Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:57 AM and sunset 8:02 PM, for 14h 05m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 61.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand three hundred seventy-first day.
Through audiovisual conferencing, the Whitewater United School District board meets at 6 PM, and the Whitewater Planning Commission also at 6 PM.
On this day in 1846, the Smithsonian Institution is chartered by the United States Congress after James Smithson donates $500,000.
Recommended for reading in full —
Jonathan V. Last writes of Identity Politics Conservatism:
The other view—let’s call it Identity Politics Conservatism until we come up with something better—is largely agnostic on questions of policy. Do these people want tariffs, or free trade? Do they hate socialism, or do they want the government picking winners and losers according to the national interest? Are they pro-life, or are the deaths of 160,000 people just something that “is what it is”?
The Identity Politics Conservatism theory would say that these people don’t care a whit about the policies—they care about who is doing the policymaking. Like old-guard Leninists, their primary concern is: Who? Whom?
In case you’re too young for Lenin, when you go from his original Russian….his bon mot translates as “Who will overtake whom?” And in practice, this was more precisely carried out as “Who will obliterate whom?”
The logic of Identity Politics Conservatism suggests that all of this think tanking and speechifying is—at best—tertiary to what these voters care about. They do not want a new strategy for bringing tech giants to heel.
They want Lafayette Park.
Niall McCarthy reports A Third of Americans Unwilling to Get Covid-19 Vaccine:
That’s according to a Gallup poll conducted between July 20 and August 02 which found that more than a third of American adults, 35%, would avoid such a vaccine.
A partisan gulf in attitudes was one of the most eye-catching results of the research with 81% of Democrats saying they would be willing to get an FDA approved vaccine while 19% said they would not. A 53% majority of Republicans on the other hand would refuse to take a vaccine while 47% would be willing to take it.
Broken down by age, 76% of younger adults aged between 18 and 29 would be willing to take a vaccine, along with 70% of senior citizens with reluctance highest among middle-aged Americans. The high level of willingness among over 65s is likely due to that age-group experiencing the most serious risk of complications and a higher chance of death due to Covid-19.
BBC News reports Violent protests in Belarus as President Lukashenko claims “landslide” election victory: