The Daily Parker

I had a lot going on this morning, so I'm only now snarfing down a Chipotle bowl. Also, I'm going to have to read these things tomorrow:

• Over 100 candidates, including a dog, will stand for election in Toronto's mayoral election on the 26th.
• Writing for Mother Jones, Ali Breland thinks the content-creator rebellion at Reddit won't stop what Corey Doctorow calls "the enshittification" of online platforms.
• Similarly, private-equity debt has killed yet another good company making good products, Insta-Pot.
• After what insiders call a deliberate campaign by New York mayor Eric Adams to strip her of power, New York City's police commissioner Keechant Sewell abruptly resigned Monday.
• Despite yesterday's rain around Chicago, the drought in Illinois has gotten worse.
• Save the firefiles!
• Tinley Park, Ill., has launched a brewery trolley that technically puts 2 new breweries on the Brews & Choos list. (I had plans to return to Banging Gavel later this summer anyway, as they're about to open the Vogt House to the public.)
• The list of people excited about the NASCAR race in downtown Chicago keeps getting shorter.

Finally, today is the 35th anniversary of the best baseball movie of all time, Bull Durham. If I had time I'd watch it tonight.

Coach US Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), whose election to the Senate in 2020 coincided with the elections of Representatives Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO), has given those two a good race to the bottom of the IQ charts since all three took office. But I have to give him the "dumbest person in Congress" honors just on the basis of his current program of holding up all general officer promotions in the Senate.

Tuberville, who has never served in the military, explained his reasoning in April: "Experts have known for more than a decade that the military is top heavy. We do not suffer from a lack of generals," Tuberville said. "When my dad served in World War II, we had one general for every 6,000 troops. Think about that: one for every 6,000. Now, we have one general for every 1,400 enlisted service members."

In just a few weeks, Tuberville's obstinance will leave us without officers in the following positions:

• Army Chief of Staff
• Chief of Naval Operations
• Commandant of the Marine Corps
• and up to 650 other admirals and generals this year alone.

That's 3/5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not including the Chair, who plans to retire soon. Also we will have several areas of the world where our allies or adversaries have 3- or 4-star officers that will have to interface with 2- or 3-star Americans, which is an astounding loss of face for us and an insult to them.

This also holds up promotions to lower-ranking service members, as O7 and higher officers must sign off on awards and assignments to the senior officer corps. This affects readiness as those officers can't plan to move their families to their new duty stations, and can't collect the pay they've earned for their promotions, until they formally "put on" their new ranks.

I'm also aware of service members overseas who can't visit their families because there isn't an admiral or general to sign off on them visiting certain countries (like the Philippines) or, in some cases, taking any leave at all. This is already having deleterious effects on morale and retention, in some of the most dangerous places in the world, like Korea.

Why is Tuberville doing this? Abortion, of course. And because he has no idea how the military actually works, or why we need proportionately more high-ranking officers than we did when we had 12 million men and women in the military. (Today we have about 1/4 that number.)

Just to get a handful of promotions through, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Democratic senators may have to hold roll-call votes on the Senate floor, which takes a lot of time. As of last week, Tuberville is blocking 221 promotions, and that number will continue to get larger as generals and admirals retire. So even with roll-calls on each nominee, there simply isn't enough time to get them all through.

When you elect clowns, you get a circus.

We've got a cool snap going into its third day here, and despite the 16 hours of daylight, it feels like autumn. But this happens every June. We just forget every year.

Coming on the heels of the studies saying I don't need 10,000 steps to stay healthy, I can honestly report I'll stay healthy today without getting 10,000 steps.

Dr Aaron Carroll of Indiana University studied five other rich-country health systems to figure out what we need in the US:

We are one of the few developed countries that does not have universal coverage. We spend an extraordinary amount on health care, far more than anyone else. And our broad outcomes are middling at best.

When we do pay attention to this issue, our debates are profoundly unproductive. Discussions of reform here in the United States seem to focus on two options: Either we maintain the status quo of what we consider a “private” system, or we move toward a single-payer system like Canada’s.

It’s outrageous that the health care system hasn’t been a significant issue in the 2024 presidential race so far.

Even if we did have that national conversation, I fear we’d be arguing about the wrong things. We have spent the last several decades fighting about health insurance coverage.

No other country I’ve visited has these debates the way we do. Insurance is really just about moving money around. It’s the least important part of the health care system.

Universal coverage matters. What doesn’t is how you provide that coverage, whether it’s a fully socialized National Health Service, modified single-payer schemes, regulated nonprofit insurance or private health savings accounts. All of the countries I visited have some sort of mechanism that provides everyone coverage in an easily explained and uniform way. That allows them to focus on other, more important aspects of health care.

It's almost as if entrenched special interests, like the insurance industry, want us to keep debating insurance rather than health care outcomes. And we seem to fall for it every election.

We lost three people last week whose deaths have made the world ever so slightly better on balance. Religious swindler Pat Robertson went first on Wednesday. Then Saturday, Ted Kaczynski, also known as the "Unabomber" for his terror campaign against university professors in the 1990s, killed himself in his jail cell:

Kaczynski was found unresponsive in his cell around 12:30 a.m. ET and transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Kaczynski was previously in a maximum security facility in Colorado but was moved to a federal medical center in Butner, North Carolina, in December 2021 due to poor health.

Kaczynski, who went nearly 20 years without being captured until his arrest in 1996, was considered America's most prolific bomber.

Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski placed or mailed 16 bombs that killed three people and injured two dozen others, according to authorities.

Finally, yesterday the world lost Silvio Berlusconi, the corrupt former prime minister of Italy whose entry into politics to stymie the many legal cases against him  may have inspired the XPOTUS to do the same:

Liberal politicians, and the prosecutors he demonized as their judicial wing, watched in dismay as he used appeals and statutes of limitations to avoid punishment despite being convicted of false accounting, bribing judges and illegal political party financing.

His governments spent an inordinate amount of time on laws that seemed tailor-made to protect him from decades of corruption trials, a goal that some of his closest advisers acknowledged was why he had entered politics in the first place.

One law overturned a court ruling that would have required Mr. Berlusconi to give up one of his TV networks; others downgraded the crime of false accounting and reduced the statute of limitations by half, effectively cutting short several trials involving his businesses. He enjoyed parliamentary immunity, but in 2003 his government went further, passing a law granting him immunity from prosecution while he remained in office — in effect suspending his corruption trials.

By the time he finally resigned in 2011, amid a fractured conservative coalition and general national malaise, a good deal of damage seemed to have been done. Many analysts held him responsible for harming Italy’s reputation and financial health and considered his time in power a lost decade that the country had struggled to recover from.

On a totally different topic, while I traveled last week I read Death of the Great Man by psychiatrist Peter Kramer, a book journalist James Fallows recommended back in April.

OK, maybe not a totally different topic. You should read the book, though.

The Post rounds up more doctors saying 7,000 or 8,000 steps a day is just fine:

The notion to take 10,000 daily steps stems from a marketing ploy: As the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics approached, a Japanese researcher decided to nudge his nation to be more active by offering pedometers with a name that loosely translated as “10,000-step meter.” (The Japanese character for the number 10,000 looks a little like a person walking.)

In the past few years, multiple large-scale studies have stepped up, looking closely into how many steps we probably need for our health and longevity. In the largest, published last year in the Lancet Public Health, dozens of global researchers pooled data from 15 earlier step-count studies, some unpublished, covering 47,471 adults of all ages, and compared their typical daily step counts to their longevity.

The sweet spot for step counts was not 10,000 or more. In general, the pooled data showed that for men and women younger than age 60, the greatest relative reductions in the risk of dying prematurely came with step counts of between about 8,000 and 10,000 per day.

For people older than age 60, the threshold was a little lower. For them, the sweet spot in terms of reduced mortality risk came at between 6,000 and 8,000 steps a day.

Walking more than 10,000 steps a day wasn’t bad for people — it didn’t increase the risk of dying — but also didn’t add much, in terms of reducing mortality risks.

Chicago historian John R. Schmidt tells the story of a guy who would have had some amazing step counts in his day:

His name was Edward Payson Weston.

By 1867 he was deeply in debt when he met a promoter named George Goodwin. Remembering Weston’s inauguration trek, Goodwin bet fellow businessman T.F. Wilcox $10,000 that Weston could walk the 1,972 km from Portland, Maine, to Chicago in thirty days.

Weston eagerly agreed to the plan. His share of the possible winnings would be $4,000. He would also receive a $6,000 bonus if he walked 100 miles in a single day.

Weston stepped off from Portland at noon on October 29, 1867. He covered the first 105 miles to Boston in two days without incident. Then, as he moved through New England, crowds began to gather. In anticipation of the turn-out, Weston carried with him a supply of studio portraits, which he sold for twenty-five cents each.

Thousands of spectators lined Wabash Avenue as Weston made his victory lap on November 28—Thanksgiving Day. They waved American flags and cheered themselves hoarse. As the conquering hero approached the Sherman House hotel, the crush was so thick that police had to clear the way. At the hotel he gave a short speech to his admirers before retiring.

Assuming he had a normal stride, his walk from Maine to Chicago would have taken about 2.4 million steps, or a little over 92,000 per day. And, one would expect, a few dozen pairs of socks.

Police Scotland has arrested Nicola Sturgeon, who resigned as first minister of Scotland two months ago, as part of their investigation into allegations the SNP misspent £600,000 of donated money:

Her husband, Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the SNP, was arrested at their home in Uddingston near Glasgow on 5 April, and interviewed under caution for nearly 12 hours before being released without charge.

The police searched their home and back garden, and also searched the SNP’s headquarters under warrant, taking out boxes of documents and computers.

Colin Beattie MSP, then the party’s treasurer, was arrested and questioned as part of the same inquiry on 18 April and also released later without charge, pending further investigation.

The BBC has a timeline of the investigation.

I've just read the indictment against the XPOTUS and his "body man" Walt Nauta. Wow. As a FBI agent in The West Wing once remarked, "In 13 years with the Bureau I've discovered that there's no amount of money, manpower or knowledge than can equal the person you're looking for being stupid." And wow, was the XPOTUS stupid.

I'm not a practicing lawyer but I can read an indictment. If the US Attorneys can prove any of these facts—and I have no doubt they will—he's going to get convicted of a felony. Oddly, under our Constitution, he can still run for a second term if that happens, though he won't be able to vote for himself in Florida. But as Josh Marshall points out, the larger issues just distract from the utterly banal issues:

I wanted to share one thought.

That is the sheer ordinariness of the whole story. That may seem like a odd thing to say: ex-President facing multiple federal felony indictments for the first time ever, the bizarre details of this antic clown’s Florida Villa-cum-Hotel stuffed with banker’s boxes of classified documents, the bathroom chandelier, the power glitz jammed together with gaudy dime store aesthetic. But we grant Trump too much by lavishing, wearying too much in the purported weightiness of the moment. It’s very normal. Yes, powerful people get away with a lot. But if you commit crimes repeatedly and brazenly you’re very likely to get charged with one or more crimes, particularly if you’re in the public spotlight.

We hear endlessly how everyone not thoroughly in Trump’s thrall wants to ‘move on’ from the man. The first and most important part of that is shaking free of the reality distortion field that surrounds the man, as much for his foes as his followers. He’s hit with charges with evidence of his guilt that is clear and overwhelming and he jumps to the front to declare no one ever thought this could happen or be possible. He didn’t do it … but of course he was perfectly entitled to do it, even though he chose not to. Remember, he could have but chose not to. Got it? He attacks, defames. People get caught up in the frenzy of his seeming invulnerability and transgressive nature, the entertainment and the confusion. They’re wondering what he’ll do next. They’re baffled and suddenly the obvious ceases to be obvious.

Don’t be baffled. You may be thinking somehow there’s no way he’ll actually get convicted of anything. You’re wrong. He probably will. Maybe not. That happens too. That’s normal. It’s all normal.

I lived in New York in the late '80s and late '90s, and we always thought that the XPOTUS would never survive first contact with law enforcement. It took a while, but eventually his narcissism, unaccountability, and yes, his tiny little hands mind would eventually lead us here.

One more thing. John Scalzi called out all the remaining XPOTUS supporters to "get off the train," but hit on the reason they won't: "no one who is still on the Trump train at this point in 2023 is there for logical or rational reasons, you’re probably...stuck too far down in the grift to ever admit you’re the chump." But wow, the national security implications of this indictment alone should have every rational person in the country running from this guy.

I filled up my car this afternoon, which doesn't sound like anything special until you see the numbers:

• Last filled up: August 21st, 292 days ago
• Total distance: 3,115.6 km
• Total fuel used: 32.8 L
• Fuel efficiency: 1.1 L/100 km
• Operating cost per kilometer: 5.9c

Good going, car. You're getting the extra-tasty electricity tonight!

Televangelist and horrible person Pat Robertson has died, after a long career grifting true believers for billions:

Rev. Robertson, the son of a long-serving U.S. congressman and senator from Virginia, was among the first evangelists to take religion out of the realm of private belief and into the secular arena of politics. In large part through his influence, the Christian right became a potent force in American politics and culture.

Although he bristled at the term televangelist, Rev. Robertson was one of the most popular and influential religious figures of his time. For decades, he was the host of “The 700 Club,” a casual talk show that combined hard-right politics, faith healing and lifestyle news. Broadcast in dozens of languages and in more than 200 countries, the show made Rev. Robertson the world’s most-watched TV preacher.

In addition to his TV programs, Rev. Robertson made public appearances and produced dozens of books and videos as he built a business empire that brought in more than $300 million a year at its height.

“In the not-too-distant past, the charismatic and Pentecostal wing of American Protestantism saw political engagement as a ‘worldly’ and sinful activity,” the late Michael Cromartie, who was vice president of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center and a longtime watcher of the evangelical movement, said in a 2011 interview with The Post. “Pat Robertson, perhaps more than anyone in the charismatic wing of conservative Protestantism, was pivotal in creating this paradigm shift.”

In Inferno, Dante described nine circles of Hell, each with its specific punishments for specific kinds of sin. I haven't read the whole poem, so it's not immediately clear to me whether Robertson would head down to the 8th Circle (fraudsters), possibly in the 6th Bolgia (hypocrites) or maybe he'd get off lightly in the 4th Circle (greed). 

In my imagination, he'll spend the next several thousand years apologizing to everyone he's hurt, either directly (for example, through stealing money under the guise of religion) or indirectly (for example, all the gay people his followers harmed at his urging).

As long as credulous people walk the earth, grifters like Robertson will be there to fleece them. But it's good when someone of his stature descends to his just reward.