The Daily Parker

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 will result in a new constitutional settlement, not a simple revival of what came before. We will find ourselves engaged in a kind of constitution-making arguably not seen since Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War."
• Paul Krugman looks at what professional money people are doing, and thus what they're predicting, and warns that the TACO trade is misguided, because the OAFPOTUS really has no off-ramp for his tariff obsession: "[T]he nonsensical nature of the whole enterprise is why I don’t think he’ll find an off-ramp. After all, it’s obvious that the increased steel tariff wasn’t a considered policy, it was a temper tantrum after the Court of International Trade ruled against his other tariffs. ... If you want to know where this is going, keep your eyes on the bond and currency markets, where cool-headed traders realize that U.S. policy is still being dictated by the whims of a mad king."
• Evan Osnos smacks his forehead at the unprecedented scale and reach of said mad king's plundering of the United States.
• Max Boot points to the OAFPOTUS's assault on science and education as "the suicide of a superpower."
• Jen Rubin believes the Republican Party has "no good options on the budget," thanks to a Democratic Party in array.
• The Clown Prince of X likes to excuse his sociopathy, cruelty, immaturity, and incompetence by claiming he's "Aspie." (He isn't. He's just a rich asshole.)
• Josh Marshall relays the story about the mess (literal and figurative) that the United States Institute of Peace faced when they got back into their offices after its illegal DOGE takeover in March.

Finally, Streetsblog Chicago's Harjas Sandhu shakes his fist at the seeming inability of the Chicago Transit Authority to find competent leadership. At least it's not currently run by a not-too-bright reality TV star. (And I don't mean the OAFPOTUS.)

The OAFPOTUS signed a batch of executive orders yesterday announcing the administration's support for building more nuclear power, a policy that on its face sounds great:

One order directs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nation’s independent safety regulator, to streamline its rules and to take no more than 18 months to approve applications for new reactors. The order also urges the agency to consider lowering its safety limits for radiation exposure, saying that current rules go beyond what is needed to protect human health.

The Trump administration also set a goal of quadrupling the size of the nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants, from nearly 100 gigawatts of electric capacity today to 400 gigawatts by 2050. One gigawatt is enough to power nearly 1 million homes.

In recent years, more than a dozen companies have begun developing a new generation of smaller reactors a fraction of the size of those at Vogtle [a plant under construction in Georgia]. The hope is that these reactors would have a lower upfront price tag, making them a less risky investment for utilities. They might also be based on a design that could be repeated often, as opposed to custom-built, to reduce costs.

OK, so what's the problem? Nuclear power is cleaner and safer than fossil-fuel power, especially over the long term. Despite disasters in Ukraine (1986) and Japan (2011), civilian nuclear power has killed orders of magnitude fewer people than coal mining and emissions from fossil-fuel power generation, for example.

So why am I skeptical? Because I don't trust the OAFPOTUS to tell me the time of day without trying to steal my watch, let alone to pass a major policy initiative on the merits. It's telling that the signing event included comments about building small-scale reactors to power crypto mining, for example. And given the thoroughly demonstrated lack of competence in the administration, and their desire to destroy the regulatory state entirely, I worry that the lack of oversight will lead to a nuclear disaster that will set the industry back another few decades. (Remember, a spectacular accident that kills 10 people is far scarier to most of us apes than the ongoing loss of millions of years of human lifespans from fossil-fuel pollution and resource extraction.)

I'm willing to give the administration and the Republican party support when they do the right thing. But their behavior over the last 10 years has been to (a) design policies to enrich themselves instead of providing for the general welfare and (b) screw up the implementation, whether through incompetence or malice, to render them worse than doing nothing. I hope this nuclear initiative will work out, or at least give my party some runway to fix it when we return to power. Yet neither the OAFPOTUS nor the Republican Party as a whole fill me with confidence that this time will be different.

On Monday, Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin (the one with phallic space ships) sent an all-female "crew" into low orbit for ten minutes, pretty much demonstrating everything wrong with 2020s America:

Blue Origin's all-female crew, which included pop star Katy Perry, completed their trip into space Monday morning.

Along with Perry, the crew included Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos' journalist fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, who is also a helicopter pilot.

Speaking after touchdown, Perry said she brought a daisy with her into space, in honor of her 4-year-old daughter, Daisy, whom she shares with fiancé Orlando Bloom.

"I feel super-connected to love," Perry said. "I think this experience has shown me how much love is inside of me."

Sanchez described the trip as "profound," adding, "I was up there and you see Earth and then you know it's completely black, but … we got to see the moon and it was in complete and utter darkness and then you look back at Earth and it's like this jewel."

Perry agreed with describing the trip as a 'journey," adding that it was a "supernatural one."

I...I don't even know where to begin. Fortunately, The Guardian's Moira Donegan did:

Once, Nasa was the pride of the American experiment: a testament to how a society dedicated to legal equality and passionate hard work could expand the horizons of human possibility. Now, Blue Origin is a testament to the corruption and circumscribed possibilities of the profit motive run amok. Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic. The Blue Origin flight does not make me feel like humanity will reach new heights of achievement. It makes me feel like everything that is coming is grimly predictable, tailored to the impulses of the richest, least responsible and least morally intelligent people on Earth.

But the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man.

It is not misogynist to say that these women do not have their priorities in order. Rather, it is misogynist of them to so forcefully associate womanhood with cosmetics and looks, rather than with any of the more noble and human aspirations to which space travel might acquaint them – curiosity, inquiry, discovery, exploration, a sense of their own mortality, an apprehension of the divine. These women, who have placed themselves as representatives for all women with their promotion of the flight – positioning themselves as aspirational models of femininity – have presented a profoundly antifeminist vision of what womankind’s future is: dependent on men, confined to triviality, and deeply, deeply silly.

Donegan also points out that, after bribing the OAFPOTUS with a $1 m donation to his inauguration and suppressing the Washington Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris, the OAFPOTUS rewarded Bezos with a $2 bn contract. Because corruption.

The Atlantic's Ellen Cushing thinks Perry was exactly the right celebrity to go on this "dumb stunt:"

The critics have a point. I’ve spent longer waiting for the subway than Perry was up in space. Space tourism is, at best, folly—silly, spectacularly wasteful, pointless by definition.

Beyoncé likely wouldn’t go to space. Taylor Swift probably wouldn’t either. Going to space for no reason—courtesy of a rich guy a lot of people don’t like—is risky in the physical sense, as well as in the sense that it’s an invitation to get made fun of online. And those two women are serious, careful people. They’re disciplined. They are always in control. Swift’s Eras Tour was a meticulously constructed monument to the singer-songwriter’s mythology—a spectacle, sure, but one less of pop loopiness than of precision logistics. In Perry’s Las Vegas residency, Play, by contrast, she sat perched next to a 16-foot-tall toilet and had a conversation with a giant anthropomorphic lump of excrement. If Eras was a novel, Play was a knock-knock joke. It was a psychedelically moronic piece of performance art, and possibly the most fun I’ve ever had seeing live music.

That’s Perry, though: Always misreading the room. She is, in a word, cringe. For Millennials, especially, she’s a reminder of just how embarrassing we all used to be: earnest, straightforward, unencumbered by irony or internet nihilism. With her, what you see is what you get. She’s a performer. She’s an old-fashioned celebrity in the sense that she is basically a clown.

And then there's this take.

There was a time, not so long ago, when we celebrated the people who got us into space in the first place: Shepard, Glenn, Armstrong. And, yes, Valentina Tereshkova. They didn't know if they'd survive the trip. Some of them almost didn't.

But at least Katy Perry "studied" string theory before her trip. And she has a very good tailor.

Stuff to read:

• Forgetting (or just plain ignorant) that we have a Coast Guard better suited to the task of guarding our coasts, the OAFPOTUS has ordered the guided missile destroyer USS Gravely to the Texas-Mexico border.
• The OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X, apparently not seeing the connection between weather forecasters and weather forecasts, have illegally fired 10% of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff just as a violent tornado outbreak killed 40 people in the Midwest and South.
• The administration's attacks on universities fit the Orban plan of creating a failed democracy, so naturally the OAFPOTUS has doubled down on them.
• Krugman points out that all of the above administration malfeasance has had a depressing effect on the US economy by reducing demand for our key exports, not least of which includes the $50 billion foreigners used to spend to get American educations. (He also has a good, long explanation of how inflation works, if you subscribe.)
• Surprising no one but still an illegally-targeted exercise of Federal power, the Federal Communications Commission has demanded to see the contracts between a number of National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting System stations and their acknowledged donors.
• The Waterbeach development outside Cambridge, England, has a new car-free housing complex—though it's still a 10 kilometer walk from the nearest railway station.
• Pilot Patrick Smith wishes the public would have a better sense of perspective about the safety of air travel, while acknowledging that it has seemed a bit rockier than usual.

Finally, thanks to reduced funding and deferred maintenance, the Chicago El has seen slow zones balloon from 13% of its tracks to 30% since 2019. Fully 70% of the Forest Park branch has reduced speed limits, making the trip from there to downtown take over an hour. But sure, let's  keep funding below the minimum needed to function, and keep the CTA, Metra, and Pace all separate so they can each fail in their own ways.

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 of his presidency.
• Brett Stephens thinks about how he'll be remembered.
• Josh Marshall never thought Meta's content-moderation scheme was anything other than a scam.
• Anne Applebaum warns of the anti-science mysticism afflicting more and more of the world.

Finally, the temperature in Chicago dipped below freezing just before 2 am on January 1st and hasn't risen above freezing since then, with no relief in the forecast. Even though we don't expect any seriously cold weather in the next two weeks, it would be nice to have one day above freezing.

The Times morning newsletter highlighted a story from Tuesday about yet one more example of people who have come to believe something that is not only crashingly stupid, but potentially fatal:

[A] small number of spring water aficionados...believe untreated water, or “raw water,” contains enriching minerals that are removed from tap water during the purification process.

The trend, however, alarms health experts, who say that spring water devotees are taking unnecessary risks. The country’s robust water treatment system, they emphasize, eliminates potentially deadly bacteria and parasites, and removes toxins that can cause cancer or harm children’s brain development.

Nonetheless, untreated water enthusiasts across the nation study crowdsourced spring maps and leave online comments as if they are reviewing the latest restaurants. At Red Rock Spring near Stinson Beach, Calif., the wait can be as long as 40 minutes, but the patrons are said to be friendly and the views spectacular, according to Google reviews.

Randy Dahlgren, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies watersheds, said that compared with other natural water sources, springs tended to be safer to drink from since they originated deep in the ground and the water was naturally filtered through layers of soil that could remove microbial pathogens. Fresh spring water can contain calcium, magnesium and other beneficial nutrients, and may not contain microplastics or “forever chemicals” as some tap water does, he said.

ut raw water can also be tainted with pesticides from nearby farms, contain arsenic that naturally occurs in soil, and harbor bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella that can make people extremely sick. In 2022, 19 people in Montana became ill, including one who was hospitalized, after drinking from what they thought was a spring but was actually creek drainage.

The reporter spent some time at Red Rock Spring. Basically, water dribbles out of a pair of copper pipes jammed into a cliff face by the road. No one can say with any certainty (a) where the water comes from, (b) what it contains, or (c) who put the pipes there. And yet these modern-day hippies happily fill carboys with the water and feed it to their children.

Carl Sagan was right: if society neglects teaching people critical-thinking skills, society gets dumber.

My, we've had a busy day:

• President Biden commuted the sentences of 1,500 Federal inmates in the largest single-day clemency in American history. Two of them stole millions in massive frauds against Illinois citizens. Josh Marshall doesn't see much clemency.
• Charles Sykes worries that neither major US political party has a clue how to fix our education systems (plural).
• Legalized sports betting has shifted billions from small punters to large corporations, which is why it was illegal for so long.
• Charles Blow muses about making friends after 50.
• Despite freaking out the usual car-besotted subjects, a plan to extend a protected bike lane in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Ill., will actually add parking spaces.
• A downtown Chicago office building constructed in 1928 will become 252 apartments under a plan that received City Council approval yesterday.

Finally, paleobiologists have narrowed the range of Neandertal-Sapiens interbreeding down to a period that peaked 47,000 years ago. Cue the jokes, starting with: "Who knew yo mama was that old?"

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 you may have guessed, [Robert F Kennedy, Jr] and Oz are not only friends but kindred spirits. Oz is a global adviser at iHerb, a for-profit company that offers “Earth’s best-curated selection of health and wellness products at the best possible value.” He and Kennedy, two relative outsiders, are now positioned to enjoy a symbiotic relationship within Trump’s chaotic ecosystem.

Oz was last seen running for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022. He lost to John Fetterman, who, despite dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke, carried the state by five points. Throughout that race, Oz struggled to combat the perception that he was a charlatan and carpetbagger who primarily lived in New Jersey. (Fetterman’s team repeatedly tagged Oz as an out-of-touch elitist, trolling him, for example, when he went grocery shopping for crudités and lamented high prices.) After that electoral defeat, Oz’s political dreams seemed all but dashed. But he wisely remained loyal to Trump—a person who has the ability to change trajectories on a whim.

Oz holds degrees from Harvard and Penn, and he worked as a professor of surgery at Columbia. In spite of that pedigree, Oz has spent years facing credible accusations of medical quackery for his endorsement of dietary supplements. In 2014, he received a dramatic dressing-down on Capitol Hill.

How did we get here? Oz landed this gig because he’s good on TV, yes, but also because, when he entered the political arena, he fully aligned himself with Trump. The 47th president rewards loyalty. If there’s one thing that’s become clear from his administration nominations so far, it’s that.

Some of Trump’s appointments will be less consequential than others. Anything involving the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans is inarguably serious. Oz’s confirmation is not guaranteed, but his selection has already confirmed that nothing about Trump 2.0 is mere bluster.

It's vitally important that we not fall for every trolling thing the OAFPOTUS says. Toward that end I will confine my posting to the things he actually does. Since Oz seems likely to pass Senate confirmation—which I doubted could ever happen for Gaetz—I will report on his quackery and anti-science charlatanism.

The most charitable thing I can say about the incoming administration is that it will be an interesting experiment on the resilience of the American people while a vandal is setting fire to our government. But, hey, almost half of the voters chose him.

It took me a little bit this morning to get back into things, but once I figured out what my notes meant I managed to finish two whole features today. And I still had time to check these out:

• Marine biologists think they've figured out why octopus punch fish in the face.
• Amtrak will start Chicago to Miami service on November 10th, in part to reduce congestion on the Northeast Corridor during a construction project.
• The Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) is for some reason opposed to changing the standard English beer pour from an Imperial pint (591 mL) to a 2/3 pour (349 mL).

That's it. Just three stories. I really didn't have time to read much else. But I did have time to give Cassie some pats, which I will resume doing in just a few minutes.

The New York Times had two opinion pieces today that seemed to go together.

In the first, literary critic Hillary Kelly notes the prevalence of pop-culture stories about people not so much in dystopia, but stuck in something else:

On one sci-fi show after another I’ve encountered long, zigzagging, labyrinthine passageways marked by impenetrable doors and countless blind alleys — places that have no obvious beginning or end. The characters are holed up in bunkers (“Fallout”), consigned to stark subterranean offices (“Severance”), locked in Escher-like prisons (“Andor”) or living in spiraling mile-deep underground complexes (“Silo”). Escape is unimaginable, endless repetition is crushingly routine and people are trapped in a world marked by inertia and hopelessness.

The resonance is chilling: Television has managed to uncannily capture the way life feels right now.

We’re all stuck.

What’s being portrayed is not exactly a dystopia. It’s certainly not a utopia. It’s something different: a stucktopia. These fictional worlds are controlled by an overclass, and the folks battling in the mire are underdogs — mechanics, office drones, pilots and young brides. Yet they’re also complicit, to varying degrees, in the machinery that keeps them stranded. Once they realize this, they strive to discard their sense of futility — the least helpful of emotions — and try to find the will to enact change.

I think she has a point. And just a few stories later, we get a glimpse of why that kind of story may reflect the experiences of our 2020s existence. Urbanist Stephen Smith has studied residential elevators, here and in the rest of the world, and concluded that the particular failings of the way we build elevators in the US reflect larger failings that have held us back from addressing problems that Europe and the rich Asian countries have already solved:

Elevators in North America have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system. Accessibility rules miss the forest for the trees. Our broken immigration system cannot supply the labor that the construction industry desperately needs. Regulators distrust global best practices and our construction rules are so heavily oriented toward single-family housing that we’ve forgotten the basics of how a city should work.

Similar themes explain everything from our stalled high-speed rail development to why it’s so hard to find someone to fix a toilet or shower. It’s become hard to shake the feeling that America has simply lost the capacity to build things in the real world, outside of an app.

Behind the dearth of elevators in the country that birthed the skyscraper are eye-watering costs. A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. A six-stop model will set you back more than three times as much in Pennsylvania as in Belgium. Maintenance, repairs, and inspections all cost more in America too.

The U.S. and Canada have also marooned themselves on a regulatory island for elevator parts and designs. Much of the rest of the world has settled on following European elevator standards, which have been harmonized and refined over generations. Some of these differences between American and global standards only result in minor physical differences, while others add the hassle of a separate certification process without changing the final product.

As kids in the 1970s we dreamt of flying cars and arcologies. As I shuffle through middle age in the 2020s, I dream of the social safety net and built environments that Europe takes for granted. Give me a train to New York that takes 5 hours and the end to people going bankrupt because of a treatable illness and you can keep your flying car.