The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Cassie update: surgery scheduled

Cassie and I met with her surgeon today to discuss removing the mast cell tumor on her head. The good news is that the tumor is small, sub-cutaneous (as opposed to being in her skull or more delicate tissue), and very slow-growing. The bad news is that its location, about a centimeter from her left ear, complicates the removal a bit. The surgeon generally prefers to remove about a 3-cm circle of tissue around the tumor. Since everyone wants Cassie to retain her left ear, she'll have to remove slightly less tissue, which increases the probability of missing some cancer cells.

Still, the surgeon is very optimistic, not least because dogs can live for many years with untreated mast cell disease. Popping the tumor out now gets Cassie's life expectancy to the same place it would be without the disease. She may develop another mast cell tumor later on (as Weimaraners, in particular, are apt to do), but that doesn't indicate metastasis, nor does it mean she'll have a shorter life span.

Really, the worst part of it will be the bill. Because, of course, all surgeries at this clinic come with a complimentary (and mandatory) walletectomy.

So, on July 8th, she'll get a chunk of her head removed and sewn back up, and she'll be in a cone for two weeks. She'll also look ridiculous for a month or so until the fur grows back.

Updates as the situation warrants.

Putting "No Meetings" on my work calendar

First, an update on Cassie: her spleen and lymph cytology came back clean, with no evidence of mast cell disease. That means the small tumor on her head is likely the only site of the disease, and they can pop it out surgically. We'll probably schedule that for the end of June.

I have had an unusually full calendar this week, so this afternoon I blocked off three and a half hours with "No Meetings - Coding." Before I dive into finishing up the features for what I expect will be the 129th boring release of the product I'm working on, I am taking a moment to read the news, which I have not had time to do all day:

Finally, the city of Chicago has started formal negotiations with the Union Pacific Railroad to acquire an abandoned right-of-way on the Northwest Side—that Cassie and I walked on just a week ago and that my Brews & Choos buddy and I used to get to Alarmist back in November 2023. The project still requires a few million dollars and a few years to complete. Still, the city also is talking about building a protected bike lane along Bryn Mawr Avenue in the North Park and Lincoln Square Community Areas, which would connect the Weber Spur with the North Shore trail just east of the Chicago River. For the time being, the UPRR doesn't seem to mind people walking on their right-of-way, though technically it's still private property. But that trail will be really cool when completed.

And now, I will finish this feature...

Quick Cassie update

Cassie spent yesterday morning at the local veterinary oncology clinic getting poked. The ultrasound looked good, so we're just waiting for results from her spleen and lymph cytology. They said she was a model patient, although they did give her a light sedative so she wouldn't squirm during the ultrasound.

And for the next couple of weeks she'll have a naked belly:

The sedative had quite an amusing effect. I've only seen her stoned once before. Yesterday she acted more like she'd just come from a Playing Dead ("No, man! Play Floyd!") concert than the inert blob she was last time.

More info when the cytology comes back. Plus all the news stories that have accumulated while I've been in meetings all day.

Shifting gears after a morning of meetings

Just queuing a few things up to read at lunchtime:

Finally, Chicago's ubiquitous summer street fairs have found it much more difficult to sustain their funding in the years since the pandemic. The city prohibits charging an entry fee for walking down a street, so the fairs have to rely on gate donations. But even with increasing expenses, people attending festivals have stopped donating at the gate, putting the fairs in jeopardy.

When I go to Ribfest in four weeks, I will pay the donation every day, because I want my ribs. This will be the festival's 25th year. I will do my part to get them another 25.

Tuesday afternoon blahs

I thought I was done with last week's cold, but no, not entirely. So I'm spinning my wheels looking at code today. I want to be writing code today, however. My brain wants to be three meters west and three meters down from IDTWHQ (i.e., in my bed).

I will note that Columbia Journalism professor Alexander Stille just came to the same realization Josh Marshall came to over nine years ago, that the OAFPOTUS resembles Benito Mussolini in all the ways that matter:

The comparisons between Trump and Berlusconi, who dominated Italian politics between 1993 and 2011, are obvious and help us understand Trump’s initial political ascent and his first term in office. Both made their initial fortune in real estate, were better salesmen than businessmen, and developed a second career in television.

But Berlusconi’s political aims, by comparison, were comparatively modest.

Trump’s narcissism is very different from Berlusconi’s. Like Mussolini’s, it involves a desire for total dominance and an increasingly unhinged delusion of omnipotence: hence his repeated threats to take over Canada and invade Greenland; to turn Gaza into an American beach resort. Mussolini, like Trump, had a keen instinctive animal cunning that helped him intuit the public mood and vanquish his domestic political opponents. He was a brilliant demagogue who could electrify the crowd and who shrewdly understood and exploited his domestic opponents’ weaknesses.

All this served him well at first. But when he began to move outside of Italy—creating an Italian empire and forcing Italy into World War II—his fundamental provincialism, his deep ignorance of the outside world, and his overestimation of his own instincts over objective facts did him in.

Mussolini careened from crisis to crisis—the invasion of Ethiopia, the civil war in Spain, the invasion of Albania and, finally, the entrance into World War II. If his career is any guide, we can expect four years of constant crisis. Autocrats require crisis to justify the extraordinary—and often illegal—measures they take and to distract the public’s attention from the fact that they are not actually improving the lives of ordinary citizens.

Don't worry, though. We only have 1,368 more days of this presidential term.

Not much of a rally

The markets started slightly up this morning, but whatever optimism traders had before noon has evaporated. Both the S&P and DJIA are technically up, but less than 0.5%, while the OAFPOTUS continues to act like the demented old man he is.

And to think, Twin Peaks turned 35 today.

Meanwhile...

Finally, SMBC inadvertently explains the Republican Party's entire educational policy, complete with a joke I've made for years: if I ever win the lottery, I'll set up a math scholarship for areas that sell the most lottery tickets.

Shooting the bottom of the boat to spite everyone else

I'm only going to note in passing that world equities markets have continued to decline today, though the DJIA and S&P have stabilized a bit as of this afternoon. Still, the S&P is off 14% year-to-date, the DJIA 11%, the Nikkei 21%, and crude oil prices 16%. Still the OAFPOTUS continues to insist that his massive corruption engine will make things better for the people who voted for him, leaving out the bit that it'll only help about 1% of those voters.

Today, though, I want to gesticulate wildly at how the administration will kill us all by destroying biomedical research as we know it. The Times reported yesterday that illegal layoffs at the National Institutes of Health have halted cancer research just as scientists neared a breakthrough:

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health demonstrated a promising step toward using a person’s own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers in a paper in Nature Medicine on Tuesday, the same day the agency was hit with devastating layoffs that left many NIH personnel in tears.

The treatment approach is still early in its development; the personalized immunotherapy regimen shrank tumors in only about a quarter of the patients with colon, rectal and other GI cancers enrolled in a clinical trial. But a researcher who was not involved in the study called the results “remarkable” because they highlight a path to a frustratingly elusive goal in medicine — harnessing a person’s own immune defenses to target common solid tumor cancers.

Former US Representative Adam Kitzinger (R-IL) adds:

Although empowered by President Trump’s newly created, budget-slashing Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the driving force behind the dismantling of our public health infrastructure is Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Like his boss in the Oval Office, Kennedy seems intent on settling old scores with his former opponents.

One of Kennedy’s first moves as HHS Secretary was to suspend a CDC campaign encouraging Americans to get the flu shot. He also created a panel to revisit the debunked vaccine-autism link and appointed vaccine skeptic David Geier to lead it. Geier had previously been disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license.

In another era, state public health agencies might have been able to compensate for the CDC’s retreat. But Kennedy has attacked those agencies too, suspending grants that funded their response to infectious disease outbreaks. One immediate casualty was a measles vaccination program in West Texas.

Secretary Kennedy insists that a system experiencing a nearly 20 percent workforce reduction will somehow function better. It’s the same kind of magical thinking that fueled his anti-vaccine crusade. Then and now, evidence and logic take a back seat.

He calls his agenda “Make America Healthy Again.” But looking at the hollowed-out public health infrastructure and the rising measles death toll, I can only call it what it truly is: Make America Sick Again.

Josh Marshall frets that no one in the health sphere was prepared for an attack like this, so they don't even know how to talk about how bad this will be for everyone:

The White House and DOGE have entered the war on cancer on the side of cancer.

There are disease communities around every major disease in this country — breast cancer, colon cancer, Alzheimers, etc. I don’t mean the professional societies. I mean, the organizations and informal communities of people who are survivors, who’ve been directly affected by these afflictions, who have genetic predispositions, who are doctors and caregivers. It is totally outside the experience and comfort zone of people from the research community to speak directly to what we might call the end user and say your chance at a cure or your child’s cure is going up in flames as we speak.

Quite simply, until elected officials start hearing from angry constituents in town halls who are pissed that their futures and the futures of their loved ones are being lit on fire for no reason, then nothing matters. The first front in this war has already been lost. The second front, where the forces of cures, treatments and health have the advantage, has only barely gotten off the ground.

What I’m describing here also connects up with the universities, where a lot of this research takes place and which are home to a lot of academic medical centers which are the places many communities rely on for their health care.

For 30 years, Republican extremists have wanted to destroy the Federal government, but party leaders like George W Bush and Mitch McConnell wanted to do it institutionally. The OAFPOTUS and his wrecking crew don't care about institutions, or really about anything, other than their loyalty to the OAFPOTUS and their hatred of people they think look down on them.

Even if we win back all three branches of government in 2026 and 2028, it will take decades to repair the damage. Forget making the US a better place to live, or even getting the US of 2050 on technological parity with the Europe of 2010. We're going to struggle to undo the damage, full stop. So even when these assholes ultimately lose, they'll win.

Can't make March jokes anymore

We had a wild ride in March, with the temperature range here at Inner Drive Technology WHQ between 23.3° on the 14th and -5.4°C on the 2nd—not to mention 22.6°C on Friday and 2.3°C on Sunday.

Actually, everyone in the US had a wild ride last month, for reasons outside the weather, and it looks like it will continue for a while:

Finally, the Dunning-Krueger poster children working for the Clown Prince of X have announced plans to replace the 60 million lines of COBOL code running the Social Security Administration with an LLM-generated pile of spaghetti in some other language (Python? Ruby? Logo?) before the end of the year. As this will only cost a few million dollars and will keep the children away from the sharp objects for a while, I say it's money well spent for software that will never see the light of day. There are only two possibilities here, not mutually-exclusive: they are too dumb to know why this is stupid, or they don't care because they actually want to kill Social Security by any means they can. I believe it's both.

Another day, another OAFPOTUS grift

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:

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.

Wow, this totally bites

I got some bad news this morning: my dentist, John C McArthur, announced his retirement as of March 17th.

I started going to Dr McArthur in 1974. In fact, I was one of his first patients after he took over the practice from his father—who was, in turn, the dentist my mother, uncle, and grandparents started going to in 1958. So my family has a long, long history going to his Hubbard Woods office. I mean, 13 presidents long. I'm going to miss going up there.

Moreover, I have never had a cavity. So I would say he had some skills. (Of course, as he would point out, I had good genes, good habits, and fluoridated water, which may have helped.) Going to the dentist has never caused me any anxiety, so I've never really understood why other people dread it.

I mean, I've never gone to a different dentist. I've never even thought about it. What do I ask them? "How many of your patients have you kept free of cavities for 50 years?" I hope his office has a good referral.

Obviously, I knew this day would come. I figured he'd retire during the pandemic, but he kept going, for which I'm grateful. I wish him a long and happy retirement.