The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

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).

A cyber attack in plain sight

Security expert Bruce Schneier can't believe the damage that Elon Musk's team have already done to US national security, and worries it will get much, much worse:

In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound.

What makes this situation unprecedented isn’t just the scope, but also the method of attack. Foreign adversaries typically spend years attempting to penetrate government systems such as these, using stealth to avoid being seen and carefully hiding any tells or tracks. The Chinese government’s 2015 breach of OPM was a significant US security failure, and it illustrated how personnel data could be used to identify intelligence officers and compromise national security.

The Treasury’s computer systems have such an impact on national security that they were designed with the same principle that guides nuclear launch protocols: No single person should have unlimited power. Just as launching a nuclear missile requires two separate officers turning their keys simultaneously, making changes to critical financial systems traditionally requires multiple authorized personnel working in concert.

This approach, known as “separation of duties,” isn’t just bureaucratic red tape; it’s a fundamental security principle as old as banking itself. When your local bank processes a large transfer, it requires two different employees to verify the transaction. When a company issues a major financial report, separate teams must review and approve it. These aren’t just formalities—they’re essential safeguards against corruption and error. These measures have been bypassed or ignored. It’s as if someone found a way to rob Fort Knox by simply declaring that the new official policy is to fire all the guards and allow unescorted visits to the vault.

The implications for national security are staggering.

The OAFPOTUS and his enablers have already crippled the United States internationally. How do Republicans in Congress not see this? Does Musk have to personally give Vladimir Putin a thumb drive with our nuclear codes before someone in the cult wakes up? 

Not as much snow as we thought

I promised snow photos.

So far, it looks like we've gotten only about 25 mm of snow, though it continues to fall and will probably keep falling until the early morning. Cassie and I went out around 1pm, and I gave her a bit of off-leash time in the courtyard:

That is a happy dog. And we're about to go out again, because she insists on metabolizing food and water.

Tomorrow she gets to go to day camp and I get to go to my downtown office. One of us will have a lot more fun than the other.

Wednesday afternoon notes

I'm just noting a few things and moving on with my day:

I'm planning to wrap up a new release of Weather Now this evening, too. I'll post snow photos when I do.

How much will we get?

We have a winter weather advisory until tomorrow at 3am, warning of "mixed precipitation" with snow accumulations of 75 to 150 mm. It has begun in earnest:

If I don't get so busy that I forget to do it, I'll snap another photo before the sun sets for comparison. Right now we've gotten maybe 5 mm of snow, with the temperature holding steady around -2°C, about 3°C below normal. Normal snowfall for February is 273 mm, so this shouldn't surprise anyone.

Open season for scammers

The OAFPOTUS's principal motivation has always been self-enrichment. He has scammed and grifted his whole life, though he sucks at it so hard he managed to burn through so much of his inheritance that he'd have been better off stuffing it in a savings account.

So it should come as no surprise that the first few weeks of his second term have seen remarkable gifts to other grifters and scammers worldwide, not to mention our adversaries:

In other stupidity directly attributable to the OAFPOTUS:

But hey, he's really intelligent, isn't he? He's the Weave-Meister! The Weave-o-Matic! Weavy Wonder! And he really does inspire all the people with sub-100 IQs out there that, someday, they too could be president.

The damage he's done in the last three weeks to our standing in the world is a gift to Russia, China, and everyone else who wants to end Pax Americana. As Krugman said yesterday, "what we’re seeing is what you’d expect if China and Russia had somehow managed to install people who wanted to sabotage America’s international position at the highest levels of the U.S. government."

It's also a testament to the Republican Party's 50-year endeavor to destroy public education. Makes me proud to be an American.

A thought for your pennies?

I find it absolutely hilarious that the OAFPOTUS has resurrected a meme from the first season of The West Wing:

On Sunday night, Mr. Trump said he had ordered the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to stop producing new pennies, a move that he said would help reduce unnecessary government spending.

“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” he said in a post on Truth Social, adding that pennies “literally cost us more than 2 cents.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump has the power to do this. It is Congress, not the Treasury or the Federal Reserve, that authorizes the manufacture of the nation’s coins, according to the U.S. Mint.

Once again, he has trouble seeing that the laws are faithfully executed, but that's what the whole Administration is about. In this case, however, he is probably a stopped clock.

For those of you who missed out on The West Wing, here's the original:

Why do upstaters care?

Paul Krugman wonders aloud why people in Upstate New York—who will probably never in their lives drive to SoHo—care so much about the lower-Manhattan congestion pricing zone:

Morning Consult found that while residents of New York City approve of the congestion charge, residents of New York State as a whole disapprove by a substantial margin. What this tells us is that negative views of the charge come from upstaters, people who will almost never pay it or experience its effects.

Which brings me to the most important enemy of this remarkably successful policy, someone who definitely isn’t personally affected: Donald Trump, who told the New York Post that he wants to “kill” congestion pricing (and bike lanes too.)

The first question is, why should Trump be weighing in on this issue at all, let alone trying to force the city to change policy? Aren’t conservatives supposed to believe in local control?

I do wonder whether general hostility to New York is part of the story. Many people, and Trump in particular, are committed to the view that one of the safest places in America is an urban hellscape. A policy that improves life in the city runs counter to that narrative and inspires visceral opposition. And Trump in particular surely wants to hurt a city that has never supported him.

But maybe the biggest reason for Trump’s desire to kill the congestion charge is a phenomenon I identified the last time I wrote about this: the rage some Americans obviously feel at any suggestion that people should change their behavior for the common good.

This is literally why we can't have nice things. Why, as anyone who has traveled to Europe or East Asia can tell you, we have fallen so far behind our peers.

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.

Friday afternoon link roundup

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

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.