The Daily Parker

I just finished 3½ hours of nonstop meetings that people crammed into my calendar because I have this afternoon blocked off as "Summer Hours PTO." Within a few minutes of finishing my last meeting, I rebooted my laptop (so it would get updated), closed the lid, and...looked at a growing pile of news stories that I couldn't avoid:

• Dan Rather calls tomorrow's planned Soviet-style military parade through DC a charade: "The military’s biggest cheerleader (at least today) didn’t serve in Vietnam because of 'bone spurs' and has repeatedly vilified our troops, calling them 'suckers and losers,'", Rather reminds us. "But when service members are needed for a photo op or to prop up flagging poll numbers, all is forgiven, apparently."
• Anne Applebaum reminds us of the history of revolutions, and what happens when the revolutionaries get frustrated that the masses don't agree with them (hint: ask Mao or the Bolsheviks.) "The logic of revolution often traps revolutionaries: They start out thinking that the task will be swift and easy. The people will support them. Their cause is just. But as their project falters, their vision narrows. At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier."
• James Fallows praises California governor Gavin Newsom (D) as "the adult in the room" for his response to the OAFPOTUS federalizing the California National Guard.
• Andrew Sullivan draws a straight line between the OAFPOTUS's behavior and an archetypical colonial-era caudillo.
• Timothy Noah, who may have his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, wonders aloud if the OAFPOTUS's incompetence relates somehow to his obsession with weight? (tl;dr: Narcissistic projection.)
• US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) agrees with the OAFPOTUS on only one thing she can think of: the need to abolish the debt ceiling. (I also agree!)
• The US House of Representatives voted 214-212 yesterday to claw back $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting, which particularly imperils NPR stations in Republican districts.
• Slate looks into signs that exurban areas may finally be slowing down their car-centric sprawl as the economics of maintaining all that barely-used infrastructure finally take hold.

Finally, Politico describes the absolute cluster of the Chicago Public Schools refusing to close nearly-empty buildings that, in some cases, cost $93,000 per student to keep open. But don't worry, mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union president and now the least-popular mayor in city history, is on the case!

Comrade OAFPOTUS! (h/t Paul Krugman)

Historian Timothy W Ryback outlines how the Chancellor of Germany used manufactured crises to take over the Bavarian State in 1933. If you hear an echo from the past coming from California this week, that may not be an accident:

Adolf Hitler was a master of manufacturing public-security crises to advance his authoritarian agenda.

The March 5 Reichstag elections delivered Hitler 44 percent of the electorate and with that a claim on political power at every level of government. The next day, 200,000 National Socialist brownshirts stormed state and municipal offices across the country. Swastika banners draped town halls. Civil servants were thrown from their desks.

But not in Bavaria. [Bavarian minister president Heinrich] Held’s solid block of more than 1 million voters, along with the threat of armed resistance by the Bavaria Watch, gave Hitler pause. So did [Bavarian People's Party chief Fritz] Schäffer’s threat to call on Bavaria’s Prince Rupprecht to reestablish monarchical rule.

Hitler huddled with his lieutenants to frame a strategy for Bavaria. Storm troopers would stage public disturbances, triggering a response under paragraph two of Article 48, enabling Hitler to suspend the Held government, and install a Reich governor in its place.

And let's not forget the Reichstag Fire, which Hitler claimed was the start of a Bolshevik revolution even though the lone arsonist who started it was caught in the act.

With a weakened OAFPOTUS unable to win popular support for, well, anything lately, and his plastic-headed defense secretary sending marines to Los Angeles, this does not look good for the United States.

I've had a lot to do in the office today, so unfortunately this will just be a link fest:

• I agree with Jeff Maurer that "I hate that when some dickhead sets a car on fire, we have to talk about it for a week."
• Journalist G. Elliott Morris argues that the Los Angeles protests have a higher probability of hurting the OAFPOTUS than helping him.
• Paul Krugman sighs that "we finally know what 'American carnage' was about."
• Russian emigrés Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev have a list of Russian words to help explain the OAFPOTUS and his droogs.
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who served in the Wisconsin Air National Guard both here and in Afghanistan, has absolutely no patience for the OAFPOTUS militarizing the situation in Los Angeles.
• Jennifer Rubin similarly has no patience for referring to the first Defense Secretary who never served in uniform as a "warrior."
• Oh, and let's not forget the bill House Republicans passed a couple of weeks ago that, if the Senate passes it, would reshape American democracy in some pretty horrifying ways.
• Writer Michael Hirschorn thinks Democrats are missing a huge opportunity by staying away from bro-sphere podcasters like Joe Rogan.
• Both Google and Apple have reportedly added a time zone for Cape Breton Island after an article on a satirical Canadian site joked about the municipality creating an "even more annoying time zone between Atlantic and Newfoundland time."

Finally, while Graceland Cemetery in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood doubles as an arboretum and a great place to walk your dog, right now a different set of canids has sway. Graceland has temporarily banned pet dogs while a litter of coyote pups grows up. They are totes adorbs, but their parents have behaved aggressively towards people walking dogs nearby.

Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it.

Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist:

• Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of the National Guard] during the Civil Rights Era were over the refusal of segregationist state governments to enforce federal law under court order. Trump’s argument is...[that] the President [has the right] to decide when a state government isn’t protecting or enforcing civil order to his liking and to intervene with federalized National Guard or the U.S. military to do it at the point of a bayonet. ... The crisis the administration insisted it needed to solve was a crisis of the administration’s creation."
• Philip Bump puts the encroaching fascism in broader context: "What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. ... The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel...."
• The Guardian highlights how Chicago has led the way in resisting the OAFPOTUS's xenophobic mass-deportation program, as part of our long history of respecting immigrant rights.
• Anne Applebaum looks at last week's election in Poland and feels a chill that "every election is now existential."
• Lisa Schwarzbaum, a former film critic for Entertainment Weekly, likens the OAFPOTUS's style of governing to Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom."
• Ezra Klein expresses surprise at who has objected the most to the recommendations in his recent book Abundance, and the left-wing emphasis on messaging: "Democrats aren’t struggling primarily because they choose the wrong messages. They’re struggling because they fail to solve problems. ... [Brandon] Johnson is the most proudly left-wing big-city mayor in the country. ... He’s also the least popular big-city mayor in the country and may well end up as the least popular mayor in Chicago’s history. Policy failure breeds political failure."
• Oh, by the way, Meta and Yandex have started to de-anonymize your Android device by abusing how your Internet browser works.

Finally, a community group on the Northwest Side has launched an effort to build a 5-km rails-to-trails plus greenway project to connect the Bloomingdale Trail with the North Branch Trail. This would create a direct connection between the southern flank of Lincoln Park and the Chicago Botanic Garden in suburban Glencoe. It's still early days, though. I'd love to see this in my lifetime. I'm also waiting for electrified railroads around Chicago, but this project would be a lot cheaper.

I want to start with a speech on the floor of the French Senate three days ago, in which Claude Malhuret (LIRT-Allier) had this to say about the OAFPOTUS:

Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose higher tariffs on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.

I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.

Malheureusement, il a bien raison. And his speech is worth reading (or hearing, si vous parlez français bien).

But that isn't all that happened in the last day or so. No, every day brings new revelations of stupidity and corruption in the new administration:

• James Fallows listened to the OAFPOTUS's address to Congress on Tuesday so you didn't have to, and found it...disturbing.
• The Clown Prince of X appears to have pressured the FAA into issuing a license for yesterday's launch of a SpaceX rocket that exploded just two weeks after another SpaceX rocket exploded. (You may call Musk a thuper-geniuth!)
• ProPublica does the math to demonstrate how the cuts the clowns have proposed at the Internal Revenue Service will actually cost more than they will save—forgetting for a moment that the point of those cuts is to make tax cheating less likely to get caught.
• Oh, and the clowns have illegally disbanded the committee that keeps your food safe from microbes.
• The Army Corps of Engineers admitted that the rushed release of water from Northern California reservoirs shortly after the OAFPOTUS took office simply wasted it, as everyone who can look at a map already guessed.
• The jobs report that the Bureau of Labor Statistics released today only encompassed data from the first three weeks of the administration, before they started illegally firing civil servants.

And now I will take a half-day of PTO and explore four new breweries in Bridgeport and Pilsen. If only the weather had cooperated.

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.

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.

The USGS (and no doubt millions of fish) has detected a 7.0-magnitude earthquake off the coast of California. People as far away as San Diego and Hawaii have gotten tsunami warnings. So far no tsunamis have been reported; we'll see when the first possible wave reaches San Francisco in an hour.

More info when available.

Update, 14:12 CST: NOAA cancelled the tsunami warning for the US and Canadian West Coast about 15 minutes ago.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.)

Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era:

• Adam Gray (D) has defeated US Representative John Duarte (R) in California's 13 district, bringing the House of Representatives to its final tally of 210 Democrats and 215 Republicans.
• An assassin shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, 50, this morning in midtown Manhattan.
• The president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, attempted an autogolpe yesterday that failed when the military and police refused to prevent the legislature from meeting to reverse his martial law declaration and start impeaching him.
• US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel will move back to his house eight blocks from mine in January as he decides what to do with himself next. (Personally, I'd like to see him back on the Fifth Floor.)
• The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has reversed its stance on end-to-end cryptography for mobile phones now that international hackers are running amok with insecure iPhone-to-Android messages.
• Bruce Schneier analyzes the good and bad ways that AI was involved in the world's elections this year.

Let's hope tomorrow's mood is a different Far Side comic...

Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Off the Rails Brewing, 111 S. Murphy Ave., Sunnyvale, Calif.
Train line: Caltrain, Sunnyvale
Time from SF Terminal: 62 minutes
Time from Chicago: about 4½ hours by air
Distance from station: 300 m

Sunnyvale, Calif., has blocked off the north end of Murphy Ave. to traffic, turning the entire block into a pedestrian zone lined with restaurants and a good-enough-for-the-suburbs brewery where you can have good-enough beers. Despite the amazing weather when I visited on Friday—it's hard to beat 23°C and sunny in November—I just couldn't get excited about the place.

I had a flight of 4 120-mL pours that left me feeling "eh." The Kölsch (5%) had a decent, malty flavor, a little sweet for my palate, with banana and apple notes. The Lazy Hazy IPA (7.2%) did not taste like a 7% beer, and also didn't taste like it had a lot of hops, but the banana, apricot, and honey notes were pleasant enough, though again too sweet for me. The YOLO Fruity IPA (6.2%) was actually less fruity than the hazy, though it had a good balance and was drinkable. Again, though, not a memorable beer. But the Otis Imperial Stout (9.2%) was my favorite of the four, with just enough bitterness to match the coffee and chocolate flavors.

Bottom line: Off the Rails has a convenient location right by the Caltrain station in a part of Silicon Valley that doesn't have a lot of Brews & Choos-eligible breweries. So, sure, why not? But I wouldn't make a special trip.

The Thai place next door, though, smelled amazing.

Beer garden? Street pedestrian zone and smaller back patio
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Unavoidable inside
Serves food? Full menu
Would hang out with a book? Maybe
Would hang out with friends? Maybe
Would go back? Maybe