Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:25 PM, for 13h 03m 48s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand three hundred ninety-fourth day.
On this day in 1945, Japanese officials sign the Japanese Instrument of Surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
Recommended for reading in full —
David Leonhardt writes of Trump, Unbound:
• President Trump breaks so many of the normal rules of politics that it can sometimes be hard to know when his tweets and comments are truly newsworthy. Even by his standards, though, the past several days have stood out. Consider:
• Trump said on Monday that a plane “almost completely loaded with thugs” wearing “dark uniforms” had been headed to the Republican National Convention to do “big damage.” The claim is similar to a baseless conspiracy theory that spread online over the summer, well before the convention.
• He has declined to condemn the killings of two protesters in Kenosha, Wis. He instead defended the 17-year-old charged in the shootings — a Trump supporter named Kyle Rittenhouse — saying he was acting in self-defense. Trump also promoted a Twitter post that called Rittenhouse “a good example of why I decided to vote for Trump.”
• He defended violence committed by his supporters in Portland, Ore., who fired paintballs and pepper spray at Black Lives Matter protesters.
• He compared the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha to missing “a three-foot putt” in a golf tournament.
• He claimed that “people that you’ve never heard of” and “people that are in the dark shadows” are controlling Joe Biden.
• He claimed Democrats were trying to “destroy” suburbs with “low-income housing, and with that comes a lot of other problems, including crime.” He added that Cory Booker — one of the highest-profile Black Democrats — would be “in charge of it.”
• He predicted that the stock market would crash if Biden won.
• He said that Biden, at the Democratic National Convention, “didn’t even discuss law enforcement, the police. Those words weren’t mentioned.” In fact, Biden held a discussion at the convention on policing, with a police chief.
• Trump claimed that he “took control of” the situation in Kenosha by sending in the National Guard. In fact, Wisconsin’s governor, not the president, sent the National Guard.
• He retweeted messages asserting that the pandemic’s death toll was overstated. Evidence indicates the opposite is true.
• He said that protests against police brutality were actually a secret “coup attempt” by anarchists “trying to take down the President.”
Ben Collins reports Trump’s ‘plane loaded with thugs’ conspiracy theory matches months-old [Facebook!] rumor:
The conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump pushed Monday that a plane “almost completely loaded with thugs” had been set to disrupt the Republican National Convention was almost identical to a rumor that went viral on Facebook three months ago.
….
The claim about the flight matches a viral Facebook post from June 1 that falsely claimed, “At least a dozen males got off the plane in Boise from Seattle, dressed head to toe in black.” The post, by an Emmett, Idaho, man, warned residents to “Be ready for attacks downtown and residential areas,” and claimed one passenger had “a tattoo that said Antifa America on his arm.”
That post was shared over 3,000 times on Facebook, and other pages from Idaho quickly added their own spin to it, like the Idaho branch of the far-right militia group 3 Percenters.
Apple Is Making It Harder To Track iPhone Users, Which Could Hurt Facebook:
(Segment begins @ 6:43 on video.)