Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see a likelihood of an afternoon snow shower and a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 5:06 PM, for 9h 56m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}eighty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1919, Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, a citizen who challenged the legality of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of Japanese Americans. While the EO was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned decades later after the disclosure of new evidence challenging the necessity of the internment, evidence which had been withheld from the courts by the U.S. government during the war. On this day in 1866, the 9th Wisconsin Infantry musters out after serving in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas, they lost 191 enlisted men during service.
Recommended for reading in full —
Alia Dastagir reports that Outrage over Trump’s immigrant ban helps ACLU raise more money online in one weekend than in all of 2016: “The American Civil Liberties Union shattered fundraising records this weekend after taking the White House to court over President Trump’s executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. The ACLU said it has received more than 350,000 online donations totaling $24 million since Saturday morning. The non-profit organization that aims to protect individuals’ rights and liberties guaranteed in the Constitution typically raises about $4 million online in a year, according to Executive Director Anthony Romero. “It’s really clear that this is a different type of moment,” Romero said. “People want to know what they can do. They want to be deployed as protagonists in this fight. It’s not a spectator sport.”
Janna Remes of Brookings considers Aging and urban divergence [reflections on a report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), Urban world: Meeting the demographic challenge in cities] : “How cities cope with demographic change matters, not only for their economies but also for their politics and societies. Pessimism and optimism among voters—and the political choices those voters subsequently make—appear, more than ever, to depend on where they live. In the U.S. presidential election, Clinton voters were heavily metropolitan (and from areas with high economic output) while Trump voters tended to be in (lower-output) suburban and rural areas, as shown by Mark Muro and Sifan Liu. As the demographics of cities—and the strategies they deploy to cope with change—diverge, so too do perceptions of economic opportunity. The divide between rural and urban communities is already evident in the election results. As demographics create an ever-more-differentiated urban landscape, the divide between citizens of different cities is set to widen too.”
Brian Nyhan of Dartmouth has updated his solid reference guide, a Reading list: Understanding the authoritarian turn in US politics.
Bob McGinn writes that Ted Thompson’s formula for success fizzles: “the Packers have squandered still another realistic chance in the era of Aaron Rodgers to capture their 14th NFL championship. They’ve had enough talent to win the Super Bowl nine times in 11 seasons under Thompson and coach Mike McCarthy, and just once have they claimed the Lombardi Trophy. Thompson’s aversion to signing players that have been with other teams is holding hostage McCarthy and his coaches, Rodgers and his teammates and members of his own personnel department. None of them like it but they can’t do one thing about it. Packers President Mark Murphy, the one man who can do something, goes about praising Thompson whenever the opportunity presents itself for the wonderful job he has done and the wonderful job he is doing. Thompson is a good general manager with a long list of admirable qualities. If he were a great general manager, the Packers would have been in the Super Bowl more than once in his 12-year tenure, especially considering his quarterbacks have been Favre and Rodgers.”
Could this be the loneliest whale in the world?
Somewhere in the North Pacific Ocean there is a whale. There are, of course, many whales, if rather fewer than there were a couple of hundred years ago. But this whale is different. It is a male and vocalizes during mating season in a way that only male whales do. Its species, however, is uncertain. It may be a fin whale, or perhaps a blue whale, the largest whale of them all. It may even be a hybrid — an unusual but not unheard-of scenario.
Nobody is certain because nobody has claimed to have seen it. But several people have heard it. And many more have heard of it. And what this latter group has heard about it has turned the whale into an unwitting celebrity, a cultural icon and a cypher for the feelings of many unconnected people around the globe. It is, allegedly, the Loneliest Whale in the World.