Helen Czerski writes Behind the Spooky Eyes of Cats (‘Like scarier nighttime predators, cats have slit pupils that help them to judge distance and ambush their prey’):
Halloween is approaching, and a whiff of ghoulish menace is squatting casually in the darkness of London’s evenings. Ghostly figures, silhouettes of witches and jagged glowing teeth loom over me as I walk home, but it’s their eyes that I notice most: bright orbs watching me through a pupil that is often a dark vertical slit. That slit seems like a warning, a signal that whatever is behind it is out to get you. But owners of slit-shaped pupils aren’t rare in our world: Along with crocodiles and vipers, our cute fluffy pet cats all have them. So why are some eyes like this, and are they really the ones to be afraid of?
….
A cat—like its fellow nighttime predators—effectively has a narrow pupil in the horizontal direction but a wide pupil in the vertical direction. So anything along the horizontal plane is in beautiful sharp focus, and the image is more blurred in the vertical direction. But at the right focal length, the image will be perfectly in focus in both directions, and that gives the cat an extra way of judging distance.
An ambush predator needs to be absolutely perfect at distance measurements, because it only has one chance to pounce. The slit gives the cat a second way of doing this (the other is the stereo images from both eyes, which is how humans judge distance); the two complement each other to produce pinpoint accuracy.
Thursday in Whitewater will see occasional rain with a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 5:51 PM for 10h 26m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 53.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
The University of Wisconsin System announced Wednesday that it will comply with an executive order issued by President Joe Biden more than six weeks ago requiring federal contractors to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
“We cannot afford to jeopardize millions of dollars in federal contracts, which are integral to our academic and research missions,” interim System President Tommy Thompson said in a statement. “Therefore, we intend to be in compliance with the federal executive order on vaccine mandates.”
The System’s announcement that it would comply with the mandate comes on the last possible day for employees to get their first dose of the Moderna vaccine and be fully vaccinated by Dec. 8, the deadline Biden set in the order. Those receiving the Pfizer vaccine have until Nov. 3 to get their first shot and those getting the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine must do so by Nov. 24.
Biden’s Sept. 9 order has compelled colleges across the country to announce vaccine requirements, even in some conservative states where governors and legislators oppose vaccine mandates.
A large share of employees are already vaccinated at the System’s two research universities, with 95% having received the shot at UW-Madison and 82% at UW-Milwaukee. Unvaccinated employees are required to test weekly, an option that isn’t allowed under the federal order. Employees can request a medical or religious exemption under the order.
….
Sen. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, blasted the UW System for announcing its intention to follow the federal order. The longtime and vocal UW critic said the System was “trying to hide details of this decision for as long as possible to avoid potential litigation.”
Nass has previously asked legislative leaders to sue the System over what he describes as “excessive” COVID-19 policies, which include mask mandates and mandatory testing for unvaccinated individuals. His calls have not resulted in a public response from Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg.
So Thompson follows Biden’s mandate, and Nass whines to no effect. Here’s an exclusive clip of Thompson reacting to Nass’s concerns:
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 58. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 5:53 PM for 10h 28m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63% of its visible disk illuminated.
MADISON — Rebecca Kleefisch over the weekend told Republicans they needed to “hire mercenaries” and engage in “ballot harvesting” to help her win next year’s race for governor — a practice she has said she wants to ban.
In a Saturday speech to Republicans in Door County, Kleefisch said the methods she needs to use to win bother her so much she will need to wash herself with steel wool. If her campaign strategy works, she said she would quickly sign legislation overhauling how elections are conducted.
“We execute with excellence, we will beat them at their own game. And the next morning, we all wake up, take a shower with steel wool, and then, after swearing in in January … (the Legislature) is going to pass all these bills again, and then I’m going to sign them all. And we will never do elections like that again, but this is how we win,” Kleefisch said, according to audio of her speech obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
That April contest was part of a statewide wave, and in any event, the incumbent did nothing to help himself (“One expects an incumbent to advance his record confidently and defend himself thoroughly against criticism. People aren’t inclined to do for a politician what he won’t do for himself. Advancing and defending are not assurances of re-election, but their absence makes defeat likely. It has been a tumultuous year; passivity is not a winning response to tumult”).
Elected candidates can (and often should) honestly take clear, ideological or partisan positions, but in doing so they cannot expect to be treated as non-partisan and without ideology. One can expect 2022 to be different — there are reasons to oppose candidates of similar ideology next year.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 5:54 PM for 10h 31m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 71.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1944, the Battle of Leyte Gulf ends with an overwhelming American victory.
Wisconsin is beautiful, yet she has also been a testbed for ugliness: gerrymandering, false claims about the 2020 election, and populists’ efforts to dominate schools districts with PAC money and outside consultants.
There is, however, something worse than all these: Wisconsin as a testbed for politically-motivated violence.
They called themselves citizens or patriots, and the demonstrators and media often called them militias, but it would have been most accurate to call them paramilitaries: young-to-middle-aged white men, mostly, armed with assault-style rifles and often clad in tactical gear, who appeared in town that evening arrayed purposefully around gas stations and used-car lots. Their numbers, based on video footage and firsthand accounts, may have run anywhere from the high dozens to the low hundreds, but no official estimates were made. Law-enforcement officers seemed to have broadly tolerated, and occasionally openly expressed support for, their activities, despite the fact that many of them were violating the same emergency curfew order under which dozens of demonstrators were arrested.
One of the most extensive records of their appearance was made by Kristan T. Harris, the Milwaukee-based host of a streamed talk show called “The Rundown Live” (“covering news and conspiracy that your local news won’t”), a sort of junior cousin of Alex Jones’s conspiracist Infowars media empire. Harris was also a prolific livestreamer, a frequent presence at protests and other happenings in the Upper Midwest. An advocate for armed citizens’ groups (though not actually a gun owner himself), Harris had been at plenty of assemblies where military-style hardware was ostentatiously carried. “It’s a penis-measuring contest — let’s call it what it is,” he told me. But it was immediately clear to him, in Kenosha, that something had shifted: “When people say, ‘Hey, take your positions, they’re coming our way’ — that, to me, sounds like war.”
A handful of figures, rifles in hand, were visible in silhouette on the roof of a car dealership. “We’ve got militia on the roof here, and it’s pretty neat,” Harris told his viewers. “They’re here to protect the local neighborhood and buildings, they said.” Out front, two young men stood sentry with rifles in front of a silver sedan. “Get my good angle,” one of them said, leaning nonchalantly against the driver’s side door. He smiled. “I’m Kyle, by the way.”
Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, who lived just across the state line in Illinois, arrived in Kenosha the night before. The next day, he joined several other young men in the defense of the dealership where Harris encountered him. Less than two hours later, he would shoot three men, killing two and wounding the third, and transforming himself, in an instant, into a Rorschach test.
….
Donald Trump had labored for several years to make a national boogeyman out of antifa, the left-wing anti-authoritarian movement, directing law-enforcement resources toward it that had been dedicated to investigating right-wing extremism and threatening to designate it a terrorist group, despite his F.B.I. director’s belief that it was really “more of an ideology than an organization.” In the antifa heartland of Portland, Ore., the upheavals following George Floyd’s death brought members of the movement together with Black Lives Matter activists in clashes with the police that would continue for months. In other cities, the streets were filled with white demonstrators who at least lookedlike antifa. These developments offered an end run around the messy racial optics of a law-and-order campaign that directly targeted Black protesters.
Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 52. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 5:55 PM for 10h 34m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, the Community Development Authority Seed Capital Committee meets at 5:00 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets at 6 PM in closed session and 7 PM in open session.
In small-town Whitewater, most local officials advance either boosterism (excentuating the positive to spur development and promote officials’ own actions) or sheer positivity (insisting that conditions are amazing! awesome! wow!). Boosterism uses Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt as an instruction manual, and positivity takes Voltaire’s Candide as a guidebook. Both approaches are objectionable, as they ignore actual human need in favor of diversionary happy talk. SeeBoosterism’s Cousin, Toxic Positivity and Tragic Optimism as an Alternative to Toxic Positivity.
(Much of FREE WHITEWATER is a critique of the boosterism — the accentuation of the positive without regard to real conditions — of some in Whitewater before, during, and after the Great Recession.)
There is, however, a different approach to the intense political turmoil of our time that hopes to rely on simple human sociability to overcome factional animosity. (It’s clear the approach is about overcoming political tension, not poverty or individual distress.)
The nation is coming apart. The world is in turmoil. We need to chat about the weather.
I mean this sincerely.
A recent poll by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics showed that 75 percent of Biden voters and 78 percent of Trump voters believe that their political opponents “have become a clear and present danger to the American way of life.” A majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a large minority of Biden voters (41 percent) support splitting the country into two along blue/red lines.
David French points out in his newsletter that when you survey these same people on actual policies, the hard lines blur. A majority of Trump voters express support for the nuts and bolts of President Biden’s infrastructure and reconciliation plan, for example. French notes that our “mutual loathing is based more on emotion than policy.”
“We are dealing with a spiritual and moral sickness,” he writes. “Malice and disdain are conditions of the soul.”
To learn how to love our neighbors we need cultural habits that allow us to share in our common humanity. We need quiet, daily practices that rebuild social trust. And we need seemingly pointless conversation with those around us.
The great urban activist Jane Jacobs wrote about the social function of casual conversations and interactions: greeting your grocer, passing a pleasantry with a neighbor, playing peekaboo with a toddler at the crosswalk.
“Most of it is utterly trivial,” she wrote in 1961’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” “but the sum is not trivial at all.”
“The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level,” she continued, “is a feeling for the public identity of a people, a web of public respect and trust.”
This advice is serious, and far removed from the superficial approaches of boosterism and positivity: it is grounded in natural human sociability.
And yet, and yet, a difficult question presents itself: is our national conflict too far advanced to allow for an approach of natural sociability to reconcile political differences?
Any caring person would hope it is not too far advanced; some of them would hope yet feel this is a faint hope.
The most likely resolution of this national political conflict is for one side to settle the dispute lawfully but decisively.
We are, it seems, past the point of reconciliation even through natural sociability.
Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 51. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 5:57 PM for 10h 36m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 86.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1946, a camera on board the V-2 No. 13 rocket [from White Sands Missile Range in White Sands, New Mexico] takes the first photograph of Earth from outer space.
The first photos taken from space were taken on October 24, 1946 on the sub-orbital U.S.-launched V-2 rocket (flight #13) at White Sands Missile Range. Photos were taken every second and a half. The highest altitude (65 miles, 105 km) was 5 times higher than any picture taken before.
SINGAPORE — Standing on a manhole cover in downtown Singapore, dodging double-decker buses and motorcycles, Marjorie Chong sniffs the air and listens for squeaks. “Do you hear that?” she asks.
Chong is searching for otters.
Pollution and deforestation drove away Singapore’s otter population in the 1970s. But as the country cleaned up its waters and reforested land in recent years, otters came back in full force, integrating into urban spaces and learning to navigate one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.
Today, to the annoyance of some and the joy of others, the island is home to more than 10 otter romps, or families.
In the Marina Bay area, known for architecturally audacious hotels and for one-bedroom apartments that sell for $1.8 million, otters bop in the water and the crunch of fish bones echoes along the boardwalk. Using drainpipes as highways, the carnivorous mammals traverse the city, sometimes popping up in rush-hour traffic, or racing through university campuses.
Otters pushed out of the local rivers and bays by rival families dig homes between buildings. They visit hospital lobbies and condominium pools, hunting for koi fish and drinking from fountains. New families fight for access to food and shelter, in battles that are covered by the local papers and dissected online.
….
Last year, after a string of otter attacks on koi ponds, one critic wrote a letter to the Straits Times newspaper to call for the animals to be shot with rubber bullets. The demand proved divisive, and even Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who encountered a family of otters frolicking in the yard of the president’s official residence, took a stand. Singaporeans “must find ways to coexist and thrive with our local flora and fauna,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
For otter experts, the critics are missing the point. Higher fencing and sturdier gates are a small price to pay to keep the otters out of areas where they are not welcome.
Singapore’s otters are the envy of researchers around the world, who sometimes work for years without seeing an otter in the wild. They are also testament to Singapore’s reforestation and anti-pollution efforts.
While there have been rare otter attacks in Alaska (River otter attacks baffle authorities in Anchorage, Alaska), satirized here at FREE WHITEWATER (in Killer Otters and Toilet Rats), these animals are almost always harmless to humans. (A people that was truly afraid of otters would be among the most timid, and pathetic, of peoples on the planet. We Americans are, by contrast, a robust nation.)
Singapore is a place withfewer liberties than America, but even their leaders can see that they “must find ways to coexist and thrive with our local flora and fauna.”
Here in Whitewater, Wisconsin — a place of abundant natural beauty — one might have assumed her local government had a proper appreciation of flora, fauna, and residents.
Sadly not. Dumping large amounts of artificial herbicide into lakes in the middle of town that feed into a creek through and beyond the town was a plan (1) ludicrous, (2) lazy, and (3) unnecessary to the restoration of Whitewater’s lakes.
And so, and so… it fell to others, in and outside the city, to address what local government ignored, to make clear what officials kept clouded.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 51. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 5:58 PM for 10h 39m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 92.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1923, the Packers played their first NFL game. They defeated the Minneapolis Marines 7-6, for a crowd of 6,000 fans and completed their inaugural season with 3 wins, 2 losses, and 2 ties.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A highly anticipated nonpartisan audit of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin released Friday did not identify any widespread fraud in the battleground state, which a key Republican legislative leader said shows its elections are “safe and secure.”
The report from the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau did make dozens of recommendations on how the state might improve its elections. It also determined that dozens of voting machines it reviewed worked correctly. Some conservatives have called for reviews of all voting machines.
“Despite concerns with statewide elections procedures, this audit showed us that the election was largely safe and secure,” tweeted Republican state Sen. Robert Cowles, who co-chairs the Legislature’s Audit Committee, which assigned the audit bureau to conduct the review. “It’s my hope that we can now look at election law changes & agency accountability measures in a bipartisan manner based on these nonpartisan recommendations.”
The audit didn’t offer any evidence that the election won by President Joe Biden was “stolen” from Donald Trump, as Trump and some fellow conservatives have falsely claimed. Biden’s roughly 21,000-vote win over Trump in Wisconsin has withstood recounts and multiple court rulings.
Democrats hailed the audit as evidence that elections are safe, secure and accurate, but said they feared Republicans would cherry pick the findings to sow distrust.
The Audit Bureau report did identify inconsistent administration of election law based on surveys of ballots it reviewed across the state. It made 30 recommendations for the Wisconsin Elections Commission to consider and 18 possible legal changes for the Legislature to weigh.
Republican state Sen. Kathy Bernier, a former county elections clerk and current chair of Senate elections committee, said the audit “did not reveal any sizable or organized attempt at voter fraud.” But it did show “sloppy” and inconsistent election administration that must be addressed, she said.
Republican state Rep. Samantha Kerkman, the other Audit Committee co-chair, said the report will serve as a “blueprint” for the Legislature to address areas identified where current election law is not being followed.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 51. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 6:00 PM for 10h 42m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1707, four British naval vessels run aground on the Isles of Scilly because of faulty navigation. In response, the first Longitude Act is enacted in 1714.
Whitewater has two beautiful lakes, Cravath and Trippe, and they have become overgrown with vegetation, so the local government has at last set about to drain those lakes, and dredge to remove invasive plants, in the hope of restoring those bodies of water to their proper condition. Restoring the lakes is to the benefit of the community. What was the goal, here? Surely to improve the natural beauty of the city. That is generally (and in this case particularly) a worthy goal.
As part of this project, even before dredging, the City of Whitewater hit upon a plan to dump large amounts of artificial herbicides into Cravath & Trippe to kill plants that had grown there while the project dragged on.
It was, needless to say, a ludicrous plan: the lakes drain into a creek that runs through the city and toward nearby cities.
Here is a photo of the water pouring out of Cravath into Whitewater Creek:
And yet, and yet, when city officials discussed the restoration plan on camera in August 2021, the only part of the plan mentioned was dredging — not the use of artificial herbicides:
A letter to a few residents was not — and could not be — adequate. This was a matter for all the city, and for nearby communities, too. One form of notice was, by the way, a legal notice in the Whitewater Register.
(I saw that notice, but to expect most residents to look for information in the Register is something like expecting them to look for information at the bottom of a coal mine. That notice from 9.16.21, NOTICE FOR APPLICATION OF AQUATIC PLANT MANAGEMENT PERMIT, appeared in a tiny font, with nothing in the title about herbicides, and only promised a public meeting if “five or more individuals, organizations, special units of government, or local units of government request one.” Many residents had no idea about possible herbicide application at that time. It’s hard even to find the notice on the full newspaper page — it’s at the very bottom, buried among other notices and stories.)
Of course, there were those who knew better and more.
Fortunately, a nearby publication, Fort Atkinson Online, began solid and useful reporting on the city’s herbicide-dumping plan.
City government found itself in a position where a more candid and recorded public discussion (as a consequence of reporting on the planned use of herbicides and also expectations from state government) became necessary:
And so — now — the City of Whitewater has sensibly abandoned the large-scale dumping of herbicides into Cravath and Trippe (relevant discussion from the 10.19.21 meeting below, beginning at 3:30):
(Contending that this change had nothing to do with a wider awareness of the original herbicide plan is false, and preposterously so.)
Solid reporting on the original plan shows a positive example of cause and effect, from wider public awareness to a new plan. There are better ways to restore these lakes than dumping large amounts of herbicide.
What local government kept in the shadows, reporting brought to light.
For it all, Whitewater now has a better restoration plan.
Tuesday, October 26th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of The Lost City of Z @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Biography/Drama/Adventure
2 hours, 21 minutes
Rated PG-13 (2016)
Charlie Hunnam stars in a true-life adventure about British explorer Major Percival Fawcett, who disappeared while searching for a mysterious indigenous city in the Amazon, in the 1920’s. This is a thrilling, thoughtful, hauntingly beautiful film that you will not soon forget. Also stars Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Franco Nero, and Tom Holland.
In Current Biology, Kristyn R. Vitale, Alexandra C. Behnke, and Monique A.R. Udell have reported their findings on Attachment bonds between domestic cats and humans. Here is a summary of their report, with the full study available online:
Worldwide, domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus) outnumber domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Despite cats’ success in human environments, dog social cognition has received considerably more scientific attention over the last several decades [1, 2, 3]. A key aspect of what has been said to make dogs unique is their proclivity for forming attachment bonds, including secure attachments to humans [1, 3], which could provide scaffolding for the development of human-like socio-cognitive abilities and contribute to success in human environments [3]. Cats, like dogs, can be found living in social groups or solitarily, depending on early developmental factors, resource distribution, and lifetime experiences such as human interaction [1, 2, 4].
Despite fewer studies, research suggests we may be underestimating cats’ socio-cognitive abilities [2]. Here we report evidence, using behavioral criteria established in the human infant literature [5, 6], that cats display distinct attachment styles toward human caregivers. Evidence that cats share social traits once attributed to dogs and humans alone would suggest that broader non-canine-specific mechanisms may be needed to explain cross-species attachment and socio-cognitive abilities.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 6:01 PM for 10h 44m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School District’s Policy Review Committee meets at 9 AM, Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission meets at 5:30 PM, and the Whitewater Fire Department Holds a Business Meeting at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1805, A British fleet led by Lord Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish fleet under Admiral Villeneuve in the Battle of Trafalgar.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 70. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 6:03 PM for 10h 47m 42s of daytime. The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1803, the United States Senate ratifies (24-7) the Louisiana Purchase.
Free markets include markets in capital, labor, goods, and services. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids at workplaces interfere with free labor markets, denying employers willing workers. If the Biden Administration reduces ICE raids at workplaces, then it will be to America’s economic advantage. They should follow this step by also reducing, if not ending, immigration-related actions against employers. (Federal and state governments can address workplace safety concerns through other agencies without any ICE involvement.) Voluntary, mutual agreements between employers and workers are a worthy exercise of liberty, benefiting both parties to those agreements and the overall economy.
