Tuesday, October 11th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris@ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Comedy/Drama
Rated PG, 1 hours, 55 minutes (2022).
A widowed cleaning lady in 1950s London falls madly in love with a couture Dior dress and decides that she must have one of her own. After she works, starves, and gambles to raise the funds to pursue her dream she embarks on a Paris Adventure, to the House of Dior.
One can find more information about Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris at the Internet Movie Database.
Thursday in Whitewater will see an even chance of morning showers with a high of 65. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 6:26 PM for 11h 27m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1927, The Jazz Singer, the first prominent “talkie” movie, opens.
Truth precedes preference. Readers at FREE WHITEWATER know that this website has been critical of, and opposed to, Sen. Ron Johnson. (There’s a Thursday morning understatement for you.) When assessing political fortunes, however, the realistic, not the desirable, governs. The trajectory of Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race favors Johnson. Without a fundamental change in messaging, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes will lose this race to incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson.
Yesterday, FREE WHITEWATER‘s daily post included a screenshot of polling averages from FiveThirtyEight that showed Johnson 1.9 points ahead of Barnes. Barnes had been ahead in August, but saw his lead fade as September went on.
The change in these candidates’ prospects has caught national attention. Reid J. Epstein reports Democrats Worry as G.O.P. Attack Ads Take a Toll in Wisconsin (‘Mandela Barnes, the party’s Senate candidate, is now wobbling in his race against Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent’):
Democrats in Wisconsin are wringing their hands about how Mr. Barnes’s political fortunes have sagged under the weight of the Republican advertising blitz. Grumbling about his campaign tactics and the help he is receiving from national Democrats, they worry that he could be one of several of the party’s Senate candidates whose struggles to parry a withering G.O.P. onslaught could sink their candidacies and cost Democrats control of the chamber.
….
It has been an abrupt turnaround for Mr. Barnes since late summer, when he won the Democratic primary by acclimation and opened up a lead in polls over Mr. Johnson, who has long had the lowest approval ratings of any incumbent senator on the ballot this year. But the hail of attack ads from Mr. Johnson and allied super PACs has tanked Mr. Barnes’s standing, particularly among the state’s finicky independent voters.
Republicans have seized in particular on Mr. Barnes’s past progressive stances, including his suggestion in a 2020 television interview that funding be diverted from “over-bloated budgets in police departments” to social services — a key element of the movement to defund the police. Since then, Mr. Barnes has disavowed defunding the police and has called for an increase in funding.
Barnes likely needs a saturating message that’s half reassurance against Johnson’s charges and half reminder on how Johnson’s party has supported, and seeks, national limits on reproductive choices. Barnes was always going to get hit on his views about crime, and his campaign should have made better efforts to inoculate him on this issue. They didn’t, and October is late in the campaign to make the effort.
This libertarian blogger has never supported defending the police (the proposal is a blunt, lazy instrument of public policy), and other Democrats (the ones who dropped out for Barnes) would not have been similarly vulnerable.
Barnes needs more than to remind voters of Johnson’s execrable record; he needs to reassure persuadable Wisconsin voters that he understands their worries over public safety. While some of these worries are overwrought, yet still these voters’ concerns need to be addressed to win the their support.
If they are not convinced, Barnes will lose this race to one of America’s worst senators.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 73. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 6:28 PM for 11h 30m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this date Wisconsin’s first state Constitutional Convention met in Madison. The Convention sat until December 16,1846. The Convention was attended by 103 Democrats and 18 Whigs. The proposed constitution failed when voters refused to accept several controversial issues: an anti-banking article, a homestead exemption (which gave $1000 exemption to any debtor), providing women with property rights, and black suffrage.
The following convention, the Second Constitutional Convention of Wisconsin in 1847-48, produced and passed a constitution that Wisconsin still very much follows today.
Below are weighted polling averages from FiveThirtyEight for Wisconsin’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races.
(The next Marquette Law School Poll will be out on 10.12.22. In FiveThirtyEight’s assessment, the Marquette Law School Poll isn’t the most accurate pollster this election cycle. The Marquette Poll comes in as a solid A/B poll, but Public Policy Polling, Beacon Research, and Trafalgar rank higher. The Marquette Poll is, however, the most famous poll within the state, having successfully marketed itself as a gold standard.)
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 72. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 6:30 PM for 11h 33m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 67.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union launches the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit.
Over the years, Whitewater officials have occasionally admitted that Whitewater has a same-ten-person problem. The aptly-named problem occurs when too few people play too may roles in a community. As there aren’t enough volunteers for all the available roles, the same people show up again and again.
The problem is either that newcomers cannot participate (because someone else will not relinquish a role) or they do not wish to participate (because they’re expected only to acquiesce to incumbent members’ ideas). In both cases, a culture problem (this is my role for life or newcomers can join only if they conform to current practices) prevents community improvement.
The unwillingness or inability to accept newcomers as equals, including considering the newcomers’ points of view, is a principal reason that Whitewater has struggled since the Great Recession.
Old Whitewater had an adaptability problem, indeed an unwillingness to believe that it needed to adapt at all, and so it has mostly faded away. But some obstinate, entitled residents remain.
And so, and so, the government men and women (either elected or appointed) of Whitewater have a choice. Will they continue to think and act as the last generation has, following a course that has has left the city as a low-income community? Alternatively, will they at last look beyond a few to look at all residents of the city?
Free choices (in markets economic or cultural) are by their very nature not under any single person’s control or whim. Obvious point: if this libertarian blogger had the power to will the city in one direction or another, I would never do so. A power to compel like that is a dangerous, if not wicked, power.
There are a few in this town, however, so adamant that they cannot accept even the slightest deviation from their tired, ineffectual orthodoxy under which well-fed private men insist on the use of public funds for their preferred business schemes.
A few are sometimes able to get a smattering of others to join them, and using the crudest and most obvious methods they typically try to create an impression of widespread community concern. A small group that talks big does not make its ideas bigger or better.
A good future, now and always, looks beyond special-interest demands.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 68. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 6:31 PM for 11h 36m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57% of its visible disk illuminated.
There are a thousand opinions about the Russia invasion of Ukraine, but that’s understandable. We are, after all, a nation of hundreds of millions, on a planet of billions.
Opinions about the war, however, are not all of the same quality and reliability. Some profess to advance military recommendations without any military background, and others claim to describe Putin or others in the Russian dictatorship with no background in Russian history, or Ukraine’s history and separate culture.
We’ve been through this with the pandemic, haven’t we? Suddenly every other person became an epidemiologist, virologist, or public health expert. Why rely on those who went to medical school when, after all, everyone had ‘common sense’ and a repository of videos from Rumble.
Those types have been an embarrassment to themselves and America.
I’ve not held myself out as an expert on the pandemic because I’m not an expert in epidemiology or public health. I’ve not held myself out as a scholar of Slavic history and culture (a vast field) because I’m not a scholar of Slavic history.
(Indeed, FREE WHITEWATER is, by design, a blog for all readers; it is not a blog for a particular field or profession. A blog of that latter type would be wholly different.)
People should, as the Whitewater School’s District motto once hoped, be engaged lifelong learners. Part of lifelong learning is reading carefully, among those others who have studied in specific and demanding fields. Lifelong learning does not mean believing — pretending, really — that anyone is an expert merely because he wishes to be.
And so, and so — a reasonable, knowledgeable person realizes that he or she should read from among those who have made credible and creditable careers as experts in particular fields. One looks for the respect these experts have earned. (They may not always be right, as no one is always right, but they are a better starting point that a loon on a park bench or drunk on a barstool.)
When Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine back in February, many believed a Rubicon had been crossed after which the Russian president’s relationship with his elites would never be the same. It was then that Putin began to be seen as a desperate leader, no longer capable of normal interaction with the outside world.
Nonetheless, the feelings of despondency and doom that prevailed among the elites didn’t stop them from continuing to demonstrate loyalty to the president or from feeling collective anger at the West. It helped Putin’s case that many senior officials sincerely held Washington and Brussels responsible for the conflict, blaming them for pushing Russia so far that it had no choice but to take action.
In recent weeks, however, this fragile faith has been rocked by the humiliating Russian retreat from Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, the announcement of a partial mobilization that looks likely to become a full mobilization, and growing doubts over whether Russia can actually win this war. This raises the question of whether the Russian elites are prepared to stick with Putin until the bitter end, particularly amid growing threats to use nuclear weapons.
….
Putin is prepared to keep going until the bitter end and turn everyone into radioactive dust unless Russia is allowed to win in a way it deems satisfactory. The elites are, for now, still prepared to support Putin against Ukraine, but their belief that victory is inevitable is fading. And if there is to be no victory, that leaves two options: defeat, which would mean the collapse of the Putin regime and all the associated risks for the ruling elite, or the nuclear argument, which would mean a universal threat to physical survival.
Stanovaya does not suggest that Russia will fail, but instead observes that Russian elites now see failure as possible.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 67. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 6:33 PM for 11h 39m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 44.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1789, the Bill of Rights is sent to the states for ratification.
There have been television shows about crimes for decades. They’ve found new life in a new medium. Josh Koblin reports Mystery Solved: ‘Dateline’ Finds Path From TV to Podcast Stardom (‘The true crime storytelling that has done so well for so long on television seems to have met a moment in an entirely new medium’):
For years, television franchises and established news media institutions have taken turns trying to adapt to of-the-moment formats, whether digital video, newsletters or podcasts. Many times, the results are awkward and abandoned. “Pivot to video” and Facebook Live are bywords for news media experiments best forgotten.
And yet “Dateline” has transformed itself into a podcast powerhouse, churning out several original series a year, all of which have been hits. In addition, twice a week, “Dateline” opens its vault and turns old segments from the television show into podcasts. The archival material is also a success. On any given day, the “Dateline” podcast with the repurposed TV segments is usually among the top five podcasts on Apple’s charts.
What “Dateline” has done so well for so long on television — true crime, told with relish and deep reporting — appears to have met a moment in an entirely new medium.
“At a time where it is so hard for new television programs to break through, or for new brands to be established, the fact that ours seems to have renewed life? It’s great,” said Liz Cole, the executive producer of “Dateline,” who helps oversee both the TV show and the podcasts.
Listeners have downloaded “Dateline” podcast episodes nearly 800 million times since the first one appeared in 2019, NBC News said. Last year, the show beat out online heavyweights like ESPN, Barstool Sports and Crooked Media in Apple’s rankings of free podcast channels.
Of course, true crime and podcasts go hand in hand. The Hulu comedy “Only Murders in the Building” is explicitly a parody of the ubiquitousness of the genre. And there are plenty of other podcasts on the charts that center on bloody mysteries, with titles like “Morbid,” “Crime Junkie” and “My Favorite Murder.”
Still, the “Dateline” podcasts are helping the genre reach a new audience. The median age of viewers of the Friday night edition of “Dateline” is 63, according to Nielsen. On Spotify, the median age of a “Dateline” podcast listener is 41, according to data from Chartable, which was supplied by NBC News.
When film executive Gavin Smith vanishes, Los Angeles detectives search for clues amid reported sightings and suspicious circumstances. The case takes a dramatic turn when Gavin’s wife reveals painful secrets. Keith Morrison reports.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 69. Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 6:35 PM for 11h 42m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 33.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1908, Ford Model T automobiles are offered for sale at a price of $825.
Dhokra art is one of the world’s oldest art forms. The metal-casting craft has been practiced by tribal families throughout India for 4,500 years. But following an economic reform in 2016 and the rising cost of raw materials, the future of this craft may be in jeopardy.
Editor’s Note: In this video, the translation at 00:53 is incorrect. The correct translation of Rajendra’s quote is “During Covid, our artisans did not have another source of income to fall back on.” Insider regrets the error.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 70. Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 6:36 PM for 11h 44m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1954, the U.S. Navy submarine USS Nautilus is commissioned as the world’s first nuclear-powered vessel.
Wisconsinites are familiar with Fred Prehn, the dentist and cranberry farmer who refused to vacate a public board after his term expired. The WISGOP state senate will not confirm Gov. Evers’s nominated replacement, to ensure that squatter Prehn preserves WISGOP control. SeeTiny Fred Prehn.
However, Prehn is now revealed as more, much more, than an obstinate man. I’ve been critical of Prehn, but allow me to apologize from the deepest place in my loving, libertarian heart. Prehn is more than I’d imaged, and perhaps more than anyone has imagined.
For thousands of years, philosophers have urged people to self-reflect and self-examine. Many have tried, still falling short of this philosophical and spiritual goal. Across the globe, even monks, priests, rabbis, imams, and philosophers have tried but even they have failed to achieve perfect self-awareness.
Behold and rejoice: Fred Prehn has succeeded where these sages have failed.
Laura Schulte of the Journal Sentinelreports on the uncovered text messages that Prehn sent from his phone to conservative operatives.
In one of those messages, Prehn describes himself more accurately, more knowingly, than any person has ever described himself or herself:
“So I might stick around for a while. See what shakes out. I’ll be like a turd in water up there.”
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 64. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 6:38 PM for 11h 47m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 14.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1957, the Green Bay Packers dedicate City Stadium, now known as Lambeau Field, and defeat the Chicago Bears, 21-17. In the capacity crowd of 32,132 is Vice President Nixon.
While teaching a scuba diving lesson this spring, Tamara Thomsen spotted a piece of wood poking out of the sand of Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota. Though many people would’ve thought nothing of it, Thomsen—a maritime archaeologist—had a strong feeling the find was more than just driftwood.
That’s because, about a year earlier, Thomsen had discovered a 1,200-year-old canoe at the same lake in Madison. And her hunch was right: The piece of wood was part of another dugout canoe, this one an estimated 3,000 years old, the Wisconsin Historical Society revealed last week.
“Not a joke: I found another dugout canoe,” Thomsen texted her boss in May, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Sophie Carson.
The canoe—carved around 1,000 B.C.E., likely by ancestors of the Ho-Chunk Nation—is made from a single piece of white oak that stretches 14.5 feet long. Archaeologists believe it’s the oldest canoe ever found in the Great Lakes region by 1,000 years; it’s also the earliest direct evidence of water transportation used by Indigenous peoples in the region.
“This one predates agriculture, predates pottery. This one predates all of Wisconsin’s [effigy] mounds,” says Amy Rosebrough, an archaeologist with the historical society, to the Wisconsin State Journal’s Barry Adams. “I don’t have words for what this is right now. I can’t really think of much that competes with this. I really can’t. I mean Wisconsin has incredible archaeology, but this is stellar.”
Thomsen’s latest find was located only about 100 yards from the canoe she stumbled across in June 2021, while swimming on her day off. The vessels’ close proximity suggests that the shoreline of Lake Mendota, the largest of Madison’s five freshwater lakes, probably shifted over time. Indigenous people likely once lived in ancient villages where the water is now.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 58. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 6:40 PM for 11h 50m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1781, American and French forces backed by a French fleet begin the siege of Yorktown.
Whitewater has begun, only these last few years, a more candid discussion of child poverty within the area, in both the city proper and the school district.
And so, one can find a plain, accurate account of socio-economic conditions in the area, as the school district’s budget director recently presented:
Of the Whitewater Unified School District’s administration and school board: their presentation on need is true, but will this truth be transformative for them? A profound truth should bring a profound transformation in words and deeds. The district’s Central Office will not be able to address this truth through boosterism’s mendacities.
Libertarians — genuine ones — care about poverty and know that for hundreds of millions across this planet, free markets have lifted people across the globe from destitution. These successes did not come from government intervention and did not come from so-called government private ‘partnerships.’ Such partnerships are all-to-often incumbents’ and insiders’ efforts to help themselves to public funds they do not deserve. Cronyism enriches cronies.
That’s why FREE WHITEWATER has doggedly addressed poverty in this community: a it’s topic that should be discussed and a condition that can be alleviated.
Nationally, child poverty figures have dropped, and that presents an initial question: Why?
While this program argues that government spending counted more carefully for each recipient and as an increased amount has lifted many from poverty, it also notes the role of welfare reform and economic growth as causes of national poverty decline. Many of the benefits discussed are wage subsidies through tax credits for working recipients (the working poor).
An emphasis of reform on work benefited all, and poverty fell among children nationally for all races and ethnicities.
If America in aggregate has achieved these gains, then many American communities have achieved their own gains that contribute to national success against poverty.
Whitewater, bluntly, is not among the communities that have seen uplift.
While this libertarian blogger will never hold to the view that others should be silent, when the self-described development men in this town (landlords, bankers, CDA alumni, public relations men) speak they have behind them a generation of public-policy failure.
They have the same rights as other residents, deserving neither less nor more. They do not, however, have the same quality of ideas and proposals as other residents, as they’ve wasted decades on failed ideas and projects.
Their hocus-pocus economic theories will not ameliorate this condition, and their supposed successes (superficial and paltry as they are) have done nothing to improve individual and household incomes in this community.
Ordinary people in Whitewater — and we are all of this kind, a few residents’ sense of entitlement notwithstanding — know that development trickery hasn’t done the trick.
For the community’s well-being, for all of us, it’s stand or fall on this challenge. The consequences of a generation of policy errors have been worse than mere statistics; these consequences have broken the community into shards. Bad economics leads to troubled socio-economics.
Solutions won’t come from the failed past, and won’t adhere to a single orthodoxy. A minimal role for government, but a powerful role for a Dorothy Day figure in Whitewater (whether religious or secular) would do much to slowly heal this community. See Waiting for Whitewater’s Dorothy Day. (It’s impossible to imagine Day, herself, without definite religious views, but other perspectives could still reflect a fundamental, charitable focus.)
While there are parts of Day’s thinking about government that are libertarian, others of her views on economics are decidedly different. (No matter — one prescribes for the patient, not the pharmaceutical representative.)
Free markets are holistic, like good nutrition and exercise: they enrich people each day, and are the foundation of health and prosperity. Government intervention is like both ordinary and emergency medicine: a role for prescribed pills, annual checkups, and emergency trauma care.
A charitable role like Day’s would be different from either: part daily routine, part basic needs, but also healing through counseling and a transformed perspective.
Whitewater needs all of this now.
Many years ago, I thought Whitewater might have found her own, contemporary version of Dorothy Day. I was mistaken, and sadly, hauntingly so: our present would have been so much better for a past like that.
And so, and so — one carries on, while yet waiting hopefully.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 56. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 6:42 PM for 11h 53m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1777, Lancaster, Pennsylvania becomes the capital of the United States for one day after Congress evacuates Philadelphia.
In Whitewater, for many years, there has lingered the notion that one can govern and influence through statements, press releases, or marketing efforts. While one can try to do so, one cannot do so effectively and beneficially for the community. One’s claims, one’s advocacy, must align with human nature and present conditions to be effective and beneficial. Nature and present conditions set the bounds of effectiveness and benefit.
In the alternatives of maneuver (through press releases and awesome, wow! declarations) and attrition (as the influence of present conditions to wear away the past and produce something new) it is attrition that prevails. The obstinacy of a few (bankers, landlords, public relations men, boosters, purveyors of toxic positivity) is, over time, futile.
They don’t see that, but yet it remains true. Time takes its toll, and hubris invites Nemesis.
Consider housing, the bugbear of Whitewater for generations. A tiny clique of landlords has for years addressed this issue opportunistically. At one time, these few wanted to liberalize Whitewater’s ordinances to permit more student housing. And so, and so, there were more student apartments in the center of town. Ah, but when competitors sought approval to build on Prince or Tratt Streets, an incumbent landlord (and sometime public official) used one claim after another under the city’s ordinances to prevent or restrict those competitive projects.
These are proud, private businessmen right up until the time they hold public offices or entreat public bodies to bend to their special-interest desires.
Adequate, affordable housing is a national topic. Only on September 25th, Emily Badger, reporting for the New York Times, wrote of national trends in Whatever Happened to the Starter Home? (‘The economics of the housing market, and the local rules that shape it, have squeezed out entry-level homes’):
As recently as the 1990s, when Jason Nageli started off, the home-building industry was still constructing what real-estate ads would brightly call the “starter home.” In the Denver area, he sold newly built two-story houses with three bedrooms in 1,400 square feet or less.
The price: $99,000 to $125,000, or around $200,000 in today’s dollars.
That house would be in tremendous demand today. But few builders construct anything like it anymore. And you couldn’t buy those Denver area homes built 25 years ago at an entry-level price today, either. They go for half a million dollars.
The disappearance of such affordable homes is central to the American housing crisis. The nation has a deepening shortage of housing. But, more specifically, there isn’t enough of this housing: small, no-frills homes that would give a family new to the country or a young couple with student debt a foothold to build equity.
The affordable end of the market has been squeezed from every side. Land costs have risen steeply in booming parts of the country. Construction materials and government fees have become more expensive. And communities nationwide are far more prescriptive today than decades ago about what housing should look like and how big it must be. Some ban vinyl siding. Others require two-car garages. Nearly all make it difficult to build the kind of home that could sell for $200,000 today.
(Emphasis added.)
Whitewater’s Common Council, by a vote of 5-2 at its 9.20.22 session, sensibly approved on first reading the creation of an R1-S zoning district for detached, single-family homes on smaller lots. A zoning change that offers some builders and buyers, even in limited areas, more options is, prima facie, the right decision.
Updated with video of Council discussion:
A few observations:
1. The city’s and consultant’s discussion of the proposal was notably concise and thorough. This libertarian blogger is inclined neither to city officials nor city-hired consultants, but these were solid presentations worthy of one’s respect.
2. A council member may be ‘shocked’ that the city’s current regulations allow for 800 sq. ft. homes, but then some people shock easily. His proposal — in a community that has too little of single family-housing — is to increase the minimum square footage.
A long-tenured politician looks around and sees too little, and now wants to make whatever might be, even as a possibility, less likely by regulation.
3. These Community Development Authority men, serving now and having served (landlord here, public relations man there, council member also), are against regulation until they’re for it. So be it: they can fill their boots with contradictions, hypocrisies, and self-interested special pleading.
4. To the rest of the city: for private or public? for free or regulated? for the situational or the long-term? modest, single-family detached homes or nothing?
If the market — buyers and sellers freely selecting — chooses modest homes of limited square footage, then so be it. If private citizens in a free society want to live in larger homes, then they will find or buy larger homes.
5. Men who have mixed private and public roles in Whitewater for years, without once solving Whitewater’s single-family home needs, now presume to guide others despite their own generation-long public-policy failures.
6. How odd, and absurd, that in a small town some few members of the government would speak as though they were contractors or interior designers. That’s not government’s role, and most certainly not in a community that has too few private, detached single-family homes.
If residents need advice about home design, they should talk to an architect at their own expense; no one needs to pay taxes to government for opinions on design choices that should be between private buyers and sellers.
7. How snide, how very smug, to think that a modest single-family home would be junk. How ignorant to think that there would not be families who would be happy in these homes. If one doubts as much, one has not looked around at how families in the Midwest now live — these would be upgrades for many families.
8. The discussion of how public money might be directed would be more convincing if it were not conducted by CDA alumni who have over the years spent hundreds of thousands on capital catalyst start-ups that amounted to nothing.
These are self-described surgeons who keep dropping their scalpels; one would do well to look elsewhere for medical advice.
9. One last point, small but notable: about those opposing this simple, sensible proposal, on Council or as residents: how is it that they all repeat the same phrase, about being ‘shocked’ or finding this ‘shocking’?
Do they only have one word of description among them? Could not a talking point be more varied? The English language, having borrowed and evolved from so many other tongues, offers hundreds of thousands of words. There must have been at least one other word choice that opponents could have offered, to give a veneer of independent thought to each opinion.
Someone must have a thesaurus somewhere in the city…
For the community, the Council majority’s support for this proposal to offer another detached, single-family home option was the right choice.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 60. Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 6:44 PM for 11h 56m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District’s board goes into closed session shortly after 6 PM, and reconvenes in open session at 7 PM.
One of the positive changes in Whitewater, however slow it has been, is the dawning understanding that there is a difference between a business, businesses, and markets (of buyers and sellers). Old Whitewater’s outlook, with its emphasis on the few, viewing the world from behind a metaphorical perimeter fence, has over these last fifteen years faded considerably and fortunately. It was never true — never — that Whitewater’s economy was the product of one landlord’s or one banker’s ambition.
Whitewater’s economy was always, and always will be, the sum of all interactions between all residents as buyers and sellers. Thousands of people, with many interactions and transactions each day, and every day.
A simple ordering of economic significance, from smallest to greatest: a business, businesses, then markets of buyers and sellers.
Early on, when I began writing in 2007, some readers asked me why I did not pay as much attention as they’d prefer to the machinations of these few landlords and bankers. It’s true, then and even now, that I’ve paid less attention to them than some in the community would like, but then the slight attention I’ve paid is all they’ve ever deserved.
Old Whitewater, or at least a few in it, desperately sought the role of Mr. Whitewater, King of the Hill, the Smartest Person in Town, Grand Poobah, whatever. These types never existed except in the imagination of those same few.
And look, and look — there have been these same vainglorious types in every crude and simple society before us.
Even primitive societies, long before the Renaissance and Enlightenment, had men like this, while their communities were unproductive year over year, with most people in poverty and misery. The average person among the Ancients lived in filth, poverty, and disease while only a few prospered. Slave states and feudal states, for thousands of years, each had a few successful businessmen but no general prosperity (yet much general suffering and injustice).
It’s not a mere business, but free interactions between people of all types, that makes a society productive (and so prosperous for more than a few). In a society of dynamic and free markets, between buyers and sellers of all kinds, a few mediocre, stodgy, and self-important business types merit little regard.
And yet, and yet — the last to see this economic truth are those who have advanced themselves without concern to others. They shove forward with their special-interest pleading at very public opportunity. When they see an advantage in their expansion, they provisionally argue for fewer regulations; when they seek to stymie competition, they argue for more regulations to stop competitors. They see local government as a tool for their own gain. Indeed, sometimes it’s as though they seem themselves as the world.
They remind most of one of the characters from Edwin Abbott’s Flatland. In Flatland (A Romance of Many Dimensions), Abbott describes the creatures of a world that live on a plane, a two-dimensional world. They have right and left, back and forth, but not (as we do) up and down. The inhabitants vary in insight and awareness based on the number of sides that they have, so that squares exceed triangles, and pentagons exceed squares, in this regard.
As it turns out, the narrator, a square, has a vision of a one-dimensional world, called Lineland, that exists only on a single line, with back and forth the only directions of travel. This is a vision of an even more confined place. The narrator describes how the leader of Lineland imagines himself:
replied the small Line: “I am the Monarch of the world. But thou, whence intrudest thou into my realm of Lineland?” Receiving this abrupt reply, I begged pardon if I had in any way startled or molested his Royal Highness; and describing myself as a stranger I besought the King to give me some account of his dominions. But I had the greatest possible difficulty in obtaining any information on points that really interested me; for the Monarch could not refrain from constantly assuming that whatever was familiar to him must also be known to me and that I was simulating ignorance in jest. However, by preserving questions I elicited the following facts: It seemed that this poor ignorant Monarch—as he called himself—was persuaded that the Straight Line which he called his Kingdom, and in which he passed his existence, constituted the whole of the world, and indeed the whole of Space. Not being able either to move or to see, save in his Straight Line, he had no conception of anything out of it.
To imagine oneself a king on a line is to be no monarch at all, but instead only a captive of one’s narrow imagination.
Whitewater is more than a one-dimensional line, and more than a two-dimensional plane. It is, instead, a sphere in which many people of equal moral foundation interact each day as equals.
Not merely a sphere by the way, but a beautiful and luminous one, made so by the many.
