Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 32. Sunrise is 6:30 and sunset is 5:44 for 11 hours 14 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1953, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke and collapses; he dies four days later.
Is it so hard, in these intense times, to call something true or false? More bluntly: is a backlash to the truth so worrisome that one dare not say true or false, yes or no? Americans have had difficult times before now,1 and yet during those times we did not recoil from candid assessments. Indeed, candid assessments allowed us to overcome those difficult times.2
Over at Wisconsin Watch, in partnership with the Journal Sentinel, there’s a new effort to assess plainly whether a statement is true in the way that matters (whether a claim corresponds, bluntly stated, to reality, to actual conditions in the world). That one sometimes cannot determine the truth or falsity of a proposition does not mean that one never can:
Wisconsin Watch has a new partner in the fight for facts.
Ahead of another pivotal election year, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Wisconsin Watch are teaming up to produce more Fact Briefs, 150-word answers to yes/no questions based on claims made in the infosphere.
Wisconsin Watch has partnered with Gigafact since 2022 to produce more than 600 bite-sized fact checks. We’re part of a network of 18 nonprofit newsrooms across the country working to equip the public with accurate information to inform civic discussion.
The Journal Sentinel, part of the USA Today Network and the largest newsroom in Wisconsin, was an early adopter of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking nonprofit founded in 2007.
As Journal Sentinel Editor Greg Borowski writes in a column today at jsonline.com, the switch to Fact Briefs will appeal to readers seeking accurate information quickly and with a clearer true-or-false format, rather than PolitiFact’s six-tiered “score card” for assessing whether a claimant is telling the truth. Fact Briefs focus less on the claimant, and more on the claim itself.
See Matthew DeFour, Wisconsin Watch partners with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to produce more Fact Briefs (‘The newsrooms will deliver more bite-sized responses to yes/no questions in the lead-up to the 2026 election’), Wisconsin Watch, February 25, 2026.
Quite welcome — one can often apply reason to evidence and make a firm conclusion. If it should be too hard in ordinary matters, then the first place to look is inadequate evidence gathering or deficient reasoning. It’s not the case, and never has been, that arriving at the truth is so hard that no one knows nothin’. Americans did not build a world-historical civilization across a continent because everything everywhere was unknowable.
Here’s an example: Sue Bin Park, Do solar panels work in cold or cloudy climates?, Wisconsin Watch via Skeptical Science, February 23, 2026. (Spoiler: the answer is YES.)
_____
- The Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression. ↩︎
- Overcoming, respectively: the British, the Confederates, and economic calamity. ↩︎
How Perseverance Learned to ‘Self-Locate’ on Mars:
This technology rapidly compares panoramic images from the rover’s navigation cameras with onboard orbital terrain maps. It’s done with an algorithm that runs on the rover’s Helicopter Base Station processor, which was originally used to communicate with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. In a few minutes, the algorithm can pinpoint Perseverance’s position to within about 10 inches (25 centimeters). The technology will help the rover drive farther autonomously and keep exploring. Mars Global Localization was first used successfully for regular mission operations on Feb. 2, 2026, and the team expects related reliability techniques to inform future missions, including exploration on the Moon.
