Here’s a pair of pictures of the Balboa Yacht Club. The top one was taken during the day. The bottom one is the same scene taken at night.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 15. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The United States recorded an unusually bad day on Tuesday with 1,422 deaths. This produced a big uptick in our death rate and makes our weeklong rise look a little more real. We just don’t seem to have the discipline to maintain social distancing measures long enough to get ourselves down close to zero.

The New York Times reports today that the diversity of corporate boards hasn’t made much progress over the past five years. Overall, non-white directors make up 12.5 percent of board seats today, up from 10 percent in 2015.

I can’t say I’m too surprised about this, but I was interested in the accompanying chart that breaks things down by industry sector:

What’s intriguing here is that the industry that gets the most public pressure is information tech  but they’re far from being the biggest problem. Five years ago they were among the top performers and today they are the top performer.

Compare that to the good ’ol boys in the oil bidness, who were at the bottom in 2015 and remain at the bottom five years later. But how often do they get Twitter mobs coming after them? Ditto for all the others, who could stand to see a few pickets or boycotts far more than the folks in Silicon Valley.

Perhaps the people pressing for diversity are mostly youngish technophiles, and tech companies are what they know best. There’s also the ironic fact that tech companies have all been pressured into reporting their progress on diversity goals, which makes it a lot easier to see where they’re falling down.

Still, how about a campaign targeting Exxon and Halliburton? These are the companies that really need a swift kick.

I see via the Washington Post that the Census Bureau has released its latest estimate of the uninsured population in the United States through 2019. Here it is:

The number of uninsured dropped steadily through 2016 but has risen slowly ever since Donald Trump took office. Let’s compare this to the CDC’s survey, which has always been my go-to source for the most accurate numbers. I haven’t checked in with them for a while, so here’s the latest, including the first quarter of 2020:

This tells roughly the same story. The data is a little bit noisier since the CDC reports quarterly, and it shows that the increase started around 2018. Either way, it appears that Trump’s effort to seed chaos in the Obamacare signup process had a modest success. The net increase in the uninsured comes to a little more than 1 percent, which represents about 3 million fewer people with health coverage. Nice work, Donald.

I think I’ve written before about the Household Pulse survey from the Census Bureau, an “experimental data” product that was created and put into the field very quickly near the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea was to collect frequent data that allowed us to see the impact of the pandemic in near real time. It started in late April and the latest survey finished up at the end of August.

A new question was added to the survey this time around, asking people if they’ve received unemployment benefits. This is, as far as I know, the first time we’ve gotten fairly firm figures on this, and overall it turns out that 50 million people applied for benefits and 38 million received them. This means that about 24 percent of the people who applied never received anything. Here’s how that broke down by income:

Most income groups had about the same success rate with one exception: the lowest income group, which is the one that needed it the most. Here’s the breakdown by race:

Again, not too much of a difference except for one group: Black applicants, who were turned down at a substantially higher rate than other groups.

There’s not enough information in this survey to tell us what caused these discrepancies. Maybe low-income applicants tended to misunderstand the criteria for benefits more often. Maybe a lot of qualified low-income applicants didn’t apply at all, which made the denial number artificially bigger. Or maybe they didn’t get the help they needed to fill out all the forms correctly. More research, please.

Milky Way season is just about over here in the Northern Hemisphere. I had planned to take a short trip this week to around Lake Tahoe, with some nighttime side trips into Nevada to try out some new kinds of Milky Way photography, but the wildfires killed that idea—and by the time the smoke subsides it’s unlikely I’ll be able to get a decent view. So for now I’ll go ahead and post the second picture I took in April during a visit to Anza Borrego: a panoramic view that shows not only a large section of the Milky Way, but also the house and the cross on the ground. It’s not a huge panorama, which I’d like to try someday, but that’s because the conditions weren’t good enough to see all that much of the Milky Way anyway. A good viewing night in the dark skies of Nevada would help a lot on that score. Maybe next year.

From Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, on Donald Trump’s racist attempts to scare white suburban women:

“If I don’t win,” Trump alleges, “America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, ‘Friendly Protesters.’ ” There is no possible interpretation of “Low Income Projects” in this context that does not involve the incitement of racism. The same might be said for the use of “Looters” and “Protesters.” Trump is conflating protests against racial injustice with criminal activity and warning that angry faces are coming to suburbia if Biden wins.

Elsewhere, Trump has warned that “low income housing and projects” will undermine the “American Dream.” Note Trump’s consistent use of the word “projects,” which evokes images of decaying and dangerous apartment buildings filled with minorities. Trump’s twisted definition of the American Dream is White flight from urban poverty and decay.

Will this work? A poll from All In Together suggests it won’t. Women usually support the Democratic candidate for president, and this year is no different: Biden leads Trump among women by 11 points. Among suburban women that increases to 14 percentage points, but they support him more on some subjects than on others. Here’s how it nets out among suburban women:

The issue on which suburban women support Biden the most is race relations. This suggests that Trump’s racist incitements are not only falling flat, but probably losing him support. Suburban women look around their neighborhoods and they simply don’t buy the apocalypse that Trump is selling. What they want, presumably, is a president who will calm things down, not one who’s deliberately inflaming white bigotry and making things worse.

None of this means that Trump can’t possibly win. In 2016 he went all-in on Hillary Clinton as a criminal and then got lucky when James Comey wrote a letter shortly before the election that seemed to confirm it. This year he’s going all-in on racist scaremongering, and he could get lucky again if something happens late in the game that scares white suburban women. Liberals need to be careful not to let that happen, especially since Trump doesn’t precisely need to rely just on luck this time around. He’s been doing his best to incite violence for the past couple of months, and there’s no reason to think he won’t keep trying right up until November 3.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 14. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

France is starting to show a slight uptick in deaths, as is Spain (not shown). In fact, so is the United States, which was declining slowly for a month before a weeklong increase interrupted things. Maybe it’s just a blip. Then again, maybe it’s not.

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

Over the weekend I introduced you to Michael Caputo, former flack for Vladimir Putin and Carl Paladino and now the top spokesperson at HHS. He insisted that “deep state” scientists in the CDC were out to make the president look bad and demanded to review their reports before they were published. Does that seem a little over the top? You ain’t seen nothing yet. I’ll let the Daily Mail describe Caputo’s Sunday rant, since they seem like the appropriate news outlet for this kind of thing:

The top communications official at the Health and Human Services Department warned in a bizarre Facebook Live session that political opponents ‘are going to have to kill me’ and claimed Democrats are plotting an armed insurrection….‘And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,’ he said. ‘The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.’ Said Caputo: ‘If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.’

During his rant posted Sunday, Caputo said his ‘mental health has definitely failed.’

‘I don’t like being alone in Washington,’ he continued. He said there were ‘shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long.’ He also blasted government scientists ‘deep in the bowels of the CDC have given up science and become political animals’ who he said ‘haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants except for meetings at coffee shops.’

Caputo is clearly showing a bit of self-awareness here, and if he’s truly suffering from a mental breakdown then I guess I feel a little bit sorry for him. Even that little bit, though, depends on what happens next. If he resigns and seeks help, fine. If he stays on even though he knows he’s having a break with reality—and Trump allows it—then I no longer feel even a little sorry for him.