The Daily Parker

A peaceful protest in downtown Chicago that began at 2pm yesterday devolved into violence by 8pm, leading to Mayor Lori Lightfoot imposing a 9pm to 6am curfew city-wide:

“I want to express my disappointment and, really, my total disgust at the number of others who came to today’s protests armed for all-out battle.”

Lightfoot singled out “the people who came armed with weapons,’’ calling them “criminals.“

“We can have zero tolerance for people who came prepared for a fight and tried to initiate and provoke our police department.’’

She ruled out calling in the National Guard.

The city lifted bridges and blocked access to downtown, shutting Metra and downtown CTA stations around 8:30. I live about 10 km away from the protests, but I have friends and family in the Loop and South Loop. One sent this photo of police blocking the Congress Parkway:

(Movie fans may recognize the section of grass along the river, top-center in the photo, as the location of the Abegnation housing complex in the movie Divergent.)

Looters smashed windows at Macy's on State Street and Nieman-Marcus on Michigan Avenue. In the South Loop, a friend reported on Facebook:

Will have to see in the daylight but I'm hearing the entire South loop is destroyed. Every business windows smashed and looted broken glass everywhere. From Ida B Wells down to Cermak from Michigan down to Canal. Can verify all the stores on my block are destroyed.

The local CBS affiliate had this:

So, it's scary—but in many ways, it looks a lot better than it would have looked in the 1960s or 1920s. This isn't societal collapse. The Chicago Police remained professional and disciplined throughout. (Other police departments in the US, maybe not so much.) They know what's at stake, and they also know that the "protesters" instigating the violence and attacking them are trying to provoke a disproportionate response.

One of my friends summed up the complexity:

It is entirely possible to support the protesters and stand with them and to be angry and devastated by the murder of George Floyd and by every other similar murder as well as the systemic racism that allows it, and also to be angry and sad about the destruction and looting. Vandalism and looting may be what Dr. King called derivative crimes. Uncontested and deplorable derivative crimes. The people doing these things are criminals.

Yet it is also possible to have anger at the people destroying and looting and also have empathy and compassion for the people doing the destroying and looting and understanding the underlying root causes of their actions.

George Takei Tweeted:

You can tell a lot about a person if the first time they spoke up was to condemn the riots and not the murder of George Floyd.

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) May 31, 2020

He also pointed out that the Hong Kong protests worked in part because peaceful protesters called out and filmed the agitators infiltrating their events. We should do the same.

Then there's The Onion from 2017. I'll just leave it there.

The city has started adding traffic controls to side streets in an effort to encourage outdoor recreation and social distancing:

Earlier this week, officials said at least six streets are expected to be closed to through traffic and opened to the public. The move comes after weeks of transportation advocates asking the city to open up streets to pedestrians, giving them more room to walk, jog and ride bikes so they can safely social distance while outside during the pandemic.

Advocates have long called for streets to be opened to pedestrians during the pandemic. With the lakefront and popular trails like The 606 closed to prevent overcrowding, people have said they need more room to get outside without having to worry about crowds or packed sidewalks.

Other major cities, including New York and Los Angeles, created open streets weeks ago.

One of the streets announced as the first to switch runs right past my block. Unfortunately for my side of the neighborhood, our alderman threw cold water on the city's announcement in an email to constituents he sent last night:

Unfortunately, a web blog errantly [sic] and preemptively posted this information before the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) had finalized their plans.  The portion of Leland in the 46th Ward, from Clark to Sheridan, was never going to be a part of this plan because Leland already has, or will have, significant construction taking place this summer. So, according to CDOT, this portion of Leland is unsafe for promoting a shared streets concept.

For reference, these projects include: MCI utility installation, resurfacing of the 1200 block of Leland and the 4700 block of Malden, water main installation on Racine that will cross Leland, and the ongoing building construction at Sheridan and Leland for the new Sarah's Circle facility. It is because of all of these conflicts that CDOT is not supporting Leland as a shared street at this time.

Safe open space is critically important for everybody's mental and physical health during these Stay at Home orders, and that is why we continue to advocate for the Lakefront trails to reopen. This is a plea my office hears daily from residents, and I agree that the trails should open in a phased and planned way to provide safe, and equitable social distancing for recreation and transportation throughout the city.

In other words, yes, Leland will become a shared street—right up to the border of my ward and not actually in my ward. Nice to hear he's lobbying the mayor to reopen the lakefront, though Monty and Rose might want to keep it closed.

