Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 09m 26s of daytime. We’ve nearly a full moon, with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1776, John Nixon makes the first public proclamation of the Declaration of Independence from the steps of the Pennsylvania State House (now know as Independence Hall).
On this day in 1850, Walworth County resident James Jesse Strang, leader of a Mormon faction, declares himself a king:
On this date James Jesse Strang, leader of the estranged Mormon faction, the Strangites, was crowned king; the only man to achieve such a title in America. When founder Joseph Smith was assassinated, Strang forged a letter from Smith dictating he was to be the heir. The Mormon movement split into followers of Strang and followers of Brigham Young. As he gained more followers (but never nearly as many as Brigham Young), Strang became comparable to a Saint, and in 1850 was crowned King James in a ceremony in which he wore a discarded red robe of a Shakespearean actor, and a metal crown studded with a cluster of stars as his followers sang him hosannas. Soon after his crowning, he announced that Mormonism embraced and supported polygamy. (Young’s faction was known to have practiced polygamy, but had not at this time announced it publicly.) A number of followers lived in Walworth County, including Strang at a home in Burlington. In 1856 Strang was himself assassinated, leaving five wives. Without Strang’s leadership, his movement disintegrated. [Source: Wisconsin Saints and Sinners, by Fred L. Holmes, p. 106-121]
Recommended for reading in full —
Molly McKew accurately observes that Trump Handed Putin a Stunning Victory:
In very concrete terms, through speech and action, the president signaled a willingness to align the United States with Vladimir Putin’s worldview, and took steps to advance this realignment. He endorsed, nearly in its totality, the narrative the Russian leader has worked so meticulously to construct.
The readout of Trump’s lengthy meeting with Putin included several key points. First, the United States will “move on” from election hacking issues with no accountability or consequences for Russia; in fact, the U.S. will form a “framework” with Russia to cooperate on cybersecurity issues, evaluating weaknesses and assessing potential responses jointly. Second, the two presidents agreed not to meddle in “each other’s” domestic affairs—equating American activities to promote democracy with Russian aggression aimed at undermining it, in an incalculable PR victory for the Kremlin. Third, the announced, limited cease-fire in Syria will be a new basis for cooperation between the U.S. and Russia; Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went so far as to say that the Russian approach in Syria—yielding mass civilian casualties, catastrophic displacement, untold destruction and erased borders—may be “more right” than that of the United States.
Each of these points represents a significant victory for Putin. Each of them will weaken U.S. tools for defending its interests and security from the country that defines itself as America’s “primary adversary.” Trump has ceded the battle space—physical, virtual, moral—to the Kremlin. And the president is going to tell us this is a “win”….
Jason Easley writes that Adam Schiff Devastates Trump’s Version Of The Putin Meeting With A Point By Point Destruction:
In a statement provided to PoliticusUSA, Schiff said:
According to Secretary of State Tillerson, the President repeatedly pressed Putin on Russia’s interference in the election. The American people can be forgiven for a healthy skepticism about just how hard Mr. Trump could have pressed the Russian autocrat, given that the President publicly cast doubt on Russian responsibility and the probity of our intelligence agencies only the day before. Can we really expect the President to be more forthcoming with the Russian President if he is not willing to fully level with our own people on the same subject?Moreover, the establishment of a working group as reported by Foreign Minister Lavrov to study how to curb cyber interference in elections in which the Russians would play any role, would be akin to inviting the North Koreans to participate in a commission on nonproliferation — it tacitly adopts the fiction that the Russians are a constructive partner on the subject instead of the worst actor on the world stage.
With respect to the ceasefire in southwest Syria, if such an agreement can truly bring about a pause in the violence and lead to a transition away from Bashar al Assad, this could be an important start. The Russians have very different interests than we do in Syria, however, and we would be wise to treat any Russian commitments with a jaundiced eye. Other ceasefires have been poorly enforced and Russia will need to live up to any commitments that it has made.
Finally, the Secretary’s readout included no mention on pushing back against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the need to maintain sanctions until they withdraw and end their destabilization. If this topic was ignored by the President, that would send a message of tacit acceptance to the Kremlin. It also underscores the need for Congress to maintain all sanctions on Russia over Ukraine and its hacking of our elections. Congress should pass such legislation without further delay.
Alexander Baunov describes How Putin Made Political Corruption Great Again:
For many Russians, there is a blatant contradiction between the patriotic consensus Putin seeks and the immiseration they face at home. The economic growth of his early years in office has been replaced with the idea of suffering—the hardship of stagnation and sanctions that are the apparent price for assertive foreign policy. But the wages of privation do not seem to extend to the new generation of oligarchs he has surrounded himself with—his old friends, including Gennady Timchenko, the Rotenberg brothers, and Igor Sechin, all of whom became billionaires during his rule, and even receive support from the state. (Parliament passed a special law with huge tax privileges for those touched by Western sanctions.)
This is what corruption in the Putin era means. While much has been done in recent years to combat low-level corruption between citizens and authorities, his style of rule implies a “controlled corruption,” when his cronies can reckon for the reward.
Jordan Pearson reports that The Same Twitter Bots That Helped Trump Tried to Sink Macron, Researcher Says:
New research from Emilio Ferrara, the University of Southern California academic who exposed the role of bots in the 2016 US election, shows that many Trump bots went dark and later turned into MacronLeaks bots. This, Ferrara wrote in a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server this week (which is currently being peer-reviewed), suggests that there may be a “black market” for right-wing political bots that can lay dormant for months before being activated to promote the next conservative demagogue.
“There are way too many coincidences here to keep us from thinking that there are venues where organizations with enough resources can access these botnets,” Ferrara said over the phone….
Ferrara collected 17 million tweets from roughly two weeks leading up to the French election and designed a custom machine learning algorithm (based on the Botometer, a public tool that looks for the defining marks of a robot controlling a given Twitter account), to parse the massive trove and pick out bot accounts. Of the nearly 100,000 users in the sample who participated in the MacronLeaks discussion on Twitter, 18,000 were bots, Ferrara said. According to the paper, some of the accounts that targeted Macron were actually created in the lead-up to the 2016 US election.
“These accounts were tweeting their support for Trump for about a week in the run-up to the 2016 election and then they went dark for a very long time,” Ferrara said. “These same accounts picked up again and some even started tweeting in French—but the alt-right narrative was the same.”
We can be sure that at least one Finnish man will brook no intrusions from a foraging bear: