Cats are often known to fall asleep in a variety of amusing positions. But one Japanese Twitter user’s cat conked out in a position so odd that commenters are comparing the snoozing feline to a drunken salaryman on a Friday night. For those unfamiliar with the term, salaryman is typically used to refer to a Japanese white-collar office worker. And according to the common trope, salarymen are typically very loyal to their company, which often causes them to be overworked and quite stressed. As a result, it’s a common stereotype that you’ll find them passed out on the weekends—usually Friday nights—after blowing off some steam with a few too many drinks.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 46. Sunrise is 5:51 AM and sunset 7:52 PM for 14h 01m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1881, Billy the Kid escapes from the Lincoln County jail in Mesilla, New Mexico.
Kellyanne Conway, Trump apologist and serial liar (the former requires the latter) paid a visit to UW-Whitewater last night. FREE WHITEWATER has exclusive video of her appearance before at an auditorium in Hyland Hall:
Former Trump administration White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said she heard last year about “some kind of sexual allegations” against GOP Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster — but she’s working to get him elected anyway.
Conway alleged on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that groping allegations raised by eight women, including a Republican state senator, were somehow cooked up by current Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts, who does not support Herbster, a corporate CEO who has never held office.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 44. Sunrise is 5:53 AM and sunset 7:51 PM for 13h 58m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1945, Benito Mussolini is arrested by Italian partisans in Dongo, while attempting to escape disguised as a German soldier.
As was true of some on the American left by the Soviets, or some on the American right by the Nazis, so now some American conservatives are in Putin’s enthrallment. Shay Khatiri describes How Putin Conned the American Right (‘He carefully planted the seeds for his popularity among conservatives’):
Putin made his first moves in the direction of conservative cultural leadership in 2013. The previous year, President Barack Obama had put social conservatives on a defensive footing by coming out in favor of gay marriage. Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court agreed to hear United States v. Windsor. Six weeks after the oral argument, the Russian Duma passed what would come to be known as the “anti-gay law,” but Putin didn’t sign the bill into law immediately. He let it sit on his desk for three weeks. Days after the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, he signed it into law.
Later in 2013, a Kremlin-connected Russian think tank called the Center for Strategic Communications published a report titled, “Putin: World Conservatism’s New Leader.” The document repeated populist talking points that would prove influential during the 2016 presidential election. It rejected “ideological experiments” and called for social stability and conservative family values instead. It characterized immigration as a threat to the nation-state, and it framed Putin as a defender of sovereignty.
….
Putin’s information strategy is a continuation of the old Soviet information strategy. It prioritizes a large variety of low-cost operations; efforts and resources are multiplied for whichever works best. And just like the Soviet regime before it, Putin’s regime is impotent in understanding American politics, but it is well versed in understanding American societal divisions—and how to exploit them. For years, Putin’s strategy seemed to pay off, as a segment of writers and magazines and broadcasters on the American right praised him, or at least took it easier on him than they otherwise would have. But the war in Ukraine has shown the limits of Putin’s soft power: An overwhelming majority of Americans object to Russia’s invasion and view the Russian leader as a menace and a pariah.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 47. Sunrise is 5:54 AM and sunset 7:50 PM for 13h 55m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 19.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Board of Assessment meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1564, William Shakespeare is baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England (date of birth is unknown).
Update, afternoon of 4.26: 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…
[Assembly Speaker Robin] Vos gave Gableman a $676,000 taxpayer-funded budget, which includes an $11,000 monthly salary. Since the review launched, Gableman has missed multiple deadlines to issue a final report.
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In recent weeks Gableman appeared on former White House adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast to put pressure on Vos to extend his contract with the state beyond April — Vos’ deadline to complete the review. At one point, Gableman told Bannon’s fans to call and email Vos and ask him not to pick up his office furniture Tuesday.
(Emphasis added to highlight the pathos of it all.)
Perhaps all is not lost for Gableman and his extra-wide office chair, as Donald J. Trump has come to his defense:
Without naming Vos, Trump suggested in a statement to his millions of supporters that the Rochester Republican will see a successful primary opponent if he does not extend former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s contract with the state Assembly.
“Anyone calling themselves a Republican in Wisconsin should support the continued investigation in Wisconsin without interference,” Trump said.
“I understand some RINOs have primary challengers in Wisconsin. I’m sure their primary opponents would get a huge bump in the polls if these RINOs interfere,” Trump said, using an acronym for “Republicans In Name Only.” Trump did not name Vos’ primary opponent Adam Steen.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 45. Sunrise is 5:56 AM and sunset 7:49 PM for 13h 53m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 28.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified School Board meets in open session at 5:45 PM, then enters closed session, resuming open session at 7 PM.
Timothy Snyder writes that Ukrainians have coined a new word to describe the ideology behind Russia’s invasion of their country: ruscism. Snyder explains The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word (In a creative play on three different languages, Ukrainians identify an enemy: ‘ruscism’):
The origins of the word “” give us a sense of how Ukrainians differ from both Russians and Americans. A bilingual nation like Ukraine is not just a collection of bilingual individuals; it is an unending set of encounters in which people habitually adjust the language they use to other people and new settings, manipulating language in ways that are foreign to monolingual nations. I have gone on Ukrainian television and radio, taken questions in Russian and answered them in Ukrainian, without anyone for a moment finding that switch worthy of mention. Once, while speaking Ukrainian on television, I stopped for a moment to quote a few words of poetry in Russian, a switch that was an effort for me. But Ukrainians change languages effortlessly — not just as situations change, but also to make situations change, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, or even in the middle of a word.
.…
The new word “” is a useful conceptualization of Putin’s worldview. Far more than Western analysts, Ukrainians have noticed the Russian tilt toward fascism in the last decade. Undistracted by Putin’s operational deployment of genocide talk, they have seen fascist practices in Russia: the cults of the leader and of the dead, the corporatist state, the mythical past, the censorship, the conspiracy theories, the centralized propaganda and now the war of destruction. Even as we rightly debate how applicable the term is to Western figures and parties, we have tended to overlook the central example of fascism’s revival, which is the Putin regime in the Russian Federation.
….
Few beyond Ukraine seem to know that millions of Ukrainians, exercising freedom of speech in a country that allows it, have invented and are deploying a new word. “Ruscism” will sound strange at first. So did “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” other words that emerged from (Eastern) European wars. The concepts that clarify our world today were once strange and new. But when they point to something, they can take hold.
In response to invasion and war crimes against their nation, Ukrainians have crafted a new word. They and the world would have been better if there had been no need for linguistic creativity. Yet there is such a need, and so they have plainly defined the ideology tormenting them.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 68. Sunrise is 5:57 AM and sunset 7:48 PM for 13h 50m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 37.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1977, the Morris Pratt Insititute, dedicated to the study of Spiritualism and Mediumship, moves from Whitewater to Waukesha.
Politics affects all, but not all choose politics. For those who choose a political life, there should be — and for a well-ordered society must be — a commitment to respond to lies from one’s opponents.
The populists, now a blight on many communities, will say anything both to gain politically and to satisfy their own appetites. Adam Serwer was right about many of them: cruelty is the point.
The populists have a long list of those they’d like to wound and thereafter drive from society: those of another ethnicity, race, religion, nationality, or sexual orientation.
So insatiable are they in the infliction of injury that yesterday’s assaults no longer bring them pleasure; they crave new accusations against new victims.
In Michigan, a right-wing populist accused mainstream Democrat Mallory McMorrow, a state senator from the Wolverine State, of being a ‘groomer’ who was preparing children for sexual exploitation. False, of course, but an accusation that presented a choice: ignore or respond?
Sen. McMorrow made the right choice: she responded.
Every community has a few right-wing trolls, dwelling under Facebook bridges, casting sub-standard English in broken sentences of fractured reasoning at pedestrians traveling above. The populist menace is much greater than this: a major political party shares these disordered views.
McMorrow’s example is one that others, regardless of party, should follow when facing populist lies. I’m a libertarian, not a Democrat, but then appreciation of her approach shouldn’t be confined within a partisan boundary.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 77. Sunrise is 5:58 AM and sunset 7:46 PM for 13h 48m 01s of daytime. The moon is in its third quarter with 49.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1985, Coca-Cola changes its formula and releases New Coke. The response is overwhelmingly negative, and the original formula is back on the market in less than three months.
Earlier posts this week have presented topics in open government.
On Monday:The Opportunistic Use of Open-Government Principles (‘In the Llano, Texas case, the book-banners are ideologically-motivated populists. There are, however, other groups that also use open-government principles selfishly and particularly. The most obvious situation would be traditional special interest groups (business or trade) seeking regulatory capture’).
Consider two situations in which the City of Whitewater has failed to meet open government standards. In the first example, of omission, the municipal government presented a lakes drawdown update that mentioned only dredging of soil but not the proposed pouring of artificial herbicide into the lakes that was, by the city’s plan at the time, a prelude to any drawdown:
When the city presented its lakes drawdown update on 8.17.21, neither any member of the city administration nor any member of the Whitewater Common Council asked a single question about the possible use of herbicides. In fact, as early as June 2021, in an unrecorded Parks & Recreation meeting, officials broached their plan to dump herbicide into the lakes. See Minutes of the 6.9.21 City of Whitewater Parks & Recreation Meeting (highlighting mine).
But in the more prominent August 17th public meeting of the Whitewater Common Council, there was no mention of this obviously controversial part of the project. It would be easy — too easy — to say that city staff was solely responsible for the omission. There were also seven elected representatives of the public in the council chambers that evening. Public awareness came not from the government but from inquisitive residents, a local news site, and this libertarian blogger. The herbicide use was sensibly abandoned.
In the second example, from November 2021 of expressed withholding, the City of Whitewater acknowledged that it received on 11.11.21 public bids for a dredging project but intentionally omitted those documents about the received bids from the 11.16.21 council agenda packet:
So, um, the lack of material but for a memo in your packet was deliberate…
When the City of Whitewater received public bids about a multi-million-dollar project on 11.11.21, the proper open-government practice would have been to place those documents in the agenda packet. When the city manager admitted his deliberate withholding of those documents during the meeting, the proper council practice would have been to direct him to display on the chamber’s projection screen each and every page of those documents (however long it might take).
Instead, the Whitewater’s city manager intentionally withheld those documents and the Whitewater Common Council took no action during the meeting to remedy this transgression against sound open-government principles.
(Whitewater has seen two years of common council errors and omissions. If the new council president avoids this fecklessness the city will be better for it.)
Friday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 50. Sunrise is 6:00 AM and sunset 7:45 PM for 13h 45m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 61.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Gableman has used his $676,000 budget to look into the backgrounds of those who worked with the Center for Tech and Civic Life and other nonprofit groups, the records show. The center provided more than $10 million to Wisconsin communities to help them run their elections during the coronavirus pandemic.
A memo from Gableman’s office dubbed a mapping expert who works for Milwaukee as “liberally deplorable” even though she has exhibited “no overt signs of rampant partisanship” on Facebook or other websites.
The unsigned memo goes on to contend that geographic information system analyst Hannah Bubacz is “probably” a Democrat because she plays video games, “has a weird nose ring,” sometimes colors her hair, “loves nature and snakes” and lives with a boyfriend but is not married to him.
Michael Gableman and his staff in the Assembly Office of Special Counsel are destroying records deemed “irrelevant or useless,” an attorney representing Gableman in a lawsuit seeking records related to Gableman’s election review said in a recent memo to attorneys representing the liberal group American Oversight, the lawsuit’s plaintiff.
The practice is a violation of state law, according to the Legislature’s own attorneys.
“When a document comes to the OSC, the OSC evaluates whether the document is of use to the investigation. If it is, that document is downloaded and kept for further investigation, or for use in the OSC’s reports and recommendations. If the document is irrelevant or useless to the investigation, the OSC deletes that document,” Gableman attorney James Bopp wrote in a letter dated April 8 to American Oversight attorneys.
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Judge Frank Remington on Thursday issued a ruling siding with American Oversight and ordered Gableman to stop deleting records that could be responsive to the group’s requests.
Heck of a selection you made there, Robin, heck of a selection.
HELL, MI – A cat known for her oversized eyes and wonky feet is about to become the mayor of a small Michigan town. And not just any town. This little black cat will rule over Hell, located about 20 miles northwest of Ann Arbor.
Anyone can become mayor of Hell for a day. It’s part of the town’s schtick. Pets, though, are another thing. Sunday, April 24 will actually be the first time a cat will make sure all Hell doesn’t break loose.
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As Jinx grew over the days and weeks, Mia says she noticed her new kitten appeared to be a little different.
“She had big eyes and as she grew bigger, her eyes didn’t get smaller and I also noticed she had big feet. She doesn’t have a condition and the vet says she’s healthy. She just has these birth defects. She’s also not as agile as most cats and is a little clumsy. She only learned how to land on her feet a year ago.”
Jinx will rule over Hell for the day from afar [Jinx lives in California with her human, Mia]. Mia plans to livestream via Jinx’s Twitch page at around 4 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT where she will make the big announcement to viewers.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 64. Sunrise is 6:02 AM and sunset 7:44 PM for 13h 42m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 72.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
This day in 753 BC is the traditional date on which Romulus is said to have founded Rome.
Matt Levine writes, insightfully and artfully, Bloomberg’s Money Stuff column. Levine’s latest, Elon Checks His Pockets, ponders Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter (all of it). Levine writes that
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. Nor is it obvious that anyone else would want to give him $40 billion to buy Twitter, given that he sees Twitter as “not a way to make money” and does not “care about the economics at all.”
Another problem with Musk’s offer to buy Twitter is that, if you ask him where the money is coming from, he says things like “I have sufficient assets” and “I am not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it,” which do not inspire confidence that he has actually thought about raising the money.
A third problem with Musk’s offer to buy Twitter is that in 2018 he mused about taking Tesla Inc. private for about $70 billion. “Funding secured,” he said, in an infamous tweet. It turned out that he had had a single casual conversation with representatives of a Saudi sovereign wealth fund in which they did not discuss the price of the deal or how much money the Saudis were willing to invest; ultimately Musk settled fraud chargeswith the Securities and Exchange Commission over this tweet. So the answer to the question “might Elon Musk have made an offer to take a large public company private, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, without giving any real thought to where the money would come from?” is “absolutely yes, and he’s done it before.”
All of these problems mean that, if you are a Twitter shareholder and Musk says “I am going to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share,” you might not believe him. “Show me the money,” you might reasonably say. And in fact, when Musk did publicly announce his bid, the stock price dropped, closing at $45.08 on the day his bid became public. Musk’s proposal was contingent on “completion of anticipated financing,” and that is a big if.
Musk has a record of notable successes but also misses (often from overpromising).
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.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 48. Sunrise is 6:03 AM and sunset 7:43 PM for 13h 39m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 82.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission meets at 5:00 PM and the Park and Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1898, President McKinley signs a joint resolution to Congress for a declaration of war against Spain, beginning the Spanish–American War.
Monday’s post, considering populist opportunism in Texas, can be understood in its own suspiciously opportunistic local dialect. Here’s now that translation into a local context would unfold (with highlighting as the translation progresses):
Original language: Populists use open-government principles to advance selfish, particular ends.
Initial translation: Special interests use open-government principles to advance selfish, particular ends.
Refinement: Landlords, bankers, and PR men use open-government principles to advance selfish, particular ends.
It’s possible that a speaker will be misunderstood, and his or her pure intentions may merely seem opportunistic.
And yet, and yet, it’s hard to credit a special interest with general concerns. (After all, by definition they have, well, a special, particular interest.) A business lobby or a trade association is by nature a business lobby or a trade association. It doesn’t stop being a particular interest merely because its members claim a universal interest. (If they’re true to their membership, then they will not have a universal interest, as that’s not what their particular members should reasonably expect. Those who join Audubon sensibly expect advocacy of birding, not universal harmony, however important universal harmony would be.)
It rouses skepticism that landlords, bankers, and PR men insist on open government now but were lessvocal about openness when they played a more prominent role on public boards.
And while there is skepticism about these types, a similar public skepticism attaches to their office-holding allies. The development men can and will help someone get into office, but it comes with a question: are these officeholders truly their own men and women, or are they the catspaws of a narrow special interest group?
Those who lose a reputation as independent men and women are unlikely to get that reputation back without heroic efforts.
It’s noticeable how often people in Whitewater cringe when these landlords, bankers, and PR men walk into a room. How unfortunate it is that these types would engender so much concern in a small town of free and equal people.
A serious man or woman would know that it’s incomparably worse, for example, to find oneself in a gloomy wood, one’s way blocked by a leopard, lion, or wolf. That, unquestionably, would be a dire situation.
Knowing as much, one would worry hardly at all about a few entitled business lobbyists.
A commitment to open government deserves, and is best served by, support from independent advocates. There is much to be done, and done sincerely and consistently.
A 7-year-old sheep named Alex who was rescued after being found on top of a mountain in Victoria, Australia, last month just got a well-deserved shave. Handlers removed approx 80+ pounds of wool from Alex’s fleece—nearly a world record for a single sheep shaving.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be chilly with intervals of clouds and sunshine and a high of 48. Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:42 PM for 13h 37m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1775, the Revolutionary War begins with an American victory in Concord during the battles of Lexington and Concord.
Yesterday’s post addressed the opportunistic use of open-government principles to advance selfish, particular ends. SeeThe Opportunistic Use of Open-Government Principles. The use of open-government principles opportunistically is a temporary use; open government becomes closed government when it no longer serves a special interest group’s purposes.
Why, however, would a person or group oppose open governmentconsistently? There are four basic reasons.
Ignorance. Those who oppose open government through ignorance believe that the community doesn’t have a right to know the business of government because they mistakenly treat government as though it were merely another private party. They see government not as an instrumentality of popular sovereignty but as a separate and independent organism. There is a name for those who see the state as a living creature with rights over and above people: they’re called authoritarians.
Arrogance. In this case, pride grips those within government to see themselves as special, as secular gnostics with knowledge only they have and only they must possess. This pride is intoxicating, and rapidly consumes those who might otherwise insist that they’re good government advocates.
A reminder: Hubris invites Nemesis.
Indolence. Public work that is known to the public requires a higher standard than hidden work in which errors remain commonly unknown. A concealed shoddy standard is easier for the lazy to maintain than a revealed shoddy standard. Slothful officials love the shadows except when extolling their own praises.
Malfeasance. Once corrupt officials or special interests seize control of government, closed government thereafter aids their control. They may have talked about open government to get inside, but once inside they shut the door. In those concealed spaces, they deal for themselves and against competitors or perceived adversaries.
” give us a sense of how Ukrainians differ from both Russians and Americans. A bilingual nation like Ukraine is not just a collection of bilingual individuals; it is an unending set of encounters in which people habitually adjust the language they use to other people and new settings, manipulating language in ways that are foreign to monolingual nations. I have gone on Ukrainian television and radio, taken questions in Russian and answered them in Ukrainian, without anyone for a moment finding that switch worthy of mention. Once, while speaking Ukrainian on television, I stopped for a moment to quote a few words of poetry in Russian, a switch that was an effort for me. But Ukrainians change languages effortlessly — not just as situations change, but also to make situations change, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, or even in the middle of a word.