Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy in the morning, sunnier in the afternoon, with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 21m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 7.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1838, the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature assembles in Madison for the first time.
Worth reading or watching in full —
Fidel Castro’s dead, but the Cuba Archive has a record of the people his regime killed or tortured: “Cuba Archive’s Truth and Memory Project documents deaths and disappearances resulting from the Cuban revolution and studies transitional issues of truth, memory and justice. This seeks to help Cubans attain their rightful freedoms, foster a culture of respect for life and the rule of law, and honor the memory of those who’ve paid the highest price.”
Putin’s been busy, as Researchers Identify 200 Websites That ‘Reliably Echo Russian Propaganda’ to Millions of Americans: “Russia had a hand in spreading fake news to millions of Americans during the election cycle, according to two independent research groups, PropOrNot and Foreign Policy Research Institute. The Washington Post was the first media outlet to report PropOrNot’s findings that there are over 200 websites described as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.” The most recognizable names on the list of “sites that reliably echo Russian propaganda” include Alex Jones’ Infowars, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks and Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report. Others include The Federalist Papers, ZeroHedge, the Free Thought Project and USAPoliticsNow.”
Netflix & Amazon subscribers have The Heavy Water War (original title: Kampen om tungtvannet; Norwegian with English subtitles) on offer: “A mini-series based on the true story of the Norwegian saboteurs who crippled Nazi Germany’s nuclear weapons research program.”
Simon Denyer writes about how China wants to give all of its citizens a score – and their rating could affect every area of their lives: “This is not the dystopian superstate of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, in which all-knowing police stop crime before it happens. But it could be China by 2020. It is the scenario contained in China’s ambitious plans to develop a far-reaching social credit system, a plan that the Communist Party hopes will build a culture of “sincerity” and a “harmonious socialist society” where “keeping trust is glorious.” A high-level policy document released in September listed the sanctions that could be imposed on any person or company deemed to have fallen short. The overriding principle: “If trust is broken in one place, restrictions are imposed everywhere.” A whole range of privileges would be denied, while people and companies breaking social trust would also be subject to expanded daily supervision and random inspections. The ambition is to collect every scrap of information available online about China’s companies and citizens in a single place – and then assign each of them a score based on their political, commercial, social and legal “credit.”
We may someday build a city on the moon, but we may not truly be the ones to do so: