Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 62. Sunrise is 6:30 and sunset is 4:45 for 10 hours 15 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 41.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1947, in California, designer Howard Hughes makes the maiden (and only) flight of the Hughes H-4 Hercules (also known as the “Spruce Goose”), the largest fixed-wing aircraft ever built until Scaled Composites rolled out their Stratolaunch in May 2017.
Writing on Bluesky, Prof. Mark Copelovitch of UW-Madison replied to the idea of reaching out to others (in his example, other economists) who are vastly different ideologically:
The problem with this entire “talking across difference” approach to politics is that it assumes a shared consensus about democracy that no longer exists b/w the 2 main [American] political parties. You don’t need to have lunch with people who don’t believe in free elections, equal rights, & the rule of law.
The economists Justin [Wolfers] mentions here are all on the pro-democracy side of the divide, regardless of their economic views. In other words, there are table stakes that are the ante to sitting down at the table & discussing ideological differences over tax policy or regulation or interest rates.
You’re not going to learn anything by sitting down to lunch with Kevin Hassett or Peter Navarro, other than they have gone all in on lying & fascism. So again, you need to take a step back & make clear that there are prior assumptions & table stakes antes about who one should sit down to lunch with.
Indeed. The bipartisan man, the balancer of competing interests, in our time places on equal footing just positions with unjust ones, sound reasoning with unsound reasoning, and the general interest with special interests.
In an earlier time, when both sides of a dispute were reasonable, balancing may have made some sense.
No longer. The just position now competes with unjust, malevolent positions. Those who cannot see this clearly cannot see matters of importance clearly.
What did people eat and drink 4,000 years ago? New finds shed light on life in Mesopotamia: