The Daily Parker

Just a couple to mention:

• A jury convicted Sam Bankman-Fried of committing the largest fraud in US history. He faces up to 110 years in prison.
• House Republicans passed a bill that would provide $14 billion in funding for Israel's war with Hamas by taking it from IRS tax evasion enforcement, a move so cynical that Paul Krugman likens it to "the Big Lie." ("Starving the I.R.S. has long been a Republican priority; what’s new is the party’s willingness to serve that priority by endangering national security.")
• Calumet City, a mostly-Black suburb about 35 km south of Chicago, issued a citation to Daily Southtown reporter Hank Sanders for calling city employees and asking for comment (i.e., "reporting") about major flooding in the area.
• Chicago Alderperson (yes, that's what they're called now [shudder]) Ray Lopez (D-15th Ward) pulled a Vrdolyak at yesterday's City Council meeting before describing it to reporters as a "shitshow."

Finally, David Brooks offers some advice on "how to stay sane in brutalizing times."

And, almost forgot: It was 25 years ago today that Minnesota elected Jesse Ventura governor, sending my team running the election data at CBS News into a brief panic before we confirmed the result.

I spent way too much time chasing down an errant mock in my real job's unit test suite, but otherwise I've gotten a lot done today. Too much to read all these articles:

• Julia Ioffe interviews Ambassador Dennis Ross on the disappearing hopes for a two-state solution in Israel.
• Ruth Marcus wonders whether Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (R) committed tax fraud when he accepted a $267,000 motor home.
• Josh Marshall wonders WTF with House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) black "son?"
• Paul Krugman bemoans the Republican Party for going "full-on extremist."
• National Geographic takes a trip down US-50 in Nevada, the "loneliest highway in America."
• Pilot Jim Fallows explains the trio of scary aviation stories that hit the press this week.
• Pilot Patrick Smith remembers the Boeing 707.
• Ezra Klein ponders Marc Andreesen's odd blend of futurism and reactionary politics.

OK, assuming this build works, I'll have closed 4 story points today—with 4 very small 1-point stories. The harder ones start Monday morning.

Sadly, my doctor did not tell me to try to have fun no matter what I do, though we did have a brief conversation about which Bourbons we both like. Nope, he just said I'm perfectly healthy: I exercise enough, I eat right, I don't drink too much, my vital signs are perfect, and I get enough sleep. Doctor visits should be like software releases: boring.

If only that were true elsewhere:

• Israel has given the 1.1 million residents of Gaza City until tonight to evacuate to the southern part of the territory as it prepares to invade.
• Michelle Goldberg dismays over left-leaning Americans' apologies for Hamas, seemingly indifferent to the human suffering the war has already brought and will continue to bring: "No cause, righteous or otherwise, excuses the killing of children."
• US Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) (the self-proclaimed "[KKK leader] without the baggage]") lasted all of 24 hours as the Republican Party's nominee for Speaker of the House before the rest of his caucus decided democracy doesn't apply anywhere when they lose.
• The XPOTUS granted clemency to a fellow charlatan on his way out the door, but Philip Esformes's crimes were so egregious that the Justice Department will re-try the six of 12 counts Esformes's jury deadlocked on in his first trial.

Finally, for those of you just tuning in, Chicago-based Motorola invented cell phones. And today marks (only!) the 40th anniversary of David Meilahn making the world's first commercial cellular telephone call from Chicago's Soldier Field. Meilahn won a race to get his phone turned on and dialed in order to get that bit of recognition.

On a more serious note, I haven't commented on the war in Gaza yet because I haven't sifted through all the propaganda and disinformation enough. Julia Ioffe said a lot of what I'm thinking on Monday, but right now, no one can hear us moderates. I plan to address it soon. Maybe my lone center-left voice will end 3,000 years of conflict peacefully, who knows?

I'm iterating on a UI feature that wasn't 100% defined, so I'm also iterating on the API that the feature needs. Sometimes software is like that: you discover that your first design didn't quite solve the problem, so you iterate. it's just that the iteration is a bit of a context shift, so I'm going to read for about 15 minutes to clear my head:

• Kevin Philips, whose 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority laid out Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" and led to the GOP's subsequent slide into authoritarianism and ethnic entrepreneurialism has died, but unfortunately his ideas haven't.
• The US and Qatar have agreed not to release any of the $6 billion of Iran's money that Qatar currently has in escrow for them, which will no doubt make Iran yet another country demanding to know why Hamas attacked Israel just now.
• The Chicago Tribune digs into Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's $16.6 billion budget.
• In the wake of huge class-action settlements, two major Chicago real-estate brokers have changed their commission policies, but we still have to see if they'll change their actions.
• The History Channel blurbs the origins of Oktoberfest, which started in 1810 and ends for this year today. Und nächstes Jahr, ich möchte nach München zum Oktoberfest gehen!
• Jacob Bacharach says the core problem with Michael Lewis's recent biography of Sam Bankman-Fried is that SBF is just too boring to be the subject of a biography.

Finally, Chicago's heavy-rail operator Metra formally proposed simplifying its fare structure. This will cut my commuting costs by about 11%, assuming I use the day passes and individual tickets correctly. It will have the biggest impacts on suburban riders who commute into the city, and riders whose travel doesn't include the downtown terminals.

I could have worked from home today, and probably should have, but I felt well enough to come in (wearing an N95 mask, of course). It turned that I had a very helpful meeting, which would not have worked as well remotely, but given tomorrow's forecast and the likelihood I'll still have this cold, Cassie will just have to miss a day of school.

I have to jam on a presentation for the next three hours, so I'll come back to these later:

• Alex Shephard says this is the week Twitter finally went totally evil.
• Bret Stephens says the American anti-Israel left really needs to sit down for a minutes.
• Julia Ioffe decided to take the risk of getting yelled at as she mourns the chance for any peaceful resolution to the millennia-long conflict in the Levant.
• Yair Rosenberg interviews his friend Amir Tibon, who describes how he and his family survived the Hamas attack on Nahal Oz on Saturday.
• Yoval Noah Harari draws a line from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) and right-wing populism to Saturday's attack.
• Netanyahu and opposition leader Benny Gantz (Blue and White) have agreed to form a wartime coalition, excluding the crazy parties on both sides, and to suspend routine legislative activity.
• Speaking of crazy parties, House Republicans have nominated Steve Scalise (R-LA), "David Duke without the baggage," to take over as Speaker. He needs 217 votes to get elected, which means any 4 people in his party can send this game to overtime.
• As soon as that's done, the New York delegation to the Republican House Caucus plans to introduce a measure to kick out Rep. George Santos (R-NY). This will probably succeed as the seat will certainly go to a Democrat next November if he stays, but only probably go to one if the GOP can run someone else.
• In a filing with the court overseeing the XPOTUS's classified-documents trial this week, the US said it can show why he took the documents. ("Vell, Donald's just zis guy, you know?")
• Speaking of fraud, Molly White takes us through the first half of Caroline Ellison's testimony in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial.
• Speaking of corruption, US Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (R$), the subject of thousands of press reports that he took bribes in every form but bags of cash from billionaires before ruling on their cases before the Supreme Court, once again called on the Court to do away with the Sullivan rule that ensures the press can find out when Justices are on the take.
• Caltrans fired its deputy director for planning and modal programs for advocating against widening I-80 through Sacramento, even though widening I-80 through Sacramento is one of the worst ideas currently proposed by Caltrans.

Finally, no sooner did it open than the new Guinness brewery in Chicago is for sale. It will stay a Guinness brewery, just under different ownership. The Brews and Choos Project will get there soon.

Just a few:

• US Representative George Santos (R-NY) faces another 21 felony charges in New York, with prosecutors alleging he stole donors' identities and misappropriated their donations.
• Isabel Fattal attempts to explain Hamas, the terrorist organization that attacked Israel on Saturday.
• Alex Shephard is glad the news media have gotten better at reporting on the XPOTUS, but they've still missed the biggest part: he's a "singular threat to American democracy."
• Jason Pargin pays homage to celebrity worship, and goggles at how weird it's gotten.
• Molly White explains the evidence presented at Sam Bankman-Fried's trial yesterday that (allegedly) shows how they perpetrated the fraud in code.
• McSweeney's has a helpful template for right-wingers who are upset with Taylor Swift.

Finally, National Geographic gets cozy with the history of bedbugs and their relationship to humans. Fun evening read, y'all!

I woke up this morning feeling like I'm fighting a cold, which usually means I'm fighting a cold. One negative Covid test later, I'm still debating whether to go to rehearsal tonight. Perhaps after a nap. And wearing an N-95.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• Kenyan runner Kelvin Kiptum ran the world's fastest marathon yesterday in Chicago, finishing the race in 2:00:35, 36 seconds faster than Eliud Kipchoge's 2:01:09 set last year in Berlin.
• David Ignatius reflects on the massive intelligence failure that allowed Hamas to attack Israel over the weekend.
• Matt Ford completely debunks the XPOTUS's argument that being president granted him total immunity from prosecution. Along those lines, David Graham says that anyone who represents the XPOTUS in court has a fool for a client.
• David French finds "moral outrage" in the insult "OK Boomer."
• Chicago spent $3.5 million hosting NASCAR over the summer, offset only a bit by the $620,000 in fees the organization paid to the city for the privilege. And we're stuck doing it next year, too.

Finally, pilot and journalist Jim Fallows annotates a 17-minute video of the Air Traffic Control conversations with FedEx 1376, which made a gear-up landing at Chattanooga, Tenn., last week. (No one was injured, but the Boeing 757 will probably be written off.)

A rainy cold front passed over Inner Drive Technology WHQ just after noon, taking us from 15°C down to just above 10°C in two hours. The sun has come back out but we won't get a lot warmer until next week.

I've had a lot of coding today, and I have a rehearsal in about two hours, so this list of things to read will have to do:

• Mother Jones's Russ Choma thinks the XPOTUS doesn't really want to win his fraud trial.
• Robert Wright interviewed Brown University professor Lyle Goldstein, late of the US Naval War College, about what lessons Ukraine holds for Taiwan.
• Michael Tomasky salivates over the prospect of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) becoming Speaker of the House, which Josh Marshall understands.
• The Post details a gruesome Tesla crash the NTSB partially blamed on "over-reliance on automation."
• The Chicago City Council approved a plan to end the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers in Chicago.
• At least 960 migrating birds smacked into the side of Chicago's lakefront convention center yesterday, a new record.
• Poet Jesse Nathan sighs over the loss of poetry in Baseball.

Finally, for the first time in 346 days, the Chicago Bears won a football game. Amazing.

The former CEO of FTX Trading goes on trial today for making $8 billion disappear in just under three years. Molly White has a precis:

About eleven months ago, the then second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world imploded over the course of only a few days as trust in the company crumbled and it failed to meet a surge of customer withdrawals. It rapidly became apparent that customer money was missing. A lot of it.

Since then, it’s come out that FTX allowed its sister trading firm, Alameda Research, to dip into FTX’s customer funds with effectively no limit to backstop their own trading losses. Much of FTX’s balance sheet was also revealed to be denominated in flimsy crypto tokens worth far less in reality than on paper, and a substantial portion of them had been created out of thin air by FTX itself. And the FTX group of companies had spent money they didn’t have, splashing out for extravagant celebrity endorsements and advertisements, buying real estate, and donating massive sums to curry favor among seated politicians and bankroll the industry boosters running for office.

Altogether, somewhere around $8 billion was gone.

Besides Sam Bankman-Fried, four other high-level executives at the FTX group of companies have been charged, and all four have reached plea deals. Three of them agreed to cooperate with the investigation as a part of their plea, and will almost certainly appear as witnesses at the trial. They were not just Bankman-Fried’s employees and co-workers, but also his friends, roommates, confidants, and, in one case, a former romantic partner.

There’s no question that billions of dollars of customer funds went missing from FTX. Instead, prosecutors are tasked with convincing a jury that they’re missing thanks to intentional fraud by Sam Bankman-Fried. The “intentional” part is the sticky bit, with prosecutors needing to convince all twelve jurors beyond a reasonable doubt that Bankman-Fried intended to defraud people. If even one juror holds out, Bankman-Fried could dodge a guilty verdict thanks to a hung jury — and trying to appeal to just one sympathetic juror may be his only hope in what looks like a pretty overwhelming case against him.

Since his resignation from FTX, Bankman-Fried has tried to portray himself as a colossally stupid man, who was simply too dumb to commit fraud. Unfortunately, stupidity doesn't actually exonerate criminal behavior. He only needs to have intended the actions, not the harm. And from the outside, it looks like he wasn't so much stupid as greedy, immature, narcissistic, and venal.

Get out the popcorn.

I haven't had the most productive morning ever, but I should get back into coding after I take Cassie on her lunchtime walk. Meanwhile:

• California governor Gavin Newsom (D) has announced he would appoint Emily's List president Laphonza Butler to serve out the remainder of the late US Senator Dianne Feinstein's term.
• The XPOTUS has shown up to his fraud trial in New York today, in what Michael Tomasky hopes will utterly ruin the man.
• In the Post, Michael Lewis examines the last year of Sam Bankman-Fried's life in the Crypto game.
• US Representative and clownish dingleberry Matt Gaetz (R-FL) threatened to call a vote on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) tenure, but since just about everyone in his party can't stand him, the threat is going nowhere. But as Aaron Blake points out, my party won't save McCarthy either.

Finally, just look at this wonderful creature who got a bath yesterday. She actually climbed into the tub on her own, and seems to have figured out that getting a vigorous whole-body massage with warm water, followed by an equally-vigorous toweling off, actually feels pretty good.