The Daily Parker

Just queuing a few things up to read at lunchtime:

• From tavern-style communion pizza and Malört to the horrific discovery that the Pope is a White Sox fan, Chicagoans have gone nuts for Leo XIV. Catholics everywhere are finally safe from ketchup with their Eucharist.
• Former US Supreme Court Justice David Souter has died, aged 85. He "pulled a Brennan" by drifting left during his term on the court, much to the annoyance of the Republicans who elevated him.
• Political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Zilbatt warn that a descent into competitive authoritarianism—the ruling style of autocrats like India's Modi and Türkiye's Erdoğan—shows up most clearly as an increasing cost of opposing the government.
• Josh Marshall reports on how the OAFPOTUS's droogs are cutting off medical research grant payments without explicitly (if illegally) cancelling the grants, hoping they won't get caught until it's too late.
• Molly White and Paul Krugman provide their regular reminders that crypto is a scam, now with added corruption.
• James Fallows, who usually tries to get people to calm down about aviation mishaps, wants the press to be more alarmed about the air traffic control blackouts in Newark. (Another one happened just this morning, in fact.)
• Yascha Mounk looks at the Democratic Party and shrugs that, for good or ill, "the resistance is gonna be woke," even if it costs us the next two elections.
• ProPublica's David Armstrong dug into why his cancer drugs cost more than an iPhone for each dose.
• Charles Marohn points out the lie in a recent Times op-ed by reminding anyone who can do math that sprawl is a Ponzi scheme, not a solution to our housing problem.

Finally, Chicago's ubiquitous summer street fairs have found it much more difficult to sustain their funding in the years since the pandemic. The city prohibits charging an entry fee for walking down a street, so the fairs have to rely on gate donations. But even with increasing expenses, people attending festivals have stopped donating at the gate, putting the fairs in jeopardy.

When I go to Ribfest in four weeks, I will pay the donation every day, because I want my ribs. This will be the festival's 25th year. I will do my part to get them another 25.

I thought I was done with last week's cold, but no, not entirely. So I'm spinning my wheels looking at code today. I want to be writing code today, however. My brain wants to be three meters west and three meters down from IDTWHQ (i.e., in my bed).

I will note that Columbia Journalism professor Alexander Stille just came to the same realization Josh Marshall came to over nine years ago, that the OAFPOTUS resembles Benito Mussolini in all the ways that matter:

The comparisons between Trump and Berlusconi, who dominated Italian politics between 1993 and 2011, are obvious and help us understand Trump’s initial political ascent and his first term in office. Both made their initial fortune in real estate, were better salesmen than businessmen, and developed a second career in television.

But Berlusconi’s political aims, by comparison, were comparatively modest.

Trump’s narcissism is very different from Berlusconi’s. Like Mussolini’s, it involves a desire for total dominance and an increasingly unhinged delusion of omnipotence: hence his repeated threats to take over Canada and invade Greenland; to turn Gaza into an American beach resort. Mussolini, like Trump, had a keen instinctive animal cunning that helped him intuit the public mood and vanquish his domestic political opponents. He was a brilliant demagogue who could electrify the crowd and who shrewdly understood and exploited his domestic opponents’ weaknesses.

All this served him well at first. But when he began to move outside of Italy—creating an Italian empire and forcing Italy into World War II—his fundamental provincialism, his deep ignorance of the outside world, and his overestimation of his own instincts over objective facts did him in.

Mussolini careened from crisis to crisis—the invasion of Ethiopia, the civil war in Spain, the invasion of Albania and, finally, the entrance into World War II. If his career is any guide, we can expect four years of constant crisis. Autocrats require crisis to justify the extraordinary—and often illegal—measures they take and to distract the public’s attention from the fact that they are not actually improving the lives of ordinary citizens.

Don't worry, though. We only have 1,368 more days of this presidential term.

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.

I'm only going to note in passing that world equities markets have continued to decline today, though the DJIA and S&P have stabilized a bit as of this afternoon. Still, the S&P is off 14% year-to-date, the DJIA 11%, the Nikkei 21%, and crude oil prices 16%. Still the OAFPOTUS continues to insist that his massive corruption engine will make things better for the people who voted for him, leaving out the bit that it'll only help about 1% of those voters.

Today, though, I want to gesticulate wildly at how the administration will kill us all by destroying biomedical research as we know it. The Times reported yesterday that illegal layoffs at the National Institutes of Health have halted cancer research just as scientists neared a breakthrough:

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health demonstrated a promising step toward using a person’s own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers in a paper in Nature Medicine on Tuesday, the same day the agency was hit with devastating layoffs that left many NIH personnel in tears.

The treatment approach is still early in its development; the personalized immunotherapy regimen shrank tumors in only about a quarter of the patients with colon, rectal and other GI cancers enrolled in a clinical trial. But a researcher who was not involved in the study called the results “remarkable” because they highlight a path to a frustratingly elusive goal in medicine — harnessing a person’s own immune defenses to target common solid tumor cancers.

Former US Representative Adam Kitzinger (R-IL) adds:

Although empowered by President Trump’s newly created, budget-slashing Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the driving force behind the dismantling of our public health infrastructure is Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Like his boss in the Oval Office, Kennedy seems intent on settling old scores with his former opponents.

One of Kennedy’s first moves as HHS Secretary was to suspend a CDC campaign encouraging Americans to get the flu shot. He also created a panel to revisit the debunked vaccine-autism link and appointed vaccine skeptic David Geier to lead it. Geier had previously been disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license.

In another era, state public health agencies might have been able to compensate for the CDC’s retreat. But Kennedy has attacked those agencies too, suspending grants that funded their response to infectious disease outbreaks. One immediate casualty was a measles vaccination program in West Texas.

Secretary Kennedy insists that a system experiencing a nearly 20 percent workforce reduction will somehow function better. It’s the same kind of magical thinking that fueled his anti-vaccine crusade. Then and now, evidence and logic take a back seat.

He calls his agenda “Make America Healthy Again.” But looking at the hollowed-out public health infrastructure and the rising measles death toll, I can only call it what it truly is: Make America Sick Again.

Josh Marshall frets that no one in the health sphere was prepared for an attack like this, so they don't even know how to talk about how bad this will be for everyone:

The White House and DOGE have entered the war on cancer on the side of cancer.

There are disease communities around every major disease in this country — breast cancer, colon cancer, Alzheimers, etc. I don’t mean the professional societies. I mean, the organizations and informal communities of people who are survivors, who’ve been directly affected by these afflictions, who have genetic predispositions, who are doctors and caregivers. It is totally outside the experience and comfort zone of people from the research community to speak directly to what we might call the end user and say your chance at a cure or your child’s cure is going up in flames as we speak.

Quite simply, until elected officials start hearing from angry constituents in town halls who are pissed that their futures and the futures of their loved ones are being lit on fire for no reason, then nothing matters. The first front in this war has already been lost. The second front, where the forces of cures, treatments and health have the advantage, has only barely gotten off the ground.

What I’m describing here also connects up with the universities, where a lot of this research takes place and which are home to a lot of academic medical centers which are the places many communities rely on for their health care.

For 30 years, Republican extremists have wanted to destroy the Federal government, but party leaders like George W Bush and Mitch McConnell wanted to do it institutionally. The OAFPOTUS and his wrecking crew don't care about institutions, or really about anything, other than their loyalty to the OAFPOTUS and their hatred of people they think look down on them.

Even if we win back all three branches of government in 2026 and 2028, it will take decades to repair the damage. Forget making the US a better place to live, or even getting the US of 2050 on technological parity with the Europe of 2010. We're going to struggle to undo the damage, full stop. So even when these assholes ultimately lose, they'll win.

We had a wild ride in March, with the temperature range here at Inner Drive Technology WHQ between 23.3° on the 14th and -5.4°C on the 2nd—not to mention 22.6°C on Friday and 2.3°C on Sunday.

Actually, everyone in the US had a wild ride last month, for reasons outside the weather, and it looks like it will continue for a while:

• US Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) spent the night haranguing the OAFPOTUS from the Senate floor.
• Jennifer Rubin is not tired of winning against the OAFPOTUS, who has lost every single court case brought against his administration's actions.
• David French points at the decrepit Russian Army to remind us that a politicized military is an ineffective military.
• Anne Applebaum frets about "the corruption and stagnation in our future" if the OAFPOTUS keeps behaving like Viktor Orbán.
• ProPublica takes us along with the flight attendants on those illegal ICE deportation flights.
• Mother Jones' editor in chief Kiera Butler spent last weekend with the deeply weird Christianists who want more Christian babies.
• Midland, Texas-based writer Carrie McKean explains that people in her part of the world aren't actually superstitious bumpkins who want the freedom to let their children die of measles instead of vaccinating them, no matter how much that duck quacks.

Finally, the Dunning-Krueger poster children working for the Clown Prince of X have announced plans to replace the 60 million lines of COBOL code running the Social Security Administration with an LLM-generated pile of spaghetti in some other language (Python? Ruby? Logo?) before the end of the year. As this will only cost a few million dollars and will keep the children away from the sharp objects for a while, I say it's money well spent for software that will never see the light of day. There are only two possibilities here, not mutually-exclusive: they are too dumb to know why this is stupid, or they don't care because they actually want to kill Social Security by any means they can. I believe it's both.

I want to start with a speech on the floor of the French Senate three days ago, in which Claude Malhuret (LIRT-Allier) had this to say about the OAFPOTUS:

Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose higher tariffs on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.

I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.

Malheureusement, il a bien raison. And his speech is worth reading (or hearing, si vous parlez français bien).

But that isn't all that happened in the last day or so. No, every day brings new revelations of stupidity and corruption in the new administration:

• James Fallows listened to the OAFPOTUS's address to Congress on Tuesday so you didn't have to, and found it...disturbing.
• The Clown Prince of X appears to have pressured the FAA into issuing a license for yesterday's launch of a SpaceX rocket that exploded just two weeks after another SpaceX rocket exploded. (You may call Musk a thuper-geniuth!)
• ProPublica does the math to demonstrate how the cuts the clowns have proposed at the Internal Revenue Service will actually cost more than they will save—forgetting for a moment that the point of those cuts is to make tax cheating less likely to get caught.
• Oh, and the clowns have illegally disbanded the committee that keeps your food safe from microbes.
• The Army Corps of Engineers admitted that the rushed release of water from Northern California reservoirs shortly after the OAFPOTUS took office simply wasted it, as everyone who can look at a map already guessed.
• The jobs report that the Bureau of Labor Statistics released today only encompassed data from the first three weeks of the administration, before they started illegally firing civil servants.

And now I will take a half-day of PTO and explore four new breweries in Bridgeport and Pilsen. If only the weather had cooperated.

I got some bad news this morning: my dentist, John C McArthur, announced his retirement as of March 17th.

I started going to Dr McArthur in 1974. In fact, I was one of his first patients after he took over the practice from his father—who was, in turn, the dentist my mother, uncle, and grandparents started going to in 1958. So my family has a long, long history going to his Hubbard Woods office. I mean, 13 presidents long. I'm going to miss going up there.

Moreover, I have never had a cavity. So I would say he had some skills. (Of course, as he would point out, I had good genes, good habits, and fluoridated water, which may have helped.) Going to the dentist has never caused me any anxiety, so I've never really understood why other people dread it.

I mean, I've never gone to a different dentist. I've never even thought about it. What do I ask them? "How many of your patients have you kept free of cavities for 50 years?" I hope his office has a good referral.

Obviously, I knew this day would come. I figured he'd retire during the pandemic, but he kept going, for which I'm grateful. I wish him a long and happy retirement.

One of my work projects has a monthly release these days, so right now I'm watching a DevOps pipeline run through about 400 time-consuming integration tests before I release this month's update. That gives me some time to catch up on all this:

The New York Times has a long explanation of how the Clown Prince of X took over the federal bureaucracy.

• As I and others have warned for years, the OAFPOTUS has embarked on a truly unprecedented program of bribery and corruption that we may never recover from. For example, as Joyce Vance describes, the Clown Prince has cancelled a $2.4 billion Verizon contract to modernize our air-traffic control infrastructure and given it to...Starlink, which the Clown Prince owns.
• Radley Balko highlights the OAFPOTUS's "full-frontal assault on democracy" over a five-day period this month.
• Paul Krugman is shocked—shocked!—that all of the chaos from the administration has caused an economic slowdown that will only get worse.
• The Economist have published their 2024 global democracy index, which kept the US at "flawed democracy" and saw Bagnladesh plummet from there to "hybrid regime (lower half)."
• Yascha Mounk wants the US to end the requirement to have a prescription to buy glasses, and jokes that maybe DOGE can see to it.
• The Chicago Transit Authority plans to build a four-kilometer walking path with dog parks under the new Red/Purple trestle between Lawrence and Bryn Mawr.

All right, the build has finished, so I can now deploy. And for no reason other than I like it, here is a photo of Cassie watching TV with me last night:

The Weather Now gazetteer import has gotten to the Ps (Pakistan) with 11,445,567 places imported and 10,890,186 indexed. (The indexer runs every three hours.) I'll have a bunch of statistics about the database when the import finishes, probably later tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest. I'm especially pleased with the import software I wrote, and with Azure Cosmos DB. They're churning through batches of about 30 files at a time and importing places at around 10,000 per minute.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• The OAFPOTUS will likely get nowhere with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for the same reasons no one else has: Putin doesn't negotiate in good faith.
• Former US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman explains how Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and his allies have enriched themselves at the country's expense, as a warning about what is starting to happen over here.
• French president Emmanuel Macron had to correct the OAFPOTUS more than once in a press conference yesterday that I'm sure one of them remembered and the other did not.
• Clown Prince Elon Musk stepped on a rake over the weekend in part because his prank email to every Federal worker could very likely cause some Justice Department lawyers to face sanctions.
• James Fallows explains how Musk's Maoist vandalism of the US Government will have catastrophic consequences in aviation sooner rather than later.
• Will the known charlatan Dr Mehmet Oz truly divest himself from his financial interests in Medicare- and Medicaid-related companies now that he's been tapped to head the Federal agency that runs both? Ah, ha ha, ha. How droll.
• Chicago Public Media has come out as strongly as they can against Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's proposed $830 million bond sale. (I mentioned the bond sale last week.)
• According to Newsweek, a poll found Johnson's approval rating at 6.6%, lower than Rod Blagojevich's approval when the legislature removed him from office in 2009. (A Daily Parker reader joked that Johnson is now less popular than chlamydia.)
• Medium-term inflation expectations in the US have surged to levels we haven't seen this century, prompting Paul Krugman to ask why the markets don't seem to care (hint: Upton Sinclair).
• Craft distilleries in Illinois have their hopes pinned on a bill making its way through the state legislature that would remove restrictions on how they can operate tasting rooms. I'm also hoping the bill passes.

Finally, in February 1852, a man calling himself David Kennison died in Chicago. He had clamed to be 115 years old, participated in the Boston Tea Party, and hobnobbed with the great and good in the early days of the Republic. And in the proud tradition of people giving undue acclaim to total charlatans, the entire city turned out for his funeral—173 years ago yesterday.

It seems like so much of the news I've read today concerns people behaving stupidly, but thinking they're behaving intelligently. Sadly, it's mostly the same group of people:

• James Fallows makes it clear the aviation accidents over the past few weeks are not the Administration's fault—but the ones a year from now will certainly be.
• Jeff Maurer likens Elon Musk's wrecking crew to the drunk and sleep-deprived Assemblée Nationale of 4 August 1789; you know, the one that led directly to the French Revolution.
• Josh Marshall theorizes that Musk has employed a bunch of 25-year-old incels to destroy the Government precisely because the infants have no fear of consequences.
• Paul Krugman thanks the OAFPOTUS for "making microbes great again."
• Economist Claudia Goldin has discovered an inverse relationship between fertility and sharing housework, which columnist Heather Long explains is the reason so many people in rich countries have decided not to have kids.
• Cranky Flier can't countenance Southwest Airlines making its first layoffs in history, and puts the blame squarely on the private equity firm they partnered with.

Finally, people in Bridgeport and other Southwest Side neighborhoods have fallen in love with a rotund beaver who lives with her family on the Chicago River. Some have suggested naming the beaver Lori Heavyfoot or Dam Ryan. I hope she doesn't meet up with one of the city's other charismatic megafauna...