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I feel a little chagrined today as I expect to release the new version of The Daily Parker this evening, and yesterday I failed to write even a cursory post. I blame meetings and a very long dentist appointment (I'm fine; still no cavities; but the new dentist patient intake took a while). I also didn't have any time to read these: Brian Beutler outlines a workable plan for getting rid of the Schutzstaffel Immigration and Customs Enforcement permanently. Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's threats...

It looks like our above-normal temperatures will continue probably through the end of the year, but the next few days look nuts: And yet, the weather isn't nearly as nuts as the OAFPOTUS and his administration: The Times reports that White House Budget Director Russel Vought is pushing to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research, because it's the premier climate research center in the world and Vought is a climate-change-denying tool. Francis Fukuyama thinks the OAFPOTUS is losing steam, and...

I'll be in tonight's Ear Taxi Festival performance at Harris Theater in Millennium Park, singing Damien Geter's African American Requiem. I'm really enjoying the piece. Even though our call time (1:30pm) makes it impossible to participate in the No Kings demonstration happening just 400 meters away from the concert venue, I think the chorus are doing their parts as Geter's message is relevant to the day. If you're in Chicago, come for the demonstration and stay for the concert! If you're not in Chicago...

(Update: I've chased down some of Layne's sources and I am not convinced that they entirely support her conclusions about what has caused the degradation of Americans' reading skills. The Daily Parker is ever-evolving.) ProPublica reported this morning that the OAFPOTUS has stocked the Department of Education with Christian nationalists who want to end public schooling and redirect our taxes to private interests. OK, maybe they're not all Christian nationalists; maybe some of them are just grifters...

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...

I just read the Rev. Rob Schenck's essay in Mother Jones explaining, from his perspective as an evangelical minister who only recently came out of his stupor in the Christianist right wing, how Christianists could follow a man like the OAFPOTUS. The tl;dr is that evangelical Christians tend to believe the craziest shit because, at root, they believe the craziest shit. The essay reminded me of two things: this joke, and Robert Heinlein's observation that "a religionist, having accepted certain...

With my PTO cap continuing to force me into Friday afternoons off this summer (the horror!), and the sunny but (smoky 23°C) weather, Cassie and I will head to the Horner Park DFA just as soon as I release a new version of Weather Now in just a few minutes. When Cassie and I come back, I'll spend some time reading all these nuggets of existential dread: The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised last 3 months of US jobs data down to basically nil (which Krugman blames on tariffs), prompting the OAFPOTUS to...

On this day 100 years ago, John Scopes went on trial for the crime of teaching a “theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals:” On July 10, the Monkey Trial got underway, and within a few days hordes of spectators and reporters had descended on Dayton as preachers set up revival tents along the city’s main street to keep the faithful stirred up. Inside the Rhea County Courthouse, the defense...

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...

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...

We've had a run of dreary, unseasonably cold weather that more closely resembles the end of March than the middle of May. I've been looking at this gloom all day: We may have some sun tomorrow afternoon through the weekend, but the forecast calls for continuous north winds and highs around 16°C—the normal high for April 23rd, not May 23rd. Summer officially starts in 10 days. It sure doesn't feel like it. Speaking of the gloomy and the retrograde: Former US judge and George HW Bush appointee J. Michael...

Sure, Brian De Palma had a great insight into what he called "the Chicago way," but not being from Chicago, he didn't grasp our true city motto: "Where's Mine?" The owners of 212 E. 141st Place in Dalton, a small house less than 2 kilometers from the Chicago city limits, are living up to the Chicago ideal. It turns out, the house just happens to be where Robert Prevost grew up. Prevost, who recently took the name Episcopus Romanus, Vicarius Iesu Christi, Successor principis apostolorum, Summus Pontifex...

Just queuing a few things up to read at lunchtime: From tavern-style communion pizza and Malört to the horrific discovery that the Pope is a White Sox fan, Chicagoans have gone nuts for Leo XIV. Catholics everywhere are finally safe from ketchup with their Eucharist. Former US Supreme Court Justice David Souter has died, aged 85. He "pulled a Brennan" by drifting left during his term on the court, much to the annoyance of the Republicans who elevated him. Political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way...

As a devout atheist, I'm not especially concerned with the election this afternoon of Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, though I am tickled he's a South Sider from Chicago. (Next up: Malort for communion!) I'm less tickled that about the "deal" that the US and UK have reached on trade as it appears to be nothing more than "concepts of a plan" that leaves in place a 10% tax on UK goods. As Krugman explains, Nobody knows what will eventually come out of it, but we can be sure of one thing: It won’t lead to...

Well, mixed, really. It turns out Cassie isn't entirely healthy, though at the moment she's fine and will remain so for a few years at least without intervention. (I'll get that sorted in a couple of weeks and explain more about it this weekend.) Also, there's all this crap: David Brooks argues that the OAFPOTUS's single strength—his audacity—can be turned into a weakness: "Lacking any sense of prudence, he does not understand the difference between a risk and a gamble. He does daring and incredibly...

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...

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...

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...

Cassie and I survived our 20-minute, -8°C walk a few minutes ago. For some reason I feel like I need a nap. Meanwhile: James Fallows remembers his old boss Jimmy Carter, and puts his presidency in perspective for the younger generations. Paul Krugman reminds the Republican Party that California contributes more to the country's GDP than any other state, so maybe cut the crap threatening to withhold disaster relief? ProPublica goes "inside the movement to redirect billions of taxpayer dollars to private...

Once again, in the aftermath of the OAFPOTUS's demented press conference yesterday, I need to remind everyone to ignore what he says and watch what he does. He's not as harmless as the guy at the end of the bar who everyone avoids talking to, but he's just as idiotic. Meanwhile, in the real world: Block Club Chicago interviewed Mayor Brandon Johnson in the wake of the City Council barely passing his 2025 budget by a vote of 27-23. Perry Bacon Jr. blames President Biden's overconfidence for the failures...

Once every seven years (on average), Christmas and New Year's Day fall on successive Wednesdays. Most other Christian holidays get around this problem by simply moving to the nearest Sunday. I guess the tradition of celebrating the church founder's birthday on a fixed day relates to birthdays taking place on fixed days. So we get Wednesday off from work this week because, well, that's the day tradition says he was born. This is, of course, despite a great deal of evidence in their own holy books that he...

The weather doesn't seem that great for a planned 15-kilometer walk through Logan Square and Avondale to visit a couple of stragglers on the Brews & Choos Project. We've got 4°C under a low overcast, but only light winds and no precipitation forecast until Monday night. My Brews & Choos buddy drew up a route starting from the east end of the 606 Trail and winding up (possibly) at Jimmy's Pizza Cafe. Also, I've joined BlueSky, because it's like Xitter without the xit. The Times explains how you, too, can...

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...

Seventy-five years ago today, George Orwell published 1984, a horrifying novel that gets closer to reality every day. Also on 8 June 1949, the FBI released a report naming acting stars and filmmakers "communists," kicking off a horrifying chapter in American history that gets closer to coming back every day. And yesterday, NASA astronaut Bill Anders died in a plane crash. You may not know who Anders was, but you've seen the photo he took on Christmas Eve 1968: By NASA/Bill Anders (Link) Public Domain...

Every other Tuesday we release software, so that's what I just did. It was so boring we even pushed the bits yesterday evening. In theory we always have a code-freeze the night before a release, but in fact we sometimes have just one more thing to do before we commit this last bit of code... And yet, the world outside keeps becoming less boring: Paul Krugman thinks President Biden should toot his own horn a bit more. Michelle Goldberg reminds us all that the XPOTUS meant "lock her up" literally: "A...

Oh, so many things: Ankush Khardori lays out how "the Alito scandal is worse than it seems." US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a former constitutional law professor, has a plan for how to get Justices Alito (R) and Thomas (R) to recuse themselves in any January 6th case. The non-disclosure agreement The Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt signed to work on the show recently expired, and wouldn't you know, he has tapes. Pass the popcorn. Matthew Yglesias describes his drift from left to center-left....

I just popped out for lunch. It's 17°C in the Loop with lots of sun, the kind of day when I wonder why I went back to the office. Summer begins Saturday. Ah, to be French and take an entire month off... This time of year has other features, many of which popped up in my various RSS feeds this morning: For the first time in his life, the XPOTUS finds himself waiting for a jury to decide whether he's a felon. In closing arguments yesterday, his attorney nearly got himself sanctioned on the spot for a...

The Chicago Dept of Transportation this morning removed and (they claim) preserved the "Chicago Rat Hole" on the 1900 West block of Roscoe St. in the North Center neighborhood. I admit, I never saw the Rat Hole in the flesh (so to speak), but I feel its absence all the same. Moving on: Three Republican Arizona state representatives voted with all 29 Democrats to repeal the state's 1864 abortion ban; the repeal now goes to the Arizona Senate. Monica Hesse reminds people who say it's sexist to advocate...

Through next weekend I'm going to have a lot to do, so much that I've scheduled "nothing" for the back half of next week going into our annual fundraiser on April 6th. I might even get enough sleep. I hope I have time to read some of these, too: Eileen O'Neill Burke has won the Democratic Party primary for Cook County States Attorney (called a District Attorney just about everywhere else), and is therefore the presumptive successor to outgoing CCSA Kim Foxx. Andrew Sullivan sees the XPOTUS hawking $59...

My Garmin watch thinks I've had a relaxing day, with an average stress level of 21 (out of 100). My four-week average is 32, so this counts as a low-stress day in the Garmin universe. At least, today was nothing like 13 March 2020, when the world ended. Hard to believe that was four years ago. So when I go to the polls on November 5th, and I ask myself, "Am I better off than 4 years ago?", I have a pretty easy answer. I spent most of today either in meetings or having an interesting (i.e., not boring)...

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...

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 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....

House Republicans have (finally) elected a Speaker, far-right Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), an election denier who tried to popularize the "independent state legislature" malarkey after the 2020 election: Elected to Congress in 2016, Mr. Johnson is the most junior lawmaker in decades to become speaker. He may also be the most conservative. An evangelical Christian, Mr. Johnson is the former chairman of the Republican Study Committee and sponsored legislation to effectively bar the discussion of sexual...

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...

The religious right's endless struggle to steal billions of dollars from American taxpayers to fund their own religious schools dovetails nicely with the penchant for right-wingers to steal millions of dollars from their own kind: In recent years, [conservative Christianist lawyer Michael Farris] has reached the pinnacle of the conservative legal establishment. From 2017 to 2022, he was the president and chief executive of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a powerhouse Christian legal group that...

Anti-abortion Republicans, having discovered by getting their asses handed to them in multiple referenda, that the majority of Americans don't want to ban the medical procedure, tried a new tactic in Ohio yesterday: make referenda impossible. They failed by a large margin: Ohio voters rejected a bid on Tuesday to make it harder to amend the State Constitution, according to The Associated Press, a significant victory for abortion-rights supporters trying to stop the Republican-controlled State...

While I fight a slow laptop and its long build cycle (and how every UI change seems to require re-compiling), the first day of the last month of summer brought this to my inbox: Who better to prosecute the XPOTUS than a guy who prosecuted other dictators and unsavory characters for the International Criminal Court? (In America, we don't go to The Hague; here, The Hague comes to you!) After the evidence mounted that Hungary has issued hundreds of thousands of passports without adequate identity checks...

New York Times columnist and former Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse summarizes the frightening success of the Religious Right under the Roberts court: Yes, democracy survived [the Supreme Court's 2022-23 term], and that’s a good thing. But to settle on that theme is to miss the point of a term that was in many respects the capstone of the 18-year tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts. To understand today’s Supreme Court, to see it whole, demands a longer timeline. To show why, I offer a thought...

Some stories to read at lunch today: The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the US Postal Service's requirement that a religiously observant letter carrier deliver packages on the Sabbath. Since Justice Alito (R$) wrote the opinion, I'll also have to read Justices Sotomayor's (I) and Jackson's (I) concurrence. Of course, as Josh Marshall predicted, the Court split along partisan lines in a decision that essentially abolishes affirmative action for college admissions, which will likely reverse the gains...

Televangelist and horrible person Pat Robertson has died, after a long career grifting true believers for billions: Rev. Robertson, the son of a long-serving U.S. congressman and senator from Virginia, was among the first evangelists to take religion out of the realm of private belief and into the secular arena of politics. In large part through his influence, the Christian right became a potent force in American politics and culture. Although he bristled at the term televangelist, Rev. Robertson was...

But for me, it was Tuesday: The Democratic National Committee has selected Chicago to host its convention next August, when (I assume) our party will nominate President Biden for a second term. We last hosted the DNC in 1996, when the party nominated President Clinton for his second term. Just a few minutes ago, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed suit in the Southern District of New York to enjoin US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) from interfering in the prosecution of the XPOTUS. Speaking of the...

The US Federal District Courts have 670 Article III judges (that is, Senate-confirmed, lifetime-appointed), almost all of them competent and conscientious jurists. They make mistakes sometimes, for which we have nine Circuit Courts of Appeals, and ultimately, the Supreme Court. In the entre history of the US, the US Senate has convicted only 8 Federal judges in impeachment trials, the most recent, Thomas Porteous for perjury, in 2010 XPOTUS appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk, of the Northern District of Texas...

I spent the morning going over an API for standards and style, which will result in an uncomfortably large commit before I leave the office today. I prefer smaller, more focused commits, but this kind of polishing task makes small code changes all over the place, and touches lots of files. So while I have my (late) lunch, I'm taking a break to read some news: Chicago's El got color-coded route designations 30 years ago today. No more Howard-Dan Ryan line; now it's the Red Line. Web hosting service...

