The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

One last cold snap coming in

Winter ends two weeks from tomorrow, but climate science and meteorology can only study nature, not command it. That explains why, despite ample sunshine, the temperature at IDTWHQ has stayed around -7°C since it leveled out this morning, and promises to shed another 8-10 degrees tonight. Then we're in for a few blasts of cold interspersed with warm days and some snow here and there for about a week before it consistently warms up.

Elsewhere in the cold, cold world:

Finally, Google has suspended comments on the label "Gulf of America" because of all the one-star reviews people gave the body of water. I realize Google just follows the USGS on American place names (same as Weather Now), but still, they could have slow-walked it (as Weather Now is doing).

Open season for scammers

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:

In other stupidity directly attributable to the OAFPOTUS:

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.

Avoiding going outside

Yesterday, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ scraped along at -11°C early in the morning before "warming" up to -7.5°C around 3pm. Cassie and I got a 22-minute walk around then and she seemed fine. Today the pattern completely inverted. I woke up during the warmest part of the day: 7am, -8°C. Around 8am the temperature started dropping and now hovers around -11°C again—slightly colder than the point where I limit Cassie to 15 minutes outside. She just doesn't feel cold, apparently, and would happily stay outside until she passed out from hypothermia.

So, bottom line, I'm in no hurry to take her for her lunchtime walk.

Besides, I've got a lot of interesting stories to read:

  • Former Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff explains why he's a liberal, and why you should be, too.
  • Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman have some ideas about how to fix the United States' "two-party problem:" proportional representation.
  • Block Club Chicago lists 10 of its investigations into the Chicago Transit Authority's mismanagement under its outgoing boss, Dorval Carter.
  • Chuck Marohn explains why building tons of new housing in old, dense cities like San Francisco and NYC doesn't work as well as people hope.
  • Two Illinois state representatives introduced a bill in the state House to decriminalize sex work, which would dramatically increase their safety and security.
  • British computer scientist Peter Kirstein died five years ago, and left behind a delightful essay on the beginnings of the Internet—and the Internet's first-ever password.
  • James Poniewozik has a fun history of TV show opening titles that will waste a few minutes of your afternoon (in a good way).

Finally, yet another coyote found his way into a store, this time an Aldi in Humboldt Park. Almost 17 years ago one of his ancestors tried to hide in a Quiznos sandwich shop in the Loop. The result was the same for both: removal and relocation. Block Club says yesterday's incident involved "rescuing" the coyote from the Aldi, but that seems pretty harsh. Like, was the coyote trying to go to Whole Foods instead? They're usually not that bougie.

Monday lunchtime links

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:

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.

I do wish he'd shut up

Once again, in the aftermath of the OAFPOTUS's demented press conference yesterday, I need to remind everyone to ignore what he says and watch what he does. He's not as harmless as the guy at the end of the bar who everyone avoids talking to, but he's just as idiotic.

Meanwhile, in the real world:

Finally, the temperature in Chicago dipped below freezing just before 2 am on January 1st and hasn't risen above freezing since then, with no relief in the forecast. Even though we don't expect any seriously cold weather in the next two weeks, it would be nice to have one day above freezing.

Khaaaaaaan!

The Library of Congress has named Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 24 other films to the National Film Registry this week. A quick view of the list tells me I've only seen 5 of them, so I need to start watching more movies.

In other news:

Finally, Illinois could, if it wanted to, redirect $1.5 billion in Federal highway funds to mass-transit projects in the Chicago area under President Biden's 2021 Covid relief plan. Unfortunately, a lot of the state would prefer to build more useless highways, so this probably won't happen.

Friday afternoon round-up

Before I link to anything else, I want to share Ray Delahanty's latest CityNerd video that explores "rural cosplaying." I'll skip directly to the punchline; you should watch the whole thing for more context:

Elsewhere,

There is some good news today, though. In the last 6½ hours, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters rose almost 9°C (15°F), to an almost-balmy -3.5°C. The forecast says it'll keep rising another 12°C or so through Sunday. So our first cold snap of the winter appears to be behind us.

The Noodle Incident

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:

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

That was fast

Mayor Johnson's newly-appointed Chicago Public Schools Board president The Rev Mitchell Ikenna Johnson has resigned:

Amid a wave of backlash over troubling social media posts that were criticized as antisemitic, misogynistic and conspiratorial, Chicago’s new Board of Education president is resigning at the request of Mayor Brandon Johnson just seven days after he was sworn into office. It’s the latest stunning development in the ongoing leadership struggle atop Chicago Public Schools.

His resignation came after Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday called for him to step down, according to NBC5, following similar calls by 40 alderpersons and many Jewish leaders.

The mayor said he asked for the resignation.

There also have been questions about whether Johnson lives in Chicago and about his past. He was disbarred in Ohio nearly 30 years ago and at one point was so delinquent on his child support that he had a lien on his house.

Given all the problems, many have questioned the vetting process for the new school board members. On Wednesday, Rev. Johnson said he was “pretty confident that the things that are relevant to my experience were vetted.”

As one of my friends said, "Our mayor is an imbecile. That's not fair; I should give him the benefit of the doubt. It's entirely possibly he's not an imbecile, and he actually agrees with the positions of his former school board president."

I don't usually regret voting for someone this much so soon after they take office, but wow.

Another one-term mayor

Recently-elected Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson has made a couple of moves this week all but guaranteed to make him a one-term mayor. First, despite "no property tax increases" being the cornerstone of his campaign, he proposed a budget today that—wait for it—would increase property taxes:

“I’m not going to raise property taxes. I’m the only person running in this race who made a commitment to that,” he said during a Block Club interview in March 2023. “For my first term, we’re not raising property taxes.”

But facing a series of tough decisions over how to close a nearly $1 billion spending gap in 2025, now-Mayor Brandon Johnson is going back on that promise.

In his budget address Wednesday, Johnson will propose increasing the city’s property tax levy to bring in an additional $300 million per year, according to the mayor’s office.

The proposal would increase most people's taxes by 4% a year. But that may not have been his worst sin this week, compared with his appointment of The Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson (no relation) to head the Chicago Public Schools Board. The Rev. Johnson, it turns out, has quite the social media history:

A majority of the City Council is calling for the newly appointed president of the Chicago Board of Education to resign in the aftermath of “antisemitic and pro-Hamas” comments, calling his appointment a vetting failure by Mayor Brandon Johnson.

The Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson made comments containing tropes of antisemitism following Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year, Jewish Insider reports. The publication cited screenshots from various accounts linked to Mitchell Johnson, which included posts comparing “Zionist Jews” to Nazi Germany.

“My Jewish colleagues appear drunk with the Israeli power and will live to see their payment. It will not be nice and I care not how and what you call me,” he wrote in December.

The council is urging Mitchell Johnson to apologize and resign immediately, according to a joint statement signed by 26 council members. They singled out Brandon Johnson's vetting process when appointing new board members.

“Calling Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack an ‘absolute right’ and justifying it as resistance against oppression, as Rev. Johnson did in March of this year and on other occasions, is abhorrent, inexcusable and disqualifying from public service,” the statement said. “His continued role on the school board is non-negotiable, both he and Mayor Johnson must act now to correct this terrible mistake.”

Mayor Johnson's first choice for the post, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, was apparently unavailable.

"Vetting failure" my ass. Johnson has gone out of his way to piss off the moderates who decided to give him a chance over the right-of-center Paul Vallas, and boy has he succeeded. But we're stuck with him until 2027.