Too funny.
Via Huffington Post.
Monthly Archives: November 2011
Sports
Packers on national cover of Sports Illustrated
by JOHN ADAMS •
Police
The Shrewd Mr. Flynn
by JOHN ADAMS •
I wrote yesterday about the press battle between the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Milwaukee’s Police Chief Flynn. Conflicts like this often lead to wagon-circling, a self-defeating response. See, The Predictable, Dead-End Response.
And yet, Flynn is sure to have a second term, something unusual for Milwaukee, but common in most departments. Commonly, police commissions go with what they know: they favor incumbents or internal candidates. The advantage an incumbent or internal candidate has is nearly overwhelming.
If that should be so — and it is — what does that say about open applications processes, and the nature of the chief’s role?
On processes. For open processes, it’s not any given outcome, but the process itself, that matters. That process is a general good, but also has occasional practical benefits. Each and every word of a candidate’s application statements may be used as a standard by which to measure conduct in office after his selection. Did he do what he said he would do? Were those words, instead, all just the rhetoric of the moment, the mere parroting of platitudes and pale promises?
There’s a value in measuring actions against good practices, and another value in measuring words against actions.
On the chief’s role. Flynn’s looking for a second term, and he’ll get one, and he has done so shrewdly. Like him or not, the Journal Sentinel sees that Flynn’s a politically clever, nationally-recognized chief. He didn’t get that way by being obvious or outwardly fawning toward Milwaukee’s police commission.
Flynn knows what small-town pols and bureaucrats can’t quite grasp – that a chief’s authority doesn’t depend on shows of closeness with a police commission, but on the public’s direct and immediate support for community safety. Flynn doesn’t need his hand held, nor does he need to make a show of holding anyone else’s hand.
If anything, a smarmy relationship between commission and chief only reveals conflicts of interest, failures of oversight, and embarrassing neediness. Rather than serving the interests of good policing, it only serves as another avenue of legitimate criticism.
Flynn may have made a dozen mistakes, but he’s not made any of the avoidable mistakes that mediocre, dull leaders make. It’s one of the reasons that, unlike middling leaders, he’s likely to survive (even now!) with his standing mostly intact.
Laws/Regulations
Reason’s Nanny of the Month for October 2011
by JOHN ADAMS •
It’s an international edition this month, and the winner is the European Union, as that vast bureaucracy has regulated children’s activities from “baby rattlers (which have brand-new noise restrictions) to blowing up balloons (not to be done by tots under age eight!).”
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 11.2.11
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning,
It’s a rainy day with a high temperature of fifty-four for Whitewater today.
Whitewater’s an old Midwestern town, and her Landmarks Commission meets this afternoon at 5 PM. The Commission’s agenda for the meeting is available online.
Wired has an article about humanity’s domination of the planet. In Making Sense of 7 Billion People, Brandon Keim writes that
According to a back-of-the-envelope calculation, there are about 1.7 million other top-level, land-dwelling, mammalian predators on Earth. Put another way: For every non-human mammal sharing our niche, there are more than 4,000 of us.
In short, humans are Earth’s great omnivore, and our omnivorous nature can only be understood at global scales. Scientists estimate that 83 percent of the terrestrial biosphere is under direct human influence. Crops cover some 12 percent of Earth’s land surface, and account for more than one-third of terrestrial biomass. One-third of all available fresh water is diverted to human use.
Altogether, roughly 20 percent of Earth’s net terrestrial primary production, the sheer volume of life produced on land on this planet every year, is harvested for human purposes — and, to return to the comparative factoids, it’s all for a species that accounts for .00018 percent of Earth’s non-marine biomass.
We are the .00018 percent, and we use 20 percent.
Astounding. If we are so very influential among all of the natural order – and we are – we might expect more of ourselves for the exercise of such unrivaled power over other creatures.
We often don’t, but we should.
Open Government, Police
The Predictable, Dead-End Response
by JOHN ADAMS •
Writing about the feud between Milwaukee’s Chief Flynn and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Bruce Murphy writes that
Experts on police departments will tell you that criticism from outside inevitably results in everyone on the force circling the wagons.
That’s very true. So true and predictable, that it’s more predictable and regular than Old Faithful has ever been. It’s why I’ve mentioned previously that bad organizations often don’t get better, they get worse.
One might think that failed leaders would see this, and would correct past mistakes through a routine of openness and new ideas. They don’t; typically they huddle more closely together. Mostly, this is because weak leaders would prefer the easy path of a small, sycophantic cadre to the better, but harder, scene of a dynamic organization. (It’s also because they isolate and delude themselves from growing criticism.)
In drawing ever closer and inward, the members of a weak organization only compound their mistakes and deficiencies.
The best option for a community is, of course, organizational reform. The second best, though, is exactly the organizational wagon-circling of which Murphy writes. Huddling together only exacerbates existing problems, speeds decline, and makes the case for reform stronger.
One would prefer the first option; as a reformer, one would still readily accept the second, knowing the eventual result is reform.
Via Inside Milwaukee.
City
Residency and the Decline of a Small-town Elite
by JOHN ADAMS •
Small-town Whitewater has a residency requirement for public leadership positions in city government. It’s a sign of the decline of Whitewater’s town squires that they cannot consistently enforce a rule of their own making
Ironically, although I don’t support Whitewater’s mostly narrow and short-sighted town fathers, I’ve supported the residency requirement for two reasons.
First, it applies to leaders who should set an example of living in the community they serve, enjoying its benefits and sharing its burdens. If they’re compensated from the community, they should live in the community that taxes residents for that compensation.
Second, it’s a lawful requirement now, that should be applied equally and fairly to all who fall within its range. (I’d even apply this rule to interim leaders, on the same first reason, listed above.) The residency rule for leaders doesn’t say sometimes, maybe, or when someone feels like following the rules. Within the city – for services and tax purposes — actually means within the city, not kinda, sorta close by.
(If the rule changes, so be it; as long as it’s in force, all leaders should have to comply with it equally.)
Imagine how absurd it would be for someone to say he’d pay his taxes a year from now, or maybe a year after that, or thereafter if Whitewater’s Common Council thought it absolutely necessary.
Similarly, if he ran a stop sign into an empty oncoming street, no one would excuse him for being, well gosh, just halfway out into the road. On the contrary, it would be the municipal offense of the century that a common person did something like that. If he lived near the city, no one would allow him to vote in city elections just because he kinda, sorta lived near the city line.
Although some of Whitewater’s leaders have long been in the habit of making exceptions for themselves, the real story here is that Whitewater’s leaders cannot assure the enforcement of simple rules they, themselves established. Residency was supposed to be evidence of a commitment to Whitewater, to the ‘exceptional’ quality of life here, to all that these leaders had uniquely achieved.
Yet, they lack even the confidence to insist on their own standards. (If they’d really wanted those standards enforced, they would have chosen a better negotiator for the city’s position, too.)
Residency rules? Here today, gone tomorrow.
A stodgy town faction’s ability to enforce even its own standards? Just plain gone.
Politics
Gov. Walker’s Actual Political Standing in Wisconsin (October 2011)
by JOHN ADAMS •
I’m not a Walker supporter, because Gov. Walker’s far from libertarian.
If one is a Walker supporter – as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute surely is – it’s right to see Walker’s political prospects honestly. Despite a bit of spin in a WPRI narrative, a recent poll commissioned and published by WPRI reveals Gov. Walker’s weak political standing.
He’s underwater – 42% approve, 56% disapprove:
11. Now let’s turn to the political scene here in Wisconsin. Overall, do you strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove, or strongly disapprove of the way Scott Walker is handling his job as Governor of Wisconsin?
Strongly approve 24
Somewhat approve 18
Somewhat disapprove 11
Strongly disapprove 45
Don’t know / Refused 2
These results, by the way, are more reliable than airy talk about how well the governor’s policies are being received, or results from dodgy pollsters that partisans reflexively prefer. WPRI has a preference, of course, but they’ve nonetheless candidly published results inauspicious to their own camp.
Politics
Conservative Website FreeRepublic.com to Romney Supporters: ‘ENEMIES OF THE CONSTITUTION … ARE NOT WELCOME HERE’
by JOHN ADAMS •
No real surprise about FreeRepublic.com taking this position, but other rightwing sites may follow, and that’s the bigger deal for Romney.
I’m no fan of Romney, but I wouldn’t consider him an enemy of the Constitution. (He’s more like a younger McCain in his politics, but that similarity only cements his reputation as an enemy of the Constitution for some conservatives.)
Just when one thought 2012 might be a dull rematch match between Obama and McCain Romney….
See, POLITICO.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 11.1.11
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning,
I hope you had a happy Halloween, one of all treats, no tricks. Today will be mostly sunny day with a high of sixty-two in Whitewater – unseasonable, but pleasantly so.
Whitewater’s Common Council resumes budget deliberations tonight. The meeting’s agenda is available online.
At Science News, Rachel Ehrenberg reports that Facebook value overstated, study finds: Researchers warn of a social networking bubble in the offing. She writes that
“It’s not the same volume of the dot-com bubble. That was really widespread,” says coauthor Didier Sornette. Nevertheless, he and colleague Peter Cauwels conclude, a social networking bubble — and its impending pop — loom.
The ETH Zürich researchers argue that determining the value of social networking sites is vastly simpler than with other companies, because there’s a relatively direct link between the number of users and profit. This boils the math down to a simple equation: the number of users times the profit per user. Calculated that way, Facebook’s value is probably in the neighborhood of $15 billion to $20 billion, the team reports online October 6 at arXiv.org.
Twenty billion’s still a huge sum; the discrepancy between the lower figure and the higher one matters most to those basing commitments or investments in the company on a larger number. For day-to-day users, and (day-to-day vendors of Facebook), the company’s dependable. As a matter of valuation, though, it’s significant, as being wrong by a factor of five, for example, is a huge error.
Best bet for a price estimate on any particular day – what people would pay to buy a company. If that’s higher than the study’s estimate, then it’s the study’s estimate that’s in error.
I saw this animated penguin .gif today, although I’m not sure it’s an undoctored photo. If it should be real, then I’d like to thank the penguins involved for their contributions to human amusement. Enjoy.
