Linked List: May 16, 2020

Saturday, 16 May 2020

Morning Brew 

My thanks once again to Morning Brew for sponsoring this week at DF. Over 1 million people start their day with Morning Brew — the daily email that delivers the latest news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Business news doesn’t have to be dry and dense. Morning Brew is simply well-written — and it’s absolutely free to subscribe.

I’ve been subscribed for over a year, and no joke, Morning Brew is one of the very first things I read most mornings. It even looks good. They’ve been a great repeat sponsor here at DF, and that’s because a lot of you have already subscribed. If you haven’t tried it yet, I wholeheartedly recommended it.

Fred Willard Dies at 86 

If you don’t love Fred Willard, you’re not hooked up right. Among his many memorable roles, a favorite of mine was Shelby Forthright, the CEO of Buy-N-Large in WALL-E.

There was just something about Willard where you could just tell that in real life he was a great person. It was just palpable.

The Financial Times: ‘Inside Trump’s Coronavirus Meltdown’ 

Edward Luce, writing for those radical left-wing firebrands at The Financial Times:

What the headlines missed was a boast that posterity will take more seriously than Trump’s self-estimated IQ, or the exaggerated test numbers (the true number of CDC kits by March was 75,000). Trump proclaimed that America was leading the world. South Korea had its first infection on January 20, the same day as America’s first case, and was, he said, calling America for help. “They have a lot of people that are infected; we don’t.” “All I say is, ‘Be calm,’” said the president. “Everyone is relying on us. The world is relying on us.”

He could just as well have said baseball is popular or foreigners love New York. American leadership in any disaster, whether a tsunami or an Ebola outbreak, has been a truism for decades. The US is renowned for helping others in an emergency.

In hindsight, Trump’s claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself.

South Korea, which has a population density nearly 15 times greater and is next door to China, has lost a total of 259 lives to the disease. There have been days when America has lost 10 times that number. The US death toll is now approaching 90,000.

I didn’t realize yesterday that the Financial Times had pushed this remarkable story in front of its paywall. It’s a must-read, must-share, deeply researched report. It reads like contemporaneous history of the absurd.