The Daily Parker

Eighty years ago today, the US imposed daylight saving time as a wartime energy-saving measure. It took until April 1966 for Congress to enact a permanent regime of changing the clock twice a year. But that's all ancient history.

More recent history:

• Peter Wehner examines how the loser XPOTUS really hates that he's a loser.
• Meanwhile, Michelle Cottle wonders when the Republican Party turned "into a bunch of snowflakes?"
• The City of Chicago has (finally!) started cracking down on "dibs," the practice of leaving household junk in the street to claim parking spaces in winter.

Finally, Chicago brewery Hop Butcher to the World will delay opening up its new space in the old Half Acre property in North Center. The Brews & Choos Project will stop by as soon as it opens.

The XPOTUS promised yet another thing that would hurt the people he claims to want to help, in part because he (and obviously they) deeply misunderstand how the laws work in this country:

Former president Donald Trump suggested Saturday night he will pardon the rioters charged in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol if he is elected president in 2024.

Trump, who has teased but not confirmed another run for president, has repeatedly criticized the prosecution of individuals who violently stormed the Capitol to protest the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president. But his comments at a Texas rally on Saturday marked the first time he dangled pardons, an escalation of his broader effort to downplay the deadly events of Jan. 6.

Some of those involved in the riot held out hope for a Trump pardon before he left office 14 days later, but none were granted.

This really plays the rioters for suckers in two ways. First, not all of the charges against them derive from Federal law; presumably, by accepting pardons from the President they would be admitting to violations of DC law, and could go to jail anyway. Second, he already promised them that and had the power to try granting pardons to them while still in office. How does the saying go? "Fool me once, shame on...shame on you...fool me, you can't get fooled again."

The Republican Party also recently screwed several million people for political gain by refusing to renew the Child Tax Credit monthly distribution, which families had come to rely on during the pandemic. Now, to a person, the Republicans who prevented the bill passing the Senate make enough money that they can wait until they get the child tax credit through their annual tax refunds. The parents who need it the most can't wait a whole year for it.

I kind of just want all those Republican Senators to end their lives forgotten and in poverty, you know? That would be Karmic.

NPR's Steve Inskeep worked for six years to land a 15-minute interview with the XPOTUS, and yet no one felt any shock or surprise when it ended abruptly:

Trump and his team have repeatedly declined interviews with NPR until Tuesday, when he called in from his home in Florida. It was scheduled for 15 minutes, but lasted just over nine.

After being pressed about his repeated lies about the 2020 presidential election, Trump abruptly ended the interview.

When pressed, it was excuse after excuse — it was "too early" to claim fraud, his attorney was no good, things just seem suspicious.

But it all comes back to the same place: He has no evidence of widespread fraud that caused him to lose the election.

The tone of the interview changed. Trump then hurried off the phone as he was starting to be asked about the attack on the Capitol, inspired by election lies.

Philip Bump rolls his eyes at "the eternal lure of reasoning with the irrational:"

Many or most of us like to consider ourselves rational, considering the evidence before us and reaching reasoned conclusions based on what we see. Presented with a refutation of a belief, we like to think, we would change our minds and acknowledge our errors. Ergo: Present Trump with refutations of his claims, and he’d crumble.

The problem, of course, is that this isn’t how it works. Humans are emotional more robustly than they are rational, and when a belief is rooted in emotion — desire, fear, anger — you can’t reason your way around it. Put succinctly, you can’t combat irrationality with reason.

This pattern repeated a few times. Inskeep would offer a rational, accurate, indisputable point about the election results, and Trump — uninterested in rationality or accuracy but very interested in disputes — would wave them away.

Why bother even trying to convince Trump of reality when it’s not going to make a dent?

The answer, I think, is in keeping with the spirit of this article. Emotionally, I and others in the media think it’s important to confront falsehoods with accurate information. Rationally, I know it won’t make a difference; rationally, I’m sure Steve Inskeep understood it was unlikely that Trump would suddenly cop to simply making things up. But the virtue of combating misinformation holds an appeal that rational consideration can’t uproot.

I refuse to believe that it’s unimportant to tell the emperor that he’s not wearing clothes, even if it doesn’t prompt him to put on pants.

I listened to the first few minutes of it this morning, and marveled at Inskeep's ability not to laugh in the XPOTUS's face. Inskeep, of course, is a professional, unlike the interviewee. And Bump has a good point: when arguing with a fantasist, there is no middle ground.

The temperature bottomed out last night just under -10°C, colder than any night since I adopted Cassie. (We last got that cold on February 20th.) Even now the temperature has just gone above -6°C. Though she has two fur coats on all the time, I still think keeping her outside longer than about 20 minutes would cause her some discomfort.

Add that it's Messiah week and I barely have enough free time to give her a full hour of walks today.

Meanwhile, life goes on, even if I can only get the gist of it:

• Julia Ioffe points out that Russia itself turned NATO's attention back upon it, which doesn't really help Ukraine right now.
• Jeannie Suk Gersen sees Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health as a challenge to the Supreme Court's authority.
• The XPOTUS has set up a Special Purpose Acquisition Company that Josh Marshall calls "an open invitation to foreign bribes and payoffs."
• Chicago drivers spent more time stuck in traffic than in any other major US city this year. Yay us.

Finally, journalist Allison Robicelli missed a connection at O'Hare this past weekend, and spent the wee hours exploring the empty terminals. The last time I stared down a 12-hour stay at an airport, I hopped into the Tube and spent 8 of those hours exploring the city instead, but I'm not a professional journalist.

I've spent today alternately upgrading my code base for my real job to .NET 6.0, and preparing for the Apollo Chorus performances of Händel's Messiah on December 11th and 12th.

Cassie, for her part, enjoys when I work from home, even if we haven't spent a lot of time outside today because (a) I've had a lot to do and (b) it rained from 11am to just about now.

So, as I wait for the .NET 6 update to build and deploy on our dev/test CI/CD instance (I think I set the new environments on our app services correctly), I have a few things to read:

• David Corn reports on how the previous administration's incompetence, if not outright malice, is responsible for 400,000 preventable Covid-19 deaths.
• James Fallows digs into the questions we should ask about China.
• Chicago's City Council looks likely to approve a narrower definition of "restaurant" that would let more bars allow dogs.
• Russian artist Lena Ruseva will make you some MAGA art for just a few thousand bucks. No scam there.

OK, the build has...well, crap. I didn't set the environment correctly after all.

Update: Fixed the build bit. And the rain stopped. But the test platform is the wrong version. FFS.

Update: Well, I have to pick something up from a store before 6, so I'll come back to this task later.

Update: Even though I've had 4 tiny commits of minor things that broke with the .NET 6 upgrade, this hasn't gone poorly. Kudos to Microsoft for providing a straightforward upgrade path.

I'm not even a little surprised that Republican Glenn Youngkin beat Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Viriginia governor's race last night. The margin of 80,000 votes is just over 2% of the vote, so Youngkin can't exactly claim he won in a landslide. And, let's face it, President Biden doesn't exactly have Obama levels of popularity today. (He's still more popular than the last guy. And Gerald Ford.)

I worked in Virginia for six months in 2003, and I can tell you most of the state has, shall I say, not quite progressive politics.

Ross Douthat believes some of McAuliffe's problems come from the way he failed to address the popular—if inaccurate—perceptions of the latest boogeyman on the Right, "critical race theory." Since no one really knows what CRT actually is, Youngkin had no trouble banging that drum to scare all the suburban women that he handily shifted to his side in the last six weeks.

As for the president's agenda, as long as 52 senators want to stop him from doing anything in his first term, he can't get it done. The slave-owning Southerners who wrote the Constitution, particularly the ones from Virginia, designed the Federal government to do as little as possible.

We're five years in to historical political unrest and division in the United States, which I suppose was the Karmic balancingof the Cubs winning the World Series. The last time the US went through this much turmoil, we got the Civil Rights Act. But the time before, we got a Civil War.

Finally, let me grab a few grafs from Chris Cillizza on what CRT actually means:

For the record, here's what critical race theory actually is -- courtesy of Education Week:

"Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies. ... A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas."

And here's another helpful explainer via Brookings:

"CRT does not attribute racism to white people as individuals or even to entire groups of people. Simply put, critical race theory states that U.S. social institutions (e.g., the criminal justice system, education system, labor market, housing market, and healthcare system) are laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race."

The basic idea is that racism is systemic in many of the institutions of America -- and that by acknowledging that reality, we can work to overcome it.

Yeah, wow, I'd hate to teach children that...

Some of these will actually have to wait until tomorrow morning:

• Adam Serwer thanks Justice Samuel Alito (R) for confirming Serwer's complaints about the Court.
• A trove of XPOTUS-branded gifts meant for foreign heads of state representing "significant" monetary value disappeared at some point. Can't imagine how.
• The BBC Reality Check column suggests that reports in some journals about Invermectin may have painted an incomplete picture, putting it mildly.
• Cranky Flier explains that Southwest Airlines' recent troubles come from their overextended operations, not from any nefarious actors.
• An Annapolis, Md., couple will likely never walk free again after being arrested for attempting to sell American nuclear secrets to...well, to a foreign government that called the FBI on them. You have to read the FBI's affidavit.
• Chicago ranks 19th out of 20 metropolitan areas in jobs recovered from Covid-19 losses, ahead of only San Francisco.
• Former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham has a new tell-all book out, becoming the third Stephanie to write one about the XPOTUS.

And now, I will feed the dog.

I've opened nearly every window in my house to let in the 15°C breeze and really experience the first real fall morning in a while. Chicago will get above-normal temperatures for the next 10 days or so, but in the beginning of October that means highs in the mid-20s and lows in the mid-teens. Even Cassie likes the change.

Since I plan to spend nearly every moment of daylight outside for the rest of this weekend, I want to note a few things to read this evening when I come back inside:

• TFW your bogus election recount in Arizona finds your guy lost by 360 more votes than the official count reported in November. Sad!
• Speaking of the XPOTUS, he does not like the January 6th commission.
• Ed Kilgore advises the current POTUS on what to tell recalcitrant members of his own party.
• The New Yorker's Ben Crair reports on a German biologist who has elucidated how species become species.
• In an Atlantic article from May, writer and journalist Joshua Sharpe explains why "we should all be more afraid of driving."

Finally, if you really want to dig into some cool stuff in C# 10, Scott Hanselman explains implicit namespace support.

According to the Washington Post's Robert Kagan, the end has already begun:

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial.

The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.

Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.

So, is the Republican Party a modern-day Catilinarian conspiracy? I guess we'll find out in the next few years. Should be exciting.

Excuse me while I Google a few things...

Even though no one ever utters the phrase "just when you thought he couldn't stoop lower" about the XPOTUS, this might come close to making you say it:

Former President Donald Trump has signed a contract to provide commentary on a "gamecast" of Saturday's boxing event headlined by Evander Holyfield vs. Vitor Belfort, Triller told ESPN on Tuesday.

His son Donald Trump Jr. will join him at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida.

Talk about going back to his roots. But after all, who's really signing the contract anyway?