The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Not much of a rally

The markets started slightly up this morning, but whatever optimism traders had before noon has evaporated. Both the S&P and DJIA are technically up, but less than 0.5%, while the OAFPOTUS continues to act like the demented old man he is.

And to think, Twin Peaks turned 35 today.

Meanwhile...

Finally, SMBC inadvertently explains the Republican Party's entire educational policy, complete with a joke I've made for years: if I ever win the lottery, I'll set up a math scholarship for areas that sell the most lottery tickets.

Shooting the bottom of the boat to spite everyone else

I'm only going to note in passing that world equities markets have continued to decline today, though the DJIA and S&P have stabilized a bit as of this afternoon. Still, the S&P is off 14% year-to-date, the DJIA 11%, the Nikkei 21%, and crude oil prices 16%. Still the OAFPOTUS continues to insist that his massive corruption engine will make things better for the people who voted for him, leaving out the bit that it'll only help about 1% of those voters.

Today, though, I want to gesticulate wildly at how the administration will kill us all by destroying biomedical research as we know it. The Times reported yesterday that illegal layoffs at the National Institutes of Health have halted cancer research just as scientists neared a breakthrough:

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health demonstrated a promising step toward using a person’s own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers in a paper in Nature Medicine on Tuesday, the same day the agency was hit with devastating layoffs that left many NIH personnel in tears.

The treatment approach is still early in its development; the personalized immunotherapy regimen shrank tumors in only about a quarter of the patients with colon, rectal and other GI cancers enrolled in a clinical trial. But a researcher who was not involved in the study called the results “remarkable” because they highlight a path to a frustratingly elusive goal in medicine — harnessing a person’s own immune defenses to target common solid tumor cancers.

Former US Representative Adam Kitzinger (R-IL) adds:

Although empowered by President Trump’s newly created, budget-slashing Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the driving force behind the dismantling of our public health infrastructure is Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Like his boss in the Oval Office, Kennedy seems intent on settling old scores with his former opponents.

One of Kennedy’s first moves as HHS Secretary was to suspend a CDC campaign encouraging Americans to get the flu shot. He also created a panel to revisit the debunked vaccine-autism link and appointed vaccine skeptic David Geier to lead it. Geier had previously been disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license.

In another era, state public health agencies might have been able to compensate for the CDC’s retreat. But Kennedy has attacked those agencies too, suspending grants that funded their response to infectious disease outbreaks. One immediate casualty was a measles vaccination program in West Texas.

Secretary Kennedy insists that a system experiencing a nearly 20 percent workforce reduction will somehow function better. It’s the same kind of magical thinking that fueled his anti-vaccine crusade. Then and now, evidence and logic take a back seat.

He calls his agenda “Make America Healthy Again.” But looking at the hollowed-out public health infrastructure and the rising measles death toll, I can only call it what it truly is: Make America Sick Again.

Josh Marshall frets that no one in the health sphere was prepared for an attack like this, so they don't even know how to talk about how bad this will be for everyone:

The White House and DOGE have entered the war on cancer on the side of cancer.

There are disease communities around every major disease in this country — breast cancer, colon cancer, Alzheimers, etc. I don’t mean the professional societies. I mean, the organizations and informal communities of people who are survivors, who’ve been directly affected by these afflictions, who have genetic predispositions, who are doctors and caregivers. It is totally outside the experience and comfort zone of people from the research community to speak directly to what we might call the end user and say your chance at a cure or your child’s cure is going up in flames as we speak.

Quite simply, until elected officials start hearing from angry constituents in town halls who are pissed that their futures and the futures of their loved ones are being lit on fire for no reason, then nothing matters. The first front in this war has already been lost. The second front, where the forces of cures, treatments and health have the advantage, has only barely gotten off the ground.

What I’m describing here also connects up with the universities, where a lot of this research takes place and which are home to a lot of academic medical centers which are the places many communities rely on for their health care.

For 30 years, Republican extremists have wanted to destroy the Federal government, but party leaders like George W Bush and Mitch McConnell wanted to do it institutionally. The OAFPOTUS and his wrecking crew don't care about institutions, or really about anything, other than their loyalty to the OAFPOTUS and their hatred of people they think look down on them.

Even if we win back all three branches of government in 2026 and 2028, it will take decades to repair the damage. Forget making the US a better place to live, or even getting the US of 2050 on technological parity with the Europe of 2010. We're going to struggle to undo the damage, full stop. So even when these assholes ultimately lose, they'll win.

Can't make March jokes anymore

We had a wild ride in March, with the temperature range here at Inner Drive Technology WHQ between 23.3° on the 14th and -5.4°C on the 2nd—not to mention 22.6°C on Friday and 2.3°C on Sunday.

Actually, everyone in the US had a wild ride last month, for reasons outside the weather, and it looks like it will continue for a while:

Finally, the Dunning-Krueger poster children working for the Clown Prince of X have announced plans to replace the 60 million lines of COBOL code running the Social Security Administration with an LLM-generated pile of spaghetti in some other language (Python? Ruby? Logo?) before the end of the year. As this will only cost a few million dollars and will keep the children away from the sharp objects for a while, I say it's money well spent for software that will never see the light of day. There are only two possibilities here, not mutually-exclusive: they are too dumb to know why this is stupid, or they don't care because they actually want to kill Social Security by any means they can. I believe it's both.

Another day, another OAFPOTUS grift

I want to start with a speech on the floor of the French Senate three days ago, in which Claude Malhuret (LIRT-Allier) had this to say about the OAFPOTUS:

Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose higher tariffs on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.

I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.

Malheureusement, il a bien raison. And his speech is worth reading (or hearing, si vous parlez français bien).

But that isn't all that happened in the last day or so. No, every day brings new revelations of stupidity and corruption in the new administration:

And now I will take a half-day of PTO and explore four new breweries in Bridgeport and Pilsen. If only the weather had cooperated.

Wow, this totally bites

I got some bad news this morning: my dentist, John C McArthur, announced his retirement as of March 17th.

I started going to Dr McArthur in 1974. In fact, I was one of his first patients after he took over the practice from his father—who was, in turn, the dentist my mother, uncle, and grandparents started going to in 1958. So my family has a long, long history going to his Hubbard Woods office. I mean, 13 presidents long. I'm going to miss going up there.

Moreover, I have never had a cavity. So I would say he had some skills. (Of course, as he would point out, I had good genes, good habits, and fluoridated water, which may have helped.) Going to the dentist has never caused me any anxiety, so I've never really understood why other people dread it.

I mean, I've never gone to a different dentist. I've never even thought about it. What do I ask them? "How many of your patients have you kept free of cavities for 50 years?" I hope his office has a good referral.

Obviously, I knew this day would come. I figured he'd retire during the pandemic, but he kept going, for which I'm grateful. I wish him a long and happy retirement.

Reading while the world compiles

One of my work projects has a monthly release these days, so right now I'm watching a DevOps pipeline run through about 400 time-consuming integration tests before I release this month's update. That gives me some time to catch up on all this:

The New York Times has a long explanation of how the Clown Prince of X took over the federal bureaucracy.

All right, the build has finished, so I can now deploy. And for no reason other than I like it, here is a photo of Cassie watching TV with me last night:

Still chugging along

The Weather Now gazetteer import has gotten to the Ps (Pakistan) with 11,445,567 places imported and 10,890,186 indexed. (The indexer runs every three hours.) I'll have a bunch of statistics about the database when the import finishes, probably later tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest. I'm especially pleased with the import software I wrote, and with Azure Cosmos DB. They're churning through batches of about 30 files at a time and importing places at around 10,000 per minute.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

Finally, in February 1852, a man calling himself David Kennison died in Chicago. He had clamed to be 115 years old, participated in the Boston Tea Party, and hobnobbed with the great and good in the early days of the Republic. And in the proud tradition of people giving undue acclaim to total charlatans, the entire city turned out for his funeral—173 years ago yesterday.

So much Dunning, so much Kruger

It seems like so much of the news I've read today concerns people behaving stupidly, but thinking they're behaving intelligently. Sadly, it's mostly the same group of people:

Finally, people in Bridgeport and other Southwest Side neighborhoods have fallen in love with a rotund beaver who lives with her family on the Chicago River. Some have suggested naming the beaver Lori Heavyfoot or Dam Ryan. I hope she doesn't meet up with one of the city's other charismatic megafauna...

One last cold snap coming in

Winter ends two weeks from tomorrow, but climate science and meteorology can only study nature, not command it. That explains why, despite ample sunshine, the temperature at IDTWHQ has stayed around -7°C since it leveled out this morning, and promises to shed another 8-10 degrees tonight. Then we're in for a few blasts of cold interspersed with warm days and some snow here and there for about a week before it consistently warms up.

Elsewhere in the cold, cold world:

Finally, Google has suspended comments on the label "Gulf of America" because of all the one-star reviews people gave the body of water. I realize Google just follows the USGS on American place names (same as Weather Now), but still, they could have slow-walked it (as Weather Now is doing).

Hungary on the Potomac

Josh Marshall explains the significance of the NIH funding directive that the OAFPOTUS took out with the trash last night:

I think it’s a combination of two things. One is anti-COVID research payback, combined with a general hostility to scientific expertise culture and a general and not-incorrect belief that the kinds of people who work in these institutions are mainly not friendly to Trumpism. Basically, it’s seen as a body blow to blue-state and -city culture. Combined with this is a more structural belief that universities and colleges are institutional loci of opposition to MAGA and Trumpism. So you can knock them out of commission in a broader political and culture war by simply defunding them.

On a secondary level, once you’ve established that these grants are at the political pleasure of the chief executive, they’re a powerful tool for disciplining these institutions. Criticize President Trump and watch half your budget disappear. This latter model is very much the one pursued by people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary: discipline the universities and bring them under political and patronage control. Putting it all together, it’s very much a move in a broader culture war, seeing universities as the breeding ground of cosmopolitan, liberal, empirical values in the society. So you either destroy them or put them on a tight leash.

There are academic medical centers outside of Boston, New York and LA. They exist across the South and in red states as well. Indeed, these and the universities they’re associated with are often bigger drivers of job support and growth, in percentage terms, than they are in blue states. They’re also where people get treated for diseases. They’re where a lot of people’s kids go to school.

We all get that in our age the Democrats are essentially the party of the universities and higher education. Not simply because of the people who work in that sector but because of people who have college educations and advanced degrees and are acculturated to its values. So on its face, from a degenerate, authoritarian point of view it seems like a no-brainer — knock out the universities. But it doesn’t break down that clearly when you see where these places are located and the role they play in communities around the country.

Then there’s the pharmaceutical industry.

We have an administration that wants to run the US like Orbán runs Hungary, but they have the discipline, focus, and general aptitude of a Kindergarten class. That may be the only thing that saves us.