Events

Detroit has just filed for the biggest municipal bankruptcy in history: The filing begins a 30- to 90-day period that will determine whether the city is eligible for Chapter 9 protection and define how many claimants might compete for the limited settlement resources that Detroit has to offer. The bankruptcy petition would seek protection from creditors and unions who are renegotiating $18.5 billion in debt and other liabilities. Detroit’s bankruptcy is by far the largest of its kind in U.S. history, in...

Security guru Bruce Schneier suggests Snowden might not have considered all the likely outcomes: Edward Snowden has set up a dead man's switch. He's distributed encrypted copies of his document trove to various people, and has set up some sort of automatic system to distribute the key, should something happen to him. Dead man's switches have a long history, both for safety (the machinery automatically stops if the operator's hand goes slack) and security reasons. WikiLeaks did the same thing with the...

The Met issues a heat warning as London experiences its fifth consecutive day of 30°C weather? Nope. Heathrow will finally get a third runway, with new plans submitted this week? Nope. The Queen has given her assent to a law making same-sex marriage legal in England and Wales? Yep: The Queen's approval of the Marriage (same sex couples) Bill was a formality, and now clears the way for the first gay marriages, the first of which are expected to be conducted by Summer 2014. The bill enables gay couples to...

At 10th Magnitude, we have used Beanstalk as our central code repository. We transitioned to Mercurial about a year ago, which Beanstalk supported. Today they sent around an email saying they're ceasing Mercurial support—including existing repositories—on September 30th, and would we care to switch to Git? No. No, no, no. No Git. I'm not asking people to learn another damn version control system. (Plus Git doesn't quite suit us.) But fortuitously, this forced re-evaluation of Beanstalk coincides with a...

No, not more modern Pinkertons, repeating bad policy from the 1880s. This time we're repeating ancient Rome's mistakes, a parallel Atlantic writers Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane draw out: Before their empire fell, the Romans built walls. They began by erecting barriers along the border following the death of the Emperor Trajan in 117 A.D., notably Hadrian's Wall, which belted Britain. Later emperors erected internal walls, even around the great city itself, to ward off barbarians. After 300 A.D., the...

Today begins baseball's All-Star break, with the All-Star Game tomorrow in New York and 2/3 of the season behind us in purgatory. Despite yesterday's 10-6 loss to St. Louis, the Cubs have improbably won 14 of their last 21 games, bringing them nearer .500 than at any point since the fifth game of the season back on April 6th, ending the first half of the season at 42-51 (.452): So after 93 games, with 69 left to play, the Cubs are in 4th place, 4½ games away from a winning season, but unfortunately 10...

One of Josh Marshall's readers says Florida's self-defense rules are insane: I’m a criminal defense lawyer in Wisconsin... In Florida, if self-defense is even suggested, it’s the state's obligation to prove its absence beyond a reasonable doubt(!). That’s crazy. But ‘not guilty’ was certainly a reasonable result in this case. As I told in friend in Tampa today though, if you’re ever in a heated argument with anyone, and you’re pretty sure there aren’t any witnesses, it’s always best to kill the other...

After adding 25 original braverman.org posts from May 1998 yesterday, this morning I added another 32 posts from June and July, including a review of an Antigone Rising performance I saw at the Bitter End when they were first starting out. It's a little trippy.

The Spectralia theater company gave their fifth performance of Comedy of Errors yesterday at Touhy Park, Chicago. Don Johnson's adaptation clocks in at 90 minutes and zips along through Shakespeare's farce of two sets of identical twins who meet for the first time at the end of the play. Yesterday's Chicago weather could not have been better for the Mary-Kate Arnold as the Courtezan: Don Johnson, the adapter, playing Doctor Pinch: The cast:

After a short experiment yesterday at lunch, in which I put up three original braverman.org posts from 1998, I've added all the content from May 1998. A couple of things came up during this process: 1. dasBlog, whose open-source project has ceased active development, won't display any of the entries for a particular day if any one of them has any errors in its HTML. That is really annoying. 2. In frustration, I started looking for other blog engines, and came upon Orchard. I'm intrigued. The extension...