My Twitter feed is kind of a mess lately. Whatever changes Elon Musk has made to the algorithm have resulted in a bunch of posts from randos and brands that don’t seem to bear much relationship to anything I care about. Fortunately, though, a pre-Musk follow of mine that lightens up my timeline continues to break through: Cats of Yore.
The account is exactly what it says it is: pictures of cats of yore. These cats may be in historic paintings, or accompanying a child in early-20th-century New York City. They might play with a ball of string, or wear a top hat. They might be napping or hissing or licking their sibling. One thing they all have in common is extreme cuteness. If you are a cat person, this is enough. And even if you aren’t, this account may just change your mind.
It’s a fine account, well worth following if you’re on Twitter.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 52. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:29 PM for 9h 04m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 44.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1845, the United States annexes the Republic of Texas.
Foxconn was, and remains, a national embarrassment for Wisconsin. See a FREE WHITEWATERcategory dedicated to Foxconn. Through it all, after years of revealed mistakes and lies, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has been a Foxconn booster. SeeSpeaker Vos shares excitement for Foxconn deal with Wisconsin(from 2021, long after the rest of America had grown hoarse from laughing about the deal).
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is calling the state’s economic development department an “abject failure,” and says Wisconsin can no longer compete with other states to attract large companies.
“Their strategy is cookie cutter, literally saying to every business in the state ‘we’ll give you $5,000 or $10,000’ that drives little or no innovation,” Vos said. “What industry should we really try to make bigger in Wisconsin? What should we say ‘you’re a thing of the past that we shouldn’t invest in?’ We don’t have any of those discussions.”
Democrats fired back, calling Vos the lead advocate for WEDC’s creation under former Gov. Scott Walker.
“It is no surprise that he chooses to walk away from leadership at a time when there are opportunities for WEDC to shift to a more sustainable strategy that strengthens local economies and supports small businesses,” said state Rep. Francesca Hong, D-Madison, who was recently appointed to the WEDC board.
This libertarian blogger is no supporter of the WEDC, although fortunately there’s no chance that the agency will ever find again a project as fraudulent as Foxconn has been. A lightning bolt of such destructive intensity is not going to strike us twice.
Nevertheless, it says something about Vos’s shamelessness that he’d venture any opinion on development.
How many times does a person or clique get to make development mistakes before they’re no longer allowed to do so?
A loose llama led police on a chase in Fairfax County, VA, earlier this month, and multiple officers were needed to wrangle it. Aerial video with thermal imaging released by police shows the llama in a backyard. Body-worn camera video shows officers trying to lasso the llama with a rope, but it keeps getting away.
‘Always ready to give chase when a suspect flees, our officers and animal protection police (APP) encountered a nimble, furry suspect Sunday night,’ the police department wrote alongside the video on Facebook.
Eventually, three officers surrounded the llama and secured the animal with a rope, then led it to a waiting trailer. Police said the llama was later transported to an animal shelter.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 40. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:28 PM for 9h 03m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 34% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1836, Spain recognizes the independence of Mexico with the signing of the Santa María–Calatrava Treaty.
ATLANTA — Federal scrutiny is growing. The chief executive is apologizing to customers.
And as the meltdown at Southwest Airlines, one of the worst that industry observers have seen in decades, entered yet another day on Wednesday, irate customers remained stranded, separated from their families and some still carrying Christmas gifts they planned to deliver days ago.
There was no relief early Wednesday: Southwest had canceled more than 2,500 flights, or 62 percent of its planned flights for the day, according to FlightAware, a flight-tracking service. The company has said it could be days until the knots are untangled and normal service resumes.
….
The issues stem from the carrier’s unique “point to point” model, in which planes tend to fly from destination to destination without returning to one or two main hubs. Most airlines follow a “hub and spoke” model, in which planes typically return to a hub airport after flying out to other cities.
When bad weather hits, hub-and-spoke airlines can shut down specific routes and have plans in place to restart operations when the skies clear. But bad weather can scramble multiple flights and routes in a point-to-point model, leaving Southwest staff out of position to resume normal operations.
Southwest has a travel model that works well for them except in bad weather, as against other airlines’ models. Federal scrutiny isn’t needed here; consumer awareness is what’s needed. If travelers decide that flying Southwest is an itinerary risk not with taking, the airline will either change its model, decline in size, or go under. Poor safety isn’t sinking Southwest, it’s their logistical plan that doesn’t work well in bad weather that troubles them. Southwest’s planes aren’t falling out of the sky; they’re stuck on the ground.
Travelers, not the United States Department of Transportation, should be deciding Southwest’s prospects.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 26. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:27 PM for 9h 03m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 23.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Fred Prehn, Walker appointee to the Natural Resources Board, has resigned effective 12.30.22. Prehn refused to leave his seat at the expiration of his term, leading to a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling (4-3) that he did not have to resign until the Wisconsin Senate would not confirm a replacement. The WISGOP Senate wouldn’t confirm Gov. Evers’s nominee, so Prehn stayed on. Laura Schultz reports Scott Walker appointee Frederick Prehn resigns from Natural Resources Board after over-staying term:
Prehn, a Wausau dentist, was appointed by Walker in 2015. He refused to step down after his term ended, denying Evers’ appointee Sandra Naas a seat and maintaining a 4-3 majority for Republican appointees.
In his resignation letter, Prehn self-pityingly writes that “Unfortunately, it took the Supreme Court to confirm my decision to stay on at great expense for the taxpayer and an immense personal price.”
That ‘immense price’ includes the self-inflicted wound of revealed text messages in which Prehn described his plan: “So I might stick around for a while. See what shakes out. I’ll be like a turd in water up there.” Can’t say Prehn doesn’t understand himself. SeeFred Prehn, the Most Self-Aware Man in All History and Tiny Fred Prehn.
As it turns out, the Centers for Disease Control has a webpage describing why people should not relieve themselves in pools of water. See from the Centers for Disease Control, Poop in the Pool. (There doesn’t seem to be any guidance on what do do about people who describe themselves as poop in a pool.)
Prehn by character is a vulgarian, but by occupation’s a dentist and cranberry farmer. One would have expected a better grasp of self-image (and of hygiene) from someone in either line of work. Fortunately, Prehn’s not my dentist, so I’m all good there.
But I drink cranberry juice (it’s delicious!), and there’s a possibility that Prehn might be supplying to my favorite brand. A switch might be in order, right?
Our youngest would advise “pondering on that.” Indeed.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 18. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:27 PM for 9h 02m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 14.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1944, George S. Patton’s Third Army breaks the encirclement of surrounded U.S. forces at Bastogne, Belgium.
The collapse of FTX (cryptocurrency exchange and crypto hedge fund) is a financial loss for many. (I have no investments in crypto, and so the story is, for me, merely an instructive ethical tale.) No one is writing more usefully about FTX (or other financial topics) than Matt Levine.
Of course there will be several FTX movies, and maybe the most cinematic scene in the whole story is the meeting that Caroline Ellison, the chief executive officer of Alameda Research, FTX’s affiliated trading firm, held to tell her employees that they’d been stealing FTX customer money. Imagine! Imagine coming into the company all-hands meeting at the lucrative trading firm you work at, in the Bahamas, far away from your friends and family and competitors, in a slightly cult-like environment where your every need is catered to out of the firm’s enormous profits. And then your 28-year-old boss is like “so guys, a little bad news, actually we’re a Ponzi? Sorry if I didn’t mention that earlier.” Everyone quit immediately, but much too late.
….
Ellison and Gary Wang, the former chief technology officer of FTX, have agreed to plead guilty to federal fraud charges for their role in the FTX implosion. (The plea agreements say that Ellison and Wang face maximum sentences of 110 and 50 years in prison, respectively, though presumably they will end up with substantial discounts for cooperating.) Last night, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX and Alameda, landed in New York to face similar charges. There is something of a prisoner’s-dilemma situation here, in that there was in theory the possibility that everyone at FTX and Alameda could have stuck together and said “what, we never did anything wrong,” and that they might have persuaded a jury of that. The odds were always low, but it is the approach that Bankman-Fried has taken in public interviews.
….
The question I always have in situations like this is: How did they think this would go? What was the good outcome here? Why do all this? Many financial crimes have essentially the shape of Ponzi schemes, which by their nature snowball: You take some money from new customers to pay fake returns to old customers, which requires you to take even more money from newer customers to keep paying the fake returns, etc., until the hole gets too big and you go to prison. If you start by stealing $1,000, pretty soon you need to steal $10,000, and then $100,000, and then you find yourself running a billion-dollar Ponzi. And there’s rarely a way to come back from that. It is hard to make back a billion dollars at the roulette tables.
You can keep this going for a while, if you are good and lucky; Bernie Madoff ran a huge Ponzi for years. But that doesn’t really help. The longer you run the Ponzi, the deeper the hole gets; being respectable and trusted for decades doesn’t really get you the billions of dollars you need to plug the hole. It is hard to grow your way out of it; growth mostly makes the problem worse.
And that’s it: “the deeper the hole gets.” They should have walked away years ago, after the first day of this confidence game. Levine, by the way, saw this as a confidence game months before FTX collapsed. In a podcast with Bankman-Fried, Levine’s questions to Bankman-Fried made plain that Bankman-Fried’s thinking was like someone running a Ponzi scheme. See Odd Lots Podcastand Sam Bankman-Fried Described Yield Farming and Left Matt Levine Stunned.
But Bankman-Fried, Ellison, and Wang kept going, with hubris that only invited Nemesis.
They should have done better by others, but then, truthfully, they didn’t see better even of their own limits.
Christmas in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 11. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:26 PM for 9h 02m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Christmas Eve in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 8. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 02m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
There are local elections for school board, city council, and the city’s municipal court in April. The deadline for candidates to submit nomination papers for those races is 1.3.2023. That’s ten days from now. (As it turns out, ten days is also 240 hours, or 14,400 minutes, or 864,000 seconds.) Plenty of time.
And yet, and yet, over at the Whitewater Banner (a publication that uses a byline but has no real journalists) there’s some worry, it seems, that there might not be enough school board candidates: Three School Board Seats Open; What Happens if There are Less Than Three Candidates? (https://whitewaterbanner.com/three-school-board-seats-open-what-happens-if-there-are-less-than-three-candidates/).
A few quick remarks.
There’s one candidate declared, and there may be more by 1.3.23. Nothing happened yesterday, and nothing will happen tomorrow, that will in any possible way adversely affect education in Whitewater.
We won’t know if there will be three open seats until January 3rd. Both the school district’s Central Office and the Banner have used the term ‘open seats’ incorrectly. SeeElections, Candidates, and ‘Open Seats.’
How many people are in government matters less than what government does. Let’s suppose, despite all possibility, that no one ever runs for school board again in Whitewater. No one, ever. There will still be public education in Whitewater, however organized. Then — as now — it will matter what is taught and how it is taught. It’s what you do that matters, and the doing of education, so to speak, is teaching and learning. See“You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memory.”
I’ve no idea — no normal, professionally-oriented idea — why the Banner chose to accompany its post with a photo of a small, confused child, layered in sepia. There’s no reason for confusion or worry, or justification to impute confusion or worry to anyone.
It’s okay — we’re gonna get through this. Breathe deeply, think of ocean vistas and kitty cats, and you’ll be fine.
Whitewater has many challenges that she can, and must, overcome. The manner for candidates declaring and when is not among them. Indeed, if this were the measure of our problems then we’d have no problems at all.
Friday in Whitewater will be cold with a high of -1. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 01m 55s of daytime. The moon is a new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1783, George Washington resigns as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army at the Maryland State House in Annapolis, Maryland.
What’s bad advice from a lawyer? Well, when you’re not protecting the client’s interest, and when you’re dissuading the client from truthful testimony. Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer report Jan. 6 Witness Told Panel That Lawyer Tried to Influence Her Testimony (‘Cassidy Hutchinson recounted to the House select committee how a lawyer with ties to former President Donald J. Trump said to her that she should “focus on protecting the president.”’):
WASHINGTON — Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who was a standout witness of the House Jan. 6 committee investigation, told the panel in an interview in September that a lawyer aligned with former President Donald J. Trump had tried to influence her testimony, the latest example of what the committee says was an effort to stonewall its inquiry.
“We just want to focus on protecting the president,” Ms. Hutchinson recalled Stefan Passantino, a former Trump White House lawyer who represented her during her early interactions with the committee, telling her.
“We all know you’re loyal,” she said Mr. Passantino told her. “Let’s just get you in and out, and this day will be easy, I promise.”
….
But it was Ms. Hutchinson’s transcript release that captured the most attention on Capitol Hill. The document shows Mr. Passantino was not the only person who Ms. Hutchinson claimed wanted her to protect Mr. Trump.
She told the committee that on the night before her initial interview, another aide to Mr. Meadows, Ben Williamson, called her with a message.
“Mark [Meadows] wants you to know that he knows you’re loyal and he knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss,” she quoted Mr. Williamson as saying, in an apparent reference to Mr. Trump. “You know, he knows that we’re all on the same team and we’re all a family.”
….
In her two most recent interviews with the committee, Ms. Hutchinson repeatedly suggested that Mr. Passantino sought to shape her testimony and encouraged her to avoid mentioning events that might embarrass Mr. Trump. She said she was concerned in particular about being asked about an episode in which Mr. Trump was said to have lunged at a Secret Service agent who refused to take him to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
According to Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony, Mr. Passantino advised her to say that she did not recall the event if she was asked about it. “The less you remember, the better,” she quoted him as saying.
Mr. Passantino left the White House Counsel’s Office midway through Mr. Trump’s term. But he maintained ties to Mr. Trump’s world, including appearing in court as a lawyer for the Trump Organization regarding some of Mr. Trump’s legal matters.
Stefan Passantino has taken a leave of absence from law firm Michael Best & Friedrich following an allegation that he advised a Trump White House staffer to mislead the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the US Capitol.
Passantino, who was once the top ethics lawyer in the Trump White House, later advised White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson as she prepared to go before the committee. CNN reported that committee members believe Passantino urged Hutchinson to mislead the panel. Hutchinson switched lawyers before testifying publicly in a June committee hearing.
Passantino’s bio has been scrubbed from Michael Best’s website. He’s on leave “given the distraction of this matter,” he said Wednesday in a email. Passantino said he was not acting on behalf of Michael Best in his work for Hutchinson and pushed back against the allegation that he advised her to mislead lawmakers.
Michael Best did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Now, some sound advice for Whitewater (or anywhere, truly): avoid officials and their hangers-on who urge that everyone should act as ‘one family,’ or that it’s best to follow ‘our traditions’ rather than standard, ethical practices. This ilk manages that way well enough, and brims with confidence, until someone comes along and shatters the shell of their rotten egg. Walk away, as Hutchinson did, and find someone better who will offer ethical advice.
Tuesday, December 27 at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once@ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Look forward to the future and the new year, as we enter the Multiverse, a theoretical reality that includes a possibly infinite number of parallel universes.
In this adventure, an aging Chinese immigrant (Michelle Yeoh) is swept up in an insane adventure, in which she alone can save our world, by exploring other universes connecting with the other lives she could have led. Also stars Jamie Lee Curtis.
This film has garnered a lot of 2023 Oscar buzz. As the 2023 Golden Globe and Academy Awards approach, Seniors in the Park will be screening the nominated films.
P-22, a puma known and beloved to residents of Los Angeles, died last week after a life of adventure. He wore a tracking collar, and his travels and appearances in Griffith Park captivated people in California and beyond. Well, done, feline, well done.
On the one hand, there’s the matter of celebrity. Certainly, the 12-year-old cat fit the criteria — sought out by residents eager for a sighting, written up in publications including National Geographic. Just think of the iconic photos: P-22 passing below the Hollywood sign or standing on a crest overlooking the basin, with its sprawling nighttime lights.
Perhaps most telling: This newspaper [Los Angeles Times] prepared a prewritten “obituary.”
And yet, celebrity is fickle and it is fleeting. It’s far too shallow a gloss on P-22. What made this mountain lion essential for us was not that he was famous, but that he persevered.
To get to Griffith Park, P-22 had to migrate from the Santa Monica Mountains and may have crossed both the 405 and the 101 freeways. Once in the park, he beat the odds and stuck around for 10 years, making the “urban wilderness” of Los Angeles his home.
Isn’t that, to some extent, the case for all of us? Whether we arrived from elsewhere or were born here, we have built lives in this city not least by reckoning with its ferocity. Los Angeles is often caricatured as witlessly Edenic, “the City of Dreadful Joy,” in Aldous Huxley’s pointed phrase. But we know that’s just a stereotype, a convenient mythology of the place.
