The Daily Parker

Lunchtime roundup:

• Author John Scalzi gives the STBXPOTUS a colossal take-down on his blog today: "We don’t have to wait on history, but as it happens, this is how history will remember Donald Trump: Not as a forceful, charismatic authoritarian, but as a corrupt and pathetic wretch, who spent the final days of his presidency shouting at the walls about how the world is against him."
• Alexandra Petri: "Now is not the time to point fingers, Julius Caesar. Now is the time for healing." ("I am frankly appalled when I think of all the things that have been said on both sides, like, 'Death to Caesar!' and 'Ouch!'")
• National security experts, including the former chief research psychologist for the US Secret Service, advise treating the STBXPOTUS "like he's a terrorist leader."
• It appears that Ivanka and Jared wouldn't let the people protecting them into the house to pee, forcing the US Secret Service to spend nearly $100,000 over the past few years renting an apartment close by.
• Republicans in Congress supported intrusive security for everyone else in the past, but now that it affects them personally, they don't like it. How surprising.
• Since the Senate has recessed, presumably so Mitch McConnell can avoid an impeachment trial, President-Elect Biden still has no confirmed cabinet officials, forcing the incoming administration into an alternative plan after taking power next Wednesday.
• Chicago teachers locked out of the Chicago Public Schools online learning platform because they refused to return to unsafe classrooms found a poetic way of expressing their displeasure: they taught from the Board of Education President's front lawn.
• Chicago's regional heavy-rail system approved a $1.8 bn purchase of 500 slick new rail cars, which should start to arrive in 2024.

Finally, the authors of The Impostor's Guide, a free ebook aimed at self-taught programmers, has a new series of videos about general computer-science topics that people like me didn't learn programming for fun while getting our history degrees.

The Economist's Bartleby column examines how Covid-19 lockdowns have "caused both good and bad changes of routine."

We had a relatively quiet day yesterday, but only in comparison to the day before:

• Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (wife of presumptive Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned after nearly four years (and with nothing to gain from staying in Cabinet) mostly because they no longer needed those jobs. Said the Post: "Resigning now feels a little like eating all but the last bite of a piece of cake at a restaurant and then asking for a refund."
• The BBC has a commendable round-up of fact-checking who actually broke into the Capitol on Wednesday.
• The US hit a new record for daily Covid-19 deaths: 4,112.
• The STBXPOTUS whined that he won't attend President Biden's inauguration, becoming the first crybaby-in-chief to skip the event since his spiritual ancestor Andrew Johnson.
• Nonfarm payrolls fell 140,000 from November to December, though unemployment held steady at 6.7%.

Meanwhile, here in Chicago:

• Reports of Southport Lanes' demise may have been premature.
• The South Shore Line will get a new route after the Federal Transit Administration released $945 million for it.
• Chicago restaurants may re-open next week thanks to falling Covid-19 infection rates state-wide.

Finally, Bruce Schneier advises the incoming administration on how to deal with the SolarWinds intrusion.

See? Yesterday was quiet.

My company gives us the usual American holidays off, and adds two "floating holidays" you can take whenever you want. I took my first one in January and just remembered last week that I hadn't taken the second one. So I took it today. Which gave me some time to read a bunch of things:

• The Atlantic's Derek Thompson wishes politicians in both parties understood how Covid-19 spreads.
• Paul Krugman wonders whether the president's efforts to kill Covid relief come from ignorance or cynicism. (I'd imagine both.)
• The Texas Attorney General and the attorneys general of 17 other states have sued four states where Joe Biden won to try overthrowing the election. Several Republicans in Congress have signed on as amici curiae, essentially calling their own elections illegitimate.
• National Geographic explains how the French Revolution led to the metric system.
• John Maguire, writing for the BBC's Culture column, really did not like the clichéd portrayal of Irish people in Wild Mountain Thyme.
• The next president of my alma mater will be from Chicago. They just keep getting us Chicagoans to run things over there.

Finally, the list I posted Wednesday needs an update. In October 1918, influenza killed 195,000 Americans, or an average of 6,290 per day. So clearly most of that month set records well above the records we set this week.

We've got a day and a half of autumn left in Chicago. Here's what I'm reading on a lazy Sunday:

• Chicago's North Pond in Lincoln Park needs $7m in restoration work which it may not get next year.
• The Washington Post recaps the 20-day clown show of the president refusing to accept the results of the election.
• Will Wilkinson tries to sort out why so many people voted for him.
• Erika Christakis looks at how Covid-19 illuminated existing problems with the way we educate children.

And finally, new research shows that the pyroclastic flows from Vesuvius in 79 CE turned people's brains to glass. Yummy.

Talk-show host Stephen Colbert has set up a website called Better Know a Ballot where you can check on the voting requirements for your state. He's producing videos for each state (starting with North Carolina) to explain the rules.

That's the bright spot of joy for you today. Here are other...spots...of something:

• The president answered questions from "undecided" voters at a town hall on Tuesday, and naturally lied almost every time he spoke. The Washington Post lists his most egregious falsehoods.
• Charlie Pierce believes the administration "couldn't have screwed up the response to the pandemic worse if it sent out battalions of the infected to sneeze on people."
• Attorney General William Barr attacked his own federal prosecutors in a speech yesterday, saying career attorneys have too much power that should go to the political appointees.
• Greg Sargent lists 7 ways the administration is "using government to corrupt the election."
• Megan McArdle explains how the language of Fox differs from English.
• The BBC's Reality Check takes on the president's unique understanding of forestry.
• Here in Chicago, the 98-year-old bar Southport Lanes will close for good on September 27th.
• I hope they didn't use Fortune Food Product's ingredients in their food, because the FDA has ordered them to stop production "after federal inspectors allegedly witnessed live rodents and other food safety violations at the East Pilsen facility."
• On this day in 1934, Lane Tech High School opened at its current location in North Center. At the time, it was the largest high school in the world, with 7,000 (all male) students.

OK, one more bit of good news: The Economist reported this week that the southern hemisphere had almost no flu cases this winter, because pandemic response measures work on influenza just as they work on Covid-19.

Josh Marshall has a good summary of why things suck for parents, kids, and teachers right now:

But the plan [New York] city and most of [New York] state has come up with shows how limited this can be and how much we’ve made a fetish of in-school instruction. There are two big reasons to have in-school instruction. The first and most important is the educational, social and emotional development and well-being of children. The second is the impact on the economy. Many parents can’t work if their children aren’t in school and to the extent they can their children’s remote learning lacks the support it needs.

I think there is a real question whether in-school instruction on these terms is even worth it. At best kids will be in school 1/3 of the time – and it may be less – and under such straightened and perhaps nerve-wracking conditions that most of the educational and social benefit is actually lost. Watching the process as a journalist and a parent it seems to me that the school system and political authorities have been so focused on the absolute necessity of ‘reopening’ the schools that they’ve ended up with something that is not obviously better than full remote learning and called it success.

The truth is that we’re in a horrible situation. We have failed as a country to control the virus and because of that we’re forced into no-win situations and choices which are all bad. As much as anything we simply lack the kind of information that allows us to make informed, smart decisions. And yet September is less than four weeks away.

Meanwhile, Downtown Chicago suffered a coordinated attack of looters last night for no apparent reason, though police returning fire from a suspect and injuring him yesterday afternoon may have been the excuse. Since the looting took place across town and the looters came with U-Haul trucks I can't say I have any sympathy for them on this occasion. If it turns out that any of the looters were right-wing agitators, I will be disappointed but not surprised.

Oh, and the government of Lebanon resigned.

Philip Bump puts in black-and-white terms why the president should perhaps shut up about his cognitive test results:

Today's interesting and notable news stories:

• This week marks the 25th anniversary of Chicago's deadly heat wave in July 1995, during which 700 people died and we hit a record 41°C with a 52°C heat index.
• Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman sees the Trump Administration's corruption as far worse than Nixon's.
• In a recent interview with CNN, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos repeated, without coherently explaining the how or why of it, that children should go back to school this fall.
• DeVos' inherently-stupid recommendation aside, internal documents show we don't have enough PPE right now, let alone when millions of kids and teachers get sick.
• Regardless of whether he lied or not, President Trump's recent claim that he threatened Seattle with Federal intervention to clear the CHOP should make you uncomfortable.
• The Chicago Tribune has a fact sheet on voting by mail in Illinois.

Finally, Lawrence Wright explores how historical plagues, particularly the European one in 1347, can sometimes spark radical social change.

Princeton University has removed the name of their 13th president (and the 28th President of the United States) from their School of Public Policy:

Wilson’s racism was significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time. He segregated the federal civil service after it had been racially integrated for decades, thereby taking America backward in its pursuit of justice.  He not only acquiesced in but added to the persistent practice of racism in this country, a practice that continues to do harm today.

Wilson’s segregationist policies make him an especially inappropriate namesake for a public policy school. When a university names a school of public policy for a political leader, it inevitably suggests that the honoree is a model for students who study at the school. This searing moment in American history has made clear that Wilson’s racism disqualifies him from that role. In a nation that continues to struggle with racism, this University and its school of public and international affairs must stand clearly and firmly for equality and justice. The School will now be known as “The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.”

