The Daily Parker

I know, two days in a row I can't be arsed to write a real blog post. Sometimes I have actual work to do, y'know?

• The Economist argues that when the world gets 3°C hotter, nowhere will be safe.
• The New York Times predicts where heat-related deaths will rise when that happens.
• Jennifer Rubin gives President Biden high marks for his first six months in office.
• Sophia McClennen explains "why it's (almost) impossible to argue with the right" while Gary Abernathy demonstrates the problem.
• The National Labor Relations Board has given Chicago's own Scabby, the giant inflatable protest rat, a reprieve.
• Cranky Flier explains that even though Alitalia ("the worst airline in the world") will technically cease to exist in October, the Italian government just won't let it die.
• NBC's Paris Marx calls Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's thank-you speech a self-own.

Finally, as I've gone through my CD collection in the order I bought them, I occasionally encounter something that has not aged well. Today I came across Julie Brown's "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun," which...just, no. Not in this century.

Adam Gopnik makes a good point about President Biden's successful, if invisible, ideology:

Biden and his team, widely attacked as pusillanimous centrists with no particular convictions, are in fact ideologues. Their ideology is largely invisible but no less ideological for refusing to present itself out in the open. It is the belief, animating Biden’s whole career, that there is a surprisingly large area of agreement in American life and that, by appealing to that area of agreement, electoral victory and progress can be found.

He didn’t say as much as he might have or as many might have wanted [about the XPOTUS's crimes]. But this was surely due to his conviction, and the conviction of his circle, that an atmosphere of aggravation can only work to the advantage of the permanently aggrieved. With so many Americans in the grip of a totalized ideology of Trumpism—one that surmounts their obvious self-interest or normal calculations of economic utility—the way to get them out of it is to stop thinking in totalized terms. You get people out of a cult not by offering them a better cult but by helping them see why they don’t need a cult.

[L]ike a virus that infects the country, long Trump is an ailment that won’t go away.

The urge to fight it, hard, before it can return, seems irresistible. Yet Biden and his circle resist this fight, and it would be foolish to think that they resist it only out of blindness and opacity. They are betting on Charley Goldman’s wisdom: you can’t win playing the other guy’s game. This wisdom has taken them further than the more aggressive conventional kind might have imagined.

The President is about to get a $3.5 trillion infrastructure package through Congress on Democratic votes alone. He's doing everything he said he'd do, and succeeding (mostly). He might know what he's doing.

Cassie and I headed up to Tyranena Brewing in Lake Mills, Wis., yesterday to hang out with family. Today, other than a trip to the grocery and adjacent pet store where Cassie picked out an "indestructible" toy that now lies in tatters on the couch, we've had a pretty relaxing Sunday. I thought I'd take a break from Hard Times to queue up some stuff to read tomorrow at lunch:

• Joni Mitchell and friends discuss her album Blue, which came out 50 years ago this week.
• National Geographic investigated a 6,600-year-old mass killing to determine who killed whom.
• Josh Marshall worries that the current Supreme Court could overturn laws aimed at removing partisanship from redistricting.
• Julia Ioffe has started a new email list, "Tomorrow will be Worse," with a discussion about whether the Biden-Putin summit last week could presage a new cold war.
• Whenever you think Republicans want a real free-market economy, look at how Republicans in North Carolina tried to kill community-driven Internet access at the behest of major telecoms companies.
• Via John Scalzi, writer Michael Harriot points out in ways both hilarious and profane that Juneteenth isn't about white people.
• New Republic's Zachary Carter thinks the Biden presidency might finally end the Democratic Party's courtship of Milton Friedman's reactionary economics.

I will now return to Dickens, because it's funny and sad.

President Biden's 13-year-old German shepherd died earlier this week:

Champ Biden, one of two German shepherds belonging to President Biden and his family has died, the president and first lady Jill Biden announced late Saturday morning. He was 13 years old.

"Our hearts are heavy today," Biden and first lady Jill Biden wrote in a statement, adding that the dog had died at their home.

Champ was a puppy during Biden's tenure as vice president under the Obama administration. The same statement commemorated the dog's love for chasing golf balls at the Naval Observatory and spending time with the Biden grandchildren.

Champ's longtime loyalty was also remembered in the Bidens' statement Saturday.

"In our most joyful moments and in our most grief-stricken days, he was there with us, sensitive to our every unspoken feeling and emotion," the statement said. "We love our sweet, good boy and will miss him always."

Champ was a Good Boy. Major, though...he's getting there.

The BBC Fact Checker corrects the record on things the President has said since he took office:

"An increase in border migration 'happens every year... in the winter months'"

The number fluctuates widely - but there is not always a significant increase during the winter months.

At a press conference in March, he said: "There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. It happens every year."

Of the seven statements the BBC checked, only this and his claim about when polls close in Georgia was inaccurate.

The Washington Post found that President Biden made 78 false or misleading claims during his first 100 days in office, only two of which earned 4 Pinocchios. In contrast, the XPOTUS made 511 such statements in 100 days, including a few dozen whoppers. The Post also noted that the President "generally does not repeat his false claims if they have been fact-checked as false."

Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an op-ed this morning from Matthew Walther, a contributing editor at The American Conservative. Walther claims the President is governing the same as his predecessor:

After announcing his intention to “get tough on China,” the president has kept Mr. Trump’s tariffs largely in place and supplemented them with a wide-ranging “Buy American” order. Perhaps even more worthy of Mr. Trump was the new administration’s refusal in March to export unused supplies of the coronavirus vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca on the grounds that the United States needed to be “oversupplied and overprepared.” Mr. Biden’s sudden about-face on this issue a few weeks later was also fittingly Trumpian.

There is also the matter of immigration policy. Despite his formal reinstatement of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and other, mostly symbolic actions, such as proposing that the word “alien” be replaced with “noncitizen” in American law, Mr. Biden has presided over the sorts of barbarous spectacles at our southern border that were all too familiar during the past four years.

Even in the area of economics, where it might have been supposed by both supporters and critics during the presidential campaign that Mr. Biden would adopt a more progressive agenda, he has differed from the bipartisan center-right economic consensus along curiously familiar lines. In addition to keeping Mr. Trump’s moratorium on evictions in place, for example, he has continued with the suspension of interest on student loan debt and the collection of monthly payments.

So, I'm not entirely sure what Walther's criticisms are, really. I agree that the administration has taken more time than one would hope to correct the abuses at the border, but that seems more like bureaucratic inertia than policy—not to mention the philosophical bent of many of our border agents.

What Walther and other critics from the right get totally wrong is how the President corrects himself, and how the tone of the administration matters both at home and abroad. Not all of the previous administration's policies were awful. Not all of President Biden's are wonderful. But on balance, the world has become a better place now that we've seen the back of the last guy.

Paul Krugman points out that adequate child care, such as President Biden has championed, goes a long way to helping families make and keep money:

It’s ... instructive to compare the United States with other advanced countries, almost all of which have higher taxes and more generous social benefits than we do. Do they pay a price for these policies in the form of reduced employment?

Many Americans would, I suspect, be surprised to learn that the truth is that many high-tax, high-benefit countries are quite successful at creating jobs. Take the case of France: Adults between the ages of 25 and 54, the prime working years, are more likely to be employed in France than they are in America, mainly because Frenchwomen have a higher rate of paid employment than their American counterparts. The Nordic countries have an even larger employment advantage among women.

How can employment be so high in countries with lots of “job-killing” taxes? The answer is that taxes don’t visibly kill jobs — but lack of child care does. Parents in many rich countries are able to take paid work because they have access to safe, affordable child care; in the United States such care is prohibitively expensive for many, if they can get it at all. And the reason is that our government spends almost nothing on child care and pre-K; our outlays as a percentage of G.D.P. put us somewhat below Cyprus and Romania.

The American Family Plan would completely change this picture, providing free preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds while limiting child care costs to no more than 7 percent of income for lower- and middle-income parents. If this raised employment of prime-age American women to French levels, it would add about 1.8 million jobs; if we went to Danish levels, we would add three million jobs.

Might we finally get to a place in American history where we have better conditions than many of our friends? We'll see.

A few articles caught my attention this week:

• Jennifer Rubin says the GOP's opposition to literally everything President Biden has proposed is killing their popularity.
• The New Republic, in collaboration with the Chicago Reader, tells the story of the last remaining men's hotel in Chicago.
• NPR host Steve Inskeep describes his difficulties getting his adoption records from the State of Indiana.
• Writing in The New Yorker, Daniel Alcarón mourns the loss of Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory last December.
• In Illinois, March had above-normal temperatures 23 of 31 days, making the month the 13th warmest March on record.

Also, I'm just making a note to myself of Yuriy Ivon's rundown on Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, because I'm using it a lot more than I have in the past.

President Biden just signed the largest relief bill in history:

Doug Mills/New York Times

President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package into law Thursday, his first legislative achievement since taking office less than two months ago, a measure to infuse billions into the U.S. economy and bolster funding for vaccines, testing and school reopenings.

The package, which was unanimously opposed by Republicans in Congress, will also provide millions of Americans with $1,400 stimulus checks that are set to go out by the end of the month. The White House is planning a victory lap tomark the achievement with the president, First Lady Jill Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris hitting the road next week.

The signing from the Oval Office comes just hours before Biden is set to mark one year of coronavirus pandemic shutdowns with his first prime-time address since taking office. The remarks are expected to both look back at the scale of loss over that time and peer ahead at a post-pandemic future.

The law provides immediate payments of $1,400 per person, including dependents, for individuals making less than $75,000 per year or families making less than $150,000; a $3,000 tax credit for every child under 18 ($3,600 under 6); subsidies for child-car costs; an expansion of the Affordable Care Act; and money for pensions, among many other provisions.

Remember when we thought Biden would be just, you know, OK? Or that the Democratic Party would once again cower in fear of the other guys yelling about bipartisanship and deficits?

Welcome to 2021.

Chicago got up to 21°C yesterday, tying the record for March 9th set in 1974. It's already 20°C right now, close to the record 22°C set in 1955.

In other news:

• One chart shows the difference between the XPOTUS's 2017 tax cut for rich people and President Biden's pandemic-relief bill, which he will sign into law tomorrow.
• Lou Ottens, who invented the audio cassette tape, died at the age of 94.
• A survey of Windows computers found that 26% of them have not applied the WannaCry patch after four years of knowing about it.
• Nicholas Weaver explains the "Great Email Robbery" that will probably happen later this week. Great.

And now that I've finally gotten a .NET 5 application to deploy onto a Microsoft Azure Functions App, I will take a well-earned walk.

Just a few stories:

• President Biden declared that the US is on track to have enough Covid-19 vaccine to jab every adult in the country by the end of May.
• That did not stop Republicans in Texas and Mississippi from ending mask mandates and other Covid-19 safety measures.
• The House of Representatives may pass a major election reform bill that could give Senate Democrats the impetus to kill (or at least maim) the fillibuster.
• The Chicago Tribune spent some time on a retrospective of our winter weather statistics.

Finally, it only took 375 years and satellite imagery, but geologists have demonstrated that New Zealand is on its own continent.