The Daily Parker

Even though I put aside Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism for the moment because it was just too depressing, I do still think about the ongoing destruction of the United States from within.

Over the weekend I realized that one way the billionaire class have approached their accelerating theft of our collective wealth is to attack the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. By undermining the lowest two levels, physiological needs and safety needs, they render entire communities unable even to address the higher needs that the modern Democratic Party tends to worry about.

This makes it even more of an imperative for our party to present an actual plan for how we're going to make sure people have homes, food, health care, and physical security. This shouldn't be hard. Until we do, people won't have any space in their minds for long-term infrastructure project let alone social justice.

The Republican Party, in service of their billionaire donors, have bombed the US Government back to the 18th Century. We've go a lot of work to do before we can campaign on DEI or UBI. I don't for a second want us to stop doing those things; but FFS, we need to talk about much simpler issues until people feel secure enough to listen.

It's no accident that the most prosperous period in the most prosperous country in world history coincided with a strong middle class, highly progressive taxes, and strong labor unions. Only then did people have the mental energy to worry about civil rights for people they'd never meet. And the Republican Party has spent the last 70 years trying to prevent and then undo those gains.

Everything we're seeing is about corruption: taking money from us and giving it to billionaires instead of investing it in the country. It won't stop until we make it stop by winning back power and taxing the shit out of them.

The OAFPOTUS met with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, yesterday. I can't overstate that Putin won on so many levels, from getting the OAFPOTUS to agree to meeting on US soil in the first place to getting the OAFPOTUS to stomp on a rake on international television right at the end of it.

Let's start with the location. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin that most ICC signatories have said they will honor. We're not signatories, in part because President GW Bush was afraid of getting arrested overseas for the Iraq debacle. So the US is one of only a handful of countries Putin can even visit.

Next, though the OAFPOTUS probably doesn't remember this if he even learned it in the first place, Russia sold Alaska to the US in 1867 for $7 million (about $150 million today). Putin has made lots of noise about restoring Russian "greatness," making photos of him standing on the ground in Alaska a tremendous win for his domestic agenda. We gave this thing of great value to him for nothing. Nothing.

As even Ted Baxter could have predicted, the summit ended with no deal.

Then came the news conference, at which Putin said with a shit-eating grin while the OAFPOTUS wiped the shit off of his chin, "Next time, in Moscow." In fucking ENGLISH, just to twist the knife a bit more.

Oh, just FUCK YOU VERY MUCH, Vlad. I don't have the mental energy to explain all the ways that was possibly the most insulting, most trolling, least serious way he could possibly have ended the conference. And all of our allies and adversaries understood him perfectly.

Did the OAFPOTUS respond with at least the diplomatic awareness of the lunch lady at Foggy Bottom by saying something like, "Thank you for the thought, Mr President, but we have a lot of work to do before we can begin to consider such a step"? Of course not. No, the lunch lady at Foggy Bottom desperately wished she could wrap a diaper around his incontinent mouth, because the OAFPOTUS instead said, "Ooh, that's an interesting one. Uhh, I'll get a little heat for that happening, but I could see it possibly happening."

Somebody, please, invoke the 25th already. And Donald, please zip up your fly; no one needs to see that.

So, yesterday we got less than nothing. Ukraine got nothing (which, ironically, was better than they feared). Putin got everything he wanted and more. He played the OAFPOTUS like Stevie Ray Vaughn played a '63 Stratocaster. It was like watching your asshole uncle Dwayne go hard-core in Sorry! against a toddler. (At least the toddler would have the sense to cry and throw the board at him.)

I know I promised to concentrate on calling out the guy's corruption and not the myriad other ways he doesn't have the fitness of mind or morals to serve as a Chicago alderman, let alone President of the United States. But holy shit, this was one of the most embarrassing US diplomatic own-goals of the past hundred years.

Brendan McGann cannot come to the White House, and Vladimir Putin cannot come to the United States. This isn't hard.

Update: It gets better. State Department officials appear to have left behind classified documents that "shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees" on a fucking public printer. Putin was already laughing so hard on the flight home that they heard him in Japan, and we just gave him a lagniappe.

The OAFPOTUS has moved to federalize the Washington, D.C., police force under the DC Home Rule statute that gives him a little more than a month to do so before Congress has to consent. As with many of his more dramatic trolls, this has sent everyone to the left of Mitch McConnell into varying degrees of outrage.

Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort warn that the "military crackdowns are only going to get worse:"

The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end with D.C. and L.A., that other military options are very much on the table. The facts, the laws, and data do not seem to matter: Trump and his team believe he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, including using the U.S. armed forces for domestic political purposes as well as intimidating his enemies. His team is privately putting together plans for him to do just that.

Trump has long yearned to unleash the military on American soil for his political agenda, and the D.C. and L.A. deployments this summer are critical stepping stones in his increasingly authoritarian government’s vision for punishing his enemies Democratic area of the country, carrying out his brutal immigration agenda, and making life hell for unhoused people. Trump said on Monday that federal forces will work to remove “homeless encampments from all over our parks,” and that the unhoused will not be “allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.”

Trump officials note that it is a priority of the president’s that these kinds of military deployments — in L.A., and now D.C., in times of relative calm — become normalized in American political culture.

(Emphasis mine.) Federal agents have already started clearing DC homeless encampments and marching the homeless off to jail in a show of performative cruelty unmatched since Jim Crow.

Josh Marshall warns us not to get distracted by the legal niceties and to look at this as the first of many steps to occupy left-leaning US cities:

My argument was that even though the unique rules governing DC make this legal it is by Trump’s own argument part of a rollout he envisions for using federal police (ICE, CBP, FBI) and the National Guard to start taking over policing in big U.S. cities, universally blue cities and in every case in blue states.

We are fundamentally in a battle over public opinion. If a decisive majority of the public opposes Trump, his rule and criminality won’t stand. What follows from that is that what might be technically legal under some obscure statute or simply unreviewable isn’t the point. That’s deep in the weeds. That’s Michael Dukakis delving into statutes and principled opposition to the death penalty when the moment calls for modulated fury and outrage.

The issue is do people want to live under martial law, in cities occupied by the military.

Radley Balko breaks down "the White House lies about DC:"

So let’s get this out of the way, first: As I wrote in my previous post, Donald Trump’s “takeover” of Washington, D.C. is authoritarian thuggery. It’s a projection of power, driven by retrograde racism. It has nothing to do with recent crimes, or actual crime, or actual crime rates. We know this because it’s been in the works for more than a year. That said, I think it’s still important to point out when they’re lying. And everything they’re claiming in justification of the deployment of National Guard troops to D.C. is a lie.

This seems like a good time to remind everyone that when he first entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump inherited the lowest murder rate of any president in 50 years. Four years later, he was the first president in 30 years to leave with a higher murder rate than when he started.

Deploying the military won’t make people safer — and it won’t make people feel safer. We’re seeing more disorder because the pandemic brought a surge in mental illness, substance abuse, and homelessness, and funding for social programs hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Now that the Trump administration has taken a huge bite out of federal supplemental funding for those programs, it’s probably going to get worse.

I’m fairly comfortable predicting that, contrary to the administration’s claims, Donald Trump will not end crime in D.C. I’ll also go out on a limb and predict that the Democrats are not going to unravel civilization. To the extent that our own civilization is in jeopardy, Donald Trump is a big part of the cause.

NPR's Steve Inskeep, a DC resident, says "of course DC has crime," but c'mon, man:

[T]here is crime, and local politicos know they need to address it. But that’s not really the question raised by President Trump’s decision to seize formal control of the DC police and send in federal agents to help them.

Trump’s declaration, and all the rhetoric that accompanied it, lean into prejudice. People who do not live in big cities are conditioned to be afraid of them. I learned this as someone who did not grow up in a big city. The declaration plays on that fear, and widens the gulf between Americans.

Statistics are different from place to place. But unfortunately, crime is everywhere and anywhere; you are more likely to have a drug problem in your own family or on your own block than you are to encounter trouble in somebody else’s city.

James Fallows contrasts the OAFPOTUS's deranged ranting with "what it actually 'feels like' in DC:"

Donald Trump obviously does not know this city. According to press accounts, and to judge by his own rhetoric, Trump lurched into declaring a “public safety emergency” for DC based mainly on two pieces of evidence. One was the reported injury of the 19-year-old former Doge staffer Edward Coristine, generally known as “Big Balls,” in an alleged carjacking. The other was Trump’s alarm at seeing a homeless encampment while being driven from the White House to his own golf course in Northern Virginia.

Anyone in DC can tell you that it has big problems. My experience is that the same is true of anyone in Shanghai about their home city, anyone in LA about LA, any Londoner about London, anyone anywhere about the place they live.

But if you can find anybody who knew the area in the 1970s, the 1980s, or even the 1990s, and does not think that the DC of 2025 is vastly more pleasant, more stimulating, more beautiful, more environmentally sustainable, more cultured, better managed, and safer than it was a generation ago, then you have found someone detached from reality.

What’s the even bigger problem for DC? Taxation without representation.

Anyone paying attention to city life in the US knows the OAFPOTUS is full of shit. But that doesn't mean he can't make life difficult for everyone he hates. I'm glad DC is pushing back to the extent they're able, and I know that Illinois will push back as well if he tries that shit here. It's going to be a long 18 months until the next Congress.

Ninety years ago today, FDR signed Social Security into law:

In his public statement that day, FDR expressed concern for “young people [who] have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age” as well as those who had employment but no job security. Although he acknowledged that “we can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life,” he hoped the act would prevent senior citizens from ending up impoverished.

Although it was initially created to combat unemployment, Social Security now functions primarily as a powerful safety net for retirees and the disabled, and provides death benefits to taxpayer dependents. The Social Security system has remained popular and relatively unchanged since 1935.

Alas, the Republican Party has wanted to end or privatize Social Security since, oh, 1935, and they're getting closer to doing so. (Just look what they did to schools in Texas.) It would be the biggest heist in history and it would risk the retirement security of millions of senior Americans. As I get closer to the age when I will start taking payments from the system, I really hope the thieves in the party opposite don't succeed.

Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer describes a method of creating legislative districts that is provably and undeniably fair, even as he acknowledges that the nature of American politics would make adopting it nearly impossible:

Back in 2004, soon after earning my Ph.D., I found myself in the Harvard Society of Fellows chatting with a Supreme Court justice. I asked what single problem math or economics could solve for the Court. The answer was instantaneous: Give us an objective yardstick for political maps.

After months huddled around a whiteboard with a sharp graduate student, Richard Holden, fueled by too much bad Harvard Square coffee, we created a measure we call the “Relative Proximity Index.”

Picture every voter as a dot on the state map. First, we pin down the geometric minimum — the most compact way to bundle those dots inside the state’s jagged borders into its exact number of congressional districts, each with equal population, whether that means wrapping around Florida’s panhandle or hugging Georgia’s slanted shoulder. Then we compare the map the legislature actually draws to that floor. The ratio is the Relative Proximity Index. An R.P.I. of 1 means you’ve hit the geometric ideal; an R.P.I. of 3 means voters within a district would live — on average — three times farther apart than necessary.

In my view, the R.P.I. is the most attractive measure of gerrymandering. While it focuses on compactness to the exclusion of other criteria, it is a simple, easy-to-understand approach. It does not require an opaque computer algorithm to draw thousands of maps for comparison, and it does not rely on an assumption that a fair map will produce proportional representation (which may not be true, depending on how the parties’ constituencies are distributed geographically).

This fight hits home for me. I moved to Texas at age 5 and stayed through college. We pride ourselves on straight shooting. But the facts — who lives where — don’t match the tall tales coming out of Austin. One district hugs the Rio Grande for well over 500 miles, from San Antonio’s outskirts almost to El Paso. That’s not state pride; it’s sleight of hand. “Don’t mess with Texas”? Fine. Stop messing with Texas, and with the blue states preparing to respond in kind.

He calls my objection "fatalistic." I'd say "historical," but sure. I would wholeheartedly endorse a fair method of redistricting like this, just as I wholeheartedly endorse non-partisan redistricting commissions and expanding the House of Representatives to about 700 members. (Not to mention DC statehood.)

With one of our parties headed toward fascism and another one getting shut out of power through the kind of political skulduggery we haven't seen since the 1850s, I'm afraid this proposal will have to wait a few years.

The United States will spend a generation or longer in the "find out" phase after the OAFPOTUS began a trade war against our most powerful adversary while simultaneously crippling our ability to win it:

You can see it in the economic numbers: China’s economy grew by an average of 5.3 percent in the first half of the year, America’s by only 1.25 percent. You can see it, too, in Trump’s failure to wring significant concessions from Beijing. Though most countries have acquiesced to U.S. trade bullying, China has not. In April, Trump hiked U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 percent. China retaliated with 125 percent tariffs on U.S. goods. Then President Xi Jinping ramped up the pressure by restricting exports of rare earth metals to the United States, which threatens to halt production of cars, fighter jets and other products.

While conciliating Beijing, Trump has been alienating U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific region with his capricious tariff threats. The latest to suffer is India, a key U.S. partner in confronting China. Trump announced Wednesday that he was hitting India with 25 percent tariffs, to be followed by additional sanctions to punish India for buying oil and gas from Russia. It makes sense to pressure India to reduce its economic relationship with Russia, but these blunderbuss tariffs threaten to undo decades of efforts by American administrations, including the first Trump administration, to draw India into the U.S. orbit. Now there are signs of a reconciliation between New Delhi and Beijing.

Trump’s attempts to close down Voice of America are another gift to Beijing. From Indonesia to Nigeria, Chinese state media is filling the vacuum left behind by VOA. Trump’s decision to walk away from the World Health Organization and UNESCO has also opened the door for China to increase its influence in those international organizations.

China’s Achilles’ heel has long been the fear it engenders with its aggressive behavior and lack of respect for other nations. Now, America is acting a lot like China and paying the price in global opinion.

Trump’s tariff hikes, budget cuts and immigration restrictions are weakening America and inadvertently strengthening its chief rival.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but it strikes me that tanking the US economy would give billionaires and private equity the biggest gift in history and rapidly create an entirely rentier-driven, parasitic, stratified economy that, history tells us, would end in violence. So is that the end game? Or are these guys really that stupid? It's so hard to tell.

One thing, though: the more I hear about BYD cars, the more I want one. Unfortunately they're not for sale here—mainly because they're technologically superior to anything Tesla has, and a fraction of the cost. The free market doesn't apply when your friends need billions in profits.

So we'll protect Tesla and GM, while making it nearly impossible for either of them to build here because of the OAFPOTUS's asinine commodity taxes, making US consumers pay higher and higher prices for inferior products. Like I said: rentier economy.

Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) calmly and cogently explains why the OAFPOTUS "taking over" the DC police is just another example "a little, weak, tiny man who has to do things like this to feel secure:"

Emergency Video: DC by Adam Kinzinger

Trump is trying to make you think he’s bigger than he is. He’s still a small man

Read on Substack

It's still gross outside, but slightly less gross than yesterday. And my trivia team (playing today as "Relieved we're not in Milwaukee") came in 2nd. So things are looking better than they have in a couple of days. And now, Szechuan carry-out.

Regular posting resumes tomorrow.

I finally broke down and tried Chat GPT 5, wasting no time to waste half an hour. The first thing I asked it for was to write a bit of code for me. I wrote similar code about 4 years ago, so I wanted to see if the LLM could at least match what I did. I was pleasantly surprised that, after two refining prompts, it came up with a better solution.

And then I had it do this:

(Image generated by Chat GPT v5 from original work by the author.)

For comparison, here's the original:

The Super Cassie image is the second attempt. I asked it to restore her fur color and texture and it wasn't able to. Also, I discovered that 3 images pretty much uses up the Free tier's compute limit, and it appears to have a 4-hour reset window.

At the moment, the subject of both images is sitting next to me, well within my personal space, poking me with her nose. She may need to go outside. So my time-wasting will have to continue later.

I just read the Rev. Rob Schenck's essay in Mother Jones explaining, from his perspective as an evangelical minister who only recently came out of his stupor in the Christianist right wing, how Christianists could follow a man like the OAFPOTUS. The tl;dr is that evangelical Christians tend to believe the craziest shit because, at root, they believe the craziest shit.

The essay reminded me of two things: this joke, and Robert Heinlein's observation that "a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence."

Schenck's essay is worth a read:

One of the maddening—and seemingly unanswerable—questions for many concerned Americans is how deeply religious Christian voters have remained so loyal to President Donald Trump despite his many divorces, relentless vulgarity, flagrant dishonesty, and conviction for sexual assault. And now with the recent controversies around the Epstein files, Trump’s friendship with the convicted child trafficker, and the vast conspiracy theories surrounding it all, this question seems even more urgent and baffling. How is it possible for godly men and women, whose Bibles are frequently read, who consider the teachings of Jesus Christ as their guide for living, how can these men and women devote themselves to a man who appears to be a living contradiction of all that they believe?

To understand this frustrating phenomenon, one must appreciate that for white American evangelicals, Trump’s MAGA movement is, at its core, religious, which is how deeply religious voters experience it. Religious commitments don’t die or even change quickly or easily.  What drives the MAGA-religious is passion, identity, and even something so transcendent that it elevates a believer’s consciousness to unshakable sublimation to the leader—there are no unforgivable transgressions, and that includes pedophilia and sexual violence. For them, the Epstein affair is a ruse ginned up by God-haters who want to bring down the man who embodies their hopes and dreams for themselves, their families, and their country.

The reason goes to the heart of how Trump and his enablers have marketed MAGA to religious voters, how those voters now experience the movement, and the role that conspiracy theories circulating among evangelicals play in the drama. Most born-again types don’t embrace the wildest QAnon plots like elites kidnapping children to harvest youth serum from their bodies, or that JFK Jr. is still alive. But our culture club does harbor its own tall tales, including one about a secret Satanic government run by Freemasons. Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of evangelicals knows that we’ve always been susceptible to the sensational, spectacular, and, frankly, the simply unbelievable.

Trump knows how to use our collective gullibility for his benefit.

The fusion [between Christianism and MAGA] is inseparable once the transition from God and church to Trump and MAGA is complete—and the 2024 election sanctioned that completeness. For these Christians, MAGA is their new denominational home. Like baptized Catholics, cradle Methodists, and multi-generational Pentecostals, what I now call MAGA-anity (as distinct from Christi-anity) forms a follower’s deepest, most meaningful, and resilient identity. And because it’s transcendent, the bond cannot be loosened by outside forces—not by reports of a souring economy, not by videos of shrieking moms being separated from their children by masked ICE agents, not even by the call of Christianity Today magazine to release the full Epstein files.

For right-wing Catholics, politicized evangelicals, and socially frightened Pentecostal-Charismatics, MAGA is the new American religion. The experience believers have in their relationship to it is anything but rational. I have struggled to find a parallel phenomenon in American history. The closest I can get is the early days of Mormonism, a uniquely American religio-political-cultural movement.

In the end, Schenck's prediction of how this ends mirrors my own:

Defeating MAGA will only happen over time. It will require the passing of its charismatic, deified leader, either by term limit, dementia, or death, but only if that epochal event is preceded by a vigorous and unrelenting challenge to MAGA ideas, operations, and personalities using religious concepts, language, and biblical texts. Even with all of that, it will be at least a generation before MAGA is either socially domesticated or tamed into a marginal and largely inconsequential fringe group. Until then, we can mitigate MAGA’s damage to human lives, the social fabric, and public and private institutions by tirelessly exposing its nefarious intentions and actions to the light of day. As another favorite Bible verse of evangelicals reminds us, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Remember, the German Evangelical Church was instrumental in Hitler's ascent, for similar reasons. And as happened in Germany, we will get through this. At what cost, though? For some thoughts on that question, start with Yascha Mounk's observations on China. The MAGAs are hastening the end of American relevance, and China is there to pick up the slack.