Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of twenty-seven. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 4:33 PM, for 9h 47m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 31.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred thirty-fourth day.
On this day in 1858, the Heileman Brewery is founded:
[O]ne of Wisconsin’s best-known breweries was established by John Gund and Gottlieb Heileman (1824-1878). By the time Gund retired in 1872, the firm’s annual beer production had increased from 500 barrels in 1860 to 3,000. By the turn of the century, as this postcard shows, it had become one of the city’s largest manufacturing concerns, and throughout the 20th century its storage tanks (painted to resemble a six-pack of beer) were a LaCrosse landmark.
Recommended for reading in full — North Korea continues missile deployment despite Trump’s optimism, America’s struggle for moral coherence, trolls work to get around social media bans, GOP rep Steve King caught lying, and video on whether peanut butter is the new condiment for burgers —
David E. Sanger and William J. Broad report In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception:
North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.
The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.
The existence of the ballistic missile bases, which North Korea has never acknowledged, contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination of a nuclear and missile program that the North had warned could devastate the United States.
“We are in no rush,” Mr. Trump said of talks with the North at a news conference on Wednesday, after Republicans lost control of the House. “The sanctions are on. The missiles have stopped. The rockets have stopped. The hostages are home.”
….
The secret ballistic missile bases were identified in a detailed study published Monday by the Beyond Parallel program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major think tank in Washington.
(The only thing that’s stopped is any reason to take Trump at his word on North Korea policy. To be honest, credulity on the topic never should have started.)
Andrew Delbanco considers lessons opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law in America’s Struggle for Moral Coherence:
Through most of his career, Lincoln himself tried to walk the line between compliance and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law. Repulsed by the Southern demand that “we must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure,” he nevertheless pledged to respect the law. Even after his election as president and well into the Civil War, he continued trying to reconcile his revulsion at slavery with his devotion to the union. Accused from the right of being an antislavery radical, he was reviled from the left for dragging his feet in the struggle against slavery for the sake of the illusory dream that the union could be preserved.
In that sense, Lincoln was the embodiment of America’s long struggle to remake itself as a morally coherent nation. Under his leadership, the Civil War finally resolved the problem of fugitive slaves by destroying the institution from which they had fled. By the time of his death, some 4 million black Americans were no longer at risk of forcible return to their erstwhile masters. They had entered the limbo between the privations of their past and the future promise of American life—a state of suspension in which millions of black Americans still live.
The problem of the 1850s was a political problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.
Ben Collins reports In secret chats, trolls struggle to get Twitter disinformation campaigns off the ground:
In some cases, Twitter’s algorithm could not catch up with persistent trolls working together in private chats. NBC News witnessed trolls developing new strategies on the fly to circumvent the bans. Several were successful in creating unique identities that appeared to be middle-aged women who posted anti-Trump rhetoric as part of a long-term effort to build up followings that could later be used to seed disinformation to hundreds or thousands of followers.
One troll who stole a woman’s identity came up with a plan to skirt reverse image search programs that would show users the real identity of the woman in its stolen profile picture.
“If you want a Twitter pic that is a completely unique photo and not an actual person, use the Snapchat filter where you can layer another face,” said one user. “It will be a completely unique face.”
Kristine Phillips reports Steve King dared a conservative magazine to release audio of him calling immigrants ‘dirt.’ It did:
Rep. Steve King, the newly reelected Iowa Republican with a history of incendiary comments about race and immigration, dared a conservative magazine to show evidence that he had called immigrants “dirt.”
“Just release the full tape,” King, who eked out a victory last week despite affiliations with white nationalists, told the Weekly Standard’s online managing editor Saturday on Twitter. Days earlier, the magazine reported that King had made an inflammatory joke about immigrants.
The Weekly Standard released the recording — a two-minute audio in which King can be heard bantering with a handful of supporters at the back of an Iowa restaurant during a campaign stop on Nov. 5, the magazine reported. He talked about pheasant hunting and his “patented pheasant noodle soup” sprinkled with whole jalapeño peppers he had grown himself. Around the 1:20 mark, King joked that he’d have to get some “dirt from Mexico” to grow his next batch of peppers because they didn’t have enough bite.