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America, Daily Bread, History, Military

Daily Bread for 12.5.22: General Grant’s Promotion

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 39. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 4:20 PM for 9h 10m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified (to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had mandated nationwide prohibition on alcohol).

 Anne Marshall, associate professor of history at Mississippi State University writes about a pending promotion in Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s pending promotion sheds new light on his overlooked fight for equal rights after the Civil War:

Tucked away in an amendment to the FY2023 U.S. defense authorization bill is a rare instance of congressional bipartisanship and a tribute to U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant.

If approved, the measure would posthumously promote Grant to the rank of General of the Armies of the U.S., making him only the third person – along with John J. Pershing and George Washington – to be awarded the nation’s highest military honor.

As Executive Director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, I believe that the promotion would be much more than a symbolic nod to a great military general. Rather, it would highlight the overlooked legacy of a man who fought to end the last vestiges of slavery.

During the Civil War, Grant rose to fame as a decisive leader who was willing to doggedly pursue Confederate armies and avoid retreat at all costs. He first gained his reputation for tenacity with Union victories at Shiloh, the Battles for Chattanooga and the Siege of Vicksburg.

….

A year before President Abraham Lincoln signed in 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation that freed enslaved people in the Confederate states, Grant oversaw the establishment of refugee, or contraband camps, throughout the Mississippi Valley. Those camps provided basic housing, food and work for Black men and women who had fled from slavery.

Grant also administered the enlistment of African American men into United States Colored Troops units during the Vicksburg campaign.

In March 1864, Lincoln appointed Grant to the rank of lieutenant general and ordered him to take on the Confederate Army in Virginia, a task at which numerous other Union leaders had failed.

At this point during the war, Grant assumed the role of chief strategist for the entire Union war effort. It took the next 13 months of fighting during the Overland campaign before Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.

Gen. Grant’s promotion is long overdue. 

 How Tech Is Betting Big On AI Generated Art: 

Not every bet pays off… 

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City, Courts, Daily Bread, Elections, Politics, School District

Daily Bread for 12.4.22: Elections, Candidates, and ‘Open Seats’

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 39. Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 11m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1872, the crewless American brigantine Mary Celeste, drifting in the Atlantic, is discovered by the Canadian brig Dei Gratia. The ship had been abandoned for nine days but was only slightly damaged. Her master Benjamin Briggs and all nine others known to have been on board were never found.

It’s the beginning of another election season in Wisconsin. In Whitewater, there are elections upcoming for four common council seats, three school board seats, and the city’s municipal judgeship. 

Incumbents for these city or school district positions have until later in December to file papers of non-candidacy, and incumbents and challengers have until early January to file papers should they choose to run in 2023.

The final slate of candidates is always uncertain, as some candidates may wait until the last minute to file, and some who have filed may change their minds.

One small point crops up every year concerning the Whitewater Unified School District. The district’s Central Office is in the habit of describing any seat that is up for election as an ‘open seat.’ That’s not what an open seat means — an open seat is by definition one in which no incumbent is running for re-election, so that the position will be certain to have a new officeholder after the election.  

This might seem like a minor point, but each year it causes confusion in Whitewater about whether school board incumbents are running for re-election. Perhaps they are, perhaps they’re not, but there are no open seats for school board or other races until incumbents file papers for non-candidacy. The mere fact of an election does not create an open seat. E.g., Open seats in state legislative elections, 2021 or Bonneau, Chris W. “Vacancies on the Bench: Open-Seat Elections for State Supreme Courts.” The Justice System Journal 27, no. 2 (2006): 143–59 (‘This article examines the dynamics of state supreme court elections in which no incumbent is present; that is, open-seat contests.’) 

In any event, this libertarian blogger will wait to see what the final roster of candidates offers the community. 

Why Are US Consumers Favoring Experiences Over Goods?:

City, Food

Daily Bread for 12.3.22: How One of the Rarest Salts in the World Goes from Ocean to Table

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be breezy with a high of 43. Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 12m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with with 79.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1947, the first TV station in Wisconsin, WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, was established. The seventeenth television station in the country, WTMJ-TV was the first in the Midwest

How One of the Rarest Salts in the World Goes from Ocean to Table:

See the James Webb Space Telescope’s view of a galaxy merger in stunning 4K:

Business, City, Reasoning

Daily Bread for 12.2.22: (Hey, Whitewater) Here’s How to Bringing Order to Chattering Chaos

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will see a mix of clouds and sunshine with a high of 49. Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 13m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with with 71.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Holiday Parade takes place in the downtown with activities beginning at 4 PM and the parade, itself, beginning at 6 PM. 

On this day in 1954, the United States Senate votes 65 to 22 to censure Joseph McCarthy for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.” 

In places large and small, one often hears grandiose claims about why something good might happen, or excuses about why something bad has happened. Such is the case with Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX crypto exchange has collapsed, with billions unaccounted. Against the advice of his lawyers, Bankman-Fried keeps talking and talking and talking, with excuse after excuse after excuse.

And look, and look, and look — it’s all too easy to be sucked into some smooth-taking hocus pocus about how it wasn’t someone’s fault, was gonna be great if only everyone else believed, etc. 

How advantageous it is to read Matt Levine’s reasoned assessment of these excuses about the FTX collapse. In his newsletter from 12.1.22, Levine brings order to Bankman-Fried’s mendacious chaos:

It is good, for journalists, to ask Sam Bankman-Fried where all the money went, but he is not going to tell you. The possibilities are:

  1. He knows where the money went, and he has huge incentives to lie about it, or

  2. He doesn’t know where the money went, as he sort of keeps saying, and he will just pass along his confusion to you.

There is not some third possibility where you can sit Bankman-Fried down and he will be like “here is a detailed timeline of all the innocent mistakes we made and how much customer money each one vaporized.” If he had those details available to him, he would not have vaporized the money. Or he would have, but the mistakes were not innocent, and he will not describe them accurately. Either way, you will not get a satisfying explanation, from him.

The person who will tell you where the money went at Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, FTX, and its affiliated trading firm, Alameda Research, is John Ray, six months from now. Ray is the current chief executive officer of FTX, appointed moments before it filed for bankruptcy, and the former bankruptcy wrangler of disasters like Enron. He harrumphed into bankruptcy court last month to be like “this is the biggest mess I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen Enron,” and if I were him I’d say that constantly to my kids. Ray’s well-paid and frankly very interesting job is to sort it out, and I assume eventually he will. That sorting apparently involves, like, Googling news articles to see what venture capital investments FTX made, because FTX did not itself keep a list of its own investments. That is what we are dealing with here.  

But Ray is methodically piecing together the accounts, not giving interviews, and keeping his complaints to court filings. Meanwhile Bankman-Fried is at loose ends in his Bahamas penthouse and seems to be spending his time calling up journalists and compulsively confessing to … whatever it is he thinks he is confessing to? “I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone,” he told Andrew Ross Sorkin yesterday, but, otherwise.

Levine accurately sees that there are no third possibilities for Bankman-Fried and FTX. Not at all.

(Indeed, in a podcast with Bankman-Fried months ago before the FTX collapse, Levine’s questions to Bankman-Fried made plain that Bankman-Fried’s thinking was akin to someone running a Ponzi scheme. See Odd Lots Podcast and Sam Bankman-Fried Described Yield Farming and Left Matt Levine Stunned.)

There are dodgy schemes far removed from the world of crypto exchanges. Against the chattering confidence men in towns big and small, these packs of media relations types, public relations men, development men, and other smooth-talkers, there are (as Levine shows) analyses that bring reason to bear against unreasonable claims. 

 U.S. Economy Adds 263,000 Jobs In November: 

City, Conservative Populism, Daily Bread, Local Government, Politics, Populists, Trump, Trumpism

Daily Bread for 12.1.22: Trump and Trumpism (Conservative Populism, MAGA, Etc.)

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 35. Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 15m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with with 61.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

There will be a City of Whitewater election machine audit at 1:30 PM, and the Fire Departments’s board meets at 6 PM.  

On this day in 1941, Emperor Hirohito of Japan gives his tacit approval to the decision of the imperial council to initiate war against the United States

This libertarian blogger wrote on 12.1.20, and still contend, that Trump is a spent political force, but that Trumpism will go on. See Man and Movement. After disappointing midterm elections for the GOP, Trump’s tepid campaign announcement, federal and state investigations into his many transgressions, and his evident anti-Semitism, more reason than ever to doubt Trump’s future. 

Adam Serwer observes sensibly, however, that for the GOP Rebelling Against Trump Is Not the Same as Rebelling Against Trumpism (‘Even if Trump himself departs the scene, conservative demand for his approach to politics will remain’): 

Whoever comes after Trump will likely share his most politically dangerous ideological convictions: contempt for democracy, a belief that the rival party’s constituencies are inherently illegitimate, and a disdain for the rights of those the GOP coalition considers beneath it.

Right-wing elites concerned about Trump’s political effectiveness will not likely share the same worries about his heir. Without structural changes to that system, sustained political defeat, or shifts in the nature of the Republican coalition, Trump may go, but the conservative demand for Trumpism will remain. And as long as that is the case, the rise of another Trump by a different name is an inevitability.

Locally, this truth is evident in how conservatism come to be dominated by conservative populism (the MAGA men). See The Kinds of Conservatives in Whitewater.

The rightwing populists are the most energetic and vocal of the conservatives in Whitewater. The traditional conservatives are finished, and the transactional ones (that is, the few dealmaking types of bankers, landlords, and public relations men) have fewer people each year that they can cajole, dupe, sucker, manipulate, or badger into doing their bidding.

These conservative populists, however, have claims to make, scores to settle, and meltdowns to exhibit. They’ve no response to their own reverses except intensification. If, in their thinking, half a dose hasn’t worked, then surely a full dose will… 

Some of their candidates may show up in the spring. While they shouldn’t expect to speak without replies, claim without fact-checking, or contend without pertinent refutation, it’s likely that they will have those unrealistic expectations. The obligation to reason well requires more from them than a bleating what, huh, me? 

Trump’s decline won’t determine the future of Trumpism. That’s a question yet to be decided, in America, Wisconsin, and Whitewater.  

 Tonight’s Sky for December:

City, Daily Bread, Special Interests, University, UW System

Daily Bread for 11.30.22: The Diligence Required for the UW-Whitewater Chancellor Search

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 29. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 16m 28s of daytime. The moon is in its first quarter with 50.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1941, the SS-Einsatzgruppen round up 11,000 Jews from the Riga Ghetto and kill them in the Rumbula massacre. 

The UW System has announced the five candidates to be UW-Whitewater’s next chancellor. See UW-Whitewater chancellor finalists named (UW System announcement), Five finalists  announced for UW-Whitewater chancellor position (Fort Atkinson Online), and the explanatorily-titled After years of upheaval, UW-Whitewater announces 5 chancellor finalists (Wisconsin State Journal).

There are two directions from which diligent review of expectations and conditions are required. The first is the obvious perspective of the candidates: they owe it to themselves to understand the environment into which they would be stepping. Interview committees may paint a brighter picture than the real view once one is here for a bit. There’s less bright royal purple in Whitewater than on the UW-Whitewater homepage.

There’s a second direction from which diligence is required. This community, all 14,889 within it, should think about what the campus needs. Among that large number of residents, the number of bankers, landlords, and public relations men is small. UW-Whitewater, if the school is to prosper academically, must be more than a landlord’s income stream. The campus is thousands, the city is thousands, the market between them is thousands, and so the choice must involve and benefit thousands.

A candidate whose greatest ambition is to become chancellor, and will go along and get along with a few to secure that position, is unworthy of the role. 

 World’s largest active volcano erupts in Hawaii:

Accidents, Animals, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.29.22: Deer Crashes in Wisconsin

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with afternoon showers, and a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 17m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 38.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1972, Atari releases Pong, the first commercially successful video game.

 Joe Taschler, Andrew Hahn, and Ricardo Torres report Deer crashes, supply chain in Wisconsin causing drivers to pay more to keep their vehicles (‘Wisconsin drivers keep hitting deer while supply chain issues are causing them to pay more and hang on to their vehicles longer’):

Someone driving in Wisconsin has hit a white-tailed deer on the road each day for the last six years or more, data from the state Department of Transportation show.

In 2021, 16,204 deer collisions occurred on Wisconsin roads, down slightly from 16,547 in 2020. All caused damage to property, and 501 crashes resulted in injuries. Nine deer collisions were fatal.

A crash can cause considerable damage, and experts say more people are choosing to repair their vehicles rather than buy a new car.  

“We just fixed a Toyota 4Runner, it was $38,000, and that was deer,” said James Anderberg, body shop director at Ball Body Shop in Middleton. “I don’t know how fast he was going when he hit it, but it was significant amount of damage.” 

Deer collision numbers for 2022 are released in the spring of the following year, but Anderberg said he feels like his shop has been as busy as it has in most recent years.

 Pong 1972 by Atari:

Boosterism, Daily Bread, Gaslighting, Language, Toxic Positivity

Daily Bread for 11.28.22: Oh, Merriam-Webster, It’s About Time

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be party sunny with a high of 45. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 19m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 27% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater School Board meets in closed session shortly after 6 PM, returning to open session at 7 PM.

On this day in 1967, the first pulsar (PSR B1919+21, in the constellation of Vulpecula) is discovered by astronomers Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish.

One reads that Merriam-Webster has picked ‘gaslighting’ as the 2022 word of the year: 

Merriam-Webster’s top definition for gaslighting is the psychological manipulation of a person, usually over an extended period of time, that “causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

Well, that’s a solid, if tardy, choice. 

What is boosterism if not the accentuation of the positive for supposed economic gain at the expense of a honest description of conditions for all? What is toxic positivity if not the insistence that all is well, always and forever? 

Welcome, lexicographers. Gaslighting’s a fitting catchall for those distortions and others. 

Unicyclist Raises $30,000 for Charity While Cycling from Wisconsin to Arizona:

Animals, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.27.22: Fix and Release

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see morning rain with a high of 41. Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 20m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 18.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1895, at the Swedish–Norwegian Club in Paris, Alfred Nobel signs his last will and testament, setting aside his estate to establish the Nobel Prize after he dies.

