Good morning.

Whitewater will have a partly cloudy Monday with a high of twenty degrees.  Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 03m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6:30 PM tonight.

 

On this day in 1897, the pioneering comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids (by German immigrant Rudolph Dirks and drawn by Harold H. Knerr) is first published.  (“Dirks was the first cartoonist to express dialogue in comic characters through the use of speech balloons,” see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Katzenjammer_Kids.)

Worth reading in full —

He unconvincingly talks free trade, but Donald Trump’s ‘dumb market’ position on trade breaks with decades of Republican views: “TRUMP: That is–that’s not free market when they go out and they move and they sell back into our country. WALLACE: But that’s the free market. They made a decision and it makes — TRUMP: No. That’s — that’s the dumb market, okay? That’s the dumb market.”

Alex Nowrasteh observes that The Right Has Its Own Version of Political Correctness. It’s Just as Stifling: “But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences. Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.”

Jackson Diehl predicts Trump’s coming war against Islam: “Donald Trump is about to lead the West into the third and darkest phase of its 15-year quest to neutralize the threat of Islamic extremism. The first was George W. Bush’s freedom initiative, which posited that political liberalization in the Middle East’s rotting autocracies would dry up terrorist recruiting. The second was the engagement policy of Barack Obama, who bet that respectful dialogue and attention to Muslim demands for justice — above all for the Palestinians — would make the West a less compelling target. Both were widely judged to be failures. Now the new president will embrace the approach that both Bush and Obama explicitly ruled out as morally wrong and practically counterproductive: civilizational conflict.”

Derek Thompson describes The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class: “Perhaps the clearest takeaway from the November election for many liberals is that Hillary Clinton lost because she ignored the working class. In the days after her shocking loss, Democrats complained that Clinton had no jobs agenda. A widely shared essay in The Nation blamed Clinton’s “neoliberalism” for abandoning the voters who swung the election. “I come from the white working class,” Bernie Sanders said on CBS This Morning, “and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.” But here is the troubling reality for civically minded liberals looking to justify their preferred strategies: Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost.”

Quartz shows How Olympic athletes cheat without getting caught:

Good morning.

Sunday in town will be a snowy day, with total weekend accumulations of five to eight inches, and a daytime high of twenty-four. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 04m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1941, Germany and Italy declare war on the United States. On this day in 1901, Morris Pratt incorporated the Morris Pratt Institute for spiritualism, then-located in Whitewater, Wisconsin.

Worth reading in full —

Wisconsin’s State Democrats wonder: What went wrong?: “The win may have been narrow, but Trump’s triumph completed what amounts to an eight-year Republican take down of the state Democratic Party. In 2008, Wisconsin Democrats were riding high, holding the governor’s office, the Legislature, two U.S. Senate seats and five of the state’s eight congressional seats. Since then, Democrats have been wiped out at the statehouse, losing their legislative majorities and three straight governor’s races to Scott Walker, including the 2012 recall.”

Not everyone in Washington see calls for a probe of Russian hacking the same way, because As Democrats demand probe over CIA election claim, GOP senators express doubt: “Democrats immediately embraced the conclusions of the secret CIA report, which asserted that the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails — and their release to WikiLeaks — was the work of Russian operatives with ties to the government of President Vladi­mir Putin, all intended to help elect Trump. Key Republicans did not automatically accept that conclusion, despite many of them believing that Russia was behind the DNC hacks and other election interference. For Republicans, giving credence to the CIA assessment probably would cause them to anger Trump even before the president-elect has been inaugurated.”

Across America, An Alt-Right Makeover Shrouds the Swastikas: “in November, as the country’s divisive presidential campaign became ever more jagged, the National Socialist Movement, a leading neo-Nazi group, did away with its swastika. In its stead, the group chose a symbol from a pre-Roman alphabet that was also adopted by the Nazis. According to Jeff Schoep, the movement’s leader, the decision to dispense with the swastika was “an attempt to become more integrated and more mainstream.” Let us pause. Not even two years ago, white supremacists like Mr. Schoep would rant from the fringe of the fringe, their attention-desperate events rarely worth mention. Today, though, the Schoeps of America are undergoing a rebranding, as part of the so-called alt-right: a grab bag of far-right groups generally united by the belief that white identity has become endangered in what they deride as this era of dangerous diversity and political correctness.”

Lauren Duca observes that Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America: “To gas light is to psychologically manipulate a person to the point where they question their own sanity, and that’s precisely what Trump is doing to this country. He gained traction in the election by swearing off the lies of politicians, while constantly contradicting himself, often without bothering to conceal the conflicts within his own sound bites. He lied to us over and over again, then took all accusations of his falsehoods and spun them into evidence of bias. At the hands of Trump, facts have become interchangeable with opinions, blinding us into arguing amongst ourselves, as our very reality is called into question.  There is a long list of receipts when it comes to Trump’s lies. With the help of PolitiFact, clear-cut examples of deception include Trump saying that he watched thousands of people cheering on 9/11 in Jersey City (police say there’s no evidence of this), that the Mexican government forces immigrants into the U.S. (no evidence), that there are “30 or 34 million” immigrants in this country (there are 10 or 11 million), that he never supported the Iraq War (he told Howard Stern he did), that the unemployment rate is as high as “42 percent” (the highest reported rate is 16.4 percent), that the U.S. is the highest taxed country in the world (not true based on any metric of consideration), that crime is on the rise (it’s falling, and has been for decades), and too many other things to list here because the whole tactic is to clog the drain with an indecipherable mass of toxic waste. The gas lighting part comes in when the fictions are disputed by the media, and Trump doubles down on his lies, before painting himself as a victim of unfair coverage, sometimes even threatening to revoke access.”

New Pokémon are coming to Pokémon GO:

Good morning.

Saturday in this small city will be sunny in the morning, with snowfall beginning in the afternoon, and a high of twenty-one. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 05m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. On this day in 1967, Otis Redding and four members of his band die when their twin-engine Beechcraft crashes into Lake Monona in Madison.

Worth reading in full —

Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller report that a Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House: “The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter. Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances. “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

Matthew DeFour writes that Paul Ryan says he and Donald Trump don’t talk about areas of disagreement: “U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said Friday he and President-elect Donald Trump have been so focused on discussing the policy agenda items they agree on, they haven’t discussed areas of disagreement. “All our conversations revolve around getting the big things done,” Ryan said during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. “We don’t really talk about what we disagree on.”

Norman Ohler has a new book [to be published in America in April] that contends the leaders of the Third Reich were Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany: “Mr. Ohler fell back on his interest in sleuthing during the five years it took to research and write “Blitzed.” Through interviews and documents that hadn’t been carefully studied before, he unearthed new details about how soldiers of the Wehrmacht were regularly supplied with methamphetamine of a quality that would give Walter White, of “Breaking Bad,” pangs of envy. Millions of doses, packaged as pills, were gobbled up in battles throughout the war, part of an officially sanctioned factory-to-front campaign against fatigue. As surely as hangover follows high, this pharmacological stratagem worked for a while — it was crucial to the turbocharged 1940 invasion and defeat of France — and then did not, most notably when the Nazis were mired in the Soviet Union. But the most vivid portrait of abuse and withdrawal in “Blitzed” is that of Hitler, who for years was regularly injected by his personal physician with powerful opiates, like Eukodal, a brand of oxycodone once praised by William S. Burroughs as “truly awful.” For a few undoubtedly euphoric months, Hitler was also getting swabs of high-grade cocaine, a sedation and stimulation combo that Mr. Ohler likens to a “classic speedball.”

Harriet Sherwodd writes that Pope Francis compares fake news consumption to eating faeces: “Pope Francis has lambasted media organisations that focus on scandals and smears and promote fake news as a means of discrediting people in public life. Spreading disinformation was “probably the greatest damage that the media can do”, the pontiff told the Belgian Catholic weekly Tertio. It is a sin to defame people, he added. Using striking terminology, Francis said journalists and the media must avoid falling into “coprophilia” – an abnormal interest in excrement. Those reading or watching such stories risked behaving like coprophagics, people who eat faeces, he added. The pope excused himself for using terminology that some might find repellent. “I think the media have to be very clear, very transparent, and not fall into – no offence intended – the sickness of coprophilia, that is, always wanting to cover scandals, covering nasty things, even if they are true,” he said. “And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, a lot of damage can be done.”

Gabon, and an elephant, are striking by air —