The Daily Parker

Just look at that cold front, wouldn't you? And notice how the dewpoint dropped hardly at all:

The same thing happened at the official Chicago station at O'Hare, where the temperature dropped from 31°C to 22°C in 15 minutes, while the dewpoint went up. At least the forecast predicts tomorrow will be lovely.

In a related note, the OAFPOTUS's and the Republicans' 40% reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stopped the agency's Atlas 15 project, which will have a ripple effect through urban planning and disaster management for decades:

The tool is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlas 15 project — a massive dataset that will show how often storms of a given duration and intensity could be expected to occur at locations across the United States. The project was intended to be published in two volumes: one that would assess communities’ current risks and a second that would project how those risks will change under future climate scenarios.

The release of Atlas 15 had been long awaited by civil engineers, regional planners and other groups that use NOAA’s precipitation frequency estimates to develop regulations and design infrastructure. Many parts of the country rely on decades-old data to determine their rainfall risks, and there is no authoritative national dataset of how rainfall and flood threats will rise in a warmer world.

But work on Atlas 15’s climate projections has been on hold for months after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordered a review of Volume 2 this spring, according to current and former NOAA officials with knowledge of the project.

The review of Atlas 15 is among a number of efforts by the Trump administration to curb climate science. The administration dismissed the scientists responsible for writing the National Climate Assessment — a congressionally mandated study typically published every four to five years — and dismantled the program that oversees the reports. In a budget document submitted to Congress last month, Trump proposed zeroing out funding for NOAA’s climate research and eliminating many of the agency’s laboratories and institutes.

Do you know that more Republican voters live in areas negatively affected by climate change than Democratic voters? Neither did they.

We cannot comprehend the damage this administration has already done to the United States. And they plan to do so much more.

I've gotten some progress on the feature update, and the build pipeline is running now, so I will take a moment to read all of these things:

• Radley Balko looks at the creation of what looks a lot like the OAFPOTUS's Waffen-Shutzstaffel and says we've lost the debate on police militarization: "In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it."
• Linda Greenhouse condemns the pervasive cruelty of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Tom Homan: "Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are “the other” — people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but who stand outside the web of connection that defines human society."
• Paul Krugman explains more cogently than I did why the Republicans cutting NOAA will hurt everyone: "Trump’s cuts to scientific research aren’t about shrinking government and saving money. They’re about dealing with possibly inconvenient evidence by covering the nation’s ears and shouting 'La, la, la, we can’t hear you.' "
• The inconvenient evidence includes a growing realization in Mediterranean countries that their summer resorts are no longer habitable in the summer: "Across Spain, Italy, Greece, France and beyond, sand-devouring storms, rising seas, asphyxiating temperatures, deadly floods and horrific wildfires have year after year turned some of the continent’s most desired getaways into miserable locales to get away from."
• Ilya Shapiro, constitutional studies director at the Manhattan Institute, believes both the left and the right have got Amy Coney Barrett all wrong: "She’s an originalist with a strong devotion both to constitutional text and institutional procedure. But she’s also a stickler for prudence in the face of novelty. The one thing Barrett is zealous about is upholding the rule of law..."
• A group of mayors from the Chicago suburbs has decided they don't like the very same public-private partnerships between railroads and their surrounding areas that created many of the same suburbs: "Real estate could be the recipe for long-term fiscal sustainability for [the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, making some of the current revenue mechanisms only temporary and reducing the risk of a repeat of this year's fiscal cliff. [But y]ou can’t protest government overreach of private property rights, and then defend zoning in the same paragraph."
• At the same time suburban mayors rant against better transit, their residents have clogged half the side streets in Chicago to get around Kennedy Expressway construction this summer. Of course, better transit would obviate all those car trips that cause the congestion in the first place, but let's not think too hard about that.
• In some parts of the country, though, street designs from the Netherlands have become more popular as planners and citizens see how much safer they are for everyone.
• Patrick Smith takes a look at last month's Air India crash and fears the worst: "[I]f the [fuel] switches were moved to CUTOFF manually, the billion-dollar question is why? Were they moved by accident, or nefariously? Was it an act of absurd absent-mindedness, or one of willful mass murder, a la EgyptAir, Germanwings, and (almost certainly) MH370."
• Google announced a new partnership with electric truck maker Rivian to use Google Maps for navigation.
• New studies suggest that we have crooked teeth because our diet changed: "With softer diets came less mechanical strain on the jaw. Over generations, our mandibles began to shrink— a trend visible in the fossil record."

Finally, a number of commentators have experienced a healthy dose of Schadenfreude watching the OAFPOTUS's rabid followers turn on him, including Adam Kinzinger, Josh Marshall, Dan Rather, and of course, Jeff Maurer. It's not exactly "the blood of Marat strangles him," but as a centrist, I am enjoying this part just a little. (And in fairness, Kinzinger, a Republican, believes that the administration's policies will do more damage to the party than this nonsense about Epstein.)

As everyone should know by now, everything the OAFPOTUS or anyone around him does is in the service of self-enrichment. We can include "enriching friends" as well. And in the grand tradition of privatizing things that government absolutely does better than industry, it looks like the Administration intends to cripple the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) so their friends can start making rents from the vital functions it performs.

Enter Neil Jacobs, nominated to head NOAA, who claimed without evidence in a confirmation hearing Wednesday to undo the damage the Clown Prince of X inflicted on the agency:

“If confirmed, I will ensure that staffing the Weather Service offices is a top priority,” said Jacobs, who led NOAA on an acting basis in Trump’s first term. “It’s really important for the people to be there because they have relationships with people in the local community. They’re a trusted source.”

The agency’s staffing levels have been in the spotlight due to the recent floods. While NOAA sent a wide range of warnings and alerts prior to the storms that caused the deadly floods in Texas, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called on the Commerce Department’s inspector general to launch an investigation into the impacts the staffing cuts had on the crisis in Texas. That request is currently under review by the IG’s oversight teams, a spokesperson said.

Asked whether he supports President Trump’s proposal to cut NOAA’s budget by 27% in fiscal 2026, Jacobs confirmed that he did and suggested funding was being refocused from research to operations. The “mission-essential functions” of the National Weather Service and the National Ocean Service would continue, he said.

I'll believe it when I see it, Jake. At least Jacobs has a PhD in atmospheric science.

Another atmospheric scientist, meteorologist Alan Gerard, has a cogent and probably-correct hypothesis about why the OAFPOTUS made those draconian cuts to NOAA:

I have had many conversations with colleagues in recent weeks about the proposed NOAA budget cuts, and in the course of those discussions I have heard (and offered) many explanations, from the one that I gave to the reporter, to revenge against NOAA for Sharpiegate, to privatization of weather forecasting, etc. As I thought more deeply about all of this, though, I realized that I - and perhaps my colleagues, though I won’t speak for them - was likely looking at this from too myopic of a point of view.

I think the reality is that rather than support for weather science being caught in the flotsam of an anti-climate effort, weather and climate science are caught in the flotsam of anti-science efforts.

The administration’s own NOAA budget document states the need for an NWS that can provide “operational forecasts, warnings, impact-based decision support services (IDSS) and other life-saving products and services to the emergency management community and public as they prepare for and respond to increasingly frequent severe weather and water events (emphasis added).” The administration itself acknowledges the increasing frequency of events and hence growing societal needs for warning and forecast services. Destroying the NOAA research-to-operations structure built over decades seems all too likely to yield an NWS unable to evolve to meet those growing needs.

And yet I think the anti-science part isn't the point. As PBS reported earlier this week, administration officials from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik on down have financial interests that would benefit from outsourcing these functions to private firms. So instead of our tax dollars supporting weather research and forecasting, our tax dollars would support those things plus profits for private interests.

Again, it's all about the grift.

In a similar vein, I'm working on a hypothesis that tanking the economy through tariffs could just be about enriching bond holders, because if interest rates go up, we would pay more to the wealthiest among us in mortgages, student loans, credit-card interest, and yes, Federal bond coupons. Because to the OAFPOTUS and his friends, it's totally fine to burn everything down as long as they can profit from the ashes.

That has been the Republican Party since before Reagan was president. They've just stopped concealing it under this administration, because they're so close to everything they've ever wanted, they don't care who who knows.

On this day 100 years ago, John Scopes went on trial for the crime of teaching a “theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals:”

On July 10, the Monkey Trial got underway, and within a few days hordes of spectators and reporters had descended on Dayton as preachers set up revival tents along the city’s main street to keep the faithful stirred up. Inside the Rhea County Courthouse, the defense suffered early setbacks when Judge John Raulston ruled against their attempt to prove the law unconstitutional and then refused to end his practice of opening each day’s proceeding with prayer.

In the courtroom, Judge Raulston destroyed the defense’s strategy by ruling that expert scientific testimony on evolution was inadmissible–on the grounds that it was Scopes who was on trial, not the law he had violated.

[Scopes' attorney Clarence] Darrow changed his tactics and as his sole witness called [former presidential candidate William Jennings] Bryan in an attempt to discredit his literal interpretation of the Bible. In a searching examination, Bryan was subjected to severe ridicule and forced to make ignorant and contradictory statements to the amusement of the crowd. On July 21, in his closing speech, Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed. Under Tennessee law, Bryan was thereby denied the opportunity to deliver the closing speech he had been preparing for weeks. After nine minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a guilty verdict, and Raulston ordered Scopes to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed. Although Bryan had won the case, he had been publicly humiliated and his fundamentalist beliefs had been disgraced. Five days later, on July 26, he lay down for a Sunday afternoon nap and never woke up.

In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the Monkey Trial verdict on a technicality but left the constitutional issues unresolved until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment.

Boy, we've sure moved past all that ignorant anti-science fundamentalist religious hokum, haven't we?

Really, this post is just a list of links, but I'm going to start with Dan Rather's latest Stack:

• US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) started her 2026 re-election campaign last week by telling constituents not to worry about the proposed $880 billion cuts to Medicaid because "we are all going to die."
• Writer Andy Craig takes a look at the destruction the OAFPOTUS and his droogs have caused, and tries to find a path back to a constitutional republic. "Whatever eventually replaces this crisis-ridden government will result in a new constitutional settlement, not a simple revival of what came before. We will find ourselves engaged in a kind of constitution-making arguably not seen since Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War."
• Paul Krugman looks at what professional money people are doing, and thus what they're predicting, and warns that the TACO trade is misguided, because the OAFPOTUS really has no off-ramp for his tariff obsession: "[T]he nonsensical nature of the whole enterprise is why I don’t think he’ll find an off-ramp. After all, it’s obvious that the increased steel tariff wasn’t a considered policy, it was a temper tantrum after the Court of International Trade ruled against his other tariffs. ... If you want to know where this is going, keep your eyes on the bond and currency markets, where cool-headed traders realize that U.S. policy is still being dictated by the whims of a mad king."
• Evan Osnos smacks his forehead at the unprecedented scale and reach of said mad king's plundering of the United States.
• Max Boot points to the OAFPOTUS's assault on science and education as "the suicide of a superpower."
• Jen Rubin believes the Republican Party has "no good options on the budget," thanks to a Democratic Party in array.
• The Clown Prince of X likes to excuse his sociopathy, cruelty, immaturity, and incompetence by claiming he's "Aspie." (He isn't. He's just a rich asshole.)
• Josh Marshall relays the story about the mess (literal and figurative) that the United States Institute of Peace faced when they got back into their offices after its illegal DOGE takeover in March.

Finally, Streetsblog Chicago's Harjas Sandhu shakes his fist at the seeming inability of the Chicago Transit Authority to find competent leadership. At least it's not currently run by a not-too-bright reality TV star. (And I don't mean the OAFPOTUS.)

The OAFPOTUS signed a batch of executive orders yesterday announcing the administration's support for building more nuclear power, a policy that on its face sounds great:

One order directs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nation’s independent safety regulator, to streamline its rules and to take no more than 18 months to approve applications for new reactors. The order also urges the agency to consider lowering its safety limits for radiation exposure, saying that current rules go beyond what is needed to protect human health.

The Trump administration also set a goal of quadrupling the size of the nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants, from nearly 100 gigawatts of electric capacity today to 400 gigawatts by 2050. One gigawatt is enough to power nearly 1 million homes.

