For some reason the issue of lens foreshortening has invaded my Twitter stream in the past couple of days. I happen to have a couple of pictures that show this pretty well, so I figured I might as well post them. The first is a picture of the line outside my local Trader Joe’s:

Everyone is waiting patiently and is properly distanced from each other. Now here’s the same picture, but taken from the front with a zoom lens fully extended:

Yikes! What a bunch of idiots? Don’t they know they’re supposed to stay six feet apart?

This is entirely an effect created by using a long focal length lens, which produces foreshortening, and shooting into a crowd instead of across from it. And for what it’s worth, every photographer and every photo editor—without exception—knows this. If they run a picture like the bottom one, they’re deliberately trying to deceive you. It’s one thing to use this technique as an artistic choice at a fair or a crowded street, but it’s quite another if it accompanies a story about social distancing, where it’s assumed to make a concrete photojournalistic statement.

Every morning I open the door to the backyard patio and Hopper cannonballs out as if she’s been held prisoner all night. Hilbert, however, takes his time. He usually walks over to the door, settles down on the mat, and just watches things for about ten minutes. Eventually, having decided that everything looks safe, he saunters out.

The funny thing is that if I go out, he’ll follow me immediately. Apparently he doesn’t trust Hopper’s judgment, but he does trust mine. Or perhaps he just trusts me to protect him from whatever monsters might be out there.

Mike Flynn in happier days.Aude Guerrucci/CNP/ZUMA

Are you wondering why I haven’t said anything yet about the Mike Flynn affair? It’s simple: I don’t care. Flynn is a minor player in a minor tiff that happened three years ago. It barely even matters who’s “right.” Here’s all you really need to know:

• When the FBI asked Flynn about his phone calls with the Russian ambassador, Flynn lied about them. That’s a felony.
• Now the Department of Justice says the FBI was out of line even asking about this. It was just a setup. Therefore the charges should be dropped.

Fine. Like I said, I don’t really care if Mike Flynn goes to jail. Still, I have a question. The Justice Department is basically claiming that the FBI engaged in the equivalent of a perjury trap. That is, they surprised Flynn with questions he wasn’t expecting in hopes of getting him to lie. Then they’ve got him on charges of lying to a federal agent.

So here’s my question: the FBI does this all the time. It’s loathsome stuff, and I would be delighted if the Flynn case led to a wholesale reckoning with this behavior. But I don’t think that’s in the cards. In fact, I’m willing to bet that the Justice Department has never in its history voluntarily pulled back from a charge of lying to federal agents and announced that they’re really sorry it happened. Have they?

UPDATE: I’ve replaced “perjury trap” in most instances with “lying to a federal agent.”

UPDATE 2: Just to be clear, I’m not taking a stand one way or the other about whether the Flynn interview was entrapment of some kind. I’m only saying that this is what the Justice Department claimed (i.e., that the questions were “immaterial”) when they dropped their prosecution of Flynn.

Mark Rightmire/Orange County Register via ZUMA

From the LA Times:

Gov. Gavin Newsom says that unemployment in California amid the COVID-19 pandemic has far exceeded what it was during the peak of the Great Recession, with 4.7 million people filing for jobless benefits, requiring the state to borrow billions of dollars more from the federal government to cover claims. At a news conference Thursday to present a revised state budget for the fiscal year starting July 1, Newsom said the state will need $43.8 billion to cover unemployment claims in the new year, a 650% increase over what was originally proposed.

The federal government is covering the $600 per week bonus payment to unemployed workers, but state governments are still responsible for base unemployment benefits. Thanks to COVID-19, this has skyrocketed from about $6 billion to $44 billion in California, and every other state is facing a similar situation.

And that’s just the start. Not only are expenses going up, but revenue from sales taxes and income taxes have cratered. The result is massive cuts in education, Medicaid, and social welfare programs for the poor. And since California, like most states, is required to balance its budget, there’s no way around this unless the federal government comes through with a huge aid package. At the moment, though, there’s no telling whether Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans are willing to do this. They are willing to urge everyone to engage in behavior that will make the COVID-19 pandemic even worse, but so far that’s about all they’ve been willing to commit to.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through May 14. The United States is looking good! But don’t hold your breath for further improvement. I expect a rough plateau for the next week, followed by a steady rise as we start to see the effects of loosening social distancing restrictions.

Or perhaps I should put this differently. If we don’t see a plateau and then a steady rise, the epidemiological community is going to have some serious questions to answer.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Even for Donald Trump, this is deranged:

Trump on coronavirus cases: “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.”

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 14, 2020

President Trump complains that people demand more COVID-19 testing and then “don’t give you credit” when it happens. “What we want is to get rid of this thing.”

He adds: “We have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing.”

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 14, 2020

If we did less testing, fewer people would be sick. Is everyone clear on that?

This is a little girl at the Plaza Bolívar in Bogotá trying to attract a pigeon. Unfortunately, the pigeons have so many options that it’s hard to get them interested.

The Fed released its annual report on the economic well-being of US households today, most of which uses data from 2019. However, they also included a bit of data from 2020 reflecting the COVID-19 economy. They report that 13 percent of adults lost their job, but the pain was very definitely not shared equally:

These job losses were most severe among workers with lower incomes. Thirty-nine percent of people working in February with a household income below $40,000 reported a job loss in March.

Unsurprisingly, this is partly because those with lower incomes are unable to work remotely. “Sixty-three percent of workers with at least a bachelor’s degree worked entirely from home. Among workers with a high school degree or less, 20 percent worked entirely from home, as did 27 percent of workers who have completed some college or an associate degree.”

Here’s an interesting chart that has nothing whatsoever to do with COVID-19:

The peak of the two-earner family came in the late 1990s and has been declining ever since. Interestingly, it’s been replaced about equally between husband-only and wife-only earners. I would love to see this chart broken out by income level.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through May 13. Germany and Switzerland are down to 1 new death per million and France is down to 2 new deaths per million. Now comes the next step: can they implement test-and-trace effectively enough to keep the daily death toll this low even as they ease up on social distancing restrictions? I imagine it will be several weeks before we know for sure.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.