Business, Daily Bread, Tariffs
Daily Bread for 6.8.25: Tariffs Threaten Industry They’re Meant to Save
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with scattered afternoon showers and a high of 73. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset is 8:31, for 15 hours, 15 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1959, USS Barbero and the United States Postal Service attempt the delivery of mail via Missile Mail:
Upon witnessing the missile’s landing, [Postmaster General] Summerfield stated, “This peacetime employment of a guided missile for the important and practical purpose of carrying mail, is the first known official use of missiles by any Post Office Department of any nation.” Summerfield proclaimed the event to be “of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world,” and predicted that “before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.”
Tariffs threaten an industry they’re meant to save:
“For a president who is intent on building U.S. manufacturing, the tariff strategy he’s laid out is remarkably short-sighted,” said Gordon Hanson, a Harvard Kennedy School professor whose groundbreaking 2016 research work, “The China Shock,” was among the first to sound the alarm about the threat to American industry. “It fails to recognize what modern supply chains look like.”
“Even if you’re intent on reshoring parts of manufacturing, you can’t do it all,” he said. “Steel and aluminum are part of that.”
If Trump’s tariffs fail to result in a manufacturing renaissance — a central focus of his presidential campaign — it could weaken the prospects of a GOP coalition that’s increasingly reliant on working-class voters who supported his protectionist trade policies. But as unanticipated tariffs continue to drive up input costs for companies that need steel and aluminum for production, the warning signs emanating from manufacturers are getting louder.
An index published this week by the Institute for Supply Management, which tracks manufacturing, slipped for the third straight month in May as companies made plans to scale back production. A quarterly survey conducted by the National Association of Manufacturers reported the steepest drop in optimism since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, with trade uncertainty and raw material costs cited as top concerns. Federal Reserve data this month reported weaker manufacturing output.
See Sam Sutton, Trump wants a manufacturing boom. The industry is buckling, Politico, June 6, 2025.
US Veterans Mark 81 Years Since D-Day:
Books, Daily Bread, Faraway Places
Daily Bread for 6.7.25: This Place Holds the Biggest Book on Earth
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 74. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset is 8:31, for 15 hours, 14 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1965, the Supreme Court hands down its decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, prohibiting the states from criminalizing the use of contraceptives by married couples.
This place holds the biggest book on Earth:
Daily Bread, Economy, Employment
Daily Bread for 6.6.25: National Hiring Reported for May, Unemployment at 4.2%
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 76. Sunrise is 5:17 and sunset is 8:30, for 15 hours, 14 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 80.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1944, Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy, commences with the execution of Operation Neptune — commonly referred to as D-Day — the largest seaborne invasion in history. Nearly 160,000 Allied troops cross the English Channel with about 5,000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers participating. By the end of the day, the Allies have landed on five invasion beaches and are pushing inland.
The latest employment figures:
Hiring decreased just slightly in May even as consumers and companies braced against tariffs and a potentially slowing economy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
Nonfarm payrolls rose 139,000 for the month, above the muted Dow Jones estimate for 125,000 and the downwardly revised 147,000 that the U.S. economy added in April.
The unemployment rate held steady at 4.2%.
See Jeff Cox, U.S. payrolls increased 139,000 in May, more than expected; unemployment at 4.2%, CNBC, June 6, 2025.
This tiny device spins blood clots away:
Cats
Friday Catblogging: Cheetah Cubs at the St. Louis Zoo
by JOHN ADAMS •
City, Film
Film: Tuesday, June 10th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Green and Gold
by JOHN ADAMS •
Tuesday, June 10th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Green and Gold @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Drama/Family
Rated PG; 1 hour, 45 minutes (2025).
Foreclosure looms over a Wisconsin dairy farmer (Craig T. Nelson) with mounting debt and loss of the land his family has cultivated for four generations. With time running out, he places a daring Super Bowl bet on his beloved Green Bay Packers in a Hail Mary attempt to save the farm. Filmed in Door County, and at Lambeau Field. Also features Wayne Larrivee (radio voice of the Green Bay Packers) and LeRoy Butler.
One can find more information about Green and Gold at the Internet Movie Database.
Budget, Daily Bread, State Government, Wisconsin, WisDems, WISGOP
Daily Bread for 6.5.25: Seeing Once Again That Wisconsin’s Not a Bipartisan Environment
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny in the morning and cloudy in the afternoon, with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:17 and sunset is 8:30, for 15 hours, 13 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Arts Commission meets at 5 PM.
On this day in 1947, in a speech at Harvard University, the United States Secretary of State George Marshall calls for economic aid to war-torn Europe.
One reads that state budget talks have been called off as Gov. Tony Evers, Republican lawmakers hit impasse (‘The impasse means Republicans who run the Legislature will write the next budget themselves’):
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Republicans who run the Wisconsin Legislature say they’re done negotiating over the state budget, leaving GOP lawmakers to write the document themselves.
While the impasse is hardly shocking in a state that’s lived under divided government since 2019, it followed what Evers’ office said was months of negotiations. Top Republican leaders, who have often criticized Evers for not engaging with the Legislature, all described the talks as “good faith.”
At issue were some of the big picture decisions in Wisconsin’s budget debate, namely how to use a projected $4.3 billion surplus to enact some combination of tax cuts and spending increases.
See Shawn Johnson, State budget talks called off as Gov. Tony Evers, Republican lawmakers hit impasse, Wisconsin Public Radio, June 4, 2025.
These months of negotiations were likely headed to one result: to reveal yet again that there is no meaningful bipartisanship in Wisconsin. See also The WisDems’ Bipartisan Delusion and That ‘Bipartisanship’ Didn’t Last Long — Because It Was Never There.
Aerial video captures severe storm above Austin:
Daily Bread, Health, Libertarians, Vaccines, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 6.4.25: For Wisconsin, Vaccinations Are Down
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see morning showers, with partly sunny skies later in the day, and a high of 71. Sunrise is 5:17 and sunset is 8:29, for 15 hours, 12 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1876, an express train called the Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco via the first transcontinental railroad only 83 hours and 39 minutes after leaving New York City.
One reads, with disappointment, how Wisconsin, once a leader in childhood vaccinations, [is] now a leader in vaccine skepticism:
The percentage of Wisconsin schoolchildren not receiving state-mandated vaccinations because of their parents’ personal beliefs is four times higher than it was a generation ago.
That rise in personal conviction waivers has driven a decrease in all immunizations among Wisconsin children ahead of new measles outbreaks hitting the U.S. that are linked to three deaths.
Wisconsin’s measles vaccination rate among kindergartners was the third-lowest in the nation in the 2023-24 school year, behind Idaho and Alaska. (Montana didn’t report data.)
….
Wisconsin had been a national leader in childhood immunizations.
But increasingly, Wisconsin parents are opting out:
- For all childhood immunizations, vaccination rates statewide were lower in almost every quarter from 2020 through 2024, in comparison with the average rate in the three years before COVID-19.
- Wisconsin was one of the states with the largest drops in the measles vaccination rate for kindergartners between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, and no county had an MMR vaccination rate above 85%, The Economist reported.
- By a different measure, the measles vaccination rate for 2-year-olds in 2024 was as low as 44% in Vernon County and under 70% in 14 other counties.
See Tom Kertscher, Wisconsin, once a leader in childhood vaccinations, now a leader in vaccine skepticism, Wisconsin Watch, June 2, 2025.
There is a strong libertarian case for mandatory vaccinations. It’s a case that I support. See Jason Brennan, A Libertarian Case for Mandatory Vaccination, 44 J. Med. Ethics 37 (2018), https://www.jstor.org/stable/26879650. (Brennan argues that “people who refuse vaccinations violate the ‘clean hands principle’, a (in this case, enforceable) moral principle that prohibits people from participating in the collective imposition of unjust harm or risk of harm. In a libertarian framework, individuals may be forced to accept certain vaccines not because they have an enforceable duty to serve the common, and not because cost–benefit analysis recommends it, but because anti-vaxxers are wrongfully imposing undue harm upon others.”)
See also For Your Consideration, Dr. Jonas Salk for a model of demeanor and an example of an American life well lived.
What’s Up: June 2025 Skywatching Tips from NASA:
City, Daily Bread, Local Government, Open Government, School District
Daily Bread for 6.2.25: Yesteryear’s Familiar Tune
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:18 and sunset is 8:27, for 15 hours, 9 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 44.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1966, Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to soft-land on another world.
Whitewater has been in the midst of a contractual impasse between the Whitewater Unified School District and the City of Whitewater over the district’s objections to a long-standing arrangement for a school resource officer. See from FREE WHITEWATER Discussion of Whitewater’s School Resource Officer Merits a 120-Day Contract Extension, More on a Whitewater School Resource Officer, Update on School Resource Officer Discussions Between the Whitewater School District and the City of Whitewater, Status of a School Resource Officer for Whitewater’s Schools, and City of Whitewater Renews Proposal and Encourages School District to Negotiate.
A longtime resident speaks on the SRO issue at the 5.6.25 meeting of the Whitewater Common Council:
I’m not going to get into the details of the negotiations between the two boards, but help me understand how negotiation by press release is a good idea. When the city manager put out a press release laying things out, made it very public. I don’t know why they left, but I believe that [unclear] was here to deal with this issue. I know WTMJ ran a story on it. We don’t need this. They’ll get to it. They’ll get to it.
I have some questions in your packet [concerning particulars of an SRO proposal from the city]
….
But let the boards work with each other. Let’s not make this an issue of individual personalities. We don’t need any more bad press in the community.
A few remarks:
A request. A lifelong resident, who served on the old Community Development Authority, was president of the old Community Development Authority, served on the Whitewater School Board, and was president of the Whitewater School Board, asks “help me understand“ a matter of public importance.
Easily fulfilled. These are public issues involving child safety, about public officials, at public expense. The particulars of the dispute should be known to residents in the city (pop. approx. 15,000) and the whole district (pop. approx. 22,000). These details are not about mere negotiations, but about fundamental claims that should be, and in a well-ordered community must be, public knowledge.
That’s not an issue of personality, that’s an issue of policymaking.
Bad Press. The best way to avoid bad press is to do good work, and the best way to do good work is to expand the discussion to the whole community.
The particulars of the SRO proposal mentioned on 5.6.25. As it turns out, the resident’s assessment (available in the video above) on the city’s proposed SRO contract (including ill-grasped concerns1 that expenses for an SRO were ‘like double-dipping’ ) was wrong. One meeting later, on 5.20.25, the City of Whitewater answered (refuted, truly) the resident’s concerns in a memo. See City of Whitewater, Public Comment Response from May 6, 2025 Common Council Meeting, May 9, 2025.
Familiarity. Old Whitewater — a state of mind rather than a person — has always felt that a few people in this small American town should decide without informing others of vital public issues.
It’s yesteryear’s familiar tune2, as astonishingly predictable as it is predictably astonishing3.
_____
- These concerns were evidently erroneous when made on 5.6.25. Anyone with a causal knowledge of prior contractual arrangements would have seen as much. Still, a full memo refuting these concerns was helpful to the public. One can admire a good refutation. ↩︎
- Increasingly rare these days, because to call for closed discussions isn’t as common in town as it once was, but then a remnant still has a lack of reflection before speaking. ↩︎
- Hearing this never upsets me (although I am intellectually opposed to it): my reaction is perhaps similar to that of an ornithologist who hears once again the call of a fading species. There were years ago more people of this closed-government view in town, flocking here and there. ↩︎
Italy’s Mount Etna sends huge ash plume into air during eruption:
Music
Monday Music: Depeche Mode, Enjoy the Silence
by JOHN ADAMS •
Birds, Daily Bread, Nature
Daily Bread for 6.1.25: Pileated Woodpecker Snacks on Seeds and Suet
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 72. Sunrise is 5:19 and sunset is 8:27, for 15 hours, 8 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 34.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1495, a monk, John Cor, records the first known batch of Scotch whisky.
A small pterodactyl male pileated woodpecker snacks on seeds and suet:
— Bodega Cats (@bodegacats.bsky.social) May 26, 2025 at 8:01 PM
Daily Bread, Games/Puzzles, Language
Daily Bread for 5.31.25: A Scrabble World Champion’s Tips
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 70. Sunrise is 5:19 and sunset is 8:26, for 15 hours, 7 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 24.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1859, the clock tower at the Houses of Parliament, which houses Big Ben, starts keeping time.
This Scrabble World Champion can help you win:
The Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library:
See also Endangered Archives Programme, British Library.
Conspiracy Theories, Daily Bread, Health, Medicine
Daily Bread for 5.30.25: Another Conspiracy Theory Besets Wisconsin
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 78. Sunrise is 5:20 and sunset is 8:25, for 15 hours, 5 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1899, Pearl Hart, a female outlaw of the Old West, robs a stage coach 30 miles southeast of Globe, Arizona.
There have been legion conspiracy theories besetting some Wisconsinites over the last twenty-five years: 9/11 as an inside job, Obama’s birth certificate, claims the Clintons murdered several people, QAnon, that COVID-19 was a planned pandemic, the lab leak theory about COVID-19, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, that there is in America a ‘deep state,” and that elites are replacing whites with racial minorities. I’ve likely forgotten a few.
Wisconsin now faces another crackpot theory, about the cause of measles, from Wisconsin doctor Pierre Kory:
Last month, Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary and longtime anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attended the funeral for the second unvaccinated child in Texas to have died in the ongoing measles outbreak. While in Texas, he met with the two grieving families — along with two local doctors promoting unproven measles treatments, whom he called “extraordinary healers.”
Following the first death, Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vax organization Kennedy led until recently, pushed its own narrative claiming that the 6-year-old Mennonite girl did not actually die from the measles. In this effort, CHD has relied heavily on Pierre Kory, a Wisconsin doctor who has both amplified that assertion and claimed that the measles virus has been weaponized by unknown conspirators.
Kory is a Kennedy ally who has been widely criticized for spreading Covid misinformation during the pandemic, including pushing the use of ivermectin as a “miracle drug” for treating that virus.
For years, CHD and Kennedy have promoted the debunked claim that the standard measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine given to almost all children in the U.S. is tied to autism. With an upsurge in the pandemic-era, right-wing embrace of the anti-vax movement — and of Kennedy himself — there has been a notable decrease in routine pediatric vaccinations in the U.S.
Now that measles immunization rates have fallen below thresholds to maintain herd immunity in certain parts of the country, outbreaks such as the one in West Texas are expected to become more common. In February, Texas reported the country’s first measles death in a child in the more than two decades since the disease was classified as eradicated in the U.S.
In response to this death, CHD posted a video on March 19 featuring Kory and Ben Edwards, another Texas doctor Kennedy applauded, discussing the girl’s medical records, which her parents released to the organization.
Despite having no training in pediatric medicine and having had his board certifications in internal medicine and critical care revoked last year, Kory claimed the child’s death was due to incorrect antibiotic management of a bacterial pneumonia infection that had “little to do with measles.” Edwards — a family doctor who has been treating measles-stricken children in Texas with medications not indicated for measles and was accused of seeing pediatric patients while actively infected with measles himself — concurred with Kory.
(Emphasis added.)
See Center for Media and Democracy, Wisconsin doctor makes wild measles claims, Wisconsin Examiner, May 30, 2025.
Aerial video captures severe storm above Austin:
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Cats Can Identify Owners from Strangers by Scent
by JOHN ADAMS •
Cats can identify owners from strangers by scent:
The study by Tokyo University of Agriculture found cats spent significantly longer sniffing tubes containing the odours of unknown people compared to tubes containing their owner’s smell.
This suggests cats can discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar humans based on their odour, the researchers say, but that it is unclear whether they can identify specific people.
….
In the study published on Wednesday, researchers presented 30 cats with plastic tubes containing either a swab containing the odour of their owner, a swab containing the odour of a person of the same sex as their owner who they had never met, or a clean swab.
The swabs containing odours had been rubbed under the armpit, behind the ear, and between the toes of the owner or stranger.
Cats spent significantly more time sniffing the odours of unknown people compared to those of their owner or the empty tube, suggesting they can discriminate between the smells of familiar and unfamiliar people, the researchers said.
….
“The odour stimuli used in this study were only those of known and unknown persons,” said one of the study’s authors, Hidehiko Uchiyama.
“Behavioural experiments in which cats are presented with multiple known-person odour stimuli would be needed, and we would need to find specific behavioural patterns in cats that appear only in response to the owner’s odour.”
See Tim Dodd, Cats distinguish owner’s smell from stranger’s, study finds, BBC, May 28, 2025.