The Daily Parker

I mean, why? Just why?

• The XPOTUS, as predicted, announced his run for the 2024 election, despite looking like a total loser in the 2022 election. But narcissists gonna narcise.
• The Illinois Worker Rights Amendment passed, and will now become part of the state constitution. I think this will have a bunch of unintended consequences not beneficial to workers, so I voted against it. We're stuck with it now.
• Boomer Kathleen Parker spends her column today tut-tutting Boomers for not understanding Millennial jobs, picking "influencer" as just one example. I'm an X-er who completely understands "influencer" (i.e., children monetizing their own narcissism) and "change manager" (i.e., operations flunky) just fine, and suggests that the problem lies not with the Boomer parents but with the Boomer executives. (Longer post, maybe?)
• Pushwoosh, a Russian software company that writes spyware has pretended to be an American company, for reasons left as an exercise to the reader. About 8,000 apps use their stuff. As Bruce Schneier has said, supply-chain security is "an insurmountably hard problem."
• Bloomberg laments that "the wrong Americans are buying electric cars."
• Julia Ioffe cautions that Ukraine's re-taking of Kherson could lead to dangerous overreach as the war goes on—and a difficult diplomatic situation for the US.

Finally, the Missouri Department of Transportation proudly announced the 50th anniversary of their engineers killing downtown Kansas City, and the Internet let them have it.

Between my actual full-time job and the full-time job I've got this week preparing for King Roger, Cassie hasn't gotten nearly the time outdoors that she wants. The snow, rain, and 2°C we have today didn't help. (She doesn't mind the weather as much as I do.)

Words cannot describe how less disappointed I am that I will have to miss the XPOTUS announcing his third attempt to grift the American People, coming as it does just a few hours after US Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) announced his bid for Senate Minority Leader. Sad dog, sad turtle, sad party.

Now to walk the dog, pack the bag, and head to the Sitzprobe. But man, my sitz already feels probed.

James Fallows wants to put the domestic political press in a time-out:

[I]n historic terms, the midterm results under Joe Biden in 2022 are likely to be far better for the incumbent party and its president than for other modern presidents. As Biden would say, it’s a BFD.

[But] what has happened appears to be entirely at odds with what the political-reporter cadre — the people whose entire job is predicting and pre-explaining political trends — had been preparing the public for.

The Democrats have “defied expectations,” as the Post headline above puts it, largely because of the expectations our media and political professionals had set.

The premises of “analysis” pieces and talk shows over the past year-plus have been:

• “Biden is unpopular,” which may be true but seems not to have been decisive.

• “Afghanistan was the effective end of his presidency,” a widespread view 14 months ago. You can look it up.

• “Democrats have no message” — which in turn is an amalgam of (a) “Roe was a long time ago,” (b) “no one cares about infrastructure,” (c) “it’s all about crime” [or immigrants], and (d) “it’s all about Prices At The Pump.”

• “Dems in disarray.” On the day before people went to the polls, the Times’
  front page had two “analysis” stories on how bleak the Democratic prospects looked.

It’s not so much that this proved to be wrong. It’s that they felt it necessary and useful to get into the "expectations" business this way

How about this, in practical terms: For the next three stories an editor plans to assign on “Sizing up the 2024 field,” or the next three podcasts or panel sessions on “After the midterms, what’s ahead for [Biden, Trump, DeSantis, etc.],” instead give two of those reporting and discussion slots to under-reported realities of the world we live in now.

Whatever you say about the 2024 race now will be wrong. And what you say about the world of 2022 could be valuable.

Fallows, I should remind everyone, started his career as a speechwriter for President Carter and went on to write some of the most salient and prescient analyses of news media in the last 30 years.

Right now, however, I'm just glad I won't get 30 texts a day from candidates I've never heard of.

Even with Chicago's 1,642 judges on the ballot ("Shall NERDLY McSNOOD be retained as a circuit court judge in Cook County?"), I still got in and out of my polling place in about 15 minutes. It helped that the various bar associations only gave "not recommended" marks to two of them, which still left 1,640 little "yes" ovals to fill in.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world...

• Republican pollster Rick Wilson, one of the co-founders of the Lincoln Project, has a head-shaking Twitter thread warning everyone that You Know Who will probably announce his 2024 run before polls close tonight just to keep his narcissistic needs met.
• Author Stacy Schiff argues that the arguments John Hancock and Samuel Adams had in the 1770s define our politics today. (Would that make them the Isaac and Ishmael of American politics?)
• College Football and politics really, really shouldn't mix.
• Josh Marshall looks back wistfully on the stories TPM ran about alleged voter fraud in 2002 and finds nothing has changed except how much Republicans are lying about it. (Hint: they're lying more now.)
• National Geographic describes some archaeological finds that elucidate why the Western Roman Empire fell.
• The historic Belden-Stratford in Lincoln Park, which Parker and I passed every morning on his dawn relief trip to the park, is getting a multi-million-dollar rehab so the new landlord can offer $3,000-a-month studios and $8,000 three-bedrooms.
• Cranky Flier analyzes all 9,999 flight numbers for four major airlines to figure out some things about how their business models differ.
• Why is Maine building a $106 million highway that nobody wants? (The omnibus explanation seems on point.)
• John Scalzi lays out how Twitter's policy change around the "blue check" will make the notation worse than useless going forward.

Finally, Chicago gets a new brewery taproom on Thursday when Hop Butcher to the World opens in Half Acre's former Lincoln Avenue space, just over 2 km from my house. Cassie and I might find out on Saturday whether they let dogs in, assuming the forecast holds. (And there it is: a post that literally checks all the boxes for Daily Parker categories!)

It happens every September in the mid-latitudes: one day you've got over 13 hours of daylight and sunsets around 7:30, and two weeks later you wake up in twilight and the sun sets before dinnertime. In fact, Chicago loses 50 minutes of evening daylight and an hour-twenty overall from the 1st to the 30th. We get it all back in March, though. Can't wait.

Speaking of waiting:

• Buckingham Palace just warned people that the queue to see Queen Elizabeth's coffin has a 24-hour wait at the moment, so...dress warmly!
• Drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike will have to wait even longer to get into the Holland Tunnel after a planned $4.7-billion project adds even more induced demand.
• Via Bruce Schneier, Uber has had a data breach. No, scratch that—Uber lost control of its entire computing universe, because the company culture of cheapness and bullshittery extends to their IT security as well.
• Ronald Brownstein finds this year's election...really weird.
• David Brooks asks, why do we not have a strategy to defeat the XPOTUS?
• Matt Ford points to Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) as the future of Republican campaigning: trolling the libs.
• The Cook County State's Attorney has charged two Chicago cops with multiple felonies after they shot an unarmed man in Pilsen and lied about it.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria visited Kyiv, Ukraine, to learn the secret of the country's success against Russia.

With the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the British National Anthem has changed back to "God Save the King" for the third time in 185 years. In other news:

• The Guardian explains Elizabeth's funeral and other events that will take place over the next 10 days.
• James Fallows takes a second look at President Biden's speech from last week, in the context of the predictable reaction cycle about anything he does.
• Dana Milbank doesn't worry the MAGA folks want a Mussolini, since some of them keep going on about having a Caesar instead.
• Tina Nguyen wonders what Liz Cheney actually plans to do now.
• Matt Ford says, welp, "there are 'Trump Judges' after all."
• The Economist projects that the Democratic Party will keep its majority in the Senate come January, and probably even pick up a seat.
• Why is the United States the deadliest country in the OECD?
• Via Schneier, Facebook admitted it has no earthly idea what data it has on anyone.

By the way, the UK has a vacancy for the post of Prince of Wales, in case anyone would care to apply. I think we can bet on nepotism, though.

I took Friday off, so it felt like Saturday. Then Saturday felt like Sunday, Sunday felt like another Saturday, and yesterday was definitely another Sunday. Today does not feel like Tuesday.

