Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 60. Sunrise is 5:36 and sunset is 8:06 for 14 hours 30 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 34 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Plan & Architectural Review Board meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1973, citing government misconduct, Daniel Ellsberg’s charges for his involvement in releasing the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times are dismissed.
Even in small-town Whitewater, across many years, there has always been more than one kind of Democrat or Republican. See the series WHITEWATER’S LOCAL POLITICS 2021. (It’s only the unobservant or conceptually confused who think there’s only one of each type.)
Of these several types, two — species within a genus so to speak — come to mind recently.
For Whitewater’s Democrats, there have always been members of Democraticus bipartisanus whitewaterensis: Democrats who will seek purportedly bipartisan deals with leading local Republicans no matter how unfavorable the terms or how compromising to the Democrats’ overall politics. These types are fewer now, but you’ll still see some. They’re men and women who are sure that they can find common ground even on quicksand. Since Scott Walker, the number of local Democrats who think this way gets smaller each year. These remaining creatures have seen their status shift from vulnerable to endangered to critically endangered over the last dozen years.
There’s no common ground left, but they just don’t stop delusionally hoping.
For Republicans, who have seen the rise of MAGA, there’s a tendency among local MAGA devotees to associate with MAGA-spouting special interest men as part of a coalition: Republicanus magaensis subserviens whitewaterensis. These MAGA men spent much of their lives insisting that they’d been ignored by others, including fellow Republicans, and now that they’ve become more numerous the first thing they’ve done has been to take direction from the very Republicans who ignored them for years.
One can see that I’m opposed to MAGA, but it never fails to both perplex and amuse thatthe faction that insists it’s now their time still takes direction from the local men who mucked up the time before our time. All it took was a few shared cultural positions for the special interest men to co-opt MAGA to their own local ends.
In other parts of the nation, these particular species of Democrats or Republicans do not exist: Democrats seldom appease Republicans and MAGA seldom appeases anyone. Elsewhere, these species stand on their own. There’s simply greater clarity of nature and aims elsewhere.
That greater clarity is useful to everyone: communities elsewhere see more early, so to speak, what’s what.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): Claims of Legacy, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Two Rovers, Billions of Years of Martian History – NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity Rovers:
Separated by 2,300 miles, the two rovers are uncovering clues from very different moments in Martian history. Perseverance is on the rim of Jezero Crater, where it’s studying some of the oldest Martian terrain ever explored while searching for signs of ancient microbial life. Meanwhile, Curiosity is climbing Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater, where layers of rock reveal how Mars’ climate changed as water dried up from its surface. Together, the missions are helping scientists reconstruct how Mars formed, when and where water existed, and the planet’s history of having the right conditions to support life. Their discoveries are offering a clearer picture of how Mars became the dry and dusty world we know today.