Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see scattered morning showers and a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 14h 58m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Downtown Whitewater Board meets at 5 PM, the Whitewater Unified School District’s Policy Review Committee at 6 PM, and the Library Board at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1945, the United States detonates the first atomic bomb at a test site in New Mexico.
Recommended for reading in full —
David Ignatius writes Putin must wonder what else America knows about Russia:
Looking at this case through a counterintelligence lens raises an intriguing new series of questions. In putting all the detail into the indictment, Mueller was giving Russian intelligence a hint of how much America can see. But this public disclosure may mask much deeper capabilities — perhaps a capacity to expose many more layers of GRU military-intelligence operations and those by the Russian civilian spy services, the FSB and the SVR. American intelligence agencies rarely tip their hand this way by disclosing so much in an indictment; clearly they did so here to send messages.
Explains one former CIA officer: “Given that we clearly had so much of the Russian internal communication and cyber footprints, they must be asking what else do we have? Do we have communications between the units and more senior officers in the GRU? With the General Staff? With the Kremlin? With Putin? Probably not the latter directly, but the Russians are very bureaucratic and it’s hard for me to imagine there is not a clear trail of higher level approvals, progress reports, etc.”
….
The indictment also sends a message to President Trump and members of his entourage who are potential targets of Mueller’s probe: Here’s a hint of what we know; how much are you willing to wager that we don’t know a lot more about Russian contacts and collusion? For example, the indictment is a proffer of Mueller’s information about contacts between GRU cut-out “Guccifer 2.0” and Roger Stone, Trump’s friend and adviser. What else does Mueller have?
(Hat tip to Joe for the link.)
Annie Lowrey asks How Much Damage Will Trump’s Trade War Do? (“Higher prices, slowing growth, mounting layoffs—and the indirect costs may be even greater”):
The effect on American growth stands to be small but noticeable, economists said. Paul Ashworth, the chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics, said he estimated the hit at 0.1 or 0.2 percentage points of GDP. Morgan Stanley put the direct impact at 0.3 percentage points, with a variety of other forecasters and economic analysts coming up with similar numbers. “There is no question that the short-run impact of the tariffs is to weaken G.D.P.,” said Chris Varvares of Macroeconomic Advisers by IHS Markit, a forecasting firm. That said, he added, “even sizable tariffs are not recession-inducing” given the kind of growth the country is seeing right now.
But the trade war is more than just tariffs. Trump’s actions might reduce consumer confidence, undercut business investment, and reduce investors’ appetite for risk. Companies anticipating more tariffs and export barriers, for instance, might choose not to expand their operations in the United States. “Since workers and firms don’t know if they might be impacted by retaliatory tariffs, including losing your job or shutting down your firm, the U.S. imposing tariffs is the economic equivalent of a game of Russian roulette,” Varvares said, adding that the economic impact of such decision-making was far harder to model and measure.
….
Even if the overall GDP effect remains muted—just a few tenths of a percentage point—some communities and consumers stand to feel it much harder than others. Agricultural businesses, for instance, are bracing for tariffs. “For soybean producers like me this is a direct financial hit,” Brent Bible, a soy and corn farmer based in Indiana, said in a statement. “This is money out of my pocket. These tariffs could mean the difference between a profit and a loss for an entire year’s worth of work out in the field, and that’s only in the near term.” The auto industry is also warning that Trump’s threatened tariffs might cost thousands of production jobs—losses that would be concentrated in Rust Belt states like Michigan, among others.
“Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”
(Putin seizes Crimea, foments war in eastern Ukraine, bolsters a mass-murdering dictator in Syria, orders the murder of expatriates abroad, and interferes in American elections, but Trump sees America at fault. There’s no poodle half so devoted to its owner as Trump is to Putin.)
Ximena Conde reports Milwaukee Dockless Scooters Case To Be Heard In Federal Court:
Cities across the United States are grappling with how to deal with dockless electric scooters that have begun appearing along sidewalks overnight without any regulations.
Lawsuits and cease-and-desist orders have sometimes followed the arrival of California-based companies Bird Rides Inc., LimeBike and Spin. Some cities say the scooters are illegal to operate on streets or sidewalks where they get dangerously close to pedestrians. And because the scooters are dockless, they’re parked anywhere when a ride is over, causing cities heartburn over blocking sidewalks.
Now, the city of Milwaukee wants to get Bird scooters off its streets and sidewalks after they appeared in late-June.
(‘Without any regulations’ – the popularity or unpopularity of the devices will always be a more powerful constraint than a municipal ordinance.)
What Do Artificial Sweeteners Actually Do to Your Body?:
The geek in me knows a bit about the inner workings of the internet. The stuff that Mueller put out in the indictment could have been a world-class piece of forensic investigation, involving sussing out which servers were involved, digging thru mountains of ISP logs, and cracking and hacking on an unprecedented scale of hostile computer systems, located a long way away and presumably well protected. It would have been a really daunting job, and would have involved armies of talented geeks to accomplish, particularly without alerting the Russians that we were looking at some of their darkest secrets.
Or, and way more likely, in my opinion… We already had it all mirrored at a NSA server farm somewhere in rural Utah, and all we needed was some creative key-word searches to figure out what went on. I really don’t see any other explanation for the extraordinary specifics in Mueller’s indictment. Getting that level of information by hacking the Russians simply is not plausible.
Trump and the R-Team should be getting very nervous, about now. Mueller just laid a pistol on the table. It is also clear that the US security community considers Trump enough of a threat that they are willing to expose our rather extraordinary capabilities. That, in itself, is astonishing.
There’s a key contrast in all this. While Trump is unquestionably technically ignorant, even operatives of his who are skilled don’t try to rebut the scenarios you’ve outlined. They make any number of cultural or political defenses of Trump, but never a technical one. It’s a bad sign for Trump: those serving him who are technically skilled likely know that they have no technical defense, and that they cannot refute (on technical grounds) the intelligence gathering you’ve mentioned.
It’s all diversions and lies, but not a straight-up technical refutation.