Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 5:28 PM, for 10h 40m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 71.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one-hundredth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Update: these meetings are for 2.23:  Whitewater’s Community Development Authority Seed Capital Screening Committee meets at 4 PM, and the CDA —Board of Directors meets thereafter at 5 PM.

On this day in 1937, Wallace H. Carothers, a research chemist for Du Pont, received a patent for nylon. On this day in 1943, Milwaukee native Mildred Harnack is executed in Berlin for her service in the German resistance.

Jacob Carpenter reports that Wisconsin dog and Westminster winner Rumor conquers New York City: “With their Best in Show victory Tuesday night, Rumor and [owner Kent] Boyles, who runs a kennel between Janesville and Madison, became the toast of New York City, embarking on a whirlwind tour of the Big Apple. Five-year-old Rumor, named after the song “Rumour Has It” by British songstress Adele, became the second German shepherd to claim top dog in the 141-year history of the competition. “To be the old, retired one, and to come out and take on the new champion, it was a whole lot of fun,” Boyles said Wednesday. Working on just three hours of sleep, Rumor made several television appearances, snapped majestic photos atop the Empire State Building and One World Observatory, and kept with tradition by politely noshing on a pair of steaks at Sardi’s. Rumor handled the onslaught famously before crashing in the afternoon, her 65-pound body weighed down by meat and media attention.”

Ana Fifield reports that Airport assassination of half brother focuses new attention on North Korean leader: “For the victim was his older half brother, Kim Jong Nam, traveling on an apparently fake passport that said he was a 46-year-old named Kim Chol. It was an attack that South Korea’s spy chief asserted was directly ordered from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. One of the women grabbed the man as the other sprayed liquid on his face and held a cloth over it for about 10 seconds. In the hullabaloo of the check-in area, no one even seemed to notice. This account of the attack and its aftermath was pieced together from interviews with staff at the airport, police and other official statements, and leaks to the local media. The women left swiftly, but not that swiftly. They went down three sets of escalators, past an H&M and a Baskin-Robbins, and out of the terminal to a taxi stand, where they needed to buy a voucher for their journey before lining up for a cab. They got in and told the driver to take them to the Empire Hotel, some 40 minutes from the airport.

Michael D. Shear observes that After Election, Trump’s Professed Love for Leaks Quickly Faded: “WASHINGTON — As a candidate for president, Donald J. Trump embraced the hackers who had leaked Hillary Clinton’s emails to the press, declaring at a rally in Pennsylvania, “I love WikiLeaks!” To the cheering throngs that night, Mr. Trump marveled that “nothing is secret today when you talk about the internet.” The leakers, he said, had performed a public service by revealing what he called a scandal with no rival in United States history. Now, after less than four weeks in the Oval Office, President Trump has changed his mind. At a news conference on Wednesday and in a series of Twitter postings earlier in the day, Mr. Trump angrily accused intelligence agencies of illegally leaking information about Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser, who resigned after reports that he had lied about conversations with the Russian ambassador.”

Charles Blow describes a slow, Drip, Drip, Drip: “In July, at a televised campaign event, Trump said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” Then in October, an hour after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tapes of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women, WikiLeaks began to dump the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked emails on the internet. Coincidence? Maybe. But that would be one hell of a coincidence, considering all the other reinforcing “coincidences”: Trump’s inexplicable, inexhaustible praise of Russia and Vladimir Putin; Putin’s failure to respond to Obama’s sanctions; an explosive report last week from CNN that read: “For the first time, U.S. investigators say they have corroborated some of the communications detailed in a 35-page dossier compiled by a former British intelligence agent.” What we know only makes what we don’t know feel all the more ominous. But I believe that facts are forthcoming. Reporters are digging like a crew of coal miners hopped up on a case of Red Bull, and sources in Washington are leaking to anyone with a press credential. Drip, drip, drip it goes until the dam breaks and the truth spills.”

These are the bees that give us almonds:

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and susnet 5:27 PM, for 10h 37m 33s of daytime. The mon is a waning gibbous with 79.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}ninety-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets this morning at 8 AM.

On this day in 1820, social reformer and women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony is born. On this day in 1865, the 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery participated in the Union victory at Congaree Creek near Columbia, South Carolina.

Tom Kertscher reports that three (Seventh Circuit Appellate) Judges question investigators’ conduct in Brendan Dassey ‘Making a Murderer’ case: “CHICAGO – Guessing how federal appeals court judges will rule based on the questions they ask in a hearing is more parlor game than science. Nevertheless, an attorney for the state of Wisconsin had barely started his argument Tuesday that Brendan Dassey’s murder conviction should be reinstated when Judge Ilana Rovner stopped him cold. Rovner wanted to know if Dassey, convicted in the 2005 murder of photographer Teresa Halbach, would have concluded he could go home after answering questions by investigators, instead of being arrested. After all, he was a low-IQ, “extremely suggestible” 16-year-old, she noted. Wisconsin’s deputy solicitor general, Luke Berg, was firm in his response: No specific promises were ever made. However, the exchange immediately highlighted a critical issue in the case: Even if Dassey wasn’t given an explicit promise of leniency, did the way he was questioned — including lines such as, “The truth will set you free” — produce an involuntary confession? Don’t you think, Rovner asked Berg, that investigators “crossed the line?” Rovner, nominated to the court by Republican President George W. Bush, is leading a three-judge panel of the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Dassey’s murder conviction, sensationalized in the “Making A Murderer” documentary, was overturned last August by William Duffin, a federal magistrate judge in Milwaukee. Duffin ruled that Dassey’s constitutional rights were violated because investigators for the prosecution made false promises to Dassey during multiple interrogations.”

Michael Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo report that Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence: “WASHINGTON — Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials. American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election. The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation. But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.”

Greg Miller, Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima report on Flynn’s swift downfall: From a phone call in the Dominican Republic to a forced resignation at the White House: “Michael Flynn was at a beachside resort in the Dominican Republic, a stretch of sand and sun that he and his wife had visited for years, when he took a few moments out of their post-election vacation for a call with the Russian ambassador to the United States. As a veteran intelligence officer, Flynn must have known that a call with a Russian official in Washington would be intercepted by the U.S. government, pored over by FBI analysts and possibly even shared with the White House. But six weeks later, Flynn was forced out of his job as national security adviser to President Trump over what was said in that conversation and Flynn’s inability to be truthful about it with then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence and other officials now in senior positions at the White House.”

Dave Gold (a Democrat) writes that ‘Data-Driven’ Campaigns Are Killing the Democratic Party: “Though the problem for Democrats is urgent, the challenge is not new. Before the clamor for a “data-driven” approach, the “best practices” embraced by much of the Democratic Party apparatus encouraged campaigns that were predominantly driven by issue bullet points. In 2000, for example, the Gore presidential campaign had no shortage of position papers, but it would be challenging (at best) to say what the campaign’s message was. In contrast, in Obama’s 2008 campaign, “Hope and Change” was not only a slogan, but a message frame through which all issues were presented. Years ago, my political mentor taught me the problem with this approach, using a memorable metaphor: issues are to a campaign message what ornaments are to a Christmas tree, he said. Ornaments make the tree more festive, but without the tree, you don’t have a Christmas tree, no matter how many ornaments you have or how beautiful they are. Issues can advance the campaign’s story, but without a narrative frame, your campaign doesn’t have a message, no matter how many issue ads or position papers it puts forward. Storytelling has been the most effective form of communication throughout the entirety of human history. And that is unlikely to change, given that experts in neurophysiology affirm that the neural pathway for stories is central to the way the human brain functions (“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written).”

Tech Insider contends that The ‘alpha dog’ myth is leading countless owners to mistreat their dogs:

Good morning.

Valentine’s Day in Whitewater will be mild and partly sunny, with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 5:26 PM, for 10h 34m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 87.2% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the {tooltip}ninety-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1859, Oregon became America’s thirty-third state. On this day in 1819, C. Latham Sholes, one of the inventors of the typewriter, is born. Sholes lived much of his life in Wisconsin, and served in both the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate.

Recommended for reading in full —

Patrick Marley reports that Syrian man files lawsuit in Wisconsin over Trump refugee ban: “MADISON – Wisconsin was pulled into the legal fight Monday over President Donald Trump’s refugee and immigration ban, with a Syrian man filing suit over his inability to finalize asylum for his wife and 3-year-old daughter. The man – a Sunni Muslim who filed the federal lawsuit under the name John Doe to protect his family’s identity – arrived in the United States in 2014 after two military forces extorted, falsely imprisoned and tortured him. He was granted asylum in May 2016 and soon afterward sought asylum for his wife and daughter, who remain in war-torn Aleppo. According to the lawsuit, the grants of asylum for his wife and daughter were in the final stages of being processed when they were halted by Trump’s executive order that barred Syrian refugees from the United States. The order also suspended immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries.”

Eric Posner asks Is Trump mentally unstable? and concludes that he’s not unstable, but rather a lifelong liar:  “But if Trump’s behavior is politically pathological, it is psychologically natural. If biographic accounts are to be believed, he has spent his entire life telling lies and profiting from them. The lies helped his business, his love life, and his endless efforts at self-promoting. They helped him win the election. And not just the lies, but the incessant bloviating about things he knows nothing of. Having won the campaign, he has gained immense self-confidence in his political instincts. Three weeks in, he sees no reason (yet) to depart from his modus operandi of chattering, lying, bloviating, and tweeting, in order to provoke people, gain attention, and control the agenda. He enjoys it all too much, maybe he can’t really help it, but he has not been convinced that his lies harm him. He makes up facts to make himself look good because he is like everyone else except more so. Unlike everyone else, he is publicly contradicted by the press. When this happens, he doubles down rather than take the risk of losing face. Trump believes that the press is controlled by his enemies; he cannot afford to make concessions to it.”

Andrew Roth reports that Russian lawmakers rush to the defense of Trump’s ex-national security adviser: “MOSCOW — Leading Russian lawmakers rushed to defend President Trump’s former national security adviser on Tuesday after he resigned for misleading senior White House officials, including Vice President Pence, about his contacts with Russia. The heads of the foreign affairs committees in both Russia’s upper and lower houses of parliament chalked up Michael Flynn’s resignation to a dark campaign of Russophobia in Washington, and said it would undermine relations between the White House and the Kremlin.”

The 141st Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is under way. The Journal Sentinel has a 51-photograph slideshow.

Iceland, under a full moon —

 

Iceland under Full Moon from O Z Z O Photography on Vimeo.

 

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-six. Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 5:25 PM, for 10h 32m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 92.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}ninety-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1935, a New Jersey jury convicts Bruno Richard Hauptmann of the kidnapping and murder of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s son. For further reading on the case, see The Sixteenth Rail, Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colorado, ISBN 978-1-55591-716-6, copyright by Adam Schrager, 2013, 314 pages. On this day in 1935, Wisconsin establishes a minimum gasoline price per gallon.

Piet Levy reports that Al Jarreau, celebrated vocalist, Milwaukee native, dies at 76: “Al Jarreau has said his yellow brick road started in Milwaukee. From singing songs as a child at church and PTA meetings, to his first paid gigs at the Pfister Hotel, the genre-blending jazz singer went on to tour the world, record 21 albums and earn seven Grammys. He remains the only vocalist in Grammy history to win in the jazz, pop and R&B categories. But Jarreau’s heart was always at home. “Practically every night from stage, he would say, ‘I’m from Milwaukee,’ ” said fellow Milwaukee native Joe Turano, a member of Jarreau’s band for 17 years and his musical director since 2008. When they met, Turano said, Jarreau asked, “‘You’re from Milwaukee? I never had a guy from Milwaukee in my band before.’ And he gave me a big hug.” Jarreau, 76, died in a Los Angeles hospital early Sunday morning, with his wife, Susan, their son Ryan and a few friends and relatives by his side. On Wednesday, Jarreau announced through his website that he would have to retire from touring on medical orders, due to “exhaustion.” A cause of death was not immediately known. “He was just a great human and talented and wonderful to be around,” said friend Greg Marcus, CEO of the Marcus Corp. “He made you feel good. The world has lost someone special.”

Philip Rucker reports that Trump friend says Priebus is ‘in way over his head’: One of President Trump’s longtime friends made a striking move on Sunday: After talking privately with the president over drinks late Friday, Christopher Ruddy publicly argued that Trump should replace his White House chief of staff. “A lot of people have been saying, ‘Look, Donald has some problems,’ and I think he realizes that he’s got to make some changes going forward,” Ruddy said in an interview with The Washington Post. Ruddy went on to detail his critique of White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus: “It’s my view that Reince is the problem. I think on paper Reince looked good as the chief of staff — and Donald trusted him — but it’s pretty clear the guy is in way over his head. He’s not knowledgeable of how federal agencies work, how the communications operations work. He botched this whole immigration rollout. This should’ve been a win for Donald, not two or three weeks of negative publicity.”

David Sanger, Eric Schmitt, and Peter Baker describe Turmoil at the National Security Council, From the Top Down: “Three weeks into the Trump administration, council staff members get up in the morning, read President Trump’s Twitter posts and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Mr. Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls. Some staff members have turned to encrypted communications to talk with their colleagues, after hearing that Mr. Trump’s top advisers are considering an “insider threat” program that could result in monitoring cellphones and emails for leaks. The national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, has hunkered down since investigators began looking into what, exactly, he told the Russian ambassador to the United States about the lifting of sanctions imposed in the last days of the Obama administration, and whether he misled Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations. His survival in the job may hang in the balance. Although Mr. Trump suggested to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday that he was unaware of the latest questions swirling around Mr. Flynn’s dealings with Russia, aides said over the weekend in Florida — where Mr. Flynn accompanied the president and Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe — that Mr. Trump was closely monitoring the reaction to Mr. Flynn’s conversations. There are transcripts of a conversation in at least one phone call, recorded by American intelligence agencies that wiretap foreign diplomats, which may determine Mr. Flynn’s future.”

Tom Boggioni relates a comment from Charlie Sykes in Conservative pundit: Trump only uses ‘cringe-worthy’ surrogates because no one else will lie for him: ““I want to know who will play him on SNL next week,” Sykes said after watching Miller yell at multiple Sunday morning hosts. “What an extraordinary choice by the Trump administration to push Stephen Miller out when they actually do have some credible spokesmen. This was a cringe-worthy performance.” “Stephen Miller has only one audience,” Sykes continued. “He’s playing to Donald Trump. This is somebody proving that he is the loyalist possible spokesman. But what you have there [in Miller] is you have the intersection of inexperience, incompetence and zealotry, and the fact that he is doubling down on something that is clearly just not true.”

On February 7, 2017 a tornado hit NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Employees shot video of the tornado and its aftermath:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see morning rain give way to occasional sunshine and a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 5:23 PM, for 10h 29m 26s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}ninety-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Abraham Lincoln is born this day in 1809. On this day in 2002, Verona, Wisconsin’s Casey FitzRandolph wins a gold medal at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games in the Men’s 500 Meters.

Recommended for reading in full —

J. Weston Phippen writes that Yale Changes the Name of Calhoun College Over Ties to Racism: “Yale University announced Saturday that it would rename its residential college that bore the name of John C. Calhoun, a Yale graduate, U.S. vice president, white supremacist and advocate of slavery. The college will now be named after Grace Murray Hopper, a mathematician who graduated from the university in 1934 and left a teaching role to enlist in the Navy during World War II. The name change is a reversal of a decision made last spring, when Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, said he would not remove Calhoun’s name, because he thought it better to confront history, not to erase it. In that same spirit, Calhoun’s name will not be removed from the college, but will appear alongside Hopper’s, although the college will only be referred to by the latter. Hopper left her teaching job at Vassar and joined the Navy to help defeat Fascism, and she remained in service most of her life. But she is much better known for her work on early computers, developing code and language that allowed non-specialists to use them. ”

Oliver Willis describes How To Fight Cult Leaders Like Donald Trump And L. Ron Hubbard And Win (Willis – a progressive, not a libertarian – has for months now described Trump’s appeal as that of a cult leader): “In the last fifteen years or so there has been a steady stream of books, tv series, and documentaries about just how crazy the behavior of the church [of Scientology] has been historically and leading up to the bizarre behavior of current leader (and Tom Cruise bestie) David Miscavige. This informational war has demystified the church in the minds of most of the public, turning it into more of a punchline than anything….In an ideal world, a Trump supporter would learn about the bed of lies his entire persona is built on and simply leave the Trump compound of their own accord. But in the real world, this is unlikely to happen. If anything, Trump cultists will double down on their loyalty due to external attacks, with Trump issuing verbal kool-aid to them by describing everything outside the bubble as “fake news.” But outside reporting and debunking of his lies and mendacity does erode the cult of Trump. It galvanizes those of us on the left who are opposed to him with a shared set of information and logic to pass back and forth within our ranks as ammunition. Then for those moderates who are open to a logical argument, it arms them with information they need to form an informed opinion. With these two divisions of an information army continually supplied with material, you can win a war.”

Emma Green describes how These Conservative Christians Are Opposed to Trump—and Suffering the Consequences: “Earlier this month, Jonathan Martin jotted off a sad tweet. “I’ve lost count of the number of people who say they’ve had ministry jobs threatened/been fired for speaking out in some way in this season,” the Christian author and speaker wrote. Confirmation rolled in: one story from a church planter in California, another from a former worship leader in Indiana. These are “not people who would historically self-identify as progressives, at all,” Martin told me later. They’re “people who see themselves as being very faithful evangelicals.” Donald Trump has divided conservative Christian communities. Most white Christians support Trump, or at least voted for him. Some who have spoken out against his presidency or his policies, though, have encountered backlash. For a small group of people working in Christian ministry, music, and nonprofit advocacy, the consequences have been tangible: They’ve faced pressure from their employers, seen funds withdrawn from their mission work, or lost performing gigs because of their political beliefs.”

Daniel Dale has The complete list [so far – it’s only been three weeks] of all 57 false things Donald Trump has said as president: “U.S. President Donald Trump makes frequent false claims about matters big and small. The Star is planning to track them all. Contact Daniel Dale at ddale@thestar.ca if you hear Trump say anything you know is false or should be checked. Last updated: Feb. 10, 2017….

53. Feb. 7, 2017 —

Meeting with the National Sheriffs’ Association

The claim: “The murder rate in our country’s the highest it’s been in 47 years, right? Did you know that? 47 years? I’d say that in a speech and everybody’s surprised. Because the press doesn’t tell it like it is. It wasn’t to their advantage to say that.”

In fact: The homicide rate is not even close to a 47-year high. In fact, it remains near historic lows. There were 10 homicides per 100,000 residents in 1980, eight per 100,000 residents in 1995; in 2015, the latest year for which there is national data, it was five per 100,000 residents. Trump sometimes correctly notes that the increase in the homicide rate between 2014 and 2015 was the largest in more than 40 years. But that is far different than the actual rate being the highest.”

Tea & Kung Fu? Of course —

Ya’an, China, is home to some of the country’s best tea. It’s also home to the amazing long spout tea performers. This performance art, which dates back to 220 AD, mixes Kung Fu and the long spout metal teapot. Liu Xumin is a tea performer who has spent years mastering this ancient art form. His hope, he says, is to “achieve the integration of tea pot and human, of heaven and human, and of tea and human.”

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be forty-five and partly cloudy. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset is 5:22 PM, for 10h 26m 46s of daytime. The moon is full today, with 99.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}ninety-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s annual Freeze Fest at Cravath Lakefront takes place today, with a Polar Plunge from Noon – 3:00 PM to benefit Special Olympics of Wisconsin and a Chili Cook Off 11:00 AM – 2:30 PM.

Thomas Edison is born this day in 1847. On this day in 1842, Territorial Legislature member James R. Vineyard shoots fellow legislator Charles C.P. Arndt shortly after a session’s adjournment.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jason Horowitz reports that Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists: “ROME — Those trying to divine the roots of Stephen K. Bannon’s dark and at times apocalyptic worldview have repeatedly combed over a speech that Mr. Bannon, President Trump’s ideological guru, made in 2014 to a Vatican conference, where he expounded on Islam, populism and capitalism. But for all the examination of those remarks, a passing reference by Mr. Bannon to an esoteric Italian philosopher has gone little noticed, except perhaps by scholars and followers of the deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated thinker, Julius Evola. “The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant,” said Mark Sedgwick, a leading scholar of Traditionalists at Aarhus University in Denmark. Evola, who died in 1974, wrote on everything from Eastern religions to the metaphysics of sex to alchemy. But he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.  Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather. They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works. More important for the current American administration, Evola also caught on in the United States with leaders of the alt-right movement, which Mr. Bannon nurtured as the head of Breitbart News and then helped harness for Mr. Trump.”

Andrew Sullivan considers The Madness of King Donald: “Then there is the obvious question of the president’s mental and psychological health. I know we’re not supposed to bring this up — but it is staring us brutally in the face. I keep asking myself this simple question: If you came across someone in your everyday life who repeatedly said fantastically and demonstrably untrue things, what would you think of him? If you showed up at a neighbor’s, say, and your host showed you his newly painted living room, which was a deep blue, and then insisted repeatedly — manically — that it was a lovely shade of scarlet, what would your reaction be? If he then dragged out a member of his family and insisted she repeat this obvious untruth in front of you, how would you respond? If the next time you dropped by, he was still raving about his gorgeous new red walls, what would you think? Here’s what I’d think: This man is off his rocker. He’s deranged; he’s bizarrely living in an alternative universe; he’s delusional. If he kept this up, at some point you’d excuse yourself and edge slowly out of the room and the house and never return. You’d warn your other neighbors. You’d keep your distance. If you saw him, you’d be polite but keep your distance. I think this is a fundamental reason why so many of us have been so unsettled, anxious, and near panic these past few months. It is not so much this president’s agenda. That always changes from administration to administration. It is that when the linchpin of an entire country is literally delusional, clinically deceptive, and responds to any attempt to correct the record with rage and vengeance, everyone is always on edge.”

Greag Sargent believes that A blueprint for resistance to Trump has emerged. Here’s what it looks like: “1) Have (guarded) faith in our system….2) Keep pressuring Republicans to exercise real oversight on Trump….3) Fight hard in the Senate will all available procedural weapons….4) Keep looking to civil society and try to fortify it where possible….5) Keep Trump distracted and off balance, to minimize the damage he can do….”

(I’d say it’s still early, and there will be much more difficult days, with significant setbacks, along the way.)

Rosie Gray asks, and answers, What is the NRx (Neoreaction) Movement?: “White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has been in contact via intermediaries with Curtis Yarvin, Politico Magazine reported this week. Yarvin, a software engineer and blogger, writes under the name Mencius Moldbug. His anti-egalitarian arguments have formed the basis for a movement called “neoreaction.” The main thrust of Yarvin’s thinking is that democracy is a bust; rule by the people doesn’t work, and doesn’t lead to good governance. He has described it as an “ineffective and destructive” form of government, which he associates with “war, tyranny, destruction and poverty.” Yarvin’s ideas, along with those of the English philosopher Nick Land, have provided a structure of political theory for parts of the white-nationalist movement calling itself the alt-right. The alt-right can be seen as a political movement; neoreaction, which adherents refer to as NRx, is a philosophy. At the core of that philosophy is a rejection of democracy and an embrace of autocratic rule.”

In Alaska, it’s Moose v. Moose:

Good morning.

Here in Whitewater, we’ll have a partly cloudy and windy day, with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 5:21 PM, for 10h 24m 06s of daytime. Today is the {tooltip}ninety-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1763, the Treaty of Paris leaves Britain with most of France’s New World possessions. On this day in 1950, Sen. McCarthy again claims, without revealing a single name, communist infiltration within the U.S. government.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Despite official denials, Kylie Atwood and Brian Gottlieb report that Mexican foreign minister helped Jared Kushner re-write Trump border wall speech: “Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray personally made changes to President Donald Trump’s speech announcing an executive order calling for the construction of a border wall, according to Mexican officials. When Videgaray came to the White House in January, on the same day that Mr. Trump was to sign the executive order, Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser and the president’s son-in-law, showed him the speech Mr. Trump planned to deliver that day at the Homeland Security Department. Videgaray was horrified, according to the Mexican officials, and deemed the speech a non-starter. If the remarks were not changed, they would likely drive the two countries, whose relationship Videgaray was there to try and redress, even further apart. Such a speech would also do little to help President Pena’s approval ratings in his own country. Kushner suggested they re-write the speech together to make it less damaging.”

James Pethokoukis believes that The US economy may be growing faster than we think — and has been for a long time: “Might we somehow be statistically mismeasuring economic growth? Might growth be faster than we think? (It’s a topic I’ve written frequently about.) And now there’s a new research paper on the subject. See, it’s widely known that measuring quality improvements in a product is tough. So perhaps traditional inflation measures like the consumer price index fail to fully capture the benefits of new or upgraded products. (This seems to be particularly true when it come to software.) In a San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank working paper, “Missing Growth from Creative Destruction,” researchers add to that argument:

We argue that there exists a subtler, overlooked bias in the case of creative destruction. When the producer of the outgoing item does not produce the incoming item (i.e., when there is creative destruction), the standard procedure at statistical offices is to resort to some form of imputation. Imputation inserts the average price growth among a set of surviving products that were not creatively destroyed. We think this misses some growth because inflation is likely to be below-average for items subject to creative destruction. … As some products disappear precisely because they are displaced by better products, inflation may be lower at these points than for surviving products. As a result, creative destruction may result in overstated inflation and understated growth.”

Tyler Kingkade reports that Campus Rape’s Toughest Young Attorney Is Ready For Trump And DeVos: “Lately, Laura Dunn has tried to avoid thinking about rape on the weekends, but it doesn’t come naturally for the meticulous lawyer. Her idea of unwinding includes binge-watching Law & Order: SVU, not exactly light entertainment for a woman whose weeks are spent fielding calls and emails about the very topic — sexual assault — that dominates the show. For Dunn, though, this world of virtuous detectives and prosecutors is an escape from the calls and emails she receives from people asking for help, from the start of her workday at 8 a.m. until she’s collapsing into bed around 11 p.m. People who’ve been raped, people whose children were raped, people whose reports of rape were ignored and who finally got fed up enough to do something about it.”

Molly Ball considers The Anti-Trump Resistance and the Lessons of the Tea Party: “It’s too soon to tell if the current resistance movement will follow the tea party’s pattern. But there are already many parallels. It has arisen spontaneously and en masse. Many Republicans believe it’s not real: The protests, they tell me, are Astroturf funded by George Soros; the opposition to Betsy DeVos as education secretary, which jammed Senate switchboards, was merely manufactured by the teachers’ unions. But the unions and Soros didn’t start this fire any more than the Kochs started the tea party—they’re merely riding the wave in hopes it will advance their goals. Second, Trump’s election appears to have galvanized a lot of people who weren’t previously Democratic activists or politically minded at all. They may have voted Democrat, they may consider themselves “progressive,” but they’re not the Democratic base that donated to politicians and knocked on doors in years past. Commentators on the right have seized on the violent sentiments expressed by some participants as proof the whole movement is composed of frightening extremists.”

One falcon pursues many starlings, but still comes away empty –