Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 52. Sunrise is 7:35 AM and sunset 5:41 PM for 10h 05m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, Abraham Lincoln justifiably removes George B. McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac.
UW-Whitewater has declining enrollment. The university won’t collapse, but it is gettting smaller. It’s unlikely these declines stem from a single cause, let alone a single manageable cause. As with so many other problems in Whitewater (at the city, the school district, and the university), a small group is sure — absolutely, positively, indubitably sure — that marketing will address these problems. For the last generation, Whitewater has seen marketing plan after marketing plan, and yet… here we are, just the same. Whitewater probably leads the state, if not the nation, in task forces and marketing plans per capita.
UW-Whitewater is about to embark on yet another marketing plan in hope of stopping and reversing unfavorable trends. It won’t work, as past efforts haven’t worked. These men are convinced they can sell anything to anyone, even ice to an Inuit. They haven’t (as decline persists) and they won’t (as past is prologue). They overestimate themselves and underestimate everyone else.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 48. Sunrise is 7:34 AM and sunset 5:42 PM for 10h 08m 18s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1956, Soviet troops enter Hungary to end the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union that started on October 23. Thousands are killed, more are wounded, and nearly a quarter million leave the country.
The Mequon-Thiensville School District (MTSD) is a Republican area, and the conflict between those who wanted to recall four school board members and those who wanted to retain them was a conflict between traditional conservatives and populist conservatives. It is a district both more affluent and academically successful than Whitewater’s district. (Mequon-Thiensville is not so troubled with the problem of retaining students’ basic skills through high school, or of students’ enduring hunger, homelessness, or poverty.)
While the MTSD may have significant socio-economic differences with Whitewater, how residents in that community defended themselves against book-banning populists deserves consideration.
One key was local leaders who stepped up, including a letter from former mayors opposing the recall effort.
I think earned media was also key. Exposing that thinly veiled agenda was important. Half of the candidates had crazy stuff on their social media that they didn’t think to lock down prior to running.
The [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel] was really on it in that last month. The AP article (Tea Party 2.0?) was pivotal in getting further attention – including eventually NYT and Stephanie Saul.
There was so much disinformation. We had a small team of folks on social media who would correct disinformation when they saw it and hammer it home, including the inform Facebook group.
We didn’t allow the Democrats anywhere near this. They reached out to candidates and everyone declined. They dangled their voter software – we said no. (You can apparently buy data software as a 3rd party) – I think they may have mobilized their voters in their end. It required unifying fully against the recall.
The coalition is made up of folks who just last year were on opposite sides of in person vs. virtual debate…. We have varying political beliefs. We had to work together.
Redirecting folks with their own agendas back to the bigger threat was very important. At one point a few more liberal-leaning parents wanted to get involved in that Brewing Co class action lawsuits over masks. They were strongly urged by everyone else to stop.
I think the general demographics of our community helped too. We have resources. While conservative, most folks are not MAGA. Even those who did vote for Trump in 2020, did so holding their nose because they wanted tax cuts, etc…. That certainly did not equate to wanting Trump-like clowns near our district.
Finally…
We canvassed (local parents) vs. the recall who used out-of -county young Republicans… I think having your neighbor tell you something is more effective than outsourcing to a college student who doesn’t even know how to spell Thiensville…
When the right-wing populists come for a place, residents who are diligent and industrious can push them back. The kind of energy that sensible residents showed in Mequon-Thiensville is rare in Whitewater. Aspiring — wishin’ and hopin’— won’t meet the challenge.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 43. Sunrise is 7:33 AM and sunset 5:43 PM for 10h 10m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 2014, One World Trade Center officially opens in New York City, replacing the Twin Towers after they were destroyed during the September 11 attacks.
A recall effort against four Mequon-Thiensville School Board members failed to unseat any incumbents Tuesday, a major loss for recall organizers who had raised nearly $50,000 and gained national attention in their months long pursuit.
Each of the incumbents won over 58% of the votes in their races, according to unofficial results posted by the district Tuesday.
The election marks the 16th failed recall effort against school board members in Wisconsin since the pandemic began, with many of the recall organizers citing frustration with pandemic safety measures.
Incumbents won their seats with the following vote totals:
Akram Khan won with 6,719 votes, over Kris Kittell who had 4,825 votes
Chris Schultz won with 6,816 votes, over Scarlett Johnson who had 4,748 votes
Erik Hollander won with 6,926 votes, over Charles Lorenz who had 4,641 votes
Wendy Francour won with 6,799 votes, over Cheryle Rebholz who had 4,768 votes
Over 11,600 ballots were cast. In the April Mequon-Thiensville school board election, there were 6,442 ballots cast, a turnout of about 30%.
Recall organizers had pushed the message that academic achievement was declining in the district, arguing that the district’s pandemic safety measures and commitments to equity were contributing to that decline.
Two seats, those maintained by Khan and Schultz, will be up for election again in April. The others will be up in 2023.
After results came in Tuesday night, incumbents thanked supporters.
“My community of Mequon-Thiensville – the school district, the teachers, the staff, and most importantly, the students of the district, won tonight. It was never about us four. It was always about the students. And we are thrilled about the results,” Khan said in a phone interview.
“We are very happy with how the community responded to our message of rejecting lies and distortions. I am very grateful to the community that they rose up and they did not accept the distortions and lies,” Khan also said.
Most recalls in Wisconsin fail, and despite PAC money, outside canvassers, and national coverage, this one failed, too.
There are two key differences between Mequon-Thiensville and Whitewater (other than the obvious difference that Mequon-Thiensville is a wealthier area with fewer basic human needs). These differences made it easier for the MTSD to withstand a conservative populist recall effort.
First, in Mequon-Thiensville that community could point to good performance on fundamental measurements, and certainly better performance than most Wisconsin school districts. They gave their community something fundamental of which to be proud, and worthy of defense. (Administrators, including a ‘District Leadership Team’ in a struggling community, who spend millions on athletic fields via supplanted funds aren’t giving their residents something fundamental; they’re tempting the Fates. Worse, administrators who insist that what they did isn’t what they did drape themselves in evasion, and that’s a threadbare garment not worth wearing.)
Second, when the Kleefisch PAC endorsed a candidate in April in Whitewater, the incumbent sat on his hands. By contrast, when Kleefisch’s PAC went all in on the Mequon-Thiensville recall, residents of that community organized in opposition to her politicking.
The alternative would have been populist speech-banning and safe-space ending. That alternative would have been for Mequon-Thiensville, as its prospect should be for Whitewater, intolerable.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 45. Sunrise is 7:31 AM and sunset 5:45 PM for 10h 13m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 8% of its visible disk illuminated.
KENOSHA – One man described a growing anxiety. A woman feared what her husband would say if she voted for a verdict different from what he expects.
Some people talked of moving their cars to backyards, boarding up windows, leaving town, or getting guns as violence wracked Kenosha last year in the aftermath of a police shooting.
One woman said she swapped out the blue porch light — normally lit to show support for police — as protests spread and grew violent.
Others expressed fear of damage to their cars, or people coming to their homes.
“Nobody wants to be in this seat,” said one woman.
Those were just some of the responses to questions Monday during jury selection in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, which ended around 7 p.m. He is charged with killing two men and wounding a third man on Aug. 25, 2020, during a night of protests that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
Rittenhouse plans to raise self defense to charges of intentional, reckless and attempted homicide. He’s also charged with reckless endangerment, having a firearm as a minor, and was cited for violating curfew.
The trial is being closely watched nationally and internationally. But for the prospective jurors, it calls up a dire local chapter in Kenosha history.
….
By late afternoon, some people of the remaining panelists became more forthright about fears of serving.
“Believe me, no one wants to be sitting in this chair,” said one woman. “It’s scary. I live close to where he’s from.”
