Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 60. Sunrise is 6:39 and sunset is 4:37 for 9 hours 58 minutes of daylight. The moon was new earlier today with none of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Innovation Center Advisory Panel meets at 2:30 PM and the Plan & Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1913, the Great Lakes Storm of 1913, the most destructive natural disaster ever to hit the lakes, reaches its greatest intensity after beginning two days earlier. The storm destroys 19 ships and kills more than 250 people.
This libertarian blogger wrote, only days ago, that
Of Bryan Steil, the outgoing congressman from the 1st District: Has there ever been an emptier suit in Congress? Derrick Van Orden, defeated in the 3rd Congressional District, was at least plain — however objectionably — in his devotion to Trumpism. What of Steil? A devotion to crypto? An easy touch for business cronyism? Hoping big PAC money would see him through another election when most constituents had no idea where he stood except with his country club friends in D.C. Thin head, thin accomplishments, fat friends — a waste of a congressional seat.
That description of Steil must have seemed harsh. Well, if harsh, then also true:
Wisconsin voters delivered a blow to the cryptocurrency industry after Democrat Mitchell Berman defeated Republican incumbent Bryan Steil.
Weeks before the 2024 election, Fairshake, the crypto industry backed political action committee, supported Steil’s re-election campaign with a $764,000 media buy and helped him get re-elected.
Fairshake spent $1 million in the weeks before the 2026 election.
Steil had been one of biggest advocates for the industry in Washington, D.C.
As part of the House Finance Committee, Steil requested in 2025 to be chairman of the subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence, which discusses crypto and blockchain legislation.
See Ricardo Torres, Steil’s election loss to Berman could be blow to crypto industry, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 9, 2026.
Steil: A small catspaw of Big Crypto. (There’s a mistaken notion that all libertarians are enamored of crypto. We are not. Cryptocurrency’s privacy features are overrated — cryptocurrency transactions are most certainly not untraceable — and it’s often little more than a scheme to entice retail investors into acquisitions that will prove unprofitable for them but highly profitable for men like Trump, Trump Jr., Musk, etc.)
Now, Whitewater does not have a cryptocurrency of its own, even now, as the city’s various special-interest men lack the technical skill to create their own crypto coins. And so, and so, we have no perfect analog to Bryan Steil on the local level.
Instead, we have a few elected officials enamored of landlords’ interests. Like Steil, they speak mostly in even, normal tones while favoring special interests’ abnormal positions on key issues. Like Steil, as they owe their positions to more powerful men, they are instruments in others’ hands. For the most part, it’s best to concentrate on the toolmaker and not the tool, so, for example, I seldom refer to these other types by name. Indeed, even among the special-interest men, the type matters more than the person, as an ideological critique of avarice and economic ignorance applies so well. See The Special-Interest Hierarchy of a Small Town and The Special-Interest Hierarchy of a Small Town (Adjacent Support).
(Key point: A whole new generation has come up in Whitewater that simply doesn’t give a damn about bloodline this or pedigree that. It’s only some older residents who still care. If I thought a more particular critique would matter, I’d certainly not be disinclined. It doesn’t matter more, and so I’m not inclined. Indeed, from a polemical point of view, I’d prefer that this ilk talked about their legacies more often, as it only makes them look obtuse and backward-looking to those many more not brought up or captured by that mindset. The most important reason to look to the past, in my own estimation, is to show how many mistakes these self-promoting, special-interest men made. They’ve produced quite the archive of public policy failures. Other than noting as much, one’s own perspective should be forward-looking.)
Congressman Steil has been as I’ve described him; if he is to be remembered at all, he’ll be remembered as a mere tool of others.
Air pollution so bad in Delhi it’s as harmful as smoking a pack a day: