Daily Bread for 12.29.17

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a high of fourteen, and an even chance of afternoon snow showers. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 04m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 82.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fourteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1879, General William “Billy” Mitchell is born:

On this date aviation pioneer Billy Mitchell was born in Nice, France. Mitchell grew up in Milwaukee and attended Racine College. During World War I, Mitchell was the first American airman to fly over enemy lines.  He also led many air attacks in France and Germany. Upon return to the U.S., he advocated the creation of a separate Air Force.

Much to the dislike of A.T. Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, and other contemporaries, Mitchell asserted that the airplane had rendered the battleship obsolete, and attention should be shifted to developing military air power. Mitchell’s out-spokenness resulted in his being court martialed for insubordination. He was sentenced to five years suspension of rank without pay. General Douglas MacArthur — an old Milwaukee friend — was a judge in Mitchell’s case and voted against his court martial. Mitchell’s ideas for developing military air power were not implemented until long after his death. In 1946 Congress created a medal in his honor, the General “Billy” Mitchell Award. Milwaukee’s airport, General Mitchell International Airport, is named after him.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Chris Isidore and Julia Horowitz report Foxconn got a really good deal from Wisconsin. And it’s getting better [for Foxconn]:

The $3 billion incentive package used to lure Foxconn to Wisconsin to build a giant factory was only the beginning.

Associated sweeteners have now grown to more than $4 billion — adding in the cost of local government incentives and various infrastructure projects, like roads and highways, sewer and power lines.

Foxconn is also being allowed to skip state environmental rules and oversight it would otherwise have had to follow….

The Village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County, where the plant is to be built, have also agreed to provide $764 million in tax incentives to help get the facility constructed, including buying the land and giving it to Foxconn for free.

The state expects to spend about $400 million on road improvements, including adding two lanes to the nearby Interstate 94. And it’s seeking $246 million more in federal money to help pay for the interstate expansion.

In addition, the local electric utility is upgrading its lines and adding substations to provide the necessary power that will be used by the plant, at a cost of $140 million. The cost of those projects will be paid by 5 million customers in the area.

About half the state’s tax breaks depend upon how many workers Foxconn hires. While the state touts Foxconn’s plans for 13,000 workers, the company has only committed to hiring 3,000 at this point.

(Foxconn is everything wrong with state-subsidized capitalism and WEDC, made manifest and plain for all America. Three billion or four billion, whatever. Thirteen thousand or three thousand, whatever. Walker never graduated from Marquette, and that’s to Marquette’s advantage – if they had given him a degree, they’d have to explain how he got one every day until the end of time.)

Evan Osnos reports Why the 2018 Midterms Are So Vulnerable to Hackers:

The first primary of the 2018 midterm elections, in Texas, is barely eight weeks away. It’s time to ask: Will the Russian government deploy “active measures” of the kind it used in 2016? Is it possible that a wave of disinformation on Facebook and Twitter could nudge the results of a tight congressional race in, say, Virginia or Nevada? Will hackers infiltrate? low-budget campaigns in Pennsylvania and Nebraska, and leak their e-mails to the public? Will the news media and voters take the bait?

By most accounts, the answer is likely to be yes—and, for several reasons, the election may prove to be as vulnerable, or more so, than the 2016 race that brought Donald Trump to the White House….

“An attacker who wants to affect the national outcome could try targeting all of those races, find the states where the election systems are most weakly protected, and strike there,” J. Alex Halderman, the director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan, told me. In the language of hacking and cyber-defense, the 2018 midterms present an unusually large “attack surface,” because of the sheer number of competitive races. “About a dozen states still rely on obsolete paperless voting machines, and most states fail to routinely conduct rigorous post-election audits,” he said.

On a technical level, the American election system is almost as vulnerable as it was in 2016. According to U.S. intelligence, Russian hackers tested the vulnerabilities of registration rolls in twenty-one states, but did not alter the vote tallies. Halderman, who testified recently in Congress about gaps in election defenses, told me, “Unfortunately, there haven’t been widespread security improvements so far. We can be sure that our adversaries have been paying attention, and so they may be more likely to try attacking election systems in November.” At the Def Con hackers’ conference in July, attendees demonstrated that they could break into thirty voting machines of multiple types, some in as little as ninety minutes. Without altering the results, hackers could sow doubt about the outcome by shutting down or disrupting voting machines on Election Day….

(Trump has no incentive to encourage better security if he assumes – as is true – that Putin will do whatever he can to aid Trump-supporting GOP results.)

Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky ask ‘America first’? So far, Trump’s foreign policy mostly puts America last:

Concluding the national security strategy address that he delivered earlier this month, President Trump described his foreign policy aim “to celebrate American greatness as a shining example to the world.”

Not exactly.

At the end of his first year in office, the president’s approach to foreign affairs doesn’t fit the platitude-ridden narrative laid out in that speech as much as it lines up with six key components that define the Trumpian way abroad: America first, politics over policy, ego, deconstruction, risk aversion and dictators over democrats. They don’t make a neatly defined doctrine, but these components have a certain cohesion — at least in Trump’s mind — that hints at how he’ll operate for the rest of his tenure….

the yardstick for judging Trump’s foreign policy isn’t whether his administration solves the world’s toughest problems. The question is whether his approach to foreign policy can manage the challenges the United States cannot resolve in a way that strengthens our interests while avoiding international crises, such as an escalation of conflict with Iran or, particularly, North Korea, that might irreparably harm those interests. A year in, the record does not inspire confidence. His worldview isn’t one that carefully calibrates means and ends or clearly defines true U.S. national interests and makes them a priority. Instead, it is one that will likely end up putting America last, not first, on a range of issues critical to its long-term prosperity and security.

Mekela Panditharatne writes FEMA says most of Puerto Rico has potable water. That can’t be true:

The weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico brought remarkable images of people desperate to find clean water, drinking from hazardous Superfund sites and thrusting containers under makeshift spigots on the sides of mountains.

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, this particular problem has subsided now, more than three months after the storm: FEMA’s official statistics on Puerto Rico, which rely on data provided by the territory, suggest that 95 percent of Puerto Ricans now have access to potable water.

That just isn’t possible.

I’m a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, where I specialize in toxics and drinking water. Before Hurricane Maria, I worked with local groups in Puerto Rico on drinking-water contamination on the island. We put out a report in May showing that in 2015, 99.5 percent of Puerto Ricans — virtually all residents — were served by water sources that violated the Safe Drinking Water Act. These violations included contamination, failure to properly treat the water, and failure to conduct water testing or to report as required by federal rules. A substantial majority, 69.4 percent of the population, was drawing tap water that had unlawfully high levels of contaminants such as coliform bacteria, disinfection byproducts and volatile organic compounds, or that had not been treated in accordance with federal standards.

Even as mainland coverage of water access and quality issues in Puerto Rico has receded, overshadowed by chatter about the latest political crises and tax breaks in Washington, the hurricane has made an already bad water situation far worse. And by veiling the true extent of the damage, FEMA’s misleading statistics on water are exacerbating the problems.

(Bad before, worse now, and no incentive for an agency to speak truthfully when Trump, himself, lies daily.)

‘These Paper Puppets Are Like Origami But Better’:

(My late father loved origami, and he would have, I think, understood these clever paper toys as a kind of origami, not a separate art as the video’s title suggests. Beautiful, however one describes them.)