The Daily Parker

Jim Fallows points out that XPOTUS backers and really horrible people Peter Thiel and Elon Musk surely know that the XPOTUS is losing it, so we need to think about what that means should JD Vance become VPOTUS:

Here is a chain-of-being that doesn’t get enough attention:

• Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were two of the co-founders of PayPal. They are the duo you see above, nearly 25 years ago.
• Peter Thiel created JD Vance as a political figure. Vance met Thiel when Vance was a student at Yale Law; he went to work for Thiel’s venture-capital firm in San Francisco and made his money there (before more money, from his book); and Thiel was the crucial donor in Vance’s 2022 campaign for the Senate. Recall that Vance’s success in Ohio two years ago was the rare big GOP victory in the purported “red wave” of that year. Vance is also an isolated success among the political proteges Thiel has funded, whose prominent failures include the right-wing extremist Arizona candidate Blake Masters.
• Musk, Thiel, and Vance himself are all savvy enough to recognize that Donald Trump is falling apart mentally, and perhaps physically, as the world watches. Should he and Vance be elected, the odds are overwhelming that Vance would sooner or later end up in control—through the 25th Amendment or by natural means.

About that last bit: the XPOTUS outdid himself the past couple of days, including uttering an obscenity at the Al Smith dinner (with the Catholic archbishop of New York sitting right there), and going on an extensive riff about the size of Arnold Palmer's penis before calling Vice President Harris "a shit vice president." And take a look at the transcript from his Univision town hall yesterday. Not to mention, of course, that he sounds a lot like our three favorite dictators from World War II. This is who half the country want as their leader.

While you ponder that, you can enjoy The New Republic's list of "the 100 worst things Trump has done since descending that escalator." And then you can bloody well vote for Harris in 15 days.

Moving this annual 42 km walk to October really helped:

I'll have more to say about this later today or tomorrow. Right now...I'm a bit sore, but a lot less sore than I was last time.

The sun is just coming up over the trees east of my office, I'm having a bagel and coffee, and I'm checking the forecast for today's 42-kilometer walk:

Right now we've got 9°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, meaning a chilly start to the walk. But with the forecast high at our end point of 22°C with dewpoints under 6°C all day, and just a few clouds (bottom panel), I couldn't ask for better.

Here we go!

I've just pushed Weather Now v5.0.9057, which has some of the coolest shit I've built into the app, ever. Introducing: maps and charts!

At my real job, I did an evaluation of charting tools for the app we're developing, and determined that Syncfusion had the best balance between ease and power. Boy, does it ever. I managed to get a community license for Inner Drive Technology and spent the last few days playing with it.

There are also a couple of bug fixes, and one change to cut down on all the screen-scrapers that have been hitting me (you have to register to get archival data).

I invite all Daily Parker readers to check out the new features, and please give me feedback. I think it may need some usability fixes, and I still have a lot of work to do on personalization—particularly around people selecting their preferred measurement systems.

Still, I'm jazzed at how quickly all the features came together, and how easy Syncfusion's tools are. I hope y'all enjoy the new toys.

A contractor punctured the iron casing around the Queens-Midtown Tunnel in New York City, but fortunately thousands of motorists escaped a horrible death:

Workers for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the tunnel, first noticed the curious downpour in the eastbound tube around 10 a.m. Leaks are not unheard of, and at first it appeared routine. An initial report indicated that officials suspected that the water was coming from a broken main on the Queens end of the tunnel.

But there was no evidence to support that guess. So, as the water continued to pour in, a tunnel worker performed a simple test using the most sensitive of instruments: his tongue.

The water, the worker discovered, was salty.

Immediately, it was clear that this was no burst pipe. City mains carry fresh water; salt water could only be rushing in from the river above.

[T]he cause of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel’s sudden failure was ... clear. Floating on the river, high above the tunnel, was a barge working on an entirely different infrastructure project, probing deep into the water with a large, red drilling rig.

When contractors punctured Chicago's Loop tunnel network in 1992, we got flooded basements. A QMT failure could have drowned thousands of people.

The Post has more details about the pagers that the Mossad blew up, injuring thousands of Hezbollah terrorists:

As an act of spy craft, it is without parallel, one of the most successful and inventive penetrations of an enemy by an intelligence service in recent history. But key details of the operation — including how it was planned and carried out, and the controversy it engendered within Israel’s security establishment and among allies — are only now coming to light.

The idea for the pager operation originated in 2022, according to the Israeli, Middle Eastern and U.S. officials familiar with the events. Parts of the plan began falling into place more than a year before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that put the region on a path to war. It was a time of relative quiet on Israel’s war-scarred northern border with Lebanon.

Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service responsible for combating foreign threats to the Jewish state, had worked for years to penetrate the group with electronic monitoring and human informants. Over time, Hezbollah leaders learned to worry about the group’s vulnerability to Israeli surveillance and hacking, fearing that even ordinary cellphones could be turned into Israeli-controlled eavesdropping and tracking devices.

The United States, Israel’s closest ally, was not informed of the booby-trapped pagers or the internal debate over whether to trigger them, U.S. officials said.

Via Bruce Schneier, security researcher Bunnie Huang does not think this was a good idea in the long run:

The reason we don’t see exploding battery attacks more often is not because it’s technically hard, it’s because the erosion of public trust in everyday things isn’t worth it. The current discourse around the potential reach of such explosive devices is clouded by the assumption that it’s technically difficult to implement and thus unlikely to find its way to our front door.

I would posit that a lithium battery constructed with a PETN layer inside is largely undetectable: no visual inspection can see it, and no surface analytical method can detect it. I don’t know off-hand of a low-cost, high-throughput X-ray method that could detect it. A high-end CT machine could pick out the PETN layer, but it’d cost around a million dollars for one machine and scan times are around a half hour – not practical for i.e. airport security or high throughput customs screening.

now that I’ve seen it executed, I am left with the terrifying realization that not only is it feasible, it’s relatively easy for any modestly-funded entity to implement. Not just our allies can do this – a wide cast of adversaries have this capability in their reach, from nation-states to cartels and gangs, to shady copycat battery factories just looking for a big payday (if chemical suppliers can moonlight in illicit drugs, what stops battery factories from dealing in bespoke munitions?). Bottom line is: we should approach the public policy debate around this assuming that someday, we could be victims of exploding batteries, too. Turning everyday objects into fragmentation grenades should be a crime, as it blurs the line between civilian and military technologies.

I fear that if we do not universally and swiftly condemn the practice of turning everyday gadgets into bombs, we risk legitimizing a military technology that can literally bring the front line of every conflict into your pocket, purse or home.

Excuse me while I shove my phone across the desk...just a bit farther away...

The History Channel sends me a newsletter every morning listing a bunch of things that happened "this day in history." Today we had a bunch of anniversaries:

• 30 years ago, Pulp Fiction debuted.
• 47 years ago, Anita Bryant got a much-deserved pie in the face.
• 60 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., won the Nobel Peace Prize, the same day Nikita Khrushchev got deposed.
• 80 years ago, German General Erwin Rommel committed suicide rather than face trial for his role in the plot to assassinate Hitler in June 1944.

And finally, today is the 958th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which is the reason this blog is written in a Celtic-Norse-Germanic-French creole, not just a Celtic-Norse-Germanic creole.

Two guest essays in yesterday's New York Times caught my attention. The first, by Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter who wrote the "unintended work of fiction" The Art of the Deal, pivots off the new XPOTUS biopic to warn us, once more, about the psychopath topping the Republican ticket:

What struck me from the first day I met Mr. Trump was his unquenchable thirst to be the center of attention. No amount of external recognition ever seemed to be enough. Beneath his bluster and his bombast, he struck me as one of the most insecure people I’d ever met — and one of the least self-aware. He’d crossed the bridge from Queens to Manhattan but he remained the product — and even the prisoner — of his childhood experiences. As he told a reporter in 2015, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”

I buy that.

The past is prologue and, as Mr. Trump has said, he’s essentially the same person today that he was as a child. That is the central warning “The Apprentice” poses, and it comes just weeks before the election.

Ever since Mr. Trump announced in 2015 that he was running for president, I’ve argued publicly that the only limitation on his behavior as president — then and now — is what he believes he can get away with. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he believes he can get away with a lot more today. If he does win back the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have much more on his mind than revenge and domination — damn the consequences — in his doomed, lifelong quest to feel good enough.

The second comes from Harvard Law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan, arguing that the legislature should take back the power that the judiciary have essentially stolen from it:

“Make no mistake about it: We have a very strong argument that Congress by statute can undo what the Supreme Court does,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said recently as he announced the introduction of the No Kings Act. The measure declares that it is Congress’s constitutional judgment that no president is immune from the criminal laws of the United States. It would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to declare the No Kings Act unconstitutional. Any criminal actions against a president would be left in the hands of the lower federal courts. And these courts would be required to adopt a presumption that the No Kings Act is constitutional.

It might seem unusual for Congress to instruct federal courts how to interpret the Constitution. But the No Kings Act follows an admirable tradition, dating back to the earliest years of the United States, in which Congress has invoked its constitutional authority to ensure that the fundamental law of our democracy is determined by the people’s elected representatives rather than a handful of lifetime appointees accountable to no one.

In recent years, however, the court has seemed particularly uninterested in forbearance, as five or six justices routinely upend Congress’s longstanding interpretations of the Constitution. For example, nearly 50 years after Congress and the president first decided that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was appropriate legislation and after several more Congresses, presidents and Supreme Court majorities agreed that the law was constitutional, five justices in 2013 invalidated a crucial provision of the law.

Congress could pass a statute declaring that when asked to apply a federal law, a judge must do so unless the judge believes the law is unconstitutional beyond honest dispute. To ensure there is no honest dispute, Congress could require the judge to enforce the law unless the Supreme Court certifies by a supermajority or unanimous vote that there are no reasonable grounds to defend it. In this way, Congress would require the justices to show, by their votes, that the incompatibility of the law with the Constitution is beyond honest dispute.

The No Kings Act is well grounded in our constitutional tradition. Rather than allow any president or justices to hold themselves above the law, Congress should force them all to live by it.

Bowie and Renan only hint at something obvious to anyone who has read our Constitution: in the document, the legislature comes first, the executive second, and the judiciary a distant third. I agree with them that Congress needs to remind the other two branches of that fact.

My day got away from me yesterday afternoon, so all this shiznit piled up:

• In the first of two gobsmacking First Amendment stories this week, the Florida Dept of Health has threatened television stations with criminal prosecution after they aired a pro-choice ad that appears to be working.
• In the second horrific First Amendment violation story, the state of Oklahoma is backpedaling after mandating that every school kid gets a Bible that just happens to look like the one the XPOTUS is hawking. (Note to international readers: the First Amendment to our Constitution not only protects free speech, but also prohibits the government from establishing an official religion. Handing Bibles to school kids is a prima facie violation of the Establishment Clause.)
• The XPOTUS has such a credibility gap that his own supporters don't believe he'll do the things he absolutely would do if re-elected.
• Mara Gay traces the downfall of New York mayor Eric Adams to his time with the police force, and says the city deserves better.
• Hurricane Milton destroyed Tropicana Field's roof, leading one to hope that they tear the monstrosity down and build something people would actually want to visit.

Finally, it turns out the principal difference between the 12-year-saga to replace the Ravenswood train station and the 15-year-saga to build the Peterson/Ridge station was that the Ravenswood station actually started construction 13 years ago. Streetsblog explains in detail why Chicago can't have nice transit things, and why I may never get to ride on a fully-electrified express train from Evanston to the Loop.

Following a coronal mass ejection on Monday, tonight's aurora forecast is epic:

Unfortunately, I have an event just outside the Loop that ends around 10. By the time I got home, loaded up the dog, and drove to a place without streetlights, it would be around 1am. So no photos; but maybe I'll see some aurorae when I get home.

We'll see. Fortunately, we have had perfectly clear skies for 4 straight days, with no significant cloud cover forecast until tomorrow afternoon.

Aurorae peak at local midnight, which tonight in Chicago will be 00:38. I'll check around 11pm.