The Daily Parker

Meteorological summer ends in just a few hours, so this weekend I'm spending lots of time outside. Today, unfortunately, Cassie can't come with me. So yesterday, she and I left the house at 1:15 and didn't get home until 9:15. She got almost 3 hours of walks (including this 8.7-km hike to the Horner Park DFA), tons of pats, lots of treats, and extra kibble for dinner. And perfect weather.

She also met new friends:

And had some time to chill while I read my book:

Isn't she pretty?

Like I said, she can't come with me today as my cousin got me a ticket to the Yankees game at the minor-league park on the South Side. There's a chance the Yankees could win their 10th straight on the road this afternoon, so I'll be cheering them on. (For the record, the Yankees are my 27th-favorite team. The team they're playing is my 29th-favorite team. The Mets are 28th and the Cardinals are 30th. It makes sense if you grew up on the North Side of Chicago in the 1970s.)

Only 14 hours of summer left...

Welcome to stop #133 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Pilot Project Brewing, 3473 N Clark, Chicago
Train line: CTA Red Line, Addison
Time from Chicago: 18 minutes
Distance from station: 450 m

Even though Pilot Project doesn't actually brew beer at their new Wrigleyville location, thus technically not being eligible for the Brews & Choos list, I liked the place enough and found it a little oasis in the maelstrom surrounding Wrigley Field, so I'm overruling my own rules. It helped that my Brews Buddy and I had just come up from the Guinness Brew Pub Experience in Fulton Market so were ready for interesting beer and a less-corporatized environment. It also helped that the Boston terrier at the next table kept making googly eyes at me. (Of course, Boston terriers don't really have any other kind of eyes, but I digress.)

Pilot Project, like District Brew Yards, operates as a contract brewery for startup breweries. As such, they don't really do flights, and some of the beers they produce only come in cans. Consequently my Brews Buddy and I only tried one beer each. The Brewer's Kitchen Two Falls New England IPA (6.5%) looked and tasted more like a hazy, but hoppier. My buddy also liked the lack of dank notes and the almost-spiciness of the beer. (Only on checking links for this review did I remember (a) Brewer's Kitchen is Pilot Project's own brand, and (b) we already tried the Two Falls Hazy when we visited the Logan Square taproom last November.)

We also tried the Cerveceria Paracaidista Zicatela Sunset American IPA (5.6%), a cool IPA with crisp hops and a clean finish we both would drink again.

We'll be back, just not on one of the 81 days a year when the Cubs are in town. They also have a chill cocktail lounge in the basement that might have sufficient remove from Clark Street to enjoy after dinner nearby. I expect we'll be back.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Yes, avoidable
Serves food? Full menu
Would hang out with a book? Maybe
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

Welcome to stop #132 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Guinness Open Gate Brewery, 901 W Kinzie, Chicago
Train line: CTA Green Line, Morgan
Time from Chicago: 6 minutes
Distance from station: 300 m

Somehow, I pictured the second US-based Guinness experimental brewery differently, having seen their original brewery in Dublin, Ireland. The building Guinness renovated just north of the Fulton Market District has existed for a century or more, though from as far back as I can remember until last year it was a derelict hulk covered in graffiti. (The whole area used to be a post-industrial wasteland, in fact. Check out historical street views even from 2007, double the wabi sabi, add more abandoned railroad tracks and free-floating trash, and you'll have it as I first saw it in the 1980s.)

Guinness took over the decaying structure and, with the help of consultants and marketing professionals, made it into the forgettable Brew Pub Experience it is today. I did not have high hopes for the place. As my Brews & Choos Buddy and I entered through the gift shop (merch! merch! merch!), the shrug got shruggier.

Fortunately, we had perfect weather, so we sat outside. The patio has glass shielding on the street-facing side, except there's nothing to shield because Kinzie Street rises about 4 meters above the patio at that point. All the shielding did was to reflect every sound back to us, making it one of the loudest patios we've ever sat on. The consultant-approved energetic electronic music (I'm sure there's a better name for it) gave us the comfortable feeling of a Starbucks or a Chipotle. At least they allow dogs out there.

The brewery has two flight options, neither of which appealed to us, so we each got two 175-mL pours. The Near Post ESB (5.7%) had an earthy nose with a very sweet and malty body that almost tasted treacly to me. My Brews Buddy liked it as it went with the also-very-sweet brown bread we ordered. The Kinzie Street Pale Ale (5.5%) was OK, with a good hop balance and a long finish, engineered to perfection for consumption by trendy Millennials. (My Brews Buddy: "It's fine, it's drinkable, it's moderately complex, it's moderately bitter.")

The Lake Effect Haze (6.7%) was also OK, drinkable, unchallenging, and well-balanced with fewer of the dank overtones that I enjoy in a hazy IPA and my Brews Buddy does not. Finally, the Pineapple Coconut Stout (5.3%), while not a style I would ever order for myself, had only light hints of the offending fruit flavors and more of a feeling of them. BB: "I like it more than I expected."

Were we disappointed? No. Were we surprised? No. Were we excited to tell all of our friends and go back tomorrow? No. We agreed that we'd be fine meeting there if friends suggested it, but given its proximity to some pretty great places on Fulton just two blocks away, we might gently persuade them to go elsewhere.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Yes, avoidable
Serves food? Full menu
Would hang out with a book? No
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Maybe

While on a Brews & Choos mini-adventure yesterday, I learned that US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) has leaked that she won't seek re-election. This comes just a day after Democrat Catelin Drey flipped Iowa Senate district 1 from +20 OAFPOTUS to +5 Democratic. (Drey's win also breaks the Republican Party's supermajority in the Iowa Senate.)

You may also remember Senator Ernst responding to her constituents alarm at HR 1* and its effects on their ability to remain breathing by saying "we're all going to die" and doubling down with a tin-eared video from a cemetery the next day.

Then, just a few minutes ago, I heard Scott Simon on NPR interviewing California Assemblyman James Gallagher (R-Yuba City) who proposed splitting California into two states along the coast because poor Republican politicians can't get any of their programs through, given they make up only 39% of the state's electorate. "It's not fair!" he whined. "The Democrats don't care about the smallfolk!" He then went on to list three different ways the OAFPOTUS has screwed his district, suggesting the Democrats did it.

Gallagher's proposal would create a Democratic-majority state and a Republican-likely state, with the coastal part having 30 million of the state's 40 million residents and 80% of its GDP. He neglects to mention that this would increase Republican representation in the US Senate by net +2, further diluting national Democratic power. Plus, the putative interior state would become a brand new taker state, as the coastal part would increase its relative payment imbalance to the Federal Government while the new interior part would need even more outside money to stay afloat. He also ignored the many other semi-serious proposals to divide California into three states, which would increase Democratic representation in the Senate by net +2 while increasing the population-to-Senator ratio of everyone in the State. Does Gallagher support that plan? No? Why not?

Also yesterday, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington threw out the majority of the OAFPOTUS's tariffs, but stayed the ruling until October 14th. (For a complete list of the administration's losses for the week, I give you Amanda Nelson.)

Welcome to the "find out" phase.

* I'm just not going to call the thing by the juvenile and stupid name Republicans gave it.

The forecast today looks perfect: 21°C under sunny skies. Perfect for a Brews and Choos trip! And while one of the stops will be to a brewery that could under no circumstances be called "craft," the other stop will take us to a brewery incubator suspiciously close to Wrigley Field.

Fitting, then, that Crain's reports today about how craft breweries have had to evolve to stay in business:

After a decade of unbridled growth, the industry hit a rough patch in the years following the pandemic. Ten percent of the state’s roughly 300 craft breweries closed between 2022 and 2023. Consumers did not return to taprooms after COVID restrictions lifted. Retail beer sales sagged as people turned toward wine, spirits and canned cocktails. The price of ingredients, like grain and aluminum cans, skyrocketed, but people will only pay so much for a beer. Craft breweries that took out big loans to survive the pandemic could not pay them back.

The moment proved to be a crucible. In need of additional revenue, the survivors evolved. They rolled out non-alcoholic options, food menus and THC-infused beverages. In aid, Illinois introduced a new brewer license category that allowed breweries to sell wine and spirits in addition to beer. To stay afloat now, craft breweries must look a lot more like Brother Chimp and a lot less like the taprooms of the 2010s that sold nothing but their own beer.

As craft breweries’ business models have evolved over the past couple of years, their numbers have improved, said Ray Stout, executive director of the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild. Only four craft breweries in the state closed between Jan. 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025. In that same period, 16 breweries opened or expanded.

By Stout’s count, Illinois now has 308 breweries. That’s a record high for the state’s almost $2.9 billion industry.

Beneath those improving numbers, though, the headwinds remain. Craft beer sales in stores are down about 4% compared to a year ago, according to data from market research firm NielsenIQ. The average price for a case was up about 2%.

And would you just look, the article goes into detail about our second stop!

This weekend, I expect to finish a major personal (non-technical) project I started on June 15th, walk 20 km (without Cassie), and thanks to the desperation of the minor-league team on the South Side of Chicago, attend a Yankees game. It helps that the forecast looks exactly like one would want for the last weekend of summer: highs in the mid-20s and partly cloudy skies.

I might have time to read all of these things as well:

• Jeff Maurer, who watched (some of) this week's televised cabinet meeting so we didn't have to, really hates this season of The Apprentice.
• Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich (D) thinks the OAFPOTUS's "fascist capitalism" will ultimately bring down his regime.
• Jennifer Rubin asks, why is the OAFPOTUS administration trying to kill everyone?
• Paul Krugman likens our current economic situation to Wile E. Coyote not noticing he's run off the cliff.
• The Chicago Sun-Times has a map of all the lead pipes in the city. (I'm happy to learn that all of the water lines leading to my house are lead-free.)
• Rachel Janfaza wants to change the conversation around how the kids today use AI. Kyla Scanlon also dug into attitudes towards AI in the workplace.

Meanwhile, my birthday ribs order got delayed. One of the assistant butchers backed into a meat grinder, so they got behind in their work. He was the biggest ass in the shop until he recently got unseated, so I don't feel too bad for making him the butt of my jokes.

G'nite.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) social media team have decided that white Christianist nationalism is the way to go:

If you mashed together a Vietnam War epic with a Christian end-times movie, what might emerge is one of the recent social media videos produced by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In early July, the department posted a minute-long short showing agents in tactical gear bathed in eerie red light — among them, Homeland Secretary Kristi L. Noem — piling into a helicopter, from which they survey a landscape as if preparing for an aerial attack. The soundtrack is a cover of the 1940s folk tune “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” by the San Francisco rock band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. As the action unfolds, a man is heard quoting from the Book of Isaiah: “I heard the voice of the Lord say, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go forth for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me.’”

The theme was echoed three weeks later by another DHS video showing murky images of heavily armed agents conducting a nighttime raid on a building.

The videos conjure a veritable holy war, in which God’s soldiers prepare to battle evil, a.k.a. undocumented immigrants. These adversaries are largely implied, rendered as shadows visible only through night vision goggles — a stunning bit of dehumanization. As in a lot of propaganda, facts get twisted to fit the message. The quote from Isaiah is wildly out of context. Read the chapters from which it is drawn, and you’ll learn that God was asking Isaiah not to spearhead a masked army, but to warn against profligacy and corruption. “Learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor,” reads a verse in Chapter 1, “defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” In other words, nothing to do with a helicopter full of people armed to the teeth.

These Christian-themed videos are part of a larger barrage of propaganda that clogs the social media feeds of DHS and those of its subdivision Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Log on to their Instagram, X and Facebook feeds, and it is as if someone took humdrum government recruitment ads, marinated them with unhinged 21st-century meme culture, then seasoned them with a bit of Bible and Batman.

Stylistically, the posts are all over the map, but they share a tone of petty meanness straight out of 4chan. You might find an AI-generated illustration of alligators wearing ICE baseball caps, used to promote a detention center in the Florida Everglades. Or you might stumble onto an image macro touting self-deportation that features a still from the 1982 film “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” “Even E.T. knew when it was time to GO HOME,” reads the text. As journalist Tess Owen wrote in Wired, the maliciousness appeals to “the casual cruelty of the highly online far-right,” using “humor to make ICE seem like some sort of fun fraternity.”

I am so sick of these people. Most Americans are. But with the Republicans in Congress recently authorizing an eye-watering budget for the agency, the ethos these posts exhibit becomes downright scary. Read the history of the Schutzstaffel if I'm not being clear enough.

We've always had right-wing nationalism in this country; there's a good argument that the Founders were, to some extent, right-wing nationalists. (Less right-wing by the standards of their time than their ideas are today, of course.) These guys, though, are more nihilist than coherent in their ideology, which makes them far worse. We have 14 months to get Congress back. I hope that's enough time.

The OAFPOTUS's Roy Cohn-inspired habit of suing everyone who tells him to STFU came to its logical conclusion yesterday as US District Judge Thomas T Cullen (Va., Western) told him to STFU after his most egregious lawsuit yet:

A federal judge has forcefully rejected a highly unusual lawsuit the Trump administration filed against 15 other judges whom the Justice Department accused of hindering the president’s mass deportation agenda.

In tossing out the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Thomas Cullen — a Trump appointee — lamented what he described as the White House’s months-long “smear” of the federal judiciary.

For months, Cullen wrote, top executive branch officials have attacked judges who rule against the administration as “‘left-wing,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘activists,’ ‘radical,’ ‘politically minded,’ ‘rogue,’ ‘unhinged,’ ‘outrageous, overzealous, [and] unconstitutional,’ ‘[c]rooked,’ and worse.”

“Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system,” Cullen continued, “this concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate.”

“Whatever the merits of its grievance with the judges of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, the Executive must find a proper way to raise those concerns,” Cullen wrote. “All of this isn’t to say that the Executive is without any recourse; far from it. If the Executive truly believes that Defendants’ standing orders violate the law, it should avail itself of the tried-and-true recourse available to all federal litigants: It should appeal.”

Seriously, I guffawed when I heard about the case last week. But this is what happens when stupid people with big and fragile egos get told they're being stupid: they double down on the stupidity. And this is why we can't have nice things right now.

Update: I also guffawed several times reading the Court's opinion. My god, the administration's lawyers are idiots. I am a better lawyer than some of them and I never even sat for the Bar.

The only thing Illinois governor JB Pritzker said this afternoon that I quibble with is that Stephen Miller is a "complicit lackey*:"

* Pritzker has the relationship wrong; Miller is no more a lackey than Goebbels was. The OAFPOTUS just doesn't care what Miller does as long as Miller delivers the goods.

In yet another consequence of the ongoing stupidity of the OAFPOTUS and his droogs, postal services around the world have suspended service to the US while they figure out how they're going to deal with the end of the de minimis tariff exemption:

The Trump administration ended the exception for China and Hong Kong in May. In an executive order signed last month, Trump extended the decision to all countries starting Aug. 29, meaning that most low-value parcels will also be charged tariffs.

Suspensions have also been announced across Asia and the Pacific. India’s Department of Posts said that it would temporarily stop mail service to the U.S. beginning Monday. Thailand temporarily suspended all international postal parcel services to the U.S., while South Korea, Singapore and New Zealand suspended most shipments. Australia Post has temporarily suspended what is known as transit shipping — where goods from other countries are shipped to the U.S. via Australia.

The extra charges on a package will depend on the methodology used to calculate it, according to the executive order. The duty rate will either match the level of tariff the U.S. has imposed on the country of origin, or a specific duty based on the following:

• For countries with a tariff rate of 15 percent or less, such as Britain, each package will incur an additional charge of $80.
• Parcels originating from countries with U.S. tariffs of between 16 and 25 percent will incur an additional $160.
• Countries with a tariff rate of more than 25 percent will face an extra $200.

So, yeah, don't send any packages home from your trip abroad. Who knows, maybe it'll cost $200 for your post cards, too?

The stupidity would be funnier if it weren't costing us billions.