A moment of downtime

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 pervasive cruelty of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Tom Homan: "Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are “the other” — people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but who stand outside the web of connection that defines human society."
• Paul Krugman explains more cogently than I did why the Republicans cutting NOAA will hurt everyone: "Trump’s cuts to scientific research aren’t about shrinking government and saving money. They’re about dealing with possibly inconvenient evidence by covering the nation’s ears and shouting 'La, la, la, we can’t hear you.' "
• The inconvenient evidence includes a growing realization in Mediterranean countries that their summer resorts are no longer habitable in the summer: "Across Spain, Italy, Greece, France and beyond, sand-devouring storms, rising seas, asphyxiating temperatures, deadly floods and horrific wildfires have year after year turned some of the continent’s most desired getaways into miserable locales to get away from."
• Ilya Shapiro, constitutional studies director at the Manhattan Institute, believes both the left and the right have got Amy Coney Barrett all wrong: "She’s an originalist with a strong devotion both to constitutional text and institutional procedure. But she’s also a stickler for prudence in the face of novelty. The one thing Barrett is zealous about is upholding the rule of law..."
• A group of mayors from the Chicago suburbs has decided they don't like the very same public-private partnerships between railroads and their surrounding areas that created many of the same suburbs: "Real estate could be the recipe for long-term fiscal sustainability for [the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, making some of the current revenue mechanisms only temporary and reducing the risk of a repeat of this year's fiscal cliff. [But y]ou can’t protest government overreach of private property rights, and then defend zoning in the same paragraph."
• At the same time suburban mayors rant against better transit, their residents have clogged half the side streets in Chicago to get around Kennedy Expressway construction this summer. Of course, better transit would obviate all those car trips that cause the congestion in the first place, but let's not think too hard about that.
• In some parts of the country, though, street designs from the Netherlands have become more popular as planners and citizens see how much safer they are for everyone.
• Patrick Smith takes a look at last month's Air India crash and fears the worst: "[I]f the [fuel] switches were moved to CUTOFF manually, the billion-dollar question is why? Were they moved by accident, or nefariously? Was it an act of absurd absent-mindedness, or one of willful mass murder, a la EgyptAir, Germanwings, and (almost certainly) MH370."
• Google announced a new partnership with electric truck maker Rivian to use Google Maps for navigation.
• New studies suggest that we have crooked teeth because our diet changed: "With softer diets came less mechanical strain on the jaw. Over generations, our mandibles began to shrink— a trend visible in the fossil record."

Finally, a number of commentators have experienced a healthy dose of Schadenfreude watching the OAFPOTUS's rabid followers turn on him, including Adam Kinzinger, Josh Marshall, Dan Rather, and of course, Jeff Maurer. It's not exactly "the blood of Marat strangles him," but as a centrist, I am enjoying this part just a little. (And in fairness, Kinzinger, a Republican, believes that the administration's policies will do more damage to the party than this nonsense about Epstein.)