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 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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 29th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of The Daytrippers@ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Comedy/Drama. Rated R (sex, language); 1 hour, 27 minutes (1996).
On the day after Thanksgiving, a wife discovers a hidden love letter written to her husband by an unknown paramour, setting off the entire family’s madcap day drive, from Long Island to New York City, in search of the letter’s writer. Starring Stanley Tucci, Liev Schreiber, Marcia Gay Harden, and Anne Meara.
Thanksgiving Day in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 50. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 25m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1863, near Chattanooga, Tennessee, Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant capture Lookout Mountain and begin to break the Confederate siege of the city.
Sarah Lear reports Triumph of the turkeys (‘Wild birds flourish in Wisconsin cities and suburbs. After nearly being wiped out of Wisconsin, wild turkeys have repopulated their former habitats’):
More than a century after Wisconsin’s wild turkey population was nearly gobbled up, the birds are flourishing. Now, many are even flocking to urban and suburban areas.
“For the most part, they have been restored to all of their former range, and then some,” said John Kanter, a senior wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Federation.
Wild turkeys were nearly gobbled out of Wisconsin
Wild turkeys, once abundant in the region, had been wiped out of Wisconsin by late 1800s thanks to a combination of unregulated hunting and the decimation of their former habitats by the timber industry.
For much of the 20th century, attempts to restore the birds to their former habitats were unsuccessful, in part because officials were trying to send birds raised in captivity out into the wild.
“They were trying to pen-raise them with domestic turkeys, and then release them, and they were finding out that they just behaved like pen-raised birds and didn’t survive,” Kanter said.
In the 1970s, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources negotiated a deal with Missouri’s Department of Conservation to exchange ruffled grouse from Wisconsin for wild Eastern Turkeys from Missouri. After the wild turkeys took hold in Wisconsin, the DNR began trapping some of the birds and relocating them to other areas of the state where the conditions were right for them to thrive, said David Drake, a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at UW-Madison.
“We’ve restored a lot of forest lands across the state,” Drake said. “So the Wisconsin Department Natural Resources took turkeys from parts of the state where they were relatively abundant and moved them into parts of the state where they were not quite as abundant.”
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 52. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 27m 37s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
An exhibit taking place in the Madison area displays the work of Vincent Van Gogh, an artist of the nineteenth century, in a twenty-first century medium. Immersive Van Gogh, having been exhibited in many other cities, now arrives in Middleton from 11.24 to 1.8. Gayle World reports ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ exhibit to make a splash in Madison area:
After making the rounds of 20 North American cities over the past two years, the “immersive” experience — with huge video projections animating the works of the 19th-century Dutch painter of “Sunflowers” and “Starry Night” fame — is set to open Thanksgiving Day in a built-out space in the Greenway Station shopping center.
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“Immersive Van Gogh” was designed and conceived by the European video artist Massimiliano Siccardi, with a soundtrack by Luca Longobardi. Up to 200 visitors can be in the single gallery space that will be used for “Immersive Van Gogh Madison.” Related installations by Broadway’s “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen” designer David Korins also will be at the venue, along with additional scenic elements by scenic designer Randy Wong-Westbrooke.
With clouds blowing and sunflowers flexing in vast video projections on a 35-minute loop, visitors can sit or stand through the sensory-filled experience, though Ross said he prefers to be on his feet so he can easily “spin around” to take in the moving images.
This looks to be a captivating and memorable experience, especially suitable over the extended holiday between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 45. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 29m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy is assassinated and Texas Governor John Connally is seriously wounded by Lee Harvey Oswald, who also kills Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit after fleeing the scene. U.S Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as the 36th President of the United States afterwards.
MADISON – Wisconsin has a record-high budget surplus projected to hit $6.6 billion for 2022-23, according to a report released Monday by the state Department of Administration.
Over the next several months, Governor Tony Evers and the Republican-run state legislature will have to figure out how to spend the money.
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The $6.6 billion surplus does not include the roughly $1.734 billion currently in the state’s budget stabilization, or “rainy day,” fund. State general fund balances for 2023-24 are estimated to be $8.4 billion and growing to $9.7 billion at the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year.
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While politicians weigh how to spend the money, outside interest groups also have ideas. The Wisconsin Association of School Boards said, “There should be plenty of money available in state coffers to both increase public school funding and cut state taxes, which could satisfy both Governor Evers’ goals and the goals of some legislative leaders, particularly leaders in the state Senate.”
The Institute for Reforming Government, which introduced a plan to eliminate Wisconsin’s personal income tax last year, is again calling for a similar measure.
Two obvious questions: how will officials allocate the surplus (not including the rainy day fund), and will those allocations lead to structural (rather than one-time) budgetary changes? Rather than simply allocate some of all of this money for a single biennium, Wisconsin can us this opportunity (where there there is more to meet needs) to make lasting changes to how taxes are imposed or schools are funded. Multiple changes may not be possible, but a single structural change would be within reach.
Merely allocating the money is only half the work.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 40. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 4:26 PM for 9h 31m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 7.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1877, Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.
A traditional view holds that Wisconsin court races should be non-partisan. That traditional view hasn’t be an accurate assessment for decades. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has for years been a subject of partisan conflict internally and externally. That’s not about to change: there is an election this spring for the seat currently held by retiring Justice Patience Roggensack. Henry Redman reports ‘Electoral ground zero’: majority at stake in Wisconsin Supreme Court race:
Just weeks after the 2022 midterm elections, Wisconsin is already moving on to this spring’s state supreme court race in which the ideological tilt of the court is up for grabs.
Justice Patience Roggensack is retiring at the end of her term, leaving an open seat on the body that conservatives currently control with a 4-3 majority. The current makeup of the court, with conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn serving as a crucial swing vote, has led to more 4-3 decisions than any supreme court term in 70 years.
The conservative majority on the court has upheld a law that effectively ended collective bargaining power for public workers, approved Republican-drawn legislative maps that tilt the state Legislature heavily toward the Republican party and overturned Gov. Tony Evers’ COVID-19 stay-at-home order. The court has also allowed the previous administration’s appointees to remain in their seats well past the expiration of their terms, allowing the Legislature to effectively block Evers’ appointments, and disallowed a number of methods meant to make voting more accessible.
The issues at stake in the April 4 election include abortion rights, democracy and public safety
It’s an understatement to say that the election for the court will focus more on politics than jurisprudence.
There are also local political implications for places like Whitewater. If the election generates significant interest in Whitewater proper, elections in the city and school district will have a different electorate from a local election without an intense, top-of-the-ballot statewide race.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 26. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 4:27 PM for 9h 33m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 13.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1820, an 80-ton sperm whale attacks and sinks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America. (Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this incident.)
An associate professor of physics (specializing in optical science) at UNC Charlotte, writing on Twitter with the username @drskyskull, summarizes nicely Elon Musk’s mistakes & misunderstanding about Twitter. Although Musk may have purchased Twitter (with considerable debt, basically OPM), buying something does assure the understanding of a thing. (If it were otherwise, there would be no concept of buyer’s remorse, for example.)
So here’s my hypothesis on the whole Musk twitter deal. 1/
Dude LOVES Twitter. As a narcissist, he can’t get enough of the adulation of the right-wing mouth-breathers. But Twitter keeps banning the people he loves, so he becomes convinced that Twitter is a liberal SJW organization. 2/
He decides to teach them a lesson, and make an offer to buy the company. Absolutely convinced that it is a left-wing political site, he’s sure they’ll refuse his offer, even a ridiculously good offer. Then he can say “aha! they’re so woke!” and his fans will cheer. 3/
But Twitter is actually governed by businesspeople who see his offer as absurdly high, and they jump at it. Musk freaks out, tries to get out of the deal, but he’s already locked in solidly. 4/
Now his Dunning-Kruger kicks in to protect him from his panic, and he says, “heck, it’s not that hard to run this site; I’ll turn it around right quick!” He’s not completely stupid, so he cons investors into going in with him. 5/
Dude has fundamentally never understood how Twitter works, and what it takes to make Twitter work. To him, it’s a company filled with a bunch of lefties who just sit around censoring everyone. He can dump that dead weight and everything will run fine. 6/
He goes into it with the same bluster that he used to boost his car and space companies: act like the genius “disruptor” that can fix anything. But those companies are not ad-based, and advertisers immediately become spooked by his approach. 7/
He is utterly baffled; don’t they see how he’s going to make Twitter better than ever before? He fundamentally doesn’t understand how much effort Twitter put into protecting brands. He’s high on his own supply of “free speech,” which he also doesn’t understand. 8/
He clearly thinks that the value of twitter is entirely in the number of users. That is important, but the *quality* of users matters, too, which he doesn’t get. He starts his ill-advised (stupid) change to the blue check system. 9/
With the blue checks, again he’s high on his own supply. He see the check as a status symbol (which it is), but thinks that he can sell that status, which he can’t. People are verified because users need to be able to separate real people from scams. 10/
Elon also thinks that everyone is just as addicted to Twitter as he is. He’s a narcissist; he NEEDS Twitter just like Trump needed it. But relatively few people are that addicted to the site, and the real blue checks know that they *bring* value to the site. 11/
So more advisors leave. Elon is desperate to turn things around quickly, so he just throws shit at the wall to see what sticks. Nothing does, because he has no concept of how actual human beings experience reality. 12/
I think he’s in a panic state, because he *knows* that his mystique is evaporating quickly. He’s the golden boy who had “made 3 companies worth a billion dollars.” He can’t afford, mentally, to be seen as the guy holding the company losing a billion a year. 13/
He probably can’t financially, either, which has got to be intense pressure on his psyche. He keeps trying to turn things around by doing things exactly like he does at Tesla and SpaceX: he’s got a hammer, Twitter is the nail. 14/
But Twitter’s corporate culture is very different from those other companies, so most people aren’t interested in his appeals to going “hardcore.” And his immediate layoffs trigger company-wide resentment, which means almost everyone is ready to bail. 15/
He assumes that he can make things so shitty for workers that only the best, “hardcore” workers will remain. But pretty much the opposite is true: the best workers can jump somewhere else instantly. So his plan backfires 100%. 16/
Now, he’s left with a company with no advertisers, massive debt, and a toxic work environment that will struggle to find new employees. Institutional knowledge has walked out the door. 17/
Overall? I think he is a victim of being a legend in his own mind. He felt he understood twitter well enough that they would never sell. They did. Then he thought he understood it well enough to slash it in half to improve efficiency. He didn’t. 18/
He thought he could appeal to some sort of macho tough guy work ethic that he probably has never experienced himself. He probably sleeps in his office, but he probably has a very comfy bed in it. 19/
To summarize: he thought that Twitter was run by a bunch of left-wingers, who were therefore inferior to him. He was wrong on both counts, and now he’s stuck with a company that may not function at all within days. END
None of this means that Twitter will go under (outages notwithstanding); best guess is that it will remain dysfunctional as long as Musk owns it. If something else compelling comes along, then Twitter will decline as MySpace did. MySpace is still around, but no one cares. The local analog in Whitewater would be the Whitewater Register: living but irretrievably comatose.
Not many people in Whitewater use Twitter, but all people in all places are vulnerable to hubris. In this way, Twitter’s troubles are cautionary for anyone, anywhere.
Meanwhile, the stock price of Tesla year-to-date:
(Of the post title, “On Musk’s Multiple Misunderstandings and Mistakes” and mention of “Twitter’s troubles”: apologies to my high school English teacher, Mrs. Pearlberger, for the overuse of alliteration.)
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 26. Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 4:27 PM for 9h 35m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 21.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1863, President Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony for the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has over 18,000 specimens in its marine mammal bone collection, notably featuring a rare 8.5-foot adult Rice’s whale skull. This collection is so large — in both size and scale — that it has outgrown the museum. Most of the collection is located in an airplane hangar in the Museum Support Center in Maryland.
The NASA and ESA Mars Sample Return mission will send bits of the Red Planet collected by the Perseverance rover to Earth. See how it could be done in this new animation.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 25. Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 4:28 PM for 9h 37m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 29.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1928, the animated short Steamboat Willie premieres as the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, featuring the third appearances of cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse.
The University of Wisconsin System will relaunch a student free speech survey that spurred the resignation of a chancellor six months earlier. The survey is aimed at gauging attitudes toward free speech, viewpoint diversity and self-censorship at the state’s 13 universities.
The 29-page survey will be sent to random samples of students on each UW campus with researchers hoping for a minimum of 500 responses, according to a UW System press release issued Friday [11.11.22].
The questions are multiple choice and ask students things such as how likely they are to consider viewpoints they disagree with on topics like abortion, immigration, racial inequality and gender identity.
It also asks students whether they’ve felt pressured by an instructor to agree with political or ideological views expressed in class and if they’ve been reprimanded for disagreeing with an instructor.
Toward the end of the survey, students are asked to provide their enrollment status, race, sexual orientation, religious affiliation and what political party they most identify with. Those who complete the survey will receive a $10 gift card.
During a call with reporters Friday, UW System President Jay Rothman said the research project is aimed at ensuring the UW System is “committed to being a marketplace of ideas, a place where nuanced and complicated issues can be discussed openly, freely and civilly.”
“We want passionate debate on tough issues in a way that people can learn and ask questions without being labeled or tainted,” Rothman said. “We’re not going to solve the issues that we have as a society, which are challenging and complicated, by soundbites and tweets.”
Rothman said the survey has been vetted by outside experts and UW System shared governance groups.
Funding for the survey was provided by the Menard Center for the Study of Institutions and Innovation at UW-Stout, with private donations from billionaire John Menard.
The research team behind the effort includes Tim Shiell, UW-Stout philosophy professor and director of that campus’ Menard Center; Eric Kasper, UW-Eau Claire political science professor and director of the Menard Center for Constitutional Studies; UW-Eau Claire political science professor Geoffrey Peterson; and UW-Eau Claire psychology professor April Bleske-Rechek.
The survey and its implementation is overseen by the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service at UW-Stevens Point at Wausau.
Tuesday, November 22nd at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Top Gun: Maverick@ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
After thirty years, Maverick is still pushing the envelope as a top naval aviator, but must confront ghosts of his past when he leads TOP GUN’s elite graduates on a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those chosen to fly it.
In a study published in 2020, scientists observed cat-human interactions, and were able to confirm that this act of blinking slowly makes cats – both familiar and unfamiliar animals – approach and be receptive to humans.
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If you’ve spent any time around cats, you’ve probably seen their ‘partially closed eyes’ facial expression, accompanied by slow blinking. It’s similar to how human eyes narrow when smiling, and usually occurs when puss is relaxed and content. The expression is interpreted as a kind of cat smile.
Anecdotal evidence from cat owners has hinted that humans can copy this expression to communicate to cats that we are friendly and open to interaction. So, in the study, a team of psychologists designed two experiments to determine whether cats behaved differently towards slow-blinking humans.
In the first experiment, owners slow-blinked at 21 cats from 14 different households. Once the cat was settled and comfy in one spot in their home environment, the owners were instructed to sit about a meter away and slow-blink when the cat was looking at them.
Cameras recorded both the owner’s face and the cat’s face, and the results were compared to how cats blink with no human interaction.
The results showed that cats are more likely to slow-blink at their humans after their humans have slow-blinked at them, compared to the no-interaction condition.
