Good morning.
Memorial Day in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a four-in-ten chance of scattered afternoon thunderstorms. Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 15h 05m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 18.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay successfully reached the summit of Mount Everest. On this day in 1848, Wisconsin enters the Union.
Recommended for reading in full —
Jasmin Mujanovic and Evan McMullin describe these times —
Authoritarians decimate trad pol binaries; regime reduces politics to subservience or treason. To question is to be an enemy of the state. https://t.co/mEIhsMRMYl
— Jasmin Mujanovi? (@JasminMuj) May 28, 2017
In our Trumpian era, is there any longer a traditional right and left? Or are there only those who fight for liberty and those against it.
— Evan McMullin (@Evan_McMullin) May 28, 2017
David Frum contends that Trump’s Trip Was a Catastrophe for U.S.-Europe Relations:
There’s an effort now to spin words to present this trip as something less than an utter catastrophe for U.S. interests in Europe. National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has insisted that President Trump did indeed affirm Article 5. Compare Trump’s words to those of his predecessors, and you can see for yourself how untrue that is. The Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, went on record to declare that he could not have been more pleased with the trip. If true, that would reflect poorly on Senator Corker’s judgment. I prefer to think that the statement reflects poorly on his candor.
Here’s what’s really true: Donald Trump is doing damage to the deepest and most broadly agreed foreign-policy interests of the United States. He is doing so while people associated with his campaign are under suspicion of colluding with Vladimir Putin’s spy agencies to bring him to office. The situation is both ugly and dangerous. If it’s to be corrected, all Americans—eminent Republicans like Bob Corker above all—must at least correctly name it for what it is.
Henry Farrell observes and asks Thanks to Trump, Germany says it can’t rely on the United States. What does that mean?:
Merkel’s comment about what she has experienced in the past few days is a clear reference to President Trump’s disastrous European tour. Her belief that the United States is no longer a reliable partner is a direct result of Trump’s words and actions. The keystone of NATO is Article 5, which has typically been read as a commitment that in the event that one member of the alliance is attacked, all other members will come to its aid. When Trump visited NATO, he dedicated a plaque to the one time that Article 5 has been invoked — when all members of NATO promised to come to the United States’ support after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. However, Trump did not express his commitment to Article 5 in his speech to NATO, instead lambasting other NATO members for not spending enough money on their militaries….
Christopher Dickey recalls The Harlem Hellfighters Who Cut Down Germans and Gave France Jazz:
…there was one National Guard regiment, first known as the 15th New York, then the 369th Infantry attached to the French Army, and ultimately, “The Harlem Hellfighters,” that made its own very special history, and by the end of the Great War was anything but “unknown.”
The men of the 369th had something nobody else could come close to matching, a unit so talented that it was able at times to cut through some of the bigotry that surrounded them, and eventually win the regiment’s soldiers a place in the front lines—win them the chance to fight, to test their mettle against the massed forces of the Germans. And they did so with such distinction that the regiment and many of the soldiers in it were awarded one of the French military’s high honors, the Croix de Guerre.
What the 369th had that set it apart was strong leadership by black officers as well as white— and the best damned band in the American Army. And what it brought to France, in addition to the blood and bravery of its soldiers in the fight against the Germans, was something revolutionary. It brought jazz—a kind of music, just then growing out of ragtime, that was not like anything the French, or most Americans, had ever heard before, but that caused a sensation wherever it was played.
(For more about the Harlem Hellfighters, see a C-SPAN clip where author Max Brooks talks in 2014 about his book on the 369th Infantry Regiment at the Free Library of Philadelphia.)
What would it look like for a German shepherd to play with a reindeer? It would look like this —