Tuesday, January 24th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Ticket to Paradise @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Romantic Comedy
Rated PG13; 1 hour, 44 minutes (2022)
A divorced couple (Julia Roberts and George Clooney) reunite and travel to Bali to stop their daughter from making the same mistake they think they made 25 years ago.
One can find more information about Ticket to Paradise at the Internet Movie Database.
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 38. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:51 PM for 9h 31m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 8.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1986, the first IBM PC computer virus is released into the wild. A boot sector virus dubbed (c)Brain, it was created by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter unauthorized copying of the software they had written.
Thinking about the Russian military’s latest reorganization plan, Dara Massicot offers an observation that applies to organizations far beyond Russia:
Watching this announcement, having watched these men for many years, I was left with the thought that, sometimes an organization is so broken that it cannot fix itself. It’s turning away from the solutions and resolutions that it previously identified and is looking backward.
On Twitter, people say of something apt: ‘that’s it, that’s the tweet.’ As it turns out, about organizations (public or private) one can say of Massicot’s observation ‘that’s it, that’s the insight.’
Nation, state, or city: one could find a broken organization in any of them. And yet, and yet, when Massicot describes an organization as broken, she accurately identifies the cause of a broken organization in certain and definite terms: ‘having watched these men for many years.’
Oh yes: the cause of organizational failure rests in certain people, certain actions, and certain events.
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 36. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:50 PM for 9h 30m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 16% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1967, Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler,” is convicted of numerous crimes and is sentenced to life imprisonment.
Greg Rosalsky reports New nation, new ideas: A study finds immigrants out-innovate native-born Americans:
Many studies over the years have suggested that immigrants are vital to our nation’s technological and economic progress. Today, around a quarter of all workers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields are immigrants.
But while there’s plenty of evidence suggesting that immigrants play an important role in American innovation, a group of economists — Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, Timothy McQuade, and Beatriz Pousada — wanted to find a more precise estimate of how much immigrants contribute.
In a fascinating new working paper, the economists link patent records to more than 230 million Social Security numbers. With this incredible dataset, they are able to suss out who among patent-holders are immigrants (by cross-referencing their year of birth and the year they were assigned their Social Security number).
The economists find that, between 1990 and 2016, 16 percent of all US inventors were immigrants. More than that, they find that the “average immigrant is substantially more productive than the average US-born inventor.” Immigrant inventors produced almost a quarter of all patents during this period. These patents were disproportionately likely to be cited (a sign that they were valuable to their fields) and seem to have more financial value than the typical native-born patent. The economists also find evidence suggesting that immigrant inventors help native-born inventors become more productive. All in all, the economists estimate that immigrants are responsible for roughly 36% of innovation in America.
What is it that makes some of the native-born so resistant to immigration, and to the evident accomplishments of immigrants? In my own case, both my paternal and maternal families arrived in America before the Revolution, yet this lineage in America has not blinded my family to the accomplishments of newcomers to this continent.
What teaching makes one’s own birth, over which one has no control, more important than a welcoming embrace of those who arrive here and improve our society? The nativist would rather sit in sickness than stand in good health.
It is an ignorant and arrogant teaching that trumpets native birth over America’s tradition of a free movement of capital, goods, and labor.
Shark Tows Kayaker After Chomping on Fishing Bait:
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 39. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:49 PM for 9h 28m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 25.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1945, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg is taken into Soviet custody while in Hungary; he is never publicly seen again.
Emily Anthes reports Snarl, You’re on Candid Camera (‘Wildlife cameras in Wisconsin are capturing interspecies encounters — and providing evidence that human activity might make such meetings more likely’):
An animal’s fortunes, and the health of entire ecosystems, can hinge on these ephemeral encounters — or lucky non-encounters. “An animal must be at the right place, at the right time, to avoid predators, find food, reproduce successfully,” said Neil Gilbert, a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University.
In that way, the interactions between the animals in a given ecosystem are like a theatrical production, he said, adding, “For the production to be a success, each actor has to be onstage, in the right place, and they must act and deliver their lines at the right time.”
Now, a new study reveals how humans might unwittingly rewrite these ecological scripts, altering how the characters interact and fueling more interspecies encounters.
To conduct the study, Dr. Gilbert and his colleagues analyzed images captured by Snapshot Wisconsin, a citizen-science project run by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Since 2016, volunteers have deployed more than 2,000 wildlife cameras across the state, capturing tens of millions of images of Wisconsin’s fields, farms and forests — and the fauna that frequent them.
Wild animals of different species were more likely to lead overlapping lives — appearing at local camera sites in quicker succession — in human-altered landscapes, like farms, than in more undisturbed locations, such as national forests, scientists reported in PNAS last month.
….
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources created Snapshot Wisconsin in an effort to collect continuous, statewide data — at all hours of the day and during all seasons of the year — on local wild animal populations. It relies on an army of volunteer camera hosts to install, monitor and maintain wildlife cameras, on both public and private land across the state.
The cameras, which are triggered by motion and body heat, have captured a menagerie of animals going about their everyday lives: bald eagles scavenging in the snow, bear cubs climbing trees, a newborn fawn, a bevy of otters gamboling down a grassy trail. “It’s just so many otters,” said Jennifer Stenglein, a quantitative research scientist at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and an author of the new study.
Beautiful and humbling: no art of ours reaches the beauty of the natural world.
Black hole twists star into ‘donut shape,’ Hubble discovery:
Good morning.
The Dr. King Holiday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 45. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:48 PM for 9h 26m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 32.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1945, Hitler moves into his underground air raid shelter, the so-called Führerbunker.
Johnson is obsessed with Hunter Biden, and here’s his latest theory about Joe Biden: if Hunter Biden solicited prostitutes, and if during that time Joe Biden gave his son money, does that mean Joe Biden might be criminally liable for his son’s activities in “potentially” a “sex trafficking operation”?
I mean, Chuck, is it a crime to be soliciting and purchasing prostitution in potentially European sex trafficking operations? Is that a crime? Because Chuck Grassley and I laid out about $30,000 paid by Hunter Biden to those types of individuals over December of 2018, 2019, about $30,000. That’s about the same time that President Biden offered to pay about $100,000 of Hunter Biden’s bills. I mean, again, that’s just some information. I don’t know exactly if it’s a crime.
Johnson doesn’t “know exactly if it’s a crime” and says he’s offering “just some information” (because he’s ignorant and conspiratorial), but it turns out those claims about Joe Biden don’t establish a crime.
Johnson, as it turns out, is bad at all this, as he stammers and stutters his way through the interview. He’s an awkward gossip and liar, and his delivery leaves his gossip and lies stillborn.
Odd, the populists couldn’t find a loon with a smoother in delivery in a state of 5.8 million, in a nation of 330 million. There are in America bums on park benches going on about time machines who exhibit a more convincing manner.
See also an entire FREE WHITEWATER category dedicated to Ron Johnson’s ignominious senate career.
Stunning moment that road collapses in California following intense storms:
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 40. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:46 PM for 9h 24m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 44.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1967, the first Super Bowl takes place in Los Angeles: the Packers defeat the Chiefs 35–10.
Here’s Popkov’s Wikipedia biography:
Mikhail Viktorovich Popkov … born 7 March 1964) is a Russian serial killer, rapist, and necrophile who committed the sexual assault and murder of seventy-eight girls and women between 1992 and 2010 in Angarsk, Irkutsk, in Siberia, and Vladivostok in Far East, although he has confessed to and is suspected of at least eighty-three in total. He is known as “The Werewolf” and the “Angarsk Maniac” for the particularly brutal nature of his crimes; he would extensively mutilate the bodies of his victims and perform sexual acts on them.
Popkov, a former police officer and security guard, was convicted of 22 murders in 2015 and sentenced to life imprisonment, and confessed to an additional 59 three years later; on December 10, 2018, he was convicted for 56 of the 59 additional killings, three of which the police could not find sufficient evidence with which to be proven, and given a second life sentence.[3] Popkov received a second life sentence.[4] There were calls for Popkov to be executed, but this was unavailable as capital punishment in Russia is subject to a formal moratorium.[5]
Russian propagandists on state TV say life is overrated:
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of 35. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:45 PM for 9h 22m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 55.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1952, NBC‘s long-running morning news program Today debuts, with host Dave Garroway.
Jeffrey Gettleman and Oleksandra Mykolyshyn report As Russians Steal Ukraine’s Art, They Attack Its Identity, Too (‘Russian forces have looted tens of thousands of pieces, including avant-garde oil paintings and Scythian gold. Experts say it is the biggest art heist since the Nazis in World War II, intended to strip Ukraine of its cultural heritage’):
KHERSON, Ukraine — One morning in late October, Russian forces blocked off a street in downtown Kherson and surrounded a graceful old building with dozens of soldiers.
Five large trucks pulled up. So did a line of military vehicles, ferrying Russian agents who filed in through several doors. It was a carefully planned, highly organized, military-style assault — on an art museum.
Over the next four days, the Kherson Regional Art Museum was cleaned out, witnesses said, with Russian forces “bustling about like insects,” porters wheeling out thousands of paintings, soldiers hastily wrapping them in sheets, art experts barking out orders and packing material flying everywhere.
“They were loading such masterpieces, which there are no more in the world, as if they were garbage,” said the museum’s longtime director, Alina Dotsenko, who recently returned from exile, recounting what employees and witnesses had told her.
When she came back to the museum in early November and grasped how much had been stolen, she said, “I almost lost my mind.”
Kherson. Mariupol. Melitopol. Kakhovsky. Museums of art, history and antiquities.
As Russia has ravaged Ukraine with deadly missile strikes and brutal atrocities on civilians, it has also looted the nation’s cultural institutions of some of the most important and intensely protected contributions of Ukraine and its forebears going back thousands of years.
International art experts say the plundering may be the single biggest collective art heist since the Nazis pillaged Europe in World War II.
The Russian army and her mercenaries: invaders, killers, war criminals, thieves.
While a libertarian would prefer peaceful trade with all the world, he or she cannot countenance savagery in its place. We are right to arm the Ukrainians so that they can defend themselves. Russian weapons and tactics are inferior to our own; those in our country before the war who claimed otherwise are now evident fools.
Americans who apologize for Putin, or craft lies against Ukraine, debase themselves by becoming fellow travelers or (occasionally) fifth columnists of the Russian dictatorship.
Deadly tornado rips through Alabama leaving damage in its wake:
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 30. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:44 PM for 9h 21m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 65.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1888, the National Geographic Society is founded in Washington, D.C.
Henry Redman reports Racine at the center of Wisconsin’s election conspiracy universe:
In the two years since the 2020 election, the city of Racine and the surrounding area have become a hotbed of right-wing election-related activism.
In November of 2021, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling accused five of the election commission’s six members of committing felony election fraud for choosing not to force voting assistants to go in person to nursing homes to collect absentee ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last year, Schmaling was again involved in a right-wing allegation of election fraud when Racine County resident Harry Wait reached out to the sheriff to alert him of a vulnerability in the state’s online absentee ballot request system. Instead of exposing a flaw, Wait informed Schmaling that he’d illegally requested and received absentee ballots on behalf of Racine’s Democratic Mayor Cory Mason and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester).
Wait is now facing criminal charges for his fraudulent absentee ballot requests.
The 2020 election was fair and accurate. Numerous reviews, audits, lawsuits and investigations in Wisconsin have affirmed that President Joe Biden won the state and that there was no widespread election fraud. Yet in the more than two years since the 2020 election, complaints of election fraud have come from all over the state. Two of the most vocal lawmakers on the issue, Reps. Janel Brandtjen and Tim Ramthun, came from Waukesha and Fond du Lac counties. Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s widely derided review of the 2020 election was based in Brookfield.
But the Racine area has seen election-related right-wing activism persist past the 2022 midterms with a fervor that other parts of the state have not been able to sustain as attention has shifted to other issues.
….
“So there’s a local group here that’s very active, Harry Wait being one of their leaders who’ve really been pretty steadfast in their critique of the work that the city does to make sure that people have access to the polls,” Mason says. “So I think that’s what’s different. I think there’s a group here that’s radicalized in a way that we’re not seeing in other parts of the state.”
Whitewater has her share of conspiracy-minded populists, convinced of one lunatic notion or another, but not so many as Racine. If we’d educated our people better, and so fortified them against nonsense, we’d have a healthier and more prosperous city. We didn’t, as it was momentarily easier to pretend that all was well, and to avoid refuting ignorant-but-easily-offended conspiracy theorists, so now we’ve a years-long problem of recovery ahead of us.
There is nothing that scares Whitewater community leaders and our school administrators into acquiescence so much as an edgy, ignorant man in a red trucker cap. See (Local) Fear of a Red Hat.
Scientists record world’s largest hatching of baby turtles in South America:
Andrew Daniels writes in Popular Mechanics about the Acoustic Kitty project, a Failed Government Feline Mission:
In the 1960s, the CIA allegedly spent $20 million to implant microphones in cats’ ear canals so the animals could inconspicuously eavesdrop on the Soviets. The disastrous first mission, in which a cat would mosey around the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., doomed the ill-conceived effort—codenamed “Acoustic Kitty”—from the start: “The cat was released nearby, but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately.”
Acoustic Kitty was canceled in 1967…
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 35. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:43 PM for 9h 19m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1932, Hattie Caraway becomes the first woman elected to the United States Senate.
Scott Bauer reports Wisconsin Elections Commission member bragged about GOP plan to suppress Milwaukee votes:
A Democratic member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission called Wednesday for a Republican member who bragged about GOP efforts to suppress votes in Milwaukee to resign from the bipartisan panel.
Commissioner Robert Spindell’s comments sent in an email to Republicans in the 4th Congressional District were first reported on Tuesday by Urban Milwaukee. On Wednesday, fellow Commissioner Mark Thomsen, a Democratic attorney, said Spindell should step down from the six-member commission.
“My fellow commissioner Bob Spindell has shown he cannot be fair and should resign from the WEC,” Thomsen tweeted.
In the email, as quoted by Urban Milwaukee, Spindell, who is white, says that Republicans “can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”
Spindell said the effort was due to a “well thought out multi-faceted plan.”
Spindell provided The Associated Press with a similar email he said he sent to Republicans in the 4th Congressional District. That message also heralded the drop in voters in Milwaukee, but described it differently.
….
Spindell is a defendant in three separate pending lawsuits related to him serving as a fake GOP elector.
One in federal court seeks $2.4 million in damages from Spindell and the other fake electors, alleging that they were part of conspiracy by Trump to overturn the election. Another lawsuit in Dane County circuit court alleges that Spindell should have recused himself from a complaint filed with the Wisconsin Elections Commission seeking action against the fake electors, of which Spindell was one. A third lawsuit alleged Spindell did not comply with the state open records law for documents requested related to his being a fake elector.
An elections commissioner as fake elector and opponent of (some) voter turnout.
That’s present-day Wisconsin.
James Webb Space Telescope snaps ‘dynamic star-forming region’:
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 45. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:42 PM for 9h 18m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 82.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Police & Fire Commission meets at 7 PM.
On this day in 1964, Surgeon General of the United States Dr. Luther Terry, M.D., publishes the landmark report Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States saying that smoking may be hazardous to health, sparking national and worldwide anti-smoking efforts.
Shawn Johnson reports Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates discuss abortion, redistricting at Madison forum:
The four candidates running for a pivotal seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court laid out how they’d approach the job during a forum in Madison Monday, with some of the candidates sending strong signals about their views on issues like redistricting and abortion.
Waukesha County Judge Jennifer Dorow, former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Everett Mitchell and Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz are all seeking a 10-year term on the court to replace conservative Justice Patience Roggensack, who is retiring. Roggensack endorsed Dorow Monday.
The court currently has a 4-3 conservative majority, meaning the race could flip the ideological balance of the court. While the race is officially nonpartisan, Dorow and Kelly are supported by Republicans while Mitchell and Protasiewicz are backed by Democrats.
The forum comes a little more than a month before voters head to the polls in a Feb. 21 primary. The top two vote-getters will advance to the general election on April 4.
The statewide court race with an ideological tint (where candidates express definite & partisan views) will affect local elections that take on an ideological tint. If the high-court race should cause a tide in one direction or another, candidates locally who are identified ideologically will benefit (or lose) ground accordingly.
Of posts this week: Wisconsin’s Near-Death Experience (the 2022 elections), What Price for a Wisconsin Legacy? (an aspirational future), and today’s on the Wisconsin Supreme Court Race (the real future whether hopeful or regrettable). Local may not be local, as nonpartisan is not nonpartisan.
Drone footage shows vehicle inside huge sinkhole after torrential downpours in California:
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 42. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:41 PM for 9h 16m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 89% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 49 BC, Caesar crosses the Rubicon, signaling the start of civil war.
Steven Walters writes Evers, Vos Seek Legacy-Defining Wins:
The Capitol’s two top elected officials, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, fought over dozens of major policy issues over the last four years. But they share one thing — worry about their legacies — in the 2023-24 legislative session that began last week.
The 71-year-old Evers is unlikely to seek a third four-year term in 2026. So, he wants both this session and the one that follows to write his eight years in office into Wisconsin’s history books.
Vos will turn 55 on July 5, just past the deadline for approval of the 2023-25 state budget. Vos took his 10th oath of office last week; he will have spent more than one-third of his life in the Assembly by mid-2023. The longest-serving Assembly speaker in state history, Vos has passed on all runs for statewide office and is not expected to run against Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin in 2024.
But Vos had a political near-death experience last August, when he won his party’s nomination for re-election by only 300 votes over a challenger backed by former President Donald Trump.
All this may have Vos, who runs several small businesses, asking how much longer he wants to be a Capitol power broker.
….
Evers and Vos may find one definition of a “legacy” helpful: “Learning from the past, living in the present, and building for the future.”
What deals are truly worth making with a gerrymandered — illegitimate — leader?
There may be a few (e.g., medical marijuana), but only few.
A better definition of legacy would be holding to principle.
Ozone layer on track to recover within decades, UN reports:
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 40. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:39 PM for 9h 15m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1962, NASA announces plans to build the C-5 rocket launch vehicle, then known as the “Advanced Saturn,” to carry human beings to the Moon.
Ari Berman writes How Democracy Nearly Died in Wisconsin:
If the redistricting maps drawn in secret by Republican staffers and passed by the GOP-controlled legislature in 2011 were unfair, the maps adopted by Republicans in 2021, over Evers’ objections, were even more one-sided. As a result, the number of GOP-leaning seats increased to 63 out of 99 in the state Assembly and to 23 out of 33 in the state Senate. That meant that—according to calculations by Marquette University Law School research fellow John Johnson—Democrats would have to win the 2022 statewide vote by 12 points just to get to 50 seats in the Assembly, while Republicans could garner a majority with only 44 percent of the vote.
At the state GOP convention back in May, held at a Marriott in suburban Madison, GOP Assembly leader Robin Vos candidly laid out his plan for total domination of state politics. His top priority, he said, was defeating Evers. But short of that, if Republicans picked up one more seat in the Senate and five in the Assembly, Vos explained, that would give them a two-thirds supermajority that would “make Tony Evers irrelevant.”
That supermajority would have given legislative Republicans unfettered authority to override Evers’ vetoes and the power to implement an extreme and unpopular agenda on issues ranging from guns to education to abortion—including, potentially, the ability to overturn election results. “If Republicans get supermajorities in the state legislature,” Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler warned before the election, “it’s a threat to the foundations of American democracy.”
On November 8, Vos’ first plan failed. Evers was reelected by 3.5 points—triple his margin in 2018 and practically a landslide by Wisconsin standards—marking the first time since 1962 that Wisconsin had voted for a Democratic governor while a Democratic president was in office. But Vos’ backup plan almost succeeded: Despite Democrats winning four out of five statewide offices, Republicans picked up the state Senate seat they needed and ended up just two Assembly seats short of a supermajority, coming remarkably close to nullifying the power of the twice-elected governor.
In a year in which seemingly the entire GOP radicalized against democracy, Republicans in Wisconsin were on the cutting edge of attacking free and fair elections. Donald Trump had made the state the focal point of his obsession to decertify the 2020 election; nearly three-quarters of Republicans in the legislature acted to discredit or overturn the results; and critics of the way elections are conducted in Wisconsin ran for governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. That was just the beginning of their plans. The GOP hoped to wrest control away from the bipartisan commission that supervises elections and turn it over to the ultra-gerrymandered legislature, which could give it more power over how elections are certified. That could’ve allowed Republicans to toss aside election results in 2024 through more sophisticated and ostensibly legal means than Trump used in 2020.
A place nearly drowned yet saved.
‘Flying boat’ makes waves at CES:
