The Daily Parker

Chicago got a few millimeters of ice last night, which made my 15-minute walk from my house to Cassie's day camp into a 24-minute walk. The poor girl could not understand my difficulty, but she also can't count all four of her paws, so we work with what we have. Fortunately the temperature has gotten above freezing and promises to stay there at least until late tonight.

Elsewhere in the world:

• Josh Marshall proposes a taxonomy of the Administration's forces of destruction.
• Part of that destruction: erasing from DOJ websites any information about the January 6th terrorists who stormed the Capitol.
• Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien describes Elon Musk's efforts as "state capture."
• Karen Tumulty says we're watching a constitutional collapse.
• Jeff Maurer jokes that Musk closing a $0.04-trillion agency will certainly put a dent in the $1.8-trillion budget gap.

In other news, I deployed an update to Weather Now last night that corrected a couple of bugs, and I also imported a few thousand places from the US Census Bureau and the US Geological Survey. By the end of February I should have the entire USGS gazetteer imported, plus a vastly expanded search service that will speed up finding places in the world to see their weather. I also hope to (finally!) allow registered users to choose measurement systems and to see where the best and the worst weather in the world is currently reported. Fun!

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.

Topping the link round-up this afternoon, my go-to brewery Spiteful fears for its business if it has to pay a 25% tariff on imported aluminum cans. If the OAFPOTUS drives Spiteful out of business for no fucking reason I will be quite put out.

In other news:

• Timothy Noah reads Jean Piaget to learn more about the OAFPOTUS's "infantile incapacity to grasp the mechanics of cause and effect," suggesting that his reasoning is more transductive, like a 3-year old's ("taking a nap causes the afternoon" ~=~ "DEI causes plane crashes").
• Aaron Blake says "it's complicated" whether the OAFPOTUS completely caved to Canada and Mexico earlier this week, despite the "deals" with those nations having already been worked out by the Biden Administration, while Ruth Marcus calls the era that began on January 20th "the most damaging first two weeks in presidential history."
• Margaret Renkl reminds everyone that the Republican plan to destroy public schooling so those people won't get basic education continues apace.
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has issued an order to align transit funding with marriage and birth rates, which will help places that don't actually have transit and hurt places like Chicago and New York.
• A woman has sued author Neil Gaiman for sexual assault, alleging serial abuse that occurred in New Zealand while she was his live-in nanny.

Other than the Neil Gaiman thing, which pains me deeply, this all goes to show that President Camacho will be a Republican.

Demonstrating one more time that the OAFPOTUS is all hat and no cattle, the White House announced that it will "postpone" the crippling and needless tariffs he had threatened to impose on our second-biggest trading partner in exchange for...something Mexico would have done anyway. Avocados will continue to flow north, and dollars will continue to flow south.

Canada, meanwhile, has taken a more hardline position on the threat, which James Fallows calls "an international lesson in leadership." Perhaps Canada will agree to increased anti-coca-production efforts in exchange for the OAFPOTUS "pausing" the tariffs that it seems he never really intended to impose in the first place. Because of course he didn't.

The OAFPOTUS is a con man, and this was a grift, just like everything else he does. Or maybe, as Timothy Noah suggested, it's a simple protection racket.

Meanwhile:

• Paul Krugman is shocked—shocked!—that the OAFPOTUS is doing what he threatened to do to the economy. But he's more worried that unelected, unconstrained tech bros have apparently gained access to the Treasury Department payment system.
• Cranky Flyer fears for aviation safety after the OAFPOTUS's unhinged and narcissistic response to the crash of AE 5342 on Wednesday.
• Charls Marohn argues that the response to 67 people dying in a plane crash should be the response to over 100 people dying every day in car crashes.
• John Scalzi explains how his next novel's title got translated into Hungarian as an example of why machines are simply not up to the task of translating yet.

And finally, the New Yorker has a cautionary tale about a real-estate deal that (quite literally) went sideways.

Update, 15:52 CST: Yeah, called it. Tariffs against Canada also paused, "in exchange" for Canada allocating 10,000 staff to policing the border—which I'm pretty sure they had already planned to do.

Since I live in a dense urban environment and drive a plug-in hybrid, I can go a long time without buying gasoline.

Last night, I broke down and put 35 liters of gas in the car, because I'm concerned the OAFPOTUS's tariffs against Canada will cause petrol prices to spike in the Midwest. In fairness, I only had 3 liters left, but still: I could have gone another month!

I last filled up coming back from watching the eclipse on April 8th. So I did set a new personal record for time between refueling: 300 days. Sadly, the 2,863 km between fuel stops didn't get all the way to my PR of 3,116 km or the Holy Grail of 3,219 km (2,000 miles). And hey, 1.2 L/100 km (194.3 MPG) really doesn't suck. Since buying the car six years ago, I've spent less than $600 on gas. That also doesn't suck.

Still, I'm annoyed that politics interfered. The OAFPOTUS continues to present as the dumbest person ever to sit in the Oval Office by at least 20 IQ points.

Throughout all the bullshit the OAFPOTUS has spewed onto the nation in the past couple of weeks, Ezra Klein wants to remind you of something I have mentioned many times: he's a charlatan, and everything he does is a grift. Don't believe him:

People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency.

The president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president.

Josh Marshall has a slightly different, but overlapping, perspective:

The point is that you do “shock and awe” when you don’t actually have the power to pull the job off. You’re trying for a rapid-fire dramatic effect that gets your opponent to collapse or stand down. The psychological shock value is the additional weapon that fills the gap between your power and your intended goal. And understanding that is a critical, really the critical first step to combating it.

This stuff isn’t an illusion. It’s happening. It’s real. But you do “shock and awe” when you don’t actually have the power to make it stick. Otherwise there’s no need for the drama. You just do it. So recognizing that shock and confusion and not falling for it is essential to combating it.

It helps that they're not particularly competent at any of this. Not a lot, but it helps.

It's hard to see the OAFPOTUS's actions towards our two biggest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, as in the interests of the United States. So far, the White House hasn't actually issued a (probably unlawful) order imposing steep tariffs that would undo our free-trade agreements, but just the threat has caused a lot of damage already:

As I wrote the other day, in the three decades since NAFTA went into effect, North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times. Manufacturers developed this system not just because tariffs were low or zero, but because they thought they had a guarantee that tariffs would stay low.

One way of saying this is that until just the other day there was really no such thing as U.S. manufacturing, Canadian manufacturing or Mexican manufacturing, just North American manufacturing — a highly efficient, mutually beneficial system that sprawled across the three nations’ borders.

But now we have a U.S. president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn’t worth the paper it was printed on — that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it. And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate — that is, dis-integrate — reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.

And to think that many people imagined that Trump would be good for business.

We have, by a very narrow margin and with less than a majority of the vote, managed to put the most corrupt and possibly stupidest person in history into this office. If an adversary threatened to disrupt North American trade as much as this clown has, we'd threaten war.

And before you start wondering how long it will take for average Americans to get nervous, well, that's already happened: the only newly-inaugurated president in modern history with a lower approval rating was, of course, the same guy 8 years ago. (He has the highest disapprovals in history right now, though.)

Only 1,449 days to go...

I had a delightful 2-hour lunch with a friend I've not seen in a while, after a morning of non-stop meetings. I also updated a piece of software that gets deployed tomorrow. I've got about 20 minutes now to jot down all of the things I hope to read later today:

• An Army helicopter on a training flight collided with an American Airlines CRJ on approach to DCA last night, killing 64 people; the OAFPOTUS blamed black folk. (I'm not kidding, he really did.)
• Paul Rosensweig explains how the flurry of orders coming out of the White House targeted the weak spots of the US government, "precisely [those parts] whose oversight might interfere with Trump’s activities, or those of his allies."
• Mark S. Zaid and Andrew P. Bakaj agree.
• David A Graham expands on this thought, looking at the funding-freeze memo and the chaos it caused.
• Matt Ford chuckles over the effort's "crash and burn."
• Paul Krugman points out that the Elon Musk-driven effort to get rid of a sizeable chunk of said bureaucracy is "a scam and a purge." 
• Jamie Bouie just calls the administration "delusional."

Finally, singer Marianne Faithfull has died at 78. She will be missed.

First: the good. My friend Kat Kruse has a new book of her short stories coming out. She let me read a couple of them, and I couldn't wait to pre-order the entire collection. I should get it on February 17th.

Still on the good things—or at least the things that don't seem so bad, considering:

• The Guardian has a reflection on Seoul removing the Cheonggyecheon Expressway in 2005 to expose the historic stream that the highway previously covered.
• Margaret Renkl praises the coyotes that live with us in our cities.
• Christopher Geier equates mandatory return-to-office policies as a manifestation of the sunk-cost fallacy, on a par with the Concorde airplane.
• SBA and SSA Inspector General Mark Ware pushed back on the OAFPOTUS's purported firing of him and 16 others IGs in a letter suggesting that the White House check with counsel's office and Congress first.

Now for the bad:

• The OAFPOTUS has called on all federal agencies to halt all grants and loans, putting $1 trillion of funds at risk and creating the first constitutional crisis of his second term. This is especially evil because it's using the bogeyman of DEI to cover up an unconstitutional power grab.
• Maytal Eyal has had it up to here with "weepy influencers."
• Anne Applebaum warns that oligarchs like Elon Musk have undermined European elections to a dangerous degree.

And, of course, the stupid:

• Because Google Maps reflects the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), and because the OAFPOTUS directed GNIS to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to something too stupid ever to appear on The Daily Parker, Google will update the US view of Maps to reflect the new name. (Contra the Post article, Google's process has no mystery at all. They simply follow GNIS, as does Weather Now.)
• The OAFPOTUS lied (sacre bleu!) about reducing inflation, as his immediate steps upon taking office and his stated plans will, as everyone who has ever taken Econ 101 knows, actually increase inflation.

I might as well finish with a good thing. The temperature has gotten all the way up to 6.2°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ and 7.8°C at O'Hare. It was last this warm at WHQ on December 29th. If O'Hare can get up to 11.1°C, it will eke past December 27th.

I don't necessarily agree with everything Nate Silver wrote in his analysis from last week, but he makes a some excellent points:

Biden hadn’t delivered the complete repudiation of Trump that polls — showing a massive 8.4-point popular vote lead — had been projecting. That’s why the election took four long days to call. Biden’s popular vote (4.5 points) and Electoral College (306-222) margins had been perfectly solid, and the migration of Georgia and Arizona into the blue column had enhanced its visual appeal on the map. But in the end, the tipping-point state — Wisconsin — voted for Biden by only 0.6 percentage points. Trump made gains in many areas, including South Texas, South Florida, and major cities, that would foreshadow his return to the White House four years later. If Trump’s handling of the pandemic hadn’t been so clumsy — he did get some of the big things right, including Operation Warp Speed and a stimulus package that quickly got the economy back on its feet — he might have been reelected.

Biden, despite a lot of effort — including making it the centerpiece of his aborted 2024 campaign — was never able to persuade Americans that January 6 had been on the same magnitude as a threat to the republic as September 11, for instance. Why not? Well, it’s hard to persuade people based on near-misses: thwarted attacks or narrowly averted disasters. Even actual disasters don’t always spur action when the inertia is high enough: America remains woefully unprepared for the next pandemic.

But I also think you can place some of the blame on the Democrats’ polycrisis framing (often echoed by a liberal establishment that over-selects for negative emotionality, less politely known as “neuroticism.”) If everything is an existential crisis, then nothing is. You’ll begin to suspect people of crying wolf. Or you’ll say, YOLO, if we’re all fucked anyway, let’s blow it all up, have some fun, and vote for Trump.

By July 2022, perceptions that the country was going in the wrong direction were among their highest-ever levels, worse than at any point, even in the annus horribilis of 2020.

In the end, Biden made what was essentially a triple devil’s bargain in exchange for winning the 2020 nomination and the presidency. First, he sold people on a quick return to normalcy from the pandemic when it would instead take until summer 2022 thanks to reinfections, new variants, and sharp divisions over mitigation measures. The extent to which this is his fault isn’t so clear. I have plenty of critiques of the White House’s handling of COVID — and plenty of critiques of Trump’s — but COVID is a uniquely wicked problem. Biden gambled on COVID going away when vaccines became widely available, and it didn’t work out. But he made matters worse by promising not just to solve COVID but also to save democracy and even deliver racial justice.

I suspect this won't be the last critique of Biden's presidency to come out this year. It will take decades, however, to knit all the threads into a coherent tapestry.