Winner of 17 Film Festivals, Fix and Release explores a small turtle trauma centre in Peterborough Ontario Canada as it fights to even the odds for survival that freshwater turtles face in a modern world. This visually beautiful film shows turtles in a way that few have seen before.

 How One Of The Oldest Forms Of Theater Survived 2000 Years: 

Culture, Daily Bread, Populists, Twitter

Daily Bread for 11.26.22: The Weakness Implicit in Musk’s Culture War Question

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 22m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 9.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1838, the Wisconsin legislature assembles in Madison for the first time:

On this date, after moving from the temporary capital in Burlington, Iowa, the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature assembled in Madison for the first time. Two years earlier, when the territorial legislature had met for the first time in Belmont, many cities were mentioned as possibilities for the permanent capital — Cassville, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, Platteville, Mineral Point, Racine, Belmont, Koshkonong, Wisconsinapolis, Peru, and Wisconsin City.

Madison won the vote, and funds were authorized to erect a suitable building in which lawmakers would conduct the people’s business. Progress went so slowly, however, that some lawmakers wanted to relocate the seat of government to Milwaukee, where they also thought they would find better accommodations than in the wilds of Dane Co. When the legislature finally met in Madison in November 1838 there was only an outside shell to the new Capitol. The interior was not completed until 1845, more than six years after it was supposed to be finished.

On November 26, 1838, Governor Henry Dodge delivered his first speech in the new seat of government.

On November 25th, Elon Musk asked (trolled, really) a question about culture wars on his private social media platform. Thomas Jefferson provides an excellent reply:

There’s much talk about Musk as a libertarian, or techno-libertarian (whatever that’s supposed to be, as all advocates of free markets embrace technological innovation). If he were libertarian, then he wouldn’t be so exercised over cultural differences and debates present in every age. It’s often the populists, whether of left or right, who worry over these debates. Musk is a billionaire who frets over cultural issues as though he were an ordinary, agitated conservative populist. 

How soon until he walks into a school board meeting and starts whining about an imaginary CRT curriculum or a Marxist/Socialist/Globalist cabal? 

Concern over culture wars quickly devolves into a desire to limit speech, inquiry, and debate in a free society. This desire to limit is part weakness and  part arrogance, the two varying in proportion case by case. 

A private platform can set its own standards. Society should not be so constrained and cramped. 

See also The Populists Circle Disney (Yes, Disney).

 Explore the Orion Nebula via multiple space-based observatories:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.25.22: Wisconsin’s Grassroots Sponsorships Aid Ukrainian Refugees

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 50. Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 24m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 3.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, the last British troops leave New York City three months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

John Davis reports Grassroots sponsorships bringing Ukrainian war refugees to Wisconsin (‘Refugees are making their way to the state though private sponsorships and small organizations’):

Tatyana Lukash said her life was turned upside down in February when Russia invaded Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine and home to Lukash, her husband and teenage son.

“We had a decent life. We had everything we needed. We are alive and God brings us here (to Wisconsin). We will try,” she said.

Lukash and her 15-year-old son went to Poland in March, and she spent months looking for a more stable living situation.

Her 45-year-old husband, a now unemployed welder, had to stay behind in Ukraine because he’s still eligible to be drafted into the Ukrainian military.

Lukash connected on Facebook with Gary Coryell and his wife, who live on a hobby farm in northern La Crosse County.

The Lukashes are the second Ukrainian family Coryell has sponsored. A mother and daughter lived with them for about six weeks this summer before moving to Texas for work before Lukash and her son moved in with them in mid-October.

“Bringing these people into our home has given me a passion and a purpose that I haven’t felt in many years,” Coryell said. “These people are in harms way, especially the mothers and the children. Open your homes and your hearts, and you won’t regret it.”

Coryell has been using the federal government’s United for Ukraine program that was established in late April as a way for Ukrainian refugees to live in the United States under a sponsor.

Sponsors help refugees fill out paperwork proving they have some form of financial support. The federal government then does a background check on the refugees.

An eternal reminder: productive free markets involve private voluntary transactions of capital, labor, and goods. Restrictions on the free movement of workers are presumptively wrong, economically and morally. (Indeed, the economic benefit of greater prosperity through the free movement of labor is itself a moral argument.) 

Wisconsinites’ humanity ameliorates Russian depravity. These displaced Ukrainians are productive people, who are likely to be soon on their feet; Wisconsin is a state with chronic labor shortages.

They’ve come our way after unlawful violence against their entire nation. We cannot give them what they once had. We’ve no such power of restoration. Wisconsinites can, however, through collective efforts offer them a place among us, for so long as they should like.

They, and we, will be better for it. 

‘The result is tragic’: Russian missiles hit civilian infrastructure, killing at least six: