It’s Oscars Month and the Seniors in the Park Bijou Theatre will be showing three of the Nominated Films. The Academy Awards ceremony is Sunday evening, March 27th.
Tuesday, March 29th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of The Eyes of Tammy Faye @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Biography/Drama/Romance
Rated PG-13
2 hours, 6 minutes (2021)
The rise, fall and comeback of Televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, PTL, CBN and the 700 Club. (Andrew Garfield and Jessica Chastain; Best Actress nomination). Also nominated for Best Makeup & Hairstyling.
Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered rain or snow showers with a high of 38. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 7:12 PM for 12h 23m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 58.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1721, Johann Sebastian Bach dedicates six concertos to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt, now commonly called the Brandenburg Concertos, BWV 1046–1051.
The U.S. Supreme Court handed down two decisions yesterday addressing the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling on least-change maps for legislative and Congresional districts. In a terse decision, the federal high court let stand Wisconsin’s least-change maps for the Congressional districts.
By contrast, in a separate decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Wisconsin’s least-change maps for state legislative districts. Amy Howe of the SCOTUSblog writes of yesterday’s decision that
In an unsigned seven-page opinion, the justices reversed the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision adopting the governor’s map and sent the case back to the state court. The majority explained that by issuing its ruling now, without additional briefing or oral argument, it would give the state court enough time to adopt new maps for the Aug. 9 primary election.
The majority reasoned that, to justify race-based districting, a state must show a good reason to believe that the Voting Rights Act requires such a result. If the Wisconsin Supreme Court regarded Evers as the mapmaker, the majority explained, it was clearly wrong to do so. Evers had contended, without more, that he had drawn an additional majority-Black district because there was a chance to do so – “a sufficiently large and compact population of black residents to fill it.” But even if the Wisconsin Supreme Court saw itself as the creator of the map, it still needs to go back to the drawing board, the majority continued. Among other things, the majority noted, the court could adopt the maps only if it believed the Voting Rights Act required an additional majority-Black district – which, the state court conceded, it could not “say for certain.” When the case returns to the state court, the majority stressed, that court is also “free to take additional evidence if it prefers to reconsider the Governor’s maps.”
In a four-page dissent, Sotomayor noted that summary rulings – those that the Supreme Court issues based on abbreviated briefing and no oral argument – “are generally reserved for decisions in violation of settled law.” But in this case, Sotomayor wrote, the Supreme Court is sending the case back because the state supreme court failed to “comply with an obligation that, under existing precedent, is hazy at best.” What’s more, she wrote, the Supreme Court’s intervention on Wednesday “is not only extraordinary but also unnecessary” because the state court left open the possibility that someone could still bring a challenge to the maps. “I would allow that process to unfold,” she concluded.
A copy of yesterday’s decision, with dissent, appears immediately below.
It’s uncertain how significantly the federal decision will alter state legislative districts across the state. Wisconsin could reaffirm the least-change maps already selected with additional justifying evidence. Alternatively, the state’s high court could select a different set of legislative maps. If a different set of maps should be chosen, some legislators may rethink their election plans (e.g., Don Vruwink only decided to run after the Wisconsin Supreme Court selected Gov. Evers’s preferred maps, and Dale Kooyenga wasn’t going to run after the state high court picked Evers’s proposal.)
New state maps will have to be in place before the August 9th state primary.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 49. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 7:11 PM for 12h 20m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 69.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt leaves New York for a post-presidency safari in Africa. The trip is sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic Society.
STURTEVANT – Using public money, Mount Pleasant improved its infrastructure anticipating a massive Foxconn factory and $1.4 billion worth of investment.
With that not happening, village officials believe they can attract another national or international company to the massive and largely vacant site.
“We’ve put in a lot of infrastructure folks,” said Claude Lois, Foxconn’s project manager hired by Mount Pleasant. “We’ve sized this at the time for Foxconn Generation 10, but today, actually because of all the work we did we are sitting pretty good for all the work we did for the future.”
Lois spoke during a special meeting of the Racine County Board and the Mount Pleasant Village Board Tuesday — the first time a public update on Foxconn has been given since 2019. Foxconn representatives were invited to participate but declined.
Residents were not allowed to speak during the meeting but were given a chance to submit questions in advance. Those questions were not answered during the meeting.
Jim Paetsch, executive director of the Milwaukee 7, helped to negotiate the Racine County Intel pitch. He said Foxconn was cooperative throughout the process.
Paetsch said what Intel liked about Mount Pleasant will be attractive to other companies including farming and battery manufacturers.
“The really good news is Mount Pleasant and Racine County have a really good site,” Paetsch said. “We’re looking forward to pursuing more opportunities in months to come. What people don’t understand sometimes about economic development is, if you don’t have a site, you don’t have a deal.”
But some residents say hypothetical deals aren’t good enough.
Kim Mahoney is one of the few remaining homeowners still living on the Foxconn site. Mount Pleasant closed negotiations on buying her property in 2019.
“People gave up their homes for a $10 billion investment and 13,000 jobs, not for speculation as to what might get built there,” said Mahoney, who attended the meeting.
(Emphasis added.)
What Paetsch doesn’t understand is that if you don’t have a solid deal, you don’t take residents’ homes through eminent domain.
Claude Lois is a contracted consultant with engineering firm Kapur and Associates,and he works in Mount Pleasant’s Village Hall. His role as project director has no official job description, and records obtained by Wisconsin Public Radio of Lois’ time card and village-owned calendar do not match.
Lois does not provide public updates to the village on how his time is spent or have a direct boss overseeing his work. Village Administrator Maureen Murphy authorizes his $28,000 per month salary without further documentation. When pressed for further information, Murphy provided WPR with Lois’ 2017 contract.
On a smaller scale, in 2009 Whitewater has also seen grand promises go unfulfilled. Local officials promised that a multi-million-dollar grant for Whitewater’s ‘Innovation Center’ would be “part of an $11,051,728 project which grantees estimate will help create 1,000 jobs and generate $60 million in private investment.”
That was some ‘estimate.’
These years later, we’ve not had 1,000 jobs from a building that’s more like a university annex with a revolving door of here today, gone tomorrow startups.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 46. Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 7:10 PM for 12h 17m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 78.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee meets at 5:30 PM. [Updated: Wednesday, not today.]
On this date Eugene Shepard was born near Green Bay. Although he made his career in the lumbering business near Rhinelander, he was best known for his story-telling and practical jokes. He told many tales of Paul Bunyan, the mythical lumberjack, and drew pictures of the giant at work that became famous. Shepard also started a new legend about a prehistoric monster that roamed the woods of Wisconsin – the hodag. Shepard built the mythical monster out of wood and bull’s horns. He fooled everyone into believing it was alive, allowing it to be viewed only inside a dark tent. The beast was displayed at the Wausau and Antigo county fairs before Shepard admitted it was all a hoax.
Geothermal energy has long been the forgotten member of the clean energy family, overshadowed by relatively cheap solar and wind power, despite its proven potential. But that may soon change – for an unexpected reason.
Geothermal technologies are on the verge of unlocking vast quantities of lithium from naturally occurring hot brines beneath places like California’s Salton Sea, a two-hour drive from San Diego.
Lithium is essential for lithium-ion batteries, which power electric vehicles and energy storage. Demand for these batteries is quickly rising, but the U.S. is currently heavily reliant on lithium imports from other countries – most of the nation’s lithium supply comes from Argentina, Chile, Russia and China. The ability to recover critical minerals from geothermal brines in the U.S. could have important implications for energy and mineral security, as well as global supply chains, workforce transitions and geopolitics.
Geothermal power plants use heat from the Earth to generate a constant supply of steam to run turbines that produce electricity. The plants operate by bringing up a complex saline solution located far underground, where it absorbs heat and is enriched with minerals such as lithium, manganese, zinc, potassium and boron.
Geothermal brines are the concentrated liquid left over after heat and steam are extracted at a geothermal plant. In the Salton Sea plants, these brines contain high concentrations – about 30% – of dissolved solids.
If test projects now underway prove that battery-grade lithium can be extracted from these brines cost effectively, 11 existing geothermal plants along the Salton Sea alone could have the potential to produce enough lithium metal to provide about 10 times the current U.S. demand.
Disclosures:
1. Bryant Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
2. Michael McKibben currently receives federal funding from the Department of Energy to research the origins of lithium resources in geothermal brines. He occasionally consults for geothermal companies, but does not own individual shares in those companies.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 71. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 7:09 PM for 12h 14m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 88.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. leads 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
There are particular lies both small and large, but in the repertoire of practiced liars there’s somethingas powerful as any single lie: a torrent of mendacity that aims to undermine confidence in the very possibility of truth. Putin’s regime, drawing on techniques of Soviet propaganda, uses lies this way.
Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson report Truth Is Another Front in Putin’s War (‘The Kremlin has used a barrage of increasingly outlandish falsehoods to prop up its overarching claim that the invasion of Ukraine is justified’):
Using a barrage of increasingly outlandish falsehoods, President Vladimir V. Putin has created an alternative reality, one in which Russia is at war not with Ukraine but with a larger, more pernicious enemy in the West. Even since the war began, the lies have gotten more and more bizarre, transforming from claims that “true sovereignty” for Ukraine was possible only under Russia, made before the attacks, to those about migratory birds carrying bioweapons.
….
The power of Russia’s claim that the invasion is justified comes not from the veracity of any individual falsehood meant to support it but from the broader argument. Individual lies about bioweapons labs or crisis actors are advanced by Russia as swiftly as they are debunked, with little consistency or logic between them. But supporters stubbornly cling to the overarching belief that something is wrong in Ukraine and Russia will fix it. Those connections prove harder to shake, even as new evidence is introduced.
That mythology, and its resilience in the face of fact-checking and criticism, reflects “the ability of autocrats and malign actors to completely brainwash us to the point where we don’t see what’s in front of us,” said Laura Thornton, the director and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.
As Putin relies on Soviet-era techniques, so do his few defenders here in America. They parrot his ever-shifting claims, moving from one to another, winning approval from the Kremlin as dutiful propagandists.
We face, as a consequence, opponents of the truth both foreign and and domestic.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 59. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 7:07 PM for 12h 11m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 94% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1942, General Douglas MacArthur, at Terowie, South Australia, makes his famous speech regarding the fall of the Philippines, in which he says: “I came out of Bataan and I shall return.”
Will Iowa State attack the rim or bomb away? Iowa State finished with 56 field-goal attempts against LSU. Of that total, 37 were three-pointers. That is a whopping 66% of the team’s shots. The Cyclones entered the game with 669 three-point attempts out of 1,787 overall field-goal attempts, or just 37.4% of their shots. It will be interesting to see if the Iowa State coaches believe they can attack UW off the dribble or will need another three-point barrage to advance.
It’s Oscars Month and the Seniors in the Park Bijou Theatre will be showing three of the Nominated Films. The Academy Awards ceremony is Sunday evening, March 27th.
Tuesday, March 22nd at 1 PM, there will be a showing of King Richard @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Biography/Drama/Sports
Rated PG-13
2 hours, 24 minutes (2021)
The story of tennis Super Stars Venus and Serena Williams and their coach & father, Richard Williams (Will Smith; Best Actor nomination). Also nominations for Best Supporting Actress (Aunjanue Ellis), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture.
Friday in Whitewater will see rain, and perhaps some snow, with a high of 38. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 7:05 PM for 12h 05m 49s of daytime. The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos left a state Capitol meeting with Republicans seeking to decertify the 2020 election and declared, again, that what they wanted from him wasn’t possible.
But the group said they left Madison with hope for their efforts because of what he said next to reporters: “I think there was widespread fraud.”
Vos’ words emboldened proponents of the unsupported narrative that systemic fraud affected Wisconsin’s election outcome and played into a Republican Party talking point nationally.
Audio of his comments were played over booming speakers in a blacktop parking lot off I-39 in Portage County as a couple hundred people cheered while Vos was across the street meeting with county party leaders to manage their views on the same idea.
“I think he is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and this is one of the dumbest things he has ever said,” Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said Thursday.
“That’s not leadership. We want people to vote. We want eligible people to vote. We want to make it as easy as possible. But when we continue to ratchet up the narrative that there was widespread fraud … that’s wrong. And that’s a leader saying that.”
Vos did not respond to requests for an interview on Thursday.
Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and director of the university’s Elections Research Center, said Vos’ statement will make it even more difficult to assuage concerns within his party over the 2020 election.
(It’s hard to believe that Evers truly thinks that Vos is one of the smartest people he’s met, as Evers has met well more than six or seven people in his life.)
What’s easy to believe, because it’s obvious, is that Vos is a small, scared man. In the presence of the mob, Vos squeals in agreement and scurries away soaked in his own sweat and urine.
Behold, Wisconsin: there goes your Speaker of the Assembly.
St. Patrick’s Day in Whitewater will see an early evening shower with a high of 56. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 7:04 PM for 12h 02m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.2% its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified School District’s Citizens Financial Advisory Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1776, the British Army evacuates Boston, ending the Siege of Boston, after George Washington and Henry Knox place artillery in positions overlooking the city.
On March 17, the world celebrates the feast day of St. Patrick, a zealous British bishop of the fifth century who became famous for spreading Christianity in Ireland. Patrick is Ireland’s main patron saint.
But as a medieval historian, I suggest that we also pause to remember another of Ireland’s patron saints, the nurturing, compassionate St. Brigid.
This year, following a three-year campaign by a feminist organization, herstory.ie, the Irish government finally acknowledged Brigid’s importance by declaring a new national holiday on her feast day of Feb. 1. Until now, Ireland counted her among their official three patrons, along with St. Patrick and St. Columcille, or Columba, but gave workers a day off only on St. Patrick’s Day.
Unlike Patrick, who came from Britain, Brigid was born in Ireland, sometime around A.D. 450, the child of a slave and a king in the province of Leinster.
Unfortunately, Brigid left no historical record of her missionary work. Patrick wrote two letters that still exist: one a defense of his missionary career and the other a rebuke to a slave-raiding British king. All information about Brigid comes from biographies of saints written long after she lived. A churchman named Cogitosus was the first to write about Brigid, in about A.D. 650, or approximately 200 years after her birth.
Cogitosus recounted Brigid’s many purported miracles: As a girl, she gave away the household’s butter and bacon to hungry beggars and dogs, then miraculously replaced the food for her family. Later in life, she turned a wooden column into a living tree with one touch and hung her cloak on a sunbeam. After she founded her monastic community at Kildare and became its abbess, she also traveled, preached and was said to have cured Christians of serious debilities such as blindness and muteness, all in imitation of Christ. While many early female saints have miracles attributed to them, few of them actively proselytized.
….
Today, some people keep St. Brigid’s Day by weaving a special reed cross or visiting a holy well whose waters, blessed by Brigid, are believed to heal illness. The Brigidine Sisters of Kildare attend their ever-burning flame for Brigid, as nuns did in the Middle Ages. These seem like modest observances compared with the massive parades that flood the main streets of towns around the globe in annual celebration of Patrick.
This year on March 17, when you’re wearing the green and singing “Dirty Ol’ Town,” take a moment to whisper thanks to St. Brigid, the compassionate, sensible, native-born patron saint of Ireland, and ask if Ireland’s premier patron saint should be a woman.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 68. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 7:03 PM for 11h 59m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.3% its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1935, Adolf Hitler orders Germany to rearm herself in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Conscription is reintroduced to form the Wehrmacht.
What would happen if Whitewater’s rightwing populists got everything they wanted?
As always, a reminder: the politics of the city government and school district matter less than genuinely charitable efforts to uplift this community. I’ve held these views for years. SeeAn Oasis Strategy (2016) and Waiting for Whitewater’s Dorothy Day(2020).
To the extent that government has any money left after providing for the basic services of the community, that money should be directed as though it were a charitable effort. SeeLocal Public Policy as if Charitable Assistance (2020).
And yet, here Whitewater is, after the Great Recession, opioid epidemic, economic stagnation, repeated incidents of sexual harassment, a pandemic, and another recession. Neither longstanding boosterism, nor the recent advocacy of (toxic) positivity from the school district offers any effective remedy for the community. If Whitewater’s public officials want to be taken seriously, they’ll need to begin thinking, speaking, and acting seriously.SeeWhitewater’s Local Government: Always Literally, Not as Often Seriously
For it all, one finds that bad goes to worse: a faction of rightwing populists now ludicrously presumes that it has a concoction that will have Whitewater up and at ’em.
The obvious one is that populists are going to claim that all other contenders for power are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a disagreement about policies or even about values, which after all in a democracy is completely normal, ideally maybe even somewhat productive. No, populists always immediately make it personal and they make it entirely moral. This tendency to simply dismiss everybody else from the get-go as corrupt, as not working for the people, that’s always the pattern.