The Biden administration Tuesday [10.12] ordered a halt to large-scale immigration arrests at job sites, and said it is planning a new enforcement strategy to more effectively target employers who pay substandard wages and engage in exploitative labor practices.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s memo ordered a review of enforcement policies and gave immigration officials 60 days to devise proposals to better protect workers who report on their bosses from facing deportation.
Mass arrest operations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, commonly referred to as ICE raids, have been used primarily against industries that employ large numbers of immigrants, such as meatpacking. Immigrant advocates and many Democrats who oppose the raids say they punish vulnerable workers, sow fear in immigrant communities and rarely result in consequences for employers.
“The deployment of mass worksite operations, sometimes resulting in the simultaneous arrest of hundreds of workers, was not focused on the most pernicious aspect of our country’s unauthorized employment challenge: exploitative employers,” Mayorkas’s memo states.
“These highly visible operations misallocated enforcement resources while chilling, and even serving as a tool of retaliation for, worker cooperation in workplace standards investigations,” it says.
ICE work site enforcement practices have flip-flopped between Republican and Democratic administrations over the years. In 2019, the Trump administration swept up 680 workers at seven poultry and other food processing plants in Mississippi, the largest single-state immigration enforcement action in U.S. history. Four managers were later indicted.
Pathologists often use tissue samples and microscopy to help diagnose diseases like cancer. But distinguishing different cells often requires several stages of staining. Now researchers are presenting a new type of microscope slide which uses nanotechnology to change the perceived color of cells without staining them. They say that this could help diagnose diseases like cancer.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 72. Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 6:04 PM for 10h 50m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Nick Rolovich came to Washington State as a fun-loving coach, known nationally for his off-the-wall antics and an ability to win.
After less than two years and only 11 games, Rolovich has been fired, and will be known nationally as one of the highest-profile terminations for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Washington State athletic director Pat Chun said WSU had “initiated the separation process” with Rolovich and four of his assistant coaches for not complying with the state mandate that all state employees be fully vaccinated by Monday.
Defensive coordinator Jake Dickert has been named acting head coach.
“This is a disheartening day to be here today,” Chun said in a Monday evening news conference. “Our football team is hurting, our WSU community is fractured, and today will have a lasting impact on the young men on our team and the remaining coaches on the staff.
“As the director of athletics and the steward of this department, I take full responsibility for hiring Nick. … We believed we had found the perfect fit and a long-term solution for Washington State football. Unfortunately, we stand here today making a transition.”
Defensive tackles coach Ricky Logo, cornerbacks coach John Richardson, quarterbacks coach Craig Stutzmann and offensive line coach Mark Weber are also being let go.
“To be at this juncture today is unacceptable on so many levels,” Chun said.
Rolovich will not receive the remaining $3.6 million buyout of his contract.
He had applied for a religious exemption to the mandate requiring all state employees to be vaccinated by Oct. 18. To remain as coach, Rolovich needed approval for his exemption request and for his supervisor, Chun, to determine that he could effectively do his job while keeping the public safe.
“For the employees that we received notification [on] today, it was really simple and their accommodation requests were denied,” Chun said.
Washington State did not fire coach Nick Rolovich on Monday. The school was merely the vessel of dismissal, carrying out a state mandate designed to save lives and contain a pandemic.
In reality, Rolovich fired Rolovich.
He alone is responsible for his termination, halfway through his second season and with his team on the ascent.
He alone bears the burden for the mess in Pullman, for the massive disruption to the football program, for the immense embarrassment to the university and for the gut punch to Cougar constituents.
A reminder on the libertarian case for vaccine mandates: Cato adjunct scholar, and George Mason law professor, Ilya Somin on why vaccine mandates are consistent with libertarian views. Summarizing: (1) a disease like COVID involves the potential of harm to other people (2) mask mandates, lockdowns, and restrictions on international travel are all much more intrusive than the relatively slight imposition of a safe and effective vaccine (3) there is a strong libertarian case that private institutions, and even the government when acting as employer, can set policies attached to what are voluntary relationships: employees, customers, students, etc. (4) Florida’s recent attempt to ban private businesses such as cruise lines from adopting vaccine requirements has already suffered defeat in court and is one example of an affront to libertarian sensibilities.
