Good morning.

A new year and new decade in Whitewater begin with sunshine and a high of forty.  Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9h 05m 34s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 34.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation takes effect in Confederate territory.

Recommended for reading in full —

Aubrey Whelan reports Study: Counties that lost auto plants suffered spike in opioid overdoses:

U.S. counties that weathered the closure of auto assembly factories saw a spike in opioid overdoses in the five years after the plants were shut down, a new study from the University of Pennsylvania has found.

The findings are a window into how economic instability can drive a public health crisis, said lead author Atheendar Venkataramani, an assistant professor of health policy and medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.

Factory closures “are a culturally significant shock to the economy, which has a real effect on depressing economic opportunities for people over a long period of time,” he said. “When there is a contraction of economic activities — when people feel the economy and society is shifting in a way that it reduces their chances of upward mobility and happiness, you see this despair set in.”

The study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, looked at overdose mortality rates among 18- to 65-year-olds in 112 manufacturing counties — places where most workers are in the manufacturing industry, primarily in the Midwest and South — that were home to at least one auto assembly plant.

Between 1999 and 2016, overdose rates in counties that lost their auto plants were 85% higher than in counties that retained their factories.

In their analysis, Venkataramani and his co-authors controlled for other factors that might have contributed to a rise in overdose deaths, such as national shifts in the availability of opioids and the onset of the Great Recession.

Shamane Mills reports The Reasons Behind Wisconsin’s Falling Birth Rate (‘Report Cites Following Reasons: Women Having Fewer Children At Later Age, Fewer Teen Births, Young Adults Leaving State’):

The reasons behind this pattern and what it could mean for a state with a rapidly aging population are outlined in “The Birth Dearth: Falling Fertility Rates, Fewer Babies,” a report prepared by Forward Analytics, the research arm of the Wisconsin Counties Association.

One reason is that women are delaying motherhood.

Instead of starting a family in their early 20s, they are waiting longer. From 2007 to 2017, the median age of a mother having her first-born child rose from 24 to 26. And many are holding off starting a family until their 30s, according to the report. That segment of mothers has actually increased.

However, that rise in births is countered by a large drop in teen pregnancies and millennials leaving the state. The latter could signal long-term challenges for Wisconsin and other states if the trend continues.

The report states this could have significant consequences for economic growth and for the funding of major federal programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Rare Black Rhino is Born at Michigan Zoo:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 05m 34s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 25.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1967, the Packers triumph in the ‘Ice Bowl,’ defeating the Cowboys 21-17.

Recommended for reading in full —

Lee Bergquist reports Pollution cases involving ‘forever’ chemicals are growing across Wisconsin:

Often called “forever” chemicals because they do not break down in the environment, the substances have been used for decades in products like stain-resistant fabrics, nonstick cookware and firefighting foam. The chemicals have proven to be especially adept at smothering petroleum blazes and have been used extensively at airports and military bases.

PFAS compounds have highly desirable traits that can both repel water and oil.

“They can move freely in the environment and that’s why they end up everywhere,” said Christy Remucal, an aquatic chemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We are going to be dealing with them for a really long time.”

They figure prominently in several pollution cases, including in Marinette, Madison and a cleanup project getting underway at Mitchell Airport.

Epidemiology studies suggest some PFAS compounds are associated with increased risk of pregnancy-induced hypertension, liver damage, thyroid disease, asthma, decreased fertility, some cancers and a decline in response to vaccines.

The Department of Health Service told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week it is considering conducting a cancer cluster assessment in the Marinette and Peshtigo areas after residents reported their stories of having cancer and other serious illnesses at a public meeting on Dec. 18.

Patrick Marley reports Wisconsin Elections Commission deadlocks, keeps voters on the rolls for now:

The Wisconsin Elections Commission deadlocked Monday over whether to remove the voter registrations of more than 200,000 people in response to a judge’s order.

The commission’s inability to reach a consensus means the voters will stay on the rolls for at least the time being. An appeal in the case is ongoing and the commission faces a separate lawsuit that is trying to make sure people are not pulled from the rolls.

The three Republicans on the commission sought to take many of them off the rolls, but they were blocked by the three Democrats on the commission.

It was the second time in as many weeks that the commission broke down along party lines over the lawsuit, which has drawn national attention because of Wisconsin’s top-tier status in the 2020 presidential race.

Monday’s commission meeting came as election officials provided new estimates that suggested a smaller number of voters than originally believed — about 144,000 — could be at risk of being taken off the rolls.

Rare video shows a puffin using a tool to scratch an itch:

This was not some nesting behavior gone awry. Puffins collect soft grass for their nests, then hurry into their burrows with beaks full of bedding. The puffin in Iceland dropped the stick after it finished scratching. Hours later, the camera recorded the stick, still discarded, on the ground.

This behavior “fits all current definitions” of tool use, said University of Oxford zoologist Alex Kacelnik, who has studied toolmaking crows and was not a member of the puffin research team.

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a bit of snow in the evening, and with a daytime high of thirty-five.  Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 04m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 18.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1903,  a fire at the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago becomes the deadliest theater fire and the deadliest single-building fire in United States history, resulting in at least 602 deaths.

Recommended for reading in full —

Bram Sable-Smith reports Inside A Rural Wisconsin Doctor’s Fight To Manage Opioid Use (‘Juneau County Doctor Starts Program To Help Address Lack Of Treatment, Alternatives In Rural Areas’):

Dr. Angela Gatzke-Plamann didn’t grasp the full extent of her community’s opioid crisis until one desperate patient called on a Friday afternoon in 2016.

“He was in complete crisis because he was admitting to me that he had lost control of his use of opioids,” recalls Gatzke-Plamann, 40, the only full-time family physician in the central Wisconsin village of Necedah, population 916, nestled among bluffs and pines.

The patient had used opioids for several years for what Gatzke-Plamann calls “a very painful condition.” But a urine screening one week earlier had revealed heroin and morphine in his system as well. He denied any misuse that day. Now he was not only admitting it, but asking for help.

….

In many ways, rural communities like Necedah have become the face of the nation’s opioid epidemic. Drug overdose deaths are more common in rural areas than in urban ones. And rural doctors prescribe opioids more often by far, despite a nationwide decline in prescribing rates since 2012. Meanwhile, rural Americans have fewer alternatives to treat their very real pain, and they disproportionately lack access to effective addiction treatment like the medication buprenorphine.

Sibile Marcellus reports ‘We squandered a major economic recovery’: Harvard professor: 

The nation wasted the major economic recovery, according to a new report by Harvard Business School on U.S. competitiveness.

“We had this wonderful recovery. It could have given us the chance to take some significant resources and devote them to some of our well-known challenges, like infrastructure or health care…none of that happened. Instead, we squandered a major economic recovery and didn’t use it to make things better,” said Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, a co-author of the study.

The business community’s role in politics has made a significant contribution to Washington’s dysfunction, according to HBS’s report. The majority of the business leaders surveyed said businesses’ overall engagement worsened the political system by advancing policies that benefited special interests.

The report lays out the different ways in which businesses engage in politics today. The $6 billion spent annually on lobbying is just one facet; others include spending on elections and ballot initiatives, efforts to influence employees’ votes and donations, and adding former government officials to companies’ payrolls.

(Emphasis added.)

[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/a-recovery-squandered.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

Why Planes Dump Jet Fuel:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of fifty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 04m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 11% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1812, USS Constitution, under the command of Captain William Bainbridge, captures HMS Java off the coast of Brazil after a three-hour battle.

Recommended for reading in full —

Greg Robb reports Fed study finds Trump tariffs backfired:

President Donald Trump’s strategy to use import tariffs to protect and boost U.S. manufacturers backfired and led to job losses and higher prices, according to a Federal Reserve study released this week.

“We find that the 2018 tariffs are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices,” concluded Fed economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, in an academic paper.

While the tariffs did reduce competition for some industries in the domestic U.S. market, this was more than offset by the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs, the study found.

“While the longer-term effects of the tariffs may differ from those that we estimate here, the results indicate that the tariffs, thus far, have not led to increased activity in the U.S. manufacturing sector,” the study said.

See Flaaen, Aaron, and Justin Pierce (2019). “Disentangling the Effects of the 2018-2019 Tariffs on a Globally Connected U.S. Manufacturing Sector,” Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2019-086. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2019.086.

Kim Zetter asks How Close Did Russia Really Come to Hacking the 2016 Election?:

On November 6, 2016, the Sunday before the presidential election that sent Donald Trump to the White House, a worker in the elections office in Durham County, North Carolina, encountered a problem.

There appeared to be an issue with a crucial bit of software that handled the county’s list of eligible voters. To prepare for Election Day, staff members needed to load the voter data from a county computer onto 227 USB flash drives, which would then be inserted into laptops that precinct workers would use to check in voters. The laptops would serve as electronic poll books, cross-checking each voter as he or she arrived at the polls.

The problem was, it was taking eight to 10 times longer than normal for the software to copy the data to the flash drives, an unusually long time that was jeopardizing efforts to get ready for the election. When the problem persisted into Monday, just one day before the election, the county worker contacted VR Systems, the Florida company that made the software used on the county’s computer and on the poll book laptops. Apparently unable to resolve the issue by phone or email, one of the company’s employees accessed the county’s computer remotely to troubleshoot. It’s not clear whether the glitch got resolved—Durham County would not answer questions from POLITICO about the issue—but the laptops were ready to use when voting started Tuesday morning.

….

To this day, no one knows definitively what happened with Durham’s poll books. And one important fact about the incident still worries election integrity activists three years later: VR Systems had been targeted by Russian hackers in a phishing campaign three months before the election. The hackers had sent malicious emails both to VR Systems and to some of its election customers, attempting to trick the recipients into revealing usernames and passwords for their email accounts. The Russians had also visited VR Systems’ website, presumably looking for vulnerabilities they could use to get into the company’s network, as the hackers had done with Illinois’ state voter registration system months earlier.

(Here the question is whether hackers changed any votes cast in an American election; there’s no doubt whatever that Russia and her proxies interfered in other ways.)

A Monastery in the Sky:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with scattered showers and a high of forty-three.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 03m 38s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, the 1st Wisconsin Light Artillery participates in the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou, Mississippi.

Recommended for reading in full —

Ian MacDougall reports How McKinsey Helped the Trump Administration Detain and Deport Immigrants (‘Newly uncovered documents show the consulting giant helped ICE find “detention savings opportunities” — including some that the agency’s staff viewed as too harsh on immigrants’):

Just days after he took office in 2017, President Donald Trump set out to make good on his campaign pledge to halt illegal immigration. In a pair of executive orders, he ordered “all legally available resources” to be shifted to border detention facilities and called for hiring 10,000 new immigration officers.

The logistical challenges were daunting, but as luck would have it, Immigration and Customs Enforcement already had a partner on its payroll: McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm brought on under the Obama administration to help engineer an “organizational transformation” in the ICE division charged with deporting migrants who are in the United States unlawfully.

ICE quickly redirected McKinsey toward helping the agency figure out how to execute the White House’s clampdown on illegal immigration.

But the money-saving recommendations the consultants came up with made some career ICE staff uncomfortable. They proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees, according to interviews with people who worked on the project for both ICE and McKinsey and 1,500 pages of documents obtained from the agency after ProPublica filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

McKinsey’s team also looked for ways to accelerate the deportation process, provoking worries among some ICE staff members that the recommendations risked short-circuiting due process protections for migrants fighting removal from the United States. The consultants, three people who worked on the project said, seemed focused solely on cutting costs and speeding up deportations — activities whose success could be measured in numbers — with little acknowledgment that these policies affected thousands of human beings.

Karen Zraick reports University of Illinois Is Stifling NPR Reporting on Sexual Misconduct, Critics Say:

A University of Illinois policy requiring NPR member station reporters to disclose information about sources who say they were sexually harassed or assaulted is coming under fire from media organizations and free-speech advocates, who say the rule will have a chilling effect on reporting about sexual misconduct.

An investigation published in August by NPR Illinois and the nonprofit outlet ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network found that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had repeatedly protected the reputations of professors who had been accused of sexual misconduct. Along with the articles, they asked people who had experienced sexual misconduct at Illinois colleges and universities to share their stories via an online form. The form specified that the accounts would not be shared or published without permission.

NPR Illinois reported that after the investigation was published, the university, which owns the license for the station, said that its journalists could not promise confidentiality to students, employees or faculty members in the University of Illinois system who contacted them to report sexual misconduct.

Solar Eclipse – Moon’s Shadow Seen From Space:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 03m 08s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1968, Apollo 8 splashes down in the Pacific after successfully orbiting the moon.

Recommended for reading in full —

Tim Murphy writes Trump’s Not Richard Nixon. He’s Andrew Johnson (‘Betrayal. Paranoia. Cowardice. We’ve been here before’):

The best parallel to Trump isn’t Nixon; it’s Andrew Johnson, a belligerent and destructive faux-populist who escaped conviction in the Senate by the thinnest of margins. Yet for more than a century, the official narrative of the first presidential impeachment has been butchered and distorted, reduced to a historical curiosity, a showdown between two irresponsible factions in which voices of reason ultimately triumphed. You were likely taught (if you were taught at all) that the 1868 fight to remove Johnson from office centered on an obscure and dubious law, the Tenure of Office Act, and that “Radical” Republicans—their influence inflated in the aftermath of the Civil War—overstepped their bounds in a quest for even more power.

….

Andrew Johnson was a sort of anti-­Lincoln—a stumpy, vengeful, subliterate tailor who rose through the ranks of the Democratic Party in East Tennessee by railing against elites. In 1861, he was the only Southern senator to stay loyal to the Union, leaving him not only without a state but largely without a party. Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee, and later, hoping to shore up his support ahead of his reelection campaign, added Johnson to the ticket. Johnson showed up drunk to his own swearing-in, then hid out at a friend’s house in Maryland, ashamed to show his face. A few weeks later, Lincoln was murdered and Johnson was president. As the historian Brenda Wineapple explains in her lively 2019 book, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, the road to impeachment began in the violence and political turmoil that followed the assassination, as Johnson wrestled with Republicans in Congress about what postwar Reconstruction should look like. The impeachment process was rife with bumbling and paranoia, but nonetheless centered on a profound question: whether the nation would continue on its path toward a pluralistic democracy or revert to the white supremacist state that had existed before Fort Sumter.

Alarm bells began to sound early on. Johnson was erratic. He was wavering. Frederick Douglass met with him at the White House and came away disturbed. In the meeting, the president had suggested deporting millions of freedmen and appeared not to know that Douglass had been enslaved. Johnson granted mass amnesties to Confederate soldiers and appointed ex-Confederates to key posts. In the spring and summer of 1866, a wave of racial pogroms broke out in the cities of the former Confederacy, targeting African Americans—34 killed in New Orleans; 46 killed in Memphis. Why hadn’t Johnson done anything to stop it? Why was he suddenly blocking every effort by Congress to bring white supremacist violence in the South under control? People who had once seemed enthusiastic about the project ahead [Reconstruction] were beginning to talk about the I-word.

How urban farming is helping erase food deserts:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 02m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1776,  Washington is victorious at the Battle of Trenton, defeating and capturing nearly one hundred Hessian mercenaries.

Recommended for reading in full —

Monsy Alvarado, Ashley Balcerzak, Stacey Barchenger, Jon Campbell, Rafael Carranza, Maria Clark, Alan Gomez, Daniel Gonzalez, Trevor Hughes, Rick Jervis, Dan Keemahill, Rebecca Plevin, Jeremy Schwartz, Sarah Taddeo, Lauren Villagran, Dennis Wagner, Elizabeth Weise, and Alissa Zhu report Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US (‘A USA TODAY Network investigation revealed sex assaults, routine use of physical force, poor medical care and deaths at facilities overseen by ICE’):

[Leer en español]

Combined with an analysis by a government watchdog, the USA TODAY Network analyzed inspection reports since 2015 and identified 15,821 violations of detention standards. Yet more than 90% of those facilities received passing grades by government inspectors. Network reporters interviewed 35 former and current detainees, some conducted using video chats from inside an ICE detention center. They reviewed hundreds of documents from lawsuits, financial records and government contracts, and toured seven ICE facilities from Colorado to Texas to Florida. Such tours are extremely rare.

At least two detention centers passed inspections despite using a chemical restraint – Freeze +P – that is forbidden for use under ICE rules because it contains tear gas that produces “severe pain,” according to its manufacturer. Other centers received passing marks even after inspectors chronicled widespread use of physical force or solitary confinement. Richwood was one of the centers that passed inspections.

Vicente Raul Orozco Serguera, one of the Richwood detainees who protested after Hernandez-Diaz died, told outsiders that the death and violent confrontation with guards punctuated a terrifying stay at Richwood that began with detention center officials forcing him to sign a document listing who would recover his body if he died in custody.

“The United States has appointed itself the country of liberty, the land of opportunity, the defender of human rights and the refuge for people oppressed by their governments. All that ends once you’re detained,” Orozco Serguera wrote in a letter from Richwood that was delivered to a lawyer in hopes of finding someone to help him. “We want our freedom to fight our cases freely and leave this hell, for Louisiana is a ‘Cemetery of living men.’ ”

(In this, one does well to remember that Adam Serwer is right about Trumpism: cruelty is the point, that ‘President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.’ Repeated rights abuses of others bring Trumpism’s lumpen band – a bund, one might also say – closer together. These abuses have a secondary purpose, undoubtedly – to convince America’s majority that resistance and opposition are futile. Trump and his officials are, in this, short-sighted: they will meet a lawful reckoning individually, and political ruin collectively. A Third Reconstruction awaits, advancing – over a century – America’s liberal democratic tradition while rendering its adversaries ineffectual.)

‘Ring of Fire’ solar eclipse darkens the skies across Asia: