The Daily Parker

A total lunar eclipse has just started and will reach totality at 12:30 Chicago time, which is unfortunately about 10 hours too early for us to enjoy it here. It's a good way to end the first day of meteorological autumn, though, as is the 8 km walk Cassie and I have planned around 2 this afternoon. With a forecast high of 19°C, it should be lovely.

In other eclipses this past week:

• The OAFPOTUS has so badly damaged US foreign policy and our standing in the world that China has eclipsed us as the de facto soft power in the world.
• The OAFPOTUS's bad poll numbers released this morning have eclipsed his bad poll numbers from the previous...ever—and this is even before pollsters factored in HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr's excruciatingly horrific performance in front of the Senate on Friday.
• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik's old company, the private equity firm Cantor Fitzgerald, has offered up to $1 billion to buy tariff refund rights at 20-30c on the dollar, a level of corruption only barely eclipsed by the OAFPOTUS's cryptocurrency scams.
• The crime data from hundreds of other cities around the world totally eclipse Chicago's, despite the OAFPOTUS's bullshit.
• Jeff Maurer warns, in his own special way, that lies about the Gaza war mostly eclipse any actual journalism that could otherwise be happening about it.
• James Fallows frets that the coverage of Harvard University's defiance of the OAFPOTUS may eclipse Harvard's actions themselves.

For what it's worth, the next total lunar eclipse visible from Chicago will be on 26 June 2029, starting at sunset and reaching totality at 21:31 CDT.

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.

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.

It's entirely possible that I will have something to post about the OAFPOTUS's self-dealing almost every one of the next 1,417 days. One hopes not, however. I mean, we only have 608 more days until the next election!

Jeff Maurer starts today's update with his take on the laughable proposal for the United States Government to buy cryptocurrency:

The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the less-laughable cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin — if Bitcoin is Coca-Cola, Trump wants to also buy Jittery Jimmy’s High-Fructose Fizz Drink. Trump has mused that buying cryptocurrency could get the government out of debt, which sounds like the plan a degenerate gambler makes right before his body turns up in a New Jersey landfill.

This plan clearly benefits someone — the value of the cryptocurrencies Trump mentioned spiked after the announcement — but because cryptocurrencies are anonymous, we don’t know who got rich. It could be donors, foreign interests, or Trump family members — the only thing we know is that it was somebody terrible. Plus, someone placed a highly leveraged $200 million purchase right before Trump’s announcement, so there’s probably an old-timey insider trading scam happening alongside this Digital Age scam-of-the-future.

Another likely beneficiary is the guy who told Trump to do this: David Sacks. You may know Sacks as the ardent Trump backer and frequent repeater of Kremlin talking points whom Trump named as his “Crypto Czar”, with the “Czar” part really making sense given Sacks’ beliefs. Sacks says that he sold all of his cryptocurrency before Trump took office, but we can’t verify that, because crypto is anonymous. We do know that Sacks’ venture capital firm — the stake in which Sacks has not said that he sold — invests in a crypto fund whose top five holdings are exactly the five cryptocurrencies that Trump wants the government to buy. Sacks is a really lucky dude! It’s like if I was named Blog Czar and then got the government to buy a billion I Might Be Wrong subscriptions, and to be clear: President Trump, that offer is very much on the table.

Molly White also has a few things to say on the subject, with less satire and more technical expertise.

Given the raging corruption coming from the top of the party, is it any surprise that US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) has cozy relationships with the military contractors her committee regulates?

Meanwhile...

• The S&P 500 index of large stocks fell 2% yesterday and 3.5% over the last week as the OAFPOTUS started the stupidest trade war in history with our three biggest trading partners.
• Who could have guessed that China's and Russia's foreign-intelligence services have ramped up efforts to recruit US government workers, now that so many of them are legitimately disgruntled? Who indeed.
• American Airlines has cut hundreds of flights from its summer schedule because of the Clown Prince of X illegally firing thousands of government employees.
• Yascha Mounk does not completely understand the new world order yet, but it seems clear to him that we're in a truly historical transition.
• Paul Krugman interviews Nathan Tankus, an expert on the COBOL code that runs the Federal Reserve and Treasury.
• Charles Marohn is infuriated by the OAFPOTUS rescinding Federal approval for the New York City congestion pricing plan, even though he found flaws in its implementation.

Finally, I was pleased to see that Amazon and MGM Studios have started development of a TV series based on the first novel in Iain M Banks' Culture series, Consider Phlebas. It's a fun novel, and a good introduction to the series—which makes sense as it's the first one he wrote. I hope it gets to production.

Security expert Bruce Schneier can't believe the damage that Elon Musk's team have already done to US national security, and worries it will get much, much worse:

In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound.

What makes this situation unprecedented isn’t just the scope, but also the method of attack. Foreign adversaries typically spend years attempting to penetrate government systems such as these, using stealth to avoid being seen and carefully hiding any tells or tracks. The Chinese government’s 2015 breach of OPM was a significant US security failure, and it illustrated how personnel data could be used to identify intelligence officers and compromise national security.

The Treasury’s computer systems have such an impact on national security that they were designed with the same principle that guides nuclear launch protocols: No single person should have unlimited power. Just as launching a nuclear missile requires two separate officers turning their keys simultaneously, making changes to critical financial systems traditionally requires multiple authorized personnel working in concert.

This approach, known as “separation of duties,” isn’t just bureaucratic red tape; it’s a fundamental security principle as old as banking itself. When your local bank processes a large transfer, it requires two different employees to verify the transaction. When a company issues a major financial report, separate teams must review and approve it. These aren’t just formalities—they’re essential safeguards against corruption and error. These measures have been bypassed or ignored. It’s as if someone found a way to rob Fort Knox by simply declaring that the new official policy is to fire all the guards and allow unescorted visits to the vault.

The implications for national security are staggering.

The OAFPOTUS and his enablers have already crippled the United States internationally. How do Republicans in Congress not see this? Does Musk have to personally give Vladimir Putin a thumb drive with our nuclear codes before someone in the cult wakes up? 

The OAFPOTUS's principal motivation has always been self-enrichment. He has scammed and grifted his whole life, though he sucks at it so hard he managed to burn through so much of his inheritance that he'd have been better off stuffing it in a savings account.

So it should come as no surprise that the first few weeks of his second term have seen remarkable gifts to other grifters and scammers worldwide, not to mention our adversaries:

• Yesterday, he pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the first Illinois governor so corrupt that the legislature actually removed him from office, and possibly the only politician with a lower approval rating in Chicago than the OAFPOTUS.
• His acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau told the agency's employees to go home, probably in violation of several laws, and certainly to the delight of every corrupt financial institution in the United States. Former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra talked to NPR yesterday morning about the insanity of this order.
• He imposed 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum, which will piss off our closest friends in the world while raising prices for all Americans, throwing Americans out of work, and raising no revenue worth discussing.

In other stupidity directly attributable to the OAFPOTUS:

• Google explained as patiently as possible that they have always followed the Board of Geographic Names database, but in the case of the asinine directive to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico in the database, they're going to show it three different ways depending on where you are in the world.
• Jordan's King Abdullah made it clear to the OAFPOTUS that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza he proposed would abrogate Israel's peace treaty with Jordan and force the two nations into a state of war.

But hey, he's really intelligent, isn't he? He's the Weave-Meister! The Weave-o-Matic! Weavy Wonder! And he really does inspire all the people with sub-100 IQs out there that, someday, they too could be president.

The damage he's done in the last three weeks to our standing in the world is a gift to Russia, China, and everyone else who wants to end Pax Americana. As Krugman said yesterday, "what we’re seeing is what you’d expect if China and Russia had somehow managed to install people who wanted to sabotage America’s international position at the highest levels of the U.S. government."

It's also a testament to the Republican Party's 50-year endeavor to destroy public education. Makes me proud to be an American.

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.

Imagine an overnight train from New York to Miami that takes 12 hours. China just opened a $165 train that does about the same thing:

From Hong Kong to Beijing, the overnight trip takes 12 hours 30 minutes, and it covers roughly the same distance as a flight from New York to Miami or Los Angeles to Dallas. It complements the 8 hour 15 minute day train that has run for years.

The overnight trip to Shanghai takes 11 hours. The corresponding day train takes just 7 hours 47 minutes.

We can have similar rail lines and options, if we choose to. The Federal Railroad Administration has in fact published plans that call for HSR service between cities of similar (or longer) distances. For example, the Midwest Regional Rail Plan calls for high-speed trains between St. Paul and Nashville, while the Southeast Regional Rail Plan calls for high-speed trains between Nashville and Orlando.

Together, the plans would create a single HSR line of about 1,500 miles. So, a family in St. Paul could board a sleeper train in the evening and be at Orlando’s Disney World by mid-morning the next day—rested and ready to go, instead of stressed out from driving and poorer from a hotel stay.

I will grant two things that make this a difficult problem for the US: the fifth amendment and our psychotic relationship with cars. The first requires that the government provides just compensation for any property it takes, and buying the land to create a grade-separated high-speed rail line would not be cheap. China just kicks people off their land.

The second is that we've spent a century subsidizing cars and building our physical environment around cars, which prevents even reasonable people from understanding the basic economics behind highways. (Or, if you're the Chicago Tribune editorial board, the basic understanding of how traffic works.)

Still, it frustrates me to no end that we're not even discussing it.

In the early autumn I'm going to get on a train in London, change in Paris, and get off the train in Marseille, which will take about 7 hours, depending on how tight I want to make the connection between Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon. I'll get to St Pancras about half an hour before the train, very likely from a hotel a few blocks away, and when I get off the train in Marseille, I'll have another walk of a block or two to that hotel. Contrast with my flight home from Marseille, which, including half an hour by transit to the Provence airport, customs, emigration in France and immigration into the UK, will take about the same length of time. And then I'll be at Heathrow, an hour from central London.

I once made it from central Richmond, Va., to a friend's apartment in Murray Hill, Manhattan, in just over 5 hours, door to door. So I know the US has the ability to build real high-speed trains. But will I ever see one in my lifetime?

A whole knot of miserable weather is sneaking across the Mississippi River right now, on its way to Chicago. It looks like, maybe, just maybe, it'll get here after 6pm. So if I take the 4:32 instead of the 5:32, maybe I'll beat it home and not have a wet dog next to me on the couch later.

To that end I'm punting most of these stories until this evening:

• US Representative and professional troll Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wants you to think she isn't serious, except when she is. I would say, when her IQ gets to 80 she should sell. Tina Nguyen has more inside baseball on MTG's bomb-throwing.
• The Biden Administration has a dilemma with electric cars: let cheap Chinese models in and risk losing the election, or keep them out and postpone climate action. (The article skips over the incompetent management at American auto makers as one of the causes of this problem.)
• Gail Collins looks at the abortion debate and wonders, where's the debate about guns?
• Via Bruce Schneier, the attempted infiltration of the XZ project has other open-source maintainers in a near panic about their own code, and they have discovered other attempts at undermining the security of everything that way.
• Charles Marohn unpacks the speculation that rents seem close to collapse even as house prices keep going up.
• Caitlyn Zaloom reviews Benjamin Herold's new book about the "unraveling of America's suburbs," awakening to a problem Marohn has shouted from the rooftops for many, many years.

Finally, if you have an extra $500 lying around and want to buy a nice steak with it, Crain's has options ranging from 170 grams of Chateau Uenae rib-eye steak (and a glass of water) at RPM on down to a happy hour of rib-eye steak frites for eight at El Che. The txuleton at Asador Bastian for $83 seems like a good deal to me, even without three other people or a bottle of wine to bring the bill up to $500. But the Wagyu? Maybe if I get a bonus next year. A guy can dream.

I learned this morning that I have a meeting at 6am Wednesday, because the participants will be in four time zones across four continents. Since I'm traveling to Munich later that day, I'll just comfort myself by remembering it's 1pm Central Europe time.

I'm already queuing up some things to read on the flights. I'll probably finish all of these later today, though:

• Jennifer Rubin highlights four ways in which the XPOTUS has demonstrated his electoral weakness in the past few weeks.
• Republican pollster Frank Luntz agrees, warning the MAGA Republican extremists to stop screwing around lest the party suffer an historic ass-kicking in November. (For my part, I don't think they will stop, and the ass-kicking is long overdue.)
• Sean Wilentz warns that the Supreme Court abdicating its responsibility to evaluate the XPOTUS in light of the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause will lead to worse problems later on.
• James Fallows chastises the Times in particular for creating the controversy about President Biden's age they claimed simply to report on.
• Ian Bogost moans about the ever-deepening problems of carrying baggage onto planes. (I will be checking my bag through to Munich, for what it's worth, but I may carry it on for the return flight to avoid customs delays changing planes at Charlotte.)

Finally, John Scalzi erupts at the 2023 Hugo Awards administrators for outright fraud and unforgivable cowardice following a report on Chinese political interference in the awards selection process last summer.