Also yesterday, the mayor announced that the city will close a few streets to traffic to encourage restaurants to expand outdoor dining. The Tribune said, however, "it was unclear when the program would start."

It's a little comforting to realize that we've only dealt with Covid-19 social distancing rules about 5% as long as we dealt with World War II (1,345 days from 7 December 1941 to 13 August 1945). It's still a grind.

In the news today:

• Seasonal Chicago residents Monty and Rose Plover have laid four eggs on Montrose Beach, and will hopefully have four chicks around June 17th.
• There's a guy in North Side neighborhood Edgewater who posts a dad joke in his window every day.
• The Economist says "farewell for now to a golden age of drinking."
• Citylab imagines "what our post-pandemic behavior might look like."
• Politico weighs the possibility of a second wave of infections.
• Paul Krugman praises fallible leaders.

Finally, perhaps jealous of Mayor Lori Lightfoot's memes, Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle put this out on Facebook recently:

I rode the El yesterday for the first time since March 15th, because I had to take my car in for service. (It's 100% fine.) This divided up my day so I had to scramble in the afternoon to finish a work task, while all these news stories piled up:

• Josh Marshall unmasks the PPE debate.
• Matthew Sitman explains "why the pandemic is driving conservative intellectuals [sic] mad."
• Michigan's Attorney General called the president "a petulant child," called Lake Huron "a big lake," and called the Upper Peninsula "a cold region."
• Who's interviewing for Vice President?
• In my neighborhood, the Chamber of Commerce and friends want to rethink what our business district will look like in a year. And the Trib asks restaurants what they might look like.
• Elsewhere in Chicago, sex workers have had to change their business models as well.
• AVWeb reports that Air France will retire its A380 fleet this year, instead of in 2022.
• Climate change will make last week's Chicago-area floods more common.
• James Bennett II, writing in McSweeney's, asks: what does your favorite requiem mass say about you? ("Cats, man.")

Finally, author and Ohio resident John Scalzi sums up why he won't rush back to restaurants when they reopen in his state next week:

My plan is to stay home for most of June and let other people run around and see how that works out for them. The best-case scenario is that I’m being overly paranoid for an extra month, in which case we can all laugh about it afterward. The worst case scenario, of course, is death and pain and a lot of people with confused about why ventilator tubes are stuck down their throats, or the throats of their loved ones, when they were assured this was all a liberal hoax, and then all of us back in our houses until September. Once again, I would be delighted to be proved overly paranoid.

I have sympathy for the people who are all, the hell with this, I’ll risk getting sick, just let me out of my fucking apartment. I get where you’re coming from. You probably don’t actually know what you’re asking for. I hope that you never have to learn.

Note to Mr Scalzi: I hope to start The Last Emperox this week. I really do.

Since January 2019, Chicago has had only two months with above-average sunshine, and in both cases we only got 10% more than average. This year we're ticking along about 9% below, with no month since July 2019 getting above 50% of possible sunshine.

In other news:

• Former White House Butler Roosevelt Jerman, who served from 1957 to 2012, died of Covid-19 at age 91.
• One wonders, if the current White House had acted more propitiously, would Jerman have lived longer? Researchers suggest yes, if we'd locked down a week earlier, we would have 36,000 fewer Covid-19 deaths.
• The US saw 2.4 million more unemployment claims last week, bringing the national total to 39 million and Illinois' to 1 million.
• Ichan School of Medicine virologist Benjamen tenOever lays out how SARS-CoV-2 hijacks cellular machinery to suppress interferon production while boosting chemokines, which may explain why the virus is so damaging and hard to kill.
• President Trump "said the corrupt part out loud" in his threats to Michigan and Nevada yesterday, says Greg Sargent.
• Because it's 2020, and we haven't gotten through all the plagues yet, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts an above-average Atlantic hurricane season starting June 1st.
• What happens to cities that depend on giant cruise ships if the ships won't go there? (NB: Perfect time to visit Venice or Alaska right now, except for the virus.)
• Block Club Chicago lays out what could open if the state moves to Phase 3 of the "Restore Illinois" plan a week from tomorrow.
• Around the corner from where I lived until 2015, a condo association is suing the private school next door for fraud, alleging the Francis Parker School illegally attempted to take over the condominium board through straw-man condo purchases.
• The European Southern Observatory revealed evidence of planets forming around a nearby star.

Finally, having "walktails" with friends may be a thing, but because drinking alcohol on public streets in Chicago is prohibited by city ordinance, I cannot admit to ever doing this.