Rittenhouse was living in Antioch, Illinois in 2020, with his mother and sisters.
Another woman testified she took a Lyft to court Monday. She didn’t want anyone to see her car.
“Either way this goes, you’re going to have half the country upset with you,” said another.
Schroeder tried to assure worried panelists the degree of risk to them is probably far less than they think, and that security measures he couldn’t reveal will substantially address those fears.
“Maybe the country would calm down if they saw a verdict from a fair trial,” Schroeder said.
Around 7 p.m., lawyers from both sides had finished applying the seven strikes each to a panel of 34 jurors and arrived at 20 to hear the case, including an unusually large group of eight alternates. The group includes 11 women and nine men and one person of color.
The trial continues Tuesday morning with opening statements, followed by the state’s first witnesses.
These jurors are ordinary people serving in an extraordinary trial. It’s no easy task, and it’s understandable that they would have worries, both founded and unfounded.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 47. Sunrise is 7:30 AM and sunset 5:46 PM for 10h 15m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 15.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Equal Opportunities Commission meets at 5 PM and Downtown Whitewater’s Board of Directors meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1870, the United States Weather Bureau (later renamed the National Weather Service) makes its first official meteorological forecast.
In a huge upset to New Zealand birds, but a win for one of the country’s only native land mammals, a bat has swooped in “by a long way” to take out the annual bird of the year competition.
Forest and Bird, which runs the election, threw the bat among the pigeons as a surprise entry this year. The pekapeka-tou-roa, or long tailed bat, is one of two bats in the country and one of the rarest mammals in the world. It is as small as a thumb, and the size of a bumblebee when it is born.
The voting closed on Sunday night, which appropriately was Halloween. Forest and Bird’s Lissy Fehnker-Heather announced the win to RNZ’s Morning Report on Monday.
The pekapeka-tou-roa flew ahead of the avian flock by 3,000 votes, she said, adding that this year’s competition drew the highest number of total votes in the competition’s 17 year history.
“We had about 58,000 votes and they came from all around the world,” she said.
The list runs in reverse order, from mildly scary to truly frightening.
10.Feedin’ Wildlife. I didn’t know — but local officials claim to know — that there’s a problem with residents feeding wildlife. It’s so great a problem that they propose to pass an ordinance against the feeding of feral creatures. These officials must believe that, in a city of low-wage workers and high child poverty, there are residents who have so much time and money that they’re feedin’ WILD, WILD, WILD! animals all day.
Now I walk through our beautiful city daily, and not once have I seen the shocking feeding of wild animals by BAD, BAD, BAD! people.
I would offer that there needs to be a BIG, BIG, BIG! reason for Whitewater to spend even a moment on this proposal. If this city can show, for example, that the Beast of Bray Road or a Sasquatch is enjoying resident-provided meals, well, then perhaps it’s worth considering a few, narrowly-tailored restrictions…
Otherwise, we have enough ordinances — and real problems that no ordinances could address — to last a lifetime.
A first reading of the proposal will take place this November.
9.Climate.We are only one small city, and climate change is a global problem, but our weather (expressed over a long period as climate) does seem to have changed in Whitewater over the last generation. Even small efforts at mitigation are a worthy exercise.
8. Herbicide. How ’bout, as a lakes restoration plan, the City of Whitewater dumps artificial herbicide into those very lakes that flow into a creek through the city and beyond, simply to speed that process up a bit? The original plan — part ludicrous and part lazy — has been abandoned. It never should have been a plan. See Reporting About Artificial Herbicides in Whitewater, Wisconsin.
7.Passivity. Officeholders running for re-election who let opponents beat the stuffing out of them without reply shouldn’t be officeholders.
6.Cat’s Got Their Tongues.When there’s repeated institutional failure at UW-Whitewater or the UW System, the very men paid to talk suddenly turn mute. SeeFrom UW-Whitewater’s Administration, Too Many and Too Few Words(“There is a oft-asserted contention that during litigation an institutional defendant should prudently make ‘no comment.’ That’s false, although it’s often what non-lawyers speciously contend lawyers should do. On the contrary, there is a range of replies (in word and deed) that an institution, its spokesmen, and its lawyers can make when faced with serious claims of abusive and unethical behavior. ‘No comment’ is what those who are indolent or indifferent say.”)
5.Speech Restrictions. The populists want government to ban speech they don’t like, and to require private publishers to carry speech they do like. No.
4. Personal Responsibility. See Jane Jacobs with Useful Advice on Responsibility (for Whitewater, Richmond Township, Delavan, Etc.)(“In Whitewater and other small towns, bold and brash populists sometimes talk about private liberty only moments later to insist that public institutions owe them and their children the teaching of virtues and habits (hard work, personal responsibility, fortitude) these very parents have sadly left untaught.”) and The ‘Personal Responsibility’ Crowd Wants a Handout(“These WISGOP men talk about individual liberty, but they’re not prepared to accept the consequences of choice in a free society. Instead, these able-bodied, populist men want a government handout from others while exercising free choice. That’s not liberty; it’s state-subsidized dependency. These populists, Trumpists one and all, talk about personal responsibility but will not accept the consequences of employers’ decisions on workplace protocols.”)
3. Toxic Positivity. Worse than last year. Hundreds of Facebook posts on how the district is doing AWESOME! WOW! but an annual state of the district presentation that discussed not a single major measure of academic performance.
2. Gaslighting.An expression derived from the 1944 film Gaslight, about a man who tries to convince his wife that what she sees plainly isn’t really happening. While one may be a booster, and others may be toxically positive, it’s more brazen still to tell people that what they see and read isn’t, in fact, seen and read. As bad a boosterism is, and as bad as toxic positivity is, gaslighting — contending reality isn’t reality, so to speak — is worse.
When a school district, for example, tells you that what you read isn’t what you read, and what their district did isn’t what it did, they’ve issued a challenge against truth itself. SeeWhitewater Schools Use Pandemic Funds for Artificial Turf.
If there’s a school board member or superintendent who’d like to deceive in this way, well, this isn’t the district, and this isn’t the city, in which to make those claims with impunity. Somewhere else, perhaps, but not here.
1.The Empty Chair. As was true last year, still true this year: “Sad more than scary, truly. Whitewater still awaits what she most needs: ‘Whitewater needs her own version of Dorothy Day – someone committed to a lifetime of charitable work on behalf of this community without flinching or favoritism. Someone here, who will hold fast come what may, unyielding, beginning and ending each day in the place of her devoted efforts.’ ” See Waiting for Whitewater’s Dorothy Day.
There’s talk about doing what one can, where one can. Few cities need those devoted efforts more than we do. All the elected officials, appointed officials, town notables, and libertarian bloggers together offer less than one charitable person who would devote her compassion to this city.
Halloween in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 51. Sunrise is 7:29 AM and sunset 5:47 PM for 10h 18m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 22.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1999, Yachtsman Jesse Martin returns to Melbourne after 11 months of circumnavigating the world, solo, non-stop and unassisted.
Elisabeth Zerofsky reports How the American Right Fell in Love With Hungary (‘Some U.S. conservatives are taking a cue from Prime Minister Viktor Orban — how to use the power of the state to win the culture wars’):
For one week this summer, Fox News beamed the face of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary into the homes of Tucker Carlson’s 3.2 million viewers. In a two-tiered library adorned with dark wood and the Hungarian flag, Carlson sat across from the prime minister in Budapest with an expression of intense concentration, though he evinced little familiarity with the internal affairs of Hungary. The trip was hastily arranged after Orban agreed to the interview: Carlson dined at the prime minister’s office the evening before the broadcast, and earlier in the week, he was taken in a military helicopter to a tightly controlled area along the country’s southern border, generally off limits to journalists, in the presence of a Hungarian minister. There, Hungary became the idealized backdrop for Carlson’s habitual preoccupations: Thanks to a barbed-wire fence, Hungary’s border area was “perfectly clean and orderly,” free of the “trash” and “chaos” that mark other borders of the world. Consequently, “There weren’t scenes of human suffering.” He did not bring up the fact that civic groups have repeatedly taken the Hungarian government to court for denying food to families held in immigration detention centers.
Carlson’s trip to Hungary was prompted, in part, by a text message from Rod Dreher, a conservative writer. Dreher, who spent the spring and summer there on a fellowship and helped Carlson secure the interview with Orban, understands, as the activist Christopher F. Rufo recently observed, that Carlson doesn’t report the news for American conservatives; he creates it. Bringing Carlson to Budapest was meant to persuade Americans to pay attention to Orban’s Hungary. The effort appeared to be successful: The following week, several Republican senators told Insider, an online news publication, that Carlson’s broadcasts from Budapest had given them a favorable opinion of Orban. In September, Jeff Sessions, the former U.S. attorney general, went to Budapest for a panel discussion on immigration, and Mike Pence traveled there to address a meeting on family and demographic decline, with Orban in the audience. Next year, the Conservative Political Action Conference, an influential annual gathering of conservatives in America, will be held in Budapest.
Seven generations of one family have been making drums at Noble & Cooley since 1854. The Massachusetts company started off manufacturing toys, but is now known for their high-end snare drums made from a single plank of wood.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 58. Sunrise is 7:27 AM and sunset 5:48 PM for 10h 20m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 32.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1938, Orson Welles broadcasts a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, convincing some listeners that Martians were invading the planet.
It is, a Nieman Lab investigation can also confirm, a lot to take in. Protocol is doing its best to keep track of all the new stories that came off embargo today (though some began to dribble out Friday). At this typing, their list is up to 40 consortium pieces, including work from AP, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, NBC News, Politico, Reuters, The Atlantic, the FT, The New York Times, The Verge, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Wired. (For those keeping score at home, Politico leads with six stories, followed by Bloomberg with five and AP and CNN with four each.) And that doesn’t even count reporters tweeting things out directly from the leak. I read through ~all of them and here are some of the high(low?)lights — all emphases mine.
Facebook’s role in the January 6 Capitol riot was bigger than it’d like you to believe.
Relief flowed through Facebook in the days after the 2020 presidential election. The company had cracked down on misinformation, foreign interference and hate speech — and employees believed they had largely succeeded in limiting problems that, four years earlier, had brought on perhaps the most serious crisis in Facebook’s scandal-plagued history.
“It was like we could take a victory lap,” said a former employee, one of many who spoke for this story on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters. “There was a lot of the feeling of high-fiving in the office.”
Many who had worked on the election, exhausted from months of unrelenting toil, took leaves of absence or moved on to other jobs. Facebook rolled back many of the dozens of election-season measures that it had used to suppress hateful, deceptive content. A ban the company had imposed on the original Stop the Steal group stopped short of addressing dozens of look-alikes that popped up in what an internal Facebook after-action report called “coordinated” and “meteoric” growth. Meanwhile, the company’s Civic Integrity team was largely disbanded by a management that had grown weary of the team’s criticisms of the company, according to former employees.
….
If you think Facebook does a bad job moderating content here, it’s worse almost everywhere else.
On Feb. 4, 2019, a Facebook researcher created a new user account to see what it was like to experience the social media site as a person living in Kerala, India.
For the next three weeks, the account operated by a simple rule: Follow all the recommendations generated by Facebook’s algorithms to join groups, watch videos and explore new pages on the site.
The result was an inundation of hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence, which were documented in an internal Facebook report published later that month.
“Following this test user’s News Feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the Facebook researcher wrote.
“The test user’s News Feed has become a near constant barrage of polarizing nationalist content, misinformation, and violence and gore.”
….
The kids fled Facebook long ago, but now they’re fleeing Instagram too.
Also: “Most [young adults] perceive Facebook as place for people in their 40s or 50s…perceive content as boring, misleading, and negative…perceive Facebook as less relevant and spending time on it as unproductive…have a wide range of negative associations with Facebook including privacy concerns, impact to their wellbeing, along with low awareness of relevant services.” Otherwise, they love it.
….
Apple was close to banning Facebook and Instagram from the App Store because of how it was being used for human trafficking.
Facebook has for years struggled to crack down on content related to what it calls domestic servitude: “a form of trafficking of people for the purpose of working inside private homes through the use of force, fraud, coercion or deception,” according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by CNN.
The company has known about human traffickers using its platforms in this way since at least 2018, the documents show. It got so bad that in 2019, Apple threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram’s access to the App Store, a platform the social media giant relies on to reach hundreds of millions of users each year. Internally, Facebook employees rushed to take down problematic content and make emergency policy changes avoid what they described as a “potentially severe” consequence for the business.
But while Facebook managed to assuage Apple’s concerns at the time and avoid removal from the app store, issues persist. The stakes are significant: Facebook documents describe women trafficked in this way being subjected to physical and sexual abuse, being deprived of food and pay, and having their travel documents confiscated so they can’t escape. Earlier this year, an internal Facebook report noted that “gaps still exist in our detection of on-platform entities engaged in domestic servitude” and detailed how the company’s platforms are used to recruit, buy and sell what Facebook’s documents call “domestic servants.”
Last week, using search terms listed in Facebook’s internal research on the subject, CNN located active Instagram accounts purporting to offer domestic workers for sale, similar to accounts that Facebook researchers had flagged and removed. Facebook removed the accounts and posts after CNN asked about them, and spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed that they violated its policies.
Friday in Whitewater will be windy with occasional rain and drizzle and a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:26 AM and sunset 5:50 PM for 10h 23m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 43.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashes in what will be called the Crash of ’29 or “Black Tuesday,” ending the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and beginning the Great Depression.
The people who talk about a “civil war” and independence from the USA have no real idea what it would mean and don’t really want it. They want their lives as they live them now, but with some sense that they’ve settled scores with people who look down on them. /1
They don’t really want to know what life would be like without the US infrastructure. They want everything they have now, but with some sort of authority figure who says “It’s okay to be terrible. We went and hurt those other folks. Oh, and here’s some cash for your pain.” /2
Now, I suppose there are people who are just too stupid to understand that “secession” means “You have to fix all the highways that have that blue shield on them,” and “you’ll have to use MAGA Bucks instead of the dollar,” but most of them really aren’t that stupid. /3
They mean “Civil War” as “I want approval to advocate terrorizing people I think are judging me.” These same people, of course, *relentlessly* judge their own fellow citizens and think of them as monsters. Their “equality” is limited to “equality for people like me.” /4
At some point, maybe there will be enough broken families and friendships that some of these folks will get off the ledge. Most won’t. They will, like their predecessors in 1865 and 1965, go to their graves thinking they were wronged. /6
There is nothing you can do about this except to lower the temperature by not engaging with the same rancor. Be calm, civil, and outvote them. I wish there were better answers. But this isn’t going to change via rational argument or appeals to conscience. /7x
The seventh point offers sound advice during this national conflict. One should — to be effective — carry on during this conflict methodically, calculating at each moment in support of one’s position. The conservative populists talk about common sense, but their demeanor is all umbrage and rampage. (See along these lines Who Rampaged Better?)
Helen Czerski writes Behind the Spooky Eyes of Cats (‘Like scarier nighttime predators, cats have slit pupils that help them to judge distance and ambush their prey’):
Halloween is approaching, and a whiff of ghoulish menace is squatting casually in the darkness of London’s evenings. Ghostly figures, silhouettes of witches and jagged glowing teeth loom over me as I walk home, but it’s their eyes that I notice most: bright orbs watching me through a pupil that is often a dark vertical slit. That slit seems like a warning, a signal that whatever is behind it is out to get you. But owners of slit-shaped pupils aren’t rare in our world: Along with crocodiles and vipers, our cute fluffy pet cats all have them. So why are some eyes like this, and are they really the ones to be afraid of?
….
A cat—like its fellow nighttime predators—effectively has a narrow pupil in the horizontal direction but a wide pupil in the vertical direction. So anything along the horizontal plane is in beautiful sharp focus, and the image is more blurred in the vertical direction. But at the right focal length, the image will be perfectly in focus in both directions, and that gives the cat an extra way of judging distance.
An ambush predator needs to be absolutely perfect at distance measurements, because it only has one chance to pounce. The slit gives the cat a second way of doing this (the other is the stereo images from both eyes, which is how humans judge distance); the two complement each other to produce pinpoint accuracy.
Thursday in Whitewater will see occasional rain with a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 5:51 PM for 10h 26m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 53.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
The University of Wisconsin System announced Wednesday that it will comply with an executive order issued by President Joe Biden more than six weeks ago requiring federal contractors to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
“We cannot afford to jeopardize millions of dollars in federal contracts, which are integral to our academic and research missions,” interim System President Tommy Thompson said in a statement. “Therefore, we intend to be in compliance with the federal executive order on vaccine mandates.”
The System’s announcement that it would comply with the mandate comes on the last possible day for employees to get their first dose of the Moderna vaccine and be fully vaccinated by Dec. 8, the deadline Biden set in the order. Those receiving the Pfizer vaccine have until Nov. 3 to get their first shot and those getting the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine must do so by Nov. 24.
Biden’s Sept. 9 order has compelled colleges across the country to announce vaccine requirements, even in some conservative states where governors and legislators oppose vaccine mandates.
A large share of employees are already vaccinated at the System’s two research universities, with 95% having received the shot at UW-Madison and 82% at UW-Milwaukee. Unvaccinated employees are required to test weekly, an option that isn’t allowed under the federal order. Employees can request a medical or religious exemption under the order.
….
Sen. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, blasted the UW System for announcing its intention to follow the federal order. The longtime and vocal UW critic said the System was “trying to hide details of this decision for as long as possible to avoid potential litigation.”
Nass has previously asked legislative leaders to sue the System over what he describes as “excessive” COVID-19 policies, which include mask mandates and mandatory testing for unvaccinated individuals. His calls have not resulted in a public response from Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg.
So Thompson follows Biden’s mandate, and Nass whines to no effect. Here’s an exclusive clip of Thompson reacting to Nass’s concerns:
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 58. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 5:53 PM for 10h 28m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63% of its visible disk illuminated.
MADISON — Rebecca Kleefisch over the weekend told Republicans they needed to “hire mercenaries” and engage in “ballot harvesting” to help her win next year’s race for governor — a practice she has said she wants to ban.
In a Saturday speech to Republicans in Door County, Kleefisch said the methods she needs to use to win bother her so much she will need to wash herself with steel wool. If her campaign strategy works, she said she would quickly sign legislation overhauling how elections are conducted.
“We execute with excellence, we will beat them at their own game. And the next morning, we all wake up, take a shower with steel wool, and then, after swearing in in January … (the Legislature) is going to pass all these bills again, and then I’m going to sign them all. And we will never do elections like that again, but this is how we win,” Kleefisch said, according to audio of her speech obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
That April contest was part of a statewide wave, and in any event, the incumbent did nothing to help himself (“One expects an incumbent to advance his record confidently and defend himself thoroughly against criticism. People aren’t inclined to do for a politician what he won’t do for himself. Advancing and defending are not assurances of re-election, but their absence makes defeat likely. It has been a tumultuous year; passivity is not a winning response to tumult”).
Elected candidates can (and often should) honestly take clear, ideological or partisan positions, but in doing so they cannot expect to be treated as non-partisan and without ideology. One can expect 2022 to be different — there are reasons to oppose candidates of similar ideology next year.
