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Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.27.20

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty-three with occasional afternoon showers.  Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 7:16 PM, for 12h 33m 32s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 8.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1886, Apache warrior Geronimo surrenders to the U.S. Army, ending the main phase of the Apache Wars.

Recommended for reading in full —

Devi Shastri reports UW System estimates campuses will refund $78 million in housing, dining expenses:

The University of Wisconsin System is estimating its campuses will pay back nearly $80 million to students who left campuses as the coronavirus took hold in the state.

System leaders announced last week they would ensure students received prorated refunds for the spring 2020 semester’s housing and food payments.

Every campus in the school system has moved courses online or to a remote format through the end of the semester, with some going into the summer semester. Many have made the decision to delay or cancel commencement ceremonies as well.

Schools are still calculating the exact costs of the payback, but the UW System estimate as of Thursday was about $78 million.

The Associated Press reports Wisconsin National Guard Col. James V. Locke stripped of command duties:

The Wisconsin National Guard’s new commander has stripped a colonel of his duties.

The Guard announced Thursday that Maj. Gen. Paul Knapp relieved Col. James V. Locke of command of the 128th Air Refueling Wing in Milwaukee.

The Guard said in a statement that Knapp had lost confidence in Locke, based on command climate, poor judgment and alleged misconduct. An investigation is underway.

“A decision like this is never easy to make, but it is the right thing to do and is in the best interest of the organization,” Knapp said.

A spokesman for the Guard declined to comment Thursday, citing the open investigation.

The Guard is still trying to recover after federal investigators last year revealed they had found multiple problems with how the Guard handles sexual harassment and sexual assault complaints. Most notably, the review found commanders had been opening their own internal investigations into complaints rather than referring them to Army or Air Force criminal investigators as required by federal law and Department of Defense policy.

Koalas Return Home After Surviving Australia’s Fires:

Coronavirus, Ethics, Public Health

A Right – and Duty – of Protection

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One does not have to be a member of the Southern Baptist tradition (as I am not) to agree with Dr. Russell Moore’s description of the obligation to care for the elderly. Moore, the president of that denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, writes that God Doesn’t Want Us to Sacrifice the Old to Coronavirus:

A life in a nursing home is a life worth living. A life in a hospital quarantine ward is a life worth living. The lives of our grandparents, the lives of the disabled, the lives of the terminally ill, these are all lives worth living. We will not be able to save every life. Many will die, not only of the obviously vulnerable but also of those who are seemingly young and strong.

….

That means we must listen to medical experts, and do everything possible to avoid the catastrophe we see right now in Italy and elsewhere. We must get back to work, get the economy back on its feet, but we can only do that when doing so will not kill the vulnerable and overwhelm our hospitals, our doctors, our nurses, and our communities.

….

This pandemic will change us, change our economy, our culture, our priorities, our personal lives. That we cannot avoid. But let’s remember: One day we will tell our grandchildren how we lived, how we loved, during the Great Pandemic. Let’s respect human life in such a way that we will not be ashamed to tell them the truth.

A dark utilitarianism grips those who would cast the vulnerable aside. It is an impulse dangerous and wicked. It sweeps through parts of this beautiful country. It must be fought wherever it is found, and cannot be allowed to take hold in this beautiful city.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.26.20

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 7:15 PM, for 12h 30m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1945, Battle of Iwo Jima ends in an American victory.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jennifer Steinhauer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs report Job Vacancies and Inexperience Mar Federal Response to Coronavirus:

Of the 75 senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security, 20 are either vacant or filled by acting officials, including Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary who recently was unable to tell a Senate committee how many respirators and protective face masks were available in the United States.

The National Park Service, which like many federal agencies is full of vacancies in key posts, tried this week to fill the job of a director for the national capital region after hordes of visitors flocked to see the cherry blossoms near the National Mall, creating a potential public health hazard as the coronavirus continues to spread.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, workers are scrambling to order medical supplies on Amazon after its leaders, lacking experience in disaster responses, failed to prepare for the onslaught of patients at its medical centers.

Empty slots and high turnover have left parts of the federal government unprepared and ill equipped for what may be the largest public health crisis in a century, said numerous former and current federal officials and disaster experts.

Corrinne Hess and Alana Watson report Wisconsin Businesses Pivot To Help Health Care Providers During Pandemic:

While many Wisconsin businesses have closed to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, some companies have shifted gears to help hospitals and health care workers.

Health care providers across the country have reported ongoing and dire shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) including hospital gowns, face shields and respiratory N95 face masks.

Last week, the Wisconsin Hospital Association reached out to the construction trades through the state Department of Workforce Development and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce asking them to donate any unused N95 masks to their local hospital.

Dozens of smaller businesses have stepped up, too.

Family-owned company Canopies, a Milwaukee-based event rental company, would normally be booked with spring weddings and parties. But the COVID-19 pandemic halted business until owner David Hudak contacted Advocate Aurora Health.

The health care provider, which has hospitals in Illinois and throughout eastern Wisconsin, is now contracting with Canopies to provide tents to its hospitals in both states.

The tents are being used as a triage area before patients are taken into emergency rooms, Hudak said.

Educators in Arkansas Provide Meals for Kids in Need During COVID-19:

(The Whitewater Unified School District plans to update its own children’s meal program.)

Coronavirus, Public Health, Trump

No, the Country Will Not “Open” on Easter

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Conservative Jonathan V. Last, writing at the Bulwark, states what should be obvious – The Country Will Not “Open” on Easter:

We talked yesterday about the benchmarks that need to be met in order to begin re-opening the economy: A clear understanding of the infected population and rate of transmission; the healthcare system at a steady-state; a rigorous and basically unlimited ability to test and process cases on-site.

But what does “re-opening” the economy look like after those goals are met?

I’ll tell you what it doesn’t look like: Millions of people who may or may not be carrying viral loads crammed on top of each other in churches on a Sunday morning just to make a rhetorical point.

….

If you move through the re-opening gradually, at each step making sure the virus isn’t breaking out again, then you build confidence as you go. Because if you think things are bad now, imagine what it will look like if we open up everything again and then have to shut it down because we lose control over the management of the virus.

The idea that America is just going to throw the doors open on a Sunday morning two weeks from now and declare “We’re Open for Business” is yet another one of Trump’s dangerous fantasies and it is irresponsible of him to have planted it in the public’s mind.

Conflicts of Interest, Local Government, Newspapers

APG Was Always Going to Play a Vulture’s Role

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One reads that APG, the out-of-state newspaper chain that purchased two local family papers (Janesville Gazette, Daily Jefferson County Union) is slashing the salaries of those papers’ employees.

A few remarks —

I’m not a newspaperman, and have never aspired to be one. Bloggers are modern-day pamphleteers, reviving a tradition that was robust during our founding era. Rather, I’m from a family of newspaper readers. From as far back as I can remember, there were always newspapers (and books, magazines) all over the house. Many Americans of my generation grew up respecting serious journalism – reading, pondering, and critiquing what we read.

The pandemic has hit smaller papers hard, notably alt-weeklies (the Isthmus in Madison has gone dark, and the Shepherd Express has stopped printing and is now online only. (Alternative papers rely significantly on restaurant and entertainment advertising, and those industries are disproportionately affected by the need for social distancing.) For more on the plight of alternative papers see “Total annihilation”: Coronavirus may just be the end for many alt-weeklies. What’s happening to these alternative weeklies – commendable, feisty publications – is heartbreaking.

There’s a different problem with the dailies in this part of the world. Newspapers in the area from which I write – southeastern Wisconsin – have never been especially strong. They grew worse over time – after the Great Recession, they offered weak-tea reporting. The bias to act as press agents for government was, with fewer exceptions each year, strong. Indeed, the importance of journalistic independence from government didn’t merely vanish, but came to be seen as an offense in the eyes of local notables.

The editors of two local dailies – the Daily Union and the Gazette – accelerated their own papers’ demise with happy-talk boosterism. They ran their papers into the ground. They inured others to a lesser standard. See from 3.23.20 A Newspaper’s Boosterism During a Pandemic.

In a city like Whitewater, this problem of boosterism became so acute that a city councilman (who had been on the school board for years prior, and is on the school board again) published his own ersatz online newspaper. Even while he served in office, he published countless pro-government stories, and covered his own candidacy to return to the school board.

Such men might say – as one has heard others in Whitewater say – that they are committing no conflicts of interest because they wear different hats when acting in their respective roles. It’s a laughable claim – those different hats sit on the same heads.

The failure of local newspapers to hold these officials to account has encouraged this ilk.

Now comes APG, picking at the sagging flesh of this area’s daily papers. APG likely would have done so in time – the pandemic has simply accelerated these plans. Blaming APG is like blaming a vulture for needing a meal. It’s the men and women who weakened the animal, and left it vulnerable to predation, who are truly responsible for this sad fate.

Bigotry, Trump

Trump Criticizes Trump

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One can – rightly – despise the Chinese government as a dictatorship without – wrongly – blaming the Chinese people for a pandemic. Trump, however, is a crude bigot, and so he delights in ridiculing those of races other than his own.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.25.20

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-six.  Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 7:14 PM, for 12h 27m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1655, Huygens discovers Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

Recommended for reading in full —

David E. Sanger, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Ana Swanson report Slow Response to the Coronavirus Measured in Lost Opportunity:

When Ford’s chief executive, Jim Hackett, announced on Tuesday that the carmaker would team up with General Electric to build ventilators, he tempered the good news with a note of caution: “We’re talking about early June.”

That was just one of several examples that underscored the price of the Trump administration’s slow response to evidence as early as January that the coronavirus was headed to the United States.

For the first time, it is now possible to quantify the cost of the lost weeks, as President Trump was claiming as recently as February that in a “couple of days” the number of cases in the United States “is going to be down to close to zero.”

Ford’s timeline suggested that if the administration had reacted to the acute shortage of ventilators in February, the joint effort between Ford and General Electric might have produced lifesaving equipment sometime in mid- to late April.

Tory Newmyer writes Wall Street to Trump: Don’t restart economy before stopping coronavirus spread:

President Trump is considering whether to bring the economy out of its government-induced coma in the next week or two, insisting the pain of the restrictions should not outweigh that from the coronavirus itself.

But investors, portfolio managers and economists with a front-row seat to the ongoing carnage on Wall Street and beyond aren’t so sure that scaling back social distancing is the right move. Many say the economy — and still-sliding stock market along with it — won’t begin to recover until the United States definitively turns the tide against the disease. 

“You may get a [market] bounce on the headline,” Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial Inc., tells me…Above all else it will be the empirical data that suggests the virus is receding.” 

(Emphasis in original.)

David A. Fahrenthold, Joshua Partlow, and Jonathan O’Connell report Before Trump called for reevaluating lockdowns, they [states’ orders] shuttered six of his top-earning clubs and resorts:

President Trump’s private business has shut down six of its top seven revenue-producing clubs and hotels because of restrictions meant to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, potentially depriving Trump’s company of millions of dollars in revenue.

Those closures come as Trump is considering easing restrictions on movement sooner than federal public health experts recommend, in the name of reducing the virus’s economic damage.

In a tweet late Sunday, Trump said the measures could be lifted as soon as March 30. “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” he wrote on Twitter.

….

Three of Trump’s hotels — in Doral, Chicago and Washington — have outstanding loans from Deutsche Bank that originally totaled more than $300 million. Even before the coronavirus outbreak, all three reported lagging behind their peers in occupancy and revenue, struggles that the company’s representatives blamed, in one way or another, on Trump’s political rise.

(Emphasis added.)

Should We Turn Chickens into Dinosaurs?:

Coronavirus, Mendacity, Public Health, Television

They Protected Themselves. They Lied to You.

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Embed from Getty Images

In the first 10 days of March, some of the commentators on Fox News and Fox Business played down the threat of what would soon be recognized as a pandemic.

Many of the networks’ elderly, pro-Trump viewers responded to the coverage and the president’s public statements by taking the virus less seriously than others.

But one elderly Fox News viewer, a crucial supporter of President Trump, took the threat seriously: The channel’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, who was to celebrate his 89th birthday on March 11.

On March 8, as the virus was spreading, the Murdoch family called off a planned party out of concern for the patriarch’s health, according to a person familiar with the cancellation. There were about 20 people on the guest list.

Via As Fox News played down the coronavirus, its chief protected himself.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.24.20

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 7:13 PM, for 12h 24m 47s of daytime.  The moon is new with nearly none of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Police & Fire Commission meets at 6:30 PM. 

On this day in 1874, Harry Houdini, who lived during part of his childhood in Appleton, is born.

Recommended for reading in full —

Christopher Rowland reports As Trump touts an unproven coronavirus treatment, supplies evaporate for patients who need those drugs:

The U.S. has all but exhausted its supplies of two anti-malarial drugs that are being used by some doctors in the U.S. and China to treat the coronavirus, but which lack definitive evidence as effective treatment or approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Hopes that the decades-old drugs could be effective against the coronavirus were also boosted by President Trump, who told a White House press briefing last week that the compounds were “a game-changer” and have shown “very, very encouraging results.” He made similar remarks Friday and tweeted the recommendation again on Saturday morning, saying he hoped the medicines will “be put in use IMMEDIATELY.”

The sudden shortages of the two drugs could come at a serious cost for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients who depend on them to alleviate symptoms of inflammation, including preventing organ damage in lupus patients.

See also A man thought aquarium cleaner with the same name as the anti-viral drug chloroquine would prevent coronavirus. It killed him.

Dahleen Green writes Trump’s new campaign rally? His daily coronavirus news conference:

It is obvious that Donald Trump thinks he can score political points with the coronavirus. There is no other reason for him to show up at a news conference every day and spew one lie after another.

He stands there with an approving look on his face, seemingly stalking speakers at the podium to make sure they give him sole credit for everything the many smart, brave and committed health professionals and government workers are doing on the front lines to combat the virus.

Though most people on the stage have much more useful — and accurate — information to offer than Trump, they are forced to cede the platform to him while he babbles on for an hour. The nation is held captive while he verbally attacks reporters, recreates history and makes up stuff as if we are too dumb to know it.

Piet Levy reports Summerfest in Milwaukee postponed until September due to coronavirus pandemic:

Festivals are canceling and postponing all over the world because of the coronavirus pandemic.

For Summerfest in Milwaukee, the show will go on — in September.

Officials with parent company Milwaukee World Festival Inc. announced that the annual 11-day festival — originally set this year for June 24 to 28 and June 30 to July 5 — will now run nine days in 2020, taking place on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays across the first three weeks in September.

The new dates: Sept. 3 to 5, Sept. 10 to 12 and Sept. 17 to 19. Festival officials Monday did not reveal if any of the 32 acts already announced for 2020 will be available in September.

Coronavirus — ‘Stay at home and save lives’ says Boris Johnson as UK enters tighter lockdown: