Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy and cold, with a high of eleven. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset is 4:21 PM, for 9h 03m 26s of daytime. The moon’s full today, with 99.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1918, Pres. Wilson arrives in Versailles. Wilson, flawed in other ways, yet argued for a generous peace. On this day in 1864,the 3rd Wisconsin Light Artillery reaches Savannah, Georgia.
Worth reading in full —
Jacob Carpenter writes that Supervisors want outside reviews of jail deaths: “Two Milwaukee County supervisors are offering a resolution to require outside investigations of deaths at the Milwaukee County Jail — a mandate they don’t have the authority to impose, according to county lawyers. County board Chairman Theodore Lipscomb Sr. and Supervisor Supreme Moore Omokunde are sponsoring the resolution, announced Monday afternoon, in light of four deaths since April at the jail. The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the jail, is investigating three of the four deaths. The fourth is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Milwaukee Police Department.”
David Filipov explains What is the Russian Order of Friendship, and why does Trump’s pick for secretary of state have one?: “[W]hile there may be plenty of valid concerns about the Russian entanglements of Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of ExxonMobil tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be the next secretary of state, his 2013 Order of Friendship award, based on its own merits, isn’t necessarily one of them. Tillerson won the award after signing deals with the state-owned Russian oil company, Rosneft, whose chief, Igor Sechin, is seen as Putin’s loyal lieutenant. The partnership had begun a drilling program in the Arctic’s Kara Sea, where Exxon made a find, and had agreed to explore shale oil areas of West Siberia and deep waters of the Black Sea. But U.S. sanctions against Russia over the annexation of Crimea kicked in and the partnership was put on hold. ExxonMobil spent $650 million to drill one wildcat hole in the Kara Sea, and had gotten just a measly sample of oil, said Mikhail Krutikhin, co-owner of RusEnergy, an independent oil and gas consultancy. (The head of the Italian oil major Eni also won a 2013 Order of Friendship.)”
Jonathan Chait explains Trump’s thinking in The Russian Conspiracy on Behalf of Conspiracy Theorist Donald Trump: “Donald Trump is America’s most successful conspiracy theorist. He won the market share within the conservative-media entertainment complex that ultimately enabled his victory by energetically promoting a conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birthplace. He kept it up and up and up: Global warming is a Chinese hoax to gain market advantage; the real unemployment rate is many times higher than the official one; Antonin Scalia may have been murdered; Ted Cruz’s dad helped kill JFK, and on and on. And yet the oddity of his election, or one of the oddities, is that it was enabled in part by a conspiracy, a real one. Russia sponsored a hacking operation that likely had the effect, and almost certainly had the intent, of making him president. One of the most astonishing conspiracies in American history helped make a conspiracy theorist president….While it may give Trump too much credit to assume he has followed a considered strategy, there is a coherent pattern to the discourse he has promoted. It is a comprehensive attack on empiricism. He spreads distrust against every institution, so that the only possible grounds for belief is trust in a person. The suspicion he spreads against every institution protects Trump from accountability. If everybody is guilty — what governments don’t murder journalists? — then nobody is guilty. Questions about Trump’s own suspicious financial and political ties are simply more conspiracy theories.”
Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander show How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News: “Meanwhile, roughly 6,000 miles away in a small town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, a young man watched as money began trickling into his Google AdSense account. Over the past year, the Macedonian town of Veles (population 45,000) has experienced a digital gold rush as locals launched at least 140 US politics websites. These sites have American-sounding domain names such as WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co, and USADailyPolitics.com. They almost all publish aggressively pro-Trump content aimed at conservatives and Trump supporters in the US. The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don’t care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising — a declining market for American publishers — goes a long way in Veles. Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook — and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters.”
So how would humans hide from extraterrestrials? Here’s one possible (although not fool-proof) way: