I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Cassie is my 7½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in March 2021. Quite a lot has changed since then, most notably I wrote a whole new blog engine. (More on that in a moment.)

About the blog

The Daily Parker is about:

• Cassie, whom I adopted on 16 March 2021. (The blog is named after my previous dog, Parker, whom I adopted in 2006 and who died in 2020.)
• Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. And I'm looking forward to the day, whether 20 January 2029 or earlier, when we can start repairing all the damage caused by this rogue administration.
• The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 27 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change, especially given the OAFPOTUS's hostility to science.
• Chicago (the greatest city in North America), and sometimes London, San Francisco, and the rest of the world.
• Photography. I took tens of thousands of photos as a kid, then drifted away from making art until early 2011 when I finally got the first digital camera I've ever had whose photos were as good as film. That got me reading more, practicing more, and throwing more photos on the blog. In my initial burst of enthusiasm I posted a photo every day. That frequency is incompatible with having a life, so I don't update this category very often.

I also write a lot of software, and will occasionally post about technology as well. I've got more than 45 years experience writing the stuff, 30 as a professional. I own Inner Drive Technology, a microscopic software development company in Chicago, which has some interesting packages available on NuGet. I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code, some of which may appear here.

I strive to write about these and other things with fluency and concision. "Fast, good, cheap: pick two" applies to writing as much as to any other creative process (cf: software). I hope to find an appropriate balance between the three, as streams of consciousness and literacy have always struggled against each other since the first time someone put chisel to tablet 5,500 years ago.

Finally, given that I started this blog almost 23 years ago, it has old and crappy examples of my writing and of my opinions. I have evolved quite a bit. Author John Scalzi put it perfectly: the guy I was in 1998, the guy I am now, and the guy I'll be in 2036 are three different people.

About the blog engine

Now let's talk about the software the blog runs on. In 2016, I had an idea for software that would allow users to put together a timeline of events. The software needed to have seriously strong privacy protections, because I envisioned it as something people could use as a personal journal, or as a way to organize a legal case, or as a cache of sources and notes for a journalist.

I started writing the software in 2020, but put it aside until I had a burst of inspiration about a year ago. From that point I made slow but steady progress, until the BlogEngine.NET platform that The Daily Parker had run on since 2015 basically wouldn't run anymore without frequent reboots and cursing. That got me thinking, wouldn't the minimum viable product for a timeline application be, in fact, a blog engine?

Over the next few days and weeks, I'll have a series of technical posts about how I developed it and how it works. Check back on this post for links, or just watch them come up on the new posts page.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy The Daily Parker.

• About this Blog (v5.0)  (1 hour)
• Brews and Choos project  (2 weeks)
• Chicago sunrises, 2026  (2 weeks)
• Inner Drive Technology's computer history  (1 year)
• Logical fallacies  (6 years)
• Other people's writing  (5 years)
• Parker Braverman, 2006-2020  (5 years)
• Style sheet  (6 months)
• Where I get my corn-pone  (1 year)

I feel a little chagrined today as I expect to release the new version of The Daily Parker this evening, and yesterday I failed to write even a cursory post. I blame meetings and a very long dentist appointment (I'm fine; still no cavities; but the new dentist patient intake took a while).

I also didn't have any time to read these:

• Brian Beutler outlines a workable plan for getting rid of the Schutzstaffel Immigration and Customs Enforcement permanently.
• Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's threats against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell "violate the two democratic guardrails that matter most."
• James Fallows examines the "time of the Mad King."
• Paul Krugman reviews the first year of the OAFPOTUS's economic policies and explains why things feel a lot shittier than the official statistics might suggest.
• For the first time in over 60 years, a dog tested positive for rabies in Chicago, causing the PAWS rescue (where Cassie came from) to review their acquisition pipeline.

Finally, Education Secretary Linda McMahon probably used some A-1 to come up with her plan to eliminate public education as we know it in favor of publicly-funded religious education. I've got an A-1 amendment for her to read while she's dreaming of Christianist madrassas.

(After Dave and Bob got so excited about yesterday's post, I just had to give them more of what they came for. You're welcome.)

It turns out, several people use RSS to keep up with The Daily Parker. I hadn't planned to write an RSS feed component before launch, but as I don't want to cut them off, I've reprioritized the feature. Plus, I have a couple more things to do before I can cut over to the new production environment:

• Implement Real Simple Syndication (RSS);
• Fix a bug caused by the interaction between the HTTP context object and Azure Front Door; and
• Create a new About page.

I'll fix the bug in the next 15 minutes, but the RSS feed probably won't get done today. Cassie and I took an hour-long walk (because the weather is unusually good for January) and I just need a few hours of reading time today.

So, you'll just have to live with the anticip—

Say it!

ation.

Again: you're welcome.

I did not watch the Bears-Packers playoff game last night, but I got real-time updates from my friends and family. You can bet I'm going to watch the highlight reel this afternoon:

The Bears won this way all season and delivered yet another thriller Saturday to stay alive in the playoffs.

They rallied from a big deficit to beat the Packers 31-27 in their wild-card game at Soldier Field and advanced to host the Rams or defending champion Eagles in the divisional round. It was their first playoff victory since 2011.

They rallied from down 21-3 early, as well as trailing 27-16 in the last five minutes, on a furious charge by quarterback Caleb Williams and the offense. He put them ahead with a 25-yard pass to DJ Moore with 1:43 left, and the Bears’ defense did its job at the end of a rocky night on that side of the ball.

Ultimately, the Bears got 25 points in the 4th quarter, which is like getting four goals in the last 15 minutes of regulation play in everybody else's football. Imagine Manchester City trailing Chelsea 3-0 at 50 minutes, and then going on to win 4-3 with the last goal at 88 minutes of regulation. Not penalty kicks; an actual goal.

Cassie and I are talking an hour-long walk before lunch so I don't have time to watch just now. But this afternoon, while I'm cutting over to the new Daily Parker, I'm going to watch the 4th quarter. Because, wow.

As I type this, Azure DevOps is banging away at the new blog engine's dev-test pipeline so that I can confirm the last few bits of it are correctly configured. The production environment is up and working, except for icons and RECAPTCHA, which explains the rebuild. Google: your dashboards are really confusing.

Creating the production environment took 57 minutes this morning, and creating the production release pipeline (which included setting all the Azure roles properly on things like the database and Key Vault) took about 45 minutes. I'm particularly pleased that the pipeline succeeded on the second try, which is not my usual experience with devops tasks.

For the past hour or so, I've been testing the production environment, noticing annoyances, fixing them, and repeating the cycle. Now that the dev-test environment has restarted, and all looks good, I'm pushing up the Production branch to start the continuous-integration deployment to the Production environment.

The final step will be to transfer and transform the data from this version of The Daily Parker to the new one. With over 10,000 entries, plus the tags and comments that go along for the ride, that should take most of tomorrow. (Fortunately it's completely automated and idempotent.)

If all goes well, I will switch the DNS entries and move the SSL certificate to the new app once that is far enough along that people won't encounter broken links unless they're looking for them. Wish me luck.

At midnight Chicago tied its high-temperature record for January 9th, 15.6°C (60°F), set in 1880. Then from 4am to 5am the temperature dropped 7°C (12°F) and now hovers around 6°C (42°F). This is a weakening La Niña plus human-caused global heating plus Chicago generally having weird weather.

In other news:

• Glenn Kessler warns that the OAFPOTUS's vandalism of our foreign policy is the equivalent of Cortez burning his ships, with similarly grim prospects for the natives. Matt Ford thinks it will "haunt us for generations." I think it's more like centuries, but that's only because I've read the history of Rome.
• Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who yesterday told Immigration and Customs Enforcement to "get the fuck out of Minneapolis," reminds everyone that if the OAFPOTUS or his droogs are speaking, they are lying.
• In a glimmer of good news, it looks like Congress is creeping closer to a ban on Congressional stock-trading, which has become one of the most egregious sources of insider trading in contemporary history.
• So many SpaceX rockets have exploded over busy air travel routes that the safety of flight is at risk, particularly in the Caribbean. (Did NASA's rockets blow up that much? I don't think so.)
• Texas no longer requires ABA accreditation for law schools, instead ruling the state supreme court would decide who gets to sit for the bar exam. The reason? DEI, of course. And that the ABA's headquarters is here in Chicago.

Finally, the Bears host the Green Bay Packers tomorrow evening here in Chicago. The winner gets the wild-card slot in the NFL playoffs, and the loser goes home to Green Bay (I hope). Most of the local breweries will have it on, so Cassie and I will likely head over to Spiteful to watch. Or maybe I'll leave her at home and go down to Begyle where they'll have tacos...

Despite the annoyances with the soon-to-be-decommissioned BlogEngine.NET version of the Daily Parker, I actually had some things to say today.

Mainly: the OAFPOTUS and his droogs know they're losing everywhere that matters, and they know they only have slightly less than a year before the next Congress effectively shuts them down, so they're going for broke. And the last 36 hours are just the beginning.

Top of mind is yesterday's murder of Renee Good, a mother of three shot in the face by a poorly-trained, undisciplined, and unhinged Federal immigration officer, on a quiet residential street in Minneapolis. The OAFPOTUS and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called it a terrorist incident, which is correct just not the way they intended.

Reactions in the reality-based community have run from "just fucking no" all the way to "really ICE can just fuck right off now." I'll start with the Republicans:

• Adam Kinzinger: "This administration wants force normalized. It wants fear. It wants examples made. That is the deeper sickness here. This wasn’t just about one encounter. Minneapolis didn’t wake up yesterday and randomly get flooded with ICE agents. That surge happened for one reason: provocation. A show of force. A political message."
• Jennifer Rubin: "Going forward, it is long past time for Congress to conduct actual oversight of the Department of Homeland Security. Any reasonable person knew that an out-of-control, cruel, and lawless regime openly spouting xenophobic attacks on non-Whites and rushing to flood American cities with armed thugs (who feel empowered to resort to violence) would invariably wind up hurting and killing innocent people."
• The Economist: "For months Mr Trump has seemed to want to provoke protesters to violence in order to justify cracking down even harder on Democrat-run cities. Recent court decisions limit his ability to deploy the National Guard the way he did in Los Angeles, but that is not the only option the president has if things get out of hand. He has long toyed with the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to send troops to cities. Once again, Minneapolis is at the centre of a storm."
• Heather Cox Richardson: "That both DHS and Trump posted false accounts of the shooting even as there are four videos circulating that reveal those accounts to be lies shows they no longer are making any attempt to justify their actions. Instead, they are demanding Americans abandon reality in favor of whatever the administration says. If this works, it would be a demonstration of totalitarian power, the ability to control how people think. Accepting that lie is a loyalty test."
• Luke Hallam: "Trump’s response...was to vilify the victim. He accused her of willfully attempting to mow down an officer. He asserted, without a shred of evidence, that an onlooker was a paid agitator. And—worst of all—he said nothing that even came close to the sort of human response to tragedy that we would expect of minimally decent human beings. This is about Trump’s clear failings as a human being."
• Amanda Nelson: "The fight needs to be on two things: your state and local legislative offices, including Sheriffs and state houses, which decide on whether your police departments partner with ICE. And the midterms. If we take the House back in the midterms, we can 1/ reduce the budget and headcount of ICE, which is the easiest way to reduce their operations and 2/ begin investigations."

That isn't all the regime did this week. In fact, Renee Good's murder might serve as a welcome (to the OAFPOTUS) distraction from all the other damaging things they did:

• How about the "looting of US foreign policy?"
• Or effectively (but not legally) withdrawing from 60+ international organizations that we helped set up and that solve real problems in the world?
• Or destroying our immigration courts while pretending to care about immigration law?
• Or just the OAFPOTUS having trouble with the pronoun "we?"

It's past time for us to behave like grandma's Democratic Party. We need to stop this shit, and we have 10 months to make our case. We have to fight with every legal means possible and, once we've driven these assholes from the field, strengthen our system against future attacks from within like this one.

The BlogEngine.NET version of The Daily Parker seems to know it has run out of time. It won't let me log in this afternoon. No errors, nothing in the logs, the authentication cookie looks correct, just...no author controls. It knows.

So once I'm done writing this directly in SQL Server, I'll start creating the production environment.

Last orders, please.

Republicans want to make your life worse; Democrats want to make it better. This has been largely true since 1980, when Ronald Reagan and his friends took the Republican Party sharply to the right and want to keep going until it's just billionaires and peasants in the US.

The Democratic Party is a huge amalgam of constituencies that account for the majority of voters in the majority of states. Almost to a person, we think the OAFPOTUS and his droogs are horrible people who should never hold positions of power or responsibility because of how they've acted so far. But our geriatric Party leadership just can't seem to get their heads out of their asses.

Brian Beutler explained the problem this morning:

Imagine the biggest donor to the Democratic Party ran a website—a media platform, really—where users could send pictures of real-life women and girls to an artificial intelligence chatbot, and the A.I. would spit the pictures back out for them, with the women and girls stripped of their clothing. What would happen when this “feature” came online, and flooded the internet with sexual exploitation of innocents?

Would Republicans shrug? Would they insist on investigating the owner or his company, criminally, for generating child sexual-abuse material? Would they demand Democrats return his donations? Would they hound the media to cover the story, and accuse journalists who ignored it of bias?

This question stops being hypothetical when you swap the parties around. The website is X. The owner of the website is Elon Musk. He spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to elect Republicans. His artificial intelligence software, Grok, has recently flooded X with this kind of material.

And the answer to the question—what happened?—is: basically nothing, so far.

The disparity here is indicative of a larger tendency: Republicans act, while Democrats react.

For instance: Tim Walz reacted to the Republican slander of the Minnesota Somali community by retiring from politics.

In pressing the Epstein Files matter in defiance of skeptical colleagues, Ro Khanna showed that Democrats can force Republicans into defensive crouches, too.

A small change in approach along these lines would help Democrats out of their doldrums. Tens of millions of Americans understand that their way of life is under threat from the country’s most morally repulsive individuals. But when they look up to see if their representatives are rising to protect them, there’s no cavalry. Sometimes there’s no one at all.

Yes. We need our side to act, not to sit around commissioning policy papers on the pros and cons of campaigning on issues like unprecedented corruption and a President whose frontal lobe has disintegrated into a mushy collection of barely-functioning neurons.

So imagine my eye-roll this morning when I heard that my Representative, Mike Quigley (D-IL 5th), became the first to throw his name onto the ballot for the 2027 mayoral election. Now, Quigley votes the way I want him to vote, so I have in turn voted to keep him in Congress each time his name has come up. But he's one of those old Chicago pols, an old-style, old-guard former county commissioner who did his time filling potholes and expects higher office as a reward for not making waves. (The absolute monarch of this approach was the late Roland Burris, who found his way into the US Senate by kissing exactly and precisely the right asses at the right times.)

We don't need Quigley on the 5th Floor any more than we need the continued presence of Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in the leader's office. We need people who are ready to fight. Let's show the Republican Party we're tired of their enshittification and we're going to spend the next ten years making the US and the world better, whether they like it or not.