Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty-four. Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 37m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred thirty-ninth day.
On this day in 1883, time zones come to America:
U.S. and Canadian railroads implemented a version proposed by William F. Allen, the editor of the Traveler’s Official Railway Guide.[6] The borders of its time zones ran through railroad stations, often in major cities. For example, the border between its Eastern and Central time zones ran through Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Charleston. It was inaugurated on Sunday, November 18, 1883, also called “The Day of Two Noons”,[7] when each railroad station clock was reset as standard-time noon was reached within each time zone.
Recommended for reading in full — the truth about the migrant caravan, fact-checking Trump’s broken record of lies, the radical [Putin-oriented] evolution of WikiLeaks, acting A.G. Whitaker’s company hawked crackpot ideas like time travel, the hunt for Bigfoot, and fresh fruit laced with cannabis (I’ll take my fruit plain, thanks very much), and a video on turkey carving —
Stephanie Martin reports a Pastor Wanted to Know the Truth About the Migrant Caravan. So He Joined It:
Saying he’s interested in people not politics, a Texas pastor is traveling with the migrant caravan in Mexico. Gavin Rogers, associate pastor at San Antonio’s Travis Park United Methodist Church, has been documenting his journey—and the relationships he’s forming—on Facebook.
Rogers writes about long days of traveling with 6,000 refugees via a wide variety of methods. Reaching Guadalajara, for example, involved covering 400 kilometers in “23 hours of walking, hitchhiking and police escorts. Walking. Car, semi-trailer, truck, police truck, dump truck, bus, shelter.”
On November 11, the pastor posted, “It is a long road. But life is good when you are with people filled with love and hospitality.” A Mexican truck driver who volunteered to drive some refugees to their next shelter site said he acted “because I’m human.” The subway in Mexico City also provided free rides to the traveling refugees.
Hoping to dispel fear and falsehoods about caravan members, Rogers is sharing photos of what the migrants and the people helping them really look like. “Kindness is all over the place,” he writes next to posts of “real images of Mexican police officers and refugees.”
The pastor criticizes people, including Christians, who are sharing images about “the supposed violence in the caravan.” When someone posted to Rogers’ Facebook page photos depicting violence, an image search revealed they were actually from 2012. One such post has been removed, probably because of its misleading nature. Local officers Rogers has talked to say the caravan has been overwhelmingly peaceful, with no police-related conflicts.
Daniel Dale writes It’s easy to fact check Trump’s lies. He tells the same ones all the time:
I’ve made it my mission to fact-check every word Donald Trump utters as president. That means trying to watch every speech, read every transcript, decipher every tweet. I’ve accidentally established a reputation for using Twitter to point out that he’s lying within seconds of him telling a lie.
People sometimes ask in response how I can blast out these corrections so quickly. But I have no special talent. My secret is that Trump tells the same lies over and over.
On his fifth day in office, Trump baselessly alleged widespread voter fraud. He did the same thing this past week. In his third month in office, Trump falsely claimed that the United States has a $500 billion trade deficit with China. He has said the same thing more than 80 times since.
Listen to this president long enough, and you can almost sense when a lie is coming. If Trump tells a story in which an unnamed person calls him “sir,” it’s probably invented. If Trump claims he has set a record, he probably hasn’t. If Trump cites any number at all, the real number is usually smaller.
Fact-checking Trump is kind of like fact-checking one of those talking dolls programmed to say the same phrases for eternity, except if none of those phrases were true. As any parent who owns a squealing Elmo can tell you, the phrases can get tiresome. I’m sure my Twitter followers get bored when I remind them that Trump wasn’t the president who got the Veterans Choice health-care program passed (Barack Obama signed it into law in 2014 ), that U.S. Steel is not building six, seven, eight or nine new plants (it has recently invested in two existing plants) and that foreign governments don’t force their unsavory citizens into the lottery for U.S. green cards (would-be immigrants enter of their own free will).
(Can’t recommend Daniel Dale highly enough – one can follow his excellent work on Twitter @ddale8 . Trump, himself, is a challenge in part because he’s a stunted man – intellectually & knowledgeably who speaks grandiosely of himself and responds to others mostly through crude, irritating fallacies. Normal, rational people have trouble managing outrageous liars, and usually seek to avoid them, and Trump battens on others’ discomfort.)
Kathy Gilsinan reports The Radical Evolution of WikiLeaks:
In the meantime, though, WikiLeaks has been accused of turning into something much worse than a mere purveyor of information, however uncomfortable—or even, some would argue, dangerous—for its subjects. For WikiLeaks’ role in releasing hacked emails stolen by Russian intelligence from the Democratic National Committee, then–CIA Director Mike Pompeo in 2017 declared it to be the agent of a “hostile intelligence service.”
In that case, too, it appeared that many of the documents released were authentic chronicles of real disputes within the DNC about the conduct of the 2016 primary contest between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Yet even true information can paint a distorted picture: The publication of a large volume of information detrimental to Clinton and not to Trump seemed to align with what the intelligence community identified as Russia’s intent to help Trump win.
[Read: Donald Trump, WikiLeaks, and Russia: a timeline]
Over the years, the common thread connecting WikiLeaks’ biggest stories, from Collateral Murder to the DNC leaks, is that even what’s billed as anodyne “transparency” is seldom neutral. The choice to publish anything of consequence will always have political effects. And mere “information” may be something less than the truth if it comes without context about who is wielding that information and to what end. Even a massive document dump never quite tells the full story.
Greg Walters and Nick Miriello report Acting AG Matt Whitaker Worked for a Company that Hawked “Time Travel” Technology and Other Insane Products:
The company’s Twitter account also traded in racist messaging and political outrage, and appeared to throw its support behind Trump, announcing plans in 2015 for a super PAC called Republicans Invent.
Oh, and it promoted a future where “time travel” technology was within reach.
“World-renowned physicist, author, and scholar Dr. Ronald Mallett believes time travel is possible, perhaps within the next decade…. World Patent Marketing has partnered with Dr. Ronald Mallett to make his vision a reality,” the company wrote in a caption on its Vimeo page.
….
Below are a list of some of the ideas and products World Patent Marketing promoted before a federal judge forced its closure and ordered the firm to pay $26 million in this year.
—The hunt for Bigfoot. World Patent Marketing CEO Scott Cooper offered $1 million for proof of Sasquatch’s existence, while peddling Bigfoot dolls.
—A toilet specially designed for well-endowed men. “The distance between the rim and the water surface needs to be long enough to ensure there is no risk of contact,” the press release for the “masculine toilet” said.
—A sticky-dart gun, for mounting on the grill of a cop car. “When the officer gets within range of a fleeing vehicle, they simply pull the trigger and a sticky dart shoots out and attaches itself to the criminal’s ride,” the press release says. Then the dart provides GPS coordinates of the fleeing suspect.
— An invention that combines weed with “fresh fruit,” whatever that means.
—Disposable underwear for women. A product called Kntrol Disposable Underwear was featured in a press release as “a personal care invention created for women to prevent leakage.”
— The next skinny jeans, which are apparently just big, bulky, workman jeans. “Hipster’s Skinny Jeans Are Out And World Patent Marketing’s Miller Industrial Jeans Are In For Hard Labor,” the company announced.
— Green Leaf Organic, an “alternative to smokeless tobacco and chewing tobacco,” which the company presented as a solution to a smoking habit.