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City, Daily Bread, Special Interests, University, UW System

Daily Bread for 11.30.22: The Diligence Required for the UW-Whitewater Chancellor Search

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 29. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 16m 28s of daytime. The moon is in its first quarter with 50.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1941, the SS-Einsatzgruppen round up 11,000 Jews from the Riga Ghetto and kill them in the Rumbula massacre. 

The UW System has announced the five candidates to be UW-Whitewater’s next chancellor. See UW-Whitewater chancellor finalists named (UW System announcement), Five finalists  announced for UW-Whitewater chancellor position (Fort Atkinson Online), and the explanatorily-titled After years of upheaval, UW-Whitewater announces 5 chancellor finalists (Wisconsin State Journal).

There are two directions from which diligent review of expectations and conditions are required. The first is the obvious perspective of the candidates: they owe it to themselves to understand the environment into which they would be stepping. Interview committees may paint a brighter picture than the real view once one is here for a bit. There’s less bright royal purple in Whitewater than on the UW-Whitewater homepage.

There’s a second direction from which diligence is required. This community, all 14,889 within it, should think about what the campus needs. Among that large number of residents, the number of bankers, landlords, and public relations men is small. UW-Whitewater, if the school is to prosper academically, must be more than a landlord’s income stream. The campus is thousands, the city is thousands, the market between them is thousands, and so the choice must involve and benefit thousands.

A candidate whose greatest ambition is to become chancellor, and will go along and get along with a few to secure that position, is unworthy of the role. 

 World’s largest active volcano erupts in Hawaii:

Accidents, Animals, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.29.22: Deer Crashes in Wisconsin

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with afternoon showers, and a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 17m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 38.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1972, Atari releases Pong, the first commercially successful video game.

 Joe Taschler, Andrew Hahn, and Ricardo Torres report Deer crashes, supply chain in Wisconsin causing drivers to pay more to keep their vehicles (‘Wisconsin drivers keep hitting deer while supply chain issues are causing them to pay more and hang on to their vehicles longer’):

Someone driving in Wisconsin has hit a white-tailed deer on the road each day for the last six years or more, data from the state Department of Transportation show.

In 2021, 16,204 deer collisions occurred on Wisconsin roads, down slightly from 16,547 in 2020. All caused damage to property, and 501 crashes resulted in injuries. Nine deer collisions were fatal.

A crash can cause considerable damage, and experts say more people are choosing to repair their vehicles rather than buy a new car.  

“We just fixed a Toyota 4Runner, it was $38,000, and that was deer,” said James Anderberg, body shop director at Ball Body Shop in Middleton. “I don’t know how fast he was going when he hit it, but it was significant amount of damage.” 

Deer collision numbers for 2022 are released in the spring of the following year, but Anderberg said he feels like his shop has been as busy as it has in most recent years.

 Pong 1972 by Atari:

Boosterism, Daily Bread, Gaslighting, Language, Toxic Positivity

Daily Bread for 11.28.22: Oh, Merriam-Webster, It’s About Time

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be party sunny with a high of 45. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 19m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 27% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater School Board meets in closed session shortly after 6 PM, returning to open session at 7 PM.

On this day in 1967, the first pulsar (PSR B1919+21, in the constellation of Vulpecula) is discovered by astronomers Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish.

One reads that Merriam-Webster has picked ‘gaslighting’ as the 2022 word of the year: 

Merriam-Webster’s top definition for gaslighting is the psychological manipulation of a person, usually over an extended period of time, that “causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

Well, that’s a solid, if tardy, choice. 

What is boosterism if not the accentuation of the positive for supposed economic gain at the expense of a honest description of conditions for all? What is toxic positivity if not the insistence that all is well, always and forever? 

Welcome, lexicographers. Gaslighting’s a fitting catchall for those distortions and others. 

Unicyclist Raises $30,000 for Charity While Cycling from Wisconsin to Arizona:

Animals, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.27.22: Fix and Release

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see morning rain with a high of 41. Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 20m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 18.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1895, at the Swedish–Norwegian Club in Paris, Alfred Nobel signs his last will and testament, setting aside his estate to establish the Nobel Prize after he dies.

Winner of 17 Film Festivals, Fix and Release explores a small turtle trauma centre in Peterborough Ontario Canada as it fights to even the odds for survival that freshwater turtles face in a modern world. This visually beautiful film shows turtles in a way that few have seen before.

 How One Of The Oldest Forms Of Theater Survived 2000 Years: 

Culture, Daily Bread, Populists, Twitter

Daily Bread for 11.26.22: The Weakness Implicit in Musk’s Culture War Question

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 22m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 9.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1838, the Wisconsin legislature assembles in Madison for the first time:

On this date, after moving from the temporary capital in Burlington, Iowa, the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature assembled in Madison for the first time. Two years earlier, when the territorial legislature had met for the first time in Belmont, many cities were mentioned as possibilities for the permanent capital — Cassville, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, Platteville, Mineral Point, Racine, Belmont, Koshkonong, Wisconsinapolis, Peru, and Wisconsin City.

Madison won the vote, and funds were authorized to erect a suitable building in which lawmakers would conduct the people’s business. Progress went so slowly, however, that some lawmakers wanted to relocate the seat of government to Milwaukee, where they also thought they would find better accommodations than in the wilds of Dane Co. When the legislature finally met in Madison in November 1838 there was only an outside shell to the new Capitol. The interior was not completed until 1845, more than six years after it was supposed to be finished.

On November 26, 1838, Governor Henry Dodge delivered his first speech in the new seat of government.

On November 25th, Elon Musk asked (trolled, really) a question about culture wars on his private social media platform. Thomas Jefferson provides an excellent reply:

There’s much talk about Musk as a libertarian, or techno-libertarian (whatever that’s supposed to be, as all advocates of free markets embrace technological innovation). If he were libertarian, then he wouldn’t be so exercised over cultural differences and debates present in every age. It’s often the populists, whether of left or right, who worry over these debates. Musk is a billionaire who frets over cultural issues as though he were an ordinary, agitated conservative populist. 

How soon until he walks into a school board meeting and starts whining about an imaginary CRT curriculum or a Marxist/Socialist/Globalist cabal? 

Concern over culture wars quickly devolves into a desire to limit speech, inquiry, and debate in a free society. This desire to limit is part weakness and  part arrogance, the two varying in proportion case by case. 

A private platform can set its own standards. Society should not be so constrained and cramped. 

See also The Populists Circle Disney (Yes, Disney).

 Explore the Orion Nebula via multiple space-based observatories:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.25.22: Wisconsin’s Grassroots Sponsorships Aid Ukrainian Refugees

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 50. Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 24m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 3.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, the last British troops leave New York City three months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

John Davis reports Grassroots sponsorships bringing Ukrainian war refugees to Wisconsin (‘Refugees are making their way to the state though private sponsorships and small organizations’):

Tatyana Lukash said her life was turned upside down in February when Russia invaded Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine and home to Lukash, her husband and teenage son.

“We had a decent life. We had everything we needed. We are alive and God brings us here (to Wisconsin). We will try,” she said.

Lukash and her 15-year-old son went to Poland in March, and she spent months looking for a more stable living situation.

Her 45-year-old husband, a now unemployed welder, had to stay behind in Ukraine because he’s still eligible to be drafted into the Ukrainian military.

Lukash connected on Facebook with Gary Coryell and his wife, who live on a hobby farm in northern La Crosse County.

The Lukashes are the second Ukrainian family Coryell has sponsored. A mother and daughter lived with them for about six weeks this summer before moving to Texas for work before Lukash and her son moved in with them in mid-October.

“Bringing these people into our home has given me a passion and a purpose that I haven’t felt in many years,” Coryell said. “These people are in harms way, especially the mothers and the children. Open your homes and your hearts, and you won’t regret it.”

Coryell has been using the federal government’s United for Ukraine program that was established in late April as a way for Ukrainian refugees to live in the United States under a sponsor.

Sponsors help refugees fill out paperwork proving they have some form of financial support. The federal government then does a background check on the refugees.

An eternal reminder: productive free markets involve private voluntary transactions of capital, labor, and goods. Restrictions on the free movement of workers are presumptively wrong, economically and morally. (Indeed, the economic benefit of greater prosperity through the free movement of labor is itself a moral argument.) 

Wisconsinites’ humanity ameliorates Russian depravity. These displaced Ukrainians are productive people, who are likely to be soon on their feet; Wisconsin is a state with chronic labor shortages.

They’ve come our way after unlawful violence against their entire nation. We cannot give them what they once had. We’ve no such power of restoration. Wisconsinites can, however, through collective efforts offer them a place among us, for so long as they should like.

They, and we, will be better for it. 

‘The result is tragic’: Russian missiles hit civilian infrastructure, killing at least six:

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, November 29th, 1:00 PM @ Seniors in the Park, The Daytrippers

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Tuesday, November 29th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of The Daytrippers @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Comedy/Drama. Rated R (sex, language); 1 hour, 27 minutes (1996).

On the day after Thanksgiving, a wife discovers a hidden love letter written to her husband by an unknown paramour, setting off the entire family’s madcap day drive, from Long Island to New York City, in search of the letter’s writer. Starring Stanley Tucci, Liev Schreiber, Marcia Gay Harden, and Anne Meara.

One can find more information about The Daytrippers at the Internet Movie Database.

Birds, Daily Bread, Nature, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 11.24.22: Happy Thanksgiving 2022

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Good morning.

Thanksgiving Day in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 50. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 4:24 PM for 9h 25m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1863, near Chattanooga, Tennessee, Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant capture Lookout Mountain and begin to break the Confederate siege of the city.

 Sarah Lear reports Triumph of the turkeys (‘Wild birds flourish in Wisconsin cities and suburbs. After nearly being wiped out of Wisconsin, wild turkeys have repopulated their former habitats’):

More than a century after Wisconsin’s wild turkey population was nearly gobbled up, the birds are flourishing. Now, many are even flocking to urban and suburban areas.

“For the most part, they have been restored to all of their former range, and then some,” said John Kanter, a senior wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Federation.

Wild turkeys were nearly gobbled out of Wisconsin

Wild turkeys, once abundant in the region, had been wiped out of Wisconsin by late 1800s thanks to a combination of unregulated hunting and the decimation of their former habitats by the timber industry.

For much of the 20th century, attempts to restore the birds to their former habitats were unsuccessful, in part because officials were trying to send birds raised in captivity out into the wild.

“They were trying to pen-raise them with domestic turkeys, and then release them, and they were finding out that they just behaved like pen-raised birds and didn’t survive,” Kanter said.

In the 1970s, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources negotiated a deal with Missouri’s Department of Conservation to exchange ruffled grouse from Wisconsin for wild Eastern Turkeys from Missouri. After the wild turkeys took hold in Wisconsin, the DNR began trapping some of the birds and relocating them to other areas of the state where the conditions were right for them to thrive, said David Drake, a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at UW-Madison.

“We’ve restored a lot of forest lands across the state,” Drake said. “So the Wisconsin Department Natural Resources took turkeys from parts of the state where they were relatively abundant and moved them into parts of the state where they were not quite as abundant.”

Indiana Pacers’ ‘Puppy Race’ Hilariously Fails:

Art, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.23.22: Immersive Van Gogh

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 52. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 27m 37s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1644, John Milton publishes Areopagitica (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/608/pg608-images.html), a pamphlet decrying censorship.

An exhibit taking place in the Madison area displays the work of Vincent Van Gogh, an artist of the nineteenth century, in a twenty-first century medium. Immersive Van Gogh, having been exhibited in many other cities, now arrives in Middleton from 11.24 to 1.8.  Gayle World reports ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ exhibit to make a splash in Madison area: 

After making the rounds of 20 North American cities over the past two years, the “immersive” experience — with huge video projections animating the works of the 19th-century Dutch painter of “Sunflowers” and “Starry Night” fame — is set to open Thanksgiving Day in a built-out space in the Greenway Station shopping center.

….

“Immersive Van Gogh” was designed and conceived by the European video artist Massimiliano Siccardi, with a soundtrack by Luca Longobardi. Up to 200 visitors can be in the single gallery space that will be used for “Immersive Van Gogh Madison.” Related installations by Broadway’s “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen” designer David Korins also will be at the venue, along with additional scenic elements by scenic designer Randy Wong-Westbrooke.

With clouds blowing and sunflowers flexing in vast video projections on a 35-minute loop, visitors can sit or stand through the sensory-filled experience, though Ross said he prefers to be on his feet so he can easily “spin around” to take in the moving images.

This looks to be a captivating and memorable experience, especially suitable over the extended holiday between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. 

See also https://www.vangoghmadison.com for information and tickets. 

European Parliament votes to declare Russia a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’:

Budget, Daily Bread, Government Spending

Daily Bread for 11.22.22: Wisconsin’s $6,600,000,000 (and Counting) Opportunity

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 45. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 29m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 4:30 PM. 

On this day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy is assassinated and Texas Governor John Connally is seriously wounded by Lee Harvey Oswald, who also kills Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit after fleeing the scene. U.S Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as the 36th President of the United States afterwards.

Corrinne Hess reports Wisconsin now projects the state’s record-high budget surplus to hit $6.6 billion:

MADISON – Wisconsin has a record-high budget surplus projected to hit $6.6 billion for 2022-23, according to a report released Monday by the state Department of Administration.

Over the next several months, Governor Tony Evers and the Republican-run state legislature will have to figure out how to spend the money.

….

The $6.6 billion surplus does not include the roughly $1.734 billion currently in the state’s budget stabilization, or “rainy day,” fund. State general fund balances for 2023-24 are estimated to be $8.4 billion and growing to $9.7 billion at the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year.

….

While politicians weigh how to spend the money, outside interest groups also have ideas. The Wisconsin Association of School Boards said, “There should be plenty of money available in state coffers to both increase public school funding and cut state taxes, which could satisfy both Governor Evers’ goals and the goals of some legislative leaders, particularly leaders in the state Senate.”

The Institute for Reforming Government, which introduced a plan to eliminate Wisconsin’s personal income tax last year, is again calling for a similar measure.

Two obvious questions: how will officials allocate the surplus (not including the rainy day fund), and will those allocations lead to structural (rather than one-time) budgetary changes? Rather than simply allocate some of all of this money for a single biennium, Wisconsin can us this opportunity (where there there is more to meet needs) to make lasting changes to how taxes are imposed or schools are funded. Multiple changes may not be possible, but a single structural change would be within reach. 

Merely allocating the money is only half the work.

NASA’s Artemis 1 spacecraft sees Earth from 229,000 miles away:

City, Courts, Daily Bread, Elections, Politics, School District

Daily Bread for 11.21.22: Wisconsin’s Next ‘Non-Partisan’ Partisan Battle

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 40. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 4:26 PM for 9h 31m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 7.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1877, Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.

A traditional view holds that Wisconsin court races should be non-partisan. That traditional view hasn’t be an accurate assessment for decades. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has for years been a subject of partisan conflict internally and externally. That’s not about to change: there is an election this spring for the seat currently held by retiring Justice Patience Roggensack. Henry Redman reports ‘Electoral ground zero’: majority at stake in Wisconsin Supreme Court race: 

Just weeks after the 2022 midterm elections, Wisconsin is already moving on to this spring’s state supreme court race in which the ideological tilt of the court is up for grabs. 

Justice Patience Roggensack is retiring at the end of her term, leaving an open seat on the body that conservatives currently control with a 4-3 majority. The current makeup of the court, with conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn serving as a crucial swing vote, has led to more 4-3 decisions than any supreme court term in 70 years. 

The conservative majority on the court has upheld a law that effectively ended collective bargaining power for public workers, approved Republican-drawn legislative maps that tilt the state Legislature heavily toward the Republican party and overturned Gov. Tony Evers’ COVID-19 stay-at-home order. The court has also allowed the previous administration’s appointees to remain in their seats well past the expiration of their terms, allowing the Legislature to effectively block Evers’ appointments, and disallowed a number of methods meant to make voting more accessible. 

The issues at stake in the April 4 election include abortion rights, democracy and public safety

It’s an understatement to say that the election for the court will focus more on politics than jurisprudence. 

There are also local political implications for places like Whitewater. If the election generates significant interest in Whitewater proper, elections in the city and school district will have a different electorate from a local election without an intense, top-of-the-ballot statewide race.  

 A DIY tiny home you can build in weeks: