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City, Daily Bread, Education, University, UW System

Daily Bread for 5.23.22: UW-Whitewater’s Chancellor Search Brings Opportunity

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 62. Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:19 PM for 14h 55m 28s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 40.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1854,  the first railroad reaches Madison:

On this date the Milwaukee and Mississippi railroad reached Madison, connecting the city with Milwaukee. When the cars pulled into the depot, thousands of people gathered to witness the ceremonial arrival of the first train, and an enormous picnic was held on the Capitol grounds for all the passengers who’d made the seven-hour trip from Milwaukee to inaugurate the line.

Rich Kremer reports UW-Whitewater chancellor search to begin amid increased political scrutiny of higher education. Of course, there are challenges, but a search is an opportunity for UW-Whitewater and this community. Kramer begins with where the university now stands:

A search will soon begin for a new chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater who can provide “stable leadership” at the campus, which has had four chancellors since 2018.

The announcement comes just days after Republican state lawmakers and candidates attacked the most recent UW chancellor pick.

A UW System press release May 18 announced the creation of a 12-member search and screen committee that will gather potential candidates to find a long-term chancellor to lead the UW-Whitewater campus. The committee, named by UW Board of Regents President Edmund Manydeeds, includes regents, students and campus instructors.

“This is a critically important search,” Manydeeds said. “The students, faculty and staff of UW-Whitewater have been resilient and dedicated, and they deserve stable leadership.”

The search committee announcement comes more than a month after former UW-Whitewater Interim Chancellor Jim Henderson abruptly resigned, citing a lack of support from UW System administration amid plans to survey students at every state university about whether they feel campuses support freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

Kremer spoke with UW-Whitewater professor and faculty senate president Tracy Hawkins for the story, and Hawkins’s remarks are sound — there’s a good position at a good school waiting to be filled:

But despite the turnover in UW-Whitewater’s chancellor’s office and the GOP criticism of the latest UW chancellor pick, Tracy Hawkins, a UW-Whitewater professor and faculty senate chair, said she and others on campus are optimistic about the upcoming search.

“I hope that the candidates who are interested in this position do their research so that they know what they’re coming into,” Hawkins said. “But I think that the situation here is really ripe for a great leader who can really advocate for the students of UW-Whitewater and the citizens of Wisconsin in general as deserving of access to high quality education that includes a variety of viewpoints.”

I’ve been a critic of UW-Whitewater and UW System’s leadership, yet I am optimistic about what can be accomplished if the search committee looks carefully and informs candidates fully.

It’s a mistake to think that a leadership search is necessarily a dismal prospect for Whitewater. There are good educators to be found from across this county who would be happy to work in this small, beautiful city.

Whitewater should accept no less.

The Sun seen by the Solar Orbiter at closest approach:

From within the orbit of planet Mercury, the Solar Orbiter returned imagery during its first close encounter (perihelion) with the Sun. In close-up, the south pole of the Sun.

Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI team
The Sun observed by the Solar Orbiter at perihelion

Daily Bread, Science/Nature

Daily Bread for 5.22.22: Inside the Hidden Collections of the Smithsonian

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 60. Sunrise is 5:24 AM and sunset 8:18 PM for 14h 53m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 53% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1968,  Milwaukee’s NBA franchise suggests the name “Milwaukee Bucks” “after 14,000 fans participated in a team-naming contest. 45 people suggested the name, one of whom, R.D. Trebilcox, won a car for his efforts.”

Inside the Hidden Collections of the Smithsonian:

The Smithsonian Natural History Museum houses 147 million specimens — everything from pickled animals to priceless gems to dinosaur bones. But less than 1% of it’s on display. The rest is hidden behind the scenes in what’s called collections. But they’re not just sitting in storage rooms collecting dust. The specimens are actively used for scientific research with real-world benefits, from preventing bird strikes to documenting invasive species. We went inside the collections to see how they acquire, maintain, and protect our Earth’s treasures.

Italy’s Mount Etna spurts lava into night sky:

Europe’s tallest active volcano, Mount Etna, put on a stunning display with lava and smoke spewing meters up into the sunset sky and lava flowing down the mountain during the night, heading for the ‘Lion Valley.’

