Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with afternoon showers and a high of sixty-four.  Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 6:15 PM, for 11h 09m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 25.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM.

 On this day in 1928, an iron lung respirator is used for the first time at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Trump’s words on covid-19 are like ‘slap in the face’ for those who lost family:

President Trump’s comparisons in October of the coronavirus to the flu and admonitions not to fear it were “appalling” to those who have lost family members.

Nicola Davis reports on ‘Brain fog’: the people struggling to think clearly months after Covid:

For Mirabai Nicholson-McKellar, Covid-19 brought an onslaught of symptoms from chest pains to an 11-day migraine, three positive test results, and a period in hospital.

Seven months later, the rollercoaster is far from over: the 36-year-old from Byron Bay, Australia is still experiencing symptoms – including difficulties with thinking that are often described as “brain fog”.

“Brain fog seems like such an inferior description of what is actually going on. It’s completely crippling. I am unable to think clearly enough to [do] anything,” says Nicholson-McKellar, adding that the experience would be better described as cognitive impairment.

….

Dr Michael Zandi, a consultant at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology , says he has seen patients who have been living with brain fog for a few months. While some have been admitted to hospital or intensive care with Covid, Zandi says he is now seeing cases among people who coped with Covid at home.

“The proportion of people with cognitive symptoms for any period of time as a result of Covid-19 is unknown, and a focus of study now, but in some studies could be up to 20%,” he says.

Kate Manne writes Trump obsesses over ‘dominating’ covid-19 because he wants to look manly (‘According to this worldview, if you take any pandemic precautions, you “submit” to the virus’):

The president, a self-professed germaphobe, could hardly have been more explicit about his worldview: This potentially deadly illness is something to dominate or be dominated by. It does not matter whether a person is an essential worker, is in a high-risk demographic, has a chronic health condition, or is simply and sometimes tragically unlucky: Illness is a weakness, and those who succumb are feeble, even pathetic. Those who conquer it are, conversely, strong and morally admirable. This view is a crucial element of toxic masculinity, which festers and causes harm, not just to individual men but to everyone around them.

….

Bankrupt machismo feeds Trump’s denialism about this disease, whether he’s contemplating his own frailty or that of the American people. Whatever it means to be a “real man” (a concept I doubt has any genuine value), it’s clear that our era’s incarnation of toxic masculinity has little to do with the real strength it takes to protect and serve the community. Instead it’s about weakness, and the fearful inability to admit to human vulnerability — and it takes an appalling pride in endangering those around you.

(Trump replaces science with ignorance, and prudence with pride. Pride is a sin.)

Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s Presidency:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of sixty-three.  Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 6:17 PM, for 11h 12m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 34.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1991, Prof. Anita Hill delivers her televised testimony concerning sexual harassment during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Nicholas Confessore, Karen Yourish, Steve Eder, Ben Protess, Maggie Haberman, Grace Ashford, Michael LaForgia, Kenneth P. Vogel, Michael Rothfeld, and Larry Buchanan of the New York Times report The Swamp That Trump Built (‘A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington to his family’s hotels and resorts — and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration’):

As president-elect, he had pledged to step back from the Trump Organization and recuse himself from his private company’s operation. As president, he built a system of direct presidential influence-peddling unrivaled in modern American politics.

As president-elect, he had pledged to step back from the Trump Organization and recuse himself from his private company’s operation. As president, he built a system of direct presidential influence-peddling unrivaled in modern American politics.

Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades.

Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades.

But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.

….

IT WAS SPRINGTIME at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, and the favor-seekers were swarming.

In a gold-adorned ballroom filled with Republican donors, an Indian-born industrialist from Illinois pressed Mr. Trump to tweet about easing immigration rules for highly skilled workers and their children.

“He gave a million dollars,” the president told his guests approvingly, according to a recording of the April 2018 event.

Later that month, in the club’s dining room, the president wandered over to one of its newer members, an Australian cardboard magnate who had brought along a reporter to flaunt his access. Mr. Trump thanked him for taking out a newspaper ad hailing his role in the construction of an Ohio paper mill and box factory, whose grand opening the president would attend.

And in early March, a Tennessee real estate developer who had donated lavishly to the inauguration, and wanted billions in loans from the new administration, met the president at the club and asked him for help.

Mr. Trump waved over his personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen. “Get it done,” the president said, describing the developer as “a very important guy,” Mr. Cohen recalled in an interview.

Exotic, endangered & trafficked animals in the Middle East receive UAE care:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 6:18 PM, for 11h 15m 00s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 45% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns after being charged with evasion of federal income tax.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer writes I will hold the president accountable for endangering and dividing America:

When I addressed the people of Michigan on Thursday to comment on the unprecedented terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges against 13 men, some of whom were preparing to kidnap and possibly kill me, I said, “Hatred, bigotry and violence have no place in the great state of Michigan.” I meant it. But just moments later, President Trump’s campaign adviser, Jason Miller, appeared on national television accusing me of fostering hatred.

I’m not going to waste my time arguing with the president. But I will always hold him accountable. Because when our leaders speak, their words carry weight.

When our leaders encourage domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions. When they stoke and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit. And when a sitting president stands on a national stage refusing to condemn white supremacists and hate groups, as President Trump did when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during the first presidential debate, he is complicit. Hate groups heard the president’s words not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry. As a call to action.

Lois Beckett reports Michigan terror plot: why rightwing extremists are thriving on Facebook:

Before Michigan, there was the militia group in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that used a Facebook event to encourage armed citizens to take to the streets, and the anti-government “boogaloo” cop-killer in California this May allegedly met his accomplice on Facebook. The deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, was originally organized as a Facebook event.

Facebook has defended itself as working hard to keep users safe and to adapt to emerging threats on its platform, as well as coordinating closely with law enforcement. But evidence has mounted for years that Mark Zuckerberg’s goal of using Facebook to “bring the world closer together” and to “give people the power to build community” has also built powerful tools for radicalization and coordinated violence.

….

At times, Facebook has chosen not to significantly restrict or ban extremist groups on its platform until after a member of the group has killed someone, even when experts have sounded warnings about the group for months or years before an attack.

This was true of boogaloo groups on Facebook. A February 2020 report by the Network Contagion Research Institute warned about the growth of boogaloo rhetoric on Facebook, specifically that it included violent rhetoric about killing law enforcement that might translate into action. After the report was made public, Facebook told NBC News it was monitoring the groups for threats of violence, but did not take any immediate action to banboogaloo groups, even through violent insurrection and killing law enforcement were central themes of boogaloo discussions.

The company finally announced a ban on a network of boogaloo groups on 30 June, four months after a clear public warning that a cop-killer ideology was spreading on Facebook, and nearly a month after two officers in California had already been shot to death: the federal security officer David Patrick Underwood, on 29 May in Oakland, and the California sheriff’s deputy Damon Gutzwiller, in a subsequent ambush attack.

 Video from Space – Highlights for the Week of Oct. 4:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 6:20 PM, for 11h 17m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 55.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1701, the Collegiate School of Connecticut (later renamed Yale University) is chartered in Old Saybrook.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Bill Chappell reports In Rare Step, Esteemed Medical Journal Urges Voters To Oust Trump:

The Trump administration has “taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy” in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, The New England Journal of Medicine says in a scathing editorial that essentially calls on American voters to throw the president out of office.

It is the first time the prestigious medical journal has taken a stance on a U.S. presidential election since it was founded in 1812.

“When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent,” reads the editorial signed by nearly three dozen of the journal’s editors. “We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”

The editors accuse Trump’s government of a massive public health failure — and of worsening the pandemic’s effects by prioritizing politics over sound medical guidance.

The piece, titled “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum” and published Wednesday, does not mention President Trump or his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, by name. But it refers to the Trump administration repeatedly, and its footnotes cite news articles about Trump insisting that coronavirus risks are overblown, pressuring federal scientists, and politicizing the search for treatments.

Chico Harlan and Michael Birnbaum report Nobel Peace Prize goes to World Food Program for efforts to combat hunger:

The World Food Program was awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a recognition of the critical work by the United Nations agency to battle hunger around the world, especially as the coronavirus pandemic has brought a global spike in poverty.

Announcing the prize in Oslo, Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the world was in danger of a food crisis of “inconceivable proportions.”

For decades, the Rome-based World Food Program has played a central role in dealing with people caught in conflict or fleeing for safety. But Reiss-Andersen also emphasized a symbolic aspect of the selection, describing WFP’s work as form of global cooperation that seemed in danger in an era of nationalism and rising mistrust.

“The need for international solidarity and multilateral cooperation is more conspicuous than ever,” Reiss-Andersen said.

Can the coldness of space be used to cool the Earth and combat climate change?:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-four.  Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 6:22 PM, for 11h 20m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 65.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM.

 On this day in 1871, Peshtigo, Wisconsin suffers the Peshtigo Fire: “devastated by a fire which took 1,200 lives. The fire caused over $2 million in damages and destroyed 1.25 million acres of forest. This was the greatest human loss due to fire in the history of the United States. The Peshtigo Fire was overshadowed by the Great Chicago firewhich occured on the same day, killing 250 people and lasting three days. While the Chicago fire is said to have started by a cow kicking over a lantern, it is uncertain how the Peshtigo fire began.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Astead W. Herndon and Adam Nagourney report 6 Standout Moments From Harris and Pence at the Debate:

The [Biden] campaign believes the pandemic response encapsulates every unpopular part of Mr. Trump’s administration, and Ms. Harris opened the debate by focusing on the federal government’s response to the virus. She was unrelenting, evoking memories of the Democratic presidential primary race, when she promised to “prosecute the case against Donald Trump.”

The early attack on the virus was also significant for media markets. With the debate starting at 9 p.m. Eastern, both campaigns will have known that the early moments are critical for newspaper deadlines and audience ratings, because live viewership tends to drop as the evening goes on.

With Ms. Harris making the pandemic response her first answer, she focused her energy on the issue her campaign is zeroed in on.

Andrew Prokop asks Who does Trump owe hundreds of millions of dollars to?:

The New York Times’s blockbuster report on President Trump’s tax records has drawn new attention to the fact that Trump is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, with much of that debt coming due in the next four years.

This has led to much speculation about to whom the president might owe so much money, and why.

But in fact, the answer — or at least, part of the answer — has long been known. Trump owes hundreds of millions of dollars each to two financial institutions: Deutsche Bank and Ladder Capital.

Trump revealed this in his financial disclosure forms when he first ran for president in 2016, and journalists like Russ Choma of Mother Jones have been writing about it since. Choma wrote another piece on this earlier this summer, making the case that Trump’s half a billion in loans coming due “may be his biggest conflict of interest yet.”

Trump’s loans from Deutsche and Ladder were all linked to particular properties — they were either mortgages on the properties themselves, or loans to fund the development of a property. Still, there have long been questions about why Deutsche and Ladder would loan Trump so much, given his history of stiffing his creditors.

But overall, these loans are less mysterious than another aspect of Trump’s financial history — that from 2006 to 2014, he spent more than $400 million in cash on buying or developing various properties. Some journalists have long questioned how Trump got the money for all this, wondering whether he has other sources of funds he hasn’t disclosed. And the Times’s first story on the new tax records doesn’t clear this up.

Pilot And Architect Answer Google’s Boeing 747 Brain Teaser:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 6:24 PM, for 11h 23m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1774, Britain passes the Quebec Act, making Wisconsin part of the province of Quebec.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Siobhán O’Grady reports In a few days, more people in Trump’s orbit tested positive for coronavirus than in all of Taiwan:

More than a dozen White House officials have recently tested positive for the novel coronavirus, including some who are among the at least nine guests and two journalists who tested positive after they attended Amy Coney Barrett’s Sept. 26 Supreme Court nomination event in the Rose Garden.

Trump announced his positive test early Friday, and was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center later that day. He returned Monday to the White House, where he removed his mask, despite doctors saying he was still contagious.

Meanwhile, Taiwan — the self-ruled island home to 23 million people — reported just eight new cases in the past week.

Patrick Radden Keefe reports The Sackler Family’s Plan to Keep Its Billions (‘The Trump Administration is poised to make a settlement with Purdue Pharma that it can claim as a victory for opioid victims. But the proposed outcome would leave the company’s owners enormously wealthy—and off the hook for good’):

Behind the scenes, lawyers for Purdue and its owners have been quietly negotiating with Donald Trump’s Justice Department to resolve all the various federal investigations in an overarching settlement, which would likely involve a fine but no charges against individual executives. In other words, the deal will be a reprise of the way that the company evaded comprehensive accountability in 2007. Multiple lawyers familiar with the matter told me that members of the Trump Administration have been pushing hard to finalize the deal before Election Day. The Administration will likely present such a settlement as a major victory against Big Pharma—and as another “promise kept” to Trump’s base.

If the deal goes forward, it would mark a stunning turn in the decades-long saga of trying to hold Purdue and the Sacklers responsible for their role in the opioid crisis. But even more stunning is the projected outcome of the bankruptcy proceeding in White Plains. At a recent hearing, the judge, Robert Drain, became defensive when a lawyer representing creditors suggested that the Sacklers might “get away with it.” But, if the Sacklers achieve the result that the family’s legal team is quietly engineering, they seem poised to do just that.

 Tory Newmyer reports The $4 trillion federal bailout missed its mark, leaving millions struggling:

Washington seemingly pulled out all the stops in shoveling about $4 trillion into its response to the coronavirus pandemic, more than it spent on 18 years of war in Afghanistan.

But more than half of that sum, roughly $2.3 trillion, has gone to businesses that in many cases didn’t need the help or weren’t required to show they used the taxpayer funds to keep workers on the job.

By contrast, about a fifth, $884 billion, went to help workers and families. And even less aimed at the health crisis itself, with 16 percent of the total going toward testing and tracing, vaccine development, and helping states provide care, among other health-related needs.

(Emphasis in original.)

Elephant seal stranded on street returned to ocean with help from residents in Chile:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-one.  Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 6:25 PM, for 11h 26m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 82.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1927, The Jazz Singer, the first prominent “talkie” movie, has its premiere.

Recommended for reading in full — 

David Leonhardt writes of the coronavirus that only cancer and heart disease will kill more Americans this year than Covid:

Only cancer and heart disease will kill more Americans this year than Covid. Already, the virus has killed more than twice as many Americans as either strokes or Alzheimer’s disease, about four times as many as diabetes and more than eight times as many as either gun violence or vehicle accidents.

Most other rich countries have been much more successful in fighting the virus than the U.S. A chart is the simplest way to see this:

Outbreaks are again increasing in the U.S. The number of new cases per day has risen more than 25 percent since mid-September. “Covid-19 is spreading again across most of the U.S., hammering rural America and smaller cities and raising anxiety in New York,” Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The outbreak connected to the White House is responsible for about 30 known cases so far — more than the average daily number of new cases recently in all of Australia.

The virus is genuinely terrifying for thousands of people. In addition to the more than 200,000 deaths — and all of the Americans mourning those deaths — many other people have spent weeks battling fatigue, shortness of breath, cardiac problems and more.

Tim Walker reports Trump’s breathless White House return:

A still-contagious Donald Trump returned to the White House from Walter Reed military hospital on Monday evening, and immediately removed his mask for a photo op on the Truman balcony, where he appeared to be short of breath as he posed for cameras. In a campaign video shot moments later, however, the president insisted he was better following three days of hospital treatment for Covid-19 – and perhaps even “immune” to the disease.

Trump’s reported desperation to leave hospital and get back to campaigning while still in the throes of the illness is a sign of his willingness to sacrifice anyone – even those closest to him – to spare himself the humiliation of a one-term presidency, writes Julian Borger: “He has produced a toxic workplace to the point of potential lethality.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has tested positive for Covid-19, she announced on Monday.

Another guest from the Rose Garden event for Amy Coney Barrett has also tested positive. Mega-church pastor Greg Laurie said in a Facebook post that his symptoms were so far “mild”.

Trump’s team and the wider world might have hoped the president would learn something from his personal experience of the virus, writes Francine Prose:

We’d like to believe that suffering instructs and ennobles; that our grief, fear and pain increases our sympathy for the grief, fear and pain of others. But again, Donald Trump seems to be ineducable, impervious to shame, guilt, or any sense of personal responsibility, unaffected by anything except vanity, selfishness and reckless self-regard.

(Emphasis in original.)

Belarus: Tens of thousands protest eight weeks after election: