Knowing What I Know Now, I'd Still Take the Shot

Yesterday I got my flu shot at the Costco Pharmacy.

That's not newsworthy, of course, but it is unusual for me to get it this early in the season. I often skip the shot or get it in the winter because the flu does not normally affect me greatly, and the injection is only about 50% effective anyway. But these days one must be extra cautious and extra diligent.

I was out of sorts today with a fever (101 °F) and mild aches and pains. Thankfully, there were no breathing or gastrointestinal problems, which are other signs of the coronavirus. I'm hoping they are just a reaction to the shot.

This actually been the healthiest year in memory. Mask-wearing, social distancing, and limited interactions with non-family members have kept sickness at bay.

Getting a flu shot, IMHO, is worth the downside risk of a reaction. One doesn't want to get both the flu and the coronavirus, as one unfortunate person did in Solano County.

The first known case in the Bay Area of a dual coronavirus-influenza infection was confirmed Thursday in Solano County, prompting health officials to urge residents to hurry up and get flu shots and double down on social distancing and mask wearing.

The Solano County Department of Health and Social Services described the unlucky patient as an otherwise healthy individual under the age of 65, but the county did not release any personal information.

Bela Matyas, the Solano County health officer, said the victim is older than 20, works in the “health care realm” and appears to have recovered from the co-infection.

Happy Halloween!

A Spike in Coverage

There's been a spike in coronavirus cases in the United States.

Although the WSJ article was packed with information, your humble blogger has trouble grasping written descriptions of numerical data and can comprehend it more easily in graphs or tables. Below are graphs from the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 website via Google:


U.S. Total Cases = 9,020,000

U.S. Deaths = 229,000

Comments:

1) Yes, infections have spiked, but deaths per day have leveled off.

2) With total U.S. cases of 9.02 million and total deaths of 229,000, the cumulative data showed that one has a 2.5% chance of dying if one contracts the coronavirus.

3) The chances of recovery from COVID-19 are getting better than 2.5%. Whether due to improved treatment, better health among the new cases (for example, younger, fitter patients), earlier detection, or a combination of factors, the graphs show that the chances of dying after diagnosis is now 1% or less.

4) The coronavirus is unquestionably deadlier than the flu. According to the CDC 2018-2019 infections and deaths were 35.5 million and 34,200, respectively, which is a 0.1% chance of dying if one catches the flu. In 2017-2018 infections and deaths were 44.8 million and 61,099, respectively, a 0.14% mortality.

5) A vaccine is not yet available for the coronavirus, while flu infections and deaths are undoubtedly lower because a flu vaccine has been widely distributed and is inexpensive.

6) If I were in charge, I would recommend masks and social distancing indoors with modifications for quality of ventilation. I support universal reopening and would require each establishment (e.g., schools, churches, restaurants) to post its policy so that patrons are fully informed before they make the decision to enter. Then again, it's probably a good thing that I'm not in charge.

Mondrian Memory

On the list of 2020's disappointments this item is nothing, but the loss of San Francisco's Mondrian House merits a moment of reflection. (It's only an intangible loss because the house has been painted over--see above before and after.)

The two-story home at 2140 Great Highway, separated from Ocean Beach by a sand dune covered in ice plant, was one of those unexpected encounters that stood as a vivid treat in what can seem an ever-more-predictable Bay Area landscape. The taut balancing of blue, yellow and red planes within a meticulous white grid also had been a presence for at least 20 years.

No longer. Just like that favorite store or saloon that has closed for good because of the coronavirus....The house changed hands last year, and earlier this month the color scheme changed too. The garage door and front entrance are now soft yellow. Everything else is a sky blue that already looks washed out.

Composition with Yellow, Blue,
and Red (Tate.org)

Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) created a distinctive style, "restricted to the three primary colours and to a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines on a white ground," that once one becomes conscious of it one sees duplicated everywhere.

Mondrian dresses became fashionable in the '60's. Their rectangular frame, perpendicular lines, and primary colors were minimalist and futuristic. They echoed the block letters and basic colors of the nascent computer age, the transition from the complexity of analog to the simplicity of digital 1's and 0's.

That world, along with the Mondrian House, exists no longer.

YSL Mondrian dress (pleasure photo)

The Eviction Tidal Wave is Coming

Sign in LA (marketplace.org)

Last month we wrote about the extension of eviction moratoriums to 2021:

There is a next-to-zero chance of collecting the unpaid rent once a tenant moves out, so basically the State will have taken tens of $thousands per rental unit from property owners in order to effect public policy.

Many owners cannot afford to go without rent for a year. I know elderly landlords who rent out their homes to pay, partially, for their assisted living apartments, which cost $10,000 per month. I know another single-property owner who is taking her condo off the market.

Nationally, defaulting renters number in the millions and unpaid rent is in the $billions:

Moody’s Analytics estimates that [outstanding rent debt] could reach nearly $70 billion by year-end if there is no additional stimulus spending. The economic-research firm calculated that 12.8 million Americans would then owe an average of $5,400 from missed payments.

Small landlords have not been granted relief from property taxes, nor can they defer loan payments because their debt is categorized as commercial, not residential.

All the sympathy has been directed to the tenants who can't pay, but give a thought to the landlords whose properties are in effect being taken because of the State decreeing that legal agreements are not enforceable in one direction.

The eviction of millions, as well as repossessions of thousands of rental properties, will be upon us soon after November 3rd. Though many publications have written about it, looming evictions have not captured the imagination, and politicians have not been asked to come up with solutions.

That's too bad, because real estate experience could have been relevant in the election, and it's a mystery why the media didn't mention it more.

Find My iPhone Will Need to be Updated

(ArtistShot Image)

In case you missed it, Your iPhone will soon work on the moon: (H/T Tyler Cowen) [bold added]

Nokia will build a 4G cellular network on the moon. It’ll allow future astronauts to make voice and video calls, but also transmit data and remotely control equipment.

The goal is to have the wireless network in place on Earth’s largest satellite by 2022. It’s part of NASA’s Artemis program, which has the goal of establishing a sustainable presence on the moon by the end of the decade...

NASA could have skipped 4G and gone straight to the latest standard, but telecoms are only just now rolling out 5G on Earth.

It's wise that they're installing 4G instead of the much-faster-but-unproven 5G.

If you bring a vintage 2014 iPhone 6 (valued at $100) to the multibillion dollar lunar base, you want to be sure it's going to work.

Hornets Weren't Part of the Model

Murder hornets in Washington (Chron photo)

Global warming may not be all bad. If it is indeed responsible for California's hot, dry weather, then it keeps away the murder hornets:

The insect, whose actual name is the Asian giant hornet, inflicts painful stings and can spit venom but typically doesn’t attack people and pets unless threatened. It earned its “murder” moniker because it is highly lethal to honeybees and can annihilate entire hives in hours...

“It is exceedingly unlikely that these hornets can establish in California,” [UCD entomologist] Lynn Kimsey said. “If you look at where they're found in their native range in southern Asia, this region has summer rain. I think California is too dry, except perhaps along the far northern coast.”

A recent study by Washington State University researchers also concluded that while murder hornets could spread down the West Coast through Oregon within a few decades, they likely would not settle in California. The study found that “much of the interior of the U.S. is inhospitable to the hornet due to extremes of heat, cold and low rainfall,” including California’s Central Valley, according to a university news release.

By killing our honeybees murder hornets would threaten

California’s agriculture industry, which state data shows is the largest in the U.S., accounting for over 13% of the nation’s total agricultural value. According to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the Golden State produces two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts — crops that rely on pollination by honeybees.

To support State agriculture California should spend its scarce dollars on building more dams and water infrastructure while letting markets dictate the speed of the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. We should accept high temperatures because it keeps the honeybees safe.

This path, however, would need much less regulation, and where's the fun in that?

Beer, Conversation, and God

(Syracuse Diocese)

Before the coronavirus people had already begun finding their faith outside of churches.

“pub theology” meetings...have grown increasingly popular in recent years. The modern trend began in 1981, when a group of Catholic priests in Illinois began holding gatherings to talk about God over beer. They called it “Theology on Tap.” The concept soon gained popularity in the U.K., where it picked up the “pub theology” name...

Over the past decade, the pub theology movement has grown to more than 200 weekly gatherings across the U.S. Average attendance can reach around two dozen people. Over the phone, [Pastor Bryan] Berghoef describes a regular pub-theology night in Western Michigan. Scripture from any of the major world religions is read and discussed, as are current events.

A current topic of discussion could be Halloween, which remains contentious for some of the faithful because of its pagan roots. Most Christian denominations are present every week. Jews and Muslims often attend. The occasional Hindu, Buddhist and Baha’i comes by, along with a few atheists and agnostics

The sharing of food goes back to Christianity's founding. The Lord's Supper was a real meal:

It was meant to satisfy the participants' hunger. In principle the idea was that the more well-to-do members of the community would share food with poorer members. This sharing of food gave the Lord's Supper, inter alia, the function of a charity meal.

I suspect that pubs and bars will bounce back more quickly than churches will as America re-opens. Pastors, priests, and rabbis would do well to have conversations about God, with beer, in a place where the younger crowd feels more comfortable.

As Willie Sutton might have said, that's where the people are.

Give Me a Bigger Piece of the Rock

Trillions of dollars have been spent so far, and the economy is hurting so badly that Congress and the President are negotiating another $2.0 trillion coronavirus rescue package.

Yet in the midst of misery there's a housing boom. [bold added]

There are, broadly, three forces behind housing’s resurgence. First, while the crisis has put millions out of work, those job losses have been concentrated in lower-paying services industries, so those hit hardest tend not to have the means to buy a house in any circumstances. Meanwhile, the higher-income earners who generally can afford a house have weathered the downturn much better.

Second, the downturn, and the Federal Reserve easing efforts it brought forth, have led to a sharp decline in borrowing costs. The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage has fallen to 2.8%—its lowest level on record—from 3.7% at the start of the year. That has made it, on balance, easier for many people to afford a house.

Finally, the pandemic has prompted many people to move away from urban centers, such as New York City, to more socially distant accommodations in the suburbs, while the work-from-home revolution has convinced some to move even farther afield. There has also been an increase in demand for vacation and second homes.

Normally during periods of uncertainty even the well-off hunker down and preserve their savings. In this unusual year many have decided there's greater risk in staying where they are, especially if they're renting or owning in a high-density urban area.

Some experts believe the exodus from the cities is short-lived, while I, no expert, think it has some staying power. From four months ago:

Your humble blogger believes that this time is different; the de-population of urban centers won't reverse itself for at least 20 years. As services like fire, education, health, transportation, and police are asked to do more on frozen budgets, businesses and the middle and upper classes flee--not all at once, to be sure--but enough so that the tax base erodes. Services are further reduced, and the flight continues. The admittedly extreme example is Detroit, a once-great American city that has never recovered from the 1967 riots.

We are entering a downward spiral that is extremely difficult to turn around. Almost everyone wants to feel safe where they live, and cities are going in the opposite direction with COVID-19. (Defunding of police forces might be the last straw for many American urban dwellers.)

Green acres is the place to be:

Strained Relationship

Levi's Stadium: not much revenue these days (NBC photo)

In this unusual political season the locals are talking about a single $3 million contribution to a campaign, not for a House seat or State Proposition or a seat in the State Assembly but to replace the Santa Clara City Council: [bold added]

This week’s decision by Santa Clara County not to allow fans at 49ers games, despite getting the OK for limited ticket sales from California’s health department, is the latest blow in a strained relationship between the football team and its hand-selected locale...

Team owner Jed York has poured an astounding and unprecedented $3 million into the upcoming city-council election, backing four candidates and opposing four other candidates — including two female incumbents who have stood up to the 49ers on several issues. It’s a mind-blowing amount of money to infuse into a local race in a city of 130,000 people, and has some worrying that the 49ers are trying to turn the city into “Yorkville.”

(Note: the City of Santa Clara shouldn't be confused with Santa Clara County, which btw is home to prominent cities like Palo Alto, San Jose, and Mountain View.)

California's COVID-19 policies have been among the strictest in the nation, yet Santa Clara is saying that these are not strict enough. The 49ers attendance issue was initially about the tradeoff between health risk and business, but in California it quickly devolved into interest-group and identity politics:

[Mayor Lisa] Gillmor and the council, which is majority female (four council members) want to maintain oversight over the stadium. York’s influx of campaign funds, both for and against candidates of his choosing and which dwarfs the backing of any other funds coming into the race, appears to be an effort to change the dynamic.

The 49ers want to make the race an argument about diversity and describe York’s preferred candidates as an effort toward better representing the makeup of the city (40% of Santa Clara residents identify as white). Three of York’s preferred candidates are Asian American.

Rahul Chandhok, the 49ers’ vice president of public affairs and strategic communications, said in an email that York’s support was a “swift, open and transparent” response to seeing Gillmor “orchestrate her developer allies to funnel money through the Police Union PAC” and to “the outcry from civic institutions like the NAACP and the Asian Law Alliance.” Chandhok charges that Gillmor is “supporting a slate of all white candidates” and has worked to “upend voting rights to dilute minority representation.”

The 49ers are bringing out the big guns by stressing the female majority of the City Council (subtext: women don't care about a sport that men love) coupled with the Council's all-white make-up (bunch of Karens!).

Introduce the sex and race angle, now add in a dollop of negative-association words ("developer", "PAC", "union"), and so it goes in California politics.

For the record your humble blogger is in favor of the 49ers position, but c'mon, man, don't trash city council candidates.

Teach Your Children

The Mitchells and Gates families, left and right (!), respectively (WSJ photo)

Finally..a rare election story that makes one hopeful about the future:

The Mitchells, lifelong Democrats, planted a Joe Biden sign in the front yard of their suburban Pittsburgh home. The Gateses, who live next door and are lifelong Republicans, put a Donald Trump sign in theirs.

Another homemade sign stands in each yard. It reads: “We (Heart) Them” with an arrow pointing to the other house. In the middle of each heart are the words “One Nation.”

The Mitchells and Gates

don’t argue. They don’t label each other. They listen to each other’s perspective, look for common ground and recognize that reasonable and good people can reach different conclusions.

“I think it boils down to respect,” says Chris [Mitchell]. “We have no desire or illusion that we are going to change them or each other’s minds.”

They also rarely bring up issues that are more divisive than others, like abortion.

The vast majority of Americans have to work with--and maybe live with---people who hold different political views. Both you and the person you're talking to have an infinitesimal effect on an election, so the heat of the argument is fueled by pride and about who has the superior morality.

Is it worth losing a friendship or having a loved one never speak to you again just to insist that you are right?

There's a lot of wisdom in the old advice to bite your tongue, never discuss politics or religion, and count to ten before responding in anger, especially if the fight is over something that neither of you can control.

Pax vobiscum.

Good Goes Around, Then Comes Around

Maj. Gen. Miguel Correa, rescued Zayed bin Hamdan al
Nahyan, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan (WSJ)

The peace agreements (Abraham Accords) between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain would not have occurred without an unpublicized good deed in which the United States risked its soldiers' lives in 2017:

Gen. [Miguel] Correa was at his home in Abu Dhabi in 2017 when he got a call that the Emirati helicopter had gone down in Yemen while carrying out a counterterrorism mission...

Three Emirati soldiers were killed. Zayed bin Hamdan al Nahyan, a 27-year-old nephew and son-in-law to the country’s crown prince, was one of seven others seriously injured. U.S. officials soon learned that the young Emirati royal was among those being rescued.

Two American Ospreys carried a special operations forces medical team to the helicopter crash site in Yemen. The American medical team flew the seven injured soldiers to the USS Bataan, a U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship in the Gulf of Aden, said Capt. Bill Urban, spokesman for U.S. Central Command. One soldier died on the way to the ship as a surgeon on the Osprey revived a second Emirati whose heart stopped, said Capt. Urban.

Medical teams on the Bataan worked frantically for 48 hours, Capt. Urban said, as American forces onboard lined up to give blood for the Emirati soldiers. The medical team used 54 of 66 units of blood, making it the largest such “walking blood bank” the Navy has used since World War II, said Capt. Urban.

Meanwhile, U.A.E. leaders asked the Americans for special permission to fly the six soldiers, including the Emirati royal, to Landstuhl, Germany, where the U.S. Army has a medical hospital that specializes in treating combat injuries.

Gen. Joseph Votel, then head of Central Command, called then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who quickly approved the plan as Gen. Correa kept the anxious Emiratis apprised.

The U.S. flew the Emirati soldiers from the ship back to an airport in Yemen, where an Air Force C-17 cargo plane equipped with a special medical unit was waiting to fly them to Germany,

Flying the massive plane into Yemen posed a risk. The U.S. landed the plane at night and flew out before the sun rose to ensure everyone’s safety.

General Correa coordinated the mission and became "something of a hero" in the UAE. The trust that had developed between him and the UAE royal family was an invaluable part of the peace negotiations. Emirati ambassador Yousef Otaiba:

“The truth is, for the Abraham Accords to have materialized, there was a very much-needed element of trust, and we had that trust with Miguel Correa and the White House,” he said. “A pretty big leap of faith was required from all sides for this to happen.”

One good thing that will come out of a Biden victory is that the historic foreign policy triumphs of the Trump Administration may finally be given their due. Who knows, Hollywood may even make a movie (or limited series) about Major General Miguel Correa, soldier and diplomat.

Secure, Transparent, Auditable, and Reliable Voting

Homomorphic encryption: the picture helps a little

Protecting voting systems against hacking is difficult, and the principal reason is not government incompetence or corruption but the requirement of the secret ballot:

modern elections enshrine privacy at the cost of transparency, and try to compensate for the loss with a host of bureaucratic patches: voter-registration schemes to prevent people from voting twice, tally systems that ensure the number of voters matches the ballot total, and centralized polling places where rival election monitors can scrutinize the proceedings, all to impart legitimacy to a system of vanishing ballots.

“If you want to understand why elections are hard, it's because of the secret ballot,” says [MIT Comp Sci PhD Ben] Adida—that's the single variable “that introduces all of the operational complexity and trust.” Not for nothing did a leading technology conference recently declare voting the “hardest problem in IT security.”

A promising solution lies in homomorphic encryption, related to the same technology that produced bitcoin.

In 1987, [Microsoft cryptographer Josh] Benaloh's thesis at Yale spelled out how a homomorphically encrypted voting scheme would come to life. First, voters would need access to a machine that could perform advanced cryptography. When they cast their ballot, each digital vote would start out as a simple binary—1 for Biden, 0 for Trump—but its ciphertext might be thousands of characters long. Rather than send voters home with a binder full of hexadecimal gibberish, the computer would print the ciphertext as something much smaller: a hash code, much like how a URL is shortened into a Bit.ly. That would serve as the voter's unique receipt, which they would keep and carry away with them.

At the end of the night, when the computers stopped whirring, all those encrypted votes would be added together. A small number of election officials—the county clerk, the secretary of state—would possess a key that allowed them to decrypt the sum. They'd compare the columns of votes for each candidate and reveal the winner.

Thanks to the nature of the math involved, those resulting sums would also be verifiable by independent outside observers. After the election, all the encrypted votes could be posted on a public, online bulletin board for all to inspect. Using a set of mathematical operations called Chaum-Pedersen protocols, auditors would be able to crunch all those ciphertexts to arrive at what cryptographers call a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof: “Proof that the vote is correctly captured,” Benaloh explained, but without any way to know whose ballot said what.

But the thing that excited Benaloh most was what this scheme would mean for individual voters. When a voter left the polling place, clutching a receipt that bore their unique hash code, they could go home and perform a search for its twin among all the encrypted ballots on that massive public bulletin board. For the first time, elections would not only be verifiable, but people could be certain whether their specific vote had been counted, all without violating the secret ballot.

Even if STAR (secure, transparent, auditable, and reliable) machines could be produced, convincing election officials and the general public that they perform according to specifications will require extraordinary wisdom and patience. To non-experts--which are most of us--the mechanism looks like a black box, and everyone knows that black boxes 1) can be hacked and 2) have "back doors" built in by the makers.

Maybe homomorphic encryption will be too hard a sell and we should just go back to the way we used to do it. Yes, elections were stolen back then, but the methods weren't mysterious. And paper voting systems can have STAR qualities, too:

the reliance on paper in key states may strengthen voter confidence this year. Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin all have voter-verified paper trails in place for November. This changes the total number of voters using a paper trail to almost 95 percent, according to voting experts. That’s up from 75 percent during the last presidential election.

In two or more weeks the votes will be tabulated. The continuity of the American experiment will depend upon 60 million voters trusting the process even though their candidate lost. Never in the past 160 years has that trust seemed so fragile.

San Francisco: Getting What They Wanted - Part 2

The 730 Market Walgreens closed in March

Chronicle writer Phil Matier succinctly summarizes the codification of California's enlightened attitude toward property crime:

Under California law, theft of less than $950 in goods is treated as a nonviolent misdemeanor. The maximum sentence for petty theft is six months in county jail. But most of the time the suspect is released with conditions attached.

So how's that working out for the citizens? [bold added]

After months of seeing its shelves repeatedly cleaned out by brazen shoplifters, the Walgreens at Van Ness and Eddy in San Francisco is getting ready to close.

“The last day is Nov. 11,” Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso said.

The drugstore, which serves many older people who live in the Opera Plaza area, is the seventh Walgreens to close in the city since 2019...

In February, the local news website Hoodline reported that an employee at the Market Street store said the store couldn’t cope with the shoplifting, which was costing the company $1,000 a day.

I do empathize with the law-abiding citizens of San Francisco, but they did vote for these laws and a District Attorney who calls for even more leniency.

One might call it karma.

Bullish on Karma

(Image from creativityboost.net)

(Note: this post is not about secular law or the criminal justice system.)

Our rational brains tell us thst there is no Divine Justice that is meted out in this life. Even most sincere Christians don't believe in justice in the here-and-now---there are too many examples of bad things happening to good people and vice versa.

Occasionally a miscreant does receive his comeuppance, but rather than attributing the balancing of scales to God or Allah, the mysterious force is now called karma. An example from earlier this month. [bold added]

Shortly after President Trump’s early-morning revelation on Twitter last week that he and his wife, Melania, had tested positive for Covid-19, one of the top trending terms on Twitter was “karma.” Critics of the administration used the word to convey what they saw as a kind of poetic justice for Mr. Trump publicly playing down the threats of the coronavirus pandemic...

The word “karma” derives from Hindu and Buddhist teachings about reincarnation, which hold that people’s actions in their current lives, good or bad, determine what their fate will be in future existences. Used more generally in English, “karma” alludes to a vaguer concept that your destiny stems from how you live your life. Put another way: You reap what you sow.

One problem with karma is that it doesn't always show up. Another is that it can be short-lived: now that President and Mrs. Trump apparently have recovered, one rarely sees the term.

Expect usage of karma to increase markedly in a couple of weeks, after the election results are in. That's what happens when the contest is no longer between the policies of D versus the policies of R but a battle between good and evil.

As the media has told us, both of the leading Presidential candidates have plenty of evil actions to answer for. There will be a lot of karma that will be going around, but even at this late date we aren't sure who the recipient(s) will be.

Renaming Solution: Disband the Committee

Abraham Lincoln High School (Chron photo)

Three months ago we remarked somewhat bemusedly upon the movement to rename scores of San Francisco schools. Even an icon like Abraham Lincoln, who, because he had to make compromises with racists to win the deadliest war in American history, is a candidate for erasure.

Reality should have set in by now. Surely changing school names would be the lowest priority as educators struggle to figure out how to re-open safely. Surely the resumption of in-person learning--as well as improving the experience of on-line classes--should command most of the financial resources and the full attention of teachers and administrators.

But never doubt the fanaticism of ideologues---reminiscent of the Scopes trial of nearly 100 years ago--to place their "religion" above the welfare of children.

S.F. might change 44 school names, renouncing Washington, Lincoln and even Dianne Feinstein

Parents and principals at 44 sites were forced to scramble this week to brainstorm new school names while also juggling the demands of distance learning in a pandemic.

Those names on the school buildings, including Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson, that have connections to slavery, genocide or oppression should be changed, according to a committee recommendation heading to the school board.

More than a third of the district’s 125 schools made the list of objectionable names, which also included Balboa, Lowell and Mission high schools, as well as Roosevelt and Presidio middle schools and Webster, Sanchez and Jose Ortega elementary schools.

Repainting the signage while the schools are (metaphorically) collapsing is like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic--a cliché, to be sure, but one that some of our more junior readers may not know.

The duly elected African-American mayor of San Francisco thinks that the renaming project is of scant importance, and who are we to argue?

Today I issued a statement on the need for our School District to focus on reopening our public schools, not renaming them. To address inequities, we need to get our kids back in the classroom. pic.twitter.com/nHnauVZzFe

— London Breed (@LondonBreed) October 16, 2020