Wednesday, May 25th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of Licorice Pizza @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Comedy, Drama, Romance
Rated R ( Language, Sexual References, Drugs) 2 hour, 13 minutes (2021)
Growing up, running around, and falling in love for the first time in the San Fernando Valley, California, in 1973, this film was nominated for 3 Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay. Stars Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, and Sean Penn.
Tuesday, May 24th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of C’mon, C’mon @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Drama/Family
Rated R (Language); 1 hour, 49 minutes (2021)
When his sister asks him to look after her precocious nine-year-old son, a radio journalist (Joaquin Phoenix) embarks on a cross-country trip with his nephew to show him life away from the big city. Nominee for 2022 AARP Movies for Grownups Best Intergenerational film.
Friday in Whitewater will see periods of sun contrasted with scattered thundershowers with a high of 72. Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:16 PM for 14h 50m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1873, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive a U.S. patent for blue jeans with copper rivets.
Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is the lowest it has ever been.
New data from the state Department of Workforce Development for April show that for the second month in a row, the state’s unemployment rate was 2.8 percent, a historic low.
Just over 3 million people are working in Wisconsin, DWD chief economist Dennis Winters said in a briefing Thursday, and the labor force expanded by 2,700 last month. That’s significant as employers in many sectors struggle to hire. Like the unemployment rate, the state’s labor force participation rate was unchanged from March. At 66.5 percent, Wisconsin’s share of people working exceeds the national labor force participation rate by 4.3 percentage points.
Economists measure unemployment based on how many people are actively seeking work, which means those who have retired or aren’t looking for work for other reasons are not counted as unemployed.
The state has about 98 percent as many jobs as it did before the pandemic plunged it into recession in early 2020, and even hard-hit sectors including hospitality are at 95 percent or more of their pre-COVID-19 employment levels. But only construction has added jobs since 2020, Winters said.
“We know the housing market is booming, especially multi-family housing,” Winters said. “All the construction folks we talk to, they’re just crying for workers.”
Multi-family residential construction is significantly outpacing building of single-family homes or heavy construction such as road-building, Winters said.
Two obvious points: (1) not all parts of the state are in the same economic condition and (2) areas of low unemployment cannot adopt a ‘growth strategy’ without additional workers, automation, or dramatic (and improbable) gains in short-term productivity.
We follow the very good boy Sir Willie the Wiener during the final build up to his latest Fastest Known Dog (FKD) Strava segment attempt. See his cutting edge approach to training, recovery, and equipment, plus the unique relationship he’s built with his training partner, former Pro Tour racer and 2022 Belgian Waffle Ride Champ, Alexey Vermeulen.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 82. Sunrise is 5:27 AM and sunset 8:15 PM for 14h 48m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1780, New England’s Dark Day, an unusual darkening of the day sky, was observed over the New England states and parts of Canada:
In Connecticut, a member of the Governor’s council (renamed the Connecticut State Senate in 1818), Abraham Davenport, became most famous for his response to his colleagues’ fears that it was the Day of Judgment:
“I am against adjournment. The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought.“
A political party that believes it has a destiny to rule (whether by divine mandate or a supposed secular entitlement like race, ethnicity, etc.) will not accept electoral defeat within a liberal democratic order. All losses, therefore, must be illegitimate, the result of some nefarious scheme that enemies of the party must have imposed. In this outlook, victory confirms integrity but defeat confirms only perfidy.
MADISON – It’s been a year since Republican legislative leaders in Wisconsin took a step they thought would put to rest former President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in this battleground state and allow the party to move on from 2020.
It didn’t work.
Wisconsin Republicans head into their state party convention this weekend a year after the last gathering where Trump’s pressure pushed Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to name former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to coordinate a probe to be conducted by former police detectives into the 2020 election. At the time, it was set to last just a few
Nothing about the WISGOP’s position on the Big Lie involves how that conspiracy theory will play in November. It doesn’t matter to them; it matters only that they hold to the claim as a core belief of the party. By their reckoning, they must have been cheated — it could not have been otherwise.
Practicality is yesterday’s concern. Adherence is today’s imperative.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see occasional thundershowers with a high of 62. Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset 8:14 PM for 14h 46m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 92.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1756, the Seven Years’ War begins when Great Britain declares war on France.
Whitewater’s Common Council met in a brief session last night. It was not only a short meeting, but also one without controversial agenda items.
There are limits, more evident than ever, to this local municipal government’s ability to shape community life. See from 2021 The Limits of Local Politics: ‘local public (or powerful private) institutions have a limited power of action (with harmful actions likely to be more immediate than helpful ones).’ Whitewater’s challenges outstrip the ability of local government to achieve significant socio-economic uplift for residents.
Old Whitewater much believed in the booster’s motto that if local public money built something, meaningful gains would come. They haven’t.
This meeting shows, yet again, that (as with a lakes restoration plan that was millions short of received bids) received bids for a lift station were millions higher than local government’s estimates. SeeVideo beginning at @ 08:25.
The 5.17.22 session, while brief, was more orderly than most others over the preceding two years. Order in meetings is, however, only a preliminary to effective oversight. The proper goal, if realized, would be an elected body effective in its oversight of city hall.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 74. Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:13 PM for 14h 44m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 9 AM and Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
Mnookin has been dean of the UCLA School of Law since 2015 and began work at UCLA as a professor in 2005. She was a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law prior to that, and was a visiting professor at the Harvard University Law School for a year.
She has a doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned her law degree from Yale Law School and got her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College.
Republican leaders were, predictably and on cue, upset:
Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who is running for governor, said she was infuriated by the hire.
“Decisions like this from the Board of Regents make Wisconsin moms and dads consider sending their kids out of state where they can get an honest education,” said Kleefisch, whose daughter attends a private college in Texas. “This ridiculous mindset demonstrates why we need to drain the Madison swamp — to get away from this crazy groupthink.”
Kevin Nicholson, another GOP candidate for governor, called the board’s decision “insane.”
I’ve been a critic of more than one UW System decision, but the rending of garments over Mnookin’s selection is overwrought. For a faction that describes itself as defending common sense, these Republicans are dependably emotional, if not hysterical, about university life.
Kevin Nicholson’s simple (and simple-minded) criticism, that the regents’ decision is ‘insane,’ brings to mind nothing so much as an old 1970s television commercial:
On Feb. 24, the first day of the war in Ukraine, a Russian attack on a hospital in the eastern city of Vuhledar killed four people and wounded 10 others. The next day, elsewhere in Ukraine, a cancer center and a children’s hospital were hit.
And the attacks on the nation’s health care infrastructure kept coming, at a rate of at least two a day, by some counts — hospitals, clinics, maternity wards, a nursing home, an addiction treatment facility, a blood bank.
As of May 9, the Ukrainian Healthcare Center, a consultancy in Kyiv, had documented 165 cases of health care facilities damaged in the war, and the World Health Organization has identified some 200 such attacks.
In the video guest essay above, Pavlo Kovtoniuk, a co-founder of the consultancy and a former deputy health minister of Ukraine, explains that the attacks have sown psychological terror and devastated the nation’s health care system.
“It all seems cruel, inhumane and deliberate,” he says.
Whether the attacks against Ukraine’s hospitals and medical personnel amount to war crimes may eventually be a matter for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, as well as other courts and special war crimes tribunals, to decide.
But Mr. Kovtoniuk has already made up his mind. “The evidence for potential war crimes will take years to gather,” he says. “But I don’t need to wait that long to know that what I’m seeing every day is a murderous pattern.”
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 74. Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:12 PM for 14h 42m 29s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
wp-svg-icons icon=”checkbox-partial” wrap=”I”] Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1868, the United States Senate fails to convict President Andrew Johnson by one vote.
How, precisely, is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?
Do you get along better with your neighbors, your co-workers if you can’t understand each other or share no common values? Please be honest as you answer this question.
Carlson must think this appealing, but it’s repulsive in the way that sloth is repulsive. His question reveals the indolence of his nativist audience: “if you can’t understand each other” only appertains when they’ve not made an effort to understand newcomers.
America is a dynamic and productive place. If Carlson’s viewers are too shiftless to learn about other cultures, they’re below the standard of intellectual curiosity and effort America should expect of the able-bodied. We are no sleepy backwater; we are the most developed society in human history, engaging in commerce with nations across the globe.
Carlson appeals to his audience’s complacent laziness, but their complacent laziness is a drag on this society.
Tucker Carlson tells them what they want to hear; they and we would be better off if someone spoke bluntly and truthfully to them.
The Super Flower Blood Moon lunar eclipse on May 15-16, 2022 was captured by the Griffith Observatory in California. See the entire eclipse in this time-lapse. The longest total lunar eclipse in 33 years, wows stargazers.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 72. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:11 PM for 14h 40m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1911, in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, the United States Supreme Court declares Standard Oil to be an unreasonable monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act and orders the company to be broken up.
BUFFALO — A teenage gunman espousing a white supremacist ideology known as replacement theory opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday, methodically shooting and killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black, in one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history.
The authorities identified the gunman as 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, a small town in New York’s rural Southern Tier. Mr. Gendron drove more than 200 miles to mount his attack, which he also live streamed, the police said, a chilling video feed that appeared designed to promote his sinister agenda.
Shortly after Mr. Gendron was captured, a manifesto believed to have been posted online by the gunman emerged, riddled with racist, anti-immigrant views that claimed white Americans were at risk of being replaced by people of color. In the video that appeared to have been captured by the camera affixed to his helmet, an anti-Black racial slur can be seen on the barrel of his weapon.
And yet, and yet, after repeated incidents, it’s still hard for some to identify the sources of these screeds.
Gee— which politicians? Which popular tv shows? Hmmm such a mystery. https://t.co/SwXhw17wDl
Where Replacement Theory was once spoken only on the fringes of society, in a lumpen subculture, Tucker Carlson has brought it to a broader audience:
NEW: A mass shooter in Buffalo, NY who killed at least 10 people had posted a manifesto online espousing the White Replacement Theory, per @BNONews.
White Replacement Theory has been long promoted and championed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News.pic.twitter.com/LaO82WpzfH
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) May 14, 2022
One needn’t look far away to VDARE, Taki’s Mag, or the fetid Daily Stormer for concern about a ‘great replacement.’ It’s much closer now, on every screen that displays Fox News.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:10 PM for 14h 38m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Milwaukee brewery workers begin a 10-week strike, demanding contracts comparable to those of East and West coast workers. The strike was won when Blatz Brewery accepted their demands, but Blatz was ousted from the Brewers Association for “unethical” business methods as a result. The following year Schlitz president Erwin C. Uihlein told guests at Schlitz’ annual Christmas party that “Irreparable harm was done to the Milwaukee brewery industry during the 76-day strike of 1953, and unemployed brewery workers must endure ‘continued suffering’ before the prestige of Milwaukee beer is re-established on the world market.”
Oh, brother: ‘irreparable harm’ and ‘continued suffering.’ Considering history since 1953, supposed irreparable harm from a mere brewery strike would count as a national blessing today…
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Parole Commission’s leader agreed Friday to rescind a convicted murderer’s parole at Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ request after the governor came under criticism from rival Republicans looking to unseat him in November.
Evers sent a letter Friday to John Tate, the commission’s chairman, asking him to reconsider 54-year-old Douglas Balsewicz’s parole. He was set to be released from prison as soon as Tuesday after serving less than 25 years of his 80-year sentence for the 1997 stabbing death of his wife, Johanna Balsewicz. Evers lacks the power to rescind an convict’s parole on his own.
Evers met with Johanna Balsewicz’s family in the Capitol before sending the letter. The governor wrote that the family hadn’t gotten a chance to fully respond to the move.
“I do not agree with this decision, and I have considerable concerns regarding whether Johanna’s family was afforded sufficient opportunity to voice their memories, perspectives, and concerns before this decision was made,” Evers wrote.
Tate, an Evers appointee, later said in an email to The Associated Press and the Department of Corrections that he understands the governor’s concerns about the lack of victim input and that he was rescinding Douglas Balsewicz’s parole.
Earlier in the week, Tate told the Racine Journal Times that it was extremely unlikely Balsewicz’s parole would be revoked at this point unless he did something to warrant it. Tate, who is president of the Racine City Council, said rescinding Balsewicz’s parole would likely lead to a lawsuit that the state would lose. Tate didn’t immediately respond to an email from the AP Friday evening.
The crime: a husband stabbed his wife over forty times leading to her death in front of their daughter, for which the husband was lawfully convicted and sentenced to 80 years in prison. Parole almost 50 years before the end of the sentence amounts to unjustified leniency. A well-ordered society has a duty to confine the violent away from others, both as punishment and deterrent. Those lawfully convicted of violent crimes are yet able to live their lives in a confined setting. Douglas Balsewicz’s crime justified his sentence.
Tate’s concern about a possible lawsuit is expediency over principle. The right course here would have been to reject a parole request, after it was made, and then defend the denial of parole should there have followed a lawsuit from the murderous defendant. Win or lose that suit, at least Tate would have stood on principle. As it is, Parole Commission Chairman Tate made the wrong decision, tried to defend that wrong decision, and compelled Gov. Evers to urge reconsideration. If Tate had acted on principle (the general principle that violent killers should serve their sentences away from society), then the victim’s family would not have had to endure additional hardship, and there would have been no need for Evers to seek reversal of a bad decision.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 88. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:09 PM for 14h 36m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 90.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, the USS Planter, a steamer and gunship, steals through Confederate lines and is passed to the Union, by a southern slave, Robert Smalls, who later was officially appointed as captain, becoming the first black man to command a United States ship.
Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch has suggested the Assembly Republican caucus should fire Vos, despite receiving his endorsement. Marine veteran Kevin Nicholson has spent months calling him a failure. State Rep. Tim Ramthun wants the speaker prosecuted. And construction executive Tim Michels said Vos needed “training.”
Vos’ crime? Not doing more about Trump’s loss, including by taking the impossible and illegal step of decertifying the 2020 election.
….
“The fact that people need to use me as a punching bag to make themselves look better. I think it’s kind of a sad statement about politics today. I think people should be running on their own ideas.”
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 90. Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:08 PM for 14h 34m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Tim Alberta, an evangelical Christian, writes How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church (‘The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it’s at war with itself):
“Before I turn to the Word,” the preacher announces, “I’m gonna do another diatribe.”
“Go on!” one man yells. “Amen!” shouts a woman several pews in front of me.
Between 40 minutes of praise music and 40 minutes of preaching is the strangest ritual I’ve ever witnessed inside a house of worship. Pastor Bill Bolin calls it his “diatribe.” The congregants at FloodGate Church, in Brighton, Michigan, call it something else: “Headline News.”
Bolin, in his mid-60s, is a gregarious man with thick jowls and a thinning wave of dyed hair. His floral shirt is untucked over dark-blue jeans. “On the vaccines …” he begins.
For the next 15 minutes, Bolin does not mention the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, or the life everlasting. Instead, he spouts misinformation and conspiratorial nonsense, much of it related to the “radically dangerous” COVID-19 vaccines. “A local nurse who attends FloodGate, who is anonymous at this time—she reported to my wife the other day that at her hospital, they have two COVID patients that are hospitalized. Two.” Bolin pauses dramatically. “They have 103 vaccine-complication patients.” The crowd gasps.
“How about this one?” Bolin says. He tells of a doctor who claims to know that “between 100 and 200 United States Congress members, plus many of their staffers and family members with COVID, were treated by a colleague of his over the past 15 months … with …” Bolin stops and puts a hand to his ear. A chorus of people responds: “Ivermectin.” Bolin pretends not to hear. “What was that?” he says, leaning over the lectern. This time, they shout: “Ivermectin!” Bolin nods.
This isn’t my first time at FloodGate, so none of what Bolin says shocks me. Yet I’m still struggling to make sense of the place.
Having grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pastor at another church in town, I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It’s heartbreaking. So many people who love the Lord, who give their time and money to the poor and the mourning and the persecuted, have been reduced to a caricature. But I understand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ. To his credit, even when my dad would lean hard into a political debate, he was careful to remind his church of the appropriate Christian perspective. “God doesn’t bite his fingernails over any of this,” he would say around election time. “Neither should you.”
Now, I am a mainline Protestant (with Catholic relatives), and not a conservative evangelical. Alberta’s account, however, is unfortunately commonplace. Too many conservative populists are quick to declare that they’re for GOD, GUNS, and TRUMP, without seeing how close to a traditional heresy that is.
While these populists often insist that others are soft, or weak, or insufficiently devoted, in the case Alberta recounts it is these congregants who are left without a sound moral formation, and perhaps an adequate general formation.
They are quick to exercise their right to criticize other religious or political views, but even quicker to take umbrage (what, what? what!) when someone suggests they might read more, orthink more, before speaking or writing. (A perpetual embarrassment to America: the native born who defend in their nativism while revealing their inability to speak, read, and write in standard English. I don’t believe in adopting a national language — America is beautiful in any tongue — but those born here might take a bit more time to express their views with proper grammar and usage.)
Saying as much as infuriates the populists, and they owe a good part of their success to fits, tantrums, and threats that intimidate others. In small towns that are meant to be congenial and comfortable places, the populists advance by crude intimidation. See(Local) Fear of a Red Hat.
One can’t answer for others, except to note that if someone is a true believer in religion, politics, art, philosophy, etc., then one grasps that the principles from those beliefs should, if believed, govern one’s actions. Those who believe in free will can nonetheless acknowledge without contradiction that principle determines — indeed, compels — action even in the face of opposition or risk.
