The Daily Parker

The December solstice happened about 8 hours ago, which means we'll have slightly more daylight today than we had yesterday. Today is also the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley's meeting with Richard Nixon in the White House.

More odd things of note:

• Former Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel attorney Erica Newland has some regrets.
• Congress finally passed a $900 million stimulus bill that has no real hope of stimulating anyone who's unemployed or about to lose his home. Nice work, Mitch.
• Canada joined several European countries in blockading the United Kingdom after a new strain of coronavirus emerged in England.
• On this day in 1910, Montgomery Ward won a landmark case in the Illinois Supreme Court that led to the creation of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History.
• Calculated Risk has a rundown of 7 key high-frequency indicators showing just how dire things are across several industries.
• Writing for Smithsonian, Beth Daniels reminisces about how Bullwinkle taught her political satire at a young age.
• New evidence suggests early humans survived cold winters by hibernating.
• Nielsen Norman Group has a list of their top-10 UX articles from 2020.

Finally, it's very likely you've made out with a drowning victim from the 19th century.

If you live in the northern hemisphere, tonight will last longer than any of the 365 others in 2020. Sunsets have gotten later by a few seconds a day since the 8th, but sunrises have also gotten later and will continue to do so until just before perihelion on January 4th.

We're also only a month from Joe Biden's inauguration. Almost everyone in the Western world and quite a few outside it have felt more relaxed and less stressed in the last six weeks, and will feel even better once the STBXPOTUS loses his public-interest protections on Twitter.

Meanwhile, we've only got a few hours before the Federal Government shuts down, because Republicans in the US Senate didn't really care about Covid-19 relief until the January 5th runoff elections in Georgia got too tight for comfort. Help Doug Perdue, yes; help 30 million Americans, no. That's today's GOP. Even if we manage to get the bill through, the STBXPOTUS has lost all connection to reality and may not sign it.

The bill as it stands calls for about $900 billion in "stimulus," even though we can't actually spend money where we need to spend it to save our restaurants and restaurant workers. As economist Paul Krugman points out, giving people $600 or $1200 checks won't help; we need enhanced unemployment benefits, which puts the money in the most needful hands. He also asks, "why is there a limit on the amount of aid?" He explains:

Republicans appear willing to make a deal because they fear that complete stonewalling will hurt them in the Georgia Senate runoffs. But they are determined to keep the deal under a trillion dollars, hence the reported $900 billion price tag.

That trillion-dollar cap, however, makes no sense. The amount we spend on emergency relief should be determined by how much aid is needed, not by the sense that $1 trillion is a scary number.

For affordability isn’t a real issue right now. The U.S. government borrowed more than $3 trillion in the 2020 fiscal year; investors were happy to lend it that money, at remarkably low interest rates. In fact, the real interest rate on U.S. debt — the rate adjusted for inflation — has lately been consistently negative, which means that the additional debt won’t even create a major future burden.

And even economists who worry about deficits normally agree that it’s appropriate to run big deficits in the face of national emergencies. If a pandemic that is still keeping around 10 million workers unemployed isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.

So, yes, the longest night of the year might also see yet another Republican-sponsored government shutdown. But the longest night of the year means tomorrow night will be a few seconds shorter, and 9 nights later, 2020 will end.

Only 7 shopping days until Boxing Day! So, what's going on in the world?

• Fortunately, Illinois seems to have escaped a post-Thanksgiving Covid-19 bump.
• Not so in the UK, where despite not having a big family holiday in November, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced a new stay-at-home order covering London and much of the South. So much for Boxing Day.
• Late yesterday, the FDA approved a second Covid-19 vaccine, from Moderna.
• WBEZ, Chicago's NPR station, has collected 52 photos looking back at 2020.
• WBEZ also has a look at the giant flying rats that call the city home.

And I will leave you with my alma mater's Canine Cognition Lab's kindergarten:

We're in the home stretch. We have 14 days until 2021 starts, and 32 days until the Biden Administration takes office. As Andrew Sullivan said in his column today, 2021 is going to be epic. Meanwhile:

• After giving away billions in tax revenue to the richest Americans in 2017, the Republican Party suddenly doesn't like budget deficits again, coincidentally with them losing the White House. Fascinating.
• Atlantic City is raising money for charity by auctioning off the right to blow up one of the STBXPOTUS's casinos.
• Today is the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower docking in Plymouth Harbor. (Apparently they didn't like the neighbors in P-Town.)
• Over 1,000 people found themselves stranded in a 15 km traffic jam overnight, some of them for 40 hours.
• Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips lists his top 10 films of 2020.

And watch this blog for information about the Apollo Chorus of Chicago's final performance of 2020.

Welcome to the (abbreviated) lunchtime roundup:

• Not only have attackers breached hundreds of networks due to a subtle flaw in a complicated piece of software, it turns out that a Dutch software engineer has—for the second time—exposed a rather glaring flaw in an uncomplicated piece of wetware by guessing the STBXPOTUS's Twitter password. (It was "maga2020!". I am not making this up.)
• Thomas Edsall decries "the rise of 'political sectarianism'."
• It's time once again for Drew Magary's "Hater's Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog."

Finally, Julie Nolke for the fourth time explains the pandemic to her past self.

Josh Marshall outlines how the STBXPOTUS and his friends in the Senate have structured vaccination funding to give President Joe Biden a black eye within two weeks of taking office:

Here are some basic outlines of what’s happening. As we learned last week the Trump White House skimped on actually buying enough doses of vaccine from Pfizer. But the federal government will cover the actual purchase of vaccines. The White House says the military is in charge of and has a plan to actual get the supplies to the states. And though we don’t know all the details let’s assume they have that covered. But that only appears to be getting the crates of supplies to a central staging point in each state. That’s not a negligible job. But it’s only a relatively small part of actually getting the country vaccinated. You need public health campaigns. You need staging areas and distribution from wherever the military drops it off to actual health centers and vaccination centers around each state. And finally you need a small army of medical professionals to actually administer the doses. It’s a big job and the Trump administration hasn’t funded any of that or devised any national plan.

What the White House has arranged funding for is a critical but relatively small part of the vaccination effort: vaccinations for people in assisted living facilities and health care workers. Those are the two most critical populations. They should go first, and the plan is to get those people vaccinated in December and January. But that leaves the great bulk of the population unvaccinated. The plan is for that phase to end around Feb 1. Meanwhile CARES Act funding, which states can use for various purposes, has to be spent by Dec. 31.

So as you can see, today’s excitement and anticipation over the vaccine is cued up to turn sharply to disappointment in February when people start asking where their shots are and blame the train wreck on President Biden. No plan. And no funding to implement a plan. Of course that is potentially catastrophic in human terms. But a lag in vaccination means not only more suffering and death but more delay in allowing the economy to get back on its feet, since people aren’t going to go to restaurants and participate in public life until case numbers drop dramatically.

Also, I recently accepted a Facebook friend request from a friend of a friend from business school. He (a Republican) and I used to have long, interesting arguments over beers about policy. This new person's feed hasn't got a lot of policy in it. Rather, it's a window through which I can see some of the most eye-roll-worthy right-wing memes going around right now. It's educational.

Happy Hanukkah! Now read these:

• Thomas Edsall summarizes the sociology of resentment, hypothesizing that status is the single biggest indicator of political affiliation.
• Jelani Cobb digs into the Republican strategy in the Loeffler-Warnock race for Georgia's junior US Senate seat.
• The US Postal Service warns that it has absolutely no more capacity, and is near gridlock. (If only we could, you know, fund it.)
• It looks ever more likely that two weeks from Friday, the UK will crash out of Europe with no divorce agreement in place.
• Illinois law appears to allow companies to require employees to get vaccinated for Covid-19.

I will now have some very yummy Szechuan leftovers.

I posted a table about a week ago showing the number of American deaths per day from various disasters that we've had over our history. I did a bit more research, and we've had a lot more Covid-19 deaths, so I've updated the table:

1. Average daily deaths from 1918 flu, October 1918: 6,290
2. Galveston hurricane, 9 Sep 1900: ~6,000
3. Battle of Antietam, 18 Sep 1862: 3,652
4. Covid-19, 9 Dec 2020: 3,411
5. Puerto Rico hurricane, 7 Aug 1899: 3,389
6. Covid-19, 6 Apr 2020: 3,156
7. San Francisco Earthquake, 18 Apr 1906: ~3,100
8. Covid-19, 11 Dec 2020: 3,013
9. Terrorist attacks, 11 Sep 2001: 2,996
10. Covid-19, 3 Dec 2020: 2,861

Pearl Harbor, formerly 8th on this list, has dropped to 19th.

I also corrected the durations and total counts for this chart, which I've posted a few times. Note that Covid-19 is even more clearly the most deadly disaster in American history on an annualized basis, and the third worst catastrophe after our annual heart disease and cancer mortality:

And to think, if we'd had (a) leadership and (b) a more mature populace, we might have prevented most of those deaths.

The Electoral College has voted, and with no surprises, as of 16:37 Chicago time Joe Biden has received the requisite 270 votes to be elected President of the United States. And yet, we had a few surprises today:

• The loathsome STBXPOTUS fired his almost-equally-loathsome Attorney General, Bill Barr, which could not have happened to a better couple.
• The US passed 300,000 Covid-19 deaths today. Probably 250,000 could have been prevented.
• Security guru Bruce Schneier advocates for regulation of persuasion technologies.
• A man in Peoria, Ill., impersonated a property owner to have an artist paint a Cookie Monster mural. The real property owner did not find this amusing.

Finally, John le Carré died at 89 yesterday. Time to revisit Josephine Livingstone's review of "the glorious return of George Smiley," le Carré's 2017 novel A Legacy of Spies.

I'm not good at it, personally. But NBC News has some advice they've titled "How to talk to your friends and family about Covid, vaccines and wearing masks:"

“You always want to offer your empathy first,” said Amy Pisani, executive director of Vaccinate Your Family, the nation’s largest nonprofit organization dedicated to vaccine advocacy. “If they have a personal story, start with your shared values.”

Steven Taylor, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, said that confrontation is particularly doomed to failure when talking to people who have fallen down conspiracy rabbit holes.

“Many conspiracy theorists score high in a trait called psychological reactance, which, to put it simply, is like an allergic reaction to being told what to do,” Taylor said. “We have to think of messages that don’t trigger that psychological reactance.”

Rather, it may be more effective to find non-confrontational ways to appeal to people that don’t overtly challenge their sense of self or freedom — a concept that Taylor refers to as introducing “behavioral nudges.” Instead of harping on the scientifically proven benefits of wearing a mask, for instance, people could try to convince friends and family to don face coverings for the good of their community.

Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., said the emergence of conspiracy theories in times of upheaval has been well-documented throughout history.

“What you often see is that in times of uncertainty — whether it’s political uncertainty, economic uncertainty or social uncertainty — there’s a surge in conspiracy theories,” van der Linden said.

And that’s cause for real concern. Van der Linden’s research has shown that people who believe misinformation about the coronavirus are less likely to wear masks or get vaccinated, which makes it critical at this juncture of the pandemic to try to engage, rather than ignore, skeptical loved ones.

In times of extreme stress, we become apes, in other words. Yet somehow, we'll get through this.