The Daily Parker

I've gotten some progress on the feature update, and the build pipeline is running now, so I will take a moment to read all of these things:

• Radley Balko looks at the creation of what looks a lot like the OAFPOTUS's Waffen-Shutzstaffel and says we've lost the debate on police militarization: "In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it."
• Linda Greenhouse condemns the pervasive cruelty of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Tom Homan: "Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are “the other” — people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but who stand outside the web of connection that defines human society."
• Paul Krugman explains more cogently than I did why the Republicans cutting NOAA will hurt everyone: "Trump’s cuts to scientific research aren’t about shrinking government and saving money. They’re about dealing with possibly inconvenient evidence by covering the nation’s ears and shouting 'La, la, la, we can’t hear you.' "
• The inconvenient evidence includes a growing realization in Mediterranean countries that their summer resorts are no longer habitable in the summer: "Across Spain, Italy, Greece, France and beyond, sand-devouring storms, rising seas, asphyxiating temperatures, deadly floods and horrific wildfires have year after year turned some of the continent’s most desired getaways into miserable locales to get away from."
• Ilya Shapiro, constitutional studies director at the Manhattan Institute, believes both the left and the right have got Amy Coney Barrett all wrong: "She’s an originalist with a strong devotion both to constitutional text and institutional procedure. But she’s also a stickler for prudence in the face of novelty. The one thing Barrett is zealous about is upholding the rule of law..."
• A group of mayors from the Chicago suburbs has decided they don't like the very same public-private partnerships between railroads and their surrounding areas that created many of the same suburbs: "Real estate could be the recipe for long-term fiscal sustainability for [the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, making some of the current revenue mechanisms only temporary and reducing the risk of a repeat of this year's fiscal cliff. [But y]ou can’t protest government overreach of private property rights, and then defend zoning in the same paragraph."
• At the same time suburban mayors rant against better transit, their residents have clogged half the side streets in Chicago to get around Kennedy Expressway construction this summer. Of course, better transit would obviate all those car trips that cause the congestion in the first place, but let's not think too hard about that.
• In some parts of the country, though, street designs from the Netherlands have become more popular as planners and citizens see how much safer they are for everyone.
• Patrick Smith takes a look at last month's Air India crash and fears the worst: "[I]f the [fuel] switches were moved to CUTOFF manually, the billion-dollar question is why? Were they moved by accident, or nefariously? Was it an act of absurd absent-mindedness, or one of willful mass murder, a la EgyptAir, Germanwings, and (almost certainly) MH370."
• Google announced a new partnership with electric truck maker Rivian to use Google Maps for navigation.
• New studies suggest that we have crooked teeth because our diet changed: "With softer diets came less mechanical strain on the jaw. Over generations, our mandibles began to shrink— a trend visible in the fossil record."

Finally, a number of commentators have experienced a healthy dose of Schadenfreude watching the OAFPOTUS's rabid followers turn on him, including Adam Kinzinger, Josh Marshall, Dan Rather, and of course, Jeff Maurer. It's not exactly "the blood of Marat strangles him," but as a centrist, I am enjoying this part just a little. (And in fairness, Kinzinger, a Republican, believes that the administration's policies will do more damage to the party than this nonsense about Epstein.)

Cassie had a solid night of post-anesthesia sleep and woke up mostly refreshed. The cone still bums her out, and the surgery bill bums me out, but at least she's walking at close to her normal speed. She gets her stiches out—and her cone off—two weeks from today.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• Very stupid people have allowed measles, which we functionally eliminated from the US in 2000, to infect close to 1300 people this year.
• Jennifer Rubin argues that the Department of Homeland Security provides neither “freedom from danger” or “freedom from fear or anxiety,” i.e., security.
• Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers is ashamed of the OAFPOTUS's tax bill and what it will do to the most vulnerable Americans.
• George Will praises former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel for holding the center against the loony left.
• Echoing my own thoughts, Stephanie Bai wants people to stop throwing blame around for this past weekend's Texas floods. (The blame for future disasters, however, falls squarely on the Republican Party.)
• Paul Krugman lauds victories over NIMBYs that are starting to revitalize building in urban areas.
• Cook County's practice of stealing people's homes for non-payment of property tax will likely cost us hundreds of millions of dollars once the class-action lawsuit gets going.
• Strava has once again lost control of its subscribers' location data, this time outing the Swedish prime minister's bodyguards, and thus the PM himself. Oops. (In fairness, it might be that the bodyguards themselves failed to protect the data by posting workouts publicly.)

Finally, lightning bugs appear to have made a small comeback in the Chicago area after a few years of reduced numbers. Educational campaigns have encouraged people to leave leaf litter undisturbed whenever possible, to allow the critters to breed safely. A mild winter and wet spring also helped a lot.

I'll skip the usual political screeds today. Enjoy these:

• The Nielsen/Norman Group wonders aloud why the "Save" icon continues to be a 3½" floppy disk?
• Could this intersection redesign in Fairbanks, Alaska, have made the crossing worse than what came before? Oh yes, it could: "traffic improved partly because people now avoid the area altogether."
• Chicago Street Blog's Nik Hunder rode 230 km through all 77 Chicago Community Areas in this year's Tour de Chi on June 28th.

That's it. I have to continue refactoring a client-facing app until my 4pm meeting.

I'll get to the ABBA—sorry, OBBBA—reactions after lunch. Right now, with apologies, here is a boring link dump:

• The Clown Prince of X is in the "finding out" phase, learning what happens to oligarchs who cross autocrats.
• Adam Kinzinger calls out the bribe that Shari Redstone's Paramount/CBS agreed to pay the OAFPOTUS to settle a bogus libel lawsuit stemming from a 2020 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris.
• After the US and Israeli attacks on Iran temporarily shut down Internet connectivity in the country, hundreds of pro-Scottish independence social media accounts went dark in what I'm sure the Iranian Government will call a bizarre coincidence.
• The UK Royal Family have decided to decommission the Royal Train, a version of which has carried the UK Head of State around the country since 1869.
• Cook County will open the first of 120 planned modular houses in Chicago to kick off a $12 million push for more affordable housing in the county.
• The Chicago Board of Education refused to hand over $175 million that it owed for pensions last year, leaving the city with an unexpected $161 million general-fund deficit.
• Richard Day tells Chicago Streets Blog what everyone has been saying since the pandemic: the Chicago Transit Authority needs to resume enforcing its own rules of passenger conduct again.
• Yesterday was the 90th birthday of the first Grant Park summer concert.
• Josh Marshall remembers Bill Moyers.

Finally, does a healthy adult really need to drink 4 liters of water per day? Well, it depends on a lot of things. National Geographic debunks this and five other myths about hydration.

And just because she's so pretty, here is a gratuitous photo of Cassie:

Note: I started this post at 8:30 am but got interrupted by work and HOA stuff.

I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain.

Before I do any of that, however, I'm going to read these things:

• The US Supreme Court temporarily and partially paused rulings by three lower-court judges on the OAFPOTUS's birthright citizenship order on the narrow question of whether lower courts can enjoin the entire country. (I will read Justice Coney Barrett's opinion when I have an empty stomach and a strong gummy.)
• Paul Krugman does the math on the Medicaid provisions in the ridiculous Republican budget proposal now winding through the Senate, and calls it "the coming health care apocalypse."
• Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has quietly killed the most onerous MAGA over-reaches from the ridiculous Republican budget proposal.
• Politico describes how Georgia's Medicaid work mandate has resulted in 97% of eligible residents being unable to register for the state's work verification program—which, given the current state of the Republican Party, seems exactly on brand.
• Julia Ioffe scoffs at the inability of the OAFPOTUS and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to utter more than three consecutive words about our attack on Iran last weekend without lying.
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) sees omens and portents in Zohran Mamdani's win in Tuesday's New York City Democratic Party primary. So does Dan Rather. Jeff Maurer jokes about who really won.
• Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan bawls out the gay-rights movement for morphing into a radical, illiberal, and ultimately ineffective leftist crusade: "Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized."
• Yascha Mounk shares "18 observations about learning Chinese."
• Bruce Schneier argues that we need to care more about data integrity in systems design.
• What the hell happened to the Lincoln Yards development site?

Finally, though I have not seen the Apple TV show Dark Matter, it's on my list. And if I really like it, I can buy the house whose façade is used as the protagonist's house. It's going on the market for only $2.5 million.

I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain.

Before I do any of that, however, I'm going to read these things:

• The US Supreme Court temporarily and partially paused rulings by three lower-court judges on the OAFPOTUS's birthright citizenship order on the narrow question of whether lower courts can enjoin the entire country. (I will read Justice Coney Barrett's opinion when I have an empty stomach and a strong gummy.)
• Paul Krugman does the math on the Medicaid provisions in the ridiculous Republican budget proposal now winding through the Senate, and calls it "the coming health care apocalypse."
• Politico describes how Georgia's Medicaid work mandate has resulted in 97% of eligible residents being unable to register for the state's work verification program—which, given the current state of the Republican Party, seems exactly on brand.
• Julia Ioffe scoffs at the inability of the OAFPOTUS and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to utter more than three consecutive words about our attack on Iran last weekend without lying.
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) sees omens and portents in Zohran Mamdani's win in Tuesday's New York City Democratic Party primary. So does Dan Rather. Jeff Maurer jokes about who really won.
• Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan bawls out the gay-rights movement for morphing into a radical, illiberal, and ultimately ineffective leftist crusade: "Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized."
• Yascha Mounk shares "18 observations about learning Chinese."
• Bruce Schneier argues that we need to care more about data integrity in systems design.
• What the hell happened to the Lincoln Yards development site?

Finally, though I have not seen the Apple TV show Dark Matter, it's on my list. And if I really like it, I can buy the house whose façade is used as the protagonist's house. It's going on the market for only $2.5 million.

I don't watch a lot of YouTube videos, mainly because I can no longer concentrate on two things at once with any useful comprehension like (I thought) I could in my 20s. Today at lunch, though, I watched two short videos by well-respected creators that are worth passing on.

First, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich reminds us, "The purpose of a government is not to turn a profit, it's to achieve the common good:"

Second, Strong Towns executive director Charles Marohn points out the flawed thinking that leads some cities and traffic engineers to miss the obvious reason traffic deaths went up in the pandemic and down when people started driving again:

Enjoy.

The OAFPOTUS threatened to kill an adversary's head of state today, showing the world not only how reckless and stupid he is, but also that he has never actually seen the movie he clearly wants to emulate:

Lebanon, desperately wanting to stay out of this one, has warned the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah not to attack Israel. No word yet from our allies, who I'm sure did not want our village idiot to go rogue on this one. But, hey, he's the Inciter in Chief back home, so why would we expect any measured diplomacy from him abroad?

As if that were the only thing going on today:

• The Atlantic's Andrew Ryvkin argues that the OAFPOTUS has become a problem for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
• Philip Bump tells Democrats to quit catastrophizing: protests against the OAFPOTUS do not help him.
• Staff at Le Musée de Louvre went on strike yesterday to protest "untenable" working conditions because of crowding and chronic understaffing.
• As I've warned for years, the United States has fallen behind our peer countries because of our crumbling and obsolete infrastructure.
• Bruce Schneier lays out four ways that AI is actually useful, even though many uses remain problematic.

OK, I'm done for now. Say what you will about President Biden, but we didn't have this kind of chaos every day while he was in office.

I just finished 3½ hours of nonstop meetings that people crammed into my calendar because I have this afternoon blocked off as "Summer Hours PTO." Within a few minutes of finishing my last meeting, I rebooted my laptop (so it would get updated), closed the lid, and...looked at a growing pile of news stories that I couldn't avoid:

• Dan Rather calls tomorrow's planned Soviet-style military parade through DC a charade: "The military’s biggest cheerleader (at least today) didn’t serve in Vietnam because of 'bone spurs' and has repeatedly vilified our troops, calling them 'suckers and losers,'", Rather reminds us. "But when service members are needed for a photo op or to prop up flagging poll numbers, all is forgiven, apparently."
• Anne Applebaum reminds us of the history of revolutions, and what happens when the revolutionaries get frustrated that the masses don't agree with them (hint: ask Mao or the Bolsheviks.) "The logic of revolution often traps revolutionaries: They start out thinking that the task will be swift and easy. The people will support them. Their cause is just. But as their project falters, their vision narrows. At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier."
• James Fallows praises California governor Gavin Newsom (D) as "the adult in the room" for his response to the OAFPOTUS federalizing the California National Guard.
• Andrew Sullivan draws a straight line between the OAFPOTUS's behavior and an archetypical colonial-era caudillo.
• Timothy Noah, who may have his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, wonders aloud if the OAFPOTUS's incompetence relates somehow to his obsession with weight? (tl;dr: Narcissistic projection.)
• US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) agrees with the OAFPOTUS on only one thing she can think of: the need to abolish the debt ceiling. (I also agree!)
• The US House of Representatives voted 214-212 yesterday to claw back $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting, which particularly imperils NPR stations in Republican districts.
• Slate looks into signs that exurban areas may finally be slowing down their car-centric sprawl as the economics of maintaining all that barely-used infrastructure finally take hold.

Finally, Politico describes the absolute cluster of the Chicago Public Schools refusing to close nearly-empty buildings that, in some cases, cost $93,000 per student to keep open. But don't worry, mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union president and now the least-popular mayor in city history, is on the case!

Comrade OAFPOTUS! (h/t Paul Krugman)

Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it.

Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist:

• Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of the National Guard] during the Civil Rights Era were over the refusal of segregationist state governments to enforce federal law under court order. Trump’s argument is...[that] the President [has the right] to decide when a state government isn’t protecting or enforcing civil order to his liking and to intervene with federalized National Guard or the U.S. military to do it at the point of a bayonet. ... The crisis the administration insisted it needed to solve was a crisis of the administration’s creation."
• Philip Bump puts the encroaching fascism in broader context: "What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. ... The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel...."
• The Guardian highlights how Chicago has led the way in resisting the OAFPOTUS's xenophobic mass-deportation program, as part of our long history of respecting immigrant rights.
• Anne Applebaum looks at last week's election in Poland and feels a chill that "every election is now existential."
• Lisa Schwarzbaum, a former film critic for Entertainment Weekly, likens the OAFPOTUS's style of governing to Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom."
• Ezra Klein expresses surprise at who has objected the most to the recommendations in his recent book Abundance, and the left-wing emphasis on messaging: "Democrats aren’t struggling primarily because they choose the wrong messages. They’re struggling because they fail to solve problems. ... [Brandon] Johnson is the most proudly left-wing big-city mayor in the country. ... He’s also the least popular big-city mayor in the country and may well end up as the least popular mayor in Chicago’s history. Policy failure breeds political failure."
• Oh, by the way, Meta and Yandex have started to de-anonymize your Android device by abusing how your Internet browser works.

Finally, a community group on the Northwest Side has launched an effort to build a 5-km rails-to-trails plus greenway project to connect the Bloomingdale Trail with the North Branch Trail. This would create a direct connection between the southern flank of Lincoln Park and the Chicago Botanic Garden in suburban Glencoe. It's still early days, though. I'd love to see this in my lifetime. I'm also waiting for electrified railroads around Chicago, but this project would be a lot cheaper.