The Daily Parker

Another sprint has ended. My hope for a boring release has hit two snags: first, it looks like one of the test artifacts in the production environment that our build pipeline depends on has disappeared (easily fixed); and second, my doctor's treatment for this icky bronchitis I've had the past two weeks works great at the (temporary) expense of normal cognition. (Probably the cough syrup.)

Plus, Cassie and I have a houseguest:

But like my head, the rest of the world keeps spinning:

• A 3-judge panel on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that presidents do not have blanket immunity from prosecution, which the XPOTUS has vowed to appeal en banc and then to his hand-picked Supreme Court.
• The Republican Party got the border deal they asked for, but they refuse to pass it because the XPOTUS needs border chaos for his re-election campaign. Greg Sargent has even more about their own-goal.
• Los Angeles experienced record rainfall yesterday, with a whopping 104 mm of rain recorded downtown, smashing the old record of 65 mm set in 1927.
• Here in Chicago, we expect above-average temperatures to hang out for the rest of winter, possibly even hitting 16°C later this week.
• That means we won't get to see the winners of this year's snowplow-naming contest: Skilling It, CTRL-SALT-DELETE, Casimir Plowaski, Ernie Snowbanks, Mies van der Snow, and Bad, Bad Leroy Plow.
• Speaking of roads, the Sun-Times ran an essay today outlining the history of Chicago expressways (motorways), and what we lost when we built them.

And now, my production test pipeline has concluded successfully, so I will indeed have a boring release.

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. When I first visited London in 1992, a bobby at Victoria Station explained that they didn't have bins there because "they tend to explode." I supported President Clinton in brokering the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and I was in a pub in Killarney in July 2005 watching the telly with the silent crowd there as Sinn Féin put down their guns for good.

So while today's news would have shocked me in 1992, I'm merely surprised in 2024:

Northern Ireland’s devolved government has reconvened and appointed Michelle O’Neill as first minister in a historic moment for Sinn Féin and Irish nationalism.

The Stormont assembly nominated the County Tyrone republican as the region’s first nationalist first minister, ending a century of unionist first ministers.

The appointment of a republican first minister represented “a new dawn” unimaginable to previous generations that grew up with discrimination against Catholics, said O’Neill. “That state is now gone.”

The devolved government reconvened after the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) walked out of Stormont on 3 February 2022 in protest against post-Brexit trading arrangements that it said undermined the region’s place in the UK. The party agreed to end the boycott this week after its leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, wrung concessions from the UK government that smoothed the so-called Irish Sea border.

Welcome to the 21st Century, when both republicans and unionists can find common ground in their disgust with the Conservative government in Westminster.

A few months ago a Chicago Parking Enforcement Agent (PEA) tried to give me a ticket while I was paying for the parking spot online. I kept calm and polite, but I firmly explained that writing a ticket before I'd even finished entering the parking zone in the payment app might not survive the appeal.

Yesterday I got another parking ticket at 9:02pm in a spot that has free parking from 9pm to 9am. The ticket actually said "parking expired and driver not walking back from meter." Note that the parking app won't let you pay for parking beyond 9pm in that spot. Because, again, it's free after 9pm. That didn't stop the PEA, so now I actually will appeal, and I'll win. But it's a real pain.

Again, I thank Mayor Daley for jamming through the worst public financial deal in the history of the United States.

Meanwhile, I didn't have time to read all of these at lunch today:

• Almost as shocking as the realization that privatizing parking meters games the system in favor of private interests against the general public, it turns out so do traffic impact studies.
• The Illinois Board of Elections voted unanimously to reject an effort to keep the XPOTUS off the Republican Party primary ballot, citing an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that excludes the Board from constitutional questions.
• Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (R) won't win the Republican nomination for president this year, but she will make the XPOTUS froth at the mouth.
• Of course, she and others in her party persist in trying to make their own voters froth at the mouth, mostly by lying to them about the state of the economy, cities, and other things that have gone pretty well since 2021.
• Of course, perhaps the Republican Party lies so much to cover their demonstrable incompetence at governing?
• Christopher Elmensdorf warns that the clean energy bill winding through the Democratic offices on Capitol Hill will lead to endless NIMBYism—not to mention bad-faith blockage by fossil-fuel companies.
• For only $120,000 a year, this consultant will get your kid into Harvard.
• Helmut Jahn's new building at 1000 S. Michigan Ave. looks super cool.

I will now go back to work. Tonight, I will schedule my parking appeal. Updates as conditions warrant.

The computer I'm using to write this post turns 8 years old on April 6th. It has served me well, living through thousands of Daily Parker posts, two house moves, terabytes of photographs, and only one blown hard drive.

So I have finally broken down and ordered a new one: a Dell Precision 3460 that will sit on my desk instead of under it, and will run Windows 11 with TPM 2.0 instead of warning me that it doesn't have the right hardware to get the latest OS.

The new computer will have an 13th Gen Intel Core i5-13600 processor with burst speeds up to 5 GHz, an nVidia T1000 graphics card with 3 DP outputs right on the chassis, a 512 GB SSD as a boot drive, and a pair of 32 GB 4800 MHz DIMMS that I ordered separately. Plus, instead of decrypting and re-encrypting my 4 TB, 7200-RPM data drive, I'm just going to get a 4 TB M.2 2280 SSD, because they're actually less expensive and use less power than the one in my 2016 box.

Unfortunately I'll need to completely replace my 14-year-old Dell monitor, and get an HDMI-to-DP conversion cable for my newer (2018-vintage) monitor, but neither of those things is terribly expensive these days.

I've also updated the math on the March 2016 post announcing my previous computer, to show the progression of computing technology over the past 8 years:

I mean, wow. I fully expect to be amazed at the speed—and the video.

I will say that my hope that the computer I bought in March 2016 would last at least 4 years came true twice over. In fact, from 1991 to 2016, I upgraded my main computer about every 2.7 years on average. Only two made it past 5 years, but only by 4 and 6 months.

It's been a really great machine. And I'm sure I'll discover that it can do one or two things that my new box can't, just like this one lost a couple of features I still sometimes miss. (My 2008 desktop could make mix CDs. I've never set this one up to do that.)

Ctrl+W closes the active browser window, you see. I meant to type the word "Wade" in italics but somehow hit the Ctrl key instead of the Shift key. There may be some irony there.

Possibly the warmth has addled my brain? It's just gone above freezing for the first time since the wee hours of January 13th. It's also gloomy and gray, but those things go together.

Anyway:

• Today is the 51st anniversary of the US Supreme Court's decision in Roe v Wade.
• Michael Tomasky wants to know why the press seem to ignore the XPOTUS's obvious dementia.
• Something fishy happened with the 2023 Hugo nomination process, but that certainly has nothing to do with the politics of the host country.
• The City of London has embarked on an ambitious pedestrianization scheme that has, among other things, turned the area around the Bank Tube stop into a pleasant place to sit.

Finally, European researchers have published a report suggesting that domestic dogs wag their tails because humans like the rhythm. I will shortly go test this theory on my resident tail-wagger.

Twenty years ago today, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) showed enthusiasm for his 3rd-place finish in the Iowa Caucuses in a way he came to regret:

Conventional wisdom says that this scream tanked (see what I did there?*) his campaign, but really, Dean never had the momentum or following needed to win the nomination. Plus, President Bush had taken us to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and with common sense in Iraq, so war hero John Kerry looked like the best person to challenge him.

I can't remember exactly, but I think I voted for Kerry, mainly because the nomination was sewn up by then. More importantly, though, I voted for Illinois State Senator Barack Obama (D-13th) in the primary to fill the US Senate seat of retiring US Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R). My guy won that election (if you recall), and I got to go to the victory party on primary night. Fun!

* See, e.g., this clip from 1988.

My socials today have a lot of chatter about the weather, understandably as we're now in our fourth day below -15°C. And yet I have vivid memories of 20 January 1985 when we hit the coldest temperature ever recorded in Chicago, -32°C. The fact that winters have gotten noticeably milder since the 1970s doesn't really matter during our annual Arctic blast. Sure, we had the coldest winter ever just 10 years ago, but the 3rd and 5th coldest were 1977-78 and 1978-79, respectively. I remember the snow coming up to my chin those years, and the never-ending below-freezing temperatures (like the 43 days from 28 December 1976 to 8 February 1977).

That said, I completely support the Chicago Public Schools closing today and tomorrow. And that they smoothed out all the streets since I was younger, so kids don't have to walk uphill both ways in the snow. But given the wind-chill advisory in effect until tomorrow morning, none of us wanted to go into the office either.

So instead of commuting, I'll have some time to read these as I shiver in my home office:

• Josh Marshall points out that the leader of the Republican party and its presumptive presidential nominee only got 51% of the vote in last night's Iowa caucuses, which hardly seems like a big win when you think about it.
• James Fallows also focuses on the election 294 days from now, cautioning against fortune-telling in the guise of reporting.
• Molly White presents a long-form video explaining the charges against Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao.
• Julia Ioffe continues publishing her interview with David Scheffer.
• Paul Krugman lauds the increasing economic prosperity of African-Americans but concedes there's a lot more to be done.

Finally, should I get an induction burner? I've been using my electric teakettle to pre-boil water for pasta, which saves a ton of time. The Post looked into the benefits of induction vs natural gas, principally around air quality. Looks like it's worth $120 to reduce my gas use. Of course, since I have gas furnaces, it might not do a lot for me this week.

Julia Ioffe interviews David Scheffer, a lawyer and professor who served as Bill Clinton's ambassador-at-large for war crimes, to provide some clarity around South Africa's suit against Israel in the International Court of Justice:

South Africa is alleging the entire corpus of the Genocide Convention and its application, namely that Israel has failed to prevent genocide against Gaza and that it is committing genocide against Gaza. It is a very fulsome application. South Africa is not asking the I.C.J. to make a finding of a failure to prevent, or a commission of, genocide. They are asking the I.C.J. to direct Israel through what are called provisional measures to do what is necessary to prevent and not commit genocide in Gaza, to take those measures while the I.C.J., over a much longer period of time, considers the merits of South Africa’s allegations. For a commission of genocide, one needs to establish that both the genocidal act has occurred and that it has occurred with the specific intent to destroy all or part of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group. The dolus specialis, we call it—the specific intent to do that. That’s why, particularly on a merits stage, it takes time to put those two together: the genocidal acts, and the mens rea of the specific intent.

The application disgorges an enormous amount of publicly available information about what has happened in Gaza. We all know that it’s a humanitarian catastrophe of some dimension in Gaza right now. I don’t want to diminish the importance of that. But nowhere in South Africa’s application is there any recognition that there is a war taking place. This is not a genocide like Rwanda or of the Rohingya or the Yazidis in recent times, where these were just authoritarian regimes that went after populations that were not attacking them.

But this is a war. There is an act of self-defense by Israel. Now, that does not mean that Israel has clean hands on absolutely everything it’s done, absolutely not.

I think genocide is a very powerful word. You get everyone’s attention. South Africa could just as easily say, “We clearly think atrocity crimes are occurring now in Gaza. We’re not prepared yet to say whether it’s genocide or not.” But they did make a determination: They want to call it genocide. And they’re free to do so. I don’t blame them. 

But in the court of law as well as in the court of public opinion, I think it’s very important that we not embrace that word in this particular conflict until there’s a better understanding of what is occurring in terms of warfare and of the humanitarian plight of the Palestinian people. 

At the same time, as I have pointed out, Hamas could stop it all tomorrow by surrendering. Hamas has the power to prevent genocide. It has had the power to prevent genocide even after it, itself, probably committed genocide on October 7th. It had the power, after October 7th, to subject none of the Palestinian population to what South Africa describes as genocide. Hamas had the power and it did not use that power. Hamas has no right to fight on. It has no right of self-defense. And furthermore, by virtue of the fact that it continues to fight, it brings an enormous amount of suffering and destruction upon the Palestinian people, all of which it could stop by simply surrendering.

The last paragraph I quoted is particularly important. For all the online outrage I see about Israel's military campaign against Hamas, I don't see many Palestine supporters recognizing that Hamas started this, and Hamas can end it.

Because really, October 7th and what happened afterwards comes down to Hamas wanting to destroy Israel. People seem to forget that.

Netanyahu has to go, soon, along with all the right-wing crazies propping up his government. But so does Hamas.

A small collection:

• The CTA's Yellow Line has resumed service seven weeks after a train hit a stopped snowplow near the Howard station.
• Europe needs more trains, so they're building them.
• Scholars examining some personal effects from a 17th-century shipwreck have some new answers and some new questions.
• A coalition of landlords and real estate companies doesn't want a referendum on the Cook County ballot that could levy a one-time tax on the sale of million-dollar properties.

Finally, in her column on December 31st, Jennifer Rubin suggested people get some perspective on history to understand that the past was much worse than today.

Update: A friend sent this security-cam photo of the first Yellow Line pulling into the Dempster station after service resumed:

It was a busy day, so I didn't have a lot of time to write a substantial post. I did want to highlight Nate Cohn's comparison of President Biden's situation going into the 2024 election and another guy who did a pretty good job in his first term:

Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.

The source of postwar inflation was fundamentally similar to post-pandemic inflation. The end of wartime rationing unleashed years of pent-up consumer demand in an economy that hadn’t fully transitioned back to producing butter instead of guns. A year after the war, wartime price controls ended and inflation skyrocketed. A great housing crisis gripped the nation’s cities as millions of troops returned from overseas after 15 years of limited housing construction. Labor unrest roiled the nation and exacerbated production shortages. The most severe inflation of the last 100 years wasn’t in the 1970s, but in 1947, reaching around 20 percent.

n the end, Mr. Truman won in perhaps the most celebrated comeback in American electoral history, including the iconic “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline and photograph. He had barnstormed the country with an economically populist campaign that argued Democrats were on the side of working people while reminding voters of the Great Depression. You might well remember from your U.S. history classes that he blamed the famous “Do Nothing Congress” for not enacting his agenda.

I'm glad Cohn got there with data, because I'd already gotten there with inference. This will be a long 11 months, but I think we might just pull this one out.