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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

City, Local Government, Politics

Dr. Kissinger’s Services Not Required

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Henry_A_Kissinger

Yesterday, I wrote about an obvious lack of diligence from members of Whitewater’s Police and Fire Commission. Their meetings are an exercise in lack of preparation, sloppiness, and plodding along unenthusiastically. (See, Lack of Diligence, Front and Center.)

Someone asked me, in reply to that post, if I thought that Whitewater’s commissioners, on the PFC or elsewhere, were all to be expected to be like Henry Kissinger.  The question was about Kissinger’s obvious intellect and erudition, not his foreign-policy approach.  (Honestly, the last thing Whitewater needs is commissioners exercising Kissinger-like machinations.)

It’s a false choice – a fallacy of the excluded middle – to assume that we’ve only the two alternatives of lazy commissioners or Henry Kissinger.  

Of course not – we have no need to pine for Dr. Kissinger (assuming anyone would be likely to do so).

Whitewater is filled with thousands of smart and diligent residents as capable as any in all America.  

Some commissions enjoy such members now, and the city is better for it.  

All it takes is their willingness to work hard seriously and thoroughly at their volunteer jobs.  A pencil, paper, some reading, some notes: that’s what we need and deserve.  

When officials fill committees with their entitled-but-light-working buddies, pals, friends, and cronies, they worsen our present condition and discourage sincere people from playing a future role.  

All the while, those same officials will bemoan a lack of greater participation.  Their complaints are disingenuous.  For decades, Whitewater has under-performed while politicians and bureaucrats have packed principal committees with their pals, and this decades-long habit is the cause of our lack of diligence now.  

We’ve very many in this city – right, center, left, libertarian – who would treat their responsibilities with more care and seriousness, and offer better ideas, than some of those commissioners one sees now on the city’s leading boards and committees.

We can do this ourselves; Dr. Kissinger’s services are, fortunately, unnecessary.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.29.14

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Good morning.

We’ll have a sunny day with a high of nineteen today.

For those looking for a new hobby, one reads that America is experiencing a falconry revival:

In 1968, when Lars Sego was eight years old, he decided he wanted to become a falconer. He put a hood and jess on a chicken and let it jump off his arm to catch bugs, and so began an illustrious career in bird training. As a teenager, after finally getting a few falcons of his own, one of the birds he’d raised from a hatchling climbed on top of his head and tried to have sex with it. It was at that moment, while being violated by a bird of prey, that he realized he should start breeding his animals on a larger scale. Today, he runs a New Mexico-based falcon-breeding firm with the no-nonsense title ‘Falcons for Sale.’ They raise only 40 to 60 birds per year, but their animals are so prized by wealthy foreigners that few of them stay in America. Residents from more falcon-friendly countries like the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia swoop in regularly and pay premiums for birds they’ve reserved years in advance….

His success is the manifestation of a small, unlikely falconry renaissance in America. Although humans have practiced falconry for thousands of years, it never really caught on in the US. Estimates put the number of active falconers in the country somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 (up from maybe 1,500 in the mid-20th century), whereas in Dubai alone Sego believes there are as many as 20,000. Despite their small numbers, the expertise and care that American falconers put into their craft has propelled them to the forefront of breeding and bird-based innovation. As a result, US birds are in high demand in the world’s more raptorial nations….

On this day in 1936, the Baseball Hall of Fame gets its first five members: “Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson.”

Here’s Puzzability‘s Wednesday game:

This Week’s Game — January 27-31
Team Scrimmage
Looks like there’s a gain on the play all week. For each day, we started with a word or phrase, added the letters in the name of one of the two teams competing in this year’s Super Bowl (BRONCOS or SEAHAWKS), and rearranged all the letters to get a new word or phrase. Both pieces are described in each day’s clue, with the shorter one first.
Example:
Ran like crazy; gets clean after playing football
Answer:
Tore; takes a shower (Seahawks)
What to Submit:
Submit both pieces, with the shorter one first (as “Tore; takes a shower” in the example), for your answer.
Wednesday, January 29
Lounge around doing nothing productive; something often indicated by initials on a love letter’s envelope

City, Local Government, Police

Lack of Diligence, Front and Center

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In the fall, during the 11.6.13 Whitewater’s Police and Fire Commission meeting, the PFC’s chairperson introduced a draft code of ethics and drafts of procedures for complaints and interviewing candidates for employment or promotion.  

I wrote about that meeting afterward, because the drafts were poorly written, and in the case of the procedures for complaints often ill-considered and seemingly slapdash in design.  See, following that meeting, Policies for the Police and Fire Commission.    

With a week to consider the poor-quality drafts, and the opportunity to make much-needed corrections, what did the Police and Fire Commission do when it reconvened on 11.14.13?   

Four of the five members considered an oath, a commissioner’s code of ethics, procedures for a complaint process, and for a hiring process (one left early for another commitment).  

If all commissioners cannot attend, on significant issues, then the meeting should be postponed.  If that’s too hard, commissioners with conflicts should quit the PFC, thereby affording themselves more time for those other matters of greater interest. 

Watch the video, if you’d like, beginning at 1:21 in the recording, and be embarrassed:

There are (1) mistakes even in the draft for final review, (2) it’s obvious that some members of the commission have not reviewed the documents beforehand, (3) the commission chairperson, Jan Bilgen, isn’t even sure if existing commissioners will have to take the new commissioner’s oath the PFC has just approved, and (4) that same chairperson has to wait for someone to reprint new copies of the documents that were meant for final review, as she notices during the meeting that they’re incorrectly formatted.

The topics that the commissioners discuss at more than a few words – of all the issues of oath, ethics, complaints and hiring processes – are remarking on typos they’ve not noticed before, wondering about the time interviews might take (laughably struggling over what ‘as soon as possible’ means, pondering if that’s one day or perhaps – wait for it – two days’ time), or asking for definitions at the meeting that they should have researched beforehand.

There is one exception – beginning at about 18:51 into the video they address complaints against command staff, and later appeal rights to Common Council, and it’s obvious that even the draftswoman of the process doesn’t understand her draft or the issues involved.  

These processes should have been read well in advance, rather than at the last moment, during the meeting itself.  If that’s the best one can do, one’s ill-serving this community. There’s no honorable service from sloth.

Small wonder that PFC chairperson Bilgen once argued against televised PFC meetings – she’s out of her depth, often unsure, guessing about what might happen, occasionally laughing nervously as the commission stumbles along.  

Whitewater’s police leadership needs all the competent oversight it can get, but it’s an understatement to say it’s not getting it from this PFC.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.28.14

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Good morning.

It will be another cold day today, with a high of zero and wind chill values of thirty to forty below. Sunrise for Tuesday is 7:14 AM, and sunset is 5:03 PM. The moon is a waning crescent with 7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger is destroyed in an explosion shortly after liftoff, with all seven astronauts abroad killed.

A fictional account of a review commission’s inquiry into the explosion, The Challenger Disaster, stars William Hurt as Richard Feynman, and is particularly gripping.

On this day in 1959, the Packers make a good pick:

1959 – Lombardi Named Packers Coach
On this date Vince Lombardi was named head coach of the Packers. He had been the offensive backfield coach of the New York Giants for the previous five seasons. Lombardi went on to coach the Packers for nine years, winning five NFL Championships and victories in Super Bowls I and II. [Source: Packers.com]

Here’s Puzzability‘s game for Tuesday:

This Week’s Game — January 27-31
Team Scrimmage
Looks like there’s a gain on the play all week. For each day, we started with a word or phrase, added the letters in the name of one of the two teams competing in this year’s Super Bowl (BRONCOS or SEAHAWKS), and rearranged all the letters to get a new word or phrase. Both pieces are described in each day’s clue, with the shorter one first.
Example:
Ran like crazy; gets clean after playing football
Answer:
Tore; takes a shower (Seahawks)
What to Submit:
Submit both pieces, with the shorter one first (as “Tore; takes a shower” in the example), for your answer.
Tuesday, January 28
Beethoven’s “Pathétique,” for example; woodwind with a very low range

Film

Tuesday, January 28th: Award-Winning Film Mud @ Starin Seniors in the Park

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mud-poster

This Tuesday at 12:30 PM, at the community building in Starin Park, there will be a showing of the award-winning feature film Mud. The film stars Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland, and Sam Shepard in the story of two boys who help a fugitive escape pursuing vigilantes and try to reunite him with an old flame.

Mud has been nominated and won over a dozen film society awards, including selection as one of the National Board of Review‘s Top Ten Independent Films of 2013.

Here’s the trailer for the film:

The showing is free and open to the public.

Crime, Health, Walworth County

The Long, Hard Roads

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Over at the Gazette, there’s a story entitled, Walworth County officials hope drug court for heroin addicts will start in June (subscription required).  The story, from reporter Andrea Anderson, is about a hoped-for program of rehabilitation for heroin addicts.  

The program would apply to Walworth County residents, addicted to, and charged with possession of, heroin. If part of the program, they would receive a jail term that would allow for detoxification, a months-long program of after-care, and mandatory, periodic testing and counseling in exchange for the possibility of becoming clean and avoiding a felony conviction.

It’s a program that Walworth County should pursue, with the goal of restoring addicts to health, preventing a relapse into addiction, forestalling other crimes in furtherance of addiction, and to demonstrate to others similarly addicted that rehabilitation is possible for their own conditions.   

I’ve no personal experience with addiction, but like many others (right, center, left, libertarian), I can see that punishment alone – without treatment – is an invitation to relapse into addiction and crime – an invitation to an increasingly expensive recidivism.  

Many libertarians read widely about crimes of addiction because that topic highlights the harm from obsessive government punishment alone. The state fails often, but of addicts and their victims more so than many others.  

No manner of punishment alone has been enough to prevent addiction; no manner of punishment alone could ever be enough.   

There are, in fact, two long roads ahead, for this better idea and those (including the community, generally) who would benefit from it.  

Immediately, there’s the hard path that addicts will have to walk, albeit with necessary assistance, to become sober again.  Their sobriety would be both a personal and a social gain.  All Walworth County would benefit.  

There’s another hard road for this program.  One can expect that for a few, unreconstructed in their politics and grandstanding in their manner, opposition to a program like this will be a reflex. They’ve insisted on waging war against some of their fellow citizens over narcotics, and using that decades-long war as a means to political and institutional power. 

That war has achieved too little, and cost too much, but for the unreconstructed there’s no admitting any of that – they’ll insist on more of the same (but failing) approach as they only imaginable course. 

There is a better way – indeed, there has to be a better way than repeated addiction, unchecked crime, and perpetual waste.  

One hopes the best for this limited program, knowing full well that it will be a hard path, made occasionally harder still through a stubborn, unthinking opposition.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.27.14

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Good morning.

We’ll have a cold day in Whitewater, with a high of six below zero, and wind chill values of twenty-five to thirty below.

The Whitewater Schools are closed today and tomorrow.

On this day in 1888, the National Geographic Society is born:

…The 33 men who originally met and formed the National Geographic Society were a diverse group of geographers, explorers, teachers, lawyers, cartographers, military officers and financiers. All shared an interest in scientific and geographical knowledge, as well as an opinion that in a time of discovery, invention, change and mass communication, Americans were becoming more curious about the world around them. With this in mind, the men drafted a constitution and elected as the Society’s president a lawyer and philanthropist named Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Neither a scientist nor a geographer, Hubbard represented the Society’s desire to reach out to the layman.

Nine months after its inception, the Society published its first issue of National Geographic magazine. Readership did not grow, however, until Gilbert H. Grosvenor took over as editor in 1899. In only a few years, Grosvenor boosted circulation from 1,000 to 2 million by discarding the magazine’s format of short, overly technical articles for articles of general interest accompanied by photographs. National Geographic quickly became known for its stunning and pioneering photography, being the first to print natural-color photos of sky, sea and the North and South Poles….

Puzzability has a new, football-themed series this week, incorporating the Super-Bowl-contending team names into the daily game answers:

This Week’s Game — January 27-31
Team Scrimmage
Looks like there’s a gain on the play all week. For each day, we started with a word or phrase, added the letters in the name of one of the two teams competing in this year’s Super Bowl (BRONCOS or SEAHAWKS), and rearranged all the letters to get a new word or phrase. Both pieces are described in each day’s clue, with the shorter one first.
Example:
Ran like crazy; gets clean after playing football
Answer:
Tore; takes a shower (Seahawks)
What to Submit:
Submit both pieces, with the shorter one first (as “Tore; takes a shower” in the example), for your answer.
Monday, January 27
Cannoli cheese; squeezing snake

City

How Groups Try to Hide Decline

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In cities big and small, groups and companies that are in decline often try to conceal bad news about their performance or popularity.

An easy way to attempt this is to change the unit of measure by which the group reports membership, readership, production, popularity, etc.

To disguise a precipitous decline in production, for example, a group might change the unit of measure by which it reports success.

So, they might declare that they produced 3,000 gallons in 2012, and had another great year in 2013 by producing 3,000 quarts.

The change in the unit of production is a trick, to preserve the illusion that they’re still producing 3,000 of something. Of course, they are producing 3,000 of something, it’s just that it’s 3,000 of something much smaller, and only one-fourth of the previous size.

Wait long enough, and they’ll be compelled to report production in pints, cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons. Still three-thousand of each, perhaps, but three-thousand of ever-smaller units.

One should care about this change in measurement only slightly. It’s true that it’s meant to work a deception, but it scarcely matters.

First, the overwhelming majority of people in a community are easily sharp enough to spot the supposedly crafty sleight-of-hand. They’ll see through it.

Second, as a group declines in production or popularity, they become increasingly irrelevant, and their attempts to conceal their decline matter less because, having truly waned, they’ve not the influence or importance they once had. They can say what they want, but it matters less and less.

And that, all said and done, is what decline means.