Wednesday Night Owls: Excerpts from Harper’s Index

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Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week

35 DAYS UNTIL JOE BIDEN AND KAMALA HARRIS TAKE THE OATH OF OFFICE

It’s time once again for excerpts from the Harper’s Index:

• Portion of single Americans who have had sex since the coronavirus pandemic began: 3/10
• Portion of those single Americans whose sexual partner was a roommate with whom they were not in a relationship: 1/4
• Estimated value of loans taken out by U.S. couples for canceled 2020 weddings: $3,700,000,000
• Portion of U.S. adults who consume news on YouTube: 1/4
• Percentage of YouTube news channels that are oriented around a single person: 44
• Number of climate-related disasters worldwide between 1980 and 1999: 3,656
• Between 2000 and 2019: 6,681
• Number of countries to which the International Monetary Fund has granted pandemic loans: 81
• Percentage of these loan agreements that strongly encourage austerity measures once the crisis has ended: 84
• Number of hours that U.S. workers saved each day in commuting time from March to September last year: 60,000,000
• Percentage of this saved time that was spent working: 35
• Percentage of U.S. employers with remote workers who say that productivity has remained the same or improved: 94
• Estimated portion of white students who live in U.S. school districts with reopening plans that included in-person learning: 1/2
• Of Black and Hispanic students who do: 1/4

THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING

• Japanese Jishuku and the Coronavirus, by Kaki Okumura. The power of cultures that have traditions of sharing consideration during times of crisis.
   
• John le Carré Told the Truth About Cold War Espionage When Few Others Would, by Emma Steiner. John le Carré died Saturday at age eighty-nine. His novels rejected the glamor and ritz of Cold War–era spy fiction. Instead, he portrayed espionage as a dreary, disturbing machine that ground up innocents for a goal that didn’t justify the human cost.
   
• People Are Taking the Wrong Lesson From Trump’s Failed Coup, by Elie Mystal. The Supreme Court ruling on Friday should finally have put a stop to Trump’s seditionist antics, but he and his sycophants only amped up the tension.

TOP COMMENTS • RESCUED DIARIES • THE BRIEF

QUOTATION

“Winter represents rest, hibernation, and even death. We humans–driven by our demanding work and school schedules–tend to forget that winter is a time to slow down, but our fellow animals and plants prepare accordingly, allowing themselves a season of rest.”
          ~~Jill McKeever, The Spirit of Botany: Aromatic Recipes and Rituals (2020)

TWEET OF THE DAY

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this day in 2017—Trump’s bluster about pardoning Flynn is as idiotic as usual:

Here’s an idea—after admitting that you knew your national security adviser had lied to the FBI and subsequently begging your FBI director to quash his investigation into it only to fire him for not doing so, you float the idea of pardoning the national security adviser who is now widely known to be cooperating with that investigation.

It’s so obstruction-y, only an idiot would do it, right?

Asked whether he planned to pardon former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Trump said “I don’t want to talk about pardons for Michael Flynn yet. We’ll see what happens.”

Welcome to your Friday installment of Donald Trump’s stupidity. So yeah, this raises all kinds of concerns about presidential power, etc. But the fact of the matter is, most of the damage Flynn can do to Trump is probably already done, otherwise we probably still wouldn’t even know about Flynn’s plea agreement with federal authorities to begin with. Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti laid it out pretty nicely in a tweet thread.

“If Flynn is pardoned now,” Mariotti wrote, “the upside for Trump is much lower than it would have been earlier because Flynn has already told Mueller everything he knows. Additionally, if Flynn accepted a pardon, he couldn’t take the Fifth if called to testify.”