The Daily Parker

Oh, FFS. I tried to avoid the inauguration entirely, but since we're dealing with the OAFPOTUS again, I couldn't. Especially because of 3rd grader Elon Musk.

The OAFPOTUS's second inaugural address was the longest in modern history. If you really want to read the text, the New York Times has annotated it, but I wouldn't recommend it. James Fallows read it so you don't have to:

Donald Trump, as 5th-grader. Sometimes Trump’s formal speeches are “written,” in the sense of trying to have “eloquent” or “fine writing” passages. But these “fancy” parts of a speech—related to the parts we remember as the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, or Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall—are clearly tough sledding for Trump. You can tell that he plods his way through these obligatory passages, in the fashion of a fifth-grader called upon to read to the classroom from an assigned text. Halting, not sure of the words, pausing from time to time at a passage he’d never seen before, as if to say, “Hey, that’s interesting!”

The absolutely stupidest part of this speech was this. Any other public official would be embarrassed even to say something of this sort:

We are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

If your second grader gave you this thought, you’d be having a little talk about how history and geography worked.

But second prize for stupidness goes to this, about Panama.

The speech did not get better. Shortly afterward, Elon Musk did this:

Well, that was certainly a departure from the usual nihilism of the incoming administration. Walter wasn't completely wrong, either. But yeah, Musk heiled the crowd:

Back in the first Trump presidency Trump’s critics spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Trumpers to admit they’d done this or that, to apologize, whatever. This was always a mistake. I don’t need anyone to validate what I saw. I saw it. I don’t care what the explanation is. These are just twisted anti-American degenerates. We know this. Just what level of exuberant disinhibition led Musk to this moment or why this unmistakable gesture came so naturally to him … well, that’s really not my problem. Everyone knows what they saw here.

Then, shortly after that, the OAFPOTUS pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,500 insurrectionists who invaded the US Capitol and killed cops:

At the time Trump issued the pardons, there were about 700 defendants who either never received prison sentences or had already completed their sentences, meaning pardons or commutations would have little practical impact on them, beyond restoring voting rights and gun rights for those who were convicted of felonies.

More than 600 people were sentenced to incarceration, but only a small fraction of them are still behind bars. Many of those who are in the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons were convicted of violent attacks on police officers protecting the Capitol during an assault in which Jan. 6 defendants were armed with firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive “Trump” billboard, “Trump” flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device.

More than 140 police officers were injured and several Trump supporters died during the attack, including one who was shot trying to breach the House Speaker's Lobby and another who died in the middle of a brutal battle at the lower west tunnel, where some of the worst violence of the day took place.

Like I said, I don't really care about the OAFPOTUS's lies and bullshitting. I do care what he does, and what his toadies do when they have actual power. The first few hours of this presidency did not instill confidence.

The good news is that there will be a different President in only 1,461 days. The bad news is that we could have up to 1,460 days of the Once Again Fucking POTUS before he finally goes away. His second inaugural address—the longest in modern history—made his first one sound like an ASMR video:

The 47th president’s 29-minute address on Monday, just after noon, painted an even bleaker portrait of a country in disarray, one seized by “years of a radical and corrupt establishment,” with the pillars of society “broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.” America, he said, “cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad.”

It was a misleading and incomplete assessment of a country that has a growing economy, with falling inflation, slowing illegal immigration, a record-breaking stock market, the lowest levels of violent crime in years and a military that has limited engagement in conflicts around the world.

There will be only two genders in America, he said, male and female. There will be no preferences for electric vehicles. There will be no escape from tariffs for other countries. And there will be no misunderstanding when it comes to the mission of the military. The Panama Canal will be taken, with the implication that he will do so by force if necessary. And the Gulf of Mexico will be renamed the Gulf of America, he claimed.

Like I've said many times, we need to oppose what he does and ignore what he says. I am not going to get exercised over us invading the Panama Canal Zone until the Navy blockades Colón.

Jason Linkins recommends we "shove the presidency down [his] throat:"

The most recent entry in the “good advice for Democrats” canon comes from occasional TNR contributor and Bulwark writer Jonathan V. Last, who wrote, “The job of the Democratic party comes in two parts. First: Do not help Republicans. Not in any way. Second: Make Donald Trump own every bad outcome that happens, anywhere in the world.”

Rather than exert so much energy trying to thrust Trump out of the presidency, liberals would be well served to spend their time thrusting the presidency upon Donald Trump. Instead of searching for illusory quick fixes for the existence of the Trump administration, start demanding the Trump administration fix everything quickly.

Krugman also urges us to hold him accountable:

Trump ran a campaign based entirely on lies, and his victory doesn’t make those lies true. No, the price of bacon didn’t quadruple or quintuple. No, America isn’t experiencing a vast wave of crime driven by immigrants.

[Y]ou should resist the temptation to engage in truthwashing, a close cousin to the sanewashing that may not have been decisive but certainly helped Trump win.

I see that temptation all around — commentators who want to seem relevant starting to say “Well, maybe Trump has a point about migrant crime/seizing Greenland/annexing Canada/whatever.” Before going there, look at yourself in the mirror.

So keep calling out lies, even if — especially if — they’re coming from people in power. I’d like to promise that the truth will win in the end, but I can’t. All I can promise is that those who continue to tell the truth as they see it will find it easier to live with themselves than those who don’t.

How to reconcile that advice with The Daily Parker's approach of not paying attention to what he says? Let me revise and extend: I won't pay attention to what he says about the future, but I will damn well hold him to account for his lies about his own actions.

Josh Marshall agrees:

The Trump people have been signaling for days that they’re going to hit the ground running with what they describe as an executive ‘shock and awe’. I don’t see any reason to be shocked or awed. I don’t say this in any grand metaphysical sense. I mean that I’ve seen headstrong winners of close elections high on their own supply before. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, all of this is meant to hit you with so much sensory stimulus that you become overwhelmed. But the images you see wrapped around you in an iMax theater aren’t real. It’s still a movie.

Everyone is so spun up on themselves, hungry for the killer strategy or tactic to get back in the political driver’s seat. That’s natural. But desperation doesn’t lead to clear or good thinking. When you have time – and I would argue that at the moment, paradoxically, you do have time – the best place to start is to think clearly about what you’re actually trying to achieve in your own small role in politics.

The role of a political opposition is to oppose. Oppose everything. That’s especially the case in a situation like this when all the power is in Republican hands. They have majorities in both houses of Congress. Whatever happens is entirely a conversation and decision among Republicans. Again, an opposition’s role is to oppose. Putting forward an alternative program becomes relevant at the next election. At the moment the role is simply to highlight the corruption, highlight the empowerment of the wealthy few over everyone else and be the vehicle of opposition. This is their high watermark. Impassivity. Patience. Focus. They’re not as big as they look.

It will be a long two or four years. So don't waste energy on trivia.

We woke up this morning to frigid -17°C air (with sun though!), with an official overnight low of -19°C at O'Hare. We get cold like this almost every year; in fact, it got down to -23°C just 371 days ago.

No, the record low temperature for this day was also the coldest temperature ever recorded in Chicago, on Sunday 20 January 1985: -32°C. It was so cold that morning that my high school cancelled classes the next day—the only time they did so in my four years there.

Chicago historian John R Schmidt also remembers:

The winters had been getting colder in Chicago. The previous record low temperature had been -31°C, posted only three years ago. A new Ice Age seemed to be on the way. Both Time and Newsweek had predicted it in cover-stories.

Some experts claimed that Chicago temperatures weren’t really setting records. In 1970 the city’s official weather station had been moved from Midway to O’Hare. Everyone knew that the readings were usually a few degrees lower at O’Hare.

The day moved on. By noon the mercury had climbed to -27°C. Now more people were venturing out. A young man on State Street was heading for a movie. “I got tired of staying in,” he said. “What can you do except watch reruns on television?”

Remember, kids: this was five years before Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web and 16 years before the current century. We had to read books, or in my case, study for final exams.

More relevantly, though, is what happened to the predicted ice age. Going by astronomical cycles that have governed Earth's climate for millions of years, we should be moving into a cooler period, and indeed temperatures have declined overall since about 4000 YBP. Yet since around 1800, global average temperatures have instead gone up, increasing even more rapidly in the last 40 years than in any other time than we have detected in the million-year ice record.

There is no guarantee that Chicago will never experience a colder temperature than we did 40 years ago today. But with the OAFPOTUS bringing his kakistocratic, climate-denying clown car back into power in just two hours, we will probably break more heat records than cold records.

I hope we live long enough to see.

So much to read...tomorrow morning, when I wake up:

• Fallows and the Post have solid takes on President Biden's farewell address.
• Kim Lane Scheppelle shakes her head at how authoritarians use playground taunts keep their opponents off balance.
• John Scalzi does not expect much from the incoming administration.
• The Daily Overview has an amazing post today on the Los Angeles fires, and other fires in the recent past.
• Arwa Mahdawi calls out United HealthCare for going "villain mode."
• Heather Souvaine Horn asks, "what if the Los Angeles fires were a turning point?"
• Jeff Maurer sticks his tongue firmly in his cheek, pleading not to ban TikTok "just because it's a flaming planet of dinosaur shit..." and then, today, laughing at China for inviting "our dumbest young people."
• A family on Prince Edward Island captured an actual meteor strike on their doorbell camera, which astronomers believe is the first time this has every happened.

Finally, Block Club Chicago wonders why coyotes seem to be everywhere right now? I have two explanations: first, because it's mating season; and second, because of confirmation bias. We had two coyote sightings in strange places last week, and people are seeing more coyotes in general because they want to get laid. So that leads to more articles on coyotes. QED.

President Biden believes we did:

On January 27, 2020, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The American Bar Association (ABA) has recognized that the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment. I agree with the ABA and with leading legal constitutional scholars that the Equal Rights Amendment has become part of our Constitution.

Law professors Lawrence Tribe and Kathleen Sullivan concur:

With three days left in his presidency, Joseph R. Biden ensured that the United States Constitution, the oldest on earth, would finally include an explicit guarantee of sex equality. In truth, the Equal Rights Amendment should have been recognized as part of our Constitution nearly half a dozen years ago, when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it on January 27, 2020.

By proclaiming, in effect, “Yes, Virginia, you have made history by repairing a glaring omission in our most fundamental law,” President Biden made official a reality that many Americans failed to recognize at the time: that Article V of the Constitution expressly makes any proposed Amendment to that document “Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States.” Nothing in Article V makes the Constitution’s binding contents depend on any further official action by any branch of the federal government, whether Congress or the Judiciary or indeed the Executive.

It is not necessary for the National Archivist to publish the ERA in order for it to be adopted according to the provisions of the Constitution. The President avoided triggering a clash with the Archivist, who recently announced her intention to defy her statutory, and purely ministerial, duty to publish the ERA. The only reason Congress gave the Archivist such a duty nearly a century ago was to ensure that the Nation got word that an amendment was in force, enabling officials at all levels of government to conform their actions to it. In our modern age of broadcast, cable and internet communication, the President’s announcement itself performed that function.

So...now what? How do we test it? When do we put it in school history books?

Today marks the middle of winter, when fewer days remain in the (meteorological) season than have passed. Good thing, too: yesterday we had temperatures that looked happy on a graph but felt miserable in real life, and the forecast for Sunday night into Monday will be even worse—as in, a low of -20°C going "up" to -14°C. Fun!.

(Yesterday's graph:)

Elsewhere in the world:

• Israel and Hamas have reached a cease-fire agreement, with the US and Qatar signing off.
• OAFPOTUS Defense Secretary nominee, former Fox News pretty boy, and all-around fundamentalist crackpot Pete Hegseth sat before the US Senate Armed Services committee yesterday, whose Republican members asked him about "your wife that you love" and whose Democratic members asked him about unlawful orders and the numerous allegations of wrongdoing against him. My combat-decorated junior Senator, Tammy Duckworth (D), flatly called him "unqualified." (She was being polite.)
• Jennifer Rubin calls Hegseth "the greatest DEI disaster ever:" "Considering Hegseth, election denier Attorney General Pam Bondi, WWE exec Linda McMahon for secretary of education, and vaccine denier, brain-worm victim Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Health and Human Services, one must conclude Republicans are not sending us their best. (Or, the more alarming alternative…they are sending their best.)" Ruth Marcus also piled on.
• Author John Scalzi shares his thoughts on the allegations against and admissions of author Neil Gaiman published in New York this week.
• Chicago's Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) has proposed $1.5 bn in spending to improve transit for the entire area.
• Chicago lost another coyote yesterday when a plane taking off from O'Hare ran him over. (Neither the FAA nor United Airlines has confirmed that the coyote died, but I think we can make an inference here.)
• Last year was the second-warmest on record in Illinois, continuing a long-term warming trend that began after the coldest winters ever in the early 1980s.

Finally, as of today I've had a private pilot certificate for 25 years. When I last posted about this anniversary, I hoped to resume flying later that spring. Alas, something else was in the air. I still want to fly again, though. All I need is a winning lottery ticket.

Yesterday, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ scraped along at -11°C early in the morning before "warming" up to -7.5°C around 3pm. Cassie and I got a 22-minute walk around then and she seemed fine. Today the pattern completely inverted. I woke up during the warmest part of the day: 7am, -8°C. Around 8am the temperature started dropping and now hovers around -11°C again—slightly colder than the point where I limit Cassie to 15 minutes outside. She just doesn't feel cold, apparently, and would happily stay outside until she passed out from hypothermia.

So, bottom line, I'm in no hurry to take her for her lunchtime walk.

Besides, I've got a lot of interesting stories to read:

• Former Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff explains why he's a liberal, and why you should be, too.
• Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman have some ideas about how to fix the United States' "two-party problem:" proportional representation.
• Block Club Chicago lists 10 of its investigations into the Chicago Transit Authority's mismanagement under its outgoing boss, Dorval Carter.
• Chuck Marohn explains why building tons of new housing in old, dense cities like San Francisco and NYC doesn't work as well as people hope.
• Two Illinois state representatives introduced a bill in the state House to decriminalize sex work, which would dramatically increase their safety and security.
• British computer scientist Peter Kirstein died five years ago, and left behind a delightful essay on the beginnings of the Internet—and the Internet's first-ever password.
• James Poniewozik has a fun history of TV show opening titles that will waste a few minutes of your afternoon (in a good way).

Finally, yet another coyote found his way into a store, this time an Aldi in Humboldt Park. Almost 17 years ago one of his ancestors tried to hide in a Quiznos sandwich shop in the Loop. The result was the same for both: removal and relocation. Block Club says yesterday's incident involved "rescuing" the coyote from the Aldi, but that seems pretty harsh. Like, was the coyote trying to go to Whole Foods instead? They're usually not that bougie.

Cassie and I survived our 20-minute, -8°C walk a few minutes ago. For some reason I feel like I need a nap. Meanwhile:

• James Fallows remembers his old boss Jimmy Carter, and puts his presidency in perspective for the younger generations.
• Paul Krugman reminds the Republican Party that California contributes more to the country's GDP than any other state, so maybe cut the crap threatening to withhold disaster relief?
• ProPublica goes "inside the movement to redirect billions of taxpayer dollars to private religious schools."
• New Republic digs into why these same fundamentalist Christians hate ideas so much.
• Illinois legislators recently took a tour of Munich's and Berlin's transit systems, both of which I have personally found to be better than Chicago's, though London's and Vienna's are a bit better in my view. (And then there's Tokyo's, which has no equal I've encountered...)
• In much more enjoyable transit news, Chicago Transit Authority CEO Dorval Carter finally plans to retire, opening the door to someone to take over who actually likes public transit.
• NASA is weighing (quite literally) whether to retrieve some rocks it has collected on Mars.

Finally, I want to end with Ross Douthat's latest (subscriber-only) newsletter, taking Vivek Ramaswamy to task for suggesting American kids need more intense competition in order for the US to stay ahead of its peers. I'll just focus on one paragraph, where he suggests Ramaswamy's end goal may not be a place we really want to go:

[T]he atmosphere he’s describing in South Korea, the frantic cycle of educational competition, isn’t just a seeming contributing factor to that country’s social misery; it’s almost certainly a contributing factor to the literal collapse of South Korea’s population, the steep economic rise that Munger describes giving way to an equally steep demographic decline. So for societies no less than individuals, it appears possible to basically burn out on competition, to cram-school your way to misery, pessimism and collapse — something that any advocate of intensified meritocratic competition would do well to keep in mind.

As I have more and more contact with kids born after 1995, I find so many of them who either have flat personalities, an inability to function independently, and an alarming lack of emotional resilience, or who have vitality, intelligence, and an ability to function in the world but no ambition. The last 30 years have crushed the elite-adjacent kids whose parents want them to enter the elite, whatever they think "elite" means. As a kid who traveled alone on public transit to Downtown Chicago at age 7, and managed to get from O'Hare security to LAX security without help by age 8, I feel sorry for these incompetent, despondent children.

We've gotten about 4 cm of snow so far today, with more coming down until this evening. Cassie loves it; I have mixed feelings. At least the temperature has gone up a bit, getting up to -0.6°C for the first time since around this time on Monday.

Elsewhere:

• Federal Judge Aileen Cannon (R-SDFL) got overruled again, this time after her corrupt effort to block Special Counsel Jack Smith from releasing his report on January 6th.
• George Will bemoans Congress ceding so much of its authority to the office of the President, especially given who will take that office in ten days.
• Just three corrupt Chicago cops will cost the city almost $34 million in settlements, making me wonder why we don't pay those settlements out of the police pension fund.
• Pamela Paul objects to historians opining about politics, which is actually one of the things they've always done.
• Five years after the pandemic began, we still haven't gotten back in the habit of being out in public, according to Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.

Finally, Maplewood Brewing has started expanding its Logan Square taproom into the other half of the building it occupies. I don't get there often, but I enjoy going back. Can't wait to see what their restaurant looks like when it's done. I also need to get to Cherry Circle Room or the CAA Drawing Room soon, as it looks like the management transition from Land & Sea to Boka may change some things.

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.