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Daily Bread for 7.4.17

Good morning.

Independence Day in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset is 8:36 PM, for 15h 13m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1863, Ulysses S. Grant wins a decisive Union victory at the Siege of Vicksburg:

The Siege of Vicksburg (May 18 – July 4, 1863) was the final major military action in the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War. In a series of maneuvers, UnionMaj. Gen.Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi River and drove the ConfederateArmy of Mississippi, led by Lt. Gen.John C. Pemberton, into the defensive lines surrounding the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Vicksburg was the last major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River; therefore, capturing it completed the second part of the Northern strategy, the Anaconda Plan. When two major assaults (May 19 and 22, 1863) against the Confederate fortifications were repulsed with heavy casualties, Grant decided to besiege the city beginning on May 25. With no reinforcement, supplies nearly gone, and after holding out for more than forty days, the garrison finally surrendered on July 4.

The successful ending of the Vicksburg Campaign significantly degraded the ability of the Confederacy to maintain its war effort, as described in the Aftermath section of the campaign article. Some historians—e.g., Ballard, p. 308—suggest that the decisive battle in the campaign was actually the Battle of Champion Hill, which, once won by Grant, made victory in the subsequent siege a foregone conclusion. This action (combined with the surrender of Port Hudson to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks on July 9) yielded command of the Mississippi River to the Union forces, who would hold it for the rest of the conflict.

On this day in 1836, the Wisconsin Territory has its first governor:

On this date in Mineral Point, Col. Henry Dodge took the oath of office to become the first Governor of the newly created Territory of Wisconsin. The Territory, previously attached to Michigan, encompassed what is now the states of Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and portions of North and South Dakota. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers, edited by Sarah Davis McBride]

Recommended for reading in full — 

James Warren ponders “Modern Day Presidential”: Has Trump’s Vulgarity Become the New Normal?:

Matthew Baum, a public policy expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School who’s good on politics and communication, said Sunday, “Well, in any other time the notion of a president so crudely and misogynistically lashing out at the hosts of a cable news show would be unthinkable. I think it’s a testament to how far we’ve fallen in the Trump era that these latest tweets are essentially par for the course for Trump”….

Says Chicago Democratic consultant Pete Giangreco, “This stuff doesn’t matter to his base. What will matter is if they pass a health care bill that he signs that closes rural hospitals and jacks up premiums for those 50-plus. Unless his base gets hit in the pocketbook or loses their local hospital, none of the rhetorical stuff matters.”

“Now if Putin rolls into the Baltic states and Trump looks like Chamberlain, that’s a different story. Or if he fires Mueller and 25 GOP members go south on him, then the base turns on him. But short of a health care crisis he owns, a constitutional crisis he creates, or Russian aggression he appeases, his base is rock solid.”

(Giangreco is right. Trump’s core supporters are more ignorant, and actually less participatory in church and civic institutions, than the national average. They’re poorly acculturated, but demanding. For the most part, the principal objects of an opposition to Trump should be those at the top of his team, yet one should not doubt that when dealing with Trump’s core supporters, they should be dealt with bluntly, as they deserve no better.)

David A. Graham explains Why Trump Keeps Returning to Reddit:

As such, drawing on r/the_donald [a part of Reddit’s message boards populated by bigots, dunces, or otherwise objectionable Trump supporters] points to two of Trump’s weaknesses. The first is his intense need for affirmation. The president boasts of shutting out unflattering stories, though his tirades against CNN and Morning Joe are strong indicators that he’s bluffing, and remains obsessed with his critics. Staffers are reportedly afraid to share negative stories with Trump, preferring to slip him untrue stories. But White House aides might feel at least some obligation to the truth and the public, whereas redditors are unalloyedly loyal to Trump….

The second is that Trump can’t, or won’t, assess the provenance of the information he takes in. He has repeatedly fallen for fraudulent stories, such as a hoax Time cover. (Fake Time covers are a frequent presence in Trump’s life.) A prudent and normal politician, and his staff, might figure out whether a meme had originated with a racist, bigoted gentleman going by the name HanAssholeSolo. Then again, a normal politician wouldn’t tweet a video of himself attacking a CNN stand-in (nor would he have appeared repeatedly on WWE). Trump has decided that this doesn’t matter, or even that it helps him with his supporters.

Graham Kates reports that Facebook, for the first time, acknowledges election manipulation:

Without saying the words “Russia,” “Hillary Clinton,” or “Donald Trump,” Facebook acknowledged Thursday for the first time what others have been saying for months.

In a paper released by its security division, the company said “malicious actors” used the platform during the 2016 presidential election as part of a campaign “with the intent of harming the reputation of specific political targets.”

“Facebook is not in a position to make definitive attribution to the actors sponsoring this activity….however our data does not contradict the attribution provided by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence in the report dated January 6, 2017,” the report’s authors wrote, referring to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment that Russia waged an information campaign with the goal of harming Clinton and helping Trump.

The paper, by two members of Facebook’s threat intelligence team and its chief security officer, noted that “fake news” has been incorrectly applied as a catch-all for a variety of techniques used to influence users of the platform. The company now divides these techniques into four specific groups:

  • “Information (or Influence) Operations – Actions taken by governments or organized non-state actors to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment.”

  • “False News – News articles that purport to be factual, but which contain intentional misstatements of fact with the intention to arouse passions, attract viewership, or deceive.”

  • “False Amplifiers – Coordinated activity by inauthentic accounts with the intent of manipulating political discussion (e.g., by discouraging specific parties from participating in discussion, or amplifying sensationalistic voices over others).”

  • “Disinformation – Inaccurate or manipulated information/content that is spread intentionally. This can include false news, or it can involve more subtle methods, such as false flag operations, feeding inaccurate quotes or stories to innocent intermediaries, or knowingly amplifying biased or misleading information.”

Eric Mack reports that SpaceX Dragon’s second splashdown is a historic first:

On Monday morning, a SpaceX Dragon capsule became the first spacecraft of its kind to return to Earth from space for a second time. The robotic Dragon’s mission was a fairly routine cargo ferrying assignment to and from the International Space Station, but making the relatively mundane trip twice is historic.

Until now, no single cargo capsule has visited the ISS and returned to Earth more than once. In fact, all other non-SpaceX vehicles that visit the space station are designed to burn up in the atmosphere after a single flight. SpaceX has been recovering its Dragon capsules via splashdowns in the ocean, but this is the first time that one of those recycled craft has completed a second re-supply mission.

NPR’s Skunk Bear explains The Science of Firework Color:

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