Ian Pelz

Some Thoughts On Richard Nickel and Historic Preservation, by @chi_geek "I cannot believe the Art Institute is even considering relocating it. The room is significant not only to Chicago’s architectural history, but also the institution’s own history. We cannot take this space for granted; we must save it! "The Chicago Stock Exchange, one of the finest examples of the First Chicago School of Architecture, was fully rented and the center of a huge preservation battle but was still torn in down in 1972. "It’s just another sad chapter in the life and legacy of Richard Nickel. Although I have a feeling if he was still with us, Richard wouldn’t be surprised at this latest development. "A year before his death, he wrote, “Ah, the world gets weaker and weaker, dumber and dumber. The good people get knocked off, the good buildings get smashed, the lofty values wither.” "Call me a cynic, but I could not agree more as the city and its cultural institutions continue to fail us. "If you’d like to sign the petition to save the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room, please add your signature here." open.substack.com/pub/chicagolan… change.org/p/stop-the-dem… photo credit: Eric Allix Roger

I’ve made a mix game vlog! Linked in my reply.

We are enthusiastically willing to pay TSA workers today, and we will keep trying, but the sticking point is that Republicans want to attach ICE funding to it. We are not in agreement about ICE, but I don’t think workers and travelers should have to wait for an ICE deal.

$25,000. No risk. The 2nd annual CSG March Madness Partner Freeroll is live! No buy-in. Fully funded. Real payouts. Just our network competing for $25,000. To join the madness next year, Dm's are open, we’re always looking for quality partners. #MarchMadness

Vouch.

@ThePokerBoss @GambleOnPoker I got my hand killed in a stud tournament when I 1st started playing because I fanned my 7 cards together and found a winner. I think my opponent was a giant douche for invoking the rule, but the rule is there to prevent cheating and it's his right to potentially protect himself.

@ThePokerBoss @GambleOnPoker High limit cash games are a different ecosystem. They naturally self police. That's why they can selectively enforce procedural rules. Rules also exist for a reason, which @GambleOnPoker gave a great example of. Public tournaments are exactly where they should be enforced.

Ruling Scenario – Seven Card Stud: Showdown. Player A has four diamonds showing. He turns over one down card, revealing the Jack of diamonds for a flush. His other two down cards remain unexposed. Player B tables all seven cards and shows Aces and Four. Two pair. Player A mistakenly believes he sees a full house. He takes his five exposed cards, the flush, turns them face down onto the two unexposed hole cards, and mucks all seven. Now what? Who wins the pot? Does the exposed flush play? Or does the muck kill the hand completely?

I'm a diehard Broncos fan, but I'm here to ask Mother Nature why she hates the Broncos. The facts: -60°+ every regular season home game -10%+ of Denver's winter snow fell in the 2nd half of AFC title game -Snow stuck right after the Pats' FG -Hasn't snowed since (25 days) Why.

@Barry_Carter Someday, the (checks notes) sponsored pro and author will get good enough at low stakes MTTs to look past them and appreciate the beauty of mixed games.

Tough shit if you couldn’t handle fifteen minutes of Bad Bunny. I’ve had to sit through @phil_hellmuth’s Main Event entrances for like, fifty years.

@WPT Bring it back!

