Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 75. Sunrise is 6:40 and sunset is 7:18 for 12 hours 38 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Plan & Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM and the Library Board at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1867, the United States purchases Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, about two cents per acre. (The U.S. Senate later ratifies a bilateral treaty with Russia in May of that year.)
Consider an accurate headline describing the latest developments in the Iran War:
See Iran War Live Updates: Trump Claims Progress in Talks to End War, Then Again Threatens Intense Attacks, New York Times, March 30, 2026.
Check again soon, because in an hour or so the latest from Mr. Trump may be wholly different. Is the goal oil? Do we need oil? Should we need oil? Do we want regime change? Should we want regime change? Has the regime already been changed? Did we attack for ourselves or at the behest of a foreign power? Is the war won? Is the war intensifying? Is this even a war?
Admittedly, Trump is an extreme example of a problem with statements on topics national, statewide, or local: Is a claim justified merely in the making of it? He said it, so it must be true.1 She claims it, and isn’t that all that matters?
A claim grounded like that would be the intellectual equivalent of a mayfly: buzzing, but only briefly. Few claims are self-authenticating, least of all the claims from Mar-a-Lago or whatever golf course Mr. Trump can find.
And yet, and yet, for so many of us, proof still matters beyond country clubs and golf courses.
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- It’s all 3-D chess, right? Has anyone considered that while a few talk about a three-dimensional version of chess, millions upon millions continue to play the traditional version of that ancient game? ↩︎
Sky turned red ahead of tropical cyclone in Western Australia: