This Tuesday, July 27th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of The Little Things @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
(Crime/Drama/Thriller)
Rated R (Violence, profanity, intense scenes)
2 hours, 8 minutes (2021)
A burnt-out California deputy sheriff (Denzel Washington) teams up with a crack LAPD detective (Rami Malek) in the search for a serial killer (Jared Leto) who is terrorizing Los Angeles. This is an edge-of-your-seat police/crime story! Globe and Oscar nominations for Jared Leto.a deputy sheriff (Denzel Washington) teams up with a crack LAPD detective (Rami Malek) in the search for a serial killer (Jared Leto) who is terrorizing Los Angeles. This is an edge-of-your-seat police/crime story! Globe and Oscar nominations for Jared Leto.
If vaccinated, no mask required. Reservations no longer required. Free popcorn and a beverage re-instituted!
A glasses-wearing cat in Pennsylvania is going viral. Danielle Crull, a local eye doctor, rescued Truffles 4 years ago. Now, she uses Truffles at her medical practice to comfort kids who might need glasses or eye patches for the first time.
‘The story that happens over and over is a little one is crying and she comes out and I put glasses on her, and they immediately stop crying and laugh and put their own glasses on,’ Crull told CNN.
‘It happens countless times, and it’s just as sweet every single time.’
Friday in Whitewater will be hazy with scattered showers and a high of 87. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 14h 45m 55s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Rural America has a growth problem. Business and industry desperately need workers, but the domestic labor pool is shallow, and the nation’s birthrate is slowing.
There’s no better place to help expand our economy than in rural communities like ours. We need smart public policy for sustained growth — and immigration reform would be a big part of it.
The Iowa Business Council, a group made up of representatives of the largest corporations in the state, has been asking for immigration reform for years to help solve our labor woes.
Plenty of research shows that flexible visa programs run federally or by the states could address this problem quickly.
Help-wanted signs are up all around town. There are help-wanted ads playing on our local radio station, in our local newspapers and all over the internet. Listen to your favorite national podcast here and you just might hear a targeted help-wanted ad for our ZIP code. Our county, Marion, is blessed with a strong agricultural and manufacturing base and is doing relatively well. The median household income in the county is $61,038, just a notch below the state median of $62,843. About 8 percent of us live in poverty.
Dave Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University, agrees that the reason we have so many jobs open is that we don’t have enough people to fill them.
Former president Donald Trump’s political PAC raised about $75 million in the first half of this year as he trumpeted the false notion that the 2020 election was stolen from him, but the group has not devoted funds to help finance the ongoing ballot review in Arizona or to push for similar endeavors in other states, according to people familiar with the finances.
Instead, the Save America leadership PAC — which has few limits on how it can spend its money — has paid for some of the former president’s travel, legal costs and staff, along with other expenses, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the group’s inner workings. The PAC has held onto much of its cash.
Even as he assiduously tracks attempts by his allies to cast doubt on the integrity of last year’s election, Trump has been uninterested in personally bankrolling the efforts, relying on other entities and supporters to fund the endeavors, they said.
Some anti-vaccination groups on Facebook are changing their names to euphemisms like “Dance Party” or “Dinner Party,” and using code words to fit those themes in order to skirt bans from Facebook, as the company attempts to crack down on misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
The groups, which are largely private and unsearchable but retain large user bases accrued during the years Facebook permitted anti-vaccination content, also swap out language to fit the new themes and provide code legends, according to screenshots provided to NBC News by multiple members of the groups.
One major “dance party” group has more than 40,000 followers and has stopped allowing new users amid public scrutiny. The backup group for “Dance Party,” known as “Dinner Party” and created by the same moderators, has more than 20,000 followers.
Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon showers with a high of 85. Sunrise is 5:37 AM and sunset 8:25 PM, for 14h 47m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM and the Urban Forestry Commission Grants and Sponsorship Sub-Committee meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1990, Greg LeMond, an American road racing cyclist, wins his third Tour de France after leading the majority of the race. It was LeMond’s second consecutive Tour de France victory.
With the Wallenhorst dairy farm gone, there’s only one left on the seven-mile stretch from one side of town to the other; there were 22 when Ron was growing up there. “We worried no one would show up because dairy farms are just disappearing in our area, so there were fewer and fewer small farmers to buy from us,” Ron said.
The license plates for Wisconsin say “America’s Dairyland” beneath a picture of a red barn. The state has the most dairy farms in the country. But it lost 826 dairy farms in 2019, or 10% of its dairy herds – the most dramatic loss in the state’s history, and part of a downward trend which saw the state lose 44% of its dairy farms over the last decade. Last year, for the first time in state history, the number of dairy farms dipped below 7,000.
At the same time, milk production in the state has increased every year since 2004, and has set a new annual record each year since 2009, according to the US Department of Agriculture. In the last decade alone, Wisconsin has increased milk production by 25%. The number of operations declines, just as the number of cows per operation goes up – 3% of Wisconsin farms now produce roughly 40% of the state’s milk. Milk produced on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO), or farms with more than about 700 cows but often housing thousands, is increasingly making up the state’s overall milk production.
For most of her 36 years at the Hufcor factory in Janesville, Wisconsin, Kathy Pawluk loved working there, at least until a private-equity firm took over four years ago. There were Christmas parties and summer picnics, and workers could listen to the radio as they built accordion-style room partitions for convention centers and hotel ballrooms.
“They treated people like they were family, not a number,” said Pawluk, 62. “We had the best health benefits. We had HR people who really cared about us.”
But Pawluk said things deteriorated soon after OpenGate Capital acquired Hufcor, a family-owned company founded in Janesville 120 years ago. “They basically told us ‘We don’t want to get to know you’ in so many words,” Pawluk said.
In late May, things took a turn for the worse. The company announced it was shuttering the sprawling plant and moving operations to Monterrey, Mexico, wiping out the jobs of 166 workers.
“They told us, ‘We can make a lot more money in Mexico. The labor is too high here. Parts cost too much here,’” Pawluk said “They’ll get away with paying dirt wages in Mexico.” Until she was laid off last week, she earned $20.92. Union officials now estimate that Hufcor’s workers in Mexico will make less than one-fifth that.
“I wasn’t so worried about myself. I’m close to retirement,” Pawluk said. “I’m more worried about the others. The rest of us are like family. We know each other’s kids. We know each other’s grandkids. Some friends have 30 years in, and they’re now forced to find another job. That sucks.”
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 78. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:26 PM, for 14h 49m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 90.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1904, Louis Rigolly, a Frenchman, becomes the first man to break the 100 mph (161 km/h) barrier on land. He drove a 15-liter Gobron-Brillié in Ostend, Belgium.
Now Milwaukee is the epicenter of professional basketball with a crown jewel of an arena and a passionate fan base who packed the Deer District throughout the playoff run. Heady times for a franchise that not too long ago debated the efficacy of building a new home to keep the team in city.
All those good feelings flow from Antetokounmpo, who has grown from that skinny teenager to an unstoppable force that the sport has not seen before.
Antetokounmpo, who suffered a scary injury in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals, missed two games in that series but was ready in Game 1 vs. the Suns.
He delivered one of the most dominant performances in Finals history with 50 points and 14 rebounds in Game 6. He even knocked down his free throws, going 17 for 19 from the line. It was his crowning achievement after so many memorable moments of these Finals, including his improbable block of Deandre Ayton in Game 4 and his Suns-eclipsing alley-oop in Game 5.
Because of how the committee was created, Ms. Pelosi will have final say on its membership. Her appointments — including Republican Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Democratic Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (Miss.), the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee who will lead the panel — reflected a real seriousness of purpose. In contrast, Mr. McCarthy’s choices seem solely designed to make a circus of the proceedings. Ringleader, of course, would be Mr. Jordan, a persistent if not terribly skillful disrupter and provocateur. Mr. Jordan, Mr. Banks and Mr. Nehls all voted against certifying the results of the election despite the absence of voter fraud or major irregularities. Their complicity in feeding Mr. Trump’s lie about a stolen election is not compatible with any dispassionate investigation of the day’s events.
“When you have partisan comments coming out of the White House regarding next Jim Crow laws, or people like Senator [Charles] Schumer and the White House not cooperating on a bipartisan bill — ‘Oh, here we’re going to be partisan, but over here you better trust us,’ ” [Sen. Bill] Cassidy [R-La] said. “That just doesn’t work.”
In other words, Cassidy believes that Louisianans have decided against being vaccinated because Biden lowered trust in government. This is nonsensical for a variety of reasons, including that trust in government was in decline well before Biden took office. It’s essentially an attempt to redirect blame toward Democrats and away from media on the right and Republican leaders who’ve repeatedly expressed skepticism about the vaccine and its rollout. The idea that Tucker Carlson’s incessant rhetoric misleadingly targeting vaccine safety and effectiveness is less of a factor than Biden’s praise for the vaccines while advocating Democratic policy positions is bizarre.
It seemed reasonable, months ago, to wait until the end of the 2020-2021 school year to assess how well the Whitewater Unified School District managed the pandemic. It doesn’t seem so reasonable now, for reasons of culture as much as public health.
Generally – and sensibly – one has reason to be skeptical of lay analyses of epidemiology. It’s not enough to review data (often incomplete); one requires a professional understanding of the concepts underlying those data. There have been no such independent analyses at FREE WHITEWATER. I’m not an epidemiologist, and the pandemic hasn’t made me one. An assessment here of the district’s performance would always be a lay assessment of general outcomes. SeeWhitewater’s Local Politics 2021 — COVID-19: Skepticism and Rhetoric.
There is, however, an equal impediment to assessing – today – the district’s pandemic performance: is it not obvious that many of the heated public comments over these last eighteen months have been culturally motivated? If culturally motivated over these last eighteen months, then why not for many months more? If cultural complaints began over masks or face-to-face instruction, will they outgrow their immediate cause and become complaints about instruction, discipline, etc.? SeeWhitewater’s Local Politics 2021: Majoritarianism.
Simply put: is controversy in this district over the pandemic one part of a larger story about ideological and cultural controversies?
Apart from public health questions about the threat (if any) from coronavirus variants, etc., it now seems too soon to close the book on what this pandemic has wrought and how officials have responded. A fire’s not truly out until the embers are cold.
A history of this time isn’t yet ready, as this time may not be over.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 89. Sunrise is 5:35 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 14h 51m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 82.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1969, Apollo 11‘s crew successfully makes the first manned landing on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility. Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon six and a half hours later.
Tucker Carlson has called the idea of vaccine passports the medical equivalent of “Jim Crow” laws. And other Fox News personalities have spent months both trafficking in anti-vaccine rhetoric and assailing the concept of showing proof of vaccination status.
But Fox Corporation, the right-wing talk channel’s parent company, has quietly implemented the concept of a vaccine passport as workers slowly return back to the company’s offices.
Fox employees, including those who work at Fox News, received an email, obtained by CNN Business, from the company’s Human Resources department in early June that said Fox had “developed a secure, voluntary way for employees to self-attest their vaccination status.”
The system allows for employees to self-report to Fox the dates their shots were administered and which vaccines were used.
The company has encouraged employees to report their status, telling them that “providing this information to FOX will assist the company with space planning and
“Thank you for providing FOX with your vaccination information,” the email said. “You no longer are required to complete your daily health screening through WorkCare/WorkMatters.”
The concept, which was first reported Monday by Ryan Grim on The Hill’s morning streaming show, is known internally as “FOX Clear Pass.”
Over the past seven years in at least 52 cases involving 46 defendants, [Outagamie County Circuit Judge Vincent] Biskupic has used so-called review hearings to either monitor a defendant’s behavior or to push them to pay fines, fees or restitution, Wisconsin Watch and WPR found. These check-ins — not spelled out in state law — often involved defendants updating the judge on their lives and their progress toward meeting Biskupic’s conditions.
About two dozen legal experts consulted by Wisconsin Watch and WPR had a wide range of views about Biskupic’s use of review hearings. Some said the practice is legal, some called it a gray area and some said it has no basis in state law. Others had never heard of it before.
A Wisconsin Watch and WPR analysis shows Biskupic is by far the biggest practitioner in Wisconsin of review hearings like in Kartsounes’ case — held after a person has been revoked from probation. Probation allows people to remain out of jail if they meet certain conditions and remain crime-free.
After a detailed review of each case file, Wisconsin Watch and WPR found that in 29 cases, Biskupic held 142 such review hearings — more than twice as many as any other judge in Wisconsin between 2014 and 2020.
And yet, and yet… no fear strikes deeper and holds tighter among moderate local officials than the fear of a red hat. Even among those nonplussed with snakes, spiders, or dark cats, a cheap trucker hat incites discomfort bordering on panic. The polite start looking for the exits when the conservative populists step into a room.
Those who find it uncomfortable, if not exhausting, to be around a combination of soft thinking and loud voices also struggle with the populists’ confidence (as brimming as it is unjustified) that their blood-and-soil perspective is infallible.
When the Trumpists arrive, moderate, polite people worry about a commotion. There’s a similar dynamic in a restaurant when a patron at a nearby table starts shouting about his unmet expectations – other patrons look away to distance themselves from the scene.
It’s a scene all the same. The hope that if one is quiet the disturbance will stop may make sense in a restaurant with only one hysterical patron, but a mass movement of the impulsive and insatiable won’t vanish so easily.
Of these Trumpists: one rightly opposes them, and would be foolish to ignore or underestimate them. In opposition, a practical focus belongs on leaders, down even to the local level.
They’ll take what they can, waiting impatiently to take still more, but giving nothing in return. Even other conservatives will have to adopt populist views lest they otherwise find themselves cast aside. SeeConservative Populism Moves in One Direction Only.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 85. Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 14h 53m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Equal Opportunities Commission meets at 5 PM (canceled).
On this day in 64, the Great Fire of Rome causes widespread devastation and rages on for six days, destroying half of the city.
President Biden hit the nail on the head Friday in response to a question about platforms such as Facebook that amplify scientifically false anti-vaccines claims, and deter people from getting lifesaving shots. “They’re killing people,” he said. “I mean they really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that’s — they’re killing people.”
One can quibble over whether Facebook or a mendacious Fox News host actually affects an individual’s decision to avoid vaccination, but it is hard to deny they can reinforce life-threatening behavior. (Disclaimer: I am an MSNBC contributor.)
Once more playing the right-wing gotcha game, Fox News’s Peter Doocy on Friday, ostensibly in response to a comment made by White House press secretary Jen Psaki about the handful of people on Facebook who promote most anti-vaccine content on the platform, demanded to know why the White House is spying on people’s social media profiles. That was a ridiculous, demonstrably false assertion. Perhaps if Fox News personnel paid attention to credible news accounts, they would be less inclined to make such wild accusations.
NPR, for example, reported: “Researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.” The report cited Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, who told NPR: “The ‘Disinformation Dozen’ produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.” This is not the government “spying” on people or suppressing free speech. This is the administration reiterating independent research based on information in the public domain.
Psaki addressed the obviously false premise of Doocy’s question. “We’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets … as we are in regular touch with social media platforms. This is publicly open information, people sharing information online. Just as you are all reporting information on your news stations,”she said.
A new study has found that 1-in-5 Americans believe that it is “definitely true” or “probably true” that there is a microchip in the COVID-19 vaccines.
The study by YouGov in conjunction with The Economist has found that 30-44-year-olds are most likely to believe this widely debunked conspiracy, with 7% of people from this age group saying that it is “definitely true” and 20% of them saying it is “probably true.”
Less than half of people surveyed (46%) said that it is “definitely false.”
The conspiracy suggesting that vaccines are a tool to implant microchips into people has been widespread across the globe, acting as one of the major tales of misinformation that has punctuated the pandemic.
There has never been any evidence to support the idea that microchips are a part of the vaccine rollout.
Despite this, false videos and content describing the false-microchip idea in great detail continue to circulate and find an audience on social media.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 14h 54m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1966, Gemini 10 is launched on a 70-hour mission that includes docking with an orbiting Agena target vehicle.
MOUNTAIN HOME, Ark. — When the boat factory in this leafy Ozark Mountains city offered free coronavirus vaccinations this spring, Susan Johnson, 62, a receptionist there, declined the offer, figuring she was protected as long as she never left her house without a mask.
Linda Marion, 68, a widow with chronic pulmonary disease, worried that a vaccination might actually trigger Covid-19 and kill her. Barbara Billigmeier, 74, an avid golfer who retired here from California, believed she did not need it because “I never get sick.”
Last week, all three were patients on 2 West, an overflow ward that is now largely devoted to treating Covid-19 at Baxter Regional Medical Center, the largest hospital in north-central Arkansas. Mrs. Billigmeier said the scariest part was that “you can’t breathe.” For 10 days, Ms. Johnson had relied on supplemental oxygen being fed to her lungs through nasal tubes.
Ms. Marion said that at one point, she felt so sick and frightened that she wanted to give up. “It was just terrible,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t take it.”
A recent paper that suggested masks may be dangerous for kids to wear has now been retracted. It’s the second pandemic-related study written by the lead author to be pulled from publication in less than a month, following the retraction of another paper claiming to show that covid-19 vaccines would kill almost as many people as they would save.
The study was published June 30 in JAMA Pediatrics as a research letter titled: “Experimental Assessment of Carbon Dioxide Content in Inhaled Air With or Without Face Masks in Healthy Children: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” Its lead author was Harald Walach, a clinical psychologist in Germany.
Walach and his colleagues claimed to show that children who wore face masks for only minutes experienced higher than safe levels of carbon dioxide in their bloodstream as a result, presumably because the masks trapped exhaled air in the mask that the children then breathed back in. Based on their and others’ research, they further argued that “children should not be forced to wear face masks.”
The study was quickly criticized for various reasons, including the use of a possibly improper measuring device to gauge carbon dioxide levels near the mask and the lack of other relevant data, like the children’s actual blood oxygen levels. What’s worse, the JAMA study was published literally the same week that Walach’s earlier paper on vaccine safety was retracted for similar data sloppiness, though only after fierce criticism from other scientists, including editors at the very journal where it was published. Just two weeks later, Walach’s second paper would meet the same fate.
….
Walach had earned a reputation as an unscientific crank long before the pandemic, having once been crowned the Pseudoscientist of the Year in 2012 by the Austrian Society for Critical Thinking over his research into alternative medicine and telepathy. So it’s worth wondering how Walach, who also seems to have no relevant experience in studying vaccines or face masks, was able to publish these terrible studies in two separate journals without any red flags popping up.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:32 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 14h 56m 38s of daytime. The moon is in its first quarter with 50.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1821, the Kingdom of Spain cedes the territory of Florida to the United States.
Students growing up in poverty are already lagging behind their classmates by the time they set foot in kindergarten — and the disparities only worsen over time.
But the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in March, will test a new proposition: What does it mean for children when their families receive enough cash benefits to lift them out of poverty?
The plan includes a $100 billion expansion of the child tax credit program, which will infuse family budgets with up to $1,600 more per child, and will allow even the lowest-income families to benefit. Under the previous child tax credit, families got up to $2,000 off their tax bills per child, but many poor families got a smaller benefit — or nothing at all.
Now, even the poorest families who do not make enough to pay income taxes will qualify. Families with citizen children will now get $3,000 per child, and $3,600 for children under the age of 6. Crucially, the benefit will be split up and paid out in monthly increments, with the money set to go out to families via checks, debit cards or direct depositsbeginning Thursday, the Biden administration announced. For some families, the money could be transformative. The colossal and historic investment is expected to cut child poverty in half, according to an analysis from Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy.
A joint investigation by The Kansas City Star and Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation reveals how June became a lost month in the fight to slow the spread of delta across Missouri. Thousands of pages of internal emails and other documents from 19 local health departments trace the growing alarm and a sense of near-resignation among officials about their chances of halting the advance of the variant.
The consequences of the squandered month will last well into summer. CoxHealth, a major Springfield hospital, told The Star it’s bracing for hospitalizations to rise for weeks to come. Delta is still spreading and has now been found in the Kansas City and St. Louis areas, though state officials hope higher vaccination rates in those places will limit increases in cases. Schools will also begin next month with some parents in open rebellion against imposing mask requirements, even with delta all but certain to continue circulating.
The emails, obtained through records requests by the institute’s Documenting COVID-19 project and shared with The Star, paint a portrait of local health officials eager to vaccinate their communities but encountering resistance from residents, apathy from some politicians and a milquetoast state-level response. They document rising frustration with everyone from DHSS to elected officials to the public. An official in one county even privately mocked a video released by DHSS explaining the delta variant.
“I feel like we’re on an island, all alone in the COVID fight, but I know others in the state are feeling the same way,” Laclede County Health Department Administrator Charla Baker wrote to a DHSS official in late June. “With our community leaders and residents not wanting to take any remedial actions to protect themselves and others, we are just very frustrated and concerned with our current situation.”
Ever wondered what it was like inside the White House during the final months, weeks, and even moments of the Trump presidency? Where better to find out than on Hell & High Water with John Heilemann’s grand return? In this special two-part episode, Heilemann has on Michael Bender, senior White House reporter for The Wall Street Journal and author of “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” to discuss Trump’s cataclysmic final year in office and mishandling of the series of crises that beset the country in 2020 and early 2021. The pair talk COVID, George Floyd’s murder, Hunter Biden, and, of course, the January 6 insurrection.