fun fact: there was once a televised @WPT Limit Hold'em Championship 😅

Some thoughts, after sitting and digesting for 24 hours: Renee Good was 37 years old. The mother of three children. A poet. A wife. A woman — a human being — is needlessly dead. For me, this is most of what matters. At the same time, this shooting provokes genuine political and legal debates, and it’s my job to start with them, even on days like today when that feels increasingly difficult. As preventable as her death was, it was also bound to happen. This is the totally horrific, tragic, obvious outcome of enforcing immigration laws this way. And it was predictable. It was so predictable that I actually predicted it. Right after Trump was elected, I warned, multiple times, that mass deportation efforts will lead to civil disobedience and clashes with law enforcement. After the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, I warned that confrontations with immigration officials were getting dangerous and would inevitably end with a major violent event that would then be used to justify more law enforcement being deployed. On X, I shared clips of confrontations between citizens and ICE and warned that they were incredibly dangerous, stressing that most people would react defensively if they saw someone dressed like this trying to arrest their neighbor. This is America. Distrusting government force is in our national DNA. Heavily armed, masked federal agents with unclear levels of police authority and training cannot reasonably expect to just traipse through our neighborhoods as if they were war zones, kicking down doors or descending from helicopters and snatching people off the streets en masse, and then think everyone will placidly accept it. That (thankfully) is not a circumstance of life we are built to accept. Each tense interaction filmed and posted and dissected in the media makes it increasingly clear that these ICE agents are not prepared for these kinds of confrontations. Trump has put these officers in dangerous positions, demanding a kind of enforcement that is bold, aggressive and confrontational. Interacting in this manner with American citizens and noncitizens alike is not what these officers are trained to do. Of course, this is America, so — also — this incident jumped straight from the phones of observers into the partisan wringer, with everyone lining up on their respective sides with their respective polarized takes. Many Democrats and political observers, particularly but not exclusively on the left, see a woman shot to death while driving away from the masked agents with guns. The president, DHS, and some Republicans in Congress have begun framing Renee Good as a “domestic terrorist” who tried to run over and kill an ICE agent. Some think the situation was simply dangerous enough that an ICE agent could fear for his life and was justified in using force. Reasonable people whom I respect, like National Review’s Andrew McCarthy (under “What the right is saying”), come to this conclusion honestly. And, for better or for worse, I think there is a decent chance our legal system absolves this agent of any wrongdoing. But I have some pushback. First, setting aside the legal question, let’s state plainly that government officials are selling a narrative that is not attached to reality — one that is fundamentally different from what we can all see in the numerous videos available to the public. This event was filmed from several different angles, and it has been broken down at several different speeds, with audio. While I loathe going over the available evidence like it’s instant replay in a football game, I also think this use of force was clearly not necessary — and to make my point most strongly I have to start by playing the game everyone else is. So here is what I can see and hear: Renee Good’s car is in the street. The videos we have show her trying to wave ICE agents past her car as they pull up in a vehicle with police lights flashing. Two ICE agents exit and approach her vehicle, she is told to get out of her car, and she says, audibly, “I’m pulling out.” At least one agent begins yelling at her to get out of her vehicle, while one puts his hand on the driver’s side door. She puts the car in reverse with the two ICE agents on the left side of her, while a third circles around the car to the left-side front. She then drives forward and turns her wheels all the way to the right; the third agent moves to get out of the way and fires a shot through the windshield. One angle appears to show the officer actually leaning on the front of the vehicle as she drives past, and though it’s blurry and from a distance, that video looks as if the car pushes the officer’s body out of the way. As this is happening, the officer has pulled out his weapon and he then discharges it. As Good’s car passes him, he fires two more shots; photos of the vehicle after the event show one bullet hole in the front windshield, making it likely the other shots were through the driver’s side window, which was down. As far as I’m concerned, everything after the guns are fired (the speed of the car, where it goes, etc.) is a moot point, since by then Good has been shot and may have been killed instantly. A man identifying himself as a doctor on scene begged to treat her, but the ICE agents refused to let him, claiming they had their own medics (even though none were visible on the scene in videos shot by eyewitnesses). Did Renee Good make a mistake? Yes, she did. When someone working for law enforcement tells you to do something, barring the most extreme extenuating circumstances, it is a good rule of thumb to do it. Why? Because respecting and listening to law enforcement is the best way to keep yourself safe. Just or unjust (and in this case, I think it is very clearly unjust), this outcome is a distinct possibility when you don’t cooperate. At the same time, Good was not the only person with agency here. Even if we concede that she did not respond to clear orders to get out of her car, that she should not have driven away and that an officer could reasonably construe her actions as a “lethal” threat, hers are not the only actions we should judge. The ICE agents are the ones with the guns and the authority who are supposed to be in control. So let’s talk about their choices. One eyewitness said ICE agents gave Good conflicting instructions, with some telling her to leave while others told her to get out of the car. The video backs this up: You can hear a lot of yelling and barking orders, and the officers aren’t approaching her car with uniform calm, control, and clarity. Also, officers are never supposed to position themselves in front of a vehicle or approach it from the front for precisely this reason. DHS officers are generally prohibited from discharging a firearm at a moving vehicle, unless someone is using their car as a deadly weapon and “no other objectively reasonable means of defense is available.” DHS also has use-of-force rules, which are relatively straightforward and include a baseline “respect for human life” and “the communities we serve,” emphasizing de-escalation tactics as a core component. It seems pretty clear to me from the available video evidence that several of these officers violated each of these rules. The agent who approached her car and grabbed the door handle needlessly escalated the situation. The agent who killed Good positioned himself in front of the vehicle with one hand on the hood and the other on his firearm; he then discharged his weapon into a moving vehicle. As a group, the officers did not display basic respect for human life or the communities they serve, and they did not attempt to de-escalate the situation. Remember, Renee Good looked to be trying to wave the officers past her and said explicitly and clearly, “I’m pulling out” before they surrounded her vehicle and demanded she get out of her car. On a street packed with law enforcement officers and civilians, it would have been safest to allow her to drive past them, then pursue her in their own vehicles if they wanted to detain her. At the risk of speculating too much, I think the videos clearly show that the reaction from the ICE agents scared Good, and she simply tried to leave. The idea that a deadly use of force here is justified seems farcical to me, even for the agent toward the front of the vehicle who was at most risk of being hurt. McCarthy, for his part, argues (emphasis mine) that Good “may not have intended to run him over, but she sure didn’t appear to be trying to avoid running him over if that was necessary to escape.” What I see, actually, is the complete opposite: that she very clearly turned her vehicle away from them. Now, I know people are looking to me for a measured, dispassionate analysis of these contentious debates, but, when I ask myself what should be happening — what appeals to my moral center — I really don't feel conflicted at all. At the end of the day, what are we really debating? ICE shot and killed an American citizen, a 37-year-old mom, whose glove box was stuffed with children’s toys and who — prior to being confronted — at the absolute worst committed the crime of blocking traffic to try to obstruct immigration enforcement. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, one of the things that struck me was that I could see myself in him — a young dad, political commentator, a podcast host, someone who does public events. As a result, I did my best to emphasize his humanity. Here, again, this killing hits home. My wife is a mom in her 30s and a public defender in Philadelphia. In the last few months, some of her clients have been snatched up by ICE while attending scheduled immigration hearings. What if she got caught in the middle, or responded with fear in a way that police viewed as “resisting” or “interfering”; would millions of people jump to the conclusion that she deserved to be killed? For the crime of standing between ICE and an immigrant alleged to be here illegally? These feelings are tough for me to shake. Why did an ICE agent pull his firearm on a 37-year-old American woman who looked like she was trying to leave the scene in her car? What threat did she reasonably pose to them? What immigration enforcement are they conducting in preventing her from leaving? Would we have had a better outcome if they simply let her leave? What are we even doing here? An American citizen has been killed by immigration officers, and for what? Who was made safer? What community benefited? From the very beginning, the idea that masked immigration agents roaming the streets of American cities would be empowered to this degree has been worrisome and frightening, precisely for this reason. They are not adequately trained for these interactions. More to the point, their authority and jurisdiction are, at best, murky in situations like this. They cannot legally detain a U.S. citizen without reasonable suspicion they are in the country illegally. They are not the police. They are not the military. They are not the National Guard. They are not the FBI. Yet they behave like they are all of the above, and are egged on by the president, his cabinet, and members of Congress. Regardless of the minute details, which we could debate and interpret in all kinds of partisan ways, what’s very, very plain to me is that this woman was not a “domestic terrorist” trying to “kill” ICE agents with her car; nor is it a “miracle” they survived (when the video shows not a single one on scene was injured, and the one in the most danger was barely touched by a vehicle moving at a speed of a few miles per hour). These are lies — from the president, from DHS, and from sitting members of Congress. If you believe this account from the government, then we are beyond a Rorschach test on use of force. You are not attached to the reality of this moment. As one neighbor and eyewitness, who self-identified as “right-leaning,” told reporters, “This is not how we’re supposed to be doing things in America.”

Sad day for those Democrats who bought Bill Clinton hats, shoes, watch, cologne, perfume, bible, NFT, crypto, cellphone and guitar.

Can someone in a position of authority on the right please stand up and say this is absolute madness?

I have a guest essay in @nytimes today about autonomous vehicle safety. I wrote it because I’m tired of seeing children die. Done right, we can eliminate car crashes as a leading cause of death in the United States @Waymo recently released data covering nearly 100 million driverless miles. I spent weeks analyzing it because the results seemed too good to be true. 91% fewer serious-injury crashes. 92% less pedestrians hit. 96% fewer injury crashes at intersections. The list goes on. 39,000 Americans died in crashes last year. More than homicide, plane crashes, and natural disasters combined. The #2 killer of children and young adults. The #1 cause of spinal cord injury. We’ve accepted this as the price of mobility. We don’t have to. In medicine, when a treatment shows this level of benefit, we stop the trial early. Continuing to give patients the placebo becomes unethical. When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do. In driving, we’re all the control group. Cities like DC and Boston are blocking deployment. And cities are not the only forces mobilizing to slow this progress. It’s time we stop treating this like a tech moonshot and start treating it like a public health intervention that will save lives. Link to article below. 👀 this video of Waymo cars evading crashes with people and vehicles. I especially note the ones that require it having a 360° view. My sincere thanks to Alex Ellerbeck and @acsifferlin for their wisdom and sure hand in editing this piece.

Somalis are not garbage. Immigrants and refugees from anywhere are people like you and me. They should not be demonized. This country is built on the backs of people who have come from other places. It’s what our country is all about. 💙

Earlier this year the BS Budget Bill reduced the tax deduction for gambling losses to 90%. In response, I introduced the FAIR BET Act to restore the commonsense 100% tax deduction to protect professional and recreational gamblers. I was the first in Congress to introduce this fix and haven’t stopped garnering support from members and stakeholders since. In fact, the #FAIRBETAct has up to 21 bipartisan co-sponsors with @RepEzell most recently joining! It is now critical for @WaysandMeansGOP to add this bill to the legislative calendar before the year ends. We must get this fixed.

Shout out to the best NFL YouTube channel out there!

@FarazJaka @CraigTapscott The fact that I haven't played a tournament in Black Hawk in over a year speaks for itself. Happy Thanksgiving!

@FarazJaka @CraigTapscott I consistently shut down conversations at the table on the topic. I regularly get asked for my opinion on the matter by people. I would be happier if the issue went away and I didn't have to discuss it again, but that hasn't happened.

Poker Twitter has been rough lately. A lot of negativity, and most of it gets amplified because a few big accounts drive the tone. It can feel like one person can’t change anything, but that’s just not true. If you want this space to feel more supportive, there is something small but powerful you can do: When someone posts something that helps you, inspires you, or makes you think… tell them. Reply. Quote-tweet. DM. Say it in person. Whatever. Positive feedback doesn’t travel on its own — you have to push it. Negativity hits the algo harder, but the truth is, there are way more positive people and meaningful things happening in poker than the timeline suggests. They just don’t get the same spotlight. And here’s the part most people don’t realize: Even the people doing great work — the ones you’d assume are confident — deal with self-doubt. Social media makes the loudest critics look like the majority. A simple “hey, this helped me” or “I appreciate what you do” goes further than you think. It keeps people motivated and shines a light on what they are doing. It keeps good ideas alive. And it pushes the culture in the direction we all say we want. Be the person who pushes the good stuff forward. It compounds.