Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 41. Sunrise is 7:07 and sunset 4:21 for 9h 14m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1942, during the Manhattan Project, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiates the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction (“a crude pile of black bricks and wooden timbers”).
By Melvin A. Miller of the Argonne National Laboratory – http://narademo.umiacs.umd.edu/cgi-bin/isadg/viewobject.pl?object=95120, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8147703
Bad politicians dislike chronologies the way that vampires dislike garlic. (In the case of vampires, it’s possible that they simply dislike natural ingredients that act as blood thinners.)
In the case of bad politicians, however, the objection to a chronology is clear: to be reminded of their past errors and delays is a reminder they don’t want their constituents to have. When someone comes along and lists what has happened (and what hasn’t happened) month after month is for those types an objectionable accounting.
For ordinary people, by contrast, a simple chronology is never objectionable; it’s merely a factual statement of events.
All this comes to mind when reading professional reporting on the Whitewater Aquatic and Fitness Center. WhitewaterWise ably recounts the interminable negotiations over the pool in Following attorney’s recommendation, council sends unapproved aquatic center operational, lease agreement back to school district.
From that reporting, one reads that
Information within the meeting’s open session packet included a letter received by Weidl on Nov. 1, from von Briesen and Roper Firm attorney Christopher Smith. In his capacity as contracted counsel representing the city, Smith wrote that the version of the contract he had most recently received [from the Whitewater Unified School District] contained two changes made from the previously authorized draft, which had been agreed upon by the two bodies — the council and the school board, describing the changes as “substantive.”
The news story then recounts month after month of negotiations, with change after change, demand after demand, from the school district. The definitive chronology is over four thousand words long.
After all this talk, over many months, somehow the Whitewater School Board decided to make changes and send the contract back.
From the school board, this has stopped being responsible dealmaking and has descended into negotiations as a fetish. Those who wish to be taken seriously behave seriously. These board changes aren’t serious; they’re ridiculousness cosplaying as seriousness.
A thorough chronology in this matter is both an irrefutable account and damning indictment.
Mount Etna erupts again, sending hot lava down its snowy slopes: