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Daily Bread for 2.11.20

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twenty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 5:21 PM, for 10h 24m 51s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 93% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand one hundred ninetieth day.

The Whitewater Schools’ Policy Review Committee meets at 8 AM, and Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1842, one Wisconsin Territorial legislator shoots another during a debate.

Recommended for reading in full —

Melissa del Bosque reports A Group of Agents Rose Through the Ranks to Lead the Border Patrol. They’re Leaving It in Crisis:

The group had overseen or witnessed crises in the past — including lawsuits over excessive use of force and revelations of corruption within the patrol’s own ranks. But the last three years, catalyzed by ever-harsher Trump administration policies, had thrust the insular agency into unprecedented turmoil. The arrival of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers at the border had forced agents into new roles, for which they had little training. A series of high-profile scandals had focused scalding attention on the agency: Children died in its custody. Reporters uncovered a racist, misogynist private Facebook page with some 9,500 current and former Border Patrol members, including, at one point, Provost. Misconduct charges rose and a longtime agent was even prosecuted as a serial killer.

The Border Patrol they’d guided was experiencing not just a crisis of confidence among legislators and the public, but from within.

Some senior agents said they can’t help but blame the current state of the Border Patrol on the Douglas agents for fostering a culture that favored loyalty over competency. “I still believe in our mission. But we need restructuring, we need change,” said one longtime senior agent from Texas, who asked to remain anonymous because he’s not authorized to speak to the media. “It’s a group following each other on their coattails with the same ideas, because everyone thinks the same way. And a lot of people skipping rank based on who they know, not on their experience.”

Robert Tracinski describes The Closing of the Conservative Mind:

In the early days of Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican party, and of the conservative movement, many of us assumed that it was happening in complete defiance of the movement’s intellectual leadership.

Trump was aggressively anti-intellectual and routinely displayed a contemptuous indifference toward the ideas to which many intellectuals on the right have devoted their lives: small government, free markets, fiscal responsibility, moral character.

Many of them had previously lined up against him, drawing a line in the sand “Against Trump.”

Yet only a few years later, Trump’s takeover of the conservative movement is nearly complete. You could interpret this one of three ways: That nobody ever really listened to the right’s intellectuals; that the intellectuals never really believed their own supposed ideals; or that there was some hidden weakness on the part of conservative intellectuals that made them vulnerable to Trumpism.

How Urban Farming Saved a Dallas Community:

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