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Daily Bread for 12.12.22: Calories and Compromise

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 37. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 04m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 83.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM

 On this day in 1941, as part of the Holocaust, Hitler declares the imminent extermination of the Jews at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery.


A person needs a certain amount of calories to be active, and while that amount varies between people, too few calories will impact that person’s health (and emotional outlook, by the way). 

The compromise of a person or community, however, is not similarly constrained. A community may brim with enthusiasm, but it may also descend to a malaise and doubt far lower than any caloric deficit.

There is, by contrast, seemingly no limit to how much a person or community can compromise on principles or standards. A starving person will tragically reach a bottom, from which neither further decline nor recovery is possible. A compromised person or community, however, can keep slicing alway principles and standards, ever more nicely, almost without end. 

A few conflicts of interest? There can be a more. A few instances of regulatory capture? There can be more. 

The starving person will presently notice the consequences of ill-health; the resident in a compromised community won’t observe so immediately or completely the consequences of compromised standards.

Of reduced standards, people often ask: is there a bottom?

The fitting reply: if there is, then it’s so far down that there might as well be none. 

Whitewater has the chance, one she deserves if anyplace deserves anything, to set her standards securely by setting aside past errors, omissions, and compromises.  

Chances like that don’t come about often.


Successful splash-down for the Artemis 1 moon mission spacecraft:

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