Presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president Joe Biden, who I hope will have shortened that title by 5 words by January 20th, has picked US Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate:
Ms. Harris, 55, is the first Black woman and the first person of Indian descent to be nominated for national office by a major party, and only the fourth woman in history to be chosen for one of their presidential tickets. She brings to the race a far more vigorous campaign style than Mr. Biden’s, including a gift for capturing moments of raw political electricity on the debate stage and elsewhere, and a personal identity and family story that many find inspiring.
A pragmatic moderate who spent most of her career as a prosecutor, Ms. Harris was seen throughout the vice-presidential search as among the safest choices available to Mr. Biden. She has been a reliable ally of the Democratic establishment, with flexible policy priorities that largely mirror Mr. Biden’s, and her supporters argued that she could reinforce Mr. Biden’s appeal to Black voters and women without stirring particularly vehement opposition on the right or left.
After leaving the presidential race in December, Ms. Harris turned her attention back to the Senate and found new purpose amid a wave of nationwide protests this spring against racism and police brutality. She marched beside protesters and forcefully championed proposals to overhaul policing and make lynching a federal crime, often speaking with a kind of clarity that had eluded her in the presidential primaries on economic issues like health care and taxation.
I thought Harris or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, though I would have agreed with any of his top-5 picks as we knew them earlier today. But Harris seems like exactly the right choice.
Note that I am, and will continue to be, a financial contributor to the Biden—now Biden/Harris—campaign.
This colorized and upscaled video is fascinating:
It has cooled off slightly from yesterday's scorching 36°C, but the dewpoint hasn't dropped much. So the sauna yesterday has become the sticky summer day today. Fortunately, we invented air conditioning a century or so ago, so I'm not actually melting in my cube.
As I munch on some chicken teriyaki from the take-out place around the corner, I'm also digesting these articles:
Can you believe we're only 99 days from the election? How time flies.
A friend and I plan to go to a local beer garden this weekend—one on the Brews and Choos list, in fact—so we had to make a reservation that included a $7.50-per-person deposit. Things are weird, man. And if you read the news today, oh boy, the weirdness is all over:
Finally, closer to home, 4,400 restaurants in Chicago have closed because of the pandemic, 2,400 permanently. The Chicago Tribune has a list of the more notable closures.
Just a few things have cropped up in the news since yesterday:
- President Trump has threatened to send federal agents to "assist" with Chicago's efforts to curb gun violence, which no one except the Trump-supporting head of our police union wants. Michelle Goldberg calls the presence of federal agents in Portland a harbinger of fascism, while the ACLU calls it "a constitutional crisis" and has filed suit to reverse the policy.
- Also in Portland, an unidentified woman wearing only a hat and face mask nonchalantly walked in front of a row of federal police and danced for them. Said the LA Times, "She stood calmly, a surreal image of human vulnerability in the face of an overpowering force that has been criticized nationally by civil rights advocates." (Nudity is constitutionally-protected speech in Oregon.)
- The BBC also digs in and reports that the 1807 Insurrection Act prohibits this kind of federal intervention. Notably, the last time a president invoked the law against the express wishes of the state was in 1957, when Eisenhower sent troops to Arkansas to protect black children from white mobs.
- St Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner's office filed felony charges against Mark and Patricia McCloskey for unlawful use of a weapon, but the Republican governor of Missouri has already promised to pardon the couple.
- The FBI arrested Republican Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and three others in connection with a $60 m bribery case.
- The Boeing 747 has become the latest casualty of Covid-19, with only one airline continuing to fly the jet in passenger service.
- The Chicago Transit Authority has started round-the-clock construction on the $2.1 bn Red-Purple Modernization Project, which my alderman acknowledged would cause "massive disruption."
Finally, the Covid-19 mitigation rollback announced yesterday has led to Guthrie's Tavern closing permanently. Guthrie's, which opened in 1986 and featured board games and good beer, will pour its last pint on Thursday.
The civil rights activist and long-time Member of Congress died yesterday of complications from pancreatic cancer:
On the front lines of the bloody campaign to end Jim Crow laws, with blows to his body and a fractured skull to prove it, Mr. Lewis was a valiant stalwart of the civil rights movement and the last surviving speaker at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.
More than a half-century later, after the killing in May of George Floyd, a Black man in police custody in Minneapolis, Mr. Lewis welcomed the resulting global demonstrations against systemic racism and the police killings of Black people. He saw those demonstrations, the largest protest movement in American history, as a continuation of his life’s work, though his illness had left him to watch from the sideline.
Mr. Lewis’s personal history paralleled that of the civil rights movement. He was among the original 13 Freedom Riders, the Black and white activists who challenged segregated interstate travel in the South in 1961. He was a founder and early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which coordinated lunch-counter sit-ins. He helped organize the March on Washington, where the main speaker on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mr. Lewis led demonstrations against racially segregated restrooms, hotels, restaurants, public parks and swimming pools, and he rose up against other indignities of second-class citizenship. At nearly every turn, he was beaten, spat upon or burned with cigarettes. He was tormented by shrieking white mobs and absorbed body blows from law enforcement.
On March 7, 1965, he led one of the most famous marches in American history. In the vanguard of 600 people demanding the voting rights they had been denied, Mr. Lewis marched partway across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a waiting phalanx of state troopers in riot gear.
Lewis represented Georgia's 5th district from 1987 until his death yesterday.
The most destructive man-made force in the history of the planet exploded for the first time 75 years ago today:
On July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project comes to an explosive end as the first atom bomb is successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The scientists and a few dignitaries had removed themselves 10,000 yards away to observe as the first mushroom cloud of searing light stretched 40,000 feet into the air and generated the destructive power of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. The tower on which the bomb sat when detonated was vaporized.
The Alamogordo blast tested the "Fat Man" implosion design that compressed two hemispheres of Pu-239 around a U-235 trigger through a perfectly-timed set of high explosive detonations around the sphere. This resulted in almost 40% more yield than the gun-type "Little Boy" design that exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, three weeks later. The second "Fat Man" exploded over Nagasaki, Japan, three days after that.
In 1952, the United States demonstrated a fusion bomb that produced 450 times more yield than the Nagasaki explosion, igniting an arms race that ultimately led to the USSR developing a 100 MT "Tsar Bomba" that, were it detonated over O'Hare, would produce a fireball completely vaporising the airport and surrounding villages, would destroy any masonry or wood-framed buildings from Mundelein to Oak Lawn and St Charles to the Loop, and would cause third-degree burns to any exposed flesh in a 74 km radius encompassing Kenosha, Channahon, De Kalb, Gary, and more than halfway across Lake Michigan.
The half-strength (!) Tsar Bomba tested on 30 October 1961 remains the most destructive weapon ever demonstrated on earth.
The United States remains the only country to have prosecuted a nuclear war against another country.
In a side note, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed an estimated 100,000 people outright and perhaps another 50,000 people over the following year due to secondary effects like radiation sickness and disease. This is only 10,000 more than the number of Americans killed by Covid-19 since March.
Happy tax day! And now, we're off to the races:
Finally, Bloomberg takes a backward glance at the rise and fall of the Segway.
Back in May I started listening to every CD I own, in the order that I bought them, starting with Eugen Jochum conducting Mozart's Mass in C-Major, K317 (purchased in May 1988). I'm up to July 1989 now, and as I write this, I'm playing The Mama's and the Papa's [sic] If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (1967). This follows The Beatles' With The Beatles (1963) and Paul McCartney's Pipes of Peace (1983).
And then it goes sideways.
Next up: Haydn's Piano Concerto #11 (1781), and Josquin's "Missa L'Homme Armé" (ca. 1500). I bought those five CDs on 7 July 1989.
Three days later I acquired a batch of six, including a collection of English madrigals sung by the King's Singers, Oscar Levant playing Gershwin, and the soundtrack from The Breakfast Club.
There are stretches of classical and stretches of modern throughout this list, but right now I'm in summer break after my first year of college when I was expanding both sides of my collection as fast as I could afford to.
I just did some math: at the rate I'm going, I'll be out of my university years around November 17th, in the 21st Century around the beginning of April, and through all of them in the fall of 2021. (That's a moving target for obvious reasons.)
It's a little trippy. I haven't heard some of these in a long, long time.
Today's interesting and notable news stories:
Finally, Lawrence Wright explores how historical plagues, particularly the European one in 1347, can sometimes spark radical social change.