The Daily Parker

As we end the work-week, we can start our weekend with these little nuggets of horror and amusement:

• The UK Home Office has demanded that Apple create a back door into its cloud storage system to allow the UK government to snoop on everyone's content worldwide, which, if I correctly understand Apple's ADP architecture, is technically impossible.
• ProPublica has compiled a list of the people Elon Musk has enlisted to capture the government of the United States. Paul Krugman calls Musk's efforts an "attempted autogolpe."
• Gen-Z writer Olivia Julianna doesn't think the OAFPOTUS is exceptional—he's what the entire generation has known all their lives.
• The NTSB has released its final report on the fatal CTA Yellow Line accident in November 2023, largely exonerating the train's driver and finding a CTA decision to disable automatic braking as one of the probable causes.
• Kate Wagner takes a look at Neuschwanstein Castle and sees an 1870s version of the McMansions she's crusaded against for years.

Finally, Chicago has only gotten 251 mm of snowfall this season, just 3 mm more than the record-lowest 1920-21 season and only 26% of our normal 975 mm. Granted, we still have three more weeks of winter, but nothing in the forecast suggests we'll get a significant snowfall before March 1st. We may get 10 mm or so Saturday night, depending on when the temperature falls below freezing, but the 10-day forecast doesn't have a lot of precipitation in it. I hope we get some good rainfall this spring, though.

Chicago got a few millimeters of ice last night, which made my 15-minute walk from my house to Cassie's day camp into a 24-minute walk. The poor girl could not understand my difficulty, but she also can't count all four of her paws, so we work with what we have. Fortunately the temperature has gotten above freezing and promises to stay there at least until late tonight.

Elsewhere in the world:

• Josh Marshall proposes a taxonomy of the Administration's forces of destruction.
• Part of that destruction: erasing from DOJ websites any information about the January 6th terrorists who stormed the Capitol.
• Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien describes Elon Musk's efforts as "state capture."
• Karen Tumulty says we're watching a constitutional collapse.
• Jeff Maurer jokes that Musk closing a $0.04-trillion agency will certainly put a dent in the $1.8-trillion budget gap.

In other news, I deployed an update to Weather Now last night that corrected a couple of bugs, and I also imported a few thousand places from the US Census Bureau and the US Geological Survey. By the end of February I should have the entire USGS gazetteer imported, plus a vastly expanded search service that will speed up finding places in the world to see their weather. I also hope to (finally!) allow registered users to choose measurement systems and to see where the best and the worst weather in the world is currently reported. Fun!

This will be a bit ranty, but I'm super pissed off at far-left ideologues in the US right now.

Since right after the October 7th attack, hordes of children at elite American colleges have protested Israel's response. These kids came out as anti-Israel mere days after Hamas killed or kidnapped 1,200 civilians in a surprise attack on lightly-defended farms near the border. That is, they didn't wait for Israel actually to invade Gaza before calling for Israel to accept the murder of 1,000 of its citizens because they deserved it; no, they started with the slogans and the die-ins right away.

If you live in the currently fashionable oppressor-oppressed dichotomy that these kids believe, Israel—a country created by the UN to be the permanent home of the survivors of the greatest mass murder in human history—is prima facie evil because they "oppress" Palestinians—an Arab people who also have historic roots in the same area but who have been kicked out of every other neighboring country, in part to irritate Israel. If you're chanting "from the river to the sea," you're echoing the Palestinians who chant the same thing, because they literally want to sweep the Jews from Israel (i.e., from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea). In other words, the children who immediately began protesting Israel's right to self-defense before Israel had even started responding to the attack seem to believe that Israel has no right to exist.

Now, I have serious problems with the duration and horrific destruction of Israel's invasion of Gaza, but none at all with Israel's right to defend itself. Israeli self-defense, moral and justified; Israel completely destroying Gaza and inflicting 100,000 casualties on Palestinians, immoral and unjustified. We can all agree on these things, I hope. Israel's conduct in its war against Hamas has gone way beyond self-defense and well into ethnic cleansing. The right-wing government of Israel, and many of its citizens, really do want to kick the Palestinians out of Israeli-controlled areas and into neighboring Arab countries like Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, those countries' governments be damned.

But the kids went farther, blaming the Democratic Party for "allowing" Israel to defend itself and to continue buying US-made weapons, as opposed to, say, allowing Israel to be overrun by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists and possibly the Syrian army. So these children actively campaigned against Democratic Party candidates up to and including Kamala Harris, and may have tipped the scales in more than one state in favor of the Republican candidates who won those elections. For example, a lot of them voted for Jill Stein in swing states, and may have thrown the election to the OAFPOTUS overall.

They're not the only reason we lost the Senate and the White House, but they're definitely part of the reason. And they seemed pretty happy when the OAFPOTUS won, because they understand almost nothing about politics or history beyond the oppressed/oppressor binary they adore.

So I wonder if they were surprised that the OAFPOTUS stood up next to Israeli Prime Minister (and fellow felon) Binyamin Netanyahu yesterday and ratified Israel's ethnic cleansing of Gaza:

Donald Trump’s proposal that large numbers of Palestinians should leave Gaza to “just clean out” the whole strip has been rejected by US allies in the region and attacked as dangerous, illegal and unworkable by lawyers and activists.

The US president said he would like hundreds of thousands of people to move to neighbouring countries, either “temporarily or could be long-term”. Destinations could include Jordan, which already hosts more than 2.7 million Palestinian refugees, and Egypt, he added.

“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘You know, it’s over.’”

There were 2.3 million people living in Gaza, which is about the size and was about the density of Chicago. Imagine if the rest of Illinois came in and leveled Chicago, then Canada said all of us who live in Chicago should just move to Wisconsin or Indiana. "From the Des Plaines to the Lake" doesn't quite have the same rhythm as the other slogan, but you get the picture. Now add 3,000 years of bitter rivalry between all these peoples and you've got some idea of why clearing out Chicago would be a problem for the whole continent, not just the suburbs.

So, great work, you stupid, entitled infants. This is on you as much as it's on the Republican Party who enabled him and the right-wing Israeli parties who enabled Netanyahu. The president who moved our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem which no one asked for, and who is supported by end-times Christianists who want Israel to remain Jewish so that their deity can descend there at the end of the world, has come out in favor of the most extreme right-wing fever dreams in Israel today.

Yeah, you really showed us centrists by voting for Jill Stein. That'll teach us.

Topping the link round-up this afternoon, my go-to brewery Spiteful fears for its business if it has to pay a 25% tariff on imported aluminum cans. If the OAFPOTUS drives Spiteful out of business for no fucking reason I will be quite put out.

In other news:

• Timothy Noah reads Jean Piaget to learn more about the OAFPOTUS's "infantile incapacity to grasp the mechanics of cause and effect," suggesting that his reasoning is more transductive, like a 3-year old's ("taking a nap causes the afternoon" ~=~ "DEI causes plane crashes").
• Aaron Blake says "it's complicated" whether the OAFPOTUS completely caved to Canada and Mexico earlier this week, despite the "deals" with those nations having already been worked out by the Biden Administration, while Ruth Marcus calls the era that began on January 20th "the most damaging first two weeks in presidential history."
• Margaret Renkl reminds everyone that the Republican plan to destroy public schooling so those people won't get basic education continues apace.
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has issued an order to align transit funding with marriage and birth rates, which will help places that don't actually have transit and hurt places like Chicago and New York.
• A woman has sued author Neil Gaiman for sexual assault, alleging serial abuse that occurred in New Zealand while she was his live-in nanny.

Other than the Neil Gaiman thing, which pains me deeply, this all goes to show that President Camacho will be a Republican.

Demonstrating one more time that the OAFPOTUS is all hat and no cattle, the White House announced that it will "postpone" the crippling and needless tariffs he had threatened to impose on our second-biggest trading partner in exchange for...something Mexico would have done anyway. Avocados will continue to flow north, and dollars will continue to flow south.

Canada, meanwhile, has taken a more hardline position on the threat, which James Fallows calls "an international lesson in leadership." Perhaps Canada will agree to increased anti-coca-production efforts in exchange for the OAFPOTUS "pausing" the tariffs that it seems he never really intended to impose in the first place. Because of course he didn't.

The OAFPOTUS is a con man, and this was a grift, just like everything else he does. Or maybe, as Timothy Noah suggested, it's a simple protection racket.

Meanwhile:

• Paul Krugman is shocked—shocked!—that the OAFPOTUS is doing what he threatened to do to the economy. But he's more worried that unelected, unconstrained tech bros have apparently gained access to the Treasury Department payment system.
• Cranky Flyer fears for aviation safety after the OAFPOTUS's unhinged and narcissistic response to the crash of AE 5342 on Wednesday.
• Charls Marohn argues that the response to 67 people dying in a plane crash should be the response to over 100 people dying every day in car crashes.
• John Scalzi explains how his next novel's title got translated into Hungarian as an example of why machines are simply not up to the task of translating yet.

And finally, the New Yorker has a cautionary tale about a real-estate deal that (quite literally) went sideways.

Update, 15:52 CST: Yeah, called it. Tariffs against Canada also paused, "in exchange" for Canada allocating 10,000 staff to policing the border—which I'm pretty sure they had already planned to do.

Since I live in a dense urban environment and drive a plug-in hybrid, I can go a long time without buying gasoline.

Last night, I broke down and put 35 liters of gas in the car, because I'm concerned the OAFPOTUS's tariffs against Canada will cause petrol prices to spike in the Midwest. In fairness, I only had 3 liters left, but still: I could have gone another month!

I last filled up coming back from watching the eclipse on April 8th. So I did set a new personal record for time between refueling: 300 days. Sadly, the 2,863 km between fuel stops didn't get all the way to my PR of 3,116 km or the Holy Grail of 3,219 km (2,000 miles). And hey, 1.2 L/100 km (194.3 MPG) really doesn't suck. Since buying the car six years ago, I've spent less than $600 on gas. That also doesn't suck.

Still, I'm annoyed that politics interfered. The OAFPOTUS continues to present as the dumbest person ever to sit in the Oval Office by at least 20 IQ points.

Throughout all the bullshit the OAFPOTUS has spewed onto the nation in the past couple of weeks, Ezra Klein wants to remind you of something I have mentioned many times: he's a charlatan, and everything he does is a grift. Don't believe him:

People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency.

The president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president.

Josh Marshall has a slightly different, but overlapping, perspective:

The point is that you do “shock and awe” when you don’t actually have the power to pull the job off. You’re trying for a rapid-fire dramatic effect that gets your opponent to collapse or stand down. The psychological shock value is the additional weapon that fills the gap between your power and your intended goal. And understanding that is a critical, really the critical first step to combating it.

This stuff isn’t an illusion. It’s happening. It’s real. But you do “shock and awe” when you don’t actually have the power to make it stick. Otherwise there’s no need for the drama. You just do it. So recognizing that shock and confusion and not falling for it is essential to combating it.

It helps that they're not particularly competent at any of this. Not a lot, but it helps.

It's hard to see the OAFPOTUS's actions towards our two biggest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, as in the interests of the United States. So far, the White House hasn't actually issued a (probably unlawful) order imposing steep tariffs that would undo our free-trade agreements, but just the threat has caused a lot of damage already:

As I wrote the other day, in the three decades since NAFTA went into effect, North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times. Manufacturers developed this system not just because tariffs were low or zero, but because they thought they had a guarantee that tariffs would stay low.

One way of saying this is that until just the other day there was really no such thing as U.S. manufacturing, Canadian manufacturing or Mexican manufacturing, just North American manufacturing — a highly efficient, mutually beneficial system that sprawled across the three nations’ borders.

But now we have a U.S. president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn’t worth the paper it was printed on — that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it. And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate — that is, dis-integrate — reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.

And to think that many people imagined that Trump would be good for business.

We have, by a very narrow margin and with less than a majority of the vote, managed to put the most corrupt and possibly stupidest person in history into this office. If an adversary threatened to disrupt North American trade as much as this clown has, we'd threaten war.

And before you start wondering how long it will take for average Americans to get nervous, well, that's already happened: the only newly-inaugurated president in modern history with a lower approval rating was, of course, the same guy 8 years ago. (He has the highest disapprovals in history right now, though.)

Only 1,449 days to go...

Wednesday night saw the worst air-transport crash in the US in 19 years. The National Transportation Safety Board won't have a preliminary report until at least March 1st, but that didn't stop the OAFPOTUS from blaming everyone he doesn't like for it:

In the aftermath of the deadly collision between a jetliner and a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan National Airport, Trump held an extraordinary news conference during which he speculated on the cause of the accident. At length, he attacked former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for imposing what he called “a big push to put diversity” that he said weakened the Federal Aviation Administration.

Reading from a 2024 Fox News report — which he incorrectly identified as being two weeks old — Trump listed conditions that he suggested disqualify people from being air traffic controllers: “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”

But here’s the rub: During Trump’s first term, the FAA began a program to hire air traffic controllers with the conditions that Trump decried.

James Fallows, like most of us, felt absolute disgust after seeing the press conference:

Donald Trump’s press appearance today, designed to advance this slur and fiction, was despicable.

-He made an event that should have been about victims, consequences, investigations, questions, lessons, all about himself. It was strongly reminiscent of his hogging-the-stage early press spectacles about Covid. This was the aviation version of one of his “ivermectin” rants.

-He made his raft of appointees and officials—the new Transportation Secretary, the new Vice President, the unspeakable new Defense Secretary—perform as North Korean-style adulatory lackies, each beginning his statement with admiration and thanks to the Dear Leader and his guidance. This too was a return to the Covid/ivermectin days.

-He did what no one should ever do in the hours after an airplane disaster, which is to presume detailed knowledge of what happened and who was to blame.

-He preposterously claimed that he and his people would always be known as “the best and the brightest,” obviously with no awareness of the sarcastic meaning David Halberstam attached to that term. This is the administration proposing a former WWE figure as Secretary of Education, of Dr. Oz as head of Medicare and Medicaid, of the very worst member of the Kennedy lineage in charge of the health of millions, with Fox News figures as far as the eye can see. He’s right. This era will stand as a symbolic moment in the history of the “meritocracy.”

The least of America’s “merit” problems is the skill and caliber of its air-traffic control cadre.

In fact, if any politician may get the blame for the state of air-traffic control in the US, it would have to be Ronald Reagan. And the OAFPOTUS just disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee and fired the head of the TSA.

Juliette Kayyem points out the obvious:

The precise immediate cause of the crash—which killed all 64 passengers and crew members aboard the airliner and all three people in the helicopter—will not become clear until investigators fully analyze recordings of air-traffic-control communications and the plane’s black box. But the accident follows a long string of alarming near collisions at airports across the country—a pattern suggesting that the aviation-safety systems upon which human life depends are under enormous strain.

In 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration identified 19 “serious runway incursions,” the most in almost a decade. The causes of these events are varied: air-traffic-control staffing shortages, pilot inexperience, demand for air travel, outdated technology. The increase in near misses led the FAA to create a safety review team and issue a rare industrywide “safety call to action” demanding greater vigilance throughout the community. These incidents do not appear to have prompted any major changes in safety practices either nationally or in the Washington area. Last year, the number of serious incursions declined, making the issue seem less urgent.

Safety systems are vulnerable to a phenomenon known in the disaster-management world as the “near-miss fallacy”—an inability to interpret and act upon the warnings embedded in situations where catastrophe is only narrowly avoided. Paradoxically, people may come to see such events as signs that the system is working. In her groundbreaking research on NASA after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, the American sociologist Diane Vaughan faulted the agency for its “normalization of deviance.” The direct culprits in the spacecraft’s fate were faulty booster-rocket parts known as “O-rings.” Vaughn noted that shuttle missions had been experiencing problems with the parts for years, but NASA had downplayed their importance. Engineers were able to normalize O-ring incidents and other safety issues because none had caused significant harm—until one did.

We don't yet know the entire accident chain that brought the Army helicopter and CRJ into a collision. But we have some clues about a system that didn't help—and will get worse with the OAFPOTUS's recent actions disbanding key safety oversight groups.

I had a delightful 2-hour lunch with a friend I've not seen in a while, after a morning of non-stop meetings. I also updated a piece of software that gets deployed tomorrow. I've got about 20 minutes now to jot down all of the things I hope to read later today:

• An Army helicopter on a training flight collided with an American Airlines CRJ on approach to DCA last night, killing 64 people; the OAFPOTUS blamed black folk. (I'm not kidding, he really did.)
• Paul Rosensweig explains how the flurry of orders coming out of the White House targeted the weak spots of the US government, "precisely [those parts] whose oversight might interfere with Trump’s activities, or those of his allies."
• Mark S. Zaid and Andrew P. Bakaj agree.
• David A Graham expands on this thought, looking at the funding-freeze memo and the chaos it caused.
• Matt Ford chuckles over the effort's "crash and burn."
• Paul Krugman points out that the Elon Musk-driven effort to get rid of a sizeable chunk of said bureaucracy is "a scam and a purge." 
• Jamie Bouie just calls the administration "delusional."

Finally, singer Marianne Faithfull has died at 78. She will be missed.