Category Archive 'Wisconsin'
29 Oct 2014

“People May Not Always Understand Why, But an Armored Vehicle is Almost a Necessity Now”

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ArmoredCar

The town of Stettin, Wisconsin sent 24 cops and an armored car to collect a civil judgement from a 75-year-old man. The sheriff captain explained that the old man was known to be “argumentative.”

Journal Sentinel story

Reason story

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

07 Jun 2012

Had to Happen: Hitler Hears About Wisconsin

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07 Jun 2012

Best Post-Wisconsin Tweet

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06 Jun 2012

“Wisconsin = Stalingrad”

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German socialists surrender at Stalingrad.

Lexington Green is in a gloating mood this morning.

Mr. Walker’s victory is the Stalingrad of the Left.

They sought this recall election.

They chose to fight here.

They made it into a symbol and a do-or-die fight.

They threw everything they had into it.

And they lost it all.

Hubris led to Nemesis, to catastrophe.

The tide has turned.

On to Kursk.

On to Berlin.

On to

    November

.

26 Feb 2012

Before Photoshop

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There were tall tale postcards available in the early years of the last century. Here is a collection mosty from Wisconsin.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

05 Aug 2011

Connecticut Mountain Lion, Update

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A Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection staff member examining the dead mountain lion at the Sessions Woods Wildlife Center in Burlington, Connecticut

Science News came up with some more information on the mountain lion killed in Milford on Connecticut’s Wilbur Cross Parkway in June.

Original story

[H]air and fecal matter [from the exactly same cougar] had been collected more than a year earlier by biologists tracking the Connecticut-bound cougar across Wisconsin. First spotted in Champlin, Minn., in December 2009, biologists tracked him as he zig-zagged through Wisconsin, leaving behind a trail of paw prints, hair and poop.

Even in Wisconsin — with its bears and wolves — cougars are unexpected visitors, says mammalian ecologist Adrian Wydeven of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in Park Falls.

There have been only four confirmed cougars in that state since 2008, so when the traveling cougar appeared, Wydeven and his team kept a watchful eye on his movements. From December 2009 through late spring 2010 they haunted the cat’s trail, collecting samples and sending them to the lab. In December, a trail camera captured a cougar prowling through the evening snow near an area where hair had been sampled earlier, providing scientists with a glimpse of the cat.

Then, after another trailside portrait in May 2010, the cat disappeared.

The next time he appeared was more than a year later and a half-continent away, just a few miles from the Connecticut shore. Scientists don’t know much about the cat’s journey between Wisconsin and Connecticut, but wildlife biologist Clayton Nielsen of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale speculates the cat probably crossed Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, then wound his way down through New York. “There’s no real way of knowing,” he says. “But going south through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio — that’s very poor habitat, with a high likelihood that people would see the animal.”

Nielsen, who is studying cougars in the Midwest, says while roaming young males are increasing in the area, there are still no known breeding populations east of the Black Hills, except for an endangered group of less than 100 in and around the Florida Everglades. Scientists hypothesize that the Connecticut cat was wandering in search of food and a mate — but since he didn’t find a mate, he kept on moving. Female cougars don’t travel nearly as far as males, which limits the establishment of new breeding populations. But, Nielsen hypothesizes, if a few females made similar journeys, it’s plausible that a cougar population could re-establish itself farther east.

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David Baron wrote a kind of obituary for the Connecticut cougar in the form of a New York Times editorial, provocatively titled The Cougar Behind Your Trash Can:

Thanks to the South Dakota cat and its incredible journey, residents of the Eastern United States can now experience the fear and thrill that come with living below the top of the food chain. America has grown a bit less tame.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

08 Apr 2011

Watch Them Turn on a Dime

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Yesterday’s later-found-to-be-erroneous reports of JoAnne Kloppenburg’s narrow victory in the Wisconsin State Supreme Court race were hailed by HuffPo’s Amanda Terkel as making that election a “nationally watched bellwether on the electorate’s mood” and a “watershed moment for Wisconsin and a Waterloo for Scott Walker” that “should give Republicans… pause.”

But, whoops! it turned out that a computer error by a red-faced County Clerk had misplaced more than 14,000 votes from the city of Brookfield. Once the missing votes were added to the tally, Justice David Prosser zoomed into a lead of 7,582 votes over his challenger.

Mary Katherine Hamm observed via Twitter: Small, state-wide election with vital national implications soon to have no national implications whatsoever.

16 Mar 2011

Watch Out, America, Professor Leiter Is Starting to Get Angry

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Brian Leiter

Brian Leiter, the University of Chicago’s John P. Wilson Professor of Law and Director of its Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values, was so moved by recent events in Wisconsin that he predicted on his personal blog that the time is rapidly approaching when it will be necessary to contemplate terrorist violence.

[T]he Republican criminals in Wisconsin forced through their attack on workers’ rights. … At some point these acts of brazen viciousness are going to lead to a renewed philosophical interest in the question of when acts of political violence are morally justified, an issue that has, oddly, not been widely addressed in political philosophy since Locke. … [T]he attack [sic] on fundamental rights of collective bargaining, assuming they stand, are going to raise hard issues about civil disobedience and other forms of unlawful resistance on which philosophers might make a contribution. [emphasis added]

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How quickly the lefty mind turns toward violence.

observes the divine Miss Althouse.

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James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, was deservedly derisive about the intimidation value of the philosophical threat.

Having long viewed academia with a jaundiced eye, we’re inclined to view the Leiter post more with amusement than disgust. Just imagine if a Wisconsin businessman got a letter from a philosopher:

    Please be informed that I have recently completed an article arguing that acts of political violence are morally justified when businessmen fail to support the dedicated public employees who serve our communities. As soon as the peer-review process is complete, I expect it to be published in the prestigious journal Terrorism & Political Violence.

Really strikes fear into you, doesn’t it? Leiter seems more like a character from Monty Python than “On the Waterfront.”

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Kenneth Anderson, at the Volokh Conspiracy, began contemplating whether or not the good professor’s Gedankendrohung (“thought threat”) should be humorously compared to an article from The Onion.

I humbly tug my academic forelock before Professor Leiter, whose greater brains and greater virtue I’ll cheerfully concede upfront. Still, the rapidity with which Professor Leiter reaches, however coyly or indirectly or teasingly or hintingly, to justifications, or thinking this suddenly would be a good moment for talking about justifications, for political violence did put me in mind of this news item from the Onion of several years ago.

    In Retrospect, I Guess We Might Have Resorted To Cannibalism A Bit Early

    I have no idea how long we’d been marooned when we started edging toward Jerry. Twenty, thirty minutes, time has little meaning when you’re in a situation like that. It wasn’t a spoken decision, either. We just all looked at each other and knew something had to be done. …

I feel somewhat the same about Professor Leiter’s call (purely in the philosophical abstract, you understand) to reconsider political violence — you know, this might be an appeal just a tad early in the saga of criminal and illegitimate and unjust oppression. I leave it to Professor Leiter to say definitively, but I wonder if Locke might not also agree.

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Adam Freedman, at Ricochet, took Brian Leiter a bit more seriously.

[I]t is clear that Leiter thinks that Walker’s move to limit — not eliminate — collective bargaining rights for public employees is literally something that might justify, say, killing a bunch of Republicans. In an update to his blog, here’s how this philosopher-king explains his rationale:

“1. Collective bargaining is, per the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a human right.

2. There are circumstances in which violations of human rights call for unlawful actions, including violence.”

And that’s it. Because the elected representatives of the People of Wisconsin want to pass a law that may conflict with some charter passed by a bunch of unelected UN windbags (but never enshrined in US law), Leiter wants blood.

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On his return from the Very Important Conference on metaethics and legal philosophy which he had been attending, Professor Leiter rapidly retreated from the barricades, placing the bottle with a suspicious-looking rag at its mouth deep in his pocket, endeavored to look innocent, and explained in an update:

[I]t is quite natural for philosophers to ask (this is, after all, a blog aimed at philosophy teachers and students) whether the current circumstances–in which Wisconsin and other states are launching an attack on the human rights of organized workers–are ones in which unlawful resistance, violent or not, to the violation of human rights could be morally justified. Contrary to Professor Althouse’s invention of an answer, which she then attributes to me, I in fact do not know what the answer is to that question.

He also assured Mr. Freedman over at Ricochet.

I do not advocate violence in Wisconsin. … I expect most philosophers are likely to conclude, even if they think Wisconsin’s attack on collecting bargaining rights wrong, that violent civil disobedience would not be justified.

To which one can only respond:

03 Mar 2011

Unionized Teachers: The Results Compared

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Iowahawk catches Paul Krugman lying with figures and nails his slimy hide to the barn door.

Please pardon this brief departure from my normal folderol, but every so often a member of the chattering class issues a nugget of stupidity so egregious that no amount of mockery will suffice. Particularly when the issuer of said stupidity holds a Nobel Prize.

Case in point: Paul Krugman. The Times’ staff economics blowhard recently typed, re the state of education in Texas:

    And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.

Similarly, The Economist passes on what appears to be the cut-‘n’-paste lefty factoid du jour:

    Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:

    South Carolina – 50th
    North Carolina – 49th
    Georgia – 48th
    Texas – 47th
    Virginia – 44th

    If you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country.

The point being, I suppose, is that unionized teachers stand as a thin chalk-stained line keeping Wisconsin from descending into the dystopian non-union educational hellscape of Texas. Interesting, if it wasn’t complete bullshit. …

[A] state’s “average ACT/SAT” is, for all intents and purposes, a proxy for the percent of white people who live there. In fact, the lion’s share of state-to-state variance in test scores is accounted for by differences in ethnic composition. Minority students – regardless of state residence – tend to score lower than white students on standardized test, and the higher the proportion of minority students in a state the lower its overall test scores tend to be.

Please note: this has nothing to do with innate ability or aptitude. Quite to the contrary, I believe the test gap between minority students and white students can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic status. And poverty. And yes, racism. And yes, family structure. Whatever combination of reasons, the gap exists, and it’s mathematical sophistry to compare the combined average test scores in a state like Wisconsin (4% black, 4% Hispanic) with a state like Texas (12% black, 30% Hispanic). …

So how does brokeass, dumbass, redneck Texas stack up against progressive unionized Wisconsin?

2009 4th Grade Math

White students: Texas 254, Wisconsin 250 (national average 248)
Black students: Texas 231, Wisconsin 217 (national 222)
Hispanic students: Texas 233, Wisconsin 228 (national 227)

2009 8th Grade Math

White students: Texas 301, Wisconsin 294 (national 294)
Black students: Texas 272, Wisconsin 254 (national 260)
Hispanic students: Texas 277, Wisconsin 268 (national 260)

2009 4th Grade Reading

White students: Texas 232, Wisconsin 227 (national 229)
Black students: Texas 213, Wisconsin 192 (national 204)
Hispanic students: Texas 210, Wisconsin 202 (national 204)

2009 8th Grade Reading

White students: Texas 273, Wisconsin 271 (national 271)
Black students: Texas 249, Wisconsin 238 (national 245)
Hispanic students: Texas 251, Wisconsin 250 (national 248)

2009 4th Grade Science

White students: Texas 168, Wisconsin 164 (national 162)
Black students: Texas 139, Wisconsin 121 (national 127)
Hispanic students: Wisconsin 138, Texas 136 (national 130)

2009 8th Grade Science

White students: Texas 167, Wisconsin 165 (national 161)
Black students: Texas 133, Wisconsin 120 (national 125)
Hispanic students: Texas 141, Wisconsin 134 (national 131)

To recap: white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin.

02 Mar 2011

Things Turn Ugly in Wisconsin

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Union demonstrators chanting “Shame! Shame!” (rather hyperbolically and monotonously, I thought), and eventually “You Suck!”, hounded and ultimately trapped GOP State Senator Glenn Grothman near the doors of one of the entrances to the Badger State’s Capitol. (around 2:50)

It was beginning to look like the mob was close to attacking the white-haired state senator, when Democratic Rep. Brett Hulsey (wearing orange pro-union t-shirt) interposed himself between Grothman and the mob and managed to hold them off, as alarmed demonstration leaders in the rear hastily changed the chanting to “Peace-ful, Peace-ful.”

Remember Congressman Mike Capuano’s (D-8thMA) February 22nd statement that “Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.”?