Big Lie, Daily Bread, Gableman, Law, Public Records, Speaker Vos, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 5.21.22: “I Don’t Have Control Over Mr. Gableman”

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with afternoon showers and a high of 60. Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:17 PM for 14h 51m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 64.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1673,  Marquette and Joliet Reach the Menominee:

On or about May 21, 1673, Fr. Jacques Marquette, fur-trader Louis Joliet, and five French voyageurs pulled into a Menominee community near modern Marinette, Mich.

Marquette wrote that when the Menominee learned that he and Joliet intended to try to descend the Mississippi River all the way to the sea

“They were greatly surprised to hear it, and did their best to dissuade me. They represented to me that I should meet nations who never show mercy to strangers, but break their heads without any cause; and that war was kindled between various peoples who dwelt upon our route, which exposed us to the further manifest danger of being killed by the bands of warriors who are ever in the field. They also said that the great river was very dangerous, when one does not know the difficult places; that it was full of horrible monsters, which devoured men and canoes together; that there was even a demon, who was heard from a great distance, who barred the way, and swallowed up all who ventured to approach him; finally that the heat was so excessive in those countries that it would inevitably cause our death.”

The Menominee weren’t the only ones who thought that there were giant beasts on this continent. Jefferson thought that there might have been, even in his day, large mammals roaming North America (‘Some makers of saltpetre, in digging up the floor of one of those caves beyond the blue ridge, with which you know the limestone country abounds, found some of the bones of an animal of the family of the lion, tyger, panther &c. but as preeminent over the lion in size as the Mammoth [mastodon] is over the elephant’).

By Kurzon – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24190485
Via YouTube

Shawn Johnson reports Judge threatens to fine Vos in open records case involving Gableman election investigation:

A Dane County judge warned a lawyer for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos that she would start fining the speaker for contempt of court if he didn’t get answers from the head of a Republican election investigation.

….

“I still don’t have anything from Mr. Gableman as to what the heck he did,” Bailey-Rihn said during a hearing Thursday. “And no one has given me any evidence that, yes, we have complied with the open records request.”

Earlier this month, Bailey-Rihn ordered Vos to tell Gableman not to destroy records after a lawyer for Gableman revealed that he was deleting records he deemed irrelevant to the investigation. She was the second judge to issue such an order in an open records case involving Gableman’s investigation.

On Thursday, Bailey-Rihn expressed frustration that she still did not have a signed affidavit from Gableman pledging that he had complied with the open records request.

“It’s not like this is Batman that you have to send out the bat signal to get somebody to respond. This is a contractor that is in Waukesha (County),” Bailey-Rihn said. “You don’t need a bat phone for that. I mean, it’s not like you don’t know where the Office of Special Counsel is.”

Vos attorney Ronald Stadler told Bailey-Rihn that he could not enforce the order, playing off of her repeated Batman references.

“It isn’t as simple as Commissioner Gordon turning on the bat light and summoning Batman,” Stadler said. “Somebody has to see it, and somebody has to respond to it. I don’t have control over Mr. Gableman.”

The deeper, inexcusable problem is that Mr. Gableman doesn’t seem to have control over Mr. Gableman, so to speak.

It’s not Batman, it’s batshit crazy.

Finland Brewery Launches NATO Beer with ‘Taste of Security’:

A small brewery in Finland has launched a NATO-themed beer to mark the Nordic country’s bid to join the Western military alliance.

Olaf Brewing’s OTAN lager features a blue label with a cartoon version of a beer-drinking medieval knight in metal armor emblazoned with NATO’s compass symbol.

The beer’s name is a play on the Finnish expression “Otan olutta,” which means “I’ll have a beer,” and the French abbreviation for NATO, which is “OTAN.” The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has two official languages, English and French.

City, Film

Film: Wednesday, May 25th, 1 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Licorice Pizza

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Wednesday, May 25th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of Licorice Pizza @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Comedy, Drama, Romance

Rated R ( Language, Sexual References, Drugs) 2 hour, 13 minutes (2021)

Growing up, running around, and falling in love for the first time in the San Fernando Valley, California, in 1973, this film was nominated for 3 Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay. Stars Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, and Sean Penn.

One can find more information about Licorice Pizza at the Internet Movie Database.

Enjoy.

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, May 24th, 1 PM @ Seniors in the Park, C’mon, C’mon

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Tuesday, May 24th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of C’mon, C’mon @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Drama/Family

Rated R (Language); 1 hour, 49 minutes (2021)

When his sister asks him to look after her precocious nine-year-old son, a radio journalist (Joaquin Phoenix) embarks on a cross-country trip with his nephew to show him life away from the big city. Nominee for 2022 AARP Movies for Grownups Best Intergenerational film.

One can find more information about C’mon, C’mon at the Internet Movie Database.

Enjoy.

Daily Bread, Economy, Employment, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 5.20.22: Employment in Wisconsin

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will see periods of sun contrasted with scattered thundershowers with a high of 72. Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:16 PM for 14h 50m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1873,  Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive a U.S. patent for blue jeans with copper rivets.

Rob Mentzer reports Unemployment in Wisconsin is at a historic low, labor force is growing:

Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is the lowest it has ever been.

New data from the state Department of Workforce Development for April show that for the second month in a row, the state’s unemployment rate was 2.8 percent, a historic low. 

Just over 3 million people are working in Wisconsin, DWD chief economist Dennis Winters said in a briefing Thursday, and the labor force expanded by 2,700 last month. That’s significant as employers in many sectors struggle to hire. Like the unemployment rate, the state’s labor force participation rate was unchanged from March. At 66.5 percent, Wisconsin’s share of people working exceeds the national labor force participation rate by 4.3 percentage points.

Economists measure unemployment based on how many people are actively seeking work, which means those who have retired or aren’t looking for work for other reasons are not counted as unemployed.

The state has about 98 percent as many jobs as it did before the pandemic plunged it into recession in early 2020, and even hard-hit sectors including hospitality are at 95 percent or more of their pre-COVID-19 employment levels. But only construction has added jobs since 2020, Winters said.

“We know the housing market is booming, especially multi-family housing,” Winters said. “All the construction folks we talk to, they’re just crying for workers.”

Multi-family residential construction is significantly outpacing building of single-family homes or heavy construction such as road-building, Winters said.

Two obvious points: (1) not all parts of the state are in the same economic condition and (2) areas of low unemployment cannot adopt a ‘growth strategy’ without additional workers, automation, or dramatic (and improbable) gains in short-term productivity.

PEARL iZUMi Legends of Cycling Presents Sir Willie the Wiener:

We follow the very good boy Sir Willie the Wiener during the final build up to his latest Fastest Known Dog (FKD) Strava segment attempt. See his cutting edge approach to training, recovery, and equipment, plus the unique relationship he’s built with his training partner, former Pro Tour racer and 2022 Belgian Waffle Ride Champ, Alexey Vermeulen.

Big Lie, Daily Bread, Politics, WISGOP

Daily Bread for 5.19.22: WISGOP Is All Big Lie, All the Time

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 82.  Sunrise is 5:27 AM and sunset 8:15 PM for 14h 48m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1780, New England’s Dark Day, an unusual darkening of the day sky, was observed over the New England states and parts of Canada:

In Connecticut, a member of the Governor’s council (renamed the Connecticut State Senate in 1818), Abraham Davenport, became most famous for his response to his colleagues’ fears that it was the Day of Judgment:

“I am against adjournment. The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought.“

A political party that believes it has a destiny to rule (whether by divine mandate or a supposed secular entitlement like race, ethnicity, etc.) will not accept electoral defeat within a liberal democratic order. All losses, therefore, must be illegitimate, the result of some nefarious scheme that enemies of the party must have imposed. In this outlook, victory confirms integrity but defeat confirms only perfidy.

And so, and so, a question… Republicans head into their state party convention still consumed with the 2020 election. Will that play in November? is easy to answer:

MADISON – It’s been a year since Republican legislative leaders in Wisconsin took a step they thought would put to rest former President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in this battleground state and allow the party to move on from 2020. 

It didn’t work. 

Wisconsin Republicans head into their state party convention this weekend a year after the last gathering where Trump’s pressure pushed Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to name former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to coordinate a probe to be conducted by former police detectives into the 2020 election. At the time, it was set to last just a few

But Gableman’s taxpayer-funded review continues despite not having found evidence of widespread fraud, and a member of Vos’ own caucus launched a campaign for governor falsely arguing the 2020 election could be decertified.

Nothing about the WISGOP’s position on the Big Lie involves how that conspiracy theory will play in November. It doesn’t matter to them; it matters only that they hold to the claim as a core belief of the party. By their reckoning, they must have been cheated — it could not have been otherwise.

Practicality is yesterday’s concern. Adherence is today’s imperative.

Wallaby sisters do a ‘switcheroo’ in Czech zoo:

City, Daily Bread, Local Government

Daily Bread for 5.18.22: Tuesday’s Whitewater Common Council Session

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see occasional thundershowers with a high of 62.  Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset 8:14 PM for 14h 46m 25s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 92.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1756, the Seven Years’ War begins when Great Britain declares war on France.

Whitewater’s Common Council met in a brief session last night. It was not only a short meeting, but also one without controversial agenda items.

There are limits, more evident than ever, to this local municipal government’s ability to shape community life. See from 2021 The Limits of Local Politics: ‘local public (or powerful private) institutions have a limited power of action (with harmful actions likely to be more immediate than helpful ones).’ Whitewater’s challenges outstrip the ability of local government to achieve significant socio-economic uplift for residents.

Old Whitewater much believed in the booster’s motto that if local public money built something, meaningful gains would come. They haven’t.

This meeting shows, yet again, that (as with a lakes restoration plan that was millions short of received bids) received bids for a lift station were millions higher than local government’s estimates. See Video beginning at @ 08:25.

The 5.17.22 session, while brief, was more orderly than most others over the preceding two years. Order in meetings is, however, only a preliminary to effective oversight. The proper goal, if realized, would be an elected body effective in its oversight of city hall.

Sweden and Finland formally apply to join Nato: ‘A historic step’:

Daily Bread, UW Madison, UW System, WISGOP

Daily Bread for 5.17.22: WISGOP Whining About the Next Chancellor of UW-Madison

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 74.  Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:13 PM for 14h 44m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 9 AM and Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1973, the televised Watergate hearings begin in the United States Senate.

Yesterday the UW System Board of Regents unanimously selected Dr. Jennifer Mnookin as the next chancellor for UW-Madison. She’s eminently qualified:

Mnookin has been dean of the UCLA School of Law since 2015 and began work at UCLA as a professor in 2005. She was a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law prior to that, and was a visiting professor at the Harvard University Law School for a year.

She has a doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned her law degree from Yale Law School and got her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College.

Republican leaders were, predictably and on cue, upset:

Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who is running for governor, said she was infuriated by the hire.

“Decisions like this from the Board of Regents make Wisconsin moms and dads consider sending their kids out of state where they can get an honest education,” said Kleefisch, whose daughter attends a private college in Texas. “This ridiculous mindset demonstrates why we need to drain the Madison swamp — to get away from this crazy groupthink.”

Kevin Nicholson, another GOP candidate for governor, called the board’s decision “insane.”

I’ve been a critic of more than one UW System decision, but the rending of garments over Mnookin’s selection is overwrought. For a faction that describes itself as defending common sense, these Republicans are dependably emotional, if not hysterical, about university life.

Kevin Nicholson’s simple (and simple-minded) criticism, that the regents’ decision is ‘insane,’ brings to mind nothing so much as an old 1970s television commercial:

Russia’s Attacks on Ukrainian Hospitals Show a ‘Murderous Pattern’:

On Feb. 24, the first day of the war in Ukraine, a Russian attack on a hospital in the eastern city of Vuhledar killed four people and wounded 10 others. The next day, elsewhere in Ukraine, a cancer center and a children’s hospital were hit.

And the attacks on the nation’s health care infrastructure kept coming, at a rate of at least two a day, by some counts — hospitals, clinics, maternity wards, a nursing home, an addiction treatment facility, a blood bank.

As of May 9, the Ukrainian Healthcare Center, a consultancy in Kyiv, had documented 165 cases of health care facilities damaged in the war, and the World Health Organization has identified some 200 such attacks.

In the video guest essay above, Pavlo Kovtoniuk, a co-founder of the consultancy and a former deputy health minister of Ukraine, explains that the attacks have sown psychological terror and devastated the nation’s health care system.

“It all seems cruel, inhumane and deliberate,” he says.

Whether the attacks against Ukraine’s hospitals and medical personnel amount to war crimes may eventually be a matter for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, as well as other courts and special war crimes tribunals, to decide.

But Mr. Kovtoniuk has already made up his mind.
“The evidence for potential war crimes will take years to gather,” he says. “But I don’t need to wait that long to know that what I’m seeing every day is a murderous pattern.”

Daily Bread, Fox News, Nativism, Sloth, Tucker Carlson

Daily Bread for 5.16.22: Nativism as Intellectual Sloth

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 74.  Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:12 PM for 14h 42m 29s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

wp-svg-icons icon=”checkbox-partial” wrap=”I”] Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1868,  the United States Senate fails to convict President Andrew Johnson by one vote.

Consider Tucker Carlson’s complaint about diversity from 2018:

How, precisely, is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?

Do you get along better with your neighbors, your co-workers if you can’t understand each other or share no common values? Please be honest as you answer this question.

Carlson must think this appealing, but it’s repulsive in the way that sloth is repulsive. His question reveals the indolence of his nativist audience: “if you can’t understand each other” only appertains when they’ve not made an effort to understand newcomers.

America is a dynamic and productive place. If Carlson’s viewers are too shiftless to learn about other cultures, they’re below the standard of intellectual curiosity and effort America should expect of the able-bodied. We are no sleepy backwater; we are the most developed society in human history, engaging in commerce with nations across the globe.

Carlson appeals to his audience’s complacent laziness, but their complacent laziness is a drag on this society.

Tucker Carlson tells them what they want to hear; they and we would be better off if someone spoke bluntly and truthfully to them.

Super Flower Blood Moon turns red in total lunar eclipse time-lapse:

The Super Flower Blood Moon lunar eclipse on May 15-16, 2022 was captured by the Griffith Observatory in California. See the entire eclipse in this time-lapse. The longest total lunar eclipse in 33 years, wows stargazers.

Bad Ideas, Bigotry, Crime, Daily Bread, Nativism, Race

Daily Bread for 5.15.22: Replacement Theory Brings Tragedy (And Not for the First Time)

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 72.  Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:11 PM for 14h 40m 28s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1911, in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, the United States Supreme Court declares Standard Oil to be an unreasonable monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act and orders the company to be broken up.

One reads that The gunman in the Buffalo mass shooting was motivated by racism:

BUFFALO — A teenage gunman espousing a white supremacist ideology known as replacement theory opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday, methodically shooting and killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black, in one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history.

The authorities identified the gunman as 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, a small town in New York’s rural Southern Tier. Mr. Gendron drove more than 200 miles to mount his attack, which he also live streamed, the police said, a chilling video feed that appeared designed to promote his sinister agenda.

Shortly after Mr. Gendron was captured, a manifesto believed to have been posted online by the gunman emerged, riddled with racist, anti-immigrant views that claimed white Americans were at risk of being replaced by people of color. In the video that appeared to have been captured by the camera affixed to his helmet, an anti-Black racial slur can be seen on the barrel of his weapon.

And yet, and yet, after repeated incidents, it’s still hard for some to identify the sources of these screeds.

Where Replacement Theory was once spoken only on the fringes of society, in a lumpen subculture, Tucker Carlson has brought it to a broader audience:

One needn’t look far away to VDARE, Taki’s Mag, or the fetid Daily Stormer for concern about a ‘great replacement.’ It’s much closer now, on every screen that displays Fox News.

The Super Flower Blood Moon lunar eclipse of 2022 occurs tonight. Here’s what to expect:

.