The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Impressive and rapid destruction

No, I don't mean the war in Ukraine. I mean the toy I got Cassie on Wednesday. To refresh your recollection, it looked like this when I handed it to her:

As of this morning, it looked like this:

I honestly don't know where the rest of it went, though I did find a lot of 2-3 cm leather fragments all over the living room. We're about to take a walk (it's 17.4°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters!), so I may, ah, encounter more fragments in the next hour or so.

Quick update from Ukraine

My friend Тетяна is still posting on social media and texting, and still at her home in central Kyiv. She reports:

Kyiv is more or less ok, except a few attacks - 2 residential buildings, Holocaust memorial instead of TV tower, children’s hospital... failing to target lots of things, the other day another Iskander got shot down targeting the famous Motherland statue... those idiots apparently thought that the museum of military vehicles is a military convoy

North-west suburbs - pure massacre (((( with air strikes, tanks etc. My friend is fighting in that area, and his house nearby was destroyed by a cluster bomb yesterday

She posted this photo from a street near her house, showing that there are worse things in the world than Chicago potholes:

Updates when possible.

Weather Now 5 close to launch

Last night, I finished the last major feature in the Weather Now upgrade that I started in earnest back in October 2020. That means the development app can do most of what the version 4 can do, except better in most cases. By extension, that means I just have a few things to do in order to replace version 4 in production. But "a few things" includes setting up all the production assets for the new version, including the DevOps pipelines. That's not a small job.

That last bit may take a while. I'll have more extensive release notes closer to launch. The Search feature will have the most limitations immediately post-launch as it requires replacing the current 7.5-million-row gazetteer from the external sources, rather than simply porting the data. A few other things (full internationalization, configuring your language and measurement systems, and historical data) will also take time. Modernizing the deployment pipeline makes adding these features back in a lot easier, though.

For now, the development app has weather archives back to last May and much simpler methods of accessing data than v4. I encourage you to try it out.

Europe's 9/11

Julia Ioffe remains one of the clearest voices about Russia in the Western press, not surprising as she was born in the USSR and lived the first few years of her life in Moscow. Her analysis of the first week of the Ukrainian invasion is a must-read:

For America, World War II was Pearl Harbor, island hopping in the Pacific, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge. As bloody and horrific as those events were, they pale in comparison to what Europe experienced. In six years of war, the continent was leveled. Tens of millions of people were killed in the most novel and horrific ways. Many countries endured the brutality of military occupation. The trauma of that war is still present today in Europe in a way that is foreign to the United States. It is passed down from generation to generation. (The same thing is true of Ukraine and Russia. The Soviet Union lost 27 million people—15 percent of its population—in just four years. Every family lost many, many loved ones, and the trauma of that war is alive and well, thanks in part to Putin’s propaganda machine.) If you could make the images coming out of Ukraine black and white, it might be hard to tell the difference between September 1939 or June 1941. The fact that there is a land war happening again, in Europe, less than a century since the last one, and using a lot of the same language, has been extremely triggering for Europeans (as well as for Russians and Ukrainians). For Europeans, as some of the continent’s officials have told people in the Biden administration, “this is our 9/11.”

Putin is determined to see this matter through—all the way through. There is no way he stops now, and the more the Ukrainian people stand up to him, the more they mock him, the more determined he will be to crush them. He will not be humiliated by “Little Russians,” by residents of a country he doesn’t believe is real. He will not be vanquished by a Ukraine he thinks is a puppet of his mortal enemy, the United States. And because he has more troops and more firepower, he can have his way, even if it won’t be as easy as he initially thought. It’s why absolutely no one should discount the possibility that Putin might make good on his threat to use a nuclear weapon. He is that angry, and he wants it badly enough. It is existential for him now. As Russian TV host Dmitry Kiselev threatened on his Sunday night show, Russia is fully willing to fire 500 nuclear warheads at NATO countries. He explained why Russia would do this. “The principle is: why do we need the world if Russia won’t be in it?”

Earlier this week, I was on Morning Joe, and one of the other guests, Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, said that he believes that, in the end, Ukraine will triumph. Good will conquer evil. For a moment, I was dumbstruck. Everything he had said on the show until then was so rational and honest, so deeply grounded in grim reality. And yet, somehow, he managed to shoehorn this cloying little bromide in there: Ukraine is vastly outgunned, a no-fly zone is not possible, Russia will eventually get the upper hand—but Ukraine will win, eventually, because good conquers evil

What a perfectly American sentiment, I thought, born of the privilege of having never been invaded or occupied, of joining world wars long after the opening shots have been fired and then claiming the victors’ podium, of wearing nice little blinders that allow you to believe that progress is inevitable, linear, and irreversible. How nice it must be, as a white man in America, to never have to experience the consequences of the moral arc of the universe collapsing under the weight of the universe’s capacity for injustice, of evil getting away with absolutely everything. 

By the way, Ioffe named her blog "Tomorrow will be Worse." Yeah.\

For more fun reading, Craig Unger provides a timeline of the XPOTUS's career as a Russian asset.

The short lives of Cassie's toys

Yesterday evening, Cassie and I went to the store to buy dog food, and I got her a toy I thought seemed durable enough even for her:

Not so much, as you can see in this photo from 55 minutes later:

Yes, that pile of white fluff by her belly came out of the stuffed rabbit.

So I have a question for the hive mind: what should I do with all of the toy corpses? Cassie still plays with them, sometimes. I mean, I know the gray one with orange highlights in the center is a duck, but no one else does. And the red Kong to its left turned out to be destructable, regardless of its labeling:

Of course, it doesn't take a lot to make this dog happy:

Will she really miss the half-eaten rubber ball?

Other reactions

What the professionals had to say about last night's State of the Union address:

  • Aaron Blake: "While Russia’s invasion has fueled some bipartisanship, there remain some divides on precisely what to do or what should have been done — particularly about our energy supply and related sanctions on things like the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. But Biden opted not to dwell on the specifics and instead focused on our sudden and rare unity of cause."
  • The Economist: "Although never regarded as a gifted orator, Mr Biden was in especially poor form, stumbling through both his scripted lines and ad libs. He spoke of the “Iranian people” when he meant Ukrainians and confused the word “vaccine” for “virus”. After the perfunctory closing line “May God protect our troops”, the president felt compelled to add a mystifying postscript: “Go get him!” (or perhaps, as some transcribed it, “Go get ’em!”), he shouted into the microphone."
  • Michael D Shear: "There were few subjects that did not get a mention in Mr. Biden’s speech. But some of the Democratic Party’s biggest agenda items — like climate change, immigration, gun control and abortion rights — received only cursory treatment."

And Greg Sargent takes the GOP to task for Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds' response: "In her speech, she reached for all kinds of absurd ways to blame Russian aggression on Biden’s alleged weakness, while declaring solidarity with Ukraine. But in the real world, while Biden has drawn a line against sending in troops, he has led an international response that has been far more robust than most observers expected."

Meanwhile, The Economist has a series of guest essays about Russia's invasion of Ukraine that you should read, especially from Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Simonyte ("Russia's invasion was predictable") and Russian scholar Alexander Gabuev ("why Putin and his entourage want war").

President Biden's first State of the Union

As I did in 2020, this year I live-posted SOTU on Facebook. Here are my posts, in the order I made them:

OK, here we go with the SOTU. Last time (2020) I needed two martinis and watched with the sound off. This time, I see no need for alcohol and I'm happy to listen. What changed, I wonder?

Ukrainian ambassador gets an extended standing ovation from the entire government of the United States. She might prefer fighter jets and ammunition, but it was a nice gesture

We're putting troops along the Russian border...whoo boy

Yes! End "trickle-down" policies which only concentrate wealth at the top

Infrastructure decade. Yes.

It's so nice to hear a coherent, positive speech from a man who cares about the job he has

I was already a little concerned about the "make it in America" rhetoric, and then cue the GOP chanting "USA, USA!"

Dignity! Yes, this is where Biden excels. Nice.

The wise grandfather is such a welcome contrast to the ugly uncle

I did not predict a chief prosecutor for pandemic fraud. Very good.

"The only president ever to cut the deficit by $1 trillion in one year." Partially disingenuous, but still true

Anti-virals on the spot at no cost if you test positive at a pharmacy. Wow

Bipartisan standing O on "our kids need to be in school."

"Let's see each other as...fellow Americans." Most of the GOP clapped too. Good.

Strong statement against "defund the police." And yes! Repeal the liability shield protecting guns!

Awww. Justice Breyer looks so cute

Wow, Katanji Brown to "strong borders" in one sentence? Grandpa missed a paragraph break

Did the speechwriters run out of time? It seems like we're in the "and another thing" section. The recap in sonata-allegro form, I suppose

Wow, connecting military burn pits to his son's cancer

ARPAH [Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health]. We can do this.

The state of the Union is strong because you, the American people, are strong.

Of course the outburst was from Boebert.

Wow, what a contrast from last time. No martinis required, but I believe I will have a wee Lagavulin.
Meanwhile, Cassie has graduated to loud snoring:

And yes, I did have a wee Lagavulin:

Here's the unedited thread:

Productive first day of spring

I finished a sprint at my day job while finding time to take Cassie to the dog park and make a stir-fry for lunch. While the unit tests continue to spin on my work computer, I have some time to read about all the things that went wrong in the world today:

I'm heading out tonight to watch President Biden's first State of the Union Address with friends. Robert Reich will also tune in.