The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Back to the Dog Beach

Cassie got almost 2 hours of walkies before 9am with a return trip to the Montrose  Beach Dog Friendly Area:

She also got a bath, because even though Lake Michigan supplies millions of people with fresh water, we don't drink it right out of the lake for very good reasons.

Also, I did not take 540 photos like last time. Maybe tomorrow...?

And if you're listening to "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" on NPR this morning (and tomorrow morning in some markets), I was there Thursday night:

Lost on a small island

Ordinance Survey, the UK's equivalent to our US Geological Survey, recently discovered that 77% of Brits can't read a map:

Just how far is it to the pub? Three-quarters of UK adults are in danger of never finding out, according to a poll commissioned by Ordnance Survey to mark National Map Reading Week (11-17 July). It found that 77% of respondents couldn’t recognise the most basic OS map symbols, such as viewpoints and pubs. (The latter is marked with a classic pint “jug” glass with handle, so could the ignorance be down to the switch to straight beer glasses?)

Of the 2,000 adults surveyed, more than half (56%) admitted they’d got lost because they couldn’t use a map or follow a phone app correctly, with 39% resorting to calling friends and family, 26% flagging down help, and 10% calling mountain rescue to get home.

Even when they’re not actually getting lost, 31% said they were worried they might. Many adults (46%) said they were happier walking with someone else.

Meanwhile, the Met Office has declared its first Red Weather Warning as they expect temperatures to hit 40°C in London on Monday and Tuesday:

Fortunately for me, they expect cooler weather Wednesday and beyond.

Northwest Ordinance, 235 years on

On this day in 1787, the Continental Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, dividing up all the land west of Pennsylvania, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River, into those little boxes you see when you fly over Illinois:

In 1781, Virginia began by ceding its extensive land claims to Congress, a move that made other states more comfortable in doing the same. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson first proposed a method of incorporating these western territories into the United States. His plan effectively turned the territories into colonies of the existing states. Ten new northwestern territories would select the constitution of an existing state and then wait until its population reached 20,000 to join the confederation as a full member. Congress, however, feared that the new states—10 in the Northwest as well as KentuckyTennessee and Vermont—would quickly gain enough power to outvote the old ones and never passed the measure.

Three years later, the Northwest Ordinance proposed that three to five new states be created from the Northwest Territory. Instead of adopting the legal constructs of an existing state, each territory would have an appointed governor and council. When the population reached 5,000, the residents could elect their own assembly, although the governor would retain absolute veto power.

The cadastral bits of the law explain why Chicago's streets form a grid and why Detroit has streets with evocative names like "13 Mile Road."

Busy day = reading backlog

I will definitely make time this weekend to drool over the recent photos from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's kind of sad that no living human will ever see anything outside our solar system, but we can dream, right?

Closer to home than the edge of the visible universe:

Finally, an F/A-18 slid right off the deck of the USS Harry S Truman and into the Mediterranean, which will probably result in a short Navy career for at least one weather forecaster or helmsman.

The perils of a political judiciary

Josh Marshall shares a couple of emails from attorneys dismayed by the politicization of the right-wing Supreme Court majority. One of them gets to the root of the problem:

I don’t believe laypeople really understand what a a heavy, heavy emotional lift it is for the vast majority of attorneys generally, and law professors in particular. The belief that we are serving rule of law and that that while decisions will always be shaped by human weakness, judges can and will render rulings contrary to their ideological predilections if the law requires it is central to our identity. It is what makes more than the lawyer jokes say we are. It is the essence the constitutional principle of due process, equal protection, Magna Carta law of the land. All that stuff. It’s hard to accept that it’s dead and courts are just political actors, even as right wing billionaires have plowed fortunes into making state and federal courts exactly that.

Matt Ford, meanwhile, examines the recent heckling of Justice Brett Kavanaugh (R) at a Washington steakhouse and finds no Constitutional right to dinner:

Is there actually a constitutional right to dinner? Or, more specifically, did the Constitution protect a right to dinner at the time that the Constitution was adopted? The Supreme Court has shown in Dobbs and other cases such as New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen that originalism is the only proper method to answer these questions. My own originalist analysis of this issue leads me to conclude that no such right to dinner exists in our legal heritage. Accordingly, I do not think such a right should be recognized now.

To understand whether Kavanaugh had a right to dinner at Morton’s, we must first look to the pre-constitutional context of medieval England to understand dinner’s place in the Anglo-American legal tradition. Antonin Scalia relied upon this time period in his majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, as did Justice Samuel Alito in his majority opinion in Dobbs. There is surely no better way to decide the scope of rights enjoyed by Americans living in 2022 than by surveying the works of legal thinkers from a different country, most of whom died well before the first shot was fired at Lexington and Concord.

This historical evidence also shows that dinner involves a “profound moral question,” as Alito said of abortion in Dobbs. That sets it apart from other constitutional rights that don’t raise moral questions, like what counts as cruel and unusual punishment or what counts as religious freedom. The nature of dinner—when it can be eaten, what can be served, and who may take part in it—is also a matter of sharp and persistent division among the American people themselves. That distinguishes it from other constitutional rights like freedom of speech and the right to bear arms, where Americans rarely disagree. Dinner is just different, for reasons I will hint at but never explicitly say and that definitely have nothing to do with my personal views on the subject.

More constructively, James Fallows keeps his focus on a legal reform that would have bipartisan support if one group of partisans weren't batshit crazy:

It is hard to see how a democracy functions, long-term, with such limitless power in such unrepresentative and unaccountable hands. That is related to the critique that Elena Kagan made in her dissent from the disastrous ruling last week dis-empowering the Environmental Protection Agency, and is parallel to the case I made here.

Yesterday a group called Fix the Court released proposed legislation with a Plan A / Plan B structure.

—The main effect of the law, Plan A, would be to enact 18-year fixed terms for Supreme Court Justices, as many groups (including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and several U.S. Representatives) have proposed, and is long overdue.

—The innovation of the law is its “contingency” provision. The Constitutional validity of any term-limit rules might ultimately be appealed to the same Supreme Court whose members would be affected. And suppose they ruled against it? To keep themselves in their seats?

If that happened, according to this provision, Plan B would kick in: the Court would automatically be expanded, from nine members to 13. The logic of this approach was laid out by G. Michael Parsons, of NYU’s law school, in a detailed law-review article and an op-ed last year.

Of course, this requires that a majority of the US Senate believe in democracy and the rule of law, when it sure seems like they don't.

I've said this before: the next few years will positively suck for the most vulnerable among us as the right-wing Court continues its rampage. Maybe enough people will vote for candidates who can stop it?

The extremism of libertarians

The town of Croydon, N.H., had a serious problem with its libertarians earlier this year, when extremists took advantage of low voter turnout to cut the school budget in half:

On a snowy Saturday this past March, the 2022 meeting began in the two-century-old town hall, where the walls are adorned with an 1876 American flag made by the “women of Croydon” and instructions to reset the furnace to 53 degrees before leaving.

Residents approved the town budget in the morning. Then they turned in the afternoon to the proposed $1.7 million school budget, which covers the colonial-era schoolhouse (kindergarten to fourth grade) and the cost of sending older students to nearby schools of their choice, public or private.

This is when Mr. Underwood, 60, stood up and threw a sucker punch to the body politic.

Calling the proposed budget a “ransom,” he moved to cut it by more than half — to $800,000. He argued that taxes for education had climbed while student achievement had not, and that based in part on the much lower tuition for some local private schools, about $10,000 for each of the town’s 80 or so students was sufficient — though well short of, say, the nearly $18,000 that public schools in nearby Newport charged for pupils from Croydon.

The town rallied and managed to reverse the budget cuts at a special meeting in May. But wow, this is just like the libertarians up the way who tried (and failed) to co-exist with bears rather than pay for a wildlife warden.

Another detail: as the Times points out, Underwood—the guy who argued school activities aren't necessary—"starred on the tennis team, ran track, played intramural sports and joined extracurricular activities in math, creative writing, radio and student government." So libertarianism works really well if you get a leg up on everyone else before kicking the ladder away.

The weather is too nice to stay indoors

So I have queued up stuff to read later:

About the Rogers outage: the CBC published a chart showing that network usage hit 100% of its capacity immediately before it started to fall steadily before collapsing entirely around 4am ET. I wonder if the sequence will turn out to resemble the 1965 northeast blackout?

More Johnson reactions

No one seems sad that Boris Johnson has resigned his role as Conservative Party Leader, but many worry what he's going to do before he finally leaves Number 10. Some other reactions:

And my favorite so far:

Meanwhile and elsewhere

In case you needed more things to read today:

There are others, but I've still got a lot to do today.