Jack Marshall, Munsters Theme Song
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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS
America, Daily Bread, History
Daily Bread for 10.19.25: Six Years, Six Months
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 57. Sunrise is 7:13 and sunset is 6:05 for 10 hours 52 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
October 19th has been a happy day for many centuries. On this day in 1781, the British surrendered at the Battle of Yorktown:
After initial preparations, the Americans and French built their first parallel and began the bombardment. With the British defense weakened, on October 14, 1781, Washington sent two columns to attack the last major remaining British outer defenses. A French column under Vicomte de Deux-Ponts took Redoubt No. 9 and an American column under Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton took Redoubt No. 10. With these defenses, the allies were able to finish their second parallel. With the Franco-American artillery closer and its bombardment more intense than ever, the British position began to deteriorate rapidly. Cornwallis asked for capitulation terms on October 17. After two days of negotiation, the surrender ceremony occurred on October 19; Cornwallis was absent from the ceremony. With the capture of more than 7,000 British soldiers, negotiations between the United States and Great Britain began, resulting in the Treaty of Paris of 1783.
While the Revolution would continue for two more years, America’s victory was assured after Yorktown:
The British Prime Minister, Lord North, is reported to have exclaimed “Oh God, it’s all over” when told of the defeat. On March 4, 1782, a motion to end “further prosecution of offensive warfare on the continent of North America”—effectively a no confidence motion—passed in the British House of Commons. Lord North and his government resigned on March 20. [Citations omitted.]
The time between the beginning of the war at Lexington and Concord and victory at Yorktown stretched over six years, six months.
Our forefathers were resolved and tenacious.
Bright fireball seen over Kentucky and Alabama:
America, Daily Bread, Law
Daily Bread for 10.18.25: Words to Live By
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 72. Sunrise is 7:12 and sunset is 6:07 for 10 hours 55 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 8.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1597, King Philip II of Spain sends his third and final armada against England, but it ends in failure due to storms. The remaining ships are captured or sunk by the English.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Volunteers save dogs from a flooded Alaska village, 1 tiny plane at a time:
Charity, City, Daily Bread, Early Childhood, Education
Daily Bread for 10.17.25: On the Extraordinary Donation for Early Childhood Care in Whitewater
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 75. Sunrise is 7:11 and sunset is 6:08 for 10 hours 58 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 13.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1931, Al Capone is convicted of income tax evasion.
At the Journal Sentinel, Cleo Krejci reports on the charitable donation of former Whitewater business owners looking to address the city’s child care gap:
Steve Moksnes remembers wondering how to best invest in his hometown of Whitewater, Wisconsin.
Then his wife of 63 years, Billie, suggested he research the impacts of early childhood education.
“You’re not just getting them ready for kindergarten. You are teaching them to work with other people, to problem solve, to control their emotions,” he said. “And that just fired my imagination.”
In September, the Moksnes donated $10 million to fund a nonprofit Whitewater Early Childhood Education and Childcare Center. They want the center to be affordable for families, and to provide competitive salaries and benefits for workers.
The goal is for the new space to open with at least 100 child care spots in 2026. The location has yet to be announced.
The project is a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the Whitewater Unified School District and the City of Whitewater.
“We spent the better part of a year having conversations with the city, the university, their child care center, other child care centers, the school district — a lot of different stakeholders,” said project co-lead Kristine Zaballos. “To talk about the need, talk about potential solutions, and to make sure that everybody who wanted to be included in the conversation was at the table.”
A 2022 study on Walworth County found the area has a steep need for child care options.
…
Thayer Coburn, vice-chair of the city’s Community Development Authority and former Whitewater school board president, is also co-leading the project. He described child care as a driver of development in the city — and a “limiting factor for growth” when there’s not enough of it.
City Manager John Weidl said a lack of child care options has prevented businesses from opening, or expanding, in the city. Most people looking to buy a home, or work in Whitewater have children, he said.
See Cleo Krejci, Former Whitewater business owners look to address child care gap with $10 million donation, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 16, 2025.
Our city has among its many talented residents those who can make this donation for early child care an enduring success. (For myself, I am in the position of a man who can tell time but cannot build a watch. I can see that a timepiece is needed, but I wouldn’t be able to craft it.)
It’s enough to know, as I’ve noted elsewhere, that this is a charitable contribution unmatched in Whitewater’s history — not merely in magnitude, but also in direction and timing. There could be no better object of charity than the care of Whitewater’s youngest residents, and no better time to meet their needs than now.
James Webb Space Telescope captures Milky Way’s ‘largest star-forming cloud’:
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Cats’ Affect on Human Brains
by JOHN ADAMS •
Laura Elin Pigott writes of what owning a cat does to your brain (and theirs):
Cats may have a reputation for independence, but emerging research suggests we share a unique connection with them – fuelled by brain chemistry.
The main chemical involved is oxytocin, often called the love hormone. It’s the same neurochemical that surges when a mother cradles her baby or when friends hug, fostering trust and affection. And now studies are showing oxytocin is important for cat-human bonding too.
Oxytocin plays a central role in social bonding, trust and stress regulation in many animals, including humans. One 2005 experiment showed that oxytocin made human volunteers significantly more willing to trust others in financial games.
…
A February 2025 study found that when owners engaged in relaxed petting, cuddling or cradling of their cats, the owners’ oxytocin tended to rise, and so did the cats’ – if the interaction was not forced on the animal.
The researchers monitored oxytocin in cats during 15 minutes of play and cuddling at home with their owner. Securely attached cats who initiated contact such as lap-sitting or nudging showed an oxytocin surge. The more time they spent close to their humans, the greater the boost.
See Laura Elin Pigott, What owning a cat does to your brain (and theirs), The Conversation, September 12, 2025.
City, Daily Bread, Economy, Entitlement, Reading, Reasoning, Special Interests
Daily Bread for 10.16.25: Large Language Models and Whitewater (Or You Are What You Put In)
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 68. Sunrise is 7:09 and sunset is 6:10 for 11 hours 1 minute of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 22.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Association meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1780, the Great Hurricane of 1780 finishes after its sixth day, killing between 20,000 and 24,000 residents of the Lesser Antilles:
The hurricane struck Barbados likely as a Category 5 hurricane, with one estimate of wind gusts as high as 200 mph (320 km/h), before moving past Martinique, Saint Lucia, and Sint Eustatius, and causing thousands of deaths on those islands. Coming in the midst of the American Revolution, the storm caused heavy losses to the British fleet contesting for control of the area, significantly weakening British control over the Atlantic. The hurricane later passed near Puerto Rico and over the eastern portion of Hispaniola, causing heavy damage near the coastlines. It ultimately turned to the northeast and was last observed on October 20 southeast of Atlantic Canada. [Citations omitted]
Matt Levine writes a newsletter, Money Stuff, on American finance for Bloomberg, and one doesn’t have to be a financier to appreciate the depth of his insight. Yesterday’s edition discussed the limits of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI enterprises.
Here’s Levine on the contrast between ambitions for ChatGPT in 2019 and the reality in 2025:
There’s a famous Sam Altman interview from 2019 in which he explained OpenAI’s revenue model:
The honest answer is we have no idea. We have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. [audience laughter] It sounds like an episode of Silicon Valley, it really does, I get it. You can laugh, it’s all right. But it is what I actually believe is going to happen.
Levine continues:
It really is the greatest business plan in the history of capitalism: “We will create God and then ask it for money.” Perfect in its simplicity.
I began this section with a jokey maximalist vision of AI, “create God,” “an omniscient superintelligence,” that sort of thing. The jokey minimalist vision of AI is probably “ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web”: Modern AI systems are approximately a synthesis of all human knowledge and communication, but given the way computers work, that means especially a synthesis of the internet, which is where you get the bulk of machine-readable human knowledge and communication. Ryan Broderick writes: “Think of ChatGPT as a big shuffle button of almost everything we’ve ever put online.” I once wrote about asking ChatGPT to pick stocks:
If you ask a modern publicly available large language model which stocks to buy, it will in some sense draw on all of human knowledge and its own powerful reasoning capacity to tell you which stocks to buy. But, among all of human knowledge, it might give extra weight to the knowledge on Reddit. And the knowledge on Reddit about what stocks to buy is “meme stocks.”
You can apply similar reasoning here. In a science fiction story, if you invented a superintelligent robot and asked it how to make money, it might come up with cool never-before-seen ideas, or at least massive fun market manipulation. But in real life, if you train a large language model on the internet and ask it how to make money, it will say “advertising, affiliate shopping links and porn.” That’s the lesson the internet teaches!
See Matt Levine, Revenue Model, Bloomberg’s Money Stuff (October 15, 2025).
Levine highlights the problem for OpenAI (and others): you start out hoping for a human version of divine omniscience — knowledge of all possible events and facts — but you’re doing so by relying on what humans write, mostly on the web. The limitations are obvious. There’s much that generative AI can do, but large language models are limited by, sadly, all-too-human writings.
And so, and so, Levine’s observations about using large language models apply to approaching problems everywhere, including in Whitewater, Wisconsin; you’re relying on what you’ve read of what others have written. If you’ve read well, all these years, then at least you’ve a model on which some derivations may be productively generated.
But if not, then someone who has read poorly (or scarcely at all) will begin to look inadequate compared with those who are truly more knowledgeable. That’s one effect of bringing in experienced development professionals to speak to the Whitewater Common Council these last ten months. One sees plainly that an overly entitled man, by contrast, will produce argumentation that seems to rely, metaphorically, on little better than advertising and affiliate links. (It also means that others who allow themselves to be tied to, and identified with, someone like that will begin from an impaired position…)
Moment when security guard saves woman from oncoming tram in Turkey:
Agriculture, Bad Ideas, Daily Bread, Economy, Trade, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 10.15.25: Elderly Gentleman Slowly Realizes What a Trade War Means
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with morning showers and a high of 60. Sunrise is 7:08 and sunset is 6:11, for 11 hours 3 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 31.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5 PM.
On this day in 1815, Napoleon begins his exile on Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean.
Conflicts can escalate quickly for the ignorant, the emotional, or the undisciplined among us. Start raising tariffs, and you might find yourself in a trade war. Find yourself in a trade war, and you might notice one day — believe it or not! — that a trade war involves other nations retaliating:
Trump posted on Truth Social last night: “I believe that China purposefully not buying our soybeans, and causing difficulty for our soybean farmers, is an economically hostile act. We are considering terminating business with China having to do with cooking oil, and other elements of trade, as retribution.”
Talk of retribution is precisely the opposite of what markets had hoped for, and is a further about-turn from the White House on relations with Beijing. On Friday, Trump threatened 100% tariffs on its key trading partner, before issuing assurances that a deal will be reached. It comes as the latest export data for China shows Washington may not have as strong a hand as it believed in the trade war, with Chinese exporters reporting growth having focussed on trade with the rest of the world as opposed to the States.
See Eleanor Pringle, Powell says exactly what Wall Street wants to hear as Trump provokes soybean battle with China, Fortune, October 15, 2025.
See also, from yesterday, Trade War Creates Cycle of Agriculture’s Dependency on Government.
California engineer wins pumpkin contest with 2,346-pound gourd:
Agriculture, Bad Ideas, Daily Bread, Economy, Trade, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 10.14.25: Trade War Creates Cycle of Agriculture’s Dependency on Government
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 68. Sunrise is 7:07 and sunset is 6:13, for 11 hours 6 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 41.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 5:15 PM, and the Finance Committee meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1774, the First Continental Congress denounces the British Parliament’s Intolerable Acts and demands British concessions.
The proposition that “trade wars are good and easy to win” is under daily stress, as the plight of Wisconsin agriculture makes evident:
Farmers harvesting their crops this fall are also waiting to hear whether they can expect a check from the government.
The administration is reportedly eyeing $10 billion to $15 billion in aid to farmers. President Donald Trump has said he’d like to use tax revenue generated by tariffs to provide relief for farmers, who’ve lost a key soybean market due to the trade war with China. Yet the expected announcement has been pushed back indefinitely in the midst of the federal government shutdown.
Matt Rehberg operates a farm near the Wisconsin-Illinois border and is the vice president of the Wisconsin Soybean Association.
He says the boycott from China — which purchased around half of all U.S. soybean exports last year — has made this year especially hard for soybean farmers. But he believes bailout programs are only a temporary solution.
“We want markets. Markets are consistent. We can bet on them,” he said. “When you go to these ad hoc bailout programs, they definitely help. But it’s kind of like putting a Band-aid on a gunshot wound.”
Along with international trade uncertainty, farmers are also struggling due to a mix of low crop prices and high costs for things like fertilizer, making this an especially tough year for farm finances.
A survey of 1,034 farmers released in September by the National Corn Growers Association showed that nearly half believe the U.S. economy is on the brink of a farm crisis, and two-thirds are more concerned about their farm’s finances than a year ago.
See Joe Schulz, Farmers caught in Trump’s trade war wait for bailout. But many call it a temporary fix, Wisconsin Public Radio, October 13, 2025.
Come for the culture war, stay for the economic decline.
SpaceX Starship travels halfway across world in successful test flight:
City, Daily Bread, Special Interests
Daily Bread for 10.13.25: Two Techniques of the Special Interest Men
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 68. Sunrise is 7:06 and sunset is 6:15, for 11 hours 9 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 52.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Plan & Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1903, the Boston Red Sox win the first modern World Series, defeating the Pittsburgh Pirates in the eighth game (it was a best-of-nine series).
In this small city, as in places elsewhere, one encounters now and again common techniques of entrenched special interests. Two come to mind this morning.
False claims about lack of transparency. Maintaining open government principles is a challenge everywhere, but some governments do better than others. In Whitewater today the municipal government is more open than at any time in memory. Not perfect (as no institution is) but better by far than its predecessors.
And yet, and yet, when Modern and Open arrive, Old-Fashioned and Closed start complaining that they’re being cheated, deceived, hoodwinked, damn it.
Listen closely, and a special-interest faction of small-town cronyism will do what it can to level charges that it was not told something, did not know something, was denied information about something. These are the same men who for years concealed information on the old Community Development Authority, e.g., unfavorable audits, a cease and desist order, lost paperwork, firings, the terms of wasteful deals, the reasons for wasteful deals, etc. Now, however, they’ve found God, so to speak. (Having seemingly found a certain open-government faith, they’d do well to keep in mind the tenet of an older faith against bearing false witness.)
There’s often a simple solution for these types: read the agenda packet thoroughly and carefully before a meeting. This should not be too hard for men who position themselves as knowledgeable and professional. Agenda packets in Whitewater are written in English; it’s a common language on this continent.
Emphasis on specific, but minor, details. Special-interest men who for years showed no grasp of broad economic trends in Whitewater will, when criticizing those who do understand those trends, focus instead on minor, picayune, insignificant details. They likely do this for two reasons. First, because the minor, picayune, and insignificant are their familiar ground. Second, because they believe a focus on minor details makes them seem clever. (It doesn’t.)
So, for example, if someone were to present a design for a new passenger plane, they might ask a question about whether the seats were covered in stain-resistant fabric, whether the flight attendants received overtime pay for delayed flights, or whether anyone knew if the aerospace engineer’s spouse’s cousin’s next-door-neighbor once went to Whitewater High.
The proposed plane could take off, fly, and land perfectly well at a reasonable cost to meet a transportation need, yet they’d still keep complaining that no one should proceed with production until their questions were answered.
During Halloween and throughout the year, these techniques are little more than hocus pocus, all tricks and no treat.
NASA research equipment crash-lands on Texas farm:
Holiday, Music
Monday Music: Halloween Trio No. 1
by JOHN ADAMS •
Tampa Red, Witching Hour Blues
Poppa Hop And His Orchestra, My Woman Has a Black Cat Bone
The 5 Jones Boys, Mr. Ghost Goes To Town
City, Congress, Daily Bread, Elections, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 10.12.25: Candidates for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 68. Sunrise is 7:05 and sunset is 6:16, for 11 hours 12 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 62.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1984, Japan’s former Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei is found guilty of taking a $2 million bribe from the Lockheed Corporation, and is sentenced to four years in jail:
While his appeal lingered in the Court’s docket, Tanaka’s medical condition deteriorated. He announced his retirement from politics in October 1989, at the age of 71, in an announcement made by his son-in-law Naoki Tanaka. The announcement ended his 42-year career in politics; the remnants of his faction, now led by former Prime Minister Takeshita, remained the most powerful bloc within the LDP at the time of his retirement. In 1993, a number of members of his faction broke away from the LDP to form part of an Eight-party Alliance government under Morihiro Hosokawa.
Tanaka was later diagnosed with diabetes, and died of pneumonia at Keio University Hospital at 2:04 p.m. on 16 December 1993. [Citations omitted]
Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District stretches along the southeastern border between Wisconsin and Illinois, with most of the City of Whitewater within the district. A portion of the city, north of Lauderdale Drive, is in the 5th Congressional District.
Today, these are the boundaries of the 1st District. The Wisconsin Supreme Court has ordered briefs on one of the complaints that requests the appointment of a three-judge panel to consider the plaintiffs’ claims that the state’s congressional districts are unlawfully gerrymandered and should be redrawn before the 2026 election. That complaint is Elizabeth Bothfeld et al. v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, No. 2025CV002432 (Wis. Cir. Ct. Dane Cnty. July 21, 2025).
These are the candidates now running for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District:
Bryan Steil (R, Incumbent, Janesville)
Connor Walleck (R, Salem)
Miguel Aranda (D, Whitewater)
Mitchell Berman (D, Raymond)
Randy Bryce (D, Caledonia)
Enrique Casiano (D, Janesville)
Gage Stills (D, Racine)
Adam Follmer (Independent, St. Francis)
The primary is August 11, 2026, and the general election November 3, 2026.
Parthenon in Greece is free of scaffolding for first time in decades:
Books, Daily Bread, Library, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 10.11.25: You Can’t Trust Everybody…
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 68. Sunrise is 7:04 and sunset is 6:18, for 11 hours 14 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 73.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1958, NASA launches Pioneer 1, its first space probe, although it fails to achieve a stable orbit.
A public service message from the New Berlin Public Library:
New York Comic Con welcomes stars and spooky characters:
Agriculture, Daily Bread, Economics, Tariffs, Trade, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 10.10.25: Even Record Crop Yields Won’t Be Enough for Wisconsin’s Farmers
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 68. Sunrise is 7:02 and sunset is 6:20, for 11 hours 17 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 83.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1846, Triton, the largest moon of the planet Neptune, is discovered by English astronomer William Lassell:
Triton was discovered by British astronomer William Lassell on October 10, 1846, just 17 days after the discovery of Neptune. When John Herschel received news of Neptune’s discovery, he wrote to Lassell suggesting he search for possible moons. Lassell discovered Triton eight days later. Lassell also claimed for a period to have discovered rings. Although Neptune was later confirmed to have rings, they are so faint and dark that it is not plausible he saw them. A brewer by trade, Lassell spotted Triton with his self-built 61 cm (24 in) aperture metal mirror reflecting telescope (also known as the “two-foot” reflector). [Citations omitted]
What does a bumper crop profit a farmer under tariffs and trade wars?:
Despite strong crop yields expected nationwide in 2025, high production costs and strained international markets continue to create market uncertainty for American farmers.
In Wisconsin, corn growers are expected to see record yields with U.S. corn production nationwide expected to be 13% higher than last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s September forecast.
While soybean production nationwide is slightly down from 2024, Wisconsin and several other states could still see record-high yields of the crop.
But with strong yield typically driving crop prices down, those low crop prices paired with high production costs and tense standoffs over President Donald Trump’s tariffs leave many American farmers uncertain about their economic outlook.
…
Wisconsin Soybean Association President Doug Rebout told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that soybean farmers in the state are concerned because without China, the U.S. soybean industry lost a huge part of its market, causing prices to drop significantly.
…
“Because of retaliatory tariffs, we are paying more for the products that we’re buying and we’re getting paid less for the products that we’re selling,” Rebout said, noting that a lot of equipment and equipment parts are imported from other countries. “It’s just a vicious cycle, and as farmers, we are caught in the middle.”
Additionally, plummeting commodity prices, high production costs and supply chain issues all have played a role in declining incomes for U.S. farmers in recent years. While total cash receipts and government payments are expected to increase, this doesn’t offset the losses for many crop farmers.
In Wisconsin, grain farmers will likely face negative margins in 2025 as expected prices for corn and soybeans are below the estimated break-even points for Wisconsin producers, according to projections by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
See Anna Kleiber, Record crop yields won’t lead to financial security for Wisconsin farmers this year. Here’s why, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin Public Radio, October 7, 2025.
See also Tariffs and Trade War Hit Wisconsin’s Soybean Farmers.
Turns out trade wars aren’t good and easy to win after all. The price of one man’s ignorance now grips much of the economy.
Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado awarded 2025 Nobel Peace Prize: