The Daily Parker

At my day job, we just ended our 80th sprint on the project, with a lot of small but useful features that will make our side of the app easier to maintain. I like productive days like this. I even voted! And now I will rest on my laurels for a bit and read these stories:

• If you don't worry that the entire US Supreme Court has the technical expertise of your 99-year-old great uncle, perhaps you should?
• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explains how giving economic aid to Ukraine benefits the West.
• In part because Republicans in Congress have no interest in actually legislating, some 700,000 Illinois residents will lose their Medicaid coverage soon.
• Giving loyalty to an unhinged, narcissistic man-child does not get you loyalty in return. And no, this isn't about the XPOTUS.
• O'Hare Terminal 3—the one I use most often—will soon get $50 million in FAA funds for upgrades.
• State schools, which exist so that everyone in the state has a shot at a solid education, have seen the steepest declines in liberal-arts degrees in the past 10 years.
• Jill Bearup updated her earlier video about the Netflix corset mini-scandal, finding her initial surmise was correct.
• Not-racist cartoonists want to know why it took so long for Scott Adams to get his comeuppance.
• WHY IS IT SNOWING IN MALLORCA? I'm vaguely alarmed here...

Finally, the European Space Agency wants to establish a standard time zone for the moon. Since one day on the moon is 29.4 days here, I don't quite know what that will look like.

The rain has stopped, and might even abate long enough for me to collect Cassie from day camp without getting soaked on my way home. I've completed a couple of cool sub-features for our sprint review tomorrow, so I have a few minutes to read the day's stories:

• Matt Ford doesn't think US Representative Marjorie Taylor (R-GA) wants secession so much as uncontested Republican rule, which, you know, is on brand for her and her party.
• San Francisco native Michael Moritz worries that one-party rule by the Democrats is hurting the city—and the Party. (Seeing a pattern here?)
• Stars & Stripes highlights a vignette from 1952, when then-Lt. Jimmy Carter helped Canada dismantle a failed nuclear reactor.
• Financial advisor Caz Craffy dissipated hundreds of thousands of dollars from Army life-insurance payouts in a case that highlights the Department of Defense's difficulties screening civilian advisors for soldiers, sailors, and Marines.
• Chester, Pa., a suburb just south of Philadelphia, drove itself into bankruptcy in part because of a useless $77m highway project.
• The Guardian outlines how Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific have spent millions on lobbying and propaganda to advance the kinds of business practices that led to the East Palestine disaster this month.

Finally, Friends of the Chicago Harbor Lighthouse hope to tap into National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act funds to turn their organization's namesake into a museum. That would be cool.

After standing on the Ravenswood Metra platform for 10 minutes in 40 km/h winds and blowing rain, I hearby sentence former Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner to 100 days of standing on said platform without an umbrella or waterproof shoes for the offense cutting off funding to all Illinois transportation projects for 3 years in a fit of ideological pique and general lack of empathy for anyone else.

Each instance of Rauner's prickishness causing suffering and inconvenience to the citizens of Illinois shall be a separate and distinct offense.

Basically, I want him to live out the remainder his life stuck in traffic, getting soaked on "temporary" train platforms, and failing to find shelter for the night because so many homeless shelters closed for lack of funds on his watch.

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing.

While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company:

• US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who even people who love her wonder if she knows where she is half the time, announced she's finally retiring from the Senate at the end of this Congress.
• Both Paul Krugman and Josh Marshall call bullshit on the GOP's (latest) plans to steal my social security contributions. (Note to the masses: the only way Social Security could be in trouble is if the United States somehow lost its taxing authority.)
• Air India has ordered 220 airplanes from Boeing and 250 from Airbus, including 70 long-haul A350s and 777s.
• Cranky Flier chides United Airlines for publishing a flight schedule they have no intention of flying over the summer.
• In other "fictional schedule" news, the CTA hasn't fixed its own frequency and reliability problems even after six months of trying.
• Rick Steves recommends traveling to Europe's second cities, like Manchester, Lyon, and Hamburg. 
• Timothy Noah draws a straight line from railroad cost-cutting through crew size reductions and the massive derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last week.
• Corrupt former Chicago police sergeant Ronald Watts, whose misconduct has led prosecutors to throw out more than 200 felony convictions and will probably cost the city half a billion dollars in settlements, blamed his downfall on "anti-police atmosphere" without the self-awareness required to see his part in that.
• Bruce Schneier bemoans the lack of urgency in Washington (and other capitals) to regulate cybersecurity.

Finally, you may not want to know what the CBP beagle squad has found in baggage at O'Hare.

John Scalzi explains why he doesn't write a lot of political posts anymore:

[S]o much political messaging these days, particularly on the right, is so performative that engaging with it is also performative, and a furtherance in distributing the original performative messaging. The political right in the United States understands that, inasmuch as it currently lacks a coherent political strategy other than will to power, it must keep its followers forever afraid, and its opponents forever on the defensive — spending their energy responding rather than doing anything else. So: outrage at trans people and black people and librarians and candies and anything else that will keep the outrage cycle going on for another 24 hours.

And, you know, I… just don’t want to. I’d like to say that it’s because I don’t have time, but I have the time, as much as I ever have with regard to this site. I just don’t have the inclination. So much of it is fucking trivial, for one — the individual incidents, to clarify, not the overall intent to strip everyone but white dudes of their rights — and all of it is “I said or did something shitty, now you have to respond, so I can play my next card.” Engaging in that level of rhetorical dishonesty for anything more than the length of a tweet feels icky, and even engaging in it for that long is fast losing its appeal.

As usual, he (the professional writer) puts in words what I've also felt. And he's completely correct, of course; you can't engage on policy when your opponent isn't serious.

Yeah, I know President Biden gave the State of the Union address on Tuesday night (while I had a rehearsal, it turns out). But I didn't get to hear it until yesterday afternoon, and I didn't get to read it until today. I'm sorry; it was a great Biden speech.

Some reactions. First, from one of President Carter's speechwriters, James Fallows:

Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last night was effective—for him, for his policies, for his party, and I think for the country.

Biden’s whole presentation last night seemed rushed, as if hurrying through the speech. It led to several mis-reads from the prompter, and some hard-to-understand slurred-together words.

I think that in context this was fine rather than a problem. Anyone open-minded knows that Biden has had a life-long stutter. Maybe this was one of his ways of coping. Everyone knows these addresses are long, and would not want him to draw it out. I think he gained more in “getting to the point” than he lost in “pausing for dramatic emphasis.” I note some of those moments below.

He has the entire speech, annotated. He notes the key moment for those who enjoy watching children finally get scolded by their parents, but he left the exegesis of that moment to others. Charlie Pierce summarizes how the President let the foamy-mouthers heckle themselves into a trap:

President Joe Biden freight-trained his whackadoo Republican opposition in his State of the Union address. He also flipped the very idea of the State of the Union address on its head by turning it into an American equivalent of the prime minister's Question Time in the British Parliament. He wrapped them in a bear hug so warm that they didn't realize they were being smothered. He took on hecklers like a veteran of a Catskills resort. He smiled, he laughed, he bellowed when it was called for. He had the only microphone in the room, and he used it like a hammer.

The real party piece came when he dared to mention that the Republicans want to gut Social Security and Medicare—which in the case of Social Security has been a Republican goal since “The Shadow” was on the radio. He baited them and baited them, and they went for it like starving carp.

Then, right on cue, the Republicans launched into a tantrum. The president has not been in politics since god was a boy to miss an opportunity like that one.

The Post fact-checked the speech (mostly favorably), while columnist Eugene Robinson praised the President's "vigor, humor, and command:"

The president took advantage of the national television audience the speech always draws to make the case that his worldview has been proved correct: Even at a time of extreme polarization, bipartisanship is not only possible but also necessary. He said there is “no reason we can’t work together and find consensus in this Congress.”

The president’s point was that despite all the hyperpartisan, apocalyptic rhetoric, the federal government has been functioning. Progress is messy, halting and incremental, but it does happen — inch by inch, step by step, mile by mile.

There have been times the past two years when Biden looked and acted his age — moments in which he seemed tired, lost his place in a speech or went off on some obscure tangent. But not on Tuesday night. Biden is 80, and it is legitimate to ask whether he is too old to seek another term. With this speech, he gave an answer. He sure sounded like a man who’s running.

You know, if he continues like this, he might stay President until he's 88.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to prepare for a polar vortex.

I have no idea. But today I managed to get a lot of work done, so I'll have to read these later:

• A whopping 78% of voters in Rep. "George Santos" (R-NY) district think he should resign.
• Who should I vote for in the upcoming Chicago Mayoral election?
• National Geographic explains the science behind seasonal depression.
• Via Bruce Schneier, it looks like ransomware payments have declined 40% since 2021.
• Writing for Strong Towns, Michel Durand-Wood compares urban planning to...pizza.
• James Fallows describes what an amateur pilot checkride is like, and why they're required. (And wow do I miss flying.)

Finally, if you live in Chicago and look straight up and slightly north with binoculars tonight, you might see a little green comet that last passed Earth 50,000 years ago.

In other news:

• Greg Hinz goes over the upcoming Chicago mayoral election.
• Kansas Republicans have not given up their fight against the state constitution as they try to ban abortions there against the will of the majority of voters.
• The US Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing today into the monopolistic behavior of organized crime syndicate concert promoter Live Nation and its accomplice, Ticketmaster.
• The Long Island Railroad begins service to Grand Central Station tomorrow, bringing commuters from Mineola and Massapequa to Madison Avenue for the first time ever.
• Eurostar says that it can't fill all the seats on its UK-bound trains because Brexit has made UK border checks too time-consuming.
• You can leave the lights on, but fix your appliances.

And finally, a glimmer of hope that the 10-year project to build one damn railroad station near my house might finally finish in the next few weeks.

Longtime readers will know that I have spent a lot of time in Half Moon Bay, Calif., over the past 15 years. So yesterday's events shocked me:

Seven people are dead following two linked shootings in the Northern California city of Half Moon Bay, officials said.

The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office tweeted at 3:48 p.m. Monday that they were responding to a shooting “with multiple victims in the area of HWY 92 and the HMB City limits.” The office tweeted roughly an hour later that a suspect was in custody and there "is no ongoing threat to the community at this time."

San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus confirmed at a press conference Monday evening that seven people were killed in two related shootings. She said four victims were found dead from gunshot wounds at a location in the 12700 block of San Mateo Road, also known as Highway 92, around 2:30 p.m. A fifth victim was discovered with "life-threatening injuries" and transported to Stanford Medical Center. They remain there in critical condition.

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) learned of the shooting while at the hospital with victims of Sunday's mass shooting in Los Angeles.

Neither the National Rifle Association nor the right-wingers suing Illinois over its latest attempt to regulate military weapons commented, though we can all expect them to say it's "too soon" to talk about why we're still the only country in the OECD where this happens. Perhaps they'll talk to the San Mateo County farm families mourning their loved ones today?

Just a pre-weekend rundown of stuff you might want to read:

• The US Supreme Court's investigation into the leak of Justice Samuel Alito's (R) Dobbs opinion failed to identify Ginny Thomas as the source. Since the Marshal of the Court only investigated employees, and not the Justices themselves, one somehow does not feel that the matter is settled.
• Paul Krugman advises sane people not to give in to threats about the debt ceiling. I would like to see the President just ignore it on the grounds that Article 1, Section 8, Article VI, and the 14th Amendment make the debt ceiling unconstitutional in the first place.
• In other idiotic Republican economics (redundant, I know), Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) has proposed a 30% national sales tax to replace all income and capital-gains taxes that I really hope the House passes just so the Senate can laugh at it while campaigning against it.
• Amazon has decided to terminate its Smile program, the performative-charity program that (as just one example) helped the Apollo Chorus raise almost $100 of its $250,000 budget last year. Whatever will we do to make up the shortfall?
• How do you know when you're on a stroad? Hint: when you really don't want to be.
• Emma Collins does not like SSRIs.
• New York Times science writer Matt Richtel would like people to stop calling every little snowfall a "bomb cyclone." So would I.
• Slack's former Chief Purple People Eater Officer Nadia Rawlinson ponders the massive tech layoffs this week. (Fun fact: the companies with the most layoffs made hundreds of billions in profits last year even as market capitalization declined! I wonder what all these layoffs mean to the shareholders? Hmm.)
• Amtrak plans to buy a bunch of new rail cars to replace the 40-year-old rolling stock on their long-distance routes. Lots of "ifs" in there, though. I still hope that, before I die of old age, the US will have a rail travel that rivals anything Europe had in 1999.
• The guy who went to jail over his fraudulent and incompetent planning of the Fyre Festival a couple of years ago wants to try again, now that he's out.

Finally, Monica Lewinsky ruminates on the 25 years since her name popped up on a news alert outing her relationship with President Clinton. One thing she realized:

The Tonight Show With Jay Leno died in 2014. For me, not a day too soon. At the end of Leno’s run, the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University analyzed the 44,000 jokes he told over the course of his time at the helm. While President Clinton was his top target, I was the only one in the top 10 who had not specifically chosen to be a public person.

If you don't follow her on social media, you're missing out. She's smart, literate, and consistently funny.