Events

Demand for petroleum has crashed so hard and so fast that North American oil producers have run out of space to store the excess. This morning the price of US crude collapsed, falling 105 500% to $-2 $-37.63 per barrel; Canadian oil prices also dropped negative. That's right, if you want to take a million or so barrels off their hands, they'll pay you to do so. (This only affects delivery by month's end; for delivery in May, oil still costs $20 a barrel.) Meanwhile, in other horrific news: Canada...

Julie Nolke is a Canadian actor, comedian, and writer:

The president continues to ignore the opprobrium leveled against him after his asinine Tweets Friday morning: James Fallows notes how deeply weird and deeply troubling the Tweets were in themselves. Mary McCord says the Tweets were patently illegal, not protected speech under the First Amendment. Thomas Friedman says "Trump is asking us to play Russian roulette with our lives." Evidence has emerged that Trump's Tweets are part of an organized attempt to stoke the base funded by the DeVos family. Kurt...

Today is the 245th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington, which began the American Revolution. It's also the 25th anniversary of the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. And day 28th day of Illinois' stay-at-home order.

Remember how I love my car? I love it even more today, and I'm a bit spooked by its costs. A new filling station opened up about 1500 m from my house, and they have the lowest gas prices around. Even though I last filled my car on November 24th, in Indiana, and even though I've driven 1,623 km since then, I still had half a tank of gas. So for $10, I put 21 L of regular into the tank, which means my car cost me 0.6¢ per kilometer to operate over the last 144 days, and I got an average of 1.3 L/100...

No, really, the president Tweeted that earlier today: LIBERATE MINNESOTA! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2020 I mean, what the actual f? (He also wants to liberate Michigan and Virginia, by the way.) Charlie Pierce warned only Monday that this kind of nonsense was coming: The acting director of the Office of National Intelligence is encouraging citizens to break local laws, endangering themselves and others, in the middle of a pandemic. Of all the screwy moments that we have experienced...

The number of new Covid-19 cases per day may have peaked in Illinois, but that still means we have new cases every day. We have over 10,000 infected in the state, with the doubling period now at 12 days (from 2 days back mid-March). This coincides with unpleasant news from around the world: Covid-19 has become the second-leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for 12,400 deaths per week, just behind heart disease which kills about 12,600. More than 5 million people filed for unemployment...

I mentioned this morning that the President has ordered a halt to payments to the WHO to shift the blame from his own failures. That explains part of the story; Graeme Wood explains the rest: Defunding the WHO (or at least threatening to do so) is yet another instance of Trump’s signature move, one that I described just weeks ago, when he insisted on calling SARS-CoV-2 “the Chinese virus,” and for a few days journalists and social-media scolds obediently modified their criticisms to fit his latest...

Today's Covid-19 news roundup highlights how no one in the White House should go anywhere near this crisis response effort: President Trump ordered a halt to payments to the World Health Organization as part of his effort to blame them for his botched response to the pandemic. He also delayed sending relief checks to tens of millions of people because he wants his name to appear on them. Kellyanne Conway, while criticizing the WHO for not knowing anything about Covid-19, demonstrates she doesn't know...

Chicago might have been breeding lilacs out of the dead land yesterday, but today we woke up to this: Because so few people are going in to the office these days, the expressways have almost no traffic. So people drive faster. Which led to this earlier this morning: About 60 vehicles were involved in a massive pile-up on an ice-slickened Kennedy Expressway near North Avenue early Wednesday, sending 14 people to hospitals as 45 others were evaluated on the scene, according to the Chicago Fire Department....