The Daily Parker

I didn't have a chance to read these yesterday:

• Boxer Joe Louis had a home in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago.
• As of yesterday, none of the 4 major U.S. air carriers has propeller-driven airplanes in service anymore.
• Juggalo makeup can reliably defeat facial recognition software.
• Contra this article by Franklin Foer, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior really is annoying.

Now I'm off to work. The heat wave of the last few days has finally broken!

Before Scott Pruitt and friends destroy the Environmental Protection Agency, it's worth remembering the good it has done over the years:

Whatever happens to the EPA, this might be a good time to reflect on its legacy, especially in urban spaces. Though environmentalism conjures “America the Beautiful” images of purple mountains and unspoiled wilderness, much of the EPA’s heaviest lifting in rescuing this nation from its own filth happened in cities.

Long before fracking made tap water ignitable, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire—a lot. The saga is a well-trod part of the EPA’s origin story, but it’s still worth revisiting. A 1969 river fire caught Time’s attention in an article on American sewage systems, headlined in print as “The Cities: The Price of Optimism.”

The EPA also went to great lengths to clean up the Great Lakes. That Time article described Lake Erie as a “cesspool" created by the waste of “Detroit's auto companies, Toledo's steel mills, and the paper plants of Erie, Pa.” More notable city water cleanup projects include the agency’s 1983 project to restore the Chesapeake Bay or the 2002 project to clean up the Hudson River after New York City became the last city to dump sewage at sea in 1992.

Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1963, but it was the creation of the EPA, combined with amendments to the law in 1970 and 1977, that added regulatory weight to the law’s mandate of reducing air pollution. The agency worked with companies and set limits on air pollutants and emissions from source like chemical plants, utilities and steel mills. Before the EPA, smog enrobed many U.S. cities in a lethal hydrocarbon haze, none more infamously than Los Angeles.

On that last point, I remember L.A. in the 1970s, and I watched it transform. Same here in Chicago. When Republicans whine about regulations hurting business, what they really mean is they want to pass along all the external costs of industry to us, the way they used to. Environmental regulations do cost industry money—because those are the real costs.

So when Scott Pruitt says he wants to reduce the burden on business, realize that he wants to put that burden right back on you.

Large areas of the planet are experiencing record heat this week, as predicted by the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis:

No single record, in isolation, can be attributed to global warming. But collectively, these heat records are consistent with the kind of extremes we expect to see increase in a warming world.

• Denver tied its all-time high-temperature record of 105 degrees on June 28.
• Burlington, Vt., set its all-time warmest low temperature ever recorded of 80 degrees on July 2.
• Montreal recorded its highest temperature in recorded history, dating back 147 years, of 97.9 degrees (36.6 Celsius) on July 2. The city also posted its most extreme midnight combination of heat and humidity.
• Scotland provisionally set its hottest temperature on record. The U.K. Met Office reported Motherwell, about 12 miles southeast of Glasgow, hit 91.8 degrees (33.2 Celsius) on June 28, passing the previous record of (32.9 Celsius) set in August 2003 at Greycrook. Additionally, Glasgow had its hottest day on record, hitting 89.4 degrees (31.9 Celsius).

As we reported, Quriyat, Oman, posted the world’s hottest low temperature ever recorded on June 28: 109 degrees (42.6 Celsius).

That's right; in Oman overnight on June 28th, it never got below a potentially lethal temperature.

It's beginning to look a little like Christmas...on Venus.

Amsterdam is building a new subway line directly beneath the Amstel River, so they drained it, as one does. Then they let a team of archaeologists go wild:

The excavations in the Amstel yielded a deluge of finds, some 700,000 in all: a vast array of objects, some broken, some whole, all jumbled together. Damrak and Rokin proved to be extremely rich sites on account of the waste that had been dumped in the river for centuries and the objects accidentally lost in the water. The enormous quantity, great variety and everyday nature of these material remains make them rare sources of urban history. The richly assorted collection covers a vast stretch of time, from long before the emergence of the city right up to the present day. The objects paint a multi-facetted picture of daily life in the city of Amsterdam.

The city has published an online catalog that you can view chronologically or alphabetically.

Governor Jerry Brown approved AB 807, which would put to the voters in November an initiative to go to "year round Daylight Saving Time:"

Wrote Brown in a signing message: "Fiat Lux!" (Let there be light.)

Assemblyman Kansen Chu, D-San Jose, who authored Assembly Bill 807, has called the practice of changing clocks twice a year, in the fall and the spring, "outdated." He argues altering the time by an hour has adverse health affects, increasing chances for heart attacks, workplace injuries and traffic accidents.

The ballot measure would overturn a 1949 voter-approved initiative called the Daylight Savings Time Act, which established Standard Pacific Time in California.

Should voters approve the ballot measure, the Legislature would then decide how the state's time should be set. Congress would have to sign off on Chu's main goal of establishing year-round daylight saving time.

If it passes, L.A. and San Francisco would see sunrises at 7:44 and 8:09, respectively. But sunsets would be 17:44 and 17:51. So...if you live in California, how would you vote?

Forget the news for a moment. This video is just so cool—especially if you're from Evanston in the 1970s:

Now that ICE and CBP feel like they have carte blanche to "do their jobs," stories like this will only become more frequent:

The coast of White Rock, British Columbia, in western Canada looks to be an ideal place for a run, with its sweeping views of the Semiahmoo Bay to the west and scores of waterfront homes and seafood restaurants to the east. That's what 19-year-old Cedella Roman thought when she went jogging along the area's smooth beaches — in a southbound direction, notably — on May 21.

Roman, who lives in France, had been visiting her mother in nearby North Delta, British Columbia. During Roman's run, she was admiring the scenery when she unwittingly crossed the border from Canada into the United States, Roman told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

On May 22, Roman was taken to ICE's Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Wash., about 140 miles south of the border point where she had been arrested. She remained detained until June 5 when, after two weeks of paperwork and processing, Roman was taken back to the border “and removed to Canada,” Cutrell said.

Two weeks in detention—basically, a kidnapping—because she didn't have her French passport with her while jogging. CBP commented:

If an individual enters the United States at a location other than an official port of entry and without inspection by a Customs and Border Protection officer, they have illegally entered the United States and will be processed accordingly. It is the responsibility of an individual traveling in the vicinity of an international border to maintain awareness of their surroundings and their location at all times to ensure they do not illegally cross the border.

Here's what the border looks like just 4 kilometers from where Roman was arrested:

That's what almost our entire border with Canada looks like. That's because, since its founding in July 1867, Canada has remained the United States' closest friend and ally.

Arresting visitors to Canada who accidentally jog across an invisible line and holding them for two weeks is not how you treat a friend. But this was a discretionary arrest and detention; the CBP agents had the authority to shoo her back across the border without an incident.

This is what happens when the guy at the top gives people at the bottom permission to behave like assholes: some of them will.

This past weekend included the Chicago Gay Pride Parade and helping a friend prepare for hosing a brunch beforehand. Blogging fell a bit on the priority list.

Meanwhile, here are some of the things I'm reading today:

• From last week, the Times discusses whether Earth's 23.4° axis tilt was actually a necessary precursor to life.
• New Republic's Josephine Huetlin asks, "Why do populists get away with corruption?"
• One of Chicago's last remaining over-the-tollway oases is slated for demolition.
• Josh Marshall points out why President Trump treating international diplomatic negotiations like flea-market haggling is a huge, long-term problem for the US.
• Writing for JetBrains' blog, developer Dino Esposito looks at how special string handling can be a code smell.
• The owner of the Lexington, Va., restaurant that kicked out Press Secretary Sarah Sanders talked to the Washington Post.

Back to debugging service bus queues...

Meetings and testing all day have put these on my list for reading tomorrow:

• The Atlantic's Carl Zimmer on epigenetics.
• New Republic's David Dayen saying AT&T has proved its critics right in only a week.
• London plans to spend £1.5 bn ($2 bn) to get enough trains on its four most-crowded lines just to keep up with demand.
• Jennifer Rubin says, contra the President, America is strong and he is weak.
• Andrew Sullivan says, fuck it, give Trump his wall.
• And pity the poor Trump Administration staffers who can't get dates in DC.

And with that, it's the weekend.

To almost everyone's frustration, the Supreme Court rendered two unanimous decisions today in which they declined to rule on the constitutionality of two gerrymandering cases. This means both Wisconsin and Maryland will keep their district maps through the November election:

In the Wisconsin case, the court said that the challenges must be brought district by district, with voters in each proving that their rights had been violated. The challengers asked the court to consider the state map as a whole.

The Maryland case was still at a preliminary stage, and the court in an unsigned opinion said the lower court had not been wrong when it decided not to make the state redraw the maps in time for the 2018 election.

The justices sent the [Wisconsin] case back to a panel of three federal judges to see if the challengers could modify their suit to show they have plaintiffs in the individual districts.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the plaintiffs should be able to do so.

“Courts—and in particular this court—will again be called on to redress extreme partisan gerrymanders,” she wrote. “I am hopeful we will then step up to our responsibility to vindicate the Constitution against a contrary law.”

I totally understand why SCOTUS punted, because they really do not want to weigh in on such a politicized issue. But wow, given that a majority of Wisconsin voters are Democrats, it's obvious that the current Wisconsin map is a power-grab by Republicans who fear they're losing power against urban Democrats.

We're not going to be done with this in my lifetime.