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 Moderna MRNA vaccine: a persistent, metallic taste on the tip of my tongue. Its incidence is apparently something approaching less than 1 in 10,000, but it appears to be harmless and to clear up on its own. I have never had this side-effect from the Pfizer vaccine. I will request Pfizer again next year. Bleah. I'll let everyone know if I start growing a giant spike protein on my forehead.
Meanwhile, the OAFPOTUS has threatened to send 100 more troops to Chicago, a city which has something like 12,000 sworn police officers already. But it's kind of hard to take the regime seriously when this sort of thing happens. Or this sort of thing. Or this sort of thing.
As Joe Biden said five years ago yesterday, "Will you shut up, man?"
How is it October in two days? As in, how is it already a full month into autumn and O'Hare is reporting a higher temperature than Phoenix?
Meanwhile:
- Incumbent New York City mayor Eric Adams has dropped his re-election bid as polling reveals that most of the city actively despises him. Josh Marshall shrugs, but runs the numbers on a possible victory by former governor Andrew Cuomo.
- Paul Krugman warns that the Republican spending bill the Democrats are currently blocking in the Senate would cause massive increases in everyone's health insurance premiums next year.
- Brian Beutler wants the Democratic Party to pick new, better fights to get people on side, instead of continuing the same focus-group-tested crappy messaging it can't seem to shake.
Finally, if you've ever visited Chicago, you'll know that we have a lot of brick construction here. (In fact, the current Inner Drive Technology World HQ is the first place I've lived in Chicago that didn't use bricks.) It turns out, a guy named Will Quam will give you a guided tour of Chicago's brick structures for a small fee. What would Chuck Rainey say?
The stupidest person ever to sit behind the Resolute Desk has made most of the world feel sad for us. Let's check on why:
And yet, both Jennifer Rubin and Josh Marshall see the tide turning hard against the administration, though George Packer thinks we now live in an authoritarian state.
Meanwhile,
And finally, the mold count in Chicago hit an all-time high on Tuesday of 82,121, which is nothing to sneeze at. The mold count is forecast to remain high until the first frost, which might be in November given the climate predictions this fall.
I just got back from a 30-minute walk with Cassie in 22°C early-autumn sun. We suffered. And now I'm back in my home office and she's back on the couch. She will spend the next several hours napping in a cool, breezy spot downstairs, and I will...work.
I will also read a bit, which is a skill that I'm glad Cassie does not have after encountering the day's news:
Finally, the Chicago Dept of Transportation has published plans to designate Wellington Avenue a bike greenway from Leavitt Ave in North Center to the lakefront path. The project will include protected counterflow bike lanes on one-way segments of Wellington, traffic calming, signage, and a number of other features to protect bicyclists. The greenway will allow bikes to avoid Belmont and Diversey, two busy streets that aren't fun to ride on. CDOT expects to finish the project this fall.
Oh, and today is the 50th anniversary of Welcome Back, Kotter premiering on ABC. Let me tell you I'm Gen X without actually saying the words, right?
A total lunar eclipse has just started and will reach totality at 12:30 Chicago time, which is unfortunately about 10 hours too early for us to enjoy it here. It's a good way to end the first day of meteorological autumn, though, as is the 8 km walk Cassie and I have planned around 2 this afternoon. With a forecast high of 19°C, it should be lovely.
In other eclipses this past week:
For what it's worth, the next total lunar eclipse visible from Chicago will be on 26 June 2029, starting at sunset and reaching totality at 21:31 CDT.
The Christianists in Florida, clearly getting bribes from Big Microbe, have ended the requirement that students get vaccinated in order to attend public schools:
Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, made the announcement on Wednesday alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican. Mr. DeSantis rose to national prominence during the coronavirus pandemic, and over time he has espoused increasingly anti-vaccine views.
“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body?” Dr. Ladapo, a vocal denigrator of vaccines, said to applause during an event on Wednesday in Valrico, Fla., near Tampa. “Your body is a gift from God.”
I mean, if it quacks like a duck...
Honestly, I have no idea why Republicans who should know better still play at being so hostile to science and reason. Ron DeSantis is a gigantic asshole, but he's not stupid. So why this religious nuttery?
This weekend, I expect to finish a major personal (non-technical) project I started on June 15th, walk 20 km (without Cassie), and thanks to the desperation of the minor-league team on the South Side of Chicago, attend a Yankees game. It helps that the forecast looks exactly like one would want for the last weekend of summer: highs in the mid-20s and partly cloudy skies.
I might have time to read all of these things as well:
Meanwhile, my birthday ribs order got delayed. One of the assistant butchers backed into a meat grinder, so they got behind in their work. He was the biggest ass in the shop until he recently got unseated, so I don't feel too bad for making him the butt of my jokes.
G'nite.
Even though I put aside Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism for the moment because it was just too depressing, I do still think about the ongoing destruction of the United States from within.
Over the weekend I realized that one way the billionaire class have approached their accelerating theft of our collective wealth is to attack the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. By undermining the lowest two levels, physiological needs and safety needs, they render entire communities unable even to address the higher needs that the modern Democratic Party tends to worry about.
This makes it even more of an imperative for our party to present an actual plan for how we're going to make sure people have homes, food, health care, and physical security. This shouldn't be hard. Until we do, people won't have any space in their minds for long-term infrastructure project let alone social justice.
The Republican Party, in service of their billionaire donors, have bombed the US Government back to the 18th Century. We've go a lot of work to do before we can campaign on DEI or UBI. I don't for a second want us to stop doing those things; but FFS, we need to talk about much simpler issues until people feel secure enough to listen.
It's no accident that the most prosperous period in the most prosperous country in world history coincided with a strong middle class, highly progressive taxes, and strong labor unions. Only then did people have the mental energy to worry about civil rights for people they'd never meet. And the Republican Party has spent the last 70 years trying to prevent and then undo those gains.
Everything we're seeing is about corruption: taking money from us and giving it to billionaires instead of investing it in the country. It won't stop until we make it stop by winning back power and taxing the shit out of them.
Cassie's stitches came out and her cone came off this afternoon:
Tomorrow she goes back to day camp. This weekend, if the weather allows it, we'll go to the dog beach. We are both so freaking happy not to have the cone anymore.
Also, her left ear doesn't look as out of place as I'd worried. We'll see how it looks when all her fur grows back in a couple of weeks.
Cassie had a solid night of post-anesthesia sleep and woke up mostly refreshed. The cone still bums her out, and the surgery bill bums me out, but at least she's walking at close to her normal speed. She gets her stiches out—and her cone off—two weeks from today.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:
- Very stupid people have allowed measles, which we functionally eliminated from the US in 2000, to infect close to 1300 people this year.
- Jennifer Rubin argues that the Department of Homeland Security provides neither “freedom from danger” or “freedom from fear or anxiety,” i.e., security.
- Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers is ashamed of the OAFPOTUS's tax bill and what it will do to the most vulnerable Americans.
- George Will praises former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel for holding the center against the loony left.
- Echoing my own thoughts, Stephanie Bai wants people to stop throwing blame around for this past weekend's Texas floods. (The blame for future disasters, however, falls squarely on the Republican Party.)
- Paul Krugman lauds victories over NIMBYs that are starting to revitalize building in urban areas.
- Cook County's practice of stealing people's homes for non-payment of property tax will likely cost us hundreds of millions of dollars once the class-action lawsuit gets going.
- Strava has once again lost control of its subscribers' location data, this time outing the Swedish prime minister's bodyguards, and thus the PM himself. Oops. (In fairness, it might be that the bodyguards themselves failed to protect the data by posting workouts publicly.)
Finally, lightning bugs appear to have made a small comeback in the Chicago area after a few years of reduced numbers. Educational campaigns have encouraged people to leave leaf litter undisturbed whenever possible, to allow the critters to breed safely. A mild winter and wet spring also helped a lot.