The Daily Parker

The American Revolutionary War began 250 years ago today when Capt John Parker's Minutemen engaged a force of 700 British soldiers on the town green in Lexington, Mass. Just over a year later, England's North American colonies declared their independence from King George III with a document that you really ought to read again with particular focus on the King's acts that drove the colonists to break away. It was almost as if they believed having a temperamental monarch with worsening mental-health problems was a sub-optimal political situation.

Today is also the 30th anniversary of Timothy McVeigh's mass killing of Federal employees and their children in Oklahoma City. Any similarities between McVeigh's and the OAFPOTUS's politics are, I'm sure, coincidental.

• Dana Milbank staggers at the self-inflicted failures that have made this the most destructive first 100 days in presidential history—with 11 days to go, yet!
• Andrew Sullivan takes us through the history of El Salvador dictator Nayib Bukele's rise to power, which of course the OAFPOTUS wants to emulate.
• Molly White outlines how blatant self-dealing combined with firing all the regulators has launched a staggering cryptocurrency grift to enrich the OAFPOTUS and his family. Former SEC Office of Internet Enforcement chief John Reed Stark concurs.
• Administration officials now claim that their letter demanding Harvard University install party cadres in every department was "unauthorized," and reminded everyone not to pay attention to the little man behind the curtain. Regardless, Jennifer Rubin cheers Harvard on.
• Jeff Maurer struggles with getting to the appropriate level of vitriol against the extremists in our party who don't seem to get that we have to win elections before they can get anything close to what they want.

As for me, and the gap in posting yesterday: I have a cold which seems entirely contained in my eyes and sinuses, so I didn't really feel creative. (Not that today's post is creative either, of course.) Somehow I got 9½ hours of sleep last night, according to my Garmin device, though I distinctly remember getting up to close windows when the temperature plummeted from 16°C to 9°C in less than an hour. And when the thunderstorms came through. And when Cassie poked me in the head. Both times.

It feels like the cold has mostly gone away, though. And with tomorrow's rainy forecast, it looks like I might get some writing done this weekend.

Before I go through the stories from the last day about how we live in the stupidest timeline, here's a photo of the Milwaukee Intermodal Station I snapped heading to my return train on Friday:

Elsewhere in the stupidest timeline, where maximizing corruption is the defining goal of the Republican Party:

• James Fallows takes us through Harvard's big "fuck you" to the OAFPOTUS's demands that the university install minders in its HR and academic departments, as does Josh Marshall.
• Jennifer Rubin reminds everyone that a functioning center-left party opposing a rogue authoritarian party does not constitute "polarization."
• A memo from the Office of Management and Budget outlines the OAFPOTUS's plans to gut climate and weather research, bringing a fresh new anti-intellectual, anti-science mission to NOAA.
• Paul Krugman outlines how cuts to the IRS will enable the rich to steal even more from everyone else.
• A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board says the DOGE children have enabled Russian hackers to gain access to NLRB data.
• Coders using large language models to write code have given attackers an enormous opportunity to introduce malicious code into your favorite apps through supply-chain attacks.

Finally, take a few minutes to read Chuck Marohn's Strong Towns series on how municipalities in the US and Canada routinely hide (or simply don't know) their long-term obligations so as to make building new infrastructure look like a better financial strategy than repairing existing infrastructure. I can tell you that you get no better view of the shitty state of American roads than riding a Divvy down almost any Chicago street, because Americans seem allergic to maintenance spending.

I know we need to put the fire out in Washington before we can fix anything else. But the long-term damage the OAFPOTUS continues to inflict on us will include more failing roads, bridges, and trains. So if you voted for him, you voted for the US becoming a third-world country in our lifetime.

The markets started slightly up this morning, but whatever optimism traders had before noon has evaporated. Both the S&P and DJIA are technically up, but less than 0.5%, while the OAFPOTUS continues to act like the demented old man he is.

And to think, Twin Peaks turned 35 today.

Meanwhile...

• The Biden Treasury official who co-wrote the research the OAFPOTUS cited to justify his malignantly stupid tariffs explains how malignantly stupid the OAFPOTUS is.
• Catherine Rampell waits in vain for the little boy to tell the OAFPOTUS he has no clothes.
• Michelle Goldberg finds it fascinating that so many people on the political right continue to have delusions about the OAFPOTUS.
• Paul Krugman returns the focus to the Health & Human Services Department under Robert F Kennedy, Jr., the head of the Quack-Industrial Complex.
• Jeff Maurer equates the OAFPOTUS with Toonces the Driving Cat. (Work with me, here.)
• Former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University president Larry Summers argues that universities need to stand up to the OAFPOTUS and his anti-intellectual flunkies.
• Cranky Flyer wants to watch what the airlines do in Chicago as an economic downturn looms.

Finally, SMBC inadvertently explains the Republican Party's entire educational policy, complete with a joke I've made for years: if I ever win the lottery, I'll set up a math scholarship for areas that sell the most lottery tickets.

Stuff to read:

• Forgetting (or just plain ignorant) that we have a Coast Guard better suited to the task of guarding our coasts, the OAFPOTUS has ordered the guided missile destroyer USS Gravely to the Texas-Mexico border.
• The OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X, apparently not seeing the connection between weather forecasters and weather forecasts, have illegally fired 10% of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff just as a violent tornado outbreak killed 40 people in the Midwest and South.
• The administration's attacks on universities fit the Orban plan of creating a failed democracy, so naturally the OAFPOTUS has doubled down on them.
• Krugman points out that all of the above administration malfeasance has had a depressing effect on the US economy by reducing demand for our key exports, not least of which includes the $50 billion foreigners used to spend to get American educations. (He also has a good, long explanation of how inflation works, if you subscribe.)
• Surprising no one but still an illegally-targeted exercise of Federal power, the Federal Communications Commission has demanded to see the contracts between a number of National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting System stations and their acknowledged donors.
• The Waterbeach development outside Cambridge, England, has a new car-free housing complex—though it's still a 10 kilometer walk from the nearest railway station.
• Pilot Patrick Smith wishes the public would have a better sense of perspective about the safety of air travel, while acknowledging that it has seemed a bit rockier than usual.

Finally, thanks to reduced funding and deferred maintenance, the Chicago El has seen slow zones balloon from 13% of its tracks to 30% since 2019. Fully 70% of the Forest Park branch has reduced speed limits, making the trip from there to downtown take over an hour. But sure, let's  keep funding below the minimum needed to function, and keep the CTA, Metra, and Pace all separate so they can each fail in their own ways.

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.

Cassie and I survived our 20-minute, -8°C walk a few minutes ago. For some reason I feel like I need a nap. Meanwhile:

• James Fallows remembers his old boss Jimmy Carter, and puts his presidency in perspective for the younger generations.
• Paul Krugman reminds the Republican Party that California contributes more to the country's GDP than any other state, so maybe cut the crap threatening to withhold disaster relief?
• ProPublica goes "inside the movement to redirect billions of taxpayer dollars to private religious schools."
• New Republic digs into why these same fundamentalist Christians hate ideas so much.
• Illinois legislators recently took a tour of Munich's and Berlin's transit systems, both of which I have personally found to be better than Chicago's, though London's and Vienna's are a bit better in my view. (And then there's Tokyo's, which has no equal I've encountered...)
• In much more enjoyable transit news, Chicago Transit Authority CEO Dorval Carter finally plans to retire, opening the door to someone to take over who actually likes public transit.
• NASA is weighing (quite literally) whether to retrieve some rocks it has collected on Mars.

Finally, I want to end with Ross Douthat's latest (subscriber-only) newsletter, taking Vivek Ramaswamy to task for suggesting American kids need more intense competition in order for the US to stay ahead of its peers. I'll just focus on one paragraph, where he suggests Ramaswamy's end goal may not be a place we really want to go:

[T]he atmosphere he’s describing in South Korea, the frantic cycle of educational competition, isn’t just a seeming contributing factor to that country’s social misery; it’s almost certainly a contributing factor to the literal collapse of South Korea’s population, the steep economic rise that Munger describes giving way to an equally steep demographic decline. So for societies no less than individuals, it appears possible to basically burn out on competition, to cram-school your way to misery, pessimism and collapse — something that any advocate of intensified meritocratic competition would do well to keep in mind.

As I have more and more contact with kids born after 1995, I find so many of them who either have flat personalities, an inability to function independently, and an alarming lack of emotional resilience, or who have vitality, intelligence, and an ability to function in the world but no ambition. The last 30 years have crushed the elite-adjacent kids whose parents want them to enter the elite, whatever they think "elite" means. As a kid who traveled alone on public transit to Downtown Chicago at age 7, and managed to get from O'Hare security to LAX security without help by age 8, I feel sorry for these incompetent, despondent children.

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.

My, we've had a busy day:

• President Biden commuted the sentences of 1,500 Federal inmates in the largest single-day clemency in American history. Two of them stole millions in massive frauds against Illinois citizens. Josh Marshall doesn't see much clemency.
• Charles Sykes worries that neither major US political party has a clue how to fix our education systems (plural).
• Legalized sports betting has shifted billions from small punters to large corporations, which is why it was illegal for so long.
• Charles Blow muses about making friends after 50.
• Despite freaking out the usual car-besotted subjects, a plan to extend a protected bike lane in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Ill., will actually add parking spaces.
• A downtown Chicago office building constructed in 1928 will become 252 apartments under a plan that received City Council approval yesterday.

Finally, paleobiologists have narrowed the range of Neandertal-Sapiens interbreeding down to a period that peaked 47,000 years ago. Cue the jokes, starting with: "Who knew yo mama was that old?"

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.