The Daily Parker

If Cassie could (a) speak English and (b) understand the concept of "future" she would be quivering with anticipation about going to Ribfest tonight after school. Since she can't anticipate it, I'll do double-duty and drool on her behalf. It helps that the weather today looks perfect: sunny, not too hot, with a strong chance of delicious pork ribs.

Meanwhile, I have a few things to read on my commute that I didn't get to yesterday:

• Remember when psychiatrist Bandy Lee got shouted down when she warned that the XPOTUS would someday unleash violence on the country? And how the XPOTUS unleashed violence on the country just like she predicted?
• David Graham reminds us how the XPOTUS has hitherto avoided consequences for his dangerous and probably criminal behavior, and how he might finally have gone over a line not even Republicans can ignore. (David Rohde points to the line.)
• Jim Fallows once again provides an example of a Times headline framing the news in the most unhelpful way possible.
• Author Jon Henschen bemoans the decline of musical literacy brought about by the evisceration of school music programs over the past decades.
• The same decline in music programs—actually, in public education in general—happened in part because of a Christianist Republican hostility towards universal education.
• I hope no one who reads this blog needs reminding that you should never, ever plug an unknown USB device into your computer, but just in case you don't believe me, read up on the improved Rubber Ducky hacking tool.
• Most people have heard of the Chicxulub asteroid that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But it now looks like that rock might have had a smaller cousin that also hit the planet.

Finally, as I ride on the UP-N commuter line in an hour or so, I can imagine what it will be like when the train gets a battery-powered locomotive in a few years.

How many sign-offs do you need to execute a no-knock raid on the former president's house?

Former president Donald Trump said Monday that the FBI had raided his Mar-a-Lago Club and searched his safe — activity related to an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified documents, according to two people familiar with the probe.

One of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its details, said agents were conducting a court-authorized search as part of a long-running investigation of whether documents — some of them top-secret — were taken to the former president’s private golf club and residence instead of sent to the National Archives when Trump left office. That could be a violation of the Presidential Records Act, which requires the preservation of memos, letters, notes, emails, faxes and other written communications related to a president’s official duties.

The inventory of unclassified items in the boxes that were recovered earlier this year from Mar-a-Lago is roughly 100 pages long, according to a person familiar with that document. Descriptions of items that were improperly taken to Mar-a-Lago include a cocktail napkin, a phone list, charts, slide decks, letters, memos, maps, talking points, a birthday dinner menu, schedules and more, this person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the ongoing investigation.

There is a separate inventory for just the classified materials that were taken to the former president’s Florida residence, this person said. If the unclassified version of the classified inventory were organized in the same way as the inventory of nonclassified items, it would be about three pages long, according to this person.

Of course this is unprecedented, just like so much of the XPOTUS's administration. I do like the irony of the FBI executing the search warrant on the anniversary of Nixon's resignation, though. Pity the XPOTUS didn't see the connection.

Today, though, I've got a lot of debugging, and several chorus meetings on various topics, plus a condo association meeting that I really don't want to attend. Since I'm president of both the chorus and the condo association (one voluntary, one voluntold), I can't shirk either.

Meanwhile, some of the grain silos that remind Beirut of the massive government incompetence that led to a massive aluminum nitrate explosion two years ago today collapsed, fortunately before the memorial began.

And one of the four finalists in the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) competition for a quantum-computer-resistant encryption algorithm got cracked by the equivalent of a home laptop in an hour.

Other newsworthy things happened today but I've got to get back to debugging.

Somehow we got to the end of July, though I could swear March happened 30 seconds ago. If only I were right, these things would be four months in my future:

• We all knew Justice Samuel Alito (R) is an arrogant prick, and now the rest of the world knows as well.
• The Post sums up what the Schumer-Manchin climate bill will actually do. (Yay! A substance story from the paper that only seems to write about process!)
• The block of Lexington Avenue at 59th Street in New York looks just like it did in April 2020. *shudder*
• An Austrian company has made a business of selling zero-day exploits to bad guys. Nice.
• Finally, The Atlantic suggests ditching your apps and dating friends instead.

I will now go out into this gorgeous weather and come back to my office...in August.

It's a lovely day in Chicago, which I'm not enjoying as much as I could because I'm (a) in my Loop office and (b) busy as hell. So I'll have to read these later:

• Josh Marshall points out the obvious, that the filibuster is a direct threat to American democracy. Brynn Tannehill says, actually, that's only one part of how we become Hungary.
• Someone just paid $11.25 million for a lakefront house in Winnetka that, if the renderings are accurate, I hope they tear down. This comes with new figures showing Chicago real estate prices have jumped 25% over two years, one of the largest increases in history.
• Law professor Mary Ziegler wrestles with the question of why abortion opponents suddenly also oppose saving the lives of pregnant women.
• Bruce Schneier sketches out Apple's lockdown mode.

Finally, Mick Jagger turns 79 today, which surprised me because I thought he was closer to 130.

The security guru just posted a video he presented in November 2020:

Even though it seems the entire world has paused to honor HRH The Queen on the 70th anniversary of her accession, the world in fact kept spinning:

Blogger Moxie Marlinspike wrote about their first impressions of web3 back in January. I just got around to reading it, and you should too.

• On the same topic, a group of 25 security professionals, including Grady Booch, Bruce Schneier, and Molly White, wrote an open letter to Congress advocating for serious regulation of cryptocurrencies.
• What's Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's strategy in Ukraine? Wait us out. (It helps that he gives no thought to anyone's life but his own.)
• Closer to home, Jelani Cobb writes about "the atrocity of American gun culture."
• The US Navy's last conventionally-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk, has arrived in Brownsville, Texas, for dismantling. Apparently Chicago didn't want an aircraft carrier museum for some reason.
• Chicago has bungalows, L.A. has dingbats, Amsterdam has canal houses, and Dublin has over-basement row houses.
• Bloomberg suggests the Elizabeth Line could prompt a whole re-map of the London Underground.

Oh, and plastic recycling doesn't work, and probably can't.

And here, a propos of nothing, is a photo of St Boniface Cemetery I took this morning:

I just discovered that Azure App Services allows you to create one free managed certificate per App Service. For Weather Now, I spent $140 creating two certificates, when really I only cared about the one (for https://www.wx-now.com).

Microsoft explains:

The free App Service managed certificate is a turn-key solution for securing your custom DNS name in App Service. It's a TLS/SSL server certificate that's fully managed by App Service and renewed continuously and automatically in six-month increments, 45 days before expiration, as long as the prerequisites set-up remain the same without any action required from you. All the associated bindings will be updated with the renewed certificate. You create the certificate and bind it to a custom domain, and let App Service do the rest.

The free certificate comes with the following limitations:

• Does not support wildcard certificates.
• Does not support usage as a client certificate by using certificate thumbprint (removal of certificate thumbprint is planned).
• Does not support private DNS.
• Is not exportable.
• Is not supported on App Service Environment (ASE).
• Only supports alphanumeric characters, dashes (-), and periods (.).

That will make a big difference going forward, and saved me $70 for the emergency Inner-Drive.com port going on this week...

Today we celebrate the big rock that gives us days in the first place. One out of 364 is pretty good, I guess. And there are some good stories on my open browser tabs:

• The Twisted Hippo Brewery has started looking for a new home, which they hope to open soon near their old location.
• The City of Chicago will soon stop charging car-jacking victims hundreds or thousands of dollars in towing and impound fees, which really is a thing here.
• Timothy Noah explains "Why Biden Had to Challenge That Trump Judge’s Dimwitted Mask Mandate Ruling."
• Another day, another severe security flaw in a fundamental component of millions of servers worldwide. Sigh.
• Campaigning in the French election Sunday stops at 5pm Chicago time, with President Emanuel Macron holding a narrow polling lead against his far-right challenger, Marine LePen.
• Julia Ioffe explains how Russia's soldiers come from the poorest and most remote parts of the country, where the mothers getting flag-draped coffins of their sons haven't got a lot of power to prevent it.

Finally, the Defense Department will open a Defense Innovation Unit just down the street from my current office in June. I knew about these plans a couple of years ago when I worked on an unclassified project for the US Military Enrollment Processing Command and was looking forward to it. I'm glad it's finally gotten to Chicago.

Leading off today's afternoon roundup, The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman) announced today that Netflix has a series in production based on his game Exploding Kittens. The premise: God and Satan come to Earth—in the bodies of cats. And freakin' Tom Ellis is one of the voices, because he's already played one of those parts.

Meanwhile, in reality:

• A consumers group filed suit against Green Thumb Industries and three other Illinois-based cannabis companies under the Clayton Act, alleging collusion that has driven retail pot prices above $8,800 per kilo. For comparison, the group alleges that retail prices in California are just $660 per kilo. (Disclosure: The Daily Parker is a GTI shareholder.)
• Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D), one of the indirect defendants in the pot suit, signed a $46 billion budget for the state that includes $1.8 billion in temporary tax relief. Apparently, I'll get a $50 check from the State that I can apply to the $600 increase in property taxes Cook County imposed this year, which is nice, but I think the state could have aimed a bit lower on the income cap for that rebate and given more help to other people.
• Shortly after US District Court Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle (a 35-year-old who never tried a case and who graduated summa cum mediocrae laude from the legal powerhouse University of Florida just 8 years ago and earned a rare "not qualified" rating from the ABA upon her appointment in 2020 by the STBXPOTUS) ruled against the CDC in a case brought by an anti-masker, the DOT dropped mask mandates for public transport and air travel in the US. In related news, the Judge also said it's OK to piss in other people's swimming pools and up to the other swimmers not to drink the water.
• While the Chicago Piping Plovers organization waits for Monty and Rose to return to Montrose Beach, another one of the endangered birds has landed at Rainbow Beach on the South Side. He appears more inclined to rent than buy, but local ornithologists report the bird has a new profile on the Plōvr dating site.
• NBC breaks down the three biggest factors driving inflation right now, and yes, one of them is president of Russia. None, however, is president of the US.
• Along those lines, (sane) Republican writer Sarah Longwell, who publishes The Bulwark, found that 68% of Republicans believe the Big Lie that the XPOTUS won the 2020 election, but "the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose." Makes me proud to be an American!

And finally, via Bruce Schneier, two interesting bits. First, a new paper explains how a bad actor can introduce a backdoor into a machine learning training session to force specific outcomes (explained in plain English by Cory Doctorow). Second, an attacker used a "flash loan" to take over the Beanstalk crypto currency voting system and stole $182 million from it. Because Crypto Is The Future™.