Bacteria from healthy cats have been shown to produce antibodies with some impressive skin healing properties… in mice.
A new study on these properties indicates we could one day harness such antibodies to potentially treat infections on humans as well as other animals.
This approach is a type of bacteriotherapy – using ‘good’ bacteria known to provide various health benefits to help protect against ‘bad’ bacteria (or pathogens). It’s a balance that scientists are constantly getting new insights into.
Here, researchers used cat bacteria to protect against the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus pseudintermedius or MRSP pathogen in mice: this bacterium is often found on domesticated animals, and can proliferate out of control when they’re sick or injured.
The results of the study suggest that good bacteria found on cats offer strong protection against MRSP – not just in mice, as was shown in this case, but potentially also in human beings who can pick up the good bacteria as well.
“It may even be possible that living with a healthy cat provides humans with some protection against MRSP,” says medical scientist Richard Gallo, from the University of California San Diego. “So this may be an argument in support of pet ownership.”
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 31. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 5:02 PM for 9h 49m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 28.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
In several states during the 2020 electoral vote certification, Republicans submitted fraudulent slates of electors, purporting falsely that Donald Trump, rather than the actual winner Joe Biden, had carried those states. Wisconsin was one of the states with a set of false GOP electors.
The scheme to use fake elector certifications to throw out Biden’s electors and replace them with phony Trump electors on January 6 was reportedly led by Rudy Giuliani and other Trump campaign officials. Here’s CNN again, from last week:
Trump campaign officials, led by Rudy Giuliani, oversaw efforts in December 2020 to put forward illegitimate electors from seven states that Trump lost, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the scheme.
The sources said members of former President Donald Trump’s campaign team were far more involved than previously known in the plan. . . . Giuliani and his allies coordinated the nuts-and-bolts of the process on a state-by-state level, the sources told CNN. One source said there were multiple planning calls between Trump campaign officials and GOP state operatives, and that Giuliani participated in at least one call. The source also said the Trump campaign lined up supporters to fill elector slots, secured meeting rooms in statehouses for the fake electors to meet on December 14, 2020, and circulated drafts of fake certificates that were ultimately sent to the National Archives.
Trump and some of his top advisers publicly encouraged the “alternate electors” scheme in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico. But behind the scenes, Giuliani and Trump campaign officials actively choreographed the process, the sources said.
If investigators determine that the fake slates were meant to improperly influence the election, those who created them could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.
What role, if any, did Whitewater’s United States Representative Scott Fitzgerald, play in the creation or submission of a fraudulent electoral vote certification?
Wisconsin State Senator Chris Larson talks with Rachel Maddow about a letter found through an open records request that suggests that Rep. Scott Fitzgerald booked a room in the state capitol for fake Trump electors to meet and sign forged paperwork at the same time as Wisconsin’s real electors were formalizing the state’s election results.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 8. Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 5:00 PM for 9h 46m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 39.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Kevin Nicholson, an all but declared GOP candidate for governor, made clear on Saturday he’s planning to run an insurgent campaign after he admonished the leader of the state Republican Party in front of a Manitowoc County crowd and promised to push him out of his job.
In brief video footage of a Manitowoc County Republican Caucus event, Nicholson blasted what he called the “machine” of Wisconsin Republican politics that he claimed was not working to win elections but instead to provide jobs for politicians.
“You represent a broken machine — you’re part of it,” Nicholson told Republican Party of Wisconsin chairman Paul Farrow in front of the caucus meeting crowd. “It has lost 11 out of 12 races. It will lose the next one if you’re allowed to get your way.”
The upcoming WISGOP gubernatorial primary: a candidate who looks like he just walked off the back nine battling a candidate who looks like she spends all day at a makeup counter in competition for the affections of the populist rightwing.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 8. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:59 PM for 9h 44m 39s of daytime. The moon is in its third quarter with 50.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
A lawyer for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos testified Monday he had done little to ensure the contractor overseeing a Republican review of the 2020 election had turned over all documents that were responsive to a series of public records requests from a liberal group.
The testimony from Vos’ staff attorney, Steve Fawcett, caught the attention of Dane County Circuit Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn, who started the day’s proceedings by saying she didn’t understand why Republicans have provided so few records in response to requests from American Oversight.
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The state’s open records law says that public officials are responsible for obtaining documents from their contractors in response to requests from the public.
In her November ruling, Bailey-Rihn determined that Vos was obligated to obtain and turn over emails, calendars, reports and other documents from Gableman’s office from last summer.
Gableman’s initial contract with the Assembly requires him to keep a weekly report of the findings of his review. Gableman publicly released a report in November but has never made available any weekly reports.
Asked if Gableman has been writing weekly reports, Fawcett said, “I have no idea.”
The judge expressed surprise that Fawcett does not know whether Gableman is producing those reports given that the contract names Fawcett as the “point of contact” between Gableman and the Assembly.
Monday in Whitewater will be snowy and cloudy with a high of 21. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:58 PM for 9h 42m 29s of daytime. The moon is waning gibbous with 60.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, Downtown Whitewater’s Board of Directors at 6 PM, and the Whitewater School Board after convening goes into closed session at approximately 6:15 PM and regular open session at 7 PM.
On this day in AD 41, Claudius is proclaimed Roman emperor by the Praetorian Guard after they assassinate the previous emperor, his nephew Caligula.
Among the major questions Rothman will face is one of how the system should be structured to meet the educational needs of future students.
His predecessor, Ray Cross, took the approach of consolidating the system’s 13 two-year campuses with its 13 four-year campuses, a controversial restructure aimed at curbing the financial impact of plummeting enrollment at the two-year community colleges, while hopefully getting more students to graduate.
Cross then created a “blueprint” for what a strong, post-pandemic UW System would require, much to the dismay of faculty and staff across the system. In it, he called for program cuts, investment in online programs, and the changing of university missions to differentiate them better from one another, saying they could no longer be “all things to all people.”
The blueprint was not implemented, and Cross retired. But the conversation around such issues carries on.
Interim System President Tommy Thompson went in a slightly different direction, at one point floating the question of whether — between the UW System and the Wisconsin Technical College System — the state simply had too many campuses. That sparked a debate over the modern roles of each system, and how they may or may not be competing with one another.
Thompson called on lawmakers to launch a commission to look at the structure of higher education in Wisconsin holistically, a request that never came to fruition.
In May 2021, state Sen. Roger Roth, chair of the Senate Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges, added his ideas to the list, calling for the system to further consolidate the campuses into four geographic regions, excluding UW-Madison.
While all this discussion was taking place, enrollment at many UW schools — particularly the two-year campuses — continued to head in the wrong direction. Many buildings are operating with enrollments equivalent to an average elementary school.
According to the system’s final headcounts, released in November, total enrollment at UW-Milwaukee’s Washington County campus dropped 23% in the past school year, to 387 students. UW-Oshkosh’s Fond du Lac campus saw a 29% drop to 281 students. UW-Stevens Point’s Marshfield campus saw a 12% drop to 346 students.
The lowest enrollments in the system were at UW-Platteville’s branch campuses: the Baraboo Sauk County campus enrolls 216 students, down 4% from last school year and the Richland campus has just 75 students, down 31%.
The System itself is beset with enrollment decline, among other problems, not collapse. (Some of the smallest System campuses might face closure, and in fairness it likely feels like collapse to students and faculty in those places.)
And yet, and yet, even stagnation (not merely in enrollment, but more generally in vibrancy) would produce by definition relative decline in a productive society.
That’s no easy situation, as relative decline fortuitously does avoid immediate disaster but at the expense of the urgency that might bring better conditions. Jay Rothman has a hard task before him.
(Whitewater is like this: the city and her major institutions do not face collapse, but instead relative decline. The temptation for policymakers is to try a bit more of the same to turn conditions around. That approach hasn’t and won’t work. Only a turning away from officials’ general direction offers a better future.)
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 14. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:57 PM for 9h 40m 23s of daytime. The moon is waning gibbous with 70.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
How does a community measure economic success? True economic success comes from widespread gains in individual and household incomes. An economy might seem good nationally, but yet at the national or local level those nattional gains mean nothing without widespead uplift to families. That’s why, in a post about The Booming National Economy, I wrote that the
level of disposable personal income is a notable and critical national deficiency in an otherwise strong performance. Whitewater knows this well, as this city has been and remains a low-income community. There is no better measure of a society’s general prosperity than individual and household income.
It’s to the credit of the New York Times editorial board that, rather than simply endorse our present economy to support a president they’ve endorsed, they point out the deficiency of America’s present economic gains:
Measured by the value of the wages that workers take home, which this board regards as the most important metric for assessing the health of the American economy, President Biden’s first year in office was not a very good year.
The dollar figures on workers’ paychecks rose handsomely over the past 12 months. But for most workers, that wasn’t enough to keep pace with the highest inflation in several decades, which eroded the value of each of those dollars.
The purchasing power of the average worker’s weekly pay declined by 2.3 percent from December 2020 to December 2021. Data for the final 20 days of Mr. Biden’s first year, not available yet, is unlikely to improve that picture.
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The White House finds itself in the position of a physician who has administered a successful course of treatment but who has neglected to prepare the patient for the side effects or to give the timeline for a full recovery. A lot of pain was averted, but it’s hard to feel gratitude for things that didn’t happen. The economic outlook is strong, but it’s hard to feel gratitude for things that haven’t happened yet. Right now, the pain of inflation is front and center for most.
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The challenge now is to bring inflation back under control without undermining the economic recovery. The work will mostly be done by the Federal Reserve, not by Mr. Biden or his administration. The role of presidents in shaping the nation’s economic fortunes is generally overstated. But if the government can complete the work it has begun, this administration may yet deserve the victory laps it is taking for successful stewardship of the nation’s economy.
The discomforting truth is that the United States last year faced a choice between a protracted period of economic pain and an economic recovery whose benefits are temporarily attenuated by high inflation. Mr. Biden made the right choice. But it came at a real price — economically, for the nation, and politically, for him.
The Times might have avoided the subject of inflation and household income to please center-left readers. It’s much to the editorial board’s credit that they did not.
Whitewater has a large number of struggling families, but a tiny class of officials who ignore actual conditions for approaches of boosterism (accentuating the positive for development purposes) or positivity (accentuating the positive for its own sake). The city government now has a half-hearted policy of boosterism, and the school district one of fervent positivity.
The simpler way of describing these approaches would be as talking about anything except the meaningful truth.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 24. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:55 PM for 9h 38m 18s of daytime. The moon is waning gibbous with 79.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States delivers its decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, legalizing elective abortion in all fifty states.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A Republican Wisconsin state lawmaker was recorded on video saying that Republicans need to “cheat like the Democrats” to win elections and that he’d like to punch Democratic Gov. Tony Evers over pandemic restrictions.
The video of state Rep. Elijah Behnke was posted online Thursday and circulated over Twitter late that night. The Wisconsin State Journal first reported about it Friday.
In the wide-ranging 25-minute video, which appears to have been taken secretly by visitors in Behnke’s Capitol office, he disparages Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos as a “swamp creature” and supports debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
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Behnke, who owns a cleaning business, also described his anger over Evers’ issuing a stay at home order early in the coronavirus pandemic. Behnke said he was “praying to God” that if he ever saw Evers, “I’m going to punch him, right? So here I am, I haven’t really seen him face-to-face yet, so we’ll see if I do.”
Evers’ spokeswoman, Britt Cudaback, reacted by saying the governor “believes in doing the right thing and leading with kindness, respect, empathy and compassion. It’s a shame those Wisconsin values seem to be lost on Republicans in the Legislature.”
Imagine being this… clever? Honest to goodness…
Additional, EXCLUSIVE video from FREE WHITEWATER of Rep. Elijah Behnke demonstrating the power of magnetism:
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 19. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:54 PM for 9h 36m 16s of daytime. The moon is waning gibbous with 88.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1954, the first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, is launched in Groton, Connecticut by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower.
The state Supreme Court’s conservative majority made clear in a November ruling it wanted all the plans submitted in this case to closely follow the 2011 map, endorsing a “least changes” approach advocated by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.
There’s nothing in state law or the Wisconsin Constitution that spells out precisely how to measure “least changes,” but by one metric, Evers’ plan would be best: It would move the fewest people from one state Assembly district to another.
“No matter how you slice it, the governor’s maps make the least changes,” argued Evers’ attorney Anthony Russomanno, an assistant attorney general with the Wisconsin Department of Justice.
But the attorney for Republican lawmakers focused on other metrics, noting the maps submitted by the Legislature had a lower “population deviation” than the governor’s, meaning the number of constituents from district to district was closer to equal.
“Only the Legislature’s plan can be described to meet that constitutional standard,” said Taylor Meehan, an attorney representing the Legislature.
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[Justice Brian] Hagedorn sided with the rest of the court’s conservatives in its November redistricting ruling, but on Wednesday, he questioned Meehan at length over the Legislature’s focus on population deviation, suggesting it was inconsistent with what the court had asked for.
“I’m having a hard time understanding why we would now use that standard when that isn’t what we told the parties,” Hagedorn said. “If we told the parties we wanted you to submit maps that have perfect equality population … we should have said so. But we didn’t say so. We said something quite, quite different. And I don’t want to be Charlie Brown and Lucy here.”
Other conservative justices sent distinctly different signals than Hagedorn, hinting they might favor the Legislature’s argument.
“We did emphasize the paramount importance of population equality,” said conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley.
No predictions to offer, but worth noting that the court’s embrace of the least-change position has been a 2021 conservative victory that departs from 2011 conservatives’ major-change redistricting.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 11. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:53 PM for 9h 34m 18s of daytime. The moon is waning gibbous with 93.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1265, the first English parliament to include not only Lords but also representatives of the major towns holds its first meeting in the Palace of Westminster, now commonly known as the “Houses of Parliament.”
The University of Wisconsin’s Board of Regents is facing some pushback after the UW System announced Friday that there would be no public interviews of the two finalists named for the role of system president.
Finalists Jay Rothman, CEO and chairman of the Milwaukee-based law firm Foley and Lardner LLC, and Jim Schmidt, chancellor of UW-Eau Claire, participated in a series of interviews Tuesday that included regents, chancellors, faculty and staff governance representatives, and UW System executive staff.
On Friday, before being publicly named, the two candidates also participated in an interview with several news organizations, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
However, as announced by Regent Vice President Karen Walsh, who chairs the search and screen committee, the two would not participate in public interviews, as has finalists have in the past.
On Tuesday, the Wisconsin chapter of the American Association of University Professors issued a statement opposing the decision, suggesting that not having the candidates answer questions in a public forum was a “unforced error.”
“We call on the Board to schedule public sessions with each of the finalists. We have no doubt that the two candidates would be up to the task,” the statement reads. “And if not, that would be important for everyone to learn before the Regents make a hiring decision.”
It’s not merely university professors who should be concerned about this selection process. Those many of us who support open and responsible government at all levels should oppose a public process that cloaks itself in private fashion.
Tuesday, January 25th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of No Time to Die @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Action/Adventure/Thriller
Rated PG-13; 2 hours, 43 minutes (2021)
In his fifth and final outing as 007 (and the 25th film in the series), Daniel Craig plays a retired and world-weary Bond who returns to MI6 only to find: he’s been replaced. Nevertheless, he must persevere to thwart a new supervillain (Rami Malek) armed with dangerous new nanotechnology. Also starring Ralph Fiennes (as M), Ben Whishaw (as Q), and Christoph Walz as Ernst Blofeld.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 15. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:52 PM for 9h 32m 21s of daytime. The moon is waning gibbous with 97.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1983, the Apple Lisa, the first commercial personal computer from Apple Inc. to have a graphical user interface and a computer mouse, is announced.
Last year, the Whitewater Unified School District spent $1,600,000.00 on artificial turf for athletic fields. One might imagine in a city having seen false promises of economic gains from public projects, that the district’s adminstration — it is an educational institution in a city with a university campus, after all — would prepare a thorough projection economic benefits.
How did the district describe the supposed economic benefits of these millions for fields of synthetic grass?
A potential boost, with a concession stand, massive amounts of people, and one local endorsement.
No one needed a PowerPoint slide to describe so nebulously the claimed economic benefits from this project.
The back of an older medium would have sufficed.
In the city and throughout the district, there are thousands of sharp and serious people. A district office with more than one doctorate-holder owed Whitewater a more detailed analysis.
This is, however, the environment the development men have entrenched in Whitewater: where very little passes for good enough.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 36. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:50 PM for 9h 30m 28s of daytime. The moon is waning gibbous with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1977, scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires’ disease.
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In 2020, eleven years after the end of the Great Recession (2007-2009), two of Whitewater’s development men offered public comments on a possible restructuring of the Whitewater Community Development Authority. Their full remarks appear in the video above, with two pertinent excerpts below.
Video beginning @ 1:22:
You know, and so this is the time as we come in, you know, we’re at the last stages of this bull cycle that we’re in, whether it be the economy, the stock market, real estate, don’t know when it’s going to end. And I’m not saying it’s going to end soon, but it will will and they always do and it’s more important than ever right now to be ready to carry that on with economic development.
Video beginning at @ 3:13:
We’ve just had one of the most booming economies that this country’s seen in close to 60 years. And we’re not at the table. We’re not playing. We’re not out there.
Well, yes. There was a national boom, uplifting many cities, but it passed by Whitewater. What did Whitewater get after the Great Recession, years into a national boom? Whitewater received a designation as a low-income community. (The gentlemen speaking, these ‘Greater Whitewater’ development men, were by their own accounts at the center of local CDA policy during most of the years that the state and national boom ignored Whitewater.)
That boom, the one that Whitewater never saw, did end, in pandemic and a pandemic recession. That’s the economic history of contemporary Whitewater: she didn’t have the recovery from the Great Recession that other places had, and so entered the most recent recession relatively weaker than many American communities.
Public officials of the city, school district, and university so often carry on in ignorance and denial of the community’s true economic condition.
David Nield writes Your Cat Could Carry ‘Good’ Bacteria That Fight Resistant Staph Infections:
