Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS
Daily Bread, Health, Hunger, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 11.2.25: 700,000 Wisconsin Residents Rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (FoodShare)
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 51. Sunrise is 6:30 and sunset is 4:45 for 10 hours 15 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1920, KDKA of Pittsburgh starts broadcasting as the first commercial radio station in America.
In Wisconsin, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is known as FoodShare. The failure of the federal government to commit to funding the program puts hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites at risk:
Gov. Tony Evers has declared a state of emergency and a period of “abnormal economic disruption” due to the ongoing federal government shutdown and a potential lapse in FoodShare benefits.
Evers’ order directs state agencies to take “any and all necessary and appropriate measures” to address the potential FoodShare stoppage, and requires them to suspend any administrative rules if they would “prevent, hinder, or delay necessary actions to respond to the emergency.” It also directs the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection to enforce prohibitions against price gouging.
The governor’s action comes as the federal government shutdown enters its second month, leaving benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in jeopardy for millions of Americans. That includes around 700,000 residents in Wisconsin, where the program is known as FoodShare.
See WPR Staff, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers declares state of emergency as shutdown continues, Wisconsin Public Radio, November 1, 2025.
The widespread need for FoodShare in Wisconsin — many hundreds of thousands — crosses all possible boundaries of location, race, ethnicity, gender, and creed. Whitewater and every other community in the state will be affected.
Federal failure on FoodShare a crisis for Wisconsin:
Daily Bread, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 11.1.25: The Wisconsin Workshop Where Mascots Come to Life
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with scattered showers and a high of 46. Sunrise is 7:29 and sunset is 5:46 for 10 hours 17 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 79 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1938, Seabiscuit defeats War Admiral in an upset victory during a match race deemed “the match of the century” in horse racing.
Inside the workshop where mascots come to life:
The Best of The Night Sky November 2025:
City, Daily Bread, Holiday
Boo! and Relax! — Scariest and Most Reassuring Things in Whitewater, 2025
by JOHN ADAMS •
Here’s the nineteenth annual FREE WHITEWATER list of the scariest, combined this year for the first time with the most reassuring, things in Whitewater. (In 2024, the scariest and most reassuring things in the city appeared in separate posts.)
(The 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 editions are available for comparison.)
The list runs in reverse order, from mildly scary to truly frightening and mildly reassuring to truly reassuring.
SCARIEST:
5. The Giant Spider Invasion. There’s an update in the works for the 1977 film The Giant Spider Invasion. Set in Wisconsin, the film depicts how “giant spiders from another dimension invade Wisconsin.” The original director, Bill Rebane, plans to add scenes and characters for a 2026 re-release.
The true risk to Wisconsin, however, isn’t giant spiders, from this or any other dimension. It’s that one of the worst films ever made (a rating of 3.3 of 10 on IMDb) will get more screen time. For those willing to view the original (as I have), it’s available on Tubi and on YouTube as a Mystery Science Theater 3000 subject.
The film does offer one of the saddest lines in all of cinema history: “Sometimes the only way I know you’re alive is when I hear you flush the toilet.” You’ve been warned.
4. Advanced Meeting Science. Can a person, or let’s say several people, create a black hole? That’s what happens in Event Horizon:
It may seem like fantasy, but perhaps it’s not. Whitewater’s collection of the most ingenious scientists school board members in all the state has done something similar by over-using the exceptions to Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law (Wis. Stat. §§ 19.81-19.98) to keep commonplace discussions hidden from the community. Information gets sucked illegitimately into a dark, compressed closed-session and stays in. It’s been that way for years.
Why follow open-government requirements when you can rely on your own dodgy past practices and the contrived opinions that tell you what you want to hear? This practice won’t change merely because people complain. On the contrary, complaints will only convince those involved to dig in. Obstinacy is among the crudest yet most emotionally satisfying of positions for those who adopt it.
One can’t say whether meeting practices in the Whitewater Schools will change, but one can say with confidence that Event Horizon was, after all, a horror film.
3. Bad, Bad Advice. So you thought that open government and the free flow of public information about public issues was the right practice for an American town? Guess again, punks and hooligans! Many small towns, including Whitewater, have a Boomer or two who’ll tell you that daddy knows best:
I’m not going to get into the details of the negotiations between the two boards, but help me understand how negotiation by press release is a good idea. When the city manager put out a press release laying things out, made it very public. I don’t know why they left, but I believe that [unclear] was here to deal with this issue. I know WTMJ ran a story on it. We don’t need this. They’ll get to it. They’ll get to it…We don’t need any more bad press in the community.
As it turns out, this advice pairs nicely with “your generation wants everything handed to you,” “back in my day, people respected their elders,” and “we didn’t have smartphones, and we turned out fine.”
2. City v. Towns. One of the oldest political tricks is to mobilize smaller communities against a larger nearby community. The more rural areas demonize a slightly larger place (“human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together … MASS HYSTERIA!”) That’s the special-interest men’s latest scheme: trot in as many non-residents as you can to demand changes in Whitewater. This libertarian blogger has often been a critic of policies in this city, but has always lived here while doing so. I’d very much support more people moving here — there is no more beautiful city than Whitewater.
(Before my arrival here a generation ago, I lived in several other lovely cities. These years living here, I’ve traveled to many lovely cities in America and abroad. Nothing equals Whitewater. No matter how pleasant a vacation may be, I’m always grateful to return to our small city.)
The Whitewater Common Council has a duty to the 15,000 residents of this city first and foremost. Everyone else is a guest, to be treated politely and fairly, but as a guest.
1. These Difficult Times. Many who lived here in Whitewater are now gone, as some of us knew that they would be. It’s always been easier to harm than to heal. The threat of injury and abuse is a gripping, tormenting force. No human power on Earth is so formidable as today’s federal administration, yet the same has been said and confounded of so many powers of the past. It has been true for us since 1791 that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” We are a people with a right to limited government.
MOST REASSURING:
5. Time. Time moves in only one direction, and with each passing day, it builds up some and wears down others. It is impossible that conditions from the last generation in Whitewater will remain unchanged, either for people or nature. If it seems strange that some few residents of this town would try to hold change at bay (and it is strange, and it is selfish), then it’s even stranger to imagine that they could succeed. There’s no one that powerful in this town or in a thousand towns beyond Whitewater. Not anywhere. The modern and the normal were not going to wait outside forever. They haven’t, and they will bolster and wither what lies before them as they see fit. The sheer passage of time brings change.
4. Energy and Attention. It’s a more energetic city government. More projects — of greater range, creativity, and enthusiasm — than we saw over the last two decades. To the city administration — go ahead, proceed as expeditiously as your judgment suggests. Whitewater’s many thousands will be better for it. (This libertarian will do his level best to keep up.) High octane is the best octane.
3. An Open Municipal Government. We’ve a more informative and open city administration. It’s markedly better than in the past. More notices, more recordings, more memorandums, and more explanations of the reasoning behind decisions.
2. Charitable Possibilities. There’s a difference between predicting the weather and changing the weather; there’s a difference between being able to tell time and watchmaking. I’ve never claimed that a role as town blogger is all there is to city life. Not at all. City life is about 15,000 residents living their lives. Telling time is, however, a skill; predicting the weather is, however, a skill. If it comes about that in difficult national times Whitewater continues to find herself the recipient of increasing charity and benevolence, then at least I’ll be able to see and appreciate that charity from this vantage. We should all of us be grateful and hopeful for what the community receives.
1. More Housing of All Kinds. Our daily workforce in the city is far larger than the residential housing stock we now have. Much of that current stock is suited only for a narrow purpose and is unsuitable for those workers or other new residents. Rehabilitation of what we have and additions to what we have will uplift this city.
Again, as always — although a tragic optimist, I’m yet an optimist at bottom. We have much that is going well locally.
Best wishes for a Happy Halloween.
Animals, Holiday
Friday Bat and Rat Blogging
by JOHN ADAMS •
In the spirit of the season —
Watson’s Climbing Rat and Orange Nectar Bats Take Over a Panama Feeder:
Daily Bread, Elections, Local Government, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 10.30.25: Wisconsin Polling on Partisanship
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:27 and sunset is 5:49 for 10 hours 22 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 58.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1995, Quebec citizens narrowly vote (50.58% to 49.42%) in favor of remaining a province of Canada in their second referendum on national sovereignty.
One of the themes here at FREE WHITEWATER is that we live in a time when true bipartisanship has collapsed (and won’t be back soon). See That ‘Bipartisanship’ Didn’t Last Long — Because It Was Never There, The WisDems’ Bipartisan Delusion, Seeing Once Again That Wisconsin’s Not a Bipartisan Environment, ‘Bipartisanship’ in Wisconsin Is Simply the Vulnerability of the WISGOP Under Fair Maps, and After Bipartisanship.
Results within the latest Marquette Law School Poll support this view. (It’s only one pollster and only one poll, but it’s a well-regarded one.) Most of the attention on this poll concerns how little Wisconsin voters know about the gubernatorial candidates. See Rich Kremer, Marquette poll: Most voters unaware of candidates for governor, Supreme Court, Wisconsin Public Radio, October 29, 2025. (There’s likely to be at least one more candidate in the race, but the Marquette poll did not include as-yet-undeclared candidates.)
Look, however, at some of the poll findings for the 2026 Wisconsin Supreme Court election:
Fifty-six percent say Wisconsin Supreme Court campaigns have become so partisan that we should change to partisan election of judges, while 43% say we should continue the current non-partisan election of judges to the court. Among Republicans, 63% say we should change to partisan elections, while 49% of independents and 49% of Democrats favor partisan elections.
It’s a judicial contest that Wisconsin has established by law as non-partisan, but large numbers of voters know it’s only nominally non-partisan (and so they want to call it what it is). In a well-crafted electoral environment, overwhelming numbers of voters should believe that the environment is accurately described. Even when Wisconsin designates the race as non-partisan under the law, Wisconsin voters perceptively say that’s not what this is. (It’s as though you called a witch doctor a physician, and yet patients said “Oh, no, that’s not true. That’s a witch doctor, dammit.”)
Whether it should become a partisan election is another question; at least voters see what it has become. It seems improbable that we’ll soon return to conditions where non-partisan state elections are truly non-partisan.
There’s a consequent consideration: if intended non-partisan statewide races are truly partisan, what would one say about intended non-partisan local races?
That’s a question worthy of further exploration. I’ve touched on it only slightly, not in the depth it deserves. See ‘Coalitions’ from Quick Observations on a Weekend.
I’m a strong proponent of the claim that ‘you are your vote, you are your coalition.’ No one should care what an elected official thinks or says if he votes contrary to those ideas and statements.
There’s more to be done on the topic, I think, about local candidates clustered on the right or left.
Statewide, however, it’s a settled question — politics is partisan to the marrow.
Pet monkey gets loose in Spirit Halloween store:
Daily Bread, Elections, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 10.29.25: The Wisconsin Attorney General’s Race Will Be a Rematch
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 56. Sunrise is 7:25 and sunset is 5:50 for 10 hours 25 minutes of daytime. The moon is in its first quarter with 49.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashes, ending the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and eventually contributing to the Great Depression.
If the Wisconsin gubernatorial election next year will be all new, then the Wisconsin attorney general’s race will be familiar. The state is in for a rematch of the Kaul-Toney race of 2022:
Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, a Republican, announced Tuesday [10.21] he’s running for a second time to unseat Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul.
The 41-year-old Toney has been the DA in Fond du Lac County since 2012. He ran against Kaul in 2022, losing by 35,000 votes. Kaul, a Democrat, recently announced he would be running for a third term as attorney general, ending speculation that he would run for governor after Gov. Tony Evers announced his retirement.
In the campaign announcement, Toney said he would prioritize supporting law enforcement officers, reducing violent crime in Milwaukee and being more aggressive in prosecuting drug crimes.
….
The Wisconsin attorney general is the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the state, responsible for overseeing state law enforcement agencies, enforcing state laws as varied as water quality rules and election laws and defending state agencies in court. This year, Kaul has been especially active in joining multi-state lawsuits against Trump administration policies.
See Henry Redman, Republican Eric Toney announces second run for attorney general, Wisconsin Examiner, October 21, 2025.
Kaul defeated Toney in the close 2022 attorney general’s race, 50.64% to 49.31%. Whether this race is close, or has a larger margin one way or the other, is likely to depend on how Wisconsin voters view federal policy as much as state policy.
Elections across the nation have become a test of support or opposition to federal actions. Absent an unexpected personal issue for a candidate, that’s likely how our own state elections will unfold.
Statewide has become a proxy for nationwide.
Pumpkins were enjoyed by all at the Cincinnati Zoo. Click on the picture to play the video:
City, Daily Bread, Weird Tales
Daily Bread for 10.28.25: Our Haunted Past
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 57. Sunrise is 7:24 and sunset is 5:52 for 10 hours 28 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 39.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5 PM.
On this day in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis ends and Premier Nikita Khrushchev orders the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.
Whitewater has a long-standing reputation as a haunted place. The topic emerges now and again because stories and legends about Whitewater are more numerous here than in ordinary Wisconsin places that have been beset only by mosquitoes and coyotes. (There’s a Spirit Tour in this town because there are stories about spirits in this town.)
Milwaukee Magazine’s Tea Krulos writes of Second Salem: The Haunted History of Whitewater’s Spiritualist Past:
These spooky stories are thick on the ground in Whitewater, a college town of less than 15,000 about an hour’s drive southwest of Milwaukee. They say that Whitewater’s three cemeteries form the points of a “Witch’s Triangle,” with all the area within its borders under a curse. Under the light of the Halloween moon, the spirit of a bloodthirsty witch (who also happens to be an ax murderer in some versions) named Mary Worth rises from a crypt to stalk new victims.
Over at UW-Whitewater’s Andersen Library, there’s an ancient, leather-bound spellbook locked in a cage that will drive anyone who reads it (or even asks about it) insane. Elsewhere on campus, a magical altar is said to be buried under a building. A network of underground tunnels is used by a coven to traverse to Starin Park, where they assemble to perform Black Mass on unholy nights in front of the “Witches Tower.” Whitewater Lake has a kraken-like beast lurking beneath the surface, possibly conjured by witchcraft. And on and on.
All of these tales are weaved from a singular source at the center of the web: the Morris Pratt Institute, a unique college begun in Whitewater where communicating with the deceased was part of the curriculum. The legacy of this school, built at the peak of the Gilded Age religious movement of Spiritualism and bankrolled by a prophesied iron bonanza, is still alive today – not just in the urban legends it spawned but also in reality.
No story about our past would be complete without mention of Morris Pratt, capitalizing on loss and longing to bring his heterodox beliefs to Whitewater:
Pratt made good on his word [to advance Spiritualism] and began making Whitewater into a hub for his beliefs.
In 1889, a three-story brick building opened at the corner of what is now Whitewater’s Fremont and Center streets: the Sanitarium and Hall of Psychic Science, later renamed the Temple of Science. Pratt’s Spiritualist center had lecture halls, living quarters and a space for the practice of séances, mediumship and scrying (visioning the future in reflective surfaces such as crystal balls). The latter was known as the White Room for its entirely colorless paint and furnishings….
Pratt’s brusque approach didn’t endear him to the town, either. At the Temple of Science’s opening day, the lineup of lecturers reportedly attacked and ridiculed other religions. Later that year, Pratt placed an announcement in the Whitewater Register challenging leaders of the other churches in town to debate him. When no one accepted, he began showing up at their church services for “highly argumentative, belligerent confrontations that caused him to be shunned and ridiculed in Whitewater,” author Len Faytus wrote in The Spook Temple: The Morris Pratt Institute in Whitewater, Spiritualism and the Occult.
See Tea Krulos, Second Salem: The Haunted History of Whitewater’s Spiritualist Past, Milwaukee Magazine, October 20, 2025.
However frightful or delightful, after an occasional Halloween interlude, one leaves behind stories of creatures or specters and returns to daily life in our small city of fifteen thousand.
Video shows view from inside the eye of Hurricane Melissa:
City, Daily Bread, Entitlement, Open Government, School District
Daily Bread for 10.27.25: There’s Defensive and Then There’s the Whitewater School Board’s Excessively Defensive Posture
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 57. Sunrise is 7:23 and sunset is 5:53 for 10 hours 30 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 29.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board will conduct an Annual Budget hearing at 5:30 PM and a Regular Meeting at 6 PM. (Note, Monday evening: The district listed the Regular Meeting to begin at 6 PM. In fact, the Annual Budget hearing ran later than 6 PM, so the Regular Meeting began later than the posted time.)
On this day in 1775, King George III expands on his earlier Proclamation of Rebellion in the Thirteen Colonies during a speech from the throne at the opening of Parliament.
The Whitewater School Board meets tonight. As part of its Regular Meeting agenda, before public comment, the following cautionary words appear:
Citizens may speak under Public Comments, but no School Board action will be taken. Issues raised may become a part of a future agenda. Participants are allotted a three-minute speaking period. A Citizen Comment Request should be filled out prior to speaking. In accordance to [sic] Board Policy 187, personal criticism and/or derogatory remarks directed at School Board members or employees of the district will not be tolerated. Should there be a number of citizens planning to speak, the President will announce the total time for citizen comments and divide the time between speakers equally with no more than three minutes allotted to each participant. The Board will not be able to respond to individual questions at the meeting. Complaints against an employee should be sent to the Superintendent or Board in writing with your signature. Please keep in mind that students often attend or view board meetings. Speakers’ remarks should therefore be suitable for an audience that includes Kindergarten through 12th grade students. The Board President or officers of the Board may interrupt, warn or terminate speakers’ statements that are unrelated to the business of the School District or inappropriate for K-12 students or disruptive to an orderly, productive meeting. The time estimates noted for agenda items are for informational purposes only and may not be reflective of actual discussion during the meeting.
Well, now we know. Honest to goodness, it’s not merely cautionary or advisory, it’s excessively so. These many warnings convey that the board is watching the public very carefully. That’s an inverted order: the public should be watching the board. Left, center, or right — Whitewater’s school board has been a self-protective, self-defensive board for many years. That’s not public service; it’s self-service.
It should be obvious that the effect of this advisory is to remove legitimate concerns about the district, administrators, or staff from public mention. There’s a difference between wanting a government position and wanting that position on terms that undermine the position’s very legitimacy in a free and open society.
As it turns out, the board president has sometimes read these words before scheduled public comment at a meeting. Here’s an example from July (which compounds the written advisory’s chilling effect with an auditory one, where neither advisory should have been fashioned or delivered the way it has been):
Speak only a bit faster, and it would sound like this:
How odd to be a man who voted for Obama, or a woman who voted for Trump, only to win seats on the school board with a shared perspective that among the most important votes are one’s own defensive position against the rest of the public. Perhaps, at bottom, that’s what’s left of bipartisanship.
I’m sure that there’s someone on the Whitewater School Board, of whatever political ideology, who would say that these measures are necessary to prevent disruptions from members of the public. To which this libertarian blogger would say that the advisory is excessively restrictive of the public, thinks too little of the public, and that these boardmembers are, in any event, from that same public.
Looking around Whitewater, after all, one doesn’t find anyone from the House of Windsor… and we’re better off for it.
Holiday, Music
Monday Music: Halloween Trio No. 3
by JOHN ADAMS •
Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells (from The Exorcist)
Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, The Shining
Ennio Morricone, The Thing
City, Daily Bread, School District
Daily Bread for 10.26.25: The Superintendent’s Presentation
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 59. Sunrise is 7:22 and sunset is 5:55 for 10 hours 33 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 21.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1881, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral takes place in Tombstone, Arizona.
On Tuesday, at a meeting of the Whitewater Common Council, the Whitewater Unified School District’s superintendent, Samuel Karns, presented his goals.
I’ve written before that one should wait about a year to see if this new superintendent’s approach has begun to make a difference. That’s a sound approach. This district has been ideologically divided among its constituent communities, has been professionally divided among its faculty, and tensions that were present before the pandemic have grown worse afterward. An autocratic administrative approach these last five years and a closed-government approach that saw some community members as adversaries made academic goals almost secondary to political controversy and managerial overreach.
Meeting after meeting wasted on funding about the aquatic center or a school resource officer are examples of frivolous endeavors styled as serious ones.
The district has been a dark field into which open government principles and a collaborative approach go to wither and die. There have been supporters of this approach — of course, of course — on the school board and in the community. See Yesteryear’s Familiar Tune.
And yet, even among those of a given ideology, there was division and discord. Backbiting, ankle-biting, — lots of biting among people who shouldn’t have been biting anyone. In general: the district tends toward an insider-outsider divide. Insiders imagine themselves (as is common in these divides) to be more insightful, more talented. (There’s no evidence of this imagined superiority, in fact, but then some people are Flat Earthers against all evidence to the contrary.)
If this district’s new superintendent and its existing board can, during his tenure, manage to avoid the governance mistakes of the last five years, establish a better relationship with the community, and make genuine academic progress, then Whitewater and the smaller towns of the district will be better for it.
A slow but steady recuperation would do the Whitewater Unified School District well.
Rare ‘red lightning’ captured in timelapse video by New Zealand photographer:
City, Daily Bread, University
Daily Bread for 10.25.25: The Final Fall Enrollment Numbers for UW-Whitewater
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 53. Sunrise is 7:20 and sunset is 5:56 for 10 hours 36 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Adlai Stevenson shows the United Nations Security Council reconnaissance photographs of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba.
In September, the Universities of Wisconsin published preliminary enrollment figures for their campuses. See, previously, For UW-Whitewater, More Students Mean More Opportunity. The final fall numbers appear below:
The final 10-day fall 2025 enrollment figures for each university are:
- UW-Eau Claire: 9,487
- UW-Green Bay: 11,519
- UW-La Crosse: 10,584
- UW-Madison: 51,481
- UW-Milwaukee: 22,909
- UW-Oshkosh: 12,191
- UW-Parkside: 3,920
- UW-Platteville: 6,426
- UW-River Falls: 5,377
- UW-Stevens Point: 8,532
- UW-Stout: 7,061
- UW-Superior: 2,872
- UW-Whitewater: 12,267
The final figure for UW-Whitewater is higher than the preliminary number of 12,075.
While it’s true that there is a statewide and nationwide decline in the demographic cohort of traditional college students, some institutions will achieve above and some below the state and national trends. It is wildly improbable that every institution will experience decline.
Why some grow, and why some decline, is the relevant and material question for each. One matter seems clear, especially contrasted with the growth at UW-Whitewater that evaporated by the end of the last decade: it’s not possible to sustain growth on marketing alone. If that were true, then there would have been no decline in growth at the school in the late Teens — marketing would have carried UW-Whitewater along forever. There were administrators (e.g., 1 and 2) from that time who carried on as much, as though gains would be everlasting until thousands of students became hundreds of thousands, then millions, and before one knew it, all America would have been attending UW-Whitewater.
It was not, and never will be, that easy to maintain a university’s population. It may be years before all the ingredients of today’s enrollment success in a difficult demographic environment become evident.
It’s enough for now to know that UW-Whitewater is holding its own.
Clean Wisconsin program director on expanding renewable energy in Wisconsin:
City, Daily Bread, Local Government, Reasoning
Daily Bread for 10.24.25: Expressions Change with Changing Times
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 51. Sunrise is 7:19 and sunset is 5:57 for 10 hours 38 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 8.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph line across the United States is completed.
These many years, writing about policies and claims whether local or state, this libertarian blogger has used the expression ‘no and no again.’ Regrettable, truly — it’s simply false (and ignorant) to contend that someone who loves this small town has ever wanted to use an expression of disapproval. On the contrary, each and every use has been, to my mind, necessary — and sadly so. One speaks and writes as the occasion requires.
On the evening of October 21st, at a meeting of the Whitewater Common Council, at a little over fifty minutes into the meeting, an official of the local government offered this observation of municipal finance:
If a community wants stable services, but also insists on low taxes, then the only way to balance that equation is through greater density, meaning more homes, businesses, and taxpayers sharing the cost of those services. If we want to keep low density and stable services, we must accept higher tax rates for them. If we want low density and low taxes, then we have to be prepared for service cuts because there simply isn’t enough revenue to maintain current service levels. The point here is not to say that the one preference is right or wrong, but to show that choices have consequences. So our community’s fiscal sustainability depends on understanding this balance between services, taxes, and growth. So as we move forward with our budget discussions, the framework that we’ll keep in mind is what balance does Whitewater want to strike?
Those one hundred, forty-three words, spoken plainly as part of a meeting of many more words, compel one’s attention. They ask for a reply.
And so, and so — ‘yes and yes again.’ Expressions change with changing times.
The words spoken in that meeting are not cold words, they’re warm; they’re not stagnant but rather they require an appreciation of the dynamic nature of a prosperous community. Too much of our local policy these last two decades has reflected only one need, often expressed insistently and at other times demanded imperiously. We are not one action, not one need, but thousands of actions and interactions among fifteen thousand people. Not one person’s prosperity, not one faction’s prosperity, but that of all the city.
That common prosperity requires foresight and calculation among many options on behalf of many thousands of people.
See the Milky Way’s stellar nurseries in this amazing animated 3D fly-through video: