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

On January 27th, we still have 5 weeks until spring officially begins. The forecast doesn't predict any above-freezing temperatures as far as it can see, and we've already had 10 days below freezing in this seemingly endless cold snap.

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.

I have a list of 6 or 7 short plumbing tasks that I hope will take less than an hour, which is 1/8th the time window the plumbing service provided for the plumber's arrival. We all know how that goes. And at my real job, I'm coordinating a bunch of processes for a biweekly release that, so far, is pretty boring—just how we like it.

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...

Tomorrow is, quite unexpectedly, October. Though the official temperature at O'Hare has not hit 32°C since August 16th, our weather has remained stubbornly summer-like. The 16-day forecast suggests the weather will continue as far as the model can predict, and may see 32°C as early as this weekend. That will make my Friday plans a bit more challenging as my Brews & Choos buddy has gotten over Covid and we're all set to walk to Lake Bluff then. For my part, I am experiencing a very rare side effect of...

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) social media team have decided that white Christianist nationalism is the way to go: If you mashed together a Vietnam War epic with a Christian end-times movie, what might emerge is one of the recent social media videos produced by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In early July, the department posted a minute-long short showing agents in tactical gear bathed in eerie red light — among them, Homeland Secretary Kristi L. Noem — piling into a...

The only thing Illinois governor JB Pritzker said this afternoon that I quibble with is that Stephen Miller is a "complicit lackey*:" * Pritzker has the relationship wrong; Miller is no more a lackey than Goebbels was. The OAFPOTUS just doesn't care what Miller does as long as Miller delivers the goods.

The OAFPOTUS has moved to federalize the Washington, D.C., police force under the DC Home Rule statute that gives him a little more than a month to do so before Congress has to consent. As with many of his more dramatic trolls, this has sent everyone to the left of Mitch McConnell into varying degrees of outrage. Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort warn that the "military crackdowns are only going to get worse:" The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end...

I've gotten some progress on the feature update, and the build pipeline is running now, so I will take a moment to read all of these things: Radley Balko looks at the creation of what looks a lot like the OAFPOTUS's Waffen-Shutzstaffel and says we've lost the debate on police militarization: "In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it." Linda Greenhouse condemns the...

First, there is no update on Cassie. She had a quick consult today, but they didn't schedule the actual diagnostics that she needs, so we'll go back first thing Tuesday. She does have a small mast cell tumor on her head, but the location makes her oncologist optimistic for treatment. I'll post again next week after the results come back from her spleen and lymph node aspirations. Meanwhile, in the real world, things lurch forward and backward as the OAFPOTUS's political trajectory slides by millimeters...

Radley Balko, who has spent his career examining police policy and law-enforcement mission creep, elucidates the latest authoritarian trolling from the White House: Donald Trump says he wants to “unleash” the police. The [latest executive order] is more virtue signaling than policy — more an expression of Trump’s mood than a serious proposal. And, when it comes to conventional crime, Trump’s mood is right where it’s always been: fearful, demagogic, and perpetually stuck in 1988. The key term in the...

We've gotten about 4 cm of snow so far today, with more coming down until this evening. Cassie loves it; I have mixed feelings. At least the temperature has gone up a bit, getting up to -0.6°C for the first time since around this time on Monday. Elsewhere: Federal Judge Aileen Cannon (R-SDFL) got overruled again, this time after her corrupt effort to block Special Counsel Jack Smith from releasing his report on January 6th. George Will bemoans Congress ceding so much of its authority to the office of...

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...

The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week. I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things: Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina)...

Another Tuesday, another collection of head-shaking news stories one might expect in the waning days of an empire: Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau (Lib-Papineau, QC) formally accused the government of India of assassinating a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. Paul Krugman traces the road from Mitt Romney to MAGA. Jonathan Last accuses "Meet the Press" of acting like 2016 never happened. Police in Birmingham, Ala., Tased a band director for not ending the band's song a minute early as ordered....

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'll elaborate on this later, but I just want to list a couple of things I desperately want for my country and city during my lifetime. For comparison, I'm also listing when other places in the world got them first. For context, I expect (hope?) to live another 50 years or so. Universal health care, whether through extending Medicare to all residents or through some other mechanism. The UK got it in 1948, Canada in 1984, and Germany in 1883. We're the only holdout in the OECD, and it benefits no one...

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...

After having the 4th-mildest winter in 70 years, the weather hasn't really changed. Abnormally-warm February temperatures have hung around to become abnormally-cool March temperatures. I'm ready for real spring, thank you. Meanwhile... ProPublica reports on the bafflement inside the New York City Council about how to stop paying multi-million-dollar settlements when the NYPD violates people's civil rights—a problem we have in Chicago, for identical reasons—but haven't figured out that police oversight...

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...

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...

It happens every September in the mid-latitudes: one day you've got over 13 hours of daylight and sunsets around 7:30, and two weeks later you wake up in twilight and the sun sets before dinnertime. In fact, Chicago loses 50 minutes of evening daylight and an hour-twenty overall from the 1st to the 30th. We get it all back in March, though. Can't wait. Speaking of waiting: Buckingham Palace just warned people that the queue to see Queen Elizabeth's coffin has a 24-hour wait at the moment, so...dress...

Even though I feel like I have a moderate cold (stuffy, sneezy, and an occasional cough), I recognize that Covid-19 poses a real danger to people who haven't gotten vaccinations or who have other comorbidities. So I'm staying home today except to walk Cassie. It's 18°C and perfectly sunny, so Cassie might get a lot of walks. Meanwhile, I have a couple of things to occupy my time: Arthur Rizer draws a straight line from the militarization of police to them becoming "LARPing half-trained, half-formed kids...

The most interesting (to me) story this afternoon comes from Cranky Flier: American Airlines has a new software tool that can, under specific circumstances, reduce weather-related cancellations by 80% and missed connections by 60%. Nice. In other news: American pharmacies have wasted 82 million (11%) of the 900 million or so Covid-19 vaccine doses we've produced since December 2020—a number that the World Health Organization sees as completely normal for a mass-vaccination campaign. Progressives...

Now that I've got a few weeks without travel, performances*, or work conferences, I can go back to not having enough time to read all the news that interests me. Like these stories: The Economist examines how Putin might be punished for war crimes in Ukraine. Max Boot wonders why Tucker Carlson still loves his old Uncle Vlad. The IPCC says we have eight years to cut greenhouse emissions by 50% or the planet will pass the 1.5°C warming threshold no matter what else we do. Welp. Via Bruce Schneier...

Just a couple of eye-roll-worthy lunchtime links today: Chicago police union head John Catanzara, who I referred to on Facebook yesterday as a "whiny, belligerent infant," has quit the CPD and announced a run for mayor. My previous comments stand. Sears closed its last remaining store in its home state of Illinois on Sunday. I still hate Eddie Lampert for it. Michelle Goldberg takes the "social justice industry" to task for policing words instead of accomplishing real change. Ordinarily-idyllic coastal...

I'm troubled not only that it's already November but also that it's already 5pm. I've been heads-down coding all day and I've got a dress rehearsal tonight. I did, at least, flag these for later: The Times reports on how traffic stops turn deadly for a lot more people than one might think, and certainly a lot more than one would want. Josh Marshall worries about the proportion of the Republican Party who believe political violence solves all problems. I need to check out this new feature in Adobe...

Oh boy: Voters have defeated billionaire, populist Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš through the simple process of banding together to kick him out, proof that an electorate can hold the line against strongmen. A school administrator in Texas told teachers that "if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an 'opposing' perspective." Because Texas. Oakland Police should stop shooting Black men having medical emergencies, one would...

Former Chicago Fraternal Order of Police president Dean Angelo died yesterday of Covid-19. And yet the current FOP president, John Catanzara, has promised to sue the City over the requirement that police officers either show proof of vaccination by Friday or go on a twice-a-week testing regimen if they want to keep getting paid: "It literally has been like everything else with this mayor the last two and a half years," said FOP President John Catanzara. "Do it or else because I said so."In a social...

Actually, I'm ecstatic that a cold front blew in off the lake yesterday afternoon, dropping the temperature from 30°C to 20°C in about two hours. We went from teh warmest September 27th in 34 years to...autumn. Finally, some decent sleepin' weather! Meanwhile: The former head of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, a vocal anti-vaxxer, has wound up in the ICU with Covid. (This is the current union leader, who has been suspended without pay for insubordination.) Murders in the entire US...

Jonathan Chait points out that the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police and other police unions might want to reconsider their threats to resign en masse if the cities enforce mask and vaccine mandates on them: Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot has mandated vaccination for all city employees, and Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara is not taking it well. “This has literally lit a bomb underneath the membership,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. “We’re in America, goddamn it. We don’t want to be...

Those topics led this afternoon's news roundup: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 6th periodic report on the state of the planet, and it's pretty grim. But as Josh Marshall points out, "Worried about life on earth? Don’t be. Life’s resilient and has a many hundreds of millions of years track record robust enough to handle and adapt to anything we throw at it. But the player at the top of the heap is the first to go." Charles Blow has almost run out of empathy for people who...

I spent the morning unsuccessfully trying to get a .NET 5 Blazor WebAssembly app to behave with an Azure App Registration, and part of the afternoon doing a friend's taxes. Yes, I preferred doing the taxes, because I got my friend a pile of good news without having to read sixty contradictory pages of documentation. I also became aware of the following: The FBI and Australian police completely pwned hundreds of criminals through a black-market "encrypted" cell phone app that they wrote and monitored, in...

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...

The United States Postal Service has a surveillance program that tracks social media posts for law enforcement, and no one can say why: The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies. “Analysts with the United States Postal...

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...

In case you needed proof that the world didn't suddenly become an Enlightenment paradise on January 20th, I give you: Georgia Republicans (and perhaps soon Florida Republicans) seem to have blundered badly with their new anti-voter law. Frank Bruni wants to retire the phrase "gun control." In a shocking development, police brutality at protests aimed at curbing police brutality have sparked yet more protests. Illinois auto dealers, a collectively useless lot of people who provide a parasitic service...

Lunchtime roundup: Author John Scalzi gives the STBXPOTUS a colossal take-down on his blog today: "We don’t have to wait on history, but as it happens, this is how history will remember Donald Trump: Not as a forceful, charismatic authoritarian, but as a corrupt and pathetic wretch, who spent the final days of his presidency shouting at the walls about how the world is against him." Alexandra Petri: "Now is not the time to point fingers, Julius Caesar. Now is the time for healing." ("I am frankly...

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...

Radley Balko has reported on criminal justice for over a decade, and I would argue he's the most-informed journalist on the subject in the United States. I therefore trust his analysis of Breanna Taylor's death more than most. In today's Washington Post, he lays out the facts about Kentucky law and about the case as far as he knows, and corrects some misinformation currently swirling around social media: Wednesday’s announcement from Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron about criminal charges in the...

Today is the last day of meteorological summer, and by my math we really have had the warmest summer ever in Chicago. (More on that tomorrow, when it's official.) So I, for one, am happy to see it go. And yet, so many things of note happened just in the last 24 hours: Greg Sargent says the president's "vile tweetstorm" yesterday "reveals the ugly core of his 'law and order' campaign." On that point, lawyer Nick Carmody suggests that the civil unrest the president has fomented "is one of the greatest...

A friend and I plan to go to a local beer garden this weekend—one on the Brews and Choos list, in fact—so we had to make a reservation that included a $7.50-per-person deposit. Things are weird, man. And if you read the news today, oh boy, the weirdness is all over: Alex Shephard calls Chris Wallace "the only person who's figured out how to interview Trump." About the same interview, Peter Wehner concludes "Donald Trump is a broken man." In his last long-form essay for New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan...

Just a few things have cropped up in the news since yesterday: President Trump has threatened to send federal agents to "assist" with Chicago's efforts to curb gun violence, which no one except the Trump-supporting head of our police union wants. Michelle Goldberg calls the presence of federal agents in Portland a harbinger of fascism, while the ACLU calls it "a constitutional crisis" and has filed suit to reverse the policy. Also in Portland, an unidentified woman wearing only a hat and face mask...

Oregon Public Broadcasting is reporting this morning that last night, two Federal agencies using unmarked cars have started pulling people off the streets: Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off. The tactic appears to...

This sort of thing keeps happening, and explains why the police hate the public's ubiquitous video recording: When CTA supervisor Martesa Lee attempted to lodge a complaint against a Chicago police officer in February, she was given a choice: Drop her grievance against the officer she accused of pushing her out of an unmarked crime scene on a Red Line platform or face possible arrest. “Is it worth it to you?” Chicago police Sgt. William Spyker asked her. It was. Authorities arrested Lee in front of her...

First, some good news: New Zealand has not had a new Covid-19 case in 14 days, making it officially coronavirus-free. Given it's an archipelago of 3 million people more than 2,000 km from its nearest neighbor, they may have had some natural defenses against reinfection. In other news: The New York Times surveyed 511 epidemiologists about when they believed it would be safe to engage in certain activities. "Defunding the police" does not mean what you think it means. A study has found that lockdowns...

Last weekend's tsunami continues to ripple: Ultra-right-wing US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), writing in the New York Times to great opprobrium, recommends sending in the troops. Former general and Defense Secretary James Mattis publicly rebuked President Trump in a 3-page letter published in the Atlantic, a move that Josh Marshall supports while adding that the letter also "its own form of militarization of society." Former Joint Chiefs Chair Mike Mullen also criticized the president earlier this week. In...

A peaceful protest in downtown Chicago that began at 2pm yesterday devolved into violence by 8pm, leading to Mayor Lori Lightfoot imposing a 9pm to 6am curfew city-wide: “I want to express my disappointment and, really, my total disgust at the number of others who came to today’s protests armed for all-out battle.” Lightfoot singled out “the people who came armed with weapons,’’ calling them “criminals.“ “We can have zero tolerance for people who came prepared for a fight and tried to initiate and...

As CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his crew asked riot police where they would like them to move early this morning, the police abruptly arrested the group: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz spoke with CNN president Jeffrey Zucker shortly after: Mr. Walz told Mr. Zucker that the arrest was “inadvertent” and “unacceptable,” according to CNN’s account of the call. By about 6:30 a.m. local time, the crew had been released and was back on television. “Everyone, to their credit, was pretty cordial,” Mr. Jimenez said...

So believes NYU media professor Jay Rosen about how President Trump will try to win this fall: The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the...

A couple of news stories have dogged me this week. First, the TSA has determined that travelers—particularly children—find floppy-eared dogs less threatening than pointy-eared dogs: TSA Administrator David Pekoske said the agency is also making at least one new change to reduce traveler stress: deploying more floppy-ear dogs, rather than pointy-ear dogs, to sniff out explosives in public areas. During a recent tour of Washington Dulles International Airport, Pekoske told the Washington Examiner that his...

The United Airlines debacle at O'Hare last week underscored how much people really hate airlines: The severity of the situation really dawned on me last Thursday as I sat in an interview with a local Fox reporter. We started talking about the Chicago Aviation Police, and that’s when it hit me. Over the last few years, police violence has been a hot-button issue. It has spawned the Black Lives Matter movement, and it has polarized people around the country. And here was a textbook example of what people...

First, two unidentified have discovered malware on 38 Android devices that could only have been installed after manufacture but before distribution to retailers: An assortment of malware was found on 38 Android devices belonging to two unidentified companies. This is according to a blog post published Friday by Check Point Software Technologies, maker of a mobile threat prevention app. The malicious apps weren't part of the official ROM firmware supplied by the phone manufacturers but were added later...

Tonight I've gotten invited to hear Lin-Manuel Miranda speak at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and after that, a masquerade. Then tomorrow is Chicago Gourmet. Then Sunday I'll either plotz or walk 30 kilometers. (Though in truth I'll probably be fine as my cold, tapering though it is, makes me not want to indulge too much.) Meanwhile, here are some articles that I may read in the next few hours: This month has been really hot and rainy in Illinois. Bleah. One more thing Trump is wrong about: Stop and...

Yesterday I mentioned in passing that Illinois State and Chicago police chased a murder suspect pretty much right past my apartment Wednesday night. Both local newspapers have updated stories today. The Tribune has an interactive map and audio from the CPD. The Sun-Times reports that one of my neighbors, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, wants to know (a) why the chase was a chase and (b) how the suspect got away: “There’s a question there. At the end of the day, the [suspect in] the homicide in Lombard, driving...

Two more things in the news. First: Over the weekend more than 200 countries (including the U.S.) signed what could be an historic treaty to reduce climate-changing pollution in hopes of keeping the damage manageable. Even Krugman is optimistic about the deal. We'll see. Second: combine the over-militarization of local police with internet trolls, and you get "swatting." Perhaps we want to re-think our slide into a police state after all? Back to waiting for the cable guy...

The good: A new study shows that drinking 3-5 cups of coffee a day has measurable health benefits. The bad: A black resident of Santa Monica, Calif., got hauled out of her apartment at gunpoint by 19 police officers after a white neighbor reported someone trying to break in. The ugly: Yale law student Omar Aziz writes about the soul of a Jihadist. And the neutral, which could be ugly: forecasters predict 15-30 cm of snow in Chicago tomorrow night into Saturday morning.