Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a high of sixty-eight, and a probability of afternoon thundershowers. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 6:26 PM, for 11h 27m 10s of daytime. The moon is full, with 99.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1927, The Jazz Singer has its premiere in New York City. On this day in 1917, Robert La Follette supports free speech in wartime: “Senator Robert La Follette gave what may have been the most famous speech of his Senate career when he responded to charges of treason with a three hour defense of free speech in wartime. La Follette had voted against a declaration of war as well as several initiatives seen as essential to the war effort by those that supported U.S. involvement in the first World War. His resistance was met with a petition to the Committee on Privileges and Elections that called for La Follette’s expulsion from the Senate. The charges were investigated, but La Follette was cleared of any wrong doing by the committee on January 16, 1919.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Joseph Bernstein writes Here’s How Breitbart And Milo [Yiannopoulos] Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream (“A cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals the truth about Steve Bannon’s alt-right ‘killing machine.’ “):
“Finally doing my big feature on the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a March 9, 2016, email to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, a hacker who is the system administrator of the neo-Nazi hub the Daily Stormer, and who would later ask his followers to disrupt the funeral of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer. “Fancy braindumping some thoughts for me.”
“It’s time for me to do my big definitive guide to the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote four hours later to Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug helped create the “neoreactionary” movement, which holds that Enlightenment democracy has failed and that a return to feudalism and authoritarian rule is in order. “Which is my whorish way of asking if you have anything you’d like to make sure I include.”
“Alt r feature, figured you’d have some thoughts,” Yiannopoulos wrote the same day to Devin Saucier, who helps edit the online white nationalist magazine American Renaissance under the pseudonym Henry Wolff, and who wrote a story in June 2017 called “Why I Am (Among Other Things) a White Nationalist.”
The three responded at length: Weev about the Daily Stormer and a podcast called The Daily Shoah, Yarvin in characteristically sweeping world-historical assertions (“It’s no secret that North America contains many distinct cultural/ethnic communities. This is not optimal, but with a competent king it’s not a huge problem either”), and Saucier with a list of thinkers, politicians, journalists, films (Dune, Mad Max, The Dark Knight), and musical genres (folk metal, martial industrial, ’80s synthpop) important to the movement. Yiannopoulos forwarded it all, along with the Wikipedia entries for “Alternative Right” and the esoteric far-right Italian philosopher Julius Evola — a major influence on 20th-century Italian fascists and Richard Spencer alike — to Allum Bokhari, his deputy and frequent ghostwriter, whom he had met during GamerGate. “Include a bit of everything,” he instructed Bokhari.
“Bannon, as you probably know, is sympathetic to much of it.”“I think you’ll like what I’m cooking up,” Yiannopoulos wrote to Saucier, the American Renaissance editor.
“I look forward to it,” Saucier replied. “Bannon, as you probably know, is sympathetic to much of it.”
Five days later Bokhari returned a 3,000-word draft, a taxonomy of the movement titled “ALT-RIGHT BEHEMOTH.” It included a little bit of everything: the brains and their influences (Yarvin and Evola, etc.), the “natural conservatives” (people who think different ethnic groups should stay separate for scientific reasons), the “Meme team” (4chan and 8chan), and the actual hatemongers. Of the last group, Bokhari wrote: “There’s just not very many of them, no-one really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.”
“Magnificent start,” Yiannopoulos responded….
Andrea Bernstein, Jesse Eisinger, Justin Elliott, and Ilya Marritz explain How Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., Avoided a Criminal Indictment:
In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell. Despite the best efforts of the siblings’ defense team, the case had not gone away. An indictment seemed like a real possibility. The evidence included e-mails from the Trumps making clear that they were aware they were using inflated figures about how well the condos were selling to lure buyers.
In one e-mail, according to four people who have seen it, the Trumps discussed how to coördinate false information they had given to prospective buyers. In another, according to a person who read the e-mails, they worried that a reporter might be on to them. In yet another, Donald, Jr., spoke reassuringly to a broker who was concerned about the false statements, saying that nobody would ever find out, because only people on the e-mail chain or in the Trump Organization knew about the deception, according to a person who saw the e-mail. There was “no doubt” that the Trump children “approved, knew of, agreed to, and intentionally inflated the numbers to make more sales,” one person who saw the e-mails told us. “They knew it was wrong.”
In 2010, when the Major Economic Crimes Bureau of the D.A.’s office opened an investigation of the siblings, the Trump Organization had hired several top New York criminal-defense lawyers to represent Donald, Jr., and Ivanka. These attorneys had met with prosecutors in the bureau several times. They conceded that their clients had made exaggerated claims, but argued that the overstatements didn’t amount to criminal misconduct. Still, the case dragged on. In a meeting with the defense team, Donald Trump, Sr., expressed frustration that the investigation had not been closed. Soon after, his longtime personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, entered the case.
Kasowitz, who by then had been the elder Donald Trump’s attorney for a decade, is primarily a civil litigator, with little experience in criminal matters. But, in 2012, Kasowitz donated twenty-five thousand dollars to the reëlection campaign of the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr., making Kasowitz one of Vance’s largest donors. Kasowitz decided to bypass the lower-level prosecutors and went directly to Vance to ask that the investigation be dropped….
(Although not ending with an indictment, evidence gathered in this matter might be used in a subsequent prosecution to show a pattern of dishonesty.)
Chris Strohm reports that Russian Hackers Stole NSA Information From Contractor, Source Says:
Russian hackers obtained classified information about National Security Agency cybersecurity programs after breaching a personal computer used by an agency contractor in 2015, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The contractor, who wasn’t identified, took the classified material home, where Russian hackers stole it by exploiting vulnerabilities in Kaspersky Lab Inc. software that he had on his computer, according to the person, who asked not to be identified….
See also Russian Kaspersky Lab faces new scrutiny, suspicion, Kaspersky Lab Antivirus Software Is Ordered Off U.S. Government Computers.
Josh Dawsey, Emily Stephenson, and Andrea Peterson report that John Kelly’s personal cell phone was compromised, White House believes:
White House officials believe that chief of staff John Kelly’s personal cellphone was compromised, potentially as long ago as December, according to three U.S. government officials.
The discovery raises concerns that hackers or foreign governments may have had access to data on Kelly’s phone while he was secretary of Homeland Security and after he joined the West Wing.
Tech support staff discovered the suspected breach after Kelly turned his phone in to White House tech support this summer complaining that it wasn’t working or updating software properly.
Kelly told the staffers the phone hadn’t been working properly for months, according to the officials.
White House aides prepared a one-page September memo summarizing the incident, which was circulated throughout the administration….
Monarchs by the Millions Await in the Butterfly Forest:
(You may have heard that a local official’s address would be a wonderful opportunity, and that one should be fortunate for it. No, and no again: wonder is to be found elsewhere, in other places, among them the created, natural order.)