Capuano’s rhetorical call to spill blood in the cause of Unionism (later retracted and apologized for, after the comment received national attention) might very easily have been responded to in reality yesterday. Republican legislators had better take to approaching the capitol with bodyguards or police escorts.

19 Feb 2011

The Battle of Madison

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40,000 angry protestors flocked to the Wisconsin capital yesterday

Walter Russell Mead explains the nature of the struggle currently underway in Wisconsin, and predicts that however this particular battle goes, a necessary revolution is underway, a war has begun which the left is certain to lose.

[I]t’s just possible that the disturbances in Madison, Wisconsin mark what will ultimately prove to be a bigger turning point in world history.

In the heart of Blue State America, we are seeing a challenge to some of the fundamental assumptions behind the progressive state, and we could conceivably be watching both the birth pangs of a new social model and the first big step in America’s transformation into a true 21st century economy. …
The problem is that the way we do government in this country has to change — and it will have to change in ways that put the interests of those who don’t have government jobs ahead of those who do. The number of people employed by government is going to have to shrink; much more work will have to be done by many fewer hands — and many tasks historically done in government bureaucracies by life-tenured employees will be done by private sector workers employed by outside contractors. Nor can government workers enjoy pension plans and health benefits better than those widely available in the private sector; the days of defined benefit pensions for government workers are drawing rapidly to a close.

The Battle of Madison is part of a national struggle over the future of American society. The public sector unions and their allies believe in what I’ve called liberalism 4.0, the twentieth century’s dominant set of progressive ideas. It was the ideology of a society made up of big unions, big corporations and big government. The Big Three car companies, Big Three networks and the Big One phone company (back when AT&T had a legal monopoly on providing telephone service) were held in check by government regulation and union power rather than by free competition.

Technological change, global competition, and the rise of a more dynamic economy have wrecked the old social model, but old institutions, old habits of mind and old interest groups don’t disappear overnight. In many ways, public sector unions and government employees are the last great citadel of the Blue Social Model and what we see in Madison (as well as Ohio and Tennessee) is a way of life fighting for survival in the last ditch. We should not be surprised that the battle is fierce, the tactics ruthless, the polarization intense: this is not just a struggle between interest groups, it is a conflict over basic ideas about how the world does or should work.

Regardless of what happens in Madison this week, it is a hopeless battle. 4.0 liberalism and the Blue Social Model aren’t immoral and they helped many Americans enjoy roughly two generations of unprecedented prosperity — but they are unworkable in the contemporary world. States that don’t make the kind of changes that Wisconsin seeks will face the problems that loyally blue Illinois does now: staggering pension bills that undermine the state’s credit and cripple its ability to attract and hold business. An article in the New York Times, that bastion of blue thinking, mocks Illinois’ latest plan to pay its current pension bill with a $3.7 billion bond issue. Note reporters Mary Williams Walsh and Michael Cooper, Illinois “is essentially paying a single year’s bill by adding to its already heavy debt load. That short-term thinking is not unlike Americans taking out home equity loans to pay for cars and vacations before the housing bust.”

However much money the public sector unions fling into the maw of Democratic party politics, the old system is going down.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

18 Feb 2011

Democrats Run and Hide

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Frank J. thinks Governor Walker is making a mistake in trying to find those missing democrat state legislators.

The left’s tactics have gotten increasingly odd as they get less and less popular, and now when confronted with state budget problems they’ve settled on running and hiding. Strangely, Walker has sent the police to find them, but I don’t get why. I guess they’re needed to finalize the bill, but there has to be some way around that. It’s just when you hear the Democrat legislators have fled your state, it’s really odd that your first response would be, “How do I get them back?” The smarter response is, “Can we nationalize this?” We need to find what laws will get Democrats to flee from all the other states and what will cause Obama to leave the White House and run and hide. And if these chase away the Democrats bills are passed in every state, eventually the Democrats will have no option but to flee to Canada — and they’ll probably be much happier there. We certainly will be. And you know what happens when all Democrats flee to Canada? That’s right: We’ve won the future.

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Charles Martin reveals that those democrats selected a rendezvous at Rockford, Illinois which features a restaurant called “The Tilted Kilt,” a Scottish-motif equivalent of Hooters.

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