Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a high of forty-three, and a one-third chance of afternoon showers.  Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 28m 35s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 38.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1963, Pres. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas.  On this day in 1906, noted Wisconsin lawyer and UW Regent Elizabeth Hawkes was born.

Worth reading in full —

Locally, Walworth County’s just not growing anymore: “Through the 1990s until about 2008, Walworth County was one of the fastest-growing counties in the state, according to census numbers from the Wisconsin Department of Administration.  Since then, however, population growth in the county has stagnated.  Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, said the reason for flat growth is simple: The number of people dying matches the number being born or moving to the county.  He said the alliance predicted slow growth from 2010 to 2040. The trend is an issue for the whole state, not just Walworth County, Berry said.  “One of Wisconsin’s biggest challenges is that few people leave the state, but few people come,” Berry said.  For some, flat population growth is not worth a worry. But for others, slowing growth can make modernizing public infrastructure more difficult.”

Ed Trevelen reports that a Federal judges panel finds state redistricting plan an ‘unconstitutional gerrymander’: “A panel of federal judges on Monday ruled that Wisconsin’s 2011 legislative redistricting plan, created by Republican leaders virtually in secret, is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.  The map “was intended to burden the representational rights of Democratic voters … by impeding their ability to translate their votes into legislative seats,” wrote federal appeals court Judge Kenneth Ripple, the senior judge on the three-judge panel, adding that “the discriminatory effect is not explained by the political geography of Wisconsin nor is it justified by a legitimate state interest.  “Consequently, Act 43 constitutes an unconstitutional political gerrymander,” Ripple wrote.”

Ananya Bhattacharya’s reports on a Handy cheat sheet of false and misleading “news” sites: “In the wake of a debate over the role of fake news in the US election, a professor is doing what Facebook has failed to: identifying untrustworthy sources.  Melissa Zimdars, an associate professor of communication and media at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, has created a public Google Doclisting news sites that distribute incorrect information. Titled “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical ‘News’ Sources,” the list includes blatantly incorrect URLs like”abcnews.com.co” and “drudgereport.com.co,” but also sites whose stories are of dubious origin and sourcing.”

Tanya Ganeva writes about drug warrior Jeff Sessions’s ridiculous anti-drug crusade: “A few days ago, it looked as if the popularity and profitability of marijuana would spare pot reform from the lurching chaos of Donald Trump’s administration. But then Sen. Jeff Sessions — probably the only person on earth who’s nostalgic about Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign — was announced as President-elect Trump’s choice for attorney general.  As my fellow guest blogger Steven Hale wrote on Friday, Sessions’s record and public statements indicate that he’ll be a nightmare for civil liberties. In terms of drug policy, Sessions stands out even in the GOP for his steadfast rejection of scientific evidence.”

Toads get around well enough, but no one would call them graceful —

I just love how ungainly these #toads are in #slowmo! pic.twitter.com/94x1fHGJWp

— Grantham Ecologist (@GranthamEcology) October 27, 2016

Good morning,

The work week in Whitewater begins with partly cloudy skies and a high of thirty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 30m 25s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 48.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s library board meets this evening at 6:30 PM, and the area school board meets in regular session at 7 PM.

Worth reading in full —

Sapna Maheshwari describes How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study: “Eric Tucker, a 35-year-old co-founder of a marketing company in Austin, Tex., had just about 40 Twitter followers. But his recent tweet about paid protesters being bused to demonstrations against President-elect Donald J. Trump fueled a nationwide conspiracy theory — one that Mr. Trump joined in promoting.   Mr. Tucker’s post was shared at least 16,000 times on Twitter and more than 350,000 times on Facebook. The problem is that Mr. Tucker got it wrong. There were no such buses packed with paid protesters….While some fake news is produced purposefully by teenagers in the Balkans or entrepreneurs in the United States seeking to make money from advertising, false information can also arise from misinformed social media posts by regular people that are seized on and spread through a hyperpartisan blogosphere.  Here, The New York Times deconstructs how Mr. Tucker’s now-deleted declaration on Twitter the night after the election turned into a fake-news phenomenon. It is an example of how, in an ever-connected world where speed often takes precedence over truth, an observation by a private citizen can quickly become a talking point, even as it is being proved false.”

Bob McGinn watches as the Packers’ season careens out of control: “The Packers drooped to 4-6 with their fifth defeat in the last six games. They’re two games behind Detroit and Minnesota in the NFC North and in a four-way tie for 11th place in the NFC.  Of the 16 teams in the conference, the Packers find themselves ahead of only Chicago (2-8) and San Francisco (1-9). Yes, their situation is that bad.  “Six losses puts your ass against the wall,” coach Mike McCarthy said. “Disappointing. Reality is we are 4-6. We understand clearly what is in front of us.  ”This is no time for personnel evaluation or coaching evaluation. This is our football team, the 2016 Green Bay Packers. We are going to rally and stick together.”  It’s the Packers’ worst position after 10 games since McCarthy’s first season, when a 4-6 record turned into 8-8.”

Simon Nixon finds that The EU’s New Bomb Is Ticking in the Netherlands: “….the risk to the EU comes from a new generation of Dutch euroskeptics who are less divisive and concerned about immigration but more focused on questions of sovereignty—and utterly committed to the destruction of the EU. Its leading figures areThierry Baudet and Jan Roos, who have close links to British euroskeptics. They have already scored one significant success: In 2015, they persuaded the Dutch parliament to adopt a law that requires the government to hold a referendum on any law if 300,000 citizens request it. They then took advantage of this law at the first opportunity to secure a vote that rejected the EU’s proposed trade and economic pact with Ukraine, which Brussels saw as a vital step in supporting a strategically important neighbor.  This referendum law is a potential bomb under the EU, as both Dutch politicians and Brussels officials are well aware. Mr. Baudet believes he now has the means to block any steps the EU might seek to take to deepen European integration or stabilize the eurozone if they require Dutch legislation. This could potentially include aid to troubled Southern European countries such as Greece and Italy, rendering the eurozone unworkable.”

Matt O’Brien ponders Donald Trump and the end of history: “From Europe’s anti-immigrant parties edging closer to power to Britain’s all-but-winning it with the country’s vote to leave the European Union to Trump’s ascension to the White House, Francis Fukuyama’s famous idea that free-market liberal democracy had vanquished all its ideological foes and was the “final form of human government” seems to be, well, a little more temporary. Just as he could have told you himself. Fukuyama, you see, believed that just because we’d reached the end of history didn’t mean we’d stay in the end of history. That peace and prosperity might not be enough for some people who would, “struggle for the sake of struggle” simply “out of a certain boredom” from living in a world that doesn’t seem to have meaning or identity any more. And so we might see a 227 year-old republic succumb to someone who evinced only the slightest respect for constitutional norms and even less for minority groups.”

Le Croisic is beautiful by air as a video from that city’s tourism bureau proudly demonstrates:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty-six.  (The average November high here is about forty-six.)  Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 32m 18s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 58% of its visible disk illuminated.

Worth reading (or hearing) in full —

Katherine J. Cramer observes that For years, I’ve been watching anti-elite fury build in Wisconsin. Then came Trump: “Almost a decade ago, I selected 27 communities in Wisconsin and asked locals to help me identify a coffee klatch in each. Some of these communities were urban or suburban, but the majority were rural. (I selected the communities by first dividing the state into eight regions, based on a variety of political, economic, and social characteristics, and then sampling a small town and a larger one in each. I later supplemented those selections with additional ones, to add variety. The result was a fairly representative swath of non-urban Wisconsin.)  I then walked into the gas station — or diner or other location — that I’d been directed to, at the appropriate time, and introduced myself as a public opinion scholar from the state’s flagship university. They tended to be welcoming, maybe in part because my thick Wisconsin accent made me less of a stranger.  Once I passed out my business cards, handed out tokens of appreciation like Badger football schedules, and turned on my recorder, I asked them, “What are the big concerns of people in this community?”  Regardless of geography, people in most of these communities talked about their concerns about health care, jobs, and taxation. But in the rural places and small towns, people expressed a deeply felt sense of not getting their “fair share” — defined in different ways. They felt that they didn’t get a reasonable proportion of decision-making power, believing that the key decisions were made in the major metro areas of Madison and Milwaukee, then decreed out to the rest of the state, with little listening being done to people like them.”

Anne Applebaum contends that The Radical Populism Phenomenon in Politics Offers a Kind of Magical Thinking:

Daniel Kahn Gillmor and Jay Stanley offer A Few Easy Steps Everyone Should Take to Protect Their Digital Privacy: “Much of the privacy protection we need in today’s world can’t happen without technological and legislative solutions, and the ACLU will continue leading the fight for digital security and privacy through our litigation and advocacy efforts. But there are simple steps that everyone can take to improve their digital privacy. While there are many advanced techniques that expert technologists can deploy for much greater security, below are some relatively basic and straightforward steps that will significantly increase your protection against privacy invasions and hacks.”

In the WSJ, Nick Timiraos finds Inside Donald Trump’s Economic Team, Two Very Different Views: “One group, which appeared ascendant in the closing weeks of the campaign, largely rejects mainstream economic thinking on trade and believes eliminating trade deficits should be an overarching goal of U.S. policy. That camp views sticks—tariffs on U.S. trading partners and taxes on companies that move jobs abroad—as critical tools to reverse a 15-year slide in incomes for middle-class Americans.  The opposing camp is closer to the traditional GOP center of gravity on taxes and regulation and includes many policy veterans staffing the transition team and advising Vice President-elect Mike Pence.  Those advisers have long championed supply-side economics and reject the hard-line position on trade that one side’s gain must come at the other’s expense. By offering more carrots—slashing red tape and taxes to make the U.S. the top destination for businesses—they say stronger growth will obviate any need for trade protectionism.  “It is the supply-siders versus the zero-sum crowd,” said Andy Laperriere, political strategist at research firm Cornerstone Macro LP who closely watches such policy developments.”

Filmmaker JT Singh’s recorded A Quick, Visual Journey Through Shanghai.  Shanghai, at a fast pace —

Good morning.

We’ve a cloudy & windy day ahead in this city, with a high of thirty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 34m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 68.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Worth reading in full — 

Steven Horwitz writes about The double thank you of the market: “It is a constant struggle to persuade people that the market is not an arena of battle where one side defeats the other. It is a process of social cooperation built on the foundation of mutual benefit. Critics of markets continue to argue they make us meaner and nastier and that they create and exploit oppositional behavior. These arguments are at least as old as Marx, but they never seem to go away despite piles of evidence to the contrary.  As Deirdre McCloskey has argued in her trilogy on the bourgeoisie, not only does the market allows us to express a variety of virtuous behavior, but our participation in exchange and profit-seeking inculcates and encourages those virtues. Markets call upon our good behavior and cause us to engage in more of it as a result, and we have experimental evidence to support these claims.  The problem is many of the most frequent manifestations of the civilized behavior markets instill in us are so deeply habitual that we only notice them when we are faced with a striking contrast.”

At the Times, Adam Goldman offers Why Democrats Now Need the F.B.I. Director, James Comey: “The positions [on terrorism] taken by Mr. Comey in recent years could put him at odds with not just Mr. Sessions but other members of Mr. Trump’s national security team. “Given the recent slate of appointments from the president-elect, F.B.I. Director Comey may well turn out to be a bulwark against the worst abuses and provide some defense of the rule of law,” said Faiza Patel of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, who is a frequent critic of the F.B.I.”

A decade ago, Daniel Golden wrote a book about how students’ families bought their way into elite schools. Trump’s current son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was one of the book’s subjects: “I would like to express my gratitude to Jared Kushner for reviving interest in my 2006 book, “The Price of Admission.” I have never met or spoken with him, and it’s rare in this life to find such a selfless benefactor. Of course, I doubt he became Donald Trump’s son-in-law and consigliere merely to boost my lagging sales, but still, I’m thankful.  My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. It reported that New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998, not long before his son Jared was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League school. At the time, Harvard accepted about one of every nine applicants. (Nowadays, it only takes one out of twenty.)  I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision. “There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”

Rich Kirchen writes that the Milwaukee Bucks’ entertainment-block design is modern interpretation of [the] city’s industry: “The entertainment block is a central element of the master design plan for the $500 million arena and surrounding development.  The Bucks said the area is being designed for year-round community use and will feature a mixture of dining, entertainment and retail.The block will serve as an important connection between the new arena and existing commercial activity along Old World Third Street, the Bucks said.  A promenade along the arena will include public art, gardens, a signature water feature and event lawns, the Bucks said.”

So how are names and words formed?  Name Explain briefly…explains:

Good morning.

The week winds down in Whitewater with partly cloudy skies and a high of sixty-six.  Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 36m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Worth reading in full:

Brendan Nyhan asks Is the Slide Into Tribal Politics Inevitable?: “Donald J. Trump’s victory could well push the American party system toward a clash between an overwhelmingly white ethnic party and a cosmopolitan coalition of minority groups and college-educated whites….Mr. Trump’s campaign may set in motion a process that reorients American politics toward the cosmopolitanism versus nationalism divide that he emphasized, reconfiguring our party system and shaping our politics for decades to come. The power of social identity suggests that such a dynamic could be difficult to stop once set in motion…Despite all the attention paid to economic anxiety as the basis for Mr. Trump’s appeal, the evidence to date is more consistent with his brand of identity politics being the most important cause of this shift in voting patterns from 2012 (though of course economic anxiety and group animus are not mutually exclusive).”

Conservative Jennifer Rubin wonders Who will stand up to Trump?: “Over and over again during the campaign, GOP Senate and House incumbents and challengers swore up and down that they would speak up and act as a brake on Trump. They have done virtually nothing so far. If they don’t keep their word, voters in 2018 and 2020 should boot them out. Conscientious center-right candidates should be prepared to challenge spineless Republicans in the primaries or general elections. There may even be instances in which a sensible centrist Democrat needs defending or support to bolster the backstop against Trump excesses. Millennials, in particular, should be prepared to go up against the new insiders, the Trumpkinized GOP. Remember, dissent can be the highest form of patriotism.”

At Reason, Shikha Dalmia explains Why Minorities Will Save American Constitutional Traditions in the Age of Trump: “The American right has long been telling itself a simple morality tale that goes something like this: The white Christian establishment is the original source and continuing guardian of America’s tradition of liberty, free markets and limited government and minorities are a threat to it because they don’t share the same attachments. One of the major arguments that restrictionist right-wing pundits make for clamping down on immigration is that immigrants, hailing from Big Government countries, dilute these American principles.  This has always been nonsense. But Donald Trump’s election has turned this story on its head given that whites are the ones who voted for him because they wanted economic nationalism and protectionism….Trump is a natural authoritarian who ran on a platform that blended populist economic policies with an aggressive law-and-order state. So he has promised to shut down trade and immigration to protect the American working class and use the strong arm of the government to bend businesses to his will – forcing them to stay in the country and hire workers at wages he mandates. (Hence his flirtation late in the campaign with a $15 minimum wage, even though it departs from his party’s orthodoxy.)”

For Russia, The Hacking Must Go On: “The U.S. election may be over, but Russia is still hacking the United States.  But the goal appears to have shifted from sowing chaos to gathering intelligence — at least for the time being. According to cybersecurity experts, the November 9 attacks was carried out by the hacking group known as Cozy Bear, which is believed to be tied to the FSB.  It targeted think tanks, NGOs, and academic researchers focusing on international security issues.  And according to the same experts, it specifically targeted people who may be associated with the incoming U.S. administration…Vladimir Putin clearly believes he is on a roll, racking up one victory after another over the West.  He sees his goal of undermining NATO, the EU, transatlantic relations, and the post-Cold War security order as being in sight.  And he’s not going to let up until he reaches it.”

Visitors to Central Park will notice a new welcoming committee:

A giant gang of 22 raccoons are taking over Central Park: https://t.co/N0Yfvvlfsy pic.twitter.com/V4magka3aV

— Time Out New York (@TimeOutNewYork) November 17, 2016

@TimeOutNewYork @iceblinkIuck this is no lie pic.twitter.com/oIaqlVPP15

— :O) (@sweetcartilage) November 17, 2016

Good morning.

Thursday in this small Midwestern city will be unseasonably mild, with a high of sixty-nine under partly cloudy skies. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 38m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 87.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Worth reading in full —

Leonid Ragozin contends that The ‘us and them’ divide worked for Putin and it will work for Trump: “I can see how Trump can appeal to African-Americans, Jews and Hispanics. I met members of these communities at Trump rallies while driving through the midwest swing states the week before the election, and I am now writing from Brighton Beach, a Russian-speaking Jewish district of New York that is overwhelmingly and vehemently pro-Trump. The local residents, mostly ageing Soviet-era immigrants who have switched from voting Democrat to Republican in the past 10 years, love the new president-elect for the same reason their former compatriots in Russia love Putin: he makes them feel great and important again, while legitimising their hatred towards liberals. The likes of Putin and Trump don’t create ethnic movements, they create gangs in which the only criterion that really matters is whether you are “with us” or “against us”, whether you are ready to insult or hurt the “others” no matter who they are and what you used to feel about them. They are mob artists, they are majoritarians or – translating the latter term into Russian – Bolsheviks. Their advantage is that they are not bound by logic or intellectual decency.”

Graham Vyse believes that Libertarians and Democrats Need to Fall in Love Again: “American liberty faces unprecedented peril. President-elect Donald Trump is so indifferent to the Constitution, when he’s not openly hostile to it, that there’s reasonable discussion of liberal democracy collapsing during his tenure. Democrats need all the allies they can find to fight him, and many Americans with genuinely libertarian values could be part of an opposition coalition….[Cato Institute Vice President Brink] Lindsey’s dream of a permanent fusion between liberalism and libertarianism may be impossible, but this is another moment when issue-based cooperation between these two factions is vital. If they unite where they agree—organizing together and pressuring Washington—it could help to neutralize some of the worse of Trump’s authoritarian agenda.”

Senate Democrats have other ideas, including a Surprising Strategy: Trying to Align With Trump: “On infrastructure spending, child tax credits, paid maternity leave and dismantling trade agreements, Democrats are looking for ways they can work with Mr. Trump and force Republican leaders to choose between their new president and their small-government, free-market principles. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, elected Wednesday as the new Democratic minority leader, has spoken with Mr. Trump several times, and Democrats in coming weeks plan to announce populist economic and ethics initiatives they think Mr. Trump might like.”

Local governmemts aren’t a refuge from closed-government policies, but often these Local governments hide public records, face few consequences: “But when residents asked for those documents, they hit a wall: Montgomery County [Maryland] government officials said they could not find many emails, letters and calendars related to their search. This seemed preposterous, so the residents took the only route available to them — they went to court. A skeptical county judge urged the government to look anew for missing documents. Officials soon managed to find most of what the residents had sought. The details weren’t pretty. Documents showed that County Executive Isiah Leggett, a Democrat less than a year from his next election, had been pushing behind closed doors for the private soccer club to take over the site and attempting to pressure a reluctant school board, even though in theory he had no power over school system decisions. The Maryland Open Meetings Compliance Board also found that the school board had violated the state’s open meetings law by discussing the lease deal in closed session.”

How big are big things? Here’s some perspective: