Cats
Friday Catblogging: Perfect Fit
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
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Archaeology, Daily Bread, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 9.29.22: A 3,000-Year-Old Canoe from Lake Mendota
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 64. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 6:38 PM for 11h 47m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 14.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1957, the Green Bay Packers dedicate City Stadium, now known as Lambeau Field, and defeat the Chicago Bears, 21-17. In the capacity crowd of 32,132 is Vice President Nixon.
Sarah Kuta, writing in Smithsonian Magazine, reports 3,000-Year-Old Dugout Canoe Recovered From Wisconsin Lake (Archaeologists believe it’s the oldest canoe ever found in the Great Lakes region):
While teaching a scuba diving lesson this spring, Tamara Thomsen spotted a piece of wood poking out of the sand of Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota. Though many people would’ve thought nothing of it, Thomsen—a maritime archaeologist—had a strong feeling the find was more than just driftwood.
That’s because, about a year earlier, Thomsen had discovered a 1,200-year-old canoe at the same lake in Madison. And her hunch was right: The piece of wood was part of another dugout canoe, this one an estimated 3,000 years old, the Wisconsin Historical Society revealed last week.
“Not a joke: I found another dugout canoe,” Thomsen texted her boss in May, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Sophie Carson.
The canoe—carved around 1,000 B.C.E., likely by ancestors of the Ho-Chunk Nation—is made from a single piece of white oak that stretches 14.5 feet long. Archaeologists believe it’s the oldest canoe ever found in the Great Lakes region by 1,000 years; it’s also the earliest direct evidence of water transportation used by Indigenous peoples in the region.
“This one predates agriculture, predates pottery. This one predates all of Wisconsin’s [effigy] mounds,” says Amy Rosebrough, an archaeologist with the historical society, to the Wisconsin State Journal’s Barry Adams. “I don’t have words for what this is right now. I can’t really think of much that competes with this. I really can’t. I mean Wisconsin has incredible archaeology, but this is stellar.”
Thomsen’s latest find was located only about 100 yards from the canoe she stumbled across in June 2021, while swimming on her day off. The vessels’ close proximity suggests that the shoreline of Lake Mendota, the largest of Madison’s five freshwater lakes, probably shifted over time. Indigenous people likely once lived in ancient villages where the water is now.
How This Restaurant Makes Chocolate Shoes:
Babbittry, Boosterism, CDA, Charity, City, Corporate Welfare, Culture, Daily Bread, Development, Economics, Economy, Free Markets, Housing, Local Government, Poverty, School District, Zoning
Daily Bread for 9.28.22: Local and National Views of Child Poverty
by JOHN ADAMS • • 2 Comments
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 58. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 6:40 PM for 11h 50m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1781, American and French forces backed by a French fleet begin the siege of Yorktown.
Whitewater has begun, only these last few years, a more candid discussion of child poverty within the area, in both the city proper and the school district.
And so, one can find a plain, accurate account of socio-economic conditions in the area, as the school district’s budget director recently presented:
See Slides on Whitewater’s (Socio-Economic) Condition and Brief Implications of Whitewater’s (Socio-Economic) Condition.
Of the Whitewater Unified School District’s administration and school board: their presentation on need is true, but will this truth be transformative for them? A profound truth should bring a profound transformation in words and deeds. The district’s Central Office will not be able to address this truth through boosterism’s mendacities.
Libertarians — genuine ones — care about poverty and know that for hundreds of millions across this planet, free markets have lifted people across the globe from destitution. These successes did not come from government intervention and did not come from so-called government private ‘partnerships.’ Such partnerships are all-to-often incumbents’ and insiders’ efforts to help themselves to public funds they do not deserve. Cronyism enriches cronies.
That’s why FREE WHITEWATER has doggedly addressed poverty in this community: a it’s topic that should be discussed and a condition that can be alleviated.
Nationally, child poverty figures have dropped, and that presents an initial question: Why?
A discussion of this topic appears from at The Daily, from 9.26.22:
While this program argues that government spending counted more carefully for each recipient and as an increased amount has lifted many from poverty, it also notes the role of welfare reform and economic growth as causes of national poverty decline. Many of the benefits discussed are wage subsidies through tax credits for working recipients (the working poor).
An emphasis of reform on work benefited all, and poverty fell among children nationally for all races and ethnicities.
If America in aggregate has achieved these gains, then many American communities have achieved their own gains that contribute to national success against poverty.
Whitewater, bluntly, is not among the communities that have seen uplift.
While this libertarian blogger will never hold to the view that others should be silent, when the self-described development men in this town (landlords, bankers, CDA alumni, public relations men) speak they have behind them a generation of public-policy failure.
They have the same rights as other residents, deserving neither less nor more. They do not, however, have the same quality of ideas and proposals as other residents, as they’ve wasted decades on failed ideas and projects.
Their hocus-pocus economic theories will not ameliorate this condition, and their supposed successes (superficial and paltry as they are) have done nothing to improve individual and household incomes in this community.
Ordinary people in Whitewater — and we are all of this kind, a few residents’ sense of entitlement notwithstanding — know that development trickery hasn’t done the trick.
For the community’s well-being, for all of us, it’s stand or fall on this challenge. The consequences of a generation of policy errors have been worse than mere statistics; these consequences have broken the community into shards. Bad economics leads to troubled socio-economics.
Solutions won’t come from the failed past, and won’t adhere to a single orthodoxy. A minimal role for government, but a powerful role for a Dorothy Day figure in Whitewater (whether religious or secular) would do much to slowly heal this community. See Waiting for Whitewater’s Dorothy Day. (It’s impossible to imagine Day, herself, without definite religious views, but other perspectives could still reflect a fundamental, charitable focus.)
While there are parts of Day’s thinking about government that are libertarian, others of her views on economics are decidedly different. (No matter — one prescribes for the patient, not the pharmaceutical representative.)
Free markets are holistic, like good nutrition and exercise: they enrich people each day, and are the foundation of health and prosperity. Government intervention is like both ordinary and emergency medicine: a role for prescribed pills, annual checkups, and emergency trauma care.
A charitable role like Day’s would be different from either: part daily routine, part basic needs, but also healing through counseling and a transformed perspective.
Whitewater needs all of this now.
Many years ago, I thought Whitewater might have found her own, contemporary version of Dorothy Day. I was mistaken, and sadly, hauntingly so: our present would have been so much better for a past like that.
And so, and so — one carries on, while yet waiting hopefully.
Space station flies over Hurricane Ian:
Babbittry, City, Corporate Welfare, Culture, Daily Bread, Economy, Free Markets, Housing, Hubris, Hypocrisy, Local Government
Daily Bread for 9.27.22: Housing Opportunity and Opportunity’s Adversaries
by JOHN ADAMS • • 2 Comments
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 56. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 6:42 PM for 11h 53m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1777, Lancaster, Pennsylvania becomes the capital of the United States for one day after Congress evacuates Philadelphia.
In Whitewater, for many years, there has lingered the notion that one can govern and influence through statements, press releases, or marketing efforts. While one can try to do so, one cannot do so effectively and beneficially for the community. One’s claims, one’s advocacy, must align with human nature and present conditions to be effective and beneficial. Nature and present conditions set the bounds of effectiveness and benefit.
In the alternatives of maneuver (through press releases and awesome, wow! declarations) and attrition (as the influence of present conditions to wear away the past and produce something new) it is attrition that prevails. The obstinacy of a few (bankers, landlords, public relations men, boosters, purveyors of toxic positivity) is, over time, futile.
They don’t see that, but yet it remains true. Time takes its toll, and hubris invites Nemesis.
Consider housing, the bugbear of Whitewater for generations. A tiny clique of landlords has for years addressed this issue opportunistically. At one time, these few wanted to liberalize Whitewater’s ordinances to permit more student housing. And so, and so, there were more student apartments in the center of town. Ah, but when competitors sought approval to build on Prince or Tratt Streets, an incumbent landlord (and sometime public official) used one claim after another under the city’s ordinances to prevent or restrict those competitive projects.
These are proud, private businessmen right up until the time they hold public offices or entreat public bodies to bend to their special-interest desires.
Adequate, affordable housing is a national topic. Only on September 25th, Emily Badger, reporting for the New York Times, wrote of national trends in Whatever Happened to the Starter Home? (‘The economics of the housing market, and the local rules that shape it, have squeezed out entry-level homes’):
As recently as the 1990s, when Jason Nageli started off, the home-building industry was still constructing what real-estate ads would brightly call the “starter home.” In the Denver area, he sold newly built two-story houses with three bedrooms in 1,400 square feet or less.
The price: $99,000 to $125,000, or around $200,000 in today’s dollars.
That house would be in tremendous demand today. But few builders construct anything like it anymore. And you couldn’t buy those Denver area homes built 25 years ago at an entry-level price today, either. They go for half a million dollars.
The disappearance of such affordable homes is central to the American housing crisis. The nation has a deepening shortage of housing. But, more specifically, there isn’t enough of this housing: small, no-frills homes that would give a family new to the country or a young couple with student debt a foothold to build equity.
The affordable end of the market has been squeezed from every side. Land costs have risen steeply in booming parts of the country. Construction materials and government fees have become more expensive. And communities nationwide are far more prescriptive today than decades ago about what housing should look like and how big it must be. Some ban vinyl siding. Others require two-car garages. Nearly all make it difficult to build the kind of home that could sell for $200,000 today.
(Emphasis added.)
Whitewater’s Common Council, by a vote of 5-2 at its 9.20.22 session, sensibly approved on first reading the creation of an R1-S zoning district for detached, single-family homes on smaller lots. A zoning change that offers some builders and buyers, even in limited areas, more options is, prima facie, the right decision.
Updated with video of Council discussion:
A few observations:
1. The city’s and consultant’s discussion of the proposal was notably concise and thorough. This libertarian blogger is inclined neither to city officials nor city-hired consultants, but these were solid presentations worthy of one’s respect.
2. A council member may be ‘shocked’ that the city’s current regulations allow for 800 sq. ft. homes, but then some people shock easily. His proposal — in a community that has too little of single family-housing — is to increase the minimum square footage.
A long-tenured politician looks around and sees too little, and now wants to make whatever might be, even as a possibility, less likely by regulation.
3. These Community Development Authority men, serving now and having served (landlord here, public relations man there, council member also), are against regulation until they’re for it. So be it: they can fill their boots with contradictions, hypocrisies, and self-interested special pleading.
4. To the rest of the city: for private or public? for free or regulated? for the situational or the long-term? modest, single-family detached homes or nothing?
If the market — buyers and sellers freely selecting — chooses modest homes of limited square footage, then so be it. If private citizens in a free society want to live in larger homes, then they will find or buy larger homes.
5. Men who have mixed private and public roles in Whitewater for years, without once solving Whitewater’s single-family home needs, now presume to guide others despite their own generation-long public-policy failures.
6. How odd, and absurd, that in a small town some few members of the government would speak as though they were contractors or interior designers. That’s not government’s role, and most certainly not in a community that has too few private, detached single-family homes.
If residents need advice about home design, they should talk to an architect at their own expense; no one needs to pay taxes to government for opinions on design choices that should be between private buyers and sellers.
7. How snide, how very smug, to think that a modest single-family home would be junk. How ignorant to think that there would not be families who would be happy in these homes. If one doubts as much, one has not looked around at how families in the Midwest now live — these would be upgrades for many families.
8. The discussion of how public money might be directed would be more convincing if it were not conducted by CDA alumni who have over the years spent hundreds of thousands on capital catalyst start-ups that amounted to nothing.
These are self-described surgeons who keep dropping their scalpels; one would do well to look elsewhere for medical advice.
9. One last point, small but notable: about those opposing this simple, sensible proposal, on Council or as residents: how is it that they all repeat the same phrase, about being ‘shocked’ or finding this ‘shocking’?
Do they only have one word of description among them? Could not a talking point be more varied? The English language, having borrowed and evolved from so many other tongues, offers hundreds of thousands of words. There must have been at least one other word choice that opponents could have offered, to give a veneer of independent thought to each opinion.
Someone must have a thesaurus somewhere in the city…
For the community, the Council majority’s support for this proposal to offer another detached, single-family home option was the right choice.
Success — DART hits asteroid Dimorphos:
Previously: DART mission explained.
Babbittry, City, Corporate Welfare, Culture, Daily Bread, Economy, Free Markets, Local Government
Daily Bread for 9.26.22: Up from Business to Markets
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 60. Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 6:44 PM for 11h 56m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District’s board goes into closed session shortly after 6 PM, and reconvenes in open session at 7 PM.
On this day in 1789, George Washington appoints Thomas Jefferson the first United States Secretary of State.
One of the positive changes in Whitewater, however slow it has been, is the dawning understanding that there is a difference between a business, businesses, and markets (of buyers and sellers). Old Whitewater’s outlook, with its emphasis on the few, viewing the world from behind a metaphorical perimeter fence, has over these last fifteen years faded considerably and fortunately. It was never true — never — that Whitewater’s economy was the product of one landlord’s or one banker’s ambition.
Whitewater’s economy was always, and always will be, the sum of all interactions between all residents as buyers and sellers. Thousands of people, with many interactions and transactions each day, and every day.
A simple ordering of economic significance, from smallest to greatest: a business, businesses, then markets of buyers and sellers.
Early on, when I began writing in 2007, some readers asked me why I did not pay as much attention as they’d prefer to the machinations of these few landlords and bankers. It’s true, then and even now, that I’ve paid less attention to them than some in the community would like, but then the slight attention I’ve paid is all they’ve ever deserved.
Old Whitewater, or at least a few in it, desperately sought the role of Mr. Whitewater, King of the Hill, the Smartest Person in Town, Grand Poobah, whatever. These types never existed except in the imagination of those same few.
And look, and look — there have been these same vainglorious types in every crude and simple society before us.
Even primitive societies, long before the Renaissance and Enlightenment, had men like this, while their communities were unproductive year over year, with most people in poverty and misery. The average person among the Ancients lived in filth, poverty, and disease while only a few prospered. Slave states and feudal states, for thousands of years, each had a few successful businessmen but no general prosperity (yet much general suffering and injustice).
It’s not a mere business, but free interactions between people of all types, that makes a society productive (and so prosperous for more than a few). In a society of dynamic and free markets, between buyers and sellers of all kinds, a few mediocre, stodgy, and self-important business types merit little regard.
And yet, and yet — the last to see this economic truth are those who have advanced themselves without concern to others. They shove forward with their special-interest pleading at very public opportunity. When they see an advantage in their expansion, they provisionally argue for fewer regulations; when they seek to stymie competition, they argue for more regulations to stop competitors. They see local government as a tool for their own gain. Indeed, sometimes it’s as though they seem themselves as the world.
They remind most of one of the characters from Edwin Abbott’s Flatland. In Flatland (A Romance of Many Dimensions), Abbott describes the creatures of a world that live on a plane, a two-dimensional world. They have right and left, back and forth, but not (as we do) up and down. The inhabitants vary in insight and awareness based on the number of sides that they have, so that squares exceed triangles, and pentagons exceed squares, in this regard.
As it turns out, the narrator, a square, has a vision of a one-dimensional world, called Lineland, that exists only on a single line, with back and forth the only directions of travel. This is a vision of an even more confined place. The narrator describes how the leader of Lineland imagines himself:
replied the small Line: “I am the Monarch of the world. But thou, whence intrudest thou into my realm of Lineland?” Receiving this abrupt reply, I begged pardon if I had in any way startled or molested his Royal Highness; and describing myself as a stranger I besought the King to give me some account of his dominions. But I had the greatest possible difficulty in obtaining any information on points that really interested me; for the Monarch could not refrain from constantly assuming that whatever was familiar to him must also be known to me and that I was simulating ignorance in jest. However, by preserving questions I elicited the following facts: It seemed that this poor ignorant Monarch—as he called himself—was persuaded that the Straight Line which he called his Kingdom, and in which he passed his existence, constituted the whole of the world, and indeed the whole of Space. Not being able either to move or to see, save in his Straight Line, he had no conception of anything out of it.
To imagine oneself a king on a line is to be no monarch at all, but instead only a captive of one’s narrow imagination.
Whitewater is more than a one-dimensional line, and more than a two-dimensional plane. It is, instead, a sphere in which many people of equal moral foundation interact each day as equals.
Not merely a sphere by the way, but a beautiful and luminous one, made so by the many.
Music
Monday Music: Nick Cave, Push the Sky Away
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Authoritarianism, Daily Bread, Elections, Fellow Traveler, Fifth Columnist, Liberal Democracy, Libertarians, Liberty, Nativism, Never Trump, Putin, Trumpism, Voting Rights
Daily Bread for 9.25.22: Putin Rigs the Vote
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be windy with afternoon thundershowers and a high of 65. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 6:45 PM for 11h 59m 24s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1237, England and Scotland sign the Treaty of York, establishing the location of their common border.
Police officers detain a woman in Moscow on September 24, 2022, following calls to protest against the partial mobilisation announced by the Russian President. President Vladimir Putin called up Russian military reservists on September 21, 2022, saying his promise to use all military means in Ukraine was “no bluff,” and hinting that Moscow was prepared to use nuclear weapons. His mobilisation call comes as Moscow-held regions of Ukraine prepare to hold annexation referendums this week, dramatically upping the stakes in the seven-month conflict by allowing Moscow to accuse Ukraine of attacking Russian territory. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
David L. Stern and Robyn Dixon report With Kalashnikov rifles, Russia drives the staged vote in Ukraine:
The purported referendums are illegal under Ukrainian and international law and would not remotely meet basic democratic standards for free and fair elections. Western leaders, including President Biden, have denounced the process as a “sham” to prepare the ground for Russia’s theft of Ukrainian land.
In his nightly address on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke directly to the Russians, warning that “no tricks will help the occupier.”
The speed at which the referendums were announced and carried out and the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Russian reserves, all within one week, reflect the Kremlin’s tacit acknowledgment of its deteriorating position in Ukraine. After invading Ukraine on Feb. 24 and failing to take the capital, Kyiv, Russian forces have been pushed back in the country’s northeast and are coming under pressure along the front lines of the war.
Hundreds more people were arrested Saturday during demonstrations in Russia against the mobilization.
People have lived on our continent for thousands of years, and there has been an American republic on this land for hundreds of years, yet some of our fellow citizens admire Putin’s and Orban’s dictatorships over our own constitutional order. One hears sometimes that one should not disrespect others, and that one should work across the aisle, but these entreaties would leave us in ruin for the sake of those who’d rather support or excuse than defend against.
The Russian woman in the photograph above is incomparably more useful to the defense of liberty than a thousand from our own nativist horde, thirsting as they are to build walls, cage children, persecute minorities, spread lies, and rig our own elections.
Those few of us remaining in America who yet believe in free markets, individual rights, limited and open government, and free trade among peaceful nations would be nothing if we were not plain-speaking.
These Russians who protest risk incomparably more than we do. It is easier for us, and our obligation is to ensure that it remains easier for all of us. Even the smallest efforts to do so are meaningful and useful.
Here’s what Hurricane Fiona’s surf looked like, from atop a 50-foot wave:
City, Film
Film: Wednesday, September 28th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, The Hand of God
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Wednesday, September 28th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of The Hand of God @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Drama
Rated R (sex, language, nudity); 2 hours, 10 minutes (2021).
This is the final film in our Wednesday Summer series of foreign, cult and documentary films.Shown in Italian with English subtitles. Nominated for Best International Film Oscar and AARP Movies for Grownups Best Foreign Film.In 1980s Naples, Italy, a young soccer player and fan pursues his dream only to be interrupted by a family tragedy that eventually changes his destiny. Filmed in Naples, Isle of Capri, Stromboli and Sicily.
One can find more information about The Hand of God at the Internet Movie Database.
Big Lie, Conservative Populism, Conspiracy Theories, Daily Bread, Elections, Law, Liberal Democracy, Never Trump, Trumpism
Daily Bread for 9.24.22: The Real Threat to American Democracy
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will see morning showers with high of 65. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 6:47 PM for 12h 02m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaims Devils Tower in Wyoming as the nation’s first National Monument.
The Real Threat to American Democracy describes the ongoing attempts of Trumpists to distort voting to assure that they’ll never lose:
For the past two years, Americans have been overwhelmed by a deluge of headlines suggesting democracy in the United States is under threat: Voter suppression. A shortage of drop boxes. Election deniers seeking key state offices. It can be difficult to gauge what stories suggest a truly terrifying threat to democracy, and which are simply disheartening or even petty. The Opinion Video film above aims to unpack one of the most dire threats to democracy, which includes a sophisticated plot to control not only who can vote, but which votes get counted.
One thing is certain: The 2020 race was not stolen. But Mr. Trump and his Republican enablers have been working to rig future elections to their advantage. (Of course it’s the people shrieking most loudly about fraud that you really need to watch.) The former president has convinced his followers that the electoral system has been so corrupted that the only way to save America is for MAGA patriots to take over the system to ensure that the “right” candidates win going forward. His allies have been busy engineering such a legal takeover, and key pieces of the plan are already in place.
In this short film, we shine a light on those machinations, so that those who care about democracy can act to stop them.
For our Democracy to survive, we need to agree on a shared reality and for the losers — that is those who lose in honest and fair elections — to accept defeat.
4 Waterspouts Off Mallorca’s Coast Caught on Camera:
Daily Bread, University, UW System
Daily Bread for 9.23.22: Preliminary Fall 2022 UW System Enrollment Figures
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with high of 63. Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 6:49 PM for 12h 05m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1779, during the American Revolution, John Paul Jones, naval commander of the United States, on board the USS Bonhomme Richard, wins the Battle of Flamborough Head.
There are 2022 preliminary — first day autumn enrollment — figures out for the UW System. Kelly Meyerhofer reports Enrollment dips at most UW campuses, but UW System president thinks campuses ‘have turned a corner’ on COVID-19:
The ongoing enrollment decline at Wisconsin’s public universities continues this school year, with preliminary numbers released Thursday showing more than half of the University of Wisconsin System campuses down by 3% or more.
Large enrollment drops drain millions in tuition revenue from campus budgets, challenging the schools to make up for demographic shifts and a slide in the state’s college-going rate in other ways.
….
Here are the enrollment increases or decreases by campus as collected by the UW System based on the first day of classes. Because the data is preliminary, the percentages could change. Branch campuses are included in overall percentages.
- UW-Madison: +5%
- UW-Superior: +4%
- UW-Green Bay: +3%
- UW-La Crosse: 0%
- UW-Milwaukee: -3%
- UW-Parkside: -3%
- UW-Stevens Point: -3%
- UW-Whitewater: -4%
- UW-Platteville: -5%
- UW-River Falls: -5%
- UW-Eau Claire: -5%
- UW-Oshkosh: -6%
- UW-Stout: -6%
Two obvious points: these are first day numbers (not the tenth day where the adding and dropping of registrations would be considered) and these numbers show both main campuses and their satellite schools as one percentage of increase or decrease.
Cats
Friday Catblogging: Mountain Lion Discovers a Swing
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
City, Film
Film: Tuesday, September 27th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Elvis
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Tuesday, September 27th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Elvis @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Biography/Drama/Music
Rated PG-13; 2 hours, 39 minutes (2022)
The life of music icon Elvis Presley (Austin Butler), his relationship with manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), and Elvis’ love affair with eventual wife, Priscilla.
One can find more information about Elvis at the Internet Movie Database.
City, Culture, Daily Bread, Local Government
Daily Bread for 9.22.22: The Next Morning
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with high of 61. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:51 PM for 12h 08m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 904, the warlord Zhu Quanzhong kills Emperor Zhaozong, the penultimate emperor of the Tang dynasty, after seizing control of the imperial government.
Organizations and institutions, sooner or later, need to choose new leaders to replace former ones. A frivolous choice is one that considers only the needs or desires of the moment.
Much of bad policy in a community is like this: ephemeral press releases, marketing campaigns, feature stories, etc. It’s all maneuver in a world where attrition truly decides. Old Whitewaternever understood this, the remaining transactional conservative types don’t understand it, and neither do the emergent conservative populists.
It’s not what one says; it’s what one says in alignment with principle, reason, and history.
And so, and so, when candidates come along for open positions, one has to decide among alternatives. It’s best to describe that choice in plain terms.
It’s not the desire of the evening, but the conversation of the next morning, that defines an assignation. If only the evening, then one thinks too little of her and of oneself. If the next morning, then one has the hope of an enduring relationship.
One should live, and choose, for the next morning.
Preventing a 2035 food catastrophe:
Daily Bread, Elections, Gerrymandering, Liberal Democracy, Politics, Voting Rights, Wisconsin, WISGOP
Daily Bread for 9.21.22: Wisconsin Among the Hardest Places in America to Vote
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with high of 74. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:53 PM for 12h 10m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 18.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
The City of Whitewater is holding an information session for a Fire & EMS referendum this evening at 6 PM on the edge of town at the Whitewater University Innovation Center, 1221 Innovation Drive. (Someone once said “neither do they light a lamp and place it under the dry-goods basket, but rather they place it upon a lampstand, and it illumines all who are in the house.” Advice worth following, even all these years later.)
On this day in 1780, Benedict Arnold gives the British the plans to West Point.
One sometimes hears (although less often than a generation ago) that one should ‘reach across the aisle’ to members of the opposite party.
How quaint.
In our time, the placement of that aisle is the consequence of voting rights restrictions and gerrymandering. The aisle has been wrongly and corruptly placed. Some are asked to reach out from floor space unfairly restricted to others on floor space unfairly taken.
Nick Corasaniti and The ‘Cost’ of Voting in America: A Look at Where It’s Easiest and Hardest:
The findings are part of the 2022 edition of the Cost of Voting Index, a nonpartisan academic study that seeks to cut through the politics of voting access. The study ranks all 50 states based on the overall investment a resident must make, in time and resources, to vote.
Researchers focused on 10 categories related to voting, including registration, inconvenience, early voting, polling hours and absentee voting.
The two categories given the most weight, according to Scot Schraufnagel, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University and an author of the study, were ease of registration to vote and the availability of early voting, both in person and by mail. The study’s emphasis on early-voting options meant that states like Washington and Oregon, where voting is conducted entirely by mail, ended up at the top of the rankings.
….
Vermont, for example, jumped “from the middle of the pack in 2020,” when it ranked 23rd for voting access, to “the third-easiest state by 2022,” according to the study. This was largely because it adopted a statewide vote-by-mail system.
Wisconsin went the opposite direction, falling to 47th from 38th, in part because the state now requires proof of residency on voter registration applications. The state also stopped using special voting deputies, officials whose tasks had sometimes included conducting voter registration drives, according to the study.
Cooperation across the aisle requires a deal between those who’ve been robbed and those who’ve robbed them.
The study appears below.
See Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy. Sep 2022.220-228. http://doi.org/10.1089/elj.2022.0041.
See James Webb Space Telescope’s view of Neptune in stunning 4K: