The Whitewater Unified School District, the public school district for Whitewater and several smaller towns nearby, is searching for a new district administrator. There will be community forums via videoconferencing with the two finalists, Dr. Caroline Pate-Hefty, Executive Director of Student Services for District #89 in Melrose Park, Illinois, and Ms. Kellie Bohn, Superintendent for Genoa City Jt. 2 School District in Genoa City, Wisconsin. The electronic forums are scheduled for the evenings of April 21st and April 22nd.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 6:10 AM and sunset 7:38 PM, for 13h 27m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 44.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets tonight at 6:30 PM briefly in open session, then entering closed session until returning in open session at 7:00 PM. The 7:00 PM open session will be available via Zoom Online.
On this day in 1861, Wisconsin receives a call to send soldiers: “Governor Alexander W. Randall received a telegram from Washington requesting one regiment of 780 men to serve the Union for three months in the Civil War. Within a week ten companies, from Kenosha, Beloit, Horican, Fond du Lac, Madison, and Milwaukee were ready.”
As the first local influenza deaths were counted in the fall of 1918, officials in Minneapolis moved quickly — more aggressively than even state health officials thought was wise — and shut down the city. They closed schools, churches, theaters and pool halls, effective midnight on Oct. 12.
Across the Mississippi River, St. Paul remained largely open into November, with its leaders confident they had the epidemic under control. Fully three weeks after Minneapolis — with The St. Paul Pioneer Press pleading “In Heaven’s Name Do Something!” — St. Paul ordered sweeping closures, too.
Both cities, relative to the worst-hit parts of the country, escaped steep death tolls. But the mortality rate in Minneapolis was considerably lower than in St. Paul. And as researchers today look back on those interventions, it appears the economy in Minneapolis emerged stronger, too.
The comparison between the Twin Cities is instructive today not just for what it tells us about the health benefits of social distancing, but also for what it says about any economic costs that come with it.
In 1918, cities that committed earlier and longer to interventions like banning public gatherings and closing schools didn’t fare worse for disrupting their economies for longer. Many of those cities actually had relatively larger gains in manufacturing employment, manufacturing output and bank assets in 1919 and into the next few years, according to a new study from researchers at the Federal Reserve and M.I.T. This is particularly clear among Western cities that had more time to prepare for a pandemic that hit the East Coast first.
But there is good reason to worry that the world economy is heading into a deep, protracted recession. Much will depend on the pandemic’s trajectory and whether policymakers’ responses are sufficient to contain the damage while rebuilding consumer and business confidence.
But a rapid recovery seems highly unlikely. Demand has been ravaged, there have been extensive disruptions to manufacturing supply chains, and a financial crisis is already underway. Unlike the 2008-09 crash, which was triggered by liquidity shortages in financial markets, the COVID-19 crisis involves fundamental solvency issues for firms and industries well beyond the financial sector.
The spring election, conducted during a pandemic, is now behind Wisconsin. There’s little question that statewide, it was a good night for Jill Karofsky and Lisa Neubauer. (I supported both candidates.)
Whitewater – the city proper – also supported these candidates. A majority of the city’s voters did, in fact, prefer these voters even while campus was out-of-session. There have been few elections where the campus is out-of-session, so it is notable that the city’s voters tended left without a full student population that old-timers feel is the source of left-of-center voting.
There is, however, a significant difference – key to understanding Whitewater’s local politics – between how the city votes for national or statewide candidates and how the city votes for local candidates.
It’s true that local races are non-partisan, but they are not – and by law need not be – non-ideological. There is a difference of kind between a partisan designation (e,g., Republican, Democrat, etc.) and an ideological one (left, center, right, libertarian, etc.).
At the local level, Whitewater’s preferred candidates are not anywhere so progressive ideologically as the candidates the city routinely selects for statewide or national offices.
At the local level, Whitewater mostly advances candidates who outwardly espouse a kind of boosterism.
Boosterism is an ideology that accentuates the positive regardless of actual conditions. It is close to a secular religion for (too) many local figures, and is very much the dominant ethos of Old Whitewater. It ignores the disabled and the disadvantaged for the sake of a happy tale. In this, it manifests sins of commission and omission.
Boosterism is an ideology narrow in thought and small of heart.
In Whitewater, this preference for happy talk has allowed smarmy rightwing development hucksters – landlords, bankers, a public relations man or two – to push their junk economics on the city.
The officeholders of the city are – almost to a person – servile in the face of these sort of men. Heads down, eyes averted, like children being scolded whenever a business-type with a head full of bad economics shows up.
So deep is this hold that these men look upon a public institution like the Community Development Authority as if their own private clubhouse.
Even after the Great Recession, most – but not all – of Whitewater’s officeholders have adhered to boosterism as a paradigm. There is the sadness of Whitewater – even in the worst times – the city’s leaders mostly held to this mendaciously ignorant depiction of the city.
What a shame, truly, that men and women who as children graduated from crawling to walking would so quickly, and so needlessly, resume their former means of locomotion in the presence of a few selfish schemers.
Left, center, and right do not matter locally in a community if boosterism is a faith, puffery is a liturgy, and public relations is a sacred tradition.
There will only be a New Whitewater – a prosperous and well-ordered community – when the city breaks locally, outwardly, and decisively from this false faith.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see a bit of rain or snow with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 6:12 AM and sunset 7:37 PM, for 13h 24m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 54.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, Pres. Lincoln is shot in Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth; Lincoln passes away the next day.
Most localities seem to be ascribing deaths to COVID-19 only in the presence of a positive test. And since we’ve had a persistent shortage of tests, many patients in serious condition are admitted without being tested, since they are presumed positive cases and the test can be better used on someone else.
Also we have home-deaths, in which case no testing is performed.
This problem is not unique to America, and has been observed in other poorly-governed countries which were unprepared for the disease, such as Italy.
We’re now starting to get a sense of just how big this group of uncounted COVID-19 deaths might be.
….
Since 2000, the annual monthly variance in deaths [in New York City] has stayed within a very small and relatively stable band: within a few hundred, plus or minus, the monthly average. There’s one big outlier, of course, for September 2001.
Now look at the 30-day period ending on April 4, 2020: 5,330 more deaths than the monthly average. And of those, only 3,350 have been officially ascribed to COVID-19.
So what about those other 1,980 dead New Yorkers?
There are a few theoretical possibilities:
(1) As we saw in Bergamo, the official numbers undercount the real COVID-19 toll by a very large percentage: In this case, it’s a 60 percent increase over the official number.
(2) A large number of non-COVID-19 deaths occurred among people who suffered other medical events—strokes, overdoses, undiagnosed aggressive cancers—because they could not get access to healthcare because the virus has overwhelmed hospitals.
(3) New York just happened to have the unluckiest month in modern history at the exact same time that a pandemic was ravaging the city.
Like I said, anything is possible. But if I was going to bet $100, I’d put it on (1).
(Emphasis added.)
William J. Broad reports Putin’s Long War Against American Science (‘A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses’):
On Feb. 3, soon after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be a global health emergency, an obscure Twitter account in Moscow began retweeting an American blog. It said the pathogen was a germ weapon designed to incapacitate and kill. The headline called the evidence “irrefutable” even though top scientists had already debunked that claim and declared the novel virus to be natural.
As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information — an “infodemic,” according to the World Health Organization.Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.
Over at the national tech website The Verge, Nilay Patel reminds that a year later, Foxconn has still done nothing with the ‘innovation’ centers that foreign corporation promised it would open around the state. They’re still empty:
In Whitewater, the ‘Greater Whitewater’ Committee – the business league of a few local men (a landlord and a public relations man, mostly) – touted Foxconn at one of their meetings. SeeA Sham News Story on Foxconn.
One can make lemonade from Foxconn’s lemons. If the promoters of corporate welfare are looking for a new clubhouse for their organization, they need only contact Foxconn’s Taiwanese ownership.
There’s plenty of available space, suitable for immediate occupancy.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 6:13 AM and sunset 7:36 PM, for 13h 22m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 65.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1960, the United States launches Transit 1-B, the world’s first satellite navigation system.
The University of Wisconsin System released initial estimates on the cost of the coronavirus pandemic Sunday: $168 million across the state’s 13 campuses as of April 10.
Robert Cramer, UW System’s vice president for administration, called the estimate short-term and conservative. It is a combination of lost revenue and added expenses.
Nearly half the figure comes from the refunds made to students for room and board fees for what was left of the spring semester, which the system initially put at $78 million statewide.
It also includes parking refunds, forgone athletic revenue, technology investments and income-continuation payments for students.
Cramer said an estimated $47 million stimulus from the federal government will help the system remain solvent. The UW System also asked the state government in late March for $59 million in emergency aid. That request has not been acted on.
France reported 43 cases of heart incidents linked to treating coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential “game changer.”
As the U.S. stockpiles as many as 29 million doses of the drug, which is also used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, the data on adverse reactions from France’s drug safety agency highlights the risk of using unproven treatments to stem a pandemic that’s killed more than 100,000 people worldwide.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday visited a clinic in Marseille, southern France, where reports of uncontrolled studies have recently propelled the 65-year-old drug to fame. Macron’s advisers said the trip wasn’t an endorsement.
France has recorded about 100 health incidents and four deaths linked to experimental drugs for coronavirus patients since March 27, the national drug-safety agency ANSM said in a statement on Friday. Three other patients had to be revived.
Some 82 incidents were deemed “serious.” Most of those were split between hydroxychloroquine and HIV antivirals lopinavir-ritonavir, according to the agency.
Easter Sunday, Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee Worship, 10 AM Central Time —
At 10 am, we will live stream a Liturgy of the Word with a special sermon from Bishop Miller via YouTube and Facebook Live. All of our all diocese liturgies feature officiants, preachers, readers, and musicians from throughout the diocese.
Easter Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon showers with a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 6:15 AM and sunset 7:34 PM, for 13h 19m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 75% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1981, the first launch of a Space Shuttle (Columbia) takes place: The STS-1 mission.
But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:
The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.
Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.
By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.
When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.
The President will stop at nothing to protect himself and himself only. By discounting those American seniors who have served and protected our nation countless times during moments of national crisis, the President is deeming them unworthy.
Saturday in Whitewater will see afternoon showers with a high of fifty-eight. Sunrise is 6:17 AM and sunset 7:33 PM, for 13h 16m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On Saturday, March 21st, while Donald Trump was tweeting about the “Chinese virus” and circulating praise for the “great job we’ve done,” Eric Ries received a phone call from another Silicon Valley C.E.O. His friend Jeff Lawson, of the firm Twilio, told Ries that, to deal with the rapidly escalating coronavirus crisis, the White House was recruiting tech executives to help. Ries—the founder and C.E.O. of a new company, the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and the author of a best-selling book, “The Lean Startup,” which had made him a well-known figure in the Valley—was an obvious choice for someone looking to stand up a high-tech solution to the disaster quickly.
….
America was watching, shocked, as doctors and nurses pleaded for protective gear and medical equipment such as ventilators. Ries was asked to help start a Web site that would match hospitals and suppliers. Sure, Ries said, he could have something up and running by Monday. What followed over the next two weeks was an inside glimpse of the dysfunction emanating from Trump’s Washington in the midst of the pandemic, a crash course in the breakdown that has led to nurses in one of the wealthiest countries in the world wearing garbage bags to protect themselves from a virus whose outbreak the President downplayed until it was too late to prepare for its consequences.
Dubbed “Trump’s looniest economic adviser” by the Wall Street–focused Dealbreaker, Navarro is an academic who famously made up a fake expert to quote in his books. A five-time failed political candidate in San Diego, Navarro is widely known there “as a nut,” says one veteran California GOP political consultant. Navarro’s views on trade are considered so fringy that, for years, reporters covering him have been trying unsuccessfully to find a credible source who may agree with him. Nonetheless, since 2016, Navarro has been advising Trump on trade policy, first on the campaign trail and then in the White House as the director of the newly created Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. And on March 27, Trump appointed Navarro to enforce the DPA, the Korean War–era law that allows the administration to force a company to prioritize government orders in production.
The new job gives Navarro immense power to order supplies like ventilators and masks, block exports, and even commandeer products made overseas by US companies to ensure delivery to American hospitals. It’s a massive logistical undertaking involving federal central planning, production, and distribution, and one urgently needed to combat shortages and prevent states and hospitals from competing for scarce supplies. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) told Trump in a letter last week that Navarro was “woefully unqualified for this task.”
The Whitewater Unified School District, the public school district for Whitewater and several smaller towns nearby, is searching for a new district administrator. There will be community forums via videoconferencing with the two finalists, Dr. Caroline Pate-Hefty, Executive Director of Student Services for District #89 in Melrose Park, Illinois, and Ms. Kellie Bohn, Superintendent for Genoa City Jt. 2 School District in Genoa City, Wisconsin. The electronic forums are scheduled for the evenings of April 21st and April 22nd.