FREE WHITEWATER

Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, November 8th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Where the Crawdads Sing

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Tuesday, November 8th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Where the Crawdads Sing @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Drama/Mystery/Thriller

Rated PG-13; 2 hours, 5 minutes (2022)

The film adaptation of the novel that has been on the New York Times Bestsellers List for over 3.5 years. A woman who raised herself in the marshes of the Deep South becomes a suspect in the murder of a man with whom she was once involved.

One can find more information about Where the Crawdads Sing at the Internet Movie Database.

Cats

Friday Catblogging: The Case for Cats

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Katherine Wu makes The Case for Cats (‘Cats are a biological marvel. That’s not (the only reason) why I love them’):

My spouse and I both grew up as die-hard dog people, but now, in the clear light of adulthood, we’re a pair of cat converts. For me, at least, it’s tough to say exactly why. It’s possible that I’ve ingested a parasite that’s invaded my brain and fueled my feline obsession. But then again, I see many reasons to favor the feline. Part of it has to be their luxurious fur; their super-silent, bean-padded paws; their fluid-like flexibility. Their vertically contracting pupils, their scritchy-scratchy tongues, their pleasantly pointy ears. Their love for laser pointers, their fear of cucumbers, their affinity for boxes. I’m also probably lured in by cats’ mysterious, melodic purrs—a form of communication that most other animals can’t mimic and that humans struggle to parse. And I’m definitely gobsmacked by their ability to right themselves within a second or two of falling and so often survive, even when the plunge is many stories high.

If I’m being completely honest, maybe it’s the feline personality that’s my personal catnip. My cats are just as cuddly as any dog I’ve ever had—probably more. They’re affectionate and personable; they come running when we call; they greet us at the door. And every cat I’ve met has been such a distinct individual, such a character: bursting with strong opinions, clear-cut preferences, bizarre and memorable quirks. And those traits are steadfast.

Animals, Birds, Daily Bread, Science/Nature

Daily Bread for 11.3.22: Crows (Yes, Crows)

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 71. Sunrise is 7:32 AM and sunset 5:44 PM for 10h 11m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 73.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM. 

On this day in 1812, Napoleon’s armies are defeated at the Battle of Vyazma.

These are turbulent times, often unnecessarily and destructively so. In former times like these, people with far more important roles than writing yet took time for occasional diversions.

In that spirit, something interesting about crows — Diane Kwon reports Crows Perform Yet Another Skill Once Thought Distinctively Human: 

Crows are some of the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom. They are capable of making rule-guided decisions and of creating and using tools. They also appear to show an innate sense of what numbers are. Researchers now report that these clever birds are able to understand recursion—the process of embedding structures in other, similar structures—which was long thought to be a uniquely human ability.

Recursion is a key feature of language. It enables us to build elaborate sentences from simple ones. Take the sentence “The mouse the cat chased ran.” Here the clause “the cat chased” is enclosed within the clause “the mouse ran.” For decades, psychologists thought that recursion was a trait of humans alone. Some considered it the key feature that set human language apart from other forms of communication between animals. But questions about that assumption persisted. “There’s always been interest in whether or not nonhuman animals can also grasp recursive sequences,” says Diana Liao, a postdoctoral researcher at the lab of Andreas Nieder, a professor of animal physiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

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This paper prompted Liao and her colleagues to investigate whether crows, with their renowned cognitive skills, might possess the capacity for recursion as well. Adapting the protocol used in the 2020 paper, the team trained two crows to peck pairs of brackets in a center-embedded recursive sequence. The researchers then tested the birds’ ability to spontaneously generate such recursive sequences on a new set of symbols. The crows also performed on par with children. The birds produced the recursive sequences in around 40 percent of trials—but without the extra training that the monkeys required. The results were published today in Science Advances.

The discovery that crows can grasp center-embedded structures and that they are better at doing so than monkeys “is fascinating,” says Giorgio Vallortigara, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Trento in Italy, who was not involved in the work. These findings raise the question of what non-human animals might use this ability for, he adds. “They do not seem to possess anything similar to human language, thus recursion is possibly relevant to other cognitive functions,” he says. One speculation is that animals might use recursion to represent relationships within their social groups.

(Hat tip to Joe Ragazzo’s newsletter for the link to the story.) 

There are some doubts, as Kwon’s story reveals, about how much crows truly understand, but the findings will likely take time to sort out through other tests.

 Adorable Beaver Goes Viral for Feuding With Her Rival:

Daily Bread, Education, School District

Daily Bread for 11.2.22: In Support of the Whitewater Schools’ Operational Referendum

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 71. Sunrise is 7:31 AM and sunset 5:45 PM for 10h 13m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1947, in California, designer Howard Hughes performs the maiden (and only) flight of the Hughes H-4 Hercules (also known as the “Spruce Goose”), one of the largest fixed-wing aircraft ever built.

For many years, in confident conviction as FREE WHITEWATER’s libertarian blogger, I have opposed school referendums, notably capital ones, for the Whitewater Unified School District. It is with equal confidence that I now urge my fellow residents to support the Whitewater Schools’ 2022 operational referendum.  The well-being of our students will best be served through operational stability, and, once assured, that stability will offer time for methodical adjustments in the district’s operation.

The rejection of this operational referendum — one that simply allows the district to continue needed services day-to-day — would plunge this district’s residents into destructive, internecine strife over budgets from one year to the next. Our community, managing through multiple challenges, would make no better choices, and find no better solutions, in the chaotic, uncertain political environment after a failed operational referendum. 

There is a profound difference between wanting change and fomenting disorder. We cannot burn this village to save it. Many years ago, using a different metaphor, the noted libertarian Sheldon Richman proposed that the only way to manage the ‘onion’ of government was to smash it completely. He was wrong: a reasonable man peels away parts of government deliberately and methodically only after careful reflection. Opposition to this referendum is an unreasonable smashing in the place of careful peeling. 

I have — rightly — opposed capital spending for a new athletic field. While not a single argument made in defense of that artificial turf has been persuasive — not one — the relevant consideration is that this is not a capital referendum, but a referendum for ordinary daily expenses. Rejecting this referendum will most certainly not recoup the money spent on the field. Those are sunk costs, that is, past costs that cannot be recouped. (No one is going to dig up the field and sell it on eBay.) All rational economic decisions are made at the moment, in the present, based on what is best going forward.

There are, to be sure, administrative challenges in this district. Not one of them will be fixed by rejecting the operational referendum. No one will be made wiser or more communicative. On the contrary, the whole district — board, administrators, teachers, students — will be plunged into quarrelsome debates over budgets rather than, well, the daily teaching of students. 

Academic performance will not improve by rejecting this referendum. It’s a diversion and a delusion to believe that if performance is insufficient now, students will somehow do better the day, month, or year after a failed referendum. They won’t do better, but they will be distracted with a year or more of battles over what’s to be cut, and when it is to be cut.

The opposition to this referendum has proposed not a single credible plan for improving learning. Not one. Complaining about academic past performance will not improve students’ present and future performance. (Indeed, opponents to this operational referendum haven’t even proposed an amount of cuts they’d prefer.)

Opposing the referendum because of past decisions on virtual schooling is both backward looking and punitive. Much of this looks like a Revenge and Retribution Tour. I have consistently argued against amateur epidemiology on all sides — no one in this community truly knew what would happen during much of the pandemic. There’s a lot of pretending about getting in right, or others getting it wrong, but for all of us in Whitewater this was guesswork.

Dr. Emily Oster, nationally noted for wanting schools to be open, writes sensibly that we should Declare a Pandemic Amnesty (‘We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID’):

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

There’s a false idea that some members of the board are in the grip of pride, and won’t admit their supposed pandemic mistakes. That’s a misunderstanding of wrongful pride. (Obviously, pride as satisfaction in running a race or feeling oneself as equal under law to others, for example, is not wrongful pride.)

Wrongful pride requires arrogance, and so is best understood as hubris (literally, an arrogant presumption). No one on this board, whatever decision he or she made during the pandemic, acted out of arrogance. They acted under conditions of uncertainty, and were very plain that they were uncertain. 

Emily Oster’s right: the pandemic is over — time to move on. No apology required. 

We’ve students in considerable, regrettable need. Not one student will be helped by rejecting this referendum. All will continue to be helped by supporting it. No students deserve disorder, least of all ours in Whitewater. 

There’s much to be done, in reform, and reform will come most effectively through a methodical approach. I’ve no doubt that this is the better way. If all the world thought otherwise, still I would hold this position. 

STABLE. SECURE. SENSIBLE.

I urge this community to support the Whitewater Schools’ referendum to assure a continuity of services so that, in these next years, we can apply ourselves to constructive change from a stable foundation. 

Acculturation, Charity, City, Culture, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.1.22: The Community Space

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 69. Sunrise is 7:30 AM and sunset 5:46 PM for 10h 16m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 52.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM. 

 On this day in 1512, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo, is exhibited to the public for the first time.

Policymaking in a community begins with asking what people in a community are like, how they’re faring. Part (only part, yet a significant part) of that inquiry should consider their socio-economic condition.

A proper analysis doesn’t depend on one’s own position, but on an assessment of others’ conditions. (It doesn’t matter that I have, for example, no personal concerns. I don’t, in fact. Writing about a community is writing about a community, not one person.) 

Part of others’ condition is, for all of us, socio-economic: a mixture of culture and income. 

A socio-economic condition reveals not merely where one stands at the moment, but often where one can go, and indeed might, go in the future. Stronger present conditions open doors to greater future opportunities; difficult present conditions restrict future opportunities for lack of means. All this should be plain and obvious, but it’s not so plain and obvious as it should be. 

A key truth: nothing, including stagnation, is truly stagnant. There is movement always, in people and in a community. There’s forward, backward, and side to side, but stationary only for the briefest moments. 

This brings our city to the unfortunate situation of the Community Space in Whitewater. (The Community Space, 834 E. Milwaukee Street, Whitewater.) That charitable effort is now temporarily closed, having experienced difficulty managing the volume, and some residents’s treatment of,  donations.

Different people have different roles in the city, but this libertarian blogger can see, and has written, about the importance of charitable roles in Whitewater. One does not have to be a doctor to see that professional medicine saves lives. I’ve no practical solution, regrettably, to offer anyone at the Community Space. 

I can offer, reasonably, a view of what these difficulties at the Community Space mean, more broadly for Whitewater. They suggest that Whitewater’s need is greater than ever, and that difficult socio-economic conditions in the city include for a few residents’ a lack of acculturation about how to donate, and how to treat donations. 

Ironically and sadly, the problems that have temporarily impeded work at the Community Space show how important the Community Space is. 

(These are not new concerns at FREE WHITEWATER. See Waiting for Whitewater’s Dorothy Day, Something Transcendent, and in the Meantime, and An Oasis Strategy.)

What’s in the Night Sky November 2022:

City, Holiday

Boo! Scariest Things in Whitewater, 2022

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Here’s the sixteenth annual FREE WHITEWATER list of the scariest things in Whitewater.

 (The 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 editions are available for comparison.)

The list runs in reverse order, from mildly scary to truly frightening.

10. The Coming Coyotepocalypse.  And look, and look — Whitewater can’t say it hasn’t been warned. When dozens upon dozens find themselves in coyotes’ stomachs, survivors will regret not taking action sooner to save their loved ones. See In Whitewater, People Won’t Feed Coyotes — Coyotes Will Feed on People.

Coyotes have natural predators of their own (cougars, wolves, grizzly bears, and black bears). Someone needs to position a few of these coyote predators at strategic locations in the town. Let’s say we go with a few cougars.

Admittedly, this is a short-term solution. When the cougars eat all the coyotes, they’re gonna go looking for another food supply. Whitewater’s population offers 14,889 choices. (The ideal solution would be to train cougars to eat only some people. I’m not sure, however, that cougars could read the street signs necessary to locate only those on a cat-chow list.) Another round of predators (let’s say, lions) would be needed to manage the cougars. Elephants could manage the lions. After that, well, this plan still needs some work.

At the least, however, there’d be no more coyotes. You’re welcome.

9. Herbicide 2.0.  A person of average ability would realize that if dumping herbicide into a drained lake was a bad idea, it’s worse to dump herbicide into a re-filled lake that feeds even more water through the town. See Reporting About Artificial Herbicides in Whitewater, Wisconsin. The moment for mucking up Whitewater’s environment should have, thankfully, passed now that the lakes are re-filled. That there is even the slightest possibility of Herbicide 2.0 suggests lamentable, below-average ability.

8. Whitewater Parks & Rec.  If Whitewater Rec Department as a pun isn’t clear enough, go ahead and change the name to Whitewater Wrecks Department. Parks & Recreation was a beloved series on NBC (with an 8.6 IMDb rating). If someone made a series about our local parks department, IMDb would have to introduce a negative rating scale.

7. Something Different. Why is something different so hard? It’s not wrong to want to develop the town; it’s foolish to think that economic development without gains in individual and household income is worthy development. Even the Soviets knew how to build big capital projects. They had no dearth of concrete and rebar; they had a dearth in income per capita. Perhaps someone will try something different before the city wastes another generation as a low-income community. See A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA.

6. Domination & Submission Rituals. Of course, of course — sometimes people will get angry at public meetings. They’ve a right to express themselves bluntly and critically. Almost all public comment in Whitewater has been legitimate, even when critical. Harsh isn’t wrong — it’s simply harsh. It’s illegitimate, however, to expect groveling in reply to a vulgar Dominance-and-Submission ritual. People are not apes; they should neither beat their chests as apes nor expect others’ submissive apologies as a response to simian behavior. These atavistic rituals are ineffective with those who are cold by nature, but they sometimes elicit unnecessary entreaties from the timid.

Yield not; hold fast.

5. Need. We see the need in others, but we hide from what it means. If officials & residents see the truth right in front of them, then why aren’t they outwardly transformed? Instead, they embrace situationally, for the occasion, later to move back to the mundane. Someone once said that “truly, the spirit is eager, but the flesh is frail.” True then, true now, of us all.

4. Love.  If not scary, then at least scarce. I told someone recently that I loved Whitewater, and he asked me what I loved about it. I understood his question, but it missed the mark. Love isn’t about what one enjoys (although there is much to enjoy about Whitewater). Love is hoping for, and acting, to allow others find their enjoyment as they understand enjoyment. That’s love: not what one wants, but doing one’s small part to clear the field of obstacles so that others can find love as they define it. Deeper still: being happy, indeed joyful, that others have found whatever it is that they’ve rightfully sought. Love is directed outward, in many forms of action, without expectation of refraction back. As it happens, directed outward and without expectation are their own incomparable, loving rewards. The consequences of true love, actually.

3. Nostalgia.  An aching yearning for a false past robs the present and beggars the future. See The Boosters’ Big Capital but Small Society.

2. Regulatory Capture. Regulatory capture happens in towns small and big: a special interest group comes along and lobbies to manipulate that community’s regulations, ordinances, and projects toward its own private ends. Sometimes they’ll audaciously advocate on their own; others times they’ll use a reliable toady who they’ve already been captured, so to speak, and who always votes the special interest’s way. Walking around while wearing a special interest’s leash is bad policy, and an obvious fashion mistake. 

Look at this story from London, only eight years ago:

Absolutely no normal person in England (there probably are at least a few normal people in England) thought well of this guy. No sane mother wished her son would grow up to be this guy; no father hoped his son would one day walk the streets of London like a spaniel. (Best guess: real spaniels encountering this weirdo would say, well, WTF is this?).

Be your own person, blaze your own trail, carry no one’s water, and wear no one’s leash.

1. Populism. Populism exists nationally on both the left and right, but in Whitewater only on the right. There is no Communist-Socialist-Radical-Whatever-Whatever leftwing movement in Whitewater. There are only conservative populists here. These conservative populists “are going to claim that all other contenders for power are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a disagreement about policies or even about values, which after all in a democracy is completely normal, ideally maybe even somewhat productive. No, populists always immediately make it personal and they make it entirely moral. This tendency to simply dismiss everybody else from the get-go as corrupt, as not working for the people, that’s always the pattern.” See Defining Populism, The Environment That Populism Creates, and The Environment That Populism Exploits.

They tend toward nativist trolling. These populists need to be handled in a particular way. See Trolls and the Exclamatory, Interrogatory, or Declaratory Response. 

Populists falsely claim to represent the majority, and believe that they’ve a right to do whatever they’d like to those not part of their horde. They respect only their own dissent. They’ve no appreciation for individual rights, where individual rights recognize natural differences among people. A free society has no one way, one person, one type, one family. When these populists say that they represent families, they mean their families, their way, their people, their types. They would gleefully toss all the rest into the maw.

They want to fight, and so they have forced a fight on others. And so, and so — they’ll have a fight, but they will not have that conflict on their terms and conditions. No and no again.

As always, best wishes for a Happy Halloween.

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Books, Daily Bread, Radio

Daily Bread for 10.30.22: 1938’s War of the Worlds Radio Play

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 63. Sunrise is 7:27 AM and sunset 5:49 PM for 10h 21m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 30.8% 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:

H. G. Wells and Orson Welles met for the first and only time in late October 1940, shortly before the second anniversary of the Mercury Theatre broadcast, when they were both lecturing in San Antonio, Texas. On October 28, 1940, the two men visited the KTSA studio for an interview by Charles C. Shaw, who introduced them by characterizing the panic generated by “The War of the Worlds”.

Wells was skeptic about the actual extent of the panic caused by “this sensational Halloween spree”, saying: “Are you sure there was such a panic in America or wasn’t it your Halloween fun?” Welles replied that “[i]t’s supposed to show the corrupt condition and decadent state of affairs in democracy, that ‘The War of the Worlds’ went over as well as it did.”

When Shaw mentioned that there was “some excitement” that he did not wish to belittle, Welles replied, “What kind of excitement? Mr. H. G. Wells wants to know if the excitement wasn’t the same kind of excitement that we extract from a practical joke in which somebody puts a sheet over his head and says ‘Boo!’ I don’t think anybody believes that that individual is a ghost, but we do scream and yell and rush down the hall. And that’s just about what happened.”

(Citations omitted.) 

America may not have been terribly panicked, but she was suitably entertained: 

Daily Bread, Twitter

Daily Bread for 10.29.22: Musk’s Ownership of Twitter

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 64. Sunrise is 7:26 AM and sunset 5:50 PM for 10h 24m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 20.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1969, the first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.

 The Hard Fork podcast looks at Elon Musk’s purchase (with other investors) of Twitter. While it was once improbable that Musk would purchase the social media company, it’s at least as improbable that he will overcome problems that have plagued Twitter for years.

Enjoying a meal in Japan: 

City, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 10.28.22: Whitewater Changed, All the Rest is Responding Accordingly

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 59. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 5:51 PM for 10h 26m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 12.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis ends and Premier Nikita Khrushchev orders the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.

Someone remarked yesterday of the perspective here at FREE WHITEWATER that, these fifteen years on, the rhetorical approach was less combative than it once was. The implication was that this libertarian blogger had somehow changed. 

I’ve not, and in any event that scarcely matters. What matters is that Whitewater has changed, and all the rest is merely a reasoned response — through the same principles — to those changes. The multiple afflictions that have beset this community since the Great Recession left the community more fragile than it once was. Much of what was formerly troublesome in Whitewater has simply withered away, replaced with new problems emerging from different sources. 

Not to see as much — a condition that grips a few trolling, agitated residents — is to be blind to Whitewater as she truly is. Striking: the now-faded boosters didn’t describe Whitewater correctly years ago, and a populist faction that has supplanted them doesn’t describe Whitewater correctly now.

Those present and former factions have shared between them a common myopia: it’s hard to see one’s surroundings clearly while staring in a mirror.

A changed response to some, and a new focus on others, is no more or less than a realistic acknowledgment of changed conditions in Whitewater.  

Update: An explanation on meaning — a town that has experienced multiple injuries over more than a decade has a fragility that must be considered and respected. One responds differently to those who are robust (as the boosters once were) from those who are ill or recovering (as the town now is). One responds differently to those who are seeking improvement from those whose actions and proposals are a detriment to the city. 

Footage Shows How Quick & Devastating a Mudslide Can Be:

America, Daily Bread, Development, Economy

Daily Bread for 10.27.22: The Irony of National Growth Figures

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 57. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 5:53 PM for 10h 29m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1904, the first underground New York City Subway line opens, later designated as the IRT Broadway–Seventh Avenue Line.

 Abha Bhattarai reports U.S. economy grows in third quarter, reversing a six-month slump (‘Latest GDP report shows the economy expanded at an annual rate of 2.6%, even though many signs point to slowdown’): 

The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent in the third quarter, marking its first increase in 2022 and a sharp turnaround after six months of contraction — despite lingering fears that the country is at risk of a recession.

The third-quarter gross domestic product figures, released Thursday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, provide an upbeat snapshot less than two weeks before midterm elections, in a year that has seen the economy and high inflation become a persistent challenge for Democrats. “The irony is, we’re seeing the strongest growth of the year when things are actually slowing,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG. “There are some real cracks in the foundation. Housing is contracting. The consumer is slowing. GDP is growing, but not for all of the right reasons.”

Economic conditions nationally are mixed, and not all of the nation is experiencing (obviously) the nation’s average level of growth.  Economic plans, if there are to be plans, and however hopeful they may be, begin only from the true present into the imagined but uncertain future. 

 Meta stock craters over bleak forecast, metaverse bets: 

Animals, Birds, Daily Bread, Nature, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 10.26.22: The Great Midwest Crane Fest

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 53. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 5:54 PM for 10h 32m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council goes into executive session shortly after 6:30 PM, to return to open session later this same evening. 

On this day in 1881, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday participate in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.

Gaby Venice reports A ‘conservation success story’: first Great Midwest Crane Fest to celebrate recovery of sandhill cranes (‘Conservationists hope to raise awareness, inspire people to commit to conservation’): 

Sandhill cranes are fairly easy to spot today, but they nearly vanished less than a century ago.

It’s their remarkable story of recovery that has inspired conservationists to plan the first Great Midwest Crane Fest, set for Nov. 10-12 in Baraboo. 

“This festival is to bring together our local community and celebrate, what we feel, is one of the great conservation stories of the Midwest,” said Richard Beilfuss, CEO and president of the International Crane Foundation, or ICF. It’s an event two years in the making — postponed due to pandemic restrictions — backed by decades-worth of efforts honoring conservation efforts by ICF and The Aldo Leopold Foundation. 

Cranes are among the oldest living bird species in the world, soaring through the skies for millions of years. 

In 1937, renowned Wisconsin conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote one of his most famous essays, “Marshland Elegy,” warning sandhill cranes could become extinct in Wisconsin and the upper Midwest. Around that time, the species had dwindled to just 25 breeding pairs in Wisconsin.  

Now, the Midwest is home to more than 15,000 sandhill cranes. And the eastern population has grown to about 90,000, according to Buddy Huffaker, executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. 

The Great Midwest Crane Fest (‘Celebrating Community and Conservation’) takes place on Nov. 10 – 12, 2022 at Baraboo, Wisconsin. Registration is available online, and the fest has a full schedule of activities.

From 2017, Sandhill Crane Migration along the Wisconsin River:

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Daily Bread, Education, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 10.25.22: Wisconsin Has Widest Score Gap Between Black and White Students in Nation

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 53. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 5:56 PM for 10h 34m 47s of daytime. The moon is new with none of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Adlai Stevenson shows the United Nations Security Council reconnaissance photographs of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba.

Rory Linnane, Molly Beck, and La Risa R. Lynch report Wisconsin reports widest score gap between Black and white students in nation:

In the first national assessment of students since the pandemic, Wisconsin again posted the widest score gaps between Black and white students of any state, now by even greater margins.

At the same time, Wisconsin scores statewide climbed in the rankings. Though the state’s 2022 scores declined since the last national assessment in 2019, most states saw steeper drops.

Known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was administered to sample schools in every state between January and March 2022. It tested fourth- and eighth-graders in reading and math.

Wisconsin scores continued to exceed most other states, ranking in the top 10 in math for fourth and eighth grades, and in reading for eighth grade. Fourth-grade reading, as it was in 2019, continued to be the state’s worst area.

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In a statement, state Superintendent Jill Underly also acknowledged the persisting opportunity gap between Black and white students.

“We’ve known Wisconsin’s racial disparities in assessment results are among the widest in the nation for too long, and these troubling results are yet one more indication that we must close the opportunity gap in our state,” Underly said.

While about a dozen states didn’t report test scores for Black students because of low numbers, all other states reported score gaps between Black and white students. Wisconsin had the widest gap out of every state in each category, although Washington, D.C., was worse.  

….

But she [Dr. Carrie Streiff-Stuessy, executive director for Common Ground’s Forward Scholars program] said the data showing the disparity in reading and math scores has been a persistent problem. Streiff-Stuessy doesn’t refer to it as an achievement gap but an opportunity gap.

“The discrepancy in students’ test scores stems for the lack of opportunities they have,” she said. “Whether a student experienced poverty versus someone who is not or whether a family faces a job disruption from the pandemic or being shuffled being shuffled among families because a lack of daycare while parents work.

“The opportunities for students in the suburbs were completely different than the opportunities for students in the city, and more of the students in the city are Black, so that hits them harder; it hits them differently.

“My word is ‘action.’ I have had enough looking at the data, but we have to do something about that data,” she said. “Wisconsin has had a black-white discrepancy on testing for such a long time; it’s time we do something about it.”

(Emphasis added.)

The gaps between the same racial groups in different states are so varying from each other that these gaps can only be environmental and not natural. Wisconsin is simply failing some racial groups in a way that other states are not, and in a way that Wisconsin need not and should not fail anyone.

The racial gap in test scores between Wisconsin and other states is a consequence of our own policy failures. Its persistence is a consequence of our own indifference and indolence. 

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