Good morning.
Here in Whitewater we’ve partly cloudy skies and a high of minus one ahead for Sunday. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, slavery ends in the United States as the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed by the states on December 6th, goes into in effect after Sec. of State Seward’s certification. (“Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”) On this day in 1950, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin makes an unsuccessful bid to be the site of the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Worth reading in full —
John Schmid reports that, in a troubled area, a Faith-based pay-what-you-can cafe opens in Sherman Park: “The Tricklebee Cafe, an elegant pay-what-you-can restaurant at 4424 W. North Ave., held its grand opening this week. In a community with an abundance of empty storefronts, the faith-based nonprofit favors vegetarian fare and furnished itself with the pews, pulpit and hymnal board of a former church in northern Wisconsin. “We will never turn anyone away if they don’t have the means to pay,” said the Rev. Christie Melby-Gibbons, an ordained pastor of the Moravian Church, a Protestant denomination. Nor will the Tricklebee turn away patrons who feel philanthropic enough to pay above and beyond the suggested per-meal donation of $5.69-$6.46, a range calculated to cover the cost of procuring locally grown organic food, utilities, rent and a “living wage” for the paid staff. “If people want to ‘pay it forward,’ we gracefully accept that, too,” Melby-Gibbons said. The cafe is open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. It launched without fanfare in time for Thanksgiving and used the past month to develop a daily operating rhythm for the kitchen that begins with early morning baking. It reserved its formal inaugural opening for this week.”
Although some Britons worry that Brexit will harm their economy, at least one has found work, as Mike McIntire describes How a Putin Fan Overseas Pushed Pro-Trump Propaganda to Americans: “The Patriot News Agency website popped up in July, soon after it became clear that Donald J. Trump would win the Republican presidential nomination, bearing a logo of a red, white and blue eagle and the motto “Built by patriots, for patriots.” Patriot News — whose postings were viewed and shared tens of thousands of times in the United States — is among a constellation of websites run out of the United Kingdom that are linked to James Dowson, a far-right political activist who advocated Britain’s exit from the European Union and is a fan of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. A vocal proponent of Christian nationalist, anti-immigrant movements in Europe, Mr. Dowson, 52, has spoken at a conference of far-right leaders in Russia and makes no secret of his hope that Mr. Trump will usher in an era of rapprochement with Mr. Putin.”
(There’s limitless audacity in a Briton calling his site a ‘patriot news network.’)
Those who’ve for years argued a so-called ‘states’ rights’ case might want to think about what it means when huge and powerful California takes up that position against a Trump Administration. James Fallows annotates Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent speech to the American Geophysical Union:
“From 4:30 to 5:15 [in the video], Brown begins one of his “we’re ready to fight” riffs. The speech as a whole is unpolished, but among its charms is Brown’s ability to seem self-aware and even self-mocking. An example is in this passage: First he says that Big Tobacco was brought down by a combination of scientists and lawyers. Then, “And in California, we’ve got plenty of lawyers! … We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers, and we’re ready to fight!”
At 5:30, he introduces the “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Brown? You’re not a country” argument, about the way California has used its technical advances and sheer scale to set national and even international environmental standards. “We have a lot of firepower! We’ve got the scientists. We’ve got the universities. We have the national labs. We have a lot of political clout and sophistication for the battle. And we will persevere!”
So many are Trump’s conflicts of interest that one has trouble keeping track. Jeremy Venook provides Donald Trump’s Conflicts of Interest: A Crib Sheet: “legality does not imply propriety. Unless Trump acts to put appropriate distance between himself and his business ventures, these questions are likely to continue throughout his time in the Oval Office. Below is an attempt to catalogue the more clear-cut examples of conflicts of interest that have emerged so far; the most recent entries appear at the top.
- Those Certificates of Divestiture
- That Carrier Deal
- That Blind-Trust Issue
- Those Fannie and Freddie Investments
- That Phone Call With Taiwan
- That Deutsche Bank Debt
- That Secret Service Detail
- That Property in Georgia (the Country)
- That Phone Call With Erdogan
- That Las Vegas Labor Dispute
- That Hotel in Washington, D.C.
- That Argentinian Office Building
- Those Companies in Saudi Arabia
- That British Wind Farm
- Those Indian Business Partners
- That Envoy From the Philippines“
Courtesy of the European Space Agency, one sees how beautiful Mars is —