The Daily Parker

The satirical newspaper The Onion just got bought by a newly-formed LLC called, yes, Global Tetrahedron. Longtime Onion readers will probably recognize the name; I had to remind myself.

Other events in the past day or so:

• Among the labor-rights wins on Tuesday was a tweak to wage and hour laws that will qualify millions more Americans for overtime pay.
• Despite having earned the title "Useful Idiot of the Year" a couple of times already, we haven't heard the last of US Representative Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) because her district's voters are just as stupid as she is. Tina Nguyen piles on.
• Julia Ioffe interviews Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt about the rise of anti-Semitism in left-wing student protests. Charles Blow speculates that the protests could come to Chicago for the DNC.
• Microsoft has released the source code to MS-DOS 4.00, which came out in (I think) 1988, just a few days before the 4.01 bug fix.
• The Civic Federation of Chicago, a government watchdog group, has recommended combining the Chicago Transit Authority, PACE (the suburban bus company), and Metra into a single regional organization.

Time to fetch Cassie from school.

The Chicago Dept of Transportation this morning removed and (they claim) preserved the "Chicago Rat Hole" on the 1900 West block of Roscoe St. in the North Center neighborhood. I admit, I never saw the Rat Hole in the flesh (so to speak), but I feel its absence all the same.

Moving on:

• Three Republican Arizona state representatives voted with all 29 Democrats to repeal the state's 1864 abortion ban; the repeal now goes to the Arizona Senate.
• Monica Hesse reminds people who say it's sexist to advocate for US Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire before the end of President Biden's current term that advocates for former Justice Stephen Breyer to resign made much more noise.
• Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter cautions student protestors that blaming Jews for the actions of the Israeli government is crossing a line. Bret Stephens concurs, describing attacks on Jewish students that belie the "peaceful" label of the pro-Palestinian protests.
• NPR stops by historical markers at the side of the road, in all their raucous inaccuracy and frivolity. Like the 600 or so planted by the Daughters of the Confederacy, which offer even less accuracy and frivolity than most.
• Meanwhile, the New York Times tunes into the "crisis" at NPR, which has lost nearly a third of its audience since 2020.
• Four people and a horse needed medical treatment and several vehicles needed repairs in London this morning after five of the King's Household Cavalry mounts panicked and ran from a training exercise, making it from near Buckingham Palace all the way to St Paul's before the Met could corral them.

Finally, are you an extrovert, and introvert, and ambivert, an omnivert, or some other kind of green French thing? National Geographic explains the first four.

The forecast today called for a lot more rain than we've had, so Cassie might get more walkies than planned. Before that happens, I'm waiting for a build to run in our dev pipeline, and one or two stories piqued my interest to occupy me before it finishes:

• Jennifer Rubin grabs the popcorn as the XPOTUS finds himself not really helped by his first criminal trial. Mary Trump says it's because the world finally sees him for the loser he's always been.
• The Federal Trade Commission has issued a sweeping ban of non-compete agreements, which will no doubt crash against the reactionary US Supreme Court in about five years. But it's a good statement.
• Speaking of SCOTUS, Ari Berman frets in his new book that American democracy may have reached a tipping point with the current reactionary crop on the bench.
• Walter Shapiro paints a picture of the Republican abortion win as a car that caught the speeding car.
• Jerry Useem traces Boeing's decline from an airplane company to a finance company, but suggests a way it could return to its better self: by having executives spend time on the shop floor, like they used to.
• Charles Marohn does the math to explain how multi-decade mortgages and the 10-year interest rate trough have trapped the real-estate market in its current high-cost, low-volume state.

Finally, after a couple of months of incoherent babbling, Voyager 1—now 24.3 million kilometers from Earth, 22.5 light-hours away, after 46 years and 7 months of travel—has started making sense again. Well, hello there!

Yesterday, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in Johnson v Grants Pass, Ore., the result of a 2018 lawsuit against the rural Southern Oregon town (pop. 39,000) for imposing fines of up to $1250 for the heinous crime of sleeping in public. Naturally, the usual suspects seem to think that's just fine:

Kelsi Brown Corkran, representing the challengers, argued that because Grants Pass defines a “campsite” as anywhere a homeless person is, within the city, with a blanket, it is “physically impossible for a homeless person to live in Grants Pass” without facing the prospect of fines and jail time. The order barring the city from enforcing its ordinances, she insisted, still leaves the city with an “abundance of tools” to address homelessness.”

At the oral argument on Monday, the court’s liberal justices largely seemed to agree. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the city’s ordinances only apply to homeless people who sleep in public. Police officers in Grants Pass, she suggested, don’t arrest others who fall asleep in public with blankets – for example, babies with blankets or people who are stargazing.

By contrast, Justice Clarence Thomas emphasized that the law at issue in Robinson barred both the use of drugs and being addicted to drugs. Do the city’s ordinances, Thomas asked, make it a crime to be homeless?

The justices also debated whether they needed to address the Eighth Amendment question at all, or whether the challengers’ contention that they cannot be punished because they have nowhere else to go would be better addressed through a “necessity defense.” Justice Neil Gorsuch was one of the justices to broach this prospect, suggesting that it would apply to bar fines or prosecutions for actions like eating or camping in public.

I'm reminded of two videos I've seen recently. The first, from British comedian Jonathan Pie, could have been about Grants Pass but actually came out of a new UK law that does approximately the same thing:

The other, from 2020, explains the thinking behind "since we can't solve homelessness in one go, what's the point of trying?" Essentially, conservatives think in binaries: either we have homelessness, or we don't. Here's Ian Danskin:

But I do find it interesting that the Tories and the Republicans came up with the same inhumane idea. Hm.

It's a gorgeous Friday afternoon in Chicago. So why am I inside? Right. Work. I'll eventually take Cassie out again today, and I may even have a chance to read all of these:

• A Florida man set himself on fire across the street from where the XPOTUS was sitting through jury selection, apparently to protest the lack of mental health care in the US.
• Josh Kovensky draws a straight line from the XPOTUS's narcissistic need to cast everyone who disagrees with him as an enemy to be defeated to his lawyers trying to undercut the bedrock principle of impartial jury trials.
• Graeme Wood says Iran has handed Israel an opportunity, so what will Netanyahu do now? Julia Ioffe wonders the same thing.
• Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) admitted (perhaps unintentionally) in a recent Politico interview that he, more than anyone else in the country, caused imbecilic grandstanding rather than actual legislating to become the main measure of Congress in some districts, like his own.
• The Governor of Illinois joined the Daily Parker and the Chicago Tribune editorial board in demanding that the city fire Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter, who (to give just one example of why) takes a chauffeured car to his office which is adjacent to an El station.
• Uri Berliner's resignation from NPR continued to generate op-ed columns, with Eric Wemple taking him to task and Andrew Sullivan taking Katherine Maher to task.
• Edinburgh, Scotland, recently opened a 3-kilometer, £23 million bike path that not everyone in the capital wants.

Finally, a milestone of sorts. The retail vacancy rate in downtown Chicago continues to climb as a longtime institution on North Wells finally closed. That's right, Wells Books, the last adult-entertainment store in the Loop, has closed.

A whole knot of miserable weather is sneaking across the Mississippi River right now, on its way to Chicago. It looks like, maybe, just maybe, it'll get here after 6pm. So if I take the 4:32 instead of the 5:32, maybe I'll beat it home and not have a wet dog next to me on the couch later.

To that end I'm punting most of these stories until this evening:

• US Representative and professional troll Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wants you to think she isn't serious, except when she is. I would say, when her IQ gets to 80 she should sell. Tina Nguyen has more inside baseball on MTG's bomb-throwing.
• The Biden Administration has a dilemma with electric cars: let cheap Chinese models in and risk losing the election, or keep them out and postpone climate action. (The article skips over the incompetent management at American auto makers as one of the causes of this problem.)
• Gail Collins looks at the abortion debate and wonders, where's the debate about guns?
• Via Bruce Schneier, the attempted infiltration of the XZ project has other open-source maintainers in a near panic about their own code, and they have discovered other attempts at undermining the security of everything that way.
• Charles Marohn unpacks the speculation that rents seem close to collapse even as house prices keep going up.
• Caitlyn Zaloom reviews Benjamin Herold's new book about the "unraveling of America's suburbs," awakening to a problem Marohn has shouted from the rooftops for many, many years.

Finally, if you have an extra $500 lying around and want to buy a nice steak with it, Crain's has options ranging from 170 grams of Chateau Uenae rib-eye steak (and a glass of water) at RPM on down to a happy hour of rib-eye steak frites for eight at El Che. The txuleton at Asador Bastian for $83 seems like a good deal to me, even without three other people or a bottle of wine to bring the bill up to $500. But the Wagyu? Maybe if I get a bonus next year. A guy can dream.

Political writer and YouTube creator Ian Danskin put together a series of videos in the aftermath of the 2016 election to explain what we Democrats did wrong, and how we need to engage with the Alt-Right (now known as the Republican Party). The whole series is worth watching, but if you want to skip to the end, watch this one:

Some things have changed since 2017, but not as many things as one would hope. We need everyone in the Party to understand the core message of the above video: we need outcomes, not just process, if we're going to save democracy. Think of LBJ, not Walter Mondale, for f's sake.

Ah, ha ha. Ha.

Anyway, here are a couple other stories from the last couple of days:

• A New York appellate judge took all of two hours to toss out a frivolous lawsuit by the XPOTUS seeking to get his gag order removed in the Stormy Daniels case, bringing the world just that little bit more relief from the XPOTUS's endless polysyllabic farts. Jennifer Rubin lists the reasons this case might even stop those noisome emanations for good.
• The Arizona Supreme Court voted 4-2 to allow enforcement of a territorial (i.e., before Arizona became a state) law banning most abortions from the moment of conception that predates the famous gunfight in Tombstone by 17 years. (NB: most Arizona voters favor legal abortions.)
• MP William Wragg (Hazel Grove, Manchester) got kicked out of the Conservative Party for sending other MPs' personal phone numbers to a spear phisher, along with photos of his junk, after falling for a Grindr honeypot.
• Paul Krugman wonders about the persistence of people reporting negative feelings about the economy even though they and all their friends and family are doing great.
• Car and Driver columnist Ezra Dyer identifies the main problem electric cars have getting people to buy them: they're boring.

Finally, Ohio State wildlife and ecology professor Stanley Gehrt has written a book I will have to stop myself (for now) from adding to my ever-expanding shelf of books I need to read. Gehrt spent decades studying Chicago's coyote population and how well they co-exist with us, tagging more than 1,400 coyotes and collaring another 700.

My only complaint about the animals is they don't eat enough rabbits. I live near several suspected dens, the closest only about 400 meters from my front door. I can't wait to read the book.

As for the risks coyotes pose to humans, he lets us know who the real enemy is: “If you were to ask me, ‘What’s the most dangerous animal out there [for urban dwellers]?’, it’s white-tailed deer,” Gehrt said.

Ah, just look at it:

Rain, snow, wind, and general gloominess will trundle through Chicago over the next 36 hours or so, severely impacting Cassie's ability to get a full hour of walkies tomorrow. Poor doggie.

If only that were the worst thing I saw this morning:

• The XPOTUS called for an end to the war in Gaza, but without regard to the hostages Hamas still holds, irritating just about everyone on the right and on the left.
• Knight Specialty Insurance Company of California has provided the XPOTUS with the bond he needed to prevent the Manhattan District Attorney from seizing $175 million of his assets, which makes you wonder, what's in it for the insurer?
• Related to that, Michelle Cottle analyzes the Republican Party's finances and concludes that the XPOTUS is destroying them.
• These are the same Republicans, remember, who are threatening to block money needed to re-open the Port of Baltimore and replace the Key Bridge.
• Massachusetts US District Judge Allison Burroughs has ruled that a case against the private air carrier who flew migrants to Martha's Vineyard may proceed, and the case against the politicians who paid for the flight could come back with an amended complaint.
• Charles Marohn argues that cities using cash accounting, rather than accrual accounting, end up completely overwhelming future generations with debt they would never have taken on with an accurate view of their finances.
• But of course, the prevalence of the city-killing suburban development pattern in the US has an upside of sorts: everywhere you go in the US feels like home.

And after all this, does it surprise me that Mother Jones took a moment to review a book called End Times?

Before I take Cassie on yet another 30-minute walk (how she suffers!), I'm going to clear some links:

• Julia Angwin asks the same thing a couple of my friends have asked: why is Congress talking about banning TikTok instead of, you know, governing? (tl;dr: Republicans, who control the house, really don't want to govern.)
• Speaking of sclerotic government, Paul Krugman reminds you that the Republican Party really does want to take away Social Security and Medicare, even as our closest friends and allies guarantee that everyone has social security and medical care.
• WTF is going on with Aaron Rodgers, and has he always been this way?
• Despite having fewer electrified rail miles than Iran, the United States actually has seen record passenger rail miles travelled this year.
• Portland, Ore., has passed a ban on gas-powered leaf blowers, with a phase-out to start in 2026. Oh, would Chicago be so progressive...
• Sierra Jones, writing for Strong Towns, provides five good reasons why we should end highway expansion.
• The Atlantic's Jonathan Haidt warns that we need to change the way children interact with their phones, and quickly.

OK, Cassie has roused herself, and probably needs to pee. Off we go.