FREE WHITEWATER

Daily Bread for 12.15.20

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty-six.  Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 02m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is both the one thousand four hundred ninety-eighth day and the thirty-ninth day. 

The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM

On this day in 1791, Bill of Rights is ratified after the Virginia General Assembly becomes the 11th state to ratify. 

Recommended for reading in full — 

David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth, and Eric Schmitt report Scope of Russian Hack Becomes Clear: Multiple U.S. Agencies Were Hit (‘The Pentagon, intelligence agencies, nuclear labs and Fortune 500 companies use software that was found to have been compromised by Russian hackers. The sweep of stolen data is still being assessed’):

The scope of a hack engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday, when some Trump administration officials acknowledged that other federal agencies — the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and parts of the Pentagon — had been compromised. Investigators were struggling to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence community and nuclear laboratories were affected by the highly sophisticated attack.

United States officials did not detect the attack until recent weeks, and then only when a private cybersecurity firm, FireEye, alerted American intelligence that the hackers had evaded layers of defenses.

It was evident that the Treasury and Commerce Departments, the first agencies reported to be breached, were only part of a far larger operation whose sophistication stunned even experts who have been following a quarter-century of Russian hacks on the Pentagon and American civilian agencies.

About 18,000 private and government users downloaded a Russian tainted software update — a Trojan horse of sorts — that gave its hackers a foothold into victims’ systems, according to SolarWinds, the company whose software was compromised.

Among those who use SolarWinds software are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department, the Justice Department, parts of the Pentagon and a number of utility companies. While the presence of the software is not by itself evidence that each network was compromised and information was stolen, investigators spent Monday trying to understand the extent of the damage in what could be a significant loss of American data to a foreign attacker.

 Keli Goff writes Dr. Jill Biden won’t be a ‘traditional’ US first lady. Some men are threatened by that:

Last week the writer Joseph Epstein embarrassed himself by publishing a Wall Street Journal column denigrating incoming first lady Jill Biden for using the “Dr” title she earned with her doctorate. He wrote: “Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo. Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.”

The backlash was swift. The president-elect’s communications director, Kate Bedingfield, tweeted: “What patronizing, sexist, elitist drivel”. The daughter of Martin Luther King Jr tweeted in support of Jill Biden, reminding people that her father used the title Dr, despite not being a medical doctor. She added “And his work benefited humanity greatly, yours does, too.” And the first lady to be replied herself in a tweet on Sunday, saying: “Together, we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughters will be celebrated, rather than diminished.”

Epstein’s article exposed the cultural powder-keg Biden was always destined to ignite. She maintained her professional career teaching community college while serving as second lady and intends to continue working as first lady. While some of us are thrilled with that, others, like Epstein are threatened.

Russell Rising — The Role of Churches in Rebuilding a Community:

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