…during the third year of World War I, Britain’s King George V orders the British royal family to dispense with the use of German titles and surnames, changing the surname of his own family, the decidedly Germanic Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, to Windsor….
With the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914, strong anti-German feeling within Britain caused sensitivity among the royal family about its German roots. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, also a grandson of Queen Victoria, was the king’s cousin; the queen herself was German. As a result, on June 19, 1917, the king decreed that the royal surname was thereby changed from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor….
Puzzability has a new series about summer, running from 6.17 to 6.21:
Summer Is a-Comin’ In
We’ll be welcoming in the new season every day this week. For each day, we started with a word, added the six letters in the word SUMMER, and rearranged all the letters to get a new phrase. Both pieces are described in each day’s clue, with the shorter one first.
Example:
Fish tank scum; church basement flea market-style event
Answer:
Algae; rummage sale
Here’s the puzzle for Wednesday:
Attractive, as a wench; ability to perform a familiar movement without conscious thought.
I posted last week against a proposal for Walworth County to purchase nearly two hundred acres of overpriced, half-unsuitable parkland. Four days later, on Saturday, June 15th, the Janesville Gazette‘s editorialist wrote in support of the proposed purchase.
(The Gazette doesn’t post its editorials online, but I’ll reproduce and reply to their principal contentions, below. )
I’ll briefly summarize my previous position, and then group the newspaper editorialist’s arguments into one of three categories: those that concede my contentions, those that repeat unthinking basic fallacies, or those that actually make the case for the purchase weaker, and the case against purchase even stronger.
Unexpected, but I think demonstrable: the Gazette‘s editorial actually undermines the position it attempts to bolster.
Initial case against the purchase.
I offered seven arguments against a public purchase of supposed parkland at a cost of $1.9-million dollars: (1) the cost is high, nearly two-million dollars, (2) the land is likely over-priced, (3) it’s a purchase for the low-priority goal of additional recreational land, (4) there’s already the 22,000-acre Kettle Moraine State Forest, Southern Unit nearby, (5) the purchase would deplete the park fund and require additional borrowing, (6) there are greater needs for this taxpayer money, and (7) it’s wholly false to contend that the purchase would truly have ‘zero tax impact.’
What the editorialist concedes.
The Gazette’s editorial makes no attempt – since there’s no attempt that could succeed – to contend that this is the best use of millions in public money, of all uses.
One reads, unconvincingly, that the land’s supposedly pretty as a postcard, as though there were no other land in the county already and equally as beautiful. There’s not the slightest attempt to explain why Walworth County should consider this small, expensive parcel more beautiful – or attractive to tourists – than the vast Kettle Moraine State Forest.
Simply asserting that it will somehow draw incremental tourists – as against all the other natural and created attractions in the county – isn’t a policy position – it’s an unsupported declaration.
If the Gazette wishes to assert the value of a $1.9-million-dollar public purchase, it owes readers more than a tired cliché about something being ‘pretty as a postcard.’
There’s no independent, credible assessment offered that the land is even accurately priced.
The canard the editorialist repeats.
One reads repeatedly of an impossibility – that there would be zero tax impact from this purchase. There is, of course, a way in which this is seemingly – but only seemingly – correct: as an appeal to local selfishness. Presumably, what Mr. Brunner (Walworth County Central Services Director) and others mean when they so contend is that there would be zero local impact – an appeal to Walworth County taxpayers’ hopes that their taxes won’t go up.
It’s a pigs-to-the-trough call, the profligate policymaker’s contention that one can take public money from the state or federal government and it will have no local tax impact. It’s also deeply condescending, treating people falsely as gluttons, as though they’re greedily seeking any local advantage.
It’s not true of the overwhelming majority in Walworth County – not at all. This patronizing, false view of people as greedy and selfish reflects poorly only on Walworth County’s officials.
All public spending either increases taxes or public debt – there is no free money. Unless the Gazette‘s editorialist or Mr. Brunner operate a printing press, they cannot escape this fundamental truth. (In fact, even if they have a press, any amount of money they print would have an impact all its own, and negative on the community, state, and nation.)
Significantly, as Walworth County taxpayers are also state taxpayers, they’ll inescapably pay a price in taxes for taking state money for this over-priced land.
This selfish thinking, in which public men insist that they can confer local benefits without local costs, is ignorant chicanery. It belongs alongside perpetual motion machines, cold fusion, and tea leaves as too-good-to-be-true ideas.
How the editorialist makes the case for the parkland weaker, and the case against it stronger.
One learns three additional points about the possible purchase. First, the county didn’t budget for this land properly last year – and so it’s a rushed, cobbled-together proposal now. It’s a grant-grab, one imagines, a hurry-up fire drill to take tax money that officials falsely contend is free grant money.
If new parkland were so important, Messrs. Brunner and Bretl (County Administrator David Bretl) should have budgeted properly last year for this year’s expenses.
If they cared so very much for this professed need, they would have tried to satisfy it sooner, and more deliberately.
Absurdly, one learns from the Gazette‘s editorial that “absent a budgetary change in direction, that money [$50,000 per year to pay off parkland borrowing] wouldn’t be available to maintain roads.”
Is the editorialist joking? That’s a prime reason to oppose this unnecessary parkland purchase.
Funny, too, that Mr. Brunner was described when he took his current job as Central Services Director and Highway Commissioner. That’s quite the highway commissioner, whose hankering for unnecessary parkland would leave the county’s roads at a disadvantage.
Finally, one reads the contention that – as half the parkland isn’t really useful at all but for farming – that Walworth County could rent it out as farmland.
This is the final absurdity – that a public entity would buy parkland half unsuited and then lease it as farmland.
Walworth County would thus become a public competitor to existing private landowners, leasing land as they might wish to do.
It’s not the place of county government to buy a thing and use half of it for another purpose in competition with private farmers.
The case against this purchase is stronger, and the case for it even weaker, after the Gazette‘s editorial.
Thanks, gentlemen, you’ve unwittingly helped the good cause of prudent public policy by talking still more about this foolish proposal.
At Starin Park’s community building on Wednesday at 12:30, there will be a free showing of the Academy Award winning Best Documentary for 2012, Searching for Sugar Man. It’s the story of two “South Africans who set out to discover what happened to their unlikely musical hero, the mysterious 1970s rock ‘n’ roller, Rodriguez.”
More on the highly-praised documentary is available online at the Internet Movie Database.
The day after the Senate followed the House of Representatives in voting to declare war against Great Britain, President James Madison signs the declaration into law–and the War of 1812 begins. The American war declaration, opposed by a sizable minority in Congress, had been called in response to the British economic blockade of France, the induction of American seaman into the British Royal Navy against their will, and the British support of hostile Indian tribes along the Great Lakes frontier. A faction of Congress known as the “War Hawks” had been advocating war with Britain for several years and had not hidden their hopes that a U.S. invasion of Canada might result in significant territorial land gains for the United States….
Puzzability has a new series about summer, running from 6.17 to 6.21:
Summer Is a-Comin’ In
We’ll be welcoming in the new season every day this week. For each day, we started with a word, added the six letters in the word SUMMER, and rearranged all the letters to get a new phrase. Both pieces are described in each day’s clue, with the shorter one first.
Example:
Fish tank scum; church basement flea market-style event
Answer:
Algae; rummage sale
Here’s the puzzle for Tuesday:
Dense Italian ice cream that’s a summer treat; repasts featuring only the finest ingredients.
Sometimes one would prefer to be wrong, rather than right. The waste, errors, exaggerations, and lies of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation are such a case:
Madison — Three Senate Democrats asked Wednesday [6.12] for a criminal investigation of Gov. Scott Walker’s signature job creation agency.
The request comes after an audit last month found the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. didn’t require financial statements from companies receiving incentives, gave awards to ineligible businesses and awarded nearly $1 million in tax credits to companies for actions taken before they had signed their contracts with the state. The agency didn’t adequately follow up to see if jobs were being created and didn’t clearly report the jobs numbers that it did have, the report by the non-partisan Legislative Audit Bureau found.
For every official of Whitewater’s municipal government, Community Development Authority, or the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater who ever boasted of ties with the WEDC, here’s an inescapable truth: you’ve sought an alliance with a corrupt, dishonest agency, a crony-capitalist disgrace to all Wisconsin.
The price of self-promotion, flimsy claims, and wasted resources has been too high for our state’s people. Having ignored sound economics and others’ genuine & pressing needs, each and every official who’s sought advantage through the Wisconsin Economic Development Authority has a share in that selfish disaster.
The people of our small city, and our whole state, have always deserved better.
(For prior criticism of the WEDC at this website, please see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.)
Tomorrow: An update about Walworth County’s proposed purchase of so-called parkland.
Whitewater’s week begins with a sunny day with a high of eighty-six, and a one-in-five chance of isolated thunderstorms in the afternoon.
Whitewater’s LIbrary Board meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1972, five burglars – but not just any five – were arrested:
In the early morning of June 17, 1972, five men are arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, an office-hotel-apartment complex in Washington, D.C. In their possession were burglary tools, cameras and film, and three pen-size tear gas guns. At the scene of the crime, and in rooms the men rented at the Watergate, sophisticated electronic bugging equipment was found. Three of the men were Cuban exiles, one was a Cuban American, and the fifth was James W. McCord, Jr., a former CIA agent. That day, the suspects, who said they were “anti-communists,” were charged with felonious burglary and possession of implements of crime.
On June 18, however, it was revealed that James McCord was the salaried security coordinator for President Richard Nixon’s reelection committee. The next day, E. Howard Hunt, Jr., a former White House aide, was linked to the five suspects. In July, G. Gordon Liddy, finance counsel for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, was also implicated as an accomplice. In August, President Nixon announced that a White House investigation of the Watergate break-in had concluded that administration officials were not involved. In September, Liddy, Hunt, McCord, and the four Cubans were indicted by a federal grand jury on eight counts of breaking into and illegally bugging the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
In September and October, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post uncovered evidence of illegal political espionage carried out by the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President, including the existence of a secret fund kept for the purpose and the existence of political spies hired by the committee. Despite these reports, and a growing call for a Watergate investigation on Capitol Hill, Richard Nixon was reelected president in November 1972 in a landslide victory.
Puzzability has a new series for us, running from 6.17 to 6.21:
Summer Is a-Comin’ In
We’ll be welcoming in the new season every day this week. For each day, we started with a word, added the six letters in the word SUMMER, and rearranged all the letters to get a new phrase. Both pieces are described in each day’s clue, with the shorter one first.
Example:
Fish tank scum; church basement flea market-style event
Whitewater has a beautiful Sunday ahead, with sunny skies, a high of eighty-three, and light winds from the northwest at 5 to 10 m.p.h. Sunrise was at 5:16 a.m., and sunset will be at 8:36 p.m. The Moon is in its first quarter.
On this day in 1884, the first roller coaster in America opens at Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York. Known as a switchback railway, it was the brainchild of LaMarcus Thompson, traveled approximately six miles per hour and cost a nickel to ride. The new entertainment was an instant success and by the turn of the century there were hundreds of roller coasters around the country.
First [Superficially] Free Public School Opened in Wisconsin
On this date the first free public school in Wisconsin was opened in Southport (now Kenosha). Michael Frank, a member of the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature, introduced bills authorizing the establishment of a Wisconsin public school system in 1843, 1844, and 1845. These attempts were failures so Frank sponsored a bill authorizing Southport to establish a public school supported by property tax dollars. [Source: Wisconsin Mosaic]
Following a revolt by the English nobility against his rule, King John puts his royal seal on the Magna Carta, or “Great Charter.” The document, essentially a peace treaty between John and his barons, guaranteed that the king would respect feudal rights and privileges, uphold the freedom of the church, and maintain the nation’s laws. Although more a reactionary than a progressive document in its day, the Magna Carta was seen as a cornerstone in the development of democratic England by later generations.
Here’s a link to the text as it remains in force to this day, from the United Kingdom’s legislative website, a service of the British government’s National Archives.
He’s used up one life, but he has eight left — cat survives boa constrictor (with help):
1832 – General Winfield Scott Ordered to Assume Command in Black Hawk War
On this date General Winfield Scott was ordered by President Andrew Jackson to take command at the frontier of the Black Hawk War. Scott was to succeed General Henry Atkinson, thought to be unable to end the war quickly. General Scott moved rapidly to recruit troops and obtain equipment for his army. However, while in New York, the troops were exposed to an Asiatic cholera. Just outside of Buffalo, the first cases on the ships were reported and death often followed infection.
By the time the ships reached Chicago, the number of soldiers had dropped dramatically from 800 to 150, due to disease and desertion. Rather than going on to the front, Scott remained with his troops in Chicago, giving Atkinson a brief reprieve. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail, by William F. Stark, p. 90-91]
