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The sun just came out, reminding me that gray skies don't last forever. Neither will all this crap:

On 28 January 1986, 40 years ago today, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Six astronauts and a teacher from New Hampshire died when the crew cabin of the orbiter impacted the Atlantic Ocean more than three minutes later; most of them were likely conscious and aware at the time.

On January 27th, we still have 5 weeks until spring officially begins. The forecast doesn't predict any above-freezing temperatures as far as it can see, and we've already had 10 days below freezing in this seemingly endless cold snap.

After bottoming out at -21.3°C (-6.3°F) around 8:30 this morning, the temperature has skyrocketed to -18.7°C (-1.7°F) a few minutes ago. I decided to walk to my optometrist appointment, 12 minutes there and 13 minutes back thanks to a red light, which wasn't too bad in my swaddling. When I got back, Cassie lasted just over 4 minutes before bolting for my front door. Smart dog.

I've just had a lot to do today and I'm not feeling particularly creative. So, nu, maybe Friday?

I have a list of 6 or 7 short plumbing tasks that I hope will take less than an hour, which is 1/8th the time window the plumbing service provided for the plumber's arrival. We all know how that goes. And at my real job, I'm coordinating a bunch of processes for a biweekly release that, so far, is pretty boring—just how we like it.

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.)

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...

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...

The United States invaded Venezuela this morning and captured its president, Nicholas Maduro, and his wife: The United States launched a “large scale strike” on Venezuela, captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and flew them out of the country, President Donald Trump said in a social media post early Saturday. Overnight, explosions shook multiple locations across Caracas, including at key military facilities, and aircraft were seen flying over the Venezuelan capital. Venezuelan Vice President...

Now that I've had a good night's sleep and the sun is out for the first time all year, I have the energy to start reading the news again. On January 2nd, most of the stories are about things that have changed since Wednesday: Chicago had 416 murders in 2025, the lowest number recorded since 1965 when the city had 620,000 (23%) more people. In 2025, the hottest temperature recorded at Inner Drive Technology WHQ was 34.3°C (93.7°F) on June 23rd; the coldest was -20°C (-4°F) January 21st. Officially at...

Cassie and I went out right at sunrise (7:14—two more weeks before the latest one of the winter on January 3rd) just as the temperature bottomed out at -10.5°C (13.1°F) after yesterday's cold front. Tomorrow will be above freezing, Sunday will be a bit below, and then Monday through the end of the year looks like it'll be above. And the forecast for Christmas Day is 11°C (52°F). Meanwhile, as I sip my second cup of tea, these stories made me want to go back to bed: As much as we want to ignore the...

Ah, December, when the easy cadence of weekly rehearsals becomes a frenzy of performances and, yes, more rehearsals. This is Messiah week, so I've already spent 8 hours of it in rehearsals or helping to set up for them. Tonight I've got the first of 4 Messiah performances over the next two weeks, plus yet another rehearsal, a church service, and a Christmas Eve service. Then, after Christmas, a bunch of us will be singing at the 50th anniversary party for a couple who have sung with us for longer than...

Of note: Jeff Maurer wants every Democratic candidate in the next election cycle to hammer the OAFPOTUS for selling pardons (and all his other corruption). Former Republican US Representative Adam Kinzinger takes his party to task for rejecting its own history by attacking the civil service. (By the way, Netflix has a great four-part miniseries about Presidents Garfield and Arthur called "Death by Lightning" that you can watch now.) Paul Krugman frets that we have become a "digital narco-state." Amanda...

The Post has woken up to the lack of success Federal incentives have had in promoting Vision Zero, an international strategy "to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all." Despite the success of Vision Zero in Europe (especially in the Netherlands), it isn't doing particularly well over here, which the Post blames on drivers: Vision Zero’s failures in more than two dozen cities fit a predictable pattern, according to the Post...

Russia expert (and emigrée) Julia Ioffe picks apart the OAFPOTUS's clownish attempts to end the war in Ukraine one more time: Stop me if you’ve heard this one. President Donald Trump, eager to get another peace deal under his belt, sends everyone in Washington, Kyiv, Moscow, and Brussels scrambling as he announces that an agreement to end the Ukraine war is imminent. The proposal, on even the most cursory examination, is revealed to echo the Russian position, at which point Volodymyr Zelensky and the...

First, just a reminder: anthropogenic climate change (aka global warming) will not wipe out humanity; but it will lead to millions of deaths, plus immense costs and disruptions, which the next few generations will bear. And we could have prevented it. Another reminder: despite what this map shows, as soon as the first real cold of the 2025-26 winter hits after Thanksgiving, lots of people will say "this disproves global warming." No, climate theory predicts weather extremes with the average temperature...

Republicans in Congress have reached for the trough of public money with both hands, just as the OAFPOTUS is about to steal hundreds of millions from us in the most offensive way possible, according to Radley Balko: Last year, New York City paid out $205 million to settle 956 lawsuits alleging police abuse. That figure includes about $16 million each to two men who served three decades in prison for a murder they didn’t commit. It also includes people who were wrongly raided and beaten by police, and...

"Enjoy:" Charles Marohn rips apart the OAFPOTUS's half-baked proposal to allow 50-year mortgages, which would transfer even more rents to bankers than the current housing situation does. In a spectacular own-goal that will, I hope, be rolled back very soon, Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin has decided the city will no longer buy US treasury bonds, which are still the safest investments in the world and do not "support the regime" as she daftly claims. Jennifer Rubin cheers the millions of...

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...

Despite the FAA reducing flights at O'Hare and Midway today because of the Republican-caused government shutdown (longest in history!), I got from my house to O'Hare and through security in just over an hour. Red-state friends: I took the #81 bus to the Blue Line, so the whole 45-minute trip cost $3.00. I even had time to get coffee. So far my flight is on time, and--unusually for the heavily-traveled ORD-SFO route--I got upgraded. Sometimes I think about cancelling my club membership because I only fly...

Economist Paul Krugman shakes his head at the GOP's own goal, bringing misery to millions of Americans way ahead of their original schedule: Why are these terrible things happening? At a basic level they’re happening because Republicans want them to happen. Drastic cuts in food stamps and health care programs were central planks in Project 2025, which is indeed the Trump administration’s policy platform, and were written into legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer. But the...

Even though I have a cute beagle hanging around my office this week, and even though I've had a lot to do at work (including a very exciting deployment today), the world keeps turning: The OAFPOTUS pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao for the crime of running a massive money-laundering website, because of course Zhao bribed him. Brian Beutler thinks the OAFPOTUS's corruption has gotten too obvious for even his supporters to ignore, leading to "the things Democrats like to talk about and the things I...

As I mentioned yesterday, the OAFPOTUS has illegally destroyed the East Wing of the White House, including the portico and everything right up to the original east entrance. This is part of his plan to build a ridiculous and unnecessary ballroom, funded by big-tech billionaires. The Post's architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, cannot hold back his revulsion: The leader as builder is an ancient idea, older than the Egyptian pyramids, older than the great public monuments of Rome, older than Emperor...

The OAFPOTUS today destroyed the East Wing of the White House, which he does not own. This reminded long-time observers of the time in 1980 when he destroyed historic frescoes that he promised not to destroy with the grace and maturity of a toddler. He has changed quite a bit since then, but unfortunately only through age-related dementia and probably myriad other cognitive problems we'll find out about 20 years from now. The constant firehose of awful things coming from him and his droogs also now...

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...

So many things passed through my inbox in the last day and a half: The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that an assistant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was observed over the weekend discussing plans over Signal with an aide to Reichsminister Stephen Miller to send the 82nd Airborne to Portland. Paul Krugman breaks from his usual economics beat to lambast the OAFPOTUS and his Reichskabinett der Nationalen Rettung for the horrifying ICE raid* on a Chicago apartment building last week: "What do we learn...

Tomorrow is, quite unexpectedly, October. Though the official temperature at O'Hare has not hit 32°C since August 16th, our weather has remained stubbornly summer-like. The 16-day forecast suggests the weather will continue as far as the model can predict, and may see 32°C as early as this weekend. That will make my Friday plans a bit more challenging as my Brews & Choos buddy has gotten over Covid and we're all set to walk to Lake Bluff then. For my part, I am experiencing a very rare side effect of...

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...

Rosh Hashana begins in just a few hours. To celebrate, let's sing! Corruption, corruption! Corruption!Corruption, corruption! Corruption! Who, day and night, has got his tiny hands out?Reaching for a pay-out, raking in the cash?And who keeps on whining, every day he's whining,"I'm the real victim here!" The POTUS, OAFPOTUS! Corruption!The POTUS, OAFPOTUS! Corruption! Who must know the way to break a proper law,A needed law, a settled law?Who must shred all precedent and end the law,So billionaires can...

The OAFPOTUS sued the New York Times in the Middle District of Florida on Monday. It only took until this morning for Senior US District Judge Stephen Merryday to throw it out: Judge Steven D. Merryday, of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, said the president’s 85-page complaint was unnecessarily lengthy and digressive. He criticized Mr. Trump’s lawyers for waiting until the 80th page to lodge a formal allegation of defamation, and for including, ahead of it, dozens of “florid...

In the day since a yet-unknown sniper assassinated far-right activist Charlie Kirk, people across the political spectrum have reacted with anger and horror. Most--at least, from the center-right to the center-left--decried the violence itself, even when they found Kirk's politics reprehensible: Former presidents Biden, Obama, Bush, and Clinton soundly condemned the killing, with Obama posting, "We don't yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable...

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...

The Christianists in Florida, clearly getting bribes from Big Microbe, have ended the requirement that students get vaccinated in order to attend public schools: Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, made the announcement on Wednesday alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican. Mr. DeSantis rose to national prominence during the coronavirus pandemic, and over time he has espoused increasingly anti-vaccine views. “Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body?” Dr. Ladapo, a...

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) social media team have decided that white Christianist nationalism is the way to go: If you mashed together a Vietnam War epic with a Christian end-times movie, what might emerge is one of the recent social media videos produced by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In early July, the department posted a minute-long short showing agents in tactical gear bathed in eerie red light — among them, Homeland Secretary Kristi L. Noem — piling into a...

The only thing Illinois governor JB Pritzker said this afternoon that I quibble with is that Stephen Miller is a "complicit lackey*:" * Pritzker has the relationship wrong; Miller is no more a lackey than Goebbels was. The OAFPOTUS just doesn't care what Miller does as long as Miller delivers the goods.

My friends just dropped Butters off, and so far she hasn't complained too much after a bit of whining when they left. I'm sure she's going to find the next hour objectionable when I take Cassie for a half-hour walk after I take Butters around the block. Since Cassie walks about 3x as fast as Butters, it's possible both walks will take 30 minutes. Meanwhile, I commend to you Julia Ioffe's latest observations on "the art of getting played," in which she breaks down how the OAFPOTUS and US Special Envoy...

I have a chunk of work to do this afternoon, but I'm hoping I can sneak in some time to read all of these: Dan Rather cheers on the Democratic Party for finally finding the fight. Francis Fukuyama says: move over Berlusconi; the Clown Prince of X has done considerably more to harm Western civilization than you ever did. David Daley puts responsibility for the exploding fight over Congressional maps squarely on US Chief Justice John Roberts. Jennifer Rubin wants us to stop using the word "guarantee" when...

Even though I put aside Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism for the moment because it was just too depressing, I do still think about the ongoing destruction of the United States from within. Over the weekend I realized that one way the billionaire class have approached their accelerating theft of our collective wealth is to attack the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. By undermining the lowest two levels, physiological needs and safety needs, they render entire communities unable even to...

The OAFPOTUS met with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, yesterday. I can't overstate that Putin won on so many levels, from getting the OAFPOTUS to agree to meeting on US soil in the first place to getting the OAFPOTUS to stomp on a rake on international television right at the end of it. Let's start with the location. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin that most ICC signatories have said they will honor. We're not signatories, in part because...

The OAFPOTUS has moved to federalize the Washington, D.C., police force under the DC Home Rule statute that gives him a little more than a month to do so before Congress has to consent. As with many of his more dramatic trolls, this has sent everyone to the left of Mitch McConnell into varying degrees of outrage. Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort warn that the "military crackdowns are only going to get worse:" The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end...

Former Chicago Opera Theater artistic director Lidya Yankovskaya, with whom I have worked several times, has started moving to London because she doesn't want her children to grow up in the anti-humanities environment the United States is becoming: “I want to be sure that my children can grow up feeling like they can always express themselves freely. I want my children to live in a society that really takes care of its people. I want my children to live in a world that really values things like the...

If you've ever played Snakes & Ladders (Chutes & Ladders in the US) with a small child, or really any game with a small child, you have probably cheated. Of course you have; don't deny it. Everyone knows letting the kid win is often the only way to get out of playing again. It turns out, Japan last week and the European Union this week both demonstrated mastery of that principle while negotiating "trade deals" with the world's largest toddler: [I]f the US-EU trade relationship was more or less OK last...

Historian Timothy Ryback, writing in The Atlantic, takes us through a short history of a not-so-long-ago German Chancellor's war with his country's apolitical civil service: A memorandum was circulated to all state civil servants demanding blind loyalty to the Hitler government. Anyone who did not feel they could support Hitler and his policies, [future war criminal Hermann] Göring added, should do the “honorable” thing and resign. The Berliner Morgenpost observed that Hitler was clearly working to...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ has passed 32°C (with a 42°C heat index!) and it keeps going up. Welcome to the summer heat advisory season, with 30 million hectares of maize corn sweating to our west. Speaking of an uncomfortable atmosphere, the OAFPOTUS and his droogs have had a bad couple of days, which they responded to by making everyone else's days bad as well. First, on yesterday the US Court for the District of New Jersey declined to allow acting US Attorney Alina Habba (whom...

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...

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...

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...

Starting today's link round-up is a report that Deerfield, Ill.—based Walgreens Boots (the pharmacists/chemists, not footwear) shareholders have voted to sell out to a private-equity firm, which no doubt will destroy the company to extract every morsel of short-term value from it. Oh, well, the local CVS is closer than the local Walgreens. In other fun news: Josh Barro hypothesizes that Democrats will actually have trouble running on the recently-passed Republican tax bill because of the timing and...

Cassie had a solid night of post-anesthesia sleep and woke up mostly refreshed. The cone still bums her out, and the surgery bill bums me out, but at least she's walking at close to her normal speed. She gets her stiches out—and her cone off—two weeks from today. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Very stupid people have allowed measles, which we functionally eliminated from the US in 2000, to infect close to 1300 people this year. Jennifer Rubin argues that the Department of Homeland Security...

As promised, here's a roundup of some reactions to the tax bill with the infantile name that the Senate passed yesterday with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. The Economist: "Despite Mr Trump’s talk of helping the least well-off, the bill’s biggest beneficiaries would be the rich. Analysis of the House version by scholars at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that Americans earning less than $16,999 would lose about $820 a year—a 5.7% reduction in median income for that group....

I'll get to the ABBA—sorry, OBBBA—reactions after lunch. Right now, with apologies, here is a boring link dump: The Clown Prince of X is in the "finding out" phase, learning what happens to oligarchs who cross autocrats. Adam Kinzinger calls out the bribe that Shari Redstone's Paramount/CBS agreed to pay the OAFPOTUS to settle a bogus libel lawsuit stemming from a 2020 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. After the US and Israeli attacks on Iran temporarily shut down Internet...

What a day for right-wing Republicans! Early this morning they managed to pass the OAFPOTUS's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" through the Senate, with every Democrat and three Republicans (Rand Paul, KY; Thom Tillis, NC; Susan Collins, ME) voting against it, forcing Vice President Vance to get out of bed before 6am: Vice President JD Vance cast the tiebreaking vote for the measure, which would extend trillions of dollars in tax cuts from Trump’s first term and implement new campaign promises — such as...

New York City adopted Ranked-Choice Voting before the 2019 Democratic mayoral primary, and they got Eric Adams—their least-popular mayor in decades—out of it. Since ranked-choice voting was supposed to reduce the likelihood of electing an extremist, this was a surprising result. Fortunately New Yorkers have had a few years to get the hang of ranked-choice, so in this year's Democratic primary, they won't make that mistake again, right? Oh, bother. The extreme leftist won. With incumbent Eric Adams...

Inner Drive Technology World HQ hit 34.3°C yesterday afternoon and only cooled down to 25.7°C by 6 this morning. As we do on hot days, Cassie and I started our long walk just before 7am, doing exactly 5 km in 50 minutes while the temperature (and dewpoint) rose a full degree. Fortunately, it looks like a much-anticipated cool front went through just after 10. I wouldn't know; I've been in meetings. So I'm about to take Cassie out again before the thunderstorms hit. I might even have time later today to...

We live in the weirdest era of the past 150 years. It's so weird, I agree with almost everything former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) said about Iran today: Let’s call this what it is: Iran has been in a slow-burn war against the United States for decades. Whether through Hezbollah, Shiite militias in Iraq, or direct attacks on oil infrastructure and U.S. assets, the Iranian regime has made its hostility clear. And they've never hidden their intentions. From “Death to America” chants in Tehran...

Earlier I mentioned Cassie and I had a fun weekend with lots of outdoor time. Unfortunately, the weekend wasn't as much fun for others: Contrasting the 5-million-plus No Kings demonstrators across the country with the desultory turnout to the Army's 250th birthday parade that the OAFPOTUS co-opted, Norman Eisen concludes that the OAFPOTUS "is a lousy dictator." The OAFPOTUS, disappointed that he didn't get loads of goose-stepping troops carrying his photo like the DPRK army on parade, predictably threw...

A smattering of stories this morning show how modern life is both better and worse than in the past: A criminologist at Cambridge has spent 15 years working on "murder maps" of London, Oxford, and York, showing just how awful it was to live in the 14th Century: "The deadliest of the cities was Oxford, which he estimated to have a homicide rate of about 100 per 100,000 inhabitants in the 14th century, while London and York hovered at 20 to 25 per 100,000. (In 2023, the most recent year for which data is...

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...

First, an update on Cassie: her spleen and lymph cytology came back clean, with no evidence of mast cell disease. That means the small tumor on her head is likely the only site of the disease, and they can pop it out surgically. We'll probably schedule that for the end of June. I have had an unusually full calendar this week, so this afternoon I blocked off three and a half hours with "No Meetings - Coding." Before I dive into finishing up the features for what I expect will be the 129th boring release...

On some days, I have more meetings than others. Today was a more extreme example, with meetings for 6 of the 8½ hours I put in. Somehow I also managed to read some documentation and get some other things accomplished. I also can't say that any of the meetings was a waste of time, either. Welcome back to management. Unfortunately, that meant I could only put these stories in a queue so I can read them now: William Finnegan wonders if he or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi "Dead Puppies" Noem is...

The OAFPOTUS is blatantly selling pardons now: [Paul] Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election, submitted a pardon application to President Trump around Inauguration Day. The application focused not solely on Mr. Walczak’s offenses but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago. Ms. Fago had raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her...

Today's theme—in fact, almost every day's theme on the Daily Parker lately—is a group doing one thing that freaks everyone out to distract from the other thing that they really want to do. For instance: In the middle of passing the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in American history, Republicans are lying about the plight of the working class being all Obama's fault. Because of course they are, and of course it isn't. Even though the OAFPOTUS is attacking Harvard to take attention away...

First, there is no update on Cassie. She had a quick consult today, but they didn't schedule the actual diagnostics that she needs, so we'll go back first thing Tuesday. She does have a small mast cell tumor on her head, but the location makes her oncologist optimistic for treatment. I'll post again next week after the results come back from her spleen and lymph node aspirations. Meanwhile, in the real world, things lurch forward and backward as the OAFPOTUS's political trajectory slides by millimeters...

I encountered a couple of head-scratchers in today's news feeds. They seem like parodies but, sadly, aren't. Exhibit the first: Former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss (Cons.—South West Norfolk), who got tossed from office in less time than it takes for a head of lettuce to rot because of her disastrous mismanagement of the UK economy, has an op-ed in today's Washington Post praising the OAFPOTUS and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for the "herculean task ahead of them in turning around the U.S. economy and...

As Crash Davis said to Annie Savoy all those years ago: A player on a streak has to respect the streak. Well, I'm on a coding streak. This week, I've been coding up a storm for my day job, leaving little time to read all of today's stories: Despite (or perhaps because of) his obvious mental illness and dementia, the OAFPOTUS is really a predictable negotiator who our adversaries have figured out how to manipulate easily. Voters may not like the OAFPOTUS, but they don't like us either. Still, the...

I had a lot going on today, so I only have a couple of minutes to note these stories: Not only is the OAFPOTUS's "new" (actually quite well-used) Qatari Boeing 747-8 a huge bribe, it will cost taxpayers almost as much as one of the (actually) new VC-25B airplanes the Air Force is currently building, as it completely fails to meet any of the requirements for survivability and security. (“You might even ask why Qatar no longer wants the aircraft," former USAF acquisitions chief Andrew Hunter said. "And...

Cassie and I walked 14 km yesterday, giving her almost 3 hours of walks and 8 hours continuously outside with friends (including Butters). The walk included a stop at Jimmy's Pizza Cafe. (It's possible Cassie got a bit of pizza.) She's now on the couch, fast asleep. I would also like to be on the couch, fast asleep, but it is a work day. I also wish some of the people in today's stories were asleep on the couch instead of asleep at the switch: The Qatari government has offered the OAFPOTUS a naked bribe...

Cincinnati mayor Aftab Pureval (I) will face Republican Cory Bowman in the November election after the two won 83% and 13%, respectively, of yesterday's primary vote. Bowman is the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance, whose endorsement of Bowman appears to have led to Pureval's enormous vote total. When you're the least-popular vice president in history, no one wants your endorsement, dude. Also, today is the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender to the Allies in Reims, France. What that has...

Radley Balko, who has spent his career examining police policy and law-enforcement mission creep, elucidates the latest authoritarian trolling from the White House: Donald Trump says he wants to “unleash” the police. The [latest executive order] is more virtue signaling than policy — more an expression of Trump’s mood than a serious proposal. And, when it comes to conventional crime, Trump’s mood is right where it’s always been: fearful, demagogic, and perpetually stuck in 1988. The key term in the...

The world has rightly reacted in horror to the OAFPOTUS's self-defeating tariff regime. But as economists Paul Krugman and Bobby Kogan point out, the tariffs are distracting us from the even more horrific Republican budget proposal: PAUL KRUGMAN: So, it’s been a pretty amazing hundred days, but almost all of my focus has been on tariffs and other things like DOGE and all of that. But meanwhile, there's a much more sort of conventional Republican plan of huge tax cuts and big benefit cuts. There is a...

Happy May Day! In both the calendar and crashing-airplane senses! We start with two reports about how the Clown Prince of X has taken control over so much government data that the concepts of "privacy" and "compartmentalization" seem quaint. First, from the Times: Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured. DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration — the likes of...

...and it's Star Wars trivia tonight at Spiteful Brewing, so I'll just have to save some links to read tomorrow: Matt Bai shakes his head at the Clown Prince of X nakedly cashing in on the trade war. Yascha Mounk says the OAFPOTUS "has a genuine mandate," but can't get past his own narcissism and grievances to use it. Jennifer Rubin agrees, saying "doubling down with a pair of deuces isn't a winning strategy." Jeff Maurer shares his thoughts on the OAFPOTUS's "first hundred years in office." Former US...

We start this morning with news that US Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), for whom I voted all 5 times he ran for Senate, will not run for re-election in 2026. He turns 82 just after the election and would be 88 at the end of the term. I am very glad he has decided to step aside: we don't need another Feinstein or Thurmond haunting the Senate again. In other news: Vice President JD Vance outlined a proposal to reward Russia for its aggression by giving it all the land it currently holds in the...

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...

Michael Tomasky takes the educated-elite-leftist view that, somehow, the OAFPOTUS actually bamboozled 77 million voters—twice: How many times did Trump say he’d end that war on the first day of his presidency? It had to have been hundreds. I saw a lot of those clips on cable news over the weekend, as you may have. He did not mean it figuratively. You know, in the way people will say, “I’ll change that from day one,” and you know they don’t literally mean day one, but they do mean fast. But that isn’t...

The American Revolutionary War began 250 years ago today when Capt John Parker's Minutemen engaged a force of 700 British soldiers on the town green in Lexington, Mass. Just over a year later, England's North American colonies declared their independence from King George III with a document that you really ought to read again with particular focus on the King's acts that drove the colonists to break away. It was almost as if they believed having a temperamental monarch with worsening mental-health...

The era between the end of World War II and now is an aberration in world history. At no other time have so many people enjoyed a middle-class existence, with most—at least in the OECD and adjacent countries—able to afford all of life's necessities, like a house, decent health care, adequate nutrition, and leisure time. This general prosperity is what people like the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X want to end, and for no other reason than they want more for themselves. The unprecedented attack on...

Before I go through the stories from the last day about how we live in the stupidest timeline, here's a photo of the Milwaukee Intermodal Station I snapped heading to my return train on Friday: Elsewhere in the stupidest timeline, where maximizing corruption is the defining goal of the Republican Party: James Fallows takes us through Harvard's big "fuck you" to the OAFPOTUS's demands that the university install minders in its HR and academic departments, as does Josh Marshall. Jennifer Rubin reminds...

I may have dodged a virus this week, though I'm not 100% sure yet. I have a lot more confidence in my health than the world has in the OAFPOTUS, however. And the news today doesn't change that at all: Radley Balko, tongue firmly in cheek, satirizes the Republican Party in a way I will not spoil for you. (His takedown of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, made me guffaw.) Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's irrational and malignantly stupid attack on the very things that made America great in...

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...

With the total acquiescence of the Republican majority in Congress (only Congress has the power to impose tariffs, really), the OAFPOTUS has exceeded everyone's expectations with yesterday's tariff announcement, solidifying himself as the stupidest person ever to hold the office: Mr. Trump’s plan, which he unveiled on Wednesday and is calling “reciprocal,” would impose a wave of tariffs on dozens of countries. The European Union will face 20 percent tariffs, but the heavier levies will fall on countries...

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...

Having the morning free, and having a lot of cool air and sun, I took a quick stroll around Nashville. I'll have more later, but for now, here's the Tennessee State Capitol, apparently under construction: Of course, since the Tennessee General Assembly has a well-Gerrymandered 75-24 Republican majority, I would expect they're actually deconstructing the Capitol. But whatever. I also passed by Riverfront Station, the downtown terminus of Nashville's adorable little 6-times-a-day toy commuter train: It...

Before getting to the weather, I don't anticipate any quiet news days for the next couple of years, do you? Someone who owns at least 16 rooms and condos in the OAFPOTUS's Wabash Ave. building in downtown Chicago has sued, alleging that—wait for it—the organization running the building is bilking investors. I mean, how preposterous! Speaking of corruption flowing from the OAFPOTUS like toxic waste from a Union Carbide plant, Molly White mourns the end of SEC oversight of the crypto industry. Former US...

When the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X turned their attention to the Environmental Protection Agency this week, it hit Chicago almost immediately: President Donald Trump this week ordered closures of offices at the Environmental Protection Agency that help low-income communities overwhelmed with pollution. It’s unclear how many positions will be cut in Chicago, but union officials estimate it may affect 20 to 30 of the roughly 1,000 EPA regional employees. Most significantly, the order ends a...

It seems Elon Musk tanking Tesla's brand value may lead to some very bad consequences for him and for the car company he pretends to run: Donald Trump transformed the White House into a car dealership to save Elon Musk’s floundering Tesla stock—to keep him from defaulting on his massive loans. Trump took a shot at being a shady car salesman Tuesday during a press event for Tesla at the White House. The president posed for photos behind the wheel of a Tesla he apparently can’t drive with a grinning Musk...

After our gorgeous weather Sunday and Monday, yesterday's cool-down disappointed me a bit. But we have clear-ish skies and lots of sun, which apparently will persist until Friday night. I'm also pleased to report that we will probably have a good view of tomorrow night's eclipse, which should be spectacular. I'll even plan to get up at 1:30 to see totality. Elsewhere in the world, the OAFPOTUS continues to explore the outer limits of stupidity (or is it frontotemporal dementia?): No one has any idea...

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...

It's entirely possible that I will have something to post about the OAFPOTUS's self-dealing almost every one of the next 1,417 days. One hopes not, however. I mean, we only have 608 more days until the next election! Jeff Maurer starts today's update with his take on the laughable proposal for the United States Government to buy cryptocurrency: The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the...

James Fallows highlights how the OAFPOTUS and Clown Prince of X have put their own enrichment ahead of public safety in ways that will be hard to miss: In aviation, almost everything about safety is tied to the weather. Likely turbulence, which has caused some recent fatalities. Locations and likelihood of “airframe icing,” which was a cause of the Colgan crash in Buffalo back in 2009. Gusty crosswinds and wind-shear, very low cloud layers, and so many more factors that affect when and where planes can...

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....

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...

By yesterday evening I managed to import all the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency country place data through the Bs. This morning, I couldn't get to the NGIA website. All right, sometimes these things happen. No biggie. Yet, knowing a little about how the OAFPOTUS and Clown Prince Elon have operated the last 30 days, I did some digging. And I discovered yet another example of how imbecilic these infants are. Simply: someone has removed the agency from the Internet. All DNS records for the agency...

Punzun Ltd. (an Illinois corporation doing business as Inner Drive Technology) turns 25 today! I set up the corporation before I moved back to Illinois from New York, so that I could take either a contract or full-time job when I got here. I can scarcely believe I've been back nearly 25 years. And 25 years ago—this was months before Bush v Gore, remember—I would not have believed that these would be the news stories I'd care about in 2025: The unelected winger specifically tasked with destroying our...

Winter ends two weeks from tomorrow, but climate science and meteorology can only study nature, not command it. That explains why, despite ample sunshine, the temperature at IDTWHQ has stayed around -7°C since it leveled out this morning, and promises to shed another 8-10 degrees tonight. Then we're in for a few blasts of cold interspersed with warm days and some snow here and there for about a week before it consistently warms up. Elsewhere in the cold, cold world: The Senate confirmed the unqualified...

The OAFPOTUS's principal motivation has always been self-enrichment. He has scammed and grifted his whole life, though he sucks at it so hard he managed to burn through so much of his inheritance that he'd have been better off stuffing it in a savings account. So it should come as no surprise that the first few weeks of his second term have seen remarkable gifts to other grifters and scammers worldwide, not to mention our adversaries: Yesterday, he pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the first Illinois governor...

Josh Marshall explains the significance of the NIH funding directive that the OAFPOTUS took out with the trash last night: I think it’s a combination of two things. One is anti-COVID research payback, combined with a general hostility to scientific expertise culture and a general and not-incorrect belief that the kinds of people who work in these institutions are mainly not friendly to Trumpism. Basically, it’s seen as a body blow to blue-state and -city culture. Combined with this is a more structural...

Topping the link round-up this afternoon, my go-to brewery Spiteful fears for its business if it has to pay a 25% tariff on imported aluminum cans. If the OAFPOTUS drives Spiteful out of business for no fucking reason I will be quite put out. In other news: Timothy Noah reads Jean Piaget to learn more about the OAFPOTUS's "infantile incapacity to grasp the mechanics of cause and effect," suggesting that his reasoning is more transductive, like a 3-year old's ("taking a nap causes the afternoon" ~=~ "DEI...

Wednesday night saw the worst air-transport crash in the US in 19 years. The National Transportation Safety Board won't have a preliminary report until at least March 1st, but that didn't stop the OAFPOTUS from blaming everyone he doesn't like for it: In the aftermath of the deadly collision between a jetliner and a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan National Airport, Trump held an extraordinary news conference during which he speculated on the cause of the accident. At length, he attacked former...

I had a delightful 2-hour lunch with a friend I've not seen in a while, after a morning of non-stop meetings. I also updated a piece of software that gets deployed tomorrow. I've got about 20 minutes now to jot down all of the things I hope to read later today: An Army helicopter on a training flight collided with an American Airlines CRJ on approach to DCA last night, killing 64 people; the OAFPOTUS blamed black folk. (I'm not kidding, he really did.) Paul Rosensweig explains how the flurry of orders...

I don't necessarily agree with everything Nate Silver wrote in his analysis from last week, but he makes a some excellent points: Biden hadn’t delivered the complete repudiation of Trump that polls — showing a massive 8.4-point popular vote lead — had been projecting. That’s why the election took four long days to call. Biden’s popular vote (4.5 points) and Electoral College (306-222) margins had been perfectly solid, and the migration of Georgia and Arizona into the blue column had enhanced its visual...

The good news is that there will be a different President in only 1,461 days. The bad news is that we could have up to 1,460 days of the Once Again Fucking POTUS before he finally goes away. His second inaugural address—the longest in modern history—made his first one sound like an ASMR video: The 47th president’s 29-minute address on Monday, just after noon, painted an even bleaker portrait of a country in disarray, one seized by “years of a radical and corrupt establishment,” with the pillars of...

We've gotten about 4 cm of snow so far today, with more coming down until this evening. Cassie loves it; I have mixed feelings. At least the temperature has gone up a bit, getting up to -0.6°C for the first time since around this time on Monday. Elsewhere: Federal Judge Aileen Cannon (R-SDFL) got overruled again, this time after her corrupt effort to block Special Counsel Jack Smith from releasing his report on January 6th. George Will bemoans Congress ceding so much of its authority to the office of...

The OAFPOTUS probably didn't care one whit about the compromise spending bill Congress looked set to pass earlier this week, and probably didn't understand how difficult it was for the tiny Republican majority to pass it knowing they'd need Democratic votes in the Senate. Worlds-griftiest-man Elon Musk didn't care either, which didn't stop him from throwing a grenade into the Speaker's office and putting the government at risk of shutting down in (checks watch) 9½ hours. I won't say much more except to...

The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime. Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these: Andrew Sullivan shakes his head at "the dumb luck" of the OAFPOTUS. On David Roberts' podcast, Dan Savage muses on "blue America in the age" of the OAFPOTUS....

Before I link to anything else, I want to share Ray Delahanty's latest CityNerd video that explores "rural cosplaying." I'll skip directly to the punchline; you should watch the whole thing for more context: Elsewhere, Josh Marshall implores people, one more time, stop giving the OAFPOTUS head space when he says dumb shit. Fareed Zakaria marvels at how weak Russia has become. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) continues the long tradition of high-ego, low-skill politicians completely failing at their...

First, Andrew Sullivan makes a very good, nuanced point about President Biden pardoning his son: A consensus of sorts has emerged among historians. Little abuses of power in the Roman system slowly multiplied, as rival factions exploited loopholes, or made minor adjustments, for short-term advantages. And so, for example, the term-limits of consuls — once strictly limited to two years in order to keep power dispersed — were gradually extended after the first breach, which set a precedent for further...

Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.) Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era: Adam Gray (D) has defeated US Representative John Duarte (R) in California's 13 district, bringing the House of Representatives to its final tally of 210 Democrats and 215 Republicans. An assassin shot and killed...

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...

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...

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...

I'm visiting family in the Bay Area today, staying in California for about 38 hours. I leave tomorrow morning early, so I'm back at the charming Dylan Hotel in Millbrae, right by the BART and CalTrain. If you held a gun to my head (or put $10 million in my bank account) and forced me to move to Silicon Valley, I might choose here. It's 40 minutes to my family in San Jose and 25 minutes to downtown San Francisco, for starters. And the Brews & Choos Project works just as well around the Bay as it does in...

You've heard the expression "crossing the Rubicon," but you may not know the history. In the Roman Republic, the Rubicon marked the border of Italy (read: the Home Counties/Eastern Seaboard), where it was illegal to garrison troops. In 49 BCE, Julius Caesar ran out of lawful ways to—wait for it—avoid prosecution for corruption stemming from his first term as Consul, and the Senate denied him the governorship of Cisalpine Gallus (read: the Midlands/the Midwest) which would have also granted him immunity....

In a decision that literally no one liked (except the XPOTUS's re-election campaign), Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos killed the Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris last week. As of today, the Post has lost 200,000 subscribers—about 10% of them—and Bezos has responded to his critics: Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements...

The Post has more details about the pagers that the Mossad blew up, injuring thousands of Hezbollah terrorists: As an act of spy craft, it is without parallel, one of the most successful and inventive penetrations of an enemy by an intelligence service in recent history. But key details of the operation — including how it was planned and carried out, and the controversy it engendered within Israel’s security establishment and among allies — are only now coming to light. The idea for the pager operation...

I can scarcely believe I took these 10 days ago, on Friday the 20th. I already posted about my walk from Borough Market back to King's X; this is where I started: You can get a lovely snack there for just a few quid. In my case, a container of fresh olives, some bread, and some cheese set me back about £6. Next time, I'll try something from Mei Mei. Later, I scored one of the rare pork baps at Southampton Arms. Someone else really wanted a bite, too: Sorry, little guy, I can't give you any of this—oh...

Other than having absolutely no real value except to scammers and thieves, cryptocurrency has no real value. But a lot of money gets laundered through crypto these days, so people will spend gobs of real currency building data centers to generate more cryptocurrency. These data centers efficiently dump nearly all the externalities of crypto mining onto their neighbors, except for the externalities crypto already dumps on just about everybody else. Oh, don't let me forget that simulated artificial...

The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week. I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things: Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina)...

Last weekend, California governor Gavin Newsom (D) announced that the San Francisco-San Jose heavy commuter rail line had entered the late 19th century (in a good way): On Thursday, the California High-Speed Rail Authority named its new CEO, Ian Choudri – and today, Choudri joined Governor Gavin Newsom in San Francisco to help celebrate the debut of Caltrain’s new electrified train fleet that will transform rail service in the Bay Area and play a key role in California’s high-speed rail system. The...

Jennifer Rubin adds her voice to the growing chorus warning that the XPOTUS doesn't seem to have even a full Euchre deck: Trump seems unable to handle reality. His opponent is beating him by multiple metrics, especially crowd size. In response, he posted several obvious lies on Truth Social, claiming that “nobody was there” and that photos and video of Vice President Kamala Harris’s crowds were AI-generated (our own reporters were eyewitnesses to the event). Trump might be conditioning voters for...

One of my co-workers and I got into a good-natured debate about the efficiency of my Prius Prime. In addition to boasting that I used no gasoline at all last month (and only 41.6 L—11 gallons—all year), I pointed out that Illinois gets a majority of its power from nuclear fission, so yes, my car is net-positive on carbon emissions. He challenged me on that, saying that Illinois uses a lot of coal and natural gas, obviating the benefits of my car's electric drive. Well, the New York Times has a really...

Watch how new UK Leader of the Opposition Rishi Sunak (Cons.-Richmond and Northallerton) used his first Question Time with new UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (Lab.-Holborn and St Pancras) last Wednesday: Sunak's Conservative Party suffered the worst electoral loss of any party since before World War I to Starmer's Labour Party. A month ago Sunak sat where Starmer sits today, and vice-versa. And Sunak knows that just about every policy he cares about will end under the new Labour government, while he...

The last 48 hours have no precedent in US politics. People have only just started to absorb what it means for President Biden to drop out of the election and Vice President Harris to take his place (which she has almost certainly done, based on delegate counts--and the endorsements of both the House Minority Leader and Senate Majority Leader). No polling data released before Thursday will have captured any of that. I will say, however, that I feel so much better about the election than I did Sunday...

Lots of stories in the last day: Are we about to see a historic change at the top of the Democratic ticket? What's the connection between vice-president nominee JD Vance (R-OH) and Hulk Hogan? Or between JD Vance and Faust? Or between JD Vance and your menstruation cycle? The City of Chicago has approved tearing down the Eamus Catuli building on Waveland. We actually had 25 tornados on Monday. Twenty five. Finally, comic genius and Chicago native Bob Newhart has died at age 94. He was a national treasure.

A few hours ago, HM King Charles III invited Sir Keir Starmer (Lab) to become his Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, and form a government in his name: Keir Starmer has said the “sunlight of hope” is now shining in Britain again as Labour won a landslide UK election victory, bringing a crushing end to 14 years of Conservative rule. Labour had won 411 seats, while the Conservatives were on just 119, with five left to declare by 9.30am. The government’s likely majority is set to be about 170...

The UK general election is going on right now. UK law prohibits editorializing or publishing poll results while polls are open. The major exit polls will come out at 22:00 BST (4pm Chicago time), at which point I will be madly refreshing The Guardian. For now, if you live in the UK, just vote. No matter which way it goes, I'll still visit.

I'm about to leave the office for the next 4½ days. Happy Independence Day! And who could forget that the UK will have a general election tomorrow? To celebrate, the Post has a graphical round-up of just how badly the Conservative Party has screwed things up since taking power in 2010: There’s a widespread feeling among voters that something has gone awry under Tory government, that the country is stagnating, if not in perilous decline. Nearly three-quarters of the public believes that the country is...

Apparently everyone else got over Covid yesterday, too. Or they're just trying to make deadline before the holiday: Peter Hamby pulls the fire alarm after reading a leaked polling report showing President Biden's support slipping in key states after last week's debate catastrophe. Constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe fumes that yesterday's decision on presidential immunity "reveals the rot in the system." Ruth Marcus simply calls the Republican majority on the Court "dishonorable." In her dissent in...

Cassie and I have gone on two walks today, the first for 3.2 km and the second for 4.25 km, despite the really uncomfortable 26°C dewpoint. I mean, it's really gross out there. Fortunately because of the way dogs get rid of excess heat, it didn't bother her as much as it bothered me—the air is only 28°C, after all. But we both felt a lot better when we got back to my air-conditioned house. (Fun fact: my thermostat is set for 25°C, but the dewpoint inside is closer to 15°C which makes all the...

Yes, President Biden is old, but he doesn't want to recreate the world of Victor Hugo. The Republican Party does, and this morning, they showed how they'll do it. The debate last night did not fill me with joy, as it showed my guy looking like the 82-year-old great-grandfather he is, and showed the convicted-felon other guy looking like the 78-year-old con artist he is. I may come back to this train wreck for democracy later today, but for now, I'd rather focus on why the President's geriatric...

I'm trying to get home a little earlier than usual, so this will be a lazy post. Stuff to read: Hillary Clinton, who has debated both President Biden and the convicted-felon XPOTUS, has thoughts on tomorrow night's event. Dana Milbank doesn't mourn Rep. Jamaal Bowman's (D-NY) loss last night, and neither do I. If you hate corporations, you might want to support President Biden's increase to the corporate income tax as well as to his proposed increase in the share-buyback tax. The village of Wheaton...

Lunchtime link roundup: Dr Daniela J Lamas of Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston evaluates how age has affected President Biden and the convicted-felon XPOTUS, given that whoever wins in November has a high probability of being the oldest serving US President in history. Israel's highest court ruled that the IDF can, in fact, draft all the religious nutters who have avoided doing anything for the benefit of society since the country was founded. Perhaps this will help the country's crushing...

I woke up at my usual time this morning, noticed how dark it was, checked radar, and got Cassie out the door less than 10 minutes later. Because by the time I had her to day camp and got myself to the Metra platform, it looked like this: Waiting for the train, I got this: But what luck, it let up just as the train arrived. The photo doesn't do it justice: those are horizontal rain bands, and I was standing behind a window. By the time I got down to Ogilvie, we had this: Again, just a bit of light rain...

As I mentioned after lunch, a lot of other things crossed my desk today than just wasted sushi: Politico reports the results of its latest poll, which, contra many pundits, shows a marked decline in the convicted felon XPOTUS's popularity following his 34 felony convictions. NPR describes what it's like living through a 50°C day in Delhi, India. Fully 83% of the union representing WBEZ-FM and Chicago Sun-Times employees voted "no confidence" in Chicago Public Media CEO Matt Moog. New York Magazine...

Tom Nichols says it's past time to quit disregarding the convicted-felon XPOTUS's disordered mental state: For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a...

The last three days—i.e., the first three days of Summer—have shown us most of the weather we can expect this season. It rained most of Saturday, yesterday we had cool, sunny, and eminently walkable weather, and today it's hot and sticky with thunderstorms on the way. At least Cassie and I got to spend most of yesterday outside. In other news: David French argues that Justice Sonia Sotomayor's (I) recent opinion defending the National Rifle Association "reinforced the constitutional wall of protection...

I took Cassie out at 11am instead of her usual 12:30pm because of this: The storm front passed quickly, but it hit right at 12:30 and continued for half an hour with some intensity. It'll keep raining on and off all day, too. Other things rained down in the past day or so: Robert Wright points out the obvious, warning that the XPOTUS was (and would be again if re-elected) way, way worse than President Biden on Gaza. Jennifer Rubin points out the obvious, echoing the warnings of Republican...

I usually spend the first day or two of a sprint researching and testing out approaches before I start the real coding effort. Since one of my stories this sprint requires me to refactor a fairly important feature—an effort I think will take me all of next week—I decided to read up on something today and have wound up in a rabbit hole. Naturally, that means a few interesting stories have piled up: The Presidential Greatness Project released its annual list of, well, presidents, putting Lincoln at the...

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (Cons., Richmond-Yorks) has gone to His Majesty and requested to dissolve Parliament, calling for an election on July 4th: Rishi Sunak has called a surprise general election for 4 July in a high stakes gamble that will see Keir Starmer try to win power for Labour after 14 years of Conservative-led government. Addressing the nation outside Downing Street, Sunak said it was “the moment for Britain to choose its future” as he claimed the Tories could be trusted to lead the...

Today my real job wraps up Sprint 109, an unexciting milestone that I hope has an unexciting deployment. I think in 109 sprints we've only had 3 or 4 exciting deployments, not counting the first production deployment, which always terrifies the dev team and always reminds them of what they left out of the Runbook. The staging pipelines have already started churning, and if they uncover anything, the Dev pipelines might also run, so I've lined up a collection of stories from the last 24 hours to keep me...

Cassie got a bad result from the lab yesterday: a mild giardia infection. It's a good-news, bad-news thing: The bad news, obviously, is that she can't go to day camp (meaning I can't spend a full day in my downtown office) for at least a week. The good news is that she's mostly asymptomatic, unlike the last guy. So we just went to the vet again, got another $110 bill for dewormer. But at least she wasn't crated for three hours with her own diarrhea. Poor Parker. In other good news, bad news stories...

Columnist Thomas Friedman, who identifies himself as "a hardheaded pragmatist who lived in Beirut and Jerusalem, [and] cares about people on all sides," finds American campus protests troubling because they're missing the larger context and workable goals: In short: I find the whole thing very troubling, because the dominant messages from the loudest voices and many placards reject important truths about how this latest Gaza war started and what will be required to bring it to a fair and sustainable...

Angry Staffer, one of the last remaining informative Twitter accounts, had this yesterday: Gen Z: WE DEMAND A CEASEFIRE!Biden: I want that too. Blinken: I’m working on that right now. Trump: Israel has to finish the problem. FINAL SOLUTION!!Biden: no, that’s wrong. Civilians must be protected. Hamas: we aren’t releasing the hostagesIsrael: we aren’t going to stop bombing Gen Z: that’s it. I can’t vote Biden. — Angry Staffer 🌻 (@Angry_Staffer) May 2, 2024 Sigh.

I'll lead off today with real-estate notices about two houses just hitting the market. In Kenilworth, the house featured at the end of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles can be yours for about $2.6 million. If you'd prefer something with a bit more mystique, the Webster Ave. building where Henry Darger lived for 40 years, now a single-family house, will also soon hit the market for $2.6 million. (That house is less than 300 meters from where my chorus rehearses.) In other news: Tina Nguyen warns about the...

Yesterday, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in Johnson v Grants Pass, Ore., the result of a 2018 lawsuit against the rural Southern Oregon town (pop. 39,000) for imposing fines of up to $1250 for the heinous crime of sleeping in public. Naturally, the usual suspects seem to think that's just fine: Kelsi Brown Corkran, representing the challengers, argued that because Grants Pass defines a “campsite” as anywhere a homeless person is, within the city, with a blanket, it is “physically impossible for a...

Credit: Nick Tyrone (@NicholasTyrone)

I'm heading off to a Euchre tournament in a bit. I haven't played cards with actual, live people in quite some time, so I just hope to end up in the middle of the pack. Or one perfect lay-down loner... A guy can dream. When I get home, I might have the time and attention span to read these: John Grinspan looks at the similarities and crucial differences between the upcoming election and the election of 1892. Andy Borowitz jokes about the latest of Robert F Kennedy's conspiracy theories: that his own...

Attorney Liz Dye teams up with Legal Eagle to explain that the smell emanating from the Truth Social merger and meme stock listing is exactly what you think it is: So if the XPOTUS gets re-elected, the shares become an intravenous emoluments delivery mechanism; if not, he can cash out and pay his legal bills. I wonder if I can short it...

I'm almost done with the new feature I mentioned yesterday (day job, unfortunately, so I can't describe it further), so while the build is running, I'm queuing these up: Philip Bump analyzes the New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan's dismissal of the XPOTUS's bogus immunity claim. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D) told reporters he's done everything he promised to do when he took office a year ago, at which point the reporters no doubt collectively cocked their eyebrows. Molly White doesn't think...

For Reasons, we have the dress rehearsal for our Saturday performance on Saturday. That means poor Cassie will likely go ten hours crossing her paws between the time I have to leave and when I'm likely to get back. Fortunately, she should be exhausted by then. Tonight's dress rehearsal for our Sunday performance won't put her out as much, thanks to Dog Delivery from my doggy day care. Still, I'd rather have a quiet evening at home than a 3-hour rehearsal and an hour-long car trip home... Meanwhile, in...

The weather forecast for Munich doesn't look horrible, but doesn't look all that great either, at least until Saturday. So I'll probably do more indoorsy things Thursday and Friday, though I have tentatively decided to visit Dachau on Thursday, rain or not. You know, to start my trip in such a way that nothing else could possibly be worse. Meanwhile, I've added these to yesterday's crop of stories to read at the airport: Deciding to be "stabbed, to live to see another day," the Republican-controlled...

As I'm trying to decide which books to take with me to Germany, my regular news sources have also given me a few things to put in my reading list: Jamelle Bouie points out that the XPOTUS "owns Dobbs and everything that comes with it." A group of app users have sued the company that owns Tinder and Hinge for predatory business practices. Tyler Austin Harper reviews Molly Roden Winter's memoir about polyamorous life, and concludes polyamory "is the result of a long-gestating obsession with authenticity...

With the news this morning that Ukraine has disabled yet another Russian ship, incapacitating fully one-third of the Russian Black Sea fleet, it has become apparent that Ukraine is better at making Russian submarines than the Murmansk shipyards. Russia could, of course, stop their own massive military losses—so far they've lost 90% of their army as well—simply by pulling back to the pre-2014 border, but we all know they won't do that. In other news of small-minded people continuing to do wastefully...

In light of the report from special counsel Robert Hur that James Fallows calls "tendentious," Republican pollster and Lincoln Project member Stuart Stephens wonders why Democrats don't crow more loudly about all that President Biden has actually accomplished: A plea to my Democratic friends: It’s time to start calling Joe Biden a great president. Not a good one. Not a better choice than Donald Trump. Joe Biden is a historically great president. Say it with passion backed by the conviction that it’s...

Another sprint has ended. My hope for a boring release has hit two snags: first, it looks like one of the test artifacts in the production environment that our build pipeline depends on has disappeared (easily fixed); and second, my doctor's treatment for this icky bronchitis I've had the past two weeks works great at the (temporary) expense of normal cognition. (Probably the cough syrup.) Plus, Cassie and I have a houseguest: But like my head, the rest of the world keeps spinning: A 3-judge panel on...

Between the Dobbs decision allowing states to enforce or enact medieval restrictions on women's rights, an estimated 59,000 pregnancies resulted from rapes in states where women could no longer terminate them: A new study estimates that more than 64,000 pregnancies resulted from rape between July 1, 2022, and January 1, 2024, in states where abortion has been banned throughout pregnancy in all or most cases. Of these, just more than 5,500 are estimated to have occurred in states with rape exceptions—and...

A few months ago a Chicago Parking Enforcement Agent (PEA) tried to give me a ticket while I was paying for the parking spot online. I kept calm and polite, but I firmly explained that writing a ticket before I'd even finished entering the parking zone in the payment app might not survive the appeal. Yesterday I got another parking ticket at 9:02pm in a spot that has free parking from 9pm to 9am. The ticket actually said "parking expired and driver not walking back from meter." Note that the parking app...

A weather pattern has set up shop near Chicago that threatens to occlude the sun for the next week, in exchange for temperatures approaching 15°C the first weekend of February. We've already had 43 days with above-normal temperatures this winter, and just 12 below normal during the cold snap from January 13th through the 22nd. By February 2nd, 84% of our days will have had above-normal temperatures since December 1st. Thank you, El Niño. Though I'm not sure the gloominess is a fair exchange for it....

Ctrl+W closes the active browser window, you see. I meant to type the word "Wade" in italics but somehow hit the Ctrl key instead of the Shift key. There may be some irony there. Possibly the warmth has addled my brain? It's just gone above freezing for the first time since the wee hours of January 13th. It's also gloomy and gray, but those things go together. Anyway: Today is the 51st anniversary of the US Supreme Court's decision in Roe v Wade. Michael Tomasky wants to know why the press seem to...

Twenty years ago today, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) showed enthusiasm for his 3rd-place finish in the Iowa Caucuses in a way he came to regret: Conventional wisdom says that this scream tanked (see what I did there?*) his campaign, but really, Dean never had the momentum or following needed to win the nomination. Plus, President Bush had taken us to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and with common sense in Iraq, so war hero John Kerry looked like the best person to challenge him. I can't...

I don't usually do link round-ups on Saturday mornings, but I got stuff to do today: Josh Marshall is enjoying the "comical rake-stomp opera" of Nikki Haley's (R-SC) primary campaign. The Economist pokes around the "city" of Rosemont, Ill., a family-owned fiefdom less than 10 km from Inner Drive Technology World HQ. The New York Times highlights the most informative charts they published in 2023. The Chicago Tribune lists some of the new Illinois laws taking effect on Monday. My favorite: Illinois will...

Due to an odd combination of holidays, a use-it-or-lose-it floating holiday, and travel, I'm just about done with my first of four short work-weeks in a row. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Of course, since I would like to finish the coding problem I've been working on before I leave today, I'll have to read some of these later: Josh Marshall thinks it's hilarious and pathetic that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), realizing she can't win against a Democrat in her own district, said she'll run in...

As I wait for my rice to cook and my adobo to finish cooking, I'm plunging through an unusually large number of very small changes to a codebase recommended by one of my tools. And while waiting for the CI to run just now, I lined these up for tomorrow morning: Michael Tomasky calls former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who has left the House and scampered back to California, "the most incompetent House Speaker of all time." (No argument from me.) Former GOP strategist, lawyer, and generally sane...

May your solstice be more luminous than these stories would have it: Chicago politician Ed Burke, who ruled the city's Finance Committee from his 14th-Ward office for 50 years, got convicted of bribery and corruption this afternoon. This has to do with all the bribes he accepted and the corruption he embodied from 1969 through May of this year. New Republic's Tori Otten agrees with me that US Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is the dumbest schmuck in the Senate. (She didn't use the word "schmuck," but it...

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has died. Of course every news outlet has an obituary, but Spencer Ackerman's in Rolling Stone pretty much nails it—"it" being a nail in Kissinger's coffin: Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. McVeigh, who in...

Tomorrow I have a quick trip to the Bay Area to see family. I expect I will not only continue posting normally, but I will also research at least two Brews & Choos Special Stops while there. Exciting stuff. And because we live in exciting times: The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has charged an Indian national with a murder-for-hire scheme in which our "friend" the Government of India put out a hit on a Sikh activist living in our country. The US Dept of Defense has released its...

Ah, Tricky Dick, you were far worse than a crook: For context, Woodward and Bernstein had only just started investigating Watergate, and he still hadn't gotten us out of Vietnam. But good thing he reassured us he didn't do anything illegal.

I have tickets to a late concert downtown, which means a few things, principally that I'm still at the office. But I'm killing it on this sprint, so it works out. Of course this means a link dump: The XPOTUS has a hate-hate relationship with life. After a damning ethics report, Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has announced he won't run again, which is too bad because it would have been an easy D pickup. Speaking of Republicans in Congress, why do they behave like adolescent boys all the time? Israel is seeing...

I hope to make the 17:10 train this evening, so I'll just note some things I want to read later: Monica Hesse can't help making fun of the dude-bros in the US Senate who think they're still in middle school. Guess which party they're in? Julia Ioffe interviews National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Last night I finished Jake Berman's The Lost Subways of North America, and this morning I read Veronica Esposito's (positive) review for The Guardian. I recommend this book too. The New Republic interviews...

Despite the XPOTUS publicly declaring himself a fascist (again), the world has other things going on: Josh Marshall plots out how House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) knows he has to pass a budget that Democrats can stomach, but because he still has to placate the extreme right wing of his party, he's pretending he can pass something else. And the clown show continues. The US Supreme Court has published their new ethics rules, which look a lot like a subset of the rules the rest of the Federal courts have...

We have unusual wind and sunshine for mid-November today, with a bog-standard 10C temperature. It doesn't feel cold, though. Good weather for flying kites, if you have strong arms. Elsewhere in the world: The right wing of the US Supreme Court has finally found a firearms restriction that they can't wave away with their nonsense "originalism" doctrine. Speaking of the loony right-wing asses on the bench, the Post has a handy guide to all of the people and organizations Justice Clarence Thomas (R) and...

We've switched around our RTO/WFH schedule recently, so I'm now in the office Tuesday through Thursday. That's exactly the opposite of my preferred schedule, it turns out. So now Tuesdays feel like Mondays. And I still can't get the hang of Thursdays. We did get our bi-weekly build out today, which was boring, as it should be. Alas, the rest of the world wasn't: The XPOTUS has vowed revenge on everyone who has wronged him, pledging to use the US government to smite his enemies, as if we needed any more...

I'm still thinking about propaganda in the Gaza war, but I'm not done thinking yet. Or, at least, not at a stopping point where a Daily Parker post would make sense. That said, Julia Ioffe sent this in the introduction to her semi-weekly column; unfortunately I can't link to it: The absolutely poisonous discourse around this war, though, has taken all of that to a whole other level. The rage, the screaming, and the disinformation, ahistoricity, the anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the propaganda—all of...

We officially had our first freeze last night as the temperature at O'Hare dipped to -1°C. At Inner Drive Technology World HQ it only got down to 0.1°C, barely above freezing, but still cold enough to put on ear muffs and gloves taking Cassie to day camp this morning. It'll warm up a bit this weekend, though. Meanwhile, I'm writing a longer post about propaganda, which I may post today or tomorrow. And that's not the only fun thing happening in the world, either: Ukraine has had a lot of success blowing...

I'm iterating on a UI feature that wasn't 100% defined, so I'm also iterating on the API that the feature needs. Sometimes software is like that: you discover that your first design didn't quite solve the problem, so you iterate. it's just that the iteration is a bit of a context shift, so I'm going to read for about 15 minutes to clear my head: Kevin Philips, whose 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority laid out Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" and led to the GOP's subsequent slide into...

I could have worked from home today, and probably should have, but I felt well enough to come in (wearing an N95 mask, of course). It turned that I had a very helpful meeting, which would not have worked as well remotely, but given tomorrow's forecast and the likelihood I'll still have this cold, Cassie will just have to miss a day of school. I have to jam on a presentation for the next three hours, so I'll come back to these later: Alex Shephard says this is the week Twitter finally went totally evil....

A rainy cold front passed over Inner Drive Technology WHQ just after noon, taking us from 15°C down to just above 10°C in two hours. The sun has come back out but we won't get a lot warmer until next week. I've had a lot of coding today, and I have a rehearsal in about two hours, so this list of things to read will have to do: Mother Jones's Russ Choma thinks the XPOTUS doesn't really want to win his fraud trial. Robert Wright interviewed Brown University professor Lyle Goldstein, late of the US Naval...

Other things actually happened recently: Slate's Sarah Lipton-Lubet explains how the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the US Supreme Court keep allowing straw plaintiffs to raise bullshit cases so they can overturn laws they don't like. Julia Ioffe, who has a new podcast explaining how Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's upbringing as a street thug informs his foreign policy today, doesn't think the West or Ukraine really need to worry about Robert Fico's election win in Slovakia. Chicago Transit...

The reactions to yesterday's defenestration of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) share a particular theme I can't quite put my finger on: Aaron Blake foresees more chaos, particularly for McCarthy's successor. Dana Milbank foresees more chaos, particularly for the Republican Party. Josh Marshall foresees more chaos, particularly for the so-called Problem-Solvers Caucus. The Economist foresees more chaos, particularly around funding for Ukraine. Ronald Brownstein foresees more chaos...

Somehow, it's already the end of September. I realize this happens with some predictability right around this time of year, but it still seems odd to me. Of course, most of the world seems odd these days: As we careen into the 4th Republican-caused government shutdown in the last 30 years, we might want to reflect on the fact that only 68,000 people elected the 8 clowns most responsible for this year's bullshit. New York Times editorial board member Alex Kingsbury wants people to keep top of mind the...

It's only Wednesday? Sheesh... The Writers Guild of America got nearly everything they wanted from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (i.e., the Astroturf organization set up by the big studios and streamers to negotiate with the Guilds), especially for young writers and for hit shows, but consumers should expect more bundling and higher monthly fees for shows in the future. Josh Marshall suspects that the two competing storylines about the XPOTUS (that he's about to return to...

New York Supreme Court (i.e., trial court) judge Arthur Engoron ruled yesterday that the XPOTUS's eponymous family business committed fraud on such a scale that the company is no longer allowed to do business in New York State: The surprising decision...is a major victory for Attorney General Letitia James in her lawsuit against Mr. Trump, effectively deciding that no trial was needed to determine that he had fraudulently secured favorable terms on loans and insurance deals. Ms. James has argued that...

Another Tuesday, another collection of head-shaking news stories one might expect in the waning days of an empire: Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau (Lib-Papineau, QC) formally accused the government of India of assassinating a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. Paul Krugman traces the road from Mitt Romney to MAGA. Jonathan Last accuses "Meet the Press" of acting like 2016 never happened. Police in Birmingham, Ala., Tased a band director for not ending the band's song a minute early as ordered....

Even though the United States Constitution prohibits the US or the States from issuing titles of nobility, the longing for lifetime honors still exists in certain status-conscious professions. Politicians, probably more than any other group of people, fit that description. Despite the desire of every SES2 to retain his or her title long after being fired by the under-secretary just above in rank, really only three offices of the United States confer a lifetime title, and only by custom, not by statute...

A few of them have come home or are en route: Cato Institute scholar Clark Nelly says the XPOTUS "is toast," as the deranged wannabe fascist (my words) won't be able to stop himself from lying to the Georgia jury on live TV. Speaking of crazy old people, author Michael Beckley backs away slowly from the historical implications of having two septuagenarian dictators aging along with their nuclear stockpiles loose in the world. The Marion County, Kan., prosecutor has filed a motion to have all the Marion...

The XPOTUS continuing to get indicted for trying to steal the 2020 election wasn't the only bit of authoritarian fuckery this week: Constitutional law professor Deborah Pearlstein wonders, as do many other people, why so many of the XPOTUS's mooks are lawyers. Nicholas Grossman can't figure out why the media spend so much time trying to understand the populist right when Biden got millions more votes than the other guy. The Marion, Kan., police department raided the town newspaper and seized its...

Not Just Bikes shows the difference between places and non-places in ten short minutes: Fortunately the part of Chicago where I live has a sense of place that he'd recognize, but you have to cross a stroad (Ashland to the east, Western to the west, Irving Park to the south, Peterson to the north) to get to another place like this. I also can't help but think that a new culture will arise in a couple of millennia that will look at "the great American roads" as something to emulate. Maybe the Romans had...

I think I finally cracked the nut on a work problem that has consumed our team for almost three years. Unfortunately I can't write about it yet. I can say, though, that the solution became a lot clearer just a couple of weeks after our team got slightly smaller. I will say nothing more. Just remember, there are two types of people: those who can infer things from partial evidence. Just a few articles left to read before I take Cassie on her pre-dinner ambulation: Titanic director James Cameron, who has...

I'll elaborate on this later, but I just want to list a couple of things I desperately want for my country and city during my lifetime. For comparison, I'm also listing when other places in the world got them first. For context, I expect (hope?) to live another 50 years or so. Universal health care, whether through extending Medicare to all residents or through some other mechanism. The UK got it in 1948, Canada in 1984, and Germany in 1883. We're the only holdout in the OECD, and it benefits no one...

Pro Publica reported this morning that Justice Sam Alito (R-$), who authored the Court's decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization that essentially (and I hope temporarily) undid Roe v Wade, spent some QT in Alaska with a billionaire and did not report this junket to the Court's ethics watchdog: In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and...

The US and the UK share a common language, a common legal tradition, and a common scourge of right-leaning political parties trying to destroy anything that the government does better than private industry. Despite over a century of evidence that many public services are natural monopolies, and therefore will provide poor quality at inflated prices whenever personal profits get involved, the electorates of both countries keep believing the lie that "industry does it better." That's why 13 years of...

Former UK Prime Minister and professional circus clown Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Cons.—Uxbridge and South Ruislip) resigned his seat in Parliament this week ahead of a damning all-parties report recommending he be suspended for 90 days: The death certificate for Boris Johnson’s career in politics read June 12th. A government statement appeared that evening appointing Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as “Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern”, the title MPs accept, according...

Dr Aaron Carroll of Indiana University studied five other rich-country health systems to figure out what we need in the US: We are one of the few developed countries that does not have universal coverage. We spend an extraordinary amount on health care, far more than anyone else. And our broad outcomes are middling at best. When we do pay attention to this issue, our debates are profoundly unproductive. Discussions of reform here in the United States seem to focus on two options: Either we maintain the...

I've just read the indictment against the XPOTUS and his "body man" Walt Nauta. Wow. As a FBI agent in The West Wing once remarked, "In 13 years with the Bureau I've discovered that there's no amount of money, manpower or knowledge than can equal the person you're looking for being stupid." And wow, was the XPOTUS stupid. I'm not a practicing lawyer but I can read an indictment. If the US Attorneys can prove any of these facts—and I have no doubt they will—he's going to get convicted of a felony. Oddly...

Just a few stories I came across at lunchtime: In an act that looks a lot like the USSR's scorched-earth retreat in 1941, Ukraine accuses Russia of blowing up the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnieper River, which could have distressing follow-on effects over the next few months. A former Chicago cop faces multiple counts of perjury and forgery after, among other things, claiming his girlfriend stole his car to get out of 44 separate speeding tickets. James Fallows explains what probably happened to the Citation...

Thanks in part to Conservative Party mismanagement of the UK transport sector for the last 13 years, things have gotten a bit fraught in the Old Country. And now, I get to spend a bit of extra time getting from Gatwick to my hotel on Saturday: The Gatwick Express takes about 30 minutes from the airport to London Victoria Station. There is no other train option. Instead, it looks like I can take a cab straight to my hotel for about £90, or a bus to bloody Heathrow and the Elizabeth Line for about £25....

On this day in 2000, during that more-innocent time, Beverly Hills 90210 came to an end. (And not a day too soon.) As I contemplate the void in American culture its departure left, I will read these articles: Anna Nemtsova rubs her hands in glee along with Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelinsky in watching the Kremlin's worst fears about Ukraine come true. Henry Grabar blames the killing of Jordan Neely on conservatives' willful failure to address homelessness and mental illness for the last 50 years....

The Daily Parker began as a joke-of-the-day engine at the newly-established braverman.org on 13 May 1998. This will be my 8,907th post since 1998 and my 8,710th since 13 November 2005. And according to a quick SQL Server query I just ran, The Daily Parker contains 15,043,497 bytes of text and HTML. A large portion of posts just curate the news and opinions that I've read during the day. But sometimes I actually employ thought and creativity, as in these favorites from the past 25 years: Old Man...

If you haven't got plans tonight, or you do but you're free Sunday afternoon, come to our Spring Concert: You can read these during the intermission: The National Association of Government Employees has sued President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen—both of whom they support politically—to force the Administration to ignore the debt ceiling. Sci-fi author Ted Chiang, in a brutal essay, suggests a metaphor for AI: think of it "as a management consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey &...

Tomorrow, King Charles III and Queen Camilla will hold their coronation in London. Matt Ford says it's all fun and games until someone loses a Parliament: Charles’s ascent is not important because he actually has a divine right to reign over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and roughly a dozen other countries. Nor is it important because Harry is attending without Meghan in either a brave stand against his abusive family or a rude snub of his well-intentioned father. The British...

James Fallows contrasts the behavior of octogenarians US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and President Joe Biden: It boils down to this: —Sometimes what helps an individual hurts a larger cause. Things have come to that point for Senator Dianne Feinstein. —Sometimes it works the other way, and an individual’s interests are aligned with a cause. I believe that applies to Joe Biden’s announcement that he is running for a second term. Feinstein staying on, at age 89, increases problems for her party. Biden...

Justice Clarence Thomas (R) began his lifetime tenure to the United States Supreme Court with the help of some old men who knew their behavior towards their subordinates would get them in trouble if they held Thomas accountable for his deplorable behavior towards Anita Hill. Since confirmation, Thomas has become more like himself, as the saying goes. In 1991 he was an arrogant, contemptuous middle-aged man who assumed anyone criticizing him or his behavior had a mental deficiency. Ah, but how much he's...

The City of Lights has done a mitzvah for its citroyens, essentially banning cars from the city center in part by providing real alternatives: French planners got a later start than their American counterparts. Before Paris could be carved up by expressways, resistance mounted over the familiar objections that also characterized highway revolts in the United States: destruction, displacement, pollution, the oil crisis. These protests were nested in a trio of nascent trends: the rise of environmentalism...

I've had a bunch of tasks and a mid-afternoon meeting, so I didn't get a chance to read all of these yet: Fifty years ago today, United States combat troops left South Vietnam. The DC foreign policy elite have grown impatient for President Biden to articulate a clearer policy on Ukraine. The Post has a fascinating story of a Russian spy who posed as a Brazilian student to get into Johns Hopkins, but got arrested when he tried to take a new job at the International Criminal Court using his fake identity....

Lebanon has one of the most chaotic political systems in the world. The previous government presided over a massive ammonium nitrate explosion they could have prevented had any one person in government taken responsibility for removing a derelict Russian freighter. Once again, the Lebanese government has displayed head-shaking incompetence, this time on what seems like a minor matter but could lead to more religious unrest as hot weather combines with people not eating or drinking water during the day....

After having the 4th-mildest winter in 70 years, the weather hasn't really changed. Abnormally-warm February temperatures have hung around to become abnormally-cool March temperatures. I'm ready for real spring, thank you. Meanwhile... ProPublica reports on the bafflement inside the New York City Council about how to stop paying multi-million-dollar settlements when the NYPD violates people's civil rights—a problem we have in Chicago, for identical reasons—but haven't figured out that police oversight...

Media reports, including the XPOTUS's own social-media posts, suggest the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York will issue an historic indictment on Tuesday: The Manhattan district attorney's office is expected to issue criminal charges against Trump in a case centering on a payment that Michael Cohen, Trump's attorney and fixer at the time, made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential election. Cohen told CNN Thursday that he believed an indictment...

Twenty years ago today, the United States invaded a neutral country that hadn't taken a shot at us for over a decade. This had predictable results for the region, including making our long-time adversary Iran a major player: The invasion “was the original sin,” said Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow for Middle East security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think tank. “It helped Iran bolster its position by being a predator in Iraq. It’s where Iran perfected the use of...

I'm in Phoenix for my company's Tech Forum, where all the technology professionals come together for a few days of panel discussions and heavy drinking networking events. This morning's lineup, including the keynote speaker, emphasized to me the dangers in the United States' declining ability to teach kids English and history. I will have more details later, but for now I'll mention these three things. First, if you show the ubiquitous graph of the growing gap between productivity and wages that the US...

Perhaps the first day of spring brings encourages some spring cleaning? Or at least, revisiting stories of the recent and more distant past: The Navy has revisited how it names ships, deciding that naming United States vessels after events or people from a failed rebellion doesn't quite work. As a consequence, the guided missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville (CG-62, named after a Confederate victory) will become the USS Robert Smalls, named after the former slave who stole the CSS Planter right from...

Chicago mayoral candidate and Fraternal Order of Police endorsee Paul Vallas blames "hackers" for his own choices to use a weak password and not to use multi-factor authentication on his Twitter account: Mayoral candidate Paul Vallas on Friday blamed unnamed hackers for his Twitter account liking offensive tweets over the past several years as he faced criticism from rival candidates over the social media posts. The comments came after a Tribune review this week found that Vallas’ Twitter account...

Let's start with combat-actor Jill Bearup explaining how the Netflix-ITV-BBC ban on corsets solves entirely the wrong problems: Meanwhile, in the modern world: The National Transportation Safety Board reported that an axle on the 23rd car of the train that derailed in East Palesine, Ohio, had a bearing temperature 140°C over normal—which is 30°C over "critical." The crew were trying to stop the train when the bearing failed. Perhaps if the train had fewer cars, or more crew, or the proper braking...

I see a connection between all of these. First, the city has accepted six proposals to convert office buildings on LaSalle Street to apartments. I used to work in one of them, so that should be interesting. These will go through community review, and will cost over $1 billion, but could bring almost 2,000 apartments to the Loop. Second, Zurich Re and Motorola have separately sued the Chicago suburb Schaumburg, Ill., one of the most dismal suburban hellscapes I've ever seen, to get the $100 million in...

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing. While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company: US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who even people who love her wonder if...

I finished a couple of big stories for my day job today that let us throw away a whole bunch of code from early 2020. I also spent 40 minutes writing a bug report for the third time because not everyone diligently reads attachments. (That sentence went through several drafts, just so you know.) While waiting for several builds to complete today, I happened upon these stories: The former co-CEO of @Properties bought 2240 N. Burling St., one of the only remaining pre-Fire houses in Lincoln Park, so...

It got practically tropical this afternoon, at least compared with yesterday: Cassie and I took advantage of the no-longer-deadly temperatures right at the top point of that curve to take a 40-minute, 4.3 km walk. Tomorrow should stay as warm, at least until the next cold front comes in and pushes temperatures down to -18°C for a few hours Thursday night. I'm heading off to pub quiz in a few minutes, so I'll read these stories tomorrow morning: London plans to build an elevated rails-to-trails park...

The sun finally came out around 3:30 this afternoon, as a high overcast layer slid slowly southeast. Of course, the temperature has fallen to -11°C and will keep sliding to -18°C overnight, but at least the gloom has receded! January will still end as the gloomiest ever, however, with around 18% of possible sunshine all month, plus whatever we get tomorrow. Meanwhile, I want to come back to these articles later: Radley Balko points out that giving hyper-aggressive cops less oversight and a...

Time is funny. On this day, 90 years ago, radio station WXYZ in Detroit began a serial called "The Lone Ranger," written by Fran Striker, who had probably never seen Texas or a Native American person in his life. When I read that this morning, it struck me that the radio audience in Detroit had living memory of the closest historical analogue to the entirely-fictional Lone Ranger character. Deputy US Marshall Bass Reeves served from 1875 to 1907, retiring just 26 years before the radio show started. So...

Two writers in the Times looked at two different aspects of the Conservative party's ongoing vandalism to the United Kingdom. First, David Wallace-Wells tracks the post-Brexit economic declines: By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one. On the...