Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see a mix of rain & snow in the morning, with a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 4:33 PM, for 9h 49m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 32.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred sixty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1942, the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (part of the larger Guadalcanal campaign) begins: “In the resulting battle, both sides lost numerous warships in two extremely destructive surface engagements at night. Nevertheless, the U.S. succeeded in turning back attempts by the Japanese to bombard Henderson Field with battleships. Allied aircraft also sank most of the Japanese troop transports and prevented the majority of the Japanese troops and equipment from reaching Guadalcanal. Thus, the battle turned back Japan’s last major attempt to dislodge Allied forces from Guadalcanal and nearby Tulagi, resulting in a strategic victory for the U.S. and its allies and deciding the ultimate outcome of the Guadalcanal campaign in their favor.”
On this day in 1863, the 33rd Wisconsin Infantry leaves for the South: “It would go on to serve in Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, and Louisiana. It participated in the sieges of Jackson and Vicksburg, the Red River Expedition, the Battle of Nashville, the siege of Spanish Fort and the capture of Fort Blakely. It would lose 202 men during service. Three officers and 30 enlisted men were killed. Two officers and 167 enlisted men died from disease.”
Recommended for reading in full —
David Frum observes These Are Not The Actions of an Innocent Man (“Trump’s after-the-fact complicity in Russia’s election meddling is abundantly clear”):
“Every time he sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe that.”—Donald Trump on Vladimir Putin, en route to Hanoi, November 11, 2017.
So, to put it bluntly: At this point in the proceedings, there can be no innocent explanation for Donald Trump’s rejection of the truth about Russian meddling in last year’s elections. Earlier, it may have been suggested, sympathetically, that the case had not yet been proven. That Trump’s vanity blocked him from acknowledging embarrassing facts. Or—more hopefully—that he was inspired by some Kissingerian grand design for a diplomatic breakthrough. Or that he was lazy. Or stubborn. Or uninformed. Or something, anything, other than … complicit. Not anymore.
As yet, it remains unproven whether Trump himself was personally complicit in Putin’s attack on U.S. democracy as it happened during last year’s presidential campaign. What is becoming ever-more undeniable is Trump’s complicity in the attack after the fact—and his willingness to smash the intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies in order to protect Putin, Russia, and evidently himself….
Sarah Kendzior asks Voter ID laws, hackers, gerrymandering – just how much can a democracy take?:
On July 3, a group of Georgia voters filed a lawsuit against state officials following the discovery that their voting machines were deeply vulnerable to hackers and had possibly been breached.
This information was not news to the sued officials: a cybersecurity expert had discovered and reported breaches in August 2016, and even more vulnerabilities were reported in March 2017 – but nothing was done to fix them. Instead, elections were held in Georgia with ostensibly faulty equipment, making the results of both the November 2016 election and a high-profile special congressional election in June 2017 questionable.
Were Georgia’s elections compromised?
We will never know, because on July 7, 2017, a computer server critical to the lawsuit was destroyed. It’s not clear who ordered the data wipe, but it occurred on the watch of Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a defendant in the lawsuit and a Republican running for governor in 2018. And it makes any forensic investigation of the machines now impossible.
The Georgia election server attack barely made the news – distracted as we were by nuclear threats, treasonous officials, and neo-Nazi rallies – but this quiet scandal is both a devastating reminder of unanswered questions about the 2016 election and a harbinger of threats to come….
Rebecca Ruiz reports Antidoping Officials Obtain Trove of Russian Lab Data:
The World Anti-Doping Agency, the global regulator of drugs in sports, said Friday it had obtained a digital trove of information that could greatly expand revelations about Russia’s state-sponsored doping program. The massive scheme has corrupted the results of several Olympics and has imperiled the country’s eligibility for the coming Winter Games in South Korea.
The agency said that its investigations department had been in possession since late October of an electronic file that was long considered a final piece of the puzzle revealing the contours of the doping system. The agency said in a news release that it was confident that the file contained “all testing data” from January 2012 to August 2015 — thousands of drug screenings run on Russian athletes.
“This evidence could be another mother lode and potentially open a new dimension to the gravity of the fraud perpetrated by the Russia doping conspiracy,” Travis T. Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, said Friday. “Clean athletes expect and deserve justice and the whole truth being brought to light.”
The database, which the Russian authorities were unwilling to share with antidoping investigators, arrived through a whistle-blower, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity….
For an excellent documentary on sports doping under Putin, there’s Icarus from Netflix:
James Gorman reports Lab Chimps Are Moving to Sanctuaries — Slowly:
Bo, the leader of his group, looks around his new home. Bo and his companions were lucky to have been kept together in a group that proved to be stable and friendly. Credit Melissa Golden for The New York Times.
BLUE RIDGE, Ga. — On the 16-hour ride from Louisiana, Bo looked out the window, took in the scenery, dozed and relaxed.He was traveling with five other male chimps from the New Iberia Research Center in Lafayette, La., where they had been members of a colony of nearly 200 animals kept for biomedical and other research.
During the ride, some of the other chimps hooted, restless and unsettled. Not Bo. “He’s the best,” said the driver of the truck.
The animals arrived at Project Chimps, a sanctuary at the southern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains about 100 miles north of Atlanta, at 6:30 a.m. one day last spring. As the sanctuary staff began to open the truck and move the chimps’ cages inside the facility, the occupants hooted and screamed, anxious and uncertain about what was going on….
Currently, about 547 chimps are still held at research institutions, according to ChimpCARE, a site that tracks all chimps in the United States. Some of them are owned or supported by the N.I.H., and some are owned by research institutes like New Iberia, which is part of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
All the government chimps are headed to Chimp Haven, a sanctuary in Keithville, La., where they will have a full social life and room to roam outdoors.
Some critics say the process has been unnecessarily slow, but both Chimp Haven and the N.I.H. say transfers are moving more quickly now. The sanctuary has accepted 14 chimps in the past two months and is expecting more before the end of the year.
Chimp Haven, with a staff of 50, more than 200 chimps and a 30-year history, has had a lot of experience caring for retired chimps. They are kept in mixed groups of various sizes and their social interactions monitored….
Great Big Story tells of Making South Korea’s Secret Sauce:
In Korea, the secret sauce has long been gochujang. From kimchi to bibimbap to Korean BBQ, gochujang is a favorite among chefs everywhere, and is poised to soon become as big as Sriracha. In Korea, no one makes it better than Seo Youngsoon. She’s been stirring up the stuff for the past 40 years, using traditional techniques passed down from generation to generation. By teaching others how to make the sauce using traditional methods, she is helping preserve a recipe that epitomizes Korean gastronomy and culture.