The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024

The 39th President of the United States died at his home in Plains, Ga., yesterday:

The Carter Center in Atlanta announced his death, which came nearly three months after Mr. Carter, already the longest-living president in American history, became the first former commander in chief to reach the century mark. Mr. Carter went into hospice care 22 months ago, but endured longer than even his family expected.

“To all of the young people in this nation and for anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning — the good life — study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith and humility,” [President] Biden, the first Democratic senator to endorse Mr. Carter’s long-shot 1976 bid for the presidency, said in a statement. “He showed that we are great nation because we are a good people.”

Other than interludes in the White House and the Georgia governor’s mansion, he and his wife, the former first lady Rosalynn Carter, lived in the same simple home in Plains for most of their adult lives and each of them passed away there, Mrs. Carter in November last year.

Carter was by far the most successful former president in history. Paul Krugman reflects on his accomplishments:

The truth is that luck plays a much bigger role in politics than we like to think.

The late 1970s would have been a difficult time for the economy no matter who was president. For one thing, the great productivity boom that doubled U.S. living standards over the generation that followed World War II had sputtered out, for reasons we still don’t fully understand.

On top of all that, persistent inflation before Carter took office — inflation that was in part due to irresponsible policy under Richard Nixon — had made the economy vulnerable to wage-price spirals. Many labor contracts had cost-of-living allowances that caused oil shocks to feed into labor costs; more generally, expectations of future inflation had become unanchored.

Reagan lucked out on his timing. The really bad stuff happened early in his presidency, and things were improving by the time he ran for reelection. Improving, not good — both unemployment and inflation were substantially worse during “morning in America” than they were at the time of the 2024 election. But Reagan benefited from the sense that the worst was over, and his reputation has been, um, inflated by decades of right-wing hagiography.

Luck, then, plays a big role in politics. It hasn’t always favored Republicans. Bill Clinton won thanks to a sluggish recovery that wasn’t obviously Bush the Elder’s fault; I’m not at all sure that Obama would have won if the 2008 financial crisis had been delayed a few months.

I met Carter once, at university. He came to Hofstra's Carter Conference in 1990. I quite literally bumped into him as he came out of the campus library, and his USSS detail allowed me to walk next to him for a good 400 meters before gently moving me aside. He even signed the question I'd prepared for the conference on a 3x5 note card that I still have.

I'm sorry he's gone. He was the kind of person we need right now.

28 Mile Vodka, Highwood (revisited)

Welcome to a revisit to #5 on the Brews and Choos project.

Distillery: 28 Mile Vodka, 454 Sheridan Rd., Highwood, Ill.
Train line: Metra Union Pacific North, Highwood
Time from Chicago (Ogilvie): 52 minutes, zone 4
Distance from station: 300 m

After Amtrak effectively cancelled our day trip to Milwaukee on Friday and meeting a third friend up there, my Brews & Choos buddy and I met the other friend in Highwood instead. We ultimately met up at Broken Tee Brewing, but we had an hour to kill while the third friend drove down from Wisconsin, so we went to 28 Mile Vodka.

I'm happy to report that Brews & Choos stop #5 is still going strong, with some innovative drinks and new spirits. I had a flight of two gins and two bourbons; my B&CB had a smoky Old Fashioned that we both thought was dangerously delicious.

Also of note was the manager's kindness letting us in an hour before opening to get out of the gloomy drizzle. He admitted that the distillery's website shows a 3pm opening time, but for the winter they actually open at 4pm.

The kitchen opened right as we were leaving to meet our third friend, so we didn't try anything on the menu. We wanted to. And perhaps we will in the near future.

28 Mile Vodka remains a "Would Go Back" Brews & Choos stop.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? None
Serves food? Yes, elevated
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

Trip cancelled while on the train

I had planned to go to Milwaukee for a quick day trip yesterday to further the Brews & Choos Project. Two friends were going to meet me at the Public Market, then go to two breweries and a distillery in the five hours between trains.

Alas, after everyone had boarded the 1:05 Hiawatha, Amtrak got all of us off the train and cancelled it because of—no kidding—a flat wheel. We could have gone on the (now-overcrowded) 3:05, but we just decided to forget it and meet one of the friends up in Highwood.

So I'll have a revisited Brews & Choos review of 28 Mile Vodka later this weekend, but no reviews of Milwaukee breweries until next year.

Boxing Day links

Because Christmas came on a Wednesday*, and my entire UK-based team have buggered off until Monday in some cases and January 6th in others, I'm off for the long weekend. Tomorrow my Brews & Choos buddy and I will hit three places in Milwaukee, which turns out to be closer to downtown Chicago by train than a few stations on the Union Pacific North and Northwest lines.

Meanwhile, read some of these:

Enjoy the weekend. I'll have three Brews & Choos Reviews up before the end of the year, plus the 2025 sunrise chart for Chicago.

* That was also The Daily Parker's 9,500th post since the "modern" blog began in November 2005.

Oh to know the joy of a dog

Cassie got a Christmas present from one of my friends:

I can only imagine the kind of joy she felt as she paraded around the house showing everyone her new toy. Perhaps it helped that I gave her sardines instead of green beans with her kibble for dinner. We all had a really nice Christmas, and Cassie had a fantastic one.

Hanlon's Razor and related irritants

I've been on the fringes of something recently that I won't get into to protect the guilty, except to say it doesn't have anything to do with my day job. As this thing goes on and on and on, I keep going back to this bit of truth:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

And yet, the errors in this thing keep compounding, as only two or three people involved appear to have any sanity regarding the project. Naturally, the sane ones keep getting shouted down. If you look at the demographics of who's doing the shouting, it gets even cringier. It's so bad that Grey's Law is implicated:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

And of course, never forget Sayre's Law:

In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.

I think this thing has finally reached a resolution that will allow the players to step off the stage, take off their costumes, wipe off their makeup, and get notes from the director. And whoo boy, I cannot wait to see those notes.

Christmas on a Wednesday is annoying

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 was born in the fall, in a different year than tradition holds, and with only speculation about which calendar ancient Judeans used at that point.

All of that just makes this a weird work week followed by an annoying work week. Weird, because with most of my new team in the UK, tomorrow's 10 am CST stand-up meeting will have relatively poor attendance (it'll be 4 pm in the UK), and I've decided to bugger off on Thursday and Friday. Most of my developers—especially the UK guys—simply took the whole week off.

At least the ridiculously light work load gives me time to read these while I wait for confirmation that a build has made it into the wild:

Finally, a while ago a good friend gave me a random gift of an Author Clock, which sits right on my coffee table so I see it whenever I'm sitting on the couch. She just sent me a link to their next product: the Author Forecast. Oh no! They found me! Dammit, take my money! Bam: $10 deposit applied.

Josh Marshall nails it

I don't always agree with what Josh Marshall says, but this morning he encapsulates the chaos perfectly:

Even beyond what I described above, with these two rough beasts [the OAFPOTUS and Musk] slouching their way into 2025, you have probably never had a time in American history where you have all the billionaires lining up and saying pretty much openly and loudly that we’re here as Team Billionaire and here to support the billionaire President and excited to usher in a new era of government of the billionaires, quite literally by the billionaires and really obviously for the billionaires.

To wrap it all together you also have the gobs of public time and attention and resources lit on fire by the tantrums, egomania and sundry character disorders of people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk because that’s a central feature of billionairedom: the rules don’t apply to you. Things most of us had to get straight with when we were in our 20s, because we live in the real world, guys like Elon Musk have magnified 100-fold by their 50s because the rules don’t apply to them.

It's going to be a long two years, but it's very likely the American voting public will like this Congress even less than the do-nothing Congress we just finished. And, of course, the OAFPOTUS doesn't care.