Christopher Hitchens may have pissed off a lot of people, but I can't dispute the wisdom of that quote. And today, we have a story out of (where else?) Florida, where a fundamentalist Christianist college woke up and discovered that one of the King's Singers "openly maintained a lifestyle that contradicts Scripture:" The King’s Singers, a Grammy Award-winning British a capella vocal ensemble, announced Monday that their planned concert at Pensacola Christian College was abruptly canceled two hours...

Speaking of loathsome, misogynist creeps, former Bishop of Rome Joseph Ratzinger died this morning, as groundbreaking journalist Barbara Walters did yesterday. In other news showing that 2022 refuses to go quietly: The House Ways and Means Committee released the XPOTUS's tax returns for tax years 2015 through 2020, re-confirming his incompetence, malfeasance, and incompetence at malfeasance. One looks forward to the Justice Department's take on them. Pilot and journalist Jim Fallows digs into the...

Argentina just won the 2022 World Cup by lining up and taking free kicks at a French goalie in a fitting end to one of the most corrupt and deadly sporting events in history. At least the 2026 World Cup will take place in countries with (reasonably) strong institutions and existing infrastructure. All the expense, the hype, the scandal, the drama...and in the end, it came down to penalty kicks. It's like having track meet decided by guys jumping one hurdle at a time, or by putting a guy on 2nd base at...

I can't quite draw a line between all of these stories, but it feels like I should: Elon Musk suspended several top journalist's Twitter accounts last night while ranting about nonsense "assassination coordinates," making the money-losing media service less relevant by the day. The XPOTUS made a "major announcement" about...a hilariously pathetic NFT project that lost value within minutes of its release. Mazars—the only firm sketchy enough to do the XPOTUS's taxes—decided crypto firm Binance was just...

With only about a week of autumn left officially, we have some great weather today. Cassie is with her pack at day care and I'm inside my downtown office looking at the sun and (relative) warmth outside, but the weather should continue through Friday. What else is going on? A reader who remembers watching The Play live on TV sent a story about the statue the Bears erected to Keven Moen and unveiled last week. A new study ranks Asian and Scandinavian public-transit systems best in the world, with...

If Cassie could (a) speak English and (b) understand the concept of "future" she would be quivering with anticipation about going to Ribfest tonight after school. Since she can't anticipate it, I'll do double-duty and drool on her behalf. It helps that the weather today looks perfect: sunny, not too hot, with a strong chance of delicious pork ribs. Meanwhile, I have a few things to read on my commute that I didn't get to yesterday: Remember when psychiatrist Bandy Lee got shouted down when she warned...

A man attacked and seriously injured author Salman Rushdie at a lecture in upstate New York this morning: The author Salman Rushdie, who spent years in hiding and under police protection after Iranian officials called for his execution, was attacked and stabbed in the neck on Friday while onstage in Chautauqua, near Lake Erie in western New York, the state police said. The attack, which shook the literary world, happened at about 11 a.m., shortly after Mr. Rushdie, 75, took the stage for a lecture at...

Indiana sits at the "crossroads of America," interposing itself between Chicago and points east like that old racist yutz at the end of your block that you hope isn't sitting on his porch when you walk by. Yesterday, with much fanfare, they became the first state to ban almost all abortions after Dobbs, for many of the same reasons that they once declared pi to be equal to 22/7: Indiana became the first in the nation to sign new restrictions into law – stripping away a right afforded to Hoosier women...

So, what's going on today? Emma Green explains "how the Federalist Society won," which actually kept awake in the middle of the night on Tuesday. As a reminder that the true goal of the Federalist Society—and right-wing governments in general—is actually to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, the Times explains how Alabama's criminal justice system essentially creates indentured servants from impoverished inmates. David Jolly, Christine Todd Whitman, and Andrew Yang have formed a centrist...

Some fun facts about the Justices of the United States: Five were appointed by presidents who took office despite losing the popular vote. All 5 voted to overturn Roe. Three of the Republicans on the Court—the Chief Justice, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett—worked for President George W Bush's Florida recount team. The 52 senators who voted in favor of Justice Kavanaugh's (R) confirmation represent 145.9 million Americans. The 48 senators who voted against him represent 180.7 million. The 50 senators who...

Mark Thiessen took a victory lap in the Post this afternoon, congratulating himself and his fellow travelers for succeeding in their 50-year project to make abortions illegal in most of the US: Overturning Roe v. Wade has been the overarching, seemingly impossible goal of the pro-life movement for almost five decades. Now that it has finally been achieved, four words should be on the lips of every pro-life conservative today: Thank you, Donald Trump. Looking back on Trump’s chaotic presidency, some...

Chicago's official temperature last hit 38°C (100°F) on 6 July 2022, almost 10 years ago. As of 4pm O'Hare reported steady at 37°C (98°F) with the likelihood of breaking the record diminishing by the minute. At Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, we have 37.2°C, still climbing, but leveling off. In other hotness around the world: The Texas Republican Party published their new platform this week in a bold bid to return to the 19th Century, including seceding from the United States. Dana Milibank...

Yesterday I had a full work day plus a three-hour rehearsal for our performance of Stacy Garrop's Terra Nostra on Monday night. (Tickets still available!) Also, yesterday, the House began its public hearings about the failed insurrection on 6 January 2021. Also, yesterday was Thursday, and I could never get the hang of Thursdays. Walter Shapiro believes the January 6th committee might "have the goods." Slate's Dan Kois describes the efforts of L.A.'s Crosswalk Collective and the UK's Tyre Extinguishers...

Two stories that bear connecting. First: the Southern Baptist Convention found in an internal investigation that its leaders had covered up sexual assaults and other bad behavior throughout the hierarchy: The SBC is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, by far. It is the nation’s most powerful and influential evangelical denomination, by far. Its 14 million members help define the culture and ethos of American evangelicalism. Last June delegates, called “messengers,” to the SBC’s annual...

A day and a half after the unprecedented leak of Justice Alito's (R) draft opinion in Dobbs v Jackson, everyone and her dog has a reaction piece: David Von Drehle in the Post warns that Alito's arguments in Dobbs, if accepted as the final majority opinion, would imperil many other rights based on privacy law: "[S]hould Alito’s draft opinion be affirmed by the court’s majority, there will be little to prevent states from enacting limits [on contraception] if they wish. Women will have only as much...

Actually, it's 5pm here. And I have a few stories queued up: Oklahoma has a new law making abortion a felony, because the 1950s were great for the white Christian men who wrote that law. Monika Bauerlein explains why authoritarians hate a free press. Not that we didn't already know. Jonathan Haidt explains "why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid." ("It's not just a phase.") Inflation in the US hit a 40-year high at 8.5% year over year, but Paul Krugman believes it will drop...

One hundred years ago today, President Warren Harding installed a "Radio Phone" in his White House office. As the Tribune reported, "Navy radio experts commenced work to-day installing the latest scientific means of communication." Flash forward to now: Margaret Talbot argues that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom nobody ever elected to public office, is playing a long game to bring her right-wing Catholic ideology into the mainstream—or, at least, to enshrine it in the law. Times columnist Margaret...

I swear, the local poké place used three shots of chili oil instead of one today. Whew. (Not that I'm complaining, of course.) While my mouth slowly incinerates, I'm reading these: University of Baltimore School of Law professor Kimberly Wehle warns that the legal theories the Republicans on the Supreme Court suggested this week could roll back a lot more than just abortion rights. Also in The Atlantic, actor Joshua Malina wonders why anyone would hire raging anti-Semite Mel Gibson. Daniel Strauss asks...

This is worth an hour of your time:

While running errands this morning I had the same thought I've had for the past three or so weeks: the trees look great this autumn. Whatever combination of heat, precipitation, and the gradual cooling we've had since the beginning of October, the trees refuse to give up their leaves yet, giving us cathedrals of yellow, orange, and red over our streets. And then I come home to a bunch of news stories that also remind me everything changes: Like most sentient humans, Adam Serwer feels no surprise (but...

Religious extremists, emboldened by lucky tactical and political successes over the past few years despite declining popular support, today won a major victory in their campaign to return women to a state of subjugation that they had only recently escaped. Supporters and allies of the religious leaders imposing the harsh new laws against women celebrated, driving around in pickup trucks while displaying traditional symbols of oppression. Afghanistan? Iran? Saudi Arabia? Nope. Texas: [T]he Supreme Court...

Today's news stories comprise a mixed bag: Famed test pilot and Air Force General Chuck Yeager died yesterday, on the 4th anniversary of astronaut John Glenn's death and the day before the 40th anniversary of John Lennon's. Michael Gerson takes Evangelical Christian leaders to task for supporting the president's attempted autogolpe. Chef Edward Lee, writing in Bon Appétit, frets that Covid-19 could end the renaissance of independent restaurants we experienced in the last 20 years. Chicago alderman Tom...

Winter began in the northern hemisphere this morning, which explains the gray cold enveloping Chicago. Nah, I kid: Chicago usually has a gray, cold envelope around it, just today it's official. And while I ponder, weak and weary, why the weather is so dreary, I've got these to read: Writing in the New York Times, Die Zeit columnist Jochen Bittner explains why Germans worry about the Republican Party's lies about the election. (Hint: Germany remembers 1918 differently than we do.) This year's Festival of...

I cracked the code on an application rewrite I last attempted in 2010, so I've spent a lot of my copious free time the past week working on it. I hope to have more to say soon, but software takes time. And when I'm in the zone, I like to stay there. All of which is why it's 9:30 and I have just gotten around to reading all this: The president stomped out of a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl, and for reasons passing understanding, has threatened to release it himself. Pope Francis has officially...

It could be worse. It might yet be: Covid-19 cases have started to climb once again in the US, passing 8 million just three weeks after passing 7 million. In Illinois, we hit a second consecutive record, with 4,554 new cases today. (There were a record 4,015 yesterday.) TNR's Alex Shepherd says NBC did the Biden campaign a huge favor by booking the president, forcing a direct comparison between the two candidates in real time. The Atlantic's Adrienne LaFrance compares the absurd conspiracy theory QAnon...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 14-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in May 2019, and the world has changed. So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 20 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many...

In a move reminiscent of the authoritarian dictators he adores, President Trump yesterday had protesters forcibly cleared from the streets in front of St John's Episcopal Church in Washington so he could pose for a photo-op holding a Bible: Moments before President Donald Trump vowed to use military might to stop rioting, police backed by the National Guard stormed into a peaceful protest outside the White House and scattered a large group of people protesting unprovoked police violence against African...

I rode the El yesterday for the first time since March 15th, because I had to take my car in for service. (It's 100% fine.) This divided up my day so I had to scramble in the afternoon to finish a work task, while all these news stories piled up: Josh Marshall unmasks the PPE debate. Matthew Sitman explains "why the pandemic is driving conservative intellectuals [sic] mad." Michigan's Attorney General called the president "a petulant child," called Lake Huron "a big lake," and called the Upper Peninsula...

Daredevil "Mad" Mike Hughes, who either believed the world is flat or merely played the role of a Flat Earther, died Saturday trying to launch a home-made rocket in an effort to "prove" the belief: In December, buttressed by his conviction and advances in homemade rocketry, “Mad” Mike Hughes flipped on a camera and fantasized about the moment when he shows mankind that it lives on a verdant disk. The plan: Float dozens of miles high in a balloon, then fly a rocket to the Karman line, the 62-mile-high...

As I try to understand why a 3rd-party API accepts one JSON document but not another, nearly-identical one, who could fault me for taking a short break? Feargus O'Sullivan explains in more detail why London wants Uber gone. Hypocrisy and absurdity collide as Franklin Graham literally demonizes the president's opponents. A man from rural California explains to Brits in the Independent why his neighbors support Trump. Continuing the Republican Party-as-farce stories, Columbia University Graduate School of...

Of note or interest: The BBC's political editor asks if the Brexit deadline is even possible now. The New York Times has a good recap of yesterday's marathon Commons sitting. So does the Washington Post. The president fired National Security Adviser John Bolton, which was the right thing to do for all the wrong reasons. Peter Wehner reminds us that the president is "not well." What's with Jerry Falwell and pool boys, anyway? Matti Friedman explains how memories of "the situation" will inform next...

Monty Python's Life of Brian turned 40 on August 17th. The BBC has a retrospective: The Pythons’ satire wouldn’t target Jesus or his teachings, instead caricaturing political militants, credulous crowds, the appeal of throwing stones at people, the complexities of Latin grammar, and the difficulties of being a tyrant when you’ve got a speech impediment. “I thought we’d been quite good,” said Idle in Robert Sellers’ behind-the-scenes book, Very Naughty Boys. “We’d avoided being specifically rude to...

First, something legitimately funny, especially if you're Jewish: And some things that are funny, as in, "the President is a little funny, isn't he?" Vice President Mike Pence will stay at a Trump resort in Doonbeg, Ireland, for two days of meetings in Dublin. Which is funny because Doonbeg is as far from Dublin as Fort Wayne, Ind., is from Chicago. President Trump sent out over 120 Tweets this past weekend warning people in Alabama of the danger posed by Hurricane Dorian. Which is funny, because (a)...

Tonight I'm looking at the resignation of Dan Coats and the likely appointment of John Ratcliffe for the office of director of national intelligence (DNI), and struggling to understand how narcissism survives. I don't really give two cents about either Coats or Ratcliffe, other than to say they're both well-established toadies and lickspittles. Ordinarily I would make an obscene gesture at either's appointment and move on with my life because, after all, Republicans are always going to prefer toadies...

But I will take the time as soon as I get it: Conor Friedersdorf thinks Tucker Carlson "has failed to assimilate." (So do I.) Daniel Drezner says we have "the worst of all possible Iran policies." (So do I.) Author TJ Martinson won't teach at a downstate religious college this coming year because, apparently, someone got around to reading his new novel. (I just put it on my "to be read" list.) Architect Greg Tamborino won an affordable-housing contest with a bungalow that can easily convert into a...

A religious group has petitioned Netflix to cancel Amazon Prime's miniseries Good Omens: The six-part series was released last month, starring David Tennant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale, who collaborate to prevent the coming of the antichrist and an imminent apocalypse. Pratchett’s last request to Gaiman before he died was that he adapt the novel they wrote together; Gaiman wrote the screenplay andworked as showrunner on the BBC/Amazon co-production, which the Radio...

Short answer: use their medieval beliefs against them: Ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel have held protests against the scheduling of the Eurovision Song Contest on the Jewish Sabbath. At one point, a small number of women held a counter protest, showing their bras. You see, Jewish crazies believe in modesty to the point where women can't even show their real hair in public (they wear wigs). Their rules also prohibit them from touching members of the opposite sex not related to them, leaving open the option...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 13-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in May 2017, and a couple have things have changed. So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 16 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations....

Yesterday's devastating fire in the Cathédral de Notre-Dame de Paris fortunately left the walls and bell towers intact. But the destruction of the fire and roof could take 10-15 years to fix, according to Le Monde. So far, corporations and other European governments have pledged over €700m ($790m, £605m) towards rebuilding it: La famille Arnault a la première annoncé un "don" de 200 millions d'euros par le groupe de luxe LVMH et a proposé que l'entreprise mette à disposition ses "équipes créatives...

Apparently Josef Ratzinger, who resigned from being Pope, seems not to understand how resignations actually work: Ever since Pope Benedict XVI became the first pontiff in six centuries to abdicate the papacy, transitioning to a life of near seclusion in a Vatican City monastery, there have been questions about how the notion of two living popes would impact the Roman Catholic Church. The events of last week offer something of an answer. Although many people hoped to hear from Benedict amid new...

For day 21 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge I'm going to wade into a religious debate: UUIDs vs. integers for database primary keys. First, let's define UUID, which stands for Universally Unique Identifier. A UUID comprises 32 hexadecimal digits typically displayed in 5 groups separated by dashes. The actual identifier is 128 bits long, meaning the chance of a collision between any two of them is slightly lower than the chance of finding a specific grain of dust somewhere in the solar system. An...

Reader Chuck Thompson got a copy of Zach Weinersmith's "Holy Bible (abridged)" for Christmas, and decided to respond in doodles. He sent me a copy of the book, which you can download here (11 mB, pdf). Enjoy.

A fundamentalist Mormon sect living along the Nevada-Arizona border has a serious problem with a rare genetic disorder, because everyone is closely related to everyone else: “With polygyny you’re decreasing the overall genetic diversity because a few men are having a disproportionate impact on the next generation,” says Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. “Random genetic mutations become more important.” In isolated communities, the problem is...

Unexpectedly had to drive for five hours today, but fortunately there doesn't seem to be much going on in the world. The president has arrived in Saudi Arabia, where so far he hasn't committed any public faux-pas. Give him time, I suppose. And anyway, he's among friends. Meanwhile, someone is selling out our Chinese intelligence assets. I sure hope it's not him.

Travel site Frommer's reports that foreign travel to the U.S. has plummeted since the inauguration, for obvious reasons: [T]he prestigious Travel Weekly magazine (as close to an “official” travel publication as they come) has set the decline in foreign tourism at 6.8%. And the fall-off is not limited to Muslim travelers, but also extends to all incoming foreign tourists. Apparently, an attack on one group of tourists is regarded as an assault on all. As far as travel by distinct religious groups, flight...

Welcome to February, in which I hope to increase my pathetic blogging rate (currently 1.23 per day for the last 12 months). Of course, even taking a day off to catch up on things doesn't seem to be helping, because I have all of these articles to read: How did Big Data help Trump win? How do you talk to dogs? How can we prevent seeing the Trump Administration as normal? How does Sam Harris analyze the Muslim ban? How can the Internet of Things work securely? How is the Trump Administration ginning up a...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 10-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in April 2016, and a couple have things have changed (not least of which, all the internal links changed when the blog moved to BlogEngine 3 last October). So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've...

Stuff to read later: New Republic asks, if so many people hate Hillary Clinton, why is she getting more votes than any other candidate running in either party? Paul Krugman expands on the thought that the Republican Party made Trump possible. New York Magazine wonders why we're not talking about the GOP disasters in Louisiana and Kansas, when their national candidates are still running on those failed platforms. The Chicago River is getting cleaner. You still never want to fall in, though... Cranky...

After the criminal gang known as ISIS held the Mosul Dam in Iraq last year, it did not follow the campsite rule when it fled the Iraqi government's counter-attack. Consequently, engineers say the dam is in danger of imminent collapse: [P]ressure on the dam’s compromised structure was building up rapidly as winter snows melted and more water flowed into the reservoir, bringing it up to its maximum capacity, while the sluice gates normally used to relieve that pressure were jammed shut. The Iraqi...

Zach Weinersmith has abridged the Bible "Beyond the Point of Usefulness." And he has given this work a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC license, which lets me post it right here for you (281 k, PDF). Enjoy. Excerpts: Genesis: God made everything, but humans keep screwing it up; some Jews move to Egypt, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Amos: Amos becomes, like, the 14,000th prophet to note that Israel is making God mad and when you make God mad things go bad. Acts: Finding the market for Jewish...

That's not exactly the question Richard Posner and Eric Segall raise, but it's not that far off: Justice Scalia ... predicted in his dissent [in Lawrence v. Texas] that the court would eventually rule that the Constitution protects the right to same-sex marriage. This June, Justice Scalia’s prediction came true in Obergefell v. Hodges. He has vented even more than his usual anger over this decision. It has become apparent that his colleagues’ gay rights decisions have driven him to an extreme position...

The good: A new study shows that drinking 3-5 cups of coffee a day has measurable health benefits. The bad: A black resident of Santa Monica, Calif., got hauled out of her apartment at gunpoint by 19 police officers after a white neighbor reported someone trying to break in. The ugly: Yale law student Omar Aziz writes about the soul of a Jihadist. And the neutral, which could be ugly: forecasters predict 15-30 cm of snow in Chicago tomorrow night into Saturday morning.

I haven't commented on Friday night's attacks in Paris for a number of reasons, none of which is relevant right now. I would like to call attention to some of the better responses I've read in the last couple of days: Paul Krugman reminds us that if we fear ISIS, they're succeeding—not the other way around. Professor Olivier Roy of the European University Institute in Florence says the Paris attacks reveal ISIS' strategic limitations, not their strength. President Obama sharply criticized Republican...

I'll have more on this when I digest it further. This week, U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) released a report showing that the Department of Defense has spent $7m sponsoring patriotic displays at sports events. I am horrified. James Fallows is gobsmacked, saying: "I wasn't cynical enough." The title of this post comes from a circa-1900 essay by Mark Twain. And, of course, we should all re-read Sinclair Lewis. And Edward Gibbon. The end is not near. We still have hundreds of years...

A Texas high school called the police yesterday when a kid brought a homemade alarm clock to school: Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday. Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case. So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may...

...sort of. But that's not important right now. I'm just spiking some articles to read later: Flaking out is rampant. There's free Azure DocumentDB training next Tuesday. Indiana's "religious freedom" law is worse than you thought. Actually, the right wing's whole idea "religious freedom" is worse than you thought. I need to register for Ignite. Glad I got my Apollo After Hours tickets already—especially because I'm performing in it. OK, time for a vendor phone call...

Excellent take-down of one of my least favorite historical figures by Bruce Levine: Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian...

The New Republic today looks into the Mormon practice of baptizing dead people, and the church's related efforts to preserve genealogical information: “The core concept of why this church cares so much about genealogy stems back to the notion that families can be eternal organizations past death,” [Jay] Verkler, [CEO of Family Search, the Mormon organization that manages the vault's records and promotes genealogy throughout the world], explained. “Members of the church seek out their ancestors because...

The latest infliction of Haredi nonsense on innocent victims comes via Gulliver this week, as religious nutters apparently can't deal with sitting next to women on airplanes: One flight last week, from New York’s JFK airport to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport, descended into chaos according to passengers, after a large group of haredim, or ultra-orthodox Jews, refused to take their seats next to women, in accordance with strict religious customs. Amit Ben-Natan, a passenger on last week’s El Al flight...

From my first trip to New York, August 1984:

The Air Force Times reported Thursday that an unnamed U.S. Air Force airman was denied re-enlistment because he refused to swear an oath "so help me God:" Air Force Instruction 36-2606 spells out the active-duty oath of enlistment, which all airmen must take when they enlist or reenlist and ends with “so help me God.” The old version of that AFI included an exception: “Note: Airmen may omit the words ‘so help me God,’ if desired for personal reasons.” That language was dropped in an Oct. 30, 2013...

...these: An infographic series explaining Game of Thrones. How much Cliven Bundy benefited from the government. Yet another 5-4 Supreme Court decision, this one allowing prayers at public meetings. Aircraft traffic-avoidance software got confused when a U-2 spy plane flew over Los Angeles. Since arguing with creationists is pointless, how can we preserve science education in vulnerable regions? Julia Louis-Dreyfus, playing VP Selena Meyer, teams up with real VP Joe Biden in this introduction to the...

Last week at my remote office, a man came to the bar to order the Duke's most excellent fish and chips for takeout. Then he asked a question: is the fish beer-battered? Well, yes, of course it is; it's a Scottish pub. Unfortunately for the pub's sales and the customer's stomach pangs, he was an observant Muslim, and believes alcohol is haram. So we got into a conversation about whether beer-battered fish was in this category. (Pubs in London have many more Muslim customers than pubs in Chicago, so they...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 7½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in September 2011, more than 1,300 posts back, so it's time for a refresh. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 13 years. That site deals with raw data and objective...

I had enough time during today's 8-hour meeting to queue up some articles to read later. Here they are: From August 2012, Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand Reader From today, Sam Harris on the high cost of tiny lies and an interview with Paul Bloom The New Republic reminds us that Rob Ford may be awful, but Mel Lastman paved the way for him, and how bad a burst pipeline really is to your community Split family portraits, by artist Ulric Collette, are really cool Anita Sarkeesian has another installment in her series...

Or, "Jenny McCarthy is an idiot." We on the left have stupid people in our midst, same as they on the right. The right's stupid people say mixed marriages make them gag and bring assault rifles where moms are meeting to plan gun-control events. On the left, our stupid people think vaccines are dangerous. You know, jabs: those little pricks that have saved millions of us from dying of childhood diseases. As we've known for 40 years or so, if you don't vaccinate enough people, you get disease epidemics...

Tuesday night, after the House of Representatives approved the deal ending the government shutdown, the House Stenographer...well, she added some commentary of her own: As the House finished their vote to reopen the federal government and raise the debt ceiling, a House stenographer decided it was a good time to let everyone know her feelings about God, Congress, and the Freemasons. “He [God] will not be mocked,” the stenographer, apparently named Molly, yelled into the microphone as she was dragged off...

Andrew Sullivan puts it best: "Every now and again, a writer needs to find a new way of expressing the notion that fundamentalism is not actually faith, but a neurosis built on misunderstandings and leading nowhere. And then you just read the AP:" A northern Arizona family that was lost at sea for weeks in an ill-fated attempt to leave the U.S. over what they consider government interference in religion will fly back home Sunday. Hannah Gastonguay, 26, said Saturday that she and her husband “decided to...

Last Sunday's Game of Thrones episode portrayed one of the most gut-wrenching scenes from the books. People who hadn't read the books had understandably strong reactions: Via Sullivan come two more-considered reactions to the scene, and to the series' portrayal of violence in general. First, from Alyssa Rosenberg: [T]he attack on Talisa seemed to stand out for some viewers even in this context as uniquely stomach-churning, evidence that the show is participating in some of its characters disgusting...

Sometimes, the Illinois General Assembly reminds us that Molly Ivins had it right: the only state legislature worse at their jobs than Illinois' is Texas'. Yesterday, the only legislature we have adjourned for the summer, after passing the least popular bill on its agenda this year and failing to pass one of the most popular: Illinois had appeared poised to become the 13th state to approve same-sex marriage. Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn promised to sign the bill. Democrats held veto-proof majorities in the...

XKCD tackles the astronomical and geographical challenges of following the Star of Bethlehem: If the wise men leave Jerusalem and walk toward the star Sirius, day and night, even when it’s below the horizon, this is the path they follow over the surface: If we allow a little theological confusion and assume the wise men can walk on water, they’ll eventually wind up going in an endless circle, 30 kilometers in diameter, around the South Pole. Re-reading Matthew 2:7-10, however, I can't quite tell who the...

Three unrelated stories drew my notice this evening: PATH service has resumed to Hoboken. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—I lived in Hoboken, N.J., the birthplace of Frank Sinatra (really) and baseball (not really). I took the Port Authority Trans-Hudson train almost every day when I worked in SoHo, and about every third day when I worked in Midtown. Having experienced other ways of commuting to New York—in fact, the switch up to 53rd and Park finally got me to return to Chicago, after my...

Science Guy Bill Nye keeps calm and carries on:

Robert Wright wonders: A few decades ago, Darwinians and creationists had a de facto nonaggression pact: Creationists would let Darwinians reign in biology class, and otherwise Darwinians would leave creationists alone. The deal worked. I went to a public high school in a pretty religious part of the country--south-central Texas--and I don't remember anyone complaining about sophomores being taught natural selection. It just wasn't an issue. A few years ago, such biologists as Richard Dawkins and PZ...

Via Sullivan, a suggestion from Dan McAdams about the difficulties some people have accepting natural selection theory: A story is a narrative account of a motivated character who acts to achieve certain goals or ends over time. Every great story you can think of—from Homer’s Iliad to your favorite television show—involves characters who pursue goals over time, characters who want something and set out to achieve it. In this sense, the classic biblical creation stories are very good stories. You have a...

Today the right wing won two battles in their long, slow, rear-guard war against the 21st century. In North Carolina, voters chose by a 60-40 margin to add an anti-marriage amendment to the state constitution, continuing the tradition of tolerance and modernity established by enlightened statesmen such as Jesse Helms and William Blount: North Carolina has become the 31st state to add an amendment on marriage to its constitution, with voters banning same-sex marriage and barring legal recognition of...

The United Kingdom has no Constitutional prohibition against established religion; in fact, the head of state is also the head of the church. But the UK has a much deeper secular grain than we have, to the extent that many people in the country get quite exercised about even public prayer. The Washington Post explains the latest row: Local lawmaker Clive Bone, an atheist, was backed by four of his peers in challenging the long-standing tradition of opening public meetings with blessings by Christian...

The astrology nutters who sued the time zone database for copyright infringement have withdrawn the suit. Plaintiff's attorney Julie Molloy filed the notice of voluntary dismissal today in the District of Massachusetts under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a)(1). So, reason prevailed. Good.

Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, someone who expects to be taken seriously as a potential leader of a 21st-century republic, has taken yet another step back from the reality-based community: “We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit,” Santorum told a Colorado crowd earlier this month. “When you have a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and says that we...

Author Sam Harris likens our love of wood fires to other unshakable beliefs: The case against burning wood is every bit as clear as the case against smoking cigarettes. Indeed, it is even clearer, because when you light a fire, you needlessly poison the air that everyone around you for miles must breathe. Even if you reject every intrusion of the “nanny state,” you should agree that the recreational burning of wood is unethical and should be illegal, especially in urban areas. By lighting a fire, you...

Sure, I've posted photos of the moon before, but it never gets old to me: Well, all right, at 4½ billion years it is old to me, but you know what I meant. On a side note, I just Googled "age of the moon" and discovered that many of the top results are from outside the reality-based community. For example, the second item on my results came from the Institute for Creation Research ("Biblical. Accurate. Certain."), in which one Thomas G. Barnes, D.Sc., begins with the assertion: "It takes but one proof of...

To counter SOPA, a Swedish group has gotten official recognition as a religion on the idea of Holy Information: The church, which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V (shortcuts for copy and paste) as sacred symbols, does not directly promote illegal file sharing, focusing instead on the open distribution of knowledge to all. It was founded by 19-year-old philosophy student and leader Isak Gerson. He hopes that file-sharing will now be given religious protection. "For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and...

Reader Curtis Manwaring alerted me this morning to movement in the copyright infringement case against Arthur David Olson, late of the Posix time zone database. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken up Olson's (and Paul Eggerts') defense, and yesterday threatened a motion for Rule 11 sanctions against the plaintiff's attorney if they don't withdraw the case within 21 days: If there were ever a pleading that invited Rule 11 sanctions, Plaintiff Astrolabe, Inc.'s Complaint is it. ... Astrolabe's...

So I thought I'd take another look at Sebastian Gutierrez' film Girl Walks Into a Bar the other day. But before the film started I saw this: Not knowing what to make of these options, I chose the two minutes of proselytizing and went to make my lunch. When I got back, the movie was on its way without interruptions, as promised. What the LDS church hopes to accomplish through this PR campaign escapes me for the moment.

Via Sullivan, the L.A. Times reports that atheists are moving toward official recognition in the U.S. military: Religion — specifically Christianity — is embedded in military culture. The Chaplain Corps traces its origins to the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Until the 1970s, the service academies required cadets to attend chapel services. Nightly prayers still are broadcast throughout Navy ships at sea. ... [N]onbelievers describe themselves as a minority that is often isolated and...

This morning The Daily Parker received a press release from Gary Christen, responding to my analyses of their lawsuit against the guys who maintain the Posix time zone database (here, here, and here). Unfortunately for Christen, Astrolabe's response fails to rebut my central assertions. I said, essentially, they have failed to state a claim upon which relief can be granted by a Federal court (or, as one of my colleagues who actually practices law suggested, their complaint is actionable in itself)....

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 5-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in February, but some things have changed. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. Twice. Thus, the "point one" in the title. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's...

From the New Yorker: UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out. COMMENTS (24) Beta version was better. I thought the Adam-Steve dynamic was much more compelling than the Adam-Eve work-around You finally settled on. Adam was obviously created somewhere else and then just put here. So, until I see some paperwork proving otherwise...

Because only in the United States do we have, enshrined in our basic law, the right to establish a city populated exclusively by religious nutters: Kiryas Joel is an enclave of ultra-orthodox Jews who belong to the Satmar Hasidic sect. Members of this group believe in separating themselves from others – they’d rather not be around non-sect members. Thirty-four years ago, they won the right to create their own village from the surrounding community of Monroe. The village’s founders might have envisioned...

They aired two back-to-back stories on Weekend Edition. First, they reported that for reasons that passeth understanding, the NRA got Florida to pass a law prohibiting doctors from asking about guns in the house: For decades, the American Academy of Pediatrics has encouraged its members to ask questions about guns and how they're stored, as part of well-child visits. But Marion Hammer, the National Rifle Association's lobbyist in Tallahassee, says that's not a pediatrician's job. "We take our children...

The Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee is bankrupt: On the first anniversary of his installation, Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki announced Tuesday afternoon that the archdiocese will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Listecki said the move was necessary to fairly compensate victims and continue the "essential ministries" of the church, and urged the faithful not to blame the victims. Yes, Archbishop, blaming the children that priests raped for the Church passing the criminals around...

I admit that phrase doesn't have as much pull with Orthodox Jews as it might with other religious groups. Still, the story of an Orthodox couple who don't accept that they're divorced even though they have a perfectly valid divorce under state law encapsulates much of what frustrates me about fundamentalists: The Friedman case has become emblematic of a torturous issue in which only a husband can "give" a get. While Jewish communities have historically pressured obstinate husbands to give gets, this was...

Via Sullivan, who spends all day surfing the net so you and I don't have to:

Via Sullivan, Kenneth Davis at the Smithsonian sets the record straight on our history: From the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the “heretic” and the “unbeliever”—including the “heathen” natives already here. Moreover, while it is true that the vast majority of early-generation Americans were Christian, the pitched battles between various Protestant sects and, more explosively, between...

Via Sullivan, the dating site okcupid.com analyzed their 3.2 m users to determine that gay people really don't want to date straight people: The subtext to a lot of homophobic thinking is the idea that gays will try to get straight people into bed at the first opportunity, or that gays are looking to "convert" straights. Freud called this concept schwanzangst; the U.S. Army calls it Don't Ask Don't Tell. We combed through over 4 million match searches, and found virtually no evidence of it: Match Search...

Apparently a former Hitler Youth called me a Nazi today: The pontiff praised Britain's fight against the Nazis - who "wished to eradicate God" - before relating it to modern day "atheist extremism". Afterwards his spokesman Federico Lombardi said: "I think the Pope knows rather well what the Nazi ideology is". Yes, Ratzinger should know what the Nazi ideology is, but I'm afraid we athiests are rather unlike him. In the same speech he also said, "I also recall the regime's attitude to Christian pastors...

The Culture Dash took me back to Kazan Cathedral today, only this time, I went inside:

So, with a project running somewhere around 105%, an old and patient client that predates my current employment waiting for some updates, Global Financial Management requiring that I figure out the combined beta of two companies about to merge, Foundations of Strategy expecting a transaction cost analysis Saturday morning, and an overwhelming anticipation of seeing Diane and Parker tomorrow after almost two weeks, I find myself completely out of creativity. Heaven bless my winter office (probably, now...

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, whose work I have followed for years, want to arrest the Pope when he visits the U.K. in September: Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998. Dawkins and...

Today the Vatican announced that there has been no cover-up in the latest U.S. sex-abuse scandal, and could we all just leave the Pope alone? This whole thing must feel like someone stampeded cattle through St. Peter's. But let's be serious. It looks quite like the current Pope intervened in the Ecclesiastical trial of a priest accused of molesting 200 deaf boys, and failed to act on dozens of other cases: The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the...

Thousands dead, a country devastated, and this clown blames the devil? Seriously: "Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it," [Televangelist Pat Robertson] said on Christian Broadcasting Network's "The 700 Club." "They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a...

Mostly photos today, because I have an economics assignment due before I can get some desperately-needed sleep. Today we did our Culture Dash (see the entry about the deliverable) through some of the same Dubai streets I walked just yesterday. Some highlights: first, Dubai Creek, with an abra (commuter flatboat) in the foreground and an Airbus 330 taking off in the background: The textile souk in the old Bur Dubai neighborhood: And last one tonight, a minaret during the evening call to prayer: More...

After a two-hour walk in the 34°C heat, I actually feel much better. (People who know me can feel free to express surprise and alarm.) As I mentioned yesterday, spending too much time in a hotel depresses the life out of me. When will I ever again visit Dubai? Probably never. Since the hotel has gone to great lengths to make itself indistinguishable from any other similar hotel in the world, I fled the official corporate tours and hopped the Dubai Metro for Deira, the old part of the city. Sadly for my...

Journalist Robert Wright weighs in on the (ridiculous, I think) question of whether dogs are parasites: I suspect the historical relationship between dogs and humans has been mutualistic, not parasitic; humans have probably been pragmatic in choosing what kinds of dogs to associate with during dog-human co-evolution, thus keeping wantonly exploitative tendencies out of the canine gene pool. (If anything, the parasitism has probably worked in the other direction.) And as for the question of whether...

A Wisconsin jury has convicted a couple of murder after they allowed their 11-year-old daughter to die right in front of them: Dale Neumann, 47, was convicted in the March 23, 2008, death of his daughter, Madeline, from undiagnosed diabetes. Prosecutors contended he should have rushed the girl to a hospital because she couldn't walk, talk, eat or speak. Instead, Madeline died on the floor of the family's rural Weston home as people surrounded her and prayed. Someone called 911 when she stopped...

Via Sullivan, Pew has some interesting data on the differences in opinions about torture held by religious Christians and godless atheists: More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed.... Therefore, as Sullivan points out, "Christian devotion correlates with approval for absolute evil in America. And people...

I'm not a big fan of Seinfeld but I am a fan of this sort of thing: The debate over religious displays in the Illinois Capitol's rotunda took a farcical turn this week when a student at a Lake Forest boarding school put up an aluminum pole to honor Festivus. For those in the dark, Festivus is a mock holiday popularized by a 1997 episode of "Seinfeld." The pole is a Christmas tree-like symbol, and semi-ironic celebrations of Festivus, usually observed on Dec. 23, include such traditions as the "Airing of...

Another gap in the fossil record has gotten filled: In a new study of a fossil fish that lived 375 million years ago, scientists are finding striking evidence of the intermediate steps by which some marine vertebrates evolved into animals that walked on land. The scientists said in a report being published Thursday in the journal Nature that the research exposed delicate details of the creature's head and neck, confirming and elaborating on its evolutionary position as "an important stage in the origin...

Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers sued God, had the case dismissed (God wasn't properly served, you see), and may appeal on the grounds that an omiscient God by definition has adequate notice of the suit. I think he may not be entirely serious, though: Chambers filed the lawsuit last year seeking a permanent injunction against God. He said God has made terroristic threats against the senator and his constituents in Omaha, inspired fear and caused "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of...

From Christopher Hitchens: "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

Writing in the New York Times today, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) attempts to distance himself from natural selection theory without looking like a complete dullard. He fails, predictably, largely through setting up false or misleading dichtomies: The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God. Either you believe God created Man or you don't; how...

Schadenfreude embarrasses me a little. I never want to wish death on anyone. But sometimes, someone dies who spent his life in opposition to everything one holds dear, and one cannot help to feel just the tiniest bit pleased at his passing. Of course I mean Jerry Falwell, one of the most reprehensible characters in American politics this century. In conversations with friends since yesterday, a couple of things came out: First, it's too bad there's no "him" left to contemplate the fact that he's not...

John Lennon once remarked that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus," explaining later that more people had bought Beatles albums than went to church. It turns out, we atheists are less popular than the GEICO Cave Man. At least, more people would vote for the GEICO Cave Man, than would vote for an atheist. The sad fact is, most of the first U.S. presidents—including Jefferson and Washington—were, famously, as close to atheists as the 18th Century allowed. Who said voters were irrational?

Via AVWeb: An aviation mechanic crew chief at Istanbul's airport got fired for allowing a ritual camel sacrifice on the tarmac: A crew of mechanics at Istanbul's airport were so glad to be rid of some trouble-prone British-made airplanes that they sacrificed a camel on the tarmac in celebration—prompting the firing [December 13] of their supervisor. Turks traditionally sacrifice animals as an offering to God for when their wishes come true. So...does this mean God did not accept the sacrifice?

I just have to sigh heavily when I read crap like this. New Scientist is reporting today on a "lab" in Redmond, Wash., where the "scientists" are trying to find evidence against Darwin: The message is clear. If ID supporters can bolster their case by citing more experimental research, another judge at some future date might conclude that ID does qualify as science, and is therefore a legitimate topic for discussion in American science classrooms. This is precisely the kind of scientific respectability...

By Bruce Marcus and Lori Factor-Marcus 'Twas the night before Christmas, and we, being Jews, My girlfriend and me—we had nothing to do. The Gentiles were home, hanging stockings with care, Secure in their knowledge St. Nick would be there. But for us, once the Hanukkah candles burned down, There was nothing but boredom all over town. The malls and the theaters were all closed up tight; There weren't any concerts to go to that night. A dance would have saved us, some ballroom or swing, But we searched...