I got in a bit early this morning to beat the heat. Good thing, too, as my train line partially shut down upstream of my stop just as I got on the train. It's up to 34°C at O'Hare and 33°C at Inner Drive Technology World HQ (feels like 42°C—107°F), with a forecast of 36°C and continued horrible heat indicies for this afternoon when I walk Cassie home from dog school.
Chicago isn't the only place getting this awful weather. The record heat will affect over 200 million people this week with similar temperatures from North Carolina to Connecticut hitting tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the Lake Michigan-Huron system's water level has dropped more than 150 cm since its soggy peak in 2020, giving us our beaches back and ending routine flooding on lakefront streets on the South Side. (Don't worry, we still have a fifth of the world's fresh water.)
The weather should moderate tomorrow, with thunderstorms coming through in the afternoon. I very much preferred the weather in Seattle this past weekend, though. And I hope that Cassie and I can get some real walks this week.
I'm flying tomorrow and Sunday, giving me a few uninterrupted hours to read between now and Monday. So I'm just queuing some of these things up:
Finally, after four years, the CTA Red Line stations at Lawrence, Argyle, Berwyn, and Bryn Mawr will re-open July 20th, which also means that Purple Line trains will resume running express. I am very pleased that a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar transport project actually finished on time and within budget in Chicago. If only we could do more of them.
What a weekend. I mean, for the world; for me, yesterday included vacuuming the house and my car, and taking Cassie on 2½ hours of walks plus sitting outside at Begyle to get pats from random strangers. (To be clear, Cassie got random pats; I did not.)
We started at Horner Park:
And stopped briefly at Burning Bush, where Cassie was under the table even before I got my beer:
I had some stuff about the political events over the weekend, but I'll put that off until later.
Organizers estimate 75,000 people marched in downtown Chicago yesterday, joining groups in 2,000 other cities and towns across the country to protest against the OAFPOTUS's illegal and immoral actions since taking office:
While the big-city rallies attracted the attention and the cameras, smaller events were organized in rural areas, including three dozen in Indiana, a state Mr. Trump won last November by 19 points.
In Dallas, another stronghold of Mr. Trump’s support, crowds of protesters stretched across a wide street for at least five blocks. The Houston protest looked more like a block party, with dances to Mexican music and cool-offs in a fountain.
Meanwhile, in Washington, the OAFPOTUS celebrated his birthday in the classic style of Soviet-bloc dictators by hijacking the US Army's 250th anniversary celebration with a tank parade across the city:
The festivities were a rapid escalation of the fairly modest affair the Army had initially envisioned when they first filed a permit request with the National Park Service last June. The parade component, specifically, was added to existing birthday plans this year. The president has long mused about a display of soldiers and tanks on the streets of the capital with aircraft overhead but backed off the idea in 2018 amid pushback from the Army and D.C. officials over exorbitant costs and the damage tanks might cause to roads.
While the Army estimates Saturday’s spectacle will cost the branch $25 million to $45 million, the cost to the city, and potentially the entire government, remained unclear as the parade roared into action. The Army agreed to foot the bill for any damage to local streets, and in an effort to reduce impact, they reinforced parts of the route with metal plates and outfitted vehicles with new rubber track pads.
Many commentators remembered the President Eisenhower's thoughts on having a huge military parade to counter the Soviets: "For us to try to imitate what the Soviets are doing in Red Square would make us look weak."
The OAFPOTUS has weakened us. Two thousand cities and millions of Americans told him that yesterday.
I just finished 3½ hours of nonstop meetings that people crammed into my calendar because I have this afternoon blocked off as "Summer Hours PTO." Within a few minutes of finishing my last meeting, I rebooted my laptop (so it would get updated), closed the lid, and...looked at a growing pile of news stories that I couldn't avoid:
- Dan Rather calls tomorrow's planned Soviet-style military parade through DC a charade: "The military’s biggest cheerleader (at least today) didn’t serve in Vietnam because of 'bone spurs' and has repeatedly vilified our troops, calling them 'suckers and losers,'", Rather reminds us. "But when service members are needed for a photo op or to prop up flagging poll numbers, all is forgiven, apparently."
- Anne Applebaum reminds us of the history of revolutions, and what happens when the revolutionaries get frustrated that the masses don't agree with them (hint: ask Mao or the Bolsheviks.) "The logic of revolution often traps revolutionaries: They start out thinking that the task will be swift and easy. The people will support them. Their cause is just. But as their project falters, their vision narrows. At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier."
- James Fallows praises California governor Gavin Newsom (D) as "the adult in the room" for his response to the OAFPOTUS federalizing the California National Guard.
- Andrew Sullivan draws a straight line between the OAFPOTUS's behavior and an archetypical colonial-era caudillo.
- Timothy Noah, who may have his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, wonders aloud if the OAFPOTUS's incompetence relates somehow to his obsession with weight? (tl;dr: Narcissistic projection.)
- US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) agrees with the OAFPOTUS on only one thing she can think of: the need to abolish the debt ceiling. (I also agree!)
- The US House of Representatives voted 214-212 yesterday to claw back $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting, which particularly imperils NPR stations in Republican districts.
- Slate looks into signs that exurban areas may finally be slowing down their car-centric sprawl as the economics of maintaining all that barely-used infrastructure finally take hold.
Finally, Politico describes the absolute cluster of the Chicago Public Schools refusing to close nearly-empty buildings that, in some cases, cost $93,000 per student to keep open. But don't worry, mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union president and now the least-popular mayor in city history, is on the case!
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Comrade OAFPOTUS! (h/t Paul Krugman)
The music legend has died at 82. Barenaked Ladies popped into my mind when I read the story.
Meanwhile, I've got a meeting in 10 minutes, so let me also add just small note how the OAFPOTUS has affected Chicago. A friend of mine works for Northwestern University, and she is pissed off:
In a message to the Northwestern community, the school’s leadership said the new measures would include a faculty and staff hiring freeze, reductions in academic budgets, and a “0% merit pool with no bonuses in lieu of merit increases,” among other actions.
“Like a number of our peer universities, we have now reached a moment when the University must take a series of cost-cutting measures designed to ensure our institution’s fiscal stability now and into an uncertain future. These are not decisions we come to lightly. The challenges we face are many, some of which have been building for some time and some of which are new,” the message said.
Other cost-cutting measures include modifications to the health insurance program and additional non-personnel budget reductions. The school said more information on each of the actions would be coming in the days and weeks ahead.
I'd also point out my agreement with Josh Marshall on how states like Illinois and California, by being net contributors to the Federal budget, are essentially funding the war on themselves.
We've got 19 more months of this shit, folks.
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.
Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it.
Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist:
- Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of the National Guard] during the Civil Rights Era were over the refusal of segregationist state governments to enforce federal law under court order. Trump’s argument is...[that] the President [has the right] to decide when a state government isn’t protecting or enforcing civil order to his liking and to intervene with federalized National Guard or the U.S. military to do it at the point of a bayonet. ... The crisis the administration insisted it needed to solve was a crisis of the administration’s creation."
- Philip Bump puts the encroaching fascism in broader context: "What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. ... The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel...."
- The Guardian highlights how Chicago has led the way in resisting the OAFPOTUS's xenophobic mass-deportation program, as part of our long history of respecting immigrant rights.
- Anne Applebaum looks at last week's election in Poland and feels a chill that "every election is now existential."
- Lisa Schwarzbaum, a former film critic for Entertainment Weekly, likens the OAFPOTUS's style of governing to Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom."
- Ezra Klein expresses surprise at who has objected the most to the recommendations in his recent book Abundance, and the left-wing emphasis on messaging: "Democrats aren’t struggling primarily because they choose the wrong messages. They’re struggling because they fail to solve problems. ... [Brandon] Johnson is the most proudly left-wing big-city mayor in the country. ... He’s also the least popular big-city mayor in the country and may well end up as the least popular mayor in Chicago’s history. Policy failure breeds political failure."
- Oh, by the way, Meta and Yandex have started to de-anonymize your Android device by abusing how your Internet browser works.
Finally, a community group on the Northwest Side has launched an effort to build a 5-km rails-to-trails plus greenway project to connect the Bloomingdale Trail with the North Branch Trail. This would create a direct connection between the southern flank of Lincoln Park and the Chicago Botanic Garden in suburban Glencoe. It's still early days, though. I'd love to see this in my lifetime. I'm also waiting for electrified railroads around Chicago, but this project would be a lot cheaper.
Pro tip: Get to Ribfest as soon as possible after it opens. Cassie and I arrived exactly at noon yesterday, allowing me to score three 3-bone samplers in just 45 minutes.
Here, too, where I expect the lines would be a block long by 2pm:
In the end, Cassie had a really good afternoon—at least until she went to sleep-away camp because of my concert:
I sense ribs in my future today as well. And very likely a 5 km walk either coming or going from Ribfest. Sadly, we won't get there exactly at noon, because I have some errands to run before then. As long as we get home before it starts raining...
Lunch today will be a sampler of ribs from the first vendor at Ribfest that looks appealing. Then Cassie goes to sleep-away camp and I go to a performance call in Glenview at 3pm. So tune in tomorrow morning for the first rib report.