Good morning.
The last day of January in this small town will be cloudy, with a few flurries or snow showers possible, and a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 5:07 PM, for 9h 58m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}eighty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1958, America launches Explorer 1, her first satellite, into orbit: “Explorer 1 was launched on January 31, 1958 at 22:48 Eastern Time (equal to February 1, 03:48 UTC) atop the first Juno booster from LC-26 at the Cape Canaveral Missile Annex, Florida. It was the first spacecraft to detect the Van Allen radiation belt,[2] returning data until its batteries were exhausted after nearly four months. It remained in orbit until 1970, and has been followed by more than 90 scientific spacecraft in the Explorer series.” On this day in 1846, Wisconsin’s territorial legislature charters Carroll College.
Recommended for reading in full —
Conservative David Frum describes How Donald Trump Could Build an Autocracy in the U.S.: “Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled….
Those citizens who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit. And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms, but with an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them. We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.”
Conservative David Brooks considers The Republican Fausts: “With most administrations you can agree sometimes and disagree other times. But this one is a danger to the party and the nation in its existential nature. And so sooner or later all will have to choose what side they are on, and live forever after with the choice.”
Conservative and former G.W. Bush Administration official Eliot Cohen Responds to Donald Trump’s First Week: “Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity—substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better.
The question is, what should Americans do about it? To friends still thinking of serving as political appointees in this administration, beware: When you sell your soul to the Devil, he prefers to collect his purchase on the installment plan. Trump’s disregard for either Secretary of Defense Mattis or Secretary-designate Tillerson in his disastrous policy salvos this week, in favor of his White House advisers, tells you all you need to know about who is really in charge. To be associated with these people is going to be, for all but the strongest characters, an exercise in moral self-destruction.”
Patrick Marley reports that Former teen inmate, now brain damaged, sues state: “Madison – A former inmate at Wisconsin’s teen prison filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Monday over a suicide attempt that left her severely brain damaged. The lawsuit by former Copper Lake School for Girls inmate Sydni Briggs and her mother alleges psychiatrists and prison officials failed to put protections in place even though Briggs had sent signals she was suicidal. She told a therapist she was thinking about suicide and twice scratched her arms so hard they bled, the suit says. “They knew that staff was stretched too thin,” Briggs’ attorneys wrote of prison officials in their lawsuit. “They knew that they were under-trained on how to prevent suicide attempts. They knew that a prolonged rash of suicide attempts had taken place at Copper Lake. Given the large number of attempts, it was only a matter of time before one was fatal.”
Consider how the planet, itself, has changed over the last few decades: