Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 15h 03m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1940, the Belgian army surrenders to Nazi Germany (“The surrender of 28 May was ordered by King Leopold III without the consultation of his government and sparked a political crisis after the war. Despite the capitulation, many Belgians managed to escape to the United Kingdom where they formed a government and army-in-exile on the Allied side.”) On this day in 1864, the 2nd, 6th, 7th, and 36th Wisconsin Infantry regiments fight at Battle of Bethesda Church during the Wilderness Campaign.
Recommended for reading in full —
Patrick Marley reports that Wisconsin shuts down unit that found Lincoln Hills abuses:
MADISON – Gov. Scott Walker’s administration is getting rid of the internal affairs unit that exposed abuses at the state’s juvenile prison complex and paved the way for a years-long criminal investigation of the facility.
The Department of Corrections’ unit will be eliminated on June 25, and its investigators will be folded into a bureau focused on reducing sexual assaults behind bars. The change means the state’s prison system will no longer have a dedicated office for investigating employee misconduct.
“I don’t understand the wisdom behind the change,” said Rep. Evan Goyke (D-Milwaukee). “Why would we return to a setup that could allow future abuse? If it’s shown value, why would we end it?”
Department of Corrections officials said closing the internal affairs division will allow the state agency to concentrate on sexual assaults while still maintaining its ability to thoroughly investigate employee misconduct.
Ulrich Boser writes that Betsy DeVos has invested millions in this ‘brain training’ company. So I checked it out:
I was checking out the Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., branch of Neurocore, a “brain performance” company owned by the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. DeVos resigned her Neurocore board seat when she joined the Trump Cabinet, but she and her husband maintain a financial stake of between $5 million and $25 million, according to a financial disclosure statement filed with the Office of Government Ethics. The DeVoses’ private-equity firm, Windquest, identifies Neurocore as part of its “corporate family.” The Windquest website posts Neurocore news and includes links for job seekers to apply to Neurocore openings…
When the DeVos-Neurocore connection made headlines during her confirmation hearings, I was skeptical of the company’s claims. I had come across brain training while working on a book, “Learn Better,” about the science of learning. The field is rife with vague and overblown promises. Last year, the creators of Lumosity paid a $2 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission to settle a complaintthat they deceptively advertised that their memory exercises could improve everyday performance and stave off memory loss….
Adam Serwer asks Why Would Jared Kushner Trust Russian Officials So Much?:
But what is also peculiar is the level of trust Kushner would have been placing in Russian officials in asking for such a communications channel. Foreign affairs is often complex, yet Kushner didn’t want the U.S. government’s help—or supervision.
“What is unusual and borderline disturbing about this is less that it cut out the State Department or cut out the intelligence community; I think there is a precedent for both of those things in back-channels,” said Jon Finer, former State Department chief of staff under John Kerry. “It shows a level of trust in Russian intelligence, and Russian diplomatic personnel beyond the level of trust afforded to American intelligence and American personnel.”
Jennifer Rubin lists The Trump team’s five major shams:
First, the Trump administration refuses to acknowledge that it has reneged on its vow not to touch entitlements….
Second, the Trump administration will not admit it is engaged in a massive giveaway to the rich….
Third, the Trump administration has no plausible explanation for why its policies won’t lead to a mammoth increase in the debt….
Fourth, the Trump administration won’t own up to the anti-growth aspect of its immigration stance….
Fifth, the Trump administration won’t present a budget that has a ghost of a chance of passing….
(Rubin details each point.)
Tina Nguyen observes that As Trump’s Problems Mount, Breitbart’s Numbers Are Cratering:
Measuring web traffic is an inexact art, but other web-analytics companies reflect a similar, unusually steep decline in Breitbart’s traffic. ComScore estimated that Breitbart had nearly 23 million unique visitors during the month of November 2016, but only drew 10.7 million in April 2017, a 53 percent drop. Last month, the site had fewer visitors than it did in April 2016, when 12.3 million people visited the site. In contrast, the four sites that Breitbart benchmarked itself against saw nowhere near that drop—and, in the case of both Fox News and Buzzfeed, saw small increases in traffic since the November election….
Other conservative media sites have also experienced declines in traffic in recent months, but none as pronounced as Breitbart’s. According to Alexa data, National Review Online, Infowars.com, The Daily Caller, and Drudge Report all saw slumps in their rankings. Over the last week, as Trump was engulfed in the Comey scandal, Fox News’s viewership dropped to third place behind CNN and MSNBC for the first time in 17 years.
Why would this be? Nguyen quotes a conservative editor who admits how hard defending Trump has become:
At the most basic level, Trump’s struggles are producing a passion gap among news consumers. “If you’re anti-Trump, there’s never been a better time to read news. It’s like Christmas every morning,” an editor at another conservative media outlet told me. “So every time you open the newspaper or open Twitter or turn on Facebook, you get to enjoy the fact that there are a lot of other people who don’t like Trump and there’s a lot of news stories that show Trump in a negative light. Whereas if you’re Breitbart, you’re scrambling to explain or defend or continue to back the guy that you backed throughout the election. And eventually, if your posture continues to just simply be reactive and trying to explain away things that are happening to or by the president, I think people slowly become sort of disheartened by politics.”
(To express this more accurately, those who have opposed Trump from the beginning, as I have, will have an experience like Christmas morning when Trump and his ilk no longer hold federal power. Until then, reading and writing as his many lies, destructive policies, and authoritarianism are exposed is merely the work of defending a free society.)
Great Big Story explains How Falconry Shaped the English Language:
How Falconry Shaped the English Language from Great Big Story on Vimeo.