Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 66. Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 7:07 PM for 12h 34m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1948, Margaret Chase Smith is elected United States senator, and becomes the first woman to serve in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the United States Senate.
Consider a dog that yelps, barks, snarls, and (too often) drools. People would have reason to see the dog as ill-natured and untrained. (The measure of nature and nurture might be hard to determine.)
Sensible people, however, would wonder: Who holds that dog’s leash? The foul canine, after all, wears a collar, the collar is attached to a leash, and the leash is in a person’s hand.
While the dog is the proximate cause of yelping, barking, snarling, and drooling, it’s the person who allows the dog to behave that way who is the root cause of the dog’s behavior.
As it is with dogs and their owners, so it is with yelping, barking, snarling, drooling politicians and the special interests who hold their leashes.
Whitewater has a problem with a politician or two like this, but the problem does not end at the tip of their snouts, so to speak. The problem extends all the way up to the hands of the local special-interest men who hold the leash.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 69. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 7:09 PM for 12h 37m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
There will be a meeting of the Public Works Committee at 6 PM.
Ultimately, the true student learns freedom by developing curiosity, judgment and creativity in the service of one’s own good and the good of their communities. This flourishing is different from being trained by an instructor to do a task or earn a badge, and it is different from the satisfaction one gets through acquiring objects or experiences in the marketplace.
On campus, students do learn specific tasks and they do enjoy experiences, of course, but as students they are doing something more fundamental and more open-ended. They are learning freedom by learning who they are and what they can do (including how they might think). This almost always happens in concert with others. Students flourish in discovering and developing their capacities together.
That’s why it’s such a challenge to be a perpetual student — as our society becomes atomized and polarized, the informal educational spaces for adults to learn from people who have different points of view are fewer and farther between. And it gets harder to exercise the intellectual humility that being a student requires when one is supposed to have the authority, the certainty, of adulthood. Yet some people manage it at various points in their lives by finding fellow learners. This can happen in book clubs, online classes, Bible study or simply in stimulating interactions with co-workers.
There is a hunger for this. Roughly 200 people join my online Great Books humanities class each week on Coursera. During the pandemic, the number was more than 1,000, and millions around the world find other classes via Khan Academy and edX. The desire for learning is also a desire for connecting. It is not just the desire for a prize or a diploma.
For perpetual students, learning (as opposed to training) has no end. As they reach the end of one path of inquiry, they find themselves already on another. These paths develop their capacities and can’t be delimited in advance of the opportunity for exploring them.
What a shame that Whitewater, with both a high school and a college, finds herself enmired in lesser institutional matters, preoccupying some but inspiring none.
Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 67. Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 7:11 PM for 12h 40m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 10.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
There will be a Whitewater Common Council and Whitewater Unified School District joint meeting at 7 PM.
On this day in 2001, the September 11 attacks kill 2,996 people using four aircraft hijacked by 19 members of al-Qaeda. Two aircraft crash into the World Trade Center in New York City, a third crashes into The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and a fourth into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
“So many harsh, terrible things have been said. It’s going to be very hard, I think, for them to sit at a table and to be able to find common ground and to be able to compromise on whatever they need to compromise on,” former Justice Janine Geske said. “There are a lot of layers to this, somebody’s going to have to work through, and I think it’s going to be hard for them to be able to do it. … I don’t know that it can be done.”
Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, recently likened the dynamic of the court to a “food fight.” Marquette University Law School professor Chad Oldfather calls it “a mess.”
“My guess is that (the conflict) just furthers the sense that has been growing for a while … that they’re just political actors — that there’s no difference between what they do and what members of the Legislature do. And that’s a problem because they’re not supposed to do the same job,” Oldfather said.
The disagreements among justices continued over the next decade [the 2010s], including a physical altercation between Ann Walsh Bradley and Prosser, and an exchange during which Prosser called Abrahamson a “bitch” and said she would be “destroyed.”
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 78. Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 7:13 PM for 12h 43m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 17% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1846, Elias Howe is granted a patent for the sewing machine.
The northern portions of the state are today below peak color, with areas closer to Whitewater showing even less fall color. (The report currently estimates our fall color in Whitewater peaking in the third week of October.)
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 74. Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 7:14 PM for 12h 46m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 25.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1947, it’s the first case of a ‘computer bug‘ being found: A moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University:
The term “bug” to describe defects has been a part of engineering jargon since the 1870s and predates electronics and computers; it may have originally been used in hardware engineering to describe mechanical malfunctions. For instance, Thomas Edison wrote in a letter to an associate in 1878:
… difficulties arise—this thing gives out and [it is] then that “Bugs”—as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves.
Baffle Ball, the first mechanical pinball game, was advertised as being “free of bugs” in 1931. Problems with military gear during World War II were referred to as bugs (or glitches). In a book published in 1942, Louise Dickinson Rich, speaking of a powered ice cutting machine, said, “Ice sawing was suspended until the creator could be brought in to take the bugs out of his darling.”
Isaac Asimov used the term “bug” to relate to issues with a robot in his short story “Catch That Rabbit“, published in 1944.
The term “bug” was used in an account by computer pioneer Grace Hopper, who publicized the cause of a malfunction in an early electromechanical computer. A typical version of the story is:
In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. Operators traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. Stemming from the first bug, today we call errors or glitches in a program a bug.
Hopper was not present when the bug was found, but it became one of her favorite stories. The date in the log book was September 9, 1947. The operators who found it, including William “Bill” Burke, later of the Naval Weapons Laboratory, Dahlgren, Virginia, were familiar with the engineering term and amusedly kept the insect with the notation “First actual case of bug being found.” This log book, complete with attached moth, is part of the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
(Citations omitted.)
Of all the kinds of bugs, however, this is — without doubt — the most formidable (indeed, unstoppable):
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 69. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:16 PM for 12h 48m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 33.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1974, President Ford signs the pardon of Richard Nixon for any federal crimes Nixon may have committed while in office.
A $3.6 million land purchase in southeastern Wisconsin will nearly double the size of the roughly 2,000-acre Prince’s Point Wildlife Area in Jefferson County, expanding key habitat for waterfowl and public access.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources acquired 1,830 acres around three miles northeast of Whitewater in May from a private landowner that’s currently managing the property as a muck farm. It’s a type of farming where wetlands have been drained, and the remaining soil is typically used to grow vegetables like beans, potatoes and onions.
The DNR is partnering with the Natural Resources Conservation Service and Ducks Unlimited on several wetland restoration projects on the property that could begin this year or in 2024.
Rachel Barker, a DNR wildlife biologist, said the work will add four wetland ponds or impoundments that are intended to provide diverse habitat for birds and wildlife.
“By restoring it to a wetland, it’s going to put the water back in the system and help create that really organic, nutrient-rich soil that is good for all the plants, forage for wildlife, and just kind of restoring that system and all the benefits of the wetland,” Barker said.
Tuesday, September 12th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Asteroid City @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Comedy/Drama/Romance
Rated PG-13
1 hour, 45 minutes (2023)
Written and directed by Wes Anderson (“Moonrise Kingdom,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “French Dispatch”), this esoteric film features an ensemble cast including Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Ed Norton and Willem Dafoe. A family of astronomy fans travels to a youth stargazing event in Asteroid City. Quirky, odd and fun
There’s good news from Alaska, as indoor-outdoor cat Leo, whose house fell into a river, survived the calamity and returned to his family twenty-six days later:
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 68. Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 7:18 PM for 12h 51m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 43.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1940, the German Luftwaffe begins the Blitz, bombing London and other British cities for over 50 consecutive nights.
If Entitlement Doesn’t Recognize Limits (and it doesn’t), then overreach is its practical problem. Not knowing what it doesn’t know, and overestimating what it does know, entitlement finds itself in the situation of an overweight German boy who leans too far over a chocolate river:
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with occasional drizzle and a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:20 PM for 12h 54m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 53.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1803, British scientist John Dalton begins using symbols to represent the atoms of different elements.
Entitlement, the feeling of a person or group that it is owed special status and privileges, grows stronger while it remains unchecked. After a while, it becomes impossible for that person or group to imagine any other perspective.
So, over a generation, a small faction of residents (e.g., bankers, landlords, public relations men) may come to believe that a community of many thousands revolves around and serves only the needs of that faction. Appeals issued to others to serve the faction’s bidding are simply pretexts to attract a few dupes, pigeons, marks, or stooges. The most deluded of those outside the faction think that they’re inside.
Some of this peripheral ilk will speak with a devotion about those men as intense as a normal person’s devotion to God, family, or country. Watching a few local politicians of this type, this libertarian blogger is surprised that they don’t genuflect upon seeing a landlord, banker, or public relations man walk by. Perhaps they do, and I’ve not noticed.
(In my case, I worship with a progressive Episcopal parish that uses an Anglo-Catholic liturgy. Something of left and right, so to speak. In that tradition, parishioners genuflect, for example, to honor the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I’d teach these local sycophants how to bend their knees if it didn’t seem so irreverent to me to do so in ordinary affairs.)
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 88. Sunrise is 6:24 AM and sunset 7:21 PM for 12h 57m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1905, the Russo-Japanese War ends with the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt (Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts).
Whitewater has a school district and a city government, each governed through boards of seven elected residents, and each bound by law and their own policies. To govern well, these elected representatives need something else to guide them: an understanding of their primary obligations.
For the school district, the primary obligation is obviously internal: students (responsible to their parents) and those who teach them. Others (residents who are non-students and non-parents) matter, but only secondarily. How are children learning, feeling, and experiencing their scholastic environment? It simply cannot be the case that non-students and non-parents matter as much as children, parents, and faculty within the district. To give everyone equal time and attention would mean insufficient attention to those who are the key subjects of the district.
This perspective is so important and should be so obvious that those who do not grasp it require, themselves, a remedial education.
For the district:those inside the district’s walls matter most. The district’s most important responsibilities are thousands of minor children within its care.
For local government:those outside the walls of city hall matter most. The city’s most important responsibility is the thousands of residents outside the municipal building. A small number of city employees should not be the primary concern of Whitewater’s elected representatives. That’s all trivial as against providing fundamental services for residents. Whitewater is not a prosperous city, and as America flourishes the gap between nation and city only widens.
It’s a myopic perspective that leads councilmembers to focus on the internal when there are important external problems that longtime politicians have failed to address, have excused, or for which they have shiftlessly blamed others.
Labor Day in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 91. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:23 PM for 13h 00m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1888, George Eastman registers the trademark Kodak and receives a patent for his camera that uses roll film.
The state’s monthly jobs reports hit a new record of more than 3 million in July, continuing to surpass Wisconsin’s peak number of jobs before the COVID-19 pandemic crushed employment through the summer of 2020.
In the months that followed that initial pandemic crash, Wisconsin’s job growth shot ahead of the rest of the U.S., according to the report. Since February 2022, however, it has fallen behind the country as a whole while still on a trajectory toward record job numbers this year.
“Given the different rates of recovery, the national economy recovered to the pre-pandemic jobs threshold a year before Wisconsin did,” the report [from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, COWS] states.
Leisure and hospitality workers were hardest hit by job losses early in the pandemic, with their number of jobs cut in half. They have rebounded dramatically, but still hold fewer jobs than before the pandemic.
The nature of those jobs, with “low wages, insufficient and volatile hours and few benefits” remains a challenge, the report adds, but nationally those conditions appear to be improving.
At the same time, however, the report finds “troubling trends in Wisconsin” for other job sectors. Information jobs have fallen by 8.3% since February 2020, just before the pandemic, while nationally the sector has grown 5.7%. Professional and business services jobs have grown 1.6% in that period, just a fraction of the 7.4% growth they have had nationally. Government job growth is also behind national trends.
“Taken together, weakness in these sectors — which tend to have high job quality and jobs for college graduates — presents an economic development challenge for the state,” the report warns.
The fundamental mistake a generation of Whitewater policymakers at the Whitewater Community Development Authority have made is thinking that capital projects are the sine qua non of economic development. That’s false (whether ignorantly or mendaciously false). These bankers, landlords, public relations men or lobbyists (an occupation more confession than boast), and longtime councilmembers have held this city back. (After all, ‘It’s possible, but unlikely, that there are any parents who say “Dear God, let our son grow up to be a lobbyist.”‘)
The measure of a thriving economy is productivity gains, reaching across the society, and expressed by consequence as gains in individual and household income. Whitewater’s last-generation types have failed in this key regard.
America and Wisconsin are doing better than Whitewater because our aged generation of local development men have done worse than others in America and Wisconsin.
