Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-six. Sunrise is 6:07 AM and sunset 7:48 PM, for 13h 40m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1968, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations invade Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring liberalization of Alexander Dubcek’s regime. On this day in 1794, American troops under General “Mad” Anthony Wayne defeat a confederation of Indian forces led by Little Turtle of the Miamis and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees: “The crushing defeat of the British-allied Indians convinced the British to finally evacuate their posts in the American west (an accession explicitly given in the Jay Treaty signed some three months later), eliminating forever the English presence in the early American northwest and clearing the way for American expansion. The battle also resulted in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, in which the defeated Indians ceded to Wayne the right of Americans to settle in the Ohio Valley (although the northwestern area of that country was given to the Indians). Wayne’s victory opened the gates of widespread settlement of the Old Northwest, Wisconsin included.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Anna Nemtsova asks Did a Mole-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named Leak Plot to Elect Trump?:
MOSCOW—For the first time in his two decades defending people accused of treason, Ivan Pavlov has come across a case he says he truly has trouble getting his head around. Everything about it is a guessing game for the defense lawyer, including the charges against his client, whose name he is not allowed to mention in public.
Speaking at his office in St. Petersburg, under a photograph of President Barack Obama shaking his hand, Pavlov, 46, explained to The Daily Beast that the arrest in Russia last December of accused cyber spies is heavy with high-profile politics….
To get a sense of just how fraught it may be, let us go back to January. By then, allegations by the American intelligence community about Russian meddling in the American elections had been building for several months. President Obama had warned Putin, eyeball to eyeball, to stop. Two reports had been issued publicly by the U.S. intelligence services in October and in December, but in guarded and less than explicit language as America’s spooks tried to protect the methods and especially the sources that had led them to their conclusions….
Conservative Jennifer Rubin contends Yes, boycott the White House — and Trump properties:
….We certainly hope [Kevin] Durant’s teammates, fellow basketball players and indeed all professional and college sports players make the same choice [not to visit Trump at the White House]. They are inarguably role models, and America could use some role models right about now. Durant and others can emphasize that their extraordinary action is required because of Trump’s deliberate effort to rewrite history and redefine the United States in ways that are antithetical to our founding creed.
We’ve urged public figures of all types — entertainers, civic leaders, public intellectuals, business leaders, scientists, etc. — to make the same decision. Those who publicly decline to attend events deserve praise; those who attend deserve our contempt. No one can honestly say that meeting with the president offers a chance to shape Trump’s views, influence his decisions or help our country. This week should have removed any doubt that Trump is immune to reason, indifferent to history and contemptuous of advice.
Charities are also making some public decisions. Both the American Cancer Society and the Cleveland Clinic have canceled events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The Post also reports, “The American Friends of Magen David Adom, which raises money for Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross, also said it would not hold its 2018 gala at the club ‘after considerable deliberation,’ though it did not give a reason. The charity had one of Mar-a-Lago’s biggest events last season, with about 600 people in attendance.” I cannot imagine why any charitable organization that wants the support of a wide array of Americans would think it was in its interest to stage an event under the Trump logo….
Meanwhile, Matthew Nussbam reports that Republicans’ confidence in Russia’s Putin on the rise:
Russian President Vladimir Putin is enjoying rising popularity among Republicans according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center.
The poll found that the share of Republicans expressing confidence in Putin doubled to 34 percent from 17 percent in 2015, when Donald Trump launched a campaign for the White House that was seen as friendly toward Moscow.
Though most Americans view Russia negatively, Moscow’s overall popularity in the United States has risen since 2014, when it plummeted after the country annexed Crimea. Twenty-nine percent of Americans now have a favorable view, compared with 19 percent in 2014, the poll found….
Dexter Roberts reports that This Is China’s Real Economic Problem (“A $600 billion stimulus program created corporate zombies and stinted on the private sector. The result: lower productivity”):
….one key indicator—total factor productivity—gives a more worrisome picture of China’s economic health. Total factor productivity is the extra output that the economy produces without additional labor or capital—it’s what creates prosperity. While productivity in the manufacturing industry grew an average of 2.6 percent a year from 1998 to 2007, growth has been almost zero since, according to Loren Brandt, a China specialist at the University of Toronto. In the U.S., by contrast, productivity growth fell from 1 percent to about 0.5 percent over the same period, he says.
It isn’t unusual for productivity to slow once the easy gains that come from industrialization, the development of supply chains, and the embrace of technologies such as computers are used up. “You would expect productivity to come down, but not as sharply as we’re seeing” in China, Brandt says.
So what explains the dramatic drop? There’s a pretty obvious culprit. To combat the effects of the global financial crisis, China unleashed a 4 trillion-yuan ($586 billion) stimulus program in 2008, much of it directed at state-owned enterprises (SOEs), to prop up growth and avoid mass layoffs. While the spending helped China avoid a deep slump, the focus on SOEs hurt the private sector. Today, state companies get almost 30 percent of all loans but contribute less than a tenth of GDP, according to Gavekal Dragonomics, a Beijing-based economic consulting firm. “The government’s repeated use of state-owned enterprises to stimulate short-term activity has weakened the private sector and lowered productivity growth,” Andrew Batson, research director at Dragonomics, wrote in a May report. As a result, China is “increasingly locked into a slower-growth future”….
Great Big Story presents The Alaskan Town FULL of Bald Eagles:
A bald eagle is an exciting, rare sighting for most Americans. But on this Alaskan island, our national symbol is as common as a beachside seagull. You can find them everywhere—lurking above the post office, inspecting the trash, waiting patiently for the local fishing boats to return with the day’s catch, even hanging out in front of the town church. In Unalaska, Alaska, everyone has an eagle story.