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Monthly Archives: April 2011

Informational Forum: Potential Local Impacts of the Proposed Wisconsin Budget, Wed., May 4th, 7-9 PM

The League of Women Voters of the Whitewater Area presents

Potential Local Impacts of the Proposed Wisconsin Budget: An Informational Forum

Wednesday, May 4th, Cravath Lake Community Center, 7 – 9 p.m.

How will the proposed Wisconsin budget likely affect Whitewater and the surrounding area? On Wednesday, May 4th from 7-9 p.m. at the Cravath Lake Community Center, the League of Women Voters will be holding an informational forum on the potential impacts of the proposed Wisconsin budget on Whitewater and the surrounding area.

Featured speakers include:

· Kevin Brunner, Whitewater City Manager

· Suzanne Zentner, Whitewater Unified School District Superintendent

· Richard Telfer, UW-Whitewater Chancellor

· Tim Cullen, 15th District State Senator

· Evan Wynn, 43rd Assembly District Representative

· Julian Zelazny, Executive Director, Wisconsin Land and Water Conservation Association

· Linda Seemeyer, Director, Health and Human Services for Walworth County

· Dr. Jolly Emrey, UW-Whitewater Associate Professor of Political Science

· Thomas Drucker (moderator), Vice President of the League of Women Voters

Other elected officials have been invited, but have not yet confirmed.

This forum is designed to inform citizens about how the budget will likely impact city services, local schools and UW-Whitewater. Additional speakers will address the likely impacts of the proposed budget on the agricultural sector as well as how the proposed budget may impact health-related programs and services. The hope is that citizens of all political persuasions can become better informed about some of the implications of the proposed budget on the local area.

Business Insider: Don’t Mean To Be Rude, But The Economy Sucks

Yes, it still does. It went bad under the last administration, has been slow under the current administration, and looks as though it will be anemic for yet longer. A change of administrations, and a change of majorities in the House, were not themselves – nor should we have expected them to be – guarantors of turnaround.

Blodget’s been wrong about things, but he’s right about this:

In the past couple of months, a disconnect has developed between the perception of the US economy and the reality.

The perception is that everything’s just fine: The continuation of a solid if unspectacular recovery that began in the summer of 2009. Stocks continue to rise. Corporate profits continue to boom. The unemployment rate continues to tick down. Wall Street continues to coin money.

But the reality is that the recovery has never been strong and that many key metrics have recently turned south–despite the fact that the government still has its foot stomped on the stimulus gas….

Blodget lists mediocre GDP growth (1.8%), weak job growth, falling home prices, and waxing inflation. They’re all bad signs, and all reason to focus on simple, fundamental fiscal strategies, to the exclusion of complicated schemes or sideshow initiatives.

Via Don’t Mean To Be Rude, But The Economy Sucks.

Program on Memory Loss Offered by the Alzheimer’s Association, May 24th, Delavan



Program on Memory Loss Offered by the Alzheimer’s Association – Orientation on the implications of memory loss

The Alzheimer’s Association will be presenting a program called ‘Orientation to Early Memory Loss’ on Tuesday, May 24, 2011 from 2:30 – 4:30 p.m. at the Community Bank CBD-Community Center located at 820 E. Geneva Street in Delavan.

This program is for individuals who have been diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s disease or a related memory disorder, and their family and friends. Topics will include beginning changes, common decisions, and the first steps to care. This program is being offered at no charge and is open to all members of the community.

Registration for this program is required by May 20th. To register, please contact Bonnie Beam-Stratz at 920.728.4088.

The Alzheimer’s Association is the leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimer’s care, support and research whose mission is to eliminate Alzheimer’s disease through the advancement of research; to provide and enhance care and support for all affected; and to reduce the risk of dementia through the promotion of brain health.

For more information about Alzheimer’s disease and local services visit http://www.alz.org/sewi or call the Alzheimer’s Association 24/7 Helpline at 800-272-3900.

Daily Bread for 4.29.11

Good morning.

It’s a sunny day ahead for Whitewater, with a high temperature of sixty-three degrees.

There’s a story over at Wired about an astrophotographer who created an interactive, 360-degree panorama of the night sky.   The story, entitled, Reader Photo: Stunning Interactive Sky Image, describes Nick Risinger’s achievement:

Nick Risinger, a 28-year-old native of Seattle, trekked more than 60,000 miles around the western United States and South Africa to create the largest-ever true-color image of the stellar sphere. The final result is an interactive, zoomable sky map showing the full Milky Way and the stars, planets, galaxies and nebulae around it.

“The genesis of this was to educate and enlighten people about the natural beauty that is hidden, but surrounds us,” Risinger said.

The project began in March 2010, when Risinger and his brother took a suite of six professional-grade astronomical cameras to the desert in Nevada. By June, Risinger had quit his job as a marketing director for a countertop company to seek the darkest skies he could find.

Every night, Risinger and his father set up the cameras on a tripod that rotates with Earth. The cameras automatically took between 20 and 70 exposures each night in three different-color wavelengths. Previous professional sky surveys (including the Digitized Sky Survey of the 1980s, which is the source for the World Wide Telescope and Google Sky) shot only in red and blue. Including a third color filter gives the new survey a more real feeling, Risinger said.

Admirable and beautiful, both.

Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays? Shakespeare

Like the old riddle about who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb, my question about Shakespeare is a joke. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

There have been some who’ve doubted that he wrote so well, but I am not among them. Of the doubters, some have been accomplished, themselves (including Mark Twain, of all people).

Yet, most who doubt don’t doubt from deserved talent, but their lack of it: they cannot imagine that someone from a run-of-the-mill upbringing could have been so insightful. They assume that a poet and playwright would have to have been an aristocrat to know so much.

It’s false — although few will produce what Shakespeare did, there are countless brilliant people all around us, whose insights are not dependent on an established upbringing. Their happiness, and our strength and prosperity, depend on assuring that they have equal opportunity under law. They will never deserve — and we must never impose — restrictions to equal opportunity against them.

These restrictions come through law and, also, hidebound customs.

When some assert that Shakespeare could not have written so deeply of human nature because he lacked a prominent background, they’re assessing the wrong deficiency — it’s not that Shakespeare couldn’t understand and intuit without privilege, but that they, his skeptics, cannot do so. They think that because they’re dull, and needful of the lessons from privilege beaten into their thoughts, over and over, that Shakespeare must have been that way, too.

Skeptics like this think too little of Shakespeare, but also far too much of themselves.

They’re the sort who insist that their supposed wisdom comes from long tenure in a career. Something like this: My long experience with X, Y, and Z makes me uniquely insightful.

Well, perhaps: What did you accomplish at X, Y, and Z? Merely being there is insufficient — what did you do, and what can you now persuasively expound, having been there?

They may instead advance something like this: In my 25 years of experience as so-and-so, I am sure about what to do in all cases.

Well, perhaps. What if, however, someone’s wares have all been shoddy, inadequate products? Under those circumstances, a long-tenure is more rebuke than commendation.

The best insights don’t come from merely being in a place, but from asking questions of, and in, that place, and imagining places yet undiscovered

Those who are sure that talent resides only in a few, well-situated people, are not only wrong, but embarrassingly so.

Alzheimer’s Association Celebrity Champions

The Alzheimer’s Association has produced a brief — but powerful — video with famous Americans talking about the disorder, and the good work of the Association.

I’ve been proud to post releases from this organization, from a general interest, rather than personal, that inclines all people to support different, worthy charitable efforts. The work of this Association is surely among any definition of worthy efforts.

I’ll have additional videos up later this week, about their work.



Daily Bread for 4.28.11

Good morning.

Today’s forecast calls for a day of showers and a high temperature of forty-six.

On this day in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl set sail from South America to Polynesia to show that pre-Incan voyagers would have been able to make the 4,300-mile trip across the Pacific.  Below are a short video about the expedition, and a longer, full-length program.

more >>

Tracking the Influence of Money in Politics

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism has issued a press release with good news about new resources to track the influence of money in politics.

Here’s the press release, with links to a new tracking website:

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and MAPLight.org, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, today announced a major initiative to help the public and journalists investigate the influence of money in Wisconsin state politics and policymaking.

MapLight.org unveiled a new site, maplight.org/wisconsin, that for the first time combines three databases of information – campaign contributions, legislative votes, and interest group support and opposition – revealing the intersection between money and votes in the Wisconsin Legislature. The site allows users to customize their searches and download the data.

“The goal of our Wisconsin site is to provide quick and easy access to information about campaign contributions, the interests of the groups that make them, and how the lawmakers that receive them vote, drawing back the curtain on how money influences legislation around the issues that people care most about,” said Daniel Newman, executive director of MapLight.org, which is based in Berkeley, Calif.

Under an agreement with MapLight.org, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism will investigate money and politics issues and serve as a resource to news organizations in Wisconsin. The project is supported with a grant from the Open Society Institute.

“By centralizing data on contributions and votes, and combining that information with research on interest group bill support and opposition, MapLight.org will provide Wisconsin’s watchdogs with insights critical to the functioning of our democracy, in a fraction of the time it would take to otherwise assemble these facts from disparate sources,” said Andy Hall, executive director of the Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that launched in 2009.

MapLight.org’s data partner for campaign contributions is the nonprofit Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

Mike McCabe, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign’s executive director, said the “collaboration creates new opportunities for investigative journalism and citizen exploration of the impact of special interest money in Wisconsin politics.”

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism focuses upon government integrity and quality of life issues. It collaborates with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where it is based, Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television and other mainstream and ethnic news organizations across the nation.

The Center publicly acknowledges all of its donors, to increase the transparency – and protect the integrity – of its public-interest journalism. The Center is supported by foundations and individuals, including Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Foundation to Promote Open Society (a partner of Open Society Institute), McCormick Foundation and Ford Foundation. Connect with the Center on Twitter and Facebook.

Readers know that I don’t support limits on campaign contributions (as a restriction on expression), but I’m all for tracking what can be tracked.