The Daily Parker

Julia Ioffe despairs of Israel ever coexisting peacefully with its neighbors:

Unfortunately, I’ve learned that ideology, for both the left and the right, is far more important than human life. How many times have you heard the left say that there are no civilians on the Israeli side, because they are all complicit in “settler colonialism”? Or heard from the right that civilians in Gaza and southern Lebanon are all complicit in the crimes of Hamas or Hezbollah? Suddenly, in a region of millions and millions of people, there are no true civilians anywhere, not even among children.

I wonder: Will Israel, which was created as a safe haven for Jews, always be like this? Will it always be destined to fight wars or maintain a military occupation over millions of people while squinting and pretending that it is a first-world, democratic country and a delightful place to live? How many Israelis—at least those who aren’t messianic zealots and psychopaths—will want to keep having children whose destiny is manning checkpoints and protecting settlers in the West Bank, or participating in yet another “limited operation” in Lebanon, the way their fathers did, or, for that matter, dismantling Hamas—or whatever organization replaces it—for the hundredth time?

The Gaza war is 368 days old, and shows no sign of getting better.

I had a busy Friday and a busier Saturday, so I just got to these this morning:

• The entire Chicago Public Schools board resigned Friday in the latest salvo in the fight between Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) and CPS CEO Pedro Martinez.
• The Supreme Court rejected two emergency applications from polluters who want to continue polluting while their cases work through the system.
• Brett Stephens looks back at a year of increasing anti-Semitism disguised as "anti-Zionism." (This is exactly why I'm reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.)
• Amazon has ordered its entire workforce back to the office, fomenting a backlash and worrying people who work better remotely (like I do).
• Metra, Chicago's heavy-rail operator, got a Federal grant to investigate expanding O'Hare to downtown service on the North Central line.
• National Highway Transportation Safety Administration regulations make it nearly impossible for carmakers to offer the super-efficient mini-cars that millions of people drive in Europe and Asia.

Finally, US Senator and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance (R-OH) has a lot to say about families, but when you actually look at how he lives his own life, it makes you wonder about his sincerity. Actually, that's not entirely true: everything the man says makes you wonder about his sincerity, but in the case of family policies he's even more obtusely hypocritical than usual.

President Jimmy Carter turned 100 today, making him the first former president to do so. James Fallows has a bit of hagiography on his blog today, and the State of Georgia has declared today "Jimmy Carter Day." I hope I make it to 100, too, but I don't expect the State of Illinois to declare that day a public holiday.

In other news:

• Hussein Ibish says Hezbollah got caught in a trap of its own making when it attacked Israel a year ago.
• A Chicago ordinance takes effect next Tuesday that will grant the right of first refusal of the sale of their buildings to thousands of apartment dwellers under threat of gentrification.
• Novelist Ross Barkan takes another look at Robert Caro's 1974 doorstopper The Power Broker, a book I got about 2/3 through before I gave up.
• Cranky Flier analyzes Southwest Airlines' decision to follow all the others out there and assign seats on its flights.

Finally, yesterday the UK turned off its last operating coal-fired power plant, ending a 142-year run of burning coal to generate power. XKCD points out that in those 142 years, the UK burned the equivalent of about 3 inches of its land surface generating electricity.

And of course, I'll watch the Vice-Presidential Debate tonight at 9pm Eastern, but I don't plan to live-blog. Reactions tomorrow, though.

I had the opportunity, but not the energy, to bugger off from Heathrow for an hour and a half or so connecting from Marseille. Instead I found a vacant privacy pod in the Galleries South lounge, and had a decent lunch. Plus I'm about to have a G&T.

I've loaded up my Surface with a few articles, but I really only want to call attention to one of them. Bruce Schneier has an op-ed in the New York Times with his perspective on the Hezbollah pager attack and supply-chain vulnerabilities in general. I may even read that before turning my Surface off.

Next stop: Chicago, home, and dog.

This floored me. The Lebanese health minister reported earlier that 8 people died and 2,750 suffered injuries when thousands of pagers exploded this morning in Lebanon and Syria:

Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abia, said the blasts killed eight people, including a girl. “About 2,750 people were injured ... more than 200 of them critically,” with injuries mostly reported to the face, hands and stomach, he told a press conference.

Hezbollah said in a statement that two of its fighters and a 10-year-old girl were among the dead.

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was one of those injured in the explosions, according to Iran’s Mehr news agency.

Some of the top Hezbollah leaders and their advisers were also injured, the Saudi-owned Al-Hadath news channel reported, quoting unnamed sources.

A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.

Yossi Melman, a co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence, said: “This absolutely has all the hallmarks of a Mossad operation. Somebody has planted minor explosives or malware from inside the pagers. I understand they were recently supplied as well.”

Melman said he understood that “a lot of people in Hezbollah carried these pagers, not just top echelon commanders”. They were used by the Lebanese group because they feared their mobile phones were being monitored by Israeli intelligence to surveil their communications and to pinpoint missile attacks.

That (a) someone managed to supply thousands of Hezbollah terrorists with booby-trapped pagers and (b) no one in Hezbollah conducted security checks on the pagers before handing them out blows my mind. Regardless of who perpetrated this attack, (a) I am very sorry the little girl died but (b) for the Hezbollah fighters and leaders injured in the attack, I will shed not one tear. It's simultaneously one of the most effective intelligence operations and one of the worst counter-espionage failures in decades. Wow.

The President will go on the air tonight at 8pm EDT to explain why he dropped out of the race, and presumably also to endorse Vice President Harris as his successor. This has the XPOTUS so rattled that a campaign lawyer whined to the television networks that the XPOTUS wants equal time so they can whine to everyone. OK, Boomer.

Meanwhile:

• Hillary Clinton lays out a strategy for Harris to do what she couldn't: become our first female president.
• The European Union's climate-tracking directive reported that Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history, with the average surface temperature of the planet cresting 17.09°C.
• Jennifer Rubin (and a few other writers) believe we'd all be better off with a centrist government. (I'm sure if we explain this to the Republican Party carefully and rationally, they'll tone down their extremism right away.)
• Speaking of centrism, Julia Ioffe digs into what a President Harris foreign policy might look like.
• Because of a confluence of events "that Tolstoy could not have made up," Israel has an opportunity this week to change the Middle East for the better—if only they didn't have a troglodyte for a prime minister.
• Pilot Patrick Smith explains turbulence, and why it has suddenly become so newsworthy.

Finally, the Times examines why some people continue to write negotiable orders of withdrawal (i.e., paper checks) despite their obvious inconveniences and vulnerabilities. I haven't written one in about 18 months, and the last time I used one in any capacity was (with no small irony) to set up automatic billing with my HOA.

The G7, meeting today in Washington, strongly rebuked the Israeli government's illegal seizure of Palestinian land:

We, the G7 Foreign Ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States of America and the High Representative of the EU, join the UN and the European Union in condemning the announcement by Finance Minister of Israel Smotrich that five outposts are to be legalised in the West Bank. We also reject the decision by the Government of Israel to declare over 1,270 hectares of land in the West Bank as ‘state lands’- the largest such declaration of state land since the Oslo Accords – and the decision to expand existing settlements in the occupied West Bank by 5,295 new housing units and to establish three new settlements. The Government of Israel’s settlement program is inconsistent with international law, and counterproductive to the cause of peace.

We reaffirm our commitment to a lasting and sustainable peace in accordance with the relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council, on the basis of a two-state solution. We have therefore consistently expressed our opposition to the expansion of settlements and, as in previous cases, we urge the Government of Israel to reverse this decision.

Further, maintaining economic stability in the West Bank is critical for regional security. In this context, we take note of the latest transfers of parts of clearance revenues to the Palestinian Authority, but we urge Israel to release all withheld clearance revenues in accordance with the Paris Protocols, remove or relax measures that exacerbate the economic situation in the West Bank, and to take the necessary measures to ensure that correspondent banking services between Israeli and Palestinian banks remain in place with proper controls.

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz behind the woodshed:

Secretary Yellen reaffirmed Treasury’s strong commitment to Israel’s security. Secretary Yellen also emphasized the need for Israel to maintain economic stability in the West Bank by regularly transferring clearance revenues to the Palestinian Authority and ensuring that correspondent banking relations between Israeli and Palestinian banks remain uninterrupted. Secretary Yellen also raised Treasury’s February Executive Order 14115, holding individuals and entities accountable for perpetrating, inciting, or financially supporting violence throughout the West Bank.

Yellen meeting with Katz instead of Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with him can be understood as a rap on the knuckles. But that's not all she did, and not the only reason she met with him.

Yellen no doubt gave Katz a heads-up that the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control has added a number of Israeli persons and entities, including several farms and extremist groups in the West Bank, to the list of "specially designated nationals." This is the same list we put narcotraficantes and terrorists on. Americans are forbidden to deal with them, and we block their American assets and access to the US banking system. We typically don't do this to people our allies' governments endorse. It's a strong statement that Israel must stop its illegal seizure of Palestinian lands in the West Bank. I'm sure it won't mollify the anti-Israeli left, but it will help move to a two-state solution once the Israeli government gets its head out of its Knesset.

I will be curious to see when all this hits the American press. The Israeli press already has it, naturally. But I guess the President having a bad debate is more important than the President taking direct action to rein in the crazies.

(Thanks to reader MG for the tip.)

Lunchtime link roundup:

• Dr Daniela J Lamas of Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston evaluates how age has affected President Biden and the convicted-felon XPOTUS, given that whoever wins in November has a high probability of being the oldest serving US President in history.
• Israel's highest court ruled that the IDF can, in fact, draft all the religious nutters who have avoided doing anything for the benefit of society since the country was founded. Perhaps this will help the country's crushing gloominess?
• A judge sentenced former Chicago alderman Ed Burke (D-14th) to two years in prison and ordered him to pay a $2m fine after Burke's conviction on charges relating to his 50-plus-year career of naked corruption. He becomes the 35th Chicago alderman convicted of corruption since 1973.
• A group of THC-infused drink manufacturers have sued the state of Iowa to prevent a law going into effect on Monday that would criminalize most of their products.
• The Regional Transportation Authority of Northern Illinois (RTA) has voted to create an all-access day pass that would allow unlimited travel on CTA, Pace, and Metra.

Finally, People for Bikes has consistently rated Chicago the worst major US city for biking, principally because of our 50 km/h speed limit. If only we'd lower it to 40 km/h, they say, Chicago would immediately jump in the ratings to something approaching its peers.

But only for a moment. I've spent most of today trying to fix things, or at least trying to figure out what problems need fixing. One of the problems has generated a comment thread on a vendor website, now at 44 comments, and I think after all that work I found the problem in an interaction between my code and Microsoft Azure Functions. If I'm right, the confirmation will come around 3pm.

Naturally, I haven't had time to read any of these:

• Jamie Boule points out that the myth of the convicted-felon XPOTUS is very far from the truth.
• Federal district judge Aileen Cannon (R-SDFL) found yet another excuse to delay the felony classified-documents trial of the convicted-felon XPOTUS, this time probably until 2025 or sometime after the 11th Circuit removes her from the case.
• McKay Coppins reviews a new book about "the most consequential TV show in history," which turned the convicted-felon XPOTUS into a star.
• The Guardian reports that Sir Keir Starmer will put language supporting Palestinian statehood into the Labour Manifesto ahead of the UK's July 4th general election.
• Illinois governor JB Pritzker (D) signed a $53.1 billion state budget for 2024-25 that includes a child tax credit, limits corporate operating loss deductions, and eliminates the 1% grocery tax.
• New York governor Kathy Hochul (D) has paused the rollout of New York City congestion pricing that the city planned to put into effect at the end of this month. The measure has gone through years of reviews and studies already, and has shown success in cities like London.
• Puck's Dylan Byers digs into Sally Buzbee's firing from the Washington Post, as does Josh Marshall, while NPR is reporting the Post CEO Will Lewis has tried to bribe reporters from other organizations more than once to kill stories about himself.

I wrote the intro to this post around 2:45 and had to pause for a while. It's now 3:25, and I appear to have solved the problem. I will now document the solution and apologize to the vendor. Fun times, fun times.

Despite a high, thin broken cloud layer, it's 23°C with a light breeze and comfortable humidity at Inner Drive Technology World HQ. Cassie and I had a half-hour walk at a nice pace (we covered just over 3 km), and I've just finished my turkey sandwich. And yet, there's something else that has me feeling OK, if only for a little while...

Perhaps it's this? Maybe this? How about this? Or maybe it's Alexandra Petri?

In other news:

• President Biden just announced that Israel has proposed a three-phase peace plan to end the war in Gaza and, with American other countries helping, rebuild the territory. (Notably, it says nothing about Palestinian statehood.)
• US Senator Joe Manchin (?-WV) said he's left the Democratic Party and become an independent, leading to some head-scratching in Washington.
• Tara Palmeri expects that the GOP will start lobbing smoke bombs about Hunter Biden to distract from their Dear Leader becoming a convicted felon yesterday.
• Bruce Schneier worries about how AI will change democracy.

Finally, another solar storm, another cloudy night in Chicago: the Aurora Borealis may be visible as far south as Chicago overnight, just not in Chicago. As long as I can get Cassie on her daily long walk before the rain hits...