The Daily Parker

The only reaction to last night's debate that I need to share is Cassie's:

Talk about on-the-nose commentary!

Right. Anyway, in other news since yesterday:

• Elaine Godfrey explains what Democrats don't understand about JD Vance.
• Julia Ioffe interviews Justice Dept official Matt Olsen, who heads up the Biden Administration's anti-election-interference group.
• Meteorologists estimate that Hurricane Helene dumped 150 trillion liters of water on Appalachia as it stalled out, with one town in North Carolina getting a staggering 796 mm of rain.

Finally, the New York Times dips into the history of chicken tenders, an American pub staple that (allegedly) turns 50 this year. Love me tenders, love me sauce...

President Jimmy Carter turned 100 today, making him the first former president to do so. James Fallows has a bit of hagiography on his blog today, and the State of Georgia has declared today "Jimmy Carter Day." I hope I make it to 100, too, but I don't expect the State of Illinois to declare that day a public holiday.

In other news:

• Hussein Ibish says Hezbollah got caught in a trap of its own making when it attacked Israel a year ago.
• A Chicago ordinance takes effect next Tuesday that will grant the right of first refusal of the sale of their buildings to thousands of apartment dwellers under threat of gentrification.
• Novelist Ross Barkan takes another look at Robert Caro's 1974 doorstopper The Power Broker, a book I got about 2/3 through before I gave up.
• Cranky Flier analyzes Southwest Airlines' decision to follow all the others out there and assign seats on its flights.

Finally, yesterday the UK turned off its last operating coal-fired power plant, ending a 142-year run of burning coal to generate power. XKCD points out that in those 142 years, the UK burned the equivalent of about 3 inches of its land surface generating electricity.

And of course, I'll watch the Vice-Presidential Debate tonight at 9pm Eastern, but I don't plan to live-blog. Reactions tomorrow, though.

I can scarcely believe I took these 10 days ago, on Friday the 20th. I already posted about my walk from Borough Market back to King's X; this is where I started:

You can get a lovely snack there for just a few quid. In my case, a container of fresh olives, some bread, and some cheese set me back about £6. Next time, I'll try something from Mei Mei.

Later, I scored one of the rare pork baps at Southampton Arms. Someone else really wanted a bite, too:

Sorry, little guy, I can't give you any of this—oh darn I just dropped a bit of pork on the ground. (Lucky dog.)

Finally, this screen shot shows why I love Europe so much. (It's in French because I switched my phone's language settings to help practice while I was preparing for the trip.) The blue dot in the center-left shows where my train was at 20:06 France time (18:06 UTC) on Saturday the 21st. The stuff in the upper-right corner shows my phone's GPS utility. If you look at the left side of that box, you can see "Vitesse 303;" i.e., a speed of 303 km/h, or 190 mph. And that isn't even the train's top normal operating speed.

If we elect people in this country who actually care about climate change, we could have trains like that here, too. But given the proportion of the electorate who plan to vote for the convicted-felon rapist demented geriatric XPOTUS in five weeks, I am not optimistic.

Because I had a busy weekend, I had quite a full inbox this morning. After deleting the 85% of it that came from the Democratic Party and the Harris-Walz campaign (guys, you've already got my vote, FFS), I still had quite a few items of interest:

• Michael Tomasky reminds everyone: the XPOTUS is an evil buffoon, not an evil genius.
• Yesterday that same evil buffoon mooted a "Purge"-like day for the police to rough everyone up a bit.
• Contra most New York Times articles this election cycle, the Post's Jennifer Rubin lays out Kamala Harris's actual policy proposals.
• The Tribune's Laura Washington asks the same question I've asked several times: why is Dorval Carter still the CTA president?
• Chicago will elect half its school board for the first time in November, but other than a few articles in Block Club, no one seems to care.
• Over 100,000 Verizon customers lost service across the country today; no one knows why yet.
• The National Institute of Standards and Technology has finally proposed common-sense password recommendations that I hope someone in my company's Global Corporate Services IT department actually reads.
• Because of climate change, Switzerland and Italy have to redraw part of their shared border in the Alps.

Finally, astronomers have found a rocky, Earth-sized planet orbiting a dying main-sequence white dwarf star, seemingly having survived the star's expansion during its red-giant phase. This suggests that our planet may last until the end of time itself. Life on Earth probably won't last more than a billion more years, but that's someone else's problem.

I had the opportunity, but not the energy, to bugger off from Heathrow for an hour and a half or so connecting from Marseille. Instead I found a vacant privacy pod in the Galleries South lounge, and had a decent lunch. Plus I'm about to have a G&T.

I've loaded up my Surface with a few articles, but I really only want to call attention to one of them. Bruce Schneier has an op-ed in the New York Times with his perspective on the Hezbollah pager attack and supply-chain vulnerabilities in general. I may even read that before turning my Surface off.

Next stop: Chicago, home, and dog.

This floored me. The Lebanese health minister reported earlier that 8 people died and 2,750 suffered injuries when thousands of pagers exploded this morning in Lebanon and Syria:

Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abia, said the blasts killed eight people, including a girl. “About 2,750 people were injured ... more than 200 of them critically,” with injuries mostly reported to the face, hands and stomach, he told a press conference.

Hezbollah said in a statement that two of its fighters and a 10-year-old girl were among the dead.

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was one of those injured in the explosions, according to Iran’s Mehr news agency.

Some of the top Hezbollah leaders and their advisers were also injured, the Saudi-owned Al-Hadath news channel reported, quoting unnamed sources.

A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.

Yossi Melman, a co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence, said: “This absolutely has all the hallmarks of a Mossad operation. Somebody has planted minor explosives or malware from inside the pagers. I understand they were recently supplied as well.”

Melman said he understood that “a lot of people in Hezbollah carried these pagers, not just top echelon commanders”. They were used by the Lebanese group because they feared their mobile phones were being monitored by Israeli intelligence to surveil their communications and to pinpoint missile attacks.

That (a) someone managed to supply thousands of Hezbollah terrorists with booby-trapped pagers and (b) no one in Hezbollah conducted security checks on the pagers before handing them out blows my mind. Regardless of who perpetrated this attack, (a) I am very sorry the little girl died but (b) for the Hezbollah fighters and leaders injured in the attack, I will shed not one tear. It's simultaneously one of the most effective intelligence operations and one of the worst counter-espionage failures in decades. Wow.

Other than having absolutely no real value except to scammers and thieves, cryptocurrency has no real value. But a lot of money gets laundered through crypto these days, so people will spend gobs of real currency building data centers to generate more cryptocurrency. These data centers efficiently dump nearly all the externalities of crypto mining onto their neighbors, except for the externalities crypto already dumps on just about everybody else. Oh, don't let me forget that simulated artificial intelligence also needs big data centers:

Across the country, from Indiana to Oregon, companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are building data centers on sites that can stretch over 1,000 acres, ringed with guard towers and razor wire fences.

People who live near one Northern Virginia center have complained that the mechanical whir of the fleet of industrial fans needed to cool the sensitive computer equipment inside can sound like a leaf blower that never turns off. Cooling the heavy equipment also diverts great volumes of water even in places where it’s scarce. And some of the costs of powering the centers are shouldered by utility customers, in the form of hundreds of dollars a year added to household energy bills.

Local leaders who run interference on behalf of tech giants often play up the benefits, particularly the jobs and advanced technical training opportunities they tout. Recently, a small but growing number of officials have begun to question these deals. In Georgia, where electricity demand and energy grid strain from more than 50 data centers pushed residential utility bills up almost $200 a year on average per household, state senators passed a bill earlier this year that would pause tax incentives for data center development for the next two years.

One thing Cooper doesn't suggest: increasing penalties on public officials who benefit personally from their offices. But that would undermine American-style democracy, wouldn't it?

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently ruled in Hachette v Internet Archive that the Internet Archive's Open Library violated copyright law. Molly White today published the best response I have seen so far:

My beliefs are simple, and hardly radical: Libraries are critical infrastructure. Access to information is a human right. When you buy a book you should truly own it. When a library buys a book, they should be able to lend it. Readers should be able to read without any third parties spying over their shoulders, or preventing them from accessing the materials they have legally obtained.

Hachette and the other plaintiff publishers have argued that, by lending out one-to-one digital copies of books they have legally purchased, the Internet Archive’s Open Library is infringing upon the publishers’ copyright and damaging their sales. And, without any evidence of actual harm to the publishers, the Second Circuit went right along with it. They also went a step further, again without evidence, to suggest that libraries are inherently detrimental to society.

