Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with scattered afternoon thundershowers and a high of 90. Sunrise is 5:31 and sunset is 8:29 for 14 hours 58 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
A resident often finds significant and interesting work from the municipal administration in the Whitewater Common Council’s consent agenda. A memo among the consent agenda items for the July 21 council meeting addresses participation on city boards and commissions. See Memorandum from Becky Magestro, Chief of Staff, City of Whitewater, to Whitewater Common Council, Board and Commission Resignations and Volunteer Recruitment (July 21, 2026). However regrettable, it has been true for many years that in Whitewater (and cities across this country) civic participation has often been low.
This topic of low participation, where the city relies on a small number of the same people to fill commission and board vacancies, was broached in Whitewater nearly a decade ago. When the city manager at that time first mentioned the problem publicly, this libertarian blogger was surprised: Old Whitewater disfavored discussions that might call into question the culture of the city. Admittedly, Old Whitewater’s decline as a force was already evident, and while its many mistakes were undeniable, it still had some kick to it. This problem, however, was not unique to Whitewater then or now.
I’ll not suggest that I have an adequate answer. It is plainly, however, a longstanding and common affliction across our area and beyond. In this, Whitewater is not alone and is now managing civic participation as well as anyone nearby.
_____
Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis and a New Ethics Ordinance.
An unknown number of people were buried after a landslide struck a county in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing, causing multiple residential buildings downhill to collapse, according to state media. A dashcam video captured the moment a section of hillside collapsed onto homes and businesses below, sending debris across the road and forcing passing cars to stop.
Sometimes cats groom each other for friendly reasons … but sometimes not:
Morgane Van Belle, another cat behavioral scientist at Ghent University and the study’s lead author, was observing her own cats, Fabio and Giovanni, interacting over a favorite napping spot in the sun and noticed something.
“I saw these weird grooming patterns in my own cats where I thought, This is not super friendly at all,” she said. “Sometimes one cat would lay on the blanket near the window and the other cat would come up and start licking it — but in an annoying way.” The interaction would induce the licked cat to get up and forfeit the sunny spot, she said.
To check whether this behavior was more widespread, Ms. Van Belle and her colleagues looked at 53 households across Europe with two or more cats. After telling the pet owners what to look for, the researchers had them submit videos of their cats’ interactions. The scientists then randomly selected a submission from each participant and used statistical analyses to tease apart the hidden nuance in cat-licking behavior.
[…]
The results revealed two things. The first was consistent with typical grooming behavior: The cats licked each other on the head, neck or ears. In these videos, the cats were much more likely to mimic each other’s body postures, either cuddling together or sitting next to one another before and after the grooming. The licks were clearly friendly gestures.
The other side of the cat-licking coin revealed something more in line with bullying. A subset of the videos showed that licking often preceded conflict. These interactions were defined by differing body postures, where one cat might stand and lick the other sitting cat. The aggressive licks were followed by signs of stress in the licked cat, including staring, yowling, rotating the ears, licking the lips or swiping at the other cat. The results were inconsistent with the prior conception of cat allogrooming.
See Taylor Mitchell Brown, Your Cat Is Being Nice? Think Again (A new study finds that sometimes cats groom each other specifically to be annoying), New York Times, July 10, 2025.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 90. Sunrise is 5:30 and sunset is 8:30 for 15 hours of daylight. The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 is destroyed in a head-on collision with Jupiter.
Brown spots mark impact sites on Jupiter‘s southern hemisphere. Hubble Space Telescope Comet Team and NASA.
Wildfire smoke from fires blazing in Canada and Minnesota will blanket much of Wisconsin this week, bringing hazardous air quality to northern Wisconsin and statewide effects.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources issued an air quality advisory Tuesday that runs through 11 a.m. Thursday, which could be extended.
[…]
Climate change is driving heat and drought that have set the stage for wildfires to burn. Wildfires in Canada have worsened as the nation has seen warmer and shorter winters that have enhanced drought conditions, said Amanda Latham, climate outreach specialist with the Wisconsin State Climatology Office.
“When we have these really, really dry conditions, and we also start to introduce the warmer conditions during the summer, that really expands the wildfire season,” Latham said. “Oftentimes, it makes it a lot worse than what we’ve seen in historic records.”
In Canada, around 835 fires are burning with nearly 3,500 so far this year that have consumed around 4.7 million acres. The number of fires is above the 10-year average.
A Minnesota Star Tribune analysis found wildfire activity has increased in Minnesota almost every season since 1992, including a tenfold increase in the average number of fires during summer and fall.
When major disasters strike, Americans are routinely waiting weeks — or even months — to receive presidential approval for aid. And if they live in a state that didn’t support President Donald Trump, chances are greater that aid will be denied.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 94. Sunrise is 5:30 and sunset is 8:31 for 15 hours 1 minute of daylight. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
In the first few months of 2025, after Trump’s second inauguration, it seemed to many as though Trumpism and the MAGA movement were America’s foreseeable future. Those of us in opposition, including those of us who are Never Trump, knew that those grandiose claims of an enduring future were false, would prove transitory and, in retrospect, delusional. And look, and look — those heady days of Trumpism now seem as though they were a hundred years ago.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission has referred two complaints against billionaire Elon Musk to the Brown County district attorney’s office, saying it found “probable cause” to believe Musk broke state election bribery laws last year.
Two letterssent to Musk and Wisconsin residents who filed the initial complaints state that the elections commission’s bipartisan board voted 5-1 last week on a motion finding probable cause that Musk violated the state’s election bribery statute, “by making a social media post that offered one million dollars to individuals who voted in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court Election in order to induce them to vote in that election.”
The actual complaints themselves are not publicly accessible under state law.
Musk was heavily involved in backing former Republican Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel’s campaign against current liberal Justice Susan Crawford. Musk and groups connected to him gave more than $20 million to support Schimel’s campaign and offered $100 payments to residents who signed a petition opposing “activist judges.” Musk also said he gave people in Green Bay and Eau Claire $1 million for signing the petition.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission letter, however, appears to focus on a specific post from Musk to his social media platform X on March 27, 2025, in which he announced he would “give a talk in Wisconsin” at an event where only “those who have voted in the Supreme Court election” would be allowed in.
“I will also personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote,” said Musk.
[…]
He deleted the post the next day and replaced it with another stating that people who signed his petition “in opposition to activist judges” would be allowed in and the million-dollar payments were no longer just for those who voted.
Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul tried to stop Musk’s million-dollar giveaway, but his lawsuit was dismissed by a county circuit court, state appeals court and the Wisconsin Supreme Court. At the event, held in Green Bay on March 30, 2025, Musk handed out two large checks for a million dollars. One of them went to the state chair of the Wisconsin College Republicans.
With the elections commission’s referrals, it’s up to Republican Brown County District Attorney David Lasee to decide whether or not to file criminal charges.
I’ll not be waiting for Brown County’s district attorney to take action. It seems unlikely that there will be any prosecution of Musk for his 2025 actions.
Tariffs, bloated federal legislation, concealment of Epstein’s vast network, murders in our streets, and wars in Venezuela and Iran have reminded a majority of our people what Trumpism consists in equal measures impracticality and moral transgression.
Musk himself is likely to escape justice in Wisconsin, but a far harsher sentence — public rejection — builds against the movement Musk so ludicrously promoted in the winter and spring of 2025.
This long political conflict is not over: worse is yet to come, but whatever comes will, despite the difficulty, be overcome.
_____
Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis and a New Ethics Ordinance.
The U.S. military early Wednesday reimposed a blockade on Iranian ports over Tehran’s attacks on ships trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, sparking new strikes on nations hosting U.S. forces as an interim deal to end the war further unraveled.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 95. Sunrise is 5:29 and sunset is 8:32 for 15 hours 3 minutes of daylight. The moon is new with none of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Innovation Center Advisory Panel meets at 8:30 AM and the Public Works Committee at 5 PM.
The U.S. has had a busy tornado season so far, and the majority of the storms are blasting through the Midwest, east of what’s traditionally thought of as Tornado Alley.
“It’s been an active tornado year so far across Wisconsin with 39 documented tornadoes, which ties it with (2025) for the sixth most in an entire year since 1950,” the NWS wrote in an update released Monday.
The NWS says the average number of tornadoes for Wisconsin in a calendar year is 23. In recent years, the state has seen tornado totals around double that number.
Historically, tornadoes have most frequently touched down in the Great Plains, hitting states like Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, but research has found since 1979 that pattern has been shifting.
“Tornadoes have been happening with less frequency in the Great Plains over the last 40 years,” said Victor Gensini, a professor and director at Northern Illinois University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Convective Storms. “And they’ve been having greater frequency in places like Illinois and Indiana and Tennessee and portions of the Mid-South and the Midwest.”
The space between stars in the Milky Way just got a little sweeter for Spanish researchers who’ve found evidence of a sugar which is found in raspberries and self-tanning lotions. The sugar, called erythrulose, lurks in interstellar space, or the space between stars.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 91. Sunrise is 5:28 and sunset is 8:32 for 15 hours 4 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On one side, universities are under enormous pressure to become engines of employment.
A study of nearly a million students this spring ranked liberal-arts graduates among the lowest financial returns of any field. On June 29 the Department of Education finalized rules that will strip federal loans from programs whose graduates do not out-earn high school diploma holders. In addition, this month the Department of Education launched Workforce Pell, extending the nation’s largest college aid program to job training courses as short as eight weeks.
On the other side stand traditionalists, exemplified by the retired Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, who recently defined the university as a community devoted to the cultivation of the mind. They see all of this as the surrender of education to employment.
[…]
Here is the mistake: concluding that if job outcomes are the goal, then job training is the method.
The capacity that actually carries a person upward over a forty-year career — through layoffs, through industry upheavals, and now through AI — is not any particular skill. It is curiosity, which is the drive to close the gap between what you know and what you want to know. And curiosity is developed precisely by the parts of education that look least vocational.
[…]
Minds grow the way muscles do: by being challenged. Environments that withhold the answer long enough for the question to deepen produce curious people. Environments built for the fastest path to a credential produce fewer — not because skills training is bad, but because it is designed to eliminate exactly the struggle in which curiosity forms.
This is why, as politically tone-deaf as it sounds, we still need to teach Chaucer and Tocqueville. The humanities put a particular kind of question at the center: questions with no single right answer. What does this passage mean? What holds a democracy together? Working on such questions is not soft; it is rigor of a harder kind, marshaling logic and evidence when no experiment will ever settle the matter.
There’s no question that this libertarian blogger leans, as Martin and Shivaram express it, on one side of this divide: my paternal family, my spouse, and our children all share the conviction that education is fundamentally about curiosity and investigation. This is our way.
In this, it’s possible — I’d say easily so — to share a view of “a community devoted to the cultivation of the mind, both the theoretical mind that raises one’s sights and the practical mind that makes one mindful of necessities” without Mansfield’s socially repugnant politics. (Mansfield’s sad irony: a commitment to the cultivation of the mind yet accompanied by an inveterate narrowness of mind toward minorities.)
One of the aspects of educational discussions in Whitewater is that most supporters and most critics of education have singular positions: either all educational decisions are right (regardless of cost) or all educational decisions are wrong (because of cost).
Expenses, budgets, marketing, branding, communication — underneath all of these merely instrumental or procedural means lie substantive, enduring principles of learning.
_____
Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Arctic sea ice is changing, with implications for ocean conditions, weather patterns, ecosystems, and shipping routes. To better understand these changes, researchers are using new types of measurements.
During a field campaign over the Arctic Ocean and remote parts of northern Canada in April 2026, researchers collected airborne data alongside satellite observations. By combining the two, scientists hope to improve measurements of sea ice thickness in particular.
The campaign used data from the international Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite; NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2); and ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) CryoSat-2. Instruments aboard the research flights were similar to what ESA will use on its upcoming CRISTAL satellite.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 87. Sunrise is 5:27 and sunset is 8:33 for 15 hours 6 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1998, France wins its first World Cup title, defeating defending champion Brazil 3–0.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 85. Sunrise is 5:26 and sunset is 8:33 for 15 hours 7 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1914, Babe Ruth makes his Major League Baseball debut.
The 21st Century Road to Housing Act, a bipartisan bill that aims to tackle housing affordability, officially became law early Saturday, despite a series of attempts by President Donald Trump to stall the legislation.
Its passage signals that lawmakers recognize the frustration many Americans feel about the high cost of housing. At a time of elevated mortgage rates and near-record high home prices, many feel locked out of homeownership or struggle with monthly rent payments.
[…]
The nation’s housing affordability crisis did not stem from a single event or policy failure. It is the result of years of underbuilding, restrictive local zoning, rising demand and policy decisions and, in many cases, policy inaction.
The legislation reflects the complexity of the crisis, combining a total of 47 proposals aimed at increasing housing supply, reducing costs and expanding access to affordable homes.
But immediate relief may not come just yet for homeowners and renters, said Yonah Freemark, a housing research associate at the Urban Institute. Building new homes takes time, and the law gives short-staffed federal government agencies a new workload to manage.
“We’re talking about a situation where not only will the federal government have to make changes, but then state and local governments also will have to make changes and then businesses, developers, etcetera will have to make investments, which itself takes time,” Freemark said.
These few area gentlemen find themselves out of step with the national consensus in the most advanced and productive society in human history. Not for the first time; perhaps not for the last time….
_____
Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:26 and sunset is 8:34 for 15 hours 8 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 20.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1212, the most severe of several early fires of London burns most of the city to the ground:
The second of the two great medieval fires of London, also known as “the Great Fire of Suthwark” [sic], began on 10 July 1212 in Southwark, the borough directly to the south of London Bridge. The flames destroyed Our Lady of the Canons (Southwark Cathedral, also known as St Mary Overie) and strong southerly winds pushed them towards the bridge, which also caught fire. London Bridge had only just been rebuilt in stone, and the structure itself survived the blaze. However, King John had authorised the construction of houses on the bridge, the rents from which were supposed to pay for its maintenance, and it appears that these were lost to the flames.
Even in a time without plentiful good news, one still finds encouraging developments. The decline in overdose deaths in Wisconsin is one of those encouraging developments:
Overdose deaths in Wisconsin rose from 1,061 in 2016, to 1,830 in 2022. A Wisconsin Department of Health Services report found stress and isolation caused by the coronavirus pandemic may have helped drive the increase.
But in the past few years, the state has seen a sharp decline in overdose deaths, dropping from 1,772 in 2023 to 1,185 in 2024. [Director of Substance Use Initiatives at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services Michelle] Haese said there is not just one reason why overdose deaths have dropped in Wisconsin, but she did point to the “cumulative effect of years of investment.”
“This is a public health ecosystem working as intended and that’s finally showing up in the lives that are being saved, and the public health outcomes that we’re seeing in this space,” Haese said.
Haese also said people receiving medications for opioid use disorder — such as buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone — has been helpful. Those are three medications, “that can help people stop or reduce opioid use,” according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
“There’s still a long ways to go, we’re cautiously hopeful, but we’re definitely seeing signs of this turning around,” she said.
One day, our long political conflict will end, as all conflicts do. Until then, there is work that should and can be done regardless of one’s politics.
_____
Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis and a New Ethics Ordinance.
The Bayeux Tapestry has arrived in Britain for the first time in nearly 1,000 years ahead of a sell-out exhibition at the British Museum this year, traveling under police escort during a meticulously choreographed journey from France.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:25 and sunset is 8:34 for 15 hours 9 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 31% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1762, Catherine the Great becomes Empress of Russia after having her husband, Peter III, arrested and forcing him to sign a document of abdication.
These recent years in Whitewater have seen a determined, if economically ignorant, effort to impede the construction of new housing in Whitewater. It has been an anti-growth, anti-progress effort to bolster a few local landlords at the expense of the community. Along the way, a self-interested few have advanced any number of outcome-driven arguments to preserve a housing oligopoly in this small American city. Needless to say, while an outcome-driven approach may serve the self-interest of a few, it’s an intellectually deficient approach. SeeOutcome-Driven Argumentation Is a Deficient Approach.
Consider, in a town with both a high school and a university, a contention advanced by these men while arguing against more single-family homes: that “jobs bring people” and that the way to bring more housing was first to create more jobs within the city.
CLAIMS:
“Jobs are what bring people in. Plain and simple. If you’re going to be an investor and you go into a community and put money into that community, you look at their industrial park.” Public comment, July 17, 2025, at Whitewater Community Development Authority.
“Jobs bring people. People do not bring jobs.” Public comment, October 13, 2025, at Whitewater Planning Commission.
“I would think that you would have businesses come in, give them the land for free so that you get the jobs here. And then people will commute here and then to those jobs and say, hey, this is a great place to live, so let’s buy a place or even rent.” Public comment, January 20, 2026, at Whitewater Common Council.
ASSESSMENT:
These claims about Whitewater’s economy are both too simplistic and, as it turns out, false. Anyone who understood Whitewater’s economy and presented it honestly would know that Whitewater already has more people working within the city than employed residents living within it. Indeed, there are nearly1,000 people who work in this city but commute and live elsewhere.
A presentation from the Community Development Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Division of Extension notes both that there is no one-way relationship between jobs and residency and that — critically — Whitewater already has a surplus of local jobs over residents:
See City of Whitewater Strategic Plan 2023–2025, app. 3, Community and Economic Data, Presented March 8, 2023 (2023).
If jobs alone were sufficient to bring residents, more of Whitewater’s workers would already live here. We have large numbers of workers in the city without residences here. We already have the jobs, so to speak. (This libertarian blogger will not argue against even more job creation — keep going. The key point is that the claim that we need more jobs to justify housing is false.)
This worker surplus relative to resident workers has been true for years, and yet when speaking before Whitewater’s public bodies these gentlemen have the temerity to tell Whitewater’s own representatives that what’s well-known is false.
Their claims are feeble attempts to convince people to accept a self-serving falsehood over the truth of this community’s daily life. Anyone of normal powers of observation and familiarity with our local economy knows we have a jobs surplus in Whitewater. Who will you believe, so to speak: these landlords or your own eyes?
These claims are merely one more embarrassing attempt to undermine housing options for residents, for their own self-interest.
These gentlemen present themselves as bears but reason more like hamsters.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 88. Sunrise is 5:24 and sunset is 8:35 for 15 hours 11 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 41.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1776, church bells (possibly including the Liberty Bell) are rung after John Nixon delivers the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.
You know, one might have listened to a few local men — landlords and lobbyists, mostly — and been told that after 1.20.25, Whitewater’s problems had been solved: manufacturing would return to this continent, prices would drop, rousting immigrants would solve housing shortages, and growth would lead us to a new golden age. Peace and prosperity.
The global economy is set to slow sharply in 2026 after the war with Iran disrupted energy supply chains and triggered a fresh bout of inflation, the International Monetary Fund warned on Wednesday.
The forecasts reflect the damaging toll from the decision by the United States and Israel to attack Iran this year. Those attacks spurred Iranian retaliation on energy infrastructure in the region, destabilizing a world economy that had already been rocked by the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Global output is poised to fall to 3 percent in 2026 from 3.5 percent last year, according to an update for the I.M.F.’s World Economic Outlook. That is slightly slower than the fund’s April projection of 3.1 percent growth, underscoring the protracted nature of the conflict.
The United States is projected to have even lower growth than the world average, as “[o]utput projections in the United States held steady from April at 2.3 percent.”
During the last decade, while controlling the policy of the old Community Development Authority, some of these same men admitted that their leadership of that public body left Whitewater as a low-income community. SeeA Candid Admission from the [Old] Whitewater CDA.
And yet, and yet, after mucking up this city’s policy in the last decade, these gentlemen have presumed to offer policy advice this decade that has been nothing more than a transparent attempt to limit the housing supply for their self-interest as incumbent landlords. Avarice is not credible policy advice. They’ve a right to speak; there is no reason to take them seriously on policy.
These gentlemen offer no economics worth considering, and every day of America’s present condition should make that plain to this city’s residents.
_____
Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
A rare drone video from Mount Etna showed a red-hot stream of lava appearing to pour into a deep summit opening near the Northeast Crater — an unusual interaction between two of the Sicilian volcano’s main craters.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 86. Sunrise is 5:24 and sunset is 8:35 for 15 hours 11 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning gibbous with 53.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1928, sliced bread is sold for the first time (on the inventor’s 48th birthday) by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.
It’s because of American ingenuity that we use the expression ‘the greatest thing since sliced bread.’ A machine that slices bread is, in fact, ingenious. And so — a post today about one of our country’s many useful inventions, created nearly a century ago.
In this Weird History deep dive, we uncover the surprising origin story behind sliced bread, discuss how it revolutionized everyday life and explain why it became the gold standard for innovation. From the disaster that forced its inventor to invent it twice, to the rise of Wonder Bread, to the World War II era ban that took sliced bread off supermarket shelves, this is the strange, fascinating story of how a simple loaf changed the world forever.
_____
Upcomingposts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
