This is a red-bellied woodpecker, pecking away at some suet in my sister-in-law’s backyard. Marian says we’ve had a visiting woodpecker lately too, so maybe I’ll have another woodpecker picture soon.

Bill Barr, officially the worst attorney general in history, steps off Air Force One after a nice long chat with his buddy, Donald Trump.Dominic Gwinn/ZUMA

As you know, Donald Trump is still hellbent on proving that the Obama administration “spied” on him. To accomplish this, Attorney General William Barr asked John Durham, the US attorney in Connecticut, to begin an investigation. Durham has been plugging away for the past year, but apparently isn’t anywhere near finishing. This is unacceptable, of course, since there’s an election coming up and Trump wants some dirt to use. So apparently pressure is being applied:

Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, a top aide to U.S. Attorney John H. Durham in his Russia investigation, has quietly resigned from the U.S. Justice Department probe — at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done, colleagues said.

Dannehy, a highly regarded prosecutor who has worked with or for Durham for decades, informed colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven of her resignation from the Department of Justice by email Thursday evening….Colleagues said Dannehy is not a supporter of President Donald J. Trump and has been concerned in recent weeks by what she believed was pressure from Barr — who appointed Durham — to produce results before the election. They said she has been considering resignation for weeks, conflicted by loyalty to Durham and concern about politics.

Well, perhaps Trump will have to be satisfied with a “leak” of parts of the investigation. Or something.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 13. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 12. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

In yesterday’s survey, supporters of putting all the charts on the same scale won an overwhelming victory with 78 percent of the vote. Sadly, in the Electoral College the other side eked out a close win, so we’ll be sticking with the old format.

Ha ha. Just kidding. I am a slave to popular opinion, and from now on we will be using the same scale for all charts. In truth, I don’t really mind anymore. When I first started these charts, the numbers were so low that you truly couldn’t see anything on some of them if I used a large scale. However, these days there’s a pretty full upswing and downswing for everyone, and it shows up fine no matter what scale I use. So every country will now be charted on the 0-16 scale, which hopefully will never have to be made any larger.

Ever since we all started wearing masks and social distancing because of COVID-19 I’ve been wondering whether this would have an effect on other illnesses. Will we have fewer colds? Less flu? It seems like we should.

And sure enough, that appears to be the case. Down in the southern hemisphere, where winter flu season started several months ago and is now over, there hasn’t been a winter flu season. Literally. Here’s an excerpt from some charts originally published by the Economist:

That’s pretty remarkable, and it looks the same in other southern hemisphere countries too. Presumably this means that if we get our act together and persuade everyone to wear their damn masks and stay six feet apart, we could have a very light flu season too. That would be a huge win since epidemiologists are universally worried about the possibility of both flu and COVID-19 coinciding later in the year.

So keep wearing your masks. Continue with your social distancing. And get a flu shot!

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 11. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve got two versions of the charts today. The top one is the usual version, which provides more detail by changing the scale to match each country. The bottom one provides an easier comparison between countries by using the same scale for everyone. After taking a look at both, there’s a quick survey at the bottom where you can note your preference.

Michael Caputo, former flack for Vladimir Putin and Carl Paladino; fired from the Trump campaign after saying mean things about Corey Lewandowski; and poster of numerous sexually crude and sexist tweets directed at women as well as multiple derogatory and crude tweets about Chinese people. This was the background that qualified him to be the senior HHS spokesperson.Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

Whenever I mention the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report it’s usually to joke about that being the worst title ever for a newsletter. Jokes aside, though, it’s actually a highly respected publication that provides doctors around the world with reliable, current information about a wide variety of subjects. Recently, of course, COVID-19 has been one of its primary focuses.

And that’s a problem. You see, sometimes the MMWR publishes information that disagrees a bit with President Trump’s public statements. What to do? Correcting Trump is out of the question, of course, so the only other option is to pressure the CDC into backing off. According to Dan Diamond in Politico, that’s exactly what’s happened:

Since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the health department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated…Caputo’s team also has tried to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence.

…In one clash, an aide to Caputo berated CDC scientists for attempting to use the reports to “hurt the President” in an Aug. 8 email sent to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other officials that was widely circulated inside the department and obtained by Politico.

…Caputo also said that HHS was appropriately reviewing the CDC’s reports. “Our intention is to make sure that evidence, science-based data drives policy through this pandemic—not ulterior deep state motives in the bowels of CDC,” he said.

There you have it. Caputo wants to make sure that science reporting isn’t driven by “deep state motives in the bowels of the CDC.” Instead it should be driven by whether or not it annoys the president.

Every morning I post the current rate of COVID-19 deaths in eight different countries, so why am I posting this yet again today? Because I still get periodic complaints that I’m misleading people by using a different scale for each country. So here’s what it looks like using the same scale for everyone:

What do you think? The problem I have with this is that my charts are pretty small, and countries like Germany and Canada barely show up if you use the same scale that works fine for, say, France. And personally, I don’t consider it all that onerous to expect people to look at the y-axis in a series of charts.

But maybe it is onerous. Not everyone is a chart nerd, after all. So perhaps tomorrow I’ll try using a standard scale for all eight charts to see what it looks like. Weekends are made for experiments, right?

You know those perfume ads that are always totally weird? The ones with vacant expressions on the models’ faces and random who-knows-what in the background? Well, this is the feline version. It’s an accidental picture, really. I had the camera on a monopod and I raised it up over the awning the cats were on. Then I just remotely started clicking the shutter button. Most of the pictures were junk, but this one was great! Though it might be better if there were, say, a ferris wheel or an exploding galaxy in the background.

Eric Draper/Planet Pix via ZUMA

Today is the 19th anniversary of the warbloggers. I believe that Charlie Kirk is this year’s recipient of the Steven Den Beste Memorial Blathering Award.

I suppose this makes no sense to most of you. Sorry. It’s sort of an inside joke for those of us who were there at the creation, so to speak. I’ve long wondered whether the warbloggers had any real influence on the events following 9/11, and I suppose I’ll never know. But they were certainly in the vanguard of the true believers who considered anyone opposed to the Iraq war to be an idiot, a traitor, or worse.

It’s a funny thing. I didn’t start blogging until 2002, so I don’t have any written record of what I thought about 9/11. But my memory tells me that I didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal. We’d all be outraged for a while and then we’d mount a smallish war in Afghanistan to catch Osama bin Laden. That’s the usual American way. And once that was done, memories would start to fade.

Needless to say, nothing could have been farther from the truth. American memories stayed red hot and Dick Cheney decided we needed to take out Iraq. And with that, an entire decade was warped out of recognition. Al Qaeda did its part, of course, by mounting deadly bombings every year or so that kept their eventual destruction front and center.

Today, al Qaeda is a dim memory for most people, and terrorism has taken a back seat to Donald Trump and COVID-19. But we still live with the surveillance and security state that 9/11 sparked. It’s just one more thing that makes living in the United States marginally worse than it was 30 years ago. Unfortunately, when you add up lots of marginal things, life really does get less pleasant. Perhaps that’s where we are today.