I've had a lot to do in the office today, so unfortunately this will just be a link fest:
Finally, while Graceland Cemetery in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood doubles as an arboretum and a great place to walk your dog, right now a different set of canids has sway. Graceland has temporarily banned pet dogs while a litter of coyote pups grows up. They are totes adorbs, but their parents have behaved aggressively towards people walking dogs nearby.
We had a lovely double rainbow yesterday:
But this morning, we had something else entirely:
Canadian wildfire smoke raised the air-quality index in Chicago to well over 150 this morning. This is the satellite view from about 20 minutes ago:
Unlike the last couple of weeks, however, the smoke has now descended to ground level, making Chicago look like it did in the 1970s, before the Clean Air Act started to do its thing:
We're hoping the smoke clears up soon. And that the Canadian firefighters will get the prairie fires under control.
As for the politics, well, the droughts and changing moisture patterns leading to the fires up north are predicted consequences of human-induced climate change.
Two photos this morning. First, Cassie tried to convince the other patrons at Spiteful Brewing yesterday that no one ever pats her:
She was pretty successful with the ruse. People stopped to pat her continuously. She has us all trained.
Second, here is the GOES-East visible light photo from about half an hour ago:
See all that haze from Alberta and Saskatchewan in the northwest, through the US Midwest, and swooping all the way down to Jacksonville and out to the Atlantic? That's wildfire smoke from the Canadian plains. There isn't a cloud in the sky over Chicago right now, but we can really see the haze.
Cassie and I are about to go on an adventure involving A Ride in the Car!, and we'll probably get another hour of walkies today. The smoke hasn't yet descended to ground level so the AQI is not great (61) but so far not hazardous. Still, the number of fires this early in the season doesn't bode well for the summer fire season.
Cassie and I took an hour-long walk through the LaBagh Woods and Forest Glen this afternoon:
It's still a very nice day, so I might have to take her on another half-hour walk soon.
The OAFPOTUS signed a batch of executive orders yesterday announcing the administration's support for building more nuclear power, a policy that on its face sounds great:
One order directs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nation’s independent safety regulator, to streamline its rules and to take no more than 18 months to approve applications for new reactors. The order also urges the agency to consider lowering its safety limits for radiation exposure, saying that current rules go beyond what is needed to protect human health.
The Trump administration also set a goal of quadrupling the size of the nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants, from nearly 100 gigawatts of electric capacity today to 400 gigawatts by 2050. One gigawatt is enough to power nearly 1 million homes.
In recent years, more than a dozen companies have begun developing a new generation of smaller reactors a fraction of the size of those at Vogtle [a plant under construction in Georgia]. The hope is that these reactors would have a lower upfront price tag, making them a less risky investment for utilities. They might also be based on a design that could be repeated often, as opposed to custom-built, to reduce costs.
OK, so what's the problem? Nuclear power is cleaner and safer than fossil-fuel power, especially over the long term. Despite disasters in Ukraine (1986) and Japan (2011), civilian nuclear power has killed orders of magnitude fewer people than coal mining and emissions from fossil-fuel power generation, for example.
So why am I skeptical? Because I don't trust the OAFPOTUS to tell me the time of day without trying to steal my watch, let alone to pass a major policy initiative on the merits. It's telling that the signing event included comments about building small-scale reactors to power crypto mining, for example. And given the thoroughly demonstrated lack of competence in the administration, and their desire to destroy the regulatory state entirely, I worry that the lack of oversight will lead to a nuclear disaster that will set the industry back another few decades. (Remember, a spectacular accident that kills 10 people is far scarier to most of us apes than the ongoing loss of millions of years of human lifespans from fossil-fuel pollution and resource extraction.)
I'm willing to give the administration and the Republican party support when they do the right thing. But their behavior over the last 10 years has been to (a) design policies to enrich themselves instead of providing for the general welfare and (b) screw up the implementation, whether through incompetence or malice, to render them worse than doing nothing. I hope this nuclear initiative will work out, or at least give my party some runway to fix it when we return to power. Yet neither the OAFPOTUS nor the Republican Party as a whole fill me with confidence that this time will be different.
We've had a run of dreary, unseasonably cold weather that more closely resembles the end of March than the middle of May. I've been looking at this gloom all day:
We may have some sun tomorrow afternoon through the weekend, but the forecast calls for continuous north winds and highs around 16°C—the normal high for April 23rd, not May 23rd. Summer officially starts in 10 days. It sure doesn't feel like it.
Speaking of the gloomy and the retrograde:
- Former US judge and George HW Bush appointee J. Michael Luttig argues that the OAFPOTUS "is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate."
- In a case of "careful what you wish for," FBI Director Dan Bongino can't escape his past conspiracy theorizing but also can't really escape the realities of (or his lack of qualifications for) his new position.
- Writer Louis Pisano excoriates Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez for their "idea that billionaires can buy their way into virtue with just enough gala invitations, foundation launches, and pocket-change donations" in Cannes this week.
- Adam Kinzinger shakes his fist at the OAFPOTUS-murdered Voice of America, now "subsidized by taxpayer dollars [to broadcast] Trump-aligned propaganda in 49 languages worldwide."
- Jen Rubin, vacationing in Spain, explains how the country's centuries-long Catholic purges of Jews and Muslims drove their globe-spanning empire into irrelevance. "The notion that national defense required ethnic and religious homogeneity not only resulted in mass atrocities, it also deprived Spain of many of the people and ideas that had helped it become a world power," she concludes. (Not that we need to worry here in the US, right?)
- Chuck Marohn shakes his head at the Brainerd, Minn., city council for ignoring his advice and building massive infrastructure they can't afford to maintain.
- Metra has formally taken control of the commuter trains running on Union Pacific track, including the one that goes right past Inner Drive Technology WHQ.
- The village of Dolton, Ill., has informed potential buyers of Pope Leo XVI's childhood home that it intends to invoke eminent domain and work with the Archdiocese of Chicago on preserving the building. Said the village attorney, "We don't want it to become a nickel-and-dime, 'buy a little pope' place."
Speaking of cashing in on the Chicago Pope, Burning Bush Brewery has just released a new mild ale called "Da Pope." Next time Cassie and I go to Horner Park, we'll stop by Burning Bush and one of us will try it. (Un?)Fortunately, we won't have time to get there by 11pm Friday, so we'll miss the $8 Chicago Pope Handshake special (a pint of Da Pope and a shot of Malört). Dang.
Chuck Marohn makes an important and oft-overlooked point about North American street design, and asks, why are we subsidizing mega corporations at our own expense?
I spent a lot of time outside over the weekend until the temperature started to slide into the single digits (Celsius) last night, so I put off reading online stories in favor of reading real books. I also failed to mention that we had an honest-to-goodness haboob in Northern Illinois on Friday, the first significant one since 1934. Because hey, let's bring back the 1930s in all their glory!
- Adam Kinzinger rolls his eyes at the world's oldest toddler: the OAFPOTUS himself, the biggest champion of the 1930s we have right now.
- Josh Marshall shakes his head at the people in our party who think the electorate is waiting with bated breath to find out which nonessential policies we're going to go with in 2026.
- Jeff Maurer draws similar parallels, this time between HBO/Max/HBO Max/whatever's branding problems and those of the Democratic Party.
- Paul Krugman slaps the GOP hard for its "incredibly cruel" budget—which is their point: "Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards."
- Speaking of cruelty, Jack Goldsmith picks apart Stephen Miller's trolling about habeas corpus, and pleads with journalists to stop falling for this stuff.
- Michael Tomasky says that Kamala Harris's race and gender weren't the problem with her candidacy—it's that the party stopped all conversation about her fitness for the presidency because of her race and gender.
- Tyler Austin Harper agrees, saying that the King Lear analogy with President Biden postulated in Jake Tapper's Original Sin doesn't quite work: his core advisers and his wife bear a lot more responsibility for our 2024 loss than they get credit for.
- Oh, and hey, did anyone in North America notice that the PKK lay down their arms and have ended their 40-year insurgency against Türkiye? It's kind of a big deal.
- In one bit of good news, the critically-endangered piping plovers nesting at Montrose Beach a few hundred meters to the east of where I'm sitting have laid an egg. Good luck, Imani and Sea Rocket!
- The UK has asked if the US Federal Aviation Administration might possibly do their jobs a bit better regulating the Clown Prince of X's rockets, which keep blowing up over the UK's Caribbean territories and littering their beaches with debris.
Finally, Scottish writer Dan Richards looks across the Atlantic and sees that the infrastructure choices we've made have driven us to having only two bad options: slow cars or polluting airplanes. Europe made investments throughout the last 30 years that gave them sleek and comfortable overnight trains.
I last took an overnight European train in September 2013, on what may be my best visit to the UK ever. The Caledonian Sleeper leaves London Euston at 22:30 and gets to Edinburgh at 08:00, for about £250 per person. Put that price against a flight and a hotel, or even an daytime express train and a hotel, and it's not a bad deal. Plus you get a wake-up call with hot tea before arriving.
Before we even set out yesterday, I discovered evidence of a cardinal nest in my back patio. The evidence was this guy and his mate dive-bombing me when I went out to check the Inner Drive Technology weather station:
Later, we took the most direct route to the Horner Park Dog Park, where I met up with a friend and Cassie met a bunch of new friends:
Altogether, Cassie got 3 hours of exercise, and we stayed outside for about 6½ hours total. We won't get anywhere near that today, unfortunately, but yesterday was a lot of fun for everyone except the cardinals outside my back door.
The Chicago Park District periodically burns conservation areas throughout the city because the prairie we built the city on evolved with fire. Last fall, they burned some of the prairie-reclamation areas in Winnemac Park, close to my house:
Here's the same area yesterday, clearly benefitting from the burn:
And just because everyone loves her, here's a photo of Cassie enjoying the random pats and treats she got at Spiteful Brewing about two hours after we passed through the park:
Happy Monday.