Good morning.
Christmas in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 11. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:26 PM for 9h 02m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as President of the Soviet Union (the union itself is dissolved the next day). Ukraine’s referendum is finalized and Ukraine officially leaves the Soviet Union.
Perfect World – Katie Melua from Karni and Saul – Sulkybunny on Vimeo.
Good morning.
Christmas Eve in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 8. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 02m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1943, U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower is named Supreme Allied Commander for the Operation Overlord.
There are local elections for school board, city council, and the city’s municipal court in April. The deadline for candidates to submit nomination papers for those races is 1.3.2023. That’s ten days from now. (As it turns out, ten days is also 240 hours, or 14,400 minutes, or 864,000 seconds.) Plenty of time.
And yet, and yet, over at the Whitewater Banner (a publication that uses a byline but has no real journalists) there’s some worry, it seems, that there might not be enough school board candidates: Three School Board Seats Open; What Happens if There are Less Than Three Candidates? (https://whitewaterbanner.com/three-school-board-seats-open-what-happens-if-there-are-less-than-three-candidates/).
A few quick remarks.
There’s one candidate declared, and there may be more by 1.3.23. Nothing happened yesterday, and nothing will happen tomorrow, that will in any possible way adversely affect education in Whitewater.
We won’t know if there will be three open seats until January 3rd. Both the school district’s Central Office and the Banner have used the term ‘open seats’ incorrectly. See Elections, Candidates, and ‘Open Seats.’
How many people are in government matters less than what government does. Let’s suppose, despite all possibility, that no one ever runs for school board again in Whitewater. No one, ever. There will still be public education in Whitewater, however organized. Then — as now — it will matter what is taught and how it is taught. It’s what you do that matters, and the doing of education, so to speak, is teaching and learning. See “You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memory.”
This Banner post follows a professionally written story at Fort Atkinson Online that was published many hours earlier. The earlier story should have been credited as previously reported.
I’ve no idea — no normal, professionally-oriented idea — why the Banner chose to accompany its post with a photo of a small, confused child, layered in sepia. There’s no reason for confusion or worry, or justification to impute confusion or worry to anyone.
It’s okay — we’re gonna get through this. Breathe deeply, think of ocean vistas and kitty cats, and you’ll be fine.
Whitewater has many challenges that she can, and must, overcome. The manner for candidates declaring and when is not among them. Indeed, if this were the measure of our problems then we’d have no problems at all.
Jingle Cats Sing Silent Night:
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cold with a high of -1. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 01m 55s of daytime. The moon is a new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1783, George Washington resigns as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army at the Maryland State House in Annapolis, Maryland.
What’s bad advice from a lawyer? Well, when you’re not protecting the client’s interest, and when you’re dissuading the client from truthful testimony. Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer report Jan. 6 Witness Told Panel That Lawyer Tried to Influence Her Testimony (‘Cassidy Hutchinson recounted to the House select committee how a lawyer with ties to former President Donald J. Trump said to her that she should “focus on protecting the president.”’):
WASHINGTON — Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who was a standout witness of the House Jan. 6 committee investigation, told the panel in an interview in September that a lawyer aligned with former President Donald J. Trump had tried to influence her testimony, the latest example of what the committee says was an effort to stonewall its inquiry.
“We just want to focus on protecting the president,” Ms. Hutchinson recalled Stefan Passantino, a former Trump White House lawyer who represented her during her early interactions with the committee, telling her.
“We all know you’re loyal,” she said Mr. Passantino told her. “Let’s just get you in and out, and this day will be easy, I promise.”
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But it was Ms. Hutchinson’s transcript release that captured the most attention on Capitol Hill. The document shows Mr. Passantino was not the only person who Ms. Hutchinson claimed wanted her to protect Mr. Trump.
She told the committee that on the night before her initial interview, another aide to Mr. Meadows, Ben Williamson, called her with a message.
“Mark [Meadows] wants you to know that he knows you’re loyal and he knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss,” she quoted Mr. Williamson as saying, in an apparent reference to Mr. Trump. “You know, he knows that we’re all on the same team and we’re all a family.”
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In her two most recent interviews with the committee, Ms. Hutchinson repeatedly suggested that Mr. Passantino sought to shape her testimony and encouraged her to avoid mentioning events that might embarrass Mr. Trump. She said she was concerned in particular about being asked about an episode in which Mr. Trump was said to have lunged at a Secret Service agent who refused to take him to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
According to Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony, Mr. Passantino advised her to say that she did not recall the event if she was asked about it. “The less you remember, the better,” she quoted him as saying.
Mr. Passantino left the White House Counsel’s Office midway through Mr. Trump’s term. But he maintained ties to Mr. Trump’s world, including appearing in court as a lawyer for the Trump Organization regarding some of Mr. Trump’s legal matters.
So, how’s Attorney Stefan Passantino doing after the revelation of this manipulative advice? Not so well, one guesses. Justin Wise reports Trump Lawyer Takes Leave From Firm After Jan. 6 Panel Allegation:
Stefan Passantino has taken a leave of absence from law firm Michael Best & Friedrich following an allegation that he advised a Trump White House staffer to mislead the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the US Capitol.
Passantino, who was once the top ethics lawyer in the Trump White House, later advised White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson as she prepared to go before the committee. CNN reported that committee members believe Passantino urged Hutchinson to mislead the panel. Hutchinson switched lawyers before testifying publicly in a June committee hearing.
Passantino’s bio has been scrubbed from Michael Best’s website. He’s on leave “given the distraction of this matter,” he said Wednesday in a email. Passantino said he was not acting on behalf of Michael Best in his work for Hutchinson and pushed back against the allegation that he advised her to mislead lawmakers.
Michael Best did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Now, some sound advice for Whitewater (or anywhere, truly): avoid officials and their hangers-on who urge that everyone should act as ‘one family,’ or that it’s best to follow ‘our traditions’ rather than standard, ethical practices. This ilk manages that way well enough, and brims with confidence, until someone comes along and shatters the shell of their rotten egg. Walk away, as Hutchinson did, and find someone better who will offer ethical advice.
Martian ‘winter wonderland’ – Frost, snow and extreme cold on the Red Planet explained:
Tuesday, December 27 at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Look forward to the future and the new year, as we enter the Multiverse, a theoretical reality that includes a possibly infinite number of parallel universes.
In this adventure, an aging Chinese immigrant (Michelle Yeoh) is swept up in an insane adventure, in which she alone can save our world, by exploring other universes connecting with the other lives she could have led. Also stars Jamie Lee Curtis.
This film has garnered a lot of 2023 Oscar buzz. As the 2023 Golden Globe and Academy Awards approach, Seniors in the Park will be screening the nominated films.
One can find more information about Everything, Everywhere, All at Once at the Internet Movie Database.
P-22, a puma known and beloved to residents of Los Angeles, died last week after a life of adventure. He wore a tracking collar, and his travels and appearances in Griffith Park captivated people in California and beyond. Well, done, feline, well done.
David Olin writes Elegy for a big, beautiful L.A. cat:
On the one hand, there’s the matter of celebrity. Certainly, the 12-year-old cat fit the criteria — sought out by residents eager for a sighting, written up in publications including National Geographic. Just think of the iconic photos: P-22 passing below the Hollywood sign or standing on a crest overlooking the basin, with its sprawling nighttime lights.
Perhaps most telling: This newspaper [Los Angeles Times] prepared a prewritten “obituary.”
And yet, celebrity is fickle and it is fleeting. It’s far too shallow a gloss on P-22. What made this mountain lion essential for us was not that he was famous, but that he persevered.
To get to Griffith Park, P-22 had to migrate from the Santa Monica Mountains and may have crossed both the 405 and the 101 freeways. Once in the park, he beat the odds and stuck around for 10 years, making the “urban wilderness” of Los Angeles his home.
Isn’t that, to some extent, the case for all of us? Whether we arrived from elsewhere or were born here, we have built lives in this city not least by reckoning with its ferocity. Los Angeles is often caricatured as witlessly Edenic, “the City of Dreadful Joy,” in Aldous Huxley’s pointed phrase. But we know that’s just a stereotype, a convenient mythology of the place.
Instead of Huxley’s witless joy, let’s substitute wildness: a city in which nature vividly asserts itself. This begins with the instability of the landscape — the fires, floods, earthquakes and droughts. Among my favorite civic symbols are the La Brea Tar Pits, which sit in the midst of the metropolis like a harbinger of past and future, reminding us of where the city came from, what it will revert to.
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Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of 27. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 01m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1864, Savannah, Georgia, falls to the Union’s Army of the Tennessee, and General Sherman tells President Lincoln: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.”
Caught on Camera, Traced by Phone: The Russian Military Unit That Killed Dozens in Bucha:
Exclusive phone records, documents, interviews and thousands of hours of video reveal how a Russian paratrooper unit killed dozens of people on one street in March.
These Russians soldiers, and the Kremlin’s dictatorship that sent them to murder in Ukraine, are enemies of our people, too. No number of fellow travelers on cable news, flacking Putin’s line, and defaming our Ukrainian allies, can change this plain truth. Disaffected populists of the extreme left and right are more agitated than they have been in many years, after seeing what they do not wish to see: that majorities in America understand right and wrong apart from the populists’ repeated distortions.
Whitewater has only one populism, a populism of the right. (That Whitewater supposedly has a meaningful, left-leaning populism is a crackpot notion held only by a few overwrought rightwing populists. People of normal intellectual ability and emotional stability could live for hundreds of years and not make the mistake of thinking that way. See Identifying Types and Spotting Issues.)
In any event, a few tankies of the left and right, who see goodness in Putin and evil in Zelensky, are morally compromised.
Eugene Finkel wryly notes “[n]ot going to lie, the simultaneous tankie far-left and far-right meltdowns are a sight to behold.”
Yes, yes they are.
Good morning.
Winter in Whitewater begins with mostly cloudy skies with a high of 25. This desert-like season lasts until March 20, 2023. No season demands more; no demands more welcome. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 01m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world’s first full-length animated feature, premieres at the Carthay Circle Theatre.
Decades from now on Mars, Douglas Quaid will tell Kuato, a psychic mutant from that planet, that he wants to remember who he is. This will be their conversation:
Kuato: What do you want, Mr. Quaid?
Douglas Quaid: The same as you; to remember.
Kuato: But why?
Douglas Quaid: To be myself again.
Kuato: You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memory.
So it will be with Quaid, as it is now with us, including even candidates and officeholders. It’s what one does that defines a person.
Some run for office, and a smaller number hold will office, but it’s what they do in office that matters.
Monkeys jump into river during turf war at Florida state park:
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 25. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 01m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1987, in the worst peacetime sea disaster, the passenger ferry Doña Paz sinks after colliding with the oil tanker MT Vector in the Tablas Strait of the Philippines, killing an estimated 4,000 people (1,749 official).
Consider the following account of a businessman’s actions:
Imagine taking the job! Yesterday Elon Musk tweeted a poll asking if he should step down as “head” of Twitter Inc.; 17.5 million people voted, and the results were 57.5% to 42.5% in favor of him stepping down. “I will abide by the results of this poll,” he said. But he also tweeted “As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it.” And: “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.” And: “The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive.” And, listing qualifications for the next chief executive officer: “You must like pain a lot. One catch: you have to invest your life savings in Twitter and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May. Still want the job?”
Meanwhile Musk has been trying to raise money for Twitter at $54.20 per share, the $44 billion valuation at which he bought it; he said in October that he was “obviously overpaying.” Since then things have, uh, not gone well. So the proposition is … what? You take all of your money, you give it to Musk to buy equity in his company at a price that you all agree is absurd? And then you get to work for him, running a sullen and broken Twitter according to his ever-shifting whims, until he changes his mind and fires you? And when he fires you he denies you severance and dares you to sue, and accuses you of being a sex criminal?
That’s Matt Levine’s assessment of Elon Musk’s latest actions at Twitter (see ‘Elon Wants Some Twitter Help‘).
Musk’s ownership has become, in fact, quite the mess.
There are two aspects to seeing as much: Musk is ridiculous, and he looks ridiculous.
The latter of these aspects, that he looks ridiculous, is easier to see from a distance. A ridiculous person close up becomes familiar in his ridiculousness, and those nearby become inured to his absurdity. From a distance, however, that absurdity isn’t leavened or obscured: it’s obvious, starkly so.
For faraway Musk, that’s his problem: he’s unmistakably absurd. For the ridiculous who are nearby, it’s our problem: we have become imperceptive to their foolishness.
We should be looking at our own businessmen anew, with fresh eyes.
What’s Really Got Inflation on the Run?:
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 24. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 01m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 19.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board goes into closed session shortly after 6 PM, to resume open session at 7 PM. Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1777, George Washington’s Continental Army goes into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
UW-Whitewater will, one day after all, have a new chancellor. (UW System regents will receive a recommended candidate in January.) Someone will get the position, and then the university’s long interregnum will end.
There’s a way to predict the quality of that selection, when it at last is made:
The more the Wisconsin Legislature’s majority endorses a selection, the worse that selection will be for the university’s future. The more disappointed the Wisconsin Legislature’s majority will be, the better that selection will be for the university’s future.
A simple, effective predictor.
Two ‘nearby’ exoplanets may be water worlds, Hubble and Spitzer data suggests:
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 19. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 01m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 27.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1271, Kublai Khan renames his empire “Yuan,” officially marking the start of the Yuan dynasty of Mongolia and China.
How Cockatoos Outsmart Humans to Open Trash Bins:
If you’re a lover of seafood, then this is the place for you:
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 26. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 02m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 28.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1903, the Wright brothers make the first controlled powered, heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Rich Kremer reports UW-Madison remains 8th in nation for research spending (‘University reported $1.38B in research expenditures during 2021 fiscal year’):
Wisconsin’s flagship university ranked eighth in the nation between July 2020 and June 2021. The university reported nearly $1.4 billion in annual research spending across all fields, a $16 million increase over the prior fiscal year.
The Higher Education Research and Development survey, or HERD, shows nearly $646 million in research spending from federal grants and awards and more than $412 million in spending from institutional funds.
Steve Ackerman, UW-Madison’s vice chancellor for research and graduate education, said the rankings add a sense of pride among researchers across the university.
“There’s always that idea of how does our research make the world a better place, and in particular the state a better place?” Ackerman said. “And this HERD survey is one of the metrics that we look at now.”
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UW-Madison was ranked fourth in the nation for research spending in 2014 but fell to sixth the following year. At the time, former Chancellor Rebecca Blank credited the drop to large cuts in state funding to the UW System.
In 2018, the university fell again to eighth in the nation and has stayed there ever since.
Ackerman said things are turning around. He said during the pandemic, many faculty members spent time away from the lab writing and submitting research grant applications.
“Now we’re looking at changing that trajectory,” Ackerman said. “We’ve been at eight now for two years and looking to catapult ourselves to number six in a short time frame.”
While this libertarian blogger has long been critical of mediocre administrative leadership on our campus and at the UW System, that criticism is founded first against injuries to individuals and then second against failures to fulfill a competitive academic position.
A legislative bias against the University of Wisconsin–Madison holds Wisconsin and America back, variously against other states or nations. Some of the same politicians who list UW System schools on their profiles are the first to pander to anti-university constituents. They should pick a lane.
A competitive spirit to win research grants advances knowledge nationally and Wisconsin economically and culturally.
Ant milk: The mysterious fluid that helps them thrive:
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with occasional snow showers and a high of 28. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 02m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 48.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1864, at the Battle of Nashville, the Union’s Army of the Cumberland routs and destroys the Confederacy’s Army of Tennessee, ending its effectiveness as a combat unit.
Kevin Roose reports Elon Musk, Management Guru? (‘Why the Twitter owner’s ruthless, unsparing style has made him a hero to many bosses in Silicon Valley’). The story relates how some other tech CEOs envy Musk’s autocratic style.
Roose reports that
In less than two months since taking over, Mr. Musk has fired more than half of Twitter’s staff, scared away many of its major advertisers, made (and unmade) a series of ill-advised changes to its verification program, angered regulators and politicians with erratic and offensive tweets, declared a short-lived war on Apple, greenlit a bizarre “Twitter Files” exposé, stopped paying rent on Twitter’s offices, and falsely accused the company’s former head of trust and safety of supporting pedophilia. His personal fortune has shrunk by billions of dollars, and he was booed at a Dave Chappelle show.
It’s not, by almost any measure, going well for him. And yet, one group is still firmly in Mr. Musk’s corner: Bosses.
In recent weeks, many tech executives, founders and investors have expressed their admiration for Mr. Musk, even as the billionaire has flailed at Twitter.
….
Tech elites don’t simply support Mr. Musk because they like him personally or because they agree with his anti-woke political crusades. (Although a number do.)
Rather, they view him as the standard-bearer of an emergent worldview they hope catches on more broadly in Silicon Valley.
The writer John Ganz has called this worldview “bossism” — a belief that the people who build and run important tech companies have ceded too much power to the entitled, lazy, overly woke people who work for them and need to start clawing it back.
In Mr. Ganz’s telling, Silicon Valley’s leading proponents of bossism — including Mr. Musk and the financiers Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel — are seizing an opportunity to tug the tech industry’s culture sharply to the right, taking leftist workers and worker-sympathizers down a peg while reinstating themselves and their fellow bosses to their rightful places atop the totem pole.
Some Musk sympathizers do view things in such stark, politicized terms. The writer and crypto founder Antonio García Martínez, for example, has hailed Mr. Musk’s Twitter takeover as “a revolt by entrepreneurial capital” against the “ESG grifters” and “Skittles-hair people” who populate the rank and file at companies like Twitter.
Sure, fine, whatever: it’s not merely what a given tech CEO thinks or does that matters, but whether he does so in market conditions that favor or disfavor workers. It’s not Musk, it’s the labor market, that will decide how much can be done. If workers can walk easily into other good tech jobs, then Twitter will lose out competitively to other employers. (A good part of Musk’s remaining labor force is green-card limited, and they have been easier to push around lest they become unemployed and have to leave the country if they don’t quickly find new employment.)
But an autocratic CEO cannot live on risk-averse green-card workers forever. Musk and others can only do what they’d like if they’ve someone else to do what they’d like. Musk isn’t writing code; he’s sh*tposting on Twitter. (In Musk’s case, that’s figuratively and literally true.)
The prospect’s for Musk’s Twitter ownership depend on market factors, including a labor market, beyond his control.
Huge aquarium bursts open wrecking Berlin hotel lobby:
A massive "Cathenge" is being unveiled in San Francisco with glowing feline monoliths https://t.co/rFWV9XewbO
— Time Out New York (@TimeOutNewYork) November 30, 2022
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