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The sun just came out, reminding me that gray skies don't last forever. Neither will all this crap:

Yesterday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement—who have no jurisdiction over US citizens—murdered another US citizen in what witness videos clearly show as a depraved act involving at least two shooters. Alex Pretti, the murdered ICU nurse who tried to shield other observers from being assaulted with chemical irritants, was unarmed and subdued when ICE agents shot him at least 8 times.

Exactly one year ago this hour, the worst administration in American history took office. One hopes they will always be the worst administration in history (though I can see some ways that becomes true for some pretty horrible reasons).

Even though I wrote this thing, the new editor interface is so radically different from the old one that it will take getting used to. Also, the new blog engine uses Markdown instead of HTML, which makes writing quicker with a lot less formatting.

At midnight Chicago tied its high-temperature record for January 9th, 15.6°C (60°F), set in 1880. Then from 4am to 5am the temperature dropped 7°C (12°F) and now hovers around 6°C (42°F). This is a weakening La Niña plus human-caused global heating plus Chicago generally having weird weather. In other news: Glenn Kessler warns that the OAFPOTUS's vandalism of our foreign policy is the equivalent of Cortez burning his ships, with similarly grim prospects for the natives. Matt Ford thinks it will "haunt...

Despite the annoyances with the soon-to-be-decommissioned BlogEngine.NET version of the Daily Parker, I actually had some things to say today. Mainly: the OAFPOTUS and his droogs know they're losing everywhere that matters, and they know they only have slightly less than a year before the next Congress effectively shuts them down, so they're going for broke. And the last 36 hours are just the beginning. Top of mind is yesterday's murder of Renee Good, a mother of three shot in the face by a...

The United States invaded Venezuela this morning and captured its president, Nicholas Maduro, and his wife: The United States launched a “large scale strike” on Venezuela, captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and flew them out of the country, President Donald Trump said in a social media post early Saturday. Overnight, explosions shook multiple locations across Caracas, including at key military facilities, and aircraft were seen flying over the Venezuelan capital. Venezuelan Vice President...

Now that I've had a good night's sleep and the sun is out for the first time all year, I have the energy to start reading the news again. On January 2nd, most of the stories are about things that have changed since Wednesday: Chicago had 416 murders in 2025, the lowest number recorded since 1965 when the city had 620,000 (23%) more people. In 2025, the hottest temperature recorded at Inner Drive Technology WHQ was 34.3°C (93.7°F) on June 23rd; the coldest was -20°C (-4°F) January 21st. Officially at...

While waiting for Visual Studio to update (it was too early to go to lunch when I started this post), I'm reading these: Someone handed the OAFPOTUS a new crayon, which he used to scrawl his name on a new class of battleship the US Navy wants to build. (Since the Navy won't even lay down the keel of the first ship in the new BBG class until the mid-2030s at the earliest, long after this elderly toddler has shuffled off his office and likely also this mortal coil, there is no actual possibility of any...

It looks like our above-normal temperatures will continue probably through the end of the year, but the next few days look nuts: And yet, the weather isn't nearly as nuts as the OAFPOTUS and his administration: The Times reports that White House Budget Director Russel Vought is pushing to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research, because it's the premier climate research center in the world and Vought is a climate-change-denying tool. Francis Fukuyama thinks the OAFPOTUS is losing steam, and...

The temperature tried and tried but couldn't get above -6.1°C over here. It should keep going up slowly for the next day. And we might even see the sun tomorrow. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Nick Reiner, the 32-year-old son of director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner, has been arrested following the stabbing death of his parents. In response to the Reiners' deaths, the OAFPOTUS posted some truly deranged crap on social media, further demonstrating how he's completely lost it. Brian...

As happens every December 1st, winter has begun. It's the first of 63 days with a 7am sunrise or later. And yet that's not as depressing as some of these stories: Jennifer Rubin argues (as do most lawyers with military backgrounds) that any order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to kill survivors of a boat the US Navy attacked would violate US law, international law, the law of war, and the US Law of War Manual, not to mention being morally abhorrent. An appeals court has ruled that Alina Habba's...

Lots of morning meetings, then stuff so far this afternoon, and now...a quick breath. Of course, given that it's still 2025, I'm not exactly breathing sweet summer air: The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked the (obviously unlawful) Texas redistricting effort, using logic that would very likely bolster the way California passed theirs. Paul Krugman muses that the billions the cryptocurrency industry spent to "buy a president" may not be the winning investment they thought, perhaps because they got...

Rosh Hashana begins in just a few hours. To celebrate, let's sing! Corruption, corruption! Corruption!Corruption, corruption! Corruption! Who, day and night, has got his tiny hands out?Reaching for a pay-out, raking in the cash?And who keeps on whining, every day he's whining,"I'm the real victim here!" The POTUS, OAFPOTUS! Corruption!The POTUS, OAFPOTUS! Corruption! Who must know the way to break a proper law,A needed law, a settled law?Who must shred all precedent and end the law,So billionaires can...

I agree with most of what the British comedian says, except I would say while both the Right and Left have descended into illiberalism, the Left aren't actually shooting anyone:

In the day since a yet-unknown sniper assassinated far-right activist Charlie Kirk, people across the political spectrum have reacted with anger and horror. Most--at least, from the center-right to the center-left--decried the violence itself, even when they found Kirk's politics reprehensible: Former presidents Biden, Obama, Bush, and Clinton soundly condemned the killing, with Obama posting, "We don't yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable...

A total lunar eclipse has just started and will reach totality at 12:30 Chicago time, which is unfortunately about 10 hours too early for us to enjoy it here. It's a good way to end the first day of meteorological autumn, though, as is the 8 km walk Cassie and I have planned around 2 this afternoon. With a forecast high of 19°C, it should be lovely. In other eclipses this past week: The OAFPOTUS has so badly damaged US foreign policy and our standing in the world that China has eclipsed us as the de...

One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded struck off the east coast of Russia last night, registering magnitude 8.8 according to the United States Geological Survey. So far there have been fewer casualty reports than one might expect, owing to the sparse population in the area. Governments around the Pacific basin issued tsunami warnings almost immediately, though they have since downgraded them. In other stories: Jeff Maurer doesn't think the Epstein scandal will end the OAFPOTUS's regime...

If you've ever played Snakes & Ladders (Chutes & Ladders in the US) with a small child, or really any game with a small child, you have probably cheated. Of course you have; don't deny it. Everyone knows letting the kid win is often the only way to get out of playing again. It turns out, Japan last week and the European Union this week both demonstrated mastery of that principle while negotiating "trade deals" with the world's largest toddler: [I]f the US-EU trade relationship was more or less OK last...

Leading off the news this afternoon, Black Sabbath lead singer Ozzy Osbourne died today at age 76. I am surprised he lasted this long, as he didn't exactly take care of himself over the years. In other news: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has stopped the legislative process of the United States rather than vote on releasing details of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with the OAFPOTUS. Adam Kinzinger details the quiet cruelty of the OAFPOTUS's droogs. Tom Nichols points out that the...

I'm cleaning out some old boxes, and in one from my college years in New York, I found this gem: I clipped it because I found it shocking at the time. Here was this buffoon demonstrating the corollary to the proverb "even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise," spending whatever it cost to get a full-page ad on page A13 of The New York Times, yearning for the halcyon days when we could just string 'em up. When I saw the performance-art piece "Imbecile Descending on an Escalator" ten years...

Before getting to the weather, I don't anticipate any quiet news days for the next couple of years, do you? Someone who owns at least 16 rooms and condos in the OAFPOTUS's Wabash Ave. building in downtown Chicago has sued, alleging that—wait for it—the organization running the building is bilking investors. I mean, how preposterous! Speaking of corruption flowing from the OAFPOTUS like toxic waste from a Union Carbide plant, Molly White mourns the end of SEC oversight of the crypto industry. Former US...

Winter ends two weeks from tomorrow, but climate science and meteorology can only study nature, not command it. That explains why, despite ample sunshine, the temperature at IDTWHQ has stayed around -7°C since it leveled out this morning, and promises to shed another 8-10 degrees tonight. Then we're in for a few blasts of cold interspersed with warm days and some snow here and there for about a week before it consistently warms up. Elsewhere in the cold, cold world: The Senate confirmed the unqualified...

Security expert Bruce Schneier can't believe the damage that Elon Musk's team have already done to US national security, and worries it will get much, much worse: In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound. What...

The OAFPOTUS's principal motivation has always been self-enrichment. He has scammed and grifted his whole life, though he sucks at it so hard he managed to burn through so much of his inheritance that he'd have been better off stuffing it in a savings account. So it should come as no surprise that the first few weeks of his second term have seen remarkable gifts to other grifters and scammers worldwide, not to mention our adversaries: Yesterday, he pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the first Illinois governor...

As we end the work-week, we can start our weekend with these little nuggets of horror and amusement: The UK Home Office has demanded that Apple create a back door into its cloud storage system to allow the UK government to snoop on everyone's content worldwide, which, if I correctly understand Apple's ADP architecture, is technically impossible. ProPublica has compiled a list of the people Elon Musk has enlisted to capture the government of the United States. Paul Krugman calls Musk's efforts an...

Chicago got a few millimeters of ice last night, which made my 15-minute walk from my house to Cassie's day camp into a 24-minute walk. The poor girl could not understand my difficulty, but she also can't count all four of her paws, so we work with what we have. Fortunately the temperature has gotten above freezing and promises to stay there at least until late tonight. Elsewhere in the world: Josh Marshall proposes a taxonomy of the Administration's forces of destruction. Part of that destruction...

Topping the link round-up this afternoon, my go-to brewery Spiteful fears for its business if it has to pay a 25% tariff on imported aluminum cans. If the OAFPOTUS drives Spiteful out of business for no fucking reason I will be quite put out. In other news: Timothy Noah reads Jean Piaget to learn more about the OAFPOTUS's "infantile incapacity to grasp the mechanics of cause and effect," suggesting that his reasoning is more transductive, like a 3-year old's ("taking a nap causes the afternoon" ~=~ "DEI...

Demonstrating one more time that the OAFPOTUS is all hat and no cattle, the White House announced that it will "postpone" the crippling and needless tariffs he had threatened to impose on our second-biggest trading partner in exchange for...something Mexico would have done anyway. Avocados will continue to flow north, and dollars will continue to flow south. Canada, meanwhile, has taken a more hardline position on the threat, which James Fallows calls "an international lesson in leadership." Perhaps...

Oh, FFS. I tried to avoid the inauguration entirely, but since we're dealing with the OAFPOTUS again, I couldn't. Especially because of 3rd grader Elon Musk. The OAFPOTUS's second inaugural address was the longest in modern history. If you really want to read the text, the New York Times has annotated it, but I wouldn't recommend it. James Fallows read it so you don't have to: Donald Trump, as 5th-grader. Sometimes Trump’s formal speeches are “written,” in the sense of trying to have “eloquent” or “fine...

Yesterday, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ scraped along at -11°C early in the morning before "warming" up to -7.5°C around 3pm. Cassie and I got a 22-minute walk around then and she seemed fine. Today the pattern completely inverted. I woke up during the warmest part of the day: 7am, -8°C. Around 8am the temperature started dropping and now hovers around -11°C again—slightly colder than the point where I limit Cassie to 15 minutes outside. She just doesn't feel cold, apparently, and...

In a podcast this week, the woman who accused Duke University lacrosse players of gang-raping her in 2006 has admitted the she made it all up: “I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong,” she told interviewer Katerena DePasquale on Nov. 13. “And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me and made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.” “And that was wrong.” The case dominated...

Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.) Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era: Adam Gray (D) has defeated US Representative John Duarte (R) in California's 13 district, bringing the House of Representatives to its final tally of 210 Democrats and 215 Republicans. An assassin shot and killed...

The only reaction to last night's debate that I need to share is Cassie's: Talk about on-the-nose commentary! Right. Anyway, in other news since yesterday: Elaine Godfrey explains what Democrats don't understand about JD Vance. Julia Ioffe interviews Justice Dept official Matt Olsen, who heads up the Biden Administration's anti-election-interference group. Meteorologists estimate that Hurricane Helene dumped 150 trillion liters of water on Appalachia as it stalled out, with one town in North Carolina...

You'd think no one would say this out loud, especially 56 days until the election, but JD Vance is a special kind of asshole: Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance on Thursday called school shootings a “fact of life” that he dislikes, saying in the wake of the Apalachee High School killings in Georgia that stricter gun laws are not the answer and that schools must beef up security. “I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said at a rally in Phoenix where he...

Our lead story today concerns empty suit and Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter, who just can't seem to bother himself with the actual CTA: From the end of May 2023 to spring 2024, as CTA riders had to cope with frequent delays and filthy conditions, Carter spent nearly 100 days out of town at conferences, some overseas, his schedule shows. Most of Carter’s trips between June 2023 and May 2024 were for events related to the American Public Transportation Association, a nonprofit advocacy...

The XPOTUS's handlers cut short his appearance this afternoon at the National Association of Black Journalists convention just 2 km from where I'm sitting. The XPOTUS began by insulting the hosts and the panelists. Then, when one of the panelists had just brought up Project 2025 (the Republican Party's blueprint for rolling the country back to the 1850s), the moderator suddenly interrupted and said the campaign had told her to wrap it up. The 37 minutes of Harris Campaign footage the XPOTUS had already...

Three celebrities from my youth died yesterday, but for obvious reasons none was the top story on any news outlet this morning. No one should politicize the attempt on the XPOTUS's life yesterday at a rally outside Pittsburgh. We have no idea why the assailant shot the XPOTUS and three other people; the FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police are investigating, and with the shooter killed by the Secret Service, we won't have to wait for a criminal trial for the full story. I trust both agencies to...

Yes, President Biden is old, but he doesn't want to recreate the world of Victor Hugo. The Republican Party does, and this morning, they showed how they'll do it. The debate last night did not fill me with joy, as it showed my guy looking like the 82-year-old great-grandfather he is, and showed the convicted-felon other guy looking like the 78-year-old con artist he is. I may come back to this train wreck for democracy later today, but for now, I'd rather focus on why the President's geriatric...

As I mentioned after lunch, a lot of other things crossed my desk today than just wasted sushi: Politico reports the results of its latest poll, which, contra many pundits, shows a marked decline in the convicted felon XPOTUS's popularity following his 34 felony convictions. NPR describes what it's like living through a 50°C day in Delhi, India. Fully 83% of the union representing WBEZ-FM and Chicago Sun-Times employees voted "no confidence" in Chicago Public Media CEO Matt Moog. New York Magazine...

I started my day with overlapping meetings, a visit from the housekeeping service, more meetings, a visit from an electrician, and just now discovered that a "new" bug report actually relates a bug we introduced on June 20th last year, but only now got reported. Oh, also: it's 25°C and sunny. At least it's Friday. And I guess I can read some of these tomorrow morning: Tara Palmeri examines the Beltway reactions to the convicted-felon XPOTUS's 34-count felony conviction. (But Josh Marshall says of this...

Despite a high, thin broken cloud layer, it's 23°C with a light breeze and comfortable humidity at Inner Drive Technology World HQ. Cassie and I had a half-hour walk at a nice pace (we covered just over 3 km), and I've just finished my turkey sandwich. And yet, there's something else that has me feeling OK, if only for a little while... Perhaps it's this? Maybe this? How about this? Or maybe it's Alexandra Petri? In other news: President Biden just announced that Israel has proposed a three-phase peace...

I just popped out for lunch. It's 17°C in the Loop with lots of sun, the kind of day when I wonder why I went back to the office. Summer begins Saturday. Ah, to be French and take an entire month off... This time of year has other features, many of which popped up in my various RSS feeds this morning: For the first time in his life, the XPOTUS finds himself waiting for a jury to decide whether he's a felon. In closing arguments yesterday, his attorney nearly got himself sanctioned on the spot for a...

The President arrived in Chicago a little while ago, but sadly I haven't seen either his airplane or his helicopter. Apparently he's just a couple of blocks from me. I'll wave if I see him. Meanwhile: Dana Milbank applauds adult film director Stormy Daniels for giving the XPOTUS some of his own chaos while testifying in New York yesterday. On the cover of June's Atlantic, Anne Applebaum explains how Russia and China have perfected a new form of propaganda that aims not to supplant one truth with...

A cold front passed this morning right after I got to the office, sparing me the 60 km/h winds and pouring rain that made the 9am arrivals miserable. The rain has passed, but the temperature has slowly descended to 17°C after hanging out around 19°C all night. I might have to close my windows tonight. I also completed a mini-project for work a few minutes ago, so I now have time to read a couple of stories: The voir dire in the XPOTUS's porn-star-payoff criminal trial forced him to listen to a lot of...

I'm heading off to a Euchre tournament in a bit. I haven't played cards with actual, live people in quite some time, so I just hope to end up in the middle of the pack. Or one perfect lay-down loner... A guy can dream. When I get home, I might have the time and attention span to read these: John Grinspan looks at the similarities and crucial differences between the upcoming election and the election of 1892. Andy Borowitz jokes about the latest of Robert F Kennedy's conspiracy theories: that his own...

Attorney Liz Dye teams up with Legal Eagle to explain that the smell emanating from the Truth Social merger and meme stock listing is exactly what you think it is: So if the XPOTUS gets re-elected, the shares become an intravenous emoluments delivery mechanism; if not, he can cash out and pay his legal bills. I wonder if I can short it...

I'm almost done with the new feature I mentioned yesterday (day job, unfortunately, so I can't describe it further), so while the build is running, I'm queuing these up: Philip Bump analyzes the New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan's dismissal of the XPOTUS's bogus immunity claim. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D) told reporters he's done everything he promised to do when he took office a year ago, at which point the reporters no doubt collectively cocked their eyebrows. Molly White doesn't think...

My Garmin watch thinks I've had a relaxing day, with an average stress level of 21 (out of 100). My four-week average is 32, so this counts as a low-stress day in the Garmin universe. At least, today was nothing like 13 March 2020, when the world ended. Hard to believe that was four years ago. So when I go to the polls on November 5th, and I ask myself, "Am I better off than 4 years ago?", I have a pretty easy answer. I spent most of today either in meetings or having an interesting (i.e., not boring)...

It's official: with two days left, this is the warmest winter in Chicago history, with the average temperature since December 1st fully 3.5°C (6.3°F) above normal. We've had only 10 days this winter when the temperature stayed below freezing, 8 of them in one week in February. This should remain the case when spring officially begins on Friday, even though today's near-record 23°C (so far) is forecast to fall to -6°C by 6am. And that's not even to discuss the raging thunderstorms and possible tornadoes...

Just noting these things to read later, as I have just a few minutes before boarding: Wisconsin assemblywoman Greta Neubauer (D) explains how she led the effort to defeat the Republican gerrymander of the state legislature. Thomas Friedman calls the modern GOP "a confederacy of fakers." The homebuilding industry doesn't want you to have an energy-efficient house. Finally, The Cut's financial-advice columnist Charlotte Cowles describes how she fell for a financial scam.

New York Justice Arthur Engoron just handed the XPOTUS a $350 million fine and barred him and his two failsons from running a business in New York for years: The decision by Justice Arthur F. Engoron caps a chaotic, yearslong case in which New York’s attorney general put Mr. Trump’s fantastical claims of wealth on trial. With no jury, the power was in Justice Engoron’s hands alone, and he came down hard: The judge delivered a sweeping array of punishments that threatens the former president’s business...

I learned this morning that I have a meeting at 6am Wednesday, because the participants will be in four time zones across four continents. Since I'm traveling to Munich later that day, I'll just comfort myself by remembering it's 1pm Central Europe time. I'm already queuing up some things to read on the flights. I'll probably finish all of these later today, though: Jennifer Rubin highlights four ways in which the XPOTUS has demonstrated his electoral weakness in the past few weeks. Republican pollster...

Another sprint has ended. My hope for a boring release has hit two snags: first, it looks like one of the test artifacts in the production environment that our build pipeline depends on has disappeared (easily fixed); and second, my doctor's treatment for this icky bronchitis I've had the past two weeks works great at the (temporary) expense of normal cognition. (Probably the cough syrup.) Plus, Cassie and I have a houseguest: But like my head, the rest of the world keeps spinning: A 3-judge panel on...

Between the Dobbs decision allowing states to enforce or enact medieval restrictions on women's rights, an estimated 59,000 pregnancies resulted from rapes in states where women could no longer terminate them: A new study estimates that more than 64,000 pregnancies resulted from rape between July 1, 2022, and January 1, 2024, in states where abortion has been banned throughout pregnancy in all or most cases. Of these, just more than 5,500 are estimated to have occurred in states with rape exceptions—and...

As I wait for my rice to cook and my adobo to finish cooking, I'm plunging through an unusually large number of very small changes to a codebase recommended by one of my tools. And while waiting for the CI to run just now, I lined these up for tomorrow morning: Michael Tomasky calls former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who has left the House and scampered back to California, "the most incompetent House Speaker of all time." (No argument from me.) Former GOP strategist, lawyer, and generally sane...

I complained yesterday that Chicago hadn't seen sunlight in almost a week. Ever the fount of helpful weather statistics, WGN pointed out that it made it the cloudiest start to a December since 1952. This streak had nothing on my winter break in 1991-92, when Chicago went 12 days without sunlight, or spring 2022, which had only 1 day of sunshine from March 21st through May 2nd. So the sun on my face this morning was delightful. In other gloominess: Julia Ioffe reports that Hamas has refused to release...

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 have tickets to a late concert downtown, which means a few things, principally that I'm still at the office. But I'm killing it on this sprint, so it works out. Of course this means a link dump: The XPOTUS has a hate-hate relationship with life. After a damning ethics report, Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has announced he won't run again, which is too bad because it would have been an easy D pickup. Speaking of Republicans in Congress, why do they behave like adolescent boys all the time? Israel is seeing...

I hope to make the 17:10 train this evening, so I'll just note some things I want to read later: Monica Hesse can't help making fun of the dude-bros in the US Senate who think they're still in middle school. Guess which party they're in? Julia Ioffe interviews National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Last night I finished Jake Berman's The Lost Subways of North America, and this morning I read Veronica Esposito's (positive) review for The Guardian. I recommend this book too. The New Republic interviews...

I actually had a lot to do today at my real job, so I pushed these stories to later: Sure, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is a crazy Christianist who has fantasies about Israel, but not exactly the fantasies you'd expect from his kind. Speaking of Christianist loonies, Josh Marshall doesn't think they've learned anything at all from yesterday's blowout in Ohio. Julia Ioffe takes a look at the "horror in the Holy Land" while Eric Levitz examines the fraught language around the war. Molly White...

We've switched around our RTO/WFH schedule recently, so I'm now in the office Tuesday through Thursday. That's exactly the opposite of my preferred schedule, it turns out. So now Tuesdays feel like Mondays. And I still can't get the hang of Thursdays. We did get our bi-weekly build out today, which was boring, as it should be. Alas, the rest of the world wasn't: The XPOTUS has vowed revenge on everyone who has wronged him, pledging to use the US government to smite his enemies, as if we needed any more...

I spent way too much time chasing down an errant mock in my real job's unit test suite, but otherwise I've gotten a lot done today. Too much to read all these articles: Julia Ioffe interviews Ambassador Dennis Ross on the disappearing hopes for a two-state solution in Israel. Ruth Marcus wonders whether Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (R) committed tax fraud when he accepted a $267,000 motor home. Josh Marshall wonders WTF with House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) black "son?" Paul Krugman bemoans the...

I'm iterating on a UI feature that wasn't 100% defined, so I'm also iterating on the API that the feature needs. Sometimes software is like that: you discover that your first design didn't quite solve the problem, so you iterate. it's just that the iteration is a bit of a context shift, so I'm going to read for about 15 minutes to clear my head: Kevin Philips, whose 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority laid out Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" and led to the GOP's subsequent slide into...

I could have worked from home today, and probably should have, but I felt well enough to come in (wearing an N95 mask, of course). It turned that I had a very helpful meeting, which would not have worked as well remotely, but given tomorrow's forecast and the likelihood I'll still have this cold, Cassie will just have to miss a day of school. I have to jam on a presentation for the next three hours, so I'll come back to these later: Alex Shephard says this is the week Twitter finally went totally evil....

A rainy cold front passed over Inner Drive Technology WHQ just after noon, taking us from 15°C down to just above 10°C in two hours. The sun has come back out but we won't get a lot warmer until next week. I've had a lot of coding today, and I have a rehearsal in about two hours, so this list of things to read will have to do: Mother Jones's Russ Choma thinks the XPOTUS doesn't really want to win his fraud trial. Robert Wright interviewed Brown University professor Lyle Goldstein, late of the US Naval...

The former CEO of FTX Trading goes on trial today for making $8 billion disappear in just under three years. Molly White has a precis: About eleven months ago, the then second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world imploded over the course of only a few days as trust in the company crumbled and it failed to meet a surge of customer withdrawals. It rapidly became apparent that customer money was missing. A lot of it. Since then, it’s come out that FTX allowed its sister trading firm, Alameda...

It's only Wednesday? Sheesh... The Writers Guild of America got nearly everything they wanted from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (i.e., the Astroturf organization set up by the big studios and streamers to negotiate with the Guilds), especially for young writers and for hit shows, but consumers should expect more bundling and higher monthly fees for shows in the future. Josh Marshall suspects that the two competing storylines about the XPOTUS (that he's about to return to...

The temperature has crept up towards 34°C all day after staying at a comfortable 28°C yesterday and 25°C Friday. It's officially 33°C at O'Hare but just a scoshe above 31°C at IDTWHQ. Also, I still feel...uncomfortable in certain places closely associated with walking. All of which explains why I'm jotting down a bunch of news stories to read instead of walking Cassie. First, if you have tomorrow off for Labor Day, you can thank Chicago workers. (Of course, if you have May 1st off for Labor Day, you can...

Meteorological autumn begins at midnight local time, even though today's autumn-like temperatures will give way to summer heat for a few days starting Saturday. Tomorrow I will once again attempt the 42-kilometer walk from Cassie's daycare to Lake Bluff. Will I go 3-for-4 or .500? Tune in Saturday morning to find out. Meanwhile: Quinta Jurecic foresees some problems with the overlapping XPOTUS criminal trials next year, not least of which is looking for a judicial solution to a political problem. Even...

The Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS) has signed off on rescheduling THC as a Schedule III drug, the first of three steps required for marijuana to become just another medication: A top official at the Department of Health and Human Services wrote Drug Enforcement Agency administrator Anne Milgram calling for marijuana to be reclassified as a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act, according to a letter dated Aug. 29 seen by Bloomberg News. This would mark a critical shift from its...

Since today is the last Friday of the summer, I'm leaving the office a little early to tackle one of the more logistically challenging itineraries on the Brews & Choos Project. So I'm queueing up a few things to read over the weekend: The XPOTUS finally won his "long hard battle" to finally get a mugshot, which the Internet immediately (a) put on swag you can buy and (b) compared with the Kubrick Stare. But where did the Fulton County Jail get his height and weight? US intelligence sources believe the...

My home office sits at the top of my house as a loft over the floor below. I think it could not have a more effective design for trapping hot air. (Fortunately I can let a lot of that out through this blog.) This afternoon the temperature outside Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters didn't quite make 25°C, and it's back down to 23°C with a nice breeze coming through the window. Wednesday and Thursday, though, the forecast predicts 36°C with heat indices up to 43°C. Whee. (It gets a lot better...

Sorry, I'm still wiping the tears from my eyes after laughing so hard: In a court filing Thursday, Trump's attorneys recommended starting the [election interference] trial in April 2026, more than two years after prosecutors are seeking to get the trial underway. U.S. District Judge Tonya Chutkan — who warned Trump that he is a "criminal defendant" who has "restrictions like every other defendant" — had asked each side to propose trial dates. In a filing last week, [Special Counsel Jack] Smith's team...

A few of them have come home or are en route: Cato Institute scholar Clark Nelly says the XPOTUS "is toast," as the deranged wannabe fascist (my words) won't be able to stop himself from lying to the Georgia jury on live TV. Speaking of crazy old people, author Michael Beckley backs away slowly from the historical implications of having two septuagenarian dictators aging along with their nuclear stockpiles loose in the world. The Marion County, Kan., prosecutor has filed a motion to have all the Marion...

The XPOTUS continuing to get indicted for trying to steal the 2020 election wasn't the only bit of authoritarian fuckery this week: Constitutional law professor Deborah Pearlstein wonders, as do many other people, why so many of the XPOTUS's mooks are lawyers. Nicholas Grossman can't figure out why the media spend so much time trying to understand the populist right when Biden got millions more votes than the other guy. The Marion, Kan., police department raided the town newspaper and seized its...

I love it when something passes all the integration tests locally, then on the CI build, and then I discover that the code works perfectly well but not as I intended it. So while I'm waiting for yet another CI build to run, I'm making note of these: Who's dumber than the XPOTUS? His lawyers. The city of Chicago has released plans to build a tunnel connecting the existing Bloomingdale Trail with the other side of I-90/94 and the Union Pacific tracks, but they don't expect it to open for about 3 years....

While I fight a slow laptop and its long build cycle (and how every UI change seems to require re-compiling), the first day of the last month of summer brought this to my inbox: Who better to prosecute the XPOTUS than a guy who prosecuted other dictators and unsavory characters for the International Criminal Court? (In America, we don't go to The Hague; here, The Hague comes to you!) After the evidence mounted that Hungary has issued hundreds of thousands of passports without adequate identity checks...

I'm just over a week from performing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, so as I try to finish a feature that turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought, I'm hearing opera choruses in my head. Between rehearsals and actual work, I might never get to read any of these items: Jesse Wegman describes how to tell a political prosecution from a real one, which would be great except the people doing the political ones don't read the Times. Meaghan O'Rourke points to...

The first day of a sprint is the best day to consolidate three interfaces with three others, touching every part of the application that uses data. So right now, I am watching most of my unit tests pass and hoping I will figure out why the ones that failed did so before I leave today. While the unit tests run, I have some stuff to keep me from getting too bored: The XPOTUS keeps confirming every theory about his behavior, this time that he only wants to run in 2024 to postpone the consequences of...

We lost three people last week whose deaths have made the world ever so slightly better on balance. Religious swindler Pat Robertson went first on Wednesday. Then Saturday, Ted Kaczynski, also known as the "Unabomber" for his terror campaign against university professors in the 1990s, killed himself in his jail cell: Kaczynski was found unresponsive in his cell around 12:30 a.m. ET and transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Kaczynski was...

Police Scotland has arrested Nicola Sturgeon, who resigned as first minister of Scotland two months ago, as part of their investigation into allegations the SNP misspent £600,000 of donated money: Her husband, Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the SNP, was arrested at their home in Uddingston near Glasgow on 5 April, and interviewed under caution for nearly 12 hours before being released without charge. The police searched their home and back garden, and also searched the SNP’s headquarters...

I've just read the indictment against the XPOTUS and his "body man" Walt Nauta. Wow. As a FBI agent in The West Wing once remarked, "In 13 years with the Bureau I've discovered that there's no amount of money, manpower or knowledge than can equal the person you're looking for being stupid." And wow, was the XPOTUS stupid. I'm not a practicing lawyer but I can read an indictment. If the US Attorneys can prove any of these facts—and I have no doubt they will—he's going to get convicted of a felony. Oddly...

Just a few stories I came across at lunchtime: In an act that looks a lot like the USSR's scorched-earth retreat in 1941, Ukraine accuses Russia of blowing up the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnieper River, which could have distressing follow-on effects over the next few months. A former Chicago cop faces multiple counts of perjury and forgery after, among other things, claiming his girlfriend stole his car to get out of 44 separate speeding tickets. James Fallows explains what probably happened to the Citation...

On this day in 2000, during that more-innocent time, Beverly Hills 90210 came to an end. (And not a day too soon.) As I contemplate the void in American culture its departure left, I will read these articles: Anna Nemtsova rubs her hands in glee along with Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelinsky in watching the Kremlin's worst fears about Ukraine come true. Henry Grabar blames the killing of Jordan Neely on conservatives' willful failure to address homelessness and mental illness for the last 50 years....

We finally have a real May-appropriate day in Chicago, with a breezy 26°C under clear skies (but 23°C closer to the Lake, where I live). Over to my right, my work computer—a 2017-era Lenovo laptop I desperately want to fling onto the railroad tracks—has had some struggles with the UI redesign I just completed, giving me a dose of frustration but also time to line up some lunchtime reading: Both Matt Ford and David Firestone goggle at how stupidly US Rep. George Santos (R-NY) ran his alleged grift...

James Fallows contrasts the behavior of octogenarians US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and President Joe Biden: It boils down to this: —Sometimes what helps an individual hurts a larger cause. Things have come to that point for Senator Dianne Feinstein. —Sometimes it works the other way, and an individual’s interests are aligned with a cause. I believe that applies to Joe Biden’s announcement that he is running for a second term. Feinstein staying on, at age 89, increases problems for her party. Biden...

A plethora: Google has updated its satellite photos of Mariupol, clearly showing the destruction from Russia's invasion and subsequent siege. Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Lisa Murkowsky (R-AK) have introduced legislation to force the Supreme Court—read: Justices Thomas (R$) and Gorsuch (R)—to adopt a binding code of ethics. Presumably a Democratic bill that would actually let Congress set the Court's ethical standards will come soon. On Monday, the city will cut down a bur oak they estimate has lived...

Good dog, people, the Discord document leak isn't that dire. And between yesterday's Post and the Times just now, I think we can all relax a bit. Look, I haven't seen the leaked documents, nor have I sought to read them, because I don't believe I'm cleared to do so. But the only classification marking I've seen reported is "NOFORN," which just means that you can't share it with non-US citizens. It's unlawful to disclose that you currently have or have ever had any security clearance above "Public...

The Manhattan District Attorney's office reported last night that a New York grand jury has returned an indictment of former president Trump, the first time this has happened in the 234-year history of the office. Reports this morning say the grand jury charged him with over 30 counts of business crimes, but at the moment, no one outside the jury room and a handful of lawyers knows what the indictment contains. The XPOTUS will travel to New York for his formal arrest, booking, and arraignment on...

Once again, I have too much to read: After Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) tried to end Disney's control over the municipal area around Disneyworld, the outgoing board added a series of restrictive covenants completely neutering DeSantis' hand-picked replacements, including a rule-against-perpetuities clause tying the covenants to the last living descendant of King Charles III. Robert Wright observed ChatGPT expressing cognitive empathy. An anonymous source provided a German reporter with 5,000 pages...

Media reports, including the XPOTUS's own social-media posts, suggest the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York will issue an historic indictment on Tuesday: The Manhattan district attorney's office is expected to issue criminal charges against Trump in a case centering on a payment that Michael Cohen, Trump's attorney and fixer at the time, made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential election. Cohen told CNN Thursday that he believed an indictment...

I spent way more time than I should have this morning trying to set up an API key for the Associated Press data tools. Their online form to sign up created a general customer-service ticket, which promptly got closed with an instruction to...go to the online sign-up form. They also had a phone number, which turned out to have nothing to do with sales. And I've now sent two emails a week apart to their "digital sales" office, with crickets in response. The New York Times had an online setup that took...

Let's start with combat-actor Jill Bearup explaining how the Netflix-ITV-BBC ban on corsets solves entirely the wrong problems: Meanwhile, in the modern world: The National Transportation Safety Board reported that an axle on the 23rd car of the train that derailed in East Palesine, Ohio, had a bearing temperature 140°C over normal—which is 30°C over "critical." The crew were trying to stop the train when the bearing failed. Perhaps if the train had fewer cars, or more crew, or the proper braking...

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing. While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company: US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who even people who love her wonder if...

Molly White would like major news outlets to treat the accused fraudster like the grown-ass adult he is: [R]eading headlines and news stories, you would be forgiven if up until now you had thought he was a teenager still driving around on a learner’s permit, who picked up cryptocurrency trading to avoid the types of high school summer jobs that might force him to go outside. SBF is being extended the benefit of the doubt that many are not so lucky to get. He is affluent, white, male, and accused of...

I finished a couple of big stories for my day job today that let us throw away a whole bunch of code from early 2020. I also spent 40 minutes writing a bug report for the third time because not everyone diligently reads attachments. (That sentence went through several drafts, just so you know.) While waiting for several builds to complete today, I happened upon these stories: The former co-CEO of @Properties bought 2240 N. Burling St., one of the only remaining pre-Fire houses in Lincoln Park, so...

The sun finally came out around 3:30 this afternoon, as a high overcast layer slid slowly southeast. Of course, the temperature has fallen to -11°C and will keep sliding to -18°C overnight, but at least the gloom has receded! January will still end as the gloomiest ever, however, with around 18% of possible sunshine all month, plus whatever we get tomorrow. Meanwhile, I want to come back to these articles later: Radley Balko points out that giving hyper-aggressive cops less oversight and a...

I'm on hold with my bank trying to sort out a transaction they seem to have deleted. I've also just sorted through a hundred or so stories in our project backlog, so while I'm mulling over the next 6 months of product development, I will read these: Via Schneier, credit-reporting service Experian patched a security hole in December that allowed anyone to view someone's credit report with "the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number." It turned out, an exciting software...

I got a lot done today, mostly a bunch of smaller tasks I put off for a while. I also put off reading all of this, which I will do now while my rice cooks: The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service determined that 2022 was the fifth-hottest year on record, once again making the last 8 years the hottest on record. As North America sees record warmth and record-low snowfall this winter, we can guess how 2023 will end up. In no small irony, Illinois was actually cooler than normal last year. I've said...

One of the most loathsome, talentless personalities on the Internet self-pwnd yesterday after going 0-for-2 against 19-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, and it was beautiful. Actor George Takei sums it up: So...Elon Musk let Andrew Tate back on Twitter, and Tate promptly used it to reveal his whereabouts to authorities in Romania who then arrested him. All because Greta Thunberg owned him so hard his little wee-wee fell off. Do I have that right? Please say I have that right. — George Takei...

What a delight to wake up for the second day in a row and see the sun. After 13 consecutive days of blah, even the -11°C cold that encouraged Cassie and me to get her to day care at a trot didn't bother me too much. Unfortunately, the weather forecast says a blizzard will (probably) hit us next weekend, so I guess I'll have time to read all of these stories sitting on the couch with my dog: The House Select Committee on the January 6th Insurrection referred the XPOTUS to the Justice Department on four...

Theodore Schleifer examines the intellectual and ethical upbringing of Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old indicted yesterday for perpetrating one of the biggest frauds in history: Of all the potentially unanswerable riddles underpinning the Sam Bankman-Fried saga—why did Sequoia invest in a mop-topped kid who played video games during a diligence call; were Alameda and FTX ever really separate?—perhaps the most vexing is how the mastermind of this whole legal and ethical imbroglio was the offspring of...

Before you freak out, I need to remind you that this made the news because this sort of thing happens so rarely. Still, two armed robberies followed by the getaway car bursting into flames just a few blocks away did get my attention: A driver fleeing police crashed and their car burst into flames Monday morning on a residential block in Lincoln Square, according to police and the local aldermen. About 10:45 a.m., several people in a stolen silver Hyundai robbed someone in the 1900 block of West Berteau...

Cassie and I took a 33-minute walk at lunchtime and we'll take another half-hour or so before dinner as the temperature grazes 14°C this afternoon. Tomorrow and each day following will cool off a bit until Wednesday, the first official day of winter, which will return to normal. Meanwhile... As every lawyer who paid attention predicted, Justice Clarence Thomas's (R) opinion in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen last summer articulated a Republican policy platform while providing...

Josh Barro explains the FTX collapse in simple terms: [T]his is not a technology story, because FTX was not a technology company. Sure, FTX’s business relied on technology, but so do most businesses. FTX has an app; so does Fidelity, and so does Chipotle, and that doesn’t make them tech companies. FTX was a brokerage, and there were two things that set them apart from a regular brokerage. One is that they dealt principally in nonsense financial products with no underlying economic value, and the other...

I'm just finishing up a very large push to our dev/test environment, with 38 commits (including 2 commits fixing unrelated bugs) going back to last Tuesday. I do not like large pushes like this, because they tend to be exciting. So, to mitigate that, I'm running all 546 unit tests locally before the CI service does the same. This happens when you change the basic architecture of an entire feature set. (And I just marked 6 tests with "Ignore: broken by story X, to be rewritten in story Y." Not the best...

I'm movin' out. A lovely young couple have offered to buy Inner Drive World Headquarters v5.0, and the rest of the place along with it. I've already gotten through the attorney-review period for IDTWHQ v6.0, so this means I'm now more likely than not to move house next month. Which means I have even less time to read stuff like this: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D) has withdrawn from the Daily Herald candidate forum after the Herald's publisher allowed a right-wing Republican group to use its mail...

Writing as a guest of James Fallows, former defense official Jan Lodal outlines how subparagraph (d) of the Espionage Act should be a slam-dunk in prosecuting the XPOTUS: This paragraph makes a straightforward action a crime: namely, failing to return classified documents if properly directed to give them back. No proof of the level of classification, or the intentions of the document holder, or the content of the documents, is required. Just a simple question, did he or she give them back or not. This...

The Washington Post Fact Checker digs deep into the allegations of mishandling classified material against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and finds, nah, she good: The Justice Department investigation of classified documents found at former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club has brought inevitable comparisons to the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s private email server that she used while secretary of state. The FBI investigation into her emails arguably tipped the close 2016...

I took Friday off, so it felt like Saturday. Then Saturday felt like Sunday, Sunday felt like another Saturday, and yesterday was definitely another Sunday. Today does not feel like Tuesday. Like most Mondays, I had a lot of catching up at the office, including mandatory biennial sexual harassment training (prevention and reporting, I hasten to point out). So despite a 7pm meeting with an Australian client tonight, I hope I find time to read these articles: The Chicago Bears have revealed a preliminary...

Meteorological summer ends in just a few hours here in Chicago. Pity; it's been a decent one (for us; not so much for the Western US). I have a couple of things to read this afternoon while waiting for endless test sessions to complete on my work laptop: Former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev died at 91. Julia Ioffe looks at Ukraine's risky counter-offensive—that might just work. Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle, who has covered the XPOTUS since the 2016 campaign, wonders if the...

So I'm going to have to postpone reading all of these: Isaac Chotiner interviews UT Law professor Steve Vladeck about whether former presidents deserve special treatment. Does the Republican Party even have a message this election cycle? Julia Ioffe argues that Vladimir Putin's "triumph of the will" turned out better than most people realize. Your mental model about what causes traffic is almost certainly wrong. From 2016, author Cixin Liu (The Three-Body Problem) examines contemporary Chinese science...

The South's misfortune is Chicago's benefit this week as a hot-air dome over Texas has sent cool Canadian air into the Midwest, giving us in Chicago a perfect 26°C afternoon at O'Hare—with 9°C dewpoint. (It's 25°C at IDTWHQ.) Add to that a sprint review earlier today, and I might have to spend a lot more time outside today. So I'll just read all this later: The Justice Department and the XPOTUS have gone back and forth about what parts of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant to publicize, with the XPOTUS...

Happy Monday: The XPOTUS uses the same pattern of lies every time he gets caught committing a crime. Jennifer Rubin says this was his dumbest crime yet. Usability experts at the Nielsen/Norman Group lay out everything you hate about phone trees, and how companies could fix them. My generation should be your boss now, but of course, we aren't. Within 30 years, Chicago could experience 52°C heat indexes. I would now like to take a nap, but alas...

The former president's stooges have no idea how to deal with the Justice Department's allegations that he essentially stole highly classified nuclear secrets from the White House: We should not lose ourselves in the logic of this inane claim – a fake claim of authority (in pectore declassification) wrapped in a demonstrable lie (the standing order). What is more noteworthy is that these are the claims of someone who is not getting any legal advice. Not bad legal advice. No legal advice. At present Trump...

A man attacked and seriously injured author Salman Rushdie at a lecture in upstate New York this morning: The author Salman Rushdie, who spent years in hiding and under police protection after Iranian officials called for his execution, was attacked and stabbed in the neck on Friday while onstage in Chautauqua, near Lake Erie in western New York, the state police said. The attack, which shook the literary world, happened at about 11 a.m., shortly after Mr. Rushdie, 75, took the stage for a lecture at...

So, what's going on today? Emma Green explains "how the Federalist Society won," which actually kept awake in the middle of the night on Tuesday. As a reminder that the true goal of the Federalist Society—and right-wing governments in general—is actually to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, the Times explains how Alabama's criminal justice system essentially creates indentured servants from impoverished inmates. David Jolly, Christine Todd Whitman, and Andrew Yang have formed a centrist...

I will definitely make time this weekend to drool over the recent photos from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's kind of sad that no living human will ever see anything outside our solar system, but we can dream, right? Closer to home than the edge of the visible universe: Josh Marshall highlight's a reader's note explaining how the historic conservatism of the Executive Branch legal team won't work any more. The President's conservatism doesn't work either, as recent polls and Democratic-party...

A lot has happened in the past day or so: The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 down partisan lines that everyone can carry a gun anywhere they want to, because they had guns in 1791 and so we have to live by 230-year-old rules. (Fun fact: a well-trained militiaman in 1791 could fire four aimed musket shots in a minute! Another fun fact: in 1791, bullets didn't yet exist!) That will surely comfort the parents of Uvalde, Texas, about as much as the news that the school police chief finally got suspended in light...

After four nights, five puddles, four solid gifts, and so much barking that the neighbors down the block left a note on my door, Sophie finally went home this afternoon. I also worked until 11:30 last night, but that had nothing to do with her. It did cause a backup in my reading, though: Reports out of the Supreme Court say the Justices have gotten testy with each other after last month's leak of Samuel Alito's (R) draft opinion allowing states to kill pregnant women with impunity. This has...

San Francisco voters recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin 60%-40% yesterday (but with only 26% turnout), which suggests a growing backlash against progressive crime policies as crime rates inch up from their historic lows: Boudin was an easy scapegoat. Decades of failed housing and mental-health policies have fed a homelessness crisis in a city that was never as liberal as it appeared. The pandemic appeared to fuel deep sociological challenges that no politician or prosecutor had easy answers for....

Chicago's two baseball teams gave up a combined 36 runs yesterday, with the Cubs losing to the Reds 20-5 and the Sox losing to the Red Sox 16-7. Perhaps the bullpens could use a little work, hmm? In other news: US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has taken more money from gun lobbyists since taking office than anyone else in the Senate, and did not like a British reporter asking him about it yesterday. The local police in Uvalde, Texas, bungled basic policing during the school shooting Tuesday in ways that just...

Australia, Canada, and the UK managed to prevent mass shootings in the aftermath of horrible crimes. And as The Onion reminded people again this week—for the 21st time since 2014—the United States is the only place where this happens. You know how they do it? How other free, English-speaking democracies keep their citizens alive? How every other civilized country in the world does? They ban the fucking guns. Civilians do not need assault rifles. They do not need large-capacity magazines. They do not...

Three reactions to this week's school shooting, the 27th of the year (despite this being only week 22 on the calendar). First, from Josh Marshall: The “good guy with a gun” theory was always absurd. These events make that all the more clear. But this is a bit more than that. In both these incidents armed police officers or security guards exchanged gunfire with the perpetrator. But they were outgunned. The assailants had more powerful weapons and they had body armor that allowed them to absorb gun shots...

The Supreme Court began its early-summer ruling season a bit early this year, starting with an opinion from Justice Thomas (R) that will make it easier for the state to kill innocent people: [The] opinion claimed that a law restricting the power of federal courts to toss out convictions in state courts prevents Jones from seeking relief. But Thomas’s reading of this law is novel — his opinion had to gut two fairly recent Supreme Court decisions to deny relief to Jones. Before Monday, the Supreme Court’s...

A little-known United Nations agency would like its $22 million back, please: At the United Nations, two officials had a problem. The little-known agency they ran found itself with an extra $61 million, and they didn’t know what to do with it. Then they met a man at a party. Now, they have $25 million less. In between was a baffling series of financial decisions, in which experienced diplomats entrusted tens of millions of dollars, the agency’s entire investment portfolio at the time, to a British...

Today we celebrate the big rock that gives us days in the first place. One out of 364 is pretty good, I guess. And there are some good stories on my open browser tabs: The Twisted Hippo Brewery has started looking for a new home, which they hope to open soon near their old location. The City of Chicago will soon stop charging car-jacking victims hundreds or thousands of dollars in towing and impound fees, which really is a thing here. Timothy Noah explains "Why Biden Had to Challenge That Trump Judge’s...

Leading off today's afternoon roundup, The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman) announced today that Netflix has a series in production based on his game Exploding Kittens. The premise: God and Satan come to Earth—in the bodies of cats. And freakin' Tom Ellis is one of the voices, because he's already played one of those parts. Meanwhile, in reality: A consumers group filed suit against Green Thumb Industries and three other Illinois-based cannabis companies under the Clayton Act, alleging collusion that has driven...

Actually, it's 5pm here. And I have a few stories queued up: Oklahoma has a new law making abortion a felony, because the 1950s were great for the white Christian men who wrote that law. Monika Bauerlein explains why authoritarians hate a free press. Not that we didn't already know. Jonathan Haidt explains "why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid." ("It's not just a phase.") Inflation in the US hit a 40-year high at 8.5% year over year, but Paul Krugman believes it will drop...

Via Molly White, a new company called Gripnr wants to monetize your D&D campaign, and it's as horrible as it sounds: Gripnr plans to generate 10,000 random D&D player characters (PCs), assign a “rarity” to certain aspects of each (such as ancestry and class), and mint them as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Each NFT will include character stats and a randomly-generated portrait of the PC designed in a process overseen by Gripnr’s lead artist Justin Kamerer. Additional NFTs will be minted to represent...

A truly bizarre story from the BBC: Madbird hired more than 50 others. Most worked in sales, some in design and some were brought in to supervise. Every new joiner was instructed to work from home - messaging over email and speaking to each other on Zoom. Days were often long. Jordan Carter from Suffolk, who was 26 at the time, was credited with being one of the hardest working members of Chris's sales team. In five months, he pitched Madbird to 10,000 possible business clients, hoping to win deals to...

I've had a lot to do at work the last couple of days, leading to an absolute pile-up of unread press: Casey Michael outlines how Russian President Vladimir Putin's aims in Ukraine have little to do with NATO and a lot to do with him wanting to restore the Russian Empire. Tom Nichols calls Putin's actions the beginning of "a forever war," and Julia Ioffe calls Putin "a furious and clearly deranged old man, threatening to drag us all into World War III." Col. Jerad Harper USA, a professor at the US Army...

A couple more resources about "web3" (cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, etc) crossed my inbox this week. Even before going through these stories and essays, the only way I can understand the persistence of the fantastic thinking that drives all this stuff is that the people most engaged with it turn out to be the same people who believe all kinds of other fantasies and wish-fulfillment stories. Case in point: the extreme right-wing protestors up in Canada have received almost all of their funding from...

The temperature dropped 17.7°C between 2:30 pm yesterday and 7:45 this morning, from 6.5°C to -10.2°C, as measured at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters. So far it's recovered to -5.5°C, almost warm enough to take my lazy dog on a hike. She got a talking-to from HR about not pulling her weight in the office, so this morning she worked away at a bone for a good stretch: Alas, the sun came out, a beam hit her head, and she decided the bone could wait: Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Julia...

Via Bruce Schneier, the New Jersey Superior Court has found that the NotPetya attack that disabled much of Merck's shipping network in 2017 was not an act of war by the Russian government, and therefore Merck's insurer may be on the hook for a $1.4 billion payout: The parties disputed whether the Notpetya malware which affected Merck's computers in 2017 was an instrument of the Russian government, so that the War or Hostile Acts exclusion would apply to the loss. The Court noted that Merck was a...

The snow has finally stopped for, we think, a couple of days, and the city has cleared most of the streets already. (Thank you, Mike Bilandic.) What else happened today? The James Webb Space Telescope reached Lagrange-2 this afternoon, and will now settle into a "halo orbit" that will hold it about 1.46 million km from Earth. (It's still traveling at 200 m/s, which gets you from Madison to Peterson in about a minute.) Lord Agnew (Con.), the minister responsible for policing Covid fraud in the UK...

We have one of those lovely January days when a tongue of cold air pushes south from Canada and gives us the warmest temperature of the day at midnight. Yesterday the Inner Drive Techology World Headquarters got up to 6°C around 3:30pm, stayed around 5°C from 6:30 pm until 1am, and since then has cooled down to -5°C. The forecast calls for continued cooling until reaching -13°C around 6am tomorrow. Yesterday's weather conditions encouraged the formation of "pancake ice" on Lake Michigan. Block Club...

Josh Marshall lays out the evidence that the Omicron Covid variant hit hard and fast, but as in South Africa, appears to have a short life-span: New York City was one of the first parts of the United States hit by the Omicron variant. The trajectory of the city’s surge now appears remarkably similar to the pattern we saw earlier in South Africa and other countries. Data out of South Africa showed a roughly four week interval between the start of the Omicron surge and its peak. “Peak in four weeks and...

The temperature bottomed out at -14.4°C around 1:30 am, and has climbed ever so slowly since then to -0.3°: Will we get above freezing? The forecast says yes, any moment now. But the sun will set in about 5 minutes. Anyway, a guy can dream, right? Meanwhile, Chicago's teachers and schools have agreed to let the kids back tomorrow, even as the mayor herself tested positive for Covid. And the Art Institute's workforce has formed a union, which will operate under AFSCME. And that's not all: It turns out...

I swear, the local poké place used three shots of chili oil instead of one today. Whew. (Not that I'm complaining, of course.) While my mouth slowly incinerates, I'm reading these: University of Baltimore School of Law professor Kimberly Wehle warns that the legal theories the Republicans on the Supreme Court suggested this week could roll back a lot more than just abortion rights. Also in The Atlantic, actor Joshua Malina wonders why anyone would hire raging anti-Semite Mel Gibson. Daniel Strauss asks...

First, continuing the thread from this morning, (Republican) columnist Jennifer Rubin neatly sums up how the Republican justices on the Supreme Court seem poised to undo Republican Party gains by over-reaching: We are, in short, on the verge of a constitutional and political tsunami. What was settled, predictable law on which millions of people relied will likely be tossed aside. The blowback likely will be ferocious. It may not be what Republicans intended. But it is coming. Next up, Washington Post...

While running errands this morning I had the same thought I've had for the past three or so weeks: the trees look great this autumn. Whatever combination of heat, precipitation, and the gradual cooling we've had since the beginning of October, the trees refuse to give up their leaves yet, giving us cathedrals of yellow, orange, and red over our streets. And then I come home to a bunch of news stories that also remind me everything changes: Like most sentient humans, Adam Serwer feels no surprise (but...

Some of these will actually have to wait until tomorrow morning: Adam Serwer thanks Justice Samuel Alito (R) for confirming Serwer's complaints about the Court. A trove of XPOTUS-branded gifts meant for foreign heads of state representing "significant" monetary value disappeared at some point. Can't imagine how. The BBC Reality Check column suggests that reports in some journals about Invermectin may have painted an incomplete picture, putting it mildly. Cranky Flier explains that Southwest Airlines'...

So these things happened: The FBI withheld REvil decryption keys from victims so not to tip off the criminals. Anonymous hackers have doxxed an ISP that provides services to right-wing hate groups. Two disbarred lawyers have filed suit against the doctor who admitted to performing an abortion in contravention of Texas law. As feared, Chicago-area animal shelters have started to fill up as selfish people return the pets they took home when Covid made them lonely. Josh Marshall frames the current...

Eric Schnurer outlines the alarming similarities between our present and Rome's past; specifically, the end of the Republic in 54 BCE: History isn’t destiny, of course; the demise of the Roman Republic is a point of comparison—not prediction. But the accelerating comparisons nonetheless beg the question: If one were to make a prediction, what comes next? What might signal the end of democracy as we know it?  There is, it turns out, an easy answer at hand. While there is no precise end date to the...

Yesterday, Boston University clinical journalism instructor and WGBH-Boston reporter Jenifer McKim presented a story on NPR's Morning Edition about Grindr, the gay dating app. NPR's Steve Inskeep introduced the story by saying "the dating app Grindr is a popular site for men seeking other men. It's also used by underage boys, which can put them at risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking." Between that introduction and the body of the story, I got pretty steamed. This morning I sent the following...

New York State Attorney General Letitia James released a report yesterday that alleges New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed at least 11 women, including a New York State Police trooper assigned to his protective detail: The report, released by the attorney general, Letitia James, and the announcement from the Albany County prosecutor, Kevin Soares, endangered Mr. Cuomo’s political future while also placing him in legal jeopardy. “Governor Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state...

Via Bruce Schneier, Motherboard got ahold of a pair of Anom phones, which the FBI and Australian Federal Police used to take down a bunch of criminal networks earlier this year: Motherboard has obtained and analyzed an Anom phone from a source who unknowingly bought one on a classified ads site. On that site, the phone was advertised as just a cheap Android device. But when the person received it, they realized it wasn't an ordinary phone, and after being contacted by Motherboard, found that it...

After Fox network blowhard Tucker Carlson whined that the National Security Agency, the US intelligence service tasked with spying on communications outside the US, had tapped his phones, the agency clapped back on Twitter: TPM's Cristina Cabrera reports, "Carlson doubled down on his accusation shortly afterward on his program, saying the NSA’s statement 'an entire paragraph of lies written purely for the benefit of the intel community’s lackeys at CNN and MSNBC.'" The NSA is just having a bit of sport...

Oh, to be a dog. Cassie is sleeping comfortably on her bed in my office after having over an hour of walks (including 20 minutes at the dog park) so far today. Meanwhile, at work we resumed using a bit of code that we put on ice for a while, and I promptly discovered four bugs. I've spent the afternoon listening to Cassie snore and swatting the first one. Meanwhile, in the outside world, life continues: Ukrainian police arrested members of the Cl0p ransomware gang, seizing money and cars along with the...

I've just received my third nearly-identical fake DMCA takedown notice, which I may decide to turn over to the FBI if I can muster the shits to give. I find it funny how each one of them has a few differences that make them look like something other than lazy script-kiddie stuff. This one again misstated the statutory damage limits for willful copyright infringement, and the randomly-generated name of the "claimant" was no less bizarre than the other two. And yet I wonder why they bothered altering the...

The northern hemisphere started meteorological summer at midnight local time today. Chicago's weather today couldn't have turned out better. Unfortunately, I go into the office on the first and last days of each week, so I only know about this from reading weather reports. At my real job, we have a release tomorrow onto a completely new Azure subscription, so for only the second time in 37 sprints (I hope) I don't expect a boring deployment. Which kind of fits with all the decidedly-not-boring news that...

A year ago today, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd under color of law: The NAACP kicked off Tuesday by holding a moment of silence for Floyd at 9:29 a.m. on its Facebook page to mark the 9 minutes and 29 seconds Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck. Shareeduh Tate, Floyd's cousin and president of the George Floyd Memorial Foundation, told CNN on Tuesday that the family feels uplifted by the racial reckoning, the conviction of Chauvin, and the federal indictment of the...

Happy Wednesday! Here's what I'm reading before my 8pm meeting, now that my 6:30pm meeting just ended: Alexandra Petri finds exactly the right analogy for the Republican complaints that an investigation into the January 6th insurrection would be "more partisan unfairness." Former election official Jennifer Morrell observed the unofficial Maricopa County, Ariz., recount, and found it even worse than you might have expected. University of Baltimore Law Professor Kimberly Wehle looks at the implications of...

Happy 51st Earth Day! In honor of that, today's first story has nothing to do with Earth: The MOXIE experiment on NASA's Perseverance rover produced 5.4 grams of oxygen in an hour on Mars, not enough to sustain human life but a major milestone in our efforts to visit the planet. Back on earth, the Nature Conservancy has released a report predicting significant climate changes for Illinois, including a potential 5°C temperature rise by 2100. Microsoft has teamed up with the UK Meteorological Office (AKA...

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is, officially, a felon and a murderer. The jury deliberated for longer than 9 minutes and 28 seconds, but not much longer. Good luck in gen pop, you racist thug. Some reactions: Barack Obama: "[I]f we’re being honest with ourselves, we know that true justice is about much more than a single verdict in a single trial." Jennifer Rubin: "Tuesday’s verdict, which is likely to be appealed, does not mean the overarching problem of racism in policing is...

Boy, did we get a clown car full of them today. Let's start with Joel Greenberg, the dingus whose bad behavior got US Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) caught up in a sex-trafficking investigation: Records and interviews detailed a litany of accusations: Mr. Greenberg strutted into work with a pistol on his hip in a state that does not allow guns to be openly carried. He spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to create no-show jobs for a relative and some of his groomsmen. He tried to talk his...

Humorist Alexandra Petri didn't write a humor column today: There are several details of the Matt Gaetz story that keep sticking in my head, but the one that sticks in it most is the report that the Florida Republican used to wander around and show his colleagues nude photos of people he had slept with. I keep coming back to the detail in CNN’s report that this wasn’t something Matt Gaetz did a single time, but repeatedly. Because if it happened more than once — if it happened twice, even — that is...

Josh Marshall looks at the results of this week's election in Israel and concludes that only one thing has stopped the country yet again from forming a government: It’s all such a mess there’s a serious discussion of forming a short term government which would simply pass a law barring anyone currently under indictment, as Netanyahu is, from serving as Prime Minister. In other words, a government whose sole act would be to remove Netanyahu from the political scene before yet another election. This all...

I read the news today, oh boy. And one of the stories reminded me of this movie: See if you can guess which one. The FBI charged Richard Michetti, of Ridley Park, Pa., with several crimes related to the January 6 insurrection after his ex-girlfriend turned over photos, videos, and texts of Michetti storming the Capitol. She did so shortly after he called her a "moron" in one of the texts. The North Atlantic Overturning Circulation has declined to its lowest point in over a millennium, threatening to...

Writing for Just Security, Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley decodes the structural and content similarities between the propaganda film that introduced the XPOTUS on the Ellipse on January 6th and the propaganda films a certain central-European country produced in the first half of the previous century: Fascism is a patriarchal cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by a treacherous and power-hungry global elite, who have encouraged minorities to...

I'm having a series of productive days lately, which has taken me away from wasting a bunch of time. So for example, I haven't yet today read these items: A group of Redditors has put a short squeeze on two hedge funds to the tune of billions of dollars, and there was much rending of clothes that kind of, sort of, made the Redditors' point for them. Journalist Yudhijit Bhattacharjee investigates a source of thieving phone scams in India. From November 2019, National Geographic explains how a phenomenon...

Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan (D-Chicago/Clearing) will lose his job later today after serving in the role since 1983. Rep. Emanuel "Chris" Welch (D-Hillside) received 69 votes (of a required 60) in the Democratic Caucus this morning, making his accession to the Speaker's chair all but guaranteed when the whole House votes in a few minutes to elect the Speaker. Welch will become the first Black Speaker in Illinois history. In other news: The Illinois legislature ended its previous legislative...

Republicans in Congress, not surprisingly the most culpable among them, have started calling for "unity" and for the country to "move on" from the violent insurrection against the US Capitol last Wednesday. The list of people who are having none of that bullshit gets longer by the day. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY): These Republicans are not asking for unity. They are requesting capitulation to a deeply unwell and volatile man.That will not heal or unify anything. Accountability, rule of law, and...

The expansion of unemployment benefits combined with sensible precautions against transmission of Covid-19 have made criminals' lives much easier: From March through the end of November, there have been more than 2 million initial claims filed for regular state unemployment benefits, according to the agency. That figure excludes people filing claims under five federal pandemic jobless aid programs the state implemented last year. The agency has said the rise in unemployment fraud is likely due to large...

We had a relatively quiet day yesterday, but only in comparison to the day before: Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (wife of presumptive Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned after nearly four years (and with nothing to gain from staying in Cabinet) mostly because they no longer needed those jobs. Said the Post: "Resigning now feels a little like eating all but the last bite of a piece of cake at a restaurant and then asking for a refund." The BBC has a...

Where to begin. Yesterday, and for the first time in the history of the country, an armed mob attacked the US Capitol building, disrupting the ceremonial counting of Electoral Votes and, oh by the way, threatening the safety of the first four people in the presidential line of succession. I'm still thinking about all of this. Mainly I'm angry and disgusted. And I'm relieved things didn't wind up worse. But wow. Here are just some of the reactions to yesterday's events: American late-night hosts Seth...

The Times continues its coverage of the SolarWinds breach, and adds a detail that explains why the Russians continue to eat our lunch: Employees say that under [SolarWinds CEO Kevin] Thompson, an accountant by training and a former chief financial officer, every part of the business was examined for cost savings and common security practices were eschewed because of their expense. His approach helped almost triple SolarWinds’ annual profit margins to more than $453 million in 2019 from $152 million in...

A couple of articles piqued my interest over the last day: Via IFL Science, a team of graduate students from three European universities studied how long humans would survive the emergence of a vampire population. (It depends a lot on how effective your slayers are.) They even built a calculator. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe, writing in the Financial Times, argues the STBXPOTUS should face prosecution for using the pardon power to obstruct justice. Emma Goldberg describes some coronavirus-era...

FireEye, a cybersecurity firm, revealed last week that unknown parties had penetrated its network and that its clients, including the US Government, were at risk. Bruce Schneier has technical details about the attack. Former Homeland Security Adviser Thomas Bossert lays out the scope of it: The attackers gained access to SolarWinds software before updates of that software were made available to its customers. Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a...

Just reviewing what I actually got up to yesterday, I'm surprised that I didn't post anything. I'm not surprised, however, that all of these articles piled up for me to read today: Dunn County, Wis., Democratic Party chair Bill Hogseth, writing in Politico, explains "why Democrats keep losing rural counties" like his. Ross Douthat asks, "why do so many Americans think the election was stolen?" Author Ben Judah explains why The Crown's portrayal of Prince Charles is wrong. The STBX...

Daniel Shaviro, a veteran tax attorney, lays out 10 takeaways from the New York Times story Sunday about the president's tax returns: 1) Tax is the least of it. The article offers direct evidence of Trump’s impending financial liability to unknown lenders, and of pervasive conflicts of interest as president, that are of grave national security concern. 6) The consulting fees that Trump’s various foreign businesses paid to Ivanka Trump and others look potentially fraudulent.  Based on what the article...

I put on a long-sleeved shirt to walk Parker this morning, and I'm about to change into a polo. It's a lovely early-autumn day here in Chicago. Elsewhere... In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, former NSC adviser Alex Vindman calls the president "a useful idiot" and warns against complacency. Jonathan Chait argues that the president is a crook, and needs to be tried for his crimes. Jeff Wise points out the criminal case has already started. Steve Coll adds his voice to the chorus wishing an end to the...

I'm taking a day off, so I'm choosing not to read all the articles that have piled up on my desktop: Tropical Storm Josephine has formed east of the windward islands, becoming the earliest 10th named storm on record. The National Hurricane Center promises an "extremely active" season. By tracking excess deaths in addition to reported Covid-19 deaths, the New York Times has concluded we've already surpassed 200,000 and could hit half a million by the end of the year. The General Accounting Office, a...

New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed suit to dissolve the National Rifle Association: The lawsuit sets up a legal confrontation that could take years to play out and will leave the 148-year-old N.R.A. — long the nation’s most influential gun-rights lobby but recently hobbled by financial woes and infighting — fighting for its survival. The attorney general’s office previously presided over the dissolution of President Trump’s scandal-marred charitable foundation, but the N.R.A., with more...

This is my 55th post this month, and the fifth month in a row in which I've posted over 50 times. That brings my 12-month total to 581, the third record in a row and the fifth record this year. I guess Covid-19 has been good for something. Here's what I'm reading today: Authorities in Tampa have charged 17-year-old Graham Clark with masterminding last month's massive Twitter hack. The Atlantic's David Graham says the president is trying to destroy the election's legitimacy. George Will points to the...

Even as Garmin picks up the pieces from what they now admit was a massive ransomware attack, bulk email provider SendGrid has gone down spectacularly. I use SendGrid, as does my company, for status emails and such. Here's my problem, though: I have a code update to put out that specifically targets a bug in SendGrid's .NET library that they claim to have fixed. My automated build pipelines won't release new code unless all the unit tests pass. Right now, the SendGrid tests fail sporadically, and at...

Welcome to day 31 of the Illinois shelter-in-place regime, which also turns out to be day 36 of my own working-from-home regime (or day 43 if you ignore that I had to go into the office on March 16th). So what's new? Oy: Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele says America "has been abused by this president." George Packer says "we are living in a failed state." Josh Marshall calls Covid-19 "an extinction-level event for news." The Trump International Hotel has asked its landlord, the...

At some point, we will probably settle on the red planet. In a fascinating article from 2018, The Atlantic wondered how we'll police it: Consider the basic science of crime-scene analysis. In the dry, freezer-like air and extreme solar exposure of Mars, DNA will age differently than it does on Earth. Blood from blunt-trauma and stab wounds will produce dramatically new spatter patterns in the planet’s low gravity. Electrostatic charge will give a new kind of evidentiary value to dust found clinging to...

I spent an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to track down a monitor to replace the one that sparked, popped, and went black on me this morning. That's going to set me back $150 for a replacement, which isn't so bad, considering. Less personally, the following also happened in the last 24 hours: Former Vice President Joe Biden thumped US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in most of the 6 primary-election states yesterday. Closer to home, the Illinois House district just south of me has become the center of...

Some headlines this morning: My preferred candidate for the Democratic nomination, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), came in 4th in yesterday's New Hampshire primary. John Judis is already reading her campaign its last rites. Jonathan Chait, for his part, says former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign "was a disaster for liberalism and his party." Also from TPM, remember all the hand-wringing we did about whether the president would try to influence the Mueller probe? Such innocent times those were. The...

In just one more example of the president slipping his leash, thanks to the Republican trolls in the Senate giving him permission to do so, the Justice Department said it found prosecutors recommendations for Roger Stone's sentence "shocking." Three Assistant US Attorneys immediately quit the case: Jonathan Kravis, one of the prosecutors, wrote in a court filing he had resigned as an assistant U.S. attorney, leaving government entirely. Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, a former member of special counsel Robert S....

Not just articles today, but also a whole HBO mini-series: Starting Monday, HBO will air a 6-part series on the infamous McDonald's Monopoly fraud, about which I have posted previously. That interesting new take-out place you saw on GrubHub? It might not exist. Republicans voting in favor of President Trump's abuse of power and obstruction of Congress will be remembered. The Atlantic calls Facebook's new data-privacy tool "a data landfill." Airlines have slashed flight schedules in and out of China as a...

New information has come out that retired Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, the convicted (and pardoned) war criminal, did some truly abhorrent shit while fighting in Iraq: The trove of materials also includes thousands of text messages the SEALs sent one another about the events and the prosecution of Chief Gallagher. Together with the dozens of hours of recorded interviews, they provide revealing insights into the men of the platoon, who have never spoken publicly about the case, and the leader...

For years, people said that Donald Trump's business practices would never survive first contact with law enforcement. Pro Publica just published a big reason why: Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less...

Just a few today: Cokie Roberts died yesterday at 75. She will be missed. The Washington Post traced all 47 dogs seized from convicted felon Michael Vick's dog-fighting operation. You will not get through this without tissues. Greenland struggles with its history and identity as much of it melts. Despite his coalition losing seats and the state of Israel essentially repudiating him, Benjamin Netanyahu could still hold onto his job. Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot has come up with an innovative use of...

Including sitting with a lost dog for 45 minutes this morning, I've had a pretty lazy Sunday. Here are some of the articles I might read if I decide to do anything productive today: Astronomers in Hawaii have mapped the structure of the entire universe. Closer to home, what's up with Jupiter's great red spot? A book published in 1968 attempted to predict the world in 2018, and got some things right. Graeme Wood calls President Trump's El Paso photo "obscene." Andrew Sullivan says, of the Democratic...

I thought the weekend of Canada Day and the weekend before Independence Day wouldn't have much a lot of news. I was wrong: Ontario Premier Doug Ford (the brother of Rob Ford) cancelled Canada Day celebrations in Toronto*. (Imagine the Governor of Virginia or the Mayor of DC canceling the 4th of July and you've about got it.) Fortunately for the city, the Ontario legislature reinstated them. You know how I write about how urban planning can make people happier, healthier, and friendlier? Yah, this city...

Federal judge Amit Mehta could not believe the arguments the president's lawyer, William Consovoy, made on Monday: Consovoy, a beefy former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, offered two related points: (A) Congress can’t issue a subpoena or otherwise probe a president unless it is doing so for a “legitimate legislative purpose.” (B) Any “legitimate legislative purpose” Congress could conceivably devise would be unconstitutional. As a result, Consovoy argued, Congress can’t investigate to see if a...

Everyone knew that Donald Trump lost millions on bad business deals and bad management in the 1980s and 1990s. But we never knew how badly he dealt and managed until now. The New York Times obtained official IRS data on Trump's tax returns from the years 1985 to 1994, showing he lost a staggering $1.17 billion during that period—equivalent to more than $2 billion today: Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his...

So far, 657 former Federal prosecutors, appointed by presidents from both parties, have signed a letter pointing out the obvious conclusions of the Mueller Report: Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice. The Mueller report describes several acts...

Illinois governor JB Pritzker announced proposed legislation today that would legalize recreational marijuana and expunge low-level possession convictions retroactively: The governor and lawmakers touted a central social justice provision of their proposal: Expunging what they estimate would be 800,000 low-level drug convictions. Revenue from Illinois’ marijuana industry would be reinvested in communities that lawmakers said have been “devastated” by the nation’s war on drugs. Under the proposed rules...

The Times is reporting that Michael Cohen has sued the Trump Organization for $1.9m in unpaid legal fees: The lawsuit, filed in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, said that the Trump Organization had agreed to pay Mr. Cohen attorney’s fees or related costs connected to his work with the Trump Organization but had failed to live up to that promise. Mr. Cohen is also seeking reimbursment for an additional $1.9 million he was ordered to pay in fines, forfeitures and restitution after he pleaded guilty to...

Today actually had a lot of news, not all of which I've read yet: About 60,000 commuters couldn't get home tonight after Amtrak signaling at Union Station, Chicago, broke down. Writing for New Republic, Matt Ford calls Michael Cohen's testimony to Congress today "the art of the deal you can't refuse."  David Frum (among others) points out that for all the GOP's impugning of Cohen's character, no one actually refuted the facts of his testimony. The Economist's Gulliver column speculates that US carriers...

I'm under the weather today, which has helped me catch up on all these stories that I haven't gotten to yet: The Chicago Tribune announced their critics choice dining awards for 2018. Yum. Megan Garber explains why female Democratic representatives wore white to the State of the Union address. Matt Ford says the actual speech was a waste. Chicago History Today compares North Michigan Avenue today with 1931. Josh Marshall says the president is scared—and should be. Jeff Bezos calls the National...

Former Embeya owner Attila Gyulai, accused of embezzling over a million dollars from the restaurant he co-owned with chef Thai Dang his wife Komal Patel, was arrested in Spain yesterday: Gyulai and his wife, Komal Patel, disappeared in summer 2016 after abruptly shutting the restaurant. They abandoned their Ford Flex SUV in front of their River West home, a detail uncovered in an exhaustive investigation by Crain's. Police ticketed the car two​ weeks later and impounded it in mid-August. By then, bank...

Via Bruce Schneier, a report on how third-party Amazon sellers use Amazon's own policies to attack their rivals: When you buy something on Amazon, the odds are, you aren’t buying it from Amazon at all. Plansky is one of 6 million sellers on Amazon Marketplace, the company’s third-party platform. They are largely hidden from customers, but behind any item for sale, there could be dozens of sellers, all competing for your click. This year, Marketplace sales were almost double those of Amazon retail...

Former Assistant Solicitor General Neal Katyal and George Conway III (yes, Kellyanne's husband) say President Trump's "appointment" of Matthew Whittaker to oversee the Justice Department is flatly unconstitutional: Mr. Whitaker has not been named to some junior post one or two levels below the Justice Department’s top job. He has now been vested with the law enforcement authority of the entire United States government, including the power to supervise Senate-confirmed officials like the deputy attorney...

Republican David Brock, who worked with Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the Clinton impeachment, urges the Senate to vote "No" on Kavanaugh's nomination: Twenty years ago, when I was a conservative movement stalwart, I got to know Brett Kavanaugh both professionally and personally. A detailed analysis of Kavanaugh's own notes from the Starr Investigation reveals he was cherry-picking random bits of information from the Starr investigation — as well as the multiple previous investigations — attempting vainly to...

The Washington Post has a must-read feature today about the sexual assault of 16-year-old Amber Wyatt in 2006—and how her Texas high school turned against her: The rumor — at least initially, and certainly in the soccer player’s initial account to Aven — wasn’t that Wyatt consented to sex with the two boys, but that they never had sex at all. Yet the tone of murmurs around the school indicated that students believed the exact opposite: that Wyatt, perhaps intoxicated, had agreed to sex and then...

Yesterday, President Trump's longtime fixer Michael Cohen plead guilty to 8 crimes at almost the exact moment a jury convicted his former campaign manager of another 8. The Atlantic explains what the first part means: The most important takeaway Tuesday is that the president’s own former personal attorney pleaded guilty to breaking campaign-finance laws at his alleged direction. While the bank- and tax-fraud charges do not involve the president, the campaign-finance charges indisputably do. Cohen made...

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, watching the Manafort trial unfold, wonders why anyone thinks our institutions are up to the challenge of stopping the Trump organization: America’s federal institutions are not the only ones designed to prevent someone like Trump from undermining the Constitution. We have other kinds of institutions, too — legal organs, regulatory bodies, banks — that are supposed to prevent men like Trump from staying in business, let alone acquiring political power. The truth...

Happy August! (Wait, where did April go?) As I munch on my salad at my desk today, I'm reading these stories: New Republic wonders if Charles Koch really thinks mainstream Democrats will embrace his vision. (tl;dr: not bloody likely.) Jennifer Rubin takes a look at President Trump's latest rally in Tampa with alarm at his supporters' disconnection from reality. The Atlantic outlines how Paul Manafort's trial in Virginia this week exposes the growing kleptocracy in Washington. In Chicago, businesses and...

I probably won't have time to read all of these things over lunch: President Trump is repaying Vladimir Putin for his 2016 win right in front of us, while still avoiding the consequences of Russia's interference. That said, Putin has to wonder what else our security services know about him. Trump's bad behavior in Britain will poison relations between both countries for a long time. Resigning didn't get Scott Pruitt out of legal jeopardy. Rent control is becoming an important issue in local politics....

Now that ICE and CBP feel like they have carte blanche to "do their jobs," stories like this will only become more frequent: The coast of White Rock, British Columbia, in western Canada looks to be an ideal place for a run, with its sweeping views of the Semiahmoo Bay to the west and scores of waterfront homes and seafood restaurants to the east. That's what 19-year-old Cedella Roman thought when she went jogging along the area's smooth beaches — in a southbound direction, notably — on May 21. Roman...

The Associated Press has obtained the latest edition of the Chicago Crime Commission's "Gang Book." It shows the turfs claimed by 59 gangs, including many small areas formed as groups split off from other groups after top leaders go to jail. The book also highlights how social media make gang disputes worse: Gangs put a premium on retaliation for perceived disrespect. In the past, insults rarely spread beyond the block. Now, they’re broadcast via social media to thousands in an instant. “If you’re...

Way back in my first day of law school, Prof. Neil Williams exclaimed that the basis of contract law was "the totality of the circumstances!" Meaning, when evaluating a contract (from whether it exists to whether it's enforceable), you have to look at the context, the facts, the intentions of the parties—everything. Take, for example, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice's description of the following circumstances: If Mr. Putin were calling the shots, he would ensure that America’s reliability...

Stuff that landed in my inbox today: Illinois has secured a $132 m grant to fix one of the worst rail bottlenecks in the state. Crain's Greg Hinz sort-of compliments Illinois governor Bruce Rauner for finally making a budget deal...in his 4th year as governor. Meanwhile, the administration's trade war will hurt Illinois harder than most—a feature, one suspects, and not a bug. WaPo's Amber Phillips lists the winners and losers from yesterday's primary elections in California and other states. New...

A student at the University of Cincinnati has filed a fascinating lawsuit against the school for discrimination in its enforcement of sexual misconduct: Is it possible for two people to simultaneously sexually assault each other? This is the question—rife with legal, anatomical, and emotional improbabilities—to which the University of Cincinnati now addresses itself, and with some urgency, as the institution and three of its employees are currently being sued over an encounter that was sexual for a...

Alexis Madrigal, closer to an X-er than a Millennial, rhapsodizes on how the telephone ring, once imperative, now repulses: Before ubiquitous caller ID or even *69 (which allowed you to call back the last person who’d called you), if you didn’t get to the phone in time, that was that. You’d have to wait until they called back. And what if the person calling had something really important to tell you or ask you? Missing a phone call was awful. Hurry! Not picking up the phone would be like someone...

Not all of this is as depressing as yesterday's batch: Dana Milbank raises the question, once again, whether President Trump is just a liar or really mentally ill. McCay Coppins describes how professional troll Stephen Miller got and kept his job. Illinois is getting an anti-carjacking bill that doesn't go as far as Chicago's police superintendent wanted. Josh Marshall wonders why Missouri Governor Eric Greitens resigned so abruptly yesterday. Via Bruce Schneier, an explanation of numbers stations....

I've queued up a few articles to read while eating lunch. I just hope I don't lose said lunch after reading them: Jeet Heer worries about President Trump's willingness to destroy everything around himself to distract from his own scandals. Catherine Rampell walks through the ways the administration's policy of separating children from parents at the border reveals the GOP's grand scam. James Fallows lays out the ways the administration continues to screw up our relationship with China. Josh Marshall...

Former DNI James Clapper, now a private citizen (though one who knows a lot more about these things than almost everyone else), believes Russia threw our 2016 presidential election: Clapper noted that the intelligence community’s formal 2017 assessment of Russian interference was not charged with assessing its impact. But this is exactly the point. It wasn’t the place of the intel community to place its imprimatur on this debate one way or the other. But now that Clapper is free to offer his own view...

In the last seven days, these things have happened: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (the worst Secretary of State in modern history?) got kicked out in typical Trump Administration fashion (i.e., without notice and on Twitter). This may have had something to do with him stating firmly that... ...Russian operatives attempted to assassinate a former Russian spy in Salisbury, England, resulting in... ...the UK government expelled 23 Russian diplomats after determining that the assassination attempt...

The shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last week have galvanized students across the country. Here are three of the more thoughtful reactions. First, David Kurtz at TPM Prime (sub.req.) thinks these murders might finally, and suddenly, break the NRA's choke-hold on the Republican Party: The NRA’s power lies in having made anything other than maximal support for gun rights a nearly impossible position for Republican officeholders to sustain. The very definition of Republican is...

I got a weird text from T-Mobile a few minutes ago: T-Mobile Alert: We have identified an industry-wide phone number port out scam and encourage you to add account security. Learn more: t-mo.co/secure Well, that does not sound good. And it's not. Apparently thieves have found that American mobile phone providers are unusually helpful when it comes time to steal mobile phone numbers (called "SIM hijacking") or to port those numbers to third-party mobile providers. In both cases, the thieves now have a...

Over the weekend I made a couple of minor updates to Weather Now, and today I'm going to spend some time taking it off its Azure Web Role and moving it to an Azure Website. That will (a) save me money and (b) make deployments a lot easier. Meanwhile, a number of articles bubbled up overnight that I'll try to read at lunchtime: Cranky Flier is annoyed how United has implemented basic-economy seat assignments. Josh Marshall outlines what the FBI knew about Trump campaign advisors in the summer of 2016....

Confronted with the options that these guys are master strategists or they're not even thinking about their next move, Occam's Razor suggests we're dealing with serious stupidity here: The war between the president and the nation’s law enforcement apparatus is unlike anything America has seen in modern times. With a special counsel investigating whether his campaign collaborated with Russia in 2016 and whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice in 2017, the president has engaged in a scorched-earth assault on...

President Trump told friends that the Nunes memo could help discredit the Mueller investigation, basically proving obstruction of justice. But is it really possible to hold him accountable? And what happens if Mueller gets fired? Amazon distribution centers don't really create a ton of jobs, so why are we subsidizing them? The UK's model of public-private partnerships doesn't work anymore because of the country's austerity. Jackpotting ATMs is a thing, and it has arrived in the US. Fun times, fun times.

People watching the big-beer industry (think: Miller Lite and Coors Light) expect a 7.1% decline in mass-market beer sales—$2.1 billion annually—as more states legalize cannabis: "There's a ton of overlap in marijuana and domestic beer consumption among younger college males," says Rick Maturo, co-founder of Cannabiz Consumer Group, an Inverness-based research company. "This is the group that drinks beer at a heavier volume and is most likely to cut back if cannabis is legally available." He says 27...

Kerry Howley, writing for New York Magazine, profiles the "terrorist [with] a Pikachu bedspread:" In those first months on the job, the country was still adjusting to Trump, and it seemed possible to some people that he would be quickly impeached. Reality listened to a podcast called Intercepted, hosted by the left-wing anti-security-state website the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill and featuring its public face, Glenn Greenwald, and listened intensely enough to email the Intercept and ask for a transcript...

Following an order of the New York Attorney General, the Donald J. Trump Foundation has started the process of dissolving: In a statement, a spokesperson for the foundation confirmed that it is being shuttered. "The Foundation continues to cooperate with the New York Attorney General’s Charities Division, and as previously announced by the President, his advisers are working with the Charities Division to wind up the affairs of the Foundation. The Foundation looks forward to distributing its remaining...

I'm heading back to the East Coast tonight to continue research for my current project, so my time today is very constrained. I hope I remember to keep these browser windows open for the plane: 538 examines why, a full year later, the 2016 election just won't go away. James Bridle says something is wrong on the Internet. Josh Marshall continues to bang the drum on President Trump's creeping authoritarianism. (Or, you know, not so much creeping as shambling, with all the zombie implications in the term....