I thought earlier today that this was unique. James Fallows, who knows more about the presidency than most living journalists, agrees:
To the best of my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened before.
Presidents of one party call nominees from the other party “bad choices” or “wrong for America” or “risky bets” or in some other way second-best options to their own preferred candidate.
As far as I am aware, none of them has previously declared a major-party nominee categorically unfit.
Again we have two possibilities. Either Barack Obama, with a career’s worth of hyper-deliberate careful phrasing behind him, has suddenly made a lurch toward hyperbole. Or Donald Trump does in fact merit classification in an unfit category of his own.
Obviously I believe the latter is the truth. We’ll get to the pushback and ramifications in subsequent installments, including President Obama’s question to the Republican leaders who “rebuke” Trump but still support him: “What does it say about your party, that this is your standard bearer?”
For now, this is one more for-the-record note of how Campaign 2016 has crossed one more previously unexplored frontier.
It's really that bad.
Attention flat-earthers: you can't simultaneously believe in GPS and that the earth is a disk covered by the dome of Heaven. Maps of Australia are the latest casualty in the war between evidence and...well, flat-earthers:
The Australian Plate is moving about 7 centimeters (2.8 inches) northwards every single year. This motion has accumulated over the decades to produce a significant discrepancy between local coordinates on maps and global coordinates in digital navigation systems used by satellites.
At present, this difference amounts to an error of 1.5 meters (4.9 feet). This is enough to cause a problem to anything in Australia that uses GPS-like systems, including smartphones and vehicles.
"If you want to start using driverless cars, accurate map information is fundamental," Dan Jaksa, a member of Geoscience Australia, told BBC News. “We have tractors in Australia starting to go around farms without a driver, and if the information about the farm doesn't line up with the coordinates coming out of the navigation system there will be problems.”
This is yet another instance where, for whatever reason, people whose religious beliefs encounter their direct economic interests seem to make allowances for science.
Next thing you know, insurance companies will start charging more to cover property close to sea level. Oh wait...
With a new job, summer weather, and lots of things going on, July 2016 turned out to be the worst month for the Daily Parker since November 2010. Back then I was finishing my MBA and traveling for work four days a week. This past month I only had 37 entries (the all-time mean is 40), averaging 1.19 per day (cf. mean 1.33).
Ah, well. I'll try to be more conscientious this month.
Via Bruce Schneier, the Universities of Bath, Manchester, and Princeton have developed a simple model to explain how altruism may have evolved in humans:
The key insight is that the total size of population that can be supported depends on the proportion of cooperators: more cooperation means more food for all and a larger population. If, due to chance, there is a random increase in the number of cheats then there is not enough food to go around and total population size will decrease. Conversely, a random decrease in the number of cheats will allow the population to grow to a larger size, disproportionally benefitting the cooperators. In this way, the cooperators are favoured by chance, and are more likely to win in the long term.
Dr George Constable, soon to join the University of Bath from Princeton, uses the analogy of flipping a coin, where heads wins £20 but tails loses £10:
"Although the odds winning or losing are the same, winning is more good than losing is bad. Random fluctuations in cheat numbers are exploited by the cooperators, who benefit more then they lose out."
So cheating works, but not for very long, so cooperation works better over the long term.
The Chicago sunrise chart for 2016-17 is up, just a few weeks late. (Look, I've been busy.)
Yesterday, after a run of 77 days (beating my previous record of 70), I missed my Fitbit step goal by less than 800 steps. So embarrassing.
From May 9th until July 24th, I walked 10,000 steps every day. Then yesterday I didn't notice I was stuck at 9,200 when I was out with friends. An 8-minute walk could have taken care of that.
Crap.
From AVWeb: one of the world's two remaining B-29 Superfortresses flew for the first time this weekend after being grounded for more than 60 years.
From CityLab: Nice's surveillance network is extensive—possibly too extensive to do any good.
From New Republic:
Over in the Atlantic, James Fallows just adds it to the list of things historians will probably wonder about (at #44) and why it matters (#45).
Cranky Flier reports on a different batch of corruption after United Airlines released documents showing how its bid in Newark, N.J., for a new hangar went south. Literally.
At New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan live-blogged day 1 of the Republican National Convention.
At The New Yorker, Jane Mayer talked with Tony Schwartz, the man who wrote Trump's Art of the Deal.
And here at home, from Crain's Chicago Business, how former governor Jim Edgar has gone from coaching current governor Bruce Rauner gently to calling him out in public.
Because I need to read all of these and have to do my actual job first:
I'll get to these this evening. I hope.
Chicago saw the end of an era today:
The final Chicago-made Oreo cookies will roll off the line Friday, ending the iconic cookie's decadeslong run of delighting consumers and providing good-paying union jobs on the Southwest Side.
The last Oreo line at the Mondelez International plant is shutting down as the global snack and confectionary company shifts some of its production to Mexico. As part of the move announced last summer, the company said it would be laying off about half of the plant's 1,200 workers; many of them are already gone. The Chicago plant will continue to make other products, like BelVita breakfast biscuits and Mini Chips Ahoy cookies. Oreo cookies will continue to be made at three other plants in the U.S. — just not at the brick bakery at 7300 S. Kedzie Ave.
In making the decision, Mondelez executives said they could save $46 million a year by installing the so-called "lines of the future" in Salinas, Mexico, rather than Chicago.
You can get a lot of Double-Stuf for $46m.