Memorial Day in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:23 and sunset is 8:20 for 14 hours 57 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 71.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Memorial Day parade begins at 10:30 AM from Fairhaven’s Hearthstone Memory Care and will proceed along North Street to Whitewater’s Old Armory.
On this day in 1961, President Kennedy announces the Project Apollo before a special joint session of Congress: that the United States “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
After 86 years, Army Cpl. John “Jack” Ginzl is finally home in Rhinelander.
He was buried the day before Memorial Day in a public ceremony at Forest Home Cemetery. Jack had previously been interred in a military cemetery in Hawaii, in a grave for unidentified soldiers.
Jack volunteered for the military before the Pearl Harbor attack sent America into the Second World War. He was stationed in the Philippines when Japan invaded, shortly after the attack.
He fought in a months-long battle, was captured and endured the Bataan Death March.
Jack spent years as a prisoner of war before dying on Jan. 9, 1945, when allied aircraft bombed the unmarked prison ship where he was held in what is now Taiwan. The bombers did not know there were hundreds of American prisoners aboard.
For more than three-quarters of a century, Jack’s identity was lost among the unaccounted for dead.
Now, with the help of DNA research and the ongoing effort of the military to give names to the missing, Jack has returned to his family. On the day before Memorial Day, was laid to rest at Forest Home Cemetery in Rhinelander at the foot of his parents’ graves.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 77. Sunrise is 5:24 and sunset is 8:20 for 14 hours 56 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 62 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge, connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan, is opened to traffic after 14 years of construction.
View of Manhattan in 1876, showing the Brooklyn Bridge under construction, Public Domain, Link
The cost of Trump’s trade wars is often measured in the dollar value of the tariffs remitted to Customs and Border Protection—i.e., the roughly $166 billion in tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court. But in reality, the cost is much greater, and often harder to quantify.
It includes lost sales; soured relationships with longtime customers, both domestically and abroad; and the endless resources spent securing warehouses, or canceling and uncanceling production orders, or scheduling and rescheduling container shipments. It includes travel spent scouting out new factory locations in lower-tariff countries, only to find that Trump has picked a fight with those places, too. Then there are the employees who were laid off and contracts that were severed as companies tried to offset their higher costs from materials, equipment, and finished goods they import.
Layer onto that the paralyzing uncertainty caused by an ever-changing set of rules, which make it hard to plan any kind of investment or expansion. And finally, not least, there is the lingering, corrosive fear of retaliation—the concern that a company might accidentally displease the president while trying to do right by their customers and shareholders.
It is for this last reason that some firms are forgoing refunds entirely, despite being entitled to them. And no wonder: Trump himself has suggested the tariffs are part of his protection(ist) racket. “If they don’t do that [refrain from lawful compensation], I’ll remember them,” [Trump] told CNBC last month, after being informed that some large companies like Amazon were not applying for refunds.
If they remain reluctant to seek compensation, Amazon would be leaving a tremendous pile of cash on the table. In response to the company’s inaction, last week consumers filed a class-action lawsuit against the company to demand that it apply for rebates and pass along the refunds to customers. General Motors, which expects $500 million back, also reportedly considered opting out, but ultimately did apply for a refund.
Trump imposed unlawful tariffs and now uses coercion to prevent businesses from seeking lawful compensation.
Trump has held an obsession with tariffs almost his entire public life. He has been sure — which should make sensible people doubtful — that tariffs would restore domestic manufacturing. That restoration has not happened:
Wisconsin lost thousands of manufacturing jobs in 2025, driven in part by an aging workforce and hesitancy to expand hiring in an uncertain economy.
Between January 2025 and January 2026, the state’s manufacturing workforce shrank by about 9,500 jobs, falling from 461,100 workers to 451,600, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The manufacturing workforce nationally declined by about 91,000 jobs over the same period.
Industry leaders say the job losses were driven more by worker retirements than widespread layoffs, though shifting tariffs and broader economic uncertainty have made some manufacturers more reluctant to hire.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 70. Sunrise is 5:24 and sunset is 8:19 for 14 hours 55 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 51.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
An effort to dethrone the honey bee as Wisconsin’s official state insect may be gaining ground. A campaign by the Wisconsin Dragonfly Society to put a rare, native dragonfly in its place got support in the Wisconsin Conservation Congress survey last month.
The Hine’s emerald dragonfly was believed to be extinct for decades. But it was rediscovered in Door County in 1987. Today, The Ridges Sanctuary in Baileys Harbor is a rare habitat for the endangered species and wildlife experts there are making the case for the species to get statewide recognition.
Tony Kiszonas, director of research at The Ridges Sanctuary, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that the effort to get the species declared as the state insect of Wisconsin could help educate people about the species and the natural habitat it lives in.
The Hine’s emerald dragonfly species was named in 1931, two years after being categorized as a distinct species. Its range included Wisconsin and other Midwestern states. By the 1950s, it was believed to be extinct. Almost 40 years after its rediscovery, it remains a federally endangered species.
I’ll not suggest that the Hine’s emerald should replace (rather than merely augment) the honey bee as a state insect, lest fanatical honey bee aficionados rampage through this community.
It does seem right, however, that Wisconsin should consider for a state insect a dragonfly species that is now endangered, is of our region, and requires the wetlands that are characteristic of our state’s natural beauty.
And, well, yes, those are beautiful emerald eyes.
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 66. Sunrise is 5:25 and sunset is 8:18 for 14 hours 53 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 40.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1819, the SS Savannah leaves port at Savannah, Georgia, United States, on a voyage to become the first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. (Savannah‘s departure had been delayed for two days “after one of her crew returned to the vessel in a highly inebriated state, fell off the gangplank, and drowned.”)
It was German scientist Ernst Haeckel, more than a century ago, who coined the now-discredited expression that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ described simply as an organism’s development as an embryo (ontogeny) repeating (recapitulating) the evolutionary past of its species (phylogeny).
And yet, if not in the natural world, then perhaps elsewhere, one might find a concept of recapitulation to prove more fitting. (There are, in fact, social science concepts that do apply recapitulation.)
I’ll suggest a loose application of recapitulation theory (very loose and permissive!) to small-town politics: a political or cultural faction rising in a town adopts the form and behaviors of the prior factions it supplements or replaces. That faction’s evolution outside the womb, so to speak, reflects the habits of earlier factions in the community.
This claim would hold true despite ideology — it’s a claim about behavior apart from ideology. One can even set aside the metaphor to an old German scientist’s views and instead see this as a contemporary American condition (and problem): those who rise now, even and especially despite their claims of unique ideological positions, soon look and behave like those who came before.
And so, and so, when a faction comes along and says it’s a new approach (MAGA after traditional conservatives or the center-left after conservative cronyism) how it truly looks and what it truly risks being little more than a recapitulation of past forms and conduct.
If, for example, a district board goes from one ideological majority to another, yet exhibits the same habits and forms of the past, is it truly new? Is it not, instead, merely a descendant of, and a dependent of, earlier habits and forms?
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Paris’ oldest bridge has vanished. This week, the artist known as the “French Banksy,” JR, inflated a giant “cave” over the Pont Neuf — a monumental, rocky illusion swallowing the 17th-century landmark whole.
Mont Blanc, a 9-month-old cat in Australia, survived a 14-story fall from his high rise apartment in Melbourne:
9-month-old Mont Blanc encountered his brush with death as he roamed around his home on the 20th floor of an apartment block in Melbourne, Australia.
His owner, Tim Aupanno, decided to leave the balcony door slightly ajar before going to work so that the cat could use the bathroom while he was gone. But when he returned home, Mont Blanc had fallen from the balcony, plunging 14 stories and landing in a bush.
[…]
It was only when a neighbor on the 6th floor heard meowing coming from the ledge outside her apartment that the missing cat was finally located.
Tuesday, May 26 at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of The Choral @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Period Drama/History/Music
Rated R (language); 1 hour, 53 minutes (2025)
As World War I rages on, a demanding Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes) takes over a British male choral society that’s lost most of its men to the army, leaving him to recruit teenagers. Together, they and their community soon discover that the best response to the chaos of war is to make beautiful music together. Says CSM film critic Peter Rainer, “It’s the kind of film that doesn’t get made much anymore.“
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 59. Sunrise is 5:26 and sunset is 8:17 for 14 hours 51 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 29.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM. The Whitewater School Board’s Strategic Planning Work Group meets at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1917, the Great Atlanta fire of 1917 causes $5.5 million in damages, destroying some 300 acres including 2,000 homes, businesses and churches, displacing about 10,000 people but leading to only one fatality (due to heart attack).
This year’s annual Spring Splash was managed as it should have been: with the matter-of-fact approach required of a foreseeable, annual event in a college town. See City of Whitewater, Council Agenda Item, Spring Splash 2026 After Action Report (May 19, 2026) and Video Presentation of the Report.
Whitewater is a college town and so one can — and should — expect to see college students. Those who live in a forest can expect to see trees in all directions. Those living in a forest and don’t want to see pines or maples might consider moving from the forest. Those who are working at public expense in a forest and don’t want to see pines or maples might consider finding work elsewhere. (There have to be deserts, somewhere, just waiting…)
Years ago, however, many in Whitewater and among her municipal employees (appointed or in law enforcement) carried on as though this college town should not have college students. (More precisely: that students should be seen but not heard, or better yet neither seen nor heard except when their rent was due.)
Whitewater is a college town and she does, in fact, have college students among her residents. Some limited portion of their time will, naturally and understandably, be spent celebrating at semester’s end. One of those celebrations is the annual Spring Splash gathering.
While adults are responsible for their actions, it was never too much to ask our municipal officials — elected, appointed, or in law enforcement — that they manage public conduct smoothly and without fuss.
Long time coming, but welcome no less for it, is the recent level-headed approach to an ordinary student festival in a normal college town.
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Why does such a big and powerful dinosaur like T. rex have such tiny forearms, in a new study scientists believe they might have the answer. They say the animal evolved to have a much larger head and jaws because the prey it was chasing was becoming much bigger, too.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see a mixture of clouds and sunshine with a high of 60. Sunrise is 5:27 and sunset is 8:16 for 14 hours 49 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1609, Shakespeare’s sonnets are first published in London, perhaps illicitly, by the publisher Thomas Thorpe.
One of the problems that small towns have is that they struggle to bring younger people into positions of leadership, not merely in politics but among private community groups. In politics particularly, one can be sympathetic to the dynamic that the WISGOP faces, if not its aims: At annual convention, Wisconsin GOP’s old guard urges party to engage young voters.
(Significantly, the city’s electorate has selected the Whitewater Common Council well in this regard. The city’s councilmembers are an eclectic mix of young and middle-aged, of new and veteran members.)
Political parties and community groups across the state have the same need to bring in new, younger members in positions of responsibility. The problem these groups often face is a self-inflicted one. They place the oldest members in positions of authority, and use new recruits only for dull tasks with little recognition and reward. The rationalization for this hierarchy — that younger members need to learn the fundamentals — often becomes a justification for hoarding recognition and rewards among aged veterans of modest productivity but immense self-regard.
Younger members in these community groups come to realize that they’re not valued new members but instead disposable indentured servants. Since indentured servitude is seldom a personal aspiration, these newcomers quit the group. This leaves the group with indolent older members on the hunt for still more new recruits to dupe persuade into membership.
For successful community groups, the goal should be a few aged members advising and mentoring many more younger members who are given prominence and genuine responsibility. For unsuccessful community groups, it’s the opposite: many aged members hogging prominence and responsibility while relegating new, younger members to scrubbing and scraping.
‘That’s how we’ve always done it’ is the implicit motto of many a failing group.
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 72. Sunrise is 5:28 and sunset is 8:15 for 14 hours 47 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 11.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1780, New England’s Dark Day, an unusual darkening of the day sky, is observed over the New England states and parts of Canada:
Most people found the darkness to be baffling and inexplicable. Many applied religious interpretations to the event.