Instead of Huxley’s witless joy, let’s substitute wildness: a city in which nature vividly asserts itself. This begins with the instability of the landscape — the fires, floods, earthquakes and droughts. Among my favorite civic symbols are the La Brea Tar Pits, which sit in the midst of the metropolis like a harbinger of past and future, reminding us of where the city came from, what it will revert to.
Thursday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of 27. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 01m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1864, Savannah, Georgia, falls to the Union’sArmy of the Tennessee, and General Sherman tells President Lincoln: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.”
Exclusive phone records, documents, interviews and thousands of hours of video reveal how a Russian paratrooper unit killed dozens of people on one street in March.
These Russians soldiers, and the Kremlin’s dictatorship that sent them to murder in Ukraine, are enemies of our people, too. No number of fellow travelers on cable news, flacking Putin’s line, and defaming our Ukrainian allies, can change this plain truth. Disaffected populists of the extreme left and right are more agitated than they have been in many years, after seeing what they do not wish to see: that majorities in America understand right and wrong apart from the populists’ repeated distortions.
Whitewater has only one populism, a populism of the right. (That Whitewater supposedly has a meaningful, left-leaning populism is a crackpot notion held only by a few overwrought rightwing populists. People of normal intellectual ability and emotional stability could live for hundreds of years and not make the mistake of thinking that way. SeeIdentifying Types and Spotting Issues.)
In any event, a few tankies of the left and right, who see goodness in Putin and evil in Zelensky, are morally compromised.
Eugene Finkel wryly notes “[n]ot going to lie, the simultaneous tankie far-left and far-right meltdowns are a sight to behold.”
Winter in Whitewater begins with mostly cloudy skies with a high of 25. This desert-like season lasts until March 20, 2023. No season demands more; no demands more welcome. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 01m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world’s first full-length animated feature, premieres at the Carthay Circle Theatre.
Decades from now on Mars, Douglas Quaid will tell Kuato, a psychic mutant from that planet, that he wants to remember who he is. This will be their conversation:
Kuato: What do you want, Mr. Quaid?
Douglas Quaid: The same as you; to remember.
Kuato: But why?
Douglas Quaid: To be myself again.
Kuato: You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memory.
So it will be with Quaid, as it is now with us, including even candidates and officeholders. It’s what one does that defines a person.
Some run for office, and a smaller number hold will office, but it’s what they do in office that matters.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 25. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 01m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1987, in the worst peacetime sea disaster, the passenger ferry Doña Paz sinks after colliding with the oil tanker MT Vector in the Tablas Strait of the Philippines, killing an estimated 4,000 people (1,749 official).
Imagine taking the job! Yesterday Elon Musk tweeted a poll asking if he should step down as “head” of Twitter Inc.; 17.5 million people voted, and the results were 57.5% to 42.5% in favor of him stepping down. “I will abide by the results of this poll,” he said. But he also tweeted “As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it.” And: “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.” And: “The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive.” And, listing qualifications for the next chief executive officer: “You must like pain a lot. One catch: you have to invest your life savings in Twitter and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May. Still want the job?”
Meanwhile Musk has been trying to raise money for Twitter at $54.20 per share, the $44 billion valuation at which he bought it; he said in October that he was “obviously overpaying.” Since then things have, uh, not gone well. So the proposition is … what? You take all of your money, you give it to Musk to buy equity in his company at a price that you all agree is absurd? And then you get to work for him, running a sullen and broken Twitter according to his ever-shifting whims, until he changes his mind and fires you? And when he fires you he denies you severance and dares you to sue, and accuses you of being a sex criminal?
Musk’s ownership has become, in fact, quite the mess.
There are two aspects to seeing as much: Musk is ridiculous, and he looks ridiculous.
The latter of these aspects, that he looks ridiculous, is easier to see from a distance. A ridiculous person close up becomes familiar in his ridiculousness, and those nearby become inured to his absurdity. From a distance, however, that absurdity isn’t leavened or obscured: it’s obvious, starkly so.
For faraway Musk, that’s his problem: he’s unmistakably absurd. For the ridiculous who are nearby, it’s our problem: we have become imperceptive to their foolishness.
We should be looking at our own businessmen anew, with fresh eyes.
Foxconn was, and remains, a national embarrassment for Wisconsin. See a FREE 
David Olin writes