Cari Lightner died 40 years ago today
Clarence Busch, a man with multiple arrests for intoxication including a hit-and-run drunk-driving charge from less than a week earlier, killed 13-year-old Cari Lightner on a quiet road in Fair Oaks,...
View ArticleI will travel from state to state in a recreational vehicle
Poor Commander Borodin, the executive officer on the Red October, who never got to live his dream:Only it turns out, during a pandemic, it's not such a dream:“Most R.V.s are not set up to be...
View ArticleTin soldiers and Nixon's coming, 50 years ago today
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...
View ArticleAfternoon news roundup
As Illinois hits 2,662 Covid-19 deaths and the CDC says the country will hit about that number every dayby month's end, May the 4th be with us:Newly-disgorged White House press secretary Kayleigh...
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A little light reading
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,...
View ArticleNot all horrible news
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...
View ArticleKim Stanley Robinson on our new "structure of feeling"
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...
View ArticleAt least the tunnel has walls now, even if we can't see the end of it
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...
View ArticleWhat's a Wednesday again?
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...
View ArticleThe economic consequences of the pandemic
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....
View ArticleUnprecedented numbers
The US unemployment rate exploded to 14.7% in April as 20.5 million people officially left the workforce, with millions more people leaving full-time work and others not even trying to find new jobs....
View ArticleWhen did this become a thing?
Writing for the Washington Post, Michele Norris has had enough of white dudes toting firearms at "peaceful" protests:We’ve gotten far too accustomed to the image of white protesters carrying...
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Fifty days in
Illinois has had a stay-at-home order in effect for over seven weeks now, though last week the state and county opened up forest trails and other outdoor activities that allow for proper distancing and...
View ArticleThe plan is to have no plan
So believes NYU media professor Jay Rosen about how President Trump will try to win this fall:The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and...
View ArticleDisbar Barr
I read the news today, oh boy:Close to 2,000 former Justice Department and FBI officials called on Attorney General William Barr to resign, which he won't do because he's this close to total world...
View ArticleAll-or-nothing doesn't work
Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Julia Marcus argues that "quarantine fatigue is real," and it may be healthier to start relaxing self-isolation (for many people) than to continue it:Public-health...
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Bye, flyby
So, this just happened:Are these the better angels of our nature? Nah, but they're still cool:
View ArticleToday's...uh, yesterday's articles
My day kept getting longer as it went on in a way that people living through the pandemic will understand. So I didn't have time to read any of these yesterday:The Chicago Tribune produced six charts...
View ArticleThat's not how this works
This is a wonky post about tax law and at the same time a pissed-off post about political advocacy under cover of "neutral" commentary that takes advantage of people's ignorance of a nuanced area of...
View ArticleWednesday, 74 March 2020
Just when you thought the Republican Party couldn't become more anti-science and pro-profit (at the expense of workers), the Wisconsin Supreme Court just struck down Wisconsin's stay-at-home order on a...
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