The Daily Parker

I've been heads-down debugging, except for going to the meetings already on my calendar, and just realized I've got to leave for rehearsal soon. I'll have to come back to these fun little nuggets later:

• What is this bullshit the OAFPOTUS is pushing about "white genocide" in South Africa?
• After some consideration, James Fallows has come around to believing that the way Senate Democrats ended the government shutdown will actually help us next year.
• The Chicago City Council finance committee rejected Mayor Brandon Johnson's tax plan for the second year in a row, principally over his plan to tax every employer in the city with more than 200 100 workers $21 $18 a month per employee.
• Weakness in downtown the real estate market has pushed up property taxes all over the city, on average by 17%. My tax bill came Saturday and had a 12% increase, so I guess I got off lucky?

Finally McSweeney's wonders what it's like to work for an evil company and still consider yourself a good person.

Between meetings and getting into the zone while fixing a bug, I worked straight through lunch and only got Cassie out around 4. So before my next meeting at 8pm, I've got a few minutes to catch up on all...this:

• Josh Marshall reflects on the 8 Democratic Senators (including one of mine, who is also the minority whip) making a deal with the Republicans, and says the next Congress must eliminate the paper filibuster and reform the Supreme Court.
• David Graham takes a more nuanced view. Krugman wants Democrats to hammer the Republicans on their unnecessary cruelty to Americans in need. Rubin says the word "moderate" lets people weasel out of being a "fighter" or a "defeatist."
• Adam Kinzinger is outraged that the OAFPOTUS has openly sold pardons, in contravention of literally everything the founders (and everyone since) stood for.
• Dan Williams lays out a strategy for confronting "highbrow misinformation."
• Calculated Risk, the blog that predicted the 2008 financial meltdown three years ahead of time, is starting to warn about the next financial meltdown from the inevitable cryptocurrency collapse.
• Matt Yglesias takes a break from the news to speculate about what would have happened had Italy joined the Central Powers in 1914.

And yesterday, as most people know, was the 50th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in Lake Superior.

You know, I probably won't be online much Friday through Sunday. I should try to do that more often.

• The OAFPOTUS pretty much guaranteed that Zohran Mamdani will win today's New York City mayoral election by endorsing former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, which I'm pretty sure Cuomo didn't want either.
• Brian Beutler chastises the Democratic Party for "the scourge of wimpiness." I am tempted to send him a strongly-worded email.
• US Rep. Jan Schakowsky's (D-IL9) departure from the US House has led to so many candidates running for her seat] in the March 2026 primary, it's hard to figure out who's who or what they stand for.
• Amherst College political science professor Javier Corrales outlines how Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro has woven the fates of the country's elites together to ensure that their literal survival depends on his political survival.
• Thirteen years after the USDOT and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania spent $77 million building two off-ramps into Chester, Pa., that the community didn't ask for, absolutely no benefits have accrued to the city. As Charles Marohn reminds us, this is "the predictable outcome of a transportation funding system that rewards appearance over impact."

Finally, Block Club Chicago spent the day at one of the last 24-hour-diners in Chicago, which happens to be just 2 km from my house. Now I know where to go if I'm craving a burger at 4am.

The Los Angeles Dodgers won game 7 of the World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays last night in one of the best baseball games I've ever seen—though, for obvious reasons, not nearly as exciting as game 7 of the World Series in 2016.

The Dodgers looked buried early, falling behind 3-0 when a hobbled Bo Bichette took an exhausted Shohei Ohtani deep in the third inning. They seemed finished until the ninth, clawing back within one but never completely erasing the deficit — until Rojas saved the season with his game-tying home run to left.

Rojas saved the day for a second time on a ground ball at second base, fielding it from a drawn-in position before firing for a force-out at home plate. The next batter, Ernie Clement, sent a fly ball to deep left-center. Kiké Hernández and defensive replacement Andy Pages collided at the warning track. Hernández hit the deck. Pages completed the catch.

The game ended in the bottom of the 11th with a perfectly-executed 6-4-3 double play.

I had been rooting for the Blue Jays, but only because I thought that this year would be exactly the right year for the only Canadian team to win it all.

But it occurred to me, this may have been the first World Series ever in which the President of the United States was not welcome in either city.

Naturally, the press had a lot to say about the largest protest in my lifetime (I was born after the Earth Day 1970 demonstration):

• As many as 250,000 people turned out for the downtown Chicago event, which included a procession that carried a 23-meter replica of the US Constitution, and resulted in zero arrests or reports of violence. (The video of the procession leaving Grant Park is epic.)
• David Graham of The Atlantic explains why the protests got under the OAFPOTUS's skin: "Trump’s movement depends on the impression that it’s unstoppable and victorious. ... Huge protests that demonstrate he is not invincible endanger his political success: They offer people who voted for Trump reluctantly or who have had second thoughts a feeling of camaraderie and hope, and give them a way to feel okay ditching him. ... Trump and his allies seem to grasp what Saturday revealed: The protests are popular, and the president is not."
• Brian Fife sees a paradox in the protests: "One could find this inspiring, so many disparate causes united under one banner. But for those of us who want to see tangible reform in the United States, the lack of clear messaging or policy recommendations—especially during a protest intended to inspire action—was disorienting."
• Josh Marshall disagrees, lauding "the subtle genius of 'No Kings'," saying the name itself is "a deceptively resonant name and slogan with the deepest possible roots in American history. This brings with it a critical inclusivity, which grows out of the name itself and the lack of those specific and lengthy sets of demands that often characterize and ultimately fracture such movements. ... The jagged and total nature of the onslaught against the American Republic creates a clarity: We all know what we’re talking about. You don’t need to explain. The imperfect but orderly and generally lawful old way versus this. And when you say “No Kings,” you’re saying I don’t want this. I don’t accept presidential despotism. I’m here ready to show my face and say publicly that I will never accept it."
• Brian Beutler has "22 thoughts on No Kings DC," of which: "I do not think it’s a coincidence that, as anticipation grew, and the GOP panicked and smeared, universities rejected Trump’s extortionate higher-education “compact,” and the Chamber of Commerce finally decided to sue Trump, etc. The days of proactive capitulation seem to be ending."

I looked for mainstream Republican reactions to the event but only heard crickets. The OAFPOTUS's own response, which I will not dignify with a link, would be grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment in any normal era.

Meanwhile, the vandalism continues:

• Workers have begun demolishing the east side of the White House East Wing as the OAFPOTUS continues to wreak historical violence on the Executive Mansion without Congressional—i.e., the owner's—approval.
• Writing in Harvard Magazine, Lincoln Caplan examines the damage that US Chief Justice John Roberts has done to the Constitution, tracing his legal career from Harvard Law through his clerkship under US Chief Justice William Rehnquist, another hard-right ideologue who, unlike Roberts, didn't have the votes to become his generation's Roger Taney.
• Jeff Maurer suggests that Democrats simply change the conversation about immigration and not apologize for our past policy misses: "I think that Democrats can craft a positive, forward-looking message on immigration that starts a new conversation without dwelling on the past. It would tell a story that happens to be true, which is nifty, because I prefer political narratives that aren’t a towering skyscraper of bullshit whenever possible. The narrative goes like this: 'America is rich, safe, and vibrant because we’ve always attracted the smartest, hardest-working people from around the world. We need an immigration system that attracts the best and the brightest for years to come.'"
• North Carolina, already one of the most-Gerrymandered states in the union, has passed a new congressional map they believe will give them a 10th Republican US House seat, with only three Democratic-majority districts in Raleigh, Durham, and Charlotte. (They've even managed to get Asheville to turn pink, based on 2024 election results.)
• Adam Kinzinger suggests encouraging Russia to end its war in Ukraine through the simple expedient of giving $2 billion of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine each day the war goes on.
• Julia Ioffe reviews the life of Lyudmila Ocheretnaya, Vladimir Putin's ex-wife.
• Molly White explains the October 10th crypto meltdown that destroyed $19 billion of Bitcoin holdings in just a few seconds.

And hey, I even read some non-political news in the past 24 hours:

• The Nielsen-Norman Group digs into the usability of Google's new AI Mode feature, which most people don't seem to know about.
• New Republic's Timothy Noah wonders if the propensity of failsons to piss away their inherited fortunes (like the OAFPOTUS before he began the biggest grift of all time) could help solve the wealth-distribution problem in the world.
• Whatever happened to the decommissioned Staten Island ferryboat that entertainers Colin Jost and Pete Davidson bought? Not much.
• Speaking of New York, Block Club Chicago compares Chicago's Bloomingdale Trail with Manhattan's High Line.

Finally, it warms my heart to read that Gen Z workers have the same attitude toward workplace "emergencies" that Gen X workers have always had. (Boomers and Millennials, WTF is wrong with y'all?)

I jotted down two notes earlier this week about things I heard that made me think. They come from two journalists who I've followed for a while, both of whom have reasoned and careful takes on events in their home countries.

The first came from New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who posted a video on Monday discussing Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought, about whom Politico ran a depressing article just this morning. Bouie says Vought believes that "if you can get rid of the 'woke elites,' you can return the country to way it should, a place of patriarchal order." He goes on to observe that Vought and people sharing his world-view simply have no theory of mind for their opponents. They think tolerance and liberalism are an illegitimate, top-down imposition of ideology from the "woke elites" instead of the bottom-up, grassroots world view that has developed over the last century. That's because they themselves think only in hierarchies and in either-or terms and have no entry into more nuanced thinking.

I've said similar things. Part of what drives people to a hierarchical world-view is a fear of the unknown and a fear of losing power. Ultimately, though, top-down thinking is unsustainable. Narrowness begets narrowness. Just think about how the OAFPOTUS draws from a smaller and smaller pool of potential henchmen because he destroys everyone who works with him. One of the most enjoyable novels I've read on this topic is Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which I would recommend every parent read to their children (as Rushdie intended).

The second "makes you go 'hmmm'" moment I had came from another short video, from Times of Israel political correspondent Haviv Rettig Gur. He says (again, paraphrasing): Everyone from the Mehdi Hasans to the activists are upset the war is over. Because the argument wasn't that the Israelis were going overboard, it's that they were trying to annihilate the Palestinians as a people. And the cease-fire plan—what Israelis have been demanding from their government and from Hamas—is that the hostages get returned. Israel agreeing to the cease-fire removes genocide from the table, and shows that this was all just propaganda. "Genocide is an argument to intention, not to how many have died." It's weird watching people be so traumatized by the war being over. Hamas is the only one breaking the deal, by not releasing all the bodies. Greta Thunburg posted a photo of Evyatar David, and when she found out he was an Israeli hostage, she just deleted it. "It wasn't about hostages, and it wasn't about torture, and it wasn't about starvation," he says. "Because if it's the wrong person facing torture and starvation, then she has nothing to say."

The Gazan people and the Israeli people were literally dancing in the streets when the ceasefire was announced. Where were the "pro-Palestinian" demonstrators elsewhere? Not to mention, with so many people protesting Israel's behavior, where are the crowds protesting Sudan's? Or China's against the Uyghurs?

But today? 10/10 would recommend!

Ah, ha ha. Ha.

Everything else today has a proportion of funny to not-funny that we should work on a bit more:

• The administration served up two full helpings of corruption today: indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James as payback for prosecuting the OAFPOTUS, and finalizing a $20 billion gift to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's friends under the guise of propping up the Argentine Peso.
• US District Judge April Perry (NDIL) has blocked the National Guard from entering Chicago pending new arguments on the 24th.
• Julia Ioffe reports on what the troops sent to Portland, Ore., think of being sent there; Jeff Maurer reports on the twerking inflatable dinosaurs taunting ICE there.
• Paul Krugman patiently explains that, in fact, everything economists predicted about the OAFPOTUS's tariffs has happened, even though what non-economists claimed they predicted didn't: "The point is that corporations are very good at finding ways to avoid paying taxes, especially when the rules are complicated and the tax collectors don’t have enough resources to track down their clever strategies."
• Why is billionaire and scary dude Peter Thiel warning about the Antichrist? Seems, you know, unhinged. In fact, he sounds a lot like Charlotte Iserbyt. What is it with these people?
• Quico Toro has lived in Japan for a year, which gave him an unhappy view of Amtrak. (Though, frankly, living in any other OECD country except Canada would do that.)
• The Cubs beat the Milwaukee Brewers yesterday, so the two teams go on to a final, fifth game tomorrow at Miller Park.

Finally, Loyola University Chicago's Sister Jean has died at 106. She was the official team chaplain of the Loyola Ramblers men's basketball team, and well-loved throughout the University.

In the news today:

• Brian Beutler reminds history buffs that in "the median experience of tyranny" life doesn't change much right away.
• Paul Krugman mines the data to understand why gold prices have soared in the last couple of months. But, he argues, "holding gold isn’t an alternative to holding currency. It is, instead, an alternative to holding bonds, which pay interest."
• Jeff Maurer reminds the smitten that, no matter how well-intentioned, activists are just "dumb assholes like you and me:" "[T]he actions of some progressive groups become less baffling when you imagine that their goal isn’t to advance for their cause, but rather to appear to advance their cause while keeping their job and improving their social standing."

Finally, the Post examines the age-old question, why is there always one side of town no one wants to live in, and why is it always downwind of the 19th- and 20th-century factories?

The stupidest person ever to sit behind the Resolute Desk has made most of the world feel sad for us. Let's check on why:

• Matthew Yglesias digs into the abject idiocy of the OAFPOTUS's war on Tylenol.
• Jeff Maurer puts on his OAFPOTUS mask and declaims "Tylenol is why I'm like this."

And yet, both Jennifer Rubin and Josh Marshall see the tide turning hard against the administration, though George Packer thinks we now live in an authoritarian state.

Meanwhile,

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called an in-person meeting of all 900 or so general and flag officers next week, an unprecedented move made even weirder by his office not telling any of them why.
• Yascha Mounk shakes his head at former US Senator Kamala Harris's refusal to acknowledge why the Democratic Party lost the last election.

And finally, the mold count in Chicago hit an all-time high on Tuesday of 82,121, which is nothing to sneeze at. The mold count is forecast to remain high until the first frost, which might be in November given the climate predictions this fall.

A total lunar eclipse has just started and will reach totality at 12:30 Chicago time, which is unfortunately about 10 hours too early for us to enjoy it here. It's a good way to end the first day of meteorological autumn, though, as is the 8 km walk Cassie and I have planned around 2 this afternoon. With a forecast high of 19°C, it should be lovely.

In other eclipses this past week:

• The OAFPOTUS has so badly damaged US foreign policy and our standing in the world that China has eclipsed us as the de facto soft power in the world.
• The OAFPOTUS's bad poll numbers released this morning have eclipsed his bad poll numbers from the previous...ever—and this is even before pollsters factored in HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr's excruciatingly horrific performance in front of the Senate on Friday.
• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik's old company, the private equity firm Cantor Fitzgerald, has offered up to $1 billion to buy tariff refund rights at 20-30c on the dollar, a level of corruption only barely eclipsed by the OAFPOTUS's cryptocurrency scams.
• The crime data from hundreds of other cities around the world totally eclipse Chicago's, despite the OAFPOTUS's bullshit.
• Jeff Maurer warns, in his own special way, that lies about the Gaza war mostly eclipse any actual journalism that could otherwise be happening about it.
• James Fallows frets that the coverage of Harvard University's defiance of the OAFPOTUS may eclipse Harvard's actions themselves.

For what it's worth, the next total lunar eclipse visible from Chicago will be on 26 June 2029, starting at sunset and reaching totality at 21:31 CDT.