Events

Time got away from me this afternoon. I might read all this tomorrow morning: Nicholas Kristof says the Musk/OAFPOTUS administration prostrating to Russia will make the world more dangerous. So does Alex Shepard. Jennifer Rubin says that the Musk/OAFPOTUS administration will break the government, and therefore own it. Anne Applebaum decries Vice President JD Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced his retirement, now that he got...

The US meeting with Russia and not Ukraine to discuss the fate of Ukraine seems unmistakably similar to the Molotov-Ribbentrop discussions in August 1939 that divvied up Poland between the Nazis and Stalin's Russia. The meeting in Riyadh between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov seems more focused on a colonial-style mineral extraction concession for the US than on Ukrainian sovereignty. This comes just days after Vice President JD Vance channeled UK Prime...

My friends have gone to a tropical beach for the week, which means I get a second dog for a few days. She has been here many times before (most recently on Saturday), so she knows the drill. Still, five minutes after her people left, Butters seemed resigned to never seeing them again: By the time I woke up this morning, however, she seemed to have settled in just fine: Walking the two of them together in this cold doesn't actually work, however. Butters hates cold weather; Cassie loves it. So Cassie...

It seems like so much of the news I've read today concerns people behaving stupidly, but thinking they're behaving intelligently. Sadly, it's mostly the same group of people: James Fallows makes it clear the aviation accidents over the past few weeks are not the Administration's fault—but the ones a year from now will certainly be. Jeff Maurer likens Elon Musk's wrecking crew to the drunk and sleep-deprived Assemblée Nationale of 4 August 1789; you know, the one that led directly to the French...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ has gone up all day, just surpassing yesterday's afternoon high of -11.3°C: Of course, yesterday's actual high was -10.3°C, at midnight, and we won't hit that again until tomorrow. But by Friday we'll be able to walk outside without losing extremities, and by Sunday it'll even be above freezing. And then, in 10 days: spring! There is one advantage to Arctic air over Chicago, though: the air is really clear.

Punzun Ltd. (an Illinois corporation doing business as Inner Drive Technology) turns 25 today! I set up the corporation before I moved back to Illinois from New York, so that I could take either a contract or full-time job when I got here. I can scarcely believe I've been back nearly 25 years. And 25 years ago—this was months before Bush v Gore, remember—I would not have believed that these would be the news stories I'd care about in 2025: The unelected winger specifically tasked with destroying our...

I threw a party for a few friends last night. Cassie's friend Butters came by and ensconced herself on the couch for most of the night. Cassie, for her part, got oo-mox from one of the guests: Cassie has spent most of today sleeping, as I would like to be doing. At some point I may even get the motivation to read. First I have to tweak a feature of Weather Now that will help re-import all the data I mentioned yesterday.

David Brooks breaks down the anti-populist behavior of the "populists" in the Republican Party: If America elected a populist as president, you would expect him to devote his administration to addressing these inequities, to boosting the destinies of working-class Americans. But that’s not what President Trump is doing. He seems to have no plans to narrow the education chasms, no plans to narrow the health outcome chasms or the family structure chasms. He has basically no plans to revive the communities...

I've added a couple of new features to Weather Now, including a view of the best weather in the world. More usefully, I've added a release notes page. This weekend, I plan to to rebuild the Gazetteer, and import all of the USGS records—about 900,000 places. This will also mean rebuilding the search index in the Basic tier. The Free tier is great for testing, but it only lets me index 10,000 items at a time. Even if the Free tier could support 900,000 records, I don't want to hit "Rebuild" 90 times. I'll...

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...