The Daily Parker

In all the excitement of the debate, I forgot to mention a couple of local news items that depressed me today:

• The world's only Michelin-starred brewpub, which is in my neighborhood, and which closed in July due to Covid-19, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. It's dead, Jim.
• Illinois set a new record for Covid-19 positive tests today (almost 5,000), prompting the city to impose new restrictions on bars and public gatherings.

Also, former US Attorney DIck Schultz talked to the Chicago Tribune and the local NBC affiliate about the Chicago 7 trial. (Watch Aaron Sorkin's Trial of the Chicago 7 to see Joseph Gordon-Leavitt play him.)

OK, really walking Parker and going to bed now...

After finishing a sprint review, it's nice to reset for a few minutes. So after working through lunch I have some time to catch up on these news stories:

• Faced with rising Covid-19 infections and deaths, Governor JB Pritzker has ordered suburban Chicago bars and restaurants to temporarily cease indoor dining.
• The Verge has an analysis of how Foxconn conned the people of Wisconsin (with the active complicity of former governor Scott Walker).
• Steven Pearlstein points out that, should we win the Senate and White House, we will have a far easier time legislating than fighting the Supreme Court.
• Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steel has endorsed Joe Biden.
• Crain's political columnist Greg Hinz recommends voting for the Fair Tax amendment to Illinois' constitution, even though its biggest champion hasn't made the best case.
• Julia Ioffe investigates the mysterious attacks on American diplomats and attempts to figure out what actually happened.

Finally, mathematician and humorist Tom Lehrer has waived most of the copyright protections around his music and lyrics, effectively putting the corpus of his work into the public domain. He says: "Most of the music written by Tom Lehrer will be added gradually later with further disclaimers." People have until the end of 2024 to download the materials he has released.

A cold front pushed its way through Chicago this afternoon, making it feel much more like autumn than we've experienced so far. And it got pretty chilly in Washington, where Senate Republicans began the first day of hearings into the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court:

• Matt Ford says Barrett's nomination is "the culmination of [the right-wing Federalist Society] movement’s work—and perhaps its high-water mark as well."
• Aaron Blake calls the Republican Party's  gamesmanship over the past 30 years "court stacking," and argues it deserves a proportional response from the left.
• Microsoft and the United States Cyber Command discovered that they had both targeted a group of cybercriminals, with happy results for all (except the Russians who they targeted).
• Closer to home, a developer will start construction on an extension to Chicago's 606 Trail across the Chicago river, due to open in 2023.
• The Chicago Tribune has yet another explainer about the Illinois graduated income tax proposal.

And much farther from home, Mars will be in opposition tomorrow night, coincidentally during the new moon, meaning we'll get a really good look at it.

Let's start with the good news: Julie Nolke has a new video.

OK, ready for everything else?

• The president called Kamala Harris "this monster" in an interview Thursday, because of course he did.
• The New England Journal of Medicine came a millimeter from endorsing Joe Biden in an editorial published yesterday.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) have introduced legislation to create a commission on presidential capacity, without naming the person who inspired the bill.
• Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has called for an independent commission on redistricting to draw the ward map in 2021.
• The World Food Programme has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
• My law school classmate and friend Paul Hletko has been named one of Crain's 2020 Notable Entrepreneurs for his work creating and managing FEW Spirits.
• The Guardian has an interview with author Neil Gaiman today.

And finally, today would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday.

Starting in March, this year has seemed like a weird anthology TV show, with each month written and directed by a different team. We haven't had Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme yet; I'm hoping that'll be the season finale in February. This month we seem to have Armando Iannucci running the show, as the President's antics over the weekend suggest.

So here's how I'm spending lunch:

• With only 4 weeks to the election, a new CNN poll out this morning has Biden up 16 points among likely voters nationally. The Economist has him at a 90% chance of winning the Electoral College with the Democrats at a 71% chance of winning the Senate. Nate Silver has Biden at 82% likely to win and the Democrats 66% likely to control the Senate.
• Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah summed up the insanity nicely.
• Fareed Zakaria says we have an historic opportunity to make the world better in the aftermath of the pandemic: "Great leaders such as Roosevelt read polls to understand the nature of their challenge, not as an excuse for inaction."
• A Republican-aligned think-tank has filed suit against the proposed Illinois constitutional amendment that would allow a graduated income tax, perhaps because they're terrified it will pass.
• Sweden and Switzerland have gotten snippy with each other over the successor to Crypto AG, the Swiss security company that was actually a CIA-BND front.
• Via The Daily WTF, the UK government lost tons of data about Covid-19 patients because they exported large .csv files to the obsolete .xls format, which only stores 65,536 rows per sheet.

Tomorrow night will be the vice-presidential debate, which I will again live-blog. I can't wait.

The cartoonist and author behind Hyperbole and a Half has returned with a new book, which I should receive tomorrow. This news offsets pretty much all the other news from today:

• Author John Scalzi, who lives in a very red, rural county in Ohio, has a depressing report about mask-wearing in his area.
• Wisconsin is back on Illinois' shit-list for its rapidly-increasing Covid-19 case load.
• Olga Khazan says the 200,000 Covid-19 deaths (officially, as of today) signal a "failure of empathy."
• Wired has the story of the person who wrote and unleashed the Love Bug virus in 2000.

I'm sure there's more, but I'm done for the day.

Just a few of the things that crossed my desktop this morning:

• Astronomers have detected phosphine gas in the clouds on Venus, which is a strong indicator of life.
• Astronomers have also detected a ping-pong-ball-sized black hole orbiting the sun, getting as close as 133 kAUs in its orbit.
• An aircraft made a precautionary landing on an Interstate in Tennessee, and got a full police escort on take-off. No one was hurt.
• Car manufacturers are teaming up with insurance companies to share data on almost every aspect of how you drive.
• The Democratic governor of Nevada slammed the president for holding a "reckless and selfish" rally inside a Las Vegas arena over the weekend.
• Disappointed would-be marijuana retailers have sued to get some of the remaining Illinois licenses, saying the process as run has created an oligopoly that harms consumers.
• Via pro photographer Scott Kelly, Iain Stanley explains why your camera equipment matters less than you think.
• There are currently 8 active tropical systems in the Western hemisphere today, including the 21st storm of the Atlantic season.

And last night, Cubs pitcher Alec Mills threw the club's 16th no-hitter against the Milwaukee Brewers. In the history of Major League Baseball, there have only been 315 no-hitters. The last time the Cubs won a no-hitter was 51 years ago.

With 58 days until the election, the noise keeps increasing. Here's some of it:

• Jeffrey Goldberg reports from multiple sources that the president referred to wounded soldiers as "losers" and "suckers" for serving the country. The administration moved quickly to lie about this.
• Andrew Sullivan calls the president a "metastasizing cancer."
• Catherine Rampell suggests ways to talk to right-wingers about the president's failures.
• Nick Martin asks, "how did 'if I die, I die' become this country's mantra?"
• Ross Douthat wonders "how many lives would a more normal president have saved?"
• A pro-president boat parade on Lake Travis, Texas, caused so much wake that several of the boats sank.
• Ken Griffin, the richest man in Illinois and therefore the one most likely to lose some money that he can never possibly spend, has donated $20 million to defeating the graduated income tax proposal in the state.
• Los Angeles has selected a new streetlight design, which is pretty cool.
• A bunch of 12-year-olds have discovered that the Edgenuity learning platform has easily-defeated grading algorithms.
• David Benioff and DB Weiss will adapt Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem for Netflix.

Finally, The Smithsonian describes how Greg Priore managed to steal priceless documents from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, because he was in charge of security for those items.

There's a lot going on today, what with the Republican National Convention celebrating the apocalypse they desperately want, but a few things outside of that also happened:

• The Lake County Sheriff has arrested 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse for killing two people in a protest in Kenosha, Wis., last night. Eyewitness reports suggest Rittenhouse shot three people who tried to disarm him after he'd already shot at a few others.
• New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has a pretty convincing explanation for why the Republican Party doesn't actually care about its platform.
• The University of Miami has a Covid-19 outbreak that couldn't in a million years have a connection to a dorm party last weekend.
• A group of four brothers managed to swindle Amazon out of millions by taking advantage of their automation.
• Want to feel old? Macaulay Culkin is 40.

Finally, only a few blocks from my house my neighbors have set up a Wee Free Library...of sticks...for dogs.

Conductors on the heavy-rail line I take downtown twice a week haven't asked me for my ticket all summer. Apparently they're pissed at Metra, the agency that runs our commuter trains:

Metra, which is struggling financially during the pandemic, said Union Pacific’s refusal to send conductors into the train cars is costing the commuter rail system $1 million a month in lost ticket revenue.

Union Pacific, which operates the UP North, Northwest and West lines, is not allowing conductors back into the aisles to punch tickets, citing coronavirus safety concerns. That has created a “no fare” policy, Metra said, essentially giving passengers on those lines a free ride for the foreseeable future.

“Because UP conductors are neither selling tickets nor validating fares, most riders on their trains have been riding for free, which is hurting the system financially and is not fair to riders on the other lines who are being asked to show their fares,” Metra spokesman Michael Gillis said Tuesday.

Metra and Union Pacific have been in negotiations since last fall to either extend their service agreement or create a new one. One option on the table would be for Metra to take over operations of the commuter trains using its own employees, Gillis said.

For what it's worth, I've "burned" an electronic ticket most times I've ridden on the train. It seems like the right thing to do. But it also seems like the conductors need to do their jobs.

Also, I want to know why, after five years, we still don't have a new inbound station at my stop. They've built all the bridges, and only a couple weeks ago they started laying new track, but at an incredibly slow pace. One morning I see a few dozen ties (sleepers); later in the week, a few more. Then the following week, they plop a single rail down on a few of them. It's maddening, especially as we're going to have yet another winter without shelter on the inbound side.