, the media refers to the Court’s “conservative” majority, but that characterization has not been accurate for some while. More and more often, dating back to Bush v Gore, Citizens United, and John Roberts’ evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, the Court has been making decisions that can’t be explained by legal philosophy. The point is that Republicans should win, not that some theory of constitutional interpretation is better than another. So henceforth I’ll be refusing to play along with the ruse that their rulings have something to do with limited government or the Founders’ original intent.

Some days I wonder if they’re re-running news from some previous day. You know: the death numbers have increased; health workers don’t have what they need; Trump said something stupid or offensive at the daily briefing; some idiot minister is defying the no-large-gathering order, as if the whole pandemic were a satanic plot to shut down his particular church; more people lost their jobs; and so on.

And now I’m part of it, because the weekly summary will (once again) have all that stuff in it.

With the same outrageous stuff happening week after week, it can be hard to notice when something happens that is outrageous even by our newly elevated standards of outrage. But Tuesday’s Wisconsin state elections (and incidentally, the presidential primary) was such an event. The Republican legislature (which is only Republican because of gerrymandering) used the threat of the virus as a voter-suppression technique. And then the supreme courts of both Wisconsin and the United States backed them up. So Wisconsinites were out there in face masks and garbage bags, standing as far apart as the long lines (to get into drastically fewer polling places) allowed.

Usually, the “I Voted” sticker is a mark of civic responsibility. Tuesday it was a badge of courage.

The vote still hasn’t been announced (more on that later), so we don’t know yet whether this bit of election tampering achieved the results the Republicans wanted: holding a seat on the very state supreme court that said all this was OK.

Anyway, the featured post will go into the blow-by-blow of all that. I’m aiming to get that out by 10 EDT, but I’m also moving unusually slowly this morning. The weekly summary will have this week’s versions of the news re-runs listed above, as well as a recap on the Democratic nomination race, which seems to be over now that Bernie Sanders has shut down his campaign. Speculation on Biden’s VP choice is rising. Trump’s taxes are going to the Supreme Court. And I’ll close with a John Prine song. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

“i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any---lifted from the no

of all nothing---human merely being

doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)”

“I trembled when the Hero clasped me.”

As it is my Holy Saturday custom, I have read The Dream of the Rood, an Old English dream narrative told from the perspective of the Cross itself.

I pick from the various translations online; this year I read Charles W. Kennedy’s version. (PDF)

In the final days of 2019, I chose three decks—two tarot, one oracle (Sasuraibito, Playful Heart, and Animal Spirit), and pulled a card from each of them for every month in 2020.

March 2020 freaked me out. From each of the tarot decks I pulled the Tower card. Old systems crumbling. The familiar, the comfortable, the secure—gone. Massive symbols of strength leveled.

From the oracle deck I pulled the Cosmic Egg, the final card in the deck. One that speaks of endings and beginnings, of the completion of a cycle, and the beginning of a new one. The individual among the collective, the collective comprised of many, many individuals.

Then March 2020 arrived. So many towers crumbled. Personal towers. Collective towers. We had to begin to find ways to stay connected while staying apart. The old way of doing things lurched, and fell.

These days the Star keeps appearing in my daily draws. The card of new beginnings. Spaciousness. The card that encourages us to begin imagining what might replace the Tower. Not rebuilding yet. But imagining.

In many decks, the Tower is a huge, old-growth tree. I learned recently from a WSU forester that old growth trees are not the most effective sequesters of carbon. They may be huge, but they are also decaying at a rate that counters the amount of carbon dioxide they absorb.

Clear-cutting old-growth forests is not the answer. But when the old trees fall, they make room for new life. And they clear a bit of night sky, so we can see the stars.

The post After the Tower, the Star appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

The post This is how we rise again appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

I preached from this sermon manuscript online for the Universalist National Memorial Church, on Good Friday, April 10, 2020.  The text was the passion of St. Matthew.  (Matthew 27:11-54)

Friends, we turn to the difficult fact of Good Friday. Here, God’s beloved dies before the jeering crowd. Betrayal, cruelty and falsehood triumph. Hope burns to ashes, and light and color drain from the world. We are left with questions, grief and silence.

Good Friday so becomes a spiritual challenge. In good times, we might have to specially direct our spirits to be receptive to this horror and grimness; so when the sun shines and the air is warm, it can seem a strange thing to try and be sad. And when times are bad, well, who needs more sadness? That’s this year, and I’m sad and anxious enough, and don’t like it. The trope, well-shared in social media, is that this Lent has been far more Lenty than anyone expected, perhaps too much to bear. Nevertheless, Good Friday prepares us for hard times, at least giving us familiar concepts to interpret them.

Perhaps we can identify the losses that come from the COVID-19 pandemic, and try to set them directly in a framework that Good Friday presents. It is a natural thing to do: tying Good Friday to the suffering we’re experiencing collectively. There’s a risk, though. It’s a collective hardship, but not an even or fair one. It is not a leveler. Those who suffered before, will suffer more — including the loss of health and life, and anxiety and depression, not to mention the economic impact. Millions of people will be pushed beyond breaking, into lasting or deeper poverty and unemployment. Its results will follow us for many years, perhaps for the rest of our life. Most hardships don’t end in redemption.

Instead of comparing the pandemic to the crucifixion directly, I think about what the disciples must have asked themselves that Friday when all their hope died: where do we go from here?

If Easter’s resurrection brightness is hard for us to conceptualize now, after centuries of meditation and interpretation, it surely must have been unthinkable for the disciples: not even an option to consider, much less weighing the up pros or cons of its likelihood. But Easter did come, and those who survive this crisis will have to decide what we will do next.

The trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate is remarkable for any number of reasons. We know so little of individuals from that period, and what little we know of Pilate is that he crucified a lot of people. I’m not prone to read him as the antihero, swayed by the mob. (Passages which have been used for centuries to justify violence against Jews, I should add. And this scene from Matthew is less troubling that the one from John.) And another odd thing was the choice of the crowd in letting one condemned man go, a practice that has no independent confirmation. So what follows is not an original thought, but one I picked up in college (I was a religion major) about thirty years ago. Consider that there were not two criminals, one of whom might be set free, but one man with two names, Jesus the Messiah, the anointed one, and Jesus Barabbas, Jesus “son of the Father.” The first tinged with triumph and the power of the governance; the other pointing to mystical connection with God. Which seems backwards, doesn’t it? Because Barabbas is described as a bandit, but well, we know not to take one-sided charges too seriously. After all, the man who died on the cross told us, “they know not what they do.” We know he was innocent.

We might have two names, too. Which will we chose? We must seek the good impulse, and live into it, but that won’t protect us. We may not escape hardship, but might, just maybe, choose what we suffer for. For goodness and for the common good. To defend the helpless, and to overcome domination. To chose life in its fullness, rather than to concede to bitterness.

How will we be known? And will that name be a blessing to those who come after us? Challenged by the experience of the Resurrection, the disciples went out to ends of the world, to share the gospel that the world might not despair, because on the cross we saw that all is not as it seems and that God’s purpose and blessing come to those, however grieved and confused, do what is good, and right and true.

Let us pray:

Eternal God, before the cross we stand in awe and trembling. Comfort and console the mourners this day. Confirm in us that mind and spirit you put within Jesus, our comfort and our strength. And lead us from this place, to go forth with your blessing, and to live without fear, waiting in hope.

There are many things I wish I could do for this country, but they are beyond my powers. … But there is one thing I can do: To a large extent, I can take partisan politics out of this struggle, and I’m going to do that right now with this announcement: I will not be a candidate for re-election in November, nor will I endorse any candidate in that election.

– from “The Speech a Great President Would Give Now“

This week’s featured posts are “The Speech a Great President Would Give Now” and “My Coronavirus Test“.

This week the virus was almost the only thing to talk about

OK, the numbers: Currently the US has about 340K cases, and 9679 have died. Sometime today we’ll likely cross 10,000 deaths.

One of the ominous things to watch is the percentage of the world toll we represent. When I first started paying attention to those ratios a few weeks ago, we had about 1/15th of the world’s cases and 1/50th of the deaths. Now we’re up to more than 1/4th of cases and almost 1/7th of deaths.

The encouraging news this week is that Italy seems to have passed the top of the curve.

Europe saw further signs of hope in the coronavirus outbreak Sunday as Italy’s daily death toll was at its lowest in more than two weeks and its infection curve was finally on a downward slope. In Spain, new deaths dropped for the third straight day.

Italy, the world leader in deaths-by-country, had 525 deaths in a 24-hour period Sunday. The United States had 1165.

We’re getting some encouraging signs from the earliest-hit American regions, Washington and California.

The virus started in the cities, because people of all sorts (including infected people) pass through cities. But no place is really an island, so the pandemic is also starting to hit rural areas. In some ways it might eventually be worse there, because rural areas don’t have the same medical and emergency infrastructure that larger cities do.

Margaret Renkyl in the NYT notes that a “perfect storm” is gathering in the South:

What does it mean to live though a pandemic in a place with a high number of uninsured citizens, where many counties don’t have a single hospital, and where the governor delayed requiring folks to stay home? Across the South, we are about to find out.

Grist adds a factor to that analysis: environmental hazards. Poor air quality, for example, correlates strongly with respiratory illness in general. John Showalter, chief product officer for health-data company Jvion says:

There’s definitely a biologic rationale that environmental health hazards that lead to pulmonary and cardiovascular conditions would then lead people with those conditions to do poorly during a COVID-19 outbreak.

Louisiana in particular is famous for its oil-and-chemical-industry pollution, but much of the South is also lax in regulating polluters.

New Orleans is already one of the worst-hit places in the country, and (on a per capita basis) so is a county in Georgia.

More people—thirty—had died in Dougherty County, the state’s twenty-seventh most populous county, than anywhere else in Georgia. While Dougherty is served by a well-regarded hospital, nine Georgia counties, most of them also in the southern part of the state, not only lack hospitals but have no practicing physicians at all, according to Monty Veazey, the president of the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals. Eighteen have no family-practice doctors. Thirty-two have no internal-medicine doctors. Seventy-six counties have no ob-gyn.

Kentucky and Tennessee look almost like a controlled experiment:

Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, urged his citizens not to enter Tennessee: “We have taken very aggressive steps to try to stop or limit the spread of the coronavirus to try to protect our people,” Mr. Beshear said. “But our neighbors from the south, in many instances, are not. If you ultimately go down over that border and go to a restaurant or something that’s not open in Kentucky, what you do is you bring the coronavirus back here.”

Kentucky, which not only elected a Democratic governor but also expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, is an outlier in the South.

Renkyl recalls the March 16 conference call Tennessee Governor Bill Lee had with local officials around the state, when he urged them to pray. The old saying that “The Lord helps those who help themselves” is often used cynically to justify grabbing whatever you can get. But if you turn the saying around “The Lord doesn’t help those who refuse to help themselves”, I think it’s pretty sound Christian theology: It’s hard to picture God helping people who could take action on their own, but choose not to.

The Washington Post printed a comprehensive what-went-wrong article.

Nobody quite understands why the virus kills more men than women. But the pattern recurs all over the world.

and how leaders respond

In addition to my fantasy of what a great president would say, we also heard real speeches from the Queen of England, Angela Merkel, and Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. All of them somehow managed to make statements of hope and determination without insulting anybody, saying anything false, or pushing quack remedies. Governor Walz even told a story he was not the hero of:

The White Bear Lake Pee Wee hockey team was on the road to New Ulm for the state tournament when it was canceled mid-route due to COVID-19.  While the season ended abruptly, the team is still a team– virtually. The players and their parents have started a text chain to check in every night to see how everyone is doing and if anyone needs help.

One evening, a player’s mom shared how she is exhausted from her work as a nurse and is worried about doing her job without personal protective equipment. The next day, the hockey dads cleaned out their supplies of masks at work and in their garage. A big box was left on the nurse’s doorstep with a note that said: “Your hockey family loves you.” It left her in tears. Her hockey family is helping her through this crisis.

Trump is doing his best to undercut the good things Democrats wrote into the $2.2 trillion emergency response act.

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act sought to protect workers and families from losing income if they fell sick with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. It gives workers two weeks of paid leave, 12 weeks if their children are home from school or require child care, and reimburses employers with tax credits.

It came with some carveouts, though: The law exempts businesses with over 500 employees, and companies with fewer than 50 employees could ask the Department of Labor for an exemption if they believed the rule could bankrupt them. Nearly 75% of workers are employed by companies with under 50 employees or over 500, according to the New York Times.

Now, the Department of Labor has issued a rule that lets small businesses choose whether to give workers paid sick leave, rather than apply for a waiver.

The act also created a special inspector general to oversee the $500 billion the bill appropriates to aid businesses — partly over concern that Trump will direct money into his own pocket, or use the money to reward friends and punish enemies. The inspector general he nominated comes from his White House counsel staff and was involved in his impeachment defense.

Speaking of inspectors general, Trump continued his post-impeachment purge by firing the intelligence community IG, the one who refused to quash the whistleblower report that led to Trump’s impeachment. In that episode, there is no indication that he did anything other than his job as defined by law.

Meanwhile in the Situation Room, a heated debate broke out between medical people and political appointees who don’t actually know anything and should just shut up. The topic was the untested remedy hydroxychloroquine that Trump has promoted numerous times in the daily briefings.

But what can be expected from an administration where first-son-in-law Jared Kushner has a major role in dealing with a generation-defining crisis? Our lives are in the hands of someone whose sole life accomplishments are to be born rich and marry rich.

Meanwhile, no good deed goes unpunished. Captain Brett Crozier, who drew attention to the coronavirus outbreak on the aircraft carrier he commanded, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, was fired. He has also tested positive.

James Fallows:

I should have pointed out that Thomas Modly, the acting secretary of the Navy who dismissed Crozier, was in that role because his predecessor, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer, was forced out of that job when he resisted Donald Trump’s efforts on behalf of Edward Gallagher, the former Navy SEAL who was prosecuted for war crimes in a court martial.

War criminals do well in this administration. Commanders who try to protect their men, not so much.

Andy Borowitz: “National Incompetence Stockpiles at Full Capacity”.

“The sheer tonnage of failure and impotence that is being dumped into the stockpiles on a daily basis is straining their ability to contain it,” the G.A.O. statement read.

and let’s close with something to pass the time

Music video parodies are among the best things to come out of this pandemic. My favorite so far is Chris Mann’s parody of Madonna’s “Vogue”.

Though there’s a lot to be said for either Mann’s “My Corona” or Brent McCollough’s BeeGees parody “Stayin’ Inside” or Jon Pumper’s “Kokoma” parody “My Corona Home“.

Drive-through virus testing at Holy Family Hospital in Haverhill, Mass.

Let me begin this post by saying that, as best I can tell, I’m doing fine. I’ve quarantined myself since Tuesday, but so far my symptoms are somewhere between minor and imaginary. Nonetheless, I got tested Friday, and I should hear results Tuesday or Wednesday.

OK, let’s go back and tell the story from the beginning: My wife has a large number of risk factors, so we are terrified of what would happen should she catch Covid-19. Both of us are in our 60s. She had a lung collapse during surgery several years ago, and it never fully reinflated, so essentially she gets by on one-and-a-half lungs. A different medical problem resulted in half her liver being removed. And she takes a drug that drags on her immune system (though I don’t think it’s that bad; she throws off colds fairly well).

So our household is hyper-vigilant. That gets tricky, because I have a number of conditions that mimic coronavirus symptoms: An allergy causes me to wake up congested every morning and spend my first waking hour coughing and blowing my nose. If I sleep in the wrong position, I’ll have a muscle ache when I do that coughing. As for aches and pains in general, I already mentioned that I’m over 60. In short, most of the early-warning symptoms of Covid-19 are normal for me.

That leaves me focused on the one symptom I don’t ordinarily have, which is fever. Quite the opposite, in fact: My body typically runs cool. A normal morning temperature for me is below 98, and can run as low as 97.4. It tends to rise through the day, but hardly ever hits 98.6.

Anyway, first thing Tuesday, I’m having my morning cough and feeling a little more discomfort in it than usual. I take my temperature and it’s 98.3 — fine for anybody else; not fine for me. And I think “Probably nothing, but …”. And then I think “If you wait until you’re sure, you’ll have waited too long.”

So I call over to my wife, tell her to keep her distance, and explain what’s happening. She grabs some stuff, and goes to occupy a room on the second floor. (While our new apartment is under construction, we’re living on the top floor of a friend’s three-story Victorian. It was bought years ago for a family with five boys, and only two of them are still here.) Except for one trip I’ll describe later on, I’ve been up here by myself ever since. My housemates prepare plates of food and leave them on the steps; I retrieve them like a caged animal. Thank God there’s a bathroom up here.

I expected the temperature thing to resolve itself by Tuesday afternoon, but it didn’t. I kept getting readings that would top out at 99 or 99.1 in the mid-afternoons. (Again, no emergency for anybody else.) Friday afternoon, the digital ear-thermometer I was using went completely wild — I couldn’t get the same reading twice — raising the possibility that the whole episode is an equipment malfunction. By the time I got hold of an old-style mercury thermometer, I was showing more normal temperature patterns, which have continued for the last few days. What to think?

Anyway, Thursday afternoon I emailed my doctor, who did a Zoom-meeting with me Friday morning. She agreed with me that (1) these are pretty sketchy symptoms, and (2) I’m in a situation where I should pay attention to sketchy symptoms. Apparently, though, tests are now plentiful enough to justify getting me one. I suspect that wouldn’t have been true a week before.

There is a drive-through testing site at Holy Family Hospital in Haverhill, Massachusetts, about a 40-minute drive away. (I should add, though, that you can’t just drive up unannounced. They require a physician order.) I went downstairs for the first time in days, was careful to touch nothing until I reached my car, and drove myself to Haverhill.

The picture above is one I took through the windshield. I had to wait in line behind two or maybe three other cars. A young woman swathed in protective garb talked to me through my open window, had me sign a form (with a pen she refused to take back), and stuck a long Q-tip-like thing up each of my nostrils. It was fast, and while I would never do it for fun, it wasn’t that bad. She told me to expect results Tuesday or Wednesday. (Those 15-minute tests you’ve been hearing about apparently aren’t in wide use yet.) Results would go to my doctor, and I shouldn’t call Holy Family. Meanwhile, she said, I should consider myself quarantined for 14 days or until I get a no-infection result.

So now I wait. And in truth, I’m not even sure what I’m rooting for. No infection would be nice, but in some ways the best result of all would be to get away with a minor-symptom case and then have some kind of immunity. On the other hand, I also have heard stories of minor symptoms that suddenly turn bad, so I get anxious every time I start to feel tired. It would be nice to have that over with.

I’ll update this post when my results come in.

If we’re ever going to have great presidents again, we need to hold a space in our imaginations that a great president could occupy.

Ever since Donald Trump made his famous descent down the escalator to announce his candidacy (and assert that Mexicans crossing the border are rapists), we’ve been lowering our standards to his level. Once in a great while he does something so outrageous that his opponents try (and usually fail) to draw a line in the sand. But for the most part we’ve just accepted that he will do the kinds of things he does: ignore obvious facts, insult large swathes of people who have done nothing to deserve it, funnel public money into his own businesses, deny that he said what he said, respond to his critics with schoolyard taunts, and so on. We’ve come to expect him to politicize everything, admit no mistakes, fire anyone who reveals inconvenient truths, and confront everyone who comes into his presence with the choice to flatter him or face his wrath.

At times I’ve been as guilty of this normalization as anyone. Given a choice between letting a lie or injustice go unremarked, and distracting my readers from what I saw as more important issues, I’ve often just shrugged off norm-violations that would have been major scandals in any previous American administration.

Still, every now and then I think it’s worthwhile to ask ourselves: “What would a real leader do in this situation?” Not because I imagine Trump will listen to our answer, slap his forehead, and say, “That’s a good idea!”, but just to maintain our own sense of what is good and right. If we’re ever going to have great presidents again, we need to hold a space in our imaginations that a great president could occupy.

So I have written a speech for a great president to deliver in the midst of the current crisis. There’s no reason Trump couldn’t deliver it, and I hope he does. For obvious reasons, he won’t. I accept that, but I’m still going to put the vision out there.

My fellow Americans:

Every president faces crises and makes decisions that could either save or cost lives. I have already faced my share: military conflicts in various parts of the world; hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, as well as floods and tornadoes and the full run of other natural disasters. An economic crisis may not take as many lives as war or disease, but it can ruin lives, as people lose their jobs and homes and dreams for the future.

The current crisis, the one brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, is on a scale most presidents never need to confront. Thousands of Americans are dead, and some estimate that the eventual toll could be in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are already sick. Tens of thousands of businesses hang in the balance, and millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Tens of millions are sheltering in their homes.

This is not only the greatest crisis of the four-year term I was elected to in 2016, but most likely it will overshadow the crises of the next four years as well. So whether I serve four years or eight, I believe I have already met the defining challenge of my presidency, the one for which history will judge me.

Public-health experts I trust tell me that we will go through the peak of this crisis in the next month or two. No one can guarantee what will happen after that, but I think it is safe to say that the most important chapters in the story of this pandemic will be written between now and the inauguration in 2021.

It is desperately important that we get this right. The decisions that are made between now and November or January — here in the White House, in Congress, throughout government at every level, and in homes all over this country — could save or cost the lives of countless human beings, and save or cost the livelihoods of countless more. When the stakes are this high, we can’t let politics interfere with doing the right thing.

And yet, how can it not, as we move towards the 2020 election? Already, both my supporters and my critics interpret everything I do in the light of that election. I deserve credit for this, blame for that — no I don’t, yes I do — it goes on and on. But none of those arguments save anyone. They just make it harder for America to move forward in unity.

When this is all over, there will be plenty of time to distribute credit and blame. There are undoubtedly many lessons to learn — both good and bad — from what we have done so far. But trying to do that analysis in the middle of the crisis, and absorbing that discussion into what was already a poisonous partisan environment before Covid-19 emerged, does not serve this country. Partisanship can only decrease the likelihood that we will judge correctly, or learn the lessons that might save us from the next plague.

Right now, there are many things I wish I could do for this country, but they are beyond my powers. I can’t banish the disease by executive order. I can’t decree a vaccine or effective treatment into existence here and now. I can’t speed time up so that we jump past the peak of the crisis and skip all the suffering Americans will have to endure in the coming weeks and months.

But there is one thing I can do: To a large extent, I can take partisan politics out of this struggle, and I’m going to do that right now with this announcement: I will not be a candidate for re-election in November, nor will I endorse any candidate in that election. Instead, I will lead the battle against this disease until my term ends in January.

The election will still happen, and I’m sure the candidates who vie to replace me will debate their views and their plans with all the vigor we expect from a presidential campaign. But I will take no part in it. If any members of my administration want to participate in that election, God bless them, but I will ask them to step away from whatever active roles they might be playing in managing our country’s response to the virus.

I cannot insist that others follow my example. But I can ask political leaders at all levels do what they can to take partisan politics out of this effort. Most of us tell ourselves that we entered politics to do something important. Let me suggest that nothing you might do in future years from future offices will be quite so important as what you do these next few months. Lives and livelihoods are at stake.

Going forward, there are many choices to make, and I expect to hear much argument about what should happen next. A healthy democracy always has room for disagreement. But let those discussions center on the health and well-being of our citizens, not on the November elections, and especially not on me. My political future is already set: I will finish my term and then return to the private sector to await history’s judgement on my actions. I pray history will be able to say that I rallied a unified nation to take decisive and successful action.

God bless you all, and God bless the United States of America.

You know what I’m going to talk about this week, right? There’s a historic crisis happening, and I can’t justify focusing on anything else.

So this week’s two featured posts will look at it from two very different altitudes. On an extremely personal scale, the most important thing that happened this week is that I got a Covid-19 test. But you really shouldn’t worry about me. So far I’ve got either a very mild case or a hyperactive imagination. (My current bet is on the latter.) But I also have a wife with a number of risk factors, so I’ve been quarantining myself since Tuesday. I should hear results in another day or two.

I’m writing about it because I think my personal experience has some news value: At least in the part of the country where I live, people with fairly minor symptoms are getting tested now. Those 15-minute tests you read about are still science fiction, and I think we’re still a long way from the kind of widespread testing we need if we’re going to reopen the country. But a result in 3-5 days is lots better than never.

That’s the small scale. On the large scale, I asked myself what great president would say to the country right now. I know we don’t have a great president, or even an average one. But far too often, we have let our expectations of the presidency shrink to fit the tiny man who currently occupies that office. If we’re ever going to have a great president again, we need to hold a space in our imaginations that a great president could fill.

So that’s what I did. “The Speech a Great President Would Give Now” will be out soon, and contains a shocking announcement. I don’t expect Trump to give this speech, but if he does, he doesn’t even need to give me credit. Hearing the speech would be satisfaction enough.

“My Coronavirus Test” isn’t written yet, but it shouldn’t be that hard to pull out of memory, so I expect it to post between 10 and 11 EDT. Expect an abbreviated weekly summary around noon.

The post Rolling along in the Gnome-mobile appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

How many of us fell into that trap, at first? The one that lured us in, promising that we would accomplish so much with all this “extra time.”

Early on, I bought a gallon of non-homogenized milk—local, with a yellows tinge. I wanted to make yogurt again, this time with my kids. But it’s still in the fridge, taunting me.

I imagined baking, too. Cupcakes, muffins, cookies, and of course, bread.

Nope. None of that, either.

Some days I slide way in the opposite direction. Lower the bar, people say. And then lower it again, and again.

I’ve decided it’s not really about the bread, or the yogurt.

It’s about the why.

If the why is shame-based, skip it. If the cattle prod in my head is saying, “Hey, you’ve got all this extra time! Use it to get your shit together!,” then no, let’s not bake bread and make yogurt.

But if the why is joy-based, go for it! If bread-baking sounds like fun, bake bread. If you can’t wait to see your kids’ faces light up, watching the little jars of milk turn into soft yogurt, then get the milk out of the fridge, warm it up, add starter, and wait for the miracle of yogurt. At least with yogurt—and bread—you know about how long you have to wait!

The post To bake, or not appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

If  you are on the lower, especially the lower Reformed-ish, end of the church; and if you are having a streamed service where the members are providing their own bread and wine (or wine-ish) this Lord’s Supper framework seems ideal.

A communion service I’d use for a prayer breakfast

(I’m not interested if you think this is heresy.)

A word from a mourner in sequester:

• He stared at the great canyon, feeling humbled by its immenseness.
• They stood in the great, empty cathedral, surrounded by history that took their breath away.
• She considered the heavens and felt dwarfed by their glory.

I hear three-year-old feet as I begin this post. They’ve paused. What have they found to occupy them, on the other side of my door?

It is good to hear them, to be reminded of Spring, because this post is about late Fall and long Winter.

Sometimes Deathwinter comes slowly, with time to transition and say good-bye and harvest the bounty of a long life well-lived. COVID-19’s Deathwinter is not that way. It is sudden and wasteful, with so much left to rot in the field.

These days, in the current resurgence of Tarot, it is common to hear reassuring interpretations of the Death card: it’s just the end of something, a transition, a letting-go of one thing so that something new can emerge.

But in the context of so many COVID-19 deaths, I like the imagery of the Brady Tarot. Emi Brady’s Death card shows a human skull, and beneath that a saber-toothed tiger’s skull, and beneath that, the open jaws of a tyrannosaurus rex.

This is the reality of death, of the passing of one thing so that another can emerge. It is the rotting compost giving its body for Spring’s new shoots.

It is not pretty. It is brutal. It is existentially terrifying. And when it comes close, its grief cuts to the bone.

The post This sudden Deathwinter appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

As schools closed and governors issued stay-at-home orders, people with experience working from home published how-to lists for the masses of others joining us.

Most lists included some version of this: “Keep to your routines!”

Those lists, and the urgent messages about routine-keeping, reveal our anxiety: “Who am I if I am not productive? I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.”

We have an opportunity—a global one, but particularly in hard-driving, industrialized countries. The forces that drive us have been knocked off-kilter. In some cases, they have been completely stilled. With fewer external drivers, and with those that remain weakened by this shutdown, we have a chance to hear our internal voices.

I first noticed this in my kids’ sleep patterns. Thomas, my early-riser, has been sleeping later—and still going to bed at night relatively easily. Willa, my night owl, has not been sleeping till noon like I thought she might. Instead, she goes to bed at night with less of a fight and wakes up ready to enjoy whatever the day brings.

It’s as if, with their routines disrupted, they are discovering their biological rhythms.

Without really thinking about it, many of us are responding to the pressure to “keep to our routines” with the simple question, “Why?”

If there isn’t a good answer, we just don’t do it.

Now, I can hear in my head the objection that this is a middle-class perspective. Sure. No doubt.

But maybe that’s changing, too. I saw this morning that Instacart workers are planning a strike. My first response was, “Oh no! So many people rely on them for groceries!”

As I thought more about it, however, I saw the strike as further evidence of weakening external drivers. The Instacart workers are pushing back against conditions that endanger them, or at the very least make their lives miserable.

With a looming threat circling the globe, Instacart workers have the mental space to question their situation. Why would they want to risk their lives to deliver groceries for a company that does not protect them? Wouldn’t it be better to cast their lots with the millions of people with employment insecurity? What kind of world might they create together, free from corporate, one-percent masters?

This pandemic has changed the calculus of what we can and can’t do. Projects big and small, things we’ve said, “Oh, we can’t do that.” And now we say, “Why not?”

If it works for you, sure, keep to your routines.

Having a shower first thing in the morning helps me feel more awake, alert, ready to face the day. I’ll (try to) keep that routine.

But why does it need to be at six in the morning? It doesn’t. Today Thomas didn’t wake up until almost nine o’clock. Almost enough time for me to finish this blog post, without setting an alarm.

It’s ok to ease up on our routines, and to sort through which ones are life-giving. I suspect it’s a short list.

More important than our routines are our rhythms—the ebb and flow of our bodies, long-ignored as we struggled to obey external demands.

Today Willa and Thomas woke up within half an hour of each other, without nudging from me. They’re both happy, playing and chattering with each other.

It’s a glimpse of how it must have been before the clock, before the sundial, when we marked time with the sun and the moon and the seasons and our bodies.

I don’t like the sickness and death of this pandemic; but I do like this drastic re-ordering of our lives toward freedom, creativity, connection, and compassion.

Who knows what the world will look like when this is all over? If we work together, each free to honor our rhythms? Who knows what kind of world we might create?

The post Disrupted routines and emerging rhythms appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled

– Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman
“Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle” (1986)
Appendix F. Report of the Rogers Commission

When you have a political movement almost entirely built around assertions that any expert can tell you are false, you have to cultivate an attitude of disdain toward expertise, one that spills over into everything. Once you dismiss people who look at evidence on the effects of tax cuts and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, you’re already primed to dismiss people who look at evidence on disease transmission.

– Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman
“Covid-19 Brings Out All the Usual Zombies” (3-28-2020)

This week’s featured post is “How the Economy Restarts“.

This week everybody was talking about spending $2 trillion

After some difficult negotiations, the bill passed the Senate 96-0 and the House by voice vote. It was a striking example of bipartisanship, and yet Trump only invited Republicans to be present for the signing ceremony that officially made it a law.

When a bill is this big and complex, it’s hard to know exactly what’s in it. ABC lists a few of the more prominent measures:

• Individuals making less that $75K (or couples below $150K) get $1,200 ($2,400), with $500 extra per child.
• Unemployment benefits are increased, last longer, and apply to more classes of workers.
• Small businesses who pledge not to lay off workers can get emergency loans, which are forgiven if the workers do indeed keep their jobs.
• Hospitals and health systems get $100 billion.
• $500 billion is set aside for loans to big businesses, including $75 billion for airlines and hotels.

I’m sure we’ll find out over the next several months that all kinds of special-interest provisions got inserted.

Former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes makes the obvious comment:

So weird how the Tea Party isn’t rising up in opposition to all this government spending.

Obama’s stimulus proposal was about 1/3 the size of Trump’s, but it had right-wingers talking about revolution. Now they’re silent. It’s almost enough to make you think they had some other reason for not liking Obama.

There was also little bipartisan support then, despite Republican economists virtually all calling for a major stimulus. No Republican House members and only three Republican senators voted for the bill.

Thanks, Malacandra:

“My country and its economy aren’t working for the people.” Tech Support: “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”

and the virus

First, the numbers: As of this morning, the US had 140,393 cases (compared to 33,018 a week ago) and 2,437 deaths (428 a week ago). We now have more cases than any other country in the world, though our death totals are still behind Italy (10,779), Spain, China, Iran, and France.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is now talking about between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths eventually. In his Sunday briefing, President Trump seemed to accept those numbers and move the goalposts to make them a measure of success. He quoted an estimate of “2.2 million … if we did nothing”, implying that he would take credit for any total less than that.

Wired sorts out the rumor that people shouldn’t take ibuprofen to deal with possible coronavirus fevers.

The ibuprofen furor left researchers and physicians exasperated over the distress it caused people already frightened by the virus, and also for the apparent lack of evidence. … When they’re being cautious about associating phenomena and diseases, epidemiologists will say something represents “correlation, not causation.” In other words, just because two things occurred at the same time doesn’t mean that they’re linked. But to this point, the connection between ibuprofen and severe Covid-19 may not even be a correlation, since no statistical relationship has been found.

One of the mysteries of the pandemic is why different countries have such different death rates.

In Italy, 9.5 percent of the people who have tested positive for the virus have succumbed to covid-19, according to data compiled at Johns Hopkins University. In France, the rate is 4.3 percent. But in Germany, it’s 0.4 percent.

In the US, the fatality rate is around 1.3%. Those numbers would make sense if the Germans had discovered some magic treatment that they wouldn’t share with anybody else, especially the Italians. But that seems not to be the case; nobody has come up with any treatment better than to give people lots of fluids, keep their temperatures down, and help them breathe. Germans also aren’t all that different from other Europeans, either genetically or in lifestyle.

But think about what the fatality rate is: a fraction. It’s the number of deaths divided by the number of cases. The difference seems to be in the denominator, not the numerator: Germany has done a better job than any other country of identifying all the people who are infected.

The biggest reason for the difference, infectious disease experts say, is Germany’s work in the early days of its outbreak to track, test and contain infection clusters. That means Germany has a truer picture of the size of its outbreak than places that test only the obviously symptomatic, most seriously ill or highest-risk patients.

Now consider the implications: If the death rate in the US is really the same as Germany’s, it means that we have three times as many cases as we think we have.

OK, after that thought you deserve some amusement: the Coronavirus Rhapsody.

In the same way that the record of Trump clueless tweets continues to exist, tweets exist that show his “nobody saw this coming” excuse is false. Here’s Senator Murphy (D-CT) on February 5:

Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.

Last week I told you about an ad that assembles a number of quotes of Trump minimizing the virus. Now the Trump campaign is threatening TV stations that run the ad.

[Y]our failure to remove this deceptive ad … could put your station’s license in jeopardy.

This is how authoritarianism snowballs: What might (in another administration) be a controversial-but-toothless cease-and-desist letter from a campaign is now far more ominous, because Trump freely uses the power of his office for personal benefit. A station owner has to worry that there may be no distance between the Trump campaign and the FCC.

Another example of how authoritarian regimes work: Trump tells governors that they should “be appreciative” of the great job he’s doing, and implies that his administration may stop cooperating with the ones who aren’t.

[Vice President Mike Pence] calls all the governors. I tell him — I mean, I’m a different type of person — I tell him “Don’t call the governor of Washington. You’re wasting your time with him. Don’t call the woman in Michigan. … You know what I say? If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.

The phrase “wasting your time” tells you what Trump thinks his administration should be trying to achieve: “appreciation” for the President. If he’s not going to get that appreciation, then what’s the point of doing his job and saving American lives?

Similarly, the Sunday briefing began with executives from a variety of corporations describing how they’re contributing to the virus-fighting effort — after doing North-Korean-style tributes to the “great leadership” of the President. I get tired of pointing this out, but we can’t let ourselves lose sight of it: This kind of ego-stroking has never happened in any previous administration of either party. Obama would have thrown people out of the room for trying to butter him up so blatantly, but Trump requires it.

and sacrificing lives for the economy

Tuesday, Trump floated the idea of re-opening the economy by Easter, envisioning “packed churches”, though yesterday he backed off and extended the social-distance guidelines until April 30. (More about all that in the featured post.)

His argument at the time was that shutting down the economy was a cure worse than the disease. A number of Trump supporters then came out and said the part Trump merely implied: A higher death toll is a price worth paying for a higher GDP. In an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick put it like this:

No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance for your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in. … I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me — I have 6 grandchildren — that, what we all care about, and what we love more than anything are those children. And I want to live smart and see through this but I don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed.

What’s really perverse about this is that Patrick is also a climate-change denier. So he’s willing to risk death to make a better future for his grandchildren, but not willing to limit fossil fuels. I’ll resolve this paradox with a wild guess: Patrick’s grandchildren are just a rhetorical device here; his true loyalty is to big business.

Eventually, you’d think Republicans would learn: You don’t want to be out in front of Trump, because he’s likely to switch directions and leave you hanging. I’m sure we’ll soon hear that Trump never suggested risking lives to save the economy.

OK, another amusement break: “Stay the F**k At Home” by Bob E. Kelley. (NSFW – duh):

While we’re talking about packed churches: Most of the time, I think we should respect other people’s prerogative to believe whatever they believe, even if it seems like nonsense to us. This wine has become the blood of your god? All the languages of humanity derive from the Tower of Babel? Fine, whatever. As Thomas Jefferson put it: “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

But during a public health emergency, religion can be dangerous. This happened a week ago yesterday in Louisiana:

The Life Tabernacle Church hosted 1,825 people at their Sunday morning service. 26 buses were used to pick people up from around the Baton Rouge area and transport them to Sunday service. … Throughout the service parishioners could be seen touching each other and closely gathering, very few wearing masks or gloves. [Pastor Tony] Spell says if anyone in his congregation contracts covid-19 he will heal them through God.

Another megachurch in Tampa is doing something similar, and likewise promising divine healing. And I’m sure lots of otherwise sensible Christians will find it hard to stay home on Easter Sunday.

Some people look at this from an individualistic point of view and think, “It’s their choice to make. If they’re wrong, they’ll be the ones to suffer from it.” But they won’t be the ONLY ones. As they spread the disease, their friends and family and neighbors and caregivers are also at risk. And when they show up at the ICU, they’ll compete for scarce resources with people who were more careful.

If someone in your life is making the God-will-protect-me argument, remind them of the temptation of Jesus in Luke 4 verses 9-12:

The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. For it is written: ‘He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus answered, “It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'”

I interpret this to mean: It is fine to call on God when you have no way to save yourself. But don’t show off by taking unnecessary risks and creating situations where God needs to save you.

In the same way that Trump is shifting the blame for his own blunders to China, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is shifting blame to New York: Ignore the bad decisions he has made; focus on New York.

Josh Marshall:

The future is FLA Gov. DeSantis today. The governor who left the beaches and almost all commerce open as the virus spread like wildfire across the country is now blaming his state’s outbreak on New York and New Yorkers fleeing to Florida. This is the new political message.

Trump’s briefing yesterday was a festival of blame-shifting and excuse making: He doesn’t admit that the US has the most coronavirus cases, because China is lying. There’s no shortage of ventilators, hospitals are hoarding them. There are plenty of masks available, but someone is stealing them.

And as I noted above, he’s also moving the goalposts: 2.2 million Americans would die if the government did nothing, so 200K deaths would be evidence that he has done a great job!

Watch: If anybody at all is still alive by November, Trump will expect them to thank him.

Friday, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey denied the need to issue a shelter-in-place order, saying:

We are not Louisiana, we are not New York state, we are not California. And right now is not the time to order people to shelter in place.

Next door in Mississippi, Governor Tate Reeves’s executive order undid any local order that interfered with

airports, medical and healthcare facilities, retail shopping including grocery and department stores, offices, factories and other manufacturing facilities or any Essential Business or Operation as determined by and identified below.

The Jackson Free Press reports:

One of the immediate consequences of Reeves’ order is the formal declaration that most of Mississippi’s businesses qualify under it as “essential,” and thus are exempt from restrictions on public gatherings. As of press time, the Jackson Free Press has received reports from businesses in the Jackson area that have, as of today’s executive order, scuttled plans for work-from-home and ordered their employees back to work on-site.

Also included among essential services in the executive order were religious facilities, just days after the Mississippi State Department of Health told Mississippians to skip churches, weddings and funerals to help slow the spread of COVID-19.

Up until now, it’s been possible for Trump’s base to imagine that COVID-19 is a Blue America problem: New York, California, Washington, and other liberal places. When a red state like Louisiana does get hit, the epicenter is a cosmopolitan city like New Orleans.

So if you’ve been sitting in Little Town, USA and watching Fox News, the whole crisis probably seems overblown. I think that’s about to change. Viruses are a lot like fashions; they hit the big cities first, but they make it everywhere eventually. States and towns that wait to take action until the problem is local and serious will regret the delay.

and you also might be interested in …

I keep hearing people ask where Joe Biden is. And physically the answer is that he’s at home in Wilmington, doing what we all should be doing.

Of course, what people are really asking is why he isn’t on their TVs, providing a counterpoint to Trump’s incessant nonsense. And the answer to that is that he’s giving interviews and telling people what a real president would do in this situation, but it’s almost impossible for him to break into the news cycle.

Think about it: He doesn’t have any current office, so he can’t announce an action, like Governor Cuomo does nearly every day. Primaries keep getting cancelled, so he can’t win them. He can’t hold rallies. Just about anything he says from Wilmington leads editors and producers to ask “Why is this news?”

Now, of course, if Trump were in this position, he would have no trouble making news. He’d do it by being an ignorant asshole: crudely insulting someone who did nothing to deserve it, saying something provably wrong or bigoted, or violating political norms in some other way. And the same thing could work for Biden as well — he could call Mike Pence a faggot or something; that would make news — but it would also break the brand he’s running on.

Lots of people (including me) have been wondering how to safely bring home food that has been handled by other people, either in the grocery or at a take-out restaurant. Here’s one healthcare professional’s response.

Interesting lecture Heather Cox Richardson gave in 2018 on “How the Gilded Age Created the Progressive Era“.

It looks for all intents and purposes in 1890, 1893, 1894 that the Gilded Age is here to stay, that a few rich guys are going to run everything. They have gamed the system. They’ve stolen a presidential seat. They’ve changed the mechanics so that you can’t possibly ever take the Senate again. They’ve gamed the census, so that they’re doing all the counting. And then when even still it looks bad, they’ve packed the Supreme Court for eternity. And the Supreme Court is handing down idiotic decisions, all of which have been either overturned or modified since then. …

So it looks like it’s time for everyone to pack up and go home.

And yet things changed. And it’s somewhat embarrassing for a non-violent history professor to admit how big a role assassinating President McKinley played.

Curly Neal, arguably the greatest dribbler in basketball history, died this week at 77. The Harlem Globetrotters assembled this collection of highlights in honor of his 74th birthday.

and let’s close with some suggestions for the housebound

Oddly relevant again is the Statler Brothers’ “Flowers on the Wall” from 1966. Don’t tell me I’ve nothing to do.

It’s not going to happen soon or fast, but maybe the process begins by June.

Sadly, any serious article about restarting the economy has to begin by brushing aside the misinformation coming from the White House.

Disclaimers. The economy cannot be restarted safely any time soon.

It won’t happen on Easter (as the President was envisioning Tuesday, but has since backed off of). We won’t even reach the peak daily death total by Easter (as he predicted yesterday). If we’re lucky, we might see the daily new-cases totals peak by then, but deaths trail diagnoses by at least a week. (Italy’s new-cases peak was March 21. Deaths might or might not be peaking now.)

Public health experts agree that certain conditions and capabilities need to be in place before it will be safe to relax social distancing practices, open non-essential businesses, or allow people to start congregating. Those conditions and capabilities aren’t in place now and won’t be for at least several weeks, and probably longer. Trump’s notion that the country will be “well on our way to recovery” by June 1 seems wildly optimistic.

The talking point that shutting down the economy to stop the virus is “worse than the problem itself” (which Trump tweeted a week ago yesterday) is nonsense. COVID-19, unchecked, could kill millions of Americans (which Trump finally admitted yesterday: “Think of the number: 2.2 million people, potentially, if we did nothing.”) The idea that the economy might putter along normally while people are dying in those numbers is just absurd. (I think of this as the Masque of the Red Death theory.)

The supporting talking point that “You are going to lose a number of people to the flu [i.e., coronavirus], but you are going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression” is likewise nonsense. Not only won’t a depression kill millions of Americans, the effect usually goes the other way: Lower economic activity means fewer overall deaths, mostly because traffic deaths and heart attacks go down.

We find that in areas where the unemployment rate is growing faster, mortality rates decline faster. So during the Great Recession in the U.S., we saw increases in the unemployment rate of about 4-5 percentage points, so that translates to about 50,000 to 60,000 fewer deaths per year

Smithsonian magazine looked further back and found that “The Great Depression had little effect on death rates.”

Prerequisites. OK, now that the decks have been cleared of some widely distributed bad information, we can start talking sensibly about how the economy restarts

Let’s start with the prerequisite conditions. Dr. Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins listed five:

• The number of new cases starts going down over time.
• The health system can quickly and reliably test people who may have been exposed to the virus, even if their symptoms are minor or non-existent.
• Caretakers have a sufficient supply of masks and other protective equipment.
• Hospitals have sufficient resources: ventilators, ICU beds, etc.
• Systems are in place to trace the contacts of any new cases.

These five conditions are consistent with what Anthony Fauci and other public-health experts have been saying. Together, they paint a picture of a South-Korea-like containment: The virus hasn’t been eliminated, but the public health system has identified and isolated almost everyone in a region who is infected. As new outbreaks happen, they can be quickly found and traced, so that the newly infected can also be identified and isolated. Moreover, public health workers have the means to protect themselves, so that a new virus outbreak won’t break the system.

It should be obvious that those conditions don’t exist now. Even in New Rochelle and Seattle, early hotspots that took early action, the optimistic story is that the rate of increase in cases is down, not that the number of cases has actually peaked. (The curve is being bent sideways rather than bent down.) Some parts of the country, particularly rural areas, have not seen large numbers of cases yet. But their numbers are increasing and none of them have the virus contained in the way the experts envision. Tests are not as rare as they were a week or two ago, but the number needed has grown to stay ahead of the number provided, so they still are not plentiful. Better and quicker tests have been developed, but are still not widely available.

Perhaps the best evidence that ventilators and masks are scarce is that Trump has stopped denying it and started finding other people to blame for it.

It’s worth pointing out what’s not on this list: a vaccine or a magic anti-viral treatment that changes the whole nature of the struggle. Such advances will happen eventually, but almost certainly not in the next few months, and maybe not for a year or more.

First steps. So it’s not happening tomorrow or next week, but you don’t have to wear rose-colored glasses to imagine a time when the prerequisites have been fulfilled. No matter how bad the pandemic gets, the number of cases has to peak eventually. Tests exist and are being manufactured in ever larger numbers. Ditto for hospital equipment. Infection-tracking systems work in other countries and could work here.

So it’s anybody’s guess how long it will take to get there, but we will get there. And what happens then?

Ezekiel Emmanuel envisions how a restarting process might go. He pictures a nationwide shelter-in-place policy lasting until about June (except in places — are there any? — with so few cases that public-health officials can already track them all), during which he imagines achieving more-or-less the same things Dr. Inglesby described:

State and local health departments then need to deploy thousands of teams to trace contacts of all new Covid-19 cases using cellphone data, social media data, and data from thermometer tests and the like. We also need to get infected people to inform their own contacts. It would be easier to lift the national quarantine if we isolate new cases, find and test all their contacts, and isolate any of them who may be infected.

The national quarantine would give hospitals time to stock up on supplies and equipment, find more beds and room to treat people, get better organized and give clinical staff a respite to recuperate for the next onslaught of Covid-19 care. Without these measures, any Covid-19 resurgence would be far harsher, and economically damaging.

Whether all that happens by June or not is debatable. But even with those capabilities in place, the restart happens gradually. Nobody flips a switch or makes an all-clear announcement.

The first people Emmanuel would send back to work are those who have recovered from the virus and provably have anti-bodies to resist reinfection. And even they would need some rigorous training in safe working procedures: frequent hand-washing, avoiding unnecessary contact with others, etc.

Next, low-risk parts of the population could be allowed to congregate, while higher-risk people continue to shelter in place: Colleges might be allowed to hold in-person summer sessions. Summer school, camp, and daycare for K-12 children could be attempted — with ubiquitous testing to spot any viral resurgence.

If that works — it might not, and then retreats would have to happen — public venues could slowly start returning to almost-normal: Offices, libraries and museums, and bars and restaurants could re-open, but with reduced occupancy limits. (I heard a Starbucks executive interviewed on CNBC. He described the gradual reopening of Starbucks outlets in China: First take-out only, then dine-in with one person per table, then dine-in with at most two people per table.)

This is hardly a let-it-rip vision, and I think that it ultimately relies on some kind of treatment or vaccine developing: The economy isn’t completely closed down, but limps along for a year or so until medical developments rescue it.

Herd immunity. Thomas Friedman has tried to popularize a more ambitious opening envisioned by David Katz, who IMO gives way too much credence to the economic-contraction-will-cost-lives theory. The argument here is to focus on protecting the vulnerable (mainly the elderly), while letting the less-vulnerable behave more-or-less normally.

Even here, though, the same ideas show up: A period of lockdown, during which ubiquitous testing and research give us a much better idea of who has the virus, how it spreads, and who the vulnerable really are. (Some young people are dying too.) There is, I think, too much optimism about how quickly this period could be brought to a close. (Katz proposed two weeks, which is already about to expire without the kind of testing availability his plan needs.)

Once the vulnerable are sequestered — how you keep vulnerable parents away from their virus-exposed children and grandchildren is never specified — the virus spreads more-or-less harmlessly among the rest of the population, resulting in ever more recoveries with corresponding immunity. (We’re not totally positive immunity happens or how long it lasts, but it’s a reasonable theory.) The ultimate result is a general population with enough herd immunity that the virus no longer spreads like wildfire. As time goes by, then, more and more of the vulnerable can return to society.

Science Alert’s Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz dissents on this view: Herd immunity requires something like 90% of the population to be immune, and 20% of COVID-19 infections are serious enough to require hospitalization. So if you picture even the minimal overlap, about 10% of the population winds up being hospitalized. That will break the health-care system, even if it manages to save almost everybody — which it probably won’t.

So again, I think some kind of treatment or vaccine has to appear before the economy gets back to hitting on all cylinders.

Summing up. In every re-opening vision I’ve seen, conditions more-or-less like Dr. Inglesby’s have to be met first, and it’s hard to picture that happening much before June. By then, the $1,200 checks the government is sending out will have been used up long ago, so another trillion or two or three will have to be spent, both to keep people eating and to supply the public-health system with what it needs to get through the crisis.

And there’s not going to be an everybody-come-out-now announcement. Re-opening will happen slowly, and probably in fits and starts. Some things will reopen too quickly, start a new outbreak, and have to close again. Some new habits will have to continue for a long time, and maybe we will never go back to washing (or not washing) our hands the way we used to. Cubicle-farm offices may never reopen with the same density. Business travel may never recover. Working from home may become permanent for many jobs, or working-from-home augmented by rare trips to the home office.

When will we be able to pack into stadiums again? Or elbow-fight for armrest-space in theaters? That will probably have to wait for a vaccine, which is at least a year away.

Following up on last week’s explanation of why some massive government intervention in the economy was necessary, this week I’ll look at how the economy restarts and when that might become possible. Unfortunately, Trump has polluted that conversation with so much misinformation that it’s hard to discuss it properly without doing a long debunk first. So I’ll start there, then go on to list prerequisites for relaxing the lockdown, and from there how a restart might go.

That post will be called “How the Economy Restarts”. It should be out around 10 EDT or so.

The weekly summary again has to be dominated by virus news. (People ask why they never see Joe Biden, and the answer is that without any official role in the virus response, he can’t break into the news cycle.) There’s $2.2 trillion of new government money to discuss, the weekly infection-and-death numbers, the mega-churches that are still gathering their flocks together, and so on. I’ll try to mix in some other things. (If you’re looking for something edifying and hopeful, I’ll link to a Heather Cox Richardson lecture on why the Gilded Age didn’t last forever. In addition to the education, it’s amusing to watch her skate around the role that assassinating McKinley played.)

And whenever the actual news gets too grim, I’ll declare an amusement break and link to a creatively funny virus-response video. The closing is a Statler brothers song from the 60s that suggests activities for people sheltering in place. That should appear sometime around noon.

• Education units (pre-K through higher education) quickly mobilizing to online without a break, and with sensitivity to students' needs
• Textbook publishers allowing free access to online textbooks over the duration of the sheltering
• Internet Archive offering free access to their library
• Local Facebook groups helping each other meet needs
• Outreach by the Instagram cat community reminding us to take care of ourselves (I suppose there are others, but I tune into the cat community)
• Countless others
• Harbor Freight's donations of N95 masks and face shields to hospitals
• People on social media reaching out to the more vulnerable
• And so many I'm not aware of

Oh, the irony of my last post! Here I was imagining that climate change would be the big disruptor. That we needed to begin building bridges on I-5 between Tacoma and Bellingham. That Vancouver would need a new airport.

It never is what you expect, right?

Instead of rising waters, it’s an insidious disease, spreading from person to person to person before there’s a single symptom to alert anyone to danger. It’s exponential increases in number of persons infected, and death tolls that make mass shootings look small.

It’s an economic tsunami, wiping out small businesses and threatening to upend large ones. It’s unemployment spiking—and grocery providers desperate for workers to fill pickup and delivery orders. It’s Amazon putting fast delivery of most products on hold, to prioritize necessities.

My kids have been at home from elementary and preschool for what seems like forever. I go back and forth between “Let’s do structure” and “OMG here’s your tablets just go away.”

Today is a structure day. I stayed up late last night creating a flexible lesson plan based on suggestions from the kids’ schools. We didn’t get started on it until midday, but so far, so good. We’ve gotten ourselves dressed and fed, and two of us brushed our teeth.

We took our first fresh air break—a walk with the goats where we took notes about the signs of spring we saw (white alyssum, blue lithodora, daffodil buds about to burst, red alder catkins—and buds, a few viola, and green strawberry leaves).

Now we’re all having writing time. Willa is writing about “signs of spring,” while Thomas is supposed to be sorting the magnet letters and numbers. I’m writing this.

Maybe we’ll plant the indoor starts later today, or maybe we won’t. The dishes do need to be done, and I suppose we need clean clothes.

One good thing about all this: the driving urgency that pushed so many of us has abated some. The days stretch ahead of us without end, without any reliable timeline of when life will return to something resembling normalcy. We are all waiting, and waiting makes it hard to plan and execute. So we just wait, and every day things change. So far, they keep on changing for the worse, and no one knows when we’ll get to the downhill side of the curve.

Life has slowed down to this moment, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

Some people say that’s a good thing.

The post This moment, and the next one appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

Days are numbers, watch the stars.
We can only see so far.
Someday, you’ll know where you are.

– The Alan Parsons Project, “The Traveller“

This week’s featured post is “Economies Aren’t Built to Stop and Restart“.

This week everybody was talking about life at home

Like much of the country, lately I’ve been much more housebound than I’m used to. I’m not in any kind of strict quarantine, because everybody I live with seems healthy. (Thank you for asking.) But like the hunters of old, these days I mainly go out to acquire food. (Is it my imagination, or are there more men in the supermarkets than there used to be? Maybe the viral threat makes shopping feel manlier than it used to.)

I also walk the dog in the morning, though I’m starting to feel guilty about it. Allergies I’ve had for years leave me congested in the mornings, so I spend much of my morning walk coughing and clearing my throat. This didn’t used to be a concern, but now I feel sorry for anyone within earshot. (“Authorized distributor of the Fear of God [TM]. Enjoy your free sample!”)

Another thing I’ve noticed: Having all my regular activities canceled makes it hard to keep track of what day it is. For example, Wednesday was our 36th wedding anniversary, but neither my wife nor I figured that out until the afternoon. That experience reminded me of the Alan Parsons song that gives this post its title. When you’re traveling, sometimes you get into a state where it’s not Thursday, it’s the tenth day of the trip, or the second day in Savannah, or the third day before you go home. Days become numbers; someone says “Tuesday” and you have to think for a few seconds about what that means.

Strangely, not being able to travel at all is making me feel the same way. So if some week the Sift doesn’t appear on schedule, don’t jump to the conclusion that something has happened to me. I may just have forgotten that it’s Monday.

Sadly, though, not everyone is getting into the spirit of social distancing. Wednesday evening I went to our favorite local bar/restaurant to pick up take-out — anniversary celebration! — hoping that they’ll get enough business to still be there when we start eating out again. A group of people in running gear were having a tailgate party in the parking lot. Basically, they were just moving the bar scene outdoors. They were in the prime of life and looked very healthy, so they probably believe their risk is low.

And maybe it is. (Maybe.) But the paradox of social distancing is that it’s not about each of us as individuals, it’s about trying to do right by the other people in our lives, and right by the human herd in general. We stay away from others because we care about them.

and the continued spread of the virus

As of this morning, there were 33,018 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States (compared to 3602 last Monday and 564 two weeks ago) and 428 deaths (compared to 66 and 22).

It’s hard to know what to make of these numbers. Part of the rise undoubtedly reflects the spread of the disease, but part is due to the fact that we’re finally testing people in large numbers; we’re finding new cases, but we’re also discovering cases that were hidden last week. And since we’re still rolling out social distancing, it won’t bend the curve for at least another week or two.

So perversely, things may actually be starting to get better at a time when our numbers are looking worse. I’ll bet that social distancing actually works. It’s not going to fix everything, but the real curve will start to bend away from exponential growth by next week or the week after. The apparent curve will probably still be exponential next week, because of the increase in testing.

Thursday, Italy passed China for having the most COVID-19 deaths. Currently, we’re on the Italy track, about a week or two behind. We’re also about four times the size of Italy. So if the curve doesn’t bend soon, it’s possible that eventually the country with the most deaths will be the United States.

Here’s the coolest thing I heard this week:

Earlier this month, a group of more than 300 engineers, designers, doctors, nurses and others came together on Facebook to work on the Open Source Ventilator project.

In seven days they came up with a prototype for a ventilator that can be assembled from bio-plastics and manufactured with 3-D printers. The Irish engineer Colin Keogh says that Ireland’s Health Services will review the prototype next week with the goal of making it available to coronavirus patients.

Or maybe it was this: Engineers at the University of Minnesota are going “full-on MacGyver” against the ventilator shortage. In a feasibility test, a prototype made from $150 of parts, a motor ripped out of something else, and a red toolbox base kept a pig alive for an hour.

Friday, the FDA approved a new test that can detect coronavirus in as little as 45 minutes. This opens the possibility of quickly sorting the COVID-19 sick from the ordinary sick, who could safely go home and recover in the usual way.

Speaking as someone cooped up with four other people, the terror is in not knowing. If one of us spikes a fever, we will suffer simultaneous urges to take care of each other and stay away from each other. What a relief it would be to determine quickly that this was just a cold or the ordinary flu.

We’ll see how quickly this can be deployed.

Those of us going through our first plague might have some things to learn from the gay community.

This video was made by Kenneth, who I know through Unitarian Universalist circles. It appeared on his YouTube channel Common Hawthorn, which focuses on his interest in Tarot. But this particular piece is only tangentially about Tarot; it primarily discusses (in a very matter-of-fact way) the reality of death and the need for people to care for each other.

Before this pandemic is over, we’re all going to know someone who died from it, and possibly far more than one. We may, at some point, fear for our own lives. Those are difficult ideas to wrap your mind around, but gay men who lived through the 1980s had to get used to them.

and the government’s public-health response

This week the strain on the hospitals began to show, particularly in New York and Washington state. At the state and local level, we keep hearing about shortages of ventilators, hospital beds, and protective gear for healthcare workers. At the federal level, we hear a lot of happy talk about how well things are going.

and its economic response

I discuss this in the featured post. Minutes ago, Vox’ Dylan Matthews outlined the five major disagreements that are holding up the stimulus/bailout bill.

and we need to think yet again about how to handle Trump

Rachel Maddow gave examples of happy announcements Trump has made at recent press conferences, which then turned out not to be true:

• A malaria drug has been shown to be effective against COVID-19 and will be available “almost immediately”.
• The virus is “well contained” and “under control” and “is going to disappear”.
• 1.4 million tests would be available this week.
• Google is developing a web site to help people decide whether they needed testing and where to get it — it will be “quickly done”.
• The Navy is deploying two medical ships to virus-hit coasts in the next week or so.
• The government has massive amounts of ventilators.
• The government has ordered 500 million N95 masks.

All false, or so grossly misleading that they would be better ignored than believed. (The order for 500 million masks is real, but will take 18 months to fill, something Trump neglected to mention. Any health professionals who are counting on receiving those masks in time to make a difference have been misled.) She concluded:

There is a clear pattern here in this crisis, of the President promising stuff that he knows America would love to hear, but it’s not true. … We should inoculate ourselves against the harmful impact of these ongoing false promises and false statements by the President by recognizing that when he is talking about the coronavirus epidemic, more often than not, he is lying. … I would stop putting those briefings on live TV. Not out of spite, but because it’s misinformation. If the President does end up saying anything true, you can run it as tape. But if he keeps lying like he has been every day on stuff this important, we should (all of us) stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it’s going to cost lives.

Washington Post columnists Margaret Sullivan and Michael Gerson agree. Sullivan reviews the same false claims as Maddow, then concludes:

The news media, at this dangerous and unprecedented moment in world history, must put the highest priority on getting truthful information to the public.

Taking Trump’s press conferences as a live feed works against that core purpose.

Gerson is a never-Trump Republican, who waxes wistful about the missed chance to impeach Trump. That would have given us President Pence, who “is no Franklin D. Roosevelt, but … possesses the type of qualities one might find in an effective governor facing a hurricane.”

The point here is not simply to condemn Trump, which has limited usefulness in the midst of a national crisis. At this point it is perhaps better to ignore him, which is precisely what governors and mayors across the country are doing to good effect.

Jay Rosen offers a sample emergency declaration for a news organization:

On everything that involves the coronavirus Donald Trump’s public statements have been unreliable. And that is why today we announce that we are shifting our coverage of the President to an emergency setting. … Switching to emergency mode means our coverage will look different and work in a different way, as we try to prevent the President from misinforming you through us. …

Refusing to go with live coverage. Suspending normal relations with his White House. Always asking: is this something we should amplify? A focus on what he’s doing, not on what he’s saying. The truth sandwich when we feel we have to highlight his false claims. This is what you can expect now that our coverage has been switched to an emergency setting.

American Bridge 21st Century uses Trump’s false claims in a damaging ad:

This brings up something I’ve been scratching my head over for a while: Some of Trump’s thought processes make sense to me, but the aspect I can never grasp is his extreme short-sightedness.

If I were President of the United States right now, I hope I would worry primarily about saving lives, with my political future a distant second. But even when I thought about politics, what would grab my attention would not be the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market, or the unemployment numbers, or even the daily numbers of cases or deaths. What would scare me politically is the possibility of presiding over the country with the most total COVID-19 deaths. If that happens, it will happen well before November, and there will be no way to spin it.

So even when I was being totally self-centered and partisan, I’d keep asking one question: How many Americans will die by November? Purely for my own political survival, that’s the number I would be trying to keep down.

But Trump seems not to be focused on that number, and I can’t grasp why not.

and the Democratic primary race

Last week I started saying that it’s over. After this week’s primaries, it clearly is. Biden now leads Sanders in the delegate race 1201-896, with 1991 needed to have a majority at the Democratic Convention. The RealClearPolitics polling average now shows Biden ahead of Sanders nationally 55.5%-36.2%.

At this point, Sanders needs to start thinking about the role he will play in the general-election campaign, and what he can do to make sure Trump is not re-elected. He certainly has the right to stay in the race, get as many delegates as he can, and try to influence the platform Biden will run on, if that’s what he thinks is best. But any negative campaigning against Biden needs to stop. He’s going to be the nominee, and smearing him is Trump’s job now.

Tulsi Gabbard dropped out of the race Thursday morning, leaving Biden and Sanders as the only active Democratic candidates. She said this about Joe Biden:

I know Vice President Biden and his wife and am grateful to have called his son Beau a friend who also served in the National Guard. Although I may not agree with the Vice President on every issue, I know that he has a good heart and is motivated by his love for our country and the American people. I’m confident that he will lead our country guided by the spirit of aloha — respect and compassion — and thus help heal the divisiveness that has been tearing our country apart.

So today, I’m suspending my presidential campaign, and offering my full support to Vice President Joe Biden in his quest to bring our country together.

All the speculation (including my own) that Gabbard was planning to run a third-party spoiler campaign in the fall was clearly off base. I still think Hillary Clinton was not wrong that the Russians were hoping she would, and I believe that Russia is probably still hoping to boost a candidate to split the anti-Trump vote. But whatever Putin might have in mind, Gabbard is clearly not in on it.

and you also might be interested in …

In normal times, I could imagine the Senate’s insider-trading scandal being the week’s top story. The center of the story is Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. On February 7, Burr was upbeat about the country’s ability to deal with coronavirus:

No matter the outbreak or threat, Congress and the federal government have been vigilant in identifying gaps in its readiness efforts and improving its response capabilities.

The public health preparedness and response framework that Congress has put in place and that the Trump Administration is actively implementing today is helping to protect Americans. Over the years, this framework has been designed to be flexible and innovative so that we are not only ready to face the coronavirus today but new public health threats in the future.

But a few weeks later, on February 27, without warning the general public that he had been too optimistic, he painted a much more dire picture to his donors. He compared COVID-19 to the 1918 influenza, and predicted school closures and the need for military hospital ships and field hospitals to supplement the local health infrastructure.

And he was selling stock.

Soon after he offered public assurances that the government was ready to battle the coronavirus, the powerful chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, sold off a significant percentage of his stocks, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions. … A week after Burr’s sales, the stock market began a sharp decline and has lost about 30% since.

… His biggest sales included companies that are among the most vulnerable to an economic slowdown. He dumped up to $150,000 worth of shares of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, a chain based in the United States that has lost two-thirds of its value. And he sold up to $100,000 of shares of Extended Stay America, an economy hospitality chain. Shares of that company are now worth less than half of what they did at the time Burr sold.

Four other senators have since come under similar scrutiny.

Burr should hardly be singled out. Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California have also sold significant amounts of stocks in recent months.

However, some of those transactions are less troubling than others. Loeffler’s case seems the most serious.

For Loeffler, the sell-off of between $1.3 million and $3.1 million worth of stock she owned with her husband came starting on January 24, the same day the Senate Health Committee hosted an all-members briefing on the coronavirus (Loeffler sits on the committee). Loeffler’s husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, is the chair of the New York Stock Exchange.

She also bought shares in Citrix, a teleworking company likely to do well in the new environment.

Lachlan Markay, the Daily Beast reporter who broke the Loeffler story, is less disturbed by the other senators’ transactions: Inhofe started selling before he got a private coronavirus briefing. Johnson “sold a $5M-25M stake in his brother’s privately held company on March 2, well after the general public was aware of COVID-19.” And Feinstein’s sale “is clearly innocuous as well. In fact, her husband’s $1M-5M sale of shares in biopharma company Allogene actually came at a low-point in its stock value, as noted by Barron’s a few weeks ago.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is using the public health emergency to stay in power, using maneuvers that some have called a “coup”.

A new Parliament was sworn in last week, but among the key votes Mr. Edelstein [a Netanyahu ally] has prevented is one on replacing him as speaker. … Though his right-wing-religious alliance narrowly lost this month’s election, the prime minister is reluctant to give up his bloc’s control of Parliament.

But Israel’s highest court has ordered the vote to proceed by Wednesday, a move which Netanyahu’s supporters have called a coup by the court.

Meanwhile, the Justice Minister appointed by Netanyahu has postponed Netanyahu’s trial on three corruption charges. The postponement is for two months, and is also an “emergency” measure that is supposed to prevent the spread of the virus.

and let’s close with some history

Back in 2013, Pentatonix performed “The Evolution of Music“.

More recently, the Y-Studs a cappella group did their own version of “The Evolution of Jewish Music“.

As of this morning, Republicans and Democrats in Congress still hadn’t agreed on a stimulus/bailout package for the economy. (Global markets are once again plunging this morning.) The parties agree on the need for extra government money, and even seem to agree on the size ($1.8 trillion). The remaining issues are who gets the money and what kinds of strings should be attached to it.

It’s far too easy to jump straight into the partisan back-and-forth of the issue — and we’ll get to that — but first I’d like to review why government intervention is needed in the first place.

It starts with a simple truth: Modern capitalist economies are supposed to be perpetual-motion machines. They’re never supposed to stop, and so there is no obvious way to restart them.

Right now, though, we’re in a situation where much of the US (and global) economy needs to stop. To prevent (or perhaps just slow) the spread of the COVID-19 virus, people need to stay home and stay away from all but a handful of other people. So industries that depend on gathering people together (sports, bars and restaurants, live entertainment, conventions, schools, retail malls) need to come to a halt. Industries that depend on travel (airlines, hotels, tourism) need to stop as well. If a factory employs a large number of people at the same location and and has them touch a lot of the same objects, it has to stop. Services in which practitioners touch their clients (barber shops, beauty salons, massage therapists) or enter people’s homes (cleaners, dog-walkers) or invite people to enter their homes (music teachers) have to stop.

How long? We’re not sure. Probably until summer. Maybe longer.

Then what?

There are basically two problems, or rather one problem relating to two kinds of entities: people and businesses. How do they survive until things start up again?

Our models for thinking about economic dislocations like this are natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes. But none of those models quite fit, because the economic infrastructure hasn’t been damaged. There are still plenty of places to live in America and plenty of foods to eat. The fields, mines and factories are still there. Nothing needs rebuilding, we just need to survive until the virus is gone and then restart. But how?

People. Long before COVID-19 got started, studies had revealed that about half of American households live paycheck-to-paycheck. Around 40% would have had trouble coming up with $400 to cover some surprise expense. Now that the economy is pulling back to just food and healthcare, large numbers of those people will be without paychecks until summer (or maybe fall).

They don’t make it without some kind of help. Some of them could rely on family or friends, but many couldn’t. And what if those families and friends are financially stressed at the same time? After all, American society is economically stratified: Rich people tend to know rich people, and people on the edge tend to know people on the edge.

The problem, as I said above, isn’t a shortage of stuff. It’s that people can’t earn money to pay for the stuff they need. Somebody needs to collect or create enough money to get them through and figure out a way to distribute it. The federal government is really the only institution set up to do that.

Businesses. If you’re a minimum-wage worker, the business that employs you — whether it’s a corner restaurant or a giant manufacturer like Boeing — seems incredibly rich. And it probably is, as long as the perpetual-motion machine of the economy keeps running. But American business, large and small, runs on debt. Debt requires interest, but in normal times a successful business generates plenty of revenue to cover that interest.

Very few businesses, though, are set up to survive without revenue for even a fairly short amount of time. Nobody has a plan for that, because it wasn’t supposed to happen. Economies don’t just stop.

But now large chunks of the economy are stopping. The problem shows up first in businesses that have a lot of debt and are supposed to generate a lot of revenue. Airlines, for example, borrow to buy their planes. (And banks or bond investors are happy to lend them the money, because an airliner is good collateral — as long as airlines go bankrupt one at a time and aren’t all looking to sell off their planes simultaneously.) On a smaller scale, restaurants rent their space, and may rent their fixtures as well.

Both Delta and Joe’s Diner have employees — pilots and cooks, respectively — they really can’t afford to lose. Restarting will be tricky if they have to go out and find new ones quickly. So even if you don’t have anything for them to do in the meantime, you really want to maintain their employment somehow.

Add all that up — rent, interest, and some kind of salary to essential employees — and a business runs out of capital in a hurry. I’ve seen an estimate that the airlines will all be bankrupt by May, and Boeing is likely to go down with them. That’s likely just the beginning. The auto companies can’t operate their factories. And if enough large and small businesses can’t repay their loans, banks will go under. We saw in 2008 how far the ripples of a banking collapse can spread.

So this crisis may have started as a health crisis, but it quickly turns into a financial crisis. And we know from 2008 how hard those are to solve.

Preserving business preserves inequality. Imagine that we get to October and COVID-19 is gone — there’s a treatment of some sort, or maybe the infection has just run its course. The government has pumped out enough money to keep everybody eating and living somewhere, so the 99% of the population that survives is ready to go back to work.

But where do they go? A few companies — Amazon, maybe, and possibly the big grocery chains and internet providers — have actually prospered. Others (Apple, for example) had big cash hoards that kept them going. But the majority of business have gone belly-up. Eventually, the market would probably sort that out. New businesses would arise to fill the demand for air travel or hotel rooms or meals out or whatever. But it could be a long painful process.

The alternative is that the government could keep businesses going the same way that it kept people going. It could float big low-interest loans or buy stock or just write checks. So all the businesses survive, and are ready to rehire people at the same time that people are ready to go back to work.

There are two problems with that scenario. First, it’s an awesome amount of money, and (since we don’t know when the pandemic ends) nobody has a good estimate how much we’re talking about. And second, the government would not just be preserving the workplaces of workers, it might also be preserving the fortunes of rich people. There’s good reason to want the economy to be in a position to restart, but why does it have to restart in the same place?

That was what was so unpopular about the bailouts of 2008-2009. Government money didn’t just save the financial system, it saved the banks and the bankers who arguably had crashed everything to begin with.

This time around, you can already see the problem with the first bailout candidates: the airlines and Boeing. The airlines go into the crisis short of cash because they spent it all on stock buybacks. Robert Reich isn’t having it:

The biggest U.S. airlines spent 96% of free cash flow over the last decade to buy back shares of their own stock in order to boost executive bonuses and please wealthy investors. Now, they expect taxpayers to bail them out to the tune of $50 billion. It’s the same old story.

Boeing entered the crisis in a weakened state because of safety problems with the 737 Max. The company cut corners and airplanes crashed. If they’d won that gamble, the profits would have stayed with the company and its shareholders. But they lost it, and now they need to be bailed out with public money.

And those are just the companies that need help right away. Once we establish the pattern of bailing out big companies hurt by the virus, how do we say no to the companies that run out of money in June or August? How much will that take?

There’s also a too-big-to-fail problem again. The main proposal for helping small business is via government loans. The proprietor of a dog-walking service in Philadelphia doesn’t see the sense of that:

We have no idea what sort of landscape we will return to when this is all over. Will we come back to 90% of our previous business if this ends in two months? If this goes on for four months, will 50% of our clients be laid off themselves and unable to rehire us? If this goes for a year, will we have any clients or employees left? Will we have to start from scratch with nothing but our reputation?

Two weeks ago, a bank would not underwrite a loan without a clear business plan. Right now, none of us can do any sort of business forecasting for what our revenue is going to look after this Covid-19 pandemic recedes, but we’re being told to take out loans. That is not sound business advice. It’s the government passing the buck to the very job creators that employ millions of Americans.

But a major employer like Boeing will probably get free money, not just a loan.

The corruption problem. The most efficient way to distribute whatever cash the government sets aside for bailouts is to have a simple process overseen by a single person. In the current proposal, that person would be Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

The problem, though, is that a streamlined process is open to corruption. Maybe WalMart gets bailout money because its owners support conservative causes, and Amazon doesn’t because Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Or maybe Amazon does get money, but not until after the Post starts covering the Trump more favorably. (That’s a bad example, because neither WalMart nor Amazon is likely to need bailing out, but you see the point.)

That would be a disturbing possibility in the best of times, but it’s particularly troublesome with the current administration and its history of self-dealing. The gist of the Ukraine scandal was that Trump is willing to use the powers of his office to gain unfair political advantages. How can he (or a Treasury Secretary who has shown no ability to say no to him) be trusted to dole out large sums of money?

And while we’re at it: If the hotel industry ultimately gets a bailout, won’t a chunk of that money go straight to the Trump Organization? How can we trust the Trump administration to judge fairly the amount of public subsidy the President’s business needs?

The Warren principles. That’s why Senator Warren has put forward eight principles that would control bailouts:

• Companies must maintain payrolls and use federal funds to keep people working.
• Businesses must provide $15 an hour minimum wage quickly but no later than a year from the end
• Companies would be permanently banned from engaging in stock buybacks.
• Companies would be barred from paying out dividends or executive bonuses while they receive federal funds and the ban would be in place for three years.
• Businesses would have to provide at least one seat to workers on their board of directors, though it could be more depending on size of the rescue package.
• Collective bargaining agreements must remain in place.
• Corporate boards must get shareholder approval for all political spending.
• CEOs must certify their companies are complying with the rules and face criminal penalties for violating them.

The legislation Majority Leader McConnell is trying to push through the Senate doesn’t fulfill those conditions. In particular, it includes $500 billion for Secretary Mnuchin to distribute with very few strings attached. Paul Krugman had already criticized such a proposal in advance:

as Congress allocates money to reduce the economic pain from Covid-19, it shouldn’t give Trump any discretion over how the money is spent. For example, while it may be necessary to provide funds for some business bailouts, Congress must specify the rules for who gets those funds and under what conditions. Otherwise you know what will happen: Trump will abuse any discretion to reward his friends and punish his enemies. That’s just who he is.

According to Politico:

the language drafted by Senate Republicans also allows Mnuchin to withhold the names of the companies that receive federal money and how much they get for up to six months if he so decides.

So if he were to simply hand a few billion to the Trump Organization in mid-May, no one need hear about it until after the election.

It’s been another week of exponential growth in confirmed COVID-19 cases, as ramped-up testing reveals both new and previously existing cases, and social distancing has not yet bent the curve.

Politically, there are two issues: whether the federal government is doing everything it could or should be doing to fight the virus and support the healthcare system, and what kind of aid is necessary to keep people and businesses afloat until normal economic activity can resume. The first issue centers on the executive branch and the second on Congress, which had hoped (but so far has failed) to come to agreement on a $1.8 trillion stimulus/bailout package.

This week’s featured article is going to be about the economic issue. I don’t have a solution to present, but I thought I’d set up how to think about the question. That post is called “Economies Aren’t Built to Stop and Restart”. I still have a lot of work to do on that, so it probably won’t be out until 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will start with some personal observations about the life of social distance, then go on to give the numbers about the spread of the virus and dive into the political issues. It’s kind of amazing how many stories that would ordinarily lead the Sift are down in the weeds somewhere: the Democratic primary race, the senators accused of insider trading, what some are calling Netanyahu’s “coup” in Israel, and so on. And once again we need a light-hearted closing, so I’ll pass on videos of two excursions through the history of music. That should be out by 1.

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.

– President Franklin Roosevelt
First Inaugural Address (3-4-1933)

This week’s featured post is “Interesting (but not necessarily important) Questions and Answers about the Pandemic“.

This week everybody was talking about the continued spread of COVID-19

Last Monday, I reported that the US had 564 confirmed coronavirus cases and had suffered 22 deaths. Today, the latest numbers I can find are 3602 cases and 66 deaths. If you just look at those raw numbers and imagine that everything stops here, it wouldn’t be a crisis worth the response it’s getting. But if you look at the trajectory — deaths tripling in a week and cases up more than six times — you begin to understand.

But since we have a continuing shortage of testing kits, the number of cases is suspect. Everyone believes the number is higher, and some experts believe it is MUCH higher.

Like Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton:

“Just the fact of community spread, says that at least 1 percent, at the very least, 1 percent of our population is carrying this virus in Ohio today,” Acton said. “We have 11.7 million people. So the math is over 100,000.”

And Johns Hopkins Professor Marty Makary:

“Don’t believe the numbers when you see, even on our Johns Hopkins website, that 1,600 Americans have the virus,” he said. “No, that means 1,600 got the test, tested positive. There are probably 25 to 50 people who have the virus for every one person who is confirmed.”

He added: “I think we have between 50,000 and half a million cases right now walking around in the United States.”

As he has been doing regularly for some time now, Vice President Pence promised yesterday that millions of test kits are going to be available very soon. Tests from WHO were available by the end of February, but the US decided not to use them. So the virus got a 2-3 week head start.

The public discussion of COVID-19 sounds very different if your immune system isn’t in good shape.

When news of COVID-19 started to spread, there were two popular responses. The first was to rush to the store, buying N95 masks and hand sanitizer until shelves were bare. The second was to shrug and comfort the masses because mostly immunocompromised people—people like me—would die.

Trump officially declared a state of emergency on Friday, but he continues to lag behind the pace of the virus. Sunday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called on Trump to make a national policy for closing businesses.

When one state unilaterally closes businesses, people typically cross state lines to look for open businesses elsewhere. If the purpose is to keep our citizens home and out of crowded spaces, such inconsistency in state policies is counterproductive. There should be a uniform federal standard for when cities and states should shut down commerce and schools, or cancel events.

And he asked for the Army to help outfit temporary hospitals that will be necessary when our current hospitals are full.

States cannot build more hospitals, acquire ventilators or modify facilities quickly enough. At this point, our best hope is to utilize the Army Corps of Engineers to leverage its expertise, equipment and people power to retrofit and equip existing facilities — like military bases or college dormitories — to serve as temporary medical centers. Then we can designate existing hospital beds for the acutely ill.

Additional hospital beds aren’t necessary yet. But if we wait until they are, it will be too late.

and canceling everything

A week ago social distancing was an idea that some of us were starting to take seriously and some of us weren’t. This week the places you might have been planning to go began to close: first the NBA, and then March Madness and just about all the other sporting events. Then Broadway theaters, conferences, meetings of more than X people, schools, and so on.

Yesterday, the governor of my state, Massachusetts, closed the schools, stopped restaurants from serving anything but take-out, and banned gatherings of more than 25 people. Similar orders were given by governors of several states, like Ohio and Illinois.

My church “met” virtually over the internet yesterday. When my town held an election Saturday, the monitors sat behind two tables rather than one and pointed to a ballot rather than handing it to me. People waiting to vote were instructed to stay six feet apart.

Nothing symbolizes France more than the cafes. But Prime Minister Édouard Philippe just closed them all. BBC reports:

In Spain, people are banned from leaving home except for buying essential supplies and medicines, or for work. … Italy, which has recorded more than 1,440 deaths, began a nationwide lockdown [last] Monday.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer pointed out an important difference between how the pandemic is hitting factory workers and professionals: “You can’t build an airliner at home.”

An article from August that is even more relevant now: Andy Borowitz displayed a picture of Donald Trump under the headline “Unskilled Man Fears He Will Lose Job in Recession“.

and the Democratic nomination

The big question after Biden’s wins Tuesday in Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, and Idaho was: Is it over?

Yeah, it kind of is. 538’s model now rates Biden’s chances of being nominated above 99%. His delegate lead is not prohibitive in itself. (NPR’s delegate tracker shows Biden with 890 to Sanders’ 736, with 1991 needed.) But he also leads in the four large states voting tomorrow.

Biden has a 38 percentage-point advantage over Sanders in Florida — at 65 percent to 27 percent — according to a Gravis Marketing survey released last Friday. … Biden also leads Sanders in Illinois by 21 percentage points, according to an Emerson poll; by 22 points in Ohio, according to an Emerson survey; and by 17 points in Arizona, according to a Univision/ASU poll.

With California already in the books, it’s hard to see where Sanders turns this around. He needed a knock-out in the one-on-one debate last night, and he did not appear to get one.

For what it’s worth, my take on the debate was that both candidates showed a command of the situation far beyond our current president. Biden’s headline-making pledge to select a woman as VP left me with a well-duh response. Of course a male Democratic nominee will need a female VP.

The Sanders supporters who keep implying Biden suffers from dementia need to stop. He fumbled some words (as did Sanders), but looked plenty sharp Sunday night.

and the economic fallout

When I watched Trump’s press conference Friday, the Fed had just announced it was cutting interest rates to zero. Trump thought this was fabulous news. (“I think people in the market should be very happy.”) I thought it looked like panic. Somebody at the Fed must have just seen some truly scary projections about economic activity.

Apparently, I’m a more typical investor than Trump is. This morning the Dow is down around 2000 points, wiping out all the gains from Friday.

One of the things I find most puzzling in Trump’s thought process is how short-term it is. He really cares about the hour-to-hour swings in the market, and tries to influence them. But if he says something misleading that gets a rise on Friday, by Monday everybody knows and the market goes the other way. So what was accomplished?

Ditto for the way he’s been slow-walking the news about the virus. If all this were happening in late October, I could see the sense (but not the morality) of trying to happy-talk people past the election. But by November we’ll all know how this came out. Some number of people will be dead, and we’ll all know what that number is. What’s the point of trying to massage our expectations?

This isn’t a partisan thing; it’s Trump. All other presidents of either party have asked themselves “How do I make things come out right?” Trump asks: “How do I keep my illusions going for a little longer?”

“I don’t take responsibility at all” was said in response to a very specific issue (the delay in virus-testing), but it’s going to be the epitaph of the entire Trump administration. When the definitive history of this period is written, that will be the title.

The House and Secretary Mnuchin agreed on an aid package to help people who are victims of either the coronavirus or of the economic contraction it is causing. The Senate will take up the bill this week, after taking a long weekend off. The Senate’s lack of urgency is a bit disturbing.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in a statement that he hopes the Senate “will approach this with a level head and pass a bill that does more good than harm — or, if it won’t, pass nothing at all.”

Let it never be said that I will turn down a good idea just because it comes from Ted Cruz:

If you can buy a gift certificate from a local small business—a restaurant or a toy store or a hair salon—now is a good time to do so. Small acts of kindness, of love in our communities, repeated a million times over, that’s how we will make it through together.

and you also might be interested in …

The world doesn’t stop just because we’re preoccupied with something else.

Putin in January unveiled a major shake-up of Russian politics and a constitutional overhaul, which the Kremlin billed as a redistribution of power from the presidency to parliament.

But Putin, 67, who has dominated Russia’s political landscape for two decades as either president or prime minister, made a dramatic appearance in parliament on Tuesday to back a new amendment that would allow him to ignore a current constitutional ban on him running again in 2024.

Speaking of Putin, Trump says he’s “strongly considering” pardoning Michael Flynn. Pardons are the final stage in Trump’s obstruction of justice regarding his Russia connection. The two big questions in my mind at the start of the Mueller investigation were (1) Why did so many Trump campaign people have so many interactions with Russians? and (2) Why did they all lie when they were asked about it?

We never got answers.

and let’s close with something adorable

There appears to be an empty bucket right over there, but all six puppies want to be in the same bucket. Be sure to watch all the way to the big finish.

You don’t really need to know any of this, but I found it engaging.

The major media is sensitive to the criticism that they’re raising panic, so they garnish their we’re-all-going-to-die coverage with practical information for those of us stuck at home. These public-minded segments answer important practical questions like: What should I do if I get sick? What’s the right way to wash my hands? What disinfectants kill the virus? How should I practice social distancing? And so on.

I’m sure you’ve seen most of those questions discussed more than once, so I’ve just linked to sample articles without rehashing. That kind of stuff isn’t what this post is about.

But you can’t have this many people focusing on a single subject without a few interesting things getting written. The questions below may not have the practical importance as the ones above — some are entirely frivolous — but in my purely idiosyncratic opinion, they’re fascinating.

Why are people hoarding toilet paper? I’ve observed it locally and heard reports from all over the world: Hoarders have been cleaning out stores’ supplies of toilet paper. Numerous Facebook friends posted pictures of empty shelves, while others traded tips about which stores might still have a few rolls.

Most of the other empty shelves in the supermarket have made some kind of sense: There are clear reasons why wipes and hand sanitizers are in demand. And masks; you can argue about how effective they are, but they’re an obvious thing to try. Everybody suddenly wants to disinfect their counters and other surfaces, so it’s been hard to find bleach. (All those over-priced organic no-harsh-chemicals cleaning products are suddenly much less desirable.)

But hoarding toilet paper? Economist Jay Zagorsky points out in The Boston Globe that classical supply-and-demand economics has no justification for it. Other than the hoarding itself, there’s no demand problem: The pandemic doesn’t make us use additional toilet paper. There’s also no supply problem: The US makes 90% of its own toilet paper, and most of what we import comes from Canada and Mexico, where transportation is working just fine.

So why, then? When pragmatic thinking comes up short, it’s tempting to look for psychological explanations. So Time goes Freudian:

What is it about toilet paper—specifically the prospect of an inadequate supply of it—that makes us so anxious? Some of the answer is obvious. Toilet paper has primal—even infantile—associations, connected with what is arguably the body’s least agreeable function in a way we’ve been taught from toddlerhood.

And Niki Edwards from the Queensland University of Technology (evidently they’re hoarding toilet paper “down under” too) echoes:

Toilet paper symbolises control. We use it to “tidy up” and “clean up”. It deals with a bodily function that is somewhat taboo. When people hear about the coronavirus, they are afraid of losing control. And toilet paper feels like a way to maintain control over hygiene and cleanliness.

Other writers (I’ve lost the references) point out that while hoarding toilet paper is an irrational response to the pandemic, it’s not that irrational: Toilet paper is easy to store, it doesn’t go bad, and you will eventually use it up.

But I think Zagorsky ultimately has the best explanation. It’s economic, but comes from behavioral economics rather than classical economics: When people feel endangered, they instinctively want to eliminate the risk rather than mitigate it. So when faced with a risk we can’t eliminate completely, we are tempted to divert our attention to a related risk we can eliminate, even if it’s not the main thing that threatens us. (The economic term for this is zero-risk bias.) So the logic of the toilet-paper hoarder is most likely to go something like this: “Maybe we are all going to die, but at least I won’t run out of toilet paper.”

How does soap kill viruses? Most of us learned about soap long before we learned about science, so soap holds an almost magical significance for us. But now that we’re washing our hands twenty times a day, it’s hard not to wonder if we’re being superstitious: I know Mom said it was important, but … really?

The answer turns out to be: Yeah, really. Simple soap, the stuff that’s older than recorded history, kills all sorts of viruses. The NYT’s Ferris Jabr covers this pretty well. The full article has a lot of fascinating detail, but here’s the gist:

Soap is made of pin-shaped molecules, each of which has a hydrophilic head — it readily bonds with water — and a hydrophobic tail, which shuns water and prefers to link up with oils and fats. … When you wash your hands with soap and water, you surround any microorganisms on your skin with soap molecules. The hydrophobic tails of the free-floating soap molecules attempt to evade water; in the process, they wedge themselves into the lipid envelopes of certain microbes and viruses, prying them apart.

Now that I can’t go to bars, restaurants, and performances, what should I binge-watch on TV? If you’d asked me last fall, I would have picked out March as a particularly good time to be housebound, because I usually spend large chunks of the month couch-potatoing in front of the NCAA basketball tournament. If I have any TV time still available, NBA teams are maneuvering for playoff positions, and hope springs eternal in baseball’s spring-training games.

Well, that plan didn’t work out. But in the streaming era we still have plenty of choices about what to watch.

There are two basic theories here: One says you should use the opportunity social distancing provides to catch up on all the high-quality classics you’ve missed. The other says that life in near-quarantine is stressful enough, so you should chill out by watching stuff as comforting and unchallenging as possible. (In other words, “The Walking Dead” or “The Strain” might not be a good choice right now.)

If you go the high-quality route, I recommend signing up with HBO and watching all five seasons of “The Wire”. Now that “Game of Thrones” is complete, going back to the beginning and seeing how it all hangs together is a worthy project I still haven’t tackled. I’ve also recently gotten the PBS app, through which I’ve streamed “Poldark”, “Sanditon”, “Vienna Blood”, “Modus”, and now “Beecham House”.

But that’s just me. For expert advice, check out The Guardian’s “100 best TV shows of the 21st Century“.

On the other hand, comfort TV (like comfort food) is too personal to find on some expert’s list. I recommend thinking back to some long lost era of your life and recalling what your favorite show was back then. When I ask that question, I drift back to the 80s and remember that I haven’t seen most episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in at least 30 years.

A third option entirely is to surprise yourself with something you’ve never heard of before. Decider has 10 suggestions, most of which you can find on NetFlix. (I can vouch for “Slings and Arrows”.)

What is “flattening the curve”? And why does it help? The whole point of everything closing and people staying home is to “flatten the curve”. A bunch of sources have images that illustrate curve-flattening. Here’s the one from Wired:

(The Washington Post also has some fabulous graphics that simulate disease spread.)

Left to their own devices, epidemics spread exponentially as long as there are still plenty of new people to infect. And when something bad grows exponentially “everything looks fine until it doesn’t.” The mistake Italy made was to wait until it had a significant number of cases before it started shutting everything down. The right time to shut everything down is when that still seems like a ridiculous over-reaction. (If you do it right, the spike in cases never arrives, and critics conclude that you didn’t know what you were talking about.)

If the number of cases rises too fast, the healthcare system gets swamped, which leads to a whole new set of problems. (It’s bad enough to be sick, but it’s much worse to be sick when nobody has any place to put you.) Social distancing is supposed to slow down the spread, in hopes that the healthcare system might be able to deal with it.

That’s why you eliminate big-arena sports events and other large gatherings — so that one sick guy can’t infect 50 or 100 others. If you can’t stop the virus, make it work harder — it will spread by infecting two people here and three people there, not dozens at a time.

There’s also some hope that if you slow down the virus enough, you can affect not just the distribution of cases, but their total number as well. That’s the lesson of how two cities handled the 1918 Spanish flu.

What the heck did the UK just decide to do? Experts around the world advise that governments shut down places where people meet, encourage social distancing, and hope to flatten the curve. But in United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has a different idea.

On Friday, the UK government’s chief science adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said on BBC Radio 4 that one of “the key things we need to do” is to “build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission.”

The “herd immunity” notion is easy to make fun of, because it sounds like a let-the-virus-run-wild model. But it’s a little more nuanced than that.

A UK starting assumption is that a high number of the population will inevitably get infected whatever is done – up to 80%. As you can’t stop it, so it is best to manage it. … The [UK’s model] wants infection BUT of particular categories of people. The aim of the UK is to have as many lower risk people infected as possible. Immune people cannot infect others; the more there are the lower the risk of infection. That’s herd immunity. Based on this idea, at the moment the govt wants people to get infected, up until hospitals begin to reach capacity. At that they want to reduce, but not stop infection rate.

I understand this through a thought experiment: Imagine that you had some foolproof way to keep the uninfected-but-vulnerable part of the population safe for a limited time. (Imagine you shot them into orbit or something, but you couldn’t leave them up there forever.) One thing you might try is to have the rest of the population — the Earth-bound part — get sick and recover as fast as possible. Then when the vulnerable people came back, the virus would have a hard time finding them, because they’d be surrounded by people who had developed immunity.

Go back to the Philadelphia/St.Louis graph above. Philadelphia certainly made the wrong choice for its citizens, but if you had managed to hide in a deep mine shaft until November 20 or so, after you came out you’d do much better in Philadelphia.

So the UK government is advising people over 70 (and other vulnerable folks, I suspect) to “self-isolate” while younger and stronger people get sick.

It’s not a completely insane idea, but I’ll be amazed if it works.

How did the Federal Reserve “inject” $1.5 trillion into the economy? And where’s my share? On Thursday, the Fed announced that it was “injecting” $1.5 trillion into the economy. Immediately, progressive social media lit up with comparisons to the cost of Medicare For All or the Green New Deal. Bernie Sanders, for example, tweeted:

When we say it’s time to provide health care to all our people, we’re told we can’t afford it. But if the stock market is in trouble, no problem! The government can just hand out $1.5 trillion to calm bankers on Wall Street.

Vox explains why this is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The Fed didn’t spend the money, it loaned it to banks (at interest, with collateral). The point of the Fed’s move is that loan demand is about to spike: As events get cancelled and people stop traveling and going out, businesses that used to make a profit are going to lose money for a while. The only way they’ll keep going is if they get loans. The Fed’s loans to banks will turn into business loans that hopefully will make the difference between, say, Jet Blue having a disappointing quarter and Jet Blue declaring bankruptcy.

If things work out as expected — the disruption from COVID-19 lasts for a quarter or two, and then the economy more-or-less goes back to normal — all the loans will be repaid and the Fed will get its money back.

That wouldn’t happen if the Fed created money and spent it on healthcare or infrastructure or something else. Whether or not those things would be good ideas, they’re not anything like creating money and loaning it to banks.

It should be fairly obvious that a repo market intervention isn’t like, say, printing $1.5 trillion to pay for an expansion of health care. If the Fed funded Medicare-for-all that way, it would not get $1.5 trillion back plus interest. It would just spend a whole lot of money on doctor’s and nurse’s salaries, MRI equipment, hospital mortgages, etc., and never get it back.

A better comparison might have been the housing crisis of 2008-2009. If the homeowners who couldn’t pay their mortgages were good bets to have future income, and if the houses themselves were worth enough to cover the loans, then it might have made sense to create money to keep those households going until the Great Recession was over. That would have been a similar loan-and-get-repaid scenario. But that kind of retail transaction would require a different kind of institution: something more like the post-office banks Senator Warren has proposed.

What does the COVID-19 virus actually look like? Part of the terror of classic plagues like the Black Death was their invisibility: You barricaded yourself in your home to hide from something you couldn’t see. But with today’s advanced microscopy, we’re not only able to see the virus, but to start designing the antibodies we need to beat it.

Let’s blow that last quadrant up a little more:

Somebody (sorry, I don’t remember who) commented on Facebook the other day that “2020 has been a tough couple of years.” Anyway, this week was dominated by the same troika of stories that have been front-and-center for a while now: the virus, the economic collapse, and the presidential race.

Media coverage of the virus bounces between apocalyptic this-is-why-there-will-be-many-megadeaths stories and practical tips like here’s-how-to-wash-your-hands. I assume you’ve seen plenty of both, so the featured post this week will instead focus on the interesting sidebar stories, like “Why exactly are people hoarding toilet paper?” and “What should you binge-watch on TV now that everything is closed?” That post is called “Interesting (but not necessarily important) Questions and Answers about the Pandemic”. It should be out shortly.

If the Fed thought the markets would be encourages to see interest rates go to zero, they’re finding out differently this morning. At the moment, futures on the Dow are down about 4.5%. Personally, I interpreted the Fed’s message as “Holy shit! We just saw some numbers that scared the crap out of us.”

My own governor (Baker of Massachusetts) just closed everything yesterday evening. Governors all over the country are doing the same. (Except in West Virginia, which still hasn’t had its first verified coronavirus case. Apparently no one goes there.) So the weekly summary will talk about the string of cancellations, give the numbers on the virus spread, consider whether the Democratic primary campaign is over yet, and discuss what else might be happening in the world (Hello, President-for-Life Putin!) while our attention has been elsewhere. We all need something cute, so I’ll close with a charming video of puppies  trying to crowd into a basket. I’ll predict the summary posts by noon EDT.

• It can be protest, which may accomplish something if enough people do it for long enough. I think about protests in Poland, which have prevented some authoritarian actions there. 
• It can be subverting the paradigm -- I think about the Norwegians in WWII and their use of humor against the Nazis, destroying their morale: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/during-the-nazi-occupation-of-norway-humor-was-the-secret-weapon
• It can be refusal to take action, but this must be clearly because the action is wrong and not because the person doesn't want to do it. And the action has to be clearly wrong. Civil disobedience is my favorite example: occupying buildings and other public spaces, risking arrest to protest war, violence, disruption of rights, and corporate irresponsibility.
• It can be social media, which is the resistance I see the most in America. The issue, though, is the swell of resistance is pitted against conspiracy theories, Russian bots, and other misinformation. We must prove our assertions with truth, even when accurate information seems useless -- the truth will out.
• It can't be offensive -- which encompasses everything from riots to mailing dangerous materials to bomb threats to violence.  Resorting to violence makes the resister look like an extremist, which means they've lost. 
• It can't have worse consequences than what the resister is fighting. I think about people who refuse to vote if their presidential candidate isn't nominated. By inaction, they may be choosing the greater of two evils.

So, I was working up the next installment of my series about using a portable communion set when the coronavirus outbreak created a very long and stressful week. (As you well know.) And this was just the beginning for the United States, western Europe and Australia where most of my readers come from.

Churches and temples of all kinds have closed, at least for this weekend, and for many at least through the end of March. We might still be under some kind of restriction through Holy Week and Easter (April 12) now. That’s a hard thought, but people have had to manage living with epidemics before, and it’s during difficult times that you learn to make alterations and concessions that both keep people safe and fulfill religious desires and duties. This weekend we’ll see a new flowering of online services. What’s next? Perhaps a renaissance of mainstream religious broadcasting?

But with Holy Week (specifically Maundy Thursday) and Easter, you have communion services. Unlike the long-televised Catholic mass “for shut-ins” there’s not much of a custom for broadcasting the Lord’s Supper, at least not at the Reformed end where we come from. In part because, apart from the Campbell-Stone traditions — it’s still a “special service,” a break from the normal Sunday preaching service. The Lord’s Supper, too, is felt but low Reformed administration of the ordinance isn’t much to look at if you’re not in the middle of it. You might ordinarily broadcast a sermon, but not the sacrament.

So, what to do without risking the spread of a deadly illness? I wanted to introduce the thought, and in short order review the history and map out some options.  Publishing this, to make some momentum…

I now began to consider seriously with myself concerning my own case, and how I should dispose of myself; that is to say, whether I should resolve to stay in London or shut up my house and flee, as many of my neighbours did. I have set this particular down so fully, because I know not but it may be of moment to those who come after me, if they come to be brought to the same distress, and to the same manner of making their choice; and therefore I desire this account may pass with them rather for a direction to themselves to act by than a history of my actings, seeing it may not be of one farthing value to them to note what became of me.

I had two important things before me: the one was the carrying on my business and shop, which was considerable, and in which was embarked all my effects in the world; and the other was the preservation of my life in so dismal a calamity as I saw apparently was coming upon the whole city, and which, however great it was, my fears perhaps, as well as other people’s, represented to be much greater than it could be.

– Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

This week’s featured post is “Coronavirus Reaches My Town, and other notes“.

This week everybody was talking about Joe Biden

It’s hard to remember that just two weeks ago, the talking heads were saying that Super Tuesday might give Bernie Sanders an insurmountable lead in the delegate count. The splintered field of his opponents might be able to deny him a first-ballot victory, but none would get close enough to claim that they deserved the nomination instead.

Then South Carolina happened. Joe Biden won big, particularly among black voters (who hadn’t been a big factor in the previous contests). Then Tom Steyer dropped out of the race. Then Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden. (Trevor Noah: “We all know that once a gay guy sets a trend, white women won’t be far behind.”)

The ground seemed to be shifting, but it still looked like Sanders would come out of Super Tuesday with a delegate lead, though maybe not an insurmountable one.

And then it was Super Tuesday. And while Sanders did win the California primary (or so we think, the final results are still not in), Biden swept the South by such large margins (and also won in Minnesota and Massachusetts) that he became the delegate leader. That caused Mike Bloomberg to withdraw and endorse Biden. Then Elizabeth Warren (who I voted for) also dropped out. (More about her below.)

Tomorrow is another round of primaries, with basically two candidates rather than half a dozen, and now the talking heads are wondering if Biden will emerge with an insurmountable lead.

I’m thinking we should maybe wait and see. A series of unlikely things just happened bang-bang-bang, so I’m reluctant to assume that everything will settle down and be predictable from here on.

The analysis of Michigan (which votes tomorrow, along with Mississippi, Missouri, Washington state, North Dakota, and Idaho) is particularly interesting: Sanders narrowly won Michigan over Hillary Clinton in 2016, a surprise victory that kept his campaign going at a time when things were beginning to look hopeless.

He won then on the strength of his support from white working-class voters, particularly rural and small-town ones. But something has happened to that support between 2016 and 2020.

Mr. Sanders has so far failed to match his 2016 strength across the white, working-class North this year, and that suggests it will be hard for him to win Michigan.

This pattern has held without exception this primary season. It was true in Iowa and New Hampshire against Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. It was true in Maine, Minnesota, Massachusetts and even Vermont on Super Tuesday against Mr. Biden.

Over all, Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Sanders by 10 points, 38 percent to 28 percent, in counties across Maine, Minnesota and Massachusetts where white voters made up at least 80 percent of the electorate and where college graduates represented less than 40 percent of the electorate.

One possibility: Sanders’ 2016 support was more anti-Hillary than pro-Bernie. And that raises the question: Did traditionally minded voters support a man over a woman, without ever enlisting in the progressive movement?

Meanwhile, let’s think about what did happen on Super Tuesday. My social media feed includes a lot of Sanders supporters, who were quick to see a DNC conspiracy behind Biden’s resurgence. I’m seeing a lot of “The DNC is screwing up the same way it did in 2016” posts.

However, it’s hard for me to see what the DNC has to do with anything. The candidates all did sensible candidate-like things: They dropped out after a major defeat left them without a viable path to their goal, and they endorsed the remaining candidate whose policies best matched the ones they’d been running on.

The real authors of these surprising two weeks have been the voters. Attributing Biden’s surge to “the DNC” or “the billionaire class” simply ignores the millions of people who voted for him. It’s especially disturbing given that Biden’s vote totals were driven largely by black voters, who have been disenfranchised and depersonalized often enough in American history, without liberals doing it again now. Michael Harriot at The Root is just not having it.

Sanders’ political failings are his own, and black people are not here to channel the political yearnings of white progressives. We are not here to carry your water or clean up your mess.

Blaming the DNC also allows the progressive movement to put aside a bunch of challenging questions, like: Why aren’t more voters attracted to progressive proposals that are intended to benefit them? Does the movement need to change those policies? Or the messaging around those policies? Or the kinds of candidates the movement puts forward?

Why did black voters in particular flock to Biden? Why didn’t the young voters Bernie has been counting on show up in the numbers he expected? What does that say about the case for Bernie beating Trump in November if he does get the nomination?

Ezra Klein makes a good point: Persuading former rivals to unite around you is precisely the kind of skill presidents need.

The work of the president requires convincing legislators in your party to support your agenda, sometimes at the cost of your political or policy ambitions. If Sanders and his team don’t figure out how to do it, they could very well lose to Biden, and even if they win, they’ll be unable to govern.

Persuading the Amy Klobuchars of the world to support you, even when they know it’s a risk, is exactly what the president needs to do to pass bills, whether that’s a Green New Deal or Medicare-for-all or just an infrastructure package. Biden, for all his weak debate performances and meandering speeches, is showing he still has that legislator’s touch. That he can unite the party around him, and convince even moderate Democrats to support a liberal agenda, is literally the case for his candidacy.

Sanders hasn’t demonstrated that same skill over the course of this primary, or his career. Worse, his most enthusiastic supporters treat that kind of transactional politicking with contempt. Senators like Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren, who co-sponsored Sanders’s Medicare-for-all bill but quibbled with details or wanted to soften sections, were treated not as allies to cultivate but as traitors to exile.

We’re in the season where people try to construct their dream ticket, usually without thinking about whether the two people actually get along. So what about Biden/Sanders or Sanders/Warren or Biden/Klobuchar or Biden/Buttigieg or some other combination of candidates?

I’ve been saying from the beginning that the ticket needs to be integrated by gender and race, and that seems more important than ever now that it has come down to two old white men. Either Sanders or Biden would lucky to get Michelle Obama to take the VP slot, though I don’t think she will. Either Kamala Harris or Stacey Abrams would make a good Biden VP. Harris is probably too moderate for Bernie, but Abrams could work. I’m having trouble coming up with Hispanic options; AOC is not old enough to be eligible.

When Drew Millard went looking for a Democratic-establishment Biden voter to interview, he didn’t have to look far: His Dad, who chairs his county’s Democratic Party, and didn’t care for being cast as the Establishment. “That irritates the crap out of me, I gotta be honest.” But his account is interesting:

As soon as Biden won South Carolina, I knew exactly what I had to do: I had to vote for Joe on Super Tuesday. Nobody called me, I didn’t get together and plot anything, I just knew in my gut I had to do that. Everybody I heard from in the next day or so said the exact same thing. I do believe that’s what happened in all those states. Because at some point we’ve gotta settle on somebody.

and the virus

See the featured article.

and Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren’s exit from the campaign was a sad day for me and for a lot of the people I know. (We’re in that educated-white-liberal demographic that is her base. We believe in facts, and we like people who are really smart.) Women particularly took it hard, because it will be at least another four years before we have the first woman president. And if both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren weren’t good enough, what’s it going to take?

It’s hard to look at that diverse collection of qualified candidates we had a year ago, and conclude that merit alone winnowed it down to the two septuagenarian straight white guys. (John Hickenlooper is a straight white guy, but at 68, he still missed the cut.)

But since we’re the educated white liberal demographic, our pain seldom goes unexpressed. Here are a few well-written articles:

• “Warren’s Loss Hurts. Let Women Grieve.” by Versa Sharma in Now This. “And here’s the key: the default lens through much of our news and media is filtered through a very male point of view. That determines what issues are elevated, which candidates get the most coverage, who is presented and understood to be a viable candidate, all based on conscious and unconscious biases.”
• “America Punished Elizabeth Warren for her Competence” by Megan Garber in The Atlantic. “To run for president is to endure a series of controlled humiliations. … The accusation of condescension, however, is less about enforced humiliation than it is about enforced humility. It cannot be disentangled from Warren’s gender. The paradox is subtle, but punishing all the same: The harder she works to prove to the public that she is worthy of power—the more evidence she offers of her competence—the more ‘condescending,’ allegedly, she becomes. And the more that other anxious quality, likability, will be called into question.”
• “Let’s Face It, America: We Didn’t Deserve Elizabeth Warren.” by Amanda Marcotte: “Americans apparently couldn’t see that she is a once-in-a-generation talent and reward her for it with the presidency. That is a shameful blight on us. She wrecked Bloomberg in the debate and, in the process, may well have spared us from seeing a presidential election purchased by a billionaire. We responded as we so often do for women who go above the call of duty: We thanked her for her service and promoted less qualified men above her.
  “This feels personal to women, and it should. The same forces that pushed Warren out of the race — such as asking her to do the work of figuring out how to finance Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan, and then criticizing her for it while he skated by on generalities — offer a microcosm of how we treat women generally, and the reasons why women work so hard both at home and on the job yet make less money.”

Finally, watch the interview Warren did with Rachel Maddow right after dropping out.

Politics in the Trump Era is a series of disillusionments. Trump’s victory blew up my belief in the Power of Truth. No American politician has ever spat on Truth as contemptuously as Trump, and here he is. And now Warren’s defeat emphasizes  that you can’t get to be president — or even make it to the Democratic convention — by caring about people and figuring out how to solve their problems. We prefer men who don’t have a plan for that.

and you also might be interested in …

In Tuesday’s Washington Post Daniel Drezner said what I’ve been thinking about the Trump regime’s deal with the Taliban:

Pretty much everything Trump’s critics say about this deal is correct. It probably will not hold. It throws a regional allied government under the bus. It shreds America’s reputation and credibility. The thing is, Trump has already done all of this for the past three years — not just in Afghanistan but in Europe, Asia and the rest of the greater Middle East. The United States has paid the price of the disaster that is Donald Trump’s diplomacy. Maybe, just maybe, it is time to accrue some of the benefits — like extricating the country from a generation-long morass.

The race for Alabama’s Republican Senate nomination (to challenge incumbent Democrat Doug Jones) demonstrates how far the Republican Party has devolved into a personality cult. Jeff Sessions, who held the seat before getting appointed as Trump’s first attorney general, is in a runoff with football coach Tommy Tuberville after Tuberville narrowly outpolled Sessions 32%-31% in Tuesday’s primary.

Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump’s candidacy in 2016. And in any policy sense, Sessions is a Trumpist. He was, in fact, a Trumpist before Trump was.

The primary in Alabama was a humbling experience for Mr. Sessions, who was treated as a castoff by the Republican Party he helped transform by championing a more nationalistic, anti-immigration, anti-free trade agenda years before Mr. Trump ran for office sounding those themes.

But as attorney general, he followed Justice Department rules and recused himself from overseeing an investigation he was too closely connected with: the probe into the Trump campaign’s illicit relationship with Russia. Trump wanted Sessions to obstruct justice, and Sessions refused. Trump has never forgiven Sessions for this act of loyalty to the law rather than to his boss’s personal interest.

So Tuberville’s campaign is based on the idea that he would be a better member of the Trump personality cult, and could do the Great Leader’s bidding without any of these pesky issues of conscience. Trump, meanwhile, is relishing Sessions’ distress.

This is what happens to someone who loyally gets appointed Attorney General of the United States & then doesn’t have the wisdom or courage to stare down & end the phony Russia Witch Hunt.

and let’s close with something that looks like a lot of work

There are places in China where people still do things the old-fashioned way. Here — reduced down to 11:20 — is how to grow some cotton and process it into a nice bedcover and some pillows.

COVID-19 reached my town this weekend. There’s been a case at the regional hospital and some local household is self-quarantining while waiting for test results. We’re still a long way from people dropping dead in the streets — I’ve read Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, so my imagination drifts in that direction — but nearby cases do get my attention. Preparations that seemed speculative a week ago are looking more pragmatic.

The current information, as of this morning, from Live Science:

About 564 people in the U.S. have been confirmed to have the virus. Of those, 22 people have died, with deaths in Washington (18), California (1) and Florida (2). (Globally, more than 111,000 cases have been confirmed, with 3,892 deaths.)

The percentage of US deaths (22/564 = 4%) is higher than you would expect, which probably indicates that we actually have many more cases, but haven’t found them yet. That would be because of the glitches in our testing process.

However, on Saturday (March 7), Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, FDA Commissioner, said that 1,583 people in the U.S. have been tested for COVID-19 through the CDC tests.

For comparison, South Korea is testing 15,000 people per day, and has tested 196,000 to date. The containment efforts of American local health officials have been undercut by the lack of tests. As a result, some people are being quarantined unnecessarily while others are undiagnosed and spreading the virus freely.

Just about everything connected with the virus is uncertain, so any projections should be taken with a grain of salt. I haven’t been able to find much in the way of numerical projections by qualified experts, so I will pass along (with reservations) a link to the calculations of bio-engineer (not epidemiologist) Liz Specht, who is getting quoted by a number of other people. Her main point is that if current trends hold, the US healthcare system will get swamped.

She assumes 2000 US cases on March 6 — acknowledging that the number of confirmed cases is much lower, but increasing it to adjust for the lack of testing. From there she assumes that cases double every six days which is “a typical doubling time across several epidemiological studies“. Obviously, doubling like that can’t go on forever, because the number of cases would eventually exceed the population of the planet. But it could go on for quite a while, as long as the number of infected people remains small relative to the general population.

We’re looking at about 1M US cases by the end of April, 2M by ~May 5, 4M by ~May 11, and so on.

Bad as that sounds, it’s in some ways less alarming than the projection on a slide that was presented at an American Hospital Association webinar on February 26 by Dr. James Lawler of the University of Nebraska Medical Center:

(Business Insider published the slide, but doesn’t appear to have Lawler’s cooperation; the associated article doesn’t fully explain what the slide means. I’ll observe that since Lawler’s doubling time is longer than Spect’s, his epidemic has to continue well into the summer to get 96 million cases. Some people are still hoping for seasonality, noting Singapore’s success containing the virus in a hot climate. But the World Health Organization is skeptical: “It’s a false hope to say, yes, that it will disappear like the flu. We hope it does. That would be a godsend. But we can’t make that assumption. And there is no evidence.”)

Anyway, Spect continues:

The US has about 2.8 hospital beds per 1000 people. With a population of 330M, this is ~1M beds. At any given time, 65% of those beds are already occupied. That leaves about 330k beds available nationwide (perhaps a bit fewer this time of year with regular flu season, etc). Let’s trust Italy’s numbers and assume that about 10% of cases are serious enough to require hospitalization. [Lawler’s slide estimates 5%.] … By this estimate, by about May 8th, all open hospital beds in the US will be filled.

A similar calculation has American hospitals running out of masks for its workers to wear while treating COVID-19 patients. That means health-care workers will start getting sick in fairly large numbers, leading to a shortage of them too.

Her point is not that we should all panic, but that we should all pitch in and do whatever we can to slow the spread, in hopes of mitigating the worst possibilities. So: wash your hands, stay out of crowds, cancel unnecessary gatherings, and so on. If you get sick, plan on self-quarantining and riding it out at home if you possibly can.

Now, about that lack of testing. The World Health Organization had a COVID-19 test that it was shipping all over the world — but not to the US — by the end of February. The initial batch of tests made by the CDC were defective, so all over the country, public health officials have been proceeding on guesswork: We can’t be sure who is infected and who isn’t, so our efforts to track and contain the virus have been crippled from the start.

Why the United States declined to use the WHO test, even temporarily as a bridge until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could produce its own test, remains a perplexing question … But neither the CDC nor the coronavirus task force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence would say who made the decision to forgo the WHO test and instead begin a protracted process of producing an American test, one that got delayed by manufacturing problems, possible lab contamination and logistical delays.

Reportedly, many more tests will be available soon. But in the meantime, Trump’s solution is to lie about it:

But I think, importantly, anybody, right now and yesterday, that needs a test gets a test. They’re there, they have the tests, and the tests are beautiful. Anybody that needs a test gets a test.

That claim was made Friday, during a tour of the CDC Trump did while wearing his campaign hat “Keep America Great”. Wired reporter Adam Rogers commented:

As a reporter, in general I’m not supposed to say something like this, but: The president’s statements to the press were terrifying. That press availability was a repudiation of good science and good crisis management from inside one of the world’s most respected scientific institutions. It was full of Dear Leader-ish compliments, non-sequitorial defenses of unrelated matters, attacks on an American governor, and—most importantly—misinformation about the virus and the US response. That’s particularly painful coming from inside the CDC, a longtime powerhouse in global public health now reduced to being a backdrop for grubby politics.

The Dear Leader bragged: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.” (If his meeting Monday with pharmaceutical executives was any indication, more likely the doctors were surprised by how incredibly ignorant Trump is.)

He clearly cared much more about his own credit or blame than about Americans facing a potentially deadly disease:

Trump repeatedly sought to judge his administration’s performance by the numbers of how many have been shown to have contracted the virus and comparing it to other nations — and, in doing so, appeared to be making judgments based solely on that scorecard.

He declared he would prefer to keep the thousands of passengers and crew on the cruise ship [Grand Princess] off the California coast aboard the vessel rather than bring them ashore for quarantine, though he acknowledged that Vice President Pence and other top aides were arguing for the ship to be brought to port.

“I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said. “I don’t need the numbers to double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

Trump’s attempt (amplified by Fox News) to minimize the danger of the virus has real-world consequences. Jelani Cobb tweeted:

Overheard from the person in front of me on line at CPAC last week: “I don’t believe anything the CDC says about this virus. It’s full of deep staters who want to use this to create a recession to bring down the President.”

Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz is self-quarantining after coming into contact with a carrier of the virus at CPAC.

Now we get to the economic effects.

You may be wondering why the virus is causing such huge disruptions in the investment markets. No matter how bad the outbreak gets, the worst will probably be over in a few months. In a year (or at most two), COVID-19 should be gone completely, with the vast majority of people fully recovered and ready to be as productive as ever. (The worst epidemic in modern history, the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, was followed by the Roaring 20s.) So why are stock markets plunging and long-term interest rates at record lows?

The answer is that the virus is a shock to the system, and it’s hard to predict what else might break because of that shock. Say you run an airline. A year from now people are probably going to be flying at the same rates as before and your airline should be as profitable as ever. But what if you don’t get there? Airplanes are expensive and you borrowed a bunch of money to buy yours. That looked like a sound investment decision at the time, because your company had plenty of profits to pay the interest with. But now people afraid of catching COVID-19 have stopped flying, companies have cancelled business trips, and all your profits have gone poof.

But your debt is still there, demanding repayment. And so you may be bankrupt by the time air travel picks up again. Viruses infect people, not airlines. But an airline might die from the secondary effects. Ditto for small businesses that rely on people going out in public, like restaurants and bars. Demand for their services will certainly return to normal in 2021, but they might be out of business by then. And once businesses start closing and companies start going bankrupt, a cascade can start. One company lays off its employees, and then the businesses that serve those employees are in trouble too. One defaults on its debts, and now its creditors face bankruptcy as well. When the dominoes start falling, it’s hard to predict how far the collapse will go.

The Great Recession of 2008 may have started with people defaulting on their mortgages. But things didn’t really break until Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Eventually, people who had nothing to do with real estate were losing their jobs. The demand-drop and supply-disruption caused by the virus is like the mortgage defaults. We’re waiting to see if this cycle will have its own Lehman Brothers.

Over the weekend, one possible candidate raised its head: Russia and Saudi Arabia have been arguing about how to play the drop in the oil market, with the Saudis wanting oil-exporting countries to cut production and prop up the price, and Russia hoping to use the price drop to drive more expensive producers (like the shale-oil companies in the US) into bankruptcy. This weekend, the Saudis essentially said, “If that’s what you want, Mr. Putin, we’ll give it to you good and hard.” They increased production and drove the world oil price down to $27 a barrel. (It was $63 in January.)

The US stock market opened down about 7%, with the Dow falling over 1800 points.

Such a huge price drop in oil is its own shock to the system, and it’s hard to predict what might shake loose next.

Two stories continue to dwarf everything else: the presidential race and the coronavirus. Super Tuesday confirmed the shocking extent of Biden’s South Carolina victory. And so now in a little more than two weeks, the conventional wisdom has flipped from “Bernie can’t be stopped” to “Biden can’t be stopped”. I continue to be amazed how much pundits trust their current opinion, even when it’s the exact reverse of their previous opinion. It’s like “I was wrong before, but that couldn’t possibly happen again.”

The virus continues to advance, and the country’s state of preparedness continues to be worrisome. Complicating matters, our President shows more concern about the short-term effect on his popularity than about the lives of the people he leads. Markets continue to plunge around the world, and now we’re beginning to see some secondary effects, like Saudi Arabia intentionally crashing the oil market. I have to wonder how long we have before this cycle’s version of the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, which started the real panic in 2008.

I think I’m going to break the virus developments out as its own article, which I project to post around 10 EDT. The Biden/Sanders race will get covered in the weekly summary, which I’ll target for noon. (I think it’s premature to write a “What did we learn from this primary campaign?” article, but some lessons are starting to appear.)

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren’s exit from the presidential race hit her supporters particularly hard, particularly women who wonder if the first woman president will ever arrive. Warren attracted a unusually articulate slice of the electorate, so their sorrow has been well chronicled. The summary will link to some of the best articles.

Finally, I’ll close with an 11-minute video showing the complete process of traditional Chinese crafts producing a cotton bedcover.