Events

At a friend's prompting, I spelunked through a bunch of old Garmin tracks that I recorded in the aughts when I did a lot of road biking. I used to put a lot of the stats online, too, but that ended in 2007 when I switched braverman.org entirely to this blog. Anyway, I uploaded some of the tracks to my Garmin account, and now I want to go for a very long bike ride of the type I used to do before my knees told me not to. For example, my longest rides of 2006 (120 km) and 2007 (128 km) were both in...

I've gotten some progress on the feature update, and the build pipeline is running now, so I will take a moment to read all of these things: Radley Balko looks at the creation of what looks a lot like the OAFPOTUS's Waffen-Shutzstaffel and says we've lost the debate on police militarization: "In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it." Linda Greenhouse condemns the...

I have to finish a feature today, and had a ton of meetings yesterday, which is why I missed posting yesterday. If I finish the feature before it gets dark I may even read a bunch of stuff that has piled up in my browser. Until then...

Economist Paul Krugman started what has become a 7-part overview of inequality in the United States: how it started, how it's going, and how it has corrupted our politics to an extent not seen since the 1890s: Between World War II and the 1970s income disparities in America were relatively narrow. Some people were rich and many were poor, but overall inequality among Americans in terms of wealth, income and status was low enough that the country had a sense of shared prosperity. Things are very...

As everyone should know by now, everything the OAFPOTUS or anyone around him does is in the service of self-enrichment. We can include "enriching friends" as well. And in the grand tradition of privatizing things that government absolutely does better than industry, it looks like the Administration intends to cripple the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) so their friends can start making rents from the vital functions it performs. Enter Neil Jacobs, nominated to head NOAA, who...

Starting today's link round-up is a report that Deerfield, Ill.—based Walgreens Boots (the pharmacists/chemists, not footwear) shareholders have voted to sell out to a private-equity firm, which no doubt will destroy the company to extract every morsel of short-term value from it. Oh, well, the local CVS is closer than the local Walgreens. In other fun news: Josh Barro hypothesizes that Democrats will actually have trouble running on the recently-passed Republican tax bill because of the timing and...

Short lifespans have plagued tech more in the last 25 years than at any point in the past. I particularly hate when a bit of tech goes obsolete for no reason other than the manufacturer decided it doesn't want to support it anymore. I want to take the CEO by the lapels and remind them that they sold these products and they had better support them for a while. Belkin has become the latest company to exit a product line that I have used practically since it came out. They announced today that they will...

It took several hours after the Gila River started rising for a general alert to go out. This doesn't appear to be anyone's fault so much as the way the alert system works, which is why a bill recently proposed in the Texas legislature would provide much-needed money to upgrade the system. Unfortunately for Texans who live near rivers, Republicans in the state house killed the bill in the most recent legislative session. New York State has a similar problem. The Dept of Homeland Security just cancelled...

On this day 100 years ago, John Scopes went on trial for the crime of teaching a “theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals:” On July 10, the Monkey Trial got underway, and within a few days hordes of spectators and reporters had descended on Dayton as preachers set up revival tents along the city’s main street to keep the faithful stirred up. Inside the Rhea County Courthouse, the defense...

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...