In Connecticut, a member of the Governor’s Council (renamed the Connecticut State Senate in 1818), Abraham Davenport, became most famous for his response to his colleagues’ fears that it was the Day of Judgment:
I am against adjournment. The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought.
Davenport’s approach is worthy, admirable, and inspirational. One continues in one’s good work come what may.
What role is there — what role should there be — for family legacy in public policy? None. None whatever. In private life, one may happily recall the accomplishments of prior generations: how long a family has been in the nation or city, what one’s late relatives did, said, and believed. Private, familial bonds extend from the present backward into the past.
In the public policy of the present, however, a well-ordered free society does not extend privileges among the living to accomplishments that belong only to those who have passed. We are, in the words of a venerable liturgy, responsible only for what we have done or left undone. We have no legitimate claim to an honorable share of the accomplishments of those who came before us.
Those were their accomplishments, not ours. We, ourselves, do not live many lives but one.
And look, and look — a libertarian (as I am) contends for individual rights, of those among us here and now. (From those individual rights, persons may freely choose with whom to associate. In this way, libertarianism rejects an initial position of group rights but acknowledges and defends the right of individuals, as individuals, to choose to associate into groups if they should so desire.)
And so, and so — in this city, few could be happier than I am with the decline of family legacy as a basis of public policy. Family legacy of the past never belonged as a legitimate influence on deliberations among the living. Someone’s distant ancestor may have done many good things; someone’s distant ancestor is no longer a member of this community and its electorate.
It would have been better for our community if past family legacy had ceased simply through its own absurdity to bedevil the debates of the present. Better for all of us if these claims had simply withered on their own.
Instead, it is the rise of an aggressive nativism that has made passive claims to family entitlement so obviously suspect. If it is wrong to claim a superior entitlement today based on bloodline and pedigree merely inherited, then it is wrong to claim a superior entitlement today based on family actions that were, in fact, never one’s own in any way.
Here we are, here one stands: it is incoherent to oppose nativism in support of the free, equal movement of people and families today while simultaneously contending that one’s own family history deserves special public consideration.
There are myriad anecdotes that this libertarian blogger heard about his family’s past on this continent; they mean nothing for public policy. Nothing.
It is a great tragedy of our time that blood and soil nativism (our own version of die Ideologie von Blut und Boden) grips some of our fellow residents.
We should have finished off familial entitlement on its own, before the worse problem of nativism arrived. Perhaps if we had done so today’s nativism would not be so virulent. Too late: that worse problem has now come our way.
And so, and so — claims of familial legacy and nativism in public policy should and must face the same dustbin.
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
NASA is pushing the limits of flight on Mars — by spinning helicopter rotor blades so fast, they’re breaking the sound barrier. During recent tests at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, engineers accelerated the tips of next-generation rotor blades beyond Mach 1 inside a special chamber that simulates the atmospheric conditions of the Red Planet. The faster a Mars helicopter’s rotors spin, the more it can carry and the farther it can fly.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with scattered showers and a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:29 and sunset is 8:14 for 14 hours 45 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On Saturday, more than eighteen hundred students were graduated from UW-Whitewater. It was a pleasure to attend the afternoon ceremony. That ceremony was a heartfelt mixture of traditional and modern. Quite moving, from beginning to end. (Having attended many graduations over a lifetime, UW-Whitewater’s Saturday ceremony was easily among my favorites, including those in which I was graduated.)
The university has a marketing campaign, sensibly, promoting the success of its graduates in being hired before graduation. This libertarian blogger would never contend against participation in the marketplace, most broadly understood. It is within a broadly conceived marketplace that voluntary and productive relationships are formed. The success of the individual, and from her or him the community, comes through free and voluntary associations with other individuals.
Yet, while the university’s marketing campaign is sound both practically and in principle, there is another vital question to consider.
A second question presents itself to this community: not about the employment of these graduates before graduation, but instead about their lives after graduation.
This question is a Whitewater concern, a community concern. Look around, and one sees that despite ample land this community has not built, has not fostered, has not created for some of these graduates a lifelong role in the city. We’ve been quite good at building temporary (and sometimes dilapidated) private accommodations for those attending UW-Whitewater. A few private men have been enriched through their financial relationship to our public university.
Whitewater is more than a few private men. She is a city not of fifteen, but of fifteen thousand.
This beautiful city would be more so, far more so, if we would offer in the next generation more than we have done over the last two generations. If these graduates are talented (they are), and if these graduates are energetic (they are), then we have every reason to offer today’s graduates a place as lifelong residents.
If we do so, then Whitewater will have achieved the very best marketplace transaction, the most successful marketing and communications: lifelong membership of new graduates in a beautiful community that preserves its beauty and increases its prosperity through the participation of those very graduates.
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): Claims of Legacy, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Smile (the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) will “study the interaction between the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic environment from a unique highly elliptical orbit,” according to European Space Agency.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:30 and sunset is 8:13 for 14 hours 43 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court hands down a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing racial segregation in public schools.
Yesterday, the WISGOP held its state convention at the Kalahari in the Wisconsin Dells. Henry Redman reported on the convention by watching a live-stream of the gathering.1 The WISGOP professes an interest in economics, but knows well that cultural issues motivate the party’s diehards:
During a panel discussion of current and former Republican legislators, Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) said that the state’s residents are “feeling the economy.”
“When you look at what’s going on right now, it is affordability, it truly is,” Kurtz said. “Let’s not sugarcoat that. Everybody, at least in my district, we’re feeling the economy. So that’s where I think we, as Republicans, we have to say what we have done and what we will continue to do.”
But from the convention stage, officials such as Tiffany, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, former Gov. Scott Walker and U.S. Reps. Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden, railed against alleged election fraud, undocumented immigrants, trained protesters fighting the Trump administration and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“The left never, never talks about the victims of crime from illegal immigrants,” Johnson said. “But they take those two individuals who they trained and encouraged, put themselves into harm’s way, they died, and they turned them into martyrs and use them as an excuse to defund ICE, defund CBP, refuse to fund DHS, and put all of America, or continue to keep America at risk.”
Redman’s headline derives from the WISGOP’s effort to convince Wisconsinites that their state might become…Minnesota. It takes a huge amount of moxie and mendacity to convince ordinary people that Minnesota is a hellscape.
The warning [about becoming like Minnesota] comes after 15 years in which Republicans have controlled majorities in the state Legislature and hold six of the state’s eight congressional districts while Republicans hold both houses of Congress and the presidency. In his speech, [gubernatorial candidate Tom] Tiffany painted a Wisconsin in decline.
“This election is about more than politics. It’s about whether Wisconsin is going to continue down this path of decline,” he said.
If, by Tiffany’s account, Wisconsin is continuing on a path of decline despite significant GOP officeholding across the state and nation, one wonders how much worse off we’d be with one more WISGOP officeholder in Tom Tiffany as governor.
And yet, and yet, no matter how much WISGOP Assemblyman Tony Kurtz talks about economic issues, it’s cultural conflict that motivates the movement to which the WISGOP is beholden. One might oppose this approach (as this libertarian blogger does), but the WISGOP has a grasp of its own practicalities — the party might lose with its base, but it will certainly lose without them.
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Redman wrote on Bluesky that he was denied press credentials to the event. The denial accomplished nothing except to show that there is no one as thin-skinned as a party operative denying a press pass to a reporter. ↩︎
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): Claims of Legacy, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:31 and sunset is 8:12 for 14 hours 41 minutes of daytime. The moon is new today.
On this day in 1888, Nikola Tesla delivers a lecture describing the equipment which will allow efficient generation and use of alternating currents to transmit electric power over long distances.
Wisconsin is home to seven salamander species, and we found four of them at Kettle Moraine State Forest. From spotted to four-toed, these remarkable amphibians breathe through their skin and depend on Wisconsin’s wild vernal pools to survive.
