The Daily Parker

We officially had our first freeze last night as the temperature at O'Hare dipped to -1°C. At Inner Drive Technology World HQ it only got down to 0.1°C, barely above freezing, but still cold enough to put on ear muffs and gloves taking Cassie to day camp this morning. It'll warm up a bit this weekend, though.

Meanwhile, I'm writing a longer post about propaganda, which I may post today or tomorrow. And that's not the only fun thing happening in the world, either:

• Ukraine has had a lot of success blowing up $2 million Russian tanks with $400 drones. Good.
• The XPOTUS keeps making fun of the President's age, which, like everything else he does and says, turns out to have a pretty large element of projection. (Remember: to figure out what the XPOTUS wants to do, listen to what he says our lot are doing.) Bad.
• Chicago house prices have risen faster than in any other major US city lately, but only because they still lag almost every other US city. Mixed.
• BlueTriton, the parent company of Poland Springs-brand bottled water, not only sells one of the worst products for degrading our natural environment, but also has engaged in ballsy corruption to "persuade" the Maine legislature to let it continue doing so. Bad.
• HackRead reports a 587% increase in "quishing" attacks, where bad guys get you to scan bogus QR codes to steal your credentials. Very bad.
• Paleontologists have published evidence that the dust layer kicked up by the Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago may have persisted for 15 years, shutting down photosynthesis entirely for up to 24 months. Bad for the dinosaurs, good for the paleontologists.

Finally, as you sniffle and snort this winter, it might not comfort you to know that you have two noses that can get congested and runny. Bad.

Other things actually happened recently:

• Slate's Sarah Lipton-Lubet explains how the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the US Supreme Court keep allowing straw plaintiffs to raise bullshit cases so they can overturn laws they don't like.
• Julia Ioffe, who has a new podcast explaining how Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's upbringing as a street thug informs his foreign policy today, doesn't think the West or Ukraine really need to worry about Robert Fico's election win in Slovakia.
• Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter Jr. has a $376,000 salary and apparently no accountability, which may explain why we have some transit, uh, challenges in the city.
• The Bluewalker 3 satellite is the now 10th brightest thing in the sky, frustrating astronomers every time it passes overhead.
• An Arkansas couple plan to open an "indoor dog park with a bar" that has a daily or monthly fee and requires the dogs to be leashed, which makes very little sense to me. The location they've chosen is 900 meters from a dog park and about that distance from a dog-friendly brewery.
• Conde Nast Traveler has declared Chicago the Best Big City in the US.

Finally, as I write this, the temperature outside is 28°C, making today the fourth day in a row of July-like temperatures in October. Some parts of the area hit 32°C yesterday, though a cold front marching through the western part of the state promises to get us to more autumnal weather tomorrow. And this is before El Niño gets into full swing. Should be a weird winter...

It never stops, does it? And yet 100 years from now no one will remember 99% of this:

• A group of psychiatrists warned a Yale audience that the XPOTUS has a "dangerous mental illness" and should never get near political office again. Faced with this obvious truth, 59% of Republicans said they'd vote for him in 2024.
• Timothy Noah looks at the average age of the likely nominees for president next year (79) and the average age of the US Senate (60-something) and concludes our country needs a laxative. (Literally so in millions of cases.) Good thing US Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she'll run again next year, after she turns 84. Unfortunately, while I agree in principle with Andrew Sullivan's desire to see President Biden "leave the stage," all the alternatives seem worse to me.
• Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL, age 78) has gotten some pushback from an even bigger dick, Justice Samuel Alito (R-$), because the Senator said it would look unethical if the Justice participated in a case involving a reporter who interviewed the Justice about his unethical behavior. But Samuel says he was ethical; and, sure, he is an honourable man.
• Adolescent narcissist Elon Musk cut Internet coverage to the Ukrainian armed forces just as it started a surprise attack against Russia's Black Sea fleet, apparently at the behest of a Russian official. Josh Marshall calls this clear and convincing evidence that "[y]ou simply can’t have critical national security infrastructure in the hands of a Twitter troll who’s a soft touch for whichever foreign autocrat blows some smoke up his behind. But that's what we have here."
• The Federal Transit Administration has finally committed $2 bn to expanding Chicago's Red Line subway to 130th St., a project first proposed in (checks notes) 1969. And who says the United States has the worst public transit funding in the developed world, other than all the urbanists who have ever studied the problem?
• What do you get when you cross ChatGPT with Google Assistant (or Alexa or Siri)? Don't worry, Bruce Schneier says we'll find out soon enough.
• "Boundaries" has a specific, limited meaning in psychology, not even close to the way most people use the word: "while the proliferation of therapeutic terms has given people access to necessary mental health tools, people may overgeneralize concepts such as boundaries and triggers, and use them to rationalize certain behaviors."

