Events

The OAFPOTUS met with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, yesterday. I can't overstate that Putin won on so many levels, from getting the OAFPOTUS to agree to meeting on US soil in the first place to getting the OAFPOTUS to stomp on a rake on international television right at the end of it. Let's start with the location. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin that most ICC signatories have said they will honor. We're not signatories, in part because...

The OAFPOTUS has moved to federalize the Washington, D.C., police force under the DC Home Rule statute that gives him a little more than a month to do so before Congress has to consent. As with many of his more dramatic trolls, this has sent everyone to the left of Mitch McConnell into varying degrees of outrage. Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort warn that the "military crackdowns are only going to get worse:" The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end...

Ninety years ago today, FDR signed Social Security into law: In his public statement that day, FDR expressed concern for “young people [who] have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age” as well as those who had employment but no job security. Although he acknowledged that “we can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life,” he hoped the act would prevent senior citizens from ending up impoverished....

Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer describes a method of creating legislative districts that is provably and undeniably fair, even as he acknowledges that the nature of American politics would make adopting it nearly impossible: Back in 2004, soon after earning my Ph.D., I found myself in the Harvard Society of Fellows chatting with a Supreme Court justice. I asked what single problem math or economics could solve for the Court. The answer was instantaneous: Give us an objective yardstick for...

The United States will spend a generation or longer in the "find out" phase after the OAFPOTUS began a trade war against our most powerful adversary while simultaneously crippling our ability to win it: You can see it in the economic numbers: China’s economy grew by an average of 5.3 percent in the first half of the year, America’s by only 1.25 percent. You can see it, too, in Trump’s failure to wring significant concessions from Beijing. Though most countries have acquiesced to U.S. trade bullying...

Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) calmly and cogently explains why the OAFPOTUS "taking over" the DC police is just another example "a little, weak, tiny man who has to do things like this to feel secure:" Emergency Video: DC by Adam Kinzinger Trump is trying to make you think he’s bigger than he is. He’s still a small man Read on Substack

It's still gross outside, but slightly less gross than yesterday. And my trivia team (playing today as "Relieved we're not in Milwaukee") came in 2nd. So things are looking better than they have in a couple of days. And now, Szechuan carry-out. Regular posting resumes tomorrow.

I finally broke down and tried Chat GPT 5, wasting no time to waste half an hour. The first thing I asked it for was to write a bit of code for me. I wrote similar code about 4 years ago, so I wanted to see if the LLM could at least match what I did. I was pleasantly surprised that, after two refining prompts, it came up with a better solution. And then I had it do this: (Image generated by Chat GPT v5 from original work by the author.) For comparison, here's the original: The Super Cassie image is the...

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...

By the best count I have available, this is the 10,000th post on the Daily Parker, going back to the very first news item posted on my very first website in July 1997. I am not entirely sure this is really the 10,000th post, however, for a number of reasons. First, BlogEngine.NET doesn't actually count posts; I've had to use some arithmetic. Second, I removed a small number (3 or 4) of posts over the years for various reasons. Third, at some point I merged some of the posts from the separate Inner Drive...