The Daily Parker

The authoritarian project currently underway in the United States, like all other authoritarian projects in history, has nothing to do with any specific policies or official statements except those that concentrate wealth in friendly hands. It's entirely about power and control. The specifics do not matter to the people trying to take over.

Corruption is the main reason why Disney/ABC pulled comedian Jimmy Kimmel from its network yesterday. The conglomerate claimed that this was because of Kimmel's comments about Charlie Kirk's murder, which is only about 5% true. As NPR and others reported, this was really about the OAFPOTUS threatening to get in the way of already rich people making a lot of money:

Nexstar, which operates 32 ABC stations around the country, is seeking FCC approval for a $6.2 billion dollar merger. After Nexstar announced it was pulling Kimmel's show, Sinclair Broadcast Group was next. That major TV station operator said in a statement that suspending the show is not enough. "Sinclair also calls upon Mr. Kimmel to issue a direct apology to the Kirk family. Furthermore, we ask Mr. Kimmel to make a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA."

Sinclair, as you may know, has pronounced right-wing leanings, and is also one of the largest operators of TV stations in the US following the FCC's loosening of ownership rules in 2022 (and at other times).

This isn't hard to follow. Huge media corporations want to become bigger, to get even more wealth, so they can become bigger. (Any similarity between mega corporations and cancer is purely coincidental.) The philosophies of the managers and boards of these companies tend to be right-wing, i.e., encouraging the concentration of wealth and not caring at all about people who aren't wealthy like them. Owning media companies makes it easier to flood the zone with propaganda supporting those positions. This is a very old cycle.

The FCC chair himself calling for Kimmel's censorship demonstrates that we're in late-stage regulatory capture: the media mega-corporations can influence the regulator to decide things in their favor.

So how do we fix this? Simple: Win elections. Fight corruption. Break up mega-corporations. And quit being distracted by the bullshit.

We've done it before. We can do it again.

A reader who used to work in the TV industry sent me a potboiler of a story from the New York Times about creative control, credits, and greed:

[T]alks over a sequel to “ER” broke down in disagreements between Warner Bros. Television and the estate of Michael Crichton, the best-selling author, who wrote the screenplay for the “ER” pilot. Negotiations with Mr. Crichton’s widow, Sherri Crichton, came so close that Warner Bros. Television had drafted a news release announcing the return of the show.

Ms. Crichton has since sued Warner Bros., Mr. Wyle, Mr. Wells and the creator and showrunner R. Scott Gemmill in a California state court, asserting that “The Pitt” is the “ER” reboot they negotiated in a disguise about as tricky as a pair of Groucho glasses.

The team behind “The Pitt” contends that not just the location and the name of the protagonist changed but everything from the lighting to the music to the pacing of the show. “When I was creating ‘The Pitt,’ I intentionally made it different than ‘ER’ (and every other medical drama I am aware of) in as many ways possible,” Mr. Gemmill said in a statement to the court.

I am struggling to imagine an average jury that could possibly determine whether something is a derivative work unless it's as obvious as "My Sweet Lord."

Of course, there's a lot of money on the table here, especially with The Pitt winning Emmy awards for Best Drama and Best Actor, not to mention getting picked up for a second season. ER is thought to have netted Michael Crichton and (some of) his heirs upwards of $250 million.

Just now on Facebook the first 15 things on my feed were:

• 4 posts from friends;
• 3 posts from groups I follow; and
• 8 posts from advertisers and accounts I don't follow.

That, my friends, is enshittification.

I remember when, not long ago, 8 posts would be from friends for every 2 that weren't. It's beginning to make Facebook unusable for me. Other things on the Internet have also enshittified to near uselessness, as these three stories attest.

First, Vandenberg Coalition executive director Carrie Filipetti argues that TikTok really is the threat Congress determined it was last year, so maybe let's enforce the ban?

Imagine the following scenario. China decides to attack Taiwan, and, fearing the United States will come to Taiwan’s aid, launches preemptive strikes against American targets overseas. In the United States, Chinese operators launch drone attacks from secret bases located on more than 380,000 acres of farmland China has purchased. As the government considers its options, the 170 million American TikTok users open their feeds to thousands of bots disguised as people, rattling off anti-American propaganda; encouraging young students desperate for meaning to fight their own government; and spreading disinformation at such a rapid rate that it is impossible to discern fact from fiction.

This scenario seemed plausible enough to Congress when it weighed TikTok’s future. Lawmakers were alarmed when Osama bin Laden’s terrorist screed “Letter to America” spread on the app following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel. TikTok denies it actively pushes political content, but the company only worsened Congress’s concerns about influence operations when its app successfully urged thousands of young Americans to lobby against counter-TikTok legislation. Lawmakers reported children and teenagers flooding their phone lines, often without knowing whom they were calling or why.

Times writer Nation Taylor Pemberton digs into the infantile nihilism in the corner of the Internet that seems to have informed Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin:

The only thing that can be said conclusively about Mr. Robinson, at this moment, is that he was a chronically online, white American male.

The internet’s political communities and the open-source sleuths currently scrambling to place Mr. Robinson into a coherent ideological camp certainly won’t be content with any of this. Nor will they be satisfied with the other likelihood awaiting us: that Mr. Robinson, the son of a seemingly content Mormon family, probably possesses a mishmash of ideological stances. Some held dearly. Others not so much. They also will not be satisfied that this horrific, society-changing act of violence was most likely committed both as an ironic gesture and as a pure political statement.

If your head is spinning from the internet’s attempts to read into Mr. Robinson’s alleged choices and political identity, that’s understandable. We’ve fully stepped into a different historical moment: the age of brain-poisoning meme politics.

And finally, NNGroup's Kate Moran explains why she (and I, for that matter) continues to collect physical video discs instead of relying on ever-worsening streaming services:

What used to make analog media inconvenient now feels charming. Choosing from among a limited set of curated, favorite movies feels like a relief compared to endlessly browsing through tens of thousands of options.

With physical media, I also feel a sense of security knowing that most of my favorites are available to watch at any time. I don’t have to go hunting through multiple streaming apps to figure out which one happens to have the rights to that film this month.

But the blame for subpar streaming experiences doesn’t lie solely with streaming apps. We have to talk about “smart” TVs.

This is an example of a deceptive pattern: I purchased a display, but the manufacturer treats it as a data-collection platform without reliably delivering on its basic functionality. It’s one thing to trade my privacy for a good experience. But I should be in charge of that decision. LG has not earned its privacy invasion in this case.

So now, I have a Roku attached to my smart TV. The TV has become a dumb display like in the old days, except worse.

I'll give you a concrete example of why physical discs make more sense in many cases. A streaming service recommended that I watch Le Bureau des Légends, a taut French series about agents in the DGSE (the French equivalent of the CIA). I loved the first season, which was on the streamer that recommended it. The second season, however, was on a different streamer, and they wanted $3.99 per episode to watch it. So instead of spending $40 on each of the 4 remaining seasons, I bought a 5-disc BluRay edition for $44.99. And I can watch them any time I want.

Don't even get me started on older stuff, like the ABC series Life Goes On that has a special connection to my family and which simply doesn't exist online anywhere. Or a Joss Whedon limited series that ran 6 of its 12 episodes on HBO before vanishing entirely. HBO produced all 12, and they exist somewhere, but I may never get to see them.

I wonder, has enshittification happened before, with other technologies?

With my PTO cap continuing to force me into Friday afternoons off this summer (the horror!), and the sunny but (smoky 23°C) weather, Cassie and I will head to the Horner Park DFA just as soon as I release a new version of Weather Now in just a few minutes.

When Cassie and I come back, I'll spend some time reading all these nuggets of existential dread:

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised last 3 months of US jobs data down to basically nil (which Krugman blames on tariffs), prompting the OAFPOTUS to fire BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
• Not only is the State Department's HR director a "RIF-happy, Christian evangelizing MAGA warrior with an axe to grind," he's also apparently kind of creepy.
• Former intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper "set the record straight on Russian and 2016."
• James Fallows once again calls on everyone to help protect our institutions.
• Yascha Mounk sees the rise of AI as akin to the Industrial Revolution.
• After more than a century of slow traffic through Wrigleyville, the CTA finally straightened out a section of the Red Line to cut travel times for everyone, which unfortunately means more noise.
• The impending merger between the Southern Pacific and Norfolk Southern railroads will have a huge impact on Chicago rail traffic—but no one yet knows whether it will be up or down.
• Molly White suggests using RSS readers instead of email lists to reduce the enshittification of news publications.
• Jeff Maurer, who spent several years writing for John Oliver as you may recall, wants to have a serious autopsy of late night television that includes all the uncomfortable topics.

By the way, the new Weather Now build allows users to create their own weather lists and share them with the world or keep them private. I've wanted to build this feature for a long time, finally starting work on it two weekends ago. Try it out and let me know what you think!

If you've ever played Snakes & Ladders (Chutes & Ladders in the US) with a small child, or really any game with a small child, you have probably cheated. Of course you have; don't deny it. Everyone knows letting the kid win is often the only way to get out of playing again.

It turns out, Japan last week and the European Union this week both demonstrated mastery of that principle while negotiating "trade deals" with the world's largest toddler:

[I]f the US-EU trade relationship was more or less OK last year, why did Trump impose huge tariffs and leave many of them in place even after the so-called deal? Because he felt like it. You won’t get anywhere in understanding the trade war if you insist on believing that Trump’s tariffs are a response to any legitimate grievances. And he failed to gain any significant concessions, mainly because Europe was already behaving well and had nothing to concede.

So was the US-EU trade deal basically a nothingburger? No, it was a bad thing, but mainly for political reasons.

Two less discouraging aspects of what just happened: First, Trump appears to have backed down on the idea of treating European value-added taxes as an unfair barrier to U.S. exports (which they aren’t, but facts don’t matter here.) So that’s one potentially awful confrontation avoided, at least for now.

Second, if this trade deal was in part an attempt to drive Epstein from the top of the news, my sense of the news flow is that it has been a complete flop.

Still, if I were a European I’d be very angry at anything that even looks like Trump appeasement. The EU is an economic superpower, especially if it allies itself with the UK. It needs to start acting like it.

Oh, it will, I reckon. But for now, all the OAFPOTUS has done is to impose a 15% tariff on the United States in Europe and Japan.

Meanwhile:

• Dan Rather calls out the OAFPOTUS for (once more) enriching himself at taxpayer expense, and not just for spending $63 million on golf trips.
• Explaining to the Republican Party that we'll put down our guns when they put theirs down, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) warns that several large Blue states can also go full-Gerrymander, so maybe Texas should leave well enough alone.
• Crime has fallen dramatically in Chicago and other big cities across the US since 2020, and no one really knows why.
• Pro-Ukrainian hackers crippled Russian civil airline Aeroflot over the past weekend.
• Auto and traffic-safety writer Josh Max suggests that upping training and safety standards could reduce the 38,000 annual US traffic deaths, while ignoring the roles that road and city design play.
• The continued destruction of our environment under Republican administrations has led to the reddest districts in some places playing host to huge, noisy, climate-destroying AI data centers.
• On-premises Microsoft SharePoint Server installations suffered a catastrophic data breach in a zero-day attack starting Friday, which researchers say means any network with an on-site SPS instance exposed to the Internet must consider their user credentials compromised.

Finally, the New York Times has a look at Sesame Street's set design and how it has reflected changes in urban life over the last 56 years. "The show’s designers intentionally made the original set appear grungy, with garbage on the street, the brownstone spotted with soot and the color scheme appearing dull and muted. ... During a major redesign in the ’90s, the set introduced a new hotel and apartment building. The brownstone remained, and one of the show’s designers said it 'was meant to look like a survivor of gentrification.' After the show struck a deal to stream on HBO in 2015, the set appeared even shinier, newer and brighter." There's even a recycling bin next to Oscar's trash can. Sic transit, et cetera.

Leading off the news this afternoon, Black Sabbath lead singer Ozzy Osbourne died today at age 76. I am surprised he lasted this long, as he didn't exactly take care of himself over the years.

In other news:

• House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has stopped the legislative process of the United States rather than vote on releasing details of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with the OAFPOTUS.
• Adam Kinzinger details the quiet cruelty of the OAFPOTUS's droogs.
• Tom Nichols points out that the OAFPOTUS has no theory of governance beyond "anger, fear, and, most of all, pettiness."
• Maryland police officers got away with at least 36 murders thanks to former Maryland Chief Medical Examiner David Fowler's interference in the death classifications.
• CBS cancelled its top-rated talk show, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, in a sop to the OAFPOTUS ahead of a proposed merger involving CBS's parent company, Paramount. (Jeff Maurer has a more nuanced take on this.)
• Paul Krugman bemoans the "enshittification and the bitterness of billionaire bros."
• The Chicago Transit Authority restored the Red and Purple Lines to full capacity and re-opened the four Red Line stations closed in 2021 for the Red-Purple Modernization Project.

Finally, NOAA released its findings on the meteotsunami and seiche that rolled over Lake Superior on 21 June 2025. The storm surge and seiche rebound caused lake levels to change by 2.2 meters over the span of three hours in some places, making it the largest such event in recorded history.

Oh, and Cassie gets her cone off almost exactly 24 hours from now. Photos when it happens.

I've been slowly going through Buffy the Vampire Slayer again and cleaning out some boxes that I've stored for a similar length of time, so I've thought a lot about the 1990s recently. Apparently so has author Glynnis MacNicol:

Had I gone to sleep on New Year’s Eve in 1999 and waked today, Rip Van Winkle style, much of the world I left behind that night would still feel familiar. Fast-fashion hubs like Urban Outfitters are peddling baby tees and baby-doll dresses. Point-and-shoot cameras, like the one I toted into the city, flip phones and even smoking are making a comeback. Perhaps most notable, I’d still recognize a shocking number of the people currently wielding influence over our lives, not least because so many of them were prominent in New York City at the time.

It’s not just pop culture. New Yorkers still have Chuck Schumer trolling the Senate; he took office in 1999 and never left. And, of course, our president: It was in the 1990s that Donald Trump became an avatar for wealth and excess. It’s as though Generation X, of which I am solidly a member, is wreaking some strange revenge. The people we put in power and the culture we created currently have an outsize influence on the world.

Apparently author Kurt Andersen had a similar idea back in February.

I do miss the '90s. Well, the late '90s, after law school, right around the time The Daily Parker began on a small corner of my company's Internet server. But still.

I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain.

Before I do any of that, however, I'm going to read these things:

• The US Supreme Court temporarily and partially paused rulings by three lower-court judges on the OAFPOTUS's birthright citizenship order on the narrow question of whether lower courts can enjoin the entire country. (I will read Justice Coney Barrett's opinion when I have an empty stomach and a strong gummy.)
• Paul Krugman does the math on the Medicaid provisions in the ridiculous Republican budget proposal now winding through the Senate, and calls it "the coming health care apocalypse."
• Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has quietly killed the most onerous MAGA over-reaches from the ridiculous Republican budget proposal.
• Politico describes how Georgia's Medicaid work mandate has resulted in 97% of eligible residents being unable to register for the state's work verification program—which, given the current state of the Republican Party, seems exactly on brand.
• Julia Ioffe scoffs at the inability of the OAFPOTUS and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to utter more than three consecutive words about our attack on Iran last weekend without lying.
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) sees omens and portents in Zohran Mamdani's win in Tuesday's New York City Democratic Party primary. So does Dan Rather. Jeff Maurer jokes about who really won.
• Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan bawls out the gay-rights movement for morphing into a radical, illiberal, and ultimately ineffective leftist crusade: "Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized."
• Yascha Mounk shares "18 observations about learning Chinese."
• Bruce Schneier argues that we need to care more about data integrity in systems design.
• What the hell happened to the Lincoln Yards development site?

Finally, though I have not seen the Apple TV show Dark Matter, it's on my list. And if I really like it, I can buy the house whose façade is used as the protagonist's house. It's going on the market for only $2.5 million.

I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain.

Before I do any of that, however, I'm going to read these things:

• The US Supreme Court temporarily and partially paused rulings by three lower-court judges on the OAFPOTUS's birthright citizenship order on the narrow question of whether lower courts can enjoin the entire country. (I will read Justice Coney Barrett's opinion when I have an empty stomach and a strong gummy.)
• Paul Krugman does the math on the Medicaid provisions in the ridiculous Republican budget proposal now winding through the Senate, and calls it "the coming health care apocalypse."
• Politico describes how Georgia's Medicaid work mandate has resulted in 97% of eligible residents being unable to register for the state's work verification program—which, given the current state of the Republican Party, seems exactly on brand.
• Julia Ioffe scoffs at the inability of the OAFPOTUS and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to utter more than three consecutive words about our attack on Iran last weekend without lying.
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) sees omens and portents in Zohran Mamdani's win in Tuesday's New York City Democratic Party primary. So does Dan Rather. Jeff Maurer jokes about who really won.
• Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan bawls out the gay-rights movement for morphing into a radical, illiberal, and ultimately ineffective leftist crusade: "Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized."
• Yascha Mounk shares "18 observations about learning Chinese."
• Bruce Schneier argues that we need to care more about data integrity in systems design.
• What the hell happened to the Lincoln Yards development site?

Finally, though I have not seen the Apple TV show Dark Matter, it's on my list. And if I really like it, I can buy the house whose façade is used as the protagonist's house. It's going on the market for only $2.5 million.

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)