Good morning.

The last day of 2016 in Whitewater will be cloudy in the morning, but a bit sunnier in the afternoon, with a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9h 06m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}fifty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1879, at Menlo Park, Thomas Edison holds the first public demonstration of an incandescent light bulb; “[i]t was during this time that he said: ‘We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.’^[61]”  On this day in 1967, the Packers defeat the Cowboys, 21-17, in what amounted to an Ice Bowl (the game had a temperature of 13 below zero and a wind chill of 46 below zero).

Recommended for reading in full — 

Mark Sommerhauser writes that As Donald Trump eyes infrastructure spending, state leaders assess impact for Wisconsin. Waiting for Trump to pour money into Wisconsin may prove a long wait: “Most recently, some D.C. lobbyists have begun to question Trump’s basic commitment to an infrastructure plan. Trump, in a post-election interview with The New York Times, seemed to back away from the issue, saying infrastructure won’t be a “core” part of the first few years of his administration. Trump acknowledged that he didn’t realize during the campaign that New Deal-style proposals to put people to work building infrastructure might conflict with his party’s small-government philosophy. “That’s not a very Republican thing — I didn’t even know that, frankly,” Trump said.”

The Washington Post‘s editorial board states the obvious, in Trump refuses to face reality about Russia: “Mr. Trump has been frank about his desire to improve relations with Russia, but he seems blissfully untroubled by the reasons for the deterioration in relations, including Russia’s instigation of an armed uprising in Ukraine, its seizure of Crimea, its efforts to divide Europe and the crushing of democracy and human rights at home. Why is Mr. Trump so dismissive of Russia’s dangerous behavior? Some say it is his lack of experience in foreign policy, or an oft-stated admiration for strongmen, or naivete about Russian intentions. But darker suspicions persist. Mr. Trump has steadfastly refused to be transparent about his multibillion-dollar business empire. Are there loans or deals with Russian businesses or the state that were concealed during the campaign? Are there hidden communications with Mr. Putin or his representatives? We would be thrilled to see all the doubts dispelled, but Mr. Trump’s odd behavior in the face of a clear threat from Russia, matched by Mr. Putin’s evident enthusiasm for the president-elect, cannot be easily explained.”

Jim Henry writes persuasively of The Curious World of Donald Trump’s Private Russian Connections: “Even before the November 8 election, many leading Democrats were vociferously demanding that the FBI disclose the fruits of its investigations into Putin-backed Russian hackers. Instead FBI Director Comey decided to temporarily revive his zombie-like investigation of Hillary’s emails. That decision may well have had an important impact on the election, but it did nothing to resolve the allegations about Putin. Even now, after the CIA has disclosed an abstract of its own still-secret investigation, it is fair to say that we still lack the cyberspace equivalent of a smoking gun.Fortunately, however, for those of us who are curious about Trump’s Russian connections, there is another readily accessible body of material that has so far received surprisingly little attention. This suggests that whatever the nature of President-elect Donald Trump’s relationship with President Putin, he has certainly managed to accumulate direct and indirect connections with a far-flung private Russian/FSU [former Soviet Union] network of outright mobsters, oligarchs, fraudsters, and kleptocrats.”

Conservative David Frum describes How Trump Made Russia’s Hacking More Effective: “Without Trump’s own willingness to make false claims and misuse Russian-provided information, the Wikileaks material would have deflated of its own boringness. The Russian-hacked material did damage because, and only because, Russia found a willing accomplice in the person of Donald J. Trump. Many questions remain about how the Russian spy services did what they did. That includes Putin’s motives for ordering the operation. But on issues from Crimea to Syria to NATO to the breakup of the European Union, Trump’s publicly expressed views align with Putin’s wishes. Over Trump’s motives for collaborating so full-throatedly with Russian espionage, there hangs a greater and more disturbing mystery—a mystery that Trump seems in no hurry to dispel. And maybe he is wise to leave the mystery in place: as delegitimizing as it is, it’s very possible the truth would be even worse.”

Admittedly, I’m not an admirer of champagne, but this recipe for a champagne cocktail is intriguing, indeed, agreeably bewitching:

Good morning.

Whitewater’s week ends with partly cloudy skies and a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 05m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}fifty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this dayin 1940, California’s first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, opens. On this day in 1922, authorities in Madison confiscate 1,200 gallons of mash and fifteen gallons of moonshine from the home of a suspected bootlegger.

Recommended for reading in full —

Hungarian author Miklos Haraszti writes I watched a populist leader rise in my country. That’s why I’m genuinely worried for America: “Hungary, my country, has in the past half-decade morphed from an exemplary post-Cold War democracy into a populist autocracy. Here are a few eerie parallels that have made it easy for Hungarians to put Donald Trump on their political map: Prime Minister Viktor Orban has depicted migrants as rapists, job-stealers, terrorists and “poison” for the nation, and built a vast fence along Hungary’s southern border. The popularity of his nativist agitation has allowed him to easily debunk as unpatriotic or partisan any resistance to his self-styled “illiberal democracy,” which he said he modeled after “successful states” such as Russia and Turkey. No wonder Orban feted Trump’s victory as ending the era of “liberal non-democracy,” “the dictatorship of political correctness” and “democracy export.” The two consummated their political kinship in a recent phone conversation; Orban is invited to Washington, where, they agreed, both had been treated as “black sheep.” ”

Andrew Kramer reports How Russia Recruited Elite Hackers for Its Cyberwar: “For more than three years, rather than rely on military officers working out of isolated bunkers, Russian government recruiters have scouted a wide range of programmers, placing prominent ads on social media sites, offering jobs to college students and professional coders, and even speaking openly about looking in Russia’s criminal underworld for potential talent. Those recruits were intended to cycle through military contracting companies and newly formed units called science squadrons established on military bases around the country.”

Reporter David Fahrenthold tells the behind-the-scenes story of his year covering Trump (leading to Fahrenthold’s discovery of corruption within the Trump’s Foundation): “So by the time the New Hampshire primaries were over, the candidates I had covered were kaput. I needed a new beat. While I pondered what that would be, I decided to do a short story about the money Trump had raised for veterans. I wanted to chase down two suspicions I’d brought home with me from that event in Iowa. For one thing, I thought Trump might have broken the law by improperly mixing his foundation with his presidential campaign. I started calling experts. “I think it’s pretty clear that that’s over the line,” Marc S. Owens, the former longtime head of the Internal Revenue Service’s nonprofit division, told me when I called him.”

James Palmer describes What China Didn’t Learn From the Collapse of the Soviet Union: “The hostility toward the color revolutions and the chaos they’ve unleashed has thus been projected backward. The Soviet fall, once seen at least in part as a result of the Communist Party’s own failings, has become reinterpreted as a deliberate U.S. plot and a moral failure to hold the line against Western influence. That has ended what was once a powerful spur to reform — meaning that, barring a major change in leadership, the likely course of Chinese politics over the next few years will be further xenophobia, even more power to the party, and an unwillingness to talk about the harder lessons of history.”

What’s inside a tapestry factory? This is —

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be overcast and windy, with a high of thirty-four. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 04m 40s of daytime. The moon is new, with .1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}fifty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

It’s the birthday (12.29.1766) of Charles Macintosh, Scottish chemist and inventor of waterproof fabric: “His experiments with one of the by-products of tar, naphtha, led to his invention of waterproof fabric, the essence of his patent was the cementing of two thicknesses of cloth together with natural rubber, the rubber is made soluble by the action of the naphtha. In 1823 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, for his chemical discoveries.”

Recommended for reading in full —

For Wisconsin, Patrick Marley reports Major road delays in store: “Madison — If Wisconsin officials don’t put more money toward roads, the full Zoo Interchange won’t be completed until 2020, the north-south portion of I-94 until 2025 and the east-west section of I-94 until 2029, a report released Wednesday found. A related consultant’s report — which cost nearly $1 million — found that the state could take in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from tolling drivers on Wisconsin interstates but that state officials would face difficulties getting federal approval and raising the money necessary to launch such tolling. Together, the reports underscore many of the points Gov. Scott Walker and lawmakers have long known about the challenges to funding Wisconsin’s highways. They were issued a day after Walker’s transportation secretary, Mark Gottlieb, announced he would step down next week.”

Jay Rosen writes that Winter is coming: prospects for the American press under Trump (it’s the first of two parts, with part one listing 26 points): “For a free press as a check on power this is the darkest time in American history since World War I, when there was massive censorship and suppression of dissent. I say this because so many things are happening at once to disarm and disable serious journalism, or to push it out of the frame. Most of these are well known, but it helps to put them all together. Here is my list: 1. An economic crisis in (most) news companies, leaving the occupation of journalism in a weakened state, especially at the state and local level, where newsrooms have been decimated by the decline of the newspaper business. The digital money is going to Google and Facebook, but they do not have newsrooms….”

Nathanael Johnson asks Can capitalism, conservation, and cosmopolitanism coexist?:  “When people have to make short-term, urgent decisions to survive, the natural world suffers. The poverty that forces such decisions renders both land and people vulnerable to exploitation. Where there is prosperity, by contrast, there are institutions to protect natural resources. Historically, there’s only one way large numbers of people have escaped poverty:An economic transformation from an agrarian majority to a modern economy where just a few farmers feed everyone else. Farms become more productive, people move to cities, incomes rise, forests rebound, women gain power, and populations level off.”

Alana Semuels writes that It’s Not About the Economy (‘In an increasingly polarized country, even economic progress can’t get voters to abandon their partisan allegiance’): “This city exemplifies the economic recovery the country has experienced since the Great Recession ended. Elkhart’s unemployment rate, which had reached a high of 22 percent in March of 2009, is now at 3.9 percent. Hiring signs dot the doors of the Wal-Mart, the McDonald’s, and the Long John Silver’s. The RV industry makes 65 percent of its vehicles in Elkhart, and the industry is producing a record number of vehicles, which is creating a lot of jobs in this frosty town in northern Indiana….But despite the decisions that the Obama administration made that might have helped Elkhart, many people here have a strong dislike of Obama, who presided over an economic recovery in which the unemployment rate fell nationally to 4.6 percent from a high of 10 percent in October 2009. They say it’s not Obama who is responsible for the city or the country’s economic progress, and furthermore, that the economy won’t truly start to improve until President-elect Donald Trump takes office.”

A video from Tech Insider explains the origins of seven brand names —

Good morning.

Midweek in this small Midwestern college town will be cloudy with a high of forty degrees. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset is 4:29 PM, for 9h 04m 02s of daytime. The moon is new today, with just .5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}fiftieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn publishes The Gulag Archipelago in the West.

For reading in full —

Patrick Marley reports that Wisconsin’s Transportation Secretary Gottlieb to step down: “Madison — Gov. Scott Walker’s transportation secretary is stepping down less than a month after he told lawmakers Wisconsin’s roads would worsen under the GOP governor’s plans. Transportation Secretary Mark Gottlieb will retire Jan. 6 and be replaced by Dave Ross, a former mayor of Superior who now serves as Walker’s safety and professional services secretary, according to the governor’s office. Gottlieb has served as transportation secretary since Walker was inaugurated in 2011. A civil engineer, Gottlieb has at times called for increasing taxes and fees to pay for highways. That’s a different approach than the one Walker has touted in recent years. Walker has said he will not raise gas taxes or vehicle fees unless an equivalent cut is made in other taxes. Gottlieb has gone along with that plan, but this month acknowledged it would result in doubling the number of roads in poor condition over the next decade. He made those comments in testimony to the Assembly Transportation Committee.”

Thanassis Cambanis reports that Moscow is ready to rumble: “Incoming President Donald Trump, meanwhile, appears willing to grant Russia the official recognition that Putin has always craved. Trump and Putin — two macho leaders with empire-sized egos — tempt analysts to reduce the US-Russia relationship to personalities. But the unfolding clash stems from essentials. Russia has considerable hard power, starting with its nuclear arsenal and enormous territory. Its interests conflict with those of the United States and frequently of Europe, through tsarist and Soviet times down to the present. And finally, Moscow’s acerbic rhetoric and commitment to sovereignty and consistency place it in constant opposition in international forums to the United States, with its moralistic style and constant talk of human rights and democracy. “Putin is about restoring his country as a major power recognized by the world,” said Dmitri V. Trenin, a former officer in the Soviet and Russian armies who now heads the Carnegie Moscow Center, an international think tank.”

John Broich describes How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler: “By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get. (Though there remained infamous exceptions, like Douglas Chandler, who wrote a loving paean to “Changing Berlin” for National Geographic in 1937.) Dorothy Thompson, who judged Hitler a man of “startling insignificance” in 1928, realized her mistake by mid-decade when she, like Mowrer, began raising the alarm. “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance,” she reflected in 1935. “He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.” Applying the lesson to the U.S., she wrote, “When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

Rebecca Ruiz reports that Russians No Longer Dispute Olympic Doping Operation: “MOSCOW — Russia is for the first time conceding that its officials carried out one of the biggest conspiracies in sports history: a far-reaching doping operation that implicated scores of Russian athletes, tainting not just the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi but also the entire Olympic movement….A lab director tampered with urine samples at the Olympics and provided cocktails of performance-enhancing drugs, corrupting some of the world’s most prestigious competitions. Members of the Federal Security Service, a successor to the K.G.B., broke into sample bottles holding urine. And a deputy sports minister for years ordered cover-ups of top athletes’ use of banned substances.”

Dr. Seuss put rhymes to good use —

Good morning.

Whitewater’s Tuesday will be mostly cloudy with a high of twenty-eight. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 03m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1900, fanatical activist Carrie (Carry) Nation took “her campaign against alcohol to Wichita, Kansas, when she smashed the bar at the elegant Carey Hotel. Earlier that year, Nation had abandoned the nonviolent agitation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in favor of direct action that she called “hatchetation.” Since the Kansas Constitution prohibited alcohol, Nation argued that destroying saloons was an acceptable means of battling the state’s flourishing liquor trade.”

Worth reading in full — 

Cara Lombardo and Dee J. Hall report on Failure at the Faucet: Lead in schools, day care centers: “Water from four West Middleton Elementary School faucets taken Sept. 1, the first day of school, had tested high for levels of lead or copper. As a safety precaution, the school would provide bottled water to students until the issue was resolved. Corrigan — whose daughters Brooklyn and Carly are in first and fourth grades — thought little of the news, partly because the email told parents of students at the school west of Madison that it was “highly unlikely” that the water was unsafe to drink. But one faucet at West Middleton had more than six times the federal action level of 15 parts per billion of lead and nearly 19 times the federal action level of 1,300 ppb of copper. Other faucets showed a presence of lead. Any amount of lead can cause permanent brain damage, including reduced intelligence and behavioral problems, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Infants and children are considered the most vulnerable to lead’s negative effects.”

Don Behm reports that Coal tar [is the] main source of toxicity in streams: “Coal-tar sealants applied to blacktop parking lots and driveways are the primary source of toxic chemicals found in the muck at the bottom of Milwaukee-area waterways, according to a study by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. Tests of muck samples collected at 40 locations along 19 creeks and rivers in the metropolitan area, and dust from six parking lots, found that coal-tar sealants contributed up to 94% of all polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, in streambed sediment, says the study published last week  in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. Fully 78% of the samples contained enough PAHs to be considered toxic and capable of causing adverse effects in aquatic animals, said Austin Baldwin, a USGS scientist and lead author of the study. The most toxic sediment came from Lincoln Creek and Underwood Creek.”

Jeremy Peters reports how Wielding Claims of ‘Fake News,’ Conservatives Take Aim at Mainstream Media: “WASHINGTON — The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news“….Until now, that term had been widely understood to refer to fabricated news accounts that are meant to spread virally online. But conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself, incredulous about suggestions that fake stories may have helped swing the election, have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.”

Steve Inskeep offers (with 16 criteria) How To Tell Fake News From Real News In ‘Post-Truth’ Era: “Hazardous as the post-trust era may be, it shouldn’t cause despair. It’s all right for Americans to be skeptical of what they read and hear. How could I say otherwise? I’m a journalist. It’s my job to question what I hear. While I shouldn’t cynically dismiss everything people tell me, I should ask for evidence and avoid buying into bogus narratives. Being a skeptical reporter has made me a more skeptical news consumer….”

The planet’s had numerous earthquakes over the last fifteen years, and scientists have created an animated map to show the ‘quakes epicenters: