The Daily Parker

Author Michael Wolff believes the prosecution in all three of the XPOTUS's trials has to climb a steep epistemological hill to secure any convictions:

It is precisely this behavior, unconcerned with guardrails or rules, unmindful of cause and effect, all according to his momentary whim — an overwhelming, almost anarchic instinct to try to invert reality — that prosecutors and much of the political establishment seem to most want to hold him accountable for. The chaos he creates is his crime; there is, however, no statute against upsetting the dependable order. Breaking the rules — often seemingly to no further purpose than just to break the rules as if he were a supreme nihilist or simply an obstreperous child — is not much of a grand criminal enterprise, even though for many, it’s infuriating coming from someone charged with upholding the rules.

His prosecutors will try to use his words against him: among them, his exhortations that arguably prompted the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, his admission — on tape! — that he still had classified documents, his various, half-baked plots about how to game the Electoral College system, his relentless and unremitting insistence that he won his lost election and his comments to his bag man, Michael Cohen, before he paid off Stormy Daniels.

There’s an asymmetric battle here, between the government’s precise and thorough prosecutors and Mr. Trump’s head-smacking gang of woeful lawyers. The absolute ludicrousness and disarray of the legal team defending Mr. Trump after his second impeachment ought to go down in trial history. Similarly, a few months ago, a friend of mine was having a discussion with Mr. Trump about his current legal situation. A philosophical Mr. Trump said that while he probably didn’t have the best legal team, he was certain he had the best looking, displaying pictures of the comely women with law degrees he had hired to help with his cases.

As someone who has studied law, I believe the prosecutors only need to show that the XPOTUS intended the harms he caused, even if he didn't understand them. Regardless, it's clear that he's batshit crazy, and must never hold public office again.

I love it when something passes all the integration tests locally, then on the CI build, and then I discover that the code works perfectly well but not as I intended it. So while I'm waiting for yet another CI build to run, I'm making note of these:

• Who's dumber than the XPOTUS? His lawyers.
• The city of Chicago has released plans to build a tunnel connecting the existing Bloomingdale Trail with the other side of I-90/94 and the Union Pacific tracks, but they don't expect it to open for about 3 years.
• Developers turned a parking garage into apartments in my old neighborhood, hiding the remaining bits of the garage from the street. I approve!
• Because of Illinois and Chicago taxes, (legal) cannabis in Chicago costs more than just about everywhere else in the country.

Finally, WBEZ made me a shopping list of locally-produced hot sauces. First up: Cajun Queen—apparently available about a kilometer away.

Just a couple this morning as I have another long day of Die Zauberflöte rehearsals today:

• Ronald Brownstein warns that the closest parallel to the XPOTUS and his supporters assaulting the Constitution is "the strategies of the slaveholding South in the decades before the Civil War."
• David Brooks wonders out loud whether the old guard Republican Party (like himself) created their own monster by aggressively promoting a meritocracy that depends on people having the right parents, among other things.
• Matt Ford hopes Tuesday's indictments finally bury the "anti-anti-XPOTUS" ideology of the right, "the bizarre ideological stance held by some establishment conservatives."

It strikes me that the opera I'm in tomorrow seems less fantastic than the XPOTUS's supporters coming around to reason. Where's our Sarastro?

Yesterday evening, Special Counsel Jack Smith presented a grand jury indictment of the XPOTUS on 4 counts yesterday, including conspiracy to defraud the United States government. This is the most serious indictment yet, and a serious judge will oversee the trial.

I don't have time to excerpt or even read this material until I come home from rehearsal this evening. But here are the analyses on my list:

• New York Times, Peter Baker
• NPR
• Chicago Tribune/AP
• New Republic, Alex Shephard
• New Republic, Michael Tomasky
• The Atlantic, Tom Nichols
• The Atlantic, David Frum
• John Scalzi

Obviously many pundits and news organizations will have a lot to say about this over the next few days. But remember: at the moment, nobody knows nothin'. And it's not the only news story of note today.

While I fight a slow laptop and its long build cycle (and how every UI change seems to require re-compiling), the first day of the last month of summer brought this to my inbox:

• Who better to prosecute the XPOTUS than a guy who prosecuted other dictators and unsavory characters for the International Criminal Court? (In America, we don't go to The Hague; here, The Hague comes to you!)
• After the evidence mounted that Hungary has issued hundreds of thousands of passports without adequate identity checks, the US has restricted Hungarian passport holders from the full benefits of ESTA that other Schengen-area citizens enjoy.
• The US economy continues to exceed the expectations of people who have predicted a recession any day now. (Of course, every dead pool has a guaranteed winner eventually...)
• After an unprecedented 31 consecutive days enduring temperatures over 43°C, Phoenix finally caught a break yesterday—when the temperature only hit 42°C.
• Jake Meador explores why about 40 million fewer Americans go to church these days than in 1995.
• Remember how we all thought Tesla made cars with amazing battery ranges? Turns out, Elon Musk can't do that right, either.
• American car culture not only gives us unlivable environments, but also discourages the exploration that people in other countries (and I when I go there) do all the time.
• We should all remember (and thank) USSR naval Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, who vetoed firing a nuclear-tipped torpedo at an American destroyer during the Cuban Missile Crisis 71 years ago.

Finally, Chicago historian John Schmidt tells the story of criminal mastermind Adam Worth, who may have been Arthur Conan Doyle's inspiration for Professor Moriarty.

It's Tuesday afternoon, and I think I'm caught up with everything in the way of me ploughing through some coding at work the remainder of the week. At some point, I might even read all of these through:

• January 6th Committee Special Counsel Jack Smith has informed the XPOTUS that he is the subject of a federal investigation, a clear indication that an indictment could soon follow.
• Abi Breland reports that far-right trolls haven't figured out how to cause misery on Meta's Threads app yet, but don't worry, they will.
• Via Molly White, the OPP arrested five men who allegedly kidnapped and beat up a man who calls himself "Ontario's Crypto King" after the victim squandered stole spent C$35 million of investors' money and only invested about 2% of the "fund" in actual cryptocurrency.
• Actor George Clooney and human-rights activist John Prendergast warn that the Wagner mercenary group continues to engage in state capture in Africa, destabilizing the continent and terrorizing millions of people.
• Activists in San Francisco have begun sabotaging unoccupied autonomous vehicles by putting traffic cones on their hoods.
• Phoenix hit 43.3°C (110°F) for the 19th day in a row, exceeding the previous record set in 1974, while Tokyo continues to swelter in 38°C weather.
• Residents on the south half of the 15-year Metra UP-N bridge replacement project—i.e., the half that still has 120-year-old bridges—have started frantically googling "adverse possession" after realizing that they will lose their back yards in the next three years, just like we on the north side did 7 years ago.

Finally, North Korean troops detained a US soldier after he intentionally crossed the demarcation line in the Joint Security Area, apparently after deserting while en route to the US for unspecified disciplinary measures arising from a separate incident. When I visited the JSA in 2013, a tour guide told me that this happens occasionally, and the North Korean army rarely gives the person back. Not sure life in a North Korean prison beats an other-than-honorable discharge from the US Army, but what do I know?

The first day of a sprint is the best day to consolidate three interfaces with three others, touching every part of the application that uses data. So right now, I am watching most of my unit tests pass and hoping I will figure out why the ones that failed did so before I leave today.

While the unit tests run, I have some stuff to keep me from getting too bored:

• The XPOTUS keeps confirming every theory about his behavior, this time that he only wants to run in 2024 to postpone the consequences of actions.
• Even those of us who support Ukraine in kicking the Russian invaders out of its sovereign territory think they simply can't join NATO right now.
• Julia Ioffe wonders why the fuck several retired government officials met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, less because she thinks they're old white men who have never set foot in Russia, and more because Lavrov hasn't got the power to negotiate a discount at Macy's. (In fairness, she published her post hours before one of them, Richard Haass, went on NPR this morning to hawk his new book.)
• Media strategist Julia Alexander scratches her head about the CBS-ification of Prime Video.
• Meanwhile, the streamers and studios have decided to let the writers go broke before resuming talks with them in the fall, regardless of what the actors do.
• Pro Publica took a second look at the hypothesis that Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and now they're not so sure it's correct.

Finally, the 2023 Emmy nominations came out this morning. I need to watch The White Lotus and Succession before HBO hides them.

Update: 2 out of 430 tests have failed (so far) because of authentication timeouts with Microsoft Key Vault. That happens on my slow-as-molasses laptop more often than I like.

Some stories to read at lunch today:

• The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the US Postal Service's requirement that a religiously observant letter carrier deliver packages on the Sabbath. Since Justice Alito (R$) wrote the opinion, I'll also have to read Justices Sotomayor's (I) and Jackson's (I) concurrence.
• Of course, as Josh Marshall predicted, the Court split along partisan lines in a decision that essentially abolishes affirmative action for college admissions, which will likely reverse the gains that African American students have made over the last 40 years.
• Alex Shephard wonders if the XPOTUS's whole classified-documents disaster came out of his "perhaps world-historically, pathetic and abject" existence.
• The I-95 bridge collapse outside Philadelphia caused a spike in SEPTA ridership and renewed interest in a new subway line.
• National Geographic, struggling to remain afloat after its acquisition and rapacious mismanagement by Disney, has laid off all of its remaining staff writers.
• James Fallows annotates a recent Toronto air traffic controllers conversation with a FedEx MD-11 whose left thrust reverser deployed just after takeoff.

Finally, our air quality has improved slightly (now showing 168 at IDTWHQ), but the Canadian smoke may linger for another couple of days.

Former UK Prime Minister and professional circus clown Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Cons.—Uxbridge and South Ruislip) resigned his seat in Parliament this week ahead of a damning all-parties report recommending he be suspended for 90 days:

The death certificate for Boris Johnson’s career in politics read June 12th. A government statement appeared that evening appointing Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as “Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern”, the title MPs accept, according to Britain’s absurd constitution, in order to resign. He went because an inquiry into whether Mr Johnson deliberately misled Parliament found that he had. Not only that, he’d also impugned the investigating committee and joined a campaign of abuse and intimidation against it. Mr Johnson faced suspension as an MP for a remarkable 90 days. Given forewarning of the report, the former prime minister quit.

Conservatives are losing everywhere. But support is falling fastest in the northern constituencies the party was so proud of winning. Across the country Labour enjoys a 14-point poll lead. In “Red Wall” constituencies, this rises to 23 points, according to one pollster.

Andrew Sullivan, who attended Oxford with Johnson, wishes the US Republican Party would treat their former leader the same way:

And now we have Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. This past week saw two official reports into the abuse of their respective offices, and their lavish lying about it. The Smith indictment alleges that Trump knew full well that the documents he took from the White House and stored haphazardly at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster were highly classified and not his own. But rather than hand everything back, Trump ignored the best legal advice, lied to his own lawyers, ordered an underling to move boxes to conceal them from the FBI, and threw out his usual barrage of excuses, distractions and falsehoods.

In an eerily similar fashion, the British parliamentary committee set up to investigate whether Boris Johnson lied to the House of Commons about his breaking of social distancing rules during Covid, published its final report this week. It’s as authoritative as the Trump indictment — first-hand witnesses, photos, sworn testimony, due process. And it too focuses on a very basic fact: just as Trump knew he was not authorized to keep top secret documents, so Johnson knew that crowded office-parties were quite clearly banned across the UK. But this awareness of the rules did not stop either man from flagrantly breaking them — and then complaining of a “witch-hunt” when called to account.

And it would be “utterly incredible” — unless you had a pulse and two ears at the time, because the ban on workplace parties was incandescently clear to the entire country. When the Queen had to sit alone at the funeral of her husband, it was obviously not ok for the prime minister to have “bring your own booze” parties at Number 10.

And as with Trump and his bizarre behavior with “his boxes,” it’s very hard to see some profound, malign motive here in pursuit of something important. It’s just mindless egotism, married with an infinite capacity for deceit.

[T]here is almost nothing in the narrative of these men’s late careers that isn’t exactly replicated in every previous episode of their lives. A mature democracy will throw up these characters every now and again, and use them. But a healthy one will also test them, and cast them out if they threaten the integrity of the system as a whole. The Brits and Tories have done that, in the end, with Boris — and it speaks well of the remaining integrity of their democracy.

The GOP needs to do the same with Trump. And soon.

Oh, completely unrelated, of course: today is the 165th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's address to the Illinois Republican Convention in Springfield, Ill., also known as the "house divided" speech. It's worth a re-read.

We lost three people last week whose deaths have made the world ever so slightly better on balance. Religious swindler Pat Robertson went first on Wednesday. Then Saturday, Ted Kaczynski, also known as the "Unabomber" for his terror campaign against university professors in the 1990s, killed himself in his jail cell:

Kaczynski was found unresponsive in his cell around 12:30 a.m. ET and transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Kaczynski was previously in a maximum security facility in Colorado but was moved to a federal medical center in Butner, North Carolina, in December 2021 due to poor health.

Kaczynski, who went nearly 20 years without being captured until his arrest in 1996, was considered America's most prolific bomber.

Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski placed or mailed 16 bombs that killed three people and injured two dozen others, according to authorities.

Finally, yesterday the world lost Silvio Berlusconi, the corrupt former prime minister of Italy whose entry into politics to stymie the many legal cases against him  may have inspired the XPOTUS to do the same:

Liberal politicians, and the prosecutors he demonized as their judicial wing, watched in dismay as he used appeals and statutes of limitations to avoid punishment despite being convicted of false accounting, bribing judges and illegal political party financing.

His governments spent an inordinate amount of time on laws that seemed tailor-made to protect him from decades of corruption trials, a goal that some of his closest advisers acknowledged was why he had entered politics in the first place.

One law overturned a court ruling that would have required Mr. Berlusconi to give up one of his TV networks; others downgraded the crime of false accounting and reduced the statute of limitations by half, effectively cutting short several trials involving his businesses. He enjoyed parliamentary immunity, but in 2003 his government went further, passing a law granting him immunity from prosecution while he remained in office — in effect suspending his corruption trials.

By the time he finally resigned in 2011, amid a fractured conservative coalition and general national malaise, a good deal of damage seemed to have been done. Many analysts held him responsible for harming Italy’s reputation and financial health and considered his time in power a lost decade that the country had struggled to recover from.

On a totally different topic, while I traveled last week I read Death of the Great Man by psychiatrist Peter Kramer, a book journalist James Fallows recommended back in April.

OK, maybe not a totally different topic. You should read the book, though.