Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will see clouds, sun, and a few thunderstorms with a high of 76. Sunrise is 6:07 and sunset is 7:47 for 13 hours 40 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 64.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre employee, steals the Mona Lisa:
In 1911, Peruggia perpetrated what has been described as the greatest art theft of the 20th century. According to Peruggia’s later interrogation in Florence, following his arrest on 12 December 1913, he said that he entered the Louvre on Monday, 21 August 1911, at around 7 am, through the door where the other Louvre workers were entering, wearing one of the white smocks that museum employees customarily wore, making himself indistinguishable from the other workers. It was a quiet morning, and the Louvre was nearly empty, because 21 August was the weekly closure day during the summer holidays.
When the Salon Carré, where the Mona Lisa hung, was empty, Peruggia lifted the painting off the four iron pegs that secured it to the wall between Antonio da Correggio‘s Mystical Marriage and Titian‘s Allegory of Alfonso d’Avalos and took it to a nearby service stairway of the Sept Mètres. There, he removed the protective case and frame, hiding the discarded elements behind some student artworks stored on the staircase landing. Some people report that he concealed the painting (which Leonardo da Vinci painted on wood) under his smock that was larger than him; however, Peruggia was only 160 centimetres (63 in) tall, and the Mona Lisa measures approximately 53 cm × 77 cm (21 in × 30 in), so it would not fit under a smock worn by someone of his size. Instead, he told investigators that he took off his smock and wrapped it around the painting, before tucking it under his arm, and left the Louvre through the same door he had entered.
He simply walked out with the painting under his arm…
Oracle is a multibillion-dollar corporation (with a market capitalization of over $400 billion this morning, 8.21.26). That large corporation sought an exception from Wisconsin’s credit-rating requirements as its credit rating is poor, owing to massive borrowing. (See Jonathan Mahler, Jim Rutenberg, and Kirsten Grind, Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?: ‘Inside the 81-year-old billionaire’s risky, debt-fueled scramble to transform his data empire into an A.I. juggernaut’, New York Times, August 5, 2026.)
Tant pis. Multi-billion-dollar corporations that sink their credit ratings do not deserve exceptions from Wisconsin regulators. The state requirements imposed by law on one large corporation should be imposed on all similar corporations. (The requirements may be onerous and need revision, but any revision should be applied across the board, not for one party only. Until lawful revision, there should be no exceptions.)
Oracle has now dropped its lawsuit that sought a credit-rating exemption:
Oracle moved to voluntarily drop its lawsuit against Wisconsin’s utility regulator on Monday, nearly two months after the tech giant turned to the Ozaukee County Circuit Court to challenge new credit rating requirements for data center developers in eastern Wisconsin.
With the case put to rest, the credit rating rules — intended to shield other Wisconsin ratepayers from fallout in the event a data center developer goes bust — now stand unchallenged. Oracle previously argued the requirements were overly stringent and could dissuade other companies from setting up operations in Wisconsin.
Oracle’s share price has begun to rebound after a collapse that began in early June and continued for weeks after the company sued Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission (PSC). Its credit rating, however, remains well below the threshold at which it could avoid posting hundreds of millions of dollars in collateral as a condition of buying electricity for the Port Washington data center.
See Paul Kiefer, Oracle drops lawsuit challenging Wisconsin data center credit rules (‘The credit requirements, designed to protect We Energies customers from financial risks, now stand unchallenged’), Wisconsin Watch, August 17, 2026.
This libertarian blogger is not opposed to communities deciding for themselves whether to back data centers like Oracle’s. State requirements, however, must be imposed equally on data center builders; changes or revisions to these requirements must be general and not particular to one corporation or another.
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Forthcoming topics (in no particular order): Development in Downtown Whitewater (Follow-Up), the Value of a UW-Whitewater Education, A New Ethics Ordinance, and Polling Places in the City (Further Considerations), and Steps for a Public Interest Campaign.
Fastest star in the Milky Way found by astronomers — it orbits a black hole: