The Daily Parker

Here is the state of things as we go into the second half of 2023:

• The government-owned but independently-edited newspaper Wiener Zeitung published its last daily paper issue today after being in continuous publication since 8 August 1703. Today's headline: "320 years, 12 presidents, 10 emperors, 2 republics, 1 newspaper."
• Paula Froelich blames Harry Windsor's and Megan Markle's declining popularity on a simple truth: "Not just because they were revealed as lazy, entitled dilettantes, but because they inadvertently showed themselves for who they really are: snobs. And Americans really, really don’t like snobs."
• Starting tomorrow, Amtrak can take you from Chicago to St Louis (480 km) in 4:45, at speeds up to (gasp!) 175 km/h. Still not really a high-speed train but at least it's a 30-minute and 50 km/h improvement since 2010. (A source at Amtrak told me the problem is simple: grade crossings. They can't go 225 km/h over a grade crossing because, in a crash, F=ma, and a would be very high.)
• The Federal Trade Commission will start fining websites up to $10,000 for each fake review it publishes. "No-gos include reviews that misrepresent someone’s experience with a product and that claim to be written by someone who doesn’t exist. Reviews also can’t be written by insiders like company employees without clear disclosures."
• A humorous thought problem involving how many pews an 80-year-old church can have explains the idiocy behind parking minimums.
• Chicago bike share Divvy turned 10 on Wednesday. You can now get one in any of Chicago's 50 wards, plus a few suburbs.
• Actor Alan Arkin, one of my personal favorites for his deadpan hilarity, died yesterday at age 89.

And finally, the Chicago Tribune's food critic Nick Kindelsperger tried 21 Chicago hot dogs so you don't have to to find the best in the city.

Ah, ha ha. I'm kidding. Absolutely no one on Earth found anything surprising in the two decisions the Court just announced, except perhaps that Gorsuch and not Alito delivered the First Amendment one. Both were 6-3 decisions with the Republicans on one side and the non-partisan justices on the other. Both removed protections for disadvantaged groups in favor of established groups. And both lend weight to the argument that the Court has gone so far to the right that they continue to cause instability in the law as no one knows how long these precedents will last.

Let's start with 303 Creative v Elenis, in which the Court ruled that a Colorado web designer did not have to create websites for gay weddings, on the philosophy that religiously-motivated anti-gay bigotry is protected under the First Amendment:

The decision also appeared to suggest that the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people, including to same-sex marriage, are on more vulnerable legal footing, particularly when they are at odds with claims of religious freedom. At the same time, the ruling limited the ability of the governments to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

The designer, Lorie Smith, said her Christian faith requires her to turn away customers seeking wedding-related services to celebrate same-sex unions. She added that she intends to post a message saying the company’s policy is a product of her religious convictions.

A Colorado law forbids discrimination against gay people by businesses open to the public as well as statements announcing such discrimination. Ms. Smith, who has not begun the wedding business or posted the proposed statement for fear of running afoul of the law, sued to challenge it, saying it violated her rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion.

I actually might agree with the very narrow outcome of this specific case: I don't think someone should be forced to create something they morally oppose. That said, I fear, as do many others, that people will see this as license to scale back anti-discrimination measures against all marginalized groups. And this is why I think the case is going to be a problem for a generation. I'll read Gorsuch's opinion over the weekend, hoping that he resisted the urge to fill it with Federalist Society-approved obiter dicta. But I expect to see more litigation on anti-discrimination statutes as a result of the ruling. It's part of the Republican strategy to erode hard-won rights by creating fear and doubt in marginalized groups, and it's working.

The other ruling (Biden v Nebraska), also pitting the Republicans against everyone else in the free world, killed the President's program to waive about $405 billion in student debt that hundreds of thousands of low- and middle-income borrowers owed to the Federal Government. The Court found the thinnest of pretexts to allow the State of Missouri just enough standing to keep the case from evaporating entirely, and then rug-pulled all those people for whom $10,000 might be the difference between poverty and continued daily meals by saying the President exceeded authority granted him by Congress to "waive or modify" the loans:

The court has rejected the administration’s expansive arguments in the past. The court lifted a pandemic-era moratorium on rental evictions put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It threw out a coronavirus vaccination-or-testing mandate imposed on large businesses by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. And in a ruling unrelated to the pandemic, it cited the “major questions” doctrine to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s options for combating climate change.

The legal battles have left millions of student loan borrowers in limbo. More than half of eligible people had applied for the forgiveness program before it was halted by the courts, with the Education Department approving some 16 million applications.

Biden’s debt relief program has been a divisive issue on Capitol Hill. On June 7, Biden vetoed a Republican-led resolution to strike down the controversial program and restart loan payments for tens of millions of borrowers. The measure passed the Senate with the backing of Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.). Despite Biden’s veto, the resolution shows the likely difficulty of getting any future debt relief plan through Congress.

This, like yesterday's affirmative action decision, shows the Republican majority gleefully rolling back all the things they have hated ever since Lyndon Johnson had the gall to give those people civil rights in 1964. They firmly believe in the ability of everyone born on second base to get a home run even if it means everyone else strikes out, because (and I'm really not making this up, if you dig into what these people have written) they deserve it. (Best Tweet of the day, from the ever-scathing New York Times Pitchbot: "Opinion | Without the burden of affirmative action, Harvard can finally become a true meritocracy—by Jared Kushner and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.")

The good news—in the most general sense as the 6-3 split will continue to be very bad news in specific for years—is that this kind of reactionary behavior by the right wing tends to flame out in a generation or so. It's the desperate clawing back of gains made by the lower orders to hold onto inherited privilege for just a little longer that happens when the old guard know they're on their way out. We've seen it in the US before, and in the UK, and in lots of other times and places.

Unfortunately, undoing the damage the revanchists cause hurts like hell. The next 10-15 years are going to suck for a lot of people.

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.

The Supreme Court published its ruling in Moore v Harper today, snuffing out the Federalist Society weed-induced fantasy of the "independent state legislature theory" would remain just that—a fantasy:

[A]lthough the Constitution gives state legislatures the power to regulate federal elections, state courts can supervise the legislature’s exercise of that power. By a vote of 6-3, the court rejected the so-called “independent state legislature theory,” holding that the North Carolina Supreme Court did not violate the Constitution when it set aside a congressional map adopted by the state’s legislature.

In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts cannot consider claims of partisan gerrymandering. But the 5-4 decision by Chief Justice John Roberts noted that states could still address partisan gerrymandering in their own laws and constitutions. In February 2022, the North Carolina Supreme Court (which at the time had a 4-3 Democratic majority) ruled that the new map violated a provision in the state constitution guaranteeing free elections. The state supreme court barred the state from using the new map in the 2022 elections, and the trial court later adopted a new map, drawn by Republicans and Democrats split the state’s congressional seats 7-7.

Republican legislators came to the U.S. Supreme Court last year, challenging the state supreme court’s decision. They argued that when it set aside the legislature’s congressional map, the state court violated the “independent state legislature” theory. That theory, which the Supreme Court has never endorsed in a majority opinion, rests on two provisions of the Constitution. In Moore, the legislators point to one of those provisions, Article I’s elections clause, which provides that the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” Article II’s electors clause provides that states shall appoint presidential electors for the Electoral College “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” These provisions, the theory’s proponents contend, mean that state courts lack the power to supervise how state legislatures run elections for Congress or the president – including, as in this case, the power to set aside congressional powers.

Notably, Justices Amy Comey Barrett (R) and Brett Kavanaugh (R), themselves test-tube babies of the Federalist Society judiciary pipeline, signed onto the opinion Chief Justice John Roberts (R) wrote, along with the non-partisan Justices Katanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

Kavanaugh also concurred with Roberts' opinion in Allen v Milligan, sending Alabama's blatantly racist map back to Montgomery, and Monday in a similar Louisiana case.

I don't know whether Justices Gorsuch (R), Thomas (R$), and Alito (R$) dissenting from Moore surprises me or not. Those three have always believed the Republican Party is the only legitimate ruler of the United States, signing on to a series of ridiculous arguments to advance the Cause. I'm sure the Federalist Society expected Kavanaugh and Comey Barrett to follow behind them. Maybe Kavanaugh is turning Brennan?

Ha. No. But at least he hasn't chased the right-wingers over the ledge. Yet.

I'll elaborate on this later, but I just want to list a couple of things I desperately want for my country and city during my lifetime. For comparison, I'm also listing when other places in the world got them first. For context, I expect (hope?) to live another 50 years or so.

Universal health care, whether through extending Medicare to all residents or through some other mechanism. The UK got it in 1948, Canada in 1984, and Germany in 1883. We're the only holdout in the OECD, and it benefits no one except the owners and shareholders of private insurance companies to continue our broken system.

Universal child care, which would enable single parents to work without going broke on daycare. Much of Continental Europe makes this a no-brainer, with free day care for little kids and extended school hours for older ones. In a report covering 41 rich countries, UNICEF puts Luxembourg first, Germany 5th, Canada 22nd...and the US 40th. Only Slovakia treats its kids worse. (The UK is 35th, which is sad.)

Term limits on appellate judges, including an 18-year term for the Supreme Court and a 13-year term for the Circuit Courts. The UK and Canada require judges to retire at 75; Japan at 70; and Mexico after 15 years. Every US State (except Rhode Island) has some limitation on its supreme court, whether through mandatory retirement, term limits, or elections. This doesn't require anything more than an act of Congress, as former Justices and Appellate Judges would still continue to serve in other Federal courts "during good Behaviour." I would also like to see a Governor-appointed, single-term Illinois supreme court.

A functioning opposition party, both at the Federal level (either through the Republicans coming to their senses or a serious third party replacing them in opposition or governance), and here in Illinois. As much as I like the current Democratic trifecta in my state, I don't think single-party governance is healthy, as it tends to become single-party rule, followed shortly by something worse. All of our peer nations (except possibly the Republic of Korea) have had two or more functioning parties since the end of World War II. Only 11 US states currently have divided governments, and in 4 of the 6 most populous (California, New York, Texas, and Illinois), the party out of power has almost no power at all and no hope of getting elected this decade. Illinois farmers need an effective voice in the General Assembly; right now, they have the modern GOP.

A larger House of Representatives. We last expanded our lower house in 1913, when the US population was less than 1/3 what it is today. As of 2020, each congressional district has an average population of 762,000, with Delaware having its entire population of nearly 1 million represented by one person. The average Canadian riding has 108,000, the average UK constituency is between 56,000 (Wales) and 72,000 (England), and the Bundestag elects 598 members on a proportional basis by party and Land population. One plan I like would take the largest state that currently has 1 representative (Delaware), give it and the three smaller states 2, then use that as the size of the other districts. At roughly 500,000 per district, we'd have around 650 representatives, giving us a House the size of the UK House of Commons.

End Gerrymandering. Require that all electoral districts for any office have compact, contiguous outlines drawn by non-partisan commissions at each level of government. I would also allow multi-representative districts chosen by proportional vote (for example, a 2-person district where the first and second vote-getters win). Canada passed legislation making malapportionment much harder in the 1990s, as did the UK in 2015, while Germany has proportional representation which nearly (but not totally) obviates it. This has to be done nationally, because as the Democratic legislatures in California and Illinois would like to remind the Republican legislatures in Texas and Florida, we'll put down our guns when you put down yours.

Realistic gun regulation, including mandatory licensure and registration, limits and painful taxes on ammunition purchases, and allowing local jurisdictions to set their own regulations—up or down, for the sake of rural residents—on who can own what kinds of firearms. The UK and Australia famously enacted tough laws after mass shootings in 1996; Canada in 1977; Germany in 1973. I should also point out that Switzerland—where every adult male must own a gun—has more liberal gun laws than the US in some ways, but still restricted entire classes of weapons in 2019, and has severe penalties for misusing them.

De-militarize local police forces. There's a reason George Washington feared a standing army, and why many Americans fear they live with one today. Everyone who cares about police policy should read Radley Balko's The Rise of the Warrior Cop. All of our peer nations have strict rules against police agencies using military weapons and tactics, and most UK cops still walk around unarmed and unmolested to this day. I've used Germany as a Continental example for many of these points, so let me just say that Germany has a great deal of experience with heavily-armed local paramilitary forces, and they don't ever want to see them again. Why are we building them here? We frogs need to hop out of the pot—and soon.

Fully-electric commuter rail in Chicago. London skipped from coal to electric in the 1950s, and Munich in the 1920s. Toronto, sadly, still uses diesel trains, but they're fixing that. Sure, this would cost about $5 billion, but it would bring more than that in benefits to the whole Chicago area. For example, a side-effect of London electrifying was to drastically increase the value of workingmen's houses along rights-of-way (seriously, £1.2 m for a tiny house!), as they're awfully convenient to Central London without getting flaming cinders dropped on them anymore.

High-speed rail between most US cities less than 500 km apart, like Chicago-Detroit, San Francisco-L.A.-San Diego, and Dallas-Houston-San Antonio. (Not to mention, real high-speed rail throughout the Northeast Corridor, none of this anemic 110 km/h crap.) Most of Europe has had true HSR since the 1990s, starting with the French TGV in the 1980s. The London-Paris Eurostar came in 1994, moving people between the two cities in just over two hours—quicker than you can get from central London to your airplane seat at Heathrow. It's criminal that it takes 4½ hours to travel the 450 km between Chicago and Detroit, while you can get from Paris to Lyon (also about 450 km) in just over 2. And if they can spend £25 billion (in 2023 pounds) to build a 50-kilometer tunnel under the English Channel, we can spend half that to build a 20-kilometer tunnel under Long Island Sound, FFS.

This list isn't exhaustive, by any means. I believe the US has the resources to accomplish all of them in the next 10 years, let alone the next 50. We just lack the political will, especially in the modern Republican Party, which lacks the understanding that American greatness has always depended on collective effort.

The United States is no longer the greatest country in the world...but it could be again.

Just a few stories I came across at lunchtime:

• In an act that looks a lot like the USSR's scorched-earth retreat in 1941, Ukraine accuses Russia of blowing up the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnieper River, which could have distressing follow-on effects over the next few months.
• A former Chicago cop faces multiple counts of perjury and forgery after, among other things, claiming his girlfriend stole his car to get out of 44 separate speeding tickets.
• James Fallows explains what probably happened to the Citation jet that crashed in rural Virginia over the weekend after two F-16s scrambled to intercept it over Washington.
• Molly White explains the SEC's case against Binance.

And finally, giant-sized coconut crabs may have stashed away the remains of lost pilot Emelia Earhart, and scientists think they know where.

The billion-pound London rail project called "Crossrail" when it began opened a year ago as the Elizabeth Line. I rode it for the first time to West Ealing last Sunday, and thought it absolutely the slickest, cleanest train in the UK. (I'll ride it again tomorrow thanks to industrial action and construction on the Piccadilly Line.)

British Airways pilot Mark Vanhoenacker takes it every time he comes home from a trip, and loves how it connects the city in all new ways:

Running from Reading and Heathrow Airport in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east, the Elizabeth line brings an additional 1.5 million people within 45 minutes of the capital’s busiest districts; eases congestion on older lines; and makes London more accessible to all, as wheelchair users can reach its platforms from street level. As a pilot who commutes to Heathrow — I fly the Boeing 787 for British Airways — I’m often among its 600,000 weekday riders. The line, which runs alongside the Heathrow Express, offers another comfortable way to get to work.

[T]he line empowers travelers to leave behind the familiarities of Zone 1 — the often tourist-clogged core of the city’s transport network — and embark on fast, inexpensive journeys to fascinating outer-London destinations.

On the line’s northeastern branch lies the market town of Romford. Start at the Havering Museum, whose exhibits include a model of the long-gone Havering Palace, where Queen Elizabeth I occasionally stayed. You’ll also learn about Romford’s link to William Kempe, an actor in several of Shakespeare’s original productions, who morris danced around 100 miles from London to Norwich in 1600, and about the weights and measures that once set standards in Romford’s market.

It’s fitting, then, that the first station beyond [the eastern Thames] tunnels is Woolwich, where armaments were manufactured for around three centuries, including by one Henry Shrapnel. Woolwich was also renowned for music — its Royal Artillery Band, Britain’s first formal military band, was organized in 1762 — and for football: Arsenal, based today in Islington and still nicknamed “the Gunners,” was founded here in 1886 as a team for armaments workers.

Between my arrival this afternoon and my departure tomorrow afternoon I'll be in the UK only 23 hours, many of them in my hotel room asleep, so I won't have time to explore the places Vanhoenacker describes. But I have a hunch I'll return to the London before too long.

On this day in 2000, during that more-innocent time, Beverly Hills 90210 came to an end. (And not a day too soon.) As I contemplate the void in American culture its departure left, I will read these articles:

• Anna Nemtsova rubs her hands in glee along with Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelinsky in watching the Kremlin's worst fears about Ukraine come true.
• Henry Grabar blames the killing of Jordan Neely on conservatives' willful failure to address homelessness and mental illness for the last 50 years.
• National Geographic traces the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language after lying dormant for 2,000 years.
• The Chicago Tribune editorial board, never the most progressive group of people in Chicago, warn of doom and gloom coming from Mayor Johnson's administration.
• Timothy Noah is in awe of the CEOs of two failed banks who testified to the Senate yesterday for their ability to avoid taking any responsibility for the failures.

Finally, a new genetic study suggests that "modern humans descended from at least two populations that coexisted in Africa for a million years before merging in several independent events across the continent." Cool.

The Daily Parker began as a joke-of-the-day engine at the newly-established braverman.org on 13 May 1998. This will be my 8,907th post since 1998 and my 8,710th since 13 November 2005. And according to a quick SQL Server query I just ran, The Daily Parker contains 15,043,497 bytes of text and HTML.

A large portion of posts just curate the news and opinions that I've read during the day. But sometimes I actually employ thought and creativity, as in these favorites from the past 25 years:

• Old Man Moskowitz, sent in by an old friend in New York, 26 May 1998.
• My all-time-favorite Jewish joke, 23 June 1998. (And my second-favorite, 31 January 2003.)
• My all-time-favorite engineering joke, 11 February 2000.
• An essay on conspiracies and coincidence, 22 January 2006.
• Rant about Microsoft certification exams, 29 June 2006.
• Feeling sad about the end of Kodachrome, 31 December 2010.
• My friends and I debate the merits (such as they were) of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R), 26 March 2011.
• An examination of the Astrolabe lawsuit against the Time Zone Database, 22 October 2011, and Astrolabe's response on 14 October 2011.
• A rant about Tea Party Republicans, 14 August 2012.
• Three articles in the New York Times inspire two lengthy explanations and a rant, 18 December 2012.
• The Y2K problem and other date disasters in programming, 29 April 2018.
• The Music Theory A-Z challenge, starting on 1 April 2019.
• The entire series on logical fallacies, July-August 2019.
• My obituary for Parker, 18 November 2020.
• Star Trek: Discovery's 3rd season irked me, 3 December 2020.
• Neon CRM also irked me, 10 February 2021. (Hmm...I wrote longer blog posts in the months when I didn't have a dog.)
• Cassie comes home from PAWS, 16 March 2021.
• My struggles to play SimCity 4, 25 years after I bought it, 8 May 2021.
• Lots of posts tagged "Photography," but particularly around the time I finished scanning all my slides (from 1983 to 2001).

Also interesting is how I can chart key events in my life just by looking at how often I posted:

Right now, I'm predicting the 10,000th post on 5 August 2025. Keep reading and find out.

We finally have a real May-appropriate day in Chicago, with a breezy 26°C under clear skies (but 23°C closer to the Lake, where I live). Over to my right, my work computer—a 2017-era Lenovo laptop I desperately want to fling onto the railroad tracks—has had some struggles with the UI redesign I just completed, giving me a dose of frustration but also time to line up some lunchtime reading:

• Both Matt Ford and David Firestone goggle at how stupidly US Rep. George Santos (R-NY) ran his alleged grift, considering he had so many legal ways to scam his constituents thanks to the Roberts Court.
• In a desperate bid to win over Fox News viewers, CNN attempted a Town Hall with the sexual predator XPOTUS yesterday, which went about as you'd expect.
• Julia Ioffe looks at how much Russia and China are enjoying our own-goal-producing debt ceiling crisis even as neither has any chance of supplanting our currency dominance in the near future.
• Chicago-based Groupon, the Internet darling of 2009, has started its final death rattle after issuing a "going concern" warning to investors yesterday.
• A pop-up bar in Chicago will raffle off Taylor Swift tickets that one hopes they didn't buy on Ticketmaster.
• Bruce Schneier sees a tremendous market for trustworthy AI, but large corporations won't build it because of the inherent conflict of interest.

Finally, today marks the 30th anniversary of Aimee Mann releasing one of my favorite albums, her solo debut Whatever. She perfectly summed up the early-'90s ennui that followed the insanity of the '80s as we Gen-Xers came of age. It still sounds as fresh to me today as it did then.