Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-seven.  Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 6:10 PM, for 11h 00m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 2.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1956, FORTRAN, the first modern computer language, is first shared with the coding community.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Kate Kelly and Mark Mazzetti report As Virus Spread, Reports of Trump Administration’s Private Briefings Fueled Sell-Off (‘A hedge fund consultant’s summary of private presentations by White House economic advisers fanned investor worries’):

On the afternoon of Feb. 24, President Trump declared on Twitter that the coronavirus was “very much under control” in the United States, one of numerous rosy statements that he and his advisers made at the time about the worsening epidemic. He even added an observation for investors: “Stock market starting to look very good to me!”

But hours earlier, senior members of the president’s economic team, privately addressing board members of the conservative Hoover Institution, were less confident. Tomas J. Philipson, a senior economic adviser to the president, told the group he could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy. To some in the group, the implication was that an outbreak could prove worse than Mr. Philipson and other Trump administration advisers were signaling in public at the time.

The next day, board members — many of them Republican donors — got another taste of government uncertainty from Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council. Hours after he had boasted on CNBC that the virus was contained in the United States and “it’s pretty close to airtight,” Mr. Kudlow delivered a more ambiguous private message. He asserted that the virus was “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know,” according to a document describing the sessions obtained by The New York Times.

The document, written by a hedge fund consultant who attended the three-day gathering of Hoover’s board, was stark. “What struck me,” the consultant wrote, was that nearly every official he heard from raised the virus “as a point of concern, totally unprovoked.”

 Daniel Lippman reports Another pro-Trump ad uses footage from Russia (‘This is the fourth time a Trump-affiliated group has used Russian footage in an ad’):

A new pro-Trump super PAC ad uses stock footage from Russia and Belarus in a major ad buy that’s airing in three swing states. It’s the fourth time in three months that an ad promoting President Donald Trump’s reelection has used footage from Russia.

America First Action last Thursday launched an ad called “Pandemic Tax” in Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as part of a $10 million ad campaign slamming Joe Biden for supporting bad trade deals and arguing that he would raise taxes on “all of us.” But some of the people featured in the ad were actors in stock footage from Russia and Belarus.

….

This is the fourth time a Trump-affiliated group has used Russian footage in an ad. A digital ad last month released by a fundraising arm of the Trump campaign called on people to “support our troops” but used a stock photo of Russian-made fighter jets and Russian models dressed as soldiers.

Another Trump campaign ad also used footage of a conveyor belt with cardboard boxes saying “MADE IN THE USA” that was created by a Russian photographer and illustrator, and a pre-recorded video at the Republican National Convention used stock footage of a factory in Moscow.

How Doug the Pug Got 18 Million Followers:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of sixty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 6:12 PM, for 11h 03m 42s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 8.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM.

 On this day in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt is shot while delivering a speech in Milwaukee.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Matt Zapotosky and Shane Harris report ‘Unmasking’ probe commissioned by Barr concludes without charges or any public report:

The federal prosecutor appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr to review whether Obama-era officials improperly requested the identities of individuals whose names were redacted in intelligence documents has completed his work without finding any substantive wrongdoing, according to people familiar with the matter.

The revelation that U.S. Attorney John Bash, who left the department last week, had concluded his review without criminal charges or any public report will rankle President Trump at a moment when he is particularly upset at the Justice Department. The department has so far declined to release the results of Bash’s work, though people familiar with his findings say they would likely disappoint conservatives who have tried to paint the “unmasking” of names — a common practice in government to help understand classified documents — as a political conspiracy.

(After all the excitement at Fox News, a discovery of nothing.)

Peter Elkind, Meg Cramer, and Doris Burke report (from May) Meet the Shadowy Accountants Who Do Trump’s Taxes and Help Him Seem Richer Than He Is:

But Trump’s accountants are far from bystanders in the matters under scrutiny — or in the rise of Trump. Over a span of decades, they have played two critical, but discordant, roles for Trump. One is common for an accounting firm: to help him pay the smallest amount of taxes possible. The second is not common at all: to help him appear to the world to be rich beyond imagining. That sometimes requires creating precisely the opposite impression of what’s in his tax filings.

Time and again, from press interviews in the 1980s to the launch of his 2016 campaign, Trump has trotted out evermore outsized claims of his wealth, frequently brandishing papers prepared by members of his accounting team, who have sometimes been called on to appear in person when they were presented, offering a sort of mute testimony in support of the findings. The accountants’ written disclaimers — that the calculations rely on Trump’s own numbers, rendering them essentially meaningless — are rarely mentioned.

Trump’s accountants have been crucial enablers in his remarkable rise. And like their marquee client, they have a surprisingly colorful and tangled story of their own. It’s dramatically at odds with the image Trump has presented of his accountants as “one of the most highly respected” big firms, solemnly confirming his numbers after months of careful scrutiny. For starters, it’s only technically true to say Trump’s accounting work is handled by a large firm.

In fact, Trump entrusts his taxes and planning to a tiny, secretive team of CPAs who have operated at various times from humble quarters in Queens and two Long Island office parks.

 World’s Smallest Pandemic Problem™— Champagne sales down as coronavirus pandemic rumbles on:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of sixty-five.  Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 6:13 PM, for 11h 06m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 15.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM, and her Public Works Committee at 6 PM.

 On this day in 1775, the Continental Congress establishes the Continental Navy (predecessor of the United States Navy).

Recommended for reading in full — 

Sam Levine reports More than 10-hour wait and long lines as early voting starts in Georgia:

Voters in Georgia faced hours-long lines on Monday as people flocked to the polls for the first day of early voting in the state, which has developed a national reputation in recent years for voting issues.

Eager voters endured waits of six hours or more in Cobb County, which was once solidly Republican but has voted for Democrats in recent elections, and joined lines that wrapped around buildings in solidly Democratic DeKalb County. They also turned out in big numbers in north Georgia’s Floyd County, where support for Donald Trump is strong.

At least two counties briefly had problems with the electronic pollbooks used to check in voters. The issue halted voting for a while at State Farm Arena, in Atlanta. Voters who cast their ballots at the basketball stadium, which was being used as an early voting site, faced long waits as the glitch was resolved.

Adrienne Crowley, who waited more than an hour to vote, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution there wasn’t anything that would make her get out of the line to vote. “I would have voted all day if I had to.”

Andy Greenberg reports on Russia’s Fancy Bear hackers likely penetrated a federal agency:

A warning that unidentified hackers broke into an agency of the US federal government and stole its data is troubling enough. But it becomes all the more disturbing when those unidentified intruders are identified—and appear likely to be part of a notorious team of cyberspies working in the service of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.

Last week the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published an advisory that hackers had penetrated a US federal agency. It identified neither the attackers nor the agency, but it did detail the hackers’ methods and their use of a new and unique form of malware in an operation that successfully stole target data. Now, clues uncovered by a researcher at cybersecurity firm Dragos and an FBI notification to hacking victims obtained by WIRED in July suggest a likely answer to the mystery of who was behind the intrusion: They appear to be Fancy Bear, a team of hackers working for Russia’s GRU. Also known as APT28, the group has been responsible for everything from hack-and-leak operations targeting the 2016 US presidential election to a broad campaign of attempted intrusions targeting political parties, consultancies, and campaigns this year.

Richard Read reports Far-right groups, feeling support from Trump, find fertile recruiting ground in the Northwest:

The unrest roiling Portland and other cities this year has been a powerful recruiting tool for organizations such as the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and the Three Percenters. Patriot Prayer is led by Joey Gibson, a Washington state resident who faces a felony riot charge for brawling with antifa activists in Portland last year and who was recently photographed with a former Ku Klux Klan member.

How To Delete Your Facebook Account:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with afternoon showers and a high of sixty-four.  Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 6:15 PM, for 11h 09m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 25.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM.

 On this day in 1928, an iron lung respirator is used for the first time at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Trump’s words on covid-19 are like ‘slap in the face’ for those who lost family:

President Trump’s comparisons in October of the coronavirus to the flu and admonitions not to fear it were “appalling” to those who have lost family members.

Nicola Davis reports on ‘Brain fog’: the people struggling to think clearly months after Covid:

For Mirabai Nicholson-McKellar, Covid-19 brought an onslaught of symptoms from chest pains to an 11-day migraine, three positive test results, and a period in hospital.

Seven months later, the rollercoaster is far from over: the 36-year-old from Byron Bay, Australia is still experiencing symptoms – including difficulties with thinking that are often described as “brain fog”.

“Brain fog seems like such an inferior description of what is actually going on. It’s completely crippling. I am unable to think clearly enough to [do] anything,” says Nicholson-McKellar, adding that the experience would be better described as cognitive impairment.

….

Dr Michael Zandi, a consultant at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology , says he has seen patients who have been living with brain fog for a few months. While some have been admitted to hospital or intensive care with Covid, Zandi says he is now seeing cases among people who coped with Covid at home.

“The proportion of people with cognitive symptoms for any period of time as a result of Covid-19 is unknown, and a focus of study now, but in some studies could be up to 20%,” he says.

Kate Manne writes Trump obsesses over ‘dominating’ covid-19 because he wants to look manly (‘According to this worldview, if you take any pandemic precautions, you “submit” to the virus’):

The president, a self-professed germaphobe, could hardly have been more explicit about his worldview: This potentially deadly illness is something to dominate or be dominated by. It does not matter whether a person is an essential worker, is in a high-risk demographic, has a chronic health condition, or is simply and sometimes tragically unlucky: Illness is a weakness, and those who succumb are feeble, even pathetic. Those who conquer it are, conversely, strong and morally admirable. This view is a crucial element of toxic masculinity, which festers and causes harm, not just to individual men but to everyone around them.

….

Bankrupt machismo feeds Trump’s denialism about this disease, whether he’s contemplating his own frailty or that of the American people. Whatever it means to be a “real man” (a concept I doubt has any genuine value), it’s clear that our era’s incarnation of toxic masculinity has little to do with the real strength it takes to protect and serve the community. Instead it’s about weakness, and the fearful inability to admit to human vulnerability — and it takes an appalling pride in endangering those around you.

(Trump replaces science with ignorance, and prudence with pride. Pride is a sin.)

Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s Presidency:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of sixty-three.  Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 6:17 PM, for 11h 12m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 34.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1991, Prof. Anita Hill delivers her televised testimony concerning sexual harassment during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Nicholas Confessore, Karen Yourish, Steve Eder, Ben Protess, Maggie Haberman, Grace Ashford, Michael LaForgia, Kenneth P. Vogel, Michael Rothfeld, and Larry Buchanan of the New York Times report The Swamp That Trump Built (‘A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington to his family’s hotels and resorts — and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration’):

As president-elect, he had pledged to step back from the Trump Organization and recuse himself from his private company’s operation. As president, he built a system of direct presidential influence-peddling unrivaled in modern American politics.

As president-elect, he had pledged to step back from the Trump Organization and recuse himself from his private company’s operation. As president, he built a system of direct presidential influence-peddling unrivaled in modern American politics.

Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades.

Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades.

But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.

….

IT WAS SPRINGTIME at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, and the favor-seekers were swarming.

In a gold-adorned ballroom filled with Republican donors, an Indian-born industrialist from Illinois pressed Mr. Trump to tweet about easing immigration rules for highly skilled workers and their children.

“He gave a million dollars,” the president told his guests approvingly, according to a recording of the April 2018 event.

Later that month, in the club’s dining room, the president wandered over to one of its newer members, an Australian cardboard magnate who had brought along a reporter to flaunt his access. Mr. Trump thanked him for taking out a newspaper ad hailing his role in the construction of an Ohio paper mill and box factory, whose grand opening the president would attend.

And in early March, a Tennessee real estate developer who had donated lavishly to the inauguration, and wanted billions in loans from the new administration, met the president at the club and asked him for help.

Mr. Trump waved over his personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen. “Get it done,” the president said, describing the developer as “a very important guy,” Mr. Cohen recalled in an interview.

Exotic, endangered & trafficked animals in the Middle East receive UAE care:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 6:18 PM, for 11h 15m 00s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 45% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns after being charged with evasion of federal income tax.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer writes I will hold the president accountable for endangering and dividing America:

When I addressed the people of Michigan on Thursday to comment on the unprecedented terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges against 13 men, some of whom were preparing to kidnap and possibly kill me, I said, “Hatred, bigotry and violence have no place in the great state of Michigan.” I meant it. But just moments later, President Trump’s campaign adviser, Jason Miller, appeared on national television accusing me of fostering hatred.

I’m not going to waste my time arguing with the president. But I will always hold him accountable. Because when our leaders speak, their words carry weight.

When our leaders encourage domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions. When they stoke and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit. And when a sitting president stands on a national stage refusing to condemn white supremacists and hate groups, as President Trump did when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during the first presidential debate, he is complicit. Hate groups heard the president’s words not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry. As a call to action.

Lois Beckett reports Michigan terror plot: why rightwing extremists are thriving on Facebook:

Before Michigan, there was the militia group in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that used a Facebook event to encourage armed citizens to take to the streets, and the anti-government “boogaloo” cop-killer in California this May allegedly met his accomplice on Facebook. The deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, was originally organized as a Facebook event.

Facebook has defended itself as working hard to keep users safe and to adapt to emerging threats on its platform, as well as coordinating closely with law enforcement. But evidence has mounted for years that Mark Zuckerberg’s goal of using Facebook to “bring the world closer together” and to “give people the power to build community” has also built powerful tools for radicalization and coordinated violence.

….

At times, Facebook has chosen not to significantly restrict or ban extremist groups on its platform until after a member of the group has killed someone, even when experts have sounded warnings about the group for months or years before an attack.

This was true of boogaloo groups on Facebook. A February 2020 report by the Network Contagion Research Institute warned about the growth of boogaloo rhetoric on Facebook, specifically that it included violent rhetoric about killing law enforcement that might translate into action. After the report was made public, Facebook told NBC News it was monitoring the groups for threats of violence, but did not take any immediate action to banboogaloo groups, even through violent insurrection and killing law enforcement were central themes of boogaloo discussions.

The company finally announced a ban on a network of boogaloo groups on 30 June, four months after a clear public warning that a cop-killer ideology was spreading on Facebook, and nearly a month after two officers in California had already been shot to death: the federal security officer David Patrick Underwood, on 29 May in Oakland, and the California sheriff’s deputy Damon Gutzwiller, in a subsequent ambush attack.

 Video from Space – Highlights for the Week of Oct. 4:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 6:20 PM, for 11h 17m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 55.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1701, the Collegiate School of Connecticut (later renamed Yale University) is chartered in Old Saybrook.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Bill Chappell reports In Rare Step, Esteemed Medical Journal Urges Voters To Oust Trump:

The Trump administration has “taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy” in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, The New England Journal of Medicine says in a scathing editorial that essentially calls on American voters to throw the president out of office.

It is the first time the prestigious medical journal has taken a stance on a U.S. presidential election since it was founded in 1812.

“When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent,” reads the editorial signed by nearly three dozen of the journal’s editors. “We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”

The editors accuse Trump’s government of a massive public health failure — and of worsening the pandemic’s effects by prioritizing politics over sound medical guidance.

The piece, titled “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum” and published Wednesday, does not mention President Trump or his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, by name. But it refers to the Trump administration repeatedly, and its footnotes cite news articles about Trump insisting that coronavirus risks are overblown, pressuring federal scientists, and politicizing the search for treatments.

Chico Harlan and Michael Birnbaum report Nobel Peace Prize goes to World Food Program for efforts to combat hunger:

The World Food Program was awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a recognition of the critical work by the United Nations agency to battle hunger around the world, especially as the coronavirus pandemic has brought a global spike in poverty.

Announcing the prize in Oslo, Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the world was in danger of a food crisis of “inconceivable proportions.”

For decades, the Rome-based World Food Program has played a central role in dealing with people caught in conflict or fleeing for safety. But Reiss-Andersen also emphasized a symbolic aspect of the selection, describing WFP’s work as form of global cooperation that seemed in danger in an era of nationalism and rising mistrust.

“The need for international solidarity and multilateral cooperation is more conspicuous than ever,” Reiss-Andersen said.

Can the coldness of space be used to cool the Earth and combat climate change?: