Babbittry, Boosterism, CDA, City, Culture, Economy, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Local Government, Police, Press Release, School District
Built Against Substantive Change
by JOHN ADAMS • • 1 Comment
Over time, no matter how small the city, national conditions and trends make their way to the edge of town. Some towns will address these conditions, but others will be resistant to substantive change. For those towns in the latter category, business as usual and rhetorical feints suffice in response to powerful forces to which other communities more significantly respond.
A culture of boosterism – accentuating the positive regardless of actual conditions – is the single most evident cultural trait of Old Whitewater. Politicians, office holders, many town figures: their principal job has been to promote the city positively, real conditions notwithstanding. (From their point of view, boosterism is policy.) This sweet talk unforgivably diverts attention from residents who are in need. When boosterism is combined with a metaphorically narrow perimeter fence (in which decision-making is confined to a few), the town becomes even more resistant to effectual (rather than rhetorical) change.
The same few people occupy multiple positions sometimes because they feel themselves entitled and sometimes because other residents won’t join this insular culture.
These last dozen years have seen a Great Recession, opioid epidemic, economic stagnation, repeated incidents of sexual harassment, a pandemic, and now another recession. Whitewater has been deeply affected during this time (over the last decade, she has more poverty than before), but her governmental approach has been mostly business as usual, with the occasional – and brief – rhetorical nod to national conditions and movements.
If most of the same policymakers haven’t ventured farther than rhetoric (if that far) after so many significant events, they’re not likely to do so now.
Indeed, there’s no notable official expectation – or desire – for those hired for public positions in Whitewater to be agents of significant change. Hiring committees don’t want that sort of change – they want more of the same, with perhaps a slightly more presentable, professional manner from their selected candidates.
It would better – of course, of course – for officials to make much greater changes, but having been recalcitrant for so many years, it’s unlikely to happen now. In any event, many longtime policymakers wouldn’t know substantive change if it bit them on the ankles. (They may think that press releases are an expression of change, in the way a child thinks declaring a thing makes it so. Another version of this approach is insisting that while officials elsewhere might be in the wrong about something, that couldn’t possibly happen with our officials, in our town.)
Fortunately, no matter how hard the conditions, Whitewater will not collapse as long as she has some sort of public university (even if a smaller one). She is likely, however, to continue a sad, relative economic decline. A commuter class of daytime professionals has neither the ability nor likely the desire to bring substantive change to Whitewater. Those who are brought in, like those homegrown, are often mentored poorly (since boosterism is superficial and calls for no lasting insights).
There is deep tragedy in this, but it is a tragedy that policymakers have, themselves, brought about by an unwillingness to act far earlier. People choose freely, sometimes well, sometimes poorly. Having chosen poorly for so long, and defended those choices so often, officials have consigned the city to a more difficult near and medium future.
In this way, while writing about the city has a necessary, meaningful aspect of advocacy for a better way, another (profoundly sad) aspect of writing involves chronicling missed opportunities and their debilitating effects.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 6.25.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 19m 21s of daytime. The moon is waxing crescent with 19.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s CDA board meets at 5:30 PM via audiovisual conferencing.
On this day in 1950, the Korean War begins after North Korea invades South Korea.
Recommended for reading in full —
Neil Paine and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux write What Economists Fear Most During This Recovery:
In partnership with the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, FiveThirtyEight asked 34 quantitative macroeconomic economists what they thought about a variety of subjects around the coronavirus recession and recovery efforts. The most recent survey, which was conducted from June 19 through 22, echoed many of the predictions from the last round — though there were also a few new wrinkles in their forecasts.
When we first asked about the shape of the recovery, 58 percent of respondents thought the trajectory of future U.S. gross domestic product looked like a Nike “swoosh” — a sharp downturn followed by a long, slow recovery. This time around, however, a consensus has formed around a slightly different shape: a reverse radical (i.e., a mirrored version of the square-root symbol).
This shape — which 73 percent of our economists predicted for the country’s economic future — implies a steep drop followed by a quick partial recovery and a longer period of slower, mixed growth. But it isn’t necessarily an improvement over the swoosh. “There is nothing standard or smooth about this recovery,” said Lisa Cook, professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University. In her view, a reverse-radical-shaped recovery could be shaped by a spike in infections and hospitalizations, a wave of bankruptcies as unemployment benefits expire or consumers’ unwillingness to return to gyms, nail salons or other parts of their routine. That could make the bounce back from this recession bumpier than previous recessions.
Radley Balko writes Both parties’ police reform bills are underwhelming. Here’s why:
The Republican bill places no restrictions on the dangerous practice of no-knock raids. Instead, it asks that states collect data. The Democratic bill bars the use of no-knock warrants for federal drug investigations and cuts funding for any state or local jurisdiction that doesn’t do the same. But the Democrats’ bill requires only that police officers execute drug warrants “only after providing notice of his or her authority and purpose.” This “knock and announce” requirement is all but meaningless if you know that police officers frequently do so either simultaneous with or just seconds before entering. (The cops who killed Taylor, for example, claimed they did knock and announce.) A truly meaningful reform would go further and bar any forced entry into a private residence unless the police have reason to suspect someone inside presents an imminent threat to others, such as an active shooter, a kidnapping or a robbery in progress.
Neither bill satisfactorily provides for changing the current reality that bad cops are rarely held accountable. Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck, had 17 misconduct complaints in 18 years. He received only two letters of reprimand. The New York Times reported that since 2012, the Minneapolis Police Department received over 2,600 civilian complaints of police misconduct. Just 12 were upheld. This is consistent with other surveys of police departments across the country.
Six critically ill Covid-19 patients would overwhelm this Texas hospital:
more >>Coronavirus, Covidiocy, Public Health, Trump
This is a Mask
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
City, Culture, Employment, Local Government, School District, University
Mentoring
by JOHN ADAMS • • 1 Comment
When a small community like Whitewater comes to rely on hundreds of non-resident commuters to provide services (for city, schools, or university), those commuters will have a different work relationship than resident workers. (About these workers see The Commuter Class.)
Many will be less attached to the community (as they’ve freely chosen to live elsewhere for housing, activities, etc.). Some will see that they’re working in a community whose residents cannot fill all the available professional positions (and so come to see the community as dependent). Some will look on the community merely as a job opportunity and so come to look for other opportunities if any moment in the community goes poorly. Others will look on the community merely as a job opportunity and so bend easily to bad local ideas simply to retain employment.
Mentoring new employees or leaders is difficult in this situation: they may not be amenable to longterm guidance, either because there are too few resident leaders to provide guidance or because some of those resident leaders won’t have serious mentoring to offer non-resident professionals in any event.
In this way, a local deficiency of professional workers becomes worse through an inability to mentor adequately those commuting workers who do take employment in the city.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 6.24.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see an afternoon thunderstorm with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 19m 42s of daytime. The moon is waxing crescent with 11.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1948, the Soviets begin the Berlin Blockade.
Recommended for reading in full —
Annie Lowrey writes about risks of The Second Great Depression:
At this fraught moment, no one knows enough about consumer sentiment and government ordinances and business failures and stimulus packages and the spread of the disease to make solid predictions about the future. The Trump administration and some bullish financial forecasters are arguing that we will end up with a strong, V-shaped rebound, with economic activity surging right back to where it was in no time. Others are betting on a longer, slower, U-shaped turnaround, with the pain extending for a year or three. Still others are sketching out a kind of flaccid check mark, its long tail sagging torpid into the future.
Excitement about reopening aside, that third and most miserable course is the one we appear to be on. The country will rebound, as things reopen. The bounce will seem remarkable, given how big the drop was: Retail sales rose 18 percent in May, and the economy added 2.5 million jobs. But absent dramatic policy action, a pandemic depression is possible: the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that the American economy will generate $8 trillion less in economic activity over the next decade than it projected just a few months ago, and that a full recovery might not take hold until the 2030s.
At least four major factors are terrifying economists and weighing on the recovery: the household fiscal cliff, the great business die-off, the state and local budget shortfall, and the lingering health crisis. Three months ago, the pandemic and ensuing shelter-in-place orders caused mass job loss unlike anything in recent American history. A virtual blizzard settled on top of the country and froze everyone in place. Nearly 40 percent of low-wage workers lost their jobs in March. More than 40 million people lost their jobs in March, April, or May.
Karoun Demirjian, Matt Zapotosky, and Rachael Bade report Prosecutor to tell Congress of pressure from ‘highest levels’ of Justice Dept. to cut Roger Stone ‘a break’:
A federal prosecutor and another Justice Department official plan to tell Congress on Wednesday that Attorney General William P. Barr and his top deputies issued inappropriate orders amid investigations and trials “based on political considerations” and a desire to cater to President Trump.
Aaron Zelinsky, an assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland formerly detailed to Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, will tell the House Judiciary Committee that prosecutors involved in the criminal trial of Trump’s friend Roger Stone experienced “heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break” by requesting a lighter sentence, according to Zelinsky’s prepared remarks. The expectation, he intends to testify, was that Stone should be treated “differently and more leniently” because of his “relationship with the President.”
(Read Aaron Zelinsky’s opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee.)
Zelinsky will be joined by John Elias, an official in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, who will say that Barr ordered staff to investigate marijuana company mergers simply because he “did not like the nature of their underlying business,” according to his prepared testimony.
Apple stock hits all-time high:
more >>Coronavirus, Covidiocy, Public Health, Trump, Unfit
Trump: Slow the Testing
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Bad Ideas, Coronavirus, Covidiocy, Public Health, Walworth County
How ‘bout a New Slogan for the Walworth County Fair?
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
One reads that not only are organizers planning to hold the Walworth County Fair during a pandemic, but that they hope to entice patrons with beer sales.
Candidly, aside from the pig races (always suspenseful), one can be hit-or-miss about the fair. Holding it this year is problematic; looking for ways to attract more people is worse than problematic. It’s simply obtuse.
Critical though one may be, there’s yet an opportunity to help brand the fair to reflect the quality of decision-making that went into holding this year’s event.
Without charge, courtesy of FREE WHITEWATER, here’s a suggested slogan for this year’s fair:
Come for the Beer, Stay for the Coronavirus™.
To all concerned – you’re welcome.
Babbittry, Boosterism, City, Local Government, School District, University
The Commuter Class
by JOHN ADAMS • • 5 Comments
When one thinks of a small town – or sees depictions of a small town in books or films – one imagines that the people who work in the town also live in the town. So, city workers live in the town, teachers live in the town, and campus professors live in the town.
For Whitewater, that’s not true: significant numbers of city workers, teachers, and professors live elsewhere. They commute to the city for their daily work, but they purchase homes, raise families, and attend religious & civic events elsewhere. In this way, the City of Whitewater’s motto about the city as a place to ‘live, work, play, and learn’ is only partially fulfilled.
Partially fulfilled: hundreds of professionals combined from the city, school district, and university live in other communities. One needn’t suggest that they must live here; the simple fact of life is that they do not live here.
There a few obvious implications of their choice to live in other places.
Boosterism Fails. Years of public relations touting the city as a place to live have been unpersuasive to hundreds of people who see the city each day. There are myriad government or business marketing schemes to sell the city to others, but scores of people who are are in the city daily from Monday to Friday choose to spend nights and weekends elsewhere.
In effect, Whitewater has a focus group of hundreds of professionals who are telling government and business that they do not wish to live in Whitewater under status quo conditions. These hundreds aren’t buying what’s on offer.
If government and business groups were honest, they would look to themselves to see why these many workers aren’t interested in Whitewater. Instead, the same few longtime residents carry on as before, insisting that more marketing or more press releases will make Whitewater attractive, absurdly claiming that there are no places to live, or that no one knows Whitewater’s location, etc.
These professional workers know where Whitewater is – they drive in and out of the city every day. It’s simply that what local government tells them, and what the local business league tells them, isn’t persuasive.
Old Whitewater has, primarily, itself to blame for the unwillingness of others to live here.
The Same Ten Six People. Whitewater worries over having too few people for public committees and boards, and so fills those positions with the same people over and over. This same-ten-people problem is so acute in Whitewater it’s now closer to a same-six-people problem. If professionals who choose to live elsewhere chose to live in Whitewater, there would be many more people of talent and ability who could serve on boards and committees.
Limited Understanding. One can acknowledge that people should be free to live where they want yet see that living elsewhere leaves these hundreds of day workers less informed than those who do live here, vote here, and pay taxes here. Residents are the ones who directly feel the affects of local policies on their own households.
Community relations do not happen at a distance of fifteen miles – they happen at a distance of fifteen feet.
Those who are community leaders, either by office or (more often) self-promotion, bear the responsibility for failing to inspire many of these commuting professionals to choose freely to live in Whitewater.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 6.23.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 19m 58s of daytime. The moon is waxing crescent with 5.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1969, IBM announces that effective January 1970 it will price its software and services separately from hardware thus creating the modern software industry.
Recommended for reading in full —
Davey Alba and report 41 Cities, Many Sources: How False Antifa Rumors Spread Locally:
In late May to early June, there was a rumor that “two bus loads of antifa” were heading to Locust, N.C., about 25 miles east of Charlotte. The rumor was shared in text messages among people in the area — far out of sight of any fact-checking organization.
On June 1, the rumor surfaced in Facebook groups with names like DeplorablePride.org and Albemarle News and Weather.
That same evening, the police in Locust posted a screenshot of a text that had been circulating in the community over the weekend. The text falsely claimed that police officers had been knocking on doors to warn that “a black organization is bringing 2 bus loads of people to walmart in locust with intentions on looting and burning down the suburbs.” The post, on Facebook, assured residents that the Police Department had not been spreading the rumor.
Jeffrey Shew, the assistant chief of police, said all the residents who reached out to the department to report the buses “had no direct knowledge” of violent protesters coming to town. He said they were only sharing what they had seen on social media. By midnight on June 1, Mr. Shew said, it was clear that the rumors were untrue.
“No protests, groups looking to protest or groups looking to riot occurred,” he said.
On June 2, the police posted another message on Facebook emphasizing that the rumors had no substance. It exemplified that often, community members themselves are the ones on the front lines of debunking false rumors.
Oliver Darcy writes State spox mutes reporter after Bolton question:
CNN’s Kylie Atwood and Nicole Gaouette report: On a State Department call in which officials stressed the importance of a free press, the State Department spokesperson closed the line of a reporter who asked about John Bolton’s book. “AT&T we can mute that line,” said State Dept. spox Morgan Ortagus when a reporter asked whether US allies in Asia had reached out with concerns after the excerpts of the book were leaked. Ortagus said that the question was not what the call was about.
Later on the call, another reporter asked Ortagus to “comment on the message you think it sends to foreign journalists and other people who would be listening to this call that you guys are not willing to take questions on the John Bolton, but when you’re also talking about a message of ensuring freedom of the press in the United States.” Ortagus responded angrily afterward, calling it “a pretty offensive question” that was “totally inaccurate,” and defending the State Department’s record in responding to the press…
(Emphasis in original.)
Apple’s WWDC 2020 Event In 14 Minutes:
more >>Crime, Documentary, Drug War, History, Opioids, Public Health
The Public Health Crisis before the Public Health Crisis
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Frontline’s Opioids, Inc. (full film):
Pushing opioids. Bribing doctors. Making millions. FRONTLINE and the Financial Times investigate how Insys Therapeutics profited from a fentanyl-based painkiller up to 100 times stronger than heroin — and how some Wall Street investors looked the other way.
Since 2007, communities like Whitewater have faced a Great Recession, an opioid epidemic, economic stagnation, a pandemic, and now another recession. Whitewater’s like places that had to endure both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl at the same time.
It’s notable that, as with the novel coronavirus, America has mostly viewed the opioid crisis as a public health matter. However poorly addressed (or simply ignored), opioid addiction and the coronavirus are rightly public health matters.
Another public health crisis – a surge in the use of crack cocaine in the ‘80s and early ‘90s – wrongly received a punitive, rather than therapeutic, response.
In this moment of increased cultural awareness, the Draconian approach to one group of drug users remains another example of wrongly-biased enforcement.
Film, Music
Monday Music: John Williams, Finale from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 6.22.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see scattered thunderstorms with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 20m 11s of daytime. The moon is waxing crescent with 1.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets in closed session at 6:15 PM, with an open session beginning at 7 PM.
On this day in 1943, future United States senator from Wisconsin Joseph McCarthy breaks his leg during a drunken Marine Corps ceremony.
Recommended for reading in full —
Dylan Matthews writes A new paper finds stimulus checks, small business aid, and “reopening” can’t rescue the economy:
The coronavirus pandemic ripped through the American economy at an incredibly rapid pace — so rapidly that it’s been difficult for economists and others to understand what exactly is going on.
Our best data sources about the economy are wildly out of date: Unemployment data comes out just once a month, and GDP data only four times a year. However, a new data source put together by a research group at Harvard, drawing on a variety of corporations’ private data, now allows economists to track what has happened to the economy in real time.
The data they collated shows that the economic crash has been driven disproportionately by the actions of high-income Americans, whose consumer spending has crashed more than that of poorer Americans, devastating low-income workers and small businesses in rich areas.
The data also suggests that economic relief measures have done little for small businesses: Stimulus spending tended to go to Amazon or Walmart, not small local stores, and small businesses eligible for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans are generally not any better off than ones that were not eligible.
And researchers who developed the data found official orders “reopening” states do not increase economic activity, and so appear to endanger public health without any economic benefit.
The picture that emerges in a new working paper based on the economists’ findings is of an economy frozen in place. Simply declaring the economy “reopened” does not seem to do anything to spur high-income people to spend more, and it’s not clear that anything can until the real threat passes.
Paige St. John and Annette Choi report Mysterious deaths of infants, children raise questions about how early coronavirus hit California:
A cluster of mysterious deaths, some involving infants and children, is under scrutiny amid questions of whether the novel coronavirus lurked in California months before it was first detected. But eight weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide hunt for undetected early COVID-19 deaths, the effort remains hobbled by bureaucracy and testing limits.
Among those awaiting answers is Maribeth Cortez, whose adult son, Jeremiah DeLap, died Jan. 7 in Orange County while visiting his parents. He had been healthy, suffering on a Friday from what he thought was food poisoning, and found dead in bed the following Tuesday, drowned by fluid in his lungs.
Can Hollywood Go Virtual After Coronavirus?:
more >>Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 6.21.20
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 20m 19s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.0% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1989, the United States captures Guam from Spain.
Recommended for reading in full —
The AP, via the Guardian, reports Trump calls coronavirus ‘kung flu’ and says he slowed testing:
Donald Trump calls the coronavirus ‘kung flu’ and ‘the Chinese virus’ during a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday night. The US president also tells the crowd that he had asked his people to slow down Covid-19 testing across the country because it would find more cases.
Frida Ghitis writes Trump’s Tulsa rally was a flop:
President Donald Trump couldn’t wait. His presidency is nosediving, with bad news erupting all around him. His answer was Tulsa, a campaign rally in blood-red Oklahoma, the state he won by a crushing 36 points in 2016.
But Tulsa did not deliver. The event that was supposed to trumpet his return to greatness — and the country’s return to normalcy — instead brought embarrassing scenes of empty bleachers, a dismantled stage and a familiar speech unsuccessfully trying to reignite public fears.
After raising expectations with claims that a million people had requested tickets for his first campaign rally in more than three months, the vacant seats were the biggest story of the night. It was a bad omen for November, and Trump undoubtedly saw it with his own eyes as he scanned a sea of blue seats devoid of supporters on the top level of the arena that he and his campaign had said would be bursting beyond capacity; so full, they expected, that the campaign planned for a second outdoor speech to bring an additional 40,000 people unable to find a seat indoors.
Instead, the outdoor speech was cancelled, the stage dismantled. The campaign absurdly tried to explain by claiming that protesters blocked the entrances. But every reporter there confirmed that was not true.
See also Trump rallies in red-state America — and faces a sea of empty blue seats.
Choose Your Own Adventure | The World’s Largest Model Railway:
more >>If you love model trains, you will lose your mind on our visit to Miniatur Wunderland. There are more than 1,000 trains traveling 16,000 kilometers of track at the world’s largest model railway, located in Hamburg, Germany. But it’s not just trains. This small-scale world of wonder features mini versions of landscapes ranging from the canals of Venice to a lit-up Las Vegas. It’s also home to the world’s largest model airport, and hundreds of flights take off every day. Enough with the description. It’s time to explore this spectacular creation with our intrepid guide, Great Big Story producer Jacob Harrell. Stick around for the choose-your-own-adventure portion of the trip. We’re offering you the chance for a deeper dive into Miniatur Wunderland’s tiny versions of Las Vegas, Scandinavia, Switzerland and Venice.