FREE WHITEWATER

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Daily Bread for 3.14.25: Schumer Gets the Criticism He Deserves

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 74. Sunrise is 7:08 and sunset is 7:00, for 11 hours, 52 minutes of daytime. The moon is full with 99.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1945, the Royal Air Force drops the Grand Slam bomb in action for the first time, on a railway viaduct near Bielefeld, Germany.


There’s national discussion about Sen. Chuck Schumer’s decision to vote in favor of a Republican-supported continuing resolution in the Senate. I’m not a member of the Democratic Party, but as I am a Never Trump libertarian aligned with them on policy toward Trump, Democrats’ frustration with Schumer is understandable to me (although I’ve never thought much of him).

From Bluesky, here’s Democrat Josh Marshall writing about Schumer:

Here’s a scatological comment on reactions to Schumer’s capitulation from comedian, actor, and writer Michael Ian Black:

Indeed.

There’s a local angle in all this. A day or two ago, some Democrats were standing along Main Street in Whitewater with signs protesting recent Trump decisions. Some of them seemed about Schumer’s age, but there they were, lawfully expressing their opposition. Good for them.

And yet, and yet, in every town, including Whitewater, there’s at least one Democratic man of Schumer’s age who would behave as Schumer is behaving, capitulating, yielding, or even carrying the message of the very rightwing populists who would gladly bring about that man’s ruin. (These diffident types would have, of course, one self-serving rationalization or another for their servile behavior.)

Marshall’s words apply to such types as these: foolish and weak men.

They are unsuited to the times. The sooner they fade from the scene the better.


‘Blood moon’ lunar eclipse seen across South America:

Moongazers gathered in Chile, Argentina and Venezuela to observe a total lunar eclipse. The events happen when the moon, Earth and sun align just so. The Earth casts a shadow that can partially or totally blot out the moon

Daily Bread for 3.11.25: Doubling Down on Ignorant Economics

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 53. Sunrise is 7:13 and sunset is 6:57, for 11 hours, 44 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 5 PM.

On this day in 1941, President Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act into law, allowing American-built war supplies to be shipped to the Allies on loan.


Monday in America: The Rapidly Declining Economic Climate.

Tuesday in America:

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he will double his planned tariffs on steel and aluminum from 25% to 50% for Canada, escalating a trade war with the United States’ northern neighbor and showing an indifference to recent stock market turmoil and rising recession risks.

Trump said on social media that the increase of the tariffs set to take effect on Wednesday is a response to the price increases that the provincial government of Ontario put on electricity sold to the United States.

“I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to add an ADDITIONAL 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all STEEL and ALUMINUM COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES FROM CANADA, ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD,” Trump posted Tuesday on Truth Social.

After a brutal stock market selloff on Monday and further jitters Tuesday, Trump faces increased pressure to show he has a legitimate plan to grow the economy instead of perhaps pushing it into a recession. But so far the president is doubling down on the tariffs he talked up repeatedly during the 2024 campaign and throwing a once stable economy into utter turmoil as investors expected him to lead with deregulation and tax cuts instead of colossal tax hikes.

See Josh Boak, Rob Gillies, and Michelle Price, Trump doubles planned tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50% as trade war intensifies, Associated Press, March 11, 2025.

Update, 3.12.25: Only hours later on Tuesday, Trump reversed course. (Trump defines decisive down.)

The reporting is sound: tariffs do act as tax hikes, and Trump’s tariffs will be, in effect, colossal tax hikes on consumers and businesses. All America will feel them.


See Firefly’s Blue Ghost moon lander drill, vacuum and deploy electrodes:

The Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost moon lander has begun its work on the moon using its drill, vacuum and electrodes. Blue Ghost has drilled into surface to determine heat flow from interior of Moon. It has deployed four tethered Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) electrodes and an 8-foot mast to study the deep interior of the moon. Also, it’s Lunar PlanetVac collects lunar soil and more using pressurized nitrogen gas.

Daily Bread for 3.10.25: The Rapidly Declining Economic Climate

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 66. Sunrise is 7:15 and sunset is 6:55, for 11 hours, 41 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Plan & Architectural Commission meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 2017, the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye of South Korea in response to a major political scandal is unanimously upheld by the country’s Constitutional Court, ending her presidency.


Whitewater is in Wisconsin, and Wisconsin is in America. The economic outlook for America is in decline. Whitewater will not escape national and state trends.

A man with six business bankruptcies now won’t rule out a recession in 2025:

“I hate to predict things like that,” Trump said when pressed about the possibility of a recession during a recorded interview that aired on “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”

….

The rosy economic outlook that greeted Trump’s return to the White House has dimmed in recent weeks. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.1% in February, boosted by firings in the public sector. And consumer confidence fellby the most in any given month since August 2021. 

American consumers share concerns that tariffs will raise prices on everyday goods, while corporate CEOs are eager for clarity as the president has continually announced and then rolled back new tariff packages. His moves last week, levying and then delaying 25 percent tariffs on a major chunk of Mexican and Canadian goods until April, are just the latest example. The confusion has sent markets scrambling. The S&P 500 fell by more than 3 percent on the week.

See Gregory Svirnovskiy, Trump won’t rule out a recession in 2025, POLITICO, March 9, 2025.

The conservative populists have no sound grasp of economics, as theirs is a movement of cultural revenge, not economics. Trump’s first term was an economic failure, yet many of them delusionally imagine him as an economic guru.

Truth in advertising: Come for the culture war, stay for the recession.


Stocks take another tumble after Trump’s weekend comments on inflation:

Daily Bread for 2.27.25: The Sad Legacy of a Status-Based Culture

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 42. Sunrise is 6:33 and sunset is 5:42, for 11 hours, 9 minutes of daytime. The moon is new with 0.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1782, the House of Commons of Great Britain votes against further war in America.


A key aspect of Old Whitewater was that it was a status-based culture. Who’s who mattered a lot. Which family, etc. I’ve satirized that outlook (‘town squires,’ ‘town notables’) only because it was, and is, nuttily narrow. We are a town of fifteen-thousand equal & ordinary people, not fifteen important people. (If everyone in this town had always felt on this point as I do, there would have been less community need for Excedrin and Korbel1.)

And yet, and yet, if I’ve thought it absurd, others have taken that status-based view of the world, that hierarchy, as though a law of nature. They grew up with it, were assured by their parents that it would be unchanging, and that they in their time would be as influential as their parents were in the generation before.

It hasn’t worked out that way.

Our present time, in Whitewater, in Wisconsin, and America has a different outlook. Ours is an unsettled time, where nice hierarchies no longer matter. Over the last decade, that old way has faded in this town2, and the fading has left older men grasping for their placed in a changed city.

There’s another problem the remaining status-based old guard faces: they have not developed skill at reasoned argument (as it was unnecessary if one could simply demand a result based on status). Their idea of an argument is sometimes little more than words wrapped around a question: DYKWIA?

Good argumentation is hard, and takes time, to produce. Indeed, it’s hardest for those who are truly skillful, as they can see how much can (and should) be done.

_____

  1. Potable, and popular here in Wisconsin, but there’s better available. ↩︎
  2. It’s faded across all America, honest to goodness. We’re a freer and more egalitarian society for it. ↩︎

3,000 Golden Retrievers. Go, Dogs, Go:

Film: Tuesday, February 25th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Blitz

Tuesday, February 25th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Blitz @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building: History/Drama/Action Rated PG-13 2 hours (2024) The dramatic and hair raising stories of a group of Londoners during the German blitzkrieg bombing campaign of the British capital during World War II. Starring…

Daily Bread for 2.16.25: Updating a Post on the Kinds of Conservatives in Whitewater

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 23. Sunrise is 6:50 and sunset is 5:28, for 10 hours, 38 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 85.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1960, the U.S. Navy submarine USS Triton begins Operation Sandblast, setting sail from New London, Connecticut, to begin the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe.


In 2021, this libertarian blogger posted (as part of a longer series) on the kinds of conservatives in Whitewater. See Whitewater’s Local Politics 2021: The Kinds of Conservatives in Whitewater, April 8, 2021. At that time, there were three conservative types of note: traditionalists (old-school types) transactionalists (deal-making types), and populists (what’s now called Trumpism or MAGA).

There was a question at the time:

The populists are often underestimated. I have been – and am – a critic of these rebranded Trumpists, but have never underestimated them.

These populist conservatives are not deal-makers: they want what they want, on their terms, as soon as they can get it. As the traditionalists fade away, the question among conservatives in Whitewater (and other places) will be whether the deal-makers or the populists dominate right-of-center politics.

There’s a sure answer now, four years later: only the conservative populists matter politically. There’s one movement, one way, one outlook.

A conservative might imagine himself as something else (a traditionalist or a deal-maker), and might be something else, but only in his house or in his head.

Conservatives in Whitewater’s public square are all populists.


Father describes moment humpback whale briefly swallowed his son:

Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell Simancas, when the massive whale suddenly surfaced, trapping the young man and his yellow kayak in its mouth for a few seconds before letting him go.

Daily Bread for 2.10.25: Tariffs Won’t Solve America’s Fentanyl Addiction

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 29. Sunrise is 6:58 and sunset is 5:20, for 10 hours, 22 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Plan & Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1906,  HMS Dreadnought, the first of a revolutionary new breed of battleships, is christened.


In Whitewater, in Wisconsin, and across America, there are people addicted to fentanyl. Tariffs won’t relieve them of their addiction:

Americans consume more illicit drugs per capita than anyone else in the world; about 6% of the U.S. population uses them regularly. 

….

One such drug, fentanyl – a synthetic opioid that’s 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine – is the leading reason U.S. overdose deaths have surged in recent years. While the rate of fentanyl overdose deaths has dipped a bit recently, it’s still vastly higher than it was just five years ago.

Ending the fentanyl crisis won’t be easy. The U.S. has an addiction problem that spans decades – long predating the rise of fentanyl – and countless attempts to regulatelegislate and incarcerate have done little to reduce drug consumption. Meanwhile, the opioid crisis alone costs Americans tens of billions of dollars each year.

….

America’s experiments with tariffs can be traced back to the founding era with the passage of the Tariff Act of 1789. This long history has shown that tariffsindustrial subsidies and protectionist policies don’t do much to stimulate broad economic growth at home – but they raise prices for consumers and can even lead to global economic instability. History also shows that tariffs don’t work especially well as negotiating tools, failing to effect significant policy changes in target countriesEconomists generally agree that the costs of tariffs outweigh the benefits.

Over the course of Trump’s first term, the average effective tariff rate on Chinese imports went from 3% to 11%. But while imports from China fell slightly, the overall trade relationship didn’t change much: China remains the second-largest supplier of goods to the U.S. 

The tariffs did have some benefit – for Vietnam and other nearby countries with relatively low labor costs. Essentially, the tariffs on China caused production to shift, with global companies investing billions of dollars in competitor nations.

This isn’t the first time Trump has used trade policy to pressure China on fentanyl– he did so in his first term. But while China made some policy changes in response, such as adding fentanyl to its controlled substances list in 2019, fentanyl deaths in the U.S. continued to rise. Currently, China still ranks as the No. 1 producer of fentanyl precursors, or chemicals used to produce illicit fentanyl. And there are others in the business: India, over that same period, has become a major producer of fentanyl.

See Rodney Coates, Why Trump’s tariffs can’t solve America’s fentanyl crisis, The Conversation, February 1, 2025.

Drug War or Trade War: prohibition has been and will be futile against addiction. Domestic demand seeks supply, whether that supply is produced on this continent or elsewhere.


More on tariffs, apart from supposed drug reduction: Metals tariffs ‘will have significant cost’ for US:

US President Donald Trump said he will introduce new 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports into the US, in a major escalation of his trade policy overhaul. Economist Vicky Pryce of CEBR talks about the impact his announcement will have on trade.

Film: Tuesday, February 11th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Conclave

Tuesday, February 11th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Conclave @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building: Drama/Mystery/Thriller Rated PG 2 hours (2024) After the unexpected death of the Pope, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is tasked with managing the covert and ancient ritual of electing a new one. Sequestered…

Daily Bread for 1.27.25: A State of UW-Whitewater Presentation

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 38. Sunrise is 7:14 and sunset is 5:01, for 9 hours, 48 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 4.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 6:15 PM, and the School Board meets at 7 PM.

On this day in 1776,  Henry Knox‘s “noble train of artillery” arrives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


On 1.9.25, UW-Whitewater Chancellor Dr. Corey King delivered a State of the University presentation at a Whitewater-Area League of Women Voters’ meeting. (The university’s formal State of the University Address will be on 3.18.25.)

A few remarks:

While I don’t believe that Wisconsin’s university system is better off with a WISGOP legislature, legislative pressure has demanded in response a more skillful university chancellor than ones our campus has fifteen years ago. There’s less local control over public universities in Wisconsin than in years past, but Whitewater did poorly with the choices her local input produced (Telfer, Kopper). See on the problem of poor local judgment The Dark, Futile Dream and Revisiting Kozloff’s ‘Dark, Futile Dream.’

These are not times of local university control. For this city, the decline of local control has led, it seems, to a decidedly more competent chancellor. If local control should one day return, Whitewater will have to produce better recommendations than she did years ago.

For now, however unwelcome the legislative balance, Whitewater is fortunate that she has better than her own past judgment brought.


One should be careful about breaking pets’ treats in half. They don’t like it:

Film: Tuesday, January 28th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Reagan

Tuesday, January 28th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Reagan  @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building: Period Drama/Biography Rated PG-13 2 hours, 21 minutes (2024) Based on the life of Ronald Reagan, from his childhood, through his Hollywood career, to his time in the Oval Office. Starring Dennis…

Daily Bread for 1.22.25: National, State, and Local Topics

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be windy with morning snow and a high of 21. Sunrise is 7:18 and sunset is 4:55, for 9 hours, 37 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 42.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

There is a Lakes Advisory Committee meeting at 4:30 PM and the Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1968, the Apollo Program‘s Apollo 5 lifts off carrying the first lunar module into space:

Once the craft reached orbit and the LM separated from the S-IVB booster, the program of orbital testing began, but a planned burn was aborted automatically when the Apollo Guidance Computer detected the craft was not going as fast as planned. Flight Director Gene Kranz and his team at Mission Control in Houston quickly decided on an alternate mission, during which the mission’s goals of testing LM-1 were accomplished. The mission was successful enough that a contemplated second uncrewed mission to test the LM was cancelled, advancing NASA‘s plans to land an astronaut on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.


For today, a few points: national, state, and local. In February, I’ll split national topics into a new site, with state and local topics staying here at FREE WHITEWATER. Regrettably, national topics may intrude into Whitewater’s life for the worst of reasons (as they have in the past), and so one ordinary person’s preferred distinctions may understandably again yield to imposed circumstances.

In Whitewater, the national has become local. National attention over immigration in Whitewater is at best an interference with the natural growth and development of this city, and at worst would be an inhumane displacement that no majority within this city has (or ever will) support1.

A campaign of shock and awe only works on those who are susceptible of being shocked and awed2. Anyone who watched the 2024 presidential campaign would have expected all of this. Expectation and patient preparation in reply to what one heard and saw leaves one neither shocked nor awed. All of this was easily predictable.

The particular demands of national, state, or local governments should not, and must not, trump fundamental individual liberties. That’s a genuine libertarian view; no one should expect anything different from a genuine libertarian.

All populism, whether of the left (Revolutionary France) or right (America today), assumes strength in its members and weakness in its opponents. Sometimes that’s true, but other times false. Populists, soaked in their own fervor, cannot discern the character of others until conflict begins. Roosevelt was right of the American commitment to liberal democratic traditions, that no one should mistake out kindness for weakness.

There’s much to dispute and doubt, from this libertarian’s viewpoint, with the views of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On some fundamentals, however, she’s right, as with her contention that those within the American tradition should reject both the Confederates and the Nazis. No one is lawfully required to reject those malevolent ideologies, yet failure to do so places one outside the liberal democratic3 paradigm. (Her manner of presentation is skillful, although of a style from the generation after my own. Ocasio-Cortez is our children’s age, and she speaks in the easy, familiar manner of a social media generation.)

Of course Elon Musk’s gestures (twice) at an inauguration event were Nazi sieg heil salutes. He knew what he was doing, and people of normal discernment knew what they saw. He likely practiced in front of a mirror, and crafted an implausible denial beforehand. Musk, a supporter of Germany’s racist AfD party, wouldn’t be the first fascist to practice in front of a mirror.

Wisconsin has now joined other states in opposing Trump’s attempt to rewrite through a mere executive order the United States Constitution’s express provision of birthright citizenship:

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Monday that will end automatic citizenship for children whose parents are foreign nationals, whether they’re here legally or not.

On Tuesday, a coalition of 18 states sued Trump and federal agencies in U.S. District Court in Massachussetts, claiming the order violates the Constitution. The ACLU filed a separate legal challenge in New Hampshire on behalf of immigrant advocacy organizations on similar grounds.

It would, they said, upend a foundational aspect of the United States of America: that anyone born here is from here.

The executive order, called “Protecting the Value and Meaning of American Citizenship, would prevent federal agencies from issuing Social Security cards, passports or welfare benefits to U.S.-born children in a sweeping reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

….

Its first sentence sums up the citizenship right guaranteed at birth: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

A court case soon tested whether the amendment also afforded birthright citizenship to children born in the U.S. to immigrant parents. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark, a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents challenged the government’s claim that he wasn’t a citizen.

The Supreme Court decided in 1898 that “children born in the U.S. to immigrant parents are citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status,” according to the American Immigration Council.

See Lauren Villagran, Trump executive order restricts birthright citizenship; states sue, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, January 21, 2025.

Trump’s birthright order — by which he alone presumptuously claims to rewrite the law — is also incoherent as an attempt to do so. Josh Marshall explains:

But if you accept that place of birth isn’t controlling, everyone’s citizenship becomes at least uncertain or not clearly documented — and for many whose parents or grandparents immigrated, the uncertainty becomes very real. If any court takes this seriously, they’ll have to untangle that and possibly end up with tens of millions of Americans who may need to prove that they’re actually citizens. Even if you accept the false claim that birthright citizenship can be abolished by anything other than a constitutional amendment, there’s no way that everyone’s citizenship — and I mean everyone’s — will now rest going forward on the claims made in an executive order.

See Josh Marshall, Day Two, Talking Points Memo, January 21, 2025.

Finally, a few remarks about the prayer service at the National Cathedral yesterday. (The National Cathedral is a private Episcopal church in Washington, D.C. The name national does not mean public ownership.) The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, speaking from the pulpit, addressed Trump and others in attendance. She called for mercy (a virtue) toward gays, lesbians, and migrants. Trump, predictably, did not like these remarks, and wants an apology.

He deserves nothing of the kind. He’s weak, easily insulted by gentle words, and lashes out in response to his own narcissistic injury.

Some Americans, I included among them, worship with Episcopal congregations much like the one at the National Cathedral4. Our beliefs don’t come from Trump, won’t yield to Trump, or any of the populists who insist that God is as they last learned about Him at a political rally.

One more point about these loud and proud nativists: they lack long-term memories. One will hear that they’ve been here for a few generations, and so that entitles them to precedence. Someone else could say that his families on both sides, of German & French ancestry, came to this continent before the Revolution, and so he should have precedence5. Then again, someone could say that his forebears came to this continent in bondage even earlier. Finally, another person could rightly say that his forebears were here thousands of years earlier.

It is enough that people are here now as our neighbors.

___________

  1. As I discussed with residents last night in multiple conversations, no one in this city — other than residents who may be personally affected — wants national immigration policy to disrupt life in this city less than I do. There’s only loss in all of this. ↩︎
  2. As a military strategy, shock and awe is overrated. ↩︎
  3. Honest to goodness, for the thousandth time, the liberal democratic paradigm describes preservation of individual rights (liberal) in a society of majority decision (democratic). It doesn’t mean liberal as a partisan affiliation. Both, not either. ↩︎
  4. Not all Episcopal parishes are the same, in liturgy or political affiliation of members. There are probably about four or five different forms of worship among Episcopal congregations, and their membership runs from progressive to conservative depending on the community. In my case, the congregation with whom I worship is Anglo-Catholic in liturgy and progressive in members’ secular views (more progressive than mine — free markets are both moral and efficient). ↩︎
  5. I’m not ignorant or selfish enough to advance this claim this: all these ancestral claims strike me as primitive. My point is only that the nativists aren’t special as they imagine themselves to be. None of us is special in a nativist way. ↩︎

Daily Bread for 1.21.25: The Executive Order on Realigning The United States Refugee Admissions Program

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny and cold with a high of 0. Sunrise is 7:19 and sunset is 4:54, for 9 hours, 35 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 51.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1968, a B-52 bomber crashes near Thule Air Base, contaminating the area after its nuclear payload ruptures. One of the four bombs remains unaccounted for after the cleanup operation is complete.


Whitewater has received considerable attention, mostly lies and scapegoating, for the arrival of immigrants into this community. Yesterday, via executive order, Whitewater received yet more. Our city received mention in Section 1, first paragraph:

Section 1.  Purpose.  Over the last 4 years, the United States has been inundated with record levels of migration, including through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP).  Cities and small towns alike, from Charleroi, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Ohio, to Whitewater, Wisconsin, have seen significant influxes of migrants.  Even major urban centers such as New York City, Chicago, and Denver have sought Federal aid to manage the burden of new arrivals.  Some jurisdictions, like New York and Massachusetts, have even recently declared states of emergency because of increased migration.

There’s no surprise in this — I’ve an archive of hundreds of stories about Whitewater’s immigrants that I’ve collected methodically and patiently over these months. The archive is a partial one; it’s likely there have been thousands of stories, most of which repeated the same hysterical claim that this small town had somehow been invaded.

This national attention in a nativist media environment was predictable; Whitewater’s place in a 1.20.25 executive order, however ill-fitting, was predictable. The use of immigrants as a justification for staffing increases in Whitewater, when those staffing increases were justifiable regardless, was a fundamental failing. This libertarian blogger (and others) advised against this course, having denounced the so-called press conference that preceded it. We were ignored, not to our disadvantage, but the disadvantage of newcomers, and of the entire community.

One cannot be certain where this leads, although nativist scapegoating of Whitewater now set loose across an entire nation shows a momentum all its own.

Updated, afternoon of 1.21.25, see below memoranda from the City of Whitewater in English and Spanish in reply to the 1.20.25 federal executive order. So many years ago, FREE WHITEWATER expressly began after immigration controversies in this city. My own views on this matter have been clear since that beginning in 2007. They remain unchanged as they are by received tradition unchanging.

It’s likely an understatement that, given all possibilities, few today would want to be in our present, divided politics.

One acts in the present and on the margin. It is, in fairness to all, the best that anyone can do.

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Daily Bread for 1.20.25: The State of the City (Whitewater) Presentation

Good morning.

Dr. Martin Luther King Day in Whitewater will be sunny and cold with a high of 4. Sunrise is 7:19 and sunset is 4:52, for 9 hours, 33 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 61 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, the Kingdom of Great Britain signs preliminary articles of peace with the Kingdom of France, setting the stage for the official end of hostilities in the Revolutionary War later that year.


On 1.9.25, the Whitewater-Area League of Women Voters sponsored three presentations at Whitewater’s city hall, from City Manager John Weidl, Chancellor Corey King, and Superintendent Caroline Pate-Hefty. The first of these, from Whitewater’s city manager, is embedded above.

A few remarks:

This is a strong presentation. Neither of the last two city managers ever delivered remarks with this succinct clarity. A position of ideological skepticism of government (like mine) should strengthen, rather than weaken, one’s grasp of conditions and people. (Strengthen, rather than weaken, because it’s a sound position to hold.) And so, and so, one should be plain: there is a wide gap between this presentation and those of former city managers, or a few aged residents, who themselves have not spoken with such succinct clarity (and likely could not). Whitewater benefits by addresses like this.

Development has grown significantly in these last two years, both residential (homes and apartments) and commercial (stores big and small). Development (lit., ‘the process of converting land to a new purpose by constructing buildings or making use of its resources’) is a community gain.

We’ve also had new cultural events, e.g., a food truck fest and Christmas at Cravath. Along with thousands of residents, my family enjoyed both of these events. See A Food Truck Festival @ the Lakefront and Christmas at Cravath’s Festive Lights. These social events create social bonds.

Whitewater has sensibly moved to a professional fire and emergency services model. Response times are now markedly better. There should be no doubt that moving to a professional model meets the minimum expectation of any government: that it provides for public safety. (If all this could be done through volunteers, there would be an alternative worth considering; all this cannot be done through volunteers, and so that alternative is beyond consideration.) There is now before the city a policing referendum for additional officers. A referendum that staffs a neutral, non-ideological public safety department is in the community interest. (Every word in that last sentence matters: a partisan, ideological public safety department would not be in this community’s interest, at staffing of one person or a thousand.)

Finally, a few words about our lakes. It’s understandable that residents would be disappointed at the condition of the lakes. The last municipal administration, however, was not alone in leaving the lakes like this. There were many thousands of us living here, and all of us knew that there were lakes, and what they looked like1. We all knew it looked bad. Not enough of us did enough. Some did, but not enough of us. (This libertarian blogger is in the not enough of us group.) A comprehensive lakes management plan with outside institutional support, as is now underway, is the right direction.

There should be a discussion, and debate, about public directions. I’d guess this, however: most people in this city of fifteen thousand see progress (and far more progress than before). Most people (by a larger margin) likely prefer the current direction to the alternatives.

That preference is predictable and sensible.

__________

  1. Admittedly, the last city manager wasn’t aware for two days that oil from an asphalt project, for example, was running into the lake. ↩︎

How Bluesky Grew From A Twitter Side Project To An X Competitor:

Not many people had heard of Bluesky when the Twitter side project made its debut as a separate company in 2021. The decentralized social media platform initially flew under the radar, but user numbers skyrocketed after the U.S. election in November. This was largely because many of X’s users fled to Bluesky, as they were unhappy with some of the changes that Elon Musk made to Twitter after he acquired it in 2022 and later renamed it X. Bluesky now has over 27 million users, but whether it can continue its rapid growth and compete with the likes of Musk’s X and Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads remains to be seen.