Events

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has died. Of course every news outlet has an obituary, but Spencer Ackerman's in Rolling Stone pretty much nails it—"it" being a nail in Kissinger's coffin: Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. McVeigh, who in...

A while ago, I posted two constitutional amendments I'd like to see, to set term limits for the Supreme Court and for Congress. I also proposed an amendment to make the Justice Department independent of the other three branches of government. Monica Lewinsky proposes six new amendments, including getting rid of the Electoral College and—well, an old amendment: The most fundamental underpinning of a democracy is the fact that those who govern are chosen through free and fair elections. Especially heads...

Tomorrow I have a quick trip to the Bay Area to see family. I expect I will not only continue posting normally, but I will also research at least two Brews & Choos Special Stops while there. Exciting stuff. And because we live in exciting times: The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has charged an Indian national with a murder-for-hire scheme in which our "friend" the Government of India put out a hit on a Sikh activist living in our country. The US Dept of Defense has released its...

I guess not all of the stories I read at lunchtime depressed me, but...well, you decide: Writing in the Atlantic, Rogé Karma weaves together the threads of white backlash to civil rights laws, the Democratic Party's cultural elitism, and a series of global crises, to explain why the US uniquely among its peer nations has made such a hash of the post-1970s economy. Georgetown public policy professor George P. Moynihan, who studies government bureaucracies, lays out how the XPOTUS intends to destroy the...

Crain's Chicago Business reported this morning on the precipitous decline in performing-arts audiences (sub.req.) since March 2020: Chicago arts and cultural organizations emerged from COVID-19 lockdowns, virtual performances and fully masked audiences to slow-to-return patrons, reduced ticket sales and scaled-backed productions. A decline in subscription rates, shockingly higher costs, and donations that haven't kept pace with inflation have thrown some arts organizations off balance and spiraled...

Welcome to stop #90 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Solemn Oath Brewery, 2919 W. Armitage Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Blue Line, CaliforniaTime from Chicago: 14 minutesDistance from station: 700 m When I visited Bungalow by Middle Brow last winter, I had intended to visit Solemn Oath as well, but my friend and I had a longer catch-up over food than we intended. After visiting Off Color on Saturday, I decided to correct the oversight, so I hopped on an electric Divvy (pictured above, lower...

Welcome to stop #89 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Off Color Brewing, 1460 N. Kingsbury St., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Red Line, North/ClybournTime from Chicago: 10 minutesDistance from station: 600 m I've actually wanted to stop by The Mousetrap (as Off Color calls their Kingsbury brewery and taproom) for a long time. It opened directly across the street from the Whole Foods Market that Parker and I used to walk to back when we used to walk there. I should have visited years ago instead of...

Butters goes home tomorrow. If she understood the concept of "future," she might look forward to seeing her family again. This morning, however, she did not like getting snowed upon, will not like getting snowed upon after lunch, and will quite happily bogart Cassie's blanket until then, thank you very much: Yesterday I stopped by two breweries for the Brews & Choos Project; reviews coming later today and early tomorrow.

Yesterday's full day with our houseguest went fine. As one might predict, the dogs have discovered each other's toys, and have stolen them. Cassie started it: Butters definitely has an "oh, yeah?" look on her face while guarding Cassie's Kong: She's settled right in, though. They both snuggled with me while I caught up on Loki and digested leftovers last night:

Nothing major in Wx-Now 5.0.8730: annual .NET version update (to .NET 8), minor bug fixes, and some internal changes to how the app logs information from the AspNetCore subsystem. It seems to be a little faster now, probably because it's ignoring 99% of the log messages that it used to write to .NET tables.