Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 91. Sunrise is 5:19 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 17 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1908, the Tunguska Event, the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history, results in a massive explosion over eastern Siberia.
There’s occasional talk from the federal administration about how particular industries bring jobs. Often these industries are ones in which Trump, his family, or his cronies have an economic interest. As it turns out, although Trump is no one’s idea of an outdoorsman1, the outdoors support huge numbers of useful and fulfilling jobs.
There are, in fact, more (and cleaner) jobs in nature-related employment in the Midwest alone than there are in the entire U.S. coal industry:
See U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, All Employees, Coal Mining, Fed. Rsrv. Bank of St. Louis, FRED (last updated June 5, 2026).
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It’s a joke even to suggest, right? Riding a golf cart is not the activity of an outdoorsman. It’s the activity of an octogenarian Florida man who’s never hiked a trail, pitched a tent, or prepared a meal in the wilderness. ↩︎
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Lava from Mount Etna in Sicily lit up the sky with red flashes as eruptions continued at an elevation of 9,800 feet, Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology reported.
Monday in Whitewater will see mostly sunny skies and a high of 91. Sunrise is 5:19 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 18 minutes of daylight. The moon will be full this evening.
On this day in 1764, one of the strongest tornadoes in history strikes Woldegk, Germany, killing one person while leveling numerous mansions with winds estimated at greater than 300 miles per hour.
In the federal appellate system, Wisconsin is one of three states (along with Illinois and Indiana) that are part of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. (Collectively, these three states contain seven federal trial court districts.) The Trump administration is eager — desperate, truly — to examine states’ voter rolls in a baseless attempt to allege voter fraud or otherwise meddle in the constitutional role of states to manage their own elections. The administration has lost every lawsuit it has filed for that purpose. Recently, the Seventh Circuit rejected a Trump administration request to expedite an appeal to examine Wisconsin’s voter rolls:
President Donald Trump’s administration had another setback this week in its attempt to get unredacted voter registration data from Wisconsin.
After losing in federal district court last month, the U.S. Department of Justice asked the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals to expedite its lawsuit in order to audit Wisconsin’s voter registration list ahead of the August primary and November general election — demanding sensitive voter data like drivers license information and partial Social Security numbers.
The DOJ’s emergency motion suggested “many” absentee ballots could be sent to “non-citizens” or otherwise “fraudulent” registrants without a federal audit.
The appeals court denied the request on Wednesday.
The DOJ has filed 30 other voter roll lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia, according to an analysis by the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. Of those, nine have been dismissed by federal district court judges.
Trump has repeatedly made false claims about widespread election fraud with absentee voting by mail. The attempt to force states like Wisconsin to produce unredacted voter data coincides with a proposed U.S. Postal Service rule that wouldn’t allow ballots to be mailed unless the voter sending it is on a federally approved list. The rule proposal was blocked by a federal judge on Thursday.
Sunday in Whitewater will see periods of clouds and sunshine with an afternoon thunderstorm and a high of 76. Sunrise is 5:18 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 19 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie are assassinated in Sarajevo, beginning the July Crisis and providing the casus belli of World War I.
Some projects prove to be nothing more than the equivalent of vaporware, a computer industry term for a proposal that never comes into being. Tom Kertscher reports on what looks to be a data-center version of vaporware in Grant County:
Even for a guy like Ron Brisbois, whose job is to cultivate prosperity, a data center proposed for Wisconsin’s Driftless Area was too big to imagine.
Nothing like this had come along in Brisbois’ quarter-century as economic development director in rural Grant County. An up to $2 billion project spanning 500 acres would be at least three times larger — in dollars and space — than any development in the county.
The construction contracts. Dozens of new permanent jobs. Millions of extra tax revenue for schools and local government. This is what economic development is all about.
For months, the out-of-state developers pitching the data center spoke repeatedly with Brisbois. They toured the county in Wisconsin’s southwest corner. They visited Madison to discuss details with state officials.
Their talk was big.
But Brisbois never dug into the developers’ backgrounds.
Then, as if someone flipped a switch, they stopped returning his calls.
Now, a project that would have been historically transformational — and was already highly controversial — is all but dead.
Drawing on two months of behind-the-scenes interviews Wisconsin Watch conducted with Brisbois, here’s the behind-the-scenes story of the rise and fall of a data center proposal.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 76. Sunrise is 5:18 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 19 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Many insects are pollinators, and among those invertebrates honey bees receive the most attention. (Indeed, they receive so much attention that one often hears nothing except honey bee, honey bee, honey bee. That repetition doesn’t capture the diversity of pollinators — it simply repeats the common name of one insect three times.)
Who clocks in when the birds and bees clock out? To celebrate Pollinator Week, let’s follow the night as it travels westward around the globe to meet just some of the bats working the pollinator night shift.
[…]
Across Australia, bats are the main characters of pollination for the iconic eucalyptus forests. Bats like the little red flying fox (Pteropus scapulatus), spectacled flying fox (Pteropus conspicillatus), and grey-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus)roam long distances in search of blooming flowers. The resulting ecological and economic “bat ripple” effects are staggering: the median contribution of grey-headed flying fox pollination services to Australia’s eucalypt timber industry has been estimated at over $600 million AUD per year (with seed dispersal services contributing to recruitment of 13.9 million trees annually). The bats’ collective ‘service area’ spans up to 41 million hectares, an area roughly the size of Sweden!
Meanwhile in the northern hemisphere, the lush hills of Okinawajima Island, Japan rise dark and dense against the last wash of daylight. Beneath the canopy, pendulous bunches of purple and green flowers hang from the vines of rusty-leaf mucuna (Mucuna macrocarpa) and a Ryukyu flying fox (Pteropus dasymallus) has found them. The bat hooks a clawed thumb around a flower, pulling it closer. As the bat pushes its nose into the base of the flower, a tiny trigger at the base of the flower fires, hitting the bat’s face with a big puff of pollen. This “explosive opening” gives the bat access to the nectar within and bats may be the only visitors who can set it off, making them critical partners in this plant’s reproduction.
Across the world, in deserts and rainforests, on remote islands and over farmlands, bats have been hard at work while other pollinators sleep.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 74. Sunrise is 5:18 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 19 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1963, President Kennedy gives his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, underlining the support of the United States for democratic West Germany shortly after Soviet-supported East Germany erected the Berlin Wall.
The Federal Reserve’s primary price gauge rose at its highest level since 2023, reinforcing the central bank’s recent tough talk on inflation.
Excluding food and energy, the personal consumption expenditures price index showed a 3.4% annual rate after rising 0.3% for the month, both in line with the Dow Jones consensus. The annual core reading was the highest since October 2023.
For the all-items reading, the PCE index showed inflation running at a seasonally adjusted 4.1% annual rate, the highest since April 2023, according to a Commerce Department report Thursday. On a monthly basis, the PCE accelerated 0.4%. The annual level was in line with the Dow Jones consensus estimate while the monthly reading was 0.1 percentage point below.
While Fed officials look at both headline and core rates, they generally consider the latter a better measure of long-run trends, particularly in light of this year’s inflation surge that was driven largely by an acceleration in energy prices tied to the Iran war that have slowly been seeping into other parts of the economy.
These economic developments must surprise people in Whitewater who relied on the city’s top-notch economic panel of landlords (some of whom live in the city and others of whom live beyond the city limits while charging rent to those who actually live in the city).
By contrast, the many thousands in the city who relied on sound, professional economic reporting from national publications saw this coming.
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon showers with a high of 76. Sunrise is 5:17 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 20 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 82.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1950, the Korean War begins when North Korea invades South Korea.
Even if yesterday’s men want to pretend Whitewater is an island — and she’s not an island — sooner or later, an understanding of something more and better would take hold. So it has. News organizations from across the state have noticed Whitewater’s progress.
Harbor Homes continues to build single-family homes in the Park Crest subdivision, and have pulled all their remaining building permits.
US Shelter is continuing to build owner-occupied duplexes on the west side of the city.
The Common Council also approved the sale of 3.5 acres of City-owned land to Tanis Construction, who will be building at least four owner-occupied single-family homes on an infill site a short distance from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater campus.
“We do have a housing crisis,” Becker said. “We’ve had a shortage of new construction housing since the Great Recession, and that’s true of our entire region.”
Before the Great Recession, housing development in Jefferson County and Wisconsin was more than double its current rate.
In 2005, Jefferson County’s net new construction rate was 3.1%, Wisconsin’s was 2.8%, and inflation was 3.4%,” the report [a recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report] states. In 2025, Jefferson’s rate was 0.7%, the state’s was nearly 1.7%, and inflation was 2.6%.
Since 2011, Jefferson County’s rate of net new construction has frequently trailed both the statewide average and inflation.
However, those trends in Whitewater are climbing. And while multifamily housing for students has always remained consistent, Becker again emphasized the need for all housing in the area, especially single family.
A recent report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum found development and housing construction in Jefferson County, as in many other communities, has lagged behind demand since the Great Recession.
“Nestled between Milwaukee and Madison and bisected by Interstate 94, Jefferson County in theory has strong opportunities for development,” the report says. “In practice, that has not materialized.”
The slower development has impacted local government coffers through reduced property tax intakes and declining public school enrollment, leading to lower levels of state assistance, even as housing costs rise. In April 2021, the average home sale in Jefferson County was roughly $250,000. This April, it was $394,000, above the statewide average, according to Redfin figures.
“Over time, new construction might bring businesses, jobs, and a variety of residents, including families with children. It might also help to limit increases in housing costs for residents as the population grows,” the Wisconsin Policy Forum report says.
Whitewater hopes to become a place where more people live when classes are not in session. Walworth County’s largest city is poised to grow even more with new housing.
[…]
Stonehaven developer Tim Vandeville says the first homes could be ready for families in 60 days since the homes are being built off-site and moved to the site. He said he wants to provide new housing as soon as he can because of the demand.
“There’s an entire generation of people that are being priced out of the market in general, and future buyers will be completely priced out,” Vandeville said. “For us, it was a mission about tackling affordability and attainability.”
The Stonehaven development is not the only new addition to the neighborhood. Whitewater City Council also approved the future construction of a Piggly Wiggly grocery store and early child education center on Bluff Road during their meeting Tuesday night.
There is, perhaps, a futile hope among those few who have made themselves adversaries of progress that they’ll someday get back to their cronyism. Too late: their conflict is not principally with the municipal government but rather with those of us who support the fulfillment of genuine community needs.
This libertarian blogger can say of his own view that there will be no relenting now, either in support of recent progress or in opposition to progress’s adversaries.
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:17 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 20 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 75.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1812, Napoleon’s Grande Armée crosses the Neman River, beginning the invasion of Russia. (Within six months, hundreds of thousands in the Grande Armée would be dead, captured, missing, or would have deserted.)
The bill’s passage, by a lopsided 358-to-32 vote, ended months of sparring between the House and the Senate over a sprawling measure that aims to tackle the housing crisis by boosting supply in a country facing an acute shortage of new homes. The Senate passed its version of the same bill Monday, by a vote of 85 to 5.
With dozens of provisions, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act aims to touch communities across the country, addressing rural and urban needs as part of a strategy to eventually bring down housing costs. It loosens federal regulations, making it easier, faster and cheaper to build; eases lending rules; rewards communities that build; delivers aid to communities reeling from disasters; and, in a policy that proved to be one of the biggest flash points but was favored by Mr. Trump, sets new limits on the role institutional investors can play in the market.
[…]
In the years since the 2008 foreclosure crisis, builders have not constructed enough homes to keep up with a growing population. The country is short several million new housing units, according to some estimates. So, home prices have continued to stay high despite weak demand because there simply aren’t enough of them. Building new homes could bring down prices by adding more supply to the market, but that will take time.
One would have preferred purely private action then or now, but even Congress sees that the many public policy mistakes of the past sometimes require intervention simply to set matters right. (There is a reason, after all, that free-market advocates oppose monopoly, oligopoly, and regulatory manipulation to benefit only a few. That’s why there is antitrust law with redress for past imbalances.)
Locally, a tiny clique of landlords has fought these last several years against any significant improvement in Whitewater’s housing stock. Don’t want this, don’t want that, can’t do this, can’t do that, instead preserving a distorted housing market that favored their own student-rental properties over other options. It was, in fact, men of this ilk who, over the last generation, presided over this imbalance during their control of Whitewater’s old Community Development Authority.
Their claims from the Whitewater Common Council lectern during public comment and debate, while lawful, have been exercises in deficient outcome-driven argumentation.
Again, paraphrasing a line from a film: The greatest trick that Whitewater’s special-interest men ever pulled was convincing anyone, even themselves, that they had any credible economic insights to offer.
Consider, though, the position these gentlemen are in now: in the city, in the state, and across our entire nation, policymakers realize that there is a need for more housing options. This recognition comes from leaders of both major parties, representing places big and small, urban and rural.
And so, and so, the choice is quite stark, isn’t it? One can accept the reasoning and insights of policymakers from across the most productive nation in history, or instead choose the claims of a few small-town men pushing only their own self-interest.
Good luck and God bless to all concerned in making that choice.
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 76. Sunrise is 5:17 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 20 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 66 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5 PM and the Aquatic Center Committee at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1961, the Antarctic Treaty System, which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve and limits military activity on the continent, its islands, and ice shelves, comes into force.
These recent years in Whitewater have seen the use of outcome-driven argumentation, where the goal of every claim against a proposal, however specious, is simply to undermine the proposal. These claims don’t even have to be truthful — they need only advance (in a claimant’s mind) the proposal’s demise. This ilk becomes so attached to a desired outcome that it begins to judge every fact, every person, and every development by whether it helps that outcome.
Old Whitewater was, and what remains of it still is, a status-based culture. It ran on one’s identity and social standing, and these determined the perceived merit of what one believed. Not at all a meritocracy, but something like a shabby, small-town aristocracy.1 One earns only one’s own accomplishments; reliance on the accomplishments of earlier generations is an intergenerational plagiarism. SeeThe End of Familial Legacy as Public Entitlement.
Outcome-based arguments are suitable for these types: they want what they want, and damn it they should have what they want, so they say what they want to get what they want. Three kinds of groups typically rely on outcome-based arguments: the entitled, special-interests, and children. One sometimes finds a concentration of all three types in one: entitled special-interest types who are emotionally childish.
It should not surprise, then, that among the remnants of Old Whitewater, outcome-driven arguments are a ready recourse. For many years the same men who argued for wasteful projects through boosterism now use outcome-driven arguments against projects not to their liking. Then as now, their claims are tailored to the results that they want.
Arguments against new housing options for Whitewater from the city’s tiny, reactionary landlord class have been like this. The effectual purpose is to preserve a small-town oligopoly. All the rest is rhetorical diversion. They (and those few they’ve persuaded as fellow travelers) have shown themselves willing to say anything to kill a proposal: (1) although once supporting tax-incremental financing they now oppose the same; (2) although once falsely claiming to bring growth they now oppose those who bring genuine growth; (3) although once calling for more students within the school district they now say we have too many students; (4) all the while insisting ludicrously that proposals are safety risks or — honest to goodness — even crimes. (These last claims about possible criminality are so absurd that each and every person in this town who has raised them should commit to a multi-year, remedial education program.)
Outcome-driven thinking reveals obvious intellectual deficiencies: it subordinates truth to preference, it depreciates proper reasoning, it deprecates serious study, and it thereby makes evaluation a matter of an entitled man’s poorly justified mood.
What has changed for Whitewater, much to the community’s gain, is that even entitled men now have to explain their views at the lectern. When they do, it becomes clear that their own self-images greatly exceed their actual abilities.
It upsets them when they don’t get their way, and they are lightning quick to blame one municipal official or another. No, and no again: it’s not one or another who stands in their way.
Times have changed across an entire community, from one generation to another. They need only look in their own mirrors to see who hasn’t kept pace with these changes.
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When I have occasionally mentioned these types as small-town notables or town squires, these references were always applied as terms of light ridicule. Imagining oneself a notable or squire in a small American town is halfway to imagining oneself Napoleon Bonaparte. When I first used these terms so many years ago, someone wrote to me to suggest I was envious of those to whom I applied such descriptions. This greatly surprised me. It had never occurred to me that anyone would be envious of the characters in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. I thought then as I think now: those who believe themselves small-town notables should consult a psychiatrist or a priest. ↩︎
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 21 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 55.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School District holds an Operating Referendum Workshop at 5 PM and the Whitewater School Board meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1944, President Roosevelt signs into law the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill.
Wisconsin doesn’t mine coal, but it does have a highly polluting coal plant that runs on coal imported from elsewhere. The Trump administration intends to keep that plant going:
Earlier this month, the Trump administration listed the plant [in Pardeeville] as one of the beneficiaries of more than $700 million in spending to prop up the coal industry. The plant is expected to get $19 million through funding from the Defense Production Act.
“Our action will allow these facilities to invest in upgrades that will extend their operational lives for decades into the future, reinforce the reliability of our electric grid, which is really the biggest beneficiary, and most importantly, keep electricity prices very low for the American people,” Trump said in a June 4 Oval Office news conference.
Department of Natural Resources records show that the pollution emitted by the plant massively increased last year — a sign that the utility companies were ramping up the plant’s usage beyond its planned retirement date.
In 2024, according to the DNR data, the plant emitted 3.9 million pounds of carbon monoxide. That jumped to 6.6 million pounds last year. Carbon dioxide emissions increased from 11 billion pounds in 2024 to 14 billion in 2025.
Emissions of particulate matter, which is connected to health problems such as asthma, nearly doubled from 362,833 pounds to 685,876.
The amount of nitrogen oxide, ammonia, lead, arsenic and cyanide pumped into the air by the plant all increased last year, the DNR report shows.
Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, Outcome-Driven Argumentation, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Father’s Day (and the first day of summer) in Whitewater will be cloudy with afternoon showers and a high of 72. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 21 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing crescent with 46.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaces near the Columbia River in Oregon, firing 17 shells at Fort Stevens in one of only a handful of attacks by Japan against the mainland United States.
Pizza Hut once dominated American pizza. Now its U.S. business is being sold for $1.7 billion by parent company Yum! Brands to a private equity company called LongRange Capital. Its mainland Chinese operations are being sold to the spinoff Yum China Holdings for $1.2 billion. WSJ explains the challenges that led one of America’s most iconic restaurant chains to this moment.
Tastes change.
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Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, Outcome-Driven Argumentation, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset is 8:36 for 15 hours 20 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing crescent with 36.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1975, the film Jaws is released in the United States, becoming the highest-grossing film at that time and starting the trend of films known as “summer blockbusters.”
Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, Outcome-Driven Argumentation, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
