Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 82. Sunrise is 6:00 AM and sunset 7:59 PM, for 13h 58m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1961, East Germany closes the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin to thwart its inhabitants’ attempts to escape to the West, and construction of the Berlin Wall begins. The day is known as Barbed Wire Sunday.
Molly Beck reports Wisconsin grows modestly and more diverse while Milwaukee plummets to 1930s levels, Census data show:
MADISON – Wisconsin has grown more racially diverse over a decade of modest growth, with population gains concentrated around the state’s capital city while its largest city, Milwaukee, fell to its smallest population in nearly a century, new U.S. Census data show.
The state’s population grew 3.6% since 2010 to 5.9 million — lagging the national growth of 7.4% and less than half the rate of its neighbor Minnesota.
The new data also reveal a notable drop — 4% — in the number of children living in Wisconsin, forecasting consequences for the state’s education systems and labor force.
The state is becoming more racially diverse with Hispanic residents growing in population by 33% and now accounting for the largest racial minority group in the state, surpassing the state’s Black population.
More than one-third of Wisconsin’s population growth over the last decade occurred in Dane County, in and around Madison. The county grew by 15% to add more than 73,000 people — the highest county-level increase in the state — with the city of Verona experiencing some of the fastest growth at 32%.
Meanwhile, the state’s largest city has hit its lowest population since 1930. Milwaukee’s population fell to 577,222 — a drop of about 17,000 people since 2010. Milwaukee County also saw a tiny population decrease of less than a percentage point.
These Wisconsin trends are similar to a national trend toward a more multi-racial and multi-ethnic society. See Census data: US is diversifying, white population shrinking (‘No racial or ethnic group dominates for those under age 18, and white people declined in numbers for the first time on record in the overall U.S. population as the Hispanic and Asian populations boomed this past decade, according to the 2020 census data’).Local census data for Whitewater and smaller cities are not yet, to my knowledge, available.
All these data prompt this question: is America great from a given racial composition, or from a constitutional order among citizens of whatever race or ethnicity? For those who see superiority in their race, those men of blut und boden and herrenvolk, these are unfavorable data. For those of us committed to liberal democracy, to a constitutional order of equal justice under law, there can be no favorable or unfavorable demographics on race or ethnicity.
America now finds herself in a continental conflict between these two ways of seeing and being.
This conflict will not soon end.
Kiwi watchers capture bird song in previously silent sites:
The call of New Zealand’s iconic kiwi has been captured in sites that were previously silent five years ago. The recordings come after the threatened bird has begun to return to patches of forest where the population had dropped.