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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

Private Meetings in Public Monuments During a Pandemic

The Washington Post reports that Interior [Department] shuts Washington Monument after interior secretary tests positive for the coronavirus (‘Park Service staff say they may have been exposed when David Bernhardt led a private, after-hours tour’):

Officials have taken the extraordinary step of closing the Washington Monument starting Friday as a precaution after Interior Secretary David Bernhardt — who had been giving private, nighttime tours to associates — tested positive for the coronavirus.

Interior spokesman Nicholas Goodwin confirmed the temporary closure, saying the department acted after consulting with federal health officials. Bernhardt had led other Trump DOI appointees on a tour earlier this week. Some National Park Service staff at the site said they had been exposed to the secretary during his after-hours tour and are now in quarantine, which has led to a staffing shortage at the monument, Goodwin said.

A person of normal acculturation would not be taking private, after-hours tours of public facilities during a pandemic. Showing off the monument to ‘associates’ at the risk of exposing field workers to infection would, however, be a matter of indifference to an entitled man.

There’s no shortage of men like that in the administration.  Bernhardt is one of many.

UW-Whitewater’s Budgetary Challenges Require a Studied Approach

Whitewater is a college town. If a college town, then a college: the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. I’ve written about the university now and again. A simple summary of my views would be that Whitewater benefits from having a university, but that the school’s leaders (notably Telfer and Kopper) have failed both individuals and the community. Of UW-Whitewater’s current (and relatively new) chancellor, Dr. Dwight Watson, I’ve written less, but critically where necessary.

UW-Whitewater now faces significant budget shortfalls, as do other UW System schools. What the university confronts did not begin overnight. Both the city and the university have had a difficult dozen years. For the city: the Great Recession, a drug crisis, economic stagnation with low household incomes, a pandemic mismanaged nationally, and in consequence of that mismanagement a Pandemic Recession. For the university, all these local challenges, with funding limits, tuition price controls, their own administrative failures, and a declining demographic among typical college-aged students.

This has been no easy time for the city or the campus.

None of these challenges, however, will be settled satisfactorily though the publication of dueling press releases. To see these issues that way, or to present them that way, is no more than a superficial glance in the direction of deep wounds.

A better perspective comes from better information. Over at the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the recently published Falling Behind? The state of Wisconsin’s public universities and colleges addresses the plight of the UW System thoroughly and seriously. One might not agree with all of the WPF’s prescriptions, but it’s a sound (and timely) starting point. (One key point of agreement: a tuition price freeze, like price controls generally, has been a bad idea.)

There’s not a lot of good policy analysis in Wisconsin, to be blunt, but fortunately the Wisconsin Policy Forum is an exception to that unfortunate situation. Even where one disagrees, one can be – and should be – appreciative of diligent work.

The Falling Behind? The state of Wisconsin’s public universities and colleges analysis comes in a video summary, an executive summary, and a full report.

Watching and reading all three offers a sensible foundation for further discussion.

Friday Catblogging: Heroic Military Cats

Jackie Mead writes of 6 Heroic Military CatsAmong those admirable felines was the U.S. Navy tabby Princess Papule:

Striped tabby Princess Papule was born on July 4, 1944, at the Pearl Harbor Navy Base in Hawaii. Pooli, as she was known to the sailors, was brought aboard the attack transport USS Fremont by crewman James Lynch. The ship fought in the Pacific theater of World War II and participated in the invasions of Saipan, Palau, Leyte, and Iwo Jima.

Pooli chose to sleep in the mailroom during battles. Upon crossing the equator for the first time, the tabby participated in a ceremony transforming inexperienced sailors from “polliwogs” to sea-hardened “shellbacks.” She was issued her own uniform and awarded three service ribbons and four battle stars for her time in the navy. Pooli put the uniform back on for a Los Angeles Times story celebrating her 15th birthday.

Well done, Pooli, so very well done.

 

Daily Bread for 12.18.20

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-three  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 17.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1958, Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay), the world’s first communications satellite, is launched.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Natasha Bertrand and Eric Wolff report Nuclear weapons agency breached amid massive cyber onslaught:

The Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, have evidence that hackers accessed their networks as part of an extensive espionage operation that has affected at least half a dozen federal agencies, officials directly familiar with the matter said.

On Thursday, DOE and NNSA officials began coordinating notifications about the breach to their congressional oversight bodies after being briefed by Rocky Campione, the chief information officer at DOE.

They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation at NNSA, and the Richland Field Office of the DOE.

The hackers have been able to do more damage at FERC than the other agencies, and officials there have evidence of highly malicious activity, the officials said, but did not elaborate.

The officials said that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has been helping to manage the federal response to the broad hacking campaign, indicated to FERC this week that CISA was overwhelmed and might not be able to allocate the necessary resources to respond. DOE will therefore be allocating extra resources to FERC to help investigate the hack, even though FERC is a semi-autonomous agency, the officials said.

Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima report Federal investigators find evidence of previously unknown tactics used to penetrate government networks:

Federal investigators reported Thursday on evidence of previously unknown tactics for penetrating government computer networks, a development that underscores the disastrous reach of Russia’s recent intrusions and the logistical nightmare facing federal officials trying to purge intruders from key systems.

For days, it has been clear that compromised software patches distributed by a Texas-based company, SolarWinds, were central to Russian efforts to gain access to U.S. government computer systems. But Thursday’s alert from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security said evidence suggested there was other malware used to initiate what the alert described as “a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations.”

While many details remained unclear, the revelation about new modes of attack raises fresh questions about the access that Russian hackers were able to gain in government and corporate systems worldwide.

[The U.S. government spent billions on a system for detecting hacks. The Russians outsmarted it.]

“This adversary has demonstrated an ability to exploit software supply chains and shown significant knowledge of Windows networks,” the alert said. “It is likely that the adversary has additional initial access vectors and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that have not yet been discovered.”

How Scientists Knew Hawaii’s Kilauea Was About to Erupt:

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Ron Johnson’s 12.16.20 Senate Hearing on Election Security

Yesterday, Sen. Ron Johnson held a hearing as the (outgoing) chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. A video of the full hearing appears above. Johnson may run for a third term, and even if he doesn’t, his role in support of Trump and his affinity for a Trumpist outlook make him a subject of interest. See Probable Wisconsin Political Issues for 2021. I’ve now watched the full hearing (it’s admittedly lengthy), and Johnson remains suspect. He’s drawn under stable, negative national attention over his pro-Trump conspiracy theories. See National Reporting on Sen. Ron Johnson

Johnson’s view, in summary, is that legitimate questions about the 2016 election are a justification for his own conspiracy-laden views on the 2020 election. He further contends that the baseless suspicions that he and Trump have stoked among their partisan supporters  justify his own investigation. Johnson creates meritless doubt, and then relies on his own  fraudulent creation to create even more meritless doubt.

Press coverage (aside from Fox, etc.) of the hearing has been critical of Johnson’s list of speakers, his own conspiratorial nature, and his on-camera temperament (as he had a overwrought, defensive exchange with Sen. Garry Peters of Michigan). See Linda Qui, The election is over, but Ron Johnson keeps promoting false claims of fraud (‘The hearing was the latest effort by the Republican chairman of the homeland security committee, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, to amplify the claims and concerns of President Trump. Mr. Johnson previously used his committee to investigate Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, and to elevate fringe theories about the coronavirus pandemic’).

Immediately below is a clip of Johnson’s emotional exchange with Peters:

(A thousand times over: political displays of anger off-camera are slight as against displays of anger on-camera, as television rewards the calm, cool, and collected.)

What to make of Johnson’s on-camera emotion? Perhaps it’s a lack of discipline, a lack of sense, or perhaps it’s performance art (meant to impress someone). See U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson: Ambitious, Compromised, or Crackpot?

Johnson’s defensiveness in a hearing is hardly his greatest deficiency, but it’s an indication of more significant, underlying deficiencies.

Daily Bread for 12.17.20

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 01m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1903, the Wright brothers make the first controlled powered, heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Thomas Bossert writes I Was the Homeland Security Adviser to Trump. We’re Being Hacked:

At the worst possible time, when the United States is at its most vulnerable — during a presidential transition and a devastating public health crisis — the networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are compromised by a foreign nation. We need to understand the scale and significance of what is happening.

Last week, the cybersecurity firm FireEye said it had been hacked and that its clients, which include the United States government, had been placed at risk. This week, we learned that SolarWinds, a publicly traded company that provides software to tens of thousands of government and corporate customers, was also hacked.

The attackers gained access to SolarWinds software before updates of that software were made available to its customers. Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim’s network.

This is what is called a supply-chain attack, meaning the pathway into the target networks relies on access to a supplier. Supply-chain attacks require significant resources and sometimes years to execute. They are almost always the product of a nation-state. Evidence in the SolarWinds attack points to the Russian intelligence agency known as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the most advanced in the world.

….

The Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months. The Russian S.V.R. will surely have used its access to further exploit and gain administrative control over the networks it considered priority targets. For those targets, the hackers will have long ago moved past their entry point, covered their tracks and gained what experts call “persistent access,” meaning the ability to infiltrate and control networks in a way that is hard to detect or remove.

While the Russians did not have the time to gain complete control over every network they hacked, they most certainly did gain it over hundreds of them. It will take years to know for certain which networks the Russians control and which ones they just occupy.

 Heather Long reports Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer (‘Nation’s poverty rate has risen at the fastest pace ever this year after aid for the unemployed declined’):

The poverty rate jumped to 11.7 percent in November, up 2.4 percentage points since June, according to new data released Wednesday by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame.

While overall poverty levels are low by historical standards, the increase in poverty this year has been swift. It is the biggest jump in a single year since the government began tracking poverty 60 years ago. It is nearly double the next-largest rise, which occurred in 1979-1980 during the oil crisis, according to James X. Sullivan, a professor at Notre Dame, and Bruce D. Meyer, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

Sullivan and Meyer created a Covid-19 Income and Poverty Dashboard to track how many Americans are falling below the poverty line during this deep recession. The federal poverty line is $26,200 for a family of four.

How One of The Oldest Dye Houses in Egypt Keeps Ancient Hand Dyeing Alive:

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Trump and 2024

Trump may now float the prospect of a 2024 run, but his manifest deficiences are also political impediments. An ideology along the lines of Trumpism will go on (and require relentless opposition), but Trump, himself, faces a legal and economic reckoning. See Man and Movement.

National Reporting on Sen. Ron Johnson

Wisconsin’s political events have had more national attention over the last decade than the politics of similarly-sized states, but then we’ve had a worse politics than states of similar size.

In the Washington Post, there’s a lengthy story about Sen. Ron Johnson that’s well worth reading in full. Michael Kranish, Mike DeBonis and Karoun Demirjian (a three-person byline) report Ron Johnson could take his last stand Wednesday as Trump’s most stalwart Senate defender:

Sen. Ron Johnson believes Americans have been “snookered into this mass hysteria” about the coronavirus. He continues to promote the use of hydroxychloroquine, rejecting scientific studies that found it can endanger covid-19 patients. He has said the country’s intelligence service conspired with the media to undermine President Trump.

Now the Republican from Wisconsin is using his last days as chairman of the powerful Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee to investigate what he calls “election irregularities” related to the 2020 campaign. The hearing, to be held Wednesday, comes after an array of federal and state courts rejected Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud and in the wake of Monday’s electoral college vote confirming Joe Biden’s victory.

Johnson’s evolution from ideologically driven standard-bearer of the tea party to one of Trump’s most stalwart defenders mirrors the arc of his party over the past decade. With Johnson’s term expiring in 2022, Wednesday’s hearing could be both the last stand of Trump’s most fervent Senate follower and the first act of a post-Trump Republican Party.

It’s not to Johnson’s credit that he’s described – accurately – as a Trump defender, but he’s as much a defender of Trumpism as Trump. It’s a fair guess that, having dined willingly on lies and conspiracy theories, he’ll run for a third-term at the buffet.

It’s possible Johnson’s merely dull-witted (one can arguably describe him as America’s Dumbest Senator™), but there are other possibilities. See U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson: Ambitious, Compromised, or Crackpot?

Johnson will easily be among the top Wisconsin political stories of 2021 if he announces next year for a 2022 run. See Probable Wisconsin Political Issues for 2021.

He’ll be an interesting topic even if he chooses not to run for a third term: there aren’t, thankfully, many senators whose conduct in office prompts reasonable questions about being compromised.

Perhaps all of this is nothing more than the ordinary descent of one man from Tea Party to Trump. Trump’s obvious affinity for Putin, however, is more than an ordinary matter.

Wisconsin deserves a definitive answer on Sen. Ron Johnson.

Daily Bread for 12.16.20

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one.  Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 02m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

The Whitewater-University Tech Park Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 8:00 AM, and the Parks and Recreation Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM

On this day in 1864, the Union’s Army of the Cumberland routs and destroys the Confederacy’s Army of Tennessee, ending its effectiveness as a combat unit.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Molly Blackall reports Mitch McConnell finally concedes the election, but Trump clings on:

Joe Biden headed to Georgia on Tuesday to campaign for the Democrats in January’s crucial Senate run-off races, which will decide who controls the chamber during his administration. Back in Washington, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, broke his silence and finally recognised Biden as the winner of the presidential election. Speaking on the Senate floor, he congratulated “president-elect Joe Biden” and said: “All Americans can take pride that our nation has a female vice-president-elect for the very first time.”

Others, however, are still unwilling to hand over the reins; Donald Trump continued to peddle baseless claims of voter fraud, tweeting an article about the backlash against McConnell for conceding and saying it was “too soon to give up”. The press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, also refused to recognise Biden’s incoming administration, saying “the president is still involved in ongoing litigation related to the election” and describing the electoral college confirmation of Biden’s win as “one step in the constitutional process”. But Republicans’ problem with reality runs much deeper, writes David Litts, who argues that their rejection of the election result is one of many examples of the party baselessly disputing facts, from gun violence to the climate crisis.

 Jennifer Steinhauer reports Pandemic Leaves More Military Families Seeking Food Assistance:

Fort Bragg, the largest military base in the United States, has all the trappings of a small American city: shopping centers, a barber shop and social clubs. In a sign of the times, it also has a food bank.

This spring, the Y.M.C.A. on base — which started a food pantry last year to respond to the growing food insecurity among military families — saw a 40 percent increase in requests for groceries. During the same period, grocery requests to AmericaServes, a network that helps military families, jumped to the biggest service request in the organization’s history.

The story is much the same around the country, hunger groups say, for the lowest-income families in the military, who have a specific set of challenges, and different from civilians whose economic fortunes have also been damaged by the coronavirus pandemic.

Spouses of active-duty troops have lost jobs, the same as thousands of other Americans, but are often the least likely to be able to find new ones. Children who rely on free or reduced meals at school no longer are receiving them, and military families often have more children than the national average.

Bill Glauber reports ‘This is my home, this is my city’: Giannis Antetokounmpo is now the pride of Milwaukee:

Sure, he got a supermax contract, which is “NBA speak” for getting more money than you can spend in a lifetime.

But in one beautiful tweet, he made the kind of statement that just takes your breath away:

“This is my home, this is my city. I’m blessed to be able to be a part of the Milwaukee Bucks for the next 5 years. Let’s make these years count. The show goes on, let’s get it.”

How airlines like United are using passenger planes to transport the Covid vaccine:

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Daily Bread for 12.15.20

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty-six.  Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 02m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM

On this day in 1791, Bill of Rights is ratified after the Virginia General Assembly becomes the 11th state to ratify. 

Recommended for reading in full — 

David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth, and Eric Schmitt report Scope of Russian Hack Becomes Clear: Multiple U.S. Agencies Were Hit (‘The Pentagon, intelligence agencies, nuclear labs and Fortune 500 companies use software that was found to have been compromised by Russian hackers. The sweep of stolen data is still being assessed’):

The scope of a hack engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday, when some Trump administration officials acknowledged that other federal agencies — the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and parts of the Pentagon — had been compromised. Investigators were struggling to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence community and nuclear laboratories were affected by the highly sophisticated attack.

United States officials did not detect the attack until recent weeks, and then only when a private cybersecurity firm, FireEye, alerted American intelligence that the hackers had evaded layers of defenses.

It was evident that the Treasury and Commerce Departments, the first agencies reported to be breached, were only part of a far larger operation whose sophistication stunned even experts who have been following a quarter-century of Russian hacks on the Pentagon and American civilian agencies.

About 18,000 private and government users downloaded a Russian tainted software update — a Trojan horse of sorts — that gave its hackers a foothold into victims’ systems, according to SolarWinds, the company whose software was compromised.

Among those who use SolarWinds software are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department, the Justice Department, parts of the Pentagon and a number of utility companies. While the presence of the software is not by itself evidence that each network was compromised and information was stolen, investigators spent Monday trying to understand the extent of the damage in what could be a significant loss of American data to a foreign attacker.

 Keli Goff writes Dr. Jill Biden won’t be a ‘traditional’ US first lady. Some men are threatened by that:

Last week the writer Joseph Epstein embarrassed himself by publishing a Wall Street Journal column denigrating incoming first lady Jill Biden for using the “Dr” title she earned with her doctorate. He wrote: “Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo. Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.”

The backlash was swift. The president-elect’s communications director, Kate Bedingfield, tweeted: “What patronizing, sexist, elitist drivel”. The daughter of Martin Luther King Jr tweeted in support of Jill Biden, reminding people that her father used the title Dr, despite not being a medical doctor. She added “And his work benefited humanity greatly, yours does, too.” And the first lady to be replied herself in a tweet on Sunday, saying: “Together, we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughters will be celebrated, rather than diminished.”

Epstein’s article exposed the cultural powder-keg Biden was always destined to ignite. She maintained her professional career teaching community college while serving as second lady and intends to continue working as first lady. While some of us are thrilled with that, others, like Epstein are threatened.

Russell Rising — The Role of Churches in Rebuilding a Community:

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Wisconsin Supreme Court Rejects, 4-3, Trump Campaign’s Petition to Overturn Wisconsin Election Result

Earlier this morning, the Wisconsin Supreme Court denied the Trump Campaign’s petition to overturn, on various grounds, Joe Biden & Kamala Harris’s popular-vote victory in the state. (As a matter of law, the state’s high court affirmed a prior judgment and order against the Trump Campaign in the Circuit Court for Milwaukee County, Stephen A. Simanek, Reserve Judge.)

Considering the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s earlier order in Trump v. Evers, No. 2020AP1971-OA, the 4-3 alignment in today’s decision was likely.

The majority, dissenting, and concurring opinions appear below: