Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 37. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:58 PM for 9h 41m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6:30 PM and the Police & Fire Commission meets at 7 PM.
On this day in 1984, Apple Computer places the Macintosh personal computer on sale in the United States.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff reports Russia’s War Breathes New Life Into a Cold War Symbol (‘Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a news network originally set up as a C.I.A. operation early in the Cold War, is experiencing a renaissance and making a case for its independence’):
Until 1971, Radio Free Europe was a covert U.S. intelligence operation seeking to penetrate the Iron Curtain and foment anti-communist dissent in what was then Czechoslovakia, in Poland and elsewhere.
The C.I.A. stopped funding Radio Free Europe when its operation was revealed. Since then, the news organization has been funded by the United States Congress and has had editorial independence.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — or RFE/RL — now barely resembles its historical predecessor, as dramatized in “Glória,” but it is still very much pursuing its mission of fact-based journalism by local reporters, in local languages for local audiences across the former Soviet sphere and Central Asia.[Glória: a Netflix program about early work on a Portuguese branch of the Munich-based Radio Free Europe.]
The organization is now based in Prague instead of Munich, and is growing, opening new offices this month in Riga, Latvia, to host a big part of its Russia-focused staff.
These days, RFE/RL is only partly a radio broadcaster, although in some regions, the airwaves are still how people access it. The majority of its Russian-language audience finds its reporting online, especially through social-media platforms.
One would prefer a private press, but our European allies now face a violent dictatorship, and in those dire conditions a free people is justified in funding truthful information for that continent. Libertarians are right to prefer peace and private initiative for America and the world; there is no circumstance in which that preference condones Russian dictatorship and conquest. On the contrary, we are right to inform — and arm — free peoples against Russian imperialism.
Libertarianism is not an inherent pacifism, however much we would prefer peace, as people have a right to defend themselves and others.
Black Canada lynx caught on camera for the first time: