Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 15h 04m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 31.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred ninety-seventh day.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1892, John Muir organizes the Sierra Club.
Recommended for reading in full —
Megan McArdle writes Conservatives who refuse to wear masks undercut a central claim of their beliefs:
Even the most hard-core conservatives and libertarians have always recognized that all liberties have some limits — your right to roam ends at my property line. For years, conservatives have explained that public health efforts are a legitimate exercise of government power.
Sure, this was usually a prelude to complaining that public health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were neglecting this vital mission in favor of paternalistic nannying. But given the CDC’s many boneheaded errors over the past six months, conservatives were in a position to score some political points by shouting: “CDC, you had one job!”
Instead, far too many Republicans are suddenly arguing that public health efforts are not a legitimate exercise of power. The government, they complain, has no right to tell them what they can do, even if what they plan to do comes with some risk that a deadly disease will spread.
I’m not talking about the people who simply make the reasonable, indeed indisputable, argument that we cannot shut down the whole economy until a vaccine is developed. I’m talking about the ones who refuse to make even small compromises for public safety, such as wearing a mask — and especially conservatives who complain when store owners exercise their right to require them on store property.
This doesn’t just eviscerate generations’ worth of arguments about public health. It also undercuts a more central claim of conservatism: that big, coercive government programs are unnecessary because private institutions could provide many benefits that we think of as “public goods.” For that to be true, the civic culture would have to be such that individuals are willing to make serious sacrifices for the common good, and especially to protect the most vulnerable among us.
(McArdle is a libertarian, as I am, but she’s too forgiving of what pro-Trump conservatism represents. This atavistic horde isn’t pondering claims; they’re dreaming of a herrenvolk state. They’re following instincts not principles.)
Marlow Stern interviews Soledad O’Brien on Why the New York Times Is Failing Us Under Trump:
(Stern): It seems like you’re referring to The New York Times’ headlines, which have become just a laughably poor display of false equivalence, both sides-ing, and normalizing when it comes to Trump’s aberrant behavior.
(O’Brien): Oh my god! I wish I could just go and buy a soft blanket for whoever the poor headline writer is who’s screwing it up pretty regularly, because it’s such a mess! You want to say, how did that happen? How did you get a headline like this? And then they fix it, and they’re not particularly transparent about why they’re fixing it or how they got it wrong. It’s very disheartening. And the answer is, their digital subscriptions are up, so the response is: Have you seen our numbers? Well, OK, if that’s how you’re going to judge your worth.