The Daily Parker

In June 1943, a group of white American MPs attacked a company of Black American soldiers in the town of Bamber Bridge, England (near Blackpool). The English took the side of the Black soldiers:

During the war, American soldiers accounted for the vast majority of black people in Britain. Britain’s population was overwhelmingly white, most of the country almost entirely so. Black Britons numbered around eight thousand in total, and were clustered in London, Liverpool and a few other ports. For the residents of most towns and villages near US bases, the proximity of black people was wholly novel.

Given that most Britons had seen black people only in films or books, you might have expected them to distrust or fear the new arrivals. Instead, as the historian David Olusoga remarks, the natives were “extraordinarily welcoming” to their black visitors. In fact, black GIs were offered a warmer reception than their white counterparts. In the letters and diaries of British inhabitants, White GIs are portrayed as arrogant, flashy, and unruly, while Black GIs, by contrast, are described as courteous, self-disciplined, and charming.

For black GIs, the warm and respectful treatment they received in Britain’s shops, pubs, and church halls threw their relationship with fellow countrymen into sharp relief. At home, black Americans from Southern states were strictly segregated from whites and systematically oppressed. Jim Crow laws ensured that they were politically disenfranchised and economically marginalised, eighty years after the abolition of slavery. The oppression was cultural too: black Americans were routinely  and openly treated as contemptible by their white counterparts.

For many black soldiers, the experience of Britain renewed and sharpened a sense of injustice over how they were treated in the United States. As one put it, “we are treated better in England than we are in a country that is supposed to be our home.” Naturally enough, it led some of them to question why they were fighting. Another GI wrote: “I am an American negro, doing my part for the American government to make the world safe for a democracy I have never known.”

I recently watched the Channel 4 miniseries Traitors, in which American race relations right after World War II in London mattered a great deal to the plot. Learning about Bamber Bridge added more depth to my understanding of the show.

Oh boy:

• Voters have defeated billionaire, populist Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš through the simple process of banding together to kick him out, proof that an electorate can hold the line against strongmen.
• A school administrator in Texas told teachers that "if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an 'opposing' perspective." Because Texas.
• Oakland Police should stop shooting Black men having medical emergencies, one would think.
• The Federal Railroad Administration and Amtrak have released plans for new passenger train routes from Chicago to other Midwest cities.
• Meanwhile, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D) has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to encourage electric-vehicle production in the state.
• New Republic's David Klion says Denis Villenueuve's upcoming Dune adaptation "is the adaptation Frank Herbert's novel deserves," and I can't wait until it comes out on the 22nd!
• As Chicago has stuck to June-like temperatures for the past two weeks, an active jet stream has given the Rocky Mountain upwards of 750 mm of snow and temperatures as low as -10°C.
• Researchers have demonstrated how to reverse-engineer fake photos generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs), a common type of AI.
• Archaeologists have gotten closer to figuring out who massacred a village off the coast of Sweden around 400 CE, and why.

Cassie has bugged me for the last hour, even though we went out two hours ago. I assume she wants dinner. I will take care of that presently.

After ProPublica's story about Rutherford County, Tenn., judge Donna Davenport, things have not gone well for the judge:

In the days after ProPublica’s investigation of the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, one state lawmaker wrote that she was “horrified.” Another called it a “nightmare.” A third labeled it “unchecked barbarism.” A former Tennessee congressman posted the story about the unlawful jailing of kids and tweeted, “The most sickening and unAmerican thing I’ve read about in some time.” The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund called for a federal civil rights investigation. A pastor, in his Sunday sermon in Nashville, said: “We can’t allow this madness to continue. These are our babies.”

And on Tuesday evening, four days after the story published, the president of Middle Tennessee State University notified faculty and staff that Donna Scott Davenport, a juvenile court judge at the heart of the investigation, “is no longer affiliated with the University.” Davenport had been an adjunct instructor at the school, which is based in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. For many years, she taught a course on juvenile justice. In 2015, she was one of the university’s commencement speakers.

On Sunday, Vincent Windrow, senior pastor at Olive Branch Church in Murfreesboro and Nashville, delivered a sermon at both branches centered on the revelations by ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio about Rutherford County’s juvenile justice system. The story included a detailed account of Murfreesboro police arresting four Black girls at an elementary school in 2016. The officers handcuffed two of the girls, including the youngest, an 8-year-old. The kids were accused of watching some boys fight and not stepping in. (They were charged with “criminal responsibility for conduct of another,” which is not an actual crime. All the charges were later dismissed.)

This, ladies and gentlemen, shows that a free press is the natural enemy of corruption, which is precisely why the XPOTUS hates it so much. I hope that ProPublica's story convinces the good people of Rutherford County to elect someone else in Davenport's place as soon as legally possible.

Chicago Loop, Monday morning:

Former Chicago Fraternal Order of Police president Dean Angelo died yesterday of Covid-19. And yet the current FOP president, John Catanzara, has promised to sue the City over the requirement that police officers either show proof of vaccination by Friday or go on a twice-a-week testing regimen if they want to keep getting paid:

"It literally has been like everything else with this mayor the last two and a half years," said FOP President John Catanzara. "Do it or else because I said so."

In a social media post Tuesday, Catanzara urged his members to not comply with the vaccine mandate.

"We're notifying the city the demand for expedited arbitration along with filing unfair labor practice with the labor board," he said Tuesday. "Tomorrow we'll be filing court paperwork for a temporary restraining order."

The dispute comes as a new report from the National Law Enforcement Museum reveals that a full 62% of all line-of-duty law enforcement deaths across the country last year were from COVID-19.

(Emphasis mine.)

In related news, I'm about a quarter through Ruth Ben-Ghiat's Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, in which she details the patterns of authoritarians throughout the last century. In almost every case, the authoritarian leader demands his followers show loyalty by embracing lies, even when those lies kill them.

Ben-Ghiat's book, like the story today of Angelo's death, frustrate the hell out of me. We make the same mistakes over and over and over. Ultimately, though, we haven't had enough time away from the savannahs of Africa to stop acting like frightened apes half the time.

Some of these will actually have to wait until tomorrow morning:

• Adam Serwer thanks Justice Samuel Alito (R) for confirming Serwer's complaints about the Court.
• A trove of XPOTUS-branded gifts meant for foreign heads of state representing "significant" monetary value disappeared at some point. Can't imagine how.
• The BBC Reality Check column suggests that reports in some journals about Invermectin may have painted an incomplete picture, putting it mildly.
• Cranky Flier explains that Southwest Airlines' recent troubles come from their overextended operations, not from any nefarious actors.
• An Annapolis, Md., couple will likely never walk free again after being arrested for attempting to sell American nuclear secrets to...well, to a foreign government that called the FBI on them. You have to read the FBI's affidavit.
• Chicago ranks 19th out of 20 metropolitan areas in jobs recovered from Covid-19 losses, ahead of only San Francisco.
• Former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham has a new tell-all book out, becoming the third Stephanie to write one about the XPOTUS.

And now, I will feed the dog.

Apparently the rockets aren't the only colossal dicks at Blue Origin:

The company’s cultural issues came to light last month when Alexandra Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin’s employee communications, released an essay she said was written in conjunction with 20 other current and former Blue Origin employees. It said the company “turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.” The staffers were not identified in the essay, but three of them confirmed the allegations to The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

[I]n 2017, [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos brought in [Bob] Smith to be the company’s first CEO, taking over from Rob Meyerson, the company’s president, who had been running its day-to-day operations.

Smith and the executives he brought in, many from legacy aerospace companies, sat in an executive suite in a new office building, isolated from the rest of the staff. While that is not unusual for many large corporations, it was off-putting for many employees at Blue Origin who had been used to their leaders sitting and mingling among them.

“That wasn’t appreciated,” one former executive said. “It was an I’m-above-you message.”

Concerned about the company’s leadership, the head of human resources brought in an outside management consultant, who interviewed Smith and the members of his team in 2019 and concluded that Smith’s micromanaging style was often ineffective, according to a former senior executive and confirmed by another person familiar with the matter.

Smith bristled at the report, which was first reported by CNBC, and refused to meet on the subject again.

Culture comes from many sources, but dickish, authoritarian behavior at the top gives people to act like authoritarian dicks below. That insight isn't exactly rocket science. But it does help explain how SpaceX keeps beating Blue Origin in every way that matters.

About that new phone, I have to say, I am very impressed with T-Mobile's new 5G network:

Also note that temperature bug in the upper-left corner. Yes, it was 26°C yesterday afternoon in Chicago. For comparison, October 10th has a normal high temperature of 18.2°C. June 7th has a normal high of 26°C. I hope autumn actually starts sometime this month.

ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio dropped a bombshell description about how Rutherford County, Tenn., treats its Black children. That the main perpetrators of the violence against children under color of law appear to have a Christianist view of the world does not surprise me in the least:

In Rutherford County, a juvenile court judge had been directing police on what she called “our process” for arresting children, and she appointed the jailer, who employed a “filter system” to determine which children to hold.

The judge was proud of what she had helped build, despite some alarming numbers buried in state reports.

Among cases referred to juvenile court, the statewide average for how often children were locked up was 5%.

In Rutherford County, it was 48%.

When [judicial commissioner Sherry] Hamlett came up with “criminal responsibility for conduct of another” as a possible charge, there was a problem. It’s not an actual charge. There is no such crime. It is rather a basis upon which someone can be accused of a crime. For example, a person who caused someone else to commit robbery would be charged with robbery, not “criminal responsibility.”

But in the judicial commissioners’ office that Friday afternoon, 10 petitions were issued, each charging a child with “criminal responsibility.” The petitions didn’t distinguish the kids’ actions; the documents were cookie-cutter, saying each child “encouraged and caused” two other juveniles to commit an assault.

[One child's] lawyers wanted to know: How many kids were there who, like E.J., had been improperly arrested? How many kids had, like Jacorious Brinkley, been improperly jailed? The lawyers gathered large samples of arrest and detention records from an 11-year period, ending in December 2017. Then they extrapolated.

They would eventually estimate that kids had been wrongly arrested 500 times. And that was just for kids arrested by the sheriff’s office. This estimate didn’t account for other law enforcement agencies in the county that followed Davenport’s “process.” As for how many times the juvenile detention center had improperly locked up kids through its “filter system,” the lawyers estimated that number at 1,500.

Awful people like Davenport and a few others named in the story continue to exercise their power because the people who could stop them—the voters—don't care. I have no good explanation for how these people became so awful, but I suspect that narcissism plus religious belief had something to do with it.

Federal class-action lawsuits related to these matters have cost Rutherford County tens of millions of dollars. And yet the good people of the County can't seem to vote Davenport out of office. Would the good people of Chicago vote a similarly awful judge out? I don't know. But I'd hope that we would.

Welcome to stop #59 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: District Brew Yards., 417 N. Ashland Ave., Chicago
Train line: CTA Pink and Green Lines, Ashland
Time from Chicago: 6 minutes
Distance from station: 400 m

District Brew Yards is just up the road from All Rise Brewing, but that road is Ashland Avenue, you have to go under a dark and scary railroad bridge to get from one to the other, and the Fulton Industrial District doesn't inspire feelings of warmth and happiness at night. I recommend you go, though. And try at least one beer from each of the four breweries on site. Oh, and Lillie's Q has a kitchen there, so grab some brisket to go with your beers.

When you arrive, they swipe your credit card and hand you one of theirs. You slip the beer card into a slot, pour your own beer, and watch the charges add up. And add up they do: most beers cost 50-70¢ per ounce (about $15-20 per liter), and the cups they provide hold almost half a liter.

Those higher-than-expected prices pay the bills. Each brewery has a five-year lease on wall space, and the Yard collects 50% of every beer sale. So of my $10 pint of Juice Pillow, $1 goes to tax, $4.50 goes to the Yard, and Burnt City collects the remaining $4.50. But, Burnt City doesn't have to lay out half a million dollars for brewing equipment. They just have to give the recipe to the Yard's brewers and buy the ingredients. It socializes most of the risk of microbrewing. 

I tried one small pour of each brewery's New England-style IPA, then went back and had a pint of my favorite. I started with Around the Bend's Juicy Trials Hazy IPA (7%, 35 IBU), a maltier-than-expected, well-balanced example of the style, with a clean taste and good finish. Then on to Bold Dog's Hazy Boi double dry-hopped IPA (7.4%), which had a big nose (SWIDT?), excellent balance, vanilla notes, and a crisp finish. Third: Burnt City Juice Pillow Hazy IPA (7.4%), which my notes tell me had a very drinkable "big flavor - Citra explosion" and a clean finish. I finished up with Casa Humilde Cerveceria's Nebula IPA (5.7%), a straightforward, very hoppy (yet very tasty) ale that (again, notes) "dice ¡soy IPA!" And because I only had about 50 mL of each beer, I went back and tried Humilde's signature Firme  IPA (SWIDT?), which had more IBUs than their Nebula but still a solid, well-balanced flavor.

Of the five, I liked Juice Pillow the best, but I also had a full Hazy Boi pour while sitting next to a fire on the patio.

Two more notes. First, four Metra lines and Amtrak's Milwaukee and Empire Builder services run past the patio just to the south, so if you like trains, you'll have plenty to watch. Second, they love dogs outside, and they plan to keep the patio open all winter, so Cassie will get to visit at some point. 

Beer garden? Yes (all year!)
Dogs OK? Outside
Televisions? No
Serves food? Lillie's Q on site
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes