As forecast, O'Hare had an official high temperature of 26°C yesterday, the warmest temperature recorded there since 4pm on October 30th and the normal high temperature for June 10th. Inner Drive Technology WHQ got all the way up to 23.3°C just after 5pm, so we had all the windows open until the squall line blasted through after midnight.
Today we have a lot of wind and a lot of dust blown up from storms in Texas and Oklahoma. Without the dust, we'd have clear blue skies right now:
Remember what I wrote Thursday about how the air usually looked this time of year back in the 1980s? Today is just a little hazier. Well, OK, quite a bit hazier:
Even Cassie is wondering what that scent is:
That's the scent of climate change, baby. Same as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Fitting that we've got the resurrected zombie corpse of Herbert Hoover in the White House today.
When the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X turned their attention to the Environmental Protection Agency this week, it hit Chicago almost immediately:
President Donald Trump this week ordered closures of offices at the Environmental Protection Agency that help low-income communities overwhelmed with pollution.
It’s unclear how many positions will be cut in Chicago, but union officials estimate it may affect 20 to 30 of the roughly 1,000 EPA regional employees. Most significantly, the order ends a practice of “environmental justice” at the agency that has responded to people threatened by pollution in urban and rural areas.
“Environmental justice simply means ensuring the communities most disproportionately impacted by pollution are protected,” said Nicole Cantello, president of the union representing EPA employees in Chicago and across the Midwest. “The core mission of the EPA is simple: Protecting human health and the environment.”
Of course the Republicans want to cut these programs: it will allow their friends in polluting industries to create more externalities. Or, rather, to return to the way it was before the EPA existed, when industries happily shifted their environmental remediation costs to the public.
As an illustration, here's a photo I took 40 years ago this week:
Notice the lovely, warm colors behind Lauren. That's not an artifact of Kodachrome or of the scan; that's what the air around Chicago looked like in 1985. Since then, those orange skies have completely disappeared (except when we get hit with wildfire smoke from out west), and we all breathe a lot easier. That's what the EPA and the Clean Air Act did.
When anyone lies that the EPA "costs too much," get the person lying to you to admit that deaths and illnesses that result from pollution cost a lot more in the aggregate. That's the whole point of externalities. And that's what the OAFPOTUS wants to bring back.
It's entirely possible that I will have something to post about the OAFPOTUS's self-dealing almost every one of the next 1,417 days. One hopes not, however. I mean, we only have 608 more days until the next election!
Jeff Maurer starts today's update with his take on the laughable proposal for the United States Government to buy cryptocurrency:
The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the less-laughable cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin — if Bitcoin is Coca-Cola, Trump wants to also buy Jittery Jimmy’s High-Fructose Fizz Drink. Trump has mused that buying cryptocurrency could get the government out of debt, which sounds like the plan a degenerate gambler makes right before his body turns up in a New Jersey landfill.
This plan clearly benefits someone — the value of the cryptocurrencies Trump mentioned spiked after the announcement — but because cryptocurrencies are anonymous, we don’t know who got rich. It could be donors, foreign interests, or Trump family members — the only thing we know is that it was somebody terrible. Plus, someone placed a highly leveraged $200 million purchase right before Trump’s announcement, so there’s probably an old-timey insider trading scam happening alongside this Digital Age scam-of-the-future.
Another likely beneficiary is the guy who told Trump to do this: David Sacks. You may know Sacks as the ardent Trump backer and frequent repeater of Kremlin talking points whom Trump named as his “Crypto Czar”, with the “Czar” part really making sense given Sacks’ beliefs. Sacks says that he sold all of his cryptocurrency before Trump took office, but we can’t verify that, because crypto is anonymous. We do know that Sacks’ venture capital firm — the stake in which Sacks has not said that he sold — invests in a crypto fund whose top five holdings are exactly the five cryptocurrencies that Trump wants the government to buy. Sacks is a really lucky dude! It’s like if I was named Blog Czar and then got the government to buy a billion I Might Be Wrong subscriptions, and to be clear: President Trump, that offer is very much on the table.
Molly White also has a few things to say on the subject, with less satire and more technical expertise.
Given the raging corruption coming from the top of the party, is it any surprise that US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) has cozy relationships with the military contractors her committee regulates?
Meanwhile...
Finally, I was pleased to see that Amazon and MGM Studios have started development of a TV series based on the first novel in Iain M Banks' Culture series, Consider Phlebas. It's a fun novel, and a good introduction to the series—which makes sense as it's the first one he wrote. I hope it gets to production.
James Fallows highlights how the OAFPOTUS and Clown Prince of X have put their own enrichment ahead of public safety in ways that will be hard to miss:
In aviation, almost everything about safety is tied to the weather. Likely turbulence, which has caused some recent fatalities. Locations and likelihood of “airframe icing,” which was a cause of the Colgan crash in Buffalo back in 2009. Gusty crosswinds and wind-shear, very low cloud layers, and so many more factors that affect when and where planes can safely fly.
The readings and data for these assessments ultimately come from the National Weather Service, which is publicly funded and is part of the Commerce Department and NOAA. Its offerings are stupendous.
Last week, hundreds of forecasters at NWS and NOAA were laid off by the Doge team. Reportedly this could be as much as 10% of the work force. Just today the American Meteorological Society put out a public statement saying that these and related cutbacks are “likely to cause irreparable harm and have far-reaching consequences for public safety, economic well-being, and the United States' global leadership.”
Why will NOAA, NWS, and the public have to go through all this?
-One reason is personal grievance. By several reports, Donald Trump bears a lasting grudge against the National Weather Service because of “Sharpiegate.” That is when Trump sketched out the future path of Hurricane Dorian with one of his Sharpies, only to be ridiculed when NWS forecasters said, “Well, actually…” These things matter with Trump.
-Another is political zealotry. The Project 2025 manifesto said that NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated,” because it had become “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
-Another is commercial interest, specifically the goal of privatizing weather information. There is a long history of private companies, notably AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, wanting to limit NWS’s or NOAA’s ability to present its data directly to the public. The whole business model for these companies is taking data produced at public expense, and then selling it with their shows or apps or proprietary forecasts. You can read more here.
(Emphasis mine.)
The only thing we have to hope for right now is that enough pissed-off voters in Republican districts will give their representatives enough grief to get them to stop the bloodshed. Unfortunately, as has happened throughout history, sometimes people need to find out before they learn not to fuck around.
Jennifer Rubin gets it right:
Given the scope of the MAGA assault on the foundations of our democracy, many Democrats, responsible media outlets, and concerned Americans have (understandably) been focused on its attempt to obliterate the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the First Amendment. But we should never lose track of the abject immorality that is part and parcel of an ideology based on vengeful victimhood, conspiracy-mongering, and repudiation of science.
From the outbreak of measles to stalling grants to the pursuit of cures for “diseases ranging from heart disease and cancer to Alzheimer's and allergies” to renewing the starvation crisis in Sudan to devasting cuts at the Veterans Administration to dismissal of patriotic, highly-trained trans members of the armed services…we cannot miss this administration’s abject cruelty; its almost-boisterous disregard for human life and dignity.
Republicans pushing these cuts are depriving their constituents of healthcare, consigning rural hospitals to closure, and potentially wrecking the economic lifeline for their communities.
Understand, they are doing this so that Trump, Musk, and the oligarch class can get more tax breaks.
This GOP’s agenda is a moral abomination that no American, regardless of party, should support. If there is anything worth taking to the streets for peaceful protest, it is this sort of massive, regressive redistribution from the already-struggling to the no-amount-is-ever-enough billionaire class.
Of course they are. The entire MAGA project is a giant grift, a version of "let's him and you fight" that distracts from the massive theft of public money—our money. But the cruelty? That's just gravy for them.
One of my work projects has a monthly release these days, so right now I'm watching a DevOps pipeline run through about 400 time-consuming integration tests before I release this month's update. That gives me some time to catch up on all this:
The New York Times has a long explanation of how the Clown Prince of X took over the federal bureaucracy.
All right, the build has finished, so I can now deploy. And for no reason other than I like it, here is a photo of Cassie watching TV with me last night:
Time got away from me this afternoon. I might read all this tomorrow morning:
Finally, On Tour Brewing, a Brews & Choos Top 10 brewery, will close this spring. A new brewery and a resurrection of one of my favorite pre-pandemic bars, Links Tavern, will open in its place. Can't wait!
The US meeting with Russia and not Ukraine to discuss the fate of Ukraine seems unmistakably similar to the Molotov-Ribbentrop discussions in August 1939 that divvied up Poland between the Nazis and Stalin's Russia. The meeting in Riyadh between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov seems more focused on a colonial-style mineral extraction concession for the US than on Ukrainian sovereignty. This comes just days after Vice President JD Vance channeled UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (a known Nazi sympathizer) in a speech in Munich just before meeting with actual Nazis.
("'I never thought leopards would eat my face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."—Adrian Bott)
Meanwhile, back home:
- The State Department has decided to cancel most of its news subscriptions, because why would our diplomats need to know what's going on in the world?
- Fortunately (for now), the OAFPOTUS violently dismantling the US government's bureaucracy has gotten in the way of him dismantling the regulations that he claims to hate, further showing (a) how fundamentally stupid he is and (b) how it has nothing to do with regulations.
- Apparently jealous of the OAFPOTUS's successful raiding of public funds for his own benefit, Argentine president Javier Milei and his friends appear to have raked in close to $100 million in what looks like a classic memecoin rug-pull.
- The Chicago City Council may vote today on a proposal to borrow $830 m in an issue that would not pay back principal until 2045, a structure that (a) would result in a constant cash-flow to the private investors of something like $80 m per year and (b) cost the city $2 bn once we finally pay it all back. It would be the dumbest thing the city's government has done since the parking-meter scam.
- Researchers have determined that both work-from-home and return-to-office have drawbacks and benefits, and that mandating all of one or the other isn't great for any company. (But we knew that, even if some CEOs didn't.)
- Beware anyone asking you to send a code that you see on the screen; this is a device-code authentication attack, which is increasing in popularity among your finer criminals.
Finally, one of my least-favorite Brews & Choos stops has threatened planned to open a new brewpub in Irving Park. Crust Brewing in Rosemont wants to bring the same hellish experience to the former Leader Bar at 3000 W Irving Park Rd. Yes, this is a B&C-qualifying location, but no, I won't review it until I run out of other things to review.
It seems like so much of the news I've read today concerns people behaving stupidly, but thinking they're behaving intelligently. Sadly, it's mostly the same group of people:
Finally, people in Bridgeport and other Southwest Side neighborhoods have fallen in love with a rotund beaver who lives with her family on the Chicago River. Some have suggested naming the beaver Lori Heavyfoot or Dam Ryan. I hope she doesn't meet up with one of the city's other charismatic megafauna...
Punzun Ltd. (an Illinois corporation doing business as Inner Drive Technology) turns 25 today! I set up the corporation before I moved back to Illinois from New York, so that I could take either a contract or full-time job when I got here.
I can scarcely believe I've been back nearly 25 years.
And 25 years ago—this was months before Bush v Gore, remember—I would not have believed that these would be the news stories I'd care about in 2025:
Finally, on this Presidents Day, let's return to Washington's farewell address for just a moment:
All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.
However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
Towards the preservation of your government, and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite, not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts.
Can't say what made me go back to that source today...