The Daily Parker

The American Revolutionary War began 250 years ago today when Capt John Parker's Minutemen engaged a force of 700 British soldiers on the town green in Lexington, Mass. Just over a year later, England's North American colonies declared their independence from King George III with a document that you really ought to read again with particular focus on the King's acts that drove the colonists to break away. It was almost as if they believed having a temperamental monarch with worsening mental-health problems was a sub-optimal political situation.

Today is also the 30th anniversary of Timothy McVeigh's mass killing of Federal employees and their children in Oklahoma City. Any similarities between McVeigh's and the OAFPOTUS's politics are, I'm sure, coincidental.

• Dana Milbank staggers at the self-inflicted failures that have made this the most destructive first 100 days in presidential history—with 11 days to go, yet!
• Andrew Sullivan takes us through the history of El Salvador dictator Nayib Bukele's rise to power, which of course the OAFPOTUS wants to emulate.
• Molly White outlines how blatant self-dealing combined with firing all the regulators has launched a staggering cryptocurrency grift to enrich the OAFPOTUS and his family. Former SEC Office of Internet Enforcement chief John Reed Stark concurs.
• Administration officials now claim that their letter demanding Harvard University install party cadres in every department was "unauthorized," and reminded everyone not to pay attention to the little man behind the curtain. Regardless, Jennifer Rubin cheers Harvard on.
• Jeff Maurer struggles with getting to the appropriate level of vitriol against the extremists in our party who don't seem to get that we have to win elections before they can get anything close to what they want.

As for me, and the gap in posting yesterday: I have a cold which seems entirely contained in my eyes and sinuses, so I didn't really feel creative. (Not that today's post is creative either, of course.) Somehow I got 9½ hours of sleep last night, according to my Garmin device, though I distinctly remember getting up to close windows when the temperature plummeted from 16°C to 9°C in less than an hour. And when the thunderstorms came through. And when Cassie poked me in the head. Both times.

It feels like the cold has mostly gone away, though. And with tomorrow's rainy forecast, it looks like I might get some writing done this weekend.

Cassie and I found a 20-minute gap in the rain this morning so she could have a (slightly-delayed) walk. Since around 9 am, though, we've had variations on this:

Good thing I have all these heartwarming news stories to warm my heart:

• Dane County, Wis., Judge Susan Crawford beat Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel 55% to 45% for the vacant seat on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, despite the $25 million the Clown Prince of X donated to Schimel's campaign. The CPOX himself drew laughs from people with IQs above 80 by claiming he didn't really try to buy the seat for the right-wing Schimel.
• Paul Krugman reminds the credulous that "there's no plan, secret or otherwise" behind the OAFPOTUS's tariffs. ("Does he really believe that Canada is a major source of fentanyl? Worse, does he believe that fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs?") Timothy Noah concurs.
• Scholar Larry Diamond lays out the ways we can get through the constitutional crisis the OAFPOTUS has created.
• A Federal judge has dismissed corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Johnson, but enjoined the US Attorney from threatening more charges. It's only a partial win for corruption in the US, but still a win.
• The Times looks at Brightline's success and asks, "What's so hard about building trains?" After pointing out that "in Florida, Brightline has proved that it can operate reliable, well-designed passenger trains that people want to ride," they fail to project that it will probably get bailed out at least once in the next 25 years by state and federal money.
• The Onion imbues the Chicago Transit Authority with "an unconscious fear of success manifesting through self-sabotage." They're not wrong.

Finally, Bruce Schneier and a colleague published a paper yesterday lauding "Rational Astrologies and Security." In the paper, the authors analyze beliefs like "Nobody every got fired for buying IBM" and "It's always been done this way" as rational, and how security professionals can use them. The timing of the paper's publication in no way affects the soundness of these conclusions, of course.

I completed two surveys related to my work conference this week. The first one included the question, "To confirm that you are still reading this, please select 'Disagree.'" The second one assigned point values to the multiple-choice questions, so that the three items I answered "Somewhat OK" instead of "Excellent" brought my grade down to a B-minus.

These are the kinds of things that make one wonder how valuable the survey data really is.

Meanwhile, I've got a ton of things to do today, including getting Cassie her lunchtime walk before a line of storms comes through around noon.

More later, including two Brews & Choos reviews from Nashville.

Topping the link round-up this afternoon, my go-to brewery Spiteful fears for its business if it has to pay a 25% tariff on imported aluminum cans. If the OAFPOTUS drives Spiteful out of business for no fucking reason I will be quite put out.

In other news:

• Timothy Noah reads Jean Piaget to learn more about the OAFPOTUS's "infantile incapacity to grasp the mechanics of cause and effect," suggesting that his reasoning is more transductive, like a 3-year old's ("taking a nap causes the afternoon" ~=~ "DEI causes plane crashes").
• Aaron Blake says "it's complicated" whether the OAFPOTUS completely caved to Canada and Mexico earlier this week, despite the "deals" with those nations having already been worked out by the Biden Administration, while Ruth Marcus calls the era that began on January 20th "the most damaging first two weeks in presidential history."
• Margaret Renkl reminds everyone that the Republican plan to destroy public schooling so those people won't get basic education continues apace.
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has issued an order to align transit funding with marriage and birth rates, which will help places that don't actually have transit and hurt places like Chicago and New York.
• A woman has sued author Neil Gaiman for sexual assault, alleging serial abuse that occurred in New Zealand while she was his live-in nanny.

Other than the Neil Gaiman thing, which pains me deeply, this all goes to show that President Camacho will be a Republican.

Ah, ha ha. Ha.

Today is the first full day of the Once Again Felonious POTUS, who wound everyone up yesterday with a bunch of statements of intent (i.e., executive orders) guaranteed to get people paying attention to him again. Yawn.

But that isn't everything that happened in the last 24 hours:

• Jonathan Last argues that maybe the OAFPOTUS just doesn't like Americans.
• Jennifer Rubin reminds everyone to remain vigilant that the OAFPOTUS's mangling of the English language has consequences.
• Jeff Maurer is flabbergasted that the fanatical left wing has left behind "free speech, color-blindness, and meritocracy" on the playing field so that the right could pick it up at their leisure.
• Connor Echols worries that the US has developed a "total security" problem, with the impossible goal of making everywhere safe for Americans.
• In an unusual nontechnical post, The Daily WTF points out that "everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works."
• Bruce Schneier worries that we don't have the tools to deal with the kinds of mistakes AI LLMs will make.
• The 606 Trail, which runs along an abandoned railway right-of-way through several Chicago north side neighborhoods, won't get its promised eastern extension until at least 2027.
• Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who illustrated one of my favorite childhood books, The Phantom Tollbooth, died age 95.

Finally, while Chicago has almost no snow on the ground, which probably helped prevent the overnight temperature from going below -20°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, the same weather system has already dumped more snow on the Gulf Coast cities of Mobile and Pensacola than they have ever recorded. Right now at Pensacola International, they have snow and -4°C temperatures. Climate change science didn't predict this specific event, but it did predict the weakening of the circumpolar jet stream that made this possible. This is not normal (temperatures in Fahrenheit):

Somehow it's the 3rd day of 2025, and I still don't have my flying car. Or my reliable high-speed  regional trains. Only a few of these stories help:

• James Carville admits he got the 2024 election wrong.
• Matt Ford thinks "John Roberts is imagining things."
• A new book by Anita Say Chan equates the tech-bro culture with 20th-century eugenics.
• Molly White examines Elon Musk's war on Wikipedia.
• The US Surgeon General has called for adding cancer warnings to alcohol labels.
• Brazil's experiment in abolishing daylight saving time has gone as most of us who understand time zones would have predicted.
• Shayla Love looks into our invisible habits.

I'm also spending some time looking over the Gazetteer that underpins Weather Now. In trying to solve one problem, I discovered another problem, which suggests I may need to re-import the whole thing. At the moment it has fewer than 100,000 rows, and the import code upserts (attempts to update before inserting) by default. More details as the situation warrants.

The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime.

Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these:

• Andrew Sullivan shakes his head at "the dumb luck" of the OAFPOTUS.
• On David Roberts' podcast, Dan Savage muses on "blue America in the age" of the OAFPOTUS.
• Ross Douthat worries that "it's going to be normal to have extreme beliefs."
• Amtrak has announced it will bring brand-new Alstom train sets into Acela service this spring, bringing the top speed of the route up to 250 km/h—at least for the Trenton-to-Newark segment. (At this rate, assuming no improvements in European train service, Acela should reach comparable speeds in the 2050s.)

Finally, a friend recently sent me a book I've wanted to read for a while: The Coddling of the American Mind, which civil-liberties lawyer Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt expanded from their September 2015 Atlantic article. I have noticed that people born after 1995 don't seem to have the same resilience or tolerance for nuance that even people born a few years earlier have. Lukianoff and Haidt make an interesting case for why this is. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it when I finish.

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.)

Meanwhile, the world continues to turn:

• Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives. ... [I]f you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress."
• Eugene Robinson excoriates CNN (and by implication a good chunk of the MSM) for covering the XPOTUS as if he were a normal political candidate and not, you know, an election and a Reichstag fire from crippling the modern world: "Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away."
• Ezra Klein spends 45 minutes explaining that what's wrong with the XPOTUS isn't just the obvious, but the fact that no one around him is guarding us from his delusional disinhibitions: "What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him."
• James Fallows, counting down to November 5th, calls out civic bravery: "There are more of us than there are of them."
• Fareed Zakaria warns that the Democratic Party hasn't grokked the political realignment going on in the United States right now: "The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education. The other strong predictors of a person’s voting behavior are gender, geography and religion. So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right."
• Pamela Paul points out the inherent nihilism of "settler colonialism" ideology as it applies to the growing anti-Israel movement in left-wing academia: "Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states?"
• Hitachi has won a $212m contract to—wait for it—remove 5.25-inch floppy disks from the San Francisco MUNI light-rail network.
• American Airlines has rolled out a tool that will make an annoying sound if a gate louse attempts to board before his group number is called. Good.
• SMU writing professor Jonathan Malesic harrumphs that college kids don't read books anymore.

Speaking of books, The Economist just recommended yet another book to put on my sagging "to be read" bookshelves (plural). Nicholas Cornwell (writing as Nick Harkaway), the son of David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré), has written a new George Smiley novel set in 1963. I've read all the Smiley novels, and this one seems like a must-read as well: "Karla’s Choice could have been a crude pastiche and a dull drama. Instead, it is an accomplished homage and a captivating thriller. It may be a standalone story, but with luck Mr Harkaway will continue playing the imitation game." Excellent.

We have another glorious late-summer day in Chicago cool enough to sleep with the windows open. We still have 11 more days of summer, as the forecast reminds me, but I'll take a couple of days with 22°C sun and nights that go down to 15°C.

In other news:

• Psychologist Vince Greenwood cranks the alarms up to 11 after evaluating the XPOTUS against the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. (Tl;dr: Out of 40 points possible on the checklist, "the average score for individuals in a maximum-security prison setting is 22. ... [The cutoff] for to get formal diagnosis of psychopathy is 30. ... [The XPOTUS] receives a score of 33."
• From April, why does a malignant narcissist sell Bibles?
• Nina Burleigh reminds us about "the con at the core of the Republican Party."
• Paul Krugman endorses Vice President Kamala Harris's "solid center-left agenda."
• Author Michael Lewis has a few thoughts about Sam Bankman-Fried's criminal activities.

Finally, our biggest eyebrow-raise today: a ridiculous mansion in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood covers 2,300 m² (25,000 ft²) across eight residential lots cost about $85 million to build and went on sale at $50 million back in 2016. The family who built it finally just sold it to a yet-unknown buyer for $15.25 million. I remember when they built it, because Parker and I would walk past the construction site every so often. I can't help but shake my head. But I guess if you can lose $70 million on your house after only 15 years, you probably didn't need the money anyway.

As I wait for a build pipeline to run, I'm reading these:

• Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus argues that the recent Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity doesn't shield the XPOTUS from the most serious charges he faces.
• Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a professor of Thai politics, sees recent events in Thailand as heralds of the coming end of the monarchy's control.
• Why do people just stop dating?

Finally, author John Scalzi doesn't want you to idolize authors—especially not him:

Enjoy the art creative people do. Enjoy the experience of them in the mediated version of them you get online and elsewhere, if such is your joy. But remember that the art is from the artist, not the artist themselves, and the version of their life you see is usually just the version they choose to show. There is so much you don’t see, and so much you’re not meant to see. At the end of the day, you don’t have all the information about who they are that you would need to make them your idol, or someone you might choose to, in some significant way, pattern some fraction of your life on. And anyway creative people aren’t any better at life than anyone else.

Looks like the build is almost done...