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Daily Bread for 12.24.17

Good morning.

Christmas Eve in Whitewater will be cloudy with snow showers and a high of twenty-three. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 02m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 32% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred tenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

After years of war, on this day in 1814 the United States and Britain sign the Treaty of Ghent. The treaty formalized U.S. possession of land which included present-day Wisconsin.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Luke Harding and Stephanie Kirchgaessner report Ex-Trump adviser Carter Page accused academics who twice failed his PhD of bias:

Carter Page, Donald Trump’s former foreign policy adviser, accused his British examiners of “anti-Russian bias” after they took the highly unusual step of failing his “verbose” and “vague” PhD thesis, not once but twice….

Page first submitted his thesis on central Asia’s transition from communism to capitalism in 2008. Two respected academics, Professor Gregory Andrusz, and Dr Peter Duncan, were asked to read his thesis and to examine him in a face-to-face interview known as a viva.

Andrusz said he had expected it would be “easy” to pass Page, a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas). He said it actually took “days and days” to wade through Page’s work. Page “knew next to nothing” about social science and seemed “unfamiliar with basic concepts like Marxism or state capitalism,” the professor said….

The viva, held at University College, London, went badly. “Page seemed to think that if he talked enough, people would think he was well-informed. In fact it was the reverse,” Andrusz said. He added that Page was “dumbfounded” when the examiners told him he had failed.

Their subsequent report was withering. It said Page’s thesis was “characterised by considerable repetition, verbosity and vagueness of expression”, failed to meet the criteria required for a PhD, and needed “substantial revision”. He was given 18 months to produce another draft.

Page resubmitted in November 2010. Although this essay was a “substantial improvement” it still didn’t merit a PhD and wasn’t publishable in a “learned journal of international repute”, Andrusz noted. When after a four-hour interview, the examiners informed him he had failed again, Page grew “extremely agitated”….

(Just the sort of ignoramus who’d find his way to the Trump campaign.)

John Sipher writes of Russian Active Measures and the 2016 Election Hack:

….Putin’s rage: The scale and brazen nature of the 2016 attack can be attributed in part to the personality of Vladimir Putin. For Putin, years of resentment against the U.S. for perceived disrespect and betrayal, culminating in 2012 street riots in Moscow and the publication of the Panama papers, created a convenient target in Hillary Clinton and the Washington foreign policy establishment. Putin’s animus toward Clinton increased his tolerance for risk, and willingness to show his hand.

U.S. wasn’t prepared: By 2016, the years of focus on terrorism and the Middle East had fooled many into assuming that the Russians were no longer a threat. Greater familiarity with the Russian threat led to a better defense during the Cold War. Indeed, proximity to an aggressive Russia helped our European allies be better prepared to counter Russian propaganda and fake stories in 2015 and 2016. They Russians tried similar methods in France, Germany and elsewhere but did not have the same level of success.

Collusion? According to Russian doctrine, a successful active measures campaign relies on enlisting spies and “agents-of-influence” to help focus the attack. The Russians certainly called on all available resources to insure success, and like any good intelligence service, continued to seek new spies. Were the Russians aided by collaborators inside or around the Trump campaign, or inside our social media companies? We don’t know. If not, it would be a rare covert campaign that did not leverage human sources.

We do know, however, that countering similar attacks in the future will be made more difficult by the failure to hold Russia to account, and by Trump administration attacks on the media and national security institutions. Weakening our defenses does not seem a wise course of action….

(A ‘rare [Russian] covert campaign that did not leverage human sources’: Success of Putin’s efforts depended on American dupes, fellow travelers, and fifth columnists.)

David Frum observes Republicans Exact Their Revenge Through a Tax Bill (“Instead of eliminating favoritism, the GOP’s reforms load the costs of the state upon disfavored persons, groups, and regions”):

….If the idea behind tax reform is to eliminate favoritism from the tax code, then the tax law of 2017 is anti-reform: an aggressive loading of the costs of the state upon disfavored persons, groups, and regions. It leaves behind an unstable legacy, both economic and political. Economically, the system invites gaming. Politically, it accelerates the exodus of college-educated professionals out of the Republican Party. It will tint the blue states ever bluer, up and down the income scale.

States like California and New York desperately need a competitive Republican Party—especially at the state level—to challenge the lazy and often corrupt practices of local Democratic machines. This new tax law will have the opposite effect, wrecking whatever little remains of GOP strength in the states that motor American innovation and growth. It threatens to push New Jersey, Colorado, and Virginia into single-party blue rule as well, by painfully demonstrating that the party of Trump is not only obnoxious to their values but implacably hostile to their welfare….

McKay Coppins asks Has Trump Persuaded Orrin Hatch to Block Mitt Romney’s Senate Bid? (“The longtime Utah senator had promised this term would be his last, and told friends he planned on retiring. But after the president’s intervention, he may be changing his mind”):

After months of quietly laying the groundwork for his own retirement, the 83-year-old Utah senator has signaled to Republican allies in recent weeks that he’s having second thoughts about leaving office when his term ends next year. Interviews with 10 people familiar with the situation—some of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly—suggest that President Trump’s efforts to convince Hatch to seek reelection have influenced the senator’s thinking….

“Many of the senator’s recent positions and statements have led Utahns to speculate if he was falling into the trap that so many politicians do,” [Boyd] Matheson said, “becoming more interested in solving their own political problems than solving the American people’s problems.” As an example, he contrasted Hatch’s decision to defend Trump’s endorsement of Roy Moore with Romney’s insistence that electing a man credibly accused of sexually abusing teenage girls “would be a stain on the GOP and on the nation.” Hatch’s response, Matheson said, “has deepened this fearful question of, ‘Will he really say anything to hold on to power?’ And Utahns are increasingly exhausted by that”….

It’s The Harvard of Santa Schools:

What goes into becoming Saint Nick? It takes more than just a red suit and white beard to don the title of Santa Claus. Every year, those that want to perfect the art of being Santa travel to Midland, Michigan, to attend the world’s oldest and longest running Santa school. The Charles W. Howard Santa School has graduated thousands of Kris Kringles over its 80 years, teaching everything from beard grooming to caroling to child psychology.

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