The Daily Parker

While running errands this morning I had the same thought I've had for the past three or so weeks: the trees look great this autumn. Whatever combination of heat, precipitation, and the gradual cooling we've had since the beginning of October, the trees refuse to give up their leaves yet, giving us cathedrals of yellow, orange, and red over our streets.

And then I come home to a bunch of news stories that also remind me everything changes:

• Like most sentient humans, Adam Serwer feels no surprise (but plenty of disgust) that a Wisconsin jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse: "This is the legal regime that a powerful minority of gun-rights advocates have built—one in which Americans are encouraged to settle their differences with lethal force, preferably leaving as few witnesses capable of testimony as possible."
• Charles Blow worries about the follow-on effects—i.e., vigilantism. Says Blow, "Right-wing gun culture is not unlike the wellness industry, in that it requires the cultivation of a sustained insecurity in its audience, in order to facilitate the endless purchase of its products."
• Dan Friedman finds Rittenhouse's acquittal terrifying: "[M]ost reasonable people would agree that armed vigilantes facing off with armed protesters, or rioters—while police hide blocks away in armored vehicles—is, by and large, bad. But in Kenosha, and much the country, it is legal. And it is becoming normal. ... [T]he biggest failure was that the events of the trial, and the public perception of it, will not deter the kind of conduct that led to it. It seems sure to cause more right-wing vigilantism, more armed confrontations, and more political violence in the streets."

Outside of Kenosha:

• One of my favorite professors from my uni days and the school's longest-serving faculty member, Mike D'Innocenzo, died earlier this month.
• Forget the Belarus-Poland border; pay attention to Russia's troops on Ukraine's.
• UCSB's proposed Dormzilla project is not the first senile raving masquerading as architecture inflicted on the public by Charles Munger. He already built a windowless dorm in Michigan, with predictable (to everyone but Munger) results.
• Matthew Belloni makes the case that Kathleen Kennedy has botched the Star Wars franchise and needs to leave, and also that Netflix's new Top-10 list doesn't really tell you much.

Finally, Israel's government has loosened the certification process for Kashrut inspectors, to the outrage (do they express any other emotion?) of the Haredim. One possible factor? "The head of the Chief Rabbinate’s kashrut division was indicted on bribery charges in 2020 after being videotaped allegedly accepting envelopes of cash from food importers." Oy gevalt!

As the last workday in October draws to a close, in all its rainy gloominess, I have once again spent all day working on actually coding stuff and not reading these articles:

• Andrew Sullivan says the GOP could own clean energy by pushing nuclear power.
• Brian Merchant says Facebook has decided to change its name because it's boring.
• The last sane GOP representative, Adam Kinzinger (IL-6), won't run for re-election to the House, both because the new Illinois district map favors Democrats and also because, let's face it, he's really running for governor.
• Nicholas Kristof has given up his 37-year career at The New York Times to run for governor of Oregon.
• After a three-year delay, O'Hare's people mover will reopen, possibly just in time for my next trip.

Finally, a 97-year-old billionaire has given $240 million to UC Santa Barbara on the condition they build a 4500-room dormitory so awful (think Geidi Prime) the school's consulting architect resigned.

Stories from the usual suspects:

• Sweden's Prime Minister abruptly resigned Sunday, saying it's for the benefit of his center-left party.
• Following Andrew Cuomo's resignation, Kathy Hochul became the first female governor of New York State this morning just after midnight.
• The Capitol Police have cleared the unnamed officer who shot domestic terrorist Ashli Babbit as she tried to force her way into the Speaker's Lobby on January 6th, adding that the shooting likely saved many other lives.
• Economist Paul Krugman credits the pandemic for showing low-wage workers, particularly in the leisure and hospitality industry, they're worth more than they were paid in the past. (In other words, we should call the "labor shortage" by the more correct term "market forces" instead.)
• Josh Marshall once again points out that the evacuation from Kabul, while appearing chaotic, has actually been very successful.
• Jordan Michael Smith asks, "Twenty years after 9/11, are we any smarter?"
• Sarah Zhang frets about the new school year and hopes it won't go as badly as last year.

Finally, Whisky Advocate calls out a few lesser-known distilleries in Scotland worth visiting—or at least sampling.

Eugene Wesley Roddenberry would have been 100 years old today. Star Trek and NASA have a livestream today to celebrate.

In other news:

• Guardian UK Washington correspondent David Smith highlights White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki's ability to expertly destroy Fox News reporter Peter Doocy.
• T-Mobile has suffered its sixth known data disclosure attack in four years, this time losing control over as many as 40 million customer records.
• New Republic's Scott Stern profiles former Monsanto lawyer Clarence Thomas, whose rulings on the US Supreme Court suggest he still believes he works for Monsanto.
• Charles Blow takes us through our history of using classrooms as proxy battlefields in the culture wars.
• Chicago's favorite piping plovers, Rose and Monty, have decamped for the winter, but their kids will remain at Montrose Beach for a few more weeks.

Finally, sometime today I hope to finish reading Joe Pinsker's interview with author Oliver Burkeman about how not to get sucked into things that waste your time, like the Internet.

Brandi Levy, a 19-year-old student from Pennsylvania, won her appeal to the US Supreme Court after being suspended from cheerleading for a year after Snapchatting the above sentiment:

She sent the message on a Saturday from the Cocoa Hut, a convenience store popular with teenagers.

Though Snapchat messages are meant to vanish not long after they are sent, another student took a screenshot and showed it to her mother, a coach. The school suspended Ms. Levy from cheerleading for a year, saying the punishment was needed to “avoid chaos” and maintain a “teamlike environment.”

Ms. Levy sued the school district, winning a sweeping victory from a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia. The court said the First Amendment did not allow public schools to punish students for speech outside school grounds, relying on a precedent from a different era.

Everyone except Justice Thomas joined Justice Breyer's opinion, which held:

While public schools may have a special interest in regulating some off-campus student speech, the special interests offered by the school are not sufficient to overcome B. L.’s interest in free expression in this case.

[T]hree features of off-campus speech often, even if not always, distinguish schools’ efforts to regulate off-campus speech. First, a school will rarely stand in loco parentis when a student speaks off campus. Second, from the student speaker’s perspective, regulations of off-campus speech, when coupled with regulations of on-campus speech, include all the speech a student utters during the full 24-hour day. That means courts must be more skeptical of a school’s efforts to regulate off-campus speech, for doing so may mean the student cannot engage in that kind of speech at all. Third, the school itself has an interest in protecting a student’s unpopular expression, especially when the expression takes place off campus, because America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy. Taken together, these three features of much off-campus speech mean that the leeway the First Amendment grants to schools in light of their special characteristics is diminished.

Justice Thomas, with predictable disdain for the modern world and rational thought in general, would have applied his originalist philosophy even to Snapchat:

I would begin the assessment of the scope of free-speech rights incorporated against the States by looking to “what ‘ordinary citizens’ at the time of [the Fourteenth Amendment’s] ratification would have understood” the right to encompass. McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 813 (2010) (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). Cases and treatises from that era reveal that public schools retained substantial authority to discipline students. As I have previously explained, that authority was near plenary while students were at school. See Morse v. Frederick, 551 U. S. 393, 419 (2007) (concurring opinion). Authority also extended to when students were traveling to or from school. See, e.g., Lander v. Seaver, 32 Vt. 114, 120 (1859). And, although schools had less authority after a student returned home, it was well settled that they still could discipline students for off-campus speech or conduct that had a proximate tendency to harm the school environment.

Perhaps the most familiar example applying this rule is a case where a student, after returning home from school, used “disrespectful language” against a teacher—he called the teacher “old”—“in presence of the [teacher] and of some of his fellow pupils.” Id., at 115 (emphasis deleted). The Vermont Supreme Court held that the teacher could discipline a student for this speech because the speech had “a direct and immediate tendency to injure the school, to subvert the master’s authority, and to beget disorder and insubordination.”

I left the citations in because seeing Thomas at his epistemologically-sealed best really drives home how frighteningly out of touch he is. First, he cited his own concurrences, which (a) have no force of law and (b) he wrote. Then he cited and quoted a Vermont case from 1859 that sure, I guess, has precedential value in the state of Vermont, but probably doesn't even reflect current Vermont law.

In the rest of his dissent, Thomas cites his own concurrences a couple more times, a Missouri case from 1885, an Iowa case from 1971, and another Missouri case from 1877. He really does live in the 19th Century.

So, good on Levy, and on the First Amendment, who won a clear victory with this case. But what the hell, Clarence? How much more of this originalist crap do we have to endure before you finally retire and we can appoint someone from the 21st Century to Thurgood Marshall's seat?

Lunchtime roundup:

• Author John Scalzi gives the STBXPOTUS a colossal take-down on his blog today: "We don’t have to wait on history, but as it happens, this is how history will remember Donald Trump: Not as a forceful, charismatic authoritarian, but as a corrupt and pathetic wretch, who spent the final days of his presidency shouting at the walls about how the world is against him."
• Alexandra Petri: "Now is not the time to point fingers, Julius Caesar. Now is the time for healing." ("I am frankly appalled when I think of all the things that have been said on both sides, like, 'Death to Caesar!' and 'Ouch!'")
• National security experts, including the former chief research psychologist for the US Secret Service, advise treating the STBXPOTUS "like he's a terrorist leader."
• It appears that Ivanka and Jared wouldn't let the people protecting them into the house to pee, forcing the US Secret Service to spend nearly $100,000 over the past few years renting an apartment close by.
• Republicans in Congress supported intrusive security for everyone else in the past, but now that it affects them personally, they don't like it. How surprising.
• Since the Senate has recessed, presumably so Mitch McConnell can avoid an impeachment trial, President-Elect Biden still has no confirmed cabinet officials, forcing the incoming administration into an alternative plan after taking power next Wednesday.
• Chicago teachers locked out of the Chicago Public Schools online learning platform because they refused to return to unsafe classrooms found a poetic way of expressing their displeasure: they taught from the Board of Education President's front lawn.
• Chicago's regional heavy-rail system approved a $1.8 bn purchase of 500 slick new rail cars, which should start to arrive in 2024.

Finally, the authors of The Impostor's Guide, a free ebook aimed at self-taught programmers, has a new series of videos about general computer-science topics that people like me didn't learn programming for fun while getting our history degrees.

The Economist's Bartleby column examines how Covid-19 lockdowns have "caused both good and bad changes of routine."

We had a relatively quiet day yesterday, but only in comparison to the day before:

• Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (wife of presumptive Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned after nearly four years (and with nothing to gain from staying in Cabinet) mostly because they no longer needed those jobs. Said the Post: "Resigning now feels a little like eating all but the last bite of a piece of cake at a restaurant and then asking for a refund."
• The BBC has a commendable round-up of fact-checking who actually broke into the Capitol on Wednesday.
• The US hit a new record for daily Covid-19 deaths: 4,112.
• The STBXPOTUS whined that he won't attend President Biden's inauguration, becoming the first crybaby-in-chief to skip the event since his spiritual ancestor Andrew Johnson.
• Nonfarm payrolls fell 140,000 from November to December, though unemployment held steady at 6.7%.

Meanwhile, here in Chicago:

• Reports of Southport Lanes' demise may have been premature.
• The South Shore Line will get a new route after the Federal Transit Administration released $945 million for it.
• Chicago restaurants may re-open next week thanks to falling Covid-19 infection rates state-wide.

Finally, Bruce Schneier advises the incoming administration on how to deal with the SolarWinds intrusion.

See? Yesterday was quiet.

My company gives us the usual American holidays off, and adds two "floating holidays" you can take whenever you want. I took my first one in January and just remembered last week that I hadn't taken the second one. So I took it today. Which gave me some time to read a bunch of things:

• The Atlantic's Derek Thompson wishes politicians in both parties understood how Covid-19 spreads.
• Paul Krugman wonders whether the president's efforts to kill Covid relief come from ignorance or cynicism. (I'd imagine both.)
• The Texas Attorney General and the attorneys general of 17 other states have sued four states where Joe Biden won to try overthrowing the election. Several Republicans in Congress have signed on as amici curiae, essentially calling their own elections illegitimate.
• National Geographic explains how the French Revolution led to the metric system.
• John Maguire, writing for the BBC's Culture column, really did not like the clichéd portrayal of Irish people in Wild Mountain Thyme.
• The next president of my alma mater will be from Chicago. They just keep getting us Chicagoans to run things over there.

Finally, the list I posted Wednesday needs an update. In October 1918, influenza killed 195,000 Americans, or an average of 6,290 per day. So clearly most of that month set records well above the records we set this week.

We've got a day and a half of autumn left in Chicago. Here's what I'm reading on a lazy Sunday:

• Chicago's North Pond in Lincoln Park needs $7m in restoration work which it may not get next year.
• The Washington Post recaps the 20-day clown show of the president refusing to accept the results of the election.
• Will Wilkinson tries to sort out why so many people voted for him.
• Erika Christakis looks at how Covid-19 illuminated existing problems with the way we educate children.

And finally, new research shows that the pyroclastic flows from Vesuvius in 79 CE turned people's brains to glass. Yummy.

Talk-show host Stephen Colbert has set up a website called Better Know a Ballot where you can check on the voting requirements for your state. He's producing videos for each state (starting with North Carolina) to explain the rules.

That's the bright spot of joy for you today. Here are other...spots...of something:

• The president answered questions from "undecided" voters at a town hall on Tuesday, and naturally lied almost every time he spoke. The Washington Post lists his most egregious falsehoods.
• Charlie Pierce believes the administration "couldn't have screwed up the response to the pandemic worse if it sent out battalions of the infected to sneeze on people."
• Attorney General William Barr attacked his own federal prosecutors in a speech yesterday, saying career attorneys have too much power that should go to the political appointees.
• Greg Sargent lists 7 ways the administration is "using government to corrupt the election."
• Megan McArdle explains how the language of Fox differs from English.
• The BBC's Reality Check takes on the president's unique understanding of forestry.
• Here in Chicago, the 98-year-old bar Southport Lanes will close for good on September 27th.
• I hope they didn't use Fortune Food Product's ingredients in their food, because the FDA has ordered them to stop production "after federal inspectors allegedly witnessed live rodents and other food safety violations at the East Pilsen facility."
• On this day in 1934, Lane Tech High School opened at its current location in North Center. At the time, it was the largest high school in the world, with 7,000 (all male) students.

OK, one more bit of good news: The Economist reported this week that the southern hemisphere had almost no flu cases this winter, because pandemic response measures work on influenza just as they work on Covid-19.