Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of seventy-five.  Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 15h 04m 00s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 31.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

 On this day in 1892, John Muir organizes the Sierra Club.

Recommended for reading in full —

Megan McArdle writes Conservatives who refuse to wear masks undercut a central claim of their beliefs:

Even the most hard-core conservatives and libertarians have always recognized that all liberties have some limits — your right to roam ends at my property line. For years, conservatives have explained that public health efforts are a legitimate exercise of government power.

Sure, this was usually a prelude to complaining that public health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were neglecting this vital mission in favor of paternalistic nannying. But given the CDC’s many boneheaded errors over the past six months, conservatives were in a position to score some political points by shouting: “CDC, you had one job!”

Instead, far too many Republicans are suddenly arguing that public health efforts are not a legitimate exercise of power. The government, they complain, has no right to tell them what they can do, even if what they plan to do comes with some risk that a deadly disease will spread.

I’m not talking about the people who simply make the reasonable, indeed indisputable, argument that we cannot shut down the whole economy until a vaccine is developed. I’m talking about the ones who refuse to make even small compromises for public safety, such as wearing a mask — and especially conservatives who complain when store owners exercise their right to require them on store property.

This doesn’t just eviscerate generations’ worth of arguments about public health. It also undercuts a more central claim of conservatism: that big, coercive government programs are unnecessary because private institutions could provide many benefits that we think of as “public goods.” For that to be true, the civic culture would have to be such that individuals are willing to make serious sacrifices for the common good, and especially to protect the most vulnerable among us.

(McArdle is a libertarian, as I am, but she’s too forgiving of what pro-Trump conservatism represents. This atavistic horde isn’t pondering claims; they’re dreaming of a herrenvolk state. They’re following instincts not principles.)

 Marlow Stern interviews Soledad O’Brien on Why the New York Times Is Failing Us Under Trump:

(Stern): It seems like you’re referring to The New York Times’ headlines, which have become just a laughably poor display of false equivalence, both sides-ing, and normalizing when it comes to Trump’s aberrant behavior.

(O’Brien): Oh my god! I wish I could just go and buy a soft blanket for whoever the poor headline writer is who’s screwing it up pretty regularly, because it’s such a mess! You want to say, how did that happen? How did you get a headline like this? And then they fix it, and they’re not particularly transparent about why they’re fixing it or how they got it wrong. It’s very disheartening. And the answer is, their digital subscriptions are up, so the response is: Have you seen our numbers? Well, OK, if that’s how you’re going to judge your worth.

Accurately Counting Covid-19 Mortality:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thundershowers with a high of eighty-three.  Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:23 PM, for 15h 02m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 21.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1673, Marquette & Joliet reach Green Bay.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Gabriel Sherman reports “This Is So Unfair to Me”: Trump Whines About His COVID-19 Victimhood as Campaign Flails:

As he headed into Memorial Day weekend, Donald Trump complained that he was COVID-19’s biggest victim. “He was just in a fucking rage,” said a person who spoke with Trump late last week. “He was saying, ‘This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!” Even as the death toll neared 100,000 and unemployment ranks swelled to over 38 million, Trump couldn’t see the pandemic as anything other than something that had happened to him. “The problem is he has no empathy,” the adviser said. Trump complained that he should have been warned about the virus sooner. “The intelligence community let me down!” he said.

The White House declined to comment.

Trump’s outburst reflected his growing frustration that, at this stage of the race, he is losing to Joe Biden. According to a Republican briefed on the campaign’s internal polls, Trump is trailing Biden by double digits among women over 50 in six swing states. “Trump knows the numbers are bad. It’s why he’s thrashing about,” the Republican said.

Even those closest to Trump have been privately worried the election is slipping away.

Peter Wehner writes The Malignant Cruelty of Donald Trump:

A lot of human casualties result from the cruelty of malignant narcissists like Donald Trump—casualties, it should be said, that his supporters in the Republican Party, on various pro-Trump websites and news outlets, and on talk radio are willing to tolerate or even defend. Their philosophy seems to be that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. If putting up with Trump’s indecency is the price of maintaining power, so be it. Will Trump’s white evangelical supporters—Franklin Graham Jr., Robert Jeffress, Eric Metaxas, Mike Huckabee, Ralph Reed—defend his behavior as the perfect embodiment of the New Testament ethic, the credo of Jesus, the message from the Sermon on the Mount? “Blessed are the brutal, for they shall inherit the Earth.”

Some people will argue that Trump’s promotion of this conspiracy theory is just his latest distraction, a shiny object to pull our focus away from the human and economic cost of COVID-19. Maybe. But I’m not at all convinced that this will help Trump politically.

Remember, Trump’s approval rating was often well under 50 percent even when the economy was doing well and America was at relative peace abroad. There’s plenty of evidence, including the 2018 midterm elections, that Trump’s dehumanizing tactics erode his support, especially among white suburban women. And I rather doubt that people will have forgotten Trump’s reckless handling of the pandemic by November; defaming the memory of a woman who died nearly two decades ago and causing renewed grief for her family isn’t likely to help him with most voters, either.

(No one should be surprised when a jackal acts like a jackal.)

 What Happens to Unspent Gift Cards?:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thundershowers with a high of eighty-six.  Sunrise is 5:21 AM and sunset 8:22 PM, for 15h 01m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 14.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing in closed session at 6 PM and in open session at 7 PM, and Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1897, Irish author Bram Stoker‘s Dracula is published.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jesse Drucker, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Sarah Kliff report Wealthiest Hospitals Got Billions in Coronavirus Bailout:

A multibillion-dollar institution in the Seattle area invests in hedge funds, runs a pair of venture capital funds and works with elite private equity firms like the Carlyle Group.

But it is not just another deep-pocketed investor hunting for high returns. It is the Providence Health System, one of the country’s largest and richest hospital chains. It is sitting on nearly $12 billion in cash, which it invests, Wall Street-style, in a good year generating more than $1 billion in profits.<

And this spring, Providence received at least $509 million in government funds, one of many wealthy beneficiaries of a federal program that is supposed to prevent health care providers from capsizing during the coronavirus pandemic.

With states restricting hospitals from performing elective surgery and other nonessential services, their revenue has shriveled. The Department of Health and Human Services has disbursed $72 billion in grants since April to hospitals and other health care providers through the bailout program, which was part of the CARES Act economic stimulus package. The department plans to eventually distribute more than $100 billion more.

Ed Kilgore writes There’s Only One Way the ‘Enthusiasm Gap’ Matters:

That is, an unexcited Biden vote counts exactly as much as an excited Trump vote. Yes, enthusiasm matters up to the point that it exists sufficiently to get the voter to the polls. But unenthusiastic voters trudge to presidential elections every year – the bar for whether one will cast a vote for a candidate is considerably lower than whether someone will profess to be enthusiastic about said candidate in a poll.

In downballot or even presidential nomination races, “enthusiasm” is valuable in producing campaign contributions and volunteer signups. “Enthusiasm” is legal tender in the Iowa Caucuses, but not so much in a presidential general election in which money is largely not that significant and both candidates have near-universal name ID and vast armies of partisans at their disposal.

 The power of plants when producing vaccines:

Good morning.

Memorial Day in Whitewater will see morning thundershowers with a high of eighty-three.  Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:21 PM, for 14h 59m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1655, Saturn‘s largest moon, Titan, is discovered by Christiaan Huygens.

Recommended for reading in full —

Reis Thebault and Abigail Hauslohner report A deadly ‘checkerboard’: Covid-19’s new surge across rural America:

The novel coronavirus arrived in an Indiana farm town mid-planting season and took root faster than the fields of seed corn, infecting hundreds and killing dozens. It tore though a pork processing plant and spread outward in a desolate stretch of the Oklahoma Panhandle. And in Colorado’s sparsely populated eastern plains, the virus erupted in a nursing home and a pair of factories, burning through the crowded quarters of immigrant workers and a vulnerable elderly population.

As the death toll nears 100,000, the disease caused by the virus has made a fundamental shift in who it touches and where it reaches in America, according to a Washington Post analysis of case data and interviews with public health professionals in several states. The pandemic that first struck in major metropolises is now increasingly finding its front line in the country’s rural areas; counties with acres of farmland, cramped meatpacking plants, out-of-the-way prisons and few hospital beds.

In these areas, where 60 million Americans live, populations are poorer, older and more prone to health problems such as diabetes and obesity than those of urban areas. They include immigrants and the undocumented — the “essential” workers who have kept the country’s sprawling food industry running, but who rarely have the luxury of taking time off for illness.

Many of these communities are isolated and hard to reach. They were largely spared from the disease shutting down their states — until, suddenly, they weren’t. Rural counties now have some of the highest rates of covid-19 cases and deaths in the country, topping even the hardest-hit New York City boroughs and signaling a new phase of the pandemic — one of halting, scattered outbreaks that could devastate still more of America’s most vulnerable towns as states lift stay-at-home orders.

“It is coming, and it’s going to be more of a checkerboard,” said Tara Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University in Ohio. “It’s not going to be a wave that spreads out uniformly over all of rural America; it’s going to be hot spots that come and go. And I don’t know how well they’re going to be managed.”

Russ Choma writes Trump Brag-Tweets that COVID-19 “Numbers” Are Declining. The Numbers Don’t Say That:

According to data compiled by the Washington Post, while some moderation of new cases is being reported, numbers have remained fairly flat for the past two weeks, with the seven-day average number of new cases remaining well over 20,000. Yesterday, for instance, there were 22,520 new cases, which is lower than the previous two days, but more than other days in the last two weeks. And according to the Post’s numbers, there were 1,071 new COVID deaths yesterday, which is less than the previous days, but slightly more than the previous Saturday.

Unsold wine could be converted to hand sanitizing gel:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of eighty-three.  Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:20 PM, for 14h 57m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 3.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge opens to traffic after 14 years of construction.

Recommended for reading in full —

Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey, and Aaron C. Davis report Trump’s move to block travel from Europe triggered chaos and a surge of passengers from the outbreak’s center:

Epidemiologists contend the U.S. outbreak was driven overwhelmingly by viral strains from Europe rather than China. More than 1.8 million travelers entered the United States from Europe in February alone as that continent became the center of the pandemic. Infections reached critical mass in New York and other cities well before the White House took action, according to studies mapping the virus’s spread. The crush of travelers triggered by Trump’s announcement only added to that viral load.

Trump has repeatedly touted his decision in January to restrict travel from China as evidence that he acted decisively to contain the coronavirus, often claiming that doing so saved more than a million lives. But it was his administration’s response to the threat from Europe that proved more consequential to the majority of the more than 94,000 people who have died and the 1.6 million now infected in the United States

 Alec MacGillis reports Rent Is Still Due in Kushnerville:

Here, there is nary a telecommuting professional to be found. Here, there is no escaping the upheaval. The need in the complexes is so great that one of them, Cove Village, has become a main distribution spot for free food from the Baltimore County school department: Every Monday through Thursday, a truck arrives at Cove Village and parks on Driftwood Court from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Families line up for a breakfast, lunch and snack, with an extra set given out on Thursday to tide kids over on Friday.

There is another reason to track the upheaval in these complexes. It happens that they are owned by the company led until not long ago by the person now tasked with overseeing the federal government’s response to the crisis: Jared Kushner, son-in-law of President Donald Trump. The Kushner Companies, in which Jared still holds a large financial stake, has come under scrutiny in recent years for its litigious pursuit of tenants who allegedly owed back rent or broke leases, and for the poor conditions of many of the units. It was even the subject of a Netflix television documentary that aired just as the lockdowns first went into effect.

But the pandemic has now thrust Kushnerville, which consists of nine complexes in inner-suburban Baltimore County, some with as many as 1,000 units each, into unfamiliar territory. For years, tenants have learned to dread the aggressive tactics of their landlord: late-payment notices and court summons slapped on their doors, late fees and “court costs” and attorney fees added to bills, and, in some cases, even threats of jail time. Disclosure of those tactics led to a class-action lawsuit and a lawsuit by the state attorney general. The Kushner entities have denied wrongdoing. (A judge this year denied the plaintiffs’ bid to form a class, which is on appeal; the attorney general’s suit is ongoing.)

How Australians Are Trading Solar Energy With Their Neighbors:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with scattered afternoon thunderstorms, and a high of seventy-three.  Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:19 PM, for 14h 56m 17s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1934, infamous American bank robbers and murderers Bonnie and Clyde meet their end in Bienville Parish, Louisiana.

Recommended for reading in full —

Anna Nemtsova writes Vladimir Putin Is in Deep Trouble:

Russian President Vladimir Putin is suddenly seen to be weaker than he has been in years, and economic pain from COVID-19 is one big reason, but not the only one.

“Putin’s approval rating began to decline even before the coronavirus crisis, with oil prices collapsing and the economy deteriorating—and I don’t see what can stop this perfect storm this year,” says Denis Volkov, deputy director of the Levada Center, which does independent polling.

“We see the public mood is changing the way we saw it during the crisis of 2008. (About 25 percent of our respondents say their salaries have been cut.),” Volkov told The Daily Beast. But Putin, like U.S. President Donald Trump, has die-hard fans, and “there is still a big group of people who say there is no alternative [to him].”

Putin’s biggest challenge is poverty, that old Russian disease. During his best years, when oil prices were astronomical and revenues were very high indeed, the Russian president was able to provide people with money—and with pride. He was building the armed forces, sending them abroad, overtly or covertly, to Ukraine, Syria, and Africa, and developing very expensive new weapons systems. Putin seemed able to provide, as economists say, both guns and butter.

But this year the nation’s rapidly shrinking economy has pushed millions below the poverty line, and Putin—whose approval rating was 80 percent in 2014, has seen his numbers, already in decline, drop precipitously. The current number of 59 percent would be positive in the West, but here in Russia, Putin has been used to nearly complete control over television news coverage, and he’s been losing that grip.

Susan Svrluga reports With colleges shuttered, more students consider gap years. But those may be disrupted, too:

Colleges are usually happy to let students take a year off, Hartle said, with evidence suggesting that time off is often valuable for students. But that’s in a typical year, when the number of requests is low and administrators can predict how many students will enroll in the fall. This year, he said, “the concern is what happens if 20 percent of your students request a gap year?”

Some college counselors predict students and families talking about deferring will ultimately go forward with college plans. That’s partly because the pandemic is upending gap year programs just like it’s upending the traditional college path.

Typical gap years include travel, volunteer work, paid work, some career exploration and “a free radical,” said Ethan Knight, executive director of the Gap Year Association. “Don’t over-structure your time — leave a little space for the unknown.”

But this year, international travel and hands-on volunteer work seem unlikely, and good jobs will be harder than ever to find, said Emmi Harward, executive director of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools.

Video from Space – Weekly Highlights:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will see a mix of clouds and sun with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 5:24 AM and sunset 8:18 PM, for 14h 54m 34s of daytime.  The moon is new with none of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1968, “Milwaukee Bucks” is selected as the franchise name after 14,000 fans participated in a team-naming contest.

Recommended for reading in full —

Alison Durkee writes The Mike Pompeo Scandals Just Keep Piling Up:

President Donald Trump’s recent firing of State Department inspector general Steve Linick at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s request has set off a cascade of damning stories about the secretary of state’s behavior in office. And the news just keeps getting worse. Days after NBC News reported Pompeo’s frequent taxpayer-funded “Madison” dinners, which appear to be more of a political opportunity for the secretary’s presidential ambitions than official diplomatic affairs, the New York Times reports Pompeo has done even more politicking under the guise of official business. Per the Times, Pompeo has on multiple occasions used his official State trips to visit conservative donors and politicians—without putting them on his public schedule or informing reporters of the trips.

Pompeo’s reported secret visits included a dinner meeting with Republican donors while in London for a NATO meeting, and a visit with Republican billionaire Charles Koch aboard a government aircraft while on an official trip to Kansas. On an official visit to Florida in January, the secretary of state also made a mysterious detour to the Villages, a retirement community chock-full of Republican donors. The Tampa Bay Times reported in February that based on the address Pompeo visited, he was likely visiting GOP donor Mark Morse, whose family developed the Villages and has donated more than $100,000 to Republicans since January 2019. The secretary and former CIA director has also made trips to major gatherings of business leaders—which were branded as official business but prime for political schmoozing—including visiting the annual Bilderberg Meeting in Switzerland last year and the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in 2017 and 2019. (These visits are all on top of Pompeo’s repeated trips to Kansas while he was considering running for Senate there, which were so frequent that the Kansas City Star issued an op-ed proclaiming, “Mike Pompeo, either quit and run for U.S. Senate in Kansas or focus on your day job.”)

Robert Tracinski writes You Will Never Be #MAGA Enough:

It is pretty obvious that Fox News has done more to boost Donald Trump and carry water for him than any other institution. But that isn’t enough to save them. Only the most unblinkingly slavish devotion, with never a hint of even accidental criticism, will do. And so the president has been preparing to put the skids under his previous favorite media organization.

No, scratch that, his second favorite media organization. His favorite is and always will be Twitter, which is the platform he used to slide the knife between Fox’s ribs, declaring, “Fox News is no longer the same. We miss the great Roger Ailes. You have more anti-Trump people, by far, than ever before. Looking for a new outlet!”

He said this in response to a random Twitter fan who complained to Laura Ingraham, “Your colleagues at @FoxNews might as well be on @cnn because all they do is spew #FakeNews.”

….

If you stay on the Trump Train long enough you will discover—as Fox News has and OANN eventually will—that you will find that the demands for conformity are endless, capricious, and unforgiving.

 What Would It Mean If U.S. States Went Bankrupt?:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see partly cloudy skies with a high of sixty-nine.  Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:17 PM, for 14h 52m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 1.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1856, Lawrence, Kansas is captured and burned by pro-slavery fanatics.

Recommended for reading in full —

Sheera Frenkel, Ben Decker, and Davey Alba report How the ‘Plandemic’ Movie and Its Falsehoods Spread Widely Online (‘Conspiracy theories about the pandemic have gained more traction than mainstream online events. Here’s how’):

There have been plenty of jaw-dropping digital moments during the coronavirus pandemic.

There was the time this month when Taylor Swift announced she would air her “City of Lover” concert on television. The time that the cast of “The Office” reunited for an 18-minute-long Zoom wedding. And the time last month that the Pentagon posted three videos that showed unexplained “aerial phenomena.”

Yet none of those went as viral as a 26-minute video called “Plandemic,” a slickly produced narration that wrongly claimed a shadowy cabal of elites was using the virus and a potential vaccine to profit and gain power. The video featured a discredited scientist, Judy Mikovits, who said her research about the harm from vaccines had been buried.

“Plandemic” went online on May 4 when its maker, Mikki Willis, a little-known film producer, posted it to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and a separate website set up to share the video. For three days, it gathered steam in Facebook pages dedicated to conspiracy theories and the anti-vaccine movement, most of which linked to the video hosted on YouTube. Then it tipped into the mainstream and exploded.

Just over a week after “Plandemic” was released, it had been viewed more than eight million times on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and had generated countless other posts.

William Haseltine writes Moderna’s claim of favorable results in its vaccine trial is an example of ‘publication by press release’:

The most recent example is Moderna’s claim Monday of favorable results in its vaccine trial, which it announced without revealing any of the underlying data. The announcement added billions of dollars to the value of the company, with its shares jumping almost 20 percent. Many analysts believe it contributed to a 900-point gain in the Dow Jones industrial average.

The Moderna announcement described a safety trial of its vaccine based on eight healthy participants. The claim was that in all eight people, the vaccine raised the levels of neutralizing antibodies equivalent to those found in convalescent serum of those who recovered from covid-19. What to make of that claim? Hard to say, because we have no sense of what those levels were. This is the equivalent of a chief executive of a public company announcing a favorable earnings report without supplying supporting financial data, which the Securities and Exchange Commission would never allow.

There is a legitimate question regarding what Moderna’s unsupported assertion means. The scientific and medical literature reports that some people who have recovered have little to no detectable neutralizing antibodies. There is even existing scientific literature that suggests it is possible neutralizing antibodies may not protect animals or humans from infection or reinfection by coronaviruses.

Michigan Dams Fail Forcing Evacuations Amid “Historic” Flooding: