Events

A pool of warm air running all the way up the Rocky Mountains to Alaska has forced a blob of cold air down into the eastern United States. This has started driving temperatures down all throughout the northeast, with a forecast drop to 10°C below normal here in Chicago and possible snow as far south as Philadelphia. In May. Ah, well. We all feel like it's March 68th, anyway. And yes, this cold snap is a consequence of climate change.

The differences in the way Democrats and Republicans have approached the pandemic shouldn't surprise or shock anyone, but one might still expect Republicans not to say the quiet parts quite so loudly. Last week, 3.2 million more Americans filed for unemployment benefits, bringing the total to 33.5 million since mid-March and the unemployment rate to nearly 20%. The last time we had 20% unemployment, Herbert Hoover (a Republican, let's remember) sat on his ass in the Oval Office waiting for the market to...

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee from 31 December 2015:

Remember slow news days? Me neither. Republican legislators and business owners have pushed back on Illinois Governor JB Pritzker's plan to re-open the economy, preferring instead to force their employees into unsafe situations so they can return to making money. Professional dilettante Jared Kushner's leadership in getting a bunch of kids to organize mask distribution went about as well as one might predict. More reasonable people simply see how it means we're going to be in this a while. California...

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced this afternoon a five-phase, evidence-based plan to reopen the state: The five phases for each health region are as follows: Phase 1 – Rapid Spread: The rate of infection among those tested and the number of patients admitted to the hospital is high or rapidly increasing. Strict stay at home and social distancing guidelines are put in place and only essential businesses remain open. Every region has experienced this phase once already, and could return to it...

The science-fiction author sees hope in our response to Covid-19: People who study climate change talk about “the tragedy of the horizon.” The tragedy is that we don’t care enough about those future people, our descendants, who will have to fix, or just survive on, the planet we’re now wrecking. We like to think that they’ll be richer and smarter than we are and so able to handle their own problems in their own time. But we’re creating problems that they’ll be unable to solve. You can’t fix extinctions...

Yes, yes, the world has most of the Biblical plagues going on right now, including apparently 40 mm–long hornets, but I can see some bright spots, despite (or because of) all this: Marijuana sales in Illinois continued to increase with $37.3 m sold in April over March's $36 m and February's $35 m. Over the weekend, Graceland Cemetery's coyotes maintained a polite social distance from visitors, despite not wearing Acme PPE or catching any roadrunners. Norwood Park offers history and leafy streets to go...

Yesterday I started Federico Finchelstein's new book A Brief History of Fascist Lies, and it may have kept me awake longer than I wanted last night. Finchelstein's central thesis is that for fascists, truth was a matter of faith, not of empirical fact, and this truth was made incarnate in the fascist leader: Fascism defended a divine, messianic, and charismatic form of leadership that conceived of the leader as organically linked to the people and the nation. It considered popular sovereignty to be...

As Illinois hits 2,662 Covid-19 deaths and the CDC says the country will hit about that number every day by month's end, May the 4th be with us: Newly-disgorged White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany began her very first press briefing by saying "I will never lie to you." You'll never guess what she did next. James Fallows draws a comparison between former President George W Bush's video message to the country last week and the current president's behavior. New Republic's Libby Watson says, "For...

On 4 May 1970, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed students at Kent State University outside Cleveland: The sky was cloudless, the spring air warm and still. As the morning wore on, the growing crowd of students, now numbering in the thousands, became feisty, and some taunted the soldiers. Just after noon, a group of guardsmen suddenly huddled together, retreated briefly, wheeled toward the right, turned in tandem and fired at the students for 13 seconds. The students were not only...