The Daily Parker

Even though the Court probably won't release its ruling in the Mississippi anti-abortion bill until June, just about everyone has the same understanding about how it will turn out. No one seems to believe abortion will remain legal in much of the US beyond the end of this term. My guess: Justice Amy Coney Barrett (R) writing the opinion for a 5-4 Court with an unusual number of concurrences and dissents.

If the Court overturns or significantly curtails Roe v Wade, it will be one of the rare times that the Court has taken away a right. For all of the Republican Justices' and Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart's positioning that Roe was wrongly decided just like Plessy or Dred Scott, their analogy breaks down when you observe that in those two other cases, the Court also removed the existing rights of a living human being under state sanction.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh (R) got halfway to the fundamental problem with abortion law when he observed (at 106):

[T]he problem, I think ... and the reason this issue is hard, is that you can't accommodate both interests. You have to pick. That's the fundamental problem. And one interest has to prevail over the other at any given point in time, and that's why this is so challenging, I think.

Except he's full or shit. Courts decide where to draw the line between competing interests all the time. That's the point of courts, and the point of Roe v Wade. Justice Kavanaugh means rather that the court can't resolve absolute interests. If you believe, as the Catholics on the Court believe, that life begins at conception—that is, it's an article of religious faith for you—then abortion is anathema.

But if you believe, as the vast majority of the American people believe, that life begins at some point after conception but before birth, then you have to weigh the mother's life and liberty against the potential life of the lump of cells in her uterus.

If the Court overturns Roe, abortion will become immediately illegal or heavily restricted in 26 states, and may soon be curtailed in several others. Wisconsin, Arizona, and Michigan all have existing anti-abortion statutes that would return to full effect were Roe overturned.

The silver lining to the dark cloud of thousands of women being condemned to poverty, injury, or death because the state forces them to carry unwanted pregnancies to term? The Court will have to decide this case before the end of June, four months before the 2022 Congressional elections, as well as gubernatorial elections in the aforementioned Wisconsin and Michigan.

Finally, keep in mind that the Right has clear goals in the US and in every other democracy they're attacking: authoritarian rule that allows the rulers to pillage the ruled. Undermining trust in institutions is part of their strategy. And as Justice Sonia Sotomayor (I) asked rhetorically yesterday (at 15), "Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?" Well, no, as anyone who has studied history can tell you.

And America takes one more step toward the Rubicon.

More reactions from NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, the Guardian UK, SCOTUSblog, Dana Milibank, author Mary Ziegler, Billie Jean King, and to see where the Right gets their talking points, the Heritage Foundation.

This is worth an hour of your time:

We've just completed Sprint 50 at my day job, which included upgrading our codebase to .NET 6 and adding a much-desired feature to our administration tools. Plus, we wrote code to analyze 500,000 emails from a public dataset for stress testing one of our product's features. Not bad for a six-day sprint.

The sun is out, and while I don't hear a lot of birds singing, I do see a lot of squirrels gathering walnuts from the tree across the street. It's also an unseasonably warm 7°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, going up to 10°C today and 12°C by Thursday. So Cassie and I will head to the dog park in just a few minutes.

First, though, just a couple things of note:

• Barbados became the world's newest republic today at midnight local time when they officially terminated their relationship with Queen Elizabeth II. Prince Charles represented the Crown for the handover.
• Chicago Tribune food critic Nick Kindelsperger's November 15th list of the best bagels in Chicago got some pushback, including the reasonable question, "where's New York Bagel and Bialy?" Only now, I need to get my hands on one of Mindy's bagels, just to make sure.
• Eugene Robinson warns that if the US Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade, things will get uglier. Much, much uglier.
• Allstate has sold their Northbrook, Ill., headquarters to a developer who plans to build warehouses. It makes sense, but it's still a sad commentary on the modern world.

And with that, Cassie has some running around to do.

Today is the 50th anniversary of DB Cooper jumping out of a hijacked airplane into the wilds of Washington State. It's also the day I will try to get a Covid-19 booster shot, since I have nothing scheduled for tomorrow that I'd have to cancel if I wind up sleeping all day while my immune system tries to beat the crap out of some spike proteins in my arm.

Meanwhile, for reasons passing understanding (at least if you have a good grasp of economics), President Biden's approval ratings have declined even though last week had fewer new unemployment claims than any week in my lifetime. (He's still more popular than the last guy, though.)

In other news:

• Federal Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter ordered two Colorado lawyers to pay $187,000 in fees and penalties for filing their frivolous election-fraud lawsuit.
• The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance has added the United States to its list of "backsliding democracies" thanks to the antics of the Republican Party since 2019.
• Governing magazine interviews historian Richard White about his book examining the "greed, ineptitude, and economic cost" of our 19th-century railroad expansion.
• Chris Stokel-Walker channels your annoyance at the proliferation of streaming services and how casual viewers can't find the latest Star Trek series.
• New Buffalo, Mich., which depends almost entirely on tourist money, has sharply curtailed where they will allow short-term rentals going forward.
• The Salt Lake Tribune has re-drawn its maps of the Great Salt Lake to reflect its historically-low water levels.

Any moment now, my third DevOps build in the last hour will complete. I've had to run all three builds with full tests because I don't always write perfect code the first time. But this is exactly why I have a DevOps build pipeline with lots of tests.

While running errands this morning I had the same thought I've had for the past three or so weeks: the trees look great this autumn. Whatever combination of heat, precipitation, and the gradual cooling we've had since the beginning of October, the trees refuse to give up their leaves yet, giving us cathedrals of yellow, orange, and red over our streets.

And then I come home to a bunch of news stories that also remind me everything changes:

• Like most sentient humans, Adam Serwer feels no surprise (but plenty of disgust) that a Wisconsin jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse: "This is the legal regime that a powerful minority of gun-rights advocates have built—one in which Americans are encouraged to settle their differences with lethal force, preferably leaving as few witnesses capable of testimony as possible."
• Charles Blow worries about the follow-on effects—i.e., vigilantism. Says Blow, "Right-wing gun culture is not unlike the wellness industry, in that it requires the cultivation of a sustained insecurity in its audience, in order to facilitate the endless purchase of its products."
• Dan Friedman finds Rittenhouse's acquittal terrifying: "[M]ost reasonable people would agree that armed vigilantes facing off with armed protesters, or rioters—while police hide blocks away in armored vehicles—is, by and large, bad. But in Kenosha, and much the country, it is legal. And it is becoming normal. ... [T]he biggest failure was that the events of the trial, and the public perception of it, will not deter the kind of conduct that led to it. It seems sure to cause more right-wing vigilantism, more armed confrontations, and more political violence in the streets."

Outside of Kenosha:

• One of my favorite professors from my uni days and the school's longest-serving faculty member, Mike D'Innocenzo, died earlier this month.
• Forget the Belarus-Poland border; pay attention to Russia's troops on Ukraine's.
• UCSB's proposed Dormzilla project is not the first senile raving masquerading as architecture inflicted on the public by Charles Munger. He already built a windowless dorm in Michigan, with predictable (to everyone but Munger) results.
• Matthew Belloni makes the case that Kathleen Kennedy has botched the Star Wars franchise and needs to leave, and also that Netflix's new Top-10 list doesn't really tell you much.

Finally, Israel's government has loosened the certification process for Kashrut inspectors, to the outrage (do they express any other emotion?) of the Haredim. One possible factor? "The head of the Chief Rabbinate’s kashrut division was indicted on bribery charges in 2020 after being videotaped allegedly accepting envelopes of cash from food importers." Oy gevalt!

The richest person in Illinois has bought one of the only remaining original copies of the US Constitution at auction for $43 million, and I think this says a lot about where America has gotten in the 21st Century:

Citadel Founder Ken Griffin bought a first printing of the U.S. Constitution which sold for a record-setting $43.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction, the auction house announced Friday.

Griffin said he will loan the document to Billionaire Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

The artifact carried a presale estimate of $15 million to $20 million and belonged to collector Dorothy Goldman. Her late husband, S. Howard Goldman, had purchased it for $165,000 in 1988. 

The piece is one of 13 surviving copies of the Official Edition of the Constitution printed in 1787 for the delegates to the Constitutional Convention and for the Continental Congress.

The second-place bidder was a group of cryptocurrency investors. So, a man who got rich by taking a small piece of each transaction from millions of other people outbid a group of people who got rich scamming millions of other people.

I'm so glad Griffin has loaned the thing to another billionaire so she can put it in her museum. That sauce really brings out the flavors of this gander.

A nearly-all-white Kenosha, Wis., jury acquitted Killer Smurf Kyle Rittenhouse of all charges today, which will have the immediate effect of turning Kenosha into a war zone, and the long-term effect of escalating violence at what would otherwise be peaceful protests nationwide. I haven't followed the case closely, though I do trust the sources I've read who say an acquittal would make sense under Wisconsin law. But I doubt that most people who haven't gone to law school will see it that way, or even care.

Also this morning, in a more positive vein: President Biden availed himself of the 25th Amendment while undergoing a routine colonoscopy, temporarily making Kamala Harris the first woman ever to hold the power of the presidency in this country. I don't know of another member or former member of the British Commonwealth that hasn't yet done this, and in all of those other countries, the women in question held permanent authority, not just power for an hour or two. In fact, the first one held absolute power from 1558 to 1603, without missing a beat. Still, it's a milestone.

Just in time for my visit this week, a new report declares the River Thames no longer dead:

In 1858, sewage clogging London's Thames River caused a "Great Stink." A century later, parts of the famed waterway were declared biologically dead.

But the latest report on "The State of the Thames" is sounding a surprisingly optimistic note.

The river today is "home to myriad wildlife as diverse as London itself," Andrew Terry, the director of conservation and policy at the Zoological Society of London, writes in a forward to the report published Wednesday. Terry points to "reductions in pressures and improvements in key species and habitats."

The report highlights several promising trends. But it also cautions that work still needs to be done in other areas, and warns of the negative impact of climate change on the river, which is a major source of water for the city.

There is a possible fix on the horizon. London is currently building a "super sewer" project, which is called the Thames Tideway Tunnel and is due for completion in 2025.

"Once operational it will capture and store most of the millions of tonnes of raw sewage that currently overflow into the estuary," the report says.

I will not, however, go for a swim in the Thames on this trip.

The last bit interests me. In many ways, Europe surged ahead of the US technologically and socially in the last 50 years. Apparently, though, London is just now working on the equivalent of Chicago's Deep Tunnel, which we started in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, back home, Chicago resident Jarrett Knize caught a 33.9 kg carp in the Humboldt Park Lagoon on Sunday, which if certified will be the biggest carp ever caught in Illinois. The Humboldt Park Lagoon is about the size of the Serpentine in London's Hyde Park, and about as urban. No word from the possibly decade-old carp about how it got into the lagoon in the first place.

In the "how old do I feel now" department for this week, fifty years ago today, Led Zeppelin released their fourth album:

Led Zeppelin‘s fourth album is variously known as Led Zeppelin IV, Untitled, Four Symbols and Zoso, but its true title is formed by the four unpronounceable symbols chosen by each band member. Page did that to retaliate against writers, including several in Rolling Stone, who’d snubbed the band’s music: “After all we had accomplished, the press was still calling us a hype. So that is why the fourth album was untitled.” He also refused to give any interviews for a period of 18 months.

Thus, one of the best-selling rock albums of all time (23 million copies in the U.S., at last count) was fueled by the bandmates’ resentment; they were victors who felt like underdogs. The gatefold album design had no photos or band information, which was “professional suicide,” one industry expert warned Page, but it only added to the album’s – and group’s – still-enduring air of high-school-hallway mystery.

At first, the essence of Led Zeppelin seemed to be brutality. It was a “very animal thing, a hellishly powerful thing,” in Plant’s words. Then fortuitously, in the next decade, each band member developed his own unique power. Plant added questing lyrics to his high, keening wails of abandon. Page emerged as one of rock’s most adventurous and imaginative producers, and turned out epic guitar riffs like he was an assembly line. Jones played every instrument short of the kazoo, fortifying and expanding the band’s weaponry and arrangements.

Fifty years later, the album still rocks. It's on my playlist for today, right after my 2pm meeting.

I'm not even a little surprised that Republican Glenn Youngkin beat Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Viriginia governor's race last night. The margin of 80,000 votes is just over 2% of the vote, so Youngkin can't exactly claim he won in a landslide. And, let's face it, President Biden doesn't exactly have Obama levels of popularity today. (He's still more popular than the last guy. And Gerald Ford.)

I worked in Virginia for six months in 2003, and I can tell you most of the state has, shall I say, not quite progressive politics.

Ross Douthat believes some of McAuliffe's problems come from the way he failed to address the popular—if inaccurate—perceptions of the latest boogeyman on the Right, "critical race theory." Since no one really knows what CRT actually is, Youngkin had no trouble banging that drum to scare all the suburban women that he handily shifted to his side in the last six weeks.

As for the president's agenda, as long as 52 senators want to stop him from doing anything in his first term, he can't get it done. The slave-owning Southerners who wrote the Constitution, particularly the ones from Virginia, designed the Federal government to do as little as possible.

We're five years in to historical political unrest and division in the United States, which I suppose was the Karmic balancingof the Cubs winning the World Series. The last time the US went through this much turmoil, we got the Civil Rights Act. But the time before, we got a Civil War.

Finally, let me grab a few grafs from Chris Cillizza on what CRT actually means:

For the record, here's what critical race theory actually is -- courtesy of Education Week:

"Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies. ... A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas."

And here's another helpful explainer via Brookings:

"CRT does not attribute racism to white people as individuals or even to entire groups of people. Simply put, critical race theory states that U.S. social institutions (e.g., the criminal justice system, education system, labor market, housing market, and healthcare system) are laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race."

The basic idea is that racism is systemic in many of the institutions of America -- and that by acknowledging that reality, we can work to overcome it.

Yeah, wow, I'd hate to teach children that...