The Daily Parker

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

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.

My Brews & Choos buddy highlighted this thought-provoking essay Jonathan Rauch posted yesterday in Persuasion; the whole thing is worth a read:

Sheer aggressiveness is perhaps the postmodern left’s and right’s most salient feature. Because they are revolutionary movements, they recognize few legitimate boundaries and observe few behavioral constraints; because they are anarchic, they have no grand plan or object beyond achieving dominance. Their signature style of no-holds-barred aggression was observed on the left more than 20 years ago by Hicks, in Explaining Postmodernism: “Postmodernists,” he wrote in 2004, “are the most likely to be hostile to dissent and debate, the most likely to engage in ad hominem argument and name-calling, the most likely to enact ‘politically correct’ authoritarian measures, and the most likely to use anger and rage as argumentative tactics.” Delete “politically correct” and you have a pitch-perfect description of the postmodern right.

The modernist right draws on a tradition dating to the Magna Carta, and the traditionalist right on a tradition dating to Plato. Like them or not, they have been around a long time and will be around a lot longer. By contrast, because right-wing postmodernism is cynical and anti-rational, attempts to theorize it will fail, just as attempts to theorize left-wing postmodernism have failed. The postmodern mindset is inherently parasitic and opportunistic, good at shocking its opponents and manipulating language but not good at building and governing. The very features which give postmodernism its supernova energy when it bursts upon the scene—its ability to be all things to all people and to bulldoze but not build—require it to win victories quickly, before it falls apart. Today, the postmodern left clings to sinecures in humanities departments but is a spent force intellectually, its methods exposed as a tired bag of tricks. The postmodern right’s performative outrages are likewise quickly becoming formulaic and self-parodic.

In one future, the postmodern right overreaches, splinters its coalition, is exposed as a fraud, and suffers political defeats in 2026 and (more importantly) 2028. That provides time for opposing forces to slow it, expose it, and defeat it. In another future, the postmodern right wins those elections and uses the period to 2032, and possibly beyond, to consolidate its power, corrupt or demolish institutions that stand in its way, and use coercion to neutralize political opposition.

For liberal and traditionalist opponents of the right-postmodern onslaught, the imperative now is to do what liberals and moderates failed to do when the postmodern left rushed academia: recognize the radicalism, nihilism, and revolutionary ruthlessness of the postmodern phenomenon; organize aggressively to stall and then defeat it; and tirelessly expose it as self-serving, parasitic, and hollow. In other words, as postmodernists love to say—unmask it.

Nihilists always lose; our job is to keep them from destroying us as well.

I don't approve at all of Israel's actions in Gaza after they removed any serious military threat from Hamas or Hezbollah more than a year ago. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's declaration today that Gaza will become essentially a military protectorate of Israel means that, at least as long as Netanyahu can stay out of jail (his entire reason for staying in power at this point), Israel is no longer a democracy.

That said, Israel's utter humiliation of Iran and removal of Iran's proxies from the theater of combat will be the subject of military histories for a very long time. Politico has some of that story today, detailing how the Mossad recruited an army of Iranians in Iran to assist them against the Iranian regime:

The secret war between Israel and Iran has attracted far less public attention but has also played a significant role in the region’s changing balance of power.

In 2018, Israeli-trained operatives broke into an unguarded Tehran warehouse and used high-temperature plasma cutters to crack safes containing drawings, data, computer disks and planning books. The material, weighing over 1,000 pounds, was loaded onto two trucks and driven into neighboring Azerbaijan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed the material at a press conference in Tel Aviv and said it proved Iran had been lying about its nuclear intentions.

One key to the spy agency’s success is the ethnic composition of Iran. Israeli officials noted in interviews that roughly 40% of the country’s population of 90 million is made up of ethnic minorities: Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds and others.

The Mossad’s espionage efforts were helped by a geographic fact. Iran is bordered by Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. Smuggling is a way of life in the region, as thousands of people earn their living using donkeys, camels, cars and trucks to carry drugs, fuel and electronics across the borders.

The Mossad had developed contacts with smugglers — and often with the government intelligence agencies — in all seven nations.

The problem facing Iran's regime is the same that all authoritarian governments ultimately have: they're fundamentally incompetent. Once pleasing the Dear Leader becomes more important to keeping your job than actually doing your job, it's hard to have integrity. The competent people get replaced with incompetent lickspittles, all up and down the chain. Just look at the OAFPOTUS and his Cabinet of Deplorables.

Iran's regime and its history also support Frank Herbert's observation that "all rebels are closet aristocrats." So do the OAFPOTUS's droogs. (Herbert also wrote, "Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible." I'll end with that this afternoon.)

Today is both the 80th anniversary of the United States dropping a nuclear weapon on Japan for the first time in history, and the 60th anniversary of President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act.

Since then, nuclear weapons have proliferated and voting rights have retreated. I think we can say both trends have gone in the wrong direction. And who better than the recently departed Tom Lehrer to put both in one song:

Former Chicago Opera Theater artistic director Lidya Yankovskaya, with whom I have worked several times, has started moving to London because she doesn't want her children to grow up in the anti-humanities environment the United States is becoming:

“I want to be sure that my children can grow up feeling like they can always express themselves freely. I want my children to live in a society that really takes care of its people. I want my children to live in a world that really values things like the arts, that really values things like education,” she told WBEZ on a recent Zoom call from Sydney, where she has been leading Georges Bizet’s classic “Carmen” at the Sydney Opera House. “In London in particular, there is such a culture of valuing intellectualism, of valuing the arts and artistic pursuits for their own sake.”

As I'm no longer eligible for the kinds of highly-skilled migrant visas I could get 15 years ago from Europe and the UK, I am a bit envious. But I also understand her completely, and if I had kids, I might also make more of a concerted effort to go somewhere closer to my values.

Two more nuggets about the end of the United States as a functioning country:

• Perry Bacon argues that major institutions like CBS and Brown University have caved to the OAFPOTUS is that they kinda-sorta agree with him on a lot of things, like labor rights and DEI.
• The New York Times' chief economics correspondent, Ben Casselman, examines what happened to other regimes that meddled with their data-gathering institutions. But that's not surprising given the OAFPOTUS's continent-shattering ignorance of basic economics.

Well, that's enough optimism and cheer for one afternoon! Time to get back to my real job.

Dayrestan, Iran, sits on an island just inside the Strait of Hormuz directly across the Persian Gulf from the UAE. At 9:30 am local time Thursday, the airport weather station reported a temperature of 40°C with a dewpoint of 36°C, which makes a heat index of 83.2°C (181.8°F). AccuWeather says it was likely an instrument error, though the next station over, in Bandar Abbass, reported a temperature of 39°C with a 27°C dewpoint for a heat index of 52.3°C (126.1°F) at the same time—hardly an improvement. Bandar Abbass got up to 42°C with a 56.3°C (133.3°F) heat index later in the day, so I will not plan any summer vacations there in the near future. (Well, that and US citizens aren't allowed to visit Iran, but still.)

Elsewhere:

• Both Michael Tomasky and former Pro Publica president Richard Tofel argue that news outlets need to stop both-sidesing the OAFPOTUS and call him out on his lies more directly.
• Nobel-winning economist George Akerlof likens the OAFPOTUS's tantrum over the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report to a 5-year-old playing a board game.
• A group of Democratic legislators from Texas have decided to vacation in Chicago this week to deny Texas Republicans a quorum in the state's House of Representatives in an effort to stop the anti-democratic redistricting plan the OAFPOTUS wants them to pass.

Finally, one of the three endangered piping plovers that hatched at Montrose Beach six weeks ago got eaten by a hawk over the weekend. RIP Ferris.

With my PTO cap continuing to force me into Friday afternoons off this summer (the horror!), and the sunny but (smoky 23°C) weather, Cassie and I will head to the Horner Park DFA just as soon as I release a new version of Weather Now in just a few minutes.

When Cassie and I come back, I'll spend some time reading all these nuggets of existential dread:

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised last 3 months of US jobs data down to basically nil (which Krugman blames on tariffs), prompting the OAFPOTUS to fire BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
• Not only is the State Department's HR director a "RIF-happy, Christian evangelizing MAGA warrior with an axe to grind," he's also apparently kind of creepy.
• Former intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper "set the record straight on Russian and 2016."
• James Fallows once again calls on everyone to help protect our institutions.
• Yascha Mounk sees the rise of AI as akin to the Industrial Revolution.
• After more than a century of slow traffic through Wrigleyville, the CTA finally straightened out a section of the Red Line to cut travel times for everyone, which unfortunately means more noise.
• The impending merger between the Southern Pacific and Norfolk Southern railroads will have a huge impact on Chicago rail traffic—but no one yet knows whether it will be up or down.
• Molly White suggests using RSS readers instead of email lists to reduce the enshittification of news publications.
• Jeff Maurer, who spent several years writing for John Oliver as you may recall, wants to have a serious autopsy of late night television that includes all the uncomfortable topics.

By the way, the new Weather Now build allows users to create their own weather lists and share them with the world or keep them private. I've wanted to build this feature for a long time, finally starting work on it two weekends ago. Try it out and let me know what you think!

One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded struck off the east coast of Russia last night, registering magnitude 8.8 according to the United States Geological Survey. So far there have been fewer casualty reports than one might expect, owing to the sparse population in the area. Governments around the Pacific basin issued tsunami warnings almost immediately, though they have since downgraded them.

In other stories:

• Jeff Maurer doesn't think the Epstein scandal will end the OAFPOTUS's regime, suggesting that "Trump is being so defensive that it’s tempting to think that there’s something incredibly damning in the files, but I have a simpler, highly plausible explanation: Trump is just a huge fucking idiot."
• Paul Krugman agrees on that last point, explaining in greater detail how the EU just played the OAFPOTUS like a three-dollar kazoo.
• Though I rarely agree with George Will, today in the Post he echoes some of my own annoyances at the laziness of too many writers. Reminder: there are no degrees of "unique."
• Writer and actor Patton Oswalt has a hilarious take on pretty songs that creep him out.

I'll close with a photo that explains why so few people died in such a large earthquake. This is what Kamchatka looks like (but it's actually a bit north of there):