The Daily Parker

The US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow provides me with a long-awaited opportunity to clean out the closet under my stairs so an orphan kid more boxes will have room to stay there. I also may finish the Iain Banks novel I started two weeks ago, thereby finishing The Culture. (Don't worry, I have over 100 books on my to-be-read bookshelf; I'll find something else to read.)

Meanwhile:

• Even though I, personally, haven't got the time to get exercised about the OAFPOTUS's ridiculous threat to impose crippling (to us) tariffs on our three biggest trading partners, Mexico's president Claudia Sheinbaum used our own government's data to call bullshit on his claim that Mexico hasn't done enough to stop the flow of drugs into the US: "Tragically, it is in our country that lives are lost to the violence resulting from meeting the drug demand in yours."
• The UK will start requiring all visitors (even in transit) to register with their new Electronic Travel Authorisation scheme as of January 8th—similar to how the US ESTA program has worked for the last 16 years.
• Evanston, Ill., my home town, wants to protect bicyclists on one of its busiest streets, which of course has a bunch of stores panicking. (Note to the merchants: bike lanes don't hurt business, and in fact they encourage more foot traffic.)
• John Scalzi mourns the loss of Schwan's Home Delivery and it's bagel dogs.

Finally, as I mentioned nearly five years ago, today's date is a palindrome if you happen to study astronomy. The Julian Day number as of 6am CDT/12:00 UTC today is 2460642. Happy nerdy palindrome day!

Yesterday, the OAFPOTUS once again said something so blindingly stupid that the only appropriate response had any regular person said it would be peals of laughter. Had any other incoming president said it, it would elicit genuine surprise and alarm from all parties in Congress and even friendly newspapers like the Wall Street Journal (especially the Journal).

But since we're talking about the biggest troll ever elected to public office, a man who puts Zaphod Beeblebrox to shame (since Zaphod at least had a plan), a man who can't say "hello" without bullshitting, the only appropriate response is to ignore him unless he follows through with the threat. In fact, I would say that the only sane response is to ignore everything the OAFPOTUS says or posts on Xitter, doubly so if Stephen Cheung hurr-hurr-hurrs immediately after.

Look, the guy loves getting reactions from people. He's a 12-year-old boy of below-average intellect saying whatever pops into his head to shock his mother's friends and win points with the other mouth-breathers in his 7th-grade class. But until he actually does something (meaning his aides have followed through with the institutional process actually required to fuck something up), his words are completely meaningless.

If we have learned nothing from the past nine years, I hope we have learned this. (The New York Times has not, but that's a different post.)

The most hated person in Congress until his resignation two weeks ago has decided he really, really didn't want the House Ethics Committee to release its report on him, and has therefore withdrawn his nomination for Attorney General. He used the classic "I don't want to be a distraction" excuse, even though his entire career in politics has been a distraction.

Meanwhile, John Hendrickson guesses about the OAFPOTUS's pick for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr Donald Duck Mehmet Oz:

As you may have guessed, [Robert F Kennedy, Jr] and Oz are not only friends but kindred spirits. Oz is a global adviser at iHerb, a for-profit company that offers “Earth’s best-curated selection of health and wellness products at the best possible value.” He and Kennedy, two relative outsiders, are now positioned to enjoy a symbiotic relationship within Trump’s chaotic ecosystem.

Oz was last seen running for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022. He lost to John Fetterman, who, despite dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke, carried the state by five points. Throughout that race, Oz struggled to combat the perception that he was a charlatan and carpetbagger who primarily lived in New Jersey. (Fetterman’s team repeatedly tagged Oz as an out-of-touch elitist, trolling him, for example, when he went grocery shopping for crudités and lamented high prices.) After that electoral defeat, Oz’s political dreams seemed all but dashed. But he wisely remained loyal to Trump—a person who has the ability to change trajectories on a whim.

Oz holds degrees from Harvard and Penn, and he worked as a professor of surgery at Columbia. In spite of that pedigree, Oz has spent years facing credible accusations of medical quackery for his endorsement of dietary supplements. In 2014, he received a dramatic dressing-down on Capitol Hill.

How did we get here? Oz landed this gig because he’s good on TV, yes, but also because, when he entered the political arena, he fully aligned himself with Trump. The 47th president rewards loyalty. If there’s one thing that’s become clear from his administration nominations so far, it’s that.

Some of Trump’s appointments will be less consequential than others. Anything involving the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans is inarguably serious. Oz’s confirmation is not guaranteed, but his selection has already confirmed that nothing about Trump 2.0 is mere bluster.

It's vitally important that we not fall for every trolling thing the OAFPOTUS says. Toward that end I will confine my posting to the things he actually does. Since Oz seems likely to pass Senate confirmation—which I doubted could ever happen for Gaetz—I will report on his quackery and anti-science charlatanism.

The most charitable thing I can say about the incoming administration is that it will be an interesting experiment on the resilience of the American people while a vandal is setting fire to our government. But, hey, almost half of the voters chose him.

The OAFPOTUS has nominated TV personality and shameless quack Dr Oz to head up Medicare, which is of a piece with the rest of his cabinet nominations so far.

I think the OAFPOTUS has some other grievance than against the government, law enforcement, international norms, rational thought, and everything else he's railed against since 2015.

Clearly, the OAFPOTUS wants to drive The Onion out of business.

We're having gray, rainy weather for our few hours of daylight today. We haven't yet had a freeze this fall, and none is forecast before winter officially begins in two weeks, so all the moisture in the air just hangs around and makes more fog and rain. And yet, tomorrow we might get a high of 15°C—about 8°C above normal—before flurries and "wintry mix" Wednesday night.

Yeah, it's the end of November in Chicago.

Otherwise, I'm still mulling our electoral loss from two weeks ago, even as it looks less like a disaster and more like just three million Democrats staying home. In fact, it looks like neither candidate got a majority of the popular vote, with the OAFPOTUS increasing his total popular vote count by a little over 2½ million while our side lost about 7½ million compared with 2020.

Oh, and it's the 141st anniversary of time zones, which had a far more lasting effect than the election will have.

Happy Monday.

Yesterday I posted a short video from Robert Wright reminding everyone that the OAFPOTUS and his hangers-on thrive on negative energy. The moral: don't waste your own energy on his bullshit.

For example, I haven't agonized at all about his kakistocratic nominations for top cabinet posts, for the simple reason that I think they're distractions from the Republican Party's principal goals of increasing the wealth of billionaires and stealing as much as they can rake in from the American People. I mean, the only person in Congress more hated than Ted Cruz is Matt Gaetz; I have little doubt that the Senate will bounce his ass to a bottom-feeding lobby firm.

But nominating Gaetz and having him fail miserably doesn't bother the OAFPOTUS at all. Because when Gaetz fails to get confirmed, the OAFPOTUS will nominate someone even worse. He did this sort of thing more than once during his first term.

The United States has just re-elected Zaphod Beeblebrox to the presidency. We should really care more about the six guys with the black ships, and not worry about the idiot with two heads and three arms. (I'm just waiting for some Fox News guest to finally declare, "Donald's just zis guy, you know?")

Again: let's don't let the flim-flam distract us. Oppose the policies, not the pronouncements. We'll have enough to do for the next few years without wasting our breath on every trolling utterance that comes from the Administration.

I've got a couple of minutes before I descend into the depths of a very old codebase that has had dozens of engineers mucking about in it. Time enough to read through these:

• Michelle Goldberg sticks her tongue firmly in her cheek, declaring Matt Gaetz (R-FL) "the perfect man for the job" of running the Justice Dept.
• Annie Lowry explains the economics behind keeping minimum wages so low no one can possibly live on them.
• The Sun-Times published two stories today about how ComEd, the Illinois power utility, is one of the shittiest companies in the state.
• Andrew Price explains how places and non-places shape our cities.
• Via Schneier, computer scientist Stuart Schechter traces how the conceptual mistake made by two men (including a Turing Prize winner) 45 years ago gave us decades of crappy password policies.

Finally, everyone take six minutes and listen Robert Wright as he reminds us not to get distracted by the OAFPOTUS's trolling:

I had a completely different post in my head this afternoon, but the OAFPOTUS just nominated Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to run the Justice Department and I couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.

I expect he'll nominate high-school dropout Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to run the Education Department next.

These kinds of moves explain why I haven't worried so much about fascism as a government that couldn't find sand at a beach. As the OAFPOTUS has no competence himself, it follows that he would neither recognize nor care about competence in others. The next four years will suck, all right, but not in the ways that some of my more hysterical friends fear they will.

I haven't yet got my head around a couple of thoughts I had concerning last Tuesday's debacle. I've come to a few conclusions, but I'm still mulling the implications, and also the structure of the Daily Parker post that I promised over the weekend. It might take a few more days to write.

Meanwhile:

• The OAFPOTUS has picked South Dakota governor Kristi Noem (R) as his Homeland Security secretary and Mike Huckabee to represent the US in Israel, which have me straining not to tell the left wing of my party that I told them so.
• Timothy Noah points to a pair of US Supreme Court decisions the Republican justices wrote that all but guarantee people will bribe the OAFPOTUS, if they haven't already.
• Michael Bender pours over election data to figure out why Democrats stayed away from the polls in droves (though it has gotten better as late returns from California have come in).

Finally, the South Shore Line lost 40% of its rail cars to wheel damage over the past two weeks, and suffered 30-60 minute delays as a result, because of leaves on the tracks.

Hotel to terminal, 7 minutes (Lyft); through security, 10 minutes. Boarding in an hour. Now I just need the coffee to work its magic...

I'm also tickled that the ex-POTUS will now be called the Once And Future POTUS. At least for a couple of months.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• Andrew Sullivan doesn't like the outcome of the election any more than I do, but he nonetheless praises "the energizing clarity of democracy."
• Robert Wright lays out of plan for "fighting [the OAFPOTUS] mindfully."
• Molly White tells us to reach out to our communities, gather our strength, and keep fighting for sense and moderation.
• Proving Sinclair's Law* with only the vigor that a low-margin industry can do, landscaping companies have redoubled their efforts to slow or stop gas-powered leafblower bans across the US.
• Frog populations have crashed around the Chicago area, which is bad news for the frogs—and for us.

Finally, 35 years ago today I called my college roommate into our dorm room to watch live as Berliners took sledgehammers to the Wall. We didn't know what it meant other than we'd won the Cold War. Too bad we were still decades away from Aaron Sorkin's prescient words, "we'll see."

* "It is difficult to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on him not understanding it."