Like most Mondays, I had a lot of catching up at the office, including mandatory biennial sexual harassment training (prevention and reporting, I hasten to point out). So despite a 7pm meeting with an Australian client tonight, I hope I find time to read these articles:

• The Chicago Bears have revealed a preliminary map of the Arlington Park redevelopment that includes a new football stadium. At least it has a Metra station, so people might actually not have to drive to see the games.
• Music critic Jim DiRogatis, who broke the R. Kelly rape story for the Chicago Sun-Times, moved to quash a subpoena in Kelly's ongoing trial.
• Michael Tomasky thinks the XPOTUS will destroy the Republican Party before he destroys democracy in America, but that ship might already have foundered.
• Paul Krugman argues that President Biden's economic policies have been great for workers.
• Strong Towns explains how McMansions aren't just ugly, they're also bad for their towns.

Finally, the Hugo Awards were announced in Chicago over the weekend, and now I have a ton more books to buy.

Meteorological summer ends in just a few hours here in Chicago. Pity; it's been a decent one (for us; not so much for the Western US). I have a couple of things to read this afternoon while waiting for endless test sessions to complete on my work laptop:

• Former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev died at 91.
• Julia Ioffe looks at Ukraine's risky counter-offensive—that might just work.
• Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle, who has covered the XPOTUS since the 2016 campaign, wonders if the XPOTUS might go to jail because he used the classified documents as props.
• Jennifer Rubin wonders why some die-hards in the GOP have yet to back away slowly from the obviously-deranged XPOTUS.
• Peter Wehner lists three strategies to help get rid of the XPOTUS blues.
• Those XPOTUS blues might be why more people in the US now smoke pot than smoke tobacco.
• Margaret Talbot warns that Justice Sam Alito (R) hasn't even started destroying civil rights yet.
• Catalytic converter theft is up 1,215% since 2019, with Priuses near the top of the list.
• New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority will get rid of their colorful MetroCard vending machines next year. Aww.

And via Bruce Schneier, a group of local Chicago high schoolers will never give you up and never let you down.

In her last column, the Washington Post veteran warns that journalists still have a long way to go to properly deal with the anti-democratic party to the right:

Here’s the good news: The media has come a long, long way in figuring out how to cover the democracy-threatening ways of Donald Trump and his allies, including his stalwart helpers in right-wing media. It is now common to see headlines and stories that plainly refer to some politicians as “election deniers,” and journalists are far less hesitant to use the blunt and clarifying word “lie” to describe Trump’s false statements. That includes, of course, the former president’s near-constant campaign to claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to prevent him from keeping the White House.

And yet, I worry that it’s not nearly enough. I don’t mean to suggest that journalists can address the threats to democracy all by themselves — but they must do more.

The deeper question is whether news organizations can break free of their hidebound practices — the love of political conflict, the addiction to elections as a horse race — to address those concerns effectively.

For the sake of democracy, they must.

Journalists certainly shouldn’t shill for Trump’s 2024 rivals — whoever they may be — but they have to be willing to show their readers, viewers and listeners that electing him again would be dangerous. That’s a tricky tightrope to walk.

James Fallows has said a lot of the same things. Maybe mainstream journalists will listen?

From around now through the middle of October, the days get noticeably shorter, with the sun setting 2 minutes earlier each day around the equinox. Fall is almost here—less than 8 days away, in fact. But that also means cooler weather, lower electricity bills (because of the cooler weather), and lots of rehearsals and performances.

Before any of that happens, though, I'll read these:

• Damon Linker warns that "there is no happy ending to America's [XPOTUS] problem."
• Anthony Fauci has announced he'll retire at the end of 2022.
• The Post describes algorithmic redistricting with some pretty decent animations.
• Chicago will consolidate election precincts for the upcoming midterms, reducing the total number by 40%.
• New Republic argues that President Biden should weaponize existing laws the same way Stephen Goebbels Miller did during the last administration.
• Chicago Magazine divides Chicago into 15 "sub-cities," including "Upper Caucasia" and "Obamaland." (They also incorrectly place US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel's house in North Center, when actually he lives in Lakeview.)

Finally, some ace developers at Hyundai secured one model's in-vehicle infotainment system with an encryption key published in a programming example in many online tutorials of how to use that particular kind of encryption.