The Daily Parker

Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it.

Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist:

• Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of the National Guard] during the Civil Rights Era were over the refusal of segregationist state governments to enforce federal law under court order. Trump’s argument is...[that] the President [has the right] to decide when a state government isn’t protecting or enforcing civil order to his liking and to intervene with federalized National Guard or the U.S. military to do it at the point of a bayonet. ... The crisis the administration insisted it needed to solve was a crisis of the administration’s creation."
• Philip Bump puts the encroaching fascism in broader context: "What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. ... The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel...."
• The Guardian highlights how Chicago has led the way in resisting the OAFPOTUS's xenophobic mass-deportation program, as part of our long history of respecting immigrant rights.
• Anne Applebaum looks at last week's election in Poland and feels a chill that "every election is now existential."
• Lisa Schwarzbaum, a former film critic for Entertainment Weekly, likens the OAFPOTUS's style of governing to Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom."
• Ezra Klein expresses surprise at who has objected the most to the recommendations in his recent book Abundance, and the left-wing emphasis on messaging: "Democrats aren’t struggling primarily because they choose the wrong messages. They’re struggling because they fail to solve problems. ... [Brandon] Johnson is the most proudly left-wing big-city mayor in the country. ... He’s also the least popular big-city mayor in the country and may well end up as the least popular mayor in Chicago’s history. Policy failure breeds political failure."
• Oh, by the way, Meta and Yandex have started to de-anonymize your Android device by abusing how your Internet browser works.

Finally, a community group on the Northwest Side has launched an effort to build a 5-km rails-to-trails plus greenway project to connect the Bloomingdale Trail with the North Branch Trail. This would create a direct connection between the southern flank of Lincoln Park and the Chicago Botanic Garden in suburban Glencoe. It's still early days, though. I'd love to see this in my lifetime. I'm also waiting for electrified railroads around Chicago, but this project would be a lot cheaper.

Pro tip: Get to Ribfest as soon as possible after it opens. Cassie and I arrived exactly at noon yesterday, allowing me to score three 3-bone samplers in just 45 minutes.

Here, too, where I expect the lines would be a block long by 2pm:

In the end, Cassie had a really good afternoon—at least until she went to sleep-away camp because of my concert:

I sense ribs in my future today as well. And very likely a 5 km walk either coming or going from Ribfest. Sadly, we won't get there exactly at noon, because I have some errands to run before then. As long as we get home before it starts raining...

Lunch today will be a sampler of ribs from the first vendor at Ribfest that looks appealing. Then Cassie goes to sleep-away camp and I go to a performance call in Glenview at 3pm. So tune in tomorrow morning for the first rib report.

A smattering of stories this morning show how modern life is both better and worse than in the past:

• A criminologist at Cambridge has spent 15 years working on "murder maps" of London, Oxford, and York, showing just how awful it was to live in the 14th Century: "The deadliest of the cities was Oxford, which he estimated to have a homicide rate of about 100 per 100,000 inhabitants in the 14th century, while London and York hovered at 20 to 25 per 100,000. (In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, London’s homicide rate was about 1.2 per 100,000 inhabitants.)"
• An economist I've quoted often on The Daily Parker looks at the entirely-predictable falling out between the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X and finds a perfect example of the worst corruption the US government has ever experienced: "both men start from the presumption that the U.S. government is an entirely corrupt enterprise, with the president in a position to hand out personal favors or engage in personal acts of vengeance."
• Yascha Mounk sees it as the OAFPOTUS failing to build a coalition. (That this feud has erupted between two malignant narcissists and may be entirely kayfabe is left unexplored by both writers.)
• Jeff Maurer takes a different view that is no less depressing: "that farting baby penguin is a harbinger of the end of democracy (is a sentence that I thought I’d never write). ... Trump found a major flaw in our system, which is that you can get away with illegal stuff as long as you do so much illegal stuff that nobody can keep track."
• A tech bro with about the competence you'd expect named Sahil Lavingia used an LLM to create a script that purged more than 600 Veterans Affairs contracts in a partially-successful attempt to become the Dunning-Krueger Champion for the month of April.
• I'm not sure Slate's Scaachi Koul is entirely fair to Katy Perry in an article from earlier this week, but it's a compelling read.

Finally, I plan to spend a good bit of this afternoon on my semi-compulsory half-day holiday reading an actual book, John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye, his latest and one of his silliest. What would happen in the moon suddenly turned to cheese? Hilarity, in Scalzi's world. It's a lot more fun to read than any newspaper.

And then...dinner at Ribfest!

Just a couple of eye-rolling stories. First, Charlie Warzel mocks the OAFPOTUS's "tactical burger unit:"

We now inhabit a world beyond parody, where the pixels of reality seem to glitch and flicker. Consider the following report from Trump’s state visit to Saudi Arabia this week, posted by the foreign-affairs journalist Olga Nesterova: “As part of the red-carpet treatment, Saudi officials arranged for a fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit to accompany President Trump during his stay.” A skeptical news consumer might be inclined to pause for a moment at the phrase fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit, their brain left to conjure what those words could possibly mean.

It’s worth emphasizing that all of this is pretty embarrassing. Multiple news outlets, including Fox News, framed the truck as an act of burger diplomacy; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia pandered to a mercurial elderly man, ostensibly to guarantee that a slender beef patty was never far from his lips. As with all things Trump, it’s hard to know exactly what to believe. Is the burger unit a stylized but mostly normal bit of state-visit infrastructure, or is it a bauble meant to please the Fast-Food President? In a world where leaders seem eager to bend the knee to Trump’s every impulse, even the truly ridiculous seems plausible. The mere fact of all of this is unmooring. When strung together, the words fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit overwhelm my synapses; there could be no funnier or dumber phrase to chisel out of the English language.

All hail Meal Team Six!

I also wanted to call out today's Times story about the declining fortunes of ride-share drivers at Los Angeles International Airport:

In the early years of app-based platforms like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, people flocked to sign up as drivers. The idea of making money simply by driving someone around in your own car, on your own schedule, appealed to many, from professional chauffeurs looking for extra work to employees working in the service industry who realized they could break free of the 9-to-5 grind.

And in the early years, wages were high. Drivers would regularly take home thousands of dollars a week, as Uber and Lyft pushed growth over profits, posting quarterly losses in the billions of dollars. Then, when they became public companies, profitability became a focus, and wages gradually shrank.

Now, earnings have fallen behind inflation, and for many drivers have decreased. Last year, Uber drivers made an average of $513 a week in gross earnings, a 3.4 percent decline from the previous year, even as they worked six minutes more a week on average...

This is simply an overabundance of drivers chasing a declining population of travelers. This is the whole reason taxi regulations came into being: to ensure that taxi drivers could make a fair living doing their jobs. It's a pretty glaring display of the tragedy of the commons, too.

I'll have more to say about this soon.

Cassie and I walked 14 km yesterday, giving her almost 3 hours of walks and 8 hours continuously outside with friends (including Butters). The walk included a stop at Jimmy's Pizza Cafe. (It's possible Cassie got a bit of pizza.)

She's now on the couch, fast asleep. I would also like to be on the couch, fast asleep, but it is a work day.

I also wish some of the people in today's stories were asleep on the couch instead of asleep at the switch:

• The Qatari government has offered the OAFPOTUS a naked bribe of such magnitude that even MAGA allies can't swallow it.
• Both Norman Eisen and Molly White struggle to adequately describe the sheer volume of graft from the OAFPOTUS's cryptocurrency scamming.
• Cranky Flier scoffs at Transportation Secretary and former reality TV star Sean Duffy rolling out a pseudo-plan for—I'm not making this up—a "Brand New Air Traffic Control System."
• US Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) continues to struggle after his 2022 stroke, refusing mental-health treatment and failing to do his work in the Senate.

Finally, the Economist draws attention to all the ways that my generation continues to suffer because of the two much larger generations on either side of us. The Boomers want to use up Social Security and the Millennials want all the resources for child-raising that we didn't take. It's out lot in life.

I have more coding to do now. Though I really, really want a nap.

Just queuing a few things up to read at lunchtime:

• From tavern-style communion pizza and Malört to the horrific discovery that the Pope is a White Sox fan, Chicagoans have gone nuts for Leo XIV. Catholics everywhere are finally safe from ketchup with their Eucharist.
• Former US Supreme Court Justice David Souter has died, aged 85. He "pulled a Brennan" by drifting left during his term on the court, much to the annoyance of the Republicans who elevated him.
• Political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Zilbatt warn that a descent into competitive authoritarianism—the ruling style of autocrats like India's Modi and Türkiye's Erdoğan—shows up most clearly as an increasing cost of opposing the government.
• Josh Marshall reports on how the OAFPOTUS's droogs are cutting off medical research grant payments without explicitly (if illegally) cancelling the grants, hoping they won't get caught until it's too late.
• Molly White and Paul Krugman provide their regular reminders that crypto is a scam, now with added corruption.
• James Fallows, who usually tries to get people to calm down about aviation mishaps, wants the press to be more alarmed about the air traffic control blackouts in Newark. (Another one happened just this morning, in fact.)
• Yascha Mounk looks at the Democratic Party and shrugs that, for good or ill, "the resistance is gonna be woke," even if it costs us the next two elections.
• ProPublica's David Armstrong dug into why his cancer drugs cost more than an iPhone for each dose.
• Charles Marohn points out the lie in a recent Times op-ed by reminding anyone who can do math that sprawl is a Ponzi scheme, not a solution to our housing problem.

Finally, Chicago's ubiquitous summer street fairs have found it much more difficult to sustain their funding in the years since the pandemic. The city prohibits charging an entry fee for walking down a street, so the fairs have to rely on gate donations. But even with increasing expenses, people attending festivals have stopped donating at the gate, putting the fairs in jeopardy.

When I go to Ribfest in four weeks, I will pay the donation every day, because I want my ribs. This will be the festival's 25th year. I will do my part to get them another 25.

I want to start with a speech on the floor of the French Senate three days ago, in which Claude Malhuret (LIRT-Allier) had this to say about the OAFPOTUS:

Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose higher tariffs on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.

I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.

Malheureusement, il a bien raison. And his speech is worth reading (or hearing, si vous parlez français bien).

But that isn't all that happened in the last day or so. No, every day brings new revelations of stupidity and corruption in the new administration:

• James Fallows listened to the OAFPOTUS's address to Congress on Tuesday so you didn't have to, and found it...disturbing.
• The Clown Prince of X appears to have pressured the FAA into issuing a license for yesterday's launch of a SpaceX rocket that exploded just two weeks after another SpaceX rocket exploded. (You may call Musk a thuper-geniuth!)
• ProPublica does the math to demonstrate how the cuts the clowns have proposed at the Internal Revenue Service will actually cost more than they will save—forgetting for a moment that the point of those cuts is to make tax cheating less likely to get caught.
• Oh, and the clowns have illegally disbanded the committee that keeps your food safe from microbes.
• The Army Corps of Engineers admitted that the rushed release of water from Northern California reservoirs shortly after the OAFPOTUS took office simply wasted it, as everyone who can look at a map already guessed.
• The jobs report that the Bureau of Labor Statistics released today only encompassed data from the first three weeks of the administration, before they started illegally firing civil servants.

And now I will take a half-day of PTO and explore four new breweries in Bridgeport and Pilsen. If only the weather had cooperated.

I threw a party for a few friends last night. Cassie's friend Butters came by and ensconced herself on the couch for most of the night. Cassie, for her part, got oo-mox from one of the guests:

Cassie has spent most of today sleeping, as I would like to be doing. At some point I may even get the motivation to read. First I have to tweak a feature of Weather Now that will help re-import all the data I mentioned yesterday.

A friend pointed out that, as of this morning, we've passed the darkest 36-day period of the year: December 3rd to January 8th. On December 3rd at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, the sun rose at 7:02 and set at 16:20, with 9 hours 18 minutes of daylight. Today it rose at 7:18 and will set at 16:38, for 9 hours 20 minutes of daylight. By the end of January we'll have 10 hours of daylight and the sun will set after 5pm for the first time since November 3rd.

It helps that we've had nothing but sun today. And for now, at least, we can forget about the special weather statement that just came out warning of snow and winds starting later tonight.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• Jennifer Rubin snarks that the media have just now noticed that President Biden's economic policies worked better than expected—certainly better than Canada's.
• The Dept of Justice has sued six large landlords for fixing rents using a controversial bit of market-analysis software.
• Josh Marshall points out that the fundamental business model of social media companies makes it nigh impossible for them to do any real content moderation.
• The wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of homes in Los Angeles County came from years of overdevelopment and months of drought.
• A zero-day exploit of Ivanti VPN appliances has already affected dozens of companies.

Finally, National Geographic explains how the two cups of tea I drink every day (three in the summer) will help me live to 107 years old.