Wilson is a different figure from, say, John C. Calhoun or Robert E. Lee, whose fame derives from their defenses of the Confederacy and slavery (Lee was often honored for the very purpose of expressing sympathy for segregation and opposition to racial equality). Princeton honored Wilson not because of, but without regard to or perhaps even in ignorance of, his racism.

That, however, is ultimately the problem. Princeton is part of an America that has too often disregarded, ignored, or excused racism, allowing the persistence of systems that discriminate against Black people. When Derek Chauvin knelt for nearly nine minutes on George Floyd’s neck while bystanders recorded his cruelty, he might have assumed that the system would disregard, ignore, or excuse his conduct, as it had done in response to past complaints against him.

Josh Marshall thinks this was the correct decision:

Wilson was also a thoroughgoing Southerner and Lost Cause defender. Indeed, his scholarship as a history professor – mostly notably in Division and Reunion – played an important role in building a historiography that portrayed slavery as a generally benign institution and Reconstruction as a tragic failure that oppressed the white South with corruption and tyranny. Wilson was a thoroughgoing racist even by the standards of his own day. His attitude toward African-Americans and their political rights don’t just look bad from the perspective of the day. They were widely considered retrograde even in his own day.

This was a through-line throughout Wilson’s career, first as a scholar, a university president, governor and finally President. When he became President he segregated the federal workforce which had been integrated since Reconstruction. Indeed, it’s not too much to say that on becoming President Wilson began a thoroughgoing program of bringing Jim Crow to the federal workplace. The Post Office and Treasury set up separate bathrooms and lunch rooms for black and white employees. He even went so far as to institute a policy of requiring federal office-seekers to append photographs to their applications.

Wilson was the second Democrat and the first Southerner to become President after the Civil War. He brought thoroughly Southern white attitudes toward Blacks to the federal government and worked quickly to put them into effect.

Good on Princeton, though perhaps 50 years too late. I'm glad for the changes finally coming to the US. I'm just astounded that it has taken over 150 400 years.

I'm still plowing through all the CDs I bought over the years, now up to #55 which I got in November 1988. It's a 1957 recording of the Robert Shaw Chorale performing various Christmas carols. (Remember, remember, I got it in November.)

This comes between Billy Joel's Piano Man and Glenn Gould performing Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias. Then I'll get Simon & Garfunkel, Mozart, William Byrd, and Haydn.

At least part of this strangeness comes from my experience as a music major during my first year at university, when the music department announced a new requirement for every music major to take a listening exam every year. They published four lists, one for each school year, effectively giving students up to 3½ years to listen to all 100 works. The list drove a lot of my CD purchases while there.

In mid-April, you'd go to the music library and listen to a cassette with 60-second excerpts of music. (I think there were 50 excerpts.) You got one point for naming the composer, a point for naming the work, and if applicable, a point for identifying the movement. To pass the exam, you had to get 80% of the total points available.

Here are some of the works on the 1988-89 list:

• Bach, Cantata #4, "Christ lag in Todesbanden"
• Beethoven, Symphony #6
• Mozart, Requiem K626 (but only the "Introitus," "Kyrie," and "Dies Irae")
• Varèse, Ionisation
• Verdi, La Traviata

The lists got progressively more difficult, with the 1991-92 list containing obscurities like Schubert's Der Erlkönig and Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #2.

The music faculty believed, quite reasonably, that musicians should have some passing familiarity with these 100 works for the same reason one would expect an English major to know a few Shakespeare plays or a computer-science major could explain the bubble-sort algorithm to a non-major. It's called the canon.

In April 1989, I was the only music major to pass the exam. I didn't take the 1990 exam because I'd switched majors; but in 1991, the music department asked me to take the exam again as a control, because in 1990 no one passed the first time. Once again, I was the only person to pass the first time out.

I just couldn't fathom why. Each list had such variety, just knowing the pieces on them should give you 67% of the right answers without even trying. For example, the 1990 exam included polar opposites Berg's Wozzeck and Brahms' piano quintet in f-minor. You'd think someone could easily distinguish them. If I recall correctly, the department even let people bring in the list after the 1989 debacle. So you could just look at the list and decide whether the thing you're listening to is atonal singing in German with orchestra or a small ensemble with four strings and a piano. Or if it's a choral work instead of a massive symphony. Or if it's something by Bach or something by Ives.

It was about this time that I started worrying for the future of the arts.

If you're interested, here's the 1988-89 list. If you know anything about classical music, you should be able to identify most of these works.