[B]y fighting [Controlled Digital Lending], publishers are seeking to overstep the established boundaries of intellectual property law to exert continued control over an item that has already been purchased from them. And they are seeking to diminish the critical rights of readers to read the books they want without being subjected to censorship and surveillance. This is part and parcel with other attempts by digital publishers — of books, but also of films, video games, and other media — to turn media purchases into rentals, so as to extract endless money and private data from their customers.

In other words: even though libraries have been around far longer than the Copyright Act itself, libraries are now a threat to authors. The true meaning is clear: publishers’ abilities to extract exorbitant rents and exert control over readers outweigh the incredible benefits of increased public access to books.

US law protects rentiers better than most of our peer countries' laws do. Yet another reason to get the plutocratic Republicans out of Congress.

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.

Oh, my, the morning newspapers were not kind to the geriatric demented convicted-felon XPOTUS.

Frank Bruni: "Trump made a raving, rambling fool of himself on Tuesday night, and while Harris by no means did everything right, she had the good sense to alternately call him out on that and simply watch him unravel. She had the discipline to shake her head sadly and smile dismissively when he made laughably false accusations against her. She had the skill — here, on full display, was the prosecutor in her — to needle him into maximal seething."

Josh Marshall: "[W]hat Harris had to do in this debate was show she could handle Donald Trump, even dominate him if possible and do so in a way that was steady and forceful. She did that. And that puts her on a path toward sealing the deal with that small fraction of voters who will determine the outcome of the election. Not a done deal but she took the critical first step. She also managed a bonus, which wasn’t absolutely necessary, which was to set Trump off, rambling, incoherent and angry. He was practically yelling by the end of the debate. She baited him into acting out the role of her foil."

Michelle Norris: "The vice president clearly got under Trump’s skin when she suggested that people were leaving his rallies early out of boredom. We knew ahead of this that she knows how to throw a punch. She confirmed this when she turned to him and calmly said, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. ... Clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that.” One last thing, in their closing arguments, Harris aimed hers at the audience. Donald Trump gave up the moment by going on the attack one last time. A missed opportunity for him."

Michael Tomasky: "Kamala Harris was really good Tuesday night—really, really good. She accomplished everything she needed to accomplish. She sliced and diced him. She dangled bait, and he leapt at the hook. But as good as she was, Trump was more bad than Harris was good. Or maybe he was bad because she was good: That is to say, she wrong-footed him time after time after time in ways that President Joe Biden did not, throwing him off his game, staring him down, speaking directly to him, challenging him, saying “you” and pointing right at him. She spanked him. Said Stephanie Ruhle, in a judgment Trump would consider crushing: “She beat him at the business of television.” "

The Guardian's David Smith: "In the old days candidates might have riposted by saying Nelson Mandela or some other moral paragon was on their side. Trump reached out for the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán. “He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president.” But Harris had more ammunition: “It is well known that he admires dictators, wants to be a dictator on day one according to himself ... And it is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they’re so clear, they can manipulate you with flattery and favours.” A dictator like Putin, she added, “would eat you for lunch”."

The Economist: "Ms Harris baited hook after hook for Mr Trump over the course of their 90-minute debate and each time he lunged for it. Whether she was invoking his old business school, Wharton, in attacking his economic plans, or implying his business success was due to a gigantic inheritance, or claiming world leaders did not respect him, Ms Harris repeatedly provoked Mr Trump to defend his self-image and his own record in office, rather than mount a sustained attack on her. Call it catch-and-decrease: she made the former president look small and angry and out of his depth. For most of the debate, she made herself appear the challenger, while he became the beleaguered incumbent with a record to defend. ... Ms Harris surely did not convert any supporters of Mr Trump—who could?—but she may have assured some of the few independent-minded voters left that she is up to the job."

John Scalzi: "[L]ast night, Donald Trump was at the best any of us will ever see him again. This was the one place and time where he was meant to be prepared, coherent and presidential, where he was not surrounded by handlers, coddlers and sycophants. This was meant to be the one place and time where he was meant to keep his id and his ego in check, put voters and Americans first, and make a case for a second shot at the presidency. This was the one place and time where his worst and most self-indulgent impulses were supposed to be reined in. This was Trump on his best and most decent behavior, or at the very least, the best and most behavior he is capable of. We see how that went."

Half an hour after the debate ended, singer Taylor Swift made an Instagram post that has 8.8 million likes so far: "I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. ... With love and hope, Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady"

And, of course, Alexandra Petri deserves a link.

Fifty-five days left.