Then, second, and less obviously, populists will also suggest that anybody who doesn’t agree with their conception of the real people, and therefore also tends not to support them politically—that with all these citizens you can basically call into question whether they truly belong to the people in the first place. We’ve seen this with plenty of other politicians who are going to suggest that already vulnerable minorities, for instance, don’t truly belong to the people.
Rightwing populism has only a series of ill-considered grievances, and scores to settle. They’ve no sound economics, and even less of anything beyond that.
Now, as one can guess, any temporary alliance between the development men and the rightwing populists has the transactional types telling the populist types to tone it down a bit, to speak in vacuous business jargon to sound more reasonable. A creature’s fundamental nature doesn’t change simply because it’s quieter for a bit.
It speaks loudly to the arrogance and indifference of the development men to Whitewater’s ordinary residents that they’d hold open the door to those who not long ago supported every excess of Trumpism. Pride and greed are not good policy, but are instead bad traits. It’s an old saying, still useful, that hubris invites Nemesis.
Not long ago, these special-interest business types talked about bringing newcomers to the city. No one will move to a Whitewater dominated by Trumpists; there are already plenty of Trumpist dystopias nearer to any possible newcomer than Whitewater is. Whitewater’s comparative advantage lies in being different from these degraded places, not in becoming another one.
Many communities face a challenge from rightwing populism, but not all towns are equally hardy and resilient. An affluent and academically successful community would weather Trumpism far better than Whitewater. That kind of successful community might quickly throw off the Trumpists the way an otherwise healthy person recovers from an infection.
A community that’s already ill would find itself battling disease after disease at the same time.
After all that’s happened, and because of the failure of community leaders bolster the private rather than the political, Whitewater now faces a political challenge that would set her back still farther from prosperity and good order. Struggling communities that fall into rightwing populism (viz., Trumpism) stay down. We’ve had cold conditions these many years, but rightwing populism will bring only an ice age.
Doubt not: there is a serious critique of the status quo to be made. Know well: the rightwing populists are among the last people anywhere to offer that serious critique.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 56. Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 7:01 PM for 11h 57m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91.3% its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater once had three kinds of conservatives (traditional, transactional, and populist), but she effectively has only two types (transactional and populist) now. Whitewater’s traditional conservatives have faded into political irrelevance. They were once the backbone of Old Whitewater, but by the mid-teens another conservatism, a populist one, rose quickly and replaced the tired and fading traditional types.
Fundamentally, the populist conservatives aren’t conservative at all. They’re energetic, motivated opponents of a traditional outlook. They don’t want to conserve – they want to overturn. Emotional, thin-skinned, and contemptuous of established institutions, they’re not working to repair. They’re working to tear down and, afterward, replace with something, anything so long as it advances them over others.
They are not, however, the only rightwing faction in town. Transactional conservatives, a smaller but well-positioned group of rightwing developers and business types, have outlasted the traditional conservatives and now find themselves in an alliance with the rising rightwing populists. The transactionalists fancy themselves financial savants, but the backbone of the group rests on second-generation landlords. (Plainly and accurately stated: the rental sector isn’t a modern development, tenancy having been around as long as history itself, and it’s not part of a modern knowledge economy.) In any event, they’ve worked these years to dominate town politics, but for it all Whitewater remains a low-wage economy. SeeA Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA, Whitewater’s Still Waiting for That Boom, and Reported Family Poverty in Whitewater Increased Over the Last Decade (note well: that’s family and child poverty).
These men have done well for themselves, but they’ve done nothing for individual and household incomes.
Credit where credit is due: they have successfully managed every previous political alliance to their advantage. They’ve effectively co-opted those with whom they’ve made deals (including some on the center-left). Such an alliance is something like the old commercial about a roach motel: you can check in, but you won’t be checking out.
The alliance between the populists and the transactionalists won’t last. Either the populists will give up their ambitions to overturn existing arrangements, or they will discard the transactionalists if they achieve those ambitions. Rightwing populism as a movement only sustains intensity through ever-greater extremism; the transactionalists can only manipulate local politics through a stability that allows them to satisfy their own business ambitions. The populists are crudely appetitive, and the transactionalists are transparently acquisitive, and these are different impulses.
It’s a partnership of convenience now, but in the end only one of these factions will endure.
