Major earthquakes in Venezuela

This morning, a pair of earthquakes of magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5 rocked the area around Caracas, Venezuela, killing at least 164 people across a wide area along the Caribbean coast.

In other earth-shaking news:

• US Representative Thomas Kean, Jr. (R-NJ) answered his door this morning after a disappearance of four months without anyone in Congress apparently knowing where he was. He is expected to explain the "health condition" that kept him from working when he returns to Washington on Tuesday. And yes, he is running for re-election.
• Who could have guessed that the fossil-fuel industry has spent billions of dollars for decades to subvert climate research at major universities?
• But in a win for climate science, former National Climatic Data Center employees have restored the US government's shuttered climate website on Climate.US.
• Jeff Maurer is only half-joking about capitalism having a branding problem, given that it's the only economic system that spontaneously develops wherever it's free to do so.
• Cook County, Ill., sheriff Tom Dart has formed a task force to consider a unified transit police force for Northern Illinois before 2030.

Finally, last night I finished Jim Lehrer's novel The Last Debate, which he published in 1995. The novel seems quaint now, given that the plot revolves around a presidential debate panel goading the fundamentalist Republican candidate into a violent outburst on TV, which effectively throws the election to the Dukakis expy. Given how the US public responded to a real-life unstable, unqualified nut job in 2016, it's easy to forget how dropping an F-bomb on TV in the '90s could actually have destroyed a presidential candidate's career.

Still, I enjoyed the novel thoroughly. Its wry and biting satire includes a first-person protagonist whose ego prevents him from seeing how he's doing the very thing to journalism he claims not to be doing. And Lehrer's commentary on journalism-as-entertainment was years ahead of its time, a fictional speculation about the points Neil Postman made in Amusing Ourselves to Death. I recommend it, but only to people old enough to remember the 1990s and 3-network TV news.