The Daily Parker

A plethora:

• Google has updated its satellite photos of Mariupol, clearly showing the destruction from Russia's invasion and subsequent siege.
• Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Lisa Murkowsky (R-AK) have introduced legislation to force the Supreme Court—read: Justices Thomas (R$) and Gorsuch (R)—to adopt a binding code of ethics. Presumably a Democratic bill that would actually let Congress set the Court's ethical standards will come soon.
• On Monday, the city will cut down a bur oak they estimate has lived over 250 years.
• The US Army will rename a Virginia fort after Lt. Gen. Arthur Gregg and Lt. Col. Charity Adams, replacing the name of a disgraced traitor named Robert E. Lee.
• Carolyn Bryant Donham, whose false accusation that teenager Emmett Till whistled at her resulted in her fellow racists lynching the boy, died on Tuesday at 88.
• Emma Durand-Wood discovers what many of us already knew: having a fitness tracker, and getting your steps in, makes you very aware of walkable environments.
• Nicholas Dagen Bloom's new book explains why public transit in the US has done poorly for the last 75 years (hint: racism).
• Max Holleran suggests a way to make US cities cleaner (and encourage more public transit use): make parking impossible.
• Bruce Schneier suggests a publicly-funded AI could help save democracy—or at least offset the likely harms from only having privately-owned AIs.
• Three Colorado teens face murder charges after an evening of throwing rocks from an overpass killed a 20-year-old driver.
• In a less destructive prank gone wrong, seniors at Northridge Prep, a Catholic high school in north suburban Niles, accidentally let a steer loose in the village this morning.

Finally, as we approach the 50th anniversary of Gary Gygax creating Dungeons & Dragons, Christopher Borrelli suggests putting a statue of him up in downtown Lake Geneva. I concur. Or, since he spent the first seven years of his life just a few blocks away from where I'm sitting right now (on Kenmore near Wrigley Field), why not put one there, too? (One of my favorite memories from childhood is playing 5 minutes of AD&D with Gygax as DM.)

I got an update today from Metra about the Ravenswood Union Pacific North station, after sending an inquiry last week. Before I get to that, let's take a look at photographic evidence that we've had to use the "temporary" platform north of Lawrence Avenue for just under 12 years now:

That's the Google Street View from July 2011 showing that Metra has already closed the 1950s-era inbound platform (on the left) and opened the "temporary" platform (on the right).

I took these two photos a week ago, but I could have taken them last September with only one minor change (the new "temporary" fence by the entrance to the new platform):

OK, so now that we've established that (a) we haven't had even a semi-permanent inbound platform since the middle of President Obama's first term, and (b) neither Metra nor the UPRR has done any noticeable work on the new new-but-unfinished platform since I last posted news seven months ago, here is what a Metra spokesperson told me this afternoon:

Per our station project Construction Team, a late July 2023 completion is anticipated. There are a few items remaining that need to be addressed to complete the project.

1. Structural tiles, which the manufacturer has delayed delivery of. Our Team has 3 other options to address this issue that they are looking into and are actively progressing a tile alternative.
2. The waterproofing along the edge of the platform and the bridge abutment (Lawrence & Leland) that requires the removal of track and ballast by Union Pacific Railroad will be scheduled by UP forces. Ballast work could not be performed during winter months when ground is frozen.
3. Guardrail fencing change work at Leland Bridge is proceeding through redesign to accommodate a conduit system. Contractor estimates work end of May/early June.
4. A solution to the hairline cracks in the platform surface has been determined. A coating to address this issue cannot be applied until weather conditions permit.
5. Additional CDOT crossing work required along with the asphalt overlay patching in the street cannot occur until the asphalt plants reopen next month.

With a project of this magnitude that entailed the replacement of 22 bridges on the UPN Line, as well as a complete station project, its impact on the community was/is unavoidable and cannot be understated. Metra is making every attempt possible to improve the dates on the remaining items and complete the work, as soon as possible.

I knew about #3, and previously reported about #1. The rest just frustrates me to no end.

The UPRR and Metra should have completed this project in 2018. I will remind everyone that four years of the delay happened because former Illinois governor Bruce Rauner (R) cut funding to everything based solely on his extreme anti-government ideology. (Makes you wonder why he wanted to govern, right?) And once again, I will remind everyone that if I had the power, I would sentence the former governor to stand on the platform for two hours a day, every day, for a duration equal to the entire delay to the project that he caused. Even that sentence seems lenient.

I hope that my contact at Metra has accurate information, because I'm really tired of standing in the rain just 20 meters from what appears to be a perfectly serviceable but inaccessible shelter.

Two stories, related only in the self-perception of their protagonists. First, this morning Fox "News" announced that Tucker Carlson uttered his last bigotry for them on Friday:

A reason was not immediately provided.

“Mr. Carlson’s last program was Friday April 21st,” a statement read. “Fox News Tonight will air live at 8 PM/ET starting this evening as an interim show helmed by rotating FOX News personalities until a new host is named.”

The shock announcement ends Carlson’s meteoric rise at Fox News, where his brand of xenophobia, white grievance, and hate transformed Carlson into a singular force at the conservative news network—and its top presenter. Tucker Carlson Tonight has also been labeled the most racist show in the history of cable news.

Meanwhile, a quarter of the world away, the Chinese ambassador to France said out loud what China and Russia have said privately for years, with unfortunate results:

Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, said the countries in eastern Europe that gained independence following the USSR’s fall in 1991 did not have “effective” sovereign status in international law.

Officials in Europe reacted furiously, especially in the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, which are in constant fear of meddling and even attack from neighboring Russia.

Lu has "pulled the rug out from under China’s intention of being any sort of mediator between Russia and Ukraine,” tweeted Sari Arho Havrén, an adjunct professor at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, a research organization run by the American and German militaries. “Not recognizing Ukraine as a sovereign state, exactly as Russia claims, makes China 100% on Russia’s side.”

Actually, I suspect China doesn't really care what happens to Ukraine, or the Baltic states, being focused as they are on an island 100 kilometers off the coast of Quanzhou. (You could even say they have worried about the island formosa the time since they parted ways, but that's cheap even for me.)

I've got the popcorn out to watch the fallout from both events.

As professional narcissist Elon Musk threatened, on Thursday Twitter abruptly ended their verified "blue check" program. Suddenly, Twitter users had no way to know for sure whether tens of thousands of government agencies, celebrities, journalists, and other people whose jobs depend to some extent on their credibility, were who their Twitter accounts purported to be.

It only took two days for someone to hoax the City of Chicago:

Impostors posing as Chicago government officials, including Mayor Lori Lightfoot, posted a series of tweets early Friday morning falsely claiming that North Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive is being permanently closed.

The accounts posting the false tweets claimed to be Lightfoot, the Chicago Department of Transportation and the Illinois Department of Transportation. Their posts were seen by well over 100,000 people early in the day, according to Twitter data.

The impersonation effort came just a day after Twitter removed verification from accounts that had been previously verified for the purpose of credibility. Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s controversial decision to remove the “legacy” verifications took away the authenticated status of all three of the impersonated accounts.

Before Friday, the usernames of the true mayoral account, CDOT account and IDOT account had all previously appeared alongside a blue check mark signaling that the accounts had been proved to actually represent the authorities they claimed to represent. However, those check marks were taken away Thursday because of Musk’s decision.

New York City's government also had their own problem.

But this highlights a real problem: in a disaster, or an election, how will people know what information is real? I think "by not using Twitter" seems like the right answer but I also don't think Twitter will fully die by next November.

I didn't publish on Twitter very much before. Today, I'm just standing on shore, watching the ship sink. But it's a big ship, and its sinking will foul the environment for a long time.

Emma Camp, an assistant editor at Reason, initially found an autism diagnosis comforting, but now has second thoughts:

In many online circles — particularly those frequented by young, white, middle-class women like me — certain diagnoses are treated like a zodiac sign or Myers-Briggs type. Once they were primarily serious medical conditions, perhaps ones of which to be ashamed. Now, absent social stigma, mental health status functions as yet another category in our ever-expanding identity politics, transforming what it means to have a psychological or neurological disorder for a generation of young people, though not entirely for the better.

I was first diagnosed with autism at age 20, shortly after my sophomore year of college. After my costly evaluation, I was relieved. Knowing I had autism gave me the permission I needed to accept my quirks and insecurities.

The condition quickly became a core part of my identity.

Under the kind of identity politics most frequently found on left-wing internet circles, immutable identity characteristics like race, gender and sexual orientation are a person’s most important features, giving those in certain historically disfavored groups special authority to comment on issues affecting their community. There’s a constant throat-clearing among many left-leaning young people — “as a queer person,” “as a woman of color”— phrases used to assert epistemic authority or dodge accusations of wrongthink. I myself have started many a sentence with “as an autistic person” to pre-empt criticism.

But mental health diagnoses, along with most other categories up for examination under our identity politics, are accidents of birth. To make them central features of our identities is to focus on the things we can’t control ourselves — an approach that is ultimately disempowering.

Her whole essay is worth a read.

First, because it's April 20th, we have a a couple of stories about marijuana:

• Daniel Wolfe calls on cannabis sellers to pick names that actually provide brand differentiation.
• Cannabis companies here in Chicago (and, one expects, elsewhere) provide buses to private events to get around public-consumption laws.

(The Daily Parker owns shares in Chicago-based Green Thumb Industries.)

Second, because it's the 21st Century, we have a collection of articles about the end of democracy:

• Thomas Edsall warns that the Right has adopted a strategy of abusing the institutions of our democracy to undermine it.
• Elon Musk, whose 'sploding rocket this morning should underscore that he knows about as much rocket science as he does software, wants to become a latter-day Pullman.
• Dunning-Kruger poster child Mike Lindell must pay a computer engineer $5m after the engineer proved conclusively that Lindell's "stolen election" data was bogus.
• Josh Marshall looks at Florida governor Ron DeSantis' (R) trip to Washington that managed to get several sitting Representatives (including one from Florida!) to endorse the XPOTUS. As Marshall says, "Stick a spork in him. He's done."

And in me. I've got software to write.

The clouds have moved off to the east, so it's a bit warmer and a lot sunnier than yesterday. I still have to wait for an automated build to run. For some reason (which I will have to track down after lunch), our CI builds have gone from 22 minutes to 37. Somewhere in the 90 kB of logs I'll find out why.

Meanwhile, happy Fox News On Trial Day:

• Jennifer Rubin foresees years of aftershocks from the Tennessee legislature's expulsion of two Black members last week.
• Why are right-wingers making up conspiracy theories about vegetarian food, now?
• Jaime Green re-reads Carl Sagan's novel Contact.
• WeWork has closed its four-floor Chicago office (one of several in the city) while facing a claim in Cook County Circuit Court for $360,000 in back rent.
• Vox's culture reporter Aja Romano muses about how the third season of The Mandalorian has given the Star Wars franchise "a Baby Yoda problem."
• The New Yorker interviews Luis von Ahn, creator of the Duolingo language-teaching app I'm using to prepare for an upcoming trip to Czechia.

Finally, I've started reading The Odyssey, so I applaud National Geographic's article this month on the history of the ancient world in which Homer set the poem.

On this day in 1998, I registered braverman.org, and just a few weeks later built the first draft of what became this blog. When I registered it, only about a million domain names existed, though 1998 turned out to be the year the Internet exploded worldwide. Just seven years earlier, only 100 .org names existed, so braverman.org may be one of the oldest .orgs out there. (For comparison, there are just about 350 million registered domain names today.)

Of course, the 25th anniversary of braverman.org hasn't yet become a global holiday, so a few other things happened in the last 24 hours:

• The Democratic Party really wants US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) to retire, as it has become painfully clear she can no longer perform her duties in the Senate, preventing us from confirming new judges. Seriously, ma'am, go.
• We also want Justice Clarence Thomas (R) to go, especially after a new revelation that he sold property to the billionaire "friend" who has taken him on half-million-dollar vacations. Seriously, sir, go.
• At least his colleagues on the Supreme Court all seem unimpressed with the "independent state legislature" bullshit espoused by some right-wing Republican state legislators.
• New Republic's Timothy Noah thinks "remote work sucks," but (our hero writes from his open and airy home office just steps from his dog and refrigerator) not all of us do.
• Paul Krugman explains how immigrants are saving America's economy.
• The New York Times has a lot of good things to say about Chicago hosting next year's Democratic National Convention.
• Your local, urban apiary might actually be hurting your neighborhood.

Finally, we have another gorgeous day in Chicago, a bit cooler than yesterday where I live thanks to delightful lake breeze, but still more like July than April. 

Good dog, people, the Discord document leak isn't that dire. And between yesterday's Post and the Times just now, I think we can all relax a bit.

Look, I haven't seen the leaked documents, nor have I sought to read them, because I don't believe I'm cleared to do so. But the only classification marking I've seen reported is "NOFORN," which just means that you can't share it with non-US citizens.

It's unlawful to disclose that you currently have or have ever had any security clearance above "Public Trust," which is the clearance you need to see, for example, social security numbers. I have worked on a military software project, and I spent time in the Pentagon and on several military bases. You may make whatever inferences from these statements you wish. I'm only saying I have some context for my analysis here.

People misunderstand classification levels, so let me try to provide some perspective. "Classified" just means a document has some notation about how sensitive it is, anything from "public trust" to "confidential" to "top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information" (TS:SCI). There are additional markings that color the overall sensitivity, like "NOFORN" (keep away from non-US citizens) or "FIVE EYES" (OK to share with the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but not anyone else).

I can't say for certain what kinds of documents exist at each level, but I can speculate. "Confidential" might include an email sent to everyone on a destroyer telling them what time the ship will leave port. The drunk Bosun's Mate 2 might share this information (unlawfully) with a foreign police officer to try to stay out of jail, and might even get an Article 15 for doing so, but...everyone in the port already knew this information.

"Secret" might include, the actual top speed of a warship. Everyone with Wikipedia knows the top speed of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer is "in excess 30 knots," but only our allies, adversaries, other governments, merchant marines, Somali pirates, people with access to commercial satellite photos, and the tens of thousands of people who have served aboard one of these ships knows for sure how fast one can go. You know, a limited group of people.

"Top Secret" and above would include information that could actually get people killed, expose our methods, or ruin our day some other way. I won't speculate in this post about what could be in that category. But Duke University published an article in March 2012 revealing five declassified documents formerly marked "Top Secret," so you can draw your own conclusions.

Last night the Post published an interview with a dumbass kid who participated in the Discord community where a different dumbass kid leaked thousands of lightly-classified documents to impress other dumbass kids:

United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people.

This account of how detailed intelligence documents intended for an exclusive circle of military leaders and government decision-makers found their way into and then out of OG’s closed community is based in part on several lengthy interviews with the Discord group member, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity. He is under 18 and was a young teenager when he met OG. The Post obtained consent from the member’s mother to speak to him and to record his remarks on video.

Bellingcat reports that some of the documents had "Top Secret" markings, but admits, "[a]s the channels were deleted following the controversy generated by the leaked documents, Bellingcat has not been able to confirm" what documents were actually leaked.

All of the other descriptions I've read suggest none the documents had anything in them that Al Jazeera didn't broadcast on its evening news cast later in the week. Embarrassing? Certainly. Anything that our allies and adversaries didn't already know about? Not a chance.

One more thing stood out. Clearly, the leaker was just a dumbass enlisted kid. My best guess: some dumbass Army E4 Specialist assigned to type up briefing papers for some O3 to give to some O5. In any event, I guessed he was no more than 22 years old and likely to get out of jail in his 30s.

It turns out, I wasn't too far from the mark:

The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.

The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of the Thug Shaker Central group through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira’s childhood home — posted on social media in family photographs — also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.

The Times also has established, through social media posts and military records, that Airman Teixeira is enlisted in the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Posts on the unit’s official Facebook page congratulated Airman Teixeira and colleagues for being promoted to Airman First Class in July 2022.

Airman First Class: a dumbass E3. And yes: his job was preparing briefing papers for officers. We'll see what the court martial says about his jail sentence in a couple of months.

Often when I think about Elon Musk, Spike Jones' 1942 hit "Der Feuhrer's Face" comes to mind. Substack, whose links Musk recently banned from Twitter, brings us A.R. Moxon's similar thoughts:

If you were the world’s smartest man, after all, you’d have turned your apartheid inheritance into the world’s largest fortune, and since you haven’t done that, you aren’t the world’s smartest man. Why, you might not even be a man, the definition of which is something the world’s smartest man seems to have some opinions about.

And one other rather minor thing the world’s smartest man is doing …

He has gone and bought himself a social networking platform. It’s called Twitter and maybe you’ve heard about it. I sure have.

[A]fter he bought Twitter, we have all seen what it means. It means insisting on fostering a place for unrestricted free speech while banning reporters who are critical of him, and bringing back the sorts of abusive actors who had been banned for using their hate speech to threaten and harass other people off the platform. It means insisting that the platform should be unbiased while currying favor from far-right extremists and propogandists and even doing their bidding in real time. It means creating a subscription model that demolishes the existing verification structure and claiming that doing so will create a level playing field, even while describing the new playing field as a deeply divided hierarchy based not on value of one’s thoughts, but on one’s willingness to pay. It means firing most of the staff and pulling apart various load-bearing aspects of the platform’s framework and replacing it with a post-it note. It means doing a lot of things that destroy the value of the platform, in other words, which make more and more of the people who gather on Twitter and create its value wonder what the point of continuing to write on Twitter is.

It all makes me think, as you might expect, of Beavis and Butthead.

Heh heh. Heh. Heh heh. Musk as Cornholio? Oh, my, yes.

Oh, I almost forgot: NPR has left the platform and its 8 million followers, on the reasonable grounds that they “are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence:”

"At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter," [said NPR CEO John Lansing]. "I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."

The only surprising thing here is that anyone has faith in the decision-making at Twitter anymore.

(Note: The Daily Parker is a contributor to National Public Radio.)