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Conservative Populism, Daily Bread, Medicine, Public Health

Daily Bread for 8.24.21: Ron Johnson’s Push for Ivermectin

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see afternoon thundershowers with a high of 91. Sunrise is 6:12 AM and sunset 7:41 PM, for 13h 29m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 4:30 PM. 

 On this day in 1909, workers start pouring concrete for the Panama Canal.

Bill Glauber and Mark Johnson report ‘You are not a horse. You are not a cow’: FDA issues blunt warning on taking ivermectin, drug promoted by Ron Johnson to treat COVID-19:

For months, Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has been talking up the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as part of a cocktail of repurposed drugs for early treatment of COVID-19.

Johnson’s push even earned him a week-long suspension from YouTube.

On Saturday, the Food and Drug Administration issued a blunt warning for people not to use ivermectin to treat COVID-19.

The move by the FDA came amid reports that an increasing number of people in Mississippi and Louisiana were self-medicating with ivermectin intended for livestock.

In Wisconsin, a handful of people have called UW Health in Madison after taking the drug for COVID-19, said Nasia Safdar, the health care system’s director of infection control. Most experienced gastrointestinal side effects after taking the drug, and called because they were worried.

“I would say that we do not recommend it,” Safdar said, “and it is a danger to use it.”

The FDA made much the same point in a tweet: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

Jonathan Yardley, an associate professor at Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine, said ivermectin is used to kill worms in horses and cows, but is quite powerful.

There is no evidence that ivermectin will help treat or prevent COVID-19, said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “The clinical data is very weak and there is no confidence in it.”

Worse, Adalja said, some people are using the drug instead of getting vaccinated, and are taking the higher-dose veterinary ivermectin instead of the version that would be used to treat a human.

“I think the misinformation has been great,” Adalja said, singling out Johnson’s hearing for promoting a conspiracy that the drug is being suppressed.

He added: “I get some of the most voluminous amounts of hate mail every time I speak out against ivermectin.”

The same question about Johnson, posed before, applies now: Ambitious, Compromised, or Crackpot? The same answer applies: Whether Ambitious, Compromised, or Crackpot, Sen. Ron Johnson Doesn’t Disappoint.

Johnson’s push for snake oil cures may simply be an effort to undermine any legitimate medical research to which his fanatical supporters object. (Johnson, himself, may not prefer one bogus alternative therapy over another. His goal may be to ingratiate himself with those who doubt conventional medicine.)

America’s vaccines are among the most effective in the world; it serves enemies foreign and domestic to denigrate baselessly American medical science, and to push absurd alternative ‘preventatives.’

Dr. Amesh Adalja’s point about hate mail should not be overlooked. The right-wing populists are emotional, impulsive, and impatient. They disrupt meetings when they hear something they don’t like, and threaten advocates of views contrary to their own. They may describe themselves as possessed of ‘common sense,’ but to a majority watching them, the conservative populists look, sound, and act like crude, threatening adolescents.  (Trump, with his puerile insults, is the model for this ilk.) They prey on a reserved, reticent majority.

It’s a strategy that produces occasional local victories but frequent national contempt.

How Scientists Find, Tag, and Get Rid of ‘Murder Hornets’:

America, Daily Bread, Economy, Productivity

Daily Bread for 8.23.21: Productivity

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 89. Sunrise is 6:11 AM and sunset 7:43 PM, for 13h 32m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Urban Forestry Commission Arboretum Sponsorship Subcommittee meets at 4:30 PM. Whitewater’s School Board meets for a workshop and open session beginning at 5:30 PM and 7 PM, respectively (with a closed session, to return to open session later in the evening). Downtown Whitewater, Inc. meets at 6 PM,

 On this day in 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret addition to the pact, the Baltic states, Finland, Romania, and Poland are divided between the two nations.

 Heather Long writes The U.S. could be on the verge of a productivity boom, a game-changer for the economy:

The United States is currently experiencing a surge in worker productivity that could rival that of the tech boom 20 years ago — if it lasts.

As companies and customers embrace new technologies, making it easier for Americans to produce more with fewer workers, a growing number of economists say this is not a blip and could turn into a boom — or, at least, a “mini boom” ? with wide-ranging benefits for years to come.

Higher productivity is the economy’s special sauce. Productivity refers to how much output a worker can do in an hour. When workers have better tools or the help of robots and artificial intelligence, they can make cars or process data much faster. Higher productivity typically leads to more goods and services available at a lower cost and increases in wages. Without it, economic growth is sluggish.

The early data in this recovery is promising. Worker productivity grew 4.3 percent in the first quarter, one of the highest rates in years, according to the Labor Department. Second quarter productivity slowed to 2.3 percent growth, but that’s still nearly double the anemic productivity the nation experienced in the decade after the financial crisis — an average of just 1.2 percent.

….

Conditions are ripe for productivity to remain elevated for years to come, according to analysts from Goldman Sachs and the McKinsey Global Institute. As policymakers run the economy hot, there’s heavy demand for products and services. There is also a worker shortage, which is forcing companies to innovate even more as they struggle to find enough employees to fill a record 10 million job openings. If a robot can do someone’s job, companies are trying it.

….

“It looks like we’re on the cusp of a productivity boom, but you have to see it to believe it,” said David Beckworth, a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. “The statistics coming out so far in this recovery show a productivity surge. Will that continue? It’s too early to know for sure.”

A national-average productivity boom may await America; some parts of the country will be better suited to it than others. There are parts of America still convinced that adding a building or a business is necessarily a sign of progress. Productivity, obviously, isn’t the same as mere production; it’s building more efficiently per worker.

Wild horse round-up in drought-stricken West sparks debate:

Daily Bread, Government Spending, Police, Politics

Daily Bread for 8.22.21: ‘Defund the Police’ Was a Molehill

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 6:10 AM and sunset 7:44 PM, for 13h 34m 45s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1963, X-15 Flight 91 reaches the highest altitude of the X-15 program (67.08 mi).

 Bruce Murphy writes Police Were Defunded Before George Floyd (‘253 municipalities in state cut police funding in 2019 for budget reasons, report finds’):

The call for police defunding, which arose in the wake of George Floyd‘s killing in May 2020 by a police office in Minneapolis, has created controversy across the nation. In Wisconsin, Republicans passed legislation, which was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, which would have reduced state shared revenue payments to municipalities that decreased their spending on police and fire departments.

But in fact, hundreds of local governments across the state had already reduced funding for police departments in 2019, as a new report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum reveals. “The data show 253 municipalities decreased the dollar amount spent on all law enforcement activities,” the  report noted. “This includes large cities (Milwaukee, Green Bay), suburbs (Bayside, Grafton, Stoughton, Verona), and a number of very small communities, including 144 municipalities with fewer than 2,000 residents. In fact, all but 10 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties had at least one municipality that decreased its police budget in 2019. ”

Total spending on law enforcement for all municipalities actually increased by 1.3%, from $1.21 billion in 2018 to $1.23 billion in 2019, with 461 municipalities increasing their spending on police, the report found. But the 253 local governments that did cut funding in 2019 shows that this is commonly done by communities, not to reform police departments, but to balance their budgets.

“Wisconsin municipalities have been operating under strict property tax limits for more than a decade,” the report notes. Meanwhile, state-shared revenue has been declining for about 20 years. This has squeezed local budgets across the state and “likely [has] contributed to the difficulties faced by municipalities in maintaining police and fire department budgets and staffing,” the report finds.

That, in turn, impacted police staffing. “From 2018 to 2019, 79 Wisconsin police departments reported increasing their sworn officers, while 59 decreased them,” the report found.

Whitewater, for example, saw a decrease (2018-2019) in funding before George Floyd was murdered. It wasn’t ideology that drove those cuts; it was the pressure of budgetary constraints the city faces. Indeed, the Wisconsin Policy Forum remarks that

“In both “Dollar for Dollar” and a report we released last September, we noted that as municipal budgets have tightened for various reasons, local officials have attempted to shield police departments from cuts. As a result, those departments now take up a larger share of municipal budgets than a generation ago.”

I’ve never supported a political effort to defund the police, as against simply balancing a municipal budget.

Whitewater’s residents who worried, by the way, about ideological defunding of the police department were overwrought (and politically ignorant of the city’s actual politics). Whitewater was never going to defund her police department for ideological reasons, and any right-wing populist or two thinking otherwise could fittingly be described as politically obtuse. See Built Against Substantive Change.  

The issue has faded nationally, as major figures in the Democratic Party have opposed the idea. (Biden, for example, never took up that cause.)  Defunding is so weak that Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) could recently turn GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) attempt to re-ignite the issue into a 99-0 vote against defunding:

‘Defunding the police’ was a molehill (which, for those who need a reminder, looks nothing like a mountain).

