Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-one. Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 6:37 PM, for 11h 45m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 70.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred ninety-first day.
On this day in 1938, the Munich Agreement temporarily sates Nazi Germany’s territorial ambitions: “permitting Nazi Germany’s annexation of portions of Czechoslovakia, along the country’s borders mainly inhabited by German speakers, for which a new territorial designation, the “Sudetenland”, was coined. The agreement was signed in the German city of Munich early on 30 September 1938 (although dated 29 September) after being negotiated upon by the major powers of Europe, excluding the Soviet Union. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the future ownership of the Sudetenland in the face of demands made by Adolf Hitler. The agreement was signed by the government leaders of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy, but not Czechoslovakia, who were not invited to the conference, even though the Sudetenland was of immense strategic importance to Czechoslovakia as most of its border defenses and banks were situated there,[1][2] as well as heavy industrial districts.[3] The Agreement was soon followed by dismemberment of the Czech state. Today, it is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement, and the term has become “a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states”.[4]”
Recommended for reading in full — Who’s left behind after the Great Recession, Voter ID suppresses the vote, the most hardcore Trumpists are secular ones, a reminder of the WEDC’s corruption, and video revealing the secrets on the world’s best green tea —
Lauren Bauer and Jay Shambaugh write Workers with low levels of education still haven’t recovered from the Great Recession:
Those with less education were disproportionately harmed by the Great Recession (figure 2).2 We see that graduate degree holders—and to a lesser extent bachelor’s degree holders—experienced smaller reductions in employment during the recession. For those with no postsecondary degree, the employment rate gap in 2011 was 5 percent or more, while it was just 2 percent for those with a bachelor’s degree.
Recovery from the bottom of the trough occurred earlier for those with more education. The first upturn among graduate degree holders was between 2009 and 2010, between 2010 and 2011 for those with a bachelor’s degree. By 2018, only those with bachelor’s or graduate degrees had returned to their demographically adjusted pre-recession employment rate.
The recession was particularly hard on those without a high school diploma. In 2010 and 2011, this group had an employment-to-population ratio that was fully six percentage points lower than in 2007. Those with a high school diploma and/or some college followed a similar trend through this period, with a slightly shallower trough during the worst of the recession than those who didn’t graduate from high school. In recent years, workers without a postsecondary degree have seen improving employment outcomes, though a gap remains.3
Not only have less-educated groups not recovered as fully from the recession, they started at lower levels of employment rates prior to the crisis such that at this point, amongst those aged 25 and higher, 72.5 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree work compared to just 55 percent of those with only a high school degree.
Cameron Smith reports Voter ID linked to lower turnout in Wisconsin, other states; students, people of color, elderly most affected:
Challengers to the voter ID law had argued that hundreds of thousands of valid Wisconsin voters — many of them Hispanic, African-American and students — could be barred from casting ballots because of the identification requirement.Kenneth Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studied voter turnout in Wisconsin after the state implemented a voter ID requirement. Mayer’s study, commissioned by the Dane County clerk’s office, concluded that between 7.8 and 15.5 percent of eligible voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties had been deterred from voting due to confusion over voter ID requirements or lack of proper identification.
A UW-Madison study commissioned by Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell in 2017 tried to measure the effect. The study estimated that thousands of registered voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties were deterred or prevented from voting because of the photo ID requirement in the 2016 presidential election — a situation that more heavily affected low-income people and African-Americans. The survey was mailed to 2,400 registered voters; 293 were returned.
Based on the sampling weight, UW-Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer concluded that between 7.8 and 15.5 percent of eligible voters in these two counties had been deterred from voting due to confusion over voter ID requirements or lack of proper identification. That equated to between 11,701 and 23,252 people, the study concluded.
Trump won Wisconsin by 22,748 votes.
Emily Ekins writes The Liberalism of the Religious Right (“Conservatives who attend church have more moderate views than secular conservatives on issues like race, immigration and identity”):
President Trump has been a regular speaker at recent Values Voter Summits, and for this year’s event, he will send Vice President Mike Pence to rally the religious right. This will not surprise many people on the left who have questioned the authenticity of social conservatives’ values and their place in the Trump-Pence coalition. They think the religious right has compromised its Christian values in order to attain political power for Republicans.
But new data suggest the left may have a lot more common ground with some of these conservatives than it thinks. In a Democracy Fund Voter Study Group report, I found that religious conservatives are far more supportive of diversity and immigration than secular conservatives. Religion appears to actually be moderating conservative attitudes, particularly on some of the most polarizing issues of our time: race, immigration and identity.
….
Many progressives hope that encouraging conservatives to disengage from religion will make them more tolerant. But if the data serve as any guide, doing so may in fact make it even harder for left and right to meet in a more compassionate middle.
(See also Ross Douthat’s Conservatism After Christianity. It’s true that many prominent evangelical leaders are Trumpists, but the most fervid Trumpists among the rank-and-file are secular rightists. They’ve replaced religion with an aggressive, bigoted nationalism. Secularism, like religion, tends in more than one direction. Those who think that secularism necessarily tends toward the left are simply wrong, as good data show.)
One Wisconsin Now reminds of what the WEDC has done to Wisconsin:
The first four years after @ScottWalker‘s WEDC popped up $700 million in grants went Walker campaign donors. Sixty percent of all handouts went to Scott Walker donors. Our full report from 2015. https://t.co/KiSayMGTPG pic.twitter.com/mwSLnswQ6g
— One Wisconsin Now (@onewisconsinnow) August 30, 2018
Learn The Secret Behind the World’s Best Green Tea:
In Hangzhou, China, there’s a local saying that frying is always better than boiling. So that’s exactly how the world-famous Dragon Well tea gets prepared. Fan Shenghua’s family has made this special green tea for over one thousand years, but he fears the next generation will not carry it forward. For now, he’s keeping the unique methodology alive in his Tongwu Village home.