The Daily Parker

I spent 56 minutes trying to get ADT to change a single setting at my house, and it turned out, they changed the wrong setting. I will try again Friday, when I have time.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world:

• James Carville lays out a strategy for Vice President Kamala Harris to win the White House in *ulp* 62 days.
• Arizona officials continue to deal with the election-denier loony fringe despite (or maybe because of?) reality winning every time it's tested.
• A Federal judge in Rockford, Ill., has ruled that the Supreme Court's asinine, ahistorical, motivated reasoning in Bruen means that four schmucks from the suburbs can legally carry concealed guns on Chicago trains.
• A new report has come out that once again shows the US spends hundreds of billions too much on roadbuilding, and would benefit from removing highways instead of building them.
• A UK commission has found that all 72 deaths in the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire were preventable, likely leading to criminal actions in future.
• CVS has started using really stupid-annoying robots to prevent people loitering in front of their stores, a trend in retail that will obviously backfire.
• Lyft plans to sell parts of its public bike system (Divvy here in Chicago) to cut costs. Uh oh.
• An Illinois state government program can help you get solar power on your house.
• What's with this tunnel to nowhere in the North Carolina hills? I might have to check it out.

Finally, Slow Horses season 4 came out today, so at some point this evening I'll visit Slough House and get a dose of Jackson Lamb's sarcasm.

Before I bugger off to get at least a couple of daylight hours in this sunny, 22°C afternoon, here are the most interesting stories that popped up today:

• Two Boomer economists point out that the Boomers have made an art form of siphoning wealth from the younger generations, meaning we Gen Xers will have to work longer for lower Social Security (state pensions) payments. Typical.
• Chicago's meteorological summer was warmer and drier than normal, the 18th-warmest since 1871.
• Ravinia Brewing Company and Ravinia Festival have come to a settlement that requires the former to change its name, even though the neighborhood predates both of them.
• Police have finally identified a man who died on the Appalachian Trail in 1977.
• The wholesaler taking over the stores that Kroeger and Albertson's planned to divest in order to pass scrutiny for their merger thinks it got crappy stores in the bargain.

Finally, the Chicago White Sox have surpassed their team record for losses, going 31-108 through yesterday. If they lose 13 of the remaining 22 games—which would actually represent an improvement over their performance so far—they will surpass the 1962 New York Mets' record 120 losses in a season. For reasons passing understanding, they're still charging for tickets, with box seats going for $69 and some tickets as high as $309. They have lots of seats left, though, so maybe I'll just take the El down there this weekend to see the Athletics beat them?

The problem with having 8 billion people on Earth is that every single one of us has different ideas and opinions. If there's an opinion out there so fringe and so bizarre that only 1/10th of 1% of us share it, that's still about a quarter of the population of Chicago.

I thought of that because of how much news we have. And I imagine that from the ancestral environment thousands of years ago until the last century, we just didn't have all that much. I don't think that's entirely because of light-speed communications since the telegraph informing us of more things than the horse-drawn post could do before the 1840s. I also think we've just got so many more people, with so many more crazy people.

How much has happened in the last 50 years, for example? And by "50 years" I mean exactly that, since this speech on 8 August 1974:

That got me thinking about the relentlessness of news in the telecommunications era, and how we didn't evolve like this. Even Aldous Huxley thought our downfall as a culture would be drugs and sex, simply because in 1932 no one looked at screens all day. (I have always thought that he, and not Orwell, got the overall prediction correct—at least as regards the Anglosphere.)

Anyway, I have to debug a new feature and not worry about the Post.

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.

This shit amused me:

• The Chicago White Sox have tied the American League record of 21 consecutive losses, with the MLB all-time record of 23 a distinct and shitty possibility.
• CrowdStrike has taken enough of Delta Airlines' shit, thank you.
• In addition to all the other shit that Hurricane Debby turned up over the weekend, the storm flushed 25 kilos of cocaine onto a Florida beach. Apparently, this happens all the time.

Finally, Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the Dave Matthews Band tour bus dropping 350 liters of very literal, very stinky shit onto a boatload of sightseers in the Chicago River. "The culprit turned out to be the band’s tour bus driver, then-42-year-old Stefan Wohl, who pleaded guilty to charges of reckless conduct and discharging contaminates to cause water pollution. He got hit with 18 months on probation, 150 hours of community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine to Friends of the Chicago River."

I mean, what the shit?

As you may have seen below, yesterday I went out to Kankakee on a $15 round-trip Amtrak ticket to visit Knack Brewing for the Brews & Choos Project. Not only did the brewery surprise me—I mean, just look at it on Google Street View—but the city had a lot more going on than I anticipated.

I've been through Kankakee a bunch of times, and maybe even pulled off I-57 on some trip to Champaign or St Louis. I've even landed at IKK once, in March 2002, getting checked out in a Piper Warrior. But until yesterday, I never actually walked around the place.

If it's known for anything outside Illinois, Kankakee is probably best known as "the worst place to live in America," at least according to Money magazine in 1999. (This American Life explains.) Settlers and the US government stole the land it sits on from the Pottawatomie tribes in 1832, and platted the town in June 1853. Unlike most Northwest Ordinance cities, however, the good burghers of Bourbonnais (as it was then called) decided to orient the city along the railroad tracks, 8° east of true north.

As this Google Earth view shows, Kankakee suffered serious damage from car-oriented development in the post-WWII era as most of its downtown became parking lots:

Even getting to Kankakee takes you through an historical artifact from the beginning days of Amtrak in 1971. When Amtrak started, it consolidated its Chicago operations at Union Station, which had (and still has) the only passenger track connecting the north and south sides of the region. Dearborn Station closed, and the Illinois Central abandoned what is now Millennium Station. Trains serving Southern Illinois and points south now left from the other side of the Chicago river, which worked well enough until the 18th Street bridge became unusable in the 1980s. Today, that means trains serving Kankakee, Carbondale, and New Orleans have to proceed from Union Station in reverse for about 3 km, then turn around and pass at 8 km/h over the St Charles Airline to the freight tracks parallel to the Metra Electric and South Shore lines that come out of Millennium Station:

Source: High Speed Rail Alliance

To get the 5 km from Union Station to 22nd Street, where the train finally highballs (though only at the US "high" speed of 120 km/h), takes 20 minutes. To get from there the rest of the 90 km to Kankakee takes about 50 minutes. Amtrak needs only $147 million to restore the 18th Street Bridge and add more track to eliminate the reversing nonsense, money it might get any day now. Yeah, any day now.

Back to my adventure. Once in Kankakee, I took the long way (about 2½ km) from the station to the brewery so I could get a sense of the city. Like a lot of places, it definitely has a good side and a bad side. Less than a kilometer from the station I hustled past vacant lots and a couple of houses that had seen better days:

And yet, just over the river and a bit south of there I found a cute example of an 1880s farmhouse next to an early-1900s four-square:

And did you know the city has a wee 800 kw hydroelectric station, first built in 1912?

That's not a lot of power, but it probably provides enough for about 200 homes or businesses—reducing everyone's electricity costs.

And there's some civic pride, too. I missed the annual music festival last week, but I did stumble upon the classic car display outside the pizza joint where I grabbed a slice:

And the train station looks pretty charming at sunset on a summer evening:

I'll head back there at some point, maybe in the fall. Amtrak only has three trains a day, leaving at 8am, 4pm, and 8pm, with returns at 11am, 8pm, and 11pm. So if I take the train, I'll probably once again only get three hours or so to explore. But it only cost me $15 to get there and back yesterday, and I'm seeing tickets for as low as $5 each way, so why not? It's worth the trip.

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.

Watch how new UK Leader of the Opposition Rishi Sunak (Cons.-Richmond and Northallerton) used his first Question Time with new UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (Lab.-Holborn and St Pancras) last Wednesday:

Sunak's Conservative Party suffered the worst electoral loss of any party since before World War I to Starmer's Labour Party. A month ago Sunak sat where Starmer sits today, and vice-versa. And Sunak knows that just about every policy he cares about will end under the new Labour government, while he sits there and watches.

And yet, Sunak and Starmer made it absolutely clear to the UK and its adversaries that they both respect the rule of law, the necessity of a peaceful transition of absolute power (UK prime ministers have much more power than US presidents but much less predictable terms), and that both men respect each other.

Of course, PMQs the day after tomorrow will not be so friendly. But that's OK; Sunak behaved like a defeated politician and not like a petulant infant, demonstrating to the UK and to the world that the UK is bigger than anyone sitting in that House. Exactly as it should be in all democracies.

One of the many stories that piqued my interest this morning included a rant by the anti-Sorkin himself:

• Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It, does not like how "politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom." (He also implies that Liz Truss, and not Kamala Harris, most embodies the character of Selina Meyer.)
• Former President Obama has endorsed Vice President Harris.
• John Scalzi received a press release from the Harris campaign that he says demonstrates how "it's harder to stab when you're being punched in the face."
• David Frum sees President Biden's retirement as making himself "a modern Cincinnatus."
• Alex Shephard wonders if "JD Vance [is] the worst Vice Presidential pick ever?" (Vance "is not only one of the greatest frauds in American politics, he is the most obvious fraud in American politics.")
• Dana Milbank suggests (tongue in cheek) that the XPOTUS just "needs a mulligan:" "Vance, who has served 19 months in the Senate after writing a book and briefly dabbling as a venture capitalist, was picked by Trump on the merits. But Harris, who spent decades as a prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general and senator, became vice president because of diversity, equity and inclusion."
• George Will, not tongue-in-cheek, warned that if Democrats re-take the Senate, we're going to get rid of the filibuster, oh dearie dearie me! Because chucking something that gives 20% of the US population a veto over the other 80% would mean Republicans would have to drum up a majority of the states to do something instead of just a coalition of the small ones.
• If you have a computer built before 2024 by one of the major manufacturers, your Secure Boot might not be secure. If you want to find out whether your system is secure, open up PowerShell and run this command: [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString((Get-SecureBootUEFI PK).bytes) -match "DO NOT TRUST|DO NOT SHIP")

Finally, Journalist Lewis H Lapham has died, aged 89. He edited Harper's during the time that I read it regularly, and no coincidence that I dropped it shortly after he did. I found his work engaging and sometimes enraging, but always smart. He will be missed.

What a consequential 24 hours we've had.

After President Biden's historical withdrawal from the 2024 election, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. So far, dozens of other elected Democrats have followed, including Illinois governor JB Pritzker just this morning.

And because the Vice President is already on the campaign, according to Federal election rules, she can use the entire $96 million campaign fund—and in fact she's already filed with the Federal Election Commission to do so.

In other words, Harris is, without question, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, which means next month's Democratic National Convention in Chicago will be the election kickoff we hoped for and not a repeat of 1968.

Some reactions from the usual suspects:

• Tim Alberta: "This is exactly what the Trump team feared."
• Frank Bruni: "What Joe Biden just did is utterly extraordinary."
• Jonathan Chait: "The cop against the criminal."
• James Fallows: "Joe Biden passes the torch."
• Tom Nichols: "A candidate, not a cult leader."
• Jennifer Rubin: "Biden and his team reach the right decision."
• Author John Scalzi: "Here we go."
• Alex Shephard: "Donald Trump is now the weaker candidate."
• Simon Tisdall, The Guardian UK: "The post-Biden era may be uncertain for the Democrats, but for Trump it will be utterly dismaying."

I should also add Aaron Sorkin's piece from yesterday's Times, published before President Biden's announcement: "How I would script this moment for Biden and the Democrats." But no, we aren't going to nominate Mitt Romney (R-UT).

Meanwhile, the news has put the Republican party in complete disarray as their entire election strategy just evaporated. Over the next few days we will see the convicted-felon rapist XPOTUS back in form as the racist, misogynist wanna-be thug that he is. But the best news of all from yesterday is: the chances we need to care about him for longer than 106 more days just got a lot smaller.

One or two other things happened yesterday, including the last-surviving piping plover chick on Montrose Beach getting a name. I'll have more later today.