The Daily Parker

The hot, humid weather we've had for the past couple of weeks has finally broken. I'm in the Loop today, and spent a good 20 minutes outside reading, and would have stayed longer, except I got a little chilly. I dressed today more for the 24°C at home and less for the cooler, breezier air this close to the lake.

Elsewhere in the world:

• I was waiting for Russia expert Julia Ioffe to weigh in on last week's hostage release.
• The Chicago White Sox failed to set the all-time record for most consecutive losses in the American League yesterday by winning their first game in the last 23.
• Of the $1.2 trillion Carbon Reduction Program funds allocated to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, $130 billion has been spent so far: but only $26 billion on rail, and $70 billion on highways. 
• Even though Deutsche Bahn has faster, timelier, more convenient, more comfortable, and just more trains than the US, Germans say their national railroad is on the wrong track.
• Deadhorse, Alaska, which lies at 70° north latitude, set an all-time record yesterday with a high temperature just below 32°C.
• After CrowdStrike told Delta Airlines to go pound sand a couple days ago, Microsoft told the carrier off yesterday.
• Be careful taking dogs to fresh-water swimming holes: warmer weather has made blue-green algae blooms more common.

Finally, today is the 60th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. If you don't know what that is, read up. It's probably the most direct cause of most of our military policy since then.

This shit amused me:

• The Chicago White Sox have tied the American League record of 21 consecutive losses, with the MLB all-time record of 23 a distinct and shitty possibility.
• CrowdStrike has taken enough of Delta Airlines' shit, thank you.
• In addition to all the other shit that Hurricane Debby turned up over the weekend, the storm flushed 25 kilos of cocaine onto a Florida beach. Apparently, this happens all the time.

Finally, Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the Dave Matthews Band tour bus dropping 350 liters of very literal, very stinky shit onto a boatload of sightseers in the Chicago River. "The culprit turned out to be the band’s tour bus driver, then-42-year-old Stefan Wohl, who pleaded guilty to charges of reckless conduct and discharging contaminates to cause water pollution. He got hit with 18 months on probation, 150 hours of community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine to Friends of the Chicago River."

I mean, what the shit?

Too bad I'm in my downtown office. It's a perfect, sunny day in Chicago. I did spend half an hour outside at lunchtime, and I might take off a little early. But at least for the next hour, I'll be looking through this sealed high-rise window at the kind of day we only get about 25 times a year here.

Elsewhere in the world:

• Former CIA lawyer James Petrila and former CIA spook John Sipher warn that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v US could undo 50 years of reforms that reined in illegal clandestine activities here and abroad.
• James Fallows reviews President Biden's "quasi-valedictory" address from last night.
• The doddering, elderly, convicted-felon Republican nominee for President seemed to have some difficulties at last night's rally. Maybe he's too old to be president and he should withdraw from the race?
• Helen Lewis, shaking her head sadly at the mess of a human being that is Republican Vice-President nominee JD Vance, hopes the XPOTUS "kept the receipt."
• Bowing to market pressure, Southwest Airlines has announced an end to its chaotic boarding process, and will now assign seats like a grown-up airline.
• London expanded its Ultra-Low-Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to encompass most of the metro area last year, which has resulted in improved air quality equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road.
• Unfortunately, this side of the pond, the Illinois Dept of Transportation seems unable to comprehend the opportunity we have to remake DuSable Lake Shore Drive for the future, and instead wants to repeat all the mistakes of the past. All the aldermen along the north lakefront oppose the plan, fortunately.
• The South Works site on the southeast side of Chicago, which used to house one of the world's largest steel mills, will soon become a quantum-computing research facility.

Finally, the various agencies charged with protecting the Democratic National Convention next month have published their plan for a 60-hectare "pedestrian restriction" zone around the United Center and a smaller zone around McCormick Place. "Only people with credentials who 'have a need to be there' – such as delegates, volunteers and other workers – will be allowed within that inner perimeter, said 2024 DNC coordinator Jeff Burnside." Presumably people who live on the Near West Side will be able to get to and from their homes as well.

The President will go on the air tonight at 8pm EDT to explain why he dropped out of the race, and presumably also to endorse Vice President Harris as his successor. This has the XPOTUS so rattled that a campaign lawyer whined to the television networks that the XPOTUS wants equal time so they can whine to everyone. OK, Boomer.

Meanwhile:

• Hillary Clinton lays out a strategy for Harris to do what she couldn't: become our first female president.
• The European Union's climate-tracking directive reported that Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history, with the average surface temperature of the planet cresting 17.09°C.
• Jennifer Rubin (and a few other writers) believe we'd all be better off with a centrist government. (I'm sure if we explain this to the Republican Party carefully and rationally, they'll tone down their extremism right away.)
• Speaking of centrism, Julia Ioffe digs into what a President Harris foreign policy might look like.
• Because of a confluence of events "that Tolstoy could not have made up," Israel has an opportunity this week to change the Middle East for the better—if only they didn't have a troglodyte for a prime minister.
• Pilot Patrick Smith explains turbulence, and why it has suddenly become so newsworthy.

Finally, the Times examines why some people continue to write negotiable orders of withdrawal (i.e., paper checks) despite their obvious inconveniences and vulnerabilities. I haven't written one in about 18 months, and the last time I used one in any capacity was (with no small irony) to set up automatic billing with my HOA.

It has started raining in downtown Chicago, so it looks like Cassie and I will get wet on the walk home, as I feared. I still have a few tasks before I leave. I just hope it stays a gentle sprinkle long enough for us to get home from doggy day care.

Just bookmarking these for later, while I'm drying out:

• Researchers concluded that the problem with online misinformation and epistemic closure comes from people, not technology. Apparently we generally look for information that confirms our existing biases. Who knew.
• Chicago has more lead pipes than any other North American city--and more regulation, labor issues, and general corruption, too. We might replace all the pipes by 2075; not so much the corruption.
• Shocking absolutely no one, a study has found that drinking alcohol on an airplane is worse that doing it on the ground.

Finally, former US Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) died today, just as climate change once again contributed to a massive storm flooding neighboring Texas. I mention that because Inhofe, who served in the Senate until he was 88 years old, refused to believe that the planet had gotten warmer, and did his best to keep the US from entering the 21st Century by any reasonable measure. Oh, and he was also an asshole pilot who once nearly hit a bunch of construction workers because he wanted to land on a closed runway. He may be mourned somewhere, but the Daily Parker is glad to see him underground. So, presumably, is the FAA.

Apparently everyone else got over Covid yesterday, too. Or they're just trying to make deadline before the holiday:

• Peter Hamby pulls the fire alarm after reading a leaked polling report showing President Biden's support slipping in key states after last week's debate catastrophe.
• Constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe fumes that yesterday's decision on presidential immunity "reveals the rot in the system." Ruth Marcus simply calls the Republican majority on the Court "dishonorable."
• In her dissent in yesterday's presidential immunity case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor (I) skewered the Republican majority by quoting directly from the Dobbs decision that "[t]his official-acts immunity has ‘no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent.’"
• Josh Marshall reminds our side that "[t]he election is about Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, the two forces working to overthrow the American republic."
• The Court, meanwhile, declined (for now) to hear a challenge to Illinois' assault weapons ban, though both Justices Alito (R) and Thomas (R) said they can't wait to review it later.
• Paul Krugman would have you say what you want about the tenets of National Front, Dude, but at least it's an ethos.
• The tariffs against Chinese goods put in place by both the convicted-felon XPOTUS and President Biden have started to cost Chicago businesses real money.
• A volunteer group has formed to rescue drowned Divvy bikes from Lake Michigan.
• Chicago restaurant burglaries have jumped in the last two years.
• Hurricane Beryl, now about a day and a half from leveling Jamaica, has become the earliest Category 5 storm in history.
• My alma mater, Duke's Fuqua School of Business, has a new paper explaining why major airlines have switched back to buying planes after leasing them for decades.
• National Geographic explains why alcohol gets harder to clear from your system as you get older.

Finally, the Post analyzed a ton of weather forecasts and determined that forecasting Chicago weather is a lot harder than forecasting Miami's. The only glimmer of good news: today's 7-day forecasts are at least as accurate as the 3-day forecasts from the 1990s.

I started my day with overlapping meetings, a visit from the housekeeping service, more meetings, a visit from an electrician, and just now discovered that a "new" bug report actually relates a bug we introduced on June 20th last year, but only now got reported. Oh, also: it's 25°C and sunny.

At least it's Friday.

And I guess I can read some of these tomorrow morning:

• Tara Palmeri examines the Beltway reactions to the convicted-felon XPOTUS's 34-count felony conviction. (But Josh Marshall says of this post: "Her dispatch on Trump’s conviction is just drenched in the contempt in which she holds all Democrats.")
• Metra had a public meeting to discuss their Systemwide Network Plan, which outlines a shift from a commuter model to a regional transportation model.
• Related to that, a group of Chicago alders want the state to change direction on the planned Lake Shore Drive redesign to focus on buses rather than cars.
• Japan will soon introduce new Yen notes that may break millions of vending machines across the country.
• SOM's lead architect explains the O'Hare Terminal 2 redesign.
• Michelle Singletary answers your questions about whether tipping has gone too far.

Finally, the Chicago White Sox set a new team record yesterday: 14 losses in a row. They play the Red Sox tonight at home; can they make it 15 straight losses?

Oh, so many things:

• Ankush Khardori lays out how "the Alito scandal is worse than it seems."
• US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a former constitutional law professor, has a plan for how to get Justices Alito (R) and Thomas (R) to recuse themselves in any January 6th case.
• The non-disclosure agreement The Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt signed to work on the show recently expired, and wouldn't you know, he has tapes. Pass the popcorn.
• Matthew Yglesias describes his drift from left to center-left.
• Tina Nguyen interviews Ralph Reed (yes, that Ralph Reed).
• Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter went on a 20-minute rant at the City Council today, essentially saying he's under fire because he's black. But no, he's under fire because he's incompetent at managing the organization.
• Cranky Flier thinks American Airlines has a lot of work to do after shitting the bed for the last two years.
• A weather station in New Delhi reported a high temperature of 52.3°C (126.1°F) yesterday, with other stations in the city hovering around 49°C. If the reading holds, it will be the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city.

Finally, after it took the Ogilvie Transportation Center Starbucks over 30 minutes to make my iced tea this morning (and I ordered it from 15 minutes away on my inbound train), it turns out the Starbucks staffing algorithm might be to blame. This is why I only get that one drink from Starbucks: it's really hard to screw up and usually takes them half a minute. Fortunately, I got my morning coffee at the cute local bagel shop on my walk to Cassie's day camp (and they gave Cassie a dog treat to boot), so I wasn't feeling homicidal.

Now that Cassie's poop no longer has Giardia cysts in it, she went back to day camp today, so that I could go to my downtown office for the first time in nearly two weeks. To celebrate, it looks like I'll get to walk home from her day care in a thunderstorm.

Before that happens, though:

• Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar warns that our 2024 election looks eerily like the 1996 Russian election that eventually led to Vladimir Putin becoming dictator.
• New Republic's Thom Hartman lays out how the "mud-sill theory" of a permanent economic underclass explains so much of the right wing's horrible policy agenda.
• The Beeb examines why so many popular tourist destinations seem not to want tourists anymore.
• A homeowner on the 400 block of Sheridan Road in Winnetka, Ill., the 9th wealthiest suburb in the US, shot at three men trying to steal his Ferrari this morning. (No people or cars were hurt.)
• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill released renderings of the planned O'Hare Airport satellite terminal that could open as early as 2027.
• Unions have banded together with people who live near railroads to restrict the operation of remote-controlled trains after multiple deaths.

Finally, the MLB's least-popular umpire, Ángel Hernández, has announced his retirement, to much rejoicing. The Post has a retrospective on his worst calls over the years.

I usually spend the first day or two of a sprint researching and testing out approaches before I start the real coding effort. Since one of my stories this sprint requires me to refactor a fairly important feature—an effort I think will take me all of next week—I decided to read up on something today and have wound up in a rabbit hole.

Naturally, that means a few interesting stories have piled up:

• The Presidential Greatness Project released its annual list of, well, presidents, putting Lincoln at the top (95.03 points), Buchanan next-to-last (16.71), and the XPOTUS dead last (10.92).
• The Justice Dept has finally filed an antitrust suit against Live Nation Entertainment, owner of Ticketmaster, for running one of the most pernicious monopolies of the 21st century. (I refuse to go to Live Nation events or use Ticketmaster anymore, because who wants to pay a 35% fee to a third party just to buy a ticket?)
• Molly White worries about a Dutch court's rationale for convicting Alexey Pertsev of writing the code for a service used to launder money, pointing out that privacy is a human right, and not all anonymization is criminal.
• Pilot James Fallows explains the Singapore Airlines severe-turbulence encounter and repeats the warning I gave earlier in the week.

Finally, Lagunitas Brewing will move its brewing operations back to Petaluma, Calif., (which is a million times better than Megaluma!) and close its Chicago taproom this summer, so I suppose the Brews & Choos Project should get its ass over there pronto.