The Daily Parker

Yesterday, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ scraped along at -11°C early in the morning before "warming" up to -7.5°C around 3pm. Cassie and I got a 22-minute walk around then and she seemed fine. Today the pattern completely inverted. I woke up during the warmest part of the day: 7am, -8°C. Around 8am the temperature started dropping and now hovers around -11°C again—slightly colder than the point where I limit Cassie to 15 minutes outside. She just doesn't feel cold, apparently, and would happily stay outside until she passed out from hypothermia.

So, bottom line, I'm in no hurry to take her for her lunchtime walk.

Besides, I've got a lot of interesting stories to read:

• Former Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff explains why he's a liberal, and why you should be, too.
• Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman have some ideas about how to fix the United States' "two-party problem:" proportional representation.
• Block Club Chicago lists 10 of its investigations into the Chicago Transit Authority's mismanagement under its outgoing boss, Dorval Carter.
• Chuck Marohn explains why building tons of new housing in old, dense cities like San Francisco and NYC doesn't work as well as people hope.
• Two Illinois state representatives introduced a bill in the state House to decriminalize sex work, which would dramatically increase their safety and security.
• British computer scientist Peter Kirstein died five years ago, and left behind a delightful essay on the beginnings of the Internet—and the Internet's first-ever password.
• James Poniewozik has a fun history of TV show opening titles that will waste a few minutes of your afternoon (in a good way).

Finally, yet another coyote found his way into a store, this time an Aldi in Humboldt Park. Almost 17 years ago one of his ancestors tried to hide in a Quiznos sandwich shop in the Loop. The result was the same for both: removal and relocation. Block Club says yesterday's incident involved "rescuing" the coyote from the Aldi, but that seems pretty harsh. Like, was the coyote trying to go to Whole Foods instead? They're usually not that bougie.

Cassie and I survived our 20-minute, -8°C walk a few minutes ago. For some reason I feel like I need a nap. Meanwhile:

• James Fallows remembers his old boss Jimmy Carter, and puts his presidency in perspective for the younger generations.
• Paul Krugman reminds the Republican Party that California contributes more to the country's GDP than any other state, so maybe cut the crap threatening to withhold disaster relief?
• ProPublica goes "inside the movement to redirect billions of taxpayer dollars to private religious schools."
• New Republic digs into why these same fundamentalist Christians hate ideas so much.
• Illinois legislators recently took a tour of Munich's and Berlin's transit systems, both of which I have personally found to be better than Chicago's, though London's and Vienna's are a bit better in my view. (And then there's Tokyo's, which has no equal I've encountered...)
• In much more enjoyable transit news, Chicago Transit Authority CEO Dorval Carter finally plans to retire, opening the door to someone to take over who actually likes public transit.
• NASA is weighing (quite literally) whether to retrieve some rocks it has collected on Mars.

Finally, I want to end with Ross Douthat's latest (subscriber-only) newsletter, taking Vivek Ramaswamy to task for suggesting American kids need more intense competition in order for the US to stay ahead of its peers. I'll just focus on one paragraph, where he suggests Ramaswamy's end goal may not be a place we really want to go:

[T]he atmosphere he’s describing in South Korea, the frantic cycle of educational competition, isn’t just a seeming contributing factor to that country’s social misery; it’s almost certainly a contributing factor to the literal collapse of South Korea’s population, the steep economic rise that Munger describes giving way to an equally steep demographic decline. So for societies no less than individuals, it appears possible to basically burn out on competition, to cram-school your way to misery, pessimism and collapse — something that any advocate of intensified meritocratic competition would do well to keep in mind.

As I have more and more contact with kids born after 1995, I find so many of them who either have flat personalities, an inability to function independently, and an alarming lack of emotional resilience, or who have vitality, intelligence, and an ability to function in the world but no ambition. The last 30 years have crushed the elite-adjacent kids whose parents want them to enter the elite, whatever they think "elite" means. As a kid who traveled alone on public transit to Downtown Chicago at age 7, and managed to get from O'Hare security to LAX security without help by age 8, I feel sorry for these incompetent, despondent children.

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 Library of Congress has named Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 24 other films to the National Film Registry this week. A quick view of the list tells me I've only seen 5 of them, so I need to start watching more movies.

In other news:

• Former Chicago mayor and outgoing US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel suggests some ways the Democratic Party can get back in the saddle.
• The Chicago City Council finally passed its 2025 budget, a $17.3 bn mess that only got 27 out of 50 votes, and then only because it doesn't have a property tax increase. And we're still paying for police tort settlements out of the general fund instead of the police pension fund, where they should come from.
• Chicago's Christkindlmarket in Daley Center Plaza has been named "the most overcrowded holiday market in the US," in part because the overflow Christkindlmarket at Wrigley Field got cancelled this year due to a single hockey game next week.

Finally, Illinois could, if it wanted to, redirect $1.5 billion in Federal highway funds to mass-transit projects in the Chicago area under President Biden's 2021 Covid relief plan. Unfortunately, a lot of the state would prefer to build more useless highways, so this probably won't happen.

Before I link to anything else, I want to share Ray Delahanty's latest CityNerd video that explores "rural cosplaying." I'll skip directly to the punchline; you should watch the whole thing for more context:

Elsewhere,

• Josh Marshall implores people, one more time, stop giving the OAFPOTUS head space when he says dumb shit.
• Fareed Zakaria marvels at how weak Russia has become.
• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) continues the long tradition of high-ego, low-skill politicians completely failing at their jobs.
• ProPublica exposes UnitedHealthcare's internal process to lower its own costs (read: increase its profits) by systematically failing autistic children.
• Forget pipelines and fracking; data centers specializing in crypto mining have become the biggest threats to the environment.
• In March, Transport for London will raise Tube fares about 5%, for example raising the daily cap on zone 1-2 fares from £8.50 to £8.90.

There is some good news today, though. In the last 6½ hours, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters rose almost 9°C (15°F), to an almost-balmy -3.5°C. The forecast says it'll keep rising another 12°C or so through Sunday. So our first cold snap of the winter appears to be behind us.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.)

Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era:

• Adam Gray (D) has defeated US Representative John Duarte (R) in California's 13 district, bringing the House of Representatives to its final tally of 210 Democrats and 215 Republicans.
• An assassin shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, 50, this morning in midtown Manhattan.
• The president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, attempted an autogolpe yesterday that failed when the military and police refused to prevent the legislature from meeting to reverse his martial law declaration and start impeaching him.
• US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel will move back to his house eight blocks from mine in January as he decides what to do with himself next. (Personally, I'd like to see him back on the Fifth Floor.)
• The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has reversed its stance on end-to-end cryptography for mobile phones now that international hackers are running amok with insecure iPhone-to-Android messages.
• Bruce Schneier analyzes the good and bad ways that AI was involved in the world's elections this year.

Let's hope tomorrow's mood is a different Far Side comic...

Mayor Johnson's newly-appointed Chicago Public Schools Board president The Rev Mitchell Ikenna Johnson has resigned:

Amid a wave of backlash over troubling social media posts that were criticized as antisemitic, misogynistic and conspiratorial, Chicago’s new Board of Education president is resigning at the request of Mayor Brandon Johnson just seven days after he was sworn into office. It’s the latest stunning development in the ongoing leadership struggle atop Chicago Public Schools.

His resignation came after Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday called for him to step down, according to NBC5, following similar calls by 40 alderpersons and many Jewish leaders.

The mayor said he asked for the resignation.

There also have been questions about whether Johnson lives in Chicago and about his past. He was disbarred in Ohio nearly 30 years ago and at one point was so delinquent on his child support that he had a lien on his house.

Given all the problems, many have questioned the vetting process for the new school board members. On Wednesday, Rev. Johnson said he was “pretty confident that the things that are relevant to my experience were vetted.”

As one of my friends said, "Our mayor is an imbecile. That's not fair; I should give him the benefit of the doubt. It's entirely possibly he's not an imbecile, and he actually agrees with the positions of his former school board president."

I don't usually regret voting for someone this much so soon after they take office, but wow.

Recently-elected Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson has made a couple of moves this week all but guaranteed to make him a one-term mayor. First, despite "no property tax increases" being the cornerstone of his campaign, he proposed a budget today that—wait for it—would increase property taxes:

“I’m not going to raise property taxes. I’m the only person running in this race who made a commitment to that,” he said during a Block Club interview in March 2023. “For my first term, we’re not raising property taxes.”

But facing a series of tough decisions over how to close a nearly $1 billion spending gap in 2025, now-Mayor Brandon Johnson is going back on that promise.

In his budget address Wednesday, Johnson will propose increasing the city’s property tax levy to bring in an additional $300 million per year, according to the mayor’s office.

The proposal would increase most people's taxes by 4% a year. But that may not have been his worst sin this week, compared with his appointment of The Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson (no relation) to head the Chicago Public Schools Board. The Rev. Johnson, it turns out, has quite the social media history:

A majority of the City Council is calling for the newly appointed president of the Chicago Board of Education to resign in the aftermath of “antisemitic and pro-Hamas” comments, calling his appointment a vetting failure by Mayor Brandon Johnson.

The Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson made comments containing tropes of antisemitism following Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year, Jewish Insider reports. The publication cited screenshots from various accounts linked to Mitchell Johnson, which included posts comparing “Zionist Jews” to Nazi Germany.

“My Jewish colleagues appear drunk with the Israeli power and will live to see their payment. It will not be nice and I care not how and what you call me,” he wrote in December.

The council is urging Mitchell Johnson to apologize and resign immediately, according to a joint statement signed by 26 council members. They singled out Brandon Johnson's vetting process when appointing new board members.

“Calling Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack an ‘absolute right’ and justifying it as resistance against oppression, as Rev. Johnson did in March of this year and on other occasions, is abhorrent, inexcusable and disqualifying from public service,” the statement said. “His continued role on the school board is non-negotiable, both he and Mayor Johnson must act now to correct this terrible mistake.”

Mayor Johnson's first choice for the post, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, was apparently unavailable.

"Vetting failure" my ass. Johnson has gone out of his way to piss off the moderates who decided to give him a chance over the right-of-center Paul Vallas, and boy has he succeeded. But we're stuck with him until 2027.

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.)

Meanwhile, the world continues to turn:

• Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives. ... [I]f you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress."
• Eugene Robinson excoriates CNN (and by implication a good chunk of the MSM) for covering the XPOTUS as if he were a normal political candidate and not, you know, an election and a Reichstag fire from crippling the modern world: "Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away."
• Ezra Klein spends 45 minutes explaining that what's wrong with the XPOTUS isn't just the obvious, but the fact that no one around him is guarding us from his delusional disinhibitions: "What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him."
• James Fallows, counting down to November 5th, calls out civic bravery: "There are more of us than there are of them."
• Fareed Zakaria warns that the Democratic Party hasn't grokked the political realignment going on in the United States right now: "The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education. The other strong predictors of a person’s voting behavior are gender, geography and religion. So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right."
• Pamela Paul points out the inherent nihilism of "settler colonialism" ideology as it applies to the growing anti-Israel movement in left-wing academia: "Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states?"
• Hitachi has won a $212m contract to—wait for it—remove 5.25-inch floppy disks from the San Francisco MUNI light-rail network.
• American Airlines has rolled out a tool that will make an annoying sound if a gate louse attempts to board before his group number is called. Good.
• SMU writing professor Jonathan Malesic harrumphs that college kids don't read books anymore.

Speaking of books, The Economist just recommended yet another book to put on my sagging "to be read" bookshelves (plural). Nicholas Cornwell (writing as Nick Harkaway), the son of David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré), has written a new George Smiley novel set in 1963. I've read all the Smiley novels, and this one seems like a must-read as well: "Karla’s Choice could have been a crude pastiche and a dull drama. Instead, it is an accomplished homage and a captivating thriller. It may be a standalone story, but with luck Mr Harkaway will continue playing the imitation game." Excellent.

As you may have seen below, yesterday I went out to Kankakee on a $15 round-trip Amtrak ticket to visit Knack Brewing for the Brews & Choos Project. Not only did the brewery surprise me—I mean, just look at it on Google Street View—but the city had a lot more going on than I anticipated.

I've been through Kankakee a bunch of times, and maybe even pulled off I-57 on some trip to Champaign or St Louis. I've even landed at IKK once, in March 2002, getting checked out in a Piper Warrior. But until yesterday, I never actually walked around the place.

If it's known for anything outside Illinois, Kankakee is probably best known as "the worst place to live in America," at least according to Money magazine in 1999. (This American Life explains.) Settlers and the US government stole the land it sits on from the Pottawatomie tribes in 1832, and platted the town in June 1853. Unlike most Northwest Ordinance cities, however, the good burghers of Bourbonnais (as it was then called) decided to orient the city along the railroad tracks, 8° east of true north.

As this Google Earth view shows, Kankakee suffered serious damage from car-oriented development in the post-WWII era as most of its downtown became parking lots:

Even getting to Kankakee takes you through an historical artifact from the beginning days of Amtrak in 1971. When Amtrak started, it consolidated its Chicago operations at Union Station, which had (and still has) the only passenger track connecting the north and south sides of the region. Dearborn Station closed, and the Illinois Central abandoned what is now Millennium Station. Trains serving Southern Illinois and points south now left from the other side of the Chicago river, which worked well enough until the 18th Street bridge became unusable in the 1980s. Today, that means trains serving Kankakee, Carbondale, and New Orleans have to proceed from Union Station in reverse for about 3 km, then turn around and pass at 8 km/h over the St Charles Airline to the freight tracks parallel to the Metra Electric and South Shore lines that come out of Millennium Station:

Source: High Speed Rail Alliance

To get the 5 km from Union Station to 22nd Street, where the train finally highballs (though only at the US "high" speed of 120 km/h), takes 20 minutes. To get from there the rest of the 90 km to Kankakee takes about 50 minutes. Amtrak needs only $147 million to restore the 18th Street Bridge and add more track to eliminate the reversing nonsense, money it might get any day now. Yeah, any day now.

Back to my adventure. Once in Kankakee, I took the long way (about 2½ km) from the station to the brewery so I could get a sense of the city. Like a lot of places, it definitely has a good side and a bad side. Less than a kilometer from the station I hustled past vacant lots and a couple of houses that had seen better days:

And yet, just over the river and a bit south of there I found a cute example of an 1880s farmhouse next to an early-1900s four-square:

And did you know the city has a wee 800 kw hydroelectric station, first built in 1912?

That's not a lot of power, but it probably provides enough for about 200 homes or businesses—reducing everyone's electricity costs.

And there's some civic pride, too. I missed the annual music festival last week, but I did stumble upon the classic car display outside the pizza joint where I grabbed a slice:

And the train station looks pretty charming at sunset on a summer evening:

I'll head back there at some point, maybe in the fall. Amtrak only has three trains a day, leaving at 8am, 4pm, and 8pm, with returns at 11am, 8pm, and 11pm. So if I take the train, I'll probably once again only get three hours or so to explore. But it only cost me $15 to get there and back yesterday, and I'm seeing tickets for as low as $5 each way, so why not? It's worth the trip.