Good morning.
Whitewater’s week ends with partly cloudy skies and a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 05m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}fifty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this dayin 1940, California’s first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, opens. On this day in 1922, authorities in Madison confiscate 1,200 gallons of mash and fifteen gallons of moonshine from the home of a suspected bootlegger.
Recommended for reading in full —
Hungarian author Miklos Haraszti writes I watched a populist leader rise in my country. That’s why I’m genuinely worried for America: “Hungary, my country, has in the past half-decade morphed from an exemplary post-Cold War democracy into a populist autocracy. Here are a few eerie parallels that have made it easy for Hungarians to put Donald Trump on their political map: Prime Minister Viktor Orban has depicted migrants as rapists, job-stealers, terrorists and “poison” for the nation, and built a vast fence along Hungary’s southern border. The popularity of his nativist agitation has allowed him to easily debunk as unpatriotic or partisan any resistance to his self-styled “illiberal democracy,” which he said he modeled after “successful states” such as Russia and Turkey. No wonder Orban feted Trump’s victory as ending the era of “liberal non-democracy,” “the dictatorship of political correctness” and “democracy export.” The two consummated their political kinship in a recent phone conversation; Orban is invited to Washington, where, they agreed, both had been treated as “black sheep.” ”
Andrew Kramer reports How Russia Recruited Elite Hackers for Its Cyberwar: “For more than three years, rather than rely on military officers working out of isolated bunkers, Russian government recruiters have scouted a wide range of programmers, placing prominent ads on social media sites, offering jobs to college students and professional coders, and even speaking openly about looking in Russia’s criminal underworld for potential talent. Those recruits were intended to cycle through military contracting companies and newly formed units called science squadrons established on military bases around the country.”
Reporter David Fahrenthold tells the behind-the-scenes story of his year covering Trump (leading to Fahrenthold’s discovery of corruption within the Trump’s Foundation): “So by the time the New Hampshire primaries were over, the candidates I had covered were kaput. I needed a new beat. While I pondered what that would be, I decided to do a short story about the money Trump had raised for veterans. I wanted to chase down two suspicions I’d brought home with me from that event in Iowa. For one thing, I thought Trump might have broken the law by improperly mixing his foundation with his presidential campaign. I started calling experts. “I think it’s pretty clear that that’s over the line,” Marc S. Owens, the former longtime head of the Internal Revenue Service’s nonprofit division, told me when I called him.”
James Palmer describes What China Didn’t Learn From the Collapse of the Soviet Union: “The hostility toward the color revolutions and the chaos they’ve unleashed has thus been projected backward. The Soviet fall, once seen at least in part as a result of the Communist Party’s own failings, has become reinterpreted as a deliberate U.S. plot and a moral failure to hold the line against Western influence. That has ended what was once a powerful spur to reform — meaning that, barring a major change in leadership, the likely course of Chinese politics over the next few years will be further xenophobia, even more power to the party, and an unwillingness to talk about the harder lessons of history.”
What’s inside a tapestry factory? This is —