The Daily Parker

I was busy today, and apparently so was everyone else:

• Umair Haque deplores the "age of the idiot" in which we now live.
• The Washington Post reports that President Trump has spoken with Russian president Vladimir Putin 16 times, more than with any other world leader.
• Tim Murphy thinks Trump is more Andrew Johnson than Richard Nixon.
• Andrew Sullivan says, since Trump wants to be impeached, let's do it now.
• Elizabeth Warren deftly smacked down a right-wing troll.
• Irish writer Susan McKay asks Boris Johnson how it feels now that Ireland has more power than the UK.
• An unusual bit of architecture in Lakeview (the North Side Chicago neighborhood containing Wrigley Field) will soon be demolished.
• The University of Edinburgh has produced an interactive map of historic witch hunts in Scotland.
• Curbed explores how Los Angeles became "the land of strip malls."
• The New York Times explores how New York taxi companies took over Chicago's taxis, shortly before Uber and Lyft bankrupted the industry.

I'm sure there was other news today. But this is what I have open in my browser for reading later on.

I'm surprised I ate anything today, after this past weekend. I'm less surprised I haven't yet consumed all of these:

• Harvard Law professor John Coates argues that "a sitting president threatening civil war if Congress exercises its constitutionally-authorized power" constitutes an impeachable offense in its own right.
• The Chicago Public Library will stop fining people for overdue books, as long as you bring them back eventually.
• National Geographic digs into the Grimm Brothers' fairy-tale collections.
• Why is the USDOT cracking down on zebra-crossing art?
• London completely failed to block an east-end road to cars for even a full day.
• A 1958 women's magazine's list of 129 ways to get a husband had to have been a joke, right? Right?
• Bruce Schneier has some thoughts on supply-chain security.

Is it nap time yet?

Not only is today the anniversary of Abbey Road, it's also the anniversary of two other culturally-significant events.

Also 50 years ago this month, the Cubs entered September 1969 with a solid first-place 83-52-1 record and before dropping 17 games (including a two-week 2-14 streak) to end the month out of contention at 91-69-1.

I mention this because tomorrow I head to St Louis to see the Cubs play at Busch Stadium. Two weeks ago, the first-place Cardinals were only 4 games ahead of the second-place Cubs, who had the third-best record in the league. Yesterday, the Cubs got eliminated, having fallen to 7.5 games back on an 8-game losing streak. This seems eerily familiar in light of the 1969 season.

Tomorrow's game will be important, as the Cardinals need to hang on to first place against the Brewers, and also because it will complete the 30-Park Geas. It would be nice if the Cubs won for both reasons.

The other anniversary of note is the debut of The West Wing 20 years ago. The Atlantic's Megan Garber argues that Allison Janney's character CJ Cregg "was the heart of the Aaron Sorkin drama." This weekend might be a good time to re-watch a few classic episodes.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Abbey Road, the Beatles' final album.¹ The New York Post, not a newspaper I quote often, has a track-by-track retrospective:

“Something”

Frank Sinatra once described this George Harrison composition as “the greatest love song of the past 50 years.” But the tune also hints that it wasn’t all love among the Beatles at the time.

“Here Comes the Sun”

The most downloaded and most streamed Beatles song of the 21st century didn’t come from the sunniest of places.

“That’s a song written when the Beatles were not getting along,” Flanagan says. “So George played hooky and went over to Eric Clapton’s house. He borrows one of Eric’s guitars and walks out in the garden and starts singing, ‘Here Comes the Sun.’”

Yeah, Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl, and someday I'm gonna make her mine.²

1. Let It Be came out a few months later but the group had recorded it earlier in 1969.

2. A remarkably similar sentiment to the 10th movement in Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, "Were diu werlt alle min."

The UK has started a £100 m repatriation scheme to get stranded Thomas Cook customers home:

The government has said it will run a "shadow airline" for two weeks to repatriate the 155,000 UK tourists affected by the firm's collapse.

Transport secretary Grant Shapps said its response to the crisis was "on track so far" and "running smoothly".

Mr Shapps, who earlier attended an emergency Cobra government meeting on the government's response, said: "People will experience delays, we're not running the original airline, but we intend to get this done all in the next two weeks and then end this phase of the rescue."

He also stressed people should not come home early from their holidays but should "carry on and leave on the date they were supposed to leave, having first checked the Thomas Cook website before leaving for the airport".

The government has to chip in because of the way UK bankruptcy laws work:

Had Thomas Cook been based here, it would have most likely filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and tried to reorganize while still flying. But Thomas Cook is a UK company, and that means that when the 178-year old business ran out of financing options Sunday night, it effectively just disappeared as far as the public is concerned. The UK government is solely focused on picking up the pieces in the near term while it prepares for a massive liquidation in the long run.

But:

These repatriation flights are only for those who already left the UK and needed to get back home. Everyone else just gets refunds, and that means airlines like easyJet and Jet2 are about to get a windfall of new business. TUI will pick some up as well, and I’m sure all low-cost carriers that touch the UK at all, like Ryanair and Wizz, will see a healthy uptick in bookings. But in the long run, someone is going to step up. This capacity won’t simply disappear.

So what happened? How did the company accrue billions of pounds of debt when the aviation part of their business remained profitable? Because fewer people like package tours than before:

Meanwhile, as the rescue operation kicks into gear, people are already conducting a post mortem into the death of this 178-year-old travel-industry leviathan—a British household name, with storefronts offering all-in-one resort vacations on almost every main street in the country. Among the causes, one striking possibility has emerged: Did the apparently unstoppable rise of the city break cause the company’s demise?

The rise in popularity of shorter urban breaks does indeed seem to have been a factor. In 2019, the average Briton is far more likely to be found wandering around Barcelona or Amsterdam than, say, sunbathing on the beaches of Spain’s Costa Del Sol, a 1980s favorite.

The number of Britons taking a yearly two-week vacation (a travel-agency staple, long standard because of the country’s generous vacation days) has fallen by more than 1 million since 1996. The number of short trips, meanwhile, has skyrocketed. By 2017, more than half of people in the U.K. were taking at least one short trip annually. This shift is crucial, because it meant that most growth happened in a sector where travel agents do relatively poor business.

Most of all, though, it’s the liberalization of the aviation industry in Europe since the late 1990s that has radically changed people’s destination choices. Before the advent of bargain airlines such as easyJet and Ryanair, the only really cheap flights to be had were summer charters to beach destinations, so that’s where people went. Nowadays, the volume of affordable, even obscure destinations has hugely expanded. Previously far-flung cities such as Trieste, Italy, or Riga, Latvia, are now weekend-break destinations. Travel agencies that depend on block-booking a large number of rooms in high-volume destinations find it hard to capitalize on this trend.

I'm sure AirBnB and Hipmunk contributed as well.

I always feel a little sad (or outraged) when a venerable business dies. Everyone will get home from their holidays after this mess, but a company older than a third of the states in the US is no more.

CityLab has a good take on how the Democratic Party became the party of cities in the US:

The story begins in the late 19th century, in the filthy, sweaty maw of the Industrial Revolution. To reduce transportation costs, industrialists had built factories in cities with easy access to ports. These factories attracted workers by the thousands, who piled into nearby tenements. Their work was backbreaking—and so were their often-collapsing apartment buildings. When urban workers revolted against their exploitative and dangerous working conditions, they formed the beginning of an international labor movement that would eventually make cities the epicenter of leftist politics.

While workers’ parties won seats in parliamentary European countries with proportional representation, they struggled to gain power in the U.S. Why didn’t socialism take off in America? It’s the question that launched a thousand political-economy papers. One answer is that the U.S. political system is dominated by two parties competing in winner-take-all districts, making it almost impossible for third parties to break through at the national level. To gain power, the U.S. labor movement had to find a home in one of those parties.

This set up the first major inflection point. America’s socialists found welcoming accommodations in the political machines that sprouted up in the largest manufacturing hubs, such as Chicago, Boston, and New York. Not all of the “bosses” at the helm of these machines were Democrats; Philadelphia and Chicago were intermittently controlled by Republicans. But the nation’s most famous machine, New York’s Tammany Hall, was solidly Democratic. As that city’s urban manufacturing workforce exploded in the early 20th century, Tammany Hall bosses had little choice but to forge an alliance with the workers’ parties.

Of course, the more axes on which the parties differ, the less tolerant they become. The cycle of polarization continues.

A few good reads today:

• Bruce Schneier compares genetic engineering with software engineering, and its security implications.
• The Atlantic has goes deep into the Palace of Westminster, and its upcoming £3.5 bn renovation.
• NOAA's chief scientist publicly released a letter to staff discussing the "complex issue involving the President commenting on the path of [Hurricane Dorian]."
• Illinois has pulled back some regulations on distilleries, giving them an easier time competing with bars and restaurants.
• Matthew Dallek calls the president "the most aggressive micro-manager in the history of the Oval Office."

Haven't decided what to eat for lunch yet...

Monty Python's Life of Brian turned 40 on August 17th. The BBC has a retrospective:

The Pythons’ satire wouldn’t target Jesus or his teachings, instead caricaturing political militants, credulous crowds, the appeal of throwing stones at people, the complexities of Latin grammar, and the difficulties of being a tyrant when you’ve got a speech impediment. “I thought we’d been quite good,” said Idle in Robert Sellers’ behind-the-scenes book, Very Naughty Boys. “We’d avoided being specifically rude to specific groups.”

It seemed, though, that they hadn’t been quite good enough. Terry Jones was about to start directing the film in Tunisia when the Chief Executive of EMI, Bernard Delfont, finally got around to reading the script, and declared that there was no way his company could fund such an atrocity. The project’s unlikely saviour was George Harrison, the ex-Beatle. A friend of Idle’s and a fan of the Pythons, he volunteered to remortgage his house and chip in the £2 million ($4.1 million) the team needed – a bail-out which has become known as ‘the most expensive cinema ticket’ ever issued.

Once Life of Brian was completed, not everyone was so calm. Some countries, such as Ireland and Norway, banned it outright. (In Sweden it was advertised as being ‘so funny it was banned in Norway’.)  In the US, Rabbi Abraham Hecht, President of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, told Variety magazine: “Never have we come across such a foul, disgusting, blasphemous film before.”

Shortly after the film came out in the UK, John Cleese and Michael Palin were on Tim Rice's show "Friday Night...Saturday Morning" with the Bishop of Southwark. It's quite a show.

Let's see, where to begin?

• The UK House of Lords today agreed to progress the Benn Bill, clearing the way for it to go to the Queen as early as Monday.
• Boris Johnson's brother resigned from Parliament citing a conflict between family and country.
• Yascha Mounk calls Johnson's prorogation of Parliament "the most dangerous assault on Britain's institutions in living memory."
• Political scientist Will Jennings tries to find the Brexit option most palatable to the "median voter."
• Sterling rose to a 3-week high, $1.2319, as traders breathed a sigh of relief that Brexit may be delayed.
• In the same magazine, James Fallows points out that the Fall of Rome "wasn't that bad."
• A Federal employee has come forward with "credible allegations" of misconduct in the annual, legally-mandated federal tax audits of the President and Vice President.
• Bruce Schneier calls out a company called Crown Sterling for being "complete and utter snake oil."

Finally, RawStory has a collection of responses to the President's Sharpie-altered weather map. (This is not, however, the first time the Administration has tried to make one of its Dear Leader's errors be true.) Enjoy.

I'll circle back to a couple of these later today. But at the moment, I've got the following queued up for my lunch hour:

• The Washington Post charitably describes yesterday's press conference in France as "a glimpse into Trump's unorthodox mind." As in, he lied through the whole thing.
• MSNBC says the G7 as a whole (which ended in the aforementioned presser) shows that other world leaders have learned to manipulate the president pretty well.
• Brazil, meanwhile has become the latest country to discover that authoritarian leaders don't know what they're doing and cover it up with bluster and blame-shifting. Oh, and corruption.
• And when those authoritarian leaders (and wannabes) tank the economy, millennials will, once again, get the worst of it. (Though we Xers aren't exactly raking it in either.)
• Via Schneier, Lawfare raises the alarm about the dangers of fake scientific research.
• Adam Gopnik asks, are spies worth it?
• Meanwhile, Riz Virk argues that we need to figure out if we're in a simulation.
• Finally, Microsoft's Raymond Chen takes us back to the days when software used to cost manufacturers a dollar a byte. (That's around when TV producers paid about $1 per foot, or 2/3 of as second, for film.)

That's enough of a queue for now.