This Wednesday, August 21st at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of The History Boys @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Wednesday, August 21st; 12:30 PM
Rated R for language, sexual content (2006).
Remember the professor or teacher that made you think and wonder, and inspired you…? In 1980s England, an unruly class of gifted and charming young men are taught by two eccentric and innovative teachers, as their Headmaster pushes them to get accepted into Oxford or Cambridge. Based on the Tony Award winning Best Play. This film stars Richard Griffiths, James Corden (now host of the CBS “Late Late Show”), Russell Tovey (ABC’s “Quantico”), and Dominic Cooper (the “Mamma Mia” films).
Filmed on location at Cambridge and Oxford Universities.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 6:04 AM and sunset 7:53 PM, for 13h 49m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
The sad truth is that with all that Trump has said and done, millions of Americans don’t see where he has ever crossed the line.
Slurring Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists? Calling for a ban on all Muslims coming into the country? Suggesting that a U.S.-born judge overseeing a Trump University lawsuit should recuse himself because of his Mexican heritage (“He’s a Mexican,” Trump said)? Saying people in the United States from Nigeria will never “go back to their huts”? Referring to Haiti and African countries as “s—hole countries” while wishing the United States would take more people from places like Norway? Tweeting that four black and brown members of Congress — three of them born in the United States — should “go back” to their countries of origin? Launching a slimy birther crusade against President Barack Obama? Constantly resorting to racially charged language?
….
It doesn’t bother them at all when Trump resorts to racist, sexist and religiously intolerant tropes in his onslaughts.
Face it. They helped put — and are now fighting like mad to keep — a prejudiced president in the White House. What does that say about them?
What does it say about the rest of us if we let them?
Wisconsin taxpayers will pay a liberal group’s attorneys $200,000 because Republican lawmakers blocked them on Twitter.
State officials agreed Thursday to pay the legal bills for One Wisconsin Now’s attorneys. A federal judge ruled in January that Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Rep. John Nygren, both Republicans, had infringed on the group’s First Amendment rights.
One Wisconsin Now routinely criticizes Republicans on Twitter and other platforms. In 2017, it sued Vos, Nygren and then-Rep. Jesse Kremer of Kewaskum for blocking it.
U.S. District Judge William Conley concluded the three lawmakers had acted unconstitutionally by blocking the group on Twitter “because of its prior speech or identity.”
Kremer didn’t run for reelection and was dropped from the lawsuit after he shut down his official Twitter account.
In the video Op-Ed above, Claire Wardle responds to growing alarm around “deepfakes” — seemingly realistic videos generated by artificial intelligence. First seen on Reddit with pornographic videos doctored to feature the faces of female celebrities, deepfakes were made popular in 2018 by a fake public service announcement featuring former President Barack Obama. Words and faces can now be almost seamlessly superimposed. The result: We can no longer trust our eyes.
In June, the House Intelligence Committee convened a hearing on the threat deepfakes pose to national security. And platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are contemplating whether, and how, to address this new disinformation format. It’s a conversation gaining urgency in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
Yet deepfakes are no more scary than their predecessors, “shallowfakes,” which use far more accessible editing tools to slow down, speed up, omit or otherwise manipulate context. The real danger of fakes — deep or shallow — is that their very existence creates a world in which almost everything can be dismissed as false.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with scattered showers and a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6:02 AM and sunset 7:54 PM, for 13h 51m 58s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos accused a paralyzed Democratic lawmaker of trying to sabotage a new national role for the Republican legislative leader by publicly seeking accommodations for his disability.
“(This) does not seem like an accident to me,” Vos told a conservative radio show host Thursday. “Everything they do is political and trying to make the other side look bad.”
Vos, of Rochester, earlier this year rejected Democratic Rep. Jimmy Anderson’s request to be able to call into legislative meetings he cannot attend because of his disability and to bar overnight floor sessions, which Anderson cannot participate in fully for the same reason.
Vos told WISN’s Jay Weber he believes the timing of Anderson’s public appeal, which included speaking to a Journal Sentinel reporter, was meant to undermine the announcement of Vos taking over as president of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
But Democratic legislative leaders made the request in February and Anderson reached out to a Journal Sentinel reporter in May. Vos took over the new role earlier this month, 10 days after the story was published.
“I didn’t know he was going to be named president of the NCSL until after the story had come out,” Anderson said. “The idea that I would somehow sit and wait to make Robin Vos look bad — he’s doing that all by himself. I asked for these accommodations months and months ago.”
Immigrant children detained by the U.S. government should get edible food, clean water, soap and toothpaste under a longstanding agreement over detention conditions, a federal appeals panel ruled Thursday in dismissing a Trump administration bid to limit what must be provided.
A three-judge panel for the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco tossed out the U.S. government’s challenge to a lower court’s findings that authorities had failed to provide safe and sanitary conditions for the children in line with a 1997 settlement agreement.
The government argued that authorities weren’t required to provide specific accommodations, such as soap, under the settlement’s requirement that facilities be “safe and sanitary” and asked the panel to weigh in. The appellate judges disagreed.
American director Frank Capra, among others, was responsible for the Why We Fight series of films during the Second World war. The films helped American soldiers understand what was at stake in a war with the Axis powers. At bottom, it wasn’t Capra’s talent (although he was talented) that supplied the answer to the question why America was fighting; it was America’s violent and fanatical enemies who supplied that answer through their own depravity.
Likewise in our time, as we now face a domestic threat from a bigoted nationalism, we find that it is our adversaries who by their depravity justify our fight in opposition and resistance.
Steve King, a lumpen Congressman from Iowa, shows us through his perverse the imperative of a relentless resistance:
DES MOINES, Iowa — U.S. Rep. Steve King on Wednesday defended his call for a ban on all abortions by questioning whether there would be “any population of the world left” if not for births due to rape and incest.
Speaking before a conservative group in the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale, the Iowa congressman reviewed legislation he has sought that would outlaw abortions without exceptions for rape and incest. King justified the lack of exceptions by questioning how many people would be alive if not for those conceived through rapes and incest.
“What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?” King asked, according to video of the event, which was covered by The Des Moines Register. “Considering all the wars and all the rape and pillage that’s taken place … I know I can’t certify that I’m not a part of a product of that.”
“This year, several candidates have said they will challenge King for the Republican nomination, including conservative state Sen. Randy Feenstra. Scholten also recently announced he’d again run for the seat.
After King’s comment Wednesday, Feenstra said in a statement, “I am 100% pro-life but Steve King’s bizarre comments and behavior diminish our message & damage our cause.”)
There was never a time when rape or incest was justified, and no humane person on either side of the abortion debate would imply that population increases from immoral and criminal violence against women make that violence somehow more acceptable.
A world where King’s views would hold sway – and they don’t yet have such influence – would not be a pro-choice, pro-life, pro-abortion, or anti-abortion world.
It would be a world of nihilism, of moral emptiness stretching to the farthest horizon.
It is a simple principle that public officials should not be newspaper reporters on their own meetings and actions. For readers, reporters, editors, publishers, and public officials this should be obvious.
Worse: public officials should not be newspaper reporters when their roles as public officials are not expressly identified.
It’s right – of course – to welcome a new school principal, and it’s right to report about his hiring.
It’s not right – and never will be – for a newspaper to use a school board member to report on the hiring, especially when that school board member voted on the hiring and his status as a public official is undisclosed in the story.
I’m not a reporter, and do not want to be (blogging suits me, as pamphleteering suited our forefathers during America’s formative years). I am, however – like so many others – someone who grew up in a household with newspapers and books, where reading carefully and widely was expected.
The Daily Union’s editor (Spangler) has a history of allowing conflicted reporting that looks more like warmed-over press releases for public officials or connected business groups: 1, 2, 3.
A newspaper story about a public employee should come from someone other than a public official (especially one sharing in oversight authority).
Americans – including residents of small towns – have no need to compromise on the standards that make our country great and admirable.
If newspapers now bemoan their economic straits, then they should look to the unnecessary compromises and concessions that they have made to principle.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6:01 AM and sunset 7:56 PM, for 13h 54m 33s of daytime. The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
Republican colleagues of a paralyzed lawmaker haven’t signed a letter urging the state Assembly’s leader to allow the Democrat to call in to meetings when he’s unable to attend in person.
All 36 Democratic members of the Assembly signed a letter dated Aug. 8 asking the house’s Republican leaders to provide accommodations for Rep. Jimmy Anderson, which they say are reasonable and fall under requirements of the American Disabilities Act. None of the 63 Republicans attached their names to the letter.
Anderson also is asking Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to prohibit lawmakers from convening in floor sessions that stretch overnight unless there is an emergency purpose for doing so, to conduct business during reasonable hours and to assign an ADA coordinator to determine which accommodations requests should be granted.
“It costs the state nothing and only asks for those in power to be considerate of Representative Anderson’s disability,” the letter reads.
Anderson was paralyzed from the chest down in 2010 after a drunken driver collided with the vehicle he was traveling in, permanently injuring him and killing his family members.
The Fitchburg lawmaker wants to be able to call in to committee meetings when he has difficulty attending them in person for health reasons associated with his disability and to bar lawmakers from meeting overnight, which could prevent Anderson from being able to participate.
Perhaps the most outrageous recent example of secrecy in the name of privacy is the news that Jake Patterson, the man convicted of abducting 13-year-old Jayme Closs and killing her parents, has been moved to an out-of-state prison whose location is not being disclosed, according to a state Department of Corrections spokesperson, “for his safety.” We only know he is now in a prison in New Mexico because the Green Bay Press Gazette was able to determine this independently.
So now Wisconsin is officially sending people to secret prisons to protect their privacy. Don’t ask, because the state won’t tell.
While tornadoes are fairly rare events, the people who actively seek out the storms start their hunts in the United States, the country with far more tornadoes than anywhere else in the world. The US records, on average, more than 1,000 twisters per year. By comparison, Canada, the country in second place, records around 100.
John Bresnahan and Burgess Everett report Deficit Don? Red ink gushes in Trump era (‘The president endorsed a bipartisan budget deal without any of the spending restraints previously demanded by Republicans’):
With a new bipartisan budget deal that does nothing to cut federal spending, Trump is on track for another $1 trillion deficit this year. And there’s no reason to believe the following fiscal year will be any different, with ballooning deficits from higher spending, the 2017 tax cuts — Trump’s signature legislative achievement, which slashed revenue — and none of the entitlement reforms long preached by Republican leaders on Capitol Hill.
Candidate Trump bragged that he would pay off the entire federal debt in eight years, but President Trump is governing as if deficits don’t matter.
In fact, Trump is approaching the level of red ink from President Barack Obama’s first term, when Obama racked up trillion-dollar deficits four years in a row. Trump is on pace to do the same, starting with this year’s yawning deficit of more than $1 trillion, according to budget estimates.
But there are huge differences: Trump has a growing economy with historically low unemployment and a soaring stock market, while Obama was battling a brutal downturn in the economy during the worst recession in 80 years, making it much harder to curb federal spending.
Austerity has an unfairly bad name, and Bresnahan and Everett imply a common claim about the tolerability of spending during recessionary times. Yet there are times when austerity is prudent. See Use—and Abuses—of Austerity, reviewing the fine Austerity: When It Works and When It Doesn’t(available on Kindle and well-recommended).
Trump lacks a recessionary foundation in defense of ever-greater spending. Instead, he endorses spending in huge amounts, favoring chosen investors (men who catch his attention), often unconnected to areas of suffering (such as the Midwest), and propping up otherwise dead-end industries (e.g., coal).
Ironically, Tump’s trade war footing and anti-market tariffs push the economy in a wrong direction that encourages others to seek even more spending to shield against the effects of his trade war footing and anti-market tariffs.
Spending under Trump winds up benefitting those without need (wealthy donors and no-future-anyway companies) with a small part going to compensate for the damage of his own pre-modern economic policies.
Trump’s market interference may drive America to a recession, by which time his trillions in spending will leave less room for those who would otherwise seek – by their estimation – a pro-spending program to lessen that future recession’s effects.
Trump often talks about what’s huge, but his own role as a huge wastrel will only leave America smaller.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see occasional thundershowers with a daytime high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 6:00 AM and sunset 7:57 PM, for 13h 57m 06s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
President Trump has repeated the same mantra for months: The Chinese are paying the full price of his tariffs. It’s a line that the overwhelming majority of economists and business owners say is false, but Trump kept saying it — until Aug. 13.
The White House announced Tuesday that the president’s latest tariffs on China would be delayed on many popular items like cellphones, laptops and strollers. The 10 percent tax would not go into effect until Dec. 15, effectively ensuring retailers can import goods for the holidays before the tariffs take effect.
Trump himself told reporters the delay is to ensure consumers don’t face higher costs this Christmas. Here are his full remarks:
“We are doing this for the Christmas season, just in case some of the tariffs would have an impact on U.S. consumers. So far they’ve had virtually none. The only impact has been that we’ve collected almost $60 billion from China, compliments of China. But just in case they might have an impact on people, what we’ve done is we’ve delayed it so they won’t be relevant for the Christmas shopping season,” Trump told reporters before he flew to western Pennsylvania.
He used qualifying phrases such as “just in case” and “might have,” but his words — and actions — are a noticeable change from his insistence that the Chinese are paying the full cost of his tariffs. (Note that the harm to American farmers comes from China’s counter-tariffs, which Trump has sought to offset with a bailout targeting farm country.)
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than one in 10 voters could cast ballots on paperless voting machines in the 2020 general election, according to a new analysis, leaving their ballots more vulnerable to hacking.
A study released by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law on Tuesday evaluates the state of the country’s election security six months before the New Hampshire primary and concludes that much more needs to be done. While there has been significant progress by states and the federal government since Russian agents targeted U.S. state election systems ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the analysis notes that many states have not taken all of the steps needed to ensure that doesn’t happen again.
Updated 8.13.19 afternoon with video. Whitewater’s school board met in special session on Monday night, with two main agenda items: hiring a new middle school principal, and considering among several expenditures from five-hundred thousand dollars available to the district.
A few points to consider:
1. The school board unanimously selected Chris Fountain, most recently of the Delavan-Darien School District, as Whitewater Middle School’s new principal. More about Fountain: (1, 2).
2. Every new hire represents possibility, and at first only that. One always hopes for the best, as this community has always been deserving of the best. (SeeChanges at Whitewater Middle School: “There has never been a time – and perhaps never will be – when a mere departure, a mere change of personnel – proved sufficient. A change of leadership is sometimes necessary, but hardly enough, to create a better climate.”)
3. Oddly, it’s in the discussion of the expenditures – what otherwise would seem the smaller matter when compared to the schooling for three grade levels of students – that one encounters an issue almost as important.
The issue is not the money, however large the sum, but how to approach any expenditure.
We live in difficult times, where the end of the Great Recession has left stagnation and poverty, for our rural community and many others.
Under these circumstances, Whitewater’s conditions are less those of a boutique for cosmetic surgery than an emergency room.
Emergency rooms, or other places of serious need, should operate under principles of triage, in which degrees of urgency are assigned to illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of people.
DLT met on August 1st to discuss a 2019-20 budget update. With the budget compiled with all known information, we believe we have $500,000 of revenue or authority available. DLT discussed recommendations:
– Combining two part-time special education paraprofessional vacancies at the HS
– Updating PA systems in three elementaries and MS
– Appropriate additional funds to IT and Curriculum
– Increase sub pay 5% and explore a permanent SpEd para sub
– Waive summer school fees
– Update CO 3rd meeting space
– Increase math interventionist at Washington to 1.0 FTE (from 0.5)
– Add 1.0 FTE pupil services support at Lincoln/Washington (e.g. social worker)
– Increase Lakeview school counselor to 1.0 FTE (from 0.5)
– Appropriate $110,000 for classroom updates (amount dependent on final budget)
Board members had different ideas about whether or how to spend this money, and so there was no action taken.
What’s unexpected, though, is that in difficult economic and fiscal conditions, no one in the meeting could recite from memory an ordered list of district-wide priorities and match that global list against these DLT spending recommendations, right then and there.
Whether in individual agreement or disagreement with such a list, everyone in the district (certainly including elected board members) should be able to recite an agreed-upon triage protocol. Individual disagreement should be encouraged (seeLocal Gov’t Desperately Needs a Version of the ‘Tenth Man Rule’) but that disagreement requires an established, commonly-understood set of priorities against which to measure alternatives.
There are such priorities, no doubt; what’s odd is that they were not at the ready as a foundation for discussion.
4. A simple matter on spending: all decisions are made at the moment, in the margin. One allocates based on present, prospective needs. A school board member who thought that because the district had spent money on six of something it should spend no more wasn’t thinking reasonably: the key concern isn’t what one has already spent (or saved), but how to spend (or save) when evaluating present needs, not past actions.
To insist on additional spending because one has already spent significantly in the same way in the past, ignoring present need or opportunity, is simply to fall into a sunk cost fallacy. In a similar way, to refuse to spend in the present simply because one has already spent a certain amount in the past is to spend without regard to present need or opportunity.
Given where one stands now, with the needs of the present, what its the best allocation among many possibilities? That’s a reasonable outlook.
Principles of triage should guide that discussion, and deviations from those principles should be well-considered and well-explained.
Keeping common priorities top-of-mind isn’t pessimism – it’s an expression of optimism that one can, truly, act to make a difference even in difficult times.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a daytime high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:59 AM and sunset 7:59 PM, for 13h 59m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
A City of Whitewater Joint Public Works and Finance Committee will meet at 6 PM.
On this day in 1961, Communist East Germany begins construction of the Berlin Wall.
In early June, the Allegheny County Board of Elections held a special meeting in downtown Pittsburgh, inviting a trio of election security experts to offer advice as the county selects new voting equipment. Marian Schneider, a former Pennsylvania state elections official and the current president of Verified Voting, an election security watchdog group, gave an opening statement framing the day’s conversation in stark terms.
….
After the meeting, Candice Hoke, a longtime election administration and security expert who’d also been invited to speak, described the gathering as an unusual bright spot, contrasting the attention Allegheny County had devoted to the issue to many places around the country where the state of election security lags. Efforts by federal agencies to work with states and jurisdictions to improve election security are helping, Hoke says, but the bureaucrats overseeing the country’s more than 10,000 election jurisdictions are still routinely outmatched.
Now, critics of Big Tech are lining up to plead, cajole, and threaten—from the left and right. In June, Senators Cruz (R-TX) and Hawley (R-MO) proposed legislation that would require social media companies over a certain size to prove no political bias when moderating content. Convinced that conservatives voices are being unfairly targeted, they followed up with a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking for an investigation into moderation policies on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. In July, Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, filed suit against Google for, among other things, “playing favorites, with no warning, no transparency—and no accountability” in their content moderation.
As with the reactive policies implemented by the media companies themselves, this legislation and lawsuit are also naïvely focused on yesterday’s problems. They do not acknowledge the way the platforms are actually being gamed today, nor how they will be abused tomorrow.
Serial harassers and trolls will always figure out tricks to avoid the bans, and even if they somehow catch a block that sticks, the growing “Alt Tech” ecosystem made of decentralized, niche services often located in other countries, is more than willing to scoop them up. Finally banned from YouTube? Try Bitchute or DLive. De-platformed from Facebook or Twitter? Try Telegram, Parler, or Gab—the site favored by the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter back in October 2018—or the so-called “image boards” like 8chan, where the Christchurch, San Diego, and El Paso shooters all posted their manifestos.
