Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-six.  Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 6:46 PM, for 12h 00m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 54.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Unified School District’s Distinctions Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 2 PM, and the Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

 On this day in 1789, Congress passes the Judiciary Act, creating the office of the Attorney General and federal judiciary system and ordering the composition of the Supreme Court.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Colby Itkowitz reports Trump won’t commit to a ‘peaceful transfer of power’ if he loses:

“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster —” Trump began when asked during a White House press briefing if he would ensure a peaceful transition.

“I understand that, but people are rioting; do you commit to making sure that there’s a peaceful transferral of power?” the reporter pressed, appearing to refer to incidents of violence that have broken out during some protests.

“Get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very — we’ll have a very peaceful, there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation,” Trump said.

See generally Parsing Trump’s ‘there won’t be a transfer’ comments.

Barton Gellman writes The Election That Could Break America (‘If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?’): 

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

….

Nineteen summers ago, when counterterrorism analysts warned of a coming attack by al?Qaeda, they could only guess at a date. This year, if election analysts are right, we know when the trouble is likely to come. Call it the Interregnum: the interval from Election Day to the next president’s swearing-in. It is a temporal no-man’s-land between the presidency of Donald Trump and an uncertain successor—a second term for Trump or a first for Biden. The transfer of power we usually take for granted has several intermediate steps, and they are fragile.

The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by law. Among them are “the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,” this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; “the 3d day of January,” when the newly elected Congress is seated; and “the sixth day of January,” when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones, irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.

How an Oregon Wildfire Became One of the Most Destructive:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 6:48 PM, for 12h 03m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 43.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified District School Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1846, Astronomers Urbain Le Verrier, John Couch Adams and Johann Gottfried Galle collaborate on the discovery of Neptune.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Tory Newmyer reports Global banks process trillions in dirty money despite suspicions, investigation finds:

Trillions of dollars in money connected to criminal activity are sloshing through global banks. The banks and U.S. authorities know it, and they’re not doing nearly enough to stop it.

These revelations come from the bombshell leak of more than 2,500 secret documents, most of which banks provided to the federal government over the past two decades.

BuzzFeed got hold of the records — the so-called “FinCEN Files,” referencing the nickname for the U.S. Financial Crimes Investigation Network, the Treasury Department office that collected them in the first place. The outlet then shared them with 108 other news organizations around the world.

Taken together, the files depict a stunningly widespread phenomenon of criminals, corrupt officials and terrorists taking advantage of lax banking oversight. “These documents, compiled by banks, shared with the government, but kept from public view, expose the hollowness of banking safeguards, and the ease with which criminals have exploited them,” BuzzFeed’s team writes. “Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.”

And five banks in particular — JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — “kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money,” the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists writes.

(Emphasis in original.)

 John Cassidy writes How Boeing and the F.A.A. Created the 737 MAX Catastrophe:

The basic outlines of the Boeing 737 max tragedy are already well known—or should be well known. Even so, a detailed new report that the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure released on Wednesday morning is a remarkable document. In two hundred and thirty-eight pages of clearly written prose, it goes a long way toward explaining not only what went so wrong at Boeing but what has gone badly askew with the American corporation in general, and with American governance.

….

Thanks to the official crash reports and some excellent investigative journalism, this much we already knew. Based on an eighteen-month investigation, the new report adds a wealth of new details—and it points the finger in the right places. It illustrates how Boeing’s management prioritized the company’s profitability and stock price over everything else, including passenger safety. Perhaps even more alarmingly, the report shows how the F.A.A., which once had a sterling reputation for independence and integrity, acted as a virtual agent for the company it was supposed to be overseeing.

In 2011, when Boeing’s board of directors approved the development of the 737 max, the company was racing to compete with Airbus’s A320neo, an innovative and fuel-efficient line of aircraft that had been launched the previous year.

Tour de France under a cloud after new allegations of doping emerge:

Good morning.

Fall in Whitewater begins with sunny skies and a high of seventy-six.  Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:50 PM, for 12h 06m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 32.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

 On this day in 1979, a bright flash (the ‘Vela Incident’), resembling the detonation of a nuclear weapon, is observed near the Prince Edward Islands. Its cause is never determined.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Aaron Gregg and Yeganeh Torbati report Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks and swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor:

A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country’s supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used for making things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.

The change illustrates how one taxpayer-backed effort to battle the novel coronavirus, which has killed roughly 200,000 Americans, was instead diverted toward patching up long-standing perceived gaps in military supplies.

The Cares Act, which Congress passed earlier this year, gave the Pentagon money to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” But a few weeks later, the Defense Department began reshaping how it would award the money in a way that represented a major departure from Congress’s original intent.

The payments were made even though U.S. health officials believe there are still major funding gaps in responding to the pandemic. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in Senate testimony last week that states desperately need $6 billion to distribute vaccines to Americans early next year. There remains a severe shortage of N95 masks at numerous U.S. hospitals. These are the types of problems that the money was originally intended to address.

 Tim Weiner poses The unanswered question of our time: Is Trump an agent of Russia? (Neither Mueller nor the FBI took it on. It’s crucial someone does. This is a case for super-secret mole hunters’):

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA station chief in Moscow who worked on the epic mole hunts that captured the American turncoats Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, told me that Trump has the classic vulnerabilities that Russian intelligence could and would exploit: his greed, his corruption, his trysts and above all his ego. Trump openly courted Putin. (A 2013 tweet: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?”) In turn, Putin, a veteran KGB officer trained to manipulate people, flirted with Trump and flattered him. Putin and his social media minions supported him openly — and with secret political warfare operations. So perhaps Putin had only to influence Trump to win influence in return.

Mowatt-Larssen wonders whether that’s all there is to it. “Is it only because Putin is such a master manipulator and that Trump is so vain that he loves it?” he asked. “Because I could never have imagined that an American president could — whether it’s witting or unwitting — betray American interests so thoroughly to the Russians as has occurred in the last four years.”

 Ibex defies gravity and climbs a dam:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-four.  Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:52 PM, for 12h 09m 32s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1780, Benedict Arnold gives the British the plans to West Point.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Sam Levine and Adam Chang report Revealed: evidence shows huge mail slowdowns after Trump ally took over:

The United States Postal Service (USPS) saw a severe decline in the rate of on-time delivery of first-class mail after Louis DeJoy took over as postmaster general, according to new data obtained by the Guardian that provides some of the most detailed insight yet into widespread mail delays this summer.

Shortly after taking the helm, DeJoy – a major Republican donor with no prior USPS experience – implemented operational changes he said were intended to make the financially beleaguered agency more efficient. Those changes, which included an effort to get postal trucks to run on time, led to severe delays and widespread public outcry this summer.

In late August, DeJoy announced he was putting the changes on hold until after the election, and last week a federal judge in Washington blocked USPS from implementing them. The changes were clearly aimed at “voter disenfranchisement”, given the increased role USPS will play in this year’s presidential election, the US district judge Stanley Bastian wrote in his ruling.

“It is easy to conclude that the recent Postal Services’ changes is an intentional effort on the part the current Administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state, and federal elections,” Bastian wrote.

 Jamie Ross reports U.S. Admits That Congressman Offered Pardon to Assange If He Covered Up Russia Links:

Lawyers representing the United States at Julian Assange’s extradition trial in Britain have accepted the claim that the WikiLeaks founder was offered a presidential pardon by a congressman on the condition that he would help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer, told the court that she had attended a meeting between Assange, then Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and pro-Trump troll Charles Johnson at Assange’s hide-out, the Ecuadorian embassy in London, on August 15, 2017.

Robinson said the two Americans claimed to be emissaries from Washington and “wanted us to believe they were acting on behalf of the president.” The pair allegedly told Assange that they could help grant him a pardon in exchange for him revealing information about the source of the WikiLeaks information that proved it was not the Russians who hacked Democratic emails.

“They stated that President Trump was aware of and had approved of them coming to meet with Mr. Assange to discuss a proposal—and that they would have an audience with the president to discuss the matter on their return to Washington, D.C.,” Robinson said.

The White House has denied that Trump took part in any such plan.

….

After Robinson read her testimony in a London courtroom on Friday, lawyers representing the U.S. accepted the witness statement as accurate and confirmed they had no intention of cross-examining the claim. They did dispute, however, that President Donald Trump gave his blessing for the pardon offer.

Video shows federal agents detained people in Portland based on inaccurate, insufficient information:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 6:53 PM, for 12h 12m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1893, Charles Duryea and his brother road-test the first American-made gasoline-powered automobile.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Ishaan Tharoor writes Trump looms over a new age of far-right militancy:

That idea of civic breakdown in America looks terrifyingly real. “In the past, groups that have felt disenfranchised have turned to protest, a peaceful attempt to persuade well-meaning elites or beneficent institutions to expand democracy,” wrote Franklin Foer in the Atlantic. “But in the Trumpian worldview, those elites and institutions are conspiring against him. By delegitimizing the American political system, he has given his followers the impression that they have no choice but to assert themselves through nonpolitical means.”

“I don’t think a lot of Americans understand how fragile democracy is,” Raul Torrez, a Democratic district attorney in New Mexico who is seeking to restrict the actions of a far-right militia there, told my colleagues. “One of the early signs of a troubled democracy is when people decide that they’re no longer going to address their political differences at the ballot box — or in elected legislatures or in Congress — but they’re going to do it on the street, and they’re going to do it with guns.”

Adam Rawnsley and Lachlan Markay report Steve Bannon Is Behind Bogus Study That China Created COVID:

A new study purporting to show that the novel coronavirus was manufactured in a Chinese lab was published by a pair of nonprofit groups linked to Steve Bannon, the former top Trump strategist now facing felony fraud charges.

The study, co-authored by a Chinese virologist who fled Hong Kong this year, claims that “laboratory manipulation is part of the history of SARS-CoV-2.” Its findings were quickly picked up by a handful of prominent news organizations such as the New York Post, which hyped the “explosive” allegations that run counter to virtually all existing scientific literature on the source of the virus.

The study is the work of the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, sister nonprofit organizations that Bannon was instrumental in creating. According to documents posted on the Society’s website last year, he served as that group’s chair. The Bannon connection was first spotted by Kevin Bird, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, and shared by Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, who called the study “bizarre and unfounded.”

A search of Google Scholar and the Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation websites indicates that the organizations have not previously published scientific or medical research, and it’s unclear whether the paper received any peer review. It was posted on Monday on the website Zenodo, a publicly available repository of scientific and academic research to which anyone can upload their work.

The True Stories Behind Comic Sans and Ctrl-Alt-Del:

Thanks to the brilliance of these four computer programmers we can play Solitaire on our computers, discover Easter eggs in video games, write emails and resumes using the not-so-serious the comic sans font (even though everyone says we really shouldn’t) and shut our computers down with a simple Ctrl-Alt-Del command when they just won’t behave.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-five.  Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 6:55 PM, for 12h 15m 18s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1832, representatives of the Sauk and Fox sign a treaty ending the Black Hawk War: “The treaty demanded that the Sauk cede some six million acres of land that ran the length of the eastern boundary of modern-day Iowa. The Sauk and Fox were given until June 1, 1833 to leave the area and never return to the surrendered lands.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David A. Graham writes An Experiment in Wisconsin Changed Voters’ Minds About Trump:

Changing voters’ minds is famously difficult. Recent national campaigns have spent more effort on increasing turnout—getting sympathetic voters to go to the polls—than on winning over new supporters. Political scientists and pollsters have found that as the country grows more negatively polarized, fewer true swing voters are up for grabs.

But the Wisconsin effort, notable for both its approach and its scale, seems to have found some success. From February to May, the advocacy group Opportunity Wisconsin, with help from a progressive advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., called the Hub Project, managed to do remarkable damage to Trump’s standing with a group of persuadable voters. The effort sought to identify voters who took a favorable view of Trump’s record on the economy but who might still be receptive to alternative perspectives, then spent weeks targeting them with messages arguing that the economy was actually not working for Wisconsin, and that Trump’s policies weren’t helping.

“The most impressive thing is that they clearly had some effect in changing how people think about Donald Trump, and that’s just really difficult to do,” says David Broockman, a political scientist at UC Berkeley who studies persuasion. “For a real program to have effects on what people think about Trump in the field, not an artificial setting like a focus group, is quite impressive. There’s very little I’ve seen this election cycle that has found that.”

Daniel Dale reports Boasting and attacking Biden, Trump makes at least 25 false claims at Wisconsin rally:

Biden and private health insurance

Trump claimed again that Biden “wants to wipe out 180 million private health care plans that people love.”
Facts First: Biden does not. While Biden does endorse a “public option” to allow people to opt in to a Medicare-like government insurance plan, Biden has not agreed to anything like the “Medicare for All” single-payer proposal Sanders is known for, which would eliminate most private insurance plans. In fact, Biden and Sanders clashed on the issue during the Democratic primary.

It’s possible that, over time, a popular public option would affect private insurers’ willingness to offer some private plans. But the Trump campaign is suggesting Biden is actively proposing to wipe out private insurance, and that’s not the case at all.

10,000 Ducks ‘Clean’ Rice Paddy in Thailand:

Farmers unleash the ducks en masse so they can tear up weeds, eat pests, and leave duck droppings that then serve as fertilizer for plants. The technique, which farmers have used for centuries, is known as ‘integrated rice-duck farming