City, University, UW System
UW-Whitewater’s Chancellor on Paid Administrative Leave
by JOHN ADAMS • • 1 Comment
Update, afternoon of 9.3.20 — there is no chance – none whatever – that I will write in any detail about this matter without a careful review of published, substantial claims or documents. (I have never written about a matter like this without a review of published claims or documents, and never will.)
Original post from this morning, re-publishing a statement from the UW System, appears below —
Earlier today, UW System Interim President Tommy Thompson announced that UW-Whitewater’s chancellor, Dwight Watson, has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the completion of a UW System investigation:
MADISON, Wis.—University of Wisconsin System President Tommy Thompson today issued this statement:
“Effective today, UW-Whitewater Chancellor Dwight Watson has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation into a complaint. We will have no further comment on this personnel matter at this time. UW-Whitewater Provost Greg Cook will serve as leader of the university until the complaint is resolved.”
Babbittry, Boosterism, City, Coronavirus, Culture, Laws/Regulations, Local Government, Politics, Public Health
Whitewater’s Local Government: Always Literally, Not as Often Seriously
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
It was the Trump apologist Salena Zito who, by way of defending Trump, suggested that his words should be taken ‘seriously, not literally.’ (She offered this defense in a deceitful effort to absolve Trump from the plain meaning of what he said, at any moment. Instead of considering his statements, one was supposed to take Trump’s words not as they were – lies or calumnies – but figuratively as vague policy goals.)
Her effort toward Trump’s absolution has proved a failure: Trump is responsible for his literal claims and should also be taken seriously for the destructive policies that derive from those stated claims. He’s unfit in both words and deeds.
Zito’s formula, however, has use beyond her fruitless defense of Trump. There is, of course, a difference between statements (the literal) and actions (what’s serious as a consequence of action or policy).
Applying this formula to Whitewater’s local government, one finds an application in reverse of its original usage: one should take Whitewater’s local government literally, but seldom seriously.
Officials are responsible for their words and actions, but for Whitewater (and likely many other communities) the words alone are more tangible than policy results.
That’s a situation both ineffectual and absurd: words should lead to effective results, and an environment where policy goes no farther in effect than declarations and pronouncements reduces local government to a bad poetry reading.
That is, however, where Whitewater’s local government find itself. Following a long local custom of grandiose press releases and vainglorious claims, local government has little more by way of policy than more press releases and hollow declarations.
That approach is literal, but not serious.
Doubt not: officials are responsible, personally and often collectively, for acts of misconduct and injury to others. Those actions must always be taken seriously, and be met with redress.
Beyond that, however, Whitewater’s officials should most often be taken literally for their statements, but not as often seriously (as most local pronouncements will achieve little or nothing).
There has been, and will be, for example, controversy over local regulations during the pandemic. The seriousness – the effectiveness – of those regulations rests on cultural compliance beyond the ability of Whitewater’s local government to assure.
A different local government might have had this kind of cultural influence; this one does not.
That’s truly regrettable, as we’ve a cultural problem with public health compliance. This local government is unlikely to be able to effect sufficient, needed change. I supported a mask ordinance for example, but an ordinance is a poor substitute for committed, responsible private conduct.
Those depending on city government or university officials to see Whitewater through this pandemic are relying on too few, and too little.
Whitewater needs to develop means of persuasion apart from government officials, politicians, and others of the same-ten-people ilk. It’s hard to develop those means in the middle of a public health crisis, but the sooner they’re developed the sooner we’ll be ready for future challenges.
And so, and so – always literally, not as often seriously.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 9.3.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • 2 Comments
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:24 PM, for 13h 00m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s CDA meets at 1:30 PM.
On this day in 1783, the Revolutionary War ends with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.
Recommended for reading in full —
Colby Itkowitz reports Trump suggests voters cast ballots twice, which if done intentionally is illegal:
President Trump, on Wednesday during a trip in battleground North Carolina, urged voters to vote twice, once by mail and once in person, to test the protections intended to guard against double voting.
Trump, who has claimed the 2020 election will be rife with fraud and rigged against him, was asked by a local television reporter whether he had confidence in the vote-by-mail system.
“Let them send it in and let them go vote, and if their system’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote,” Trump said.
Intentionally voting twice is illegal, and in many states, including North Carolina, it is a felony.
The president also greeted supporters on the tarmac upon landing in Wilmington, N.C., and made nearly identical comments, encouraging them to send in their ballot “and then go in and vote.”
“So send it in early and then go and vote,” Trump said. “You can’t let them take your vote away; these people are playing dirty politics. So if you have an absentee ballot … you send it in, but I’d check it, follow it and go vote.”
Mona Charen writes of The Broken Windows Presidency:
Whatever the problems of implementation may have been with broken windows policing, the insight on which it was based—that disorder begets more disorder—seemed sound, particularly to conservatives who are temperamentally more sensitive to disruptions of order than liberals. If drug dealers are able to ply their trade unmolested on street corners and drunks are sleeping in vestibules, it’s an invitation to more serious breakdowns of public order.
Oddly, conservatives seem not to have applied this insight to Donald Trump, who from the moment he entered the fray, has been hurling rocks through windows. He smashed the window that required candidates to provide their tax returns. He lobbed a brick through the norm that American public figures do not encourage vigilantism. He demolished the principle that American presidents don’t dangle pardons before former aides caught in criminal activity. Each and every time he has violated a law or a norm and received no pushback from his party, he has made further violations of law and custom more likely.
Kevin Collier and Ken Dilanian report Russian internet trolls hired U.S. journalists to push their news website, Facebook says:
The site, called Peace Data, launched this year with coverage focused largely on the environment and corporate and political corruption. Facebook learned through a tip from the FBI that people formerly associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency, which created a number of influential Twitter and Facebook personas to inflame political tensions in the 2016 election, ran Peace Data and has taken down its known affiliated accounts. It had yet to gain a serious following, said Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of cybersecurity policy.
“It confirms what I think we’ve all thought: Russian actors are trying to target the 2020 elections and public debate in the U.S., and they’re trying to be creative about it,” Gleicher said.
How to Stop the Next Pandemic:
more >>Military, Trump, Unfit
VoteVets: The First
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
City, Coronavirus, Laws/Regulations, Local Government, Public Health, University
Whitewater Common Council Meeting, 9.1.20: Culture & Prohibitions
by JOHN ADAMS • • 4 Comments
At last night’s meeting of the Whitewater Common Council, the council discussed and gave direction to the city attorney to draft an ordinance regulating large gatherings of people on private property during the pandemic. (Updated with video. A revised agenda is available here.) The council plans to meet again on 9.9.20, where they will consider a draft ordinance; they are likely to pass a draft to take effect as quickly as possible thereafter.
A few remarks on the discussion —
1. Ripeness. One sometimes hears that a legal matter is not yet ripe – that is ready and suitable – for adjudication.
There’s no draft yet available, so much of the speculation about what a draft might look like, how it will survive Wisconsin Supreme Court precedent, etc., is yet speculative. There will be a draft presented, presumably, on 9.9.20.
2. Prohibition’s a Strategy When You’ve Nothing Left.
And yet, a draft ordinance, an adopted ordinance, or a litigated ordinance will never matter more than a culture that doesn’t believe in the aims of the ordinance. I supported a mask ordinance, but throughout I have been clear that enforcement of restrictions is likely to be ineffective, no matter how hard one tries.
The city has too many people, and too few officials and employees, to manage a pandemic without widespread cultural cooperation. If enforcement of drinking restrictions is mostly an exercise in herding cats, then limiting the spread of a pandemic at this late stage is like herding cats where some of them are invisible (as asymptomatics).
The impulse toward safety – and preserving a marketplace of myriad daily transactions – is a worthy goal. It’s almost impossible to achieve that goal if residents, themselves, do not support the means to do so.
This is not simply a problem of college students standing too close together. Hundreds of non-student adults in this city have denied the dangers of the pandemic, derided the use of masks, and carried on as though there were no novel coronavirus at all. Federal and state officials have actively encouraged these residents – and millions like them across this continent – to be mask-free ‘warriors’ for ‘re-opening.’
They’ve not achieved a re-opening; they’ve exacerbated society’s ills.
3. Disconnected. This common council no longer has the ability to persuade, and lacks the ability to enforce meaningfully, regulations against residents who’ve stopped caring about council’s authority. One shouldn’t welcome this – and I don’t – but it’s predicable in conditions of malaise.
It’s a problem that has preceded the pandemic, and will likely endure afterward. Past political mistakes and persisting stagnation have greatly limited the range of future government action.
Officials are performing for each other as much as governing the city. That’s why one can say that writing about Whitewater’s politics has significantly shifted from commentary-as-advocacy to commentary-as-narrative.
4. Social Covenant. UW-Whitwater has, and this chancellor has touted, a social covenant directed toward good public health practices. It’s unrealistic to expect – however timely that covenant may be – that it will take hold quickly. Chancellor Dwight Watson, or anyone in his role, would take years to establish a meaningful bond of that kind on campus. His predecessors (Telfer, Kopper) did not shape a university culture that would be receptive to a meaningful social compact of any kind.
A social covenant is more than a few hashtags and purple signs, but there’s no evidence that Watson’s recent predecessors would have grasped as much, and so, even if Watson should one day succeed in establishing a social covenant of any type, that day is years away.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 9.2.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:25 PM, for 13h 03m 48s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1945, Japanese officials sign the Japanese Instrument of Surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
Recommended for reading in full —
David Leonhardt writes of Trump, Unbound:
• President Trump breaks so many of the normal rules of politics that it can sometimes be hard to know when his tweets and comments are truly newsworthy. Even by his standards, though, the past several days have stood out. Consider:
• Trump said on Monday that a plane “almost completely loaded with thugs” wearing “dark uniforms” had been headed to the Republican National Convention to do “big damage.” The claim is similar to a baseless conspiracy theory that spread online over the summer, well before the convention.
• He has declined to condemn the killings of two protesters in Kenosha, Wis. He instead defended the 17-year-old charged in the shootings — a Trump supporter named Kyle Rittenhouse — saying he was acting in self-defense. Trump also promoted a Twitter post that called Rittenhouse “a good example of why I decided to vote for Trump.”
• He defended violence committed by his supporters in Portland, Ore., who fired paintballs and pepper spray at Black Lives Matter protesters.
• He compared the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha to missing “a three-foot putt” in a golf tournament.
• He claimed that “people that you’ve never heard of” and “people that are in the dark shadows” are controlling Joe Biden.
• He claimed Democrats were trying to “destroy” suburbs with “low-income housing, and with that comes a lot of other problems, including crime.” He added that Cory Booker — one of the highest-profile Black Democrats — would be “in charge of it.”
• He predicted that the stock market would crash if Biden won.
• He said that Biden, at the Democratic National Convention, “didn’t even discuss law enforcement, the police. Those words weren’t mentioned.” In fact, Biden held a discussion at the convention on policing, with a police chief.
• Trump claimed that he “took control of” the situation in Kenosha by sending in the National Guard. In fact, Wisconsin’s governor, not the president, sent the National Guard.
• He retweeted messages asserting that the pandemic’s death toll was overstated. Evidence indicates the opposite is true.
• He said that protests against police brutality were actually a secret “coup attempt” by anarchists “trying to take down the President.”
Ben Collins reports Trump’s ‘plane loaded with thugs’ conspiracy theory matches months-old [Facebook!] rumor:
The conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump pushed Monday that a plane “almost completely loaded with thugs” had been set to disrupt the Republican National Convention was almost identical to a rumor that went viral on Facebook three months ago.
….
The claim about the flight matches a viral Facebook post from June 1 that falsely claimed, “At least a dozen males got off the plane in Boise from Seattle, dressed head to toe in black.” The post, by an Emmett, Idaho, man, warned residents to “Be ready for attacks downtown and residential areas,” and claimed one passenger had “a tattoo that said Antifa America on his arm.”
That post was shared over 3,000 times on Facebook, and other pages from Idaho quickly added their own spin to it, like the Idaho branch of the far-right militia group 3 Percenters.
Apple Is Making It Harder To Track iPhone Users, Which Could Hurt Facebook:
(Segment begins @ 6:43 on video.) more >>
Biden-Harris
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: A Socially Distanced Conversation
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 9.1.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see mostly cloudy skies, scattered showers, and a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 7:27 PM, for 13h 06m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1939, Nazi Germany and Slovakia invade Poland, beginning the European phase of World War II.
Recommended for reading in full —
Dana Milbank writes Cornered, Trump tries to foment a race war:
Trump botched the coronavirus pandemic, bungled the economic recovery and flubbed the handling of civil rights demonstrations. Members of his own family denounce him.
He faces a seemingly insurmountable deficit against challenger Joe Biden.
And so the president is trying to provoke a race war on the streets of America.
“We’ve arrived at a moment in this campaign,” Biden said during a visit to a rehabilitated Pittsburgh steel mill Monday, that “we all knew . . . we’d get to — the moment when Donald Trump would be so desperate, he’d do anything to hold on to power.”
After violence claimed lives on both sides of the divide between racial-justice demonstrators and Trump supporters in recent days, Biden said Trump “fans the flames” of violence. “He can’t stop the violence because, for years, he’s fomented it.”
Biden quoted from departing Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s acknowledgment that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is” for the president. Said Biden: “He’s rooting for chaos and violence.”
Dan Friedman reports Disgraced Republican Financier Accused of Secretly Lobbying for China:
On May 25, 2017, Elliott Broidy texted Rick Gates with a message for Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Broidy, a top fundraiser for Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee, said that China would be willing to increase its cooperation with US law enforcement if the Justice Department deported Guo Wengui, a wealthy Chinese dissident living in New York.
“Mine is legitimate back channel,” Broidy wrote to Gates, a former top Trump campaign aide who Broidy had hired as a consultant. Broidy did not mention that he was in the process of receiving millions of dollars from a shady Malaysian businessman who had sought his help convincing the US government to extradite Guo.
These details were included in an extraordinary August 17 court filing alleging that a cadre of Republican power brokers and fundraisers tried to persuade the Trump administration to hand over Guo to China. In the filing, federal prosecutors say that Broidy broke a law requiring people acting in the United States as agents for foreign principals to register with the Justice Department.
Ryan McCarthy and Jack Gillum report Hundreds of Thousands of Nursing Home Residents May Not Be Able to Vote in November Because of the Pandemic:
more >>This year, what stumped [Walter] Hutchins, despite all his resourcefulness, was how he was going to exercise his basic constitutional right to vote during a pandemic. The Davis Community nursing home in Wilmington, North Carolina, where Hutchins has lived for two years, has barred visitors since March. Margaret, still in the retirement community nearby, can’t help him, nor can their four kids and eight grandchildren.
Neither can the nursing home staff. A 2013 state law prohibits staff at hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and rest homes from helping residents with their ballots. Some North Carolina counties, including New Hanover, where Wilmington is located, send teams into nursing homes to assist voters or bring them to polling places, but the threat of the coronavirus has limited that service as well.
Republicans, Trump
Republican Voters Against Trump: Elizabeth Neumann, former Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention in Trump’s DHS
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Elizabeth Neumann – the former Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention in Trump’s DHS – says that the U.S. is “less safe today” because of Trump’s actions.
Are you a Republican, ex-Republican, or Trump-voter who won’t support the president this November? Share your story here: https://rvat.org/tell-your-story
To get involved in the project, go to https://rvat.org/get-involved
To help support their mission, go to https://rvat.org/donate
Kenosha, Never Trump, Police, Protests, Race, Trump, Trumpism, Unfit
The Advantage for His Opponents in Trump’s Visit to Kenosha
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Despite the requests of Wisconsin’s governor and Kenosha’s mayor, Trump is set on visiting Kenosha tomorrow.
There’s no power to stop him from attending, however recklessly disruptive the visit may prove to be.
There is, however, an advantage for Trump’s opponents in his visiting Kenosha on September 1st. With two months to go until November 3rd, Trump’s visit will reveal how his operatives will try to capitalize on that community’s suffering to his advantage: what he will say, how he will say it, to whom he will speak personally, and how he will use photographs and videos of his visit.
It is generally better to know than not to know, and to know sooner than later. Trump’s visit be of observational value, with time to analyze how he (and, truly, his political & media operatives) will try to use tragedy for selfish ends.
Trump is an impulsive, emotional man, without personal discipline. He brays at every perceived slight, and blurts his malevolent plans. Others will learn much by observing Trump at his probable worst, so much the better to respond in a deliberate, effective way.
Music
Monday Music: Dandy Livingstone, Rudy, A Message to You
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 8.31.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:29 PM, for 13h 09m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1897, Thomas Edison patents the Kinetoscope.
Recommended for reading in full —
Tory Newmyer writes
Unemployment officially stands at 10.2 percent, down significantly from its April peak but still at a level not seen since the Great Recession. And economists now worry a defining feature of the catastrophe a decade ago — long-term joblessness — is rearing its head again.
Layoffs that workers believed to be temporary back in March are turning permanent. “About 33 percent of the employees put on furlough in March were laid off for good by July, according to Gusto, a payroll and benefits firm whose clients include small businesses in all 50 states and D.C.,” Andrew Van Dam reports this morning. “Only 37 percent have been called back to their previous employer.”
The ranks of those permanently out of their previous job is expected to reach between 6.2 million and 8.7 million by the end of the year, Van Dam reports, citing a new analysis from a pair of economists, Harvard University’s Gabriel Chodorow-Reich and the Fed’s John Coglianese.
Ed Pilkington and Joanna Walters report Portland clashes: Trump accused of encouraging violence after shooting:
Portland mayor Ted Wheeler on Sunday slammed Donald Trump, accusing the president of encouraging the kind of violence that erupted in the city overnight when a reported member of a rightwing group was shot dead after a group of Trump supporters confronted Black Lives Matter protesters.
“What America needs is for you to be stopped,” Wheeler said of Trump, after the president tore into Wheeler on Twitter in the hours after the death and retweeted video footage of his supporters in trucks firing paintballs and pepper spray at protesters downtown.
His sentiments were echoed in a statement by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in which he unequivocally condemned violence on all sides, while accusing Trump of “recklessly encouraging” it.
“He may believe tweeting about law and order makes him strong — but his failure to call on his supporters to stop seeking conflict shows just how weak he is,” Biden’s statement on Sunday said.
Margaret Sullivan writes Fact-checking Trump’s lies is essential. It’s also increasingly fruitless:
Daniel Dale met President Trump’s convention speech with a tirade of truth Thursday night — a tour de force of fact-checking that left CNN anchor Anderson Cooper looking slightly stunned.
The cable network’s resident fact-checker motored through at least 21 falsehoods and misstatements he had found in Trump’s 70-minute speech, breathlessly debunking them at such a pace that when he finished, Cooper paused for a moment and then deadpanned, “Oh, that’s it?”
So, so much was simply wrong. Claims about the border wall, about drug prices, about unemployment, about his response to the pandemic, about rival Joe Biden’s supposed desire to defund the police (which Biden has said he opposes).
Dale is a national treasure, imported last year from the Toronto Star, where he won accolades for bravely tackling the Sisyphean task of fact-checking Trump. My skilled colleagues of The Washington Post Fact Checker team, who recently published a whole book on the president’s lies, have similarly done their best to hold back the tide of Trumpian falsehoods.
.@ddale8 is absolutely incredible. pic.twitter.com/DJv5T7OT8n
— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) August 28, 2020
Why We Still Don’t Have Smart Contact Lenses:
Adventure, Film, Sports
Sunday Film: Aloha Nalu
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
ALOHA NALU from O’Neill on Vimeo.
In this film, Steven Briand worked with Team O’Neill surfer and professional athlete Malia Manuel to capture a unique perspective on a single day’s surf session in Western Australia. Utilising drones for the majority of the videography, Steven plays with perspective, taking the viewer into, above, and beyond the waves.