The Daily Parker

The Consumer Electronics Show went virtual this year, but it still had some interesting toys, like these:

Air Safety Virus Monitors

It's well-known that things like ventilation and humidity affect how well coronavirus spreads indoors. But how do you know how much ventilation is enough? Airthings sensors pair with a smartphone to monitor indoor air quality for temperature, humidity and number of people in the room (it makes a guess based on the amount of carbon dioxide present). If quality dips and virus risk rises, Airthings will suggest opening windows or making other changes. This could be helpful for businesses, such as restaurants, to know if their capacity is too high. Airthings also monitors for more traditional air quality risks like radon and mold.

Or how about:

Balcony Bee-Keeping Box

The pandemic has driven an upswing in gardening and home-canning: why not beekeeping? Italian company Beeing’s B-Box is a small hive that works with a sensor to monitor the bees’ health and environment. It also has a special design that separates the extra honeycomb from the bees, so you can harvest the honey without suiting up like an astronaut. Plus, it’s small enough to keep on even a modest urban balcony.

I don't know how my neighbors would feel about that one, but it seems perfect for the building.

Top 20 single-day death counts by disaster in the US for the past 100 years:

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Granted, I get most of my news and information from only one part of the media: the part based on evidence and reason. So I may not intuit correctly how Republicans calling for "unity" right now makes any sense at all, as I said on Sunday. I may, instead, think about how this reminds me of Lincoln's Cooper Union speech.

It turns out, I'm not the only one drawing these parallels. Jamelle Bouie makes the connection more eloquently than I do:

The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, also said that impeaching the president “will only divide our country more.”

“As leaders, we must call on our better angels and refocus our efforts on working directly for the American people,” McCarthy said in a statement given two days after he also voted not to accept the results of a free and fair election in which his favored candidate lost.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas helped lead the Senate attempt to object to Joe Biden’s victory. “My view is Congress should fulfill our responsibility under the Constitution to consider serious claims of voter fraud,” he said last Monday. Now, he too wants unity. “The attack at the Capitol was a despicable act of terrorism and a shocking assault on our democratic system,” he said in the aftermath of the violence, as calls to impeach the president grew louder and louder. “We must come together and put this anger and division behind us.”

I’m reminded, here, of one particular passage from Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 address ;at Cooper Union in Manhattan, in which he criticized the political brinkmanship of Southern elites who blamed their Northern opponents for their own threats to break the union over slavery.

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

These cries of divisiveness aren’t just the crocodile tears of bad-faith actors. They serve a purpose, which is to pre-emptively blame Democrats for the Republican partisan rancor that will follow after Joe Biden is inaugurated next week. It is another way of saying that they, meaning Democrats, shot first, so we, meaning Republicans, are absolved of any responsibility for our actions. If Democrats want some semblance of normalcy — if they want to be able to govern — then the price for Republicans is impunity for Trump.

Accountability is divisive. That’s the point. If there is a faction of the Republican Party that sees democracy itself as a threat to its power and influence, then it has to be cut off from the body politic.

Exactly. I, and a whole lot of other Democrats and moderates from both parties, have had it up to here with the lack of good faith coming from the Republican Party. They've banged away with this crap for 50 years now. Only now, after an armed incursion into the US Capitol, does it seem like my party leaders have had enough.

I really hope we've finally answered the question "what do the Republicans have to do before we finally hold them to account?"

Meanwhile, in the last 5 weeks, we have had 15 days where more Americans died of Covid-19 than died on 9/11.

The House of Representatives have started debate on a resolution to ask Vice President Mike Pence to start the process of removing the STBXPOTUS under the 25th Amendment. As you might imagine, this was not the only news story today:

• The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking officers in the US military, released a letter to the entire military reminding everyone that the military serves the Constitution, not the man who happens to hold the office of President.
• Bandy X. Lee, interviewed in the next issue of Scientific American, discusses the "shared psychosis" of the STBXPOTUS and his loyalists.
• Republican calls for "unity," as I mentioned Sunday and as Matt Ford reminds us more forcefully today, are total bullshit.
• Katherine Stewart, who has reported on the religious right for the past decade, hypothesizes about the roots of US Senator Josh Hawley's (R-MO) rage.
• Jennifer Rubin urges her party to move past "the post-truth society."
• What can the rise and fall of the Whig Party tell us about the future of the Republican Party?
• The Chicago City Council will vote later this week to prohibit any person convicted of treason, sedition, or subversive actions, from holding a sign permit. Why? Could it be the enormous sign showing the STBXPOTUS's name all down Wacker Drive?
• Oh, and by the way, over 375,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 so far, including 26,120 in the past week.

Finally, the always-funny Alexandra Petri imagines what people who have never read Orwell believe his books actually say.

The expansion of unemployment benefits combined with sensible precautions against transmission of Covid-19 have made criminals' lives much easier:

From March through the end of November, there have been more than 2 million initial claims filed for regular state unemployment benefits, according to the agency. That figure excludes people filing claims under five federal pandemic jobless aid programs the state implemented last year.

The agency has said the rise in unemployment fraud is likely due to large corporate data breaches and is not the result of any state system breaches. Past breaches including one in 2017 involving Equifax exposed the personal data of millions of people, including names, Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses number, dates of births, addresses and credit card information.

People who have not filed for benefits but receive a letter from the state unemployment agency saying a claim has been filed under their name should immediately report it through the IDES website or by calling 800-814-0513.

Don't even get me started on the calls about my car's warranty...

We had a relatively quiet day yesterday, but only in comparison to the day before:

• Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (wife of presumptive Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned after nearly four years (and with nothing to gain from staying in Cabinet) mostly because they no longer needed those jobs. Said the Post: "Resigning now feels a little like eating all but the last bite of a piece of cake at a restaurant and then asking for a refund."
• The BBC has a commendable round-up of fact-checking who actually broke into the Capitol on Wednesday.
• The US hit a new record for daily Covid-19 deaths: 4,112.
• The STBXPOTUS whined that he won't attend President Biden's inauguration, becoming the first crybaby-in-chief to skip the event since his spiritual ancestor Andrew Johnson.
• Nonfarm payrolls fell 140,000 from November to December, though unemployment held steady at 6.7%.

Meanwhile, here in Chicago:

• Reports of Southport Lanes' demise may have been premature.
• The South Shore Line will get a new route after the Federal Transit Administration released $945 million for it.
• Chicago restaurants may re-open next week thanks to falling Covid-19 infection rates state-wide.

Finally, Bruce Schneier advises the incoming administration on how to deal with the SolarWinds intrusion.

See? Yesterday was quiet.

As millions of voters in Georgia today decide which party will control the US Senate, author Ruth Ben-Ghiat looks back on other world leaders who have had a hard time letting go:

Trump has followed an authoritarian, rather than a democratic, playbook as president. It is fitting that he would end up like some of history's best-known autocrats: hunkered down in his safe space, surrounded by his latest crop of unhinged loyalists, trying pathetically to escape the reality of his defeat.

The "inner sanctums" of authoritarians take on special importance when things are going badly and their power is threatened. Composed of flatterers and family members, they function to shield the head of state from any information that conflicts with his delusion that he is always right and will stay in power indefinitely. "For God's sake, don't upset the Führer — which means do not tell him bad news — do not mention things which are not as he conceives them to be," the exiled German journalist Karl H. von Wiegand wrote of Hitler in 1939, summarizing a situation familiar to those who have worked for Italy's Benito Mussolini, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the current American president.

It is rare in history that a process of authoritarian capture is interrupted, but that's what happened when Americans voted Trump out. Many members of the GOP, still loyal to Trump, are likely to wage war on the Biden administration. The dangers to our republic from illiberal forces are far from over. Yet a new vigilance and activism have gained ground. We will need them, and a robust free media, to protect our democracy in the turbulent years to come.

Meanwhile, while waiting for the malignant narcissistic STBXPOTUS to leave office, we've passed 350,000 dead from Covid-19, and three states have higher rates of infection than anywhere else in the world.

Revisiting the numbers of people killed in one day by a single disaster, we find that Covid-19 now occupies 10 of the top 15 spots:

If we only look at the last 100 years, it gets even starker:

And the band played on.

We're so close to ending 2020 that I can almost taste it. (I hope to be tasting tacos in a few minutes, however.) True to form, 2020 has apparently decided not to leave quietly:

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has blocked a vote on $2,000 relief checks so that he can add a poison-pill amendment the STBXPOTUS has asked for.
• Writing in The Atlantic, Dani Alexis Ryskamp points out that the life depicted in The Simpsons is no longer attainable.
• New Republic has named Florida governor Ron Desantis (R) "Scoundrel of the Year."
• Michael Benson reviews some satellite photos of Earth this year and comes away horrified.
• Wired looks at the state and evolution of ransomware and also comes away horrified.
• The United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries (yes, there is such a thing) came away horrified from the STBXPOTUS pardoning the Blackwater guys who murdered Iraqi civilians.

Finally, the Washington Post's Michael Rosenwald reports that Bloom asked 28 historians to determine whether 2020 was the worst year ever. It wasn't even close.

The New Yorker next week has Lawrence Wright's excellent long-form history of "the mistakes and the struggles behind America's coronavirus tragedy:"

There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe of the covid-19 pandemic when events might have turned out differently. The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which was modelled on the American institution. Redfield had just received a report about an unexplained respiratory virus emerging in the city of Wuhan.

Redfield is convinced that, had C.D.C. specialists visited China in early January, they would have learned exactly what the world was facing. The new pathogen was a coronavirus, and as such it was thought to be only modestly contagious, like its cousin the sars virus. This assumption was wrong. The virus in Wuhan turned out to be far more infectious, and it spread largely by asymptomatic transmission. “That whole idea that you were going to diagnose cases based on symptoms, isolate them, and contact-trace around them was not going to work,” Redfield told me recently. “You’re going to be missing fifty per cent of the cases. We didn’t appreciate that until late February.” The first mistake had been made, and the second was soon to happen.

What are the odds that we can avoid a cock-up this bad in future? I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.