Events

I don't often use profanity on this blog, but this morning I am moved to call the Iowa Democratic Party's leaders a bunch of fucking morons. Last night we saw the results of the IDP picking "fast" and "cheap" for critical infrastructure in the most important election cycle in a generation. Now the national Party will go into New Hampshire with a black eye and no end of razzing from the Tweeter in Chief. It's not just that the IDP chose "fast and cheap" instead of, you know, "good." It's also that...

Both O'Hare and Midway set temperature records yesterday: 11°C at O'Hare and 12°C at Midway. Which we can all agree was a much more pleasant day than 2 February 2011.

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Today is 2020-02-02, which is 02/02/2020 in the U.S. and 02.02.2020 in Europe. There's a thing going around the Internet today that this is the first time in 909 years that both ways of representing dates have been palindromes on the same date. They put the previous instance as 01/01/1010. Unfortunately that's not true. This has never happened before, for a few reasons: Representing dates as a string of numbers only started, as far as I can tell, in the mid-19th century. As recently as the middle of the...

Started at Revolution Brewing Balmoral, Chicago

2019 adaptation

(Asking for a friend.) Because today she flayed Alan Dershowitz's laughable argument about presidential power by laughing at it: The will of the voters found its highest and best expression in the election of President Trump, and anything that seems likely to remove him from power or even just inconvenience him a little goes against their will. If the Founders had wanted it to be possible to legitimately remove from office a president the people had selected, they would have made three equal branches of...

At midnight Central European Time about five hours from now (23:00 UTC), the United Kingdom will no longer be a European Union member state. It will take years to learn whether the bare-majority of voters in the UK who wanted this were right or wrong. My guess: a bit of both, but more wrong than right. It will also take years to fully understand why the developed world collectively decided to throw out the institutions that brought us the longest period of peace and economic growth in the history of the...

We conclude January 2020 in Chicago having 16 out of 31 days (including today) with no visible sun, tying the all-time record of 9 consecutive days without sun set on 9 January 1992. We've had only 24% of possible sunlight this month, making this the third-gloomiest January on record after 1998 (20%) and 2011 (23%). But this is really just a consequence of our unusually mild winter. Since December 1st, we've had 46 out of 60 days above freezing, and only 6 days below -10°C. And mercifully, the forecast...