The Daily Parker

The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week.

I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things:

• Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina), you are much better off than you were four years ago.
• The Illinois Attorney General has filed an environmental suit against Trump Tower for refusing to fix its water-intake system.
• A New York City cop who fought against "courtesy cards" won a $175,000 settlement from the city.
• A developer plans to raze a 175-year-old house in Glencoe, Ill., designed by William Boyington, because we can't have nice things anymore.
• Speaking of not having nice things, after £175m spent and 12 years of construction, the Old Street roundabout in Islington, London, looks...about the same as before.

Finally, the New York Times ran a story in its Travel section Tuesday claiming Marseille has some of the best pizza in Europe. I will research this assertion and report back on the 24th.

I mentioned that the weather today is amazing, but yesterday's was also pretty good (if a bit humid). Cassie and I walked about 18 km throughout the day and spent most of the rest of the day outside.

But Cassie's day started pretty well even before we set out:

Sadly, neither of us could get to the last little bit of peanut butter at the bottom of the jar. (I labeled it "dog" because no one wants to get her peanut butter confused with the jar for people.)

We trundled off to the Horner Park DFA early in the afternoon:

And met her friend Butters, who decided to dig a hole next to a bench and settle into it:

(Apparently Butters does this often.)

We also had a slice at Jimmy's Pizza and some QT at Spiteful Brewing, finally getting home to some real couch time around 8.

Finally, I want to show some puzzling user experience design. I changed my phone to French because I'm visiting Provence next month and I need the practice. I'm also using Duolingo to build my skills, and in fact just started CEFR level B1 today.

Most of my apps immediately started displaying French messages, and Garmin even started sending me emails in French. One app didn't seem to get the memo, though. See if you can guess which.

Bien fait, Duolingo!

Last weekend, California governor Gavin Newsom (D) announced that the San Francisco-San Jose heavy commuter rail line had entered the late 19th century (in a good way):

On Thursday, the California High-Speed Rail Authority named its new CEO, Ian Choudri – and today, Choudri joined Governor Gavin Newsom in San Francisco to help celebrate the debut of Caltrain’s new electrified train fleet that will transform rail service in the Bay Area and play a key role in California’s high-speed rail system.

The electrification project and electric trains were supported by more than $1.3 billion in state funding, including more than $700 million from high-speed rail, and will serve as the Bay Area’s connection to California high-speed rail. Caltrain’s electrification and high-speed rail are key projects as part of Governor Newsom’s build more, faster infrastructure agenda.

The Peninsula Corridor Electrification Project converts the Caltrain corridor between San Francisco and San Jose from diesel to an electric service that reduces emissions and enhances capacity. It also equips the corridor to accommodate future California High Speed Rail service. Caltrain estimates that corridor electrification will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 250,000 tons annually, equivalent to taking 55,000 cars off the roads.

The trains look suspiciously like Germany's. (Hmm, I wonder why? Though CalTrain's sets come from Salt Lake City.)

Governor Newsom seems to think that electrified heavy rail somehow puts the Bay Area ahead of the Western World. Streetsblog SF corrects the record:

It was hard not to snicker. As should be obvious to anyone who's spent time in Europe, Asia, or even New Jersey—or anybody familiar with California's rail history—there's nothing innovative or pioneering about Caltrain electrification.

The truth is, running wires over trains so they go faster and don't pollute is just boring, meat-and-potatoes transportation.

There were also electric trains between the Bay Area and Sacramento. There was electric service throughout Marin. And of course there was the famous Red Car electric rail system throughout Los Angeles. But unlike in the Northeast and Europe, nearly all of California's electric rails of old were ripped out and replaced with highways. Today, it's generally accepted that destroying these railroads was a colossal act of civic vandalism.

California should build on what it has accomplished with Caltrain, but state leaders don't need to pretend that it's "pioneering." They also don't need to mess around with unproven technology and distractions such as hydrogen trains and hyperloops. Humanity solved short-to-medium-distance intercity transportation in 1879 when Germany's Ernst Werner von Siemens invented the electric train. Rail electrification using overhead wire is mature, proven technology that just works.

The entire project cost about $1.8 billion, showing that it could cost not much more to electrify the tracks outside my house. (San Francisco to San Jose is about 66 km, while Chicago to Kenosha is 83 km—but Waukegan is 20 km closer.)

Maybe someday we'll electrify Chicago's commuter trains. Of the 785 km Metra operates, the Metra Electric line already has 51 km of fully-electric right of way, and the Rock Island district will start running battery-powered train sets in four years. Meanwhile, I'll keep watching the 40-year-old F40PH locomotives pulling the 65-year-old carriages past my house. (At least we'll get new ones...someday, maybe even this decade.)

Meanwhile, on September 21st, I'll take a 320-km/h train built in the last 10 years. I'm so tired of waiting for my country to get out of the 1950s. CalTrain's electrification is encouraging.

The hot, humid weather we've had for the past couple of weeks has finally broken. I'm in the Loop today, and spent a good 20 minutes outside reading, and would have stayed longer, except I got a little chilly. I dressed today more for the 24°C at home and less for the cooler, breezier air this close to the lake.

Elsewhere in the world:

• I was waiting for Russia expert Julia Ioffe to weigh in on last week's hostage release.
• The Chicago White Sox failed to set the all-time record for most consecutive losses in the American League yesterday by winning their first game in the last 23.
• Of the $1.2 trillion Carbon Reduction Program funds allocated to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, $130 billion has been spent so far: but only $26 billion on rail, and $70 billion on highways. 
• Even though Deutsche Bahn has faster, timelier, more convenient, more comfortable, and just more trains than the US, Germans say their national railroad is on the wrong track.
• Deadhorse, Alaska, which lies at 70° north latitude, set an all-time record yesterday with a high temperature just below 32°C.
• After CrowdStrike told Delta Airlines to go pound sand a couple days ago, Microsoft told the carrier off yesterday.
• Be careful taking dogs to fresh-water swimming holes: warmer weather has made blue-green algae blooms more common.

Finally, today is the 60th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. If you don't know what that is, read up. It's probably the most direct cause of most of our military policy since then.

The Climate Prediction Center's 6-10 day temperature outlook has generally good news for the upper Midwest, including Chicago:

I wouldn't want to be in New Orleans next week, but that's true most weeks of the year even without this forecast.

While we weather the summer, the news just keeps coming:

• The XPOTUS lied about what caused the one-hour delay before he took the stage at Wednesday's National Association of Black Journalists conference, as one would guess, because the truth was he didn't want to be fact-checked in real time.
• Author Katherine Stewart lays out the right-wing worldview that explains how people like vice-presidential candidate JD Vance (R-OH) can lie so effortlessly while claiming to have morals.
• Paul Krugman warns that the Cryptocurrency industry "initially driven, seemingly, by libertarian instincts but which has never delivered on its economic promises will nonetheless be able to buy itself a huge government bailout."
• Chicago's Red Line extension to 130th Street got an unexpected boost of nearly $400 million extra for its first year, and may get another $2 billion (of $3.6 billion in projected costs) next year.
• The Paris regional transit agency has persuaded Google and Apple to direct travelers away from the fastest routes on the RER and Métro so "[t]hat each spectator can benefit from the best itinerary, not necessarily the most direct but the most comfortable."
• It turns out, adults learn foreign languages just as well as young children, and derive great benefits from doing so. C'est pourquoi j'apprends le français maintenant pour obtenir le niveau CEFR-B1 devant mes vacances le mois prochain.
• This year is the 100th anniversary of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb killing Bobby Franks in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago.

And as we go into the election, it's worth remembering that German President Paul von Hindenburg died 90 years ago today, ending the democratic German Republic and elevating you-know-who. Let's keep working to prevent anything like that ever happening here.

If he were even a tiny bit better as a human being, I might have some empathy for the old man clearly suffering from some kind of dementia who spoke in Doral, Fla., yesterday. But he's not, so I don't. I mean...just read the highlights.

In other news:

• Tom Friedman thinks this year's election could only have been dreamed up by the Devil himself. (Lucifer Morningstar could not be reached for comment.)
• Tom Nichols wants you to remember why NATO matters on its 75th birthday.
• If you're looking for a house to go along with the Brews & Choos Project, Chicago Magazine has a quintet for you.

Finally, I got two emails through the contact-us page from the "Brand Ambassador & Link Approval Specialist" at a little company in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick demanding that we remove a link from a post to their site. Each email was clearly the output of an automated process that must have scraped every post on The Daily Parker—all 9,479 of them—more than once, because each email had a different fully-qualified domain name and most of the links they included were for category or history pages. Clearly the BALAS hadn't actually read the post that contained the link. 

The request read: "We kindly request the immediate removal of these links to SchengenVisaInfo.com from your page because SchengenVisaInfo maintains strict editorial control over the information it provides. As such, we do not endorse the linking of our website without our prior consent."

This is dumb for several reasons. First, the emails provide clear evidence that they ran a bot over The Daily Parker more than once, which is rude. Second, this particular link could only benefit the complaining firm as it appeared in context as a way of finding out more about exactly what the company offered. And finally, before you send an email like that, you should confirm that the site you're complaining to won't ridicule you and your firm in a subsequent post.

Of course I removed the link. There are many better sources of information on the topic out there.

(Note to self: remove the company's name before posting!)

We've had stories of people clinging to power long past their ability to wield it for as long as we've had stories. Today, though, I want to take note of three people who held on so long, they wound up undoing much of what they'd accomplished in their lifetimes: Paul von Hindenburg, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and now possibly Joe Biden.

Germans largely loved and respected Hindenburg, in part because he came very close to winning the First World War as supreme commander of the Central Powers. The loss of that war, plus the humiliating terms of the November 1919 armistice, led bit by bit to Hindenburg's disastrous second term as President of Germany. After a tumultuous first term, and by this time 84 years old, he won re-election in 1932. It turned out that Hindenburg didn't have all his youthful mojo, so within a year he had handed the keys to Germany to a pathologically narcissistic convicted criminal from Austria. We all know how that went.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote some of the most progressive opinions in her time on the US Supreme Court, and fought her whole life for women's rights, abortion rights, and basically everything that progressives hold dear. She got her first diagnosis with colon cancer in 1999, with pancreatic cancer in 2009, and with heart disease severe enough to require a stent in late 2014. When John Paul Stevens retired in 2010, she became the oldest person on the Court. By this point progressives, including President Obama, really wanted her to retire to ensure that another like-minded judge took her place. She didn't; and when she died in September 2020, just two months before we finally got the not-yet-convicted felon out of the Oval Office, the Republican-controlled Senate fast-tracked the anti-Ginsburg, militant Christianist Amy Comey Barrett (R) into her seat. Since Ginsburg's death, the Republican supermajority on the Court has whittled away at everything she accomplished, up to and including reversing Roe v Wade. Fitting that the last two days have seen some of the most reactionary rulings from the Court since Plessy v Ferguson. (I expect a ruling as egregious as Dred Scott to hit next June.)

And now we come to President Biden, whose performance last night brought both Hindenburg and Ginsburg to mind immediately. Never mind that the convicted-felon XPOTUS couldn't utter three consecutive syllables without lying, it was excruciating to watch. Great time to have Covid; I really would have liked a stiff drink when it ended. (I'm especially sad that I couldn't commiserate with a dear friend who died on the 11th. He would have brought the bourbon.)

Let's review the reviews, shall we?

James Fallows: Thirty minutes in, he Tweeted: "Trump is lying nonstop but has been at the high end of his 'sounding coherent' range. Biden has too much info and has been at the low end of his 'revving up for big events' range." "So that is why his labored, halting, raspy, fact-clogged, uneasy sounding first set of answers was so startling. Without consciously realizing it, I had gotten used to the idea that in a crunch he could sound younger than he looks. This time he sounded very old. That’s what I meant by the bottom of his range."

Dana Milbank: "The first and probably last meeting between Donald Trump and President Biden wasn’t a debate. It was a 90-minute disinfomercial promoting the former president, who uttered one egregious fabrication after the other, with barely a pause for breath between his inventions. The truth never had a chance. The truth needed a standard-bearer on that stage in Atlanta on Thursday night. Biden plainly was not up to the job. If the country is 'failing,' it’s because it is experiencing a relentless, disciplined and coordinated attack on everything that is true — and because the one person the reality-based community was counting on to save us has just shown himself to be unequal to the task."

David Corn: President Biden "tumbled through 90 minutes, muffing answers, often looking uncertain, speaking in a low, gravelly voice that did not convey strength. This was not only a missed chance. It was a disaster. Bill Clinton used to say that strong-and-wrong beats weak-and-right. With his performance on Thursday night, Biden created a perfect test case for that proposition."

Alex Shephard: "Again and again, with no prompting, he made his opponent’s case for him. He was often incoherent, frequently appeared to forget the question he was responding to, and consistently failed to make the very easy and simple case for his reelection. He allowed Donald Trump—a man who was terrible in every Republican primary debate in 2016 and who decisively lost every presidential debate in 2016 and 2020—not only to appear competent in comparison, but to seem normal."

Andrew Sullivan: "For god's sake, withdraw. [L]ast night’s debate performance by Joe Biden is the end of his campaign. It’s over. Done. No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years."

David Graham: "Watching the president at the first debate was at times almost physically uncomfortable. If the purpose of debates such as this one is to show voters something new about the candidates, then it didn’t work. And how could it? Both men are very well known, and very little liked, by the entire American public. Nor was there much to learn about policy: Trump doesn’t care about it, and Biden kept getting mixed up in details about it."

Peter Hamby: "What’s striking is the level of anger coming from normal Democrats, not professional Democrats, people who just want to vote against Trump and get this over with, even if they’re not in love with Biden, who are texting me their anger. It’s because so much feels at stake. Biden, by the way, never said, “I will be a transitional president.” He hinted at it. A lot of people took that to heart, and after the midterms he could have walked away like Michael Jordan after hitting that shot against the Jazz and been a hero forever to Democrats. After the midterms, Jill and Valerie Biden, and Ron Klain and Mike Donilon and Ted Kaufman should have been like, Hey man, you did your duty. You’re a historic figure. Time to pass the torch."

And those are the people on our side!

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

When, years from now, historians try to make sense of how the United States collapsed in the late 21st century, they may clock last night as one of the nails in its coffin. Forget modern infrastructure and universal health care; we'll be lucky to have civil liberties in 20 years.

Now that Cassie's poop no longer has Giardia cysts in it, she went back to day camp today, so that I could go to my downtown office for the first time in nearly two weeks. To celebrate, it looks like I'll get to walk home from her day care in a thunderstorm.

Before that happens, though:

• Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar warns that our 2024 election looks eerily like the 1996 Russian election that eventually led to Vladimir Putin becoming dictator.
• New Republic's Thom Hartman lays out how the "mud-sill theory" of a permanent economic underclass explains so much of the right wing's horrible policy agenda.
• The Beeb examines why so many popular tourist destinations seem not to want tourists anymore.
• A homeowner on the 400 block of Sheridan Road in Winnetka, Ill., the 9th wealthiest suburb in the US, shot at three men trying to steal his Ferrari this morning. (No people or cars were hurt.)
• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill released renderings of the planned O'Hare Airport satellite terminal that could open as early as 2027.
• Unions have banded together with people who live near railroads to restrict the operation of remote-controlled trains after multiple deaths.

Finally, the MLB's least-popular umpire, Ángel Hernández, has announced his retirement, to much rejoicing. The Post has a retrospective on his worst calls over the years.

Cassie got a bad result from the lab yesterday: a mild giardia infection. It's a good-news, bad-news thing: The bad news, obviously, is that she can't go to day camp (meaning I can't spend a full day in my downtown office) for at least a week. The good news is that she's mostly asymptomatic, unlike the last guy. So we just went to the vet again, got another $110 bill for dewormer.

But at least she wasn't crated for three hours with her own diarrhea. Poor Parker.

In other good news, bad news stories today:

• A 77-year-old man shot Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico in what authorities call a political attack.
• The New Republic has a heartwarming series today on "what American fascism would look like." Enjoy.
• Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee reacted to King Charles III's official portrait the same way I reacted to Parker's bad butt all those years ago.

Actually, they're all bad-news stories. Apologies.

I went through the photos I took on my trip to Germany last week and put a couple of them through Lightroom.

Getting coffee in Viktualienmarkt:

A very practical car for city life in post-war Germany, the 1955 BMW Isetta:

The Trödelmarktinsel, Nürnberg:

A better edit of my earlier photo of the main gate at Dachau:

And finally, I had a really great view of the New York metro area on the flight home: