It’s Groundbreaking Part Deux for Whitewater today. Last September, there was a groundbreaking for the tech park, and today there’s one for the Innovation Center. (I’ve no word on whether there will be upcoming celebrations for the warmest tech park afternoon in July, smallest squirrel to frolic nearby, or best children’s depiction of a taxpayer-funded white elephant.)
So how’s it going with all those taxpayer stimulus funds and taxpayer municipal debt, for a taxpayer-supported anchor tenant?
Great! Whitewater officials have thrown away less than they expected. I’m sure they’d appreciate your praise and appreciation.
Thanks very much to everyone who submitted an opinion on whether there should be comments at FREE WHITEWATER. I thought I’d publish a non-binding poll about whether to include moderated comments on some or all posts.
Most respondents, a bit more than half, voted for comments on some posts, designated as ‘Open Forum’ feature. (The poll had more respondents than any I’ve published previously.)
So, I’ll work on how to craft an Open Forum/Comments post, probably for publication weekly. (I’ve already modified the website to be able to accept comments for designated posts.) Of course, readers will be able to submit comments pseudonymously or anonymously, if they’d like.
I very much appreciate the many responses that I’ve received. Although readers well know that one of the characteristics of FREE WHITEWATER is writing and publishing posts as I see fit, readers’ comments, opinions, and poll results matter.
It’s a measure of a stagnant, mediocre political class that it substitutes ever-more flamboyant rhetoric for ordinary language.
A normal, common person might describe a meeting as “pretty good, but a lit too long.” By contrast, cheerleaders of all things status quo would describe that event differently: “The exciting and informative meeting, described by everyone in attendance as the best discussion on mushroom growing they had ever heard, was another landmark triumph for local agriculture, already among the most advanced in the nation.”
We’ve people who write about their own supposed accomplishments (often without disclosing their roles) in the stilted language of party apparatchiks.
Descriptions like this are silly to most people, who rather prefer plain-spoken, simple descriptions. There’s a lot of color in American descriptions, but it’s a lively, local flavor, free of tedious puffery.
Places that are troubled, that cannot overcome persistent problems — often because they will not even own up to them — are ones who speak with the stilted and excessive phrases of a party bureaucrat:
Comrade Yuri Yoshenko, a loyal citizen of our noble motherland, and humble worker from State Bakery No. 2357, successfully prepared seventeen-hundred crescent rolls for the Third Party Congress, in a record time of six minutes, thirty-two seconds. Selfless party leaders from across our eternal workers’ paradise, gathered to celebrate the latest advances in science, industry, and anti-fascist crowd control, commended Yoshenko for his unprecedented, accomplishment.
When asked how he was able to make crescent rolls faster than anyone else in this classless society, Yoshenko credited his unthinking commitment to the motherland, an unwillingness to fall victim to decadent practices of capitalistic exploitation, and a steady diet of wholesome rye bread & pure water from mountain springs.
Good job, Comrade! The workers of the motherland salute you and your courageous devotion to advanced, scientific dialectical materialism!
We don’t see commendations so extreme, because we don’t live in a country so ideological that every act is a political statement.
Sadly, a preening, third-tier elite (such an elite as it might be), will speak more like this than normal people will. They’ll talk and write as I satirized in my example about praise for a local meeting on mushroom growing. Nothing will ever be simply a good try, no job will be simply a nice effort but with room for improvement.
Most of all, no official will ever do wrong. Every bureaucrat and entrenched incumbent will be a selfless and noble public servant, reflecting only on the good of his fellow citizens, and always representative of the most advanced principles of his enlightened station.
It’s a lot of nonsense, nothing more than self-praise among the same circle of back-patters.
Today’s forecast calls for a sunny day, with a high of fifty-seven degrees.
This afternoon, at 4 PM, there will be a groundbreaking ceremony for Whitewater’s multi-million dollar, taxpayer-funded Innovation Center. If you’re not able to attend, you can always catch the video of the groundbreaking for the Whitewater University Tech Park, held in September 2009:
http://www.blip.tv/file/2688983
If they’d wanted, those so inclined might simply have set up a large screen near the site of the future Innovation Center, and projected the prior ceremony’s video, without the need for any attendees.
1791: Samuel Finley Breese Morse, inventor of the practical electromagnetic telegraph, is born in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He’ll also make waves in the art world and in politics.
Morse’s father, Jedidiah, was the co-inventor of cerographic sterotypy (a wax-based printing process), and he improved the bathometer (for measuring water depth). He also wrote and edited geography textbooks and with his brother founded the New York Observer.
S.F.B. Morse went to Yale College, were he studied under mathematician Jeremiah Day and chemist Benjamin Silliman. Neither noticed any particular spark in their young student….
He helped found the National Academy of Design in 1826 and served as its first president all the way through 1845. He also enjoyed considerable popularity as a lecturer on art.
Morse returned to Europe in 1829 to study the old masters, and he stayed in France and Italy until 1832. By the time he returned, he was regarded as one of America’s foremost painters.
Congress was deciding who should paint four of the great panels on the walls of the rotunda of the Capitol Building. Four of the eight panels had already been completed by John Trumbull, president of the American Academy of Fine Arts, from which Morse’s group had seceded.
Many people — Morse included — expected Morse to be among those chosen to paint the four remaining panels. Former President John Quincy Adams, who was then a representative from Massachusetts, submitted a resolution to allow foreign artists to do some of the work, suggesting that American painters had not yet achieved the caliber of greatness required for such monumental work.
Novelist James Fenimore Cooper, a friend of Morse, wrote an anonymous letter to the New York Post defending the native talent. In the midst of a running feud between Morse and Trumbull, the letter’s effect was the reverse of what Cooper intended.
The committee in charge of selecting the artists thought that Morse had written the letter, and they rejected him as a possible candidate. (The panels were eventually painted by John Vanderlyn, William Henry Powell, John Gadsby Chapman and Robert Walter Weir, with all of whom you are no doubt familiar.)
To console him, Morse’s friends got together and commissioned a work from him. He made a few sketches but decided his career as an artist was over. He returned the advances on the commission and never picked up a brush again.
The downturn in his artistic fortunes would be a boon to communications.
On the ship back from Europe in 1832, Morse had started to contemplate the concept of transmitting messages instantaneously by using electricity. And the more he thought about it, the more he became fascinated with it.
Taking a professorship in art at New York University to support himself, Morse worked four years to produce his first model of the telegraph. He also took time to run for mayor of New York City on the anti-immigrant, anti-Abolitionist ticket of the Nativist Party. He lost.
Morse applied for a patent on the telegraph in 1837 and gave the first public exhibition of his device to scientists the following year. He ran for mayor as the Nativist Party candidate again in 1841. He lost again.
Morse petitioned Congress for development funds to work out the practical problems of the telegraph and to build a proof-of-concept system. Congress gave him $30,000 (more than $800,000 in today’s money) in 1842 to build a test line from Baltimore to Washington, D.C.
The first official transmission on the completed 41-mile line came May 24, 1844, with the grandiose message: “What hath God wrought?” (What hath Sam writ?)….
A century after the invention of the telegraph, biographer Carleton Mabee called Morse the American Leonardo. But Morse had once written to Cooper, “I have no wish to be remembered as a painter, for I never was a painter.”
Here’s the second of two posts on cosmetology. (I’ll tackle all manner of topics at FREE WHITEWATER.)
The post is about a Texas salon owner who is among those who brought a venerable practice, eyebrow threading, to the Lone Star state.
It may seem new to us, but it has been practiced safely abroad, and American customers have come to like it, too. (Eyebrow threading doesn’t use chemicals, as do current, entrenched procedures.)
Regrettably, regulators want to force eyebrow threaders to submit to expensive classes that they don’t need, and that would not address eyebrow threading specifically, or they’ll shut the practitioners down.
These expensive classes enrich the government-approved course provider, but have nothing to do with eyebrow threading.
State requirements like this are a threat to economic liberty and consumer choice, but a boon to course providers.
Readers can guess correctly that I don’t spend much time considering cosmetology.
Unfortunately, some bureaucrats spend too much time regulating cosmetology. These regulations often inhibit new procedures, favor incumbent businesses over newcomers, and insist on unnecessary and expensive licensing. (The price for mandated coursework benefits, first and foremost, those who are in the business of offering courses.)
Fish pedicures may sound odd, but they’re common in Asia, and have been offered there to customers’ satisfaction. American patrons should be able to enjoy the same treatment (however unusual it may sound).
Banning the practice from salons doesn’t advance health; it bolsters incumbent businesses against competition, and ignores consumer wishes.
I received the following press release about an upcoming presentation to be given in Whitewater. Here are the details —
Recent US immigrant and Madison resident, Ahmed Etmayesh, age 27, will tell the story of his Iraqi family as they navigated the regime of Baathist Party, the US occupation, and the insurgency. Ahmed’s family’s story is animated by the fact that they are members of a religious minority in Iraq, the Bahá’í Faith. During this time, his family members suffered imprisonment, kidnappings, and death. At the same time, Ahmed’s story resonates with the hope that is deeply rooted in the human spirit. Ahmed arrived in Madison from Baghdad only 9 weeks ago to join his American bride. Join us for fresh insights into America’s 8 year war in Iraq from the perspective of someone who has lived through an entire lifetime of national conflict. Ahmed’s talk will be enhanced by a 50 slide PowerPoint presentation.
Ahmed & Kate Etmayesh
May 2, Sunday, 1 PM
143 W Main St., Whitewater, WI
Wisconsin Community Mental Health Counseling Center/Deeper Insight Art Gallery
I’ve an update to a story about Debbie Millier, a third-tier con artist, but a first-tier screwball. In 2008, I posted about Miller’s attempt to defraud a restaurant, by claiming that she found a rat in her food. Here’s what I wrote, in a post entitled, “Ratology“:
Most people can tell the difference between a wild rat and a white laboratory rat, but apparently not every alleged con artist sees the importance of the difference.
The Wisconsin State Journalreports that Debbie Miller, aged 41, of Appleton
….claimed to find the rat in her lunch April 17 as she ate at the upscale Seasons Restaurant in Grand Chute, according to the criminal complaint.
She threatened to alert the media unless the owners paid her $500,000, the complaint said.
The owners turned the rat over to their insurance company. Investigators there determined the rodent was a white laboratory rat, not a wild rat, the complaint said.
Tests also suggested the rodent had been cooked in a microwave, but the restaurant doesn’t use microwaves in cooking.
(Emphasis added)
I am a blogger, and not a certified, credentialed ratologist, but even I could easily tell a lab rat from a wild one. What’s more, I could tell the difference between convection and microwave cooking. If I could tell, a restaurant could probably tell, too.
Hoyer regrets calling protests un-American http://bit.ly/a667GX
about 16 hours ago via Seesmic
Jeffrey Kaye: Arizona Republicans Reject Free Market; Opt for Big Government http://huff.to/bIJdmd
about 17 hours ago via web
Sign it! Wisconsin State Journal: Raw milk bill passes Assembly, heads to Gov. Doyle http://bit.ly/d2vBgg
6:47 PM Apr 23rd via web
WI Gov Poll: Dead Heat In Badger State » FREE WHITEWATER http://bit.ly/afmqPU
6:45 PM Apr 23rd via web
Subway – probably the best sub shop chain in America
12:33 PM Apr 23rd via Seesmic
RT @IJ: PRESS RELEASE: IJ Calls on U.S. Supreme Court To Protect Freedom of Speech from Mandatory Disclosure Laws: http://bit.ly/dm4OGL
12:30 PM Apr 23rd via Seesmic
RT @reasonmag: The Supreme Court’s ‘Robustly Libertarian View’ of Free Speech http://ow.ly/1BkEQ
3:33 PM Apr 21st via Seesmic
RT @reasonmag: Reason.tv: Demonizing DDT—Challenging a scare campaign that has cost millions of lives http://ow.ly/1BeLw
2:08 PM Apr 21st via Seesmic
Vapid theory that one should celebrate everything, everyday Whitewater’s town fathers take that injunction as literally as anyone on earth
1:56 PM Apr 21st via Seesmic
I sometimes wonder if it’s a prerequisite for Whitewater, WI’s bureaucrats to be theater majors, as they love nothing so much as a show
1:47 PM Apr 21st via Seesmic
Cato Institute
A word of encouragement for all who believe in limited government http://bit.ly/cCUFAW
12:19 PM Apr 21st via API
Calfornia’s fiscal and economic problems – destined to get worse Every other community in America should take heed http://bit.ly/avoaDg
4:12 PM Apr 20th via Seesmic
From Cato – The Struggle to Limit Goverment: A Modern Political History http://bit.ly/btWFIY
11:37 AM Apr 20th via Seesmic
President Obama’s job rating in Wisconsin stands at 48 percent approve, 52 percent disapprove. Retiring Gov. Jim Doyle (D) has a weak 37 percent approval rating.
Barrett holds his own, despite a net negative? That’s something interesting.
From the Onion, America’s finest news source, comes a story of foreign innovation that merits commendation —
VERTUS, FRANCE – In an effort to provide second-place finishers with a taste of the champagne enjoyed by true winners, vintner Duval-Leroy unveiled a new sparkling wine Monday designed to be bitterly consumed by runners-up.
“‘Deuxieme’ balances the sweetness of near-triumph with the acrid aftertaste of once again falling just short,” company spokesman Henri Babineaux said. “It is less effervescent but higher in alcohol content, ideal for sipping quietly in a rapidly emptying locker room.”
I posted a press release earlier this week from the Wisconsin Potato & Vegetable Growers Association. They’ve issued an updated release. Here it is —
The Wisconsin Potato & Vegetable Growers Association (WPVGA) recently announced that a fund has been established to offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of any individual or group for stealing metal such as copper or aluminum from WPVGA members’ farms.
Anyone with information about metal theft is asked to contact Detective Gary Koehmstedt with the Portage County Crime Stoppers at 715-346-1400 or 888-349-6600.
The reward fund, which was used successfully in past years, will pay a significant sum of money for information leading to the arrest and conviction of people responsible for these thefts.
I’ve been writing for nearly three years now, and I receive a good bit of email, from places near and (sometimes) surprisingly far. Every so often, I have thought about adding moderated comments to this website, for some posts. Moderated, because this website is a private publication, and a private publisher need not accept every submission. Some posts, because a more focused location for comments would make reviewing submissions simpler and faster.
So, here’s a non-binding poll, listing possible suggestions for a comment section.
One key point — I am reminded of the way that David Boaz of Cato once ended a column at the Guardian’s website: “have at it.” There’s a lot of strength in that invitation, one that I believe — Go ahead, take up a counter-argument if you’d like.
I’d also have that sort of debate, column by column, with anyone in the city, on any agreed-upon topic. One is not motivated by a desire to win the exchange (that being uncertain, in any case); one begins and persists through sincere conviction. With that conviction, any person may contend against all the world.
The poll will stay open through Monday at midnight. I’ll post on the results Tuesday.
