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.

Cassie only got an 8-minute walk this morning, and she's not likely to get a longer one today. Officially at O'Hare it's -15°C, and here at IDTWHQ it's -13°C. The forecast promises the temperature will remain right around there until tonight before sliding down to -18°C by 3am, and -21°C Tuesday morning around 5am. Brr.

My Garmin app tells me I'm on day 22 of a 30-day "walk streak" of getting a walking activity of at least 1.6 km every day. We'll see about that. Cassie won't be able to join me, poor dear, because it's not safe for her to be out longer than 10 minutes at this temperature.

The temperature will get back up to -4°C or so when it's time to come home from day camp on Wednesday, though. And I'll make sure to give her extra walkies next weekend.

While doing a routine upgrade of NuGet packages in Weather Now, I discovered that Montreal-based Xceed Software has acquired a component called Fluent Assertions. They claim they will "will continue to honour free licenses for open-source, non-commercial projects," but they also now spam log files every time the component is invoked with a "buy a license" message.

Well, I don't want all that log spam, I don't want to pay $130 a year for one testing component, and I have no idea how long they will honor the Apache-2.0 license that existed through v7.1 (released yesterday), so I just downgraded to v7.1. (Apache licenses are permanent, so as long as I'm happy staying at v7.1, the new commercial license doesn't apply.)

Also, as Devclass points out, "A common question is whether Fluent Assertions is sufficiently critical to survive as a commercial project. It is well liked, but relatively easy to replace with native .NET functionality that comes for free." So I will be looking into the equivalent packages soon, possibly this weekend when I'm stuck inside most of the time.

Bastards. I mean, I'm happy that the developers finally got paid for their work and all. Still: Bastards.

(Someone posted a bug in GitHub on the change, so if you want to see how many developers this change has angered just in the last 48 hours, it's worth a read.)

We've known for about a week that a mass of cold air was bearing down on us. It formed over Siberia, passed over the North Pole and Canada, and has now reached Chicago.

Cassie and I went out just now for 22 minutes, and in that time the temperature dropped 0.4°C (0.7°F), which may not sound like a lot until you do the math (1.2°C/2.2°F per hour). And it will continue doing so until early Monday morning, plateauing but not rising during daylight hours:

Fortunately for us (but unfortunately for a lot of insects and plants), we have almost no snow on the ground after two days of above-freezing weather. Without the snow to lower its albedo, the ground will absorb the abundant sunlight to keep us warmer than we otherwise would be:

The dump of arctic air will be in full swing Sunday night with a lobe of roughly -27° to -30°C 850 mb air waiting in the wings just to our north and west, and this will traverse northern Illinois fully on Monday night. From a climatology perspective, this is just about as cold as we`ve seen (at 850 mb) in the nearby upper air database (Quad Cities and Lincoln, IL). Out of curiosity, went back and took a look at the arctic outbreak from this time last year (January 14 - 17), which featured low temperatures in the -5° to -15°F range and wind chills solidly down towards -30°F (and even lower than that on short time periods). 850 mb temperatures in this case were actually notably "warmer", generally around -20°C. They key difference was a widespread and dense snowpack which we obviously don`t have this time around, which just goes to show the power of snowpacks in altering these arctic airmasses. In this case, little/snow in place, even amidst near-record cold just off the deck, the peak of this arctic episode looks to wind up a bit under where we found ourselves one year ago.

Also, yesterday we had a late-March-like 8.3°C high temperature at O'Hare, and the temperatures should go above zero again on Thursday. The coldest normal temperatures in January occur on the 23rd to the 25th, so this is pretty much right on time.

The worst part of this will fall on Cassie. She only has the two fur coats her parents gave her, and she has no sense of cold. I've explained to her that she's only going to get 5-minute walks from Sunday to Tuesday. She responded by rolling on her back and demanding a belly-rub. I'm envious.

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?

Writer and director David Lynch has died at 78:

The director of 10 feature films — or maybe 11, counting the 2017 revival of “Twin Peaks,” which he described as an 18-hour movie — Mr. Lynch received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 2019. He also earned four Oscar nominations for directing “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and for directing and co-writing “The Elephant Man,” a 1980 historical drama about a hideously deformed but beautifully refined Englishman.

“Eraserhead,” his dystopian 1977 debut, featured giant spermatozoa and a singing woman who lives inside a radiator. “Blue Velvet,” a voyeuristic coming-of-age story, opened with a sequence that lingered uncomfortably on swarming ants. “Mulholland Drive,” a neo-noir drama, hinged on altered identities and dreamlike mysteries, including the appearance of an enigmatic blue box inside a character’s bag.

“If you look at TV drama since its inception, shows would tell the audience what they were going to see, show it to them and then tell them what they’ve seen. Nobody was ever puzzled by what was going on,” David Chase, creator of “The Sopranos,” told Time magazine in 2017. “With ‘Twin Peaks,’ Lynch and Frost show it to you and leave you thinking, ‘What did I just see?’ That was revolutionary, and it still is.”

During its first season, on ABC, the show drew as many as 20 million viewers and received 14 Emmy nominations, winning two, behind an ensemble cast that included Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Ontkean.

I have fond memories of sitting on a dorm bed watching Twin Peaks with my friend Renee on Thursday nights junior and senior years. I have mixed feelings about "The Return"—really, about everything he did (especially Dune)—and let's not talk about Fire Walk With Me, strangled in the crib by the suits at New Line. The first season of Twin Peaks, though. That really meant a lot to us in college.

He will be missed.

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ peeked above freezing a few minutes ago:

We last had an above-freezing temperature at 4:25pm Sunday. We expect above-freezing temperatures during the day tomorrow, too. And then, around 2am Saturday morning, the forecast says the temperature will start sliding down to -20°C by 5am Sunday. We expect to have temperatures below -10°C from Saturday morning until early Wednesday morning.

Right now, however, we have clear skies and lots of sun. Time to take Cassie for a half-hour walk.