Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS
Books, City, Culture, Daily Bread, Libertarians, Liberty, Local Government, Politics, Populists, School District
Daily Bread for 5.8.22: Manufacturing Panic
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Mother’s Day in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 64. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:03 PM for 14h 25m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1869, the First Transcontinental Railroad, linking the eastern and western United States, is completed at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory with a golden spike.
Trip Gabriel reports He Fuels the Right’s Cultural Fires (‘Christopher Rufo helped make critical race theory a conservative rallying cry. Now he sees L.G.B.T.Q. issues as an even more potent line of attack’):
GIG HARBOR, Wash. — Christopher Rufo appears on Fox News so often that he converted a room in his Pacific Northwest house to a television studio, complete with professional lighting, an uplink to Fox in New York and an “On Air” light in the hall so his wife and two children don’t barge in during broadcasts.
“I’ll do ‘Tucker’ and then pop out and have dinner,” Mr. Rufo said recently at his home in Gig Harbor, Wash., thousands of miles from the nation’s media and political capitals.
Mr. Rufo is the conservative activist who probably more than any other person made critical race theory a rallying cry on the right — and who has become, to some on the left, an agitator of intolerance. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, he has emerged at the front of another explosive cultural clash, one that he sees as even more politically potent and that the left views as just as dangerous: the battle over L.G.B.T.Q. restrictions in schools.
….
He has acknowledged twisting hot-button racial issues to achieve his aims. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote on Twitter last year.
….
Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, said conservatives had falsely and intentionally linked child sex predators with opponents of the Florida law. Mr. Rufo, he said, had provided fuel for their arguments.
“This is the stock-in-trade of Rufo’s brand of activism — creating these very negative brands and then associating things that might have much more popular support with those brands to put people on the defensive,” Dr. Moynihan said. “That’s the through line you see between the C.R.T. stuff and the current ‘groomer’ effort.”
Now, this libertarian blogger is neither a member of a racial minority group nor the LGBTQ community. (On the contrary, by demographics, I am situated in more than one majority group. For it all, I am, and always will be, simply an emissary of one.) Critical to libertarian belief: those minority groups can — and in a free society must — be able to speak for themselves.
It is impossible to believe in liberty as a fundamental principle and condition and not see the threat to the individual rights of millions of Americans from book-banning and closet-confining. In communities large and small, that threat has reached the threshold of schools and city halls. Leaving aside the theological implications of the injunction (as I am in no position to send anyone anywhere), nevertheless for Rufo and his ilk the rebuke go to hell comes to mind.
(Worth noting: some of those who claimed their response to the pandemic was a battle of ‘hope’ over ‘fear’ are themselves embarrassingly overcome with fear at the mere publishing of books or the expression of individual identity.)
The question for Whitewater: if a lumpen horde gathers to destroy the lives of some of our fellow residents, falsely claiming the authority to do so, what will happen to those residents? Will city and school district officials permit the victimization of a few by the dark efforts of others? Officials who cater to the worst impulses of a mob deserve no deference while doing so; they merit only a critique more through, repeated, and effective than the bleating of any horde.
In small towns across America, people of goodwill can each play a small part, assuring that their communities remain places of individual liberty.
These French tiny homes are giving homeless people practical skills and a place to live afterwards:
City, Film
Film: Tuesday, May 10th, 1 PM @ Seniors in the Park, West Side Story
by JOHN ADAMS •
Tuesday, May 10th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of West Side Story @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Musical/Drama/Romance
Rated PG-13; 2 hours, 36 minutes (2021)
This reimagining of the 1961 classic musical was nominated for Best Picture, and garnered a best support actress Oscar for Ariana DeBose. Directed by Steven Spielberg, it stars Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, and Rita Moreno.
One can find more information about West Side Story at the Internet Movie Database.
Enjoy.
Business, Daily Bread, Federal Government, Hubris, Local Government, Planning, State Government
Daily Bread for 5.7.22: Fordlandia’s Folly
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 62. Sunrise is 5:39 AM and sunset 8:02 PM for 14h 22m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 35.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1992, Michigan ratifies a 203-year-old proposed amendment to the United States Constitution making the 27th Amendment law. This amendment bars the U.S. Congress from giving itself a mid-term pay raise.
Planning of a basic kind is necessary for most activity, and assuredly for large-scale projects. Nonetheless, central planning (from government or from the direction of a single, private individual) presents a knowledge problem that leaves centrally-planned projects at risk of failure. Hayek (as cited in Israel M. Kirzner’s excellent Economic Planning and the Knowledge Problem):
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess, the economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
See Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, American Economic Review. XXXV, No. 4. pp. 519-30 (1945).
Henry Ford’s planned community (‘Fordlandia’) in the Amazon (yes, the Amazon) is an example of failed central planning (of one wealthy man trying by his own lights to create an entire community):
It is the interaction and transaction among thousands of private people that assures an enduring basis for community. The central planners of government or corporations can begin a community, but their central planning will not sustain a community.
Russian Oligarch’s Superyacht Seized in Fiji:
Daily Bread, Never Trump, Politics, Republicans, Trump, Trumpism
Daily Bread for 5.6.22: Well, of course MAGA is the GOP’s future…
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 60. Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:01 PM for 14h 20m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1916, Babe Ruth, then a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, hits his first major league home run.
Thomas Edsall writes With or Without Trump, the MAGA Movement Is the Future of the Republican Party:
“Anti-establishment conservatives found him refreshing,” [author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, Matthew] Continetti adds. “Not one iota of Trump was politically correct. He played by no rules of civility. He genuflected to no one. He despised the media with the same intensity as the conservative grass roots.”
Millions of voters may have found Trump “refreshing,” but there continue to be dissenters on the right who see the consequences as disastrous.
David French, a senior editor at The Dispatch, warned in an interview with Sean Illing of Vox:
Here’s what’s the terrifying thing on the right that can be a career- and reputation-ending allegation: “You’re weak. You’re a coward.” So the transformation, this flipping upside down of morality, turning bullying into strength, turning restraint into vice, all of that, what has then happened is it enables the Trumpists and the Trumpist world. They’re wielding this sword that is very sharp culturally in red spaces, this accusation of weakness and cowardice, as a weapon to keep people in line, because they’ve defined support for this movement as evidence of your strength.
Yuval Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (and a contributing Opinion writer for The Times), described a transformation on the right that began before Trump but has accelerated under his direction. Speaking at a March 2021 Harvard Kennedy School forum, Levin said: “I think conservatives are naturally defenders of a society’s institutions — not blindly, they’re also reformers — but they believe in the purposes of those institutions.”
The Republican Party, he continued,
has gradually become hostile to Americans’ institutions. It sees them as possessed by the other party. It sees them as corrupt. It looks at them through a populist lens as the source of the problem, rather than the source of solutions.
In the fall of 2016, with Trump as the Republican presidential nominee, Levin wrote in Politico magazine:
This election cycle has revealed serious fault lines and weaknesses on the right, and the Republican Party will be working to make sense of it all for years. But for conservatives — I mean those who champion some version of the difficult balance of traditionalism in the moral arena, market mechanisms for addressing our economic challenges, and American strength in a dangerous world — all bound by a limited-government constitutionalism — this sorry year’s lessons have one overarching implication: We can no longer treat the G.O.P. simply as our own.
Well, yes, what Trump has brought — at least what Trump has brought to the forefront — is the future of his party. To live in rural America, is to see that Trump has transformed (or unleashed) his party. See Man and Movement.
Trumpist appetites once whetted are nearly insatiable. The party that twice nominated Trump will not, in our time, be going back.
Splashdown! SpaceX Crew-3 astronauts back on Earth:
Cats, Faraway Places
Friday Catblogging: Cats of Catstanbul Istanbul
by JOHN ADAMS •
Business, City, Daily Bread, Government Spending, Local Government, School District
Daily Bread for 5.5.22: What It Means When Even the World’s Richest Man Has to Look for Financing
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 59. Sunrise is 5:43 AM and sunset 7:59 PM for 14h 15m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 12% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM, the Police and Fire Commission at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Fire Department, Inc. Board at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1862, troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza halt a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla in Mexico.
About two weeks ago, a post here at FREE WHITEWATER highlighted Matt Levine’s insightful assessment of Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter. See Levine Elon Checks His Pockets and FREE WHITEWATER Levine About Musk About Twitter.
Levine’s key point:
“One problem with Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter Inc. for about $40 billion is that he does not have $40 billion. Of course he is very rich — the richest person in the world, worth $260 billion by Bloomberg’s estimate — but most of that money is tied up in the stock of Tesla Inc., SpaceX, the Boring Co., etc., and it is not obvious that he would want to sell enough of those things to buy a new thing. “
There’s more news this morning about the Musk bid. Lauren Hirsch reports Elon Musk has brought in new investors to fund his Twitter deal, a filing shows:
Elon Musk has brought in more than a dozen new investors to help fund his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, including the billionaire Larry Ellison and the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, according to securities documents filed Thursday morning.
The investors together will contribute $7 billion to help fund Twitter’s purchase, with the rest coming from Mr. Musk’s own pocket or through loans.
Mr. Musk had said that he would fund the deal in part with a $12.5 billion loan against his shares in Tesla, the electric vehicle company he runs. As a result of the new equity commitments, Mr. Musk said he was reducing the size of that loan against Tesla shares to $6.25 billion from $12.5 billion.
He has also said that he has secured $13 billion in other loans from seven banks and committed $21 billion of his own cash. Mr. Musk has not yet outlined the sources of that cash.
What would Musk’s large deal have to do with a small town like Whitewater?
Well, there are lessons from large events that, properly refined, apply to small events, too. That was, after all, the point of the earlier post here at FW:
And if the world’s richest man’s business plans haven’t always panned out, then it’s prudent to be cautious (if not skeptical) about the plans of government and businesses.
Dare, one might say, for the plans of local government and local businesses, too.
Even Musk is not so wealthy that he cannot manage a deal like this on his own. In a small town, where the community has less than Musk has individually, there is an even smaller margin for adjustments or errors. (Musk, after all, will never go hungry.)
In a town like Whitewater, there is a limit to what government can afford to spend, and so it must spend every dollar only after careful planning. It should be needless to say Whitewater that doesn’t have the margin for error and adjustment of Elon Musk (or the federal government). See The Limits of Local Politics: ‘posts at FREE WHITEWATER have addressed the limits of local politics in the community: local public (or powerful private) institutions have a limited power of action (with harmful actions likely to be more immediate than helpful ones).’
While some local officials live as though this were not true, it is true nonetheless.
A better underlying policy for what must be spent in an economically troubled place: Local Public Policy as if Charitable Assistance (‘When policymakers look at the city – if they are to be of value to Whitewater’s residents – they need to think of all their actions as if those actions were service to those in need (because in many cases that will be, regrettably, true). In this way, An Oasis Strategy that looks away from government – or in this case reshapes government’s attitude and perspective – is needed even more than it was in 2016′).
Jumping robot leaps to record heights:
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Conspiracy Theories, Daily Bread, Disinformation, Russia, Sen. Ron Johnson, Soviet Union
Daily Bread for 5.4.22: Ron Johnson Recycles a Soviet Conspiracy Theory About AIDS
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Wednesday — May the 4th be with you — in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 57. Sunrise is 5:43 AM and sunset 7:59 PM for 14h 15m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 12% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1776, Rhode Island becomes the first American colony to renounce allegiance to King George III.
Ron Johnson’s recent openness to yet another conspiracy theory is a present-day recycling of a Soviet conspiracy theory. Henry Redman reports In interview, Sen. Johnson says it ‘may be true’ that COVID vaccines cause AIDS:
In a video interview published on the right-wing social media platform Rumble, Sen. Ron Johnson said it “may be true” that vaccines against COVID-19 cause AIDS.
Johnson was being interviewed by anti-vaccine lawyer Todd Callender, who alleged that the shots induce AIDS and that the FDA knew so when the vaccines were approved for emergency use.
“The way to approach this is from a criminal point of view because that’s what has happened. And until we start holding people accountable, [Dr. Anthony] Fauci number one, you’re going to see people still falling out, still getting sick,” Calendar said. “You’ve got more than a hundred doctors here, all of whom will tell you that these shots caused vaccine-induced AIDS. they purposefully gave people AIDS. They knew this.”
Johnson responded that it’s possible the allegations are true, but that anti-vaccine activists need to wait for public opinion to be on their side before criminally charging health officials.
“Let me challenge you there, that’s way down the road,” Johnson said. “You’ve gotta do one step at a time. Everything you say may be true, but right now the public views the vaccines as largely safe and effective, that vaccine injuries are rare and mild. That’s the narrative, that’s what the vast majority of the public accepts. So until we get a larger percentage of the population with their eyes open to ‘woah, these vaccine injuries are real, why?’ You’ve got to do it step by step, you can’t leap to crimes against humanity, you can’t leap to another Nuremberg trial.”
The claim that the COVID-19 vaccines cause AIDS is false.
The false claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause AIDS is a refashioning of the equally false Soviet claim from the 1980s that the United States invented AIDS. Historian Douglas Selvage has studied this Soviet disinformation campaign:
In September 1985, the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) informed other Warsaw Pact foreign intelligence agencies that it had launched a new, major disinformation campaign. “We are carrying out a complex of [active] measures in connection with the appearance in recent years of a new dangerous disease in the USA known as AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome).” The KGB explained that “the goal of the measures is to create a favorable opinion for us abroad — namely, that this disease is the result of secret experiments by the USA’s secret services and the Pentagon with new types of biological weapons that have spun out of control.” Most likely, the KGB had initiated the disinformation campaign as early as 1983, but the September 1985 document — obtained by Christopher Nehring from the former Bulgarian State Security archive — is the earliest conclusive evidence that has turned up so far. (The former KGB foreign intelligence archive has never been accessible to researchers.)
Among the East European intelligence services that assisted the KGB in this effort was the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi), which used the codename “Denver” when referring to the campaign. The KGB and Stasi relied on forged documents and inaccurate testimony from purported experts to suggest that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, had originated not from infected animals in Africa but from biological warfare research carried out by U.S. military scientists at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Operation Denver proved remarkably effective, writes historian Douglas Selvage in an article featured in a recent issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies; indeed, even more effective than the KGB and Stasi had originally expected. Before long, immense numbers of people around the world (including in the United States) came to believe, falsely, that the U.S. government was responsible for AIDS.
See Lessons From Operation “Denver,” the KGB’s Massive AIDS Disinformation Campaign.
There’s nothing new with Johnson: it’s merely old lies and conspiracy theories, repackaged for our time, and placed in the mouth of a United States Senator from Wisconsin.
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Daily Bread, Law, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 5.3.22: Law and Enforcement After Roe
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 47. Sunrise is 5:44 AM and sunset 7:58 PM for 14h 13m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board meets at 6:30 PM and the Whitewater Common Council also meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1957, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, agrees to move the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.
Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward of POLITICO yesterday published a draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (a case addressing the constitutionality of Mississippi restrictions on abortion) that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
For Wisconsinites there are two principal legal questions: (1) in the absence of Roe, what law would govern access to abortion in this state and (2) how might that law be enforced?
Wisconsin law has an unenforced pre-Roe ban on abortions:
940.04 Abortion.(1) Any person, other than the mother, who intentionally destroys the life of an unborn child is guilty of a Class H felony.(2) Any person, other than the mother, who does either of the following is guilty of a Class E felony:(a) Intentionally destroys the life of an unborn quick child; or(b) Causes the death of the mother by an act done with intent to destroy the life of an unborn child. It is unnecessary to prove that the fetus was alive when the act so causing the mother’s death was committed.(5) This section does not apply to a therapeutic abortion which:(a) Is performed by a physician; and(b) Is necessary, or is advised by 2 other physicians as necessary, to save the life of the mother; and(c) Unless an emergency prevents, is performed in a licensed maternity hospital.(6) In this section “unborn child” means a human being from the time of conception until it is born alive.
Other states have similar statutes adopted long before Roe. See What would happen if Roe v. Wade were overturned.
There are (and would be more) court decisions — case law — interpreting Wisconsin’s state provision.
On the second question, how a state abortion ban in Wisconsin would be enforced, there are certain to be county-by-county differences in the willingness to prosecute cases. Wisconsin will prove to be as divided internally as some states are divided externally with other states. Those hoping to find a post-Roe harmony in Wisconsin will be disappointed.
Rocket Lab catches, drops rocket using a helicopter:
Daily Bread, Disinformation, Fox News, Propaganda, Putin, Russia, Tucker Carlson
Daily Bread for 5.2.22: The Short Distance Between Whitewater and the Kremlin
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 55. Sunrise is 5:46 AM and sunset 7:57 PM for 14h 11m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Equal Opportunities Commission meets at 5 PM.
On this day in 2012, a pastel version of The Scream, by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, sells for $120 million in a New York City auction, setting a new world record for a work of art at auction
It’s 4,937 miles from Whitewater to the Kremlin, but residents of Whitewater (or any city in America) can travel the rhetorical distance to Russian fascism without ever leaving their homes. They need only watch Fox News for an English-language version of Putin’s worldview. Stuart Thompson reports How Russian Media Uses Fox News to Make Its Case:
The narratives advanced by the Kremlin and by parts of conservative American media have converged in recent months, reinforcing and feeding each other. Along the way, Russian media has increasingly seized on Fox News’s prime-time segments, its opinion pieces and even the network’s active online comments section — all of which often find fault with the Biden administration — to paint a critical portrait of the United States and depict America’s foreign policy as a threat to Russia’s interests. Mr. Carlson was a frequent reference for Russian media, but other Fox News personalities — and the occasional news update from the network — were also included.
Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who has made several false claims about the war — including that Russia never attacked Ukraine — singled out Fox News for praise last month.
“We understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent Western media,” Mr. Lavrov told the state television station RT, adding that “only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view.”
Mentions of Fox News in Russian-language media grew 217 percent during the first quarter of this year compared with the final quarter of last year, as news coverage of Ukraine increased, according to an analysis by Zignal Labs, a media tracking company that reviewed social media posts, broadcast media and online websites. CNN, which has about three times the global viewership of Fox News, according to the tracking company Similarweb, was mentioned more often but grew less, by 71 percent.
Axis Sally once shocked and infuriated Americans.
Our modern-day versions have found quite the approving audience.
Music
Monday Music: The Beatles, Ticket To Ride
by JOHN ADAMS •
Big Lie, Conservative Populism, Conspiracy Theories, Daily Bread, Gableman, Speaker Vos, Trump
Daily Bread for 5.1.22: Gableman Bites the Hand That Feeds Him
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 52. Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 7:56 PM for 14h 08m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1898, during Spanish–American War at the Battle of Manila Bay, the Asiatic Squadron of the United States Navy destroys the Pacific Squadron of the Spanish Navy after a seven-hour battle. Spain loses all seven of its ships, and 381 Spanish sailors die. There are no American vessel losses or combat deaths.
Only last week, under pressure from Donald J. Trump, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos agreed to allow Michael Gableman’s slapdash election investigation to continue. See Trump v. Vos (“Trump wins — Vos extends Gableman’s contract. No surprise that Trump’s assist gives Gableman more time. Vos has been walkin’ around with a laminated KICK ME sign on his back for months. Some office furniture may already be gone, but Gableman will likely get to keep his mouse pad a little longer…”).
As it turns out, gratitude is not among Gableman’s thimble of virtues. Patrick Marley reports that Days after Robin Vos extended Wisconsin’s election review, Michael Gableman stands with the Assembly speaker’s critics in the GOP:
On Saturday, Gableman responded by appearing on a stage with some of the Republican speaker’s most vocal critics on the right, including Vos’ primary opponent.
Gableman appeared at a rally on the state Capitol steps immediately after Vos’ opponent, Adam Steen, called Vos a traitor.
At the beginning of Steen’s speech, someone in the crowd yelled that Vos was a RINO, or Republican in name only.
“‘RINO’ is a nice word,” Steen responded. “I prefer the word ‘treasonous traitor.'”
Taking the microphone after Steen, Gableman did not mention Steen’s attack on Vos, but noted Steen had said any change had to go through the Legislature.
“Really the change, and what we want to see, is very, very simple and direct and common sense, and that’s why it’s going to take positive, persistent passion each day — each day — for all of us to show up and do what’s necessary to support the people who see it our way,” Gableman said.
….
The event featured a who’s who of Vos’ conservative critics who have maintained he has not done enough to review Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in Wisconsin. (Vos’ many critics on the left say just the opposite — that he has spent too much time and money on studying an election that recounts and courts have found was properly conducted.)
The event was emceed by Joe Giganti, a host at Green Bay’s WTAQ-AM who has repeatedly called for Vos’ ouster and who on Saturday said the speaker’s name is “a three-letter cuss word.”
America, Big Lie, City, Conservative Populism, Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Daily Bread, Education
Daily Bread for 4.30.22: Longwell on Why Trump Supporters Believe the Big Lie
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will see showers and thunderstorms with a high of 59. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 7:54 PM for 14h 06m 04s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1864, Joseph Bailey Saves a Union Fleet:
On this date, Joseph Bailey began to direct the men of six regiments, including the 23rd Wisconsin, in a dramatic attempt to save the heart of a Union fleet during the Civil War. Bailey, who was from Wisconsin Dells and an experienced lumberjack, served as an engineer in the 4th Wisconsin Cavalry.
In a doomed campaign against the Confederates on the Red River in Louisiana, Union warships found themselves trapped by low water and the rocky river bed. As Confederate soldiers approached, Bailey employed water control techniques used by loggers to construct a series of dams that successfully narrowed the river, raised the water level by six feet, and provided enough surge to free the trapped fleet of gunboats. For his role in this rescue, Bailey was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. He also received a Tiffany punch bowl from his fellow officers.
Sarah Longwell writes Trump Supporters Explain Why They Believe the Big Lie:
Some 35 percent of Americans—including 68 percent of Republicans—believe the Big Lie, pushed relentlessly by former President Donald Trump and amplified by conservative media, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. They think that Trump was the true victor and that he should still be in the White House today.
I regularly host focus groups to better understand how voters are thinking about key political topics. Recently, I decided to find out why Trump 2020 voters hold so strongly to the Big Lie.
For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose. They know something nefarious occurred but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same.
….
Long before Election Day, the media had warned about a “red mirage” and alerted Americans to the possibility that Trump would have a large lead on Election Night only to have it dissipate as mail-in ballots were counted. But if you were watching Fox News, you probably didn’t hear any of this. Instead, Trump, MAGA-friendly politicians, and conservative media outlets were priming voters to see a conspiracy.
Trump correctly assumed that the majority of the mail-in ballots that would be counted late at night would go to Biden. So he cast mail-in ballots as fraudulent almost by definition. The woman from Georgia told me that mail-in ballots were “a crock,” without elaborating further.
Attempts to set the record straight tend to backfire. When you tell Trump voters that the election wasn’t stolen, some of them tally that as evidence that it was stolen. A woman from Arizona told me, “I think what convinced me more that the election was fixed was how vehemently they have said it wasn’t.”
America — the most technologically advanced country on Earth — did not attain this position because her people struggle to offer a “fully formed thought” or insist that factual claims are “‘a crock,’ without elaborating further.”
A higher standard has brought America to her present, developed position; the lower standard of the Big Lie — should it persist — will drag America down.
In beautiful Whitewater: a public school district spending millions, and a public university spending many times as much, and yet some of our fellow residents share views that require no learning or reasoning at all.
We are undemanding in our educational expectations: the baseless political claims of the Big Lie merit no deference.
Moon, Planets and Space Stations:
America, Assault Awareness & Prevention, Conservative Populism, Culture, Daily Bread, Mendacity, Trump, Trumpism, University
Daily Bread for 4.29.22: No Free Speech Problem for Trump Apologist Kellyanne Conway
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 61. Sunrise is 5:50 AM and sunset 7:53 PM for 14h 03m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, Union forces under David Farragut capture New Orleans.
Kellyanne Conway, mendacious Trump supporter, spoke during a visit to UW-Whitewater on Wednesday. For all the conservative worry over supposed speech suppression on UW System campuses, Conway spoke without interruption of any kind. Henry Redman reports Kellyanne Conway speech about liberals suppressing free speech meets no protest at UW-Whitewater:
Kellyanne Conway, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, gave a speech Wednesday evening at UW-Whitewater, focusing on threats to conservative speech from progressives as she spoke in front of nearly 200 people.
Speaking for about an hour in the half-full Timmerman Auditorium — which seats about 400 — Conway railed against threats to free speech as she repeatedly told the audience they were on “the right side” of issues ranging from immigration to abortion access, critical race theory and charter schools, while dropping the names of the many famous conservative figures she knows, including Trump and former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Among the people in attendance was state Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater).
In the auditorium, fliers left on each chair from the campus police department gave guidance for exercising free speech “safely, respectfully and lawfully.” A large number of police officers provided security at the event, which concluded without any disruptions inside or protests outside. The online announcement for the event included a statement that the hosts “reserve the right to remove disruptive or rowdy attendees.”
Indeed, Conway — a defender of a Nebraska gubernatorial candidate facing complaints from eight women (including a Republican state senator) — was able to speak freely at UW-Whitewater without any protest.
Redman also notes that the auditorium was only half full. Perhaps there’s not as much demand for downmarket Trump apologists as these Republicans believe.
A funny aside, though, presents itself on what the Republican organizers believe about themselves. One reads from FortAtkinsonOnline.com that “several seats within the auditorium were reserved for VIP guests.”
So, at a Greyhound bus terminal, there are not separate sections for ordinary bums and VIP bums. No. There are only bums, each in the same unfortunate condition.
In a similar way, at a zoo, there are not separate sections for ordinary hyenas and VIP hyenas, but instead only animals of the same kind with mottled fur and crazed eyes. It’s nutty that these conservatives showing up for Kellyanne Conway would somehow think it’s possible to divide their ilk into separate classes.
There is only one.
Shanghai residents bang pots and pans in Covid lockdown protest:
Frustrated residents of Chinese city bang pots and pans to protest against living under a strict lockdown for nearly a month.