7/8/2021

My Dear Friend & POTUS, JRB,

            Did you enjoy your visit to IL yesterday? I loved seeing the footage of you & Rep Lauren Underwood in the childcare center. Isn’t McHenry County College great? Particularly impressive is the training students are getting to work at employee-owned Scot Forge to make forged rings out of molten steel.

            It’s great that your Justice Department is trying to help Chicago authorities to disrupt the flow of illegal guns into the city to reduce the number of shootings there. I know Mayor Lightfoot (LL) would appreciate that.

            LL has more problems than most big city mayors. Today’s NYT had a feature about the water level fluctuations in Lake Michigan that threaten the foundations of buildings & create havoc in their storm water management system. An author in 1898 called the Chicago River a “stupendous piece of blasphemy against nature” & with climate change it cannot always drain Chicago’s dirty water into the Mississippi.

Hopefully the free tuition at McHenry will entice many budding engineers to learn calculus & physics so they can get busy designing new systems to deal with crazy lake levels. I hope your infrastructure plan includes some help for folks on Chicago’s Southside which suffers more than most neighborhoods when it rains a lot.

            Did you hear that Telenor, the Norwegian company, has sold its Myanmar mobile phone business to a Lebanese billionaire? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? What do your people think?

            As you talk about the Afghan drawdown today, please figure out a way to evacuate all of the people who helped us while we were there.

            BYBS,