Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with occasional showers, and a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 6:13 PM, for 11h 05m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 29.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred fifth day.
On this day in 1947, Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier:
Such was the difficulty in this task that the answer to many of the inherent challenges was along the lines of “Yeager better have paid-up insurance.”[25] Two nights before the scheduled date for the flight, Yeager broke two ribs when he fell from a horse. He was worried that the injury would remove him from the mission and reported that he went to a civilian doctor in nearby Rosamond, who taped his ribs.[26][Note 2] Yeager told only his wife, as well as friend and fellow project pilot Jack Ridley, about the accident. On the day of the flight, Yeager was in such pain that he could not seal the X-1’s hatch by himself. Ridley rigged up a device, using the end of a broom handle as an extra lever, to allow Yeager to seal the hatch.
Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, flying the X-1 Glamorous Glennis at Mach 1.07 at an altitude of 45,000 ft (13,700 m).[27][Note 3] over the Rogers Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert.[31] Yeager was awarded the Mackay Trophy and the Collier Trophy in 1948 for his mach-transcending flight, and the Harmon International Trophy in 1954. The X-1 he flew that day was later put on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution‘s National Air and Space Museum.
Recommended for reading in full — Trump’s son-in-law paid no federal taxes for year after year, Schimel-Kaul debate, American leadership & Saudi Arabia, LaCroix as ersatz faith, video of canine vacation ambassadors—
Jesse Drucker and Emily Flitter report Kushner Paid No Federal Income Tax for Years, Documents Suggest (“Confidential documents reviewed by The Times indicate that Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, probably paid little or no income tax from 2009 to 2016”):
Over the past decade, Jared Kushner’s family company has spent billions of dollars buying real estate. His personal stock investments have soared. His net worth has quintupled to almost $324 million.
And yet, for several years running, Mr. Kushner — President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser — appears to have paid almost no federal income taxes, according to confidential financial documents reviewed by The New York Times.
His low tax bills are the result of a common tax-minimizing maneuver that, year after year, generated millions of dollars in losses for Mr. Kushner, according to the documents. But the losses were only on paper — Mr. Kushner and his company did not appear to actually lose any money. The losses were driven by depreciation, a tax benefit that lets real estate investors deduct a portion of the cost of their buildings from their taxable income every year.
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Thirteen tax accountants and lawyers, including J. Richard Harvey Jr., a tax official in the Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama administrations, reviewed the documents for The Times. Mr. Harvey said that, assuming the documents accurately reflect information from his tax returns, Mr. Kushner appeared to have paid little or no federal income taxes during at least five of the past eight years. The other experts agreed and said Mr. Kushner probably didn’t pay much in the three other years, either.
Jenny Peek reports Brad Schimel, Josh Kaul Meet In First Attorney General Debate:
In 2014, the state Department of Justice discovered some 7,000 untested sexual assault kits being stored across Wisconsin. In September, Schimel announced that that backlog was gone.
But in Friday’s debate, Kaul questioned why it took so long for the kits to be tested.
“In his first year in office, Wisconsin received millions of dollars to address that backlog, but after he served for two years as attorney general, only nine of the kits in the backlog had been tested,” Kaul said.
Kaul added that the delay in testing led to a delay in getting justice for survivors of sexual assault — a task he’d prioritize if elected.
“Now Schimel said mission accomplished, I fundamentally disagree with that, the goal here is not simply to test these kits, it’s to get justice for survivors of sexual assault and there’s a lot of work left to be done to get justice,” Kaul said.Wisconsin U.S. Senate race: Vukmir, Baldwin debate in Wausau with key clashes on health care and immigration
Ben Rhodes describes A Fatal Abandonment of American Leadership:
When Donald Trump took office, any effort to restrain the Saudi regime disappeared. Instead, Trump and his team fell comfortably into the full embrace of MbS [Saudi Mohammad bin Salman] and MbZ [Emerati Mohammed bin Zayed]. These men understood well the mind-set of a transactional, egocentric, New York real-estate developer who cared little for universal rights or the liberal international order that the United States had built. Indeed, Saudis and Emiratis have invested in New York real estate for decades, and Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric about Iran and the nuclear deal was music to their ears. Here was the opposite of Obama, the analytical, deliberate, and idealistic leader whom they found so frustrating.
Most U.S. presidents make their first foreign trip to our neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Trump went to Riyadh, where he was lavishly flattered and feted. He deputized his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to manage the relationship with the Gulf states, which were more than willing to mentor the young presidential aide in the ways of Middle Eastern diplomacy while dangling the ever elusive proposition of Gulf support for Israel (which they still do not recognize). Trump touted the potential for tens of billions of dollars in Saudi investment in the U.S., and heaped praise on the Saudi leadership. In a picture that seemed to capture perfectly the way in which the dynamic in the Middle East had changed, Salman, Trump, and the Saudi-backed Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi placed their hands on a glowing orb as if they were masters of the globe. The days of Egyptian democracy and of diplomacy with Iran were a thing of the past, and so were any U.S. restraints on Saudi foreign policy or attention to complaints about human rights.
Alan Levinovitz ponders Why LaCroix calls its seltzer ‘natural’:
A recent class-action lawsuit against LaCroix claims that the sparkling-water company has misled consumers by calling its products “natural.” From a certain perspective, it’s a slam-dunk case: Flavored sparkling water does not gush directly from Mother Nature’s teat, and aluminum does not spontaneously form convenient gleaming cylinders so we may drink refrigerated cans of “naturally essenced” LaCroix, popping them open with fingers designed by evolution for precisely that task.
Of course, this is not what LaCroix means by “natural.” Rather, its label — and the plaintiff’s attraction to it — can be understood only in light of our tendency to conflate “natural” with “goodness.” It’s no coincidence that the word “innocent” also features prominently in LaCroix’s marketing materials and packaging. “Natural” invokes a religious myth, an origin story about pure beginnings. With giant islands of garbage floating in the seas, microplastics polluting the oceans and human-caused climate change ravaging the globe, it makes sense to be suspicious of human tampering.
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Buying “natural” is the modern equivalent of buying indulgences — deep down, we probably know that holiness can’t be purchased, but the opportunity is just too tempting to pass up. In this sense, both LaCroix and the people who buy it because it’s “natural” are guilty of reinforcing the false faith of consecrated consumption and the false idol of nature to which it is dedicated. Instead of confusing “natural” with innocence and goodness, we should think hard about who stands to benefit from the ritual practices that result.