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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

Beautiful Whitewater, Business, City, Free Markets, Lifestyle

Having Nice Things in Whitewater

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Some months ago, a community group, while embarking on a new project, began using the saying, ‘yes, we can have nice things in Whitewater.’ One supposes that they meant the saying as an expression of optimism about their chances for success, along the lines of we can do this. It’s also probable that they intended the expression as one of desire, along the lines of we deserve this.

It was not the first time that I’ve heard this said about Whitewater, and when an account of the expression’s recent use reached me, I knew immediately whence it came.

It’s a sentiment, generally and beyond any group’s particulars, with which I very much agree: we can have, and deserve, nice things in Whitewater.

Our challenge is that nice is not a fixed quality, sealed in amber, forever unchanging. Nor is nice a thing to be decided from on-high, from a few planners and politicians. The very use of the expression is confirmation that residents will no longer settle for accepting whatever comes their way.

Sometimes nice is a simple thing, overlooked until ordinary residents voice their hopes for more, different, and better.

Look back a decade, and what does one see? Too many leaders and insiders crowing that Whitewater was the pinnacle of all the world, that change would come from them, and that to dare raise any questions about local conditions was somehow an offense against the natural order. They wanted for others little more than a lemming’s life, albeit lemmings who would smile and applaud when asked.

Time takes her toll: most of the leaders from that time have slipped from Whitewater’s public scene (some tumbling more than slipping, if the truth of it be said).

Nice things are sometimes simple, plain things, changing by definition as generations pass, unplanned from above, and decided commonly by many rather than exclusively by a few.

It’s fair to say that a grocery store would be among the plain and simple things of value to Whitewater’s consumers; it’s encouraging that residents are willing to say as much.

Update, Wednesday afternoon : There will be more to write about a new grocery when possibilities become clearer.  One can confidently guess that my own position will favor private, local transactions between businesses and shoppers without government subsidy.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.27.16

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Midweek in town will be cloudy, with an even chance of snow showers, and a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:13 and sunset 5:01, for 9h 47m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 88.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

There will be a Common Council meeting tonight at 6:30 PM.

America’s borders have changed greatly over her history – here’s a two-minute illustration of how greatly:

From JigZone this Wednesday, here’s a dog puzzle, in a 48-piece cut:

Education, School District

Video & Liveliness

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33cscreenshotPost 3 in a weekly series.

There’s an unfortunate, unnecessary gap in our schools between the liveliness of students (and many teachers) and the way in which local print media present those lively people. Although I’m opposed to being too close to a subject, the encounters that I have concerning our schools unfailingly remind of this gap.

(For political commentary, too close distorts: one loses one’s objectivity after ingratiating oneself with every policymaker in town. Too close in Whitewater, by the way, is still much farther from a topic than town notables realize. Those who say one can wear several hats, switching between them at will, ignore the plain truth that all those hats sit on the same head.)

It puzzles me why our schools do not use video clips of students, faculty, and administrators more often. There are many photographs of school life (some from truly gifted photographers), but almost no candid, slice-of-life video clips.

We’ve already seen the inevitable shift in Whitewater, as in nearby communities, toward several media (often different Facebook pages) presenting school developments. Print – and here I mean actual newsprint – in this area presents school news in so deadly dull and dry a fashion that it simply drains the life out of the news being reported. (There’s a deeper problem, of course: the readership for newspapers is much smaller than those publications care to admit, and it’s skewed old.)

Websites that fashion themselves after soon-to-be-extinct newspapers have advantages over print, of course, but so many as advantages as they might have.

Why, when thousands of children and adults in the community enjoy videos every day, does the district do so little on this score? There’s no left-right in this: any community, of any politics, could publicize its work with unrehearsed, slice-of-life recordings of what’s happening now.

Part of the answer to this question is cultural, and part of it is political (based, I think, on a miscalculation about what the community’s truly like). Those are topics for future posts.

On the district’s main page, and on the pages of separate sites unconnected to Central Office, there could easily be a better, more lively account of how students and teachers speak, move, react, and experience their studies or teaching. (I am reminded that there is a teaching from long ago, everlastingly true, on the idea of letting a light be seen.)

That better, more lively account of how students and teachers speak, move, react, and experience their studies or teaching requires video.

THE EDUCATION POST: Tuesdays @ 10 AM, here on FREE WHITEWATER.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.26.16

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Our day begins with cloudy skies and brings a high of thirty, following a light snowfall last night. Sunrise is 7:14 and sunset 5:00, for 9h 45m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 94% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM and there will be a community meeting on a local grocery store at 6 PM this evening.

On this day in 1980, the U.S. Olympic Committee declines a previously-scheduled trip to Moscow:

At the request of President Jimmy Carter, the U.S. Olympic Committee votes to ask the International Olympic Committee to cancel or move the upcoming Moscow Olympics. The action was in response to the Soviet military invasion of Afghanistan the previous month.

On this day in 1925, Whitewater loses her hospital:

1925 – Fire Destroys Whitewater Hospital
On this date a fire destroyed the Whitewater Hospital. Monetary losses were estimated at $20,000, but no deaths were reported. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

Today’s puzzle from JigZone is a 67-piece cut entitled, Fantasy Toadstools:

Environment, Waste Digesters, Water, WGTB, WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN, Wisconsin

The Water Problems in Wisconsin

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WGTB logo PNG 112x89 Post 57 in a series. When Green Turns Brown is an examination of a small town’s digester-energy project, in which Whitewater, Wisconsin would import other cities’ waste, claiming that the result would be both profitable and green.

I promised to begin reviewing by the particulars of a 12.15.15 discussion of waste importation. I’ll hold off to share news about a series just published over the weekend about environmental risks to Wisconsin’s water supply. Environmental issues are a huge topic for Wisconsinites elsewhere in the state – and in those places they attract concern from all parts of the political spectrum.

This series has been going on for a bit now, and one of the things that strikes me about the discussion in Whitewater, Wisconsin is that for full-time officials it takes place as though there were no other developments anywhere else in the state or nation (except occasional, brief & inapplicable mentions of supposedly successful projects outside the city).

One could say that part of this problem is one of the press – that the area near Whitewater is a black hole for good reporting – but that’s only part of the problem. One could say that some full-time officials who tout waste importation are ignorant, but that’s only part of the problem. For a place like Whitewater, it seems clear that some topics don’t come up because some officials – despite formal schooling – simply shy from considering them, or concoct nutty theories of biology, etc. (There’s more of the latter in the 12.15.15 discussion.)

Elsewhere in Wisconsin, there’s far less quiet, and far more discussion.  See, Despite state efforts, arsenic continues to poison many private wells in Wisconsin.

(Whitewater postscript : Throughout this series, local full-time officials have repeated the same irrelevant claims, and the same false claims, no matter how often refuted. Part of the value of the discussion at the 12.15.15 meeting is to show how someone like Whitewater’s wastewater superintendent simply repeats falsehoods and refuted claims with abandon. Taking his remarks over these years, word by word, and showing them to others would, by itself, be a memorial of municipal mendacity. So, to be clear: I’m not alleging there’s arsenic in Whitewater’s water; I’m showing the clip to illustrate that Wisconsinites are concerned about environmental issues, generally. It’s a growing topic across party lines in other parts of the state.)

WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN: Appearing at whengreenturnsbrown.com and re-posted Mondays @ 10 AM here on FREE WHITEWATER.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.25.16

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Our work week in Whitewater begins with afternoon showers and a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 7:15 and sunset 4:58, for 9h 43m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

New Yorkers have battled the infamous Pizza Rat over the years, and now they’ve a Snow Rat to face. Ale_Rivera, on Instagram, records an encounter with a snow-defying rodent.  Clicking the image starts a short video –

Snow Rat #blizzard2016

A video posted by @ale_rivera on

On this day in 1924, the first stand-alone Winter Olympic Games begin:

The 1924 Winter Olympics, officially known as the I Olympic Winter Games (French: Les Iers Jeux olympiques d’hiver), were a winter multi-sport event which was held in 1924 in Chamonix, France. Originally called Semaine Internationale des Sports d’Hiver (“International Winter Sports Week”) and held in association with the 1924 Summer Olympics, the sports competitions were held at the foot of Mont Blanc in Chamonix, and Haute-Savoie, France between January 25 and February 5, 1924.[1] The Games were organized by the French Olympic Committee, and were in retrospect designated by theInternational Olympic Committee (IOC) as the I Olympic Winter Games.

The tradition of holding the Winter Olympics in the same year as the Summer Olympics would continue until 1992, after which the current practice of holding a Winter Olympics in the second year after each Summer Olympics began.

Although Figure Skating had been an Olympic event in both London and Antwerp, and Ice Hockey had been an event in Antwerp, the winter sports had always been limited by the season. In 1921, at the convention of the IOC in Lausanne, there was a call for equality for winter sports, and after much discussion it was decided to organize an “international week of winter sport” in 1924 in Chamonix.

On this day in 1983, a federal appellate court re-affirms the legality of treaty rights with the Ojibwe:

1983 – Ojibwe Treaties Reaffirmed

On this day in 1983, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals ruled that the Ojibwe bands of Lake Superior (each a sovereign tribe) legally retained hunting, fishing, and gathering rights, which they had reserved in treaties signed in 1837, 1842, and 1854. The background and text of the treaties are given in this article at Turning Points in Wisconsin History, where you can also find more information about 19th-c. treaties and the late 20th-c. conflict over them.

I’m trying a new puzzle feature from JigZone this week, in which one can embed jigsaw puzzles.  Here’s Monday’s puzzle, set to 48 pieces, Lion in Bamboo :

Charity, City

About Standards

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I’ve long argued that the application of continent-wide standards to local challenges offers better solutions for our small town than a hyper-localism that ignores best practices from across our country. See, What Standards for Whitewater?

We will achieve little, and leave less for the next generation, if we do less – if we reach lower – than this.

Consider the following results of a Google Search, from this morning:

GoogleSearch012416

Our success will not be had by the apparent display of a crudely altered but unattributed image from, of all things, a California food bank. (It’s a food bank, by the way, that like many organizations has a terms of use policy regarding logos and attribution.)

The Alamadea County Food Bank has worked for over thirty years to feed needy people in that part of California. Here’s a description of their work:

Alameda County Community Food Bank has been in business since 1985 … with a vision toward a day when we can go out of business. We are the hub of a vast collection and distribution network that provides food for 240 nonprofit agencies in Alameda County. In 2014, the Food Bank distributed 25 million meals — more than half of the food was fresh fruits and vegetables. Our goal is to ensure every food insecure child, adult and senior in Alameda County knows where their next meal is coming from, by 2018.

Since moving into our permanent facility near the Oakland Airport in 2005 and leading the national food bank movement for a ban on the distribution of carbonated beverages, the Food Bank has ramped up distribution of fresh fruits and vegetables by more than 1,000%.

We can surely succeed, but only by some (rather than by any easy) means.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.24.16

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Sunday in town will be cloudy with a high of thirty-four. Sunrise is 7:16 and sunset 4:57, for 9h 41m 20s of daytime. We’ve a full moon again today.

In Friday’s FW poll, readers could pick the teams they thought would prevail (or the teams they wanted to prevail) in today’s NFL games. Respondents chose New England and Carolina, respectively.

Here’s schedule of posts for the week ahead, with other posts possible (if there are changes to these scheduled posts I’ll explain why):

  • Today: DB, a post on standards, evening post
  • Monday: DB, weekly Music post, WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN post, evening post
  • Tuesday: DB, weekly Education post, evening post
  • Wednesday: DB, weekly Film post, evening post
  • Thursday: DB, weekly Food or Restaurant post, evening post
  • Friday: DB, weekly Poll, weekly Catblogging
  • Saturday: DB, weekly Animation post, evening post

How long did it take to get somewhere, a century ago? Here’s how long, for how far:

On this day in 1972, Shoichi Yokoi learns that the war is over:

After 28 years of hiding in the jungles of Guam, local farmers discover Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese sergeant who was unaware that World War II had ended.

Guam, a 200-square-mile island in the western Pacific, became a U.S. possession in 1898 after the Spanish-American War. In 1941, the Japanese attacked and captured it, and in 1944, after three years of Japanese occupation, U.S. forces retook Guam. It was at this time that Yokoi, left behind by the retreating Japanese forces, went into hiding rather than surrender to the Americans. In the jungles of Guam, he carved survival tools and for the next three decades waited for the return of the Japanese and his next orders. After he was discovered in 1972, he was finally discharged and sent home to Japan, where he was hailed as a national hero. He subsequently married and returned to Guam for his honeymoon. His handcrafted survival tools and threadbare uniform are on display in the Guam Museum in Agana.

On this day in 1864, the 23rd Wisconsin moves through Texas:

1864 – (Civil War) Reconnaissance of the Matagorda Peninsula continues
The 23rd Wisconsin Infantry continued its reconnaissance mission on the Matagorda Peninsula, Texas.