The Daily Parker

While I fight a slow laptop and its long build cycle (and how every UI change seems to require re-compiling), the first day of the last month of summer brought this to my inbox:

• Who better to prosecute the XPOTUS than a guy who prosecuted other dictators and unsavory characters for the International Criminal Court? (In America, we don't go to The Hague; here, The Hague comes to you!)
• After the evidence mounted that Hungary has issued hundreds of thousands of passports without adequate identity checks, the US has restricted Hungarian passport holders from the full benefits of ESTA that other Schengen-area citizens enjoy.
• The US economy continues to exceed the expectations of people who have predicted a recession any day now. (Of course, every dead pool has a guaranteed winner eventually...)
• After an unprecedented 31 consecutive days enduring temperatures over 43°C, Phoenix finally caught a break yesterday—when the temperature only hit 42°C.
• Jake Meador explores why about 40 million fewer Americans go to church these days than in 1995.
• Remember how we all thought Tesla made cars with amazing battery ranges? Turns out, Elon Musk can't do that right, either.
• American car culture not only gives us unlivable environments, but also discourages the exploration that people in other countries (and I when I go there) do all the time.
• We should all remember (and thank) USSR naval Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, who vetoed firing a nuclear-tipped torpedo at an American destroyer during the Cuban Missile Crisis 71 years ago.

Finally, Chicago historian John Schmidt tells the story of criminal mastermind Adam Worth, who may have been Arthur Conan Doyle's inspiration for Professor Moriarty.

I'm just over a week from performing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, so as I try to finish a feature that turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought, I'm hearing opera choruses in my head. Between rehearsals and actual work, I might never get to read any of these items:

• Jesse Wegman describes how to tell a political prosecution from a real one, which would be great except the people doing the political ones don't read the Times.
• Meaghan O'Rourke points to Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie as emblematic of the strangeness of modern American girl culture.
• Sci-fi author John Scalzi, who knows a thing or two about fictional aliens, does not think the US government is covering up details about real aliens, if for no other reason than the XPOTUS would have bragged about it by now.
• Via Bruce Schneier, the World of Warcraft sub-reddit embarrassed an AI-driven site by getting the site's AI to write about something that will never exist.
• The Post has an interactive history of changes to the Appalachian Trail.

Finally, New York City (and other urban areas) are experiencing a post-pandemic dog-poop renaissance. Watch where you step!

And now, I will put on "Dank sei dir Osiris" one more time.

It's Tuesday afternoon, and I think I'm caught up with everything in the way of me ploughing through some coding at work the remainder of the week. At some point, I might even read all of these through:

• January 6th Committee Special Counsel Jack Smith has informed the XPOTUS that he is the subject of a federal investigation, a clear indication that an indictment could soon follow.
• Abi Breland reports that far-right trolls haven't figured out how to cause misery on Meta's Threads app yet, but don't worry, they will.
• Via Molly White, the OPP arrested five men who allegedly kidnapped and beat up a man who calls himself "Ontario's Crypto King" after the victim squandered stole spent C$35 million of investors' money and only invested about 2% of the "fund" in actual cryptocurrency.
• Actor George Clooney and human-rights activist John Prendergast warn that the Wagner mercenary group continues to engage in state capture in Africa, destabilizing the continent and terrorizing millions of people.
• Activists in San Francisco have begun sabotaging unoccupied autonomous vehicles by putting traffic cones on their hoods.
• Phoenix hit 43.3°C (110°F) for the 19th day in a row, exceeding the previous record set in 1974, while Tokyo continues to swelter in 38°C weather.
• Residents on the south half of the 15-year Metra UP-N bridge replacement project—i.e., the half that still has 120-year-old bridges—have started frantically googling "adverse possession" after realizing that they will lose their back yards in the next three years, just like we on the north side did 7 years ago.

Finally, North Korean troops detained a US soldier after he intentionally crossed the demarcation line in the Joint Security Area, apparently after deserting while en route to the US for unspecified disciplinary measures arising from a separate incident. When I visited the JSA in 2013, a tour guide told me that this happens occasionally, and the North Korean army rarely gives the person back. Not sure life in a North Korean prison beats an other-than-honorable discharge from the US Army, but what do I know?

The first day of a sprint is the best day to consolidate three interfaces with three others, touching every part of the application that uses data. So right now, I am watching most of my unit tests pass and hoping I will figure out why the ones that failed did so before I leave today.

While the unit tests run, I have some stuff to keep me from getting too bored:

• The XPOTUS keeps confirming every theory about his behavior, this time that he only wants to run in 2024 to postpone the consequences of actions.
• Even those of us who support Ukraine in kicking the Russian invaders out of its sovereign territory think they simply can't join NATO right now.
• Julia Ioffe wonders why the fuck several retired government officials met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, less because she thinks they're old white men who have never set foot in Russia, and more because Lavrov hasn't got the power to negotiate a discount at Macy's. (In fairness, she published her post hours before one of them, Richard Haass, went on NPR this morning to hawk his new book.)
• Media strategist Julia Alexander scratches her head about the CBS-ification of Prime Video.
• Meanwhile, the streamers and studios have decided to let the writers go broke before resuming talks with them in the fall, regardless of what the actors do.
• Pro Publica took a second look at the hypothesis that Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and now they're not so sure it's correct.

Finally, the 2023 Emmy nominations came out this morning. I need to watch The White Lotus and Succession before HBO hides them.

Update: 2 out of 430 tests have failed (so far) because of authentication timeouts with Microsoft Key Vault. That happens on my slow-as-molasses laptop more often than I like.

Here is the state of things as we go into the second half of 2023:

• The government-owned but independently-edited newspaper Wiener Zeitung published its last daily paper issue today after being in continuous publication since 8 August 1703. Today's headline: "320 years, 12 presidents, 10 emperors, 2 republics, 1 newspaper."
• Paula Froelich blames Harry Windsor's and Megan Markle's declining popularity on a simple truth: "Not just because they were revealed as lazy, entitled dilettantes, but because they inadvertently showed themselves for who they really are: snobs. And Americans really, really don’t like snobs."
• Starting tomorrow, Amtrak can take you from Chicago to St Louis (480 km) in 4:45, at speeds up to (gasp!) 175 km/h. Still not really a high-speed train but at least it's a 30-minute and 50 km/h improvement since 2010. (A source at Amtrak told me the problem is simple: grade crossings. They can't go 225 km/h over a grade crossing because, in a crash, F=ma, and a would be very high.)
• The Federal Trade Commission will start fining websites up to $10,000 for each fake review it publishes. "No-gos include reviews that misrepresent someone’s experience with a product and that claim to be written by someone who doesn’t exist. Reviews also can’t be written by insiders like company employees without clear disclosures."
• A humorous thought problem involving how many pews an 80-year-old church can have explains the idiocy behind parking minimums.
• Chicago bike share Divvy turned 10 on Wednesday. You can now get one in any of Chicago's 50 wards, plus a few suburbs.
• Actor Alan Arkin, one of my personal favorites for his deadpan hilarity, died yesterday at age 89.

And finally, the Chicago Tribune's food critic Nick Kindelsperger tried 21 Chicago hot dogs so you don't have to to find the best in the city.

Some stories to read at lunch today:

• The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the US Postal Service's requirement that a religiously observant letter carrier deliver packages on the Sabbath. Since Justice Alito (R$) wrote the opinion, I'll also have to read Justices Sotomayor's (I) and Jackson's (I) concurrence.
• Of course, as Josh Marshall predicted, the Court split along partisan lines in a decision that essentially abolishes affirmative action for college admissions, which will likely reverse the gains that African American students have made over the last 40 years.
• Alex Shephard wonders if the XPOTUS's whole classified-documents disaster came out of his "perhaps world-historically, pathetic and abject" existence.
• The I-95 bridge collapse outside Philadelphia caused a spike in SEPTA ridership and renewed interest in a new subway line.
• National Geographic, struggling to remain afloat after its acquisition and rapacious mismanagement by Disney, has laid off all of its remaining staff writers.
• James Fallows annotates a recent Toronto air traffic controllers conversation with a FedEx MD-11 whose left thrust reverser deployed just after takeoff.

Finally, our air quality has improved slightly (now showing 168 at IDTWHQ), but the Canadian smoke may linger for another couple of days.

We lost three people last week whose deaths have made the world ever so slightly better on balance. Religious swindler Pat Robertson went first on Wednesday. Then Saturday, Ted Kaczynski, also known as the "Unabomber" for his terror campaign against university professors in the 1990s, killed himself in his jail cell:

Kaczynski was found unresponsive in his cell around 12:30 a.m. ET and transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Kaczynski was previously in a maximum security facility in Colorado but was moved to a federal medical center in Butner, North Carolina, in December 2021 due to poor health.

Kaczynski, who went nearly 20 years without being captured until his arrest in 1996, was considered America's most prolific bomber.

Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski placed or mailed 16 bombs that killed three people and injured two dozen others, according to authorities.

Finally, yesterday the world lost Silvio Berlusconi, the corrupt former prime minister of Italy whose entry into politics to stymie the many legal cases against him  may have inspired the XPOTUS to do the same:

Liberal politicians, and the prosecutors he demonized as their judicial wing, watched in dismay as he used appeals and statutes of limitations to avoid punishment despite being convicted of false accounting, bribing judges and illegal political party financing.

His governments spent an inordinate amount of time on laws that seemed tailor-made to protect him from decades of corruption trials, a goal that some of his closest advisers acknowledged was why he had entered politics in the first place.

One law overturned a court ruling that would have required Mr. Berlusconi to give up one of his TV networks; others downgraded the crime of false accounting and reduced the statute of limitations by half, effectively cutting short several trials involving his businesses. He enjoyed parliamentary immunity, but in 2003 his government went further, passing a law granting him immunity from prosecution while he remained in office — in effect suspending his corruption trials.

By the time he finally resigned in 2011, amid a fractured conservative coalition and general national malaise, a good deal of damage seemed to have been done. Many analysts held him responsible for harming Italy’s reputation and financial health and considered his time in power a lost decade that the country had struggled to recover from.

On a totally different topic, while I traveled last week I read Death of the Great Man by psychiatrist Peter Kramer, a book journalist James Fallows recommended back in April.

OK, maybe not a totally different topic. You should read the book, though.

Police Scotland has arrested Nicola Sturgeon, who resigned as first minister of Scotland two months ago, as part of their investigation into allegations the SNP misspent £600,000 of donated money:

Her husband, Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the SNP, was arrested at their home in Uddingston near Glasgow on 5 April, and interviewed under caution for nearly 12 hours before being released without charge.

The police searched their home and back garden, and also searched the SNP’s headquarters under warrant, taking out boxes of documents and computers.

Colin Beattie MSP, then the party’s treasurer, was arrested and questioned as part of the same inquiry on 18 April and also released later without charge, pending further investigation.

The BBC has a timeline of the investigation.

I've just read the indictment against the XPOTUS and his "body man" Walt Nauta. Wow. As a FBI agent in The West Wing once remarked, "In 13 years with the Bureau I've discovered that there's no amount of money, manpower or knowledge than can equal the person you're looking for being stupid." And wow, was the XPOTUS stupid.

I'm not a practicing lawyer but I can read an indictment. If the US Attorneys can prove any of these facts—and I have no doubt they will—he's going to get convicted of a felony. Oddly, under our Constitution, he can still run for a second term if that happens, though he won't be able to vote for himself in Florida. But as Josh Marshall points out, the larger issues just distract from the utterly banal issues:

I wanted to share one thought.

That is the sheer ordinariness of the whole story. That may seem like a odd thing to say: ex-President facing multiple federal felony indictments for the first time ever, the bizarre details of this antic clown’s Florida Villa-cum-Hotel stuffed with banker’s boxes of classified documents, the bathroom chandelier, the power glitz jammed together with gaudy dime store aesthetic. But we grant Trump too much by lavishing, wearying too much in the purported weightiness of the moment. It’s very normal. Yes, powerful people get away with a lot. But if you commit crimes repeatedly and brazenly you’re very likely to get charged with one or more crimes, particularly if you’re in the public spotlight.

We hear endlessly how everyone not thoroughly in Trump’s thrall wants to ‘move on’ from the man. The first and most important part of that is shaking free of the reality distortion field that surrounds the man, as much for his foes as his followers. He’s hit with charges with evidence of his guilt that is clear and overwhelming and he jumps to the front to declare no one ever thought this could happen or be possible. He didn’t do it … but of course he was perfectly entitled to do it, even though he chose not to. Remember, he could have but chose not to. Got it? He attacks, defames. People get caught up in the frenzy of his seeming invulnerability and transgressive nature, the entertainment and the confusion. They’re wondering what he’ll do next. They’re baffled and suddenly the obvious ceases to be obvious.

Don’t be baffled. You may be thinking somehow there’s no way he’ll actually get convicted of anything. You’re wrong. He probably will. Maybe not. That happens too. That’s normal. It’s all normal.

I lived in New York in the late '80s and late '90s, and we always thought that the XPOTUS would never survive first contact with law enforcement. It took a while, but eventually his narcissism, unaccountability, and yes, his tiny little hands mind would eventually lead us here.

One more thing. John Scalzi called out all the remaining XPOTUS supporters to "get off the train," but hit on the reason they won't: "no one who is still on the Trump train at this point in 2023 is there for logical or rational reasons, you’re probably...stuck too far down in the grift to ever admit you’re the chump." But wow, the national security implications of this indictment alone should have every rational person in the country running from this guy.

Just a few stories I came across at lunchtime:

• In an act that looks a lot like the USSR's scorched-earth retreat in 1941, Ukraine accuses Russia of blowing up the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnieper River, which could have distressing follow-on effects over the next few months.
• A former Chicago cop faces multiple counts of perjury and forgery after, among other things, claiming his girlfriend stole his car to get out of 44 separate speeding tickets.
• James Fallows explains what probably happened to the Citation jet that crashed in rural Virginia over the weekend after two F-16s scrambled to intercept it over Washington.
• Molly White explains the SEC's case against Binance.

And finally, giant-sized coconut crabs may have stashed away the remains of lost pilot Emelia Earhart, and scientists think they know where.