The Daily Parker

A Texas high school called the police yesterday when a kid brought a homemade alarm clock to school:

Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.

Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case.

So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.

Two questions have been circulating worldwide: Would a kid named Tim Smith have been arrested in similar circumstances? And just how stupid are these people?

Glenn Greenwald reminds us of the obvious:

There are all sorts of obvious, extreme harms that come from being a nation at permanent war. Your country ends up killing huge numbers of innocent people all over the world. Vast resources are drained away from individuals and programs of social good into the pockets of weapons manufacturers. Core freedoms are inexorably and inevitably eroded — seized — in its name. The groups being targeted are marginalized and demonized in order to maximize fear levels and tolerance for violence.

But perhaps the worst of all harms is how endless war degrades the culture and populace of the country that perpetrates it. You can’t have a government that has spent decades waging various forms of war against predominantly Muslim countries — bombing seven of them in the last six years alone — and then act surprised when a Muslim 14-year-old triggers vindictive fear and persecution because he makes a clock for school. That’s no more surprising than watching carrots sprout after you plant carrot seeds in fertile ground and then carefully water them. It’s natural and inevitable, not surprising or at all difficult to understand.

This kind of thing happened in Rome towards the end of the Republic, too.

Senate Democrats blocked a Republican move to kill the Iran nuclear deal, meaning it's pretty much done:

The outcome means the disapproval resolution will not reach Obama's desk, and the nuclear deal will move forward unchecked by Congress.

Senate Republicans are vowing they'll keep on fighting. House Republicans also are still maneuvering to find a way to stop the international agreement to curb Iran's nuclear program. But those efforts seem unlikely to produce results.

The deal, which Israel's right-wing government vehemently opposes, is clearly in U.S. interests.

I lost my Kindle on the flight to London last week, and only just got its replacement yesterday afternoon. Good thing, too, because I'm loading it up with articles I can't read until later:

• Anthropologists have discovered a new human species and it's weird.
• A Federal investigation into New Jersey politics that led to United Airlines' CEO resigning started with an unprofitable weekly flight that the airline allegedly scheduled to bribe an official. (Aviation, politics, and corrupt Republicans...total Daily Parker bait.)
• Cranky Flier sees this as a great opportunity to improve United.
• "There is a 95% chance that El Niño will continue through winter and gradually weaken through spring 2016, according to the NOAA Climate Prediction Center today."
• Krugman ran a simple graph showing the 2013 tax increase correlated with much better job growth than the 2003 tax cut. Not to mention, the $3.4 trillion in lost revenue...

And now I have to draft a statement of work...

Today, Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, Defender of the Faith, has just moments ago become the longest-reigning monarch in British English history:

At exactly what time Her Majesty out-reigns her great-great grandmother is not precise, due to the uncertainty of the timing of the death of her father, George VI, who died in his sleep. But Buckingham Palace has estimated, to be absolutely safe, she will pass Victoria’s 23,226 days, 16 hours and 23 minutes at around 5.30pm*. That calculation assumes George VI’s death was around 1am, and factors in extra leap days in the reigns of “Elizabeth the Steadfast”, as she has been described, and the Queen Empress.

There will be no bonfires on Wednesday, however. Palace aides have reminded the press of the sensitivity of the occasion given it owes much to the premature death, at the age of 56, of the Queen’s father. “While she acknowledges it as an historic moment, it’s also for her not a moment she would personally celebrate, which is why she has been keen to convey business as usual and no fuss,” said one.

The only living monarch to out-reign the Queen is Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who is two years younger but has reigned for six years longer. However she beats him, and all other contenders, on one matter. According to Guinness World Records, she holds the world record for most currencies featuring the same individual.

* 5:30pm BST is 11:30am CDT, or right about now.

Prince Charles, her heir-apparent, is 66, and also holds the record for being the longest-waiting heir-apparent in English history.

Long flights give me a chance to catch up on reading. In between disposing of all the back issues of whatever magazines I haven't opened in weeks, and Kindling the novels I've had queued up for months, I also get to read through the emails I've cached for days in anticipation of the downtime.

This morning's cache included the daily Crain's Chicago Business update, whose first article is about how my cost of living is going up. It turns out, the city owes retired municipal employees so much money that the mayor has proposed raising property taxes by $500 million next year. Without getting into too much detail, let me say only that this will cost me about $1,000 if it goes through.

Long-time readers of this blog know I'm not exactly an Ayn-Rand-quoting, anti-tax spewing, adolescent-thinking nut-job. I like democracy and all that. So while I'm not happy about the additional taxes, I accept them, even though I recognize the uncomfortable levels of corruption in the Greatest City in North America. Here's why.

Successive city governments for the last 20 or 30 years made promises to municipal employees that we, as a city, would pay handsome retirement benefits if they would agree to put out fires and arrest criminals. We (through our sort-of-elected representatives) made these promises when no one really wanted to fight crime or fires in Chicago. But the pension guarantees helped make being a city employee in the 1980s and 1990s one of the best gigs around.

In exchange, we got a great fire department, decent policing (despite unrepentant sociopaths like Jon Burge), and overall a much cleaner, hipper city than anyone living here in 1975 could ever have hoped. And we kept taxes low, so that people would move back to the city from their white-flight suburbs, spend money, and demand clean, safe, not-on-fire streets.

Well, now we have to pay up on those promises. And that's OK. (I'm not naive, though. I really want another Shakman suit to claw back all the corruption, but that's a different blog post.)

All these increased property taxes are, essentially, a loan coming due. Chicago in 1985 borrowed money from Chicago in 2015, in order that Chicago in 2015 would be an enviable place to live. Whatever I think of Mayors Daley fils or Emanuel, I believe both have the city's best interests in mind right after their own. (In Chicago, this is considered a noble philosophy.) And while I resent Daley's transparent zipper-lowering on parking meters and a couple of other privatization deals, I believe he really wanted to make the city a better place to live.

That's not how most people see it, I grant. Most people care only about how much they have to pay right now. Thus has it been throughout history, which explains every right-wing government ever*.

It's hard for people to see how everyone really is "in this together." The ideal—I admit, almost never seen in nature—is that a city comprises a group of people who agree to share some responsibilities (police, fire, roads) in exchange for some pro rata contribution. It's not communism; it's civics. I don't want to spend my time building a road to get to the market and neither do you. So let's band together, pool our resources, set up rules to limit cheating as much as we can (without denying the humanity of people who really can't contribute directly), and muddle through.

And if the most effective way to do that is to promise extravagant retirement packages to the people who kept the city clean and safe during one of its worst eras, well, that's OK.

* The basic electoral argument of the political right is simple: taxes take your money and give it to them. It's no coincidence that the right also want to stop you from getting a liberal education, because then you'd learn that (a) them means you to the people selling this line, and (b) no matter how much better your life is under a right-leaning government, it's a hundred times better for right-leaning politicians and their friends. We're all in this together; let's act like it.

Via TPM, Rick Perlstein says that the race-baiting tactics the GOP uses to block voting reform started as Reagan's reaction to Carter's proposals:

Everyone loved to talk about voter apathy, but the real problem, Carter said, was that “millions of Americans are prevented or discouraged from voting in every election by antiquated and overly restricted voter registration laws”—a fact proven, he pointed out, by record rates of participation in 1976 in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, where voters were allowed to register on election day. So he proposed that election-day registration be adopted universally, tempering concerns that such measures might increase opportunities for fraud by also proposing five years in prison and a $10,000 fine as penalties for electoral fraud.

A more perfect democracy. Who could find this controversial?

You guessed it: movement conservatives, who took their lessons about Democrats and “electoral reform” from Republican allegations that had Kennedy beating Nixon via votes received from the cemeteries of Chicago.

Ronald Reagan had been on this case for years. ... In his newspaper column, Reagan said the increase in voting would come from “the bloc comprised of those who get a whole lot more from the federal government in various kinds of income distribution than they contribute to it.” And if those people prove too dumb to vote themselves a raise, “don’t be surprised if an army of election workers—much of it supplied by labor organizations which have managed to exempt themselves from election law restrictions—sweep through metropolitan areas scooping up otherwise apathetic voters and rushing them to the polls to keep the benefit dispensers in power.”

Ah, Reagan, the man who ran up the deficit more than any other previous president but whose followers credit him with fiscal prudence; the staunch anti-Communist who sold arms to Iran illegally; the man whose folksy charm barely concealed a racist, vile character who believed everything he wanted to and nothing he didn't.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interréd with their bones; so let it be with Reagan.

Meanwhile, one of the most thoughtful, patient, and correct leaders our country has ever had continues to suffer unfair attacks by the very people who think Reagan should be canonized, and who are starting to feel very nervous that there is something out there even worse than their fantasy of Carter...

Chicago has five of the 20 most-congested roads in the U.S.:

Drivers in the northeastern Illinois-northwest Indiana region suffered the misery of 61 extra hours behind the wheel on average in 2014 — equivalent to a week and a half of work — because of delays caused by gridlock, construction zones and collisions that tied up traffic, according to the Urban Mobility Scorecard released late Tuesday by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.

The Los Angeles area took the top three spots on the congestion scorecard last year. Locally, different stretches of the Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways (Interstate 90/94) gave motorists the biggest headaches, accounting for three spots in the top 20. Two areas on the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) also were among the 20 most congested.

Coming in at No. 4 nationally was I-90/94 westbound from 35th Street to the Edens junction. The report noted that 4 p.m. on Fridays tended to be the worst time to be driving on the 13-mile section of road where average speeds were as slow as 16 mph. The eastbound stretch from Montrose Avenue to Ruble Street, just south of Roosevelt Road, ranked seventh nationally.

Chicago also ranks #3 in total travel delay (302.6 million hours) and cost of truck congestion ($1.5 bn). But the 1.6 million CTA rides and 300,000 Metra (heavy rail) rides every weekday probably prevent Chicago from becoming a true dystopia, like Dallas.

Krugman writes, and I agree, that Donald Trump scares the Republican establishment precisely because he's too honest:

Conservative religiosity, conservative faith in markets, were never about living a godly life or letting the invisible hand promote entrepreneurship. Instead, it was all as Corey Robin describes it: Conservatism is

a reactionary movement, a defense of power and privilege against democratic challenges from below, particularly in the private spheres of the family and the workplace.

The point is that Trump isn’t a diversion, he’s a revelation, bringing the real motivations of the movement out into the open.

He's our Putin, but without the subtlety.

Crain's reported this morning that the MacArthur Foundation has started making grants to help curb climate change:

Initial grants will help continue and accelerate U.S. greenhouse gas reductions, increase and sustain U.S. political consensus for climate action, and provide incentives for a low-carbon economy. The climate initiative is the second big bet MacArthur has announced in pursuit of transformative change in areas of profound concern; the first was a $75 million initiative to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses its jails.

MacArthur’s initial $50 million investment in 2015 includes both unrestricted general operating support and specific project grants.

So far the money is going to the usual suspects (Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy), and it can only help. I would like to see other large organizations start making these kinds of grants; in particular, insurance companies, who have a financial stake in fighting anthropogenic climate change.

W00t!

[M]any of the 4m Britons who travel to the United States each year will no doubt be delighted to hear of a plan to station American immigration officers at two British airports, London Heathrow and Manchester. These will process travellers before they leave the country, and with luck considerably speed up entrance at the other end. And, as the Telegraph goes on, processing people before they board the plane would be popular on both sides of the pond....

Pre-arrival clearance has been available for those flying from, or refuelling at, Shannon airport in Ireland for some time. This was one of the bonuses benefits of IAG, the parent of British Airways, acquiring Aer Lingus, an Irish carrier. Eight other European airports may also be included in the scheme, reports the Telegraph, including Schiphol in Amsterdam, Madrid-Barajas and Arlanda Airport in Stockholm. Still, it will probably take two years for officials on both sides of the Atlantic to agree upon and then implement the scheme in Britain. And, of course, there is always the danger that the immigration officers that are sent over here will be just as surly and incompetent as those they employ at home. But let’s stay optimistic.

The other benefit to pre-clearance is that travelers will be able to connect directly to domestic flights in the U.S. Right now, people going from London to, say, Des Moines, have to land at O'Hare, go through customs and immigration in Terminal 5, and then re-check their bags and go through security in whatever domestic terminal they're leaving from. This makes the minimum sane connection time about two hours. With pre-clearance, passengers can get off their plane and walk a few gates over to their connecting flight.

For me, though, it'll probably only save about fifteen minutes, thanks to Global Entry. (If you travel outside the U.S. more than once a year, definitely apply for this program.)

It's not clear when this will actually happen. There are challenges. The Department of Homeland Security has not yet announced a date for implementation.