Tuesday, March 25th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of A Different Man @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building: Drama/Thriller Rated R (language, violence) 1 hour, 52 minutes (2024) This unusual transformation of an “Elephant Man” into a handsome actor earned Sebastian Stan a Golden Globe award for Best…
City
City, Daily Bread, Elections, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 3.18.25: Early Voting in Wisconsin Begins
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 63. Sunrise is 7:01 and sunset is 7:05, for 12 hours, 4 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Alcohol and Licensing Committee meets at 5:30 PM. The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1990, Germans in the German Democratic Republic vote in the first democratic elections in the former communist dictatorship.
Republicans and Democrats fighting for control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court will get a sense Tuesday of how energized their sides are with the start of early in-person voting for the hotly contested race.
Voting begins two weeks before the April 1 election between Republican-backed Brad Schimel and Democratic-supported Susan Crawford in a race for an open seat that will determine whether liberals will continue to have a slim majority on the highest court in a crucial presidential battleground.
The race, which has drawn the attention of President Donald Trump’s adviser Elon Musk and attracted tens of millions of dollars in spending, is seen as a litmus test of how voters are responding to the first months of Trump’s Republican presidency.
See Scott Bauer, Start of early voting in Wisconsin Supreme Court race will test enthusiasm on both sides, Associated Press, March 18, 2025.
In the City of Whitewater, in-person early voting is available at the City Clerk’s Office, 2nd Floor, 312 W Whitewater Street:

When an English speaker likes a German song:
Barbaras Rhubarb Bar (feat. Marti Fischer) — Catchy, very catchy:
City, Daily Bread, Faraway Places, Sports, Winter
Daily Bread for 3.15.25: Snowball Fighting as a Sport (Winter Will Be Back Soon Enough)
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 67. Sunrise is 7:06 and sunset is 7:01, for 11 hours, 55 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1991, the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany comes into effect, granting full sovereignty to the Federal Republic of Germany.
Japan’s Intense Snowball Fighting Sport:
Whitewater could do this, properly organized and managed. Much better than Spring Splash. Lots of college towns have spring events, but a winter snowball competition would be something… special.
City, Daily Bread, Democrats, Fur-Wetting Dogs, Never Trump, Republicans, Trump, Trumpism, U.S. Senate
Daily Bread for 3.14.25: Schumer Gets the Criticism He Deserves
by JOHN ADAMS •
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:
America, City, Culture, Daily Bread, Economics, Economy, Tariffs, Taxes/Taxation, Trump, Trumpism, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 3.11.25: Doubling Down on Ignorant Economics
by JOHN ADAMS •
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.
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:
America, City, Conservative Populism, Culture, Daily Bread, Economics, Economy, Flop Sweat, Populists, Trump, Trumpism, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 3.10.25: The Rapidly Declining Economic Climate
by JOHN ADAMS •
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:
City, Film
Film: Tuesday, March 11th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, A Real Pain
by JOHN ADAMS •
Tuesday, March 11th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of A Real Pain @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building: (Comedy/Drama) Rated R (language) 1 hour, 30 minutes (2024) On a Seniors tour to Poland to honor their grandmother, two mismatched cousins reunite, but their travel leads to misadventures for…
City, Culture, Daily Bread, Entitlement, Reasoning
Daily Bread for 2.27.25: The Sad Legacy of a Status-Based Culture
by JOHN ADAMS •
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.
_____
- Potable, and popular here in Wisconsin, but there’s better available. ↩︎
- 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:
City, Film
Film: Tuesday, February 25th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Blitz
by JOHN ADAMS •
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…
City, Daily Bread, Politics
Daily Bread for 2.16.25: Updating a Post on the Kinds of Conservatives in Whitewater
by JOHN ADAMS •
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:
America, City, Daily Bread, Drug War, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 2.10.25: Tariffs Won’t Solve America’s Fentanyl Addiction
by JOHN ADAMS •
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 regulate, legislate 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 tariffs, industrial 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 countries. Economists 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:
City, Film
Film: Tuesday, February 11th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Conclave
by JOHN ADAMS •
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…
City, Daily Bread, University
Daily Bread for 1.27.25: A State of UW-Whitewater Presentation
by JOHN ADAMS •
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:
City, Film
Film: Tuesday, January 28th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Reagan
by JOHN ADAMS •
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…