Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 38. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 03m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 75.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1962, NASA launches Relay 1, the first active repeater communications satellite in orbit.
Inflation slowed more than expected in November, an encouraging sign for Federal Reserve officials as they gather in Washington this week to discuss the next steps in their policy campaign against rapid price increases.
Fed policymakers are set to release their latest rate decision at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, at the conclusion of their two-day meeting. They are widely expected to raise interest rates by half a percentage point, slowing down after months of rapid three-quarter point moves. They will also release fresh economic projections, which could show them raising interest rates to a slightly higher level in 2023 than they had previously anticipated.
Tuesday’s inflation figures are likely to factor into their discussion about the future policy path. The Consumer Price Index measure climbed 7.1 percent in November compared to a year earlier, less than the 7.3 percent that economists had expected and a slowdown from 7.7 percent in the previous reading. Between October and November, prices also picked up more slowly than forecast.
After stripping out food and fuel prices, which move around a lot, the index climbed by 6 percent. That was less than the 6.1 percent Bloomberg projection.
Overall inflation has been decelerating on year-over-year basis since hitting a peak in June, a sign that price increases may be turning a corner after months of unexpected strength.
Still too high, but moving in the right direction.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 37. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 04m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 83.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1941, as part of the Holocaust, Hitler declares the imminent extermination of the Jews at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery.
A person needs a certain amount of calories to be active, and while that amount varies between people, too few calories will impact that person’s health (and emotional outlook, by the way).
The compromise of a person or community, however, is not similarly constrained. A community may brim with enthusiasm, but it may also descend to a malaise and doubt far lower than any caloric deficit.
There is, by contrast, seemingly no limit to how much a person or community can compromise on principles or standards. A starving person will tragically reach a bottom, from which neither further decline nor recovery is possible. A compromised person or community, however, can keep slicing alway principles and standards, ever more nicely, almost without end.
A few conflicts of interest? There can be a more. A few instances of regulatory capture? There can be more.
The starving person will presently notice the consequences of ill-health; the resident in a compromised community won’t observe so immediately or completely the consequences of compromised standards.
Of reduced standards, people often ask: is there a bottom?
The fitting reply: if there is, then it’s so far down that there might as well be none.
Whitewater has the chance, one she deserves if anyplace deserves anything, to set her standards securely by setting aside past errors, omissions, and compromises.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 38. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:20 PM for 9h 04m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 89.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this date spiritual leader Morris Pratt gained incorporation for his school of spiritualism located in Whitewater, Wisconsin. Many people of this time embraced spiritualism to try to reach friends and family who had died in the Civil War. As a result, Whitewater became known as the “mecca of modern spiritualism.” Pratt built his institute in 1888, which was initially used as a meeting place for public seances. Pratt decided to turn his institution into an educational school for spiritualists, focusing on science, literature, morality, and communication, as well as spiritualistic instruction. The institute was closed for a few years during the Depression, and then in 1977 relocated to Waukesha, where it remains one of the few institutes in the world that is dedicated to the study of spiritualism. [Source: Wisconsin Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes]
Longtime readers know that I am not, and have never claimed to be, a journalist. Journalists are journalists. Indeed, this libertarian blogger has by design and practice kept this a general interest blog. If I had wanted FREE WHITEWATER to have a different focus, then FW would have had a different focus. (It’s possible, perhaps probable, that some work here in Twenty Twenty-Three will take a more profession-specific cast, as some topics will dictate that approach.)
What I am, however, is someone from a newspaper, magazine, journal, and book-reading family. I’ve occasionally been critical of newspaper coverage because, quite candidly, much newspaper coverage has declined over the years. In our area, we have been a veritable news desert for many years, until the arrival about two years ago of nearby of online news site.
(A few words about public officials of the city and school district: if they cannot manage a proper online news site, then they need either to improve quickly or resign their positions. This is an American city with a university campus — if officials cannot or will not engage with a professional news site, they are unsuited to office. People who are afflicted, disabled, or disadvantaged deserve care and support. Public officeholders, by contrast, wield the power of government and so should either meet a high standard or return to private life.)
Not as a journalist, but as a newspaper reader, one can see that the standard for publishing information about defendants has changed over time. It was once common everywhere to publish mug shots, and in some places to publish full addresses for mere defendants (that is, those accused but not convicted). The publishing of full addresses was never as common as the publishing of mug shots, by the way.
Standards evolve, and mug shots have become disfavored, with publishing presumed-innocent-until-convicted defendants’ full addresses — never as common as mug shots — even less common now. (The obvious reason to avoid publishing a full address — rather than a location, such as a neighborhood or city block, is to limit the risk of reprisals against a presumed-innocent-until-convicted defendant.)
It’s lawful to publish defendants’ mug shots or full addresses, but it is no less small-minded for doing so.
Then and now, these efforts have a gawker’s sheen about them, and in the digital era desperate newspapers use them as clickbait. (The Lake Geneva Regional News, a Lee Enterprises paper, publishes full addresses, but then anyone who follows Lee would know that its flagship Wisconsin State Journal has bled three waves of serious journalists over the last fifteen years. Lee has not descended to a Sham Wow! level of attention-seeking, but it’s getting there. The APG newspapers — Janesville Gazette and Daily Jefferson County Union — are now less interesting than a Sham Wow commercial.)
This libertarian blogger will never make the mistake of other sites by publishing a presumed-innocent-until-convicted defendant’s full address.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 37. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:20 PM for 9h 05m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, becoming the first American to win a Nobel Prize in any field.
The price of limes was three times higher than normal at the start of 2022. Droughts, freezes, and floods threatened the health of the fruit. We head to Veracruz, Mexico, to see how one farm is harvesting and processing millions of limes in the face of growing instability.
Friday in Whitewater will see some wet snow with a high of 34. Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 4:20 PM for 9h 06m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
People who live in a place naturally think about that place, and that leads to thinking about the past, present, and future of that place. It also means, from blogging, to look back, around, and ahead. Blogging begins not with writing but with observation and reading. Words on a page or keyboard come much later.
There should be a method to writing about a topic, especially if that topic requires a lengthy project. Not every story or event can be addressed in a single post, but every post or lengthier project should have follow a method (especially the lengthier ones). SeeSteps for Blogging on a Policy or Proposal.
After reading and walking about and observing, topics come to mind. At first, one lists what’s on one’s mind. SeeWhat Ails, What Heals.
Afterward, only afterward, one asks: what would be the best way address these key topics, with what arguments and in what format? The arguments matter most, but the medium matters, too. How many posts? Are there new ways to display posts, as serialized parts of larger work embedded on a website? How much audio or video might be needed? It seems to me that a bit of innovation is in order.
There are weighty matters waiting to be addressed, and lengthy projects waiting to be accomplished. Twenty twenty-three beckons; she demands diligence, and diligence requires work. Good outcomes— better outcomes than otherwise — will come about if only we try.
Out of What Ails, What Heals this libertarian blogger has before him a plan for some projects ahead. How many of these topics would be a series of posts or something more requires some pondering, so to speak. Any list requires by addition a project on education (“A good high school education should prepare students to express themselves in standard spoken and written English, to grasp principles of math and science, and to understand the history and laws of our people. It is both false and wrong to say that this cannot be done, to ignore doing so, or to ignore explaining plainly how one is doing so.”)
In all this, there is always the sensible reminder that, at any moment, tragedy or triumph may intrude and demand new considerations.
December is a good month to get ready for January and beyond.
Share a slice of Christmas sweetened with family and friendship in a poignant story based on a classic holiday tale. Starring Edward Herrmann and Nancy Stafford.
Since its first rumored appearance in the 1890s, the so-called Demon Cat (known as “D.C”.) has left a trail of terrified people in its wake. Some say it has appeared before tragic events, like the stock market crash of 1929 or President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. Here’s how this spooky myth got started—and why it persists today.
Cat myths in the 19th century
Reports of “demon cats”—both real and supernatural—were bizarrely commonplace during the 19th century. In fact, cat-related mythology dates back centuries around the world. Scholars attribute the ubiquity of these tales to cats’ bodies and behavior, from their otherworldly sounds to their nocturnal habits and glowing eyes.
In Japan, for example, bakneko legends depicted revenge-hungry cats that behaved like humans. Italian parents wishing to scare their children into good behavior told them terrifying tales of a gigantic feline called Gatto Mammone. In Slavic mythology, an evil ovinnik was thought to haunt barns and even set them on fire. And in Ireland, tales of demon cats abounded in local lore.
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Regardless of the legend’s source, it only grew over the years. In 1935, a Capitol policeman told the Washington Posthe’d shot his gun at a large black cat with “the generous proportions of Mae West plus the disposition of Bela Lugosi.” By then, believers thought the cat was a tabby with headlight-like eyes, saying it could be found at the White House, too.
The demon cat today
But a set of feline footprints may be the biggest driver of the Demon Cat’s fame. They can be found on the cement floor of the Small Senate Rotundanear the entrance to the Old Supreme Court Chamber.
The Architect of the Capitol, the federal office that maintains and preserves the Capitol Building, attributes the paw prints to the rat-killing cats that once roamed the building, but those who subscribe to the Demon Cat myth disagree. They say the footprints only appeared after the rotunda was nearly destroyed by an explosion in 1898—an explosion they attribute to the malicious cat even though the official record says a gas explosion was to blame. These believers also say the initials D.C. carved into the same floor stand for Demon Cat.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 39. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 4:20 PM for 9h 07m 15s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Enrollment across the Wisconsin Technical College System grew by more than 10 percent during the 2021-22 academic year. The increase follows a double-digit enrollment decline driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and marks the largest gains for the system in at least a decade.
All of the state’s 16 technical colleges saw enrollment gains during the 2021-22 school year, according to the most recent WTCS Factbook.
Nicolet Area Technical College in Rhinelander saw the largest increase of 21.9 percent over the previous academic year. Western Technical College in La Crosse reported a 19 percent increase and Northcentral Technical College in Wausau posted gains of 15.5 percent year-over-year.
The enrollment growth marks a notable turnaround for Wisconsin Technical College System, or WTCS, which saw a 13.2 percent decrease during the 2020-21 academic year driven by the pandemic. During that span, a majority of colleges saw double-digit declines and some saw enrollment fall by more than 20 percent.
Overall, WTCS added 25,669 students in the 2021-22 academic year.
WTCS President Morna Foy told Wisconsin Public Radio the enrollment growth is great news for the state’s tech colleges, but there’s still a ways to go before numbers hit pre-pandemic levels.
Wisconsin’s key requirement for K-12 education is to assure that by the time students leave high school, they have a strong foundation for whatever awaits them next. Whether it’s full time employment, a technical college, a two-year college, a four-year program, or a combination from among these choices, students graduated from high school can and should have foundation in humanities and sciences.
A good high school education should prepare students to express themselves in standard spoken and written English, to grasp principles of math and science, and to understand the history and laws of our people.
It is both false and wrong to say that this cannot be done, to ignore doing so, or to ignore explaining plainly how one is doing so.
More important than a referendum, more important even than particular candidacies for a school board, is a review of what and how a district explains at each opportunity what it is doing to teach students these fundamentals.
The Opinion video above tells the story of Father Ioann Burdin, a priest with the Russian Orthodox Church who ran afoul of his government soon after Russia invaded Ukraine. His crime? Well, we don’t want to spoil the plot for you. Suffice it to say, Father Ioann’s tale shows the hazards of following your moral compass in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. (He’s still paying the price.)
The story also explores the often tragic absurdity of the modern Russian state, something that Father Ioann, in our conversations with him, described with a wryness and wit that informed our telling of his story.
To help capture this sensibility, we invited Gary Shteyngart, a Soviet-born American satirist and best-selling author, to serve as the video’s narrator. Born in Leningrad in 1972, Mr. Shteyngart immigrated to the United States when he was a child and grew up in Queens, New York. A critic reviewing his latest book for The New York Times described him as “a writer comparably superb at demonstrating absurdity and generating pathos.” That’s a fair summary of our intention with this video.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be foggy in the morning with a high of 40. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 4:20 PM for 9h 08m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 9 AM.
There is a misunderstanding — perhaps willful for some — about how much damage many communities, including Midwestern communities, have experienced over the last twenty years. Some communities never truly bounced back from the Great Recession, only thereafter to be hit with the effects of a nationwide pandemic. In a community like Whitewater, if an assessment does not begin with how policymakers failed to respond to the Great Recession, it’s a thin, tenuous analysis. Whitewater’s contemporary socio-economics depend on understanding the 2007-2009 Great Recession and its aftermath.
The pandemic exacerbated problems in communities that had already been struggling.
Over a third of the students surveyed reported suffering depression in 2021. That’s the highest level since 1999, when the survey began asking teens if, during the last 12 months, they ever felt sad or helpless almost every day for at least two weeks in row to the point that they stopped doing usual activities.
And more than half, or 52 percent, of the respondents, said they struggled with significant anxiety in the past year, the largest percentage since that question was added in 2017.
More than 1,800 students at 43 Wisconsin public, charter and alternative schools completed the anonymous questionnaire during the fall of last year. Although the data, which is collected every two years by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, doesn’t point to a cause for mental health struggles, social worker and DPI consultant Monica Caldwell suggested the pandemic could have played a role.
“Essentially what we’ve had here is an interruption in the normal development of kids,” Caldwell said during a press event Tuesday. “So kids have some unmet needs, of course, and they’re catching up on what was lost. And what we have at the same time is we have adults that are tired and have experienced loss themselves. Our systems of care — including schools that are often the first and primary form of mental health support — we’re under resourced, and we’re tired.”
The way out cannot be the repetition of what these communities have done for years. There is, however, a way out for communities that set aside yesterday’s approaches. SeeWhat Ails, What Heals.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 39. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 4:20 PM for 9h 09m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Racial and ethnic disparities in maternal and infant health outcomes are showing no signs of improvement in Wisconsin, according to a national report card by the nonprofit March of Dimes.
Wisconsin earned a C overall. The state’s preterm birth rate rose over the last decade to 10 percent. Despite that increase, Wisconsin is doing slightly better than the national average of 10.5 percent.
Yet that advantage disappears when looking at areas of the state with higher numbers of marginalized residents. In those communities, health outcomes for expectant mothers and babies trail far behind the state and national averages. Babies born prematurely arrive before 37 weeks of pregnancy.
“We don’t want to be reactive to a health crisis. We want to be proactive and say, ‘OK, we’re seeing this kind of uptick slowly creeping in, how can we stop this from becoming a statewide F?” said Emily Kittell, the maternal and infant health initiatives manager at March of Dimes, Wisconsin.
The state’s largest city is already there. Milwaukee received an F on its report card for its above-average 12.2 percent preterm birth rate. The county earned a D- at 11.3 percent.
“We as a state need to say, ‘This is not okay for our moms, for our babies, and we can do better. And we have to do better,'” said Dr. Nathan Lepp, an associate clinical professor of neonatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
America is an advanced nation, and the nation and Wisconsin can — and should — meet an advanced standard in infant care. Our infant mortality rate at 5.8 is higher than the national average of 5.4. Using a maternal vulnerability index, where a higher score is a greater vulnerability, Walworth County has a score of 22.8, Rock County 32.4, while Dane County has a score of 6.0 and Waukesha County 0.2.
There is no structural, insuperable impediment that prevents Walworth and Rock from having lower scores as do Dane and Waukesha. Counties in the Whitewater area do not fail inevitably, but by preventable error or omission.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 39. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 4:20 PM for 9h 10m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Tucked away in an amendment to the FY2023 U.S. defense authorization bill is a rare instance of congressional bipartisanship and a tribute to U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant.
If approved, the measure would posthumously promote Grant to the rank of General of the Armies of the U.S., making him only the third person – along with John J. Pershing and George Washington – to be awarded the nation’s highest military honor.
As Executive Director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, I believe that the promotion would be much more than a symbolic nod to a great military general. Rather, it would highlight the overlooked legacy of a man who fought to end the last vestiges of slavery.
During the Civil War, Grant rose to fame as a decisive leader who was willing to doggedly pursue Confederate armies and avoid retreat at all costs. He first gained his reputation for tenacity with Union victories at Shiloh, the Battles for Chattanooga and the Siege of Vicksburg.
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A year before President Abraham Lincoln signed in 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation that freed enslaved people in the Confederate states, Grant oversaw the establishment of refugee, or contraband camps, throughout the Mississippi Valley. Those camps provided basic housing, food and work for Black men and women who had fled from slavery.
In March 1864, Lincoln appointed Grant to the rank of lieutenant general and ordered him to take on the Confederate Army in Virginia, a task at which numerous other Union leaders had failed.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 39. Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 11m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1872, the crewless American brigantine Mary Celeste, drifting in the Atlantic, is discovered by the Canadian brig Dei Gratia. The ship had been abandoned for nine days but was only slightly damaged. Her master Benjamin Briggs and all nine others known to have been on board were never found.
It’s the beginning of another election season in Wisconsin. In Whitewater, there are elections upcoming for four common council seats, three school board seats, and the city’s municipal judgeship.
Incumbents for these city or school district positions have until later in December to file papers of non-candidacy, and incumbents and challengers have until early January to file papers should they choose to run in 2023.
The final slate of candidates is always uncertain, as some candidates may wait until the last minute to file, and some who have filed may change their minds.
One small point crops up every year concerning the Whitewater Unified School District. The district’s Central Office is in the habit of describing any seat that is up for election as an ‘open seat.’ That’s not what an open seat means — an open seat is by definition one in which no incumbent is running for re-election, so that the position will be certain to have a new officeholder after the election.
