The Daily Parker

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.

This will be a bit ranty, but I'm super pissed off at far-left ideologues in the US right now.

Since right after the October 7th attack, hordes of children at elite American colleges have protested Israel's response. These kids came out as anti-Israel mere days after Hamas killed or kidnapped 1,200 civilians in a surprise attack on lightly-defended farms near the border. That is, they didn't wait for Israel actually to invade Gaza before calling for Israel to accept the murder of 1,000 of its citizens because they deserved it; no, they started with the slogans and the die-ins right away.

If you live in the currently fashionable oppressor-oppressed dichotomy that these kids believe, Israel—a country created by the UN to be the permanent home of the survivors of the greatest mass murder in human history—is prima facie evil because they "oppress" Palestinians—an Arab people who also have historic roots in the same area but who have been kicked out of every other neighboring country, in part to irritate Israel. If you're chanting "from the river to the sea," you're echoing the Palestinians who chant the same thing, because they literally want to sweep the Jews from Israel (i.e., from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea). In other words, the children who immediately began protesting Israel's right to self-defense before Israel had even started responding to the attack seem to believe that Israel has no right to exist.

Now, I have serious problems with the duration and horrific destruction of Israel's invasion of Gaza, but none at all with Israel's right to defend itself. Israeli self-defense, moral and justified; Israel completely destroying Gaza and inflicting 100,000 casualties on Palestinians, immoral and unjustified. We can all agree on these things, I hope. Israel's conduct in its war against Hamas has gone way beyond self-defense and well into ethnic cleansing. The right-wing government of Israel, and many of its citizens, really do want to kick the Palestinians out of Israeli-controlled areas and into neighboring Arab countries like Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, those countries' governments be damned.

But the kids went farther, blaming the Democratic Party for "allowing" Israel to defend itself and to continue buying US-made weapons, as opposed to, say, allowing Israel to be overrun by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists and possibly the Syrian army. So these children actively campaigned against Democratic Party candidates up to and including Kamala Harris, and may have tipped the scales in more than one state in favor of the Republican candidates who won those elections. For example, a lot of them voted for Jill Stein in swing states, and may have thrown the election to the OAFPOTUS overall.

They're not the only reason we lost the Senate and the White House, but they're definitely part of the reason. And they seemed pretty happy when the OAFPOTUS won, because they understand almost nothing about politics or history beyond the oppressed/oppressor binary they adore.

So I wonder if they were surprised that the OAFPOTUS stood up next to Israeli Prime Minister (and fellow felon) Binyamin Netanyahu yesterday and ratified Israel's ethnic cleansing of Gaza:

Donald Trump’s proposal that large numbers of Palestinians should leave Gaza to “just clean out” the whole strip has been rejected by US allies in the region and attacked as dangerous, illegal and unworkable by lawyers and activists.

The US president said he would like hundreds of thousands of people to move to neighbouring countries, either “temporarily or could be long-term”. Destinations could include Jordan, which already hosts more than 2.7 million Palestinian refugees, and Egypt, he added.

“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘You know, it’s over.’”

There were 2.3 million people living in Gaza, which is about the size and was about the density of Chicago. Imagine if the rest of Illinois came in and leveled Chicago, then Canada said all of us who live in Chicago should just move to Wisconsin or Indiana. "From the Des Plaines to the Lake" doesn't quite have the same rhythm as the other slogan, but you get the picture. Now add 3,000 years of bitter rivalry between all these peoples and you've got some idea of why clearing out Chicago would be a problem for the whole continent, not just the suburbs.

So, great work, you stupid, entitled infants. This is on you as much as it's on the Republican Party who enabled him and the right-wing Israeli parties who enabled Netanyahu. The president who moved our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem which no one asked for, and who is supported by end-times Christianists who want Israel to remain Jewish so that their deity can descend there at the end of the world, has come out in favor of the most extreme right-wing fever dreams in Israel today.

Yeah, you really showed us centrists by voting for Jill Stein. That'll teach us.

Today marks the middle of winter, when fewer days remain in the (meteorological) season than have passed. Good thing, too: yesterday we had temperatures that looked happy on a graph but felt miserable in real life, and the forecast for Sunday night into Monday will be even worse—as in, a low of -20°C going "up" to -14°C. Fun!.

(Yesterday's graph:)

Elsewhere in the world:

• Israel and Hamas have reached a cease-fire agreement, with the US and Qatar signing off.
• OAFPOTUS Defense Secretary nominee, former Fox News pretty boy, and all-around fundamentalist crackpot Pete Hegseth sat before the US Senate Armed Services committee yesterday, whose Republican members asked him about "your wife that you love" and whose Democratic members asked him about unlawful orders and the numerous allegations of wrongdoing against him. My combat-decorated junior Senator, Tammy Duckworth (D), flatly called him "unqualified." (She was being polite.)
• Jennifer Rubin calls Hegseth "the greatest DEI disaster ever:" "Considering Hegseth, election denier Attorney General Pam Bondi, WWE exec Linda McMahon for secretary of education, and vaccine denier, brain-worm victim Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Health and Human Services, one must conclude Republicans are not sending us their best. (Or, the more alarming alternative…they are sending their best.)" Ruth Marcus also piled on.
• Author John Scalzi shares his thoughts on the allegations against and admissions of author Neil Gaiman published in New York this week.
• Chicago's Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) has proposed $1.5 bn in spending to improve transit for the entire area.
• Chicago lost another coyote yesterday when a plane taking off from O'Hare ran him over. (Neither the FAA nor United Airlines has confirmed that the coyote died, but I think we can make an inference here.)
• Last year was the second-warmest on record in Illinois, continuing a long-term warming trend that began after the coldest winters ever in the early 1980s.

Finally, as of today I've had a private pilot certificate for 25 years. When I last posted about this anniversary, I hoped to resume flying later that spring. Alas, something else was in the air. I still want to fly again, though. All I need is a winning lottery ticket.

Once every seven years (on average), Christmas and New Year's Day fall on successive Wednesdays. Most other Christian holidays get around this problem by simply moving to the nearest Sunday. I guess the tradition of celebrating the church founder's birthday on a fixed day relates to birthdays taking place on fixed days. So we get Wednesday off from work this week because, well, that's the day tradition says he was born. This is, of course, despite a great deal of evidence in their own holy books that he was born in the fall, in a different year than tradition holds, and with only speculation about which calendar ancient Judeans used at that point.

All of that just makes this a weird work week followed by an annoying work week. Weird, because with most of my new team in the UK, tomorrow's 10 am CST stand-up meeting will have relatively poor attendance (it'll be 4 pm in the UK), and I've decided to bugger off on Thursday and Friday. Most of my developers—especially the UK guys—simply took the whole week off.

At least the ridiculously light work load gives me time to read these while I wait for confirmation that a build has made it into the wild:

• The Economist ran a spot-on, must-read column on the 12th, explaining how the OAFPOTUS winds everyone up without actually doing anything he promises—or threatens.
• That said, Timothy Noah finds evidence that the OAFPOTUS and his government-for-billionaires cabinet has already started destabilizing the economy.
• Jennifer Rubin rolls her eyes at Democrats trying to find "common ground" with the OAFPOTUS: we're the goddamned opposition!
• Times education reporter Sharon Otterman interviews rare and embattled centrist Israeli and Palestinian students at UCLA.
• Paul Krugman, now writing on Substack after retiring from the Times, warns about America's growing gambling addiction and its threat to the economy.
• The City of London plans major roadway changes to promote more pedestrian and bike traffic.
• Drew Magary has his annual "hater's guide to the Williams-Sonoma catalog" that you must read over a nice casserole.

Finally, a while ago a good friend gave me a random gift of an Author Clock, which sits right on my coffee table so I see it whenever I'm sitting on the couch. She just sent me a link to their next product: the Author Forecast. Oh no! They found me! Dammit, take my money! Bam: $10 deposit applied.

Stunning developments in the last 48 hours as Syrian rebels have taken Damascus and dictator Bashar al-Assad appears to have fled the country:

Mr. al-Assad’s departure after rebels opposed to his rule stormed across the country in a lightning offensive was an earthshaking moment in the history of Syria, which has been ruled by his family with an iron fist since the early 1970s. It marked a dramatic breakthrough for rebel factions in Syria that have been trying to unseat him for more than a decade, much of which was marked by a devastating civil war.

For many in Syria, Mr. al-Assad’s fall was a moment filled with hope as they no longer feared the regime that had used oppressive tactics to quash their freedoms. But it was also rife with uncertainty over who will rule Syria next and raised fears of a power vacuum in a country that has been rived with competing factions vying for control of different areas of territory.

The events capped a startling two weeks in which the coalition of rebel groups that had been pinned down in a small corner of Syria’s northwest swept through the country’s major cities, shattering a stalemate in Syria’s 13-year civil war.

The biggest factors in the dramatic shift in power appear to be both Russia and Iran over-extending their own forces and pulling out of Syria:

Hezbollah, the Shia Lebanese movement long backed by Iran in their shared fight against Israel, miscalculated in coming to Hamas’s aid in the war in Gaza by opening a front on the UN-demarcated blue line that separates the Lebanese from their Israeli neighbours.

After almost a year of tit-for-tat cross-border attacks that displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, Israel stepped up its campaign in September. It managed to wipe out much of Hezbollah’s command structure in airstrikes, including its longtime secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, and drove the group’s fighters away from the demarcation zone in a ground offensive.

Assad’s fall effectively severs the weapons, materiel and personnel route from Tehran to Hezbollah, particularly if Syrian Kurdish forces, which have expanded their control of the desert border between Syria and Iraq, remain in position with US backing. Hezbollah, already isolated, will be further weakened, making it more vulnerable to Israeli attack or infiltration.

The rebels promise to have free and fair elections as soon as possible. That would be the best outcome, however unlikely.

I haven't yet got my head around a couple of thoughts I had concerning last Tuesday's debacle. I've come to a few conclusions, but I'm still mulling the implications, and also the structure of the Daily Parker post that I promised over the weekend. It might take a few more days to write.

Meanwhile:

• The OAFPOTUS has picked South Dakota governor Kristi Noem (R) as his Homeland Security secretary and Mike Huckabee to represent the US in Israel, which have me straining not to tell the left wing of my party that I told them so.
• Timothy Noah points to a pair of US Supreme Court decisions the Republican justices wrote that all but guarantee people will bribe the OAFPOTUS, if they haven't already.
• Michael Bender pours over election data to figure out why Democrats stayed away from the polls in droves (though it has gotten better as late returns from California have come in).

Finally, the South Shore Line lost 40% of its rail cars to wheel damage over the past two weeks, and suffered 30-60 minute delays as a result, because of leaves on the tracks.

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.

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.

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.)

Meanwhile, the world continues to turn:

• Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives. ... [I]f you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress."
• Eugene Robinson excoriates CNN (and by implication a good chunk of the MSM) for covering the XPOTUS as if he were a normal political candidate and not, you know, an election and a Reichstag fire from crippling the modern world: "Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away."
• Ezra Klein spends 45 minutes explaining that what's wrong with the XPOTUS isn't just the obvious, but the fact that no one around him is guarding us from his delusional disinhibitions: "What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him."
• James Fallows, counting down to November 5th, calls out civic bravery: "There are more of us than there are of them."
• Fareed Zakaria warns that the Democratic Party hasn't grokked the political realignment going on in the United States right now: "The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education. The other strong predictors of a person’s voting behavior are gender, geography and religion. So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right."
• Pamela Paul points out the inherent nihilism of "settler colonialism" ideology as it applies to the growing anti-Israel movement in left-wing academia: "Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states?"
• Hitachi has won a $212m contract to—wait for it—remove 5.25-inch floppy disks from the San Francisco MUNI light-rail network.
• American Airlines has rolled out a tool that will make an annoying sound if a gate louse attempts to board before his group number is called. Good.
• SMU writing professor Jonathan Malesic harrumphs that college kids don't read books anymore.

Speaking of books, The Economist just recommended yet another book to put on my sagging "to be read" bookshelves (plural). Nicholas Cornwell (writing as Nick Harkaway), the son of David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré), has written a new George Smiley novel set in 1963. I've read all the Smiley novels, and this one seems like a must-read as well: "Karla’s Choice could have been a crude pastiche and a dull drama. Instead, it is an accomplished homage and a captivating thriller. It may be a standalone story, but with luck Mr Harkaway will continue playing the imitation game." Excellent.

The Post has more details about the pagers that the Mossad blew up, injuring thousands of Hezbollah terrorists:

As an act of spy craft, it is without parallel, one of the most successful and inventive penetrations of an enemy by an intelligence service in recent history. But key details of the operation — including how it was planned and carried out, and the controversy it engendered within Israel’s security establishment and among allies — are only now coming to light.

The idea for the pager operation originated in 2022, according to the Israeli, Middle Eastern and U.S. officials familiar with the events. Parts of the plan began falling into place more than a year before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that put the region on a path to war. It was a time of relative quiet on Israel’s war-scarred northern border with Lebanon.

Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service responsible for combating foreign threats to the Jewish state, had worked for years to penetrate the group with electronic monitoring and human informants. Over time, Hezbollah leaders learned to worry about the group’s vulnerability to Israeli surveillance and hacking, fearing that even ordinary cellphones could be turned into Israeli-controlled eavesdropping and tracking devices.

The United States, Israel’s closest ally, was not informed of the booby-trapped pagers or the internal debate over whether to trigger them, U.S. officials said.

Via Bruce Schneier, security researcher Bunnie Huang does not think this was a good idea in the long run:

The reason we don’t see exploding battery attacks more often is not because it’s technically hard, it’s because the erosion of public trust in everyday things isn’t worth it. The current discourse around the potential reach of such explosive devices is clouded by the assumption that it’s technically difficult to implement and thus unlikely to find its way to our front door.

I would posit that a lithium battery constructed with a PETN layer inside is largely undetectable: no visual inspection can see it, and no surface analytical method can detect it. I don’t know off-hand of a low-cost, high-throughput X-ray method that could detect it. A high-end CT machine could pick out the PETN layer, but it’d cost around a million dollars for one machine and scan times are around a half hour – not practical for i.e. airport security or high throughput customs screening.

now that I’ve seen it executed, I am left with the terrifying realization that not only is it feasible, it’s relatively easy for any modestly-funded entity to implement. Not just our allies can do this – a wide cast of adversaries have this capability in their reach, from nation-states to cartels and gangs, to shady copycat battery factories just looking for a big payday (if chemical suppliers can moonlight in illicit drugs, what stops battery factories from dealing in bespoke munitions?). Bottom line is: we should approach the public policy debate around this assuming that someday, we could be victims of exploding batteries, too. Turning everyday objects into fragmentation grenades should be a crime, as it blurs the line between civilian and military technologies.

I fear that if we do not universally and swiftly condemn the practice of turning everyday gadgets into bombs, we risk legitimizing a military technology that can literally bring the front line of every conflict into your pocket, purse or home.

Excuse me while I shove my phone across the desk...just a bit farther away...