Events

Aside: how the hell is it already February? Moving on. Two more articles popped up about Tuesday night's State of the Union speech. First, via Deeply Trivial, Andrea Jones-Rooy at 538 points out that very little of what presidents propose in the SOTU actually gets enacted: From Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, according to [Donna Hoffman and Alison Howard], presidents made an average of 34 proposals in each State of the Union or initial address to a joint session of Congress. The most requests a...

I'm finally reading last night's State of the Union address, and...well...oy, gevalt. The speech doesn't really have a lot of coherence, but SOTU speeches rarely do. Still, there's something about reading it that makes me wonder who Steve Miller actually thought would deliver it. For example, these two passages: All Americans deserve accountability and respect—and that is what we are giving them. So tonight, I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good...

I can't be sure why, but I seem to have some reluctance today to get to the State of the Union address from last night. At some point I'll read it and comment on it. But not yet.

Amazon's bidding process for its second headquarters (HQ2) has given the company a bonanza of information about what 238 cities are willing to give up in order to get a piece of the action, and thus what levers Amazon can pull to get public money for its private gain. Not to mention, the applications gave the company millions of dollars worth of marketing data: Amazon asked every city and state applying for its second headquarters for details about local resources, like available talent and transit...

Diageo, the international beverage behemoth that owns about a quarter of Scotland's distilleries (including Caol Ila and Talisker) is investigating how to produce horrible shite that isn't at all Scotch under its existing brands: First, Diageo is considering creating “scotch whisky infusions,” low-alcohol and/or flavored alcoholic beverages sold under the same name as existing single malt or blended whisky brands. Secondly, Diageo has sought permission from the [Scotch Whisky Association trade group] to...

Even though Chicago's winters have gotten milder overall in the last 50 years, extreme temperatures like we had between Christmas and January 7th still kill people: Unlike other more dramatic types of weather, such as hurricanes, floods or tornadoes, the threat of extreme cold or heat tends to be overlooked, said Laurence Kalkstein, a University of Miami public health sciences professor who studies the effects of climate on human health. “People don’t think of it as much of a threat mainly because there...

Just a few things going on, not least of which was a 7-hour chorus board retreat on Saturday. Regular posting should resume this afternoon (or whenever the caffeine starts working).

Where to start? President Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims in his first year in office—an average of nearly 6 per day. Meanwhile, his "cult of personality" is bringing fringe conspiracy theories into the White House itself. San Francisco has had three mayors in the last seven weeks, and it's getting even weirder. British journalist Cathy Newman did not seem to hear psychologist Jordan Peterson's answers to her questions. Lake Michigan is getting clearer, which is catastrophic for its ecology....

Writing for CityLab today, Richard Florida cautions that Republican policies will increase the wealth and political divides in the country (which, after all, may be their plan): [T]he declining parts of America now control our politics, and not just nationally, but also in the states. As Brownstein sums up: “The nation is poised for even greater tension between an economic order that increasingly favors the largest places—and a political dynamic that, for now, sublimates them to the smaller places that...

I'm temporarily on a new project to backstop a lonely developer. Getting ramped up on that today took all my time. Regular posting should resume tomorrow.