Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of twelve. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:33 PM, for 9h 07m 39s of daytime. The moon is nearly full, with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred eighteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1918, Wisconsin troops depart for Europe: “On this date the Wisconsin 127th and 128th Infantries departed for France from their training facility at Camp Arthur in Waco, Texas. Initially, these divisions were assigned to construct depots and facilities for troops that would follow. On May 18, they were assigned to the frontline at Belmont in the Alsace where they faced three German divisions. In the following months, 368 troops were killed, wounded or missing. Ironically, their enemy, native Alsatians, spoke German and the Wisconsin troops were better able to communicate with them than their French allies.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jared Yates Sexton considers The Toxic Loyalty of Trump’s Hardcore Zealots (“They’ve excused his winking at neo-Nazis and his support of an accused child molester. Is there anything—anything—that would make Trump’s die-hards leave his personality cult?”):

….They had stayed with him through an unthinkable gauntlet: frequent criticism of war heroes, racist rhetoric, video of him admitting to disgusting conduct, and a deluge of women charging him with sexual assault. So by the time he assumed the role of president in early 2017, his base was fairly immune to any criticism or story dealing with something as mundane as bureaucratic appointments or legislation.

While he stocked his administration cabinet with lobbyists and billionaires, people worth billions of dollars, including multiple staffers who’d worked at high profile banks like Goldman Sachs, his supporters continued to parrot his intention to drain the swamp even while he filled it with every pen stroke. He told them he was the president of the working people even while he promoted bills that would take away their health insurance his and the GOP’s legislative agenda set its sights on the Affordable Care Act that provided them healthcare and his cabinet stripped nearly every regulation that protected the food they ate, the water they drank, and the schools where their children learned.

As the rest of the country turned on Trump and his approval ratings plummeted, his diehard base stayed firm. Roughly 30% of the voting public continued to support him, seemingly proving his assertion that they were so loyal he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody.” They’d weathered one scandal after another, watched Trump undermine journalists, threaten NBC’s broadcast license, trade barbs with the unpredictable head of a rogue nuclear state, and yet, they still seemed unwavering loyal….

(True enough, and so to succeed against Trump, one’s main focus should be on Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders.)

Rick Wilson writes How Donald Trump ate the nation: The President has inserted his toxic brand of politics into every last corner of American life:

….Some people like to say our nation is more divided than ever. Obviously that’s a laughable notion for a country that lost over a half-million of her sons in a bloody Civil War.

Still, there are sweeping, powerful forces pushing our society into Balkanized camps. The catalyst of today’s division isn’t royalists vs. patriots, freedom vs. slavery, or big government vs. small, or hippies vs. squares. Today’s cultural and political divisions are driven now by more potent forces: celebrity, and rage.

Trump hasn’t just infused every single aspect of our politics, but, like some Japanese movie-monster kaiju he’s furiously, inexorably consuming our culture, from entertainment to business to education and every other institution in between….

(This infusion is a consequence of Trump’s authoritarian character – he seeks to influence both political and cultural life, including even mundane matters. He’s without normal restraint.)

Maura Ewing reports A Judicial Pact to Cut Court Costs for the Poor (“The consensus that we would do this, that we would all do it, gives us cover that we wouldn’t be labeled as liberal or too soft on defendants”):

In North Carolina, it costs inmates $10 a day to stay in jail before they’re even found guilty of a crime. Yet most people jailed pretrial are there because they can’t afford bail. It’s a predicament Mecklenburg County Public Defender Kevin Tully points out time and again to judges: that those who can’t buy their own freedom are charged for their own confinement.

In North Carolina, as in other states, judges have the discretion to reduce or waive some fines and fees. But there, as elsewhere, they don’t often use it—thanks in part to legislation that makes doing so difficult. Now, district-court judges in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, are banding together to change how the courts impose fines and fees.

Starting last month, they committed to consulting a “bench card” during every case—a piece of paper they use to remind themselves to thoroughly assess a defendant’s ability to pay before setting a fine or fee, as well as which ones are waivable or can be reduced on a sliding scale. It’s a simple act, but one that could have significant consequences for low-income defendants and their families….

The judicial pact in Mecklenburg County was born of a working group; judges, public defenders, district attorneys, and court clerks had been strategizing since the spring of 2015 on how to reduce the county’s jail population. An analysis revealed that 18 percent were there because they failed to pay court costs, fines, or fees; and they stayed for roughly four to seven days, said district-court judge Becky Tin, who’s part of the working group. “A lot of these [legal financial obligations] that defendants were being arrested for not paying were set … without ever conducting an ability-to-pay hearing,” she said….

Amber Phillips lists 12 things we can definitively say the Russia investigation has uncovered so far:

To review everything we’ve learned about Russia this year, let’s rewind to May. That was a big month President Trump, who fired his FBI director because he thought “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”

His own administration didn’t see it that way. A few weeks later, the No. 2 at the Justice Department, Rod J. Rosenstein, appointed a special counsel to ramp up the FBI’s existing investigation into “this Russia thing.”

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s mission: Look into how Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, whether it colluded with Trump’s campaign, and investigate anything else he sees fit to investigate….

So what have all these ongoing Russia investigations found so far?

A lot, but at the same time, no one big thing we can point to that indicates a sure direction of the investigation. “What we can take away is we are in the midst of a major investigation with foreign policy ramifications,” said Jeffrey Jacobovitz, a white-collar lawyer who has defended Clinton administration officials.

Here are all the things we know about the Russia investigation to date, ranked in order of their perceived magnitude [list follows]….

These 10 Robots Make Life A Lot Easier:

Good morning.

A new year begins for Whitewater under partly cloudy skies and a high of six degrees. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4L:32 PM, for 9h 06m 46s of daytime. The moon is full. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation. On this day in 1836, an act of the Michigan legislature forms the Wisconsin Territory.

Recommended for reading in full — 

In September, Lawrence Tabak wrote Why Foxconn’s Wisconsin Promise Of 13,000 Quality Jobs Is An Empty One:

Proponents of the deal, which include President Donald Trump, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and House Speaker Paul Ryan, are blinded by the political windfall that would come with Foxconn’s promise of 13,000 jobs at the $10 billion Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) factory and assembly complex planned for southeast Wisconsin (Ryan’s home district). These politicians are so eager to score a political win that much of Wisconsin’s promise of $3 billion in tax incentives to Foxconn would be paid in cash.

But careful study of Foxconn’s past dealings shows that the number and quality of jobs promised for Wisconsin are highly suspect. Back in 2007, when Foxconn announced plans for the facility in Plainfield, they said the plant would employ 1,400 people. The fact that the facility has matured to a workforce of 900 gives some indication of their prowess, or perhaps lack of honesty, when it comes to job prediction. (The same percentage shortfall would take the promised 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin down to 8,357.)

Foxconn’s original proposal to Wisconsin is also telling. Before the jobs number swelled to 13,000, Foxconn initially proposed 2,000 jobs — incidentally, the same number of workers currently employed at Foxconn’s LCD factory complex in Sakai, Japan, the largest and most advanced LCD factory in the world. The LCD plant itself was up and running with 1,000 workers. Boosters of the Wisconsin deal have visions of the working lines at the old Chrysler and GM factories in Kenosha and Janesville, where motivated high school graduates could make a living wage. But the few images and inside descriptions we have of the Sakai plant, by far the best model for what the Wisconsin factory will look like, show engineers and technicians behind computer terminals overseeing the work of giant robotic machines.

In addition to the numbers, the quality of jobs promised Wisconsin is also in question. In their written testimony in support of the Foxconn legislation, the heads of the Wisconsin Department of Administration and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation used the term “family-supporting 13,000 jobs” eight times. Much has been made of Foxconn’s estimate that the average salary will be $54,000, but there is no written guarantee regarding it. Furthermore, pay the top Taiwanese management team tens of millions each and the average is so skewed as to be meaningless. There is a welcome provision in the legislation that Wisconsin’s generous contribution of 17 percent of payroll be limited to jobs paying $30,000 to $100,000, which will certainly incentivize Foxconn to meet that mark. But Foxconn is relentless in cost management and if an unsubsidized job can be filled at a wage producing a lower cost to the company than a subsidized $30,000 job, history shows they’ll do so. And the modest constraints of the legislation give Foxconn enormous flexibility to spread those subsidies beyond native Wisconsinites. For instance, the company is known for traveling efficiency teams that roam the globe imposing the company’s latest assembly improvements. These teams have to have a home base somewhere—why not Wisconsin, where their wages would be subsidized by the state?

(It’s worth noting that the 13,000 jobs estimate is from Walker, not Foxconn. Foxconn hasn’t promised anything like 13,000.)

Julia Ioffe reports What Russian Journalists Uncovered About Russian Election Meddling:

Here’s a rundown of what we learned from the Russian press this year:

In an updated edition of their book, The Red Web, Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan—veteran reporters on the Russian secret services—revealed how and when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the attack on the American election. It happened, according to Soldatov and Borogan, at a meeting in April between Putin and a small inner circle of his national security advisors, most of them former KGB officers. Putin’s decision was also reportedly an emotional, knee-jerk one, in retaliation to the release of the Panama Papers, which implicated him. Because of Putin’s highly conspirological mindset, he apparently blamed Goldman Sachs and Hillary Clinton for the release of the embarrassing information, Soldatov and Borogan reported.

An October report from the Russian business media outlet RBC explained in great detail how the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, also known as the “troll factory,” operated during the 2016 election. The report, authored by two Russian journalists, detailed the funding, budget, operating methods, and tactics, of the 100 trolls who spent 2016 populating American social media sites with divisive commentary and imitating civil rights groups. The report showed how the Agency was financed through its owner, Putin’s court caterer Yevgeny Prigozhin. It also detailed the reach of various politically inflammatory posts. It showed, for example, how the Agency produced over 20 Facebook posts that gathered over a million unique views each.

That same month, TVRain, Russia’s last independent television network, interviewed “Maxim,” a man who had worked as a troll at this factory. He revealed that the factory was largely staffed by college students from the prestigious St. Petersburg State University, Russia’s #2 university; their majors included international relations, linguistics, and journalism. They were, in other words, young, educated, worldly, and urban—the very cohort Americans imagine would rise up against someone like Putin. Instead, they worked in the factory, making nearly double the average Russian’s salary, sowing discord on Twitter, Facebook, and in the comments sections of various websites. They were instructed not to mention Russia, but instead to focus on issues that divided Americans, like guns and race. They learned their subject matter by reading Americans’ social media posts and by watching House of Cards, effectively weaponizing American culture and openness.

Last week, TVRain ran a written interview with Konstantin Kozlovsky, who is currently in a Russian prison for hacking into various Russian banks. He confessed to hacking the DNC and to creating the viruses Lurk and Wanna Cry, the latter of which is responsible for a ransomware attack that paralyzed computer networks across the world. Kozlovsky told the journalists how he had been entrapped and blackmailed into working for the FSB, the main Russian security agency, nearly a decade ago. He said that when he hacked into the servers of the DNC, he purposely left behind a calling card: a data file with the number of his visa to the Caribbean Island of St. Martin, as well as his passport number. Kozlovsky also said that he was arrested now because the FSB wanted “to hide the digital traces” of what he did. (It’s worth noting that many of these claims are unverified.)

Earlier this month, the Bell, a scrappy upstart website based outside of Russia, published a detailed exposé by the legendary Russian investigative journalist Svetlana Reiter about the four Russian men—two of them high-ranking FSB cyber warriors—arrested in Moscow last December in connection with the 2016 election hack. Reiter delved into the mystery of why the men were charged with, of all things, passing information to the CIA about the Russian cyber-attack. According to Reiter, they had been set up by a rival faction in Russian military intelligence, the GRU. The rivalry, which Soldatov and Borogan had also reported on, centered on securing both the prestige and budgetary funds that came with penetrating U.S. government cyber-defenses. This had previously been the exclusive domain of the FSB—once run by Putin—and the GRU was trying to muscle in on the FSB’s territory and money. A side effect of this internal rivalry, Reiter concluded, was how the Americans discovered the hack….

(These Russian journalists take huge risks to report these stories, as Ioffe notes: “many of Russia’s journalists—many of them among the country’s best—either left home or abandoned the profession altogether. This is apparently the case with the journalists who published the RBC report on the troll factory: After receiving threats, they left journalism. ” They are brave men and women who have risked much for the truth. Trump wishes to reduce our own press to the same perilous condition.)

Taylor Hosking catalogues The Rise of the Alt-Right (“Selections from The Atlantic’s coverage of 2017, when the right-wing movement gained momentum”):

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, white nationalists gathered in Washington, D.C. for an annual conference, where The Atlantic captured the audience offering cheers and enthusiastic Nazi salutes. At the helm was Richard Spencer, the leader of the “alt-right,” a term he popularized. “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” they exclaimed. Spencer would go on to set up a “hub” for the alt-right movement in the Washington area. But fractures within the the movement were emerging at the Deploraball, an event held in January, where figures of the alt-right celebrated Trump’s victory.

Steve Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News who once described the site as “the platform for the alt-right,” served as Trump’s chief strategist in the White House. Over the course of the year, the resurgence of white nationalism would play out on the national stage….

In The Atlantic’s September cover story, “The First White President,” Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that race propelled Trump to the White House. Chloé Valdary countered that there’s no single explanation for Trump’s election. Vann R. Newkirk II called for the need to define white supremacy, claiming that giving it too narrow of a definition allows it to flourish. And Adam Serwer argued that efforts to highlight non-racial explanations for Trump’s glaringly racial appeal is a long-standing political tradition in “The Nationalist’s Delusion.”

Anne Applebaum writes of The euphemisms I refuse to use in 2018:

In columns or commentary, one sometimes needs to simplify in order to save space. But here’s my New Year’s resolution: In the coming 12 months, I will try to avoid the expressions “far-right” and “populist” whenever possible. They are catch-all adjectives, useful in describing a general phenomenon. But they are also euphemisms, and they disguise what’s at stake.

The terms “right” and “left,” not to mention “far-right” and “far-left,” have long been due for a rethink. They date from the French Revolution of 1789, when the nobility sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries sat on the left. Since most Western “right-wing” parties aren’t seeking to conserve aristocracy anymore, and many of the “left-wing” parties stopped being revolutionary a long time ago, the metaphor has grown stale.

As for “far-right,” it doesn’t really belong on that scale, because the modern European “far-right” isn’t conservative in any sense at all. Nor does it have much in common with parties of the so-called center-right, many of which favor free markets and global trade and are happy to participate in international institutions and treaties. The “far-right,” by contrast, is anti-trade and anti-market, favoring instead a greater role for the national state or, in Hungary for example, for oligarchs close to the ruling party. More important, many favor a greater role for those ruling parties, treating with suspicion journalists, courts, civil servants, universities and even police forces that question their compliance with existing law….

(Applebaum finds no easy solution, and there isn’t one: we lack clear terms as no description seems wholly adequate.)

Here are Highlights of the January 2018 Sky:

Good morning.

The year ends for Whitewater with mostly sunny skies and a high of nine degrees. Sunrise is 7:26 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9:05:11 of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred sixteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1879, Thomas Edison holds a successful public demonstration of an electric light bulb (after successful private tests months earlier). On this day in 1967, Green Bay Packers triumph in the ‘Ice Bowl’: “On this date the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys played in what many consider to be the greatest game in NFL history – The Ice Bowl. With the thermometer dipping to a shocking 13 below zero and a wind chill of minus 46, Bart Starr scored the winning touchdown from the 1-yard line with 13 seconds remaining, sealing a record third straight championship for the Packers, their fifth in seven years. Green Bay defeated Dallas, 21-17, to win the NFL Championship.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo report How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt:

WASHINGTON — During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

If Mr. Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. and is now a cooperating witness, was the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration, his saga is also a tale of the Trump campaign in miniature. He was brash, boastful and underqualified, yet he exceeded expectations. And, like the campaign itself, he proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation….

(It wasn’t the Steele dossier, it was a talkative Trump aide with knowledge of Russian hacking, that motivated the FBI.)

Julian Sanchez states plainly what this means:

I don’t understand how people think there’s still a question of *whether* there was collusion, as opposed to “how extensive was it?” The campaign got advance word that Russia had thousands of hacked Dem emails, yet consistently feigned doubt publicly. https://t.co/aW1HM4X6yJ

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) December 30, 2017

Adam K. Raymond reports Mueller Probing Whether Trump Digital Team Aided Russian Disinformation Campaign:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s influence on the 2016 election has begun to zero in on the joint digital operation that got Donald Trump elected, Yahoo News reports.

Mueller’s team is trying to determine if members of the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee, who worked together on the digital arm of Trump’s campaign, provided assistance to Russian trolls attempting to influence voters. It’s the latest scare for Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who managed the digital campaign and has already come under scrutiny by the special counsel for his foreign contacts.

Mueller’s move appears to concern the disproportionate targeting of swing districts by Russian trolls during the presidential campaign. CNN reported in October that ads placed by Russia-linked Facebook accounts targeted Michigan and Wisconsin in particular, with many “geared at swaying public opinion in the most heavily contested battlegrounds.”

Experts don’t think the trolls behind Russian Facebook accounts could have determined who to target on their own, but the question is whether the help they got came from Trump’s orbit. The leading suspects at this point are Kushner and Brad Parscale, the campaign’s digital media director….

(To cooperate with America’s enemies – and Putin is an enemy of America – is to be a fifth columnist.)

Nusrat Choudhury writes Jeff Sessions Takes a Stand for Debtors’ Prisons:

During the holiday season, many of us think about what we can do to help people struggling with poverty. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, decided just before Christmas to rescind a guidance meant to protect low-income Americans.

The 2016 guidance, issued by former President Obama’s Justice Department, urged state and local courts nationwide to abide by constitutional principles prohibiting the jailing of poor people who cannot afford to pay court fines and fees. Jeff Sessions’ action makes clear that he and his Justice Department are unconcerned by courts trampling on the rights of poor people.

The Obama Justice Department issued the 2016 letter after reports and lawsuits by the ACLU and other groups revealed how modern-day debtors’ prisons function in more than a dozen states, despite the fact that the U.S. two centuries ago formally outlawed jailing people simply because they have unpaid debts.

These efforts revealed that poor people were being locked up in Georgia, Washington, Mississippi, and elsewhere without court hearings or legal representation when they could not pay fines and fees for traffic tickets or other civil infractions or criminal offenses. These efforts also show that modern-day debtors’ prisons result from state laws allowing or requiring the suspension of driver’s licenses for unpaid court fines or fees without first requiring confirmation that the person could actually pay….

(Sessions is among the most consistent advocates for the most punitive measures – a patient, persistent reactionary.)

What about That Time People Put Frogs in Unrefrigerated Milk to Keep it From Spoiling?

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of three. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 05m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 90.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1936, the Flint sit-down strike against General Motors begins.

Recommended for reading in full —

The New York Times has published Excerpts From Trump’s Interview With The Times:

President Trump spoke on Thursday with a reporter from The New York Times, Michael S. Schmidt. The interview took place in the Grill Room of his golf club in West Palm Beach, Fla., whose noise made some portions at times hard to hear.

The following are excerpts from that conversation, transcribed by The Times. They have been lightly edited for content and clarity, and omit several off-the-record comments and asides….

TRUMP: Yeah. Virtually every Democrat has said there is no collusion. There is no collusion. And even these committees that have been set up. If you look at what’s going on — and in fact, what it’s done is, it’s really angered the base and made the base stronger. My base is stronger than it’s ever been. Great congressmen, in particular, some of the congressmen have been unbelievable in pointing out what a witch hunt the whole thing is. So, I think it’s been proven that there is no collusion….

TRUMP: What I’ve done is, I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department. But for purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter….

TRUMP: Yeah, China. … China’s been. … I like very much President Xi. He treated me better than anybody’s ever been treated in the history of China. You know that. The presentations. … One of the great two days of anybody’s life and memory having to do with China. He’s a friend of mine, he likes me, I like him, we have a great chemistry together. He’s [inaudible] of the United States. …[Inaudible.] China’s hurting us very badly on trade, but I have been soft on China because the only thing more important to me than trade is war. O.K.?…

Ezra Klein contends Incoherent, authoritarian, uninformed: Trump’s New York Times interview is a scary read:

The president of the United States is not well. That is an uncomfortable thing to say, but it is an even worse thing to ignore.

Consider the interview Trump gave to the New York Times on Thursday. It begins with a string of falsehoods that make it difficult to tell whether the leader of the free world is lying or delusional. Remember, these are President Donald Trump’s words, after being told a recording device is on:

Virtually every Democrat has said there is no collusion. There is no collusion. And even these committees that have been set up. If you look at what’s going on — and in fact, what it’s done is, it’s really angered the base and made the base stronger. My base is stronger than it’s ever been. Great congressmen, in particular, some of the congressmen have been unbelievable in pointing out what a witch hunt the whole thing is. So, I think it’s been proven that there is no collusion.

It almost goes without saying that literally zero congressional Democrats have said that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Zero.

What key Democrats are actually saying is closer to the opposite. On December 20, for instance, Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and thus the Senate Democrat leading the investigation into collusion, said, “despite the initial denials of any Russian contacts during the election, this Committee’s efforts have helped uncover numerous and troubling high-level engagements between the Trump campaign and Russian affiliates — many of which have only been revealed in recent months.”

Nor is Trump’s base strengthening, or even holding steady. In a detailed analysis of Trump’s poll numbers, FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten concluded that the president is losing the most ground in the reddest states:

In states where Trump won by at least 10 points, his net approval rating is down 18 percentage points, on average, compared to his margin last November. In states that were decided by 10 points or less in November, it’s down only 13 points. And it’s down 8 points in states Clinton carried by at least 10 points.

The fact that Trump has lost the greatest number of supporters in red states is perhaps the clearest indication yet that he is losing ground among some form of his base, if you think of his base as those who voted for him in November….

Jennifer Rubin contends Trump is as unfit and ignorant as ever:

He tweeted, “In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!”

Trump either was again playing dumb or evidencing his inability to distinguish between “weather” and “climate.” (“Man-made global warming, as the name suggests, refers to the steady rise of average temperature of Earth’s climate system because of the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. Indeed, at the moment much of the rest of world is warmer than normal even if a portion of the United States is chilly.”)

His response was greeted by a tweet storm of ridicule from elected Democrats, scientists and ordinary social media users who continue to marvel at his willful contempt for scientific knowledge. His missive was a timely year-end reminder that this president refuses to educate himself on the most basic aspects of key policy issues.

Guy Faulconbridge, Jonathan Saul, Polina Nikolskaya report Exclusive: Russian tankers fueled North Korea via transfers at sea – sources:

LONDON/MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian tankers have supplied fuel to North Korea on at least three occasions in recent months by transferring cargoes at sea, according to two senior Western European security sources, providing an economic lifeline to the secretive Communist state.

The sales of oil or oil products from Russia, the world’s second biggest oil exporter and a veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council, breach U.N. sanctions, the security sources said.

The transfers in October and November indicate that smuggling from Russia to North Korea has evolved to loading cargoes at sea since Reuters reported in September that North Korean ships were sailing directly from Russia to their homeland.

“The Russian vessels made transfers at sea to the North Koreans,” the first security source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters. The source said the transfers of oil or oil products took place on several occasions and were a breach of sanctions….

Here’s How the Animal Kingdom Sleeps:

Sleep is universal in the animal kingdom, but each species slumbers in a different — and often mysterious — way. Some animals snooze with half their brain, while others sleep for just two hours a day (without suffering sleep deprivation). In this episode of Animalism, Ed Yong guides us through the latest research on how creatures catch their z’s.

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a high of fourteen, and an even chance of afternoon snow showers. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 04m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 82.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fourteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1879, General William “Billy” Mitchell is born:

On this date aviation pioneer Billy Mitchell was born in Nice, France. Mitchell grew up in Milwaukee and attended Racine College. During World War I, Mitchell was the first American airman to fly over enemy lines.  He also led many air attacks in France and Germany. Upon return to the U.S., he advocated the creation of a separate Air Force.

Much to the dislike of A.T. Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, and other contemporaries, Mitchell asserted that the airplane had rendered the battleship obsolete, and attention should be shifted to developing military air power. Mitchell’s out-spokenness resulted in his being court martialed for insubordination. He was sentenced to five years suspension of rank without pay. General Douglas MacArthur — an old Milwaukee friend — was a judge in Mitchell’s case and voted against his court martial. Mitchell’s ideas for developing military air power were not implemented until long after his death. In 1946 Congress created a medal in his honor, the General “Billy” Mitchell Award. Milwaukee’s airport, General Mitchell International Airport, is named after him.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Chris Isidore and Julia Horowitz report Foxconn got a really good deal from Wisconsin. And it’s getting better [for Foxconn]:

The $3 billion incentive package used to lure Foxconn to Wisconsin to build a giant factory was only the beginning.

Associated sweeteners have now grown to more than $4 billion — adding in the cost of local government incentives and various infrastructure projects, like roads and highways, sewer and power lines.

Foxconn is also being allowed to skip state environmental rules and oversight it would otherwise have had to follow….

The Village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County, where the plant is to be built, have also agreed to provide $764 million in tax incentives to help get the facility constructed, including buying the land and giving it to Foxconn for free.

The state expects to spend about $400 million on road improvements, including adding two lanes to the nearby Interstate 94. And it’s seeking $246 million more in federal money to help pay for the interstate expansion.

In addition, the local electric utility is upgrading its lines and adding substations to provide the necessary power that will be used by the plant, at a cost of $140 million. The cost of those projects will be paid by 5 million customers in the area.

About half the state’s tax breaks depend upon how many workers Foxconn hires. While the state touts Foxconn’s plans for 13,000 workers, the company has only committed to hiring 3,000 at this point.

(Foxconn is everything wrong with state-subsidized capitalism and WEDC, made manifest and plain for all America. Three billion or four billion, whatever. Thirteen thousand or three thousand, whatever. Walker never graduated from Marquette, and that’s to Marquette’s advantage – if they had given him a degree, they’d have to explain how he got one every day until the end of time.)

Evan Osnos reports Why the 2018 Midterms Are So Vulnerable to Hackers:

The first primary of the 2018 midterm elections, in Texas, is barely eight weeks away. It’s time to ask: Will the Russian government deploy “active measures” of the kind it used in 2016? Is it possible that a wave of disinformation on Facebook and Twitter could nudge the results of a tight congressional race in, say, Virginia or Nevada? Will hackers infiltrate? low-budget campaigns in Pennsylvania and Nebraska, and leak their e-mails to the public? Will the news media and voters take the bait?

By most accounts, the answer is likely to be yes—and, for several reasons, the election may prove to be as vulnerable, or more so, than the 2016 race that brought Donald Trump to the White House….

“An attacker who wants to affect the national outcome could try targeting all of those races, find the states where the election systems are most weakly protected, and strike there,” J. Alex Halderman, the director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan, told me. In the language of hacking and cyber-defense, the 2018 midterms present an unusually large “attack surface,” because of the sheer number of competitive races. “About a dozen states still rely on obsolete paperless voting machines, and most states fail to routinely conduct rigorous post-election audits,” he said.

On a technical level, the American election system is almost as vulnerable as it was in 2016. According to U.S. intelligence, Russian hackers tested the vulnerabilities of registration rolls in twenty-one states, but did not alter the vote tallies. Halderman, who testified recently in Congress about gaps in election defenses, told me, “Unfortunately, there haven’t been widespread security improvements so far. We can be sure that our adversaries have been paying attention, and so they may be more likely to try attacking election systems in November.” At the Def Con hackers’ conference in July, attendees demonstrated that they could break into thirty voting machines of multiple types, some in as little as ninety minutes. Without altering the results, hackers could sow doubt about the outcome by shutting down or disrupting voting machines on Election Day….

(Trump has no incentive to encourage better security if he assumes – as is true – that Putin will do whatever he can to aid Trump-supporting GOP results.)

Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky ask ‘America first’? So far, Trump’s foreign policy mostly puts America last:

Concluding the national security strategy address that he delivered earlier this month, President Trump described his foreign policy aim “to celebrate American greatness as a shining example to the world.”

Not exactly.

At the end of his first year in office, the president’s approach to foreign affairs doesn’t fit the platitude-ridden narrative laid out in that speech as much as it lines up with six key components that define the Trumpian way abroad: America first, politics over policy, ego, deconstruction, risk aversion and dictators over democrats. They don’t make a neatly defined doctrine, but these components have a certain cohesion — at least in Trump’s mind — that hints at how he’ll operate for the rest of his tenure….

the yardstick for judging Trump’s foreign policy isn’t whether his administration solves the world’s toughest problems. The question is whether his approach to foreign policy can manage the challenges the United States cannot resolve in a way that strengthens our interests while avoiding international crises, such as an escalation of conflict with Iran or, particularly, North Korea, that might irreparably harm those interests. A year in, the record does not inspire confidence. His worldview isn’t one that carefully calibrates means and ends or clearly defines true U.S. national interests and makes them a priority. Instead, it is one that will likely end up putting America last, not first, on a range of issues critical to its long-term prosperity and security.

Mekela Panditharatne writes FEMA says most of Puerto Rico has potable water. That can’t be true:

The weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico brought remarkable images of people desperate to find clean water, drinking from hazardous Superfund sites and thrusting containers under makeshift spigots on the sides of mountains.

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, this particular problem has subsided now, more than three months after the storm: FEMA’s official statistics on Puerto Rico, which rely on data provided by the territory, suggest that 95 percent of Puerto Ricans now have access to potable water.

That just isn’t possible.

I’m a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, where I specialize in toxics and drinking water. Before Hurricane Maria, I worked with local groups in Puerto Rico on drinking-water contamination on the island. We put out a report in May showing that in 2015, 99.5 percent of Puerto Ricans — virtually all residents — were served by water sources that violated the Safe Drinking Water Act. These violations included contamination, failure to properly treat the water, and failure to conduct water testing or to report as required by federal rules. A substantial majority, 69.4 percent of the population, was drawing tap water that had unlawfully high levels of contaminants such as coliform bacteria, disinfection byproducts and volatile organic compounds, or that had not been treated in accordance with federal standards.

Even as mainland coverage of water access and quality issues in Puerto Rico has receded, overshadowed by chatter about the latest political crises and tax breaks in Washington, the hurricane has made an already bad water situation far worse. And by veiling the true extent of the damage, FEMA’s misleading statistics on water are exacerbating the problems.

(Bad before, worse now, and no incentive for an agency to speak truthfully when Trump, himself, lies daily.)

‘These Paper Puppets Are Like Origami But Better’:

(My late father loved origami, and he would have, I think, understood these clever paper toys as a kind of origami, not a separate art as the video’s title suggests. Beautiful, however one describes them.)

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see cloudy skies, an even chance of flurries, and a high of fourteen. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 03m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred thirteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière give the first paid public screening of a film: “[t]his history-making presentation featured 10 short films, including their first film, Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory).”

Recommended for reading in full —

Michael Morell and Mike Rogers write Russia never stopped its cyberattacks on the United States:

Every first-year international-relations student learns about the importance of deterrence: It prevented a Soviet invasion of Western Europe during the height of the Cold War. It prevented North Korea from invading South Korea in the same time frame. Today, it keeps Iran from starting a hot war in the Middle East or other nations from initiating cyberattacks against our infrastructure.

And yet, the United States has failed to establish deterrence in the aftermath of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. We know we failed because Russia continues to aggressively employ the most significant aspect of its 2016 tool kit: the use of social media as a platform to disseminate propaganda designed to weaken our nation.

There is a perception among the media and general public that Russia ended its social-media operations following last year’s election and that we need worry only about future elections. But that perception is wrong. Russia’s information operations in the United States continued after the election and they continue to this day.

This should alarm everyone — Republicans, Democrats and independents alike. Foreign governments, overtly or covertly, should not be allowed to play with our democracy.

Russia’s information operations tactics since the election are more numerous than can be listed here. But to get a sense of the breadth of Russian activity, consider the messaging spread by Kremlin-oriented accounts on Twitter, which cybersecurity and disinformation experts have tracked as part of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.

In a single week this month, Moscow used these accounts to discredit the FBI after it was revealed that an agent had been demoted for sending anti-Donald Trump texts; to attack ABC News for an erroneous report involving President Trump and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser; to critique the Obama administration for allegedly “green lighting” the communication between Flynn and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak; and to warn about violence by immigrants after a jury acquitted an undocumented Mexican accused of murdering a San Francisco woman….

(This should alarm everyone, but it does not alarm Trump: he benefits from Putin’s support. Putin is an organ grinder to Trump’s dancing monkey; the organ grinder variously plays a tune, offers a piece of fruit, or tugs on the tiny primate’s leash.)

Asawin Suebsaeng and Sam Stein contend The #NeverTrump Movement Has Been Neutered (“Conservative opposition to Trump is splintered and more than a bit pessimistic about what comes next”):

President Donald Trump is ending his first year in office in a worse political position than when he entered.

Republicans have lost statehouse seats, been trounced in the two marquee gubernatorial elections, and squandered their Alabama Senate stronghold. Trump himself has seen his popularity drop, including among conservatives and even watchers of Fox News, a Trumpian media bullhorn if there ever was one.

And yet, even at this particular nadir, the conservative intellectual forces rallying against the president remain dispirited and divided. There is dispute within the ranks, not just over how best to make the case against Trump but whether there is a coherent case at all. Looking forward, they don’t see salvation. It is an article of faith among the ranks that Trump will be challenged by a Republican in the 2020 presidential election….

By contrast, conservative Conor Friedersdorf contends ‘Never Trump’ Will Be the Only Faction Still Standing When He’s Gone (“When the Republican Party’s current coalition falls apart, those who stood up to bigotry will be the only ones with the credibility to rebuild”):

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be clear and cold, with a high of nine. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 03m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twelfth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1968, Apollo 8 splashes down at night in the Pacific after becoming “the first manned spacecraft to leave Earth orbit, reach the Earth’s Moon, orbit it and return safely to Earth. The three-astronaut crew — Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders — became the first humans to: travel beyond low Earth orbit; see Earth as a whole planet; enter the gravity well of another celestial body (Earth’s moon); orbit another celestial body (Earth’s moon); directly see the far side of the Moon with their own eyes; witness an Earthrise; escape the gravity of another celestial body (Earth’s moon); and re-enter the gravitational well of Earth.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Chris Hamby reports FBI Software For Analyzing Fingerprints Contains Russian-Made Code, Whistleblowers Say (“In a secret deal, a French company purchased code from a Kremlin-connected firm, incorporated it into its own software, and hid its existence from the FBI, according to documents and two whistleblowers. The allegations raise concerns that Russian hackers could compromise law enforcement computer systems”):

The fingerprint-analysis software used by the FBI and more than 18,000 other US law enforcement agencies contains code created by a Russian firm with close ties to the Kremlin, according to documents and two whistleblowers. The allegations raise concerns that Russian hackers could gain backdoor access to sensitive biometric information on millions of Americans, or even compromise wider national security and law enforcement computer systems.

The Russian code was inserted into the fingerprint-analysis software by a French company, said the two whistleblowers, who are former employees of that company. The firm — then a subsidiary of the massive Paris-based conglomerate Safran — deliberately concealed from the FBI the fact that it had purchased the Russian code in a secret deal, they said.

In recent years, Russian hackers have gained access to everything from the Democratic National Committee’s email servers to the systems of nuclear power companies to the unclassified computers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to US authorities.

This September, the Department of Homeland Security ordered all federal agencies to stop using products made by the Moscow-based company Kaspersky Lab, including its popular antivirus software, and media outlets reportedthat Russian hackers had exploited it to steal sensitive information on US intelligence programs. The department later clarified that the order didn’t apply to “Kaspersky code embedded in the products of other companies.” The company’s founder, Eugene V. Kaspersky, has denied any involvement in or knowledge of the hack….

Maggie Astor reports Mike Huckabee Says Trump Is Like Churchill. Historians Disagree:

“Sure. Churchill served his country 55 years in parliament, 31 years as a minister and 9 as pm,” Kristian Tonning Riise, a member of Norway’s Parliament, wrote in a tweet liked more than 19,000 times. “He was present in 15 battles and received 14 medals of bravery. He was one of history’s most gifted orators and won the Nobel Literature Prize for his writing. Totally same thing.”

(Trump’s defenders will declare anything – however absurd – about him, knowing that ignorant supporters will repeat these claims, and knowledgeable opponents will be left stunned. Indeed, Roy Moore’s supporters heard that Moore was like St. Joseph, so nutty comparisons between Trump and Churchill should not surprise. They’ll say anything.)

Marina Koren writes of A Triumphant Year for SpaceX (“The company’s record-breaking 2017 and what it means for the science and business of rocketry”):

The year 2017 has turned out to be a good one for rocket science in the United States.

American companies made 29 successful rocket launches into orbit, the highest figure since 1999, which saw 31 launches, according to a comprehensive database maintained by Gunter Krebs, a spaceflight historian in Germany. The final launch of the year, by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a cache of commercial communications satellites, took place Friday night at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company, is responsible for most of this year’s launches. After a brief hiatus following an explosion in September 2016 that destroyed a Falcon 9 and its $200 million commercial payload, SpaceXreturned to the launchpad in mid-January. At the time, the success of the launch was imperative; SpaceX had lost another rocket in June 2015, about two minutes after takeoff, and its rocket-fueling process was receiving intense scrutiny by a nasa safety advisory group. nasa was entering its fifth year of using SpaceX rockets for resupply missions to the International Space Station, and future deals were on the line….

Last Friday, SpaceX launched its 18th and final mission of 2017, sending a Falcon 9 rocket out of Vandenberg Air Force Base and into the California sky. The white tail of the rocket was an unusual sight, leaving many in Southern California who did not know a rocket launch was occurring confused, with some even speculating it was a UFO. Now, a spectacular 40-second time-lapse of the Falcon 9 has been posted by photographer Jesse Watson.

Watson lives in Yuma, Arizona, and according to PetaPixel had been following SpaceX launches for some time. Though this latest launch was held at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 400 miles away, he says it was “perfectly viewable” from where he lives in Yuma.

He had never shot a rocket before, but used The Photographer’s Ephemeris, a map-centric sun and moon calculator, as well as Google Maps to figure out where to set up his shots. Because he was working on estimated knowledge, Watson used four cameras and five lenses at four different locations, with three of the cameras rolling time-lapse and one rolling telephoto video….

Nicholas Casey, Ben C. Solomon, and Taige Jensen report on The Last Man to Speak His Language:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be chilly, with a high of nine degrees under sunny skies. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 02m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 52.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred eleventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1776, the Gen. Washington and the Continental Army are victorious at the Battle of Trenton.

Recommended for reading in full —

The Salt Lake City Tribune editorial board explains Why Orrin Hatch is Utahn of the Year:

The selection of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch as the 2017 Utahn of the Year has little to do with the fact that, after 42 years, he is the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history, that he has been a senator from Utah longer than three-fifths of the state’s population has been alive.

It has everything to do with recognizing:

Hatch’s part in the dramatic dismantling of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
His role as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in passing a major overhaul of the nation’s tax code.
His utter lack of integrity that rises from his unquenchable thirst for power.

It would be good for Utah if Hatch, having finally caught the Great White Whale of tax reform, were to call it a career. If he doesn’t, the voters should end it for him.

Common is the repetition of the catchphrase that Hatch successfully used to push aside three-term Sen. Frank Moss in this first election in, egad, 1976.

“What do you call a senator who’s served in office for 18 years? You call him home.”

Less well known is a bit of advice Hatch gave to Capitol Hill interns in 1983.

“You should not fall in love with D.C.” he admonished them. “Elected politicians shouldn’t stay here too long.”

If only he had listened to his own advice.

(See also Has Trump Persuaded Orrin Hatch to Block Mitt Romney’s Senate Bid?)

Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Jaffe report Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options:

The first email arrived in the inbox of CounterPunch, a left-leaning American news and opinion website, at 3:26 a.m. — the middle of the day in Moscow.

“Hello, my name is Alice Donovan and I’m a beginner freelance journalist,” read the Feb.?26, 2016, message.

The FBI was tracking Donovan as part of a months-long counterintelligence operation code-named “NorthernNight.” Internal bureau reports described her as a pseudonymous foot soldier in an army of Kremlin-led trolls seeking to undermine America’s democratic institutions.

Her first articles as a freelancer for CounterPunch and at least 10 other online publications weren’t especially political. As the 2016 presidential election heated up, Donovan’s message shifted. Increasingly, she seemed to be doing the Kremlin’s bidding by stoking discontent toward Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and touting WikiLeaks, which U.S. officials say was a tool of Russia’s broad influence operation to affect the presidential race.

“There’s no denying the emails that Julian Assange has picked up from inside the Democratic Party are real,” she wrote in August 2016 for a website called We Are Change. “The emails have exposed Hillary Clinton in a major way — and almost no one is reporting on it.”

The events surrounding the FBI’s NorthernNight investigation follow a pattern that repeated for years as the Russian threat was building: U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies saw some warning signs of Russian meddling in Europe and later in the United States but never fully grasped the breadth of the Kremlin’s ambitions. Top U.S. policymakers didn’t appreciate the dangers, then scrambled to draw up options to fight back. In the end, big plans died of internal disagreement, a fear of making matters worse or a misguided belief in the resilience of American society and its democratic institutions.

(There never was an Alice Donovan, but there were those duped to believe so. While America slept…)

Henry Meyer reports Putin Tries to Lure $1 Trillion Home as Sanctions Fear Grows:

President Vladimir Putin is using the threat of additional U.S. sanctions to encourage wealthy Russians to repatriate some of their overseas assets, which exceed $1 trillion by one estimate.

Putin told lawmakers late Monday that a new capital amnesty program was needed “given the foreign restrictions, which instead of lessening are now worsening,” according to a transcript posted on the Kremlin’s website. This “should stimulate the return of capital to Russia,” the president said, without specifying how long the measure will last.

“People should feel comfortable and secure and it shouldn’t involve additional expenses,” Putin said Tuesday at a Cabinet meeting where he ordered officials to finalize the plan.

Russia rolled out a similar amnesty program during the worst of the conflict in Ukraine, which coincided with a plunge in oil prices that triggered the country’s longest recession of the Putin era. That 18-month initiative, the results of which haven’t been disclosed, “didn’t work as well as we’d hoped,” Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said. Unlike that plan, this one waves Russia’s 13 percent tax on personal income, according to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman….

(Sanctions aren’t nearly stringent enough against a nation that seized Crimea, forments war in eastern Ukraine, interfered in America democracy, and commits human rights violations at home and abroad.)

Emily Steel reports At Vice, Cutting-EdgeMedia and Allegations of Old-School Sexual Harassment:

One woman said she was riding a Ferris wheel at Coney Island after a company event when a co-worker suddenly took her hand and put it on his crotch. Another said she felt pressured into a sexual relationship with an executive and was fired after she rejected him.

A third said that a co-worker grabbed her face and tried to kiss her, and she used her umbrella to fend him off.

These women did not work among older men at a hidebound company. They worked at Vice, an insurgent force in news and entertainment known for edgy content that aims for millennial audiences on HBO and its own TV network.

But as Vice Media has built itself from a fringe Canadian magazine into a nearly $6 billion global media company, its boundary-pushing culture created a workplace that was degrading and uncomfortable for women, current and former employees say.

An investigation by The New York Times has found four settlements involving allegations of sexual harassment or defamation against Vice employees, including its current president.In addition, more than two dozen other women, most in their 20s and early 30s, said they had experienced or witnessed sexual misconduct at the company — unwanted kisses, groping, lewd remarks and propositions for sex.

The settlements and the many episodes of harassment the women described depict a top-down ethos of male entitlement at Vice, where women said they felt like just another party favor at an organization where partying often was an extension of the job.

(For Whitewater and elsewhere – there’s hard work everywhere to be done. Those who wish to defend an institution or organization at any cost – indeed rather than the redress of real injuries to individuals – will sometimes defend their efforts  as otherwise progressive, enlightened, or cutting-edge. There is no noble way to defend an ignoble act; there is no worthy distraction from obstruction of justice. These institutional and organizational efforts have the character of a taunt: Will you defend the truth if we build monuments to pretty lies? Sometimes, there is a resolute reply: Yes, so assertively and completely as one can.)

There are Long-Term Health Benefits Of Running A Marathon: