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Daily Bread for 10.30.17

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:27 AM and sunset 5:48 PM, for 10h 21m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 75.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On Sunday evening, Orson Welles’s production of War of the Worlds, as the

17th episode of the CBS Radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast at 8 pm ET on Sunday, October 30, 1938.[2]:390, 394 The program’s format was a simulated live newscast of developing events. The setting was switched from 19th-century England to contemporary Grover’s Mill, an unincorporated village in West Windsor Township, New Jersey, in the United States.

The first two-thirds of the hour-long play is a contemporary retelling of events of the novel, presented as news bulletins interrupting another program. “I had conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening,” Welles later said, “and would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play.[5]

On this day in 1914, the first 4-H club in Wisconsin is organized: “the Linn Junior Farmers Club in Walworth County was organized. This club was started five months after Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act which created the Cooperative Extension Service whereby federal, state, and county governments participate in the county agent system. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers].”

Recommended for reading in full —

Trump supporters are hyping the Uranium One deal, but their contentions are easily refuted:

John Harwood debunks Trump’s claim that economic growth now is the best in the last eight years:

(Trump lies in the hope that his low-information voters won’t later learn the truth.)

Craig Silverman, Jane Lytvynenko, Lam Thuy Vo, and Jeremy Singer-Vine report Inside The Partisan Fight For Your News Feed:

The most comprehensive study to date of the growing universe of partisan websites and Facebook pages about US politics reveals that in 2016 alone at least 187 new websites launched, and that the candidacy and election of Donald Trump has unleashed a golden age of aggressive, divisive political content that reaches a massive amount of people on Facebook.

Thanks to a trinity of the internet, Facebook, and online advertising, partisan news websites and their associated Facebook pages are almost certainly making more money for more people and reaching more Americans than at any time in history. In some cases, publishers are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, with small operations easily earning five figures thanks to one website and at least one associated Facebook page.

At its root, the analysis of 667 websites and 452 associated Facebook pages reveals the extent to which American online political discourse is powered by a mix of money and outrage.

The result is hundreds of partisan news websites being run not only by dedicated American conservatives and liberals, but also by the now-famous Macedonian teens, by internet marketers, and by others who saw a business opportunity. As an example, BuzzFeed News’ analysis found that a conservative Facebook page being run by a 20-year-old Macedonian frequently outperforms some of the larger conservative pages operated by Americans.

The analysis also found that since Trump’s election, top liberal partisan Facebook pages and top-performing viral content from liberal websites are consistently generating more total engagement than their conservative counterparts….

(Propaganda arms of a  foreign power should be required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, 22 U.S. Code § 611.)

Alex Finley writes The Recruitables: Why Trump’s Team Was Easy Prey for Putin:

From an intelligence point of view, the people surrounding Trump, and Trump himself, make easy targets for recruitment. This is not to say these people have definitely been recruited by Russian intelligence—and they’ve all denied it repeatedly—but you can be sure that Russia’s intelligence services took these factors into consideration when they approached the campaign.

So, what pressure points might Russian intelligence officers have used to get their desired outcome with Trump’s Recruitables?….

Paul Manafort: Money
Anyone who has lobbied on behalf of leaders ranging from Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko to the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos to Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang likely has no set ideology or moral compass and is motivated primarily by making money. People like this make very good targets. There is no emotion involved. Getting the person to do something is a fairly straightforward transaction. For example, getting someone to buy real estate to help launder Russian funds, in return for a handsome fee, would be a pretty simple transaction. As soon as the person has done it one time, it is much easier to get them to do something else for you…..

Michael Flynn: Money, Ideology, Ego
Flynn was at the top of his game as director of intelligence at JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command. During his tenure, JSOC became a lean fighting machine, able to execute a hit on a target in a war zone and immediately process any actionable intelligence in order to hit the next target immediately, before the bad guys could move on. He moved up the intelligence ladder and landed the top spot at the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012. Here, the Peter Principle quickly set in. Castigated for his lack of vision for the agency, his inability to manage a large organization, his unconventional approach to counterterrorism, and his “Flynn facts,” it became evident in Washington circles that Flynn was over his head. President Barack Obama fired him….

Jared Kushner: Money, Coercion
Kushner had a rocky entrée into Manhattan real estate. His purchase of 666 Fifth Ave. at $1.8 billion in 2007—that is, just before the market tanked—was perhaps not the strongest display of business acumen. And now, with payments due and business going badly, he was in a pickle. Perhaps the Russians had a great way for him to get out of that pickle. So they introduced him in December 2016 to Sergey Gorkov, the head of the Russian state investment bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB, who would have made it clear that he was in a position to help….

A short video offers an overview of The Facts on America’s Opioid Epidemic:

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