Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 82. Sunrise is 6:53 and sunset is 6:33, for 11 hours 40 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 74.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1766, the Nottingham Cheese Riot breaks out at the Goose Fair in Nottingham, UK, in response to the excessive cost of cheese.
In November 2022, a FREE WHITEWATER post assessed conditions in the city and listed What Ails, What Heals. Below is a summary of that post (with the full text linked above). This list of what ails, written in the fall of 2022 was, by intention, a look at conditions then and in the generation before.
What ails:
- Boosterism. The view that if one accentuates the positive, the community will reap economic gains.
- Toxic Positivity. The view that every outlook should be a positive one.
- Regulatory Capture. Government should be limited, responsible, and humble. Whitewater’s government is not by law, and never should be in practice, the private property of a few. The last generation has seen the special-interest manipulations of landlords, bankers, and public-relations men.
- Populism. Whether of left or right, populism sweeps individual rights aside for the sake of the group, cadre, or horde, while demonizing all others.
- Closed government.
- News Deserts. We don’t have a professional press in Whitewater, and that’s a huge loss.
- Violence. Violence includes sexual harassment and assault, or unjustified use of official force, and the supportive reflex only to look the other way.
And what heals:
- Free Markets. Voluntary transactions between people and groups uplift from poverty into a true prosperity.
- Charity. Our small city is beautiful, yet beautiful while in need. Government, politics, business, journalism, and commentary have not been enough to alleviate all loss and suffering. (With reference to the historical example and importance of Dorothy Day: Waiting for Whitewater’s Dorothy Day.)
- Tragic Optimism. A true optimism, that forges on despite the occasional tragedies that befall a community. See Tragic Optimism as an Alternative to Toxic Positivity.
- Open Government. Government is a mere instrumentality, established for limited purposes, constrained by law. It must be obvious and transparent to the people from whom its authority derives.
- Impartial Government. Whitewater doesn’t have a few stakeholders — she has 14,889 residents.
- A Professional Press. The city could use greater focus and respect for professional journalism.
- Individual Rights. Each person is accorded by right an equal moral and legal status. No one forgotten, no one swept aside, no one by birth or birthplace greater than another.
If this was a look at conditions in 2022 and during the generation before, then has anything changed?
Yes, in these three years the municipal government has grown more open (by far), more professional (by far), and more empirical in its approach (again, by far). It’s not a close comparison between what Whitewater had before 2022 and what she’s had since. (There’s a difference between being a critic of government and being blind to genuine improvement.)
If this was a look at conditions in 2022 and in the generation before, then was anything missing from the list?
Looking at the list, residents in productive Wisconsin cities of similar size would have noticed that this libertarian blogger made no mention of ordinary development. A resident elsewhere might have said, “you mentioned free markets, but you left out any mention of development.”
That’s true. Whitewater before then was a place of regulatory capture that prevented normal development, and the best that one could expect was to juxtapose general principles (markets, impartiality) against a small, selfish cronyism that had this community in its grip. Whitewater has always been beautiful; she always deserved better than fifteen domineering over fifteen thousand.
The chance to live and flourish as a beautiful city of normal development is now before us. That’s a subject worth visiting many times in the months ahead.
October 2025 Skywatching Tips from NASA:
0:00 Intro
0:13 Supermoon
0:51 International Observe the Moon Night
1:14 Draconid meteor shower
1:53 Orionid meteor shower
3:00 October Moon phases