Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 55. Sunrise is 7:00 and sunset 5:17 for 10h 17m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1971, the NASDAQ stock market index opens for the first time.
For Dongjoon (DJ) Choi of Plover, making kimchi as a child was a family affair. Kimjang, the Korean tradition of preparing and sharing kimchi, is something Choi remembers fondly from his childhood in South Korea. Choi is now determined to keep the kimjang tradition alive in his home.
Mbakbaka is a hearty, one-pot Libyan tomato-based pasta stew. It features short pasta, both dried spices and hot peppers, and traditionally, a choice of chicken or beef, in a flavorful tomato broth. Zainab Hassen shares this dish that was a staple of her childhood.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 48. Sunrise is 7:01 and sunset 5:16 for 10h 14m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 7.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1979, Pluto moves inside Neptune’s orbit for the first time since either was discovered.
The Whitewater Common Council met last night, and appointed two residents to fill vacancies (Carol McCormick to fill an at-large vacancy into April 2024, and Patrick Singer to fill the District 1 vacancy into April 2025.)
In all that comes next, as with what’s come before, it’s what officeholders elected or appointed say and do: public words and public actions in sessions, on recordings, and in transcripts.
People choose freely, sometimes well, sometimes poorly. Whitewater deserves only the former.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 45. Sunrise is 7:02 and sunset 5:14 for 10h 11m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 15.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, forces under the command of Ulysses S. Grant and Andrew H. Foote give the Union its first significant victory of the war, capturing Fort Henry, Tennessee in the Battle of Fort Henry.
Linked above is the Whitewater Common Council agenda for the first council meeting of February. Embedded below is the agenda for the session. Let’s see what happens:
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 42. Sunrise is 7:04 and sunset 5:13 for 10h 09m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 24.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On Thursday, January 25th, Whitewater School District Superintendent Dr. Caroline Pate-Hefty and Board President Larry Kachel issued the following statement:
Successful school districts stay relentlessly focused on results and outcomes for their students. Dr. Pate-Hefty talked with Mr. Larry Kachel, board president, many times this week. We both hope for stability in the district and want to support our team/staff.
To be clear, the allegations made in the Monday, January 22nd board meeting were inaccurate. They were also fully investigated and reviewed by Mr. Kachel and the board attorney. There is no violation of board policy or ethics standards for the superintendent to make and negotiate salary offers; that is a requirement of the position for functional operations. According to Wisconsin State Statutes 118.24 and 19.85, administrator contracts are reviewed annually at a closed session of the board meeting. This was done according to the requirements.
The board and administration agree that the current policy language for contract negotiation is vague and are working collaboratively via the policy review process to improve clear guidance beginning in the January policy meeting; good policy is how we improve functional operations.
As we turn the corner in math and literacy, we will stay focused on the amazing work our staff and students are doing.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 46. Sunrise is 7:05 and sunset 5:12 for 10h 06m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 33.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1789, George Washington is unanimously elected as the first President of the United States by the U.S. Electoral College.
On “Here & Now,” Nathan Denzin unpacks why large numbers of migrants are heading to Whitewater.
However unnecessarily controversial1 the issue has become, this libertarian blogger has not commented on a letter to Pres. Biden that led to state and national discussion of our small town. Not unwillingness but patience has prompted my stance: the truest test of what city officials profess and how they act will come if Whitewater becomes part of the national discussion during the fall election. I would hope that test does not befall our city; this community has endured even now too many lies and too much vilification.
Knowing what has happened, local officials must be prepared to defend zealously and diligently should distortions of our city become part of a state or national campaign this autumn.
1. This matter has been unnecessarily controversial. The closed ‘press conference’ of Sen. Johnson and Rep. Steil was all anyone needed to know to see how almost any further communication from the city would be misrepresented. Of the Johnson-Steil press conference seeThe Local Press Conference that Was Neither Local Nor a Press Conference. Of the sensible recommendation against highlighting migrants further as a staffing justification in 2024’s fraught atmosphere seeMore on the 11.21 Council Session:
If a [staffing] study on the matter points to the need for more officers, and if the method of hiring requires a referendum, then (but only then) the question of staffing becomes an electoral & political matter. There’s sure to be a desire, from city staff and the department, to address all of this now. Choosing among justifications, however, has political implications.
How to present a referendum is a matter that can be addressed when the city is closer to a vote (likely spring 2025). 2025 may seem close, but there’s plenty of time.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 45. Sunrise is 7:06 and sunset 5:10 for 10h 04m 26s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 43.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
We don’t remember Garfield having weapons and did Groundhog Day really have a GIANT groundhog eating humans?!
A handful of highly skilled artists in Ghana are behind some of the most imaginative, beautiful and exaggerated film posters. These posters are hilarious, captivating, colorful and highly impressive. So much so, that they’ve become a worldwide sensation!
Whilst you may disregard these as misleading bootlegs, anthropologist Dr. Joseph Oduro-Frimpong believes that these posters are vital artifacts of Ghanaian art, history and culture. And he should know, he’s collected over one hundred of them. We begin Black History Month with this story exploring the incredible talent Ghana has to offer… Special thanks to the Ashesi Center for African Popular Culture.
Groundhog Day in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 41. Sunrise is 7:07 and sunset 5:09 for 10h 01m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 53.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
By Detroit Publishing Co. – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID det.4a24546. Commons: Licensing., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30037697
The United States delivered a much bigger-than-expected batch of jobs last month, adding further evidence that the economy still has plenty of steam.
Employers added 353,000 jobs in January, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7 percent.
After the loss of 14 percent of the nation’s jobs early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the labor market’s endurance for more than three years has surprised economists, who expected factors including the Federal Reserve’s interest rate increases to slow hiring more sharply. The strong data on Friday is likely to reinforce the Fed’s patience in beginning to cut rates.
“There’s layoffs happening, but workers are able to find new positions,” said Sara Rutledge, an independent economics consultant. “It’s almost like a ‘pinch me’ scenario.”
Ms. Rutledge helped tabulate the National Association for Business Economics’ latest member survey, which found increasing optimism that the country would avoid a recession — matching a turnaround in measures of consumer confidence as inflation has eased.
The growth in January was all the more impressive on top of upward revisions to the prior two months, which brought the monthly average job gain in 2023 to 255,000. Professional and business services accelerated to pile on 74,000 jobs, while health care added 70,000. The only major sector to lose jobs was mining and logging.
The bumper crop of added jobs, nearly twice what forecasters had expected, mirrors the similarly surprising strength in gross domestic product measurements for the fourth quarter of 2023.
Now’s the time for communities across America to take advantage of this favorable environment. Now’s the time for Whitewater.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 47. Sunrise is 7:08 and sunset 5:08 for 9h 59m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1942, Voice of America, the official external radio and television service of the United States government, begins broadcasting with programs aimed at areas controlled by the Axis powers.
There’s a difference between a private company, a public company, and a public agency. Ordinary people understand this difference, but special interests conflate these three different arrangements to maximize their influence over wholly public agencies.
First the distinctions, with help from Matt Levine’s description of Elon Musk’s influence on private companies as against public companies. A private company is held individually or by shareholders with shares that do not trade on a public exchange. A public company is a private enterprise with shares that do trade on a public exchange (e.g., the New York Stock Exchange). Levine writes of Musk’s considerable leeway with a purely private company like SpaceX:
At all but one of his companies, he could stroll into the boardroom, throw a big bag of ketamine down onto the table, and say “I need the company to spend $50 million to build a giant golden statue of me riding a rocket,”1 and
the board would be like “yes definitely let’s do it,”
the board members themselves probably are, or represent, big shareholders of the company, and as shareholders they would happily go along with the statue plan to keep Musk happy and dedicated to their company,
the other shareholders, the ones without board seats, are probably even bigger Musk fans, and are probably working on their own Musk statues in their garages anyway, so they’ll be fine with the company spending their money on a corporate gold statue, and
nobody else really has any standing to complain.
And so in fact when Musk went to SpaceX and asked to borrow $1 billion until payday so that he could buy Twitter Inc., the board was like “here’s the check, we’ve left the amount blank, take whatever you need.” And, look, was there a Wall Street Journal article saying “hey that’s weird”? There was; it was weird. Did anything come of that? No. SpaceX could just do that: Musk controls SpaceX, the board loves him, the shareholders love him, nobody in a position to complain has any complaints, and everybody else is in no position to
SpaceX is a bigger version of many private companies: these companies may have one or more owners, and those owners may be shareholders, but those shares are not available for ready trading by the general public. These owners have considerable leeway.
By contrast, a public company is also a private enterprise, but it offers shares on a public market to which the general public has access during trading hours. Trading on public markets comes with public — governmental — rules & regulations. (There’s a Securities and Exchange Commission, after all.) Levine explains how rules for a public company like Tesla limit Musk:
Tesla is a public company, which means that, even if 99% of shareholders love him, if 1% of shareholders don’t, they can sue.3 They can say: “Look, the board has a fiduciary duty to manage the company on behalf of all shareholders. Giving Musk a giant golden statue of himself is not necessary, or a good business decision, or fair to the shareholders; it’s just the controlling shareholder fulfilling his own whims with corporate money, and an ineffective board of directors giving him whatever he wants. He should have to give it back.” And they will go to court, and the shareholders will make those arguments, and the board will say — accurately! — “no you see giving him this giant golden statue is necessary for us to get more of his incredibly valuable time and attention,” and that will sound bad in court. And then a judge will get to decide whether the deal was fair to shareholders or not, and if it was not, the judge can make Musk pay the company back. Even if the board, and 99% of the shareholders, want him to keep it!
Levine’s description of Musk ends here, understandably, because Levine is writing about Musk’s role in private and public companies. An analysis of these companies is distinct — as Levine knows intuitively — from public agencies and governmental bodies.
Special interests, however, don’t see it that way: they look at public bodies (a town council, a school board, or a community development agency) and expect that they can manipulate and control that public institution like a private company. They see a public body as another of their private possessions.
No, and no again: formed only by statutes and ordinances, maintained only under statutes, ordinances, and publicly-adopted policies, these councils, boards, and agencies are public from alpha to omega.
Special interest men in Whitewater take public bodies and illegitimately and wrongfully refashion them through catspaws into versions of private companies. In this way, they place their hands around a public agency and squeeze until it does their private bidding.
Which appointed officials come along matters less to the health of this community than that special interests meet their match from among residents until attrition and exhaustion take their toll on that scheming faction.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 43. Sunrise is 7:09 and sunset 5:06 for 9h 57m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 72.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
Wisconsin students who miss 30 or more days of school could be held back a grade, under a new proposal.
If the legislation is approved, beginning in the 2025-26 school year, public school students and students at private schools that receive state money who miss a month or more of class would not advance to the next grade.
Currently, state law requires school boards to have policies stating what conditions a student must meet to be promoted from third to fourth grade, fourth to fifth grade and eight to ninth grade.
The bill, and five other truancy-related proposals, are the result of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’s Task Force on Truancy. If passed by the Legislature, the legislation would need approval from Gov. Tony Evers.
The state’s attendance rate reached a new low of 91 percent in the 2021-22 school year and nearly a quarter of students missed at least a month of school, according to data from the state Department of Public Instruction.
New truancy data won’t be released until March 2024.
Vos aims to solve a socio-economic problem that varies across hundreds of Wisconsin districts with uniform state statutes. Success seems doubtful. Alternatively, Vos aims to convince the delusionally gullible WISGOP base that He’s got this, Wisconsin! Your dawg Robin’s on it!
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 38. Sunrise is 7:10 and sunset 5:05 for 9h 54m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 80.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1930, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union orders the confiscation of lands belonging to the Kulaks in a campaign of Dekulakization, resulting in the executions and forced deportations of millions.
Trump is old, and Biden is old. Neither is getting any younger. And yet, and yet, if that’s all someone sees in these men, then he or she is politically blind. Along comes the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with a story that gives voice to the ignorant and obtuse among us in ‘They’re both dinosaurs’: Concerns about age drive lack of enthusiasm for Biden and Trump.
It’s much easier for the Journal Sentinel to publish a story with a handful of snide quotes from superficial voters than to use their print & web space to show political and legal differences between the candidates.
Meanwhile, in Whitewater, an evergreen reminder: Telling readers who the applicants are for local offices (before the deadline has arrived!) matters less than what those applicants believe and how they would act on those beliefs.
Environmental activists splattered the Mona Lisa with soup on Sunday morning as they called for the right to healthy and sustainable food. The protesters threw tomato soup at Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, which is protected by a glass case in the Louvre museum in Paris.
The painting wasn’t damaged and the gallery where it hangs was closed for an hour for cleaning, the Louvre said. The room reopened at 11:30 a.m. local time.
Quick comments: (1) Most performative protests are unproductive or counter-productive, (2) throwing soup at painting to protest for “healthy and sustainable food” is nuttily counter-productive, (3) Oh, my — France went from Devenue and Belmondo on the run to Riposte Alimentaire‘s soup-hurling act? That’s a disturbing devolution if ever there were one.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 40. Sunrise is 7:11 and sunset 5:04 for 9h 52m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 86.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Wisconsin’s budget surplus will be less than what was projected six months ago.
The state is predicted to have a surplus of $3.25 billion by the end of the current budget cycle, according to a new estimate of the state’s general fund from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
That’s nearly $800,000 less than what was projected when the current budget was signed last June.
Three billion, two-hundred fifty million is still a big number…
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 37. Sunrise is 7:12 and sunset 5:02 for 9h 50m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 92.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1813, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is first published in the United Kingdom.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 38. Sunrise is 7:13 and sunset 5:01 for 9h 47m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1967, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom sign the Outer Space Treaty in Washington, D.C., banning deployment of nuclear weapons in space, and limiting the usage of the Moon and other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes.
Friday in Whitewater will see light rain with a high of 36. Sunrise is 7:14 and sunset 5:00 for 9h 45m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
For the next few years, at least, to be successful Whitewater will have to adjust from plugging leaks to surfing the waves.
At first, wave upon wave will seem unpredictable, as though the water, itself were awry, askew. And awry comes at you fast: “Foresight allows the avoidance of many problems, yet not all. For the unavoidable remainder, it’s “what alternative mission profiles may be feasible at this time.” Whitewater, historically, has never been adept at either foresight or alternative missions.”
The tired refrain that this is how we do business around here won’t be good enough. Not even close to good enough.
Over time, the skillful and adroit will manage the waves and enjoy the ride.