How High-Quality Japanese Cutlery Is Made:

Daily Bread, Ethics, Free Markets, Law, Medicine, Misconduct, Police

Daily Bread for 8.21.21: Hundreds of Wisconsin Police Officers Back on the Job after Being Fired or Forced Out

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be variably cloudy with scattered thunderstorms and a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:08 AM and sunset 7:46 PM, for 13h 37m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1911, the Mona Lisa is stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre employee.

Peter Cameron writes Nearly 200 Wisconsin police officers back on the job after being fired or forced out:

One officer was accused by a supervisor of snoozing in his squad car while on duty. Another had multiple drunken run-ins with police, including after bar fights. A third repeatedly sent lewd photos to a female officer.

All of them were fired or forced out. And all of them are back working in law enforcement in Wisconsin.

Nearly 200 law enforcement officers currently employed in the state were fired from previous jobs in law enforcement, resigned before completion of an internal investigation or in lieu of termination, according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Justice obtained through an open records request.

….

A huge study in The Yale Law Journal titled The Wandering Officer found that Florida cops who had been fired from a previous law enforcement job were more likely to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a “moral character violation,” compared to rookies and officers who have never been fired.

The study analyzed nearly 100,000 full-time law-enforcement officers from almost 500 agencies in Florida over a 30-year period. The study concluded that “wandering officers may pose serious risks, particularly given how difficult it is to fire a police officer.”

Union contracts can give police officers strong job security, sometimes even when misconduct is committed. The controversial Act 10 legislation passed by Republicans in 2011 crippled organized public-sector labor in Wisconsin, but largely left police and fire unions, groups that lean to the political right, untouched.

A profession —properly understood — has substantive and ethical standards for membership that the profession requires and consistently enforces against its own members. Many occupations are styled as professions, but genuine professions monitor and discipline their own members. 

Across America, traditional professions like medicine, law, and the clergy find in their respective institutions a willingness to overlook, excuse, and even reward (through promotion) misconduct.

This willingness to overlook inadequacy, misconduct, and outright criminality belies talk about ‘excellence,’ ‘service,’ ‘honor,’ etc.

Cameron writes that a “bill that would require law enforcement agencies to maintain a personnel file for each employee and disclose that file to any agency that may want to hire them has bipartisan support. If enacted, the measure would bar future nondisclosure agreements that shield police personnel files from prospective employers.”

The disabled or disadvantaged in society deserve compassion and support that professionals most certainly do not. We’ve too many professionals who want authority over others while simultaneously demanding tender regard that only the disabled or disadvantaged deserve.

In law, medicine, the clergy, or policing there should be no right to perpetual membership: lawyers, doctors, clergy, or police officers who fail the standards required of them can — and should —find other, less demanding occupations in the free labor market.

Gov. DeSantis, King of Self-Awareness:

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Crime, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 8.20.21: Regarding Attorney General Kaul’s ‘Regardless’

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 89. Sunrise is 6:07 AM and sunset 7:47 PM, for 13h 40m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1794, United States troops force a confederacy of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi warriors into a disorganized retreat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Katelyn Ferral reports No criminal charges for mishandled Wisconsin National Guard sexual assault cases, state justice department says:

No criminal charges will be filed for 33 sexual assault cases mishandled by the Wisconsin National Guard, but the state Department of Justice says changes are needed to prevent future problems.

The department on Thursday issued the results of its 18-month review of National Guard sexual assault cases in which it examined botched investigations dating from 2009 to 2019. The agency, which does not file its own criminal charges in such instances, said it examined the Guard’s case files and referred them to local district attorneys, who ultimately declined to prosecute.

“Regardless of whether there is ultimately a prosecution, it’s important for our system of justice that when there are allegations made there is a full and thorough review that takes place,” Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said in an interview Wednesday. “We wanted to ensure that kind of review happened.”

The agency review followed a 2019 investigation by the federal National Guard Bureau that found at least 33 sexual assault cases had been mishandled by the Wisconsin Guard. The Guard had been improperly investigating sex assault allegations for years, failing to track such cases and punish some perpetrators.

The Guard Bureau investigation came after the Cap Times and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found the Guard was violating state and federal rules by discouraging victims from going to police and conducting internal investigations [to discourage federal involvement] into allegations of sexual assault. 

Thirty-three cases, yet not a single district attorney’s office would prosecute anyone responsible. Case after case, of obstructing claimants’ legal recourse and official concealment to avoid federal scrutiny, yet no criminal action.

Attorney General Kaul tells Wisconsinites that one should look beyond a lack of prosecutions — literally, regardless —to lessons he wishes to impart.

On the contrary, it’s prosecution, itself, that would impart the lessons Wisconsinites need to hear.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Finds A Changing Landscape:

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, August 24th, 1 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Emma

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This Tuesday, August 24th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of Emma @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Comedy/Drama/Romance

2 hours, 4 minutes

Rated PG (2021)

A requested film: Jane Austen’s beloved costume comedy. In 1800s England, a well-meaning but selfish young woman meddles in the love lives of her friends. A star-studded adaptation with Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn, Rupert Graves, and Bill Nighy.

If vaccinated, no mask is required. Reservations are no longer required. Free popcorn and a beverage re-instituted!

One can find more information about Emma at the Internet Movie Database.

Conspiracy Theories, Daily Bread, Disinformation, Education, School District

Daily Bread for 8.19.21: ‘People Into Chimpanzees’

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with scattered afternoon thunderstorms and a high of 88. Sunrise is 6:06 AM and sunset 7:49 PM, for 13h 42m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1812, the American frigate USS Constitution defeats the British frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada earning the nickname “Old Ironsides.”

Davey Alba reports Facebook removes Russian-based network that spread vaccine misinformation:

Facebook said on Tuesday [8.10.21] that it had removed a network of accounts based in Russia that spread misinformation about coronavirus vaccines. The network targeted audiences in India, Latin America and the United States with posts falsely asserting that the AstraZeneca vaccine would turn people into chimpanzees and that the Pfizer vaccine had a much higher casualty rate than other vaccines, the company said.

The network violated Facebook’s foreign interference policies, the company said. It traced the posts to a marketing firm operating from Russia, Fazze, which is a subsidiary of AdNow, a company registered in Britain.

Facebook said it had taken down 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts associated with the firm and barred Fazze from its platform. The social network announced the takedown as part of its monthly report on influence campaigns run by people or groups that purposely misrepresent who is behind the posts.

“This campaign functioned as a disinformation laundromat,” said Ben Nimmo, who leads Facebook’s global threat intelligence team.

….

The Fazze campaign was carried out in two waves, Facebook said. In late 2020, Fazze created two batches of fake Facebook accounts that initially posted about Indian food or Hollywood actors. Then in November and December, as the Indian government was discussing emergency authorization for the AstraZeneca vaccine, the accounts started pushing the false claim that the vaccine was dangerous because it was derived from a chimpanzee adenovirus. The campaign extended to websites like Medium and Change.org, and memes about the vaccine’s turning its subjects into chimpanzees proliferated on Facebook.

Facebook is a private platform, and it can (and in this situation should) ban Fazze.

The implications of Fazze’s people-into-chimpanzees disinformation campaign extend far beyond Facebook’s Menlo Park, CA headquarters. It is, after all, a local audience in towns across America that Fazze sought to impress.

They could not be impressed if they were not impressionable. 

People are impressionable through ignorance, not stupidity. There are very few people who might possibly be considered ‘stupid.’ There are, however, any number of crackpot theories circulating every day.

QAnon, lies about vaccines that are truly safe and effective, the Big Lie that Trump actually won in 2020 (he lost by millions of votes), etc.: these are educational and cultural failures.

We have taught poorly – and tolerated substandard reasoning and conspiracy theories – while claiming in a vision statement to teach “Every student, Every Day, in a Unified Way.” 

In a community beset with a faction lapping ignorance and superstition, our vision statement is little more than a rhyming self-parody.

Tasmanian Devil Twins Born at Australia Animal Park:

Daily Bread, Government Spending

Daily Bread for 8.18.21: Paycheck Protection Loan Fraud

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with scattered thunderstorms and a high of 84. Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:51 PM, for 13h 45m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 80.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM and the Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM. 

 On this day in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.

Stacy Cowley reports 15% of Paycheck Protection Program Loans Could Be Fraudulent, Study Shows (‘Some $76 billion of the program’s $800 billion in loans may have been taken improperly, a new paper concludes’):

When the Paycheck Protection Program began last year to help small businesses that were struggling during the pandemic, the federal government was determined to get the relief money out fast — so it waived much of the vetting lenders traditionally do on business loans.

The absence of those safeguards meant that fraud was highly likely. But just how much of the program’s $800 billion was taken illicitly?

A new academic working paper released on Tuesday contains an estimate: Around 1.8 million of the program’s 11.8 million loans — more than 15 percent — totaling $76 billion had at least one indication of potential fraud, the researchers concluded.

“There’s been a lot of anecdotes about fraud, but the tricky thing about anecdotes is that it’s very difficult to put them together and get at the scale of what’s going on,” said Samuel Kruger, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business and one of the paper’s authors. “We wanted to look for patterns in the data.”

The study pins blame for many of the questionable loans on one particular group of lenders: financial technology firms, known as “fintechs,” which focus on digital lending. Nine of the 10 lenders with the highest rate of suspicious loans fell into that group.

“Certain fintech lenders seem to specialize in dubious loans,” the authors wrote. Collectively, fintechs made around 29 percent of the program’s loans but accounted for more than half of its suspicious loans, the study concluded.

The Paycheck Protection Program, which ran intermittently from April 2020 to May 2021, relied on banks and other lenders to make the government-guaranteed loans, which are designed to be forgiven if borrowers followed the program’s rules. Government watchdogs have long warned of a high fraud risk on the rushed loans; the Justice Department has charged more than 500 people with improperly claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in borrowing.

These billions are those with one indication of fraud. One reads further on that a “more restrictive calculation by the researchers, of loans with at least two suspicious characteristics, identified 1.2 million potentially fraudulent loans, totaling $38 billion.”

And yet, and yet, even a single billion saved or properly & lawfully spent would make a considerable difference. If, for example, Wisconsin had an additional billion to save or spend it would amount to roughly $175 per person.

How easily these numbers tally.

Orphaned Monkeys Receive Much-Needed TLC at Bolivian Sanctuary:

Daily Bread, Demographics, Economy

Daily Bread for 8.17.21: Decline in Trump-Supporting America

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 6:04 AM and sunset 7:52 PM, for 13h 48m 01s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 70.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1945, George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm is published.

Jordan Weissman writes The Census shows that vast stretches of America are shrinking. Almost all of them voted for Donald Trump (Ninety percent of counties that lost population in the last decade backed the ex-president’):

Donald Trump and the Republican Party he shaped represent the fading face of the United States, winning over an older, more rural, and overwhelmingly caucasian bloc of voters that reflected the country’s past more than its more urban and diverse future.

The latest data from the 2020 Census, which the government released on Thursday to kick off the congressional redistricting process, illustrate that fact in incredibly stark terms. It shows that the white population fell for the first time in history during the last decade, and that Americans continued to cluster in growing cities and suburbs, whether in Texas, Georgia, Virginia, or New York.

Perhaps most strikingly, while metro areas grew, vast stretches of the country continued to bleed population. About 53 percent of all U.S. counties shrank between 2010 and 2020. You can see them in the sea of burnt orange on the graph below, rural regions and small towns that often have few residents to begin with. In total, they were home to about 50.5 million people in a nation of more than 331 million.

….

Given what we already knew about Trump’s base of support, it seemed likely that most of these emptying counties voted Republican in the last election. But how many, exactly? Mark Muro of the Metropolitan Policy Project at Brookings ran the numbers for me. He found that, in the 1,636 counties that shrank during the 2010s, the former president won a majority of votes in 90 percent of them. (Muro’s team had to exclude Alaska from its numbers because of a technical glitch.) If a corner of America is depopulating, it is almost certainly part of Trump country.

This is not to say that Trump country on the whole is in decline. The former president only received about 19 percent of his 74 million votes from counties with shrinking populations, according to Muro and his team’s analysis. Overall, the counties where he won added 7.8 million people during the previous decade. But Biden counties nearly doubled that total, expanding by 14.9 million individuals. Blue America is driving America’s population growth.

But the fact that places with diminishing populations so overwhelmingly backed our last president is one more data point in a bigger story about how the country has been polarizing between thriving metros dominated by Democrats and increasingly conservative communities that are either growing more slowly than major cities or are in outright decline. This is true both demographically and economically (though of course those things are intertwined). The Metropolitan Policy Project has previously found, for instance, that Biden counties generated 70 percent of the country’s GDP. “Republican counties represent a waning, traditional economic base, situated in struggling small towns and rural areas,” Muro told me. “And the Census story underscores the sense that growth, in the most literal sense, is somewhere else. Prosperity is out of reach.”

Emphasis added.

Decline, however, comes in one of two ways: absolute or relative. Absolute decline in population is easy to see: there are fewer people. Relative decline, of people or productivity, is more subtle: one slips slowly from a national standard. The gap from year to year may seem small; look back a decade and that gap is evident.

The MAGA crowd impoverishes its own communities.  The answer – one that many of these communities will not choose – is to turn away from Trumpism.

Massive Cargo Ship Splits in Half Near Japan:

City, Daily Bread, Economy, Poverty, School District, Technology

Daily Bread for 8.16.21: Broadband Gaps, Right Here in Whippet City

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 6:03 AM and sunset 7:54 PM, for 13h 50m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Equal Opportunities Commission meets at 5 PM, the Community Development Authority at 5:30 PM, and the Library Board at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1930, the first color sound cartoon, Fiddlesticks, is released by Ub Iwerks.

Rick Barrett reports Numerous tech developers are looking for a game-changer to bridge the digital divide:

New technologies could help bridge the digital divide in sparsely populated places where it can cost $30,000 a mile to deploy fiber cable for just a few customers.

Jonathan Sharp has been a beta tester for one of them, Starlink, from his home in Wisconsin’s Northwoods.

Starlink is an effort by SpaceX founder Elon Musk to deliver broadband to rural America via thousands of satellites in orbit closer to the Earth than conventional satellites. Last December, Musk was awarded $886 million from the federal Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to get service to nearly 643,000 locations in 35 states.

Sharp said he’s gotten speeds comparable to living in a city, a major improvement from conventional satellite service that’s been part of the rural landscape for decades and has often been labeled unreliable and expensive.

Here in Whitewater and the nearby towns of the Whitewater Unified School District – far from the most rural parts of the state – there are problems with broadband access and speeds for many residents. The pandemic made this plain: while the district had some early ambition to offer virtual services to students beyond the district’s boundaries, many district families had inadequate online access. The plan was later, and sensibly, set aside.

In the city, and in the school district, this much one can say: years of boosterism have yet to boost access to online services for all.

Indeed, the stark truth these development men and women face: there are families in the district without homes, without electricity, without water.

Broadband, sadly, is a bit farther down on these families’ lists of needs.

Fiddlesticks (1930):

Daily Bread, Employment, Free Markets, Populists, Trumpism, Vaccines

Daily Bread for 8.15.21: The ‘Personal Responsibility’ Crowd Wants a Handout

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:02 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 13h 53m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 48.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1944, Allied forces land in southern France in Operation Dragoon.

Molly Beck reports GOP lawmakers propose making workers who are fired, quit over vaccine mandates eligible for unemployment benefits:

MADISON – Republican lawmakers want to provide unemployment benefits to anyone who quits or is fired over a COVID-19 vaccine mandate — legislation Gov. Tony Evers said he would veto.

The proposal comes as health systems across the state are implementing new requirements for staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in addition to the other vaccines that have been required for years.

Hospitals are bracing for a new surge of COVID-19 infections that has materialized as not enough people are vaccinated to isolate the fast-spreading delta variant and keep it from spreading to those who are unable to get vaccinated, like children.

A number of protests have taken place in the wake of the systems’ new requirements with some health care workers pushing back against them citing the vaccines’ emergency-use approval status.

Republican Reps. Dan Knodl, Rick Gundrum, Rob Brooks and Sen. Duey Stroebel released proposed legislation on Thursday that would create an exemption in Wisconsin’s unemployment rules that would allow anyone who quit over such mandates or was fired over violating them to collect benefits.

“Individual liberty is the bedrock of a free republic and must be respected and protected. The decision of whether or not to get the COVID-19 vaccine is a decision to be made by individuals, not government bureaucrats or employers,” bill authors wrote in a memo to colleagues seeking support.

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.

The answer for employees who do not want to accept employers’ vaccine requirements is to quit and find other jobs, not to ask for state-provided benefits.

One hears so much from these right-wing populists about how their political opponents – those of us in the majority across America – are afraid, motivated by fear, etc. It’s all nonsense. No group that claims to be rational talks so much about fear as the populists. It’s all evident projection with them.

Their declarations of ‘hope over fear’ melt away at the sight of a hypodermic needle. These big, bad Trump men – who claim to be rugged individualists – plead for handouts at others’ expense rather than take a jab.

No, and no again.

Those who will not comply with employers’ lawful workplace mandates are free (as they should be) to quit and find other jobs. They should use their time while unemployed to search through Help Wanted ads for less demanding workplaces.

They are not, and should never be, entitled to unemployment compensation for their vaccine refusal.

See also Jane Jacobs with Useful Advice on Responsibility (for Whitewater, Richmond Township, Delavan, Etc.),  A Private Insurance Response to Vaccine Refusal (Updated), Daily Bread for 8.11.21: Summerfest & Private Business Requirements, and No Shirt, No Shoes? No Service.

SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy become world’s tallest rocket after stacking: