The Daily Parker

A cold front passed this morning right after I got to the office, sparing me the 60 km/h winds and pouring rain that made the 9am arrivals miserable. The rain has passed, but the temperature has slowly descended to 17°C after hanging out around 19°C all night. I might have to close my windows tonight.

I also completed a mini-project for work a few minutes ago, so I now have time to read a couple of stories:

• The voir dire in the XPOTUS's porn-star-payoff criminal trial forced him to listen to a lot of jokes about himself (plus a warning from the judge to shut up).
• His other criminal trial could hit right after Labor Day, which will make the last few weeks of the election season more interesting than anyone wants them to be.
• Molly White finds AI somewhat useful, while the Canadian Parliament finds the Tories' use of AI to gum up the legislative process somewhat douchey.
• Most economists believe that personalized pricing will make everyone's life easier, while almost everyone else wants to punch those economists.
• Aurora-based Oberweis Dairy declared bankruptcy, just a couple of years after the bankrupt gubernatorial campaign of the current owner's father.

And now, back to the next phase of the mini-project...

Another Tuesday, another collection of head-shaking news stories one might expect in the waning days of an empire:

• Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau (Lib-Papineau, QC) formally accused the government of India of assassinating a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil.
• Paul Krugman traces the road from Mitt Romney to MAGA.
• Jonathan Last accuses "Meet the Press" of acting like 2016 never happened.
• Police in Birmingham, Ala., Tased a band director for not ending the band's song a minute early as ordered. Guess what skin colors the cop and the band director had.
• Who's surprised, even a little bit, that the XPOTUS used classified documents as scrap paper?
• Tiffany Owens Reed wants to ban the car monopoly, not the cars themselves.

Closer to home, the old candy-making laboratory on the 13th floor of the historic Marshal Field building has come back to life, 24 years after the the last Frango mint was produced there. (Note to readers who speak Portuguese: no one checked a Portuguese dictionary before naming the candy.)

Welcome to July. Hard to believe, right?

I'm traveling today so regular posting continues tomorrow.

And happy birthday, Canada.

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.

As the smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to spread through the American Midwest, I want to mention that the effective use of government regulation of industry has made this week's air quality that much more surprising. Just take a look at Evanston, Ill., yesterday around 7pm:

The fact that this looks really weird says a lot about what the government can do when people are behind it.

No, really: the air-quality alerts from Minnesota to West Virginia look bizarre right now because we hardly ever see AQIs above 150 these days. In my lifetime, even 35 years ago, Chicago looked like this all the time.

The Chicago Tribune reported on this incredible change in 2015:

As early as 1874, as the city rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871, the Tribune warned that the huge increase in factories and hotels, and the new skyscrapers with their steam-powered elevators, was a serious problem. "So dense is this volume of smoke that, unless there is a brisk, stirring breeze, the whole of it settles down in the central part of the city and leaves its dirty imprint," the editorial said.

Civic leaders, including the editors of the Tribune, crusaded tirelessly against the "smoke horror."

It is hard to know how often the sun lost its battle to shine — though it happened regularly into the 1950s — because the Tribune wrote stories only when it was unusually bad. On Jan. 18, 1925, the newspaper reported the pall that turned day into night was "the densest, thickest and darkest smoke screen which has been thrown over the city this season." The "plague of darkness" on Dec. 7, 1929, was caused by low-hanging clouds, fog and "the customary smoke screen."

And the power needed to light the day meant Commonwealth Edison had to burn even more coal.

By the late 1960s people had had enough. So finally, in 1970, Congress unanimously (except for one demon from the 3rd Circle of Hell) passed the Clean Air Act, starting a decades-long process of cutting emissions and switching from dirty power sources that continues today.

In 1980, ten years after the Clean Air Act passed, Los Angeles had only 6 days with AQIs below 50 but 206 above 150. (I know, because I was there for many of them.) In 2021, LA had 41 days below 50 and only 27 above 150.

This week we have unhealthy air due to natural pollution from an unusual combination of record wildfires in Canada and a weather system blowing the smoke south. Air quality should return to normal (or even healthy) by the weekend. But absent bipartisan regulation 53 years ago, it would look like this (or worse) more than half the year.

So when I say I want a real opposition party and not the whackadoodle nihilists currently destroying their constituents' faith in government, this is why.

Chicago has an air quality alert right now as the World Air Quality Index lists us first (last?) in the world for worst air quality:

Canadian wildfire smoke pouring into Chicago has made its air quality the worst in the world Tuesday.

The World Air Quality Index ranked Chicago as the worst for air quality, with Dubai, Minneapolis, Jakarta and Doha, Indonesia rounding out the top 5. Chicago’s air is labeled an “unhealthy” 172 by the index.

The National Weather Service blamed the conditions and low visibility on the wildfire smoke that has wafted down from Canada and impacted large regions of the U.S. The service suggested limiting prolonged outdoor activities.

The problem is predicted to last through the day Tuesday.

I haven't seen air quality like this since I visited Los Angeles in the early 1980s:

A low cloud layer hung over the area until just a few minutes ago, but as you can see from this GOES-East image, we've got thick enough smoke that it almost makes now difference:

I just snapped this photo from my office door:

(I'd send up my drone but it's a bit too windy.)

People wonder what anthropogenic climate change looks like. Well, here it is.

I had a lot going on this morning, so I'm only now snarfing down a Chipotle bowl. Also, I'm going to have to read these things tomorrow:

• Over 100 candidates, including a dog, will stand for election in Toronto's mayoral election on the 26th.
• Writing for Mother Jones, Ali Breland thinks the content-creator rebellion at Reddit won't stop what Corey Doctorow calls "the enshittification" of online platforms.
• Similarly, private-equity debt has killed yet another good company making good products, Insta-Pot.
• After what insiders call a deliberate campaign by New York mayor Eric Adams to strip her of power, New York City's police commissioner Keechant Sewell abruptly resigned Monday.
• Despite yesterday's rain around Chicago, the drought in Illinois has gotten worse.
• Save the firefiles!
• Tinley Park, Ill., has launched a brewery trolley that technically puts 2 new breweries on the Brews & Choos list. (I had plans to return to Banging Gavel later this summer anyway, as they're about to open the Vogt House to the public.)
• The list of people excited about the NASCAR race in downtown Chicago keeps getting shorter.

Finally, today is the 35th anniversary of the best baseball movie of all time, Bull Durham. If I had time I'd watch it tonight.

As the wildfires in western Canada continue to burn, we in Chicago continue to live under the smoke plume, going on four days now. NASA's Earth Observatory has art:

Raging fires filled the skies of southern Canada and the northern United States with smoke in mid-May 2023. The fires had scorched 478,000 hectares (1,800 square miles) in Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan, as of May 16, which is 10-times the average area burned for this time of year.

As of May 16, there were 87 wildland fires burning in Alberta, a quarter of which were classified as out of control, meaning the fires were expected to grow in size. A majority of the 478,000 hectares burned have been in Alberta, according to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System, but several fires were classified as burning out of control on that day in British Columbia and Saskatchewan.

Wind brought smoke from the fires down to Maryland on May 10, making the Sun look milky in the sky. The AERONET instrument at NASA Goddard in Greenbelt, Maryland, had an average AOD value of about 1 in visible wavelengths on that day. On May 16, smoke contributed to hazy skies and hazardous air quality in North Dakota and northern Minnesota. An AERONET sensor at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks measured an average AOD of 2.3 on May 16, with peak values close to 3.

Unseasonably hot weather is expected to continue over the next few days in Western Canada. In British Columbia, temperatures are expected to reach 30° Celsius (86° Fahrenheit) through May 18, according to Environment Canada.

New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells forecasts a hazy future:

[A] new lesson from the evolving science of wildfire is about how far its toxic smoke spreads and how widely its noxious impacts are distributed. You may think of fire in terms of scorched homes and go bags sitting ready for sudden evacuation. But distance is no cordon sanitaire for smoke. In fact, according to one not-yet-published study led by Stanford researchers exploring the distribution of wildfire smoke, an estimated 60 percent of the smoke impact of American wildfire is experienced by those living outside the states where the trees are in flames. Eighty-seven percent of the impact is experienced by those living outside the county of the original fire. And the problem is getting much worse.

[W]hile Americans often think of wildfires as a California problem, it’s much bigger than that, with more burning elsewhere in the country every year. By some estimates, land burned across the American West grew ninefold between 1984 and 2015. It may increase several more times over in the decades ahead. The number of people exposed to what are sometimes called extreme exposure days — when particulate matter is about seven times as high as the World Health Organization safety standard — has grown 27-fold in just the last decade.

In recent years, wildfire smoke accounted for up to half of all air pollution in the American West — meaning that if you live there, as much particulate matter has blown into your skies and your lungs from the burning of trees and brush as from all other human and industrial activity combined. And the grim effects are not locally constrained: Approximately half of American deaths from all forms of air pollution come from out-of-state sources, according to one study published in Nature in 2020 — a finding that implies a remarkably large toll, given that estimates for the total number of premature American deaths attributable to fossil fuel pollution in a given year run as high as 350,000.

Today's layer of smoky haze is pretty high up over Chicago, so my ground-based AQI is a healthy 23. But you might want to reconsider your getaway weekend in Calgary.

An Illinois hobby group seems to have lost one of its hobbies recently:

The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a hobbyist group that launches hydrogen-filled, radio-equipped pico balloons and tracks them as they fly across the world, has declared one of its balloons “missing in action.”

The balloon stopped transmitting signals when it had been set to fly near the area in Canada where a military fighter jet shot down an unidentified object last week.

If the time-and-date fit is more than a coincidence, the balloon never stood a chance: The hobbyists use large, plastic party balloons that cost as little as $13 for their scientific fun; the military reportedly took the UFO out with heat-seeking missiles.

The balloon, identified by the hobbyist club as K9YO, had already circumnavigated the globe six times.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command did not immediately respond to calls and emails requesting asking about the downed object.

Poor little balloon. But hey, it's good to know that a $3m missile can take out a $13 balloon.

YouTuber Not Just Bikes shows how North American traffic engineers prioritize the convenience and speed of drivers in ways that make our streets the most dangerous in the developed world for pedestrians: