Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be windy with occasional rain and drizzle and a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:26 AM and sunset 5:50 PM for 10h 23m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 43.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashes in what will be called the Crash of ’29 or “Black Tuesday,” ending the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and beginning the Great Depression.
In a Twitter thread, Tom Nichols offers seven observations about the conservative populists, each spot on:
The people who talk about a “civil war” and independence from the USA have no real idea what it would mean and don’t really want it. They want their lives as they live them now, but with some sense that they’ve settled scores with people who look down on them. /1
They don’t really want to know what life would be like without the US infrastructure. They want everything they have now, but with some sort of authority figure who says “It’s okay to be terrible. We went and hurt those other folks. Oh, and here’s some cash for your pain.” /2
Now, I suppose there are people who are just too stupid to understand that “secession” means “You have to fix all the highways that have that blue shield on them,” and “you’ll have to use MAGA Bucks instead of the dollar,” but most of them really aren’t that stupid. /3
They mean “Civil War” as “I want approval to advocate terrorizing people I think are judging me.” These same people, of course, *relentlessly* judge their own fellow citizens and think of them as monsters. Their “equality” is limited to “equality for people like me.” /4
At some point, maybe there will be enough broken families and friendships that some of these folks will get off the ledge. Most won’t. They will, like their predecessors in 1865 and 1965, go to their graves thinking they were wronged. /6
There is nothing you can do about this except to lower the temperature by not engaging with the same rancor. Be calm, civil, and outvote them. I wish there were better answers. But this isn’t going to change via rational argument or appeals to conscience. /7x
The seventh point offers sound advice during this national conflict. One should — to be effective — carry on during this conflict methodically, calculating at each moment in support of one’s position. The conservative populists talk about common sense, but their demeanor is all umbrage and rampage. (See along these lines Who Rampaged Better?)