Events

Josh Marshall explains the significance of the NIH funding directive that the OAFPOTUS took out with the trash last night: I think it’s a combination of two things. One is anti-COVID research payback, combined with a general hostility to scientific expertise culture and a general and not-incorrect belief that the kinds of people who work in these institutions are mainly not friendly to Trumpism. Basically, it’s seen as a body blow to blue-state and -city culture. Combined with this is a more structural...

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...

Five years ago this evening, I hopped a Milwaukee District North Line train after work for Glenview, and walked about 1.3 km to Macushla Brewing at Lake and Waukegan. The Brews & Choos Project had begun. Since then, I've visited 118 breweries, distilleries, and meaderies in Chicago and another 10 while traveling. Sadly, 20 of the places I've visited have closed. (Let me revise that: sadly, 17 of them have closed, and happily, 3 others have closed.) I visited 25 places in the first month of the project...

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...

This will be a bit ranty, but I'm super pissed off at far-left ideologues in the US right now. Since right after the October 7th attack, hordes of children at elite American colleges have protested Israel's response. These kids came out as anti-Israel mere days after Hamas killed or kidnapped 1,200 civilians in a surprise attack on lightly-defended farms near the border. That is, they didn't wait for Israel actually to invade Gaza before calling for Israel to accept the murder of 1,000 of its citizens...

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...

Since I live in a dense urban environment and drive a plug-in hybrid, I can go a long time without buying gasoline. Last night, I broke down and put 35 liters of gas in the car, because I'm concerned the OAFPOTUS's tariffs against Canada will cause petrol prices to spike in the Midwest. In fairness, I only had 3 liters left, but still: I could have gone another month! I last filled up coming back from watching the eclipse on April 8th. So I did set a new personal record for time between refueling: 300...

Throughout all the bullshit the OAFPOTUS has spewed onto the nation in the past couple of weeks, Ezra Klein wants to remind you of something I have mentioned many times: he's a charlatan, and everything he does is a grift. Don't believe him: People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent...

We got a lot of outdoor time yesterday, and more than an average amount so far this morning. Yesterday we took a 5.5 km walk from downtown Elmhurst to the Prairie Path, with a sojourn at a big field where Cassie and her friend Kelsey found big sticks: Then this morning I had to get my butt down to the University of Chicago, so Cassie got to be a Big Dog on Campus for a bit: The forecast calls for 6°C today and 9°C tomorrow, so I imagine we will get a lot more walkies before the cold front comes in...