Briefly:

• Illinois surpassed 100,000 cases of Covid-19 as of today, but all four regions of the state remain on target to move into phase 3 (think: outdoor restaurant seating) a week from Friday.
• Josh Marshall says "wear your damn mask."
• Jessica Goldstein wonders when we'll mourn the dead?

Another unit test is taking forever. I turned on "long running tests" so I knew it wouldn't be quick.

You have to see these photos of the dark Sears Tower against the Chicago skyline—a metaphor for 2020 bar none. Also:

• The Chicago Teachers Union has sued the Chicago Public Schools and Betsy DeVos over the treatment of special-education students during the lockdown.
• Alexandra Petri imagines the sad, lonely life of a potato guardian.
• Three Floyds has closed their brewpub indefinitely, another sign of the apocalypse.
• President Trump really does believe his own quackery, though hydroxychloroquine as a dog whistle surely plays a part in it. Maybe he's not actually lying? ("[A]ssuming that all of his pandemic untruths are lies may obscure the degree to which he’s out of his depth.")
• Similarly, is Georgia's Brian Kemp deceitful, incompetent, malingering, racist, or just stupid? Yes.

And oh! My long-running unit test (1575.9 seconds) has finished. I can get up now.

So far—and keep in mind, we're only 2/3 done with the month—Chicago has had more precipitation this May than in any previous May, with 216 mm total. It's interesting to note that 2019 and 2018 were also the wettest Mays ever, with 210 mm and 208 mm respectively.

In Northwest Michigan, the record rainfall caused a pair of dams to break, flooding the town of Midland under 2.75 m of water.

The Lake Michigan-Huron system continues at record levels for the fifth month in a row, with no sign of receding.

Welcome to the new normal.

I think today is Tuesday, the first day of my 10th week working from home. That would make today...March 80th? April 49th? Who knows.

It is, however, just past lunchtime, and today I had shawarma and mixed news:

• Carbon emissions have declined 17% year-over-year, thanks to Covid-19-related slowdowns reducing petroleum consumption. (See? It's not all bad news.)
• Crain's Chicago Business reviews how businesses rate Mayor Lori Lightfoot's first year in office. And their editorial board says we should "start rethinking 'normal'."
• Consistent with the way authoritarian governments have always worked, Attorney General Bill Barr wants to send his own personal history down the memory hole.
• Speaking of populist lies, McSweeney's has the new New York Times style guide on how to avoid saying "the president lied."
• Scientific American explains "death awareness" and how it makes people respond to, say, pandemics.
• Metra, Chicago's heavy-rail commuter agency, will break ground on a new station in Edgewater this month.

Earlier, I mentioned that the state's unemployment office accidentally revealed thousands of records in an own goal. Turns out, Deloitte Consulting did the work, so I am no longer surprised. Note to anyone who needs software written: don't hire a big consulting firm. They don't attract the best developers because they use manager-driven development patterns that irritate the hell out of anyone with talent.

Long day, with meetings until 8:45pm and the current sprint ending tomorrow at work, so I'll read most of these after the spring review:

• Tara Smith warns about the unholy alliance of anti-vaxers and Covid-19 quarantine protesters. Libby Watson calls it a "deranged civil religion."
• You think President Trump firing State Department Inspector General Steve Linick was about walking Mike Pompeo's dogs? Uh, no. It was about the $8 bn arms deal with Saudi Arabia that Linick was about to expose.
• Why is Trump going after Obama again? Jennifer Rubin has a theory. Even Attorney General Bill Barr, no ethical paragon he, shut down the idea of investigating Obama or Biden—probably for no other reason than it would not be good to have that precedent on the books next January.
• In his latest time capsule, James Fallows looks at the past week and can scarcely believe the 5 or 6 scandals that would have been top stories in any other year.
• After we got 200 mm of rain in the last 36 hours, the forecast calls for slightly drier and much warmer weather ahead. The Sears Tower remains without power, however, after police in boats had to rescue homeless people on Lower Wacker Drive. (“Two of the top 5 wettest May days ever were in the past 4 days – no wonder why the flooding is so bad, that is unreal,” [National Weather Service meteorologist Gino] Izzi said.)
• Cranky Flier analyzes Delta's 777 retirement plan.
• Anthony Paletta looks at "why airports die."

Finally, Sheffield, U.K., wildlife photographer Simon Dell built a Hobbiton for the local field mice. It's as adorable as it sounds.