In recent years, more than a dozen companies have begun developing a new generation of smaller reactors a fraction of the size of those at Vogtle [a plant under construction in Georgia]. The hope is that these reactors would have a lower upfront price tag, making them a less risky investment for utilities. They might also be based on a design that could be repeated often, as opposed to custom-built, to reduce costs.

OK, so what's the problem? Nuclear power is cleaner and safer than fossil-fuel power, especially over the long term. Despite disasters in Ukraine (1986) and Japan (2011), civilian nuclear power has killed orders of magnitude fewer people than coal mining and emissions from fossil-fuel power generation, for example.

So why am I skeptical? Because I don't trust the OAFPOTUS to tell me the time of day without trying to steal my watch, let alone to pass a major policy initiative on the merits. It's telling that the signing event included comments about building small-scale reactors to power crypto mining, for example. And given the thoroughly demonstrated lack of competence in the administration, and their desire to destroy the regulatory state entirely, I worry that the lack of oversight will lead to a nuclear disaster that will set the industry back another few decades. (Remember, a spectacular accident that kills 10 people is far scarier to most of us apes than the ongoing loss of millions of years of human lifespans from fossil-fuel pollution and resource extraction.)

I'm willing to give the administration and the Republican party support when they do the right thing. But their behavior over the last 10 years has been to (a) design policies to enrich themselves instead of providing for the general welfare and (b) screw up the implementation, whether through incompetence or malice, to render them worse than doing nothing. I hope this nuclear initiative will work out, or at least give my party some runway to fix it when we return to power. Yet neither the OAFPOTUS nor the Republican Party as a whole fill me with confidence that this time will be different.

On Monday, Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin (the one with phallic space ships) sent an all-female "crew" into low orbit for ten minutes, pretty much demonstrating everything wrong with 2020s America:

Blue Origin's all-female crew, which included pop star Katy Perry, completed their trip into space Monday morning.

Along with Perry, the crew included Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos' journalist fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, who is also a helicopter pilot.

Speaking after touchdown, Perry said she brought a daisy with her into space, in honor of her 4-year-old daughter, Daisy, whom she shares with fiancé Orlando Bloom.

"I feel super-connected to love," Perry said. "I think this experience has shown me how much love is inside of me."

Sanchez described the trip as "profound," adding, "I was up there and you see Earth and then you know it's completely black, but … we got to see the moon and it was in complete and utter darkness and then you look back at Earth and it's like this jewel."

Perry agreed with describing the trip as a 'journey," adding that it was a "supernatural one."

I...I don't even know where to begin. Fortunately, The Guardian's Moira Donegan did:

Once, Nasa was the pride of the American experiment: a testament to how a society dedicated to legal equality and passionate hard work could expand the horizons of human possibility. Now, Blue Origin is a testament to the corruption and circumscribed possibilities of the profit motive run amok. Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic. The Blue Origin flight does not make me feel like humanity will reach new heights of achievement. It makes me feel like everything that is coming is grimly predictable, tailored to the impulses of the richest, least responsible and least morally intelligent people on Earth.

But the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man.

It is not misogynist to say that these women do not have their priorities in order. Rather, it is misogynist of them to so forcefully associate womanhood with cosmetics and looks, rather than with any of the more noble and human aspirations to which space travel might acquaint them – curiosity, inquiry, discovery, exploration, a sense of their own mortality, an apprehension of the divine. These women, who have placed themselves as representatives for all women with their promotion of the flight – positioning themselves as aspirational models of femininity – have presented a profoundly antifeminist vision of what womankind’s future is: dependent on men, confined to triviality, and deeply, deeply silly.

Donegan also points out that, after bribing the OAFPOTUS with a $1 m donation to his inauguration and suppressing the Washington Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris, the OAFPOTUS rewarded Bezos with a $2 bn contract. Because corruption.

The Atlantic's Ellen Cushing thinks Perry was exactly the right celebrity to go on this "dumb stunt:"

The critics have a point. I’ve spent longer waiting for the subway than Perry was up in space. Space tourism is, at best, folly—silly, spectacularly wasteful, pointless by definition.

Beyoncé likely wouldn’t go to space. Taylor Swift probably wouldn’t either. Going to space for no reason—courtesy of a rich guy a lot of people don’t like—is risky in the physical sense, as well as in the sense that it’s an invitation to get made fun of online. And those two women are serious, careful people. They’re disciplined. They are always in control. Swift’s Eras Tour was a meticulously constructed monument to the singer-songwriter’s mythology—a spectacle, sure, but one less of pop loopiness than of precision logistics. In Perry’s Las Vegas residency, Play, by contrast, she sat perched next to a 16-foot-tall toilet and had a conversation with a giant anthropomorphic lump of excrement. If Eras was a novel, Play was a knock-knock joke. It was a psychedelically moronic piece of performance art, and possibly the most fun I’ve ever had seeing live music.

That’s Perry, though: Always misreading the room. She is, in a word, cringe. For Millennials, especially, she’s a reminder of just how embarrassing we all used to be: earnest, straightforward, unencumbered by irony or internet nihilism. With her, what you see is what you get. She’s a performer. She’s an old-fashioned celebrity in the sense that she is basically a clown.

And then there's this take.

There was a time, not so long ago, when we celebrated the people who got us into space in the first place: Shepard, Glenn, Armstrong. And, yes, Valentina Tereshkova. They didn't know if they'd survive the trip. Some of them almost didn't.

But at least Katy Perry "studied" string theory before her trip. And she has a very good tailor.

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.

Once again, in the aftermath of the OAFPOTUS's demented press conference yesterday, I need to remind everyone to ignore what he says and watch what he does. He's not as harmless as the guy at the end of the bar who everyone avoids talking to, but he's just as idiotic.

Meanwhile, in the real world:

• Block Club Chicago interviewed Mayor Brandon Johnson in the wake of the City Council barely passing his 2025 budget by a vote of 27-23.
• Perry Bacon Jr. blames President Biden's overconfidence for the failures of his presidency.
• Brett Stephens thinks about how he'll be remembered.
• Josh Marshall never thought Meta's content-moderation scheme was anything other than a scam.
• Anne Applebaum warns of the anti-science mysticism afflicting more and more of the world.

Finally, the temperature in Chicago dipped below freezing just before 2 am on January 1st and hasn't risen above freezing since then, with no relief in the forecast. Even though we don't expect any seriously cold weather in the next two weeks, it would be nice to have one day above freezing.

The Times morning newsletter highlighted a story from Tuesday about yet one more example of people who have come to believe something that is not only crashingly stupid, but potentially fatal:

[A] small number of spring water aficionados...believe untreated water, or “raw water,” contains enriching minerals that are removed from tap water during the purification process.

The trend, however, alarms health experts, who say that spring water devotees are taking unnecessary risks. The country’s robust water treatment system, they emphasize, eliminates potentially deadly bacteria and parasites, and removes toxins that can cause cancer or harm children’s brain development.

Nonetheless, untreated water enthusiasts across the nation study crowdsourced spring maps and leave online comments as if they are reviewing the latest restaurants. At Red Rock Spring near Stinson Beach, Calif., the wait can be as long as 40 minutes, but the patrons are said to be friendly and the views spectacular, according to Google reviews.

Randy Dahlgren, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies watersheds, said that compared with other natural water sources, springs tended to be safer to drink from since they originated deep in the ground and the water was naturally filtered through layers of soil that could remove microbial pathogens. Fresh spring water can contain calcium, magnesium and other beneficial nutrients, and may not contain microplastics or “forever chemicals” as some tap water does, he said.

ut raw water can also be tainted with pesticides from nearby farms, contain arsenic that naturally occurs in soil, and harbor bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella that can make people extremely sick. In 2022, 19 people in Montana became ill, including one who was hospitalized, after drinking from what they thought was a spring but was actually creek drainage.

The reporter spent some time at Red Rock Spring. Basically, water dribbles out of a pair of copper pipes jammed into a cliff face by the road. No one can say with any certainty (a) where the water comes from, (b) what it contains, or (c) who put the pipes there. And yet these modern-day hippies happily fill carboys with the water and feed it to their children.

Carl Sagan was right: if society neglects teaching people critical-thinking skills, society gets dumber.