The Daily Parker

A weather pattern has set up shop near Chicago that threatens to occlude the sun for the next week, in exchange for temperatures approaching 15°C the first weekend of February. We've already had 43 days with above-normal temperatures this winter, and just 12 below normal during the cold snap from January 13th through the 22nd. By February 2nd, 84% of our days will have had above-normal temperatures since December 1st.

Thank you, El Niño. Though I'm not sure the gloominess is a fair exchange for it.

Elsewhere:

• President Biden, whose name didn't even appear on the ballot, won the New Hampshire Democratic primary by a larger margin than the XPOTUS won the Republican primary.
• The Washington State legislature has debated scrapping Daylight Saving Time entirely, a move that does not require USDOT sign-off, as the simplest path to avoiding the cognitive challenge of moving clocks twice a year. That this would cause 4am sunrises and 8pm sunsets in Seattle in June has not gone without notice.
• Speaking of Washington, aviation reporter Bill Saporito picks up the Atlantic's theme from 2019 and blames Boeing's problems on its cultural takeover by McDonnel-Douglas in 1997.
• New research finds that companies' return-to-office ("return to the past") mandates have no effect on profits or stock price, which everyone below the executive level already knew.
• My religious group has become the largest single denomination in the US. (We already took over most of Europe in the last century.)

Finally, Minnesota-based wildlife photographer Benjamin Olson discovered that a mouse had moved into his car. So naturally, he set up a photo trap. And naturally, it's totes adorbs.

Walking Cassie to day camp took a lot longer than usual this morning because the freezing rain and near-freezing temperatures after a long cold snap laid a layer of ice over nearly every sidewalk and street in Chicago. She seemed very concerned about my ability to walk, and very disappointed that we didn't take our usual detour to the bagel place to get me some coffee and her a fresh dog treat.

The "wintry mix" has stopped and the temperature has risen all the way to 1.5°C at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, so the walk home may not suck as much as the walk there.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has announced the nominees for 2023 Oscars, with Oppenheimer leading the pack and both Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie apparently snubbed for their work in Barbie.
• Politico takes a deep dive into the psyche of a New Hampshire primary voter who supports the XPOTUS, and finds that he's angry about everything, but he has no clear idea what he's angry about.
• The New York Times Political Memo lays out how the adolescent, schoolyard behavior of the XPOTUS towards Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R).
• Walter Shapiro bemoans the misleading and pointless political reporting covering the Republican presidential nomination.
• Ruth Marcus asks the same question I've been asking (in shocking agreement with some of my Republican friends): What the hell was Fani Willis thinking?
• David Zipper has "spent a lot of time thinking about American traffic safety messaging," and has decided that the new Federal recommendations against funny highway signs make sense.
• The city of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., a charming little town on the Monterey Peninsula where people have to go to the post office to get their mail, may soon get street addresses.
• Strong Towns describes in detail how the Texas Dept of Transportation prevents people from providing input into road projects, despite claiming to welcome it.
• Chicago-based United Airlines has started grumbling openly about Chicago-based Boeing's airplanes, stopping just short of suggesting they might buy an Airbus or two.
• Crain's has a look at how much the proposed Chicago real-estate transfer tax reform will save (or cost) home buyers in different price ranges. TL;dr: It will save money for transactions under $1 million.
• Do sleep aids work? Maybe, some of them, perhaps.

Finally, we might have gotten to Peak Rat Hole. Residents of the 1900 block of West Roscoe have gotten fed up with all the people coming to see the 30-year-old dead squirrel impression on their sidewalk. Perhaps the wedding took things too far?

Ctrl+W closes the active browser window, you see. I meant to type the word "Wade" in italics but somehow hit the Ctrl key instead of the Shift key. There may be some irony there.

Possibly the warmth has addled my brain? It's just gone above freezing for the first time since the wee hours of January 13th. It's also gloomy and gray, but those things go together.

Anyway:

• Today is the 51st anniversary of the US Supreme Court's decision in Roe v Wade.
• Michael Tomasky wants to know why the press seem to ignore the XPOTUS's obvious dementia.
• Something fishy happened with the 2023 Hugo nomination process, but that certainly has nothing to do with the politics of the host country.
• The City of London has embarked on an ambitious pedestrianization scheme that has, among other things, turned the area around the Bank Tube stop into a pleasant place to sit.

Finally, European researchers have published a report suggesting that domestic dogs wag their tails because humans like the rhythm. I will shortly go test this theory on my resident tail-wagger.

My socials today have a lot of chatter about the weather, understandably as we're now in our fourth day below -15°C. And yet I have vivid memories of 20 January 1985 when we hit the coldest temperature ever recorded in Chicago, -32°C. The fact that winters have gotten noticeably milder since the 1970s doesn't really matter during our annual Arctic blast. Sure, we had the coldest winter ever just 10 years ago, but the 3rd and 5th coldest were 1977-78 and 1978-79, respectively. I remember the snow coming up to my chin those years, and the never-ending below-freezing temperatures (like the 43 days from 28 December 1976 to 8 February 1977).

That said, I completely support the Chicago Public Schools closing today and tomorrow. And that they smoothed out all the streets since I was younger, so kids don't have to walk uphill both ways in the snow. But given the wind-chill advisory in effect until tomorrow morning, none of us wanted to go into the office either.

So instead of commuting, I'll have some time to read these as I shiver in my home office:

• Josh Marshall points out that the leader of the Republican party and its presumptive presidential nominee only got 51% of the vote in last night's Iowa caucuses, which hardly seems like a big win when you think about it.
• James Fallows also focuses on the election 294 days from now, cautioning against fortune-telling in the guise of reporting.
• Molly White presents a long-form video explaining the charges against Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao.
• Julia Ioffe continues publishing her interview with David Scheffer.
• Paul Krugman lauds the increasing economic prosperity of African-Americans but concedes there's a lot more to be done.

Finally, should I get an induction burner? I've been using my electric teakettle to pre-boil water for pasta, which saves a ton of time. The Post looked into the benefits of induction vs natural gas, principally around air quality. Looks like it's worth $120 to reduce my gas use. Of course, since I have gas furnaces, it might not do a lot for me this week.

Looking out my 30th-floor office window this afternoon doesn't cheer me. It's gray and snowy, but too warm for accumulation, so it just felt like rain when I sprinted across the street to get my burrito bowl for lunch.

I do have a boring deployment coming up in about an hour, requiring only that I show the business what we've built and then click "Run pipeline" twice. As a reward for getting ahead on development, I have time to read some of these absolutely horrifying news stories:

• Jennifer Rubin wants to know why the House Democrats damning report about the XPOTUS's corruption didn't get more traction. "History tells us that authoritarians traditionally use power for personal gain, leading to a culture of personal corruption."
• Michelle Goldberg lauds President Biden's efforts to "jolt us out of learned helplessness" regarding the XPOTUS. "[T]he best reason to vote for Biden is to stave off the calamity of an encore Trump administration, in which a lawless would-be dictator, proclaiming his own immunity from prosecution and lionizing the violent mob that tried to keep him in power, enacts an orgy of retribution against small-d democrats."
• It's official: 2023 was the warmest year on the planet since we started keeping records. (It was also the 5th warmest year ever in Illinois.)
• James Fallows (of course) has the best run-down of what happened on Alaska Airlines 1282 over the weekend when a door plug blew out at 16,000 feet.

Finally, Cranky Flier examines American Airlines' European operations and singles out its heavy dependence on Heathrow as a key reason why its fares trans-Atlantic are lower than other US carriers. Since I am using one of those really low fares to visit Germany next month, I'm OK with American keeping their fares low.

It was a busy day, so I didn't have a lot of time to write a substantial post. I did want to highlight Nate Cohn's comparison of President Biden's situation going into the 2024 election and another guy who did a pretty good job in his first term:

Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.

The source of postwar inflation was fundamentally similar to post-pandemic inflation. The end of wartime rationing unleashed years of pent-up consumer demand in an economy that hadn’t fully transitioned back to producing butter instead of guns. A year after the war, wartime price controls ended and inflation skyrocketed. A great housing crisis gripped the nation’s cities as millions of troops returned from overseas after 15 years of limited housing construction. Labor unrest roiled the nation and exacerbated production shortages. The most severe inflation of the last 100 years wasn’t in the 1970s, but in 1947, reaching around 20 percent.

n the end, Mr. Truman won in perhaps the most celebrated comeback in American electoral history, including the iconic “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline and photograph. He had barnstormed the country with an economically populist campaign that argued Democrats were on the side of working people while reminding voters of the Great Depression. You might well remember from your U.S. history classes that he blamed the famous “Do Nothing Congress” for not enacting his agenda.

I'm glad Cohn got there with data, because I'd already gotten there with inference. This will be a long 11 months, but I think we might just pull this one out.

I don't usually do link round-ups on Saturday mornings, but I got stuff to do today:

• Josh Marshall is enjoying the "comical rake-stomp opera" of Nikki Haley's (R-SC) primary campaign.
• The Economist pokes around the "city" of Rosemont, Ill., a family-owned fiefdom less than 10 km from Inner Drive Technology World HQ.
• The New York Times highlights the most informative charts they published in 2023.
• The Chicago Tribune lists some of the new Illinois laws taking effect on Monday. My favorite: Illinois will no longer bar marriage licenses for out-of-state same-sex couples whose home jurisdiction prohibits same-sex marriages.
• The CTA plans to build out 10 blocks (2 km) of "community space" under the new Red/Purple Line trestle under construction in Uptown and Edgewater.

Finally, two restaurants in Chicago—well, one restaurant and one infamous hot-dog stand—have joined forces to create the Chicago Croissant, which "features a char-dog rolled into a pastry lined with mustard, relish and onions. Definitely no ketchup. It’s topped with poppy seeds and celery salt and garnished with a tomato, pepper and pickle." This, they claim, is a breakfast food.

Due to an odd combination of holidays, a use-it-or-lose-it floating holiday, and travel, I'm just about done with my first of four short work-weeks in a row. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Of course, since I would like to finish the coding problem I've been working on before I leave today, I'll have to read some of these later:

• Josh Marshall thinks it's hilarious and pathetic that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), realizing she can't win against a Democrat in her own district, said she'll run in the next district over.
• Jennifer Rubin points out that while you can blame anyone you want for what's wrong with US politics today, ultimately it's the voters.
• Authors Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith argue for the repeal of the Insurrection Act, not just because of the XPOTUS.
• Climate scientist Brian Brettschneider has charted the perfect year-long road-trip across the US where it's always (normally) 21°C.
• A truck driver found himself trapped in an Indiana creek for six days until some fishermen discovered him. (He's OK.)

Finally, police and firefighters in Lancashire, England, are glancing about sheepishly this evening after reports of a fire at Blackpool Tower turned out to be...orange construction netting. They still managed to arrest one person for "breach of the peace," though for what The Guardian didn't report.

As I wait for my rice to cook and my adobo to finish cooking, I'm plunging through an unusually large number of very small changes to a codebase recommended by one of my tools. And while waiting for the CI to run just now, I lined these up for tomorrow morning:

• Michael Tomasky calls former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who has left the House and scampered back to California, "the most incompetent House Speaker of all time." (No argument from me.)
• Former GOP strategist, lawyer, and generally sane person George T Conway III read through the dissenting opinions in Colorado's decision to bar the XPOTUS from the election on 14th-Amendment grounds and came away convinced of the correctness of the verdict.
• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's motorcade drivers have wracked up over $2100 in fines from automated red-light and and speed cameras. (Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel solved a similar problem elegantly: he made his drivers personally responsible for the tickets.)
• Psychologist Pamela Rutledge thinks about why some people pay so much attention to their fitness trackers.
• Matthew Walther believes Händel's Messiah belongs to all of humanity, even the ridiculous mid-20th-century performances with half a million singers.
• James Fallows explains when autopilots are dangerous and when they're not—complete with pilot-view video of an Airbus A320 performing a Category III autoland at Vienna.

Finally, the CBC has an extended 3-episode miniseries version of the movie BlackBerry available online. I may have to watch that this week.

Back when I was growing up, Rudy Giuliani destroyed the Italian mob in New York City. Today he declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy to avoid paying a $148 million defamation verdict—the day after the people he defamed sued him again for repeating the same defamatory statements outside the courthouse after the judgment was handed down:

Lawyers for the two Georgia election workers who won $148 million in damages from former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani last week filed a new lawsuit Monday, asking a federal judge to order him to stop repeating his damaging debunked claims about the poll workers and to immediately enforce the jury’s massive award before his assets are dissipated.

Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Arshaye “Shaye” Moss asserted that Giuliani is continuing to baselessly accuse the former Fulton County election workers of manipulating the absentee ballot count to steal the 2020 election from former president Donald Trump in Georgia. The former New York mayor repeated the allegations during and after his defamation damages trial last week, even as his lawyer conceded in court the claims were wrong.

“Everything I said about them is true,” Giuliani told reporters outside the courthouse after the first day of his trial on Dec. 11, adding, “Of course I don’t regret it. … They were engaged in changing votes.”

I'm no doctor, but it looks like Giuliani has suffered from dementia for a long time, and it's getting worse. He appears to have no self-awareness or self-control at this stage. Other circumstantial evidence suggests late-stage alcoholism. Whatever the cause, the man stopped making sense long before he started working for the XPOTUS—even before he tried to cancel the 2001 New York mayoral election:

Once he was the toast of town. As a federal prosecutor he sent a congressman to jail, locked up mobsters and indicted white-collar criminals. As mayor, he made the streets again feel safe. Love him or hate him, crime precipitously dropped on his watch.

In the days and months following 9/11, he projected strength, confidence and reassurance. He had braced himself for a calamity; he just didn’t know its source or when it would happen. He was steady when crunchtime arrived.

As mayor, his tenure was consequential. His eight years at city hall rank up there with Fiorello La Guardia, Michael Bloomberg and Ed Koch. All that feels like aeons ago.

Yet Giuliani’s latest woes cannot be described as wholly surprising. He always possessed a penchant for drama and a tropism for the transgressive. He loved the opera and his life emerged as operatic. As a prosecutor, he dressed up “undercover”. Then as mayor, he performed onstage in drag with Trump.

All that came with a darker side. The warning signs were there. We just chose to ignore them.

Amid his first campaign for mayor, in 1989, a story broke of a concentration camp survivor, Simon Berger, being held in federal custody, facing a blackboard that read “Arbeit Macht Frei” the slogan written across the gates of Auschwitz. Berger would be acquitted. Decades later, Dunphy alleged that Giuliani has a problem with Jews.

I lived in New York City while Giuliani was mayor, though. As Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union reminded me while researching this post, even at his most popular, he was a bit unhinged:

Whatever may be going on with Rudy Giuliani personally, let’s be clear: while, for one brief moment in his career he served as a cheerleader for a devastated city and a shocked nation, the rest of Rudy Giuliani’s mayoralty was driven by a hostility to free expression, police brutality and violence, and an authoritarian disregard for democracy.

Let’s start with the First Amendment. The New York Civil Liberties Union was involved in 34 First Amendment lawsuits against the Giuliani administration – and prevailed in 26 of them. Those cases successfully challenged the firing of Police Officer Yvette Walton in retaliation for testifying before the City Council about racial profiling; the attempt to censor the Sensations exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum; the ban on press conferences and demonstrations by Giuliani critics on the steps of City Hall; the ban on condom distribution as part of AIDS education in City Parks; police harassment of homeless people sleeping on the steps of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church; and singling out political demonstrators charged with minor offenses so that they could not get appearance tickets to return to court and often had to stay in jail overnight.

In the seven-and-a-half years before 9/11, let there be no mistake: racial bias, fear-mongering, and police brutality were the hallmarks of Giuliani’s mayoralty.

As mayor, Giuliani oversaw a policing regime repeatedly engaged in persecution and brutal assaults and killings of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers, using unlawful stop-and-frisk policies to jail Black and Hispanic New Yorkers in service of his ‘broken windows’ policing. Every time the NYPD killed a Black man, Rudy Giuliani was right there not only defending the police, but attacking the victim.

I will never forget his tirade against Patrick Dorismond, a 26-year-old Black security guard and father of two, after undercover police officers killed Dorismond after initiating a scuffle while on the job in Manhattan. Giuliani attacked Dorismond’s character and publicly revealed his legally-sealed juvenile record. It was Giuliani‘s notorious street crimes unit that killed Amadou Diallo in the lobby of his apartment building.

Rudy Giuliani has always had an authoritarian streak coupled with a belief that the rules didn't apply to him. Fortunately, he behaved so badly for so long that no one ever gave him more power after his mayoralty ended in 2001. And I mention all this because, as bad as Giuliani has always been, and as far as he's descended into dementia and insanity...the XPOTUS is worse.

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