It's hot outside. Summer is here. I hope this blog is the best source of interesting news and perspective that informs and delights you.

Watching

HACKS

Oh my god, are you watching Hacks yet? I have had no idea when new episodes come out so have been in this lovely delayed binge watching cycle with this show, which is so funny and fun.

Dan Licata is a frequent collaborator of Joe Pera, his one-time high school classmate. I really enjoyed this special, where Licata takes one of his most classic stand-up bits -that he is still a high school student - to its logical end: by performing on stage at his high school to an audience of 15-year-old boys. Last Donut of the Night, a fellow Ghost.io publication, published a nice companion interview that goes into how the special was filmed with and around an audience of literal children.

Reading

Chicago

I have seen lots of praise for this long-form, woven interview on the making of Millennium Park. Mike Thomas, the interviewer-in-chief for Chicago Magazine, takes on a slate of 15 big wigs to capture an interesting moment in time for the city - when Millennium Park was dreamt and drawn and built up from empty railyard lots into a world-class park.

In stark contrast to the popular perspectives you find outside of the Downtown Business Community (like in the Mayor's office these days), this piece flashes us back to a time when the Downtown business types still very much ran Chicago. When D*ley the younger marshaled the Chicago Machine into action, it began with a young Park District lawyer (now senior partner at white-shoe Jenner & Block) teaming up with the city's Law Department to sue the Illinois Central Railroad for control of the land that now houses the Bean. It's hard to imagine this basic level of coordination in Chicago city government happening today.

Blair Kamin, former architecture critic for the Tribune (when it was still a real paper), is interviewed - his Pulitzer-awarded reporting on the issues of Chicago's lakefront in 1998, Grant Park in particular, may have pushed the other actors at play towards the grand vision of Millennium Park that we know today. But it's curious to me how incomplete the solution to the problems is - how car-centric and deserted much of Grant Park remains today, and how the Lakefront remains sharply divided by the racial and economic geographies in Chicago. Not to mention DSLSD - the lakefront highway was in the news this week as alderpeople push back on IDOT plans for the highway.

In this story, Millennium Park is hailed as a great success by its makers, all of whom have either maintained their great fortunes and power, or made their own in the 20 years since the parks completion. But it came at the cost of the expenses demanded by the CBD folk: that Chicago and the State's larger problems go unaddressed, and that investments in the city be distributed unfairly (in a way that benefits outlying, wealthy suburban communities over city residents, or even just Friends of the Machine who Own Trucks) while the costs are kept local.

Of the people interviewed for this piece, few are truly tied to Chicago and the park that they built here. None of them ever have to catch the train at Millennium Station, nor do they peruse the calendar of free events at the bandshell. They don't save up to attend Suenos or Lolla. They came, they saw, they conquered, and they left. They may one day be buried in Chicago, but these are people who do not relish, or even understand in some cases, an ordinary life in Chicago, and their legacy in the Park reflects this. It is a memorial to the period of tremendous inequality we live in, where those staring down a needles-eye pathway into heaven have inscribed their names in stone and steel.

Speaking of a flawed legacy left by the D*ley family, the appropriately evil-named Professor Judge Glock (seriously, real name and title) of the also appropriately evil-named Manhattan Institute, lays out the negative case for Chicago: huge debts and expenses (pensions), bad bets on revenue (Bally's Casino baby!!!), and mismanagement ranging from the indictable actions of the D&ley crime family:

"Many of the city’s current debt problems originate with reckless spending by Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of the legendary Mayor Richard J. Daley) in the early part of this century. The basic tenet of long-term municipal debt is that it should be issued only to create long-term capital improvements, such as roads or bridges. Yet the Chicago Tribune analyzed $10 billion of general obligation bonds issued during the younger Daley’s tenure and found that $3 billion went to such things as legal expenses and maintenance—often in contravention of IRS rules that prohibit using tax-exempt bonds for such short-term expenditures. In one case, the city used tax-exempt bonds to provide back pay to police officers. It was using bonds not to pay future or even present costs, but past ones."

All the way to what the goons at the Manhattan Institute see as today's unwillingness by the city to screw over pensioners, fire everybody except the cops and lawyers, roll over, and let creditors pat its belly.

I need to note that the Manhattan Institute is a voice-piece for the Republican party, an institution dedicated to the hollowing-out of America and cities like Chicago and the entire world. They don't believe you should have any sort of safety net, they think you should say please and thank you when cops harass you based on the color of your skin, and they believe we should drill for fossil fuels until there are none left. They are the party most in favor of letting millions of people suffer climate catastrophe so a few people can take private jets everywhere until they die like the rest of us, just older, and the Manhattan Institution helps promote this.

I came across this article by way of Patrick Mackenzie / @patio11 on Twitter. He's a software developer/smart guy who moved from Illinois to Japan and now recently back to Illinois. His uncritical parroting of this article reflects his rationalist "we've got to be better at balancing these books" politic and its underlying conservative foundations (he is no lefty loon like me). I think there is broad agreement that the system for funding Chicago as it currently works is fundamentally broken. Why it is broken and how it should be fixed is what everybody is fighting over. The conservatives will tell you, from mansions and super-yachts: ordinary people have done nothing to deserve the privileges they enjoy, guaranteed to them by the work of nobler smarter people, and should either shape up, or be forced to leave society/die. Leftists will tell you it's more of a "each their capabilities, to each their needs" type deal, which rich people funding the Manhattan Institute really, really hate.

I think one particular sticking point in America is disagreement about what is culturally allow-able behavior, which in many ways is a disagreement rooted in racism, which is less of an issue for Japanese people in Japan. I hope Patio11 can reflect on his experience as a foreigner navigating Japan's complex legal/banking systems to have compassion for poor and/or non-white people in America, who face similar language/culture barriers just trying to survive and live decent lives in this country, but who also saddle far more of the burden of problems that Chicago's debt can or will cause than everyone else (himself included).

How do you make money as a police officer in Chicago? Let me count the ways. First, get hired and stay on the job for 18 months. Congratulations, you now make $86k/year, not including benefits (uniform stipend, tuition, training, healthcare, retirement, home purchase allowance, access to side gigs, etc). Boost your pay by volunteering to join special units or assignments, butt-kissing superiors, and otherwise working the system to get assigned primo overtime hours. Then, work on the side as private security at a bar. Still not enough? Steal some guns, money, and drugs from people by flashing your badge.

Tom Schuba writes up in the Sun-Times the latest in the fallout of this COPA investigation spurred by a civilian's complaint after officers stopped her, took a gun from her, and then later unbeknownst to the original owner, claimed they recovered the same gun from the location of a ShotSpotter alert a mile away. This led to the uncovering of a pattern of doing this gun snag-gun plant scam, as well as just stealing things from people, by the officers. The lawyered-up officers have been put on the chopping block by Supt. Snelling - a rare occurrence for a department that hates to fire officers. It's taken 3 years for this misconduct to be determined fire-able, and it will take longer still while the officers fight their dismissal in the courts.

This "policing" is spurred by pressure from superiors to generate positive metrics like "weapons seized" or "positive community interactions". Superiors rely on introducing and gaming metrics like these as a substitute for doing any hard work to come up with strategies and tactics that serve the ultimate mission. Driving officers to seize weapons has resulted in unconstitutional policing of minorities via "traffic stop-and-frisk" tactics in Chicago, and it's ineffective.

Today, gun possession is one of the only crimes Chicago Police care about - because it's an easy, open and shut crime to solve, charge, and prosecute. Guy had gun who was not allowed to have gun, bing bang boom UUW case, probation. But guns are everywhere today, and focusing our attention on everyone who is breaking the rules by having one is actually distracting our police from solving the deadly shootings this tactic is supposed to prevent.

The CPD can't reasonably do anything to stop the flow of millions of guns being sold each year, thousands of which flow into Chicago in legitimate and illegitimate ways, as this flow is propped up federally by a loose coalition of America's enemies both foreign and domestic who want to doom our nation to an accelerated destruction. Pretending that they can stem this by just doing more traffic stops is a waste of everyone's time. We have federal problems causing federal crimes in Chicago that get dropped at the feet of a bloated, corrupt city police department that until recently swept all misconduct deep under the rug (and is now paying the price).

Stopping gun crime would instead require work to make communities more resilient against the drivers of gun violence, like poverty and drugs. And to provide distance for current offenders and victims from the circumstances that result in shootings. Instead, we are committed as a nation to continuing to fight a doomed War on Drugs that criminalizes poor communities and would rather spend millions to prosecute and incarcerate people instead of investing even a fraction of that cost in crime prevention.

Ever committed to doing the wrong thing, former Chicago Police head David Brown introduced the overtime-intensive "scarecrow" policing tactic. "When will our national nightmare be over" tourists and residents alike would wonder as they walked Michigan Avenue in the blinking blue light of a CPD cruiser parked in the median outside the John Hancock building. Inside, a cop, maybe working seven days a week, was being paid somewhere between 1 and 1.5 times their usual rate to look at their phone until forced to do something else.

You can make an extra $250k - a quarter of a million dollars on top of your normal salary - from overtime in the Chicago Police Department. We've created a monster of a pay system that incentivizes our police department to keep positions unfilled and work undone to justify spending insane money on the people who find ways to stick around.

Scarecrow cop cars failed to prevent notable and embarrassing crimes from happening on the stretch of North Michigan Avenue I most frequently saw them parked at. The Canada Goose store, and others, were smashed into by organized theft groups. A retired Northern Trust employee got beat up and later died last year at 4 in the afternoon. A rapper was executed in broad daylight. It felt to me like we were paying cops to sit around in the wrong places, at the wrong times, doing the wrong things to prevent crime. Who was it good for? The cops who were soaking up overtime pay sure seemed okay with it. The Chief proclaimed it was good and necessary, and the city's leadership fell in line with it.

The Chicago Police Department is a budgeted huge sum of money on a spreadsheet with an accompanying calendar of primo jobs. Do not let the people who work there tell you they don't love working there. They like Chicago for the same reasons you do - it's a beautiful, giant place to live, with great people and history and schools and parks. They love to be helicopter pilots, boat police, SWAT officers, big wig police captains, and regular beat cops in the greatest city in the world. The city has to recognize this, and that the giant money spigot is in its hands, and rein in this department from its profligate ways.

In more positive news, the story of a secret warehouse in Romeoville where the world's finest mangos meet. Ahmed Ali Akbar of the Tribune writes a sequel to his award winning piece for Eater in 2021 on the complicated way great fruit finds its way around the world to immigrants who know the difference. Did you even know there were so many varieties of mango? That it is the national fruit of Pakistan, India, and the Phillipines, and national tree of Bangladesh? The world is filled to the brim with incredible beauty and wonder and magic. Even Romeoville.

Illinois

In Rockford, ProPublicans Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen cover a big lawsuit by the National Center for Youth Law and the MacArthur Justice Center vs. the Rockford School District, alleging a pattern over years of the school giving tickets to black kids while letting white kids off the hook.

ProPublicans Molly Parker and Beth Hundsdorfer cover the broken process in Illinois child welfare practice wherein kids are taken out of school by their parents, and no one checks up on them again until something truly horrible is going on. They literally fall through the cracks, as referrals for help get sent into the trash folders of email inboxes.

Illinois' child welfare issues are a bright stain on Gov. J.B. Pritzker's record as he eyes higher political aspirations. DCFS in Illinois has been underfunded for decades and remains under an Acting Director. Its issues have been widely reported on, and persist.

National

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2024/american-indian-boarding-schools-history-legacy/

Speaking of child welfare issues. Putting this reporting on the front page got the editor-in-chief of the Washington Post fired by its new slimy conservative CEO.

In medical racism news, white doctors arbitrarily decided black people would have lower spirometer readings than other races, and this formula has continued unabated to present day. Only recently has race as a variable in medical formulas relating to organ function been challenged, and this article covers the shift that is happening as these racially-biased formulas get unwound. Black veterans have been denied disability benefits worth more than a billion dollars.

Abortion, Every Day, is an amazing publication by Jessica Valenti, long-time prominent spokesperson for women's rights. Here, she tears apart the nonsensical, anti-science beliefs of the Republican's current abortion expert.

"Francis believes: Children should be forced to give birth. Women should be forced to carry nonviable pregnancies to term. Abortion is never necessary to save women’s lives. Women with life-threatening pregnancies should be forced into vaginal labor or c-sections, even before viability. Certain kinds of birth control are actually abortions"

Outlawing abortion is a medical farce. It is one of the great shames of the Catholic church to continue to endorse these deeply anti-woman beliefs in the face of medical science. It's as bonkers as saying that Earth is the center of the universe, and we cannot let people who are this distantly removed from the science continue to shape our healthcare system.

Crazy reporting on a scam ran by a shady music industry marketing bozo to scam aspiring artists out of money in exchange for extremely half-assed or totally fake promotion from a roster of B and C-tier music names.

This may actually be the most horrible thing you read in this entire blog. David Dayen, a stand-up comedian and stand-up reporter, digs into the modern phenomenon of Personalized Pricing. People who sell you things are happy to screw you over for a couple extra bucks, no surprise there, but now we are so surveilled and isolated when we buy things we can be screwed over like never before.

This article really made me worry about people in my parent's generation. How can you possibly be expected to know what the right price to pay for a gift for your grandkid is? If you aren't an insider or lack the skills/funds to competitively source the goods you want to buy (you are competing with billionaires who can buy products they need wholesale and sell them at inflated retail prices to you) - good luck!

A Staggering Tally: Supreme Court Justices Accepted Hundreds of Gifts Worth Millions of Dollars - Fix the Court

Following the groundbreaking reporting from ProPublica and other outlets, FTC ventured to compile all the SCOTUS gifts, found a few unreported ones Ahead of tomorrow’s expected release of the justices’ financial disclosure reports, Fix the Court today is unveiling a list of the gifts the justices have received over the years, and the numbers are […]

Fix the CourtGabe Roth

This reporting by political advocacy group Fix the Court details the gifts received by Supreme Court justices throughout their tenures on the court. You can find the data here. In Bohemian Grove news, Clarence Thomas has been flown out and put up in the woods by those Californian redwood lovers multiple times. To do what? That's for him to know, and me to find out. When I get in. By not being gay. Even a little. All in all, this feels like the conclusion to the Democratic party "fix the supreme court" discussion: We can't make the court bigger, but maybe we can get Thomas to resign instead. There, ya happy?

International

Incredible story, excerpted from a forthcoming book, by Joseph Cox (one of the preeminent technology/crime reporters), of an FBI sting that ensnared international drug traffickers.

We like Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Big Con, don't we folks? Here she digs a knife at one of consultants most precious babies: AI. Is AI the solution to all of our problems? Maybe some of them! It's definitely a solution to the problem AI chip makers, data center builders, and consultants all have: how can we get more money more faster? But this causes a problem: how do we power all of this AI??

Mazzucato smartly recognizes we have but one small planet to call our own, so maybe polluting it as fast as possible is bad, and so maybe committing ourselves to the most polluting ways of existing is bad. The Manhattan Institute is telling your lawmakers we will never be able to switch to green energy because we need these data centers so badly we must build more natural-gas power plants to keep up with demand (Uh, is that so? Maybe you know someone who has some natural gas to sell us?).

In Health Alert news: Bird Flu is coming. It doesn't look like we have much of a handle on it right now. Until we do, maybe consider buying masks while they are cheap. We already have a death in Mexico from a bird flu strain we haven't seen in humans before. Buy Zoom stock, or whatever you think will shoot up when this gets bad.

Worried about a new pandemic? Me too. It doesn't help that Covid hasn't gone anywhere. In fact, it seems like we are on the brink of a new health crisis as long-Covid complications creep up on us. This interview between two Institute for New Economic Thinking super-pundits (INET is one of those high-society Soros-funded non-profits with so many PHDs it would make your head spin) details the current Covid situation, as new variants bounce up while testing has been scaled back.

"I should point out that there are, in fact, places that have installed all of these: fresh air, filtering, and germicidal UV lights. Do you know where they are?

LP: Where?

PA: The White House, Congress, Number 10 Downing, Parliament, the Reichstag, and WHO. All of our leaders have these protections and procedures in place.

LP: But not our schoolchildren.

PA: Well, the school where [former CDC director] Rochelle Walensky’s children go, they have these upgrades.

Hearing

I've been following the journey of ZENtheRapper since the beginning, by which I mean I used to give my friend Donte Winslow a ride to tennis practice. Those were good times, when we listened to Chance the Rapper's Acid Rap on CD a few songs at a time on our way to and from a high school we each felt alienated from. We both went on to attend the University of Illinois, and went our separate ways. Both of us, I think, wanted to branch out and away from who we were in high school, and both of us ran head-first into difficulties at the U of I - a place that was a promised land of opportunity but had way higher stakes and many more traps and pitfalls waiting for me than I was ready to handle.

ZENtheRapper's music blends the mystical, historical, philosophical roots of his intellectual practice with his experiences into a unique brand of hip-hop that is truly his own. These days, in addition to making music, he's creating community for artists and inspiring youth - making the world a better place with his energy.

Listening to ZEN is like seeing a butterfly, or maybe more accurately a dragonfly - an awe-inspiring child of nature that has metamorphosed himself from the person I once drove with to school to the person he is today. You can hear more from him on his recently-launched Substack: https://zentherapper.substack.com/

This is like one of the articles I write about but in audio form, so it can go in this section! Did you know the ATF had a long-running program of creating fake "stash houses" and then enticing people to join undercover agents in robbing them? And then prosecuting these people for their "crimes" as though they had some part in inventing these situations? Alison Siegler and Erica Zunkel of the University of Chicago Federal Criminal Justice Clinic detail their efforts to get these cases dismissed.

Thinking

Did you know my beautiful girlfriend also writes a blog? She writes really fun stuff and has a website you can read it on!

June 9 Edish

Summer blog!! Hacks, Dan Licata, Millennium Park, Chicago's debt, CPD misdeeds, ProPublica roundup, personal pricing, bird flu, ZENtheRapper, and more!