Finally, Guinness set the opening date for its new brewery in Chicago's Fulton Market district: Thursday September 28th. The Brews and Choos Project will visit soon thereafter.

The temperature has crept up towards 34°C all day after staying at a comfortable 28°C yesterday and 25°C Friday. It's officially 33°C at O'Hare but just a scoshe above 31°C at IDTWHQ. Also, I still feel...uncomfortable in certain places closely associated with walking. All of which explains why I'm jotting down a bunch of news stories to read instead of walking Cassie.

• First, if you have tomorrow off for Labor Day, you can thank Chicago workers. (Of course, if you have May 1st off for Labor Day, you can also thank us on the actual day that they intended.)
• A new study suggests 84% of the general population want to experience an orchestral concert, though it didn't get into how much they want to pay for such a thing. (You can hear Händel's complete Messiah on December 9th at Holy Name Cathedral or December 10th at Millar Chapel for just $50!)
• An FBI whistleblower claims Russian intelligence co-opted Rudy Giuliani in the run-up to the 2020 election—not as a Russian agent, mind you, just as a "useful idiot."
• Rapper Eminem has told Republican presidential (*cough*) candidate Vivek Ramaswamy—who Michelle Goldberg calls "very annoying"—to stop using his music in his political campaign.
• The government of Chile has promised to investigate the 3000 or so disappearances that happened under dictator Agosto Pinochet, though they acknowledge that it might be hard to find the ones thrown out of helicopters into the sea, or dropped down mine shafts. And with most of the murderers already dead of old age, it's about time.
• Julia Ioffe wonders when the next putsch attempt will get close to Moscow, now that Prigozhin seems to be dead.
• About 70,000 people continue to squelch through ankle-deep mud at Black Rock City after torrential rains at Burning Man this weekend. (I can't wait to see the moop map...)
• University of Michigan Law Professor Nicholas Bagley had a cogent explanation of why pharmaceutical companies don't want to negotiate drug prices with Medicare. (Hint: record profits.)
• Switching Chicago's pre-World War II bungalows from gas to electric heating could cut the city's GHG emissions by 14%.
• Molly White's weekly newsletter starts off with some truly clueless and entitled behavior from Sam Bankman-Fried and gets weirder.
• Zoning laws, plus the inability of the Portland, Ore., government to allow variances in any useful fashion, has condemned an entire high school to send its kids an hour away by bus while the building gets repaired, rather than just across the street to the community college many of them attend in the evenings. (Guess what skin color the kids have. Go on, guess.)
• A group of hackers compromised a Portuguese-language "stalkerware" company and deleted all the data the company's spyware had downloaded, as well as the keys to the compromised phones it came from, then posted the company's customer data online. "Because fuck stalkerware," they said.
• Traffic engineers, please don't confuse people by turning their small-town streets into stroads. It causes accidents. Which you, not they, have caused.
• Illinois had a mild and dry summer, ending just before our ferociously hot Labor Day weekend.
• James Fallows talks about college rankings, "which are marginally more encouraging than the current chaos of College Football."

Finally, I'll just leave this Tweet from former labor secretary Robert Reich as its own little monument to the New Gilded Age we now inhabit:

Three multibillionaires now own more wealth than the bottom 90% of America – 291 million Americans. This is what oligarchy looks like.

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) September 3, 2023

Since today is the last Friday of the summer, I'm leaving the office a little early to tackle one of the more logistically challenging itineraries on the Brews & Choos Project. So I'm queueing up a few things to read over the weekend:

• The XPOTUS finally won his "long hard battle" to finally get a mugshot, which the Internet immediately (a) put on swag you can buy and (b) compared with the Kubrick Stare. But where did the Fulton County Jail get his height and weight?
• US intelligence sources believe the airplane purportedly carrying mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin suffered an "internal explosion" consistent with a bomb before crashing with 10 people on board.
• The Russian Government dismissed as "all lies" that it had anything to do with Prigozhin's apparent assassination, meaning it absolutely blew up the plane and wants you to know it.
• Robert Wright interviews exiled Russian journalist Nikita Petrov about Prigozhin's disappearance, while Julia Ioffe explains how this fits with Putin's philosophy of poniyate, "understandings." ("Oh, Yevgeny, won't see him no more.")
• Lydia Polgreen "glimpsed our brutal future" when she observed our "ally" Saudi Arabia slaughter thousands of Ethiopian refugees at their border with Yemen.
• Matt Ford says the Supreme Court got its stopped-clock moment when it unanimously decided NCAA v Alston (141 S.Ct. 2141, 2021) in favor of student athletes who generate billions in revenue for their schools but see none of it.
• Crime has fallen and punctuality has risen on the CTA, and even Crain's irascible political columnist Greg Hinz has a cheer for them.

Finally, via Bruce Schneier, a report on Mexican food labeling laws, how manufacturers have gone to absurd lengths to skirt them, and how these fights are probably coming the US soon.

A few of them have come home or are en route:

• Cato Institute scholar Clark Nelly says the XPOTUS "is toast," as the deranged wannabe fascist (my words) won't be able to stop himself from lying to the Georgia jury on live TV.
• Speaking of crazy old people, author Michael Beckley backs away slowly from the historical implications of having two septuagenarian dictators aging along with their nuclear stockpiles loose in the world.
• The Marion County, Kan., prosecutor has filed a motion to have all the Marion County Record's seized equipment returned to the newspaper, citing "insufficient evidence" and not citing the massive Federal lawsuit the county will face soon.
• Windows Server 2016 and later servers sometimes just up and change their system clocks, with unpleasant results for anything running on them. Oopsi.

Finally, climate change has made your favorite hot sauce more expensive, and will continue to do so until pepper farmers adapt their vines to the new reality, or move them.

While I fight a slow laptop and its long build cycle (and how every UI change seems to require re-compiling), the first day of the last month of summer brought this to my inbox:

• Who better to prosecute the XPOTUS than a guy who prosecuted other dictators and unsavory characters for the International Criminal Court? (In America, we don't go to The Hague; here, The Hague comes to you!)
• After the evidence mounted that Hungary has issued hundreds of thousands of passports without adequate identity checks, the US has restricted Hungarian passport holders from the full benefits of ESTA that other Schengen-area citizens enjoy.
• The US economy continues to exceed the expectations of people who have predicted a recession any day now. (Of course, every dead pool has a guaranteed winner eventually...)
• After an unprecedented 31 consecutive days enduring temperatures over 43°C, Phoenix finally caught a break yesterday—when the temperature only hit 42°C.
• Jake Meador explores why about 40 million fewer Americans go to church these days than in 1995.
• Remember how we all thought Tesla made cars with amazing battery ranges? Turns out, Elon Musk can't do that right, either.
• American car culture not only gives us unlivable environments, but also discourages the exploration that people in other countries (and I when I go there) do all the time.
• We should all remember (and thank) USSR naval Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, who vetoed firing a nuclear-tipped torpedo at an American destroyer during the Cuban Missile Crisis 71 years ago.

Finally, Chicago historian John Schmidt tells the story of criminal mastermind Adam Worth, who may have been Arthur Conan Doyle's inspiration for Professor Moriarty.

The first day of a sprint is the best day to consolidate three interfaces with three others, touching every part of the application that uses data. So right now, I am watching most of my unit tests pass and hoping I will figure out why the ones that failed did so before I leave today.

While the unit tests run, I have some stuff to keep me from getting too bored:

• The XPOTUS keeps confirming every theory about his behavior, this time that he only wants to run in 2024 to postpone the consequences of actions.
• Even those of us who support Ukraine in kicking the Russian invaders out of its sovereign territory think they simply can't join NATO right now.
• Julia Ioffe wonders why the fuck several retired government officials met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, less because she thinks they're old white men who have never set foot in Russia, and more because Lavrov hasn't got the power to negotiate a discount at Macy's. (In fairness, she published her post hours before one of them, Richard Haass, went on NPR this morning to hawk his new book.)
• Media strategist Julia Alexander scratches her head about the CBS-ification of Prime Video.
• Meanwhile, the streamers and studios have decided to let the writers go broke before resuming talks with them in the fall, regardless of what the actors do.
• Pro Publica took a second look at the hypothesis that Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and now they're not so sure it's correct.

Finally, the 2023 Emmy nominations came out this morning. I need to watch The White Lotus and Succession before HBO hides them.

Update: 2 out of 430 tests have failed (so far) because of authentication timeouts with Microsoft Key Vault. That happens on my slow-as-molasses laptop more often than I like.

I've got tickets to see Straight No Chaser with some chorus friends at Ravinia Park tonight—on the lawn. Unfortunately, for the last 8 hours or so, our weather radar has looked like this:

I haven't got nearly as much disappointment as the folks sitting in Grant Park right now waiting for a NASCAR race that will never happen in this epic rainfall. (I think Mother Nature is trying to tell NASCAR something. Or at least trying to tell Chicago NASCAR fans something. Hard to tell.)

While I'm waiting to see if it will actually stop raining before my train leaves at 5:49pm, I have this to read:

• New York Magazine tries to understand why Robert F Kennedy, Jr, thinks he should run for president.
• The New Yorker has a long look at the Titan submersible, "an accident waiting to happen."
• National Geographic reminds you not to drink right before you go to bed.
• The Atlantic's Lora Kelly explains why air travel has gotten a lot worse this year.
• The Guardian reminds everyone what happens to people who humiliate Vladimir Putin.

I am happy the roofers finished my side of my housing development already. The people across the courtyard have discovered the temporary waterproofing was a bit more temporary than the roofers intended.

While "nobody knows nothin'" about why Yevgeny Prigozhin started or stopped his march on Moscow over the weekend, it exposed the horrible truth that under Vladimir Putin, Russia has become a failed, captured state governed by gangs:

Prigozhin, like Putin, was born and raised in Leningrad, which was renamed St. Petersburg as the Soviet Union was crumbling. As a young man, Prigozhin was a petty criminal and was eventually arrested and sentenced to twelve years in prison for robbing apartments. He was released after nine years. The rest of his biography resembles that of so many around Putin. After making some money selling hot dogs at the local flea market, he got involved in the grocery business, then casinos, construction, catering, and restaurants. He formed a close relationship with Putin, a frequent diner at his establishments, and that put him in a position to increase his good fortune. Private planes, helicopters, and immense residences soon followed—as did the founding of troll farms in St. Petersburg and the Wagner Group, a military contractor that was heartily supported by Putin as a way to help assist Russian Army troops.

In the early days of his reign, Putin was known in the West mainly for his background in the K.G.B. But his popular appeal also had to do with his ability to exploit the street swagger and the language of his days as a kid who played and fought in the poorer courtyards of his home town. Putin was not afraid to make cutting jokes or use profanity in public appearances. He promised to kill enemies in their “outhouses.” This distinguished him, back then, as a man close to ground, close to the narod, the people.

[Kremlin reporter Mikhail Zygar explains], “The F.S.B. [a successor to the K.G.B.] and G.R.U. [military intelligence] is not a single clan; it is a mixture of different clans, and we will see how they are going to react. For years, Putin has selected his inner circle with only one criterion: a lack of ambition. They are not the best of the best. They are the worst of the worst. So how will such mediocrities face up to one desperately brave person, or a desperately brave group of terrorists? We will see.”

It's a bit sobering to think of Don Corleone controlling 3,000 nuclear weapons, isn't it? Meanwhile, no one has heard from Prigozhin since Saturday...