Daily Bread for 11.25.16

Good morning.

Whitewater’s Friday will be cloudy with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 7 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 23m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 13.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, British soldiers evacuate New York, their last stronghold during the Revolution; George Washington later led the Continental Army into Manhattan.  On this day in 1863, fourteen Wisconsin units – seven infantry, seven artillery – participate in breaking the siege at Chattanooga.

Worth reading in full —   

Craig Timberg reports on how two teams have researchers have concluded that Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election: “Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.  Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.”

Those who thought that Trump would #DraintheSwamp are in for disappointment (one of many), as Trump [is] expected to tap billionaire investor Wilbur Ross for commerce secretary: “Wilbur Ross, the billionaire investor considered the “king of bankruptcy” for buying beaten-down companies with the potential to deliver profits, is expected to be President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for commerce secretary, two officials with knowledge of the decision said.  Ross helped shape the Trump campaign’s economic agenda, particularly its hard-line stance on the need to renegotiate — or even withdraw from — free trade agreements. That position resonated with the working class voters who were instrumental in delivering Trump’s upset victory. Elevating Ross to a position in his Cabinet could suggest that Trump intends to nurture the nationalist streak that was one of the hallmarks of his campaign.”

Yair Rosenberg describes (one way) How to Fight Anti-Semitic Trolls and Bigotry Online:

In How Journalists Need to Begin Imagining the Unimaginable, Eric Umansky interviews Masha Gessen on Trump’s transformative campaign: “Many reporters had gone directly from the state of total disbelief that Trump will never be the Republican nominee, even when he had the nomination locked in. Their argument, when I would ask people, they would say, “Well, I just can’t imagine it happening.” Well, if you can’t imagine it happening, that’s your problem. When somebody says, “I can’t imagine it happening,” that’s a problem. Then what happened was that there was this whole direction of coverage that held, incredibly to me for the entire campaign, this idea that Trump was somehow Putin’s agent and that Russia was meddling in the election and that Russia was rigging the election. There’s a little tiny bit of evidence for it, but that’s a classic conspiracy theory phenomenon where’s there is a little bit of evidence but that’s not what happened. What happened was an American phenomenon, a home-grown potential autocrat who was elected by Americans. It was so difficult to imagine that this was happening here that it was actually easier to do this complete bend over backwards maneuver that would position him as some sort of agent of Putin and Clinton’s campaign ran with it.

Americans had Thanksgiving dinner here, and the astronauts of the International Space Station prepared for it, too: