Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 87. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:23 PM for 14h 44m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 37% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1974, the United States Supreme Court unanimously rules that President Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and they order him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.
They gathered at Guisachan House, where the first goldens were bred in 1868 by Sir Dudley Marjoribanks. The Golden Retriever Club of Scotland hosts these events every five years to honor their roots.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:37 AM and sunset 8:24 PM for 14h 46m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1972, the United States launches Landsat 1, the first Earth-resources satellite.
Here in Berlin, police are saying a lion they’ve been searching for since Thursday night is probably not a lion at all. After re-evaluating this video that sparked the hunt, authorities now say it’s more likely… a wild boar!
The mayor of the small town just outside Berlin where over a hundred officers had been searching for the phantom feline – delivered the big news.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:25 PM for 14h 48m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1933, aviator Wiley Post returns to Floyd Bennett Field in New York City, completing the first solo flight around the world in seven days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes.
Residents of a suburb outside Fort Lauderdale, Fla., don’t quite know what to do about their new neighbors: dozens of domesticated rabbits, and counting.
An estimated 75 rabbits have made their home on Jenada Isles, a small community of about 80 households within the suburb of Wilton Manors, after a former resident moved away a couple of years ago and left behind a pair of pet lionhead rabbits that bred. Officials and residents are weighing solutions that would spare the rabbits from getting euthanized and still keep them out of lawns, roads and the Florida heat.
One resident concerned about the rabbits’ safety showed up to a community meeting in May with three pet rabbits in a stroller, according to the city, which was unable to identify the man.
Jenada Isles is technically an island within the suburb, surrounded by canals, which has contained the rabbit colony and allowed them to multiply in a small space.
….
In an emailed statement, Chief Blocker said, “The safety of this rabbit population is of utmost importance to the city.”
“Any decision to involve ourselves will be certain to see these rabbits placed into the hands of people with a passion to provide the necessary care and love for these rabbits,” he added.
On Friday, Chief Blocker emailed a status update to the residents of Jenada Isles that said that discussions with a rescue organization would continue and that next steps included identifying prospective funding and receiving approval from Wilton Manors and a written agreement for the services provided.
“If anyone has interest in fostering rabbits, please let us know and we will place you on a list,” he wrote.
Anecdotally, it seems as though a disproportionate number of weird tales, unfortunate events, or wrongful acts originate in Florida.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:26 PM for 14h 50m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Wisconsin’s labor force is continuing its post-pandemic expansion, the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows.
The total of number of nonfarm-related jobs across Wisconsin grew to more than 3 million as of June 2023.
That’s a record high and an increase of about 52,900 jobs compared to a year prior, according to an analysis of the preliminary numbers by Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development. Since May, the state added 6,900 nonfarm jobs, the estimate shows.
“Businesses continue to hire and those that do get laid off aren’t laid off for very long, so it’s pretty strong jobs market still here in Wisconsin,” Dennis Winters, DWD’s chief economist, said Thursday.
The state is bigger than the city, and many jobs in the state have wages higher than those in the city. And yet, and yet, it is better for the city that Wisconsin does well than that Wisconsin does poorly.
Employment trends are moving favorably overall, and that’s a reason for sober-minded optimism.
Tuesday, July 25th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Colossus: The Forbin Project @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Science Fiction/Thriller
PG-13
1 hour, 41 minutes. (1970)
It’s been said that science fiction anticipates the future and reality. Equate that with AI or artificial intelligence. In this well-regarded classic film, an Elon-Musk type electronics genius builds a super computer with a mind of its own. Or so he thinks, until he learns, so have the Soviets. When the two artificial intelligences begin to communicate with each other, machines’ world domination over humans beings is imminent. Stars Eric Braeden, Susan Clark and William Schallert.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:35 AM and sunset 8:27 PM for 14h 52m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1972, an 18-and-a-half-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between President Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex.
Whitewater has a city government, public school district, and public university, but these three government institutions are not enough to assure Whitewater the prosperous future she deserves. Manipulation of these institutions over the last generation, through various schemes of landlords, bankers, and supposed public-relations men has not brought happy times to the city; what’s left of these types offers even less for the future.
And yet, and yet, even if Whitewater had stronger institutions and fewer scheming types, the community would still need competent, useful private efforts aimed at uplifting residents.
In early 2022, [aerospace engineer Marina] Bloomer officially leased an office space in Middleton and held her first set of summer camps last year. Centered on hands-on experiments and the engineering design process, Bloomer said she aimed to bring something new to Madison to add to the “really great STEM programming already in Madison.”
“There’s so much more to engineering, learning how to problem solve like an engineer and learning how to build things with your hands out of materials,” she said. “Basically, how do you start from just a problem and a blank sheet of paper and end up with something that you made yourself that works the way it’s supposed to work and that journey to get there is what it means to be an engineer.”
That’s the process Elizabeth Younkle got to see last summer, walking into a space that greets students with a colorful sign reminding them that “the future is yours to create.”
Younkle, now a seventh-grader, has been interested in STEM “forever, basically,” she said, but camps she attended before Stellar Tech Girls were dominated by boys. In those situations, the group doesn’t always “accept me as one of them, which is a bit hard,” she said, so being surrounded by girls “was really amazing.”
“I got to meet people who had the same interests as me and that’s not a thing that usually happens, it’s usually me and a whole bunch of other people who either don’t want to be there or are guys,” she said. “So it’s awesome having people who I identify with and who I feel like understand me.”
This summer, there are three weeklong sessions in June for “Stellar Explorer” camp, three in July for “Stellar Chemistry” camp, four in August for “Stellar Space” camp and two at the end of August for “Stellar Energy” camp. The camps cost $250 in early registration by April 1 or $280 after, with some scholarships available, with three-hour sessions each day in either the morning or the afternoon.
Whitewater won’t succeed on the basis of Old Whitewater’s boosterism, toxic positivity, or yesterday’s mediocre work. To meet both basic human needs and aspirations, this community should put government in its properly limited place, discard tired hangers-on who treat government as a special account, and turn away from nostalgia sufferers who think the past was just dandy.
Find new, promote new, and we will have a new and better Whitewater.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:28 PM for 14h 54m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1977, the world’s first Global Positioning System (GPS) signal was transmitted from Navigation Technology Satellite 2 (NTS-2) and received at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at 12:41 a.m. Eastern time (ET).
Divisions between Democrats and Republicans have expanded far beyond the traditional fault lines based on race, education, gender, the urban-rural divide and economic ideology.
Polarization now encompasses sharp disagreements over the significance of patriotism and nationalism as well as a fundamental split between those seeking to restore perceived past glories and those who embrace the future.
Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, described the situation this way in an email to me:
Because political beliefs now reflect deeply held worldviews about how the world ought to be — challenging traditional ways of doing things on the one hand and putting a brake on that change on the other — partisans look across the aisle at each other and absolutely do not understand how their opponents can possibly understand the world as they do.
The reason we have the levels of polarization we have today, Hetherington continued,
is because of the gains non-dominant groups have made over the last 60 years. The Democrats no longer apologize for challenging traditional hierarchies and established pathways. They revel in it. Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality, or an LGBT person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it. It’s just something we are going to have to live with until a new set of issues rises to replace this set.
Yes, so it seems. It’s not true that every critic is angry, or that every critique is motivated by hatred. It is true, however, that populists who engage in dominance and submission rituals or throw fits at public meetings are overwrought and under-thought. They don’t have a concept, let alone a practice, of the maxim that thehotter the temperature, the colder the person.
This intensity has grown as populism has grown; it will not recede until populism recedes.
This stunning drone footage shows the extent of the lava flow from the Mount Fagradalsfjall volcanic eruption in Iceland, which began last week just 25 miles southeast of the capital city of Reykjavík. Icelandic authorities have warned people to stay away from the area.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 79. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:29 PM for 14h 55m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson is paying himself back hundreds of thousands of dollars for loans he made to his prior Senate campaigns, despite claiming he wouldn’t seek to recoup the money from donors.
The multi-millionaire Oshkosh Republican received $400,000 from his campaign account in early May, according to his latest filing with the Federal Elections Commission. The payments were made in two installments of $150,000 each and two more of $60,000 and $40,000, all on May 3, for loans from his successful 2010 and 2016 elections.
The repayments are legal.
….
But Johnson, a former plastics executive, previously said that he wouldn’t seek to repay the $8.4 million in outstanding loans he claimed his campaign owes him for loans in his 2010 and 2016 campaigns.
“I don’t have any expectation to get paid back,” Johnson told Insider Inc. on May 17 when asked about a comment on his financial disclosure form that noted “all funds to prior campaigns have been deemed loans and suitable for repayment.”
In fact, Johnson had begun to recoup some of those loans two weeks before he made the remarks to the Insider, according to the latest FEC report released this past Saturday.
Expectations change, right? What’s an expectation, anyway, except a belief that something will happen or be the case? Whose belief was this, by the way: Johnson’s or yours?
If Johnson meant truly that he would not use campaign money to pay back his own loans, he could have said no, he would not. He said he did not have any expectation, a reply that connotes doing what he wanted to do while hoping others would look away.
Those who thought otherwise should have read Johnson’s fine print.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 76. Sunrise is 5:32 AM and sunset 8:29 PM for 14h 57m 24s of daytime. The moon is new with none of its visible disk illuminated.
Yes, a lot of misinformation spread on Facebook; yes, a lot of people got a lot of their political news from dubious sources. But we know now that people’s brains don’t have an on/off switch that gets flipped by a well-made factcheck. People’s beliefs are driven by a huge number of psychological and social factors, far beyond whether they follow PolitiFact on Instagram. Knowledge alone doesn’t knock out beliefs held for deeper reasons — and sometimes, it entrenches them more deeply.1
You can see those extra layers of nuance in a lot of the academic research in the field. Like in this paper, which came out in preprint recently. It argues exactly what it says on the tin: “Partisans Are More Likely to Entrench Their Beliefs in Misinformation When Political Outgroup Members Fact-Check Claims.” Its authors are Diego A. Reinero (Princeton postdoc), Elizabeth A. Harris (Penn postdoc), Steve Rathje (NYU postdoc), Annie Duke (Penn visiting scholar), and Jay Van Bavel (NYU prof).
Here’s the abstract:
The spread of misinformation has become a global issue with potentially dire consequences. There has been debate over whether misinformation corrections (or “fact-checks”) sometimes “backfire,” causing people to become more entrenched in misinformation.
While recent studies suggest that an overall “backfire effect” is uncommon, we found that fact-checks were more likely to backfire when they came from a political outgroup member across three experiments (N = 1,217).
We found that corrections reduced belief in misinformation; however, the effect of partisan congruence on belief was 5× more powerful than the effect of corrections. Moreover, corrections from political outgroup members were 52% more likely to backfire — leaving people with more entrenched beliefs in misinformation.
In sum, corrections are effective on average, but have small effects compared to partisan identity congruence, and sometimes backfire — especially if they come from a political outgroup member. This suggests that partisan identity may drive irrational belief updating.
In Whitewater (as in places across America) in years before the pandemic and in years since, it’s proved difficult to move people from false claims. During the pandemic in Whitewater, it would have been a herculean task to move one side or another from its pandemic position. Mere recitation of statistics was ineffectual (and believing otherwise was obtuse).
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:30 PM for 14h 59m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1945, the Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
All peoples in all eras have been afflicted now & again with conspiracy theories. Different times, however, are of different severities. We now seem to suffer more of this foul condition than our forefathers. At the least, our malady is serious. Populist candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, now lies to our people when he suggests that covid was designed to spare Jews, Chinese people:
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. advanced a dangerous conspiracy theory this week that the coronavirus could have been a bioweapon “deliberately targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people while disproportionately attacking White and Black people, according to a video of the remarks published Saturday by the New York Post. “There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said during a dinner on New York’s Upper East Side on Tuesday evening. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
His remarks at the gathering — a dinner party attended by members of the media and Kennedy’s campaign managerat Tony’s Di Napoli on East 63rd Street — amplify racist and antisemitic tropes, including theories that blame Jews for the spread of the coronavirus to expand influence and financial gain, according to research by the Anti-Defamation League.
‘There is an argument’ is the language of a guarded crackpot, just askin’ questions along the way to his dark insinuation. In fact, the only dispute about Kennendy’s remarks is whether he says ‘an‘ argument or ‘no‘ argument about COVID-19 as an ethnic bio-weapon. The first is wrong, the second is simply a firmer commitment to the wrong.
Years of tolerating milder versions of bad reasoning and bad arguments weaken the intellect, making it susceptible to utter mendacity.
Anti-Semitism is arguably the world’s oldest and most durable conspiracy theory. It presents Jews as the string-pulling puppet masters behind the world’s political, economic, and social problems. For those seeking simple solutions to life’s complexities, this outlook offers a ready-made explanation—and enemy. Anyone seeking a single source for society’s travails may start with run-of-the mill conspiracy theories but will soon end up parroting anti-Jewish ideas. As I’ve written before, “Conspiracy theorists begin by rejecting mainstream explanations for social and political events in favor of supposedly suppressed knowledge and hidden hands. These individuals may not start out as anti-Semites. But anti-Semitism has a multi-thousand-year head start on their crooked conception of the world, and has produced centuries of material casting the Jews as its chief culprit. Once a person has convinced themselves that an invisible hand is manipulating the masses, they are just a couple of Google searches away from discovering that it belongs to an invisible Jew.”
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:31 PM for 15h 00m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 4.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
