Good morning. Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:35 PM for 15h 19m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.9% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1911, IBM is founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott,…
Rhetoric
Daily Bread, Reasoning, Rhetoric, Twitter
Daily Bread for 4.10.23: Good and Bad Argumentation
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning. Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 69. Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:31 PM for 13h 11m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 80.2% of its visible disk illuminated. The canvass of the recent Whitewater Unified School District election takes place at 1…
Daily Bread, Rhetoric, Twitter
Daily Bread for 11.6.22: A Scene from Twitter’s Turmoil (with Ocasio-Cortez Teaching Something About Rhetoric)
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning. Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny and breezy, with a high of 59. Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 4:41 PM for 10h 03m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.1% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1837, Burlington, Iowa selected as temporary capital: On this date,…
City, Daily Bread, Reasoning, Rhetoric
Daily Bread for 10.9.22: Trolls and the Exclamatory, Interrogatory, or Declaratory Response
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Culture, Daily Bread, Public Meetings, Public Speaking, Rhetoric
Daily Bread for 8.1.22: Two Postures, Two Results
by JOHN ADAMS • • 2 Comments
Good morning. Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 8:14 PM for 14h 27m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13% of its visible disk illuminated. Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM. On this day in 1774, British scientist…
Politics, Public Health, Rhetoric, Trumpism, UW System, Vaccines, WISGOP
Steve Nass: Troll-King in Autumn
by JOHN ADAMS • • 5 Comments
For many years, Steve Nass, as a state representative (now a state senator) was a notable farthest-to-the-right Wisconsin politician. The bête noire of liberals and universities, he was the state’s unmatched troll, criticizing the center-left time and again. Nass was a right-wing populist long before Trump. He was the great troll-king of Wisconsin, firing florid press releases…
Babbittry, Blogging, Boosterism, Culture, Disinformation, Freedom of Speech, Mendacity, Public Relations, Rhetoric
The Power of Refutation
by JOHN ADAMS • • 1 Comment
Laura Hazard Owen writes When’s the best time to correct fake news? After someone’s already read it, apparently: Debunking > prebunking. If you want someone to not believe that false or misleading headline they just read, when’s the best time to correct it? We hear a lot about inoculating people against fake news or “prebunking”…
Authoritarianism, Books, Coronavirus, History, Libertarians, Liberty, Public Health, Reasoning, Rhetoric, Russia, Tyranny, Walworth County
An Example of Bottomless Ignorance in Walworth County
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Some residents of Walworth County, Wisconsin object to public health measures to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. So hysterical is their opposition that one reads Opponents say county’s coronavirus safeguards are ‘like Russia’: Confronted by a raucous crowd of opponents fearing government intrusion, Walworth County Board members have backed away from a measure…
America, Culture, Fortitude, Language, Rhetoric
Roosevelt’s Speech at Madison Square Garden (10.31.1936)
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
So this libertarian doubts the economic effectiveness of the New Deal, in its first and later iterations during the Roosevelt Administration. And yet, and yet… I admire Roosevelt greatly, as he was a courageous man who described the conditions of his time honestly (if the solutions not so well). His speech on 10.31.1936, announcing a…