Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:02 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 13h 52m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 15.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1944, in Operation Dragoon, Allied forces land in southern France.
While President Donald Trump forthrightly acknowledged only yesterday [8.13] that weakening the Post Office will help him obstruct mail balloting this fall, postal workers in the key swing state of Michigan say his mission has been clear for weeks.
Delayed mail, a consequence of battles over funding for the United States Postal Service and of the agency’s staffing shortages, affects many aspects of American life—the delivery of millions of prescriptions, paychecks, bills. But recentfunding cuts, overtime reductions, and other changes imposed by Louis DeJoy, the man Trump recently appointed as head of the postal service, have left postal workers warning about new multi-day delays—and that a deliberate effort to slow down the mail and interfere with the election is underway.
“I think it’s absolutely true,” said Steve Wood, a mail clerk who works at the Michigan Metroplex, a massive mail sorting center near Detroit. He says he was convinced in recent weeks as he and his colleagues saw the removal of almost a quarter of the facility’s mail sorting machines, a lack of substitute employees to replace workers missing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and a general lack of urgency to locate and send along ballots that have piled up in bins.
The leading contender is already taking shape and working its way into the GOP: the lunatic conspiracy theory known as QAnon. It already has its first soon-to-be member of Congress, along with a raft of candidates who have captured Republican nominations for a number of offices, including in the U.S. Senate. And it has establishment Republicans confused and uncertain, aghast at what it represents but too cowardly to purge it from their ranks.
In case you’re not familiar, QAnon began a few years ago with posts on 4chan claiming that an anonymous government insider (“Q”) was revealing the hidden forces behind all current events. The theory posits that Trump is a messianic figure at war with an international cabal of satanic, cannabalistic pedophiles; at any moment, the president (who in some tellings was partnering in this effort with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III) will expose his enemies and cart them all off to Guantanamo Bay. The FBI believes QAnon poses a domestic terrorism threat.
At Trump rallies, you could see signs and T-shirts promoting QAnon, and the Trump campaign has courted the movement’s adherents. For a president who is, himself, both a consumer and an advocate of all manner of conspiracy theories, it was an easy fit.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 6:01 AM and sunset 7:56 PM, for 13h 55m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 23.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
President Trump on Thursday said he opposes both election aid for states and an emergency bailout for the U.S. Postal Service because he wants to restrict how many Americans can vote by mail, putting at risk the nation’s ability to administer the Nov. 3 elections.
Trump has been attacking mail balloting and the integrity of the vote for months, but his latest broadside makes explicit his intent to stand in the way of urgently needed money to help state and local officials administer elections during the coronavirus pandemic. With nearly 180 million Americans eligible to vote by mail, the president’s actions could usher in widespread delays, long lines and voter disenfranchisement this fall, voting rights advocates said.
Trump said his purpose is to prevent Democrats from expanding mail-balloting, which he has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, would invite widespread fraud. The president has also previously admitted that he believes mail voting would allow more Democrats to cast ballots and hurt Republican candidates, including himself.
In an interview Thursday with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump said he opposes a $25 billion emergency injection sought by the U.S. Postal Service, as well as a Democratic proposal to provide $3.6 billion in additional election funding to the states. Both of those requests have been tied up in congressional negotiations over a new coronavirus relief package.
Based on its own performance measures — and the loss of hundreds of Wisconsin ballots on their way to voters this summer — the U.S. Postal Service has its work cut out for it before Election Day.
Among the 13 postal districts serving key presidential battleground states, four failed to meet any on-time service goals handling first-class mail between April 1 and June 30, and six districts achieved only one.
The laggards are in, or in parts of, five battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin and North Carolina — politically competitive blends of urban and rural voters that will likely determine the presidential election. The postal service district serving Arizona, also expected to be a highly competitive state but with voters who typically vote by mail, hit both delivery targets.
As the pandemic has moved south and west from its epicenter in New York City, so have the unusual patterns in deaths from all causes. That suggests that the official death counts may be substantially underestimating the overall effects of the virus, as people die from the virus as well as by other causes linked to the pandemic.
What role does social capital play in a community’s health? Adam Gopnik, in The Paradoxical Role of Social Capital in the Coronavirus Pandemic, ponders whether there’s a relationship between communities with high social capital and a community’s public health. Gopnik uses a traditional definition of social capital as the “parts of society that, without being explicitly political, foster links and bridges of common sympathy and trust.” Of social capital & the novel coronavirus, he writes that
Now, all general truths about the pandemic are premature. But the empirical results so far seem at least to suggest an intriguing paradox: that places with a great deal of social capital got hit worst by the virus, and then recovered fastest.
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It’s a paradox of place: people who were not socially distanced at the start of the plague had an easier time learning to social-distance by its end. A striking study in Italy, for instance, found that places with high existing “civic capital” tended to “display greater mobility”—that is, people travelled around more—than places without it. But, “as soon as the threat of the virus became real, communities with high civic capital started to self-restrain and to internalize the risk of propagating the infection through social contacts.” Translated from the academese, people who are used to going out a lot stopped when people they trusted told them that doing so was a good way to get sick.
Like Gopnik, one will have to wait for more measurements to see if this relationship of social capital to public health proves generally applicable during this pandemic.
There is, however, obviously a broader way in which discussions of social capital apply; the concept was not developed simply for times of plague or pandemic.
Small Midwestern communities like Whitewater – having struggled for years with related maladies – would do well to consider whether their present divisions, disagreements, and lingering ailments come from a lack of social capital (rather than any single external event).
If that should be so, then this question arises: how will these communities rebuild that social capital? People and communities require no advanced schooling to place an emphasis on private charity, humility, honesty, avoidance of conflicts of interest & rationalizations of them, standard written composition, and sound reasoning.
Instead, for many of these communities, one finds reliance on government action, proud self-promotion, boosterism (accentuating the positive regardless of conditions), conflicts of interest, poor writing, and weak reasoning.
Midwestern communities have had hard times; they’ve also responded in ways that have only increased their own miseries.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 6:00 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 13h 57m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 32.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 1:30 PM via audiovisual conferencing.
On this day in 1942, Major General Eugene Reybold authorizes the construction of facilities that would house the “Development of Substitute Materials” project, better known as the Manhattan Project.
When does the president think America was great? Maybe the 1950s, when Jim Crow was in effect and few women worked outside their homes. Maybe the 1970s, when landlords still finagled to deny Hispanic and Black renters a place to live, and when White flight was seen as the antidote to living with “those” people. Maybe it was during the post-Civil War South, when Southerners erected their Lost Cause rubbish, which Trump seems to have adopted as his own, to mask the real motivation behind the Civil War — slavery.
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November’s election really is about which America you want to live in. The one where Trump and White evangelical snake-oil salesmen would have you think the Lost Cause defines America’s “tradition”? Or the one that reflects the kaleidoscope of American experiences and demands that we take our founding documents seriously? Biden sure had it right when he first declared that the election is about the soul of America. His running mate amplifies his vision of 21st-century America. Together they invite us to stride forward.
The likely source of the next pandemic is all around us: It’s the same one that triggered the 2009 scare. Industrial-scale hog and chicken farming—innovated in the United States and rapidly spreading globally—provides an ideal environment for the evolution and transmission of novel pathogens, especially influenza, that can infect people. (Cattle generally aren’t susceptible to human-adapted flus.)
“Another influenza pandemic occurring at some stage of the future is exceedingly high,” said Richard Webby, professor of infectious diseases at Memphis-based St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals. “The chances that it’ll come from some sort of farmed animal—my personal opinion is, that’s high as well.”
Gregory Gray, a professor of medicine, global health, and environmental health at Duke University and an expert on animal-to-human disease transmission, is even more direct. His biggest worry for the next viral pandemic? “Influenza A viruses that originate in pigs,” he said. “Hands down.”
The US president’s hair-washing complaints on Wednesday prompted the government to propose an easing of shower pressure standards.
The Trump administration proposed rule changes that would allow shower heads to boost water pressure, after Donald Trump repeatedly complained that bathroom fixtures do not work to his liking.
The Department of Energy plan followed comments from Trump last month at a White House event on rolling back regulations. He said he believed water does not come out fast enough from fixtures.
“So what do you do? You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair – I don’t know about you, but it has to be perfect,” he said.
The story of a young mother in a coma battling COVID-19 after giving birth — and the schoolteacher who stepped in to care for the newborn. This journalism is made possible by viewers like you. Director Oscar Guerra chronicles a 30-year-old mother named Zully and her fight to survive COVID and see her newborn baby, after giving birth on a ventilator and spending nearly three weeks in a coma — as her husband, Marvin, and older son, Junior, battled the virus as well. The film tells the story of how, in the Guatemalan immigrant family’s moment of crisis, their community in Stamford, CT, stepped in to help — including Junior’s ESL teacher, Luciana Lira, who took the newborn into her home while Zully, Marvin and Junior recovered.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 5:59 AM and sunset 7:59 PM, for 14h 00m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 42.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
The pastors and parishioners who accept Trump’s casual relationship with the truth and with the righteous life they preach are coming up on a test. Come November, will they, like the object of their admiration, replace faith with partisanship. Do their allegiances lie with God or with Trump? Now is the time to stand up and say to him, “Mr. President, we accept your choice to play golf on Sunday morning and behave in uncharitable ways toward others, but we cannot accept your denigration of the Bible itself and Almighty God.” The very suggestion that any human being can damage Scripture and wound God is, to the faithful, blasphemous.
Trump’s deeper incapacity is moral. Rather than judging his own actions against the standards of a creed or ideology, Trump finds his ethical inspiration in the mirror. Those who support him are fundamentally good; those who resist him are stupid, malicious and evil. A general or Cabinet secretary who bows and scrapes is the best at his or her job in human history. Those who contradict him are overrated and “dumb as a rock.” People carrying Confederate battle flags along with Trump signs can’t be all bad. Democrats who politically oppose him and media figures who challenge him are traitors or enemies of the people.
For Trump, egotism even takes precedence over nationalism. In his ambitious revision of political ethics, foreign dictators who support his reelection (and imprison their own opponents) are friends and models. Even if they sow discord and chaos in U.S. democracy. Even if they set out to humiliate the country. Even if they offer bounties for killing U.S. troops.
After riffing on “Sleepy Joe Biden,” hyping unproven allegations of voter fraud, and bragging about his still unbuilt border wall, Trump announced a series of executive orders. He said he would bypass Congress to defer payroll taxes through the end of the year, provide $400-per-week unemployment benefits, suspend payments on some student loans through the end of the year, and stop renters from being evicted from their homes.
Will these orders actually be implemented? Who can say.
They are likely to be challenged in court because only Congress can authorize spending. This is a tenet of Constitutional Conservatism that you may have heard some Republican here or there mention in the times before Trump.
Difficult to overstate what a good selection Kamala Harris is – this is a choice both sound and happy. Readers know that I supported Kamala Harris’s candidacy for president. Like so many others – millions upon millions of us across this continent – I am committed to the defeat of Trump and Trumpism.
Biden and Harris represent, however, more than Trump’s defeat – they represent America’s best hope for a renaissance of the American liberal democratic tradition.
At last night’s meeting of the Whitewater Unified School District’s board, the board heard presentations from a consulting epidemiologist and also a former Jefferson County school administrator who now works with Jefferson County. After comment & discussion, the board voted 6-1 to extend the September 1-11 teaching format through 9.25, with the present expectation of face-to-face instruction to begin 9.28.20. The board will decide whether to proceed with that face-to-face format after reviewing epidemiological measurements (among other information it chooses) at a 9.14.20 meeting. In a separate vote, the board adopted a mask requirement or a face shield requirement as an alternative for those who cannot wear a mask.
A few remarks —
1. A Conversational Format Gone Bad. Over these years, I’ve watched countless board meetings, whether or not commenting afterward. This board is, toward each other, mostly conversational in the way one might find at the dinner table of a slightly dysfunctional family with one-too-many moments of disagreement or interruption. (Candidly, the charm of back and forth at a family table comes from the wit and joy of those gathered in conversation; there’s nothing like that in these board discussions. A family that allowed interruptions, shouting, and serial digressions would be a recommendation only for the single life.)
In times of low community notice, that somewhat informal style doesn’t make much difference (if the board members want to slog through this way, so be it). For serious topics, the amount of back-and-forth, on side issues & secondary concerns, must seem oddly jarring to those accustomed to a better order and clarity of discussion. Debating possible alternatives only works if all participants have a clear – to themselves and others – sense of what they want. Some members of this board do have, and do convey, that clear sense; others don’t. This lack of clarity makes efforts at creative, in-the-moment solutions look more like confusion and delay (to borrow from Sir Topham Hat).
2. Jurisdictional Issues. An extended discussion of jurisdictional authority while looking for language on a mask ordinance for the district is time wasted. Indulging fixations comes at the expense of intelligible discussion. Allowing a member to shout his concerns (even when at moments he admits he should stop but won’t) is a failure of good order.
3. Robert’s Rules. A concern over procedure – however much one perseverates over it during a meeting – matters less than addressing more substantial matters. There is, it’s true, something known as substantive procedure, but that emphasis on a rights-oriented procedure means much more than anything in Robert’s Rules. This (like Point 2, above) all comes down to forest, trees, and not seeing the difference.
4. Epidemology and Diligence. I’ll offer no claims of my own about the path of this novel coronavirus, as I’ll sensibly avoid the fate of the Biggest Fool in America. How Whitewater fares in this – in sickness or fatality – I cannot and will not predict. It is notable, however, that very few communities in Wisconsin have relied on contracted epidemiologists (as this district has) to make their decisions. There’s a dislike of expertise in our area, as though anyone can easily assess any question. Some questions are, however, less inviting. Perhaps the assessments offered professionally will prove erroneous, as there’s risk in any human assessment. It’s delusional (and proud), however, to assume technical fields have no incremental value or can be entered easily.
5. Old Whitewater’s Sham Values. Old Whitewater – a state of mind – is mostly a perspective with a metaphorically narrow perimeter fence and an honor-shame culture. That culture looks to only a few people out of a city of thousands, and runs on praise for some and scorn for others. It’s a crude outlook that mistakes self-promotion and praise for true virtue. It’s slowly fading way, but there’s life yet in it, and it’s easy to slip into this view.
When a board member worries about how the board’s actions will seem in an online publication, she places greater importance on someone else’s words than her own actions and her own defense of them. It’s a mistaken view, to care more about another’s depiction than of her own work.
If someone from the government, pretending to be a reporter, comes along and writes If You’re Confused About the School District’s Reopening Plan, You’re Not Alone, it’s not a cause for concern but for a simple, detached, and dispassionate reply (point 1, point 2, point 3, etc.).
Whitewater is a small city, and now a factionalized one. In all of it, there’s no one to whom someone couldn’t respond suitably in one’s own defense. Even if Whitewater were a much larger place, there’d still be no concern: most people are sharp, and can handle themselves well in advocacy and their own defense if only they’d try. There are – thankfully – no titans in this city. No one on this board lacks an ability to respond.
6. Government v. Government. I’ve no interest in defending one part of the government (the district, of whom I have been sometimes critical in the past) against others. Like the ACLU (of which I am a member), the one representation I’ll never undertake is of the government. Yet, as this is true, I’ll also not believe that a politician’s role as sham private reporter on public affairs is anything but laughable.
It’s a sign of cultural decline that Whitewater carries on this way.
7. The New Administration. It’s been only about six weeks, during a tumultuous time, but Whitewater’s new district administrator shows two traits over these several weeks: she values sympathy or empathy as an approach, and she’s more data driven than past leaders in the area. It’s much too soon to say how this will develop, but it’s not typical for Whitewater. Old Whitewater’s culture emphasizes neither empathy nor sympathy, and very little work here is data-driven by reference to genuine experts. (Whitewater’s common council, for example, adopted a mask ordinance with far less reliance on particular expertise than the district has done here. I supported the mask ordinance, but this common council put out no data before its meeting. They showed characteristically weak preparatory effort. For the most part, claims here – especially on the economic development side – are simply flowery press releases.)
8. Discombobulated. So it’s easy to get discombobulated in this environment. What date did you say? Did you mean September 25, 27th, 28th, or 30th? These are mostly small matters, and easily corrected. (Too funny: some of the same officials who would take umbrage at any suggestion that they made a mistake scrutinize the work of others for a mispoken reference here or there.)
There are sometimes tell-tale words and phrases people use that point to deeper issues, but references to dates would usually not be among them.
9. Conditions in the Fall. Again and again: Conditions among people, not speculation now, will decide whether any given course was sensible. It’s stressful during this time (in many ways), but this time will give way to the late fall. In a few months, we’ll know what was the right course.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:58 AM and sunset 8:01 PM, for 14h 02m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 52.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1919, the Green Bay Packers professional football team is founded.
“I am concerned about excited delirium or whatever.” These were the words spoken by a fellow police officer as Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for the final eight minutes of his life. This concern for “excited delirium” may now become part of the case for the defense in the upcoming trial for the murder of George Floyd, as it has for other Black men before him. Just three months shy of Floyd’s murder, officers in Tacoma, Washington had suggested “excited delirium” as the cause of death in the case of another unarmed Black male, Manuel Ellis. And last year in Aurora, Colorado, paramedics injected Elijah McClain with ketamine, for “exhibiting signs of excited delirium”. McClain later died of cardiac arrest after the injection.
Law enforcement officers nationwide are routinely taughtthat “excited delirium” is a condition characterized by the abrupt onset of aggression and distress, typically in the setting of illicit substance use, often culminating in sudden death. However,?this “diagnosis” is not recognized by the vast majority of medical professionals. In fact, “excited delirium” is not recognized by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, or the World Health Organization, and it is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).
The diagnosis is a misappropriation of medical terminology, used by law enforcement to legitimize police brutality and to retroactively explain certain deaths occurring in police custody. There is no systematic or publicly available data about how this diagnosis is used in relation to deaths in police custody. The limited data available involves small samples in certain states only: In one Maryland-based study, excited delirium was invoked in 11 percent of deaths in police custody and in another Florida-based study, 53 deaths in policecustody were attributed to this entity over the past decade.
An internal investigation by Facebook has uncovered thousands of groups and pages, with millions of members and followers, that support the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to internal company documents reviewed by NBC News.
The investigation’s preliminary results, which were provided to NBC News by a Facebook employee, shed new light on the scope of activity and content from the QAnon community on Facebook, a scale previously undisclosed by Facebook and unreported by the news media, because most of the groups are private.
The top 10 groups identified in the investigation collectively contain more than 1 million members, with totals from more top groups and pages pushing the number of members and followers past 3 million. It is not clear how much overlap there is among the groups.
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The company is considering an option similar to its handling of anti-vaccination content, which is to reject advertising and exclude QAnon groups and pages from search results and recommendations, an action that would reduce the community’s visibility.
