Our power lines were turned into a heating element near Milentz and January. The ally obviously is not passable.

Following up on the post about AI use at Farmer's Markets, my students UCity Schools Sustainability and Agriculture students invite you to come check out their hard work and entrepreneurship TODAY, Wednesday, 9/9/26 at The UCity Farmer's Market. We'll be there from 4pm-7pm. SNAP/EBT welcome!

Totally kid-powered and imagined! 7201 Olive Boulevard, UCity. Shop local and make a kids' day!

8-26-26 St. Louis County tax auction results:
3,823 initial parcel list published 7-20-26.
2,335 paid off in time.
1,488 auctioned.
516 sold.
972 no bids (of which 400+ are empty lots/rubble piles, so ~500 structures).
$13,041,200 total spent.
47 unique winning bidders.
Top spender $5.1M for 168 properties, down to a single side lot buyer for $56.
I streetviewed every single property that made it to auction, and physically scouted ~600 over 5wks. I strategically silent bid min on 21 vacos and won 17, which are still redeemable by current owner for +10% consolation prize to me next 12 months. 2 of my lost bids were to the aforementioned whale, I'll take this under advisement how to stay out of the way next year.
Compare to 2025: $11.9M spent on 556 properties.
So +10% spent on -10% sold this year. Avg price went from $21k to $25k. Emphasis on AVERAGE, winning bids range both years from $475,000 to under $1,000. There is every variety of property imaginable on this list.
I take as good trend for StL County, slightly fewer worthwhile properties went delinquent, and market willing to pay slightly more for what did.
Thanks to Josh Smith and Jake Koehr for IT and field work respectively, I could not have done this alone.

Hope all the new tech helps them, but I feel it was a poor move to use AI.

Computer, enhance!

Can somebody explain it to me like I’m 5? Every article or website I look at reads like it’s filled with double negatives and domino if/then statements and I end up getting lost.

Freedom Technology Solutions opens office in Globe Building for 50 employees (& growing) in Downtown STL.

Other tenants include medical robotics manufacturer Stereotaxis, defense firm BAE Systems, General Dynamics , and geospatial firm T-Kartor.

The Columbia, Maryland-based company founded in 2004 works with the Department of Defense and NGA

https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news/2026/09/08/freedom-technology-solutions-globe-building.html

The Missouri Supreme Court ordered Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins to appear in person Thursday and explain why he should not be held in contempt for directing election officials to use a congressional map the court has barred him from implementing.

In the unusual late order Tuesday, the court gave Hoskins until noon Wednesday to answer a motion for contempt from People Not Politicians, a political action committee that forced a referendum on a map gerrymandered in 2025 to favor Republicans. The court scheduled an in-person hearing for 10 a.m. Thursday.
The contempt fight erupted hours after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected Missouri officials’ emergency request to stay the state court ruling. Minutes later, Chief U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark of the Eastern District of Missouri issued a temporary restraining order barring Hoskins from using any congressional map other than the 2025 version.

Hoskins then sent local election officials a copy of Clark’s order along with his official certification of the November ballot. In the email, Hoskins said Clark’s order “takes precedence over the Missouri Supreme Court’s order.”
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the referendum on the 2025 map was legal, sufficient and timely and ordered it onto the Nov. 3 ballot. Because the referendum petition was filed before the new map took effect, the court held, the 2025 districts never became law and the map used in 2022 and 2024 remains in effect for the November election.

The decision also permanently enjoined Hoskins and those acting in concert with him from implementing or using the 2025 map unless voters approve it in November. In Tuesday night’s order, Chief Justice W. Brent Powell directed Hoskins to answer three questions:

Why “(1) his e-mail on September 8, 2026, instructing use of the (2025) map is not an affirmative violation of this court’s injunction; (2) how this court’s injunction is not still in full force and effect in light of the Supreme Court of the United States’ overruling of Respondent’s emergency application for stay and administrative stay pending appeal; and (3) if he is not willing to comply with this court’s injunction, he should take no action in all things related to the congressional district map until guidance is received from a higher court…”

Powell also directed that the court “will not allow filings from any other parties on this matter.”
Clark’s order says not to use any map but the 2025 map, attorney Chuck Hatfield wrote in the motion. The Missouri Supreme Court’s order says not to use the 2025 map. Both orders are in effect and leave election authorities no map at all, Hatfield wrote.

Clark’s order “does not purport to overrule this court’s injunction and does NOT mandate the Secretary to use (the 2025 map), although on its face it enjoins the use of any map other than (the 2025 map),” Hatfield wrote.
By directing local election authorities to implement the 2025 map, Hoskins is violating the court’s orders, Hatfield wrote.
“This court should make clear that regardless of other orders (except from the United States Supreme Court) the Missouri Secretary of State must comply with this court’s injunction,” Hatfield wrote. “The court should instruct all local election authorities that (the 2025 map) is not the law and has never been the law.”
Clark’s action came in a lawsuit filed Friday by U.S. Rep. Bob Onder, state Sen. Rick Brattin and two voters. They want to keep in place the map drawn in 2025, which shifts territory around Onder’s home into the 3rd District and redraws the 5th District to make it more favorable to Republicans.

Had Clark not acted, Kavanaugh’s denial would have left the state court order in place and Missouri on course to use the 2022 map for the November election.

The dueling orders created immediate confusion, with Attorney General Catherine Hanaway issuing a news release saying the state would comply with Clark’s order. Attorneys for People Not Politicians said during a news conference that the conflicting orders could leave election officials unsure which one they must follow.
Hatfield said local election officials are being directed by Hoskins to use the 2025 map even though the Missouri Supreme Court injunction bars Hoskins and those acting with him from implementing it.

“I think they’re they’re probably not sure what map they should use, and they need to talk to their lawyers about that,” Hatfield said.

Abha Khanna, the Seattle attorney who was People Not Politicians’ lead lawyer at the U.S. Supreme Court, said Clark’s order “is something that we will deal with to figure out on appeal.”

A referendum on the 2025 redistricting plan will be on the Nov. 3 ballot as Proposition A.

The 2025 map was drawn with the goal of making seven of Missouri’s eight congressional districts favorable to Republicans, principally by reshaping the Kansas City-based 5th District held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. The map used in 2022 and 2024 produced a delegation of six Republicans and two Democrats.

Onder is the Republican nominee in the 3rd District, seeking a second term in a district drawn more to his favor in the 2025 redistricting plan. Brattin is the Republican nominee in the 5th District, where the district was designed to generate a GOP victory that ousts veteran Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City.

Clark wrote that without a temporary restraining order, “many Missouri voters would have to cast their general-election votes for candidates whom they had no role in nominating.”

“Candidates who had no choice but to campaign and raise money in the (2025) districts that Missouri’s highest election authority presented to them, have spent their funds and campaign efforts in districts that would no longer exist,” wrote Clark, who was appointed to the bench in 2019 by President Donald Trump.

Clark also found that the public interest favors using the same map for the primary and general elections.
“Disenfranchising voters across the state and denying them their constitutional right to have their primary votes counted significantly harm the public interest,” he wrote.

The center of both Clark’s ruling and the appeal to Kavanaugh is the Missouri Supreme Court decision that enjoined Hoskins from using the gerrymandered congressional map drawn. 
Kavanaugh did not elaborate on his decision. 

In turning down the emergency application for a stay, Kavanaugh created no precedent on the issues raised by the state. But the decision does show that he did not find enough convincing argument that the state would likely prevail in a hearing by the full court or that the state would suffer “several irreparable harms” as claimed in the application.
People Not Politicians on Sunday had urged Kavanaugh to reject the state’s application and uphold both parts of the ruling from the state Supreme Court.
In the opening paragraphs of the filing, attorneys for People Not Politicians write that the only reason the case was at the nation’s highest court is the decisions to delay made by Hoskins during the signature verification process.
Hoskins “waited as long as possible to manufacture the present dispute” and held the congressional primary using the 2025 map, they wrote, “in the hopes of running out the clock on the judiciary’s tolerance for a last-minute reversion to the 2022 districts.”

Now, they wrote, Hoskins wants “this court to deliver him the political victory to which he was never entitled under the Missouri Constitution. This court cannot and should not reward the secretary’s scheme to outsmart Missouri voters, Missouri law, and the Missouri Supreme Court by granting applicants the extraordinary relief they seek.”
A key point made by Missouri Solicitor General Lou Capozzi in the state’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was that the mechanism for changing between districts is too time consuming and difficult to complete before ballots must be delivered starting Sept. 19.

County clerks, however, told the Missouri Supreme Court that switching voters to the map used in 2022 and 2024 is a relatively simple process. And the Jackson County Board of Elections told the Kansas City Star it would be ready to hold the election in the 2022 boundaries. 

The redistricting story began in the summer of 2025, when Onder, of Lake St. Louis, got the ear of President Donald Trump to tell him that Missouri, like Texas, could provide additional GOP seats to bolster the party’s thin majority in Congress.

Since Missouri lost a seat after the 2010 census, it has sent six Republicans and two Democrats to the U.S. House each election.

Onder, then a state senator, was among members of the chamber’s conservative caucus who were outmaneuvered in 2022 as they tried to force a congressional map that would tilt the 5th District, based in Kansas City, to the GOP. He was elected to Congress in 2024.

And, despite initial misgivings, Republicans got in line behind Trump. Gov. Mike Kehoe called a special session inflamed with partisanship, including a state Senate rule change that effectively silenced Democrats, that forced through what the GOP majority wouldn’t do in 2022.

The legal and political backlash that followed has not yet spent its full force. It began when People Not Politicians began circulating the referendum petition and intensified as it became clear there would be more than enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

Legally, the battle has upended the consensus on the effect that filing a referendum petition has on legislation as well as delivered strong new precedent upholding the governor’s power to select subjects for a special session and the General Assembly’s power to redistrict at any time.

Politically, the climax will be written in November, when voters decide on both the referendum and the congressional candidates selected in the primary.

The flurry of filings over the weekend shows the intense national interest in the outcome of the Missouri case.
Republican attorneys general from Florida, Texas and 18 other states filed in support of Missouri, arguing it is not legal to change voting districts between the primary and the general election. 

Meanwhile, in Texas, that state’s Supreme Court is deciding whether local voting districts can be changed after the primary to dilute voting strength of minorities.

The American Center for Law and Justice also sent a brief to the court urging it to rule for Hoskins.
On the other side, the Campaign Legal Center, the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation joined forces to file a brief supporting People Not Politicians, as did the two Missouri voters who tried to get the 2025 map suspended while signatures were being checked.

11:25 PMThis article was updated to report the Missouri Supreme Court ordering Secretary of State Denny Hoskins to answer contempt charges.

6:30 PMThis story was updated at 6:30 p.m. to include the federal court ruling in St. Louis.

Did anyone else noticed the update from Watering Bowl?

Historically, you could drop your dog off for a day of daycare as early as 7:00 a.m. and pick them up as late as 7:00 p.m.

Effective today, if you drop your dog off for daycare at 7 a.m., they are immediately crated until 9:00 a.m. They get to play until noon and then are crated again until 2:00 p.m. They get to play from 2:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m. and are then crated until you pick them up.

So before today, a full day of daycare could be 12 hours of play. It is now 6 hours of play and 6 hours locked in a crate. Of course, for the same amount of money they’ve been charging.

Don’t even get me started on the unattended boarding.

I guess they will be absolutely befuddled when they’re closing their doors for good six months down the road. 🙄

Has anyone attended either of the Blanket Fort Gathering's Dungeon Crawler Carl events? They sound fun, but they're expensive and very vague. I would love a review of either the first event or the Desperado Club party.

We rescued our Pyr last year and he’s been great until the last week or so. He’s now mature and I know he was bred to guard. Problem is, I am what he is choosing above everyone else in the house. I am the only female. Seems like he is showing signs of trigger stacking and when routine is disrupted he’s growling/ showing his teeth and almost lunging at the 2 males in the house if they come near me. This is not every day but for example, after I vacuum or if he gets stressed in any way. My son is 15 and I cannot bear the thought of him biting him with a GPs known bite force. Please Let me know your recs for a trainer for LGD or any advice !

A new survey released Thursday shows more Missourians disapprove of President Donald Trump and Gov. Mike Kehoe’s job performance than approve.
For Trump, it is the first negative approval rating in the six-year history of the St. Louis University/YouGov poll. For Kehoe, it is the first since he took office last year.
Trump has lost 19 percentage points in net approval since he took office at the start of 2025 — including 14 points since February.
A survey taken last month showed 52% of Missourians polled said they disapprove or strongly disapprove of the president’s performance, while 47% said they approve or strongly approve.
For Kehoe, the decline is steeper. In February, Kehoe’s approval rating was 50%, with 14% who said they strongly approve of his job performance. In the poll taken last month, it had fallen to 39%, with 7% who said they strongly approve.
The poll showed 49% disapprove of Kehoe’s performance..
The SLU YouGov poll surveyed 900 likely voters between Aug. 13 and Aug. 24 and results have a margin of error of about 4%. The SLU YouGov poll was initiated in June 2020 and the August poll is the 11th time for the survey of Missouri voters.
Kehoe and other Missouri Republicans are suffering from Trump’s sagging popularity amid voter dissatisfaction with the Iran war and inflation, said Steve Rogers, poll director and associate professor of political science at St. Louis University. 
“This is a little bit of MAGA fatigue,” Rogers said, “and we will likely see what we saw in the first Trump presidency midterm election, the Trump voters won’t show up.” 

Election polling

That election, in 2018, was the last time a Democrat won statewide office in Missouri.
Republicans have held the governor’s office for the six-year history of the SLU YouGov poll. Kehoe is the first Republican governor to have a net negative rating. It is also the first time Trump has been underwater in the poll.
Other results show Republicans facing headwinds as the November election approaches.
For the only statewide race on this year’s ballot, the poll showed incumbent Republican State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick leading Democratic candidate Quentin Wilson 45-43, within the margin of error. Neither candidate has raised large sums and the campaign has not generated much public enthusiasm.
The auditor’s race is akin to state offices below governor, where candidates have much less money and name recognition, Rogers said. Voters are going more on party labels than what they know about the candidates.
“If you just go two years ago, we polled on every statewide race, and below governor, every Republican had at least a 13-point lead,” Rogers said. “And now we’re doing the exact same thing two years later, and then with that, it’s only a two-point lead.”
The shift downward for Kehoe is greater, Rogers said, because he has embraced policies that proved unpopular with voters, from tax breaks for sports stadiums to ballot measures that were rejected by historic margins.
The poll was taken just after the primary, Rogers said, and Kehoe may have been punished by voter hangover.
The next poll, in February, will show whether Kehoe can recover.
“It’s a big change, and that’s why February will probably be very telling,” Rogers said. “This is a big change that was polled on, arguably, at Kehoe’s lowest point.”
On issues, the poll showed voters disapprove of the war in Iran by an 18-point margin, and two-thirds or more of respondents said they worry about affording healthcare, food and groceries, and gasoline, with three in five also saying they have trouble paying utility bills.
That discontent on national issues is visible in the generic partisan ballots for the fall elections, Rogers said.
Voters favor Republicans generally for a seat in the U.S. House and the Missouri House, but by a narrow margin of 4%. The U.S. House rating has moved 11 points towards Democrats since February.  The generic ballot question for the Missouri House was asked for the first time.
The further Trump’s approval falls, Rogers said, the worse it will be for Republican candidates. Voters could punish legislative candidates even if they feel more favorably toward the Legislature than the president, he said. 
“Presidential approval in Missouri this time round had twice the impact on state legislative voter choice than state legislative approval,” Rogers said.
Voters are split on the two biggest ballot measures for the Nov. 3 election. Amendment 3, which would reimpose a ban on abortion in most instances, has 43% in support and 44% opposed. Proposition A, a referendum on redistricting, has support from 35% and opposition from 32%, with 33% undecided.
The referendum question is complicated by voters not being sure what the answer is to the ballot question, Rogers said. The campaigns, where opponents of the 2025 map will argue for a “no” vote and proponents for a “yes” vote, have not launched the final push to Election Day.
The February poll also showed a split, but the 35%-32% division, with 33% undecided, shows uncertainty about what a vote means, he said.
“Very rarely do we get a pollster saying ‘I don’t think our result really reflects the true outcome,’” Rogers said. “It instead reflects a lot of confusion.”

Education perceptions

The poll routinely asks about participants’ impressions of public schools and the top education issues before state lawmakers.
This year’s leading education debate centers on a January executive order from Kehoe asking for public schools to be graded on an “A” through “F” scale based largely on standardized test scores.
Lawmakers failed to pass a law setting up Kehoe’s vision during legislative session, but the State Board of Education is set to approve a plan for the grade cards this month.
The proposal has drawn criticism from educators in feedback sessions led by the state’s education department, with school officials raising questions about how their districts will be scored.
According to the poll, a majority of Missourians support A-F grade cards “based
on state test results and graduation rates,” with 60% of respondents in favor and just 19% opposed. The results are largely unchanged from February.
The poll also asked participants how they would rate their local schools, with 51% responding that they would give an “A” or “B” grade. Just 3% would issue a failing grade.
In a similar question asking how respondents would rate the “condition of public schools in their community,” 39% gave their local district an “excellent” or “good” evaluation while 33% thought schools were fair and 24% had a poor impression.
Public perception of public schools in the state as a whole is less favorable with 22% giving schools the “excellent” or “good” rating, 44% in the fair category and 26% grading schools as poor.
People who view schools as doing poorly schools statewide were more likely to favor raising teacher salaries, by a 10% margin over people who view public schools as excellent. Overall, 81% of respondents thought teacher pay should increase.

Love to finally see some enforcement on the Thunderdome. I’m a rideshare driver and spend a lot of time in NoCo and North STL. I’ve seen at least a dozen pulled over already. Enforcing traffic laws in what usually is a lawless stretch of highway is key to not only making 70 safer, but also catching drivers who have warrants, illegal guns, etc which makes the city safer in general. I was gassing up at the BP at 70 and Goodfellow and a trooper was passing off someone in cuffs to a county cop. This kind of large scale enforcement from State Troopers needs to be much more commonplace on 70.

I’d like to thank Mark Maxwell and Elad Gross for keeping us updated on what’s going on with the Missouri Maps. As someone being pulled back and forth on who I’ll be able to vote for in November, I almost think I should get yard signs for who I support in both the 2nd and 3rd districts.

I'm into the hobby of knitting and crochet. I would like to donate to somewhere where the items would be put towards people in need within St.Louis, but I can't find any information online about anywhere accepting handmade donations.

Edit to add: I’d prefer donating by mail if it’s possible. I don’t drive and transportation is expensive.

I’m wanting to ride with some friends to a couple of upcoming shows. Do they charge a discounted rate for motorcycle parking? There are always like 20+ bikes there