Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:25 PM, for 14h 48m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.4% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the nine hundred eighty-sixth day.
The Whitewater Unified School Board meets tonight in closed session at 6 PM, with an open session scheduled to begin at 7 PM.
On this day in 1864, Wisconsinites defending the Union (1st, 12th, 16th, 17th, 22nd, 25th, 26th, 31st Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 5th Wisconsin Light Artillery) engage Confederates during the Battle of Atlanta.
Recommended for reading in full:
Adam Serwer discusses his contention that cruelty is the point of Trumpism:
See also The Cruelty Is the Point (‘President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear’).
(It is necessary, if opposition to Trumpism is to prevail, to steel oneself to this truth. Those believing – pretending – otherwise will only meet with disappointment at best, and unprepared injury at worst.)
Michael Isikoff reports The true origins of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory:
In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found.
Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read as a real intelligence report —about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.
The purported details in the SVR account seemed improbable on their face: that Rich, a data director in the DNC’s voter protection division, was on his way to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Clinton when he was slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad.
Yet in a graphic example of how fake news infects the internet, those precise details popped up the same day on an obscure website, whatdoesitmean.com, that is a frequent vehicle for Russian propaganda. The website’s article, which attributed its claims to “Russian intelligence,” was the first known instance of Rich’s murder being publicly linked to a political conspiracy.
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The previously unreported role of Russian intelligence in creating and fostering one of the most insidious conspiracy theories to arise out of the 2016 election is disclosed in “Yahoo News presents: Conspiracyland,” a six-part series by the news organization’s podcast “Skullduggery” that debuts this week on the third anniversary of Rich’s murder.