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Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.27.19

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of sixty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 6:42 PM, for 11h 54m 25s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 2.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, the 29th Wisconsin Infantry musters in: “It would go on to participate in the battles of Port Gibson, Champion Hill, the Sieges of Vicksburg and Jackson, the Red River Campaign, the siege of Spanish Fort and the capture of Fort Blakely, Alabama.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Karen DeYoung reports More than 300 former officials call Trump’s actions concerning Ukraine ‘profound national security concern’:

More than 300 former U.S. national security and foreign policy officials have signed a statement warning that President Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine are a “profound national security concern” and supporting an impeachment inquiry by Congress to determine “the facts.”

“To be clear, we do not wish to prejudge the totality of the facts or Congress’ deliberative process,” said the statement, released Friday. “At the same time, there is no escaping that what we already know is serious enough to merit impeachment proceedings.”

[Read the full statement from former officials]

The collection of signatures was set in motion by National Security Action, an organization founded and largely populated by officials from the Obama administration to call attention to Trump’s “reckless leadership.”

Many of the signers are former Obama officials. But the list includes others who served as career officials in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s national security division under President George W. Bush and director of the National Counterterrorism Center under President Barack Obama.

Phil Helsel and Kurt Chirbas report N. Carolina detective accused of sending inappropriate messages to sex assault victims is fired (‘He is said to have sent messages to women whose sexual assault cases he had previously investigated’):

Paul G. Matrafailo III, who had been a member of the Fayetteville Police Department’s crisis intervention team, was fired from the force earlier this year, NBC affiliate WRAL of Raleigh reported Thursday, citing a dismissal letter.

Fayetteville police did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Friday.

The May 7 dismissal letter, which was shared with NBC News, says that police received a complaint March 5 that accused Matrafailo of contacting a sexual assault victim through Instagram and “began a conversation with her that she felt was inappropriate” and making a second attempt at contact March 9. Matrafailo had investigated the victim’s 2016 case.

Deanne Gerdes, executive director of the Rape Crisis Volunteers of Cumberland County, told WRAL that three women who had been sexually assaulted complained that Matrafailo, who had handled their cases, was sending them inappropriate texts or messages.

One woman told the station that Matrafailo sent her messages about lingerie she was planning to buy.

Can Facebook And Google Detect And Stop Deepfakes?:

Libertarians, Liberty, Local Government, Open Government

Why Transparency Matters in Local Politics

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From 2015, Libertarianism.org offers a podcast (posted on YouTube) with Kevin Glass, then of the Franklin Center. (Now called the Franklin New Foundation, it’s a center-right organization; many of Glass’s comments – he now works elsewhere – on open government are, however, non-partisan.)

There are similar projects with a center-left focus.  In Wisconsin, for example, the new – and impressive – Wisconsin Examiner offers daily reporting and scrutiny of politics under the editorship of Ruth Conniff, formerly of The Progressive.)

Government is no living organism; it’s a mere instrumentality created by people, for people, under well-defined laws, for their protection, and the advancement of their limited, common objectives.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.26.19

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 6:44 PM, for 11h 57m 18s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 7.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM, and the Board of Zoning Appeals meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1960, the first (of four) Kennedy-Nixon debates is televised.

Recommended for reading in full:

Conservative attorney David French observes The Trump–Ukraine Transcript Contains Evidence of a Quid Pro Quo:

I haven’t been a litigator since 2015. I haven’t conducted a proper cross-examination since 2014. But if I couldn’t walk a witness, judge, and jury through the transcript of Donald Trump’s call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and demonstrate that a quid pro quo was more likely than not, then I should just hang up my suit and retire in disgrace. Far from being “scattershot” — as my esteemed colleague Kyle Smith declares — the actual sequence is extremely tight, and the asks are very clear.

Indeed, as I also laid out today in Time and on Twitter, the sequence unfolds quite literally in consecutive paragraphs.

First, right near the beginning of the call, President Trump signals his displeasure with Ukraine. He notes that while the United States has been “very good” to Ukraine, he “wouldn’t say” that Ukraine has been “reciprocal” to the United States. There’s nothing subtle about this statement. It’s plain that Trump wants something from Ukraine.

In the next paragraph, Zelensky responds with the key ask. He wants more Javelin missiles, an indispensable weapon system in Ukraine’s conflict with Russia. It’s an anti-tank missile that helps address the yawning power imbalance between the two countries. It doesn’t level the playing field, but it does help deter Russian aggression by raising the possibility of substantial armor losses on the battlefield.

And what is Trump’s response? The next words out of his mouth are, “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” He raises Crowdstrike, the firm the DNC used to investigate the Russian election hacks. From context, it seems as if Trump is asking for additional assistance in investigating the 2016 election-interference scandals.

….

But then, in the following paragraph, Trump continues his ask. He says he is going to ask Rudy Giuliani, his personal attorney, to call Zelensky, and he asks Zelensky to take the call. Then, Trump says this: “The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.” He continues, “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it . . . It sounds horrible to me.”

And what is Zelenksy’s response? He pledges that the new Ukrainian prosecutor will be “100 percent” his person and that “he or she will look into the situation.”

Boston Dynamics Spot hands-on: new dog, new tricks:

City, Local Government, School District

9.19.19: State of City & State of District Presentations

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League of Women Voters: States of the City & the Schools 09/19/19 from Whitewater Community TV on Vimeo.

Whitewater’s city manager, Cameron Clapper, and the Whitewater Unified School District administrator, Dr. Mark Elworthy, presented on the states of the city and school district, respectively.  Embedded above is a full video of their presentations.

The municipal government presentation begins at 1:45 on the video; the school district presentation starts at 29:00.  It’s well worth watching the full video.

A libertarian reminder, that always bears repeating: the municipal government and the school district, however important, are only part of a larger community in which thousands of people engage in tens of thousands of interactions each day.

Libertarians are ideologically vigilant of government action not because we think government is the most important matter, but to keep government from imposing itself as the most important matter.

One final observation, about City Manager Clapper’s reply to a view (he rightly calls it a myth) that city government is actively trying to keep a grocery from coming to town. (See video beginning at 24:00.)

It’s mistaken to say that government isn’t trying to bring a grocery to town – of course it is trying to bring one.  I’d argue that the city shouldn’t spend public money to bring an outside grocer, but I have no doubt that city officials are trying.  The real discussion is whether the city should use public money as incentives.

(If the city does use public money on a grocery, they’ll simply be purchasing a bag of hurt as it becomes clear the local economy cannot sustain an out-of-town grocery for the long-term.  See Gas Stations, Fast Food, and What the Market Will Bear.)

 

 

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.25.19

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-four.  Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 6:46 PM, for 12h 00m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 15.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1789, Pres. Washington signs the Judiciary Act of 1789, legislation that established the federal judiciary of the United States.

Recommended for reading in full:

Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic, and Benjamin Wittes write So You Want to Impeach the President (‘What to include – and what not to include – in articles of impeachment’):

The Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives suddenly seems to be careening toward impeachment. The resistance to this measure, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, appears to be crumbling in the face of the new scandal over President Trump’s bullying of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to produce damaging information on Joe Biden and his son. Whether the newfound momentum will sustain itself over the coming days is anyone’s guess. But the sudden and urgent focus on impeachment raises an important question: What should the House impeach President Trump for? If the House is no longer considering whether to impeach Trump and has really decided to move forward, it needs to think about what articles of impeachment should—and should not—contain.

This is actually a difficult question. Trump’s misconduct presents what the military calls a target-rich environment. There’s a huge range of activity that a reasonable member of Congress could in good conscience regard as impeachable. That said, it would be a very bad idea for the House to take the approach of throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what, if anything, sticks. That approach could potentially trigger political blowback, giving the president’s allies more material with which to portray congressional Democrats as just a bunch of crazed and partisan attack dogs. And it could also risk doing real institutional damage. When Congress passes an article of impeachment, it makes a statement about the nature of offenses that justify removal from office. It is important to be careful when making such statements so as not to create ill-considered precedents that will justify future mischief.

Jackson Gode writes On National Voter Registration Day [9.24.19], examining ways to expand voter registration:

How To Use The iPhone’s New Voice Control Feature:

Assault Awareness & Prevention, Crime, Disinformation, Fact Checking, Marketing, Mendacity, Misconduct, Police, Press Release, University

UW-Whitewater’s Administration Covers Crap with Catsup

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For months, UW-Whitewater has publicized on its website a sham study from a burglar-alarm company as confirmation that Whitewater has the safest campus in Wisconsin. The study is a shabby fraud, with a methodology so far below proper academic standards that it taints the serious work of faculty and students at the school, in the UW System, and anywhere else there are people who believe in legitimate research.  See The Marketing of Misinformation: UW-Whitewater’s Use of a Counterfeit ‘Campus Safety’ Study, For UW-Whitewater’s Administration, Talking Points Won’t Be Enough, and Truth-Telling and Tale-Weaving.

On September 19, Jeff Angileri, UW-Whitewater’s Assistant Director of Media Relations, wrote a press release announcing the campus police chief’s role on a federal crime commission (“UW Whitewater Police Chief to Lead FBI Task Force”).  See screenshot.  In the press release, Angileri manipulatively inserts a reference to the counterfeit safety study between paragraphs describing Chief Matt Kiederlen’s completely unrelated appointment to a federal commission.  (Kiederlen had nothing to do with the so-called safety study.)

Angileri’s press release is a feeble attempt to cover a campus-safety study that’s little more than crap in the catsup of an unrelated commission appointment.

A few remarks:

Angileri uses a press release to associate UW-Whitewater Chief Matt Kiederlen‘s role on the federal commission with a mendacious study from a complaint-riddled burglar-alarm dealer.  Does Angileri not grasp the academic standards of the university where he works, and from which he was graduated years ago?  When he walks past so many thoughtful students and professors on his way to Hyer Hall, does he not comprehend that his lies undermine their search for truth?

Would Kiederlen care to defend  the methodology of the ‘safety study’ directly? Would he care to call upon his colleagues on the Beyond 2021 commission, or the men and women who manage crime data for the FBI, to defend the so-called study UW-Whitewater touts?  A person would make himself ridiculous trying to do so, but people choose freely: sometimes well, sometimes poorly.

New UW-Whitewater Chancellor Dwight Watson doubtless has to worry about enrollment declines on his campus, but he has a greater question before him: can you save an academic institution by ruining its academic reputation?

Note well: there is nothing in this city that can successfully make the worse appear the better reason.

UW-Whitewater, and the city in which the campus is nestled, will always deserve better than mendacity and mediocrity.

Send Angileri’s rancid work back to the kitchen – no discerning man or woman would be fooled into accepting crap covered in catsup.

(For a review of UW-Whitewater’s systemic, years-long problems of assault & harassment, see the FREE WHITEWATER category Assault Awareness & Prevention.)

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.24.19

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 6:48 PM, for 12h 03m 04s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 25.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1789, Pres. Washington signs the Judiciary Act of 1789, legislation that established the federal judiciary of the United States.

Recommended for reading in full:

Gina Barton and Patrick Marley report Investigating police shootings like plane crashes gets closer to reality in Wisconsin:

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ plan for criminal justice reform includes an idea championed by a retired Air Force pilot from Wisconsin: Analyze police-involved deaths the same way the National Transportation Safety Board investigates plane crashes.

Even if Harris isn’t elected, the plan could become a reality in Wisconsin. State Sen. Van Wanggaard, a Racine Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety, is working on a bill that would allocate $3 million to make it happen.

The bill would create a Police and Community Safety Board tasked with helping law enforcement learn from fatal and near-fatal incidents that victimize officers, civilians or both.

Aviation’s methods include examining and sharing the factors that contributed to a crash or near-miss with an eye toward prevention. The idea of bringing similar techniques to police work has gained traction in recent years in light of a number of high-profile police-involved deaths, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York.

Karoun Demirjian, Josh Dawsey,  Ellen Nakashima, and Carol D. Leonnig report Trump ordered hold on military aid days before calling Ukrainian president, officials say:

Meg Jones reports Spotted cows spotted at Spotted Cow brewery in New Glarus:

A herd of spotted cows busted out of their corral early Monday, shuffled and sauntered around a mile and a half before arriving at their destination — the brewery that manufactures the uber-popular, only-sold-in-Wisconsin Spotted Cow beer.

City, Crime, Cruelty, Education, Ethnicity, Immigration, Local Government, Mendacity, Migrants, Police, Race, University, UW System

‘Do Deportations Lower Crime? Not According to the Data’

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Anna Flagg writes Do Deportations Lower Crime? Not According to the Data:

In one of Donald J. Trump’s earliest moves as president, days after his inauguration, he revived the deportation program known as Secure Communities. Proponents argue that it helps prevent crime and also increases the police’s ability to solve crime through collaboration with federal immigration enforcement. But a new study from the University of California, Davis, has cast doubt on the ability of Secure Communities to do either.

This story was published in collaboration with The New York Times’s Upshot. The program, involving cooperation between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local police departments, began under George W. Bush in 2008. President Obama expanded it drastically during his first term but in 2014 discontinued it.

Embedded below, in full, is a proper academic study, Immigrants’ Deportations, Local Crime and Police Effectiveness, from Annie Laurie Hines of the University of California, Davis and Giovanni Peri, University of California, Davis and IZA (Institute of Labor Economics).

Two points for Whitewater:

1. Local law enforcement’s repeated techniques to stop and to identify undocumented residents – kept out of the press by a leader more subtle than his needy predecessors ever were – are no less objectionable than their conduct was. A brief that begins with ‘don’t make a public fuss and embarrass us’ still leaves ample room for coddling revanchist subordinates.

2. Perhaps someone will send along to the UW-Whitewater Marketing and Communications group’s Assistant Vice Chancellor Sara Kuhl and Assistant Director Jeff Angileri a copy of the embedded study, so that they can see what a proper methodology requires.

These two have been on campus for years, and yet their own flacking of a counterfeit study on campus safety from a burglar-alarm dealer shows only their ignorance (or worse, their contempt) for the basic academic standards through which UW-Whitewater’s faculty and students have been successful. See The Marketing of Misinformation: UW-Whitewater’s Use of a Counterfeit ‘Campus Safety’ Study and For UW-Whitewater’s Administration, Talking Points Won’t Be Enough.

For today — Immigrants’ Deportations, Local Crime and Police Effectiveness —

[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/dp12413.pdf” width=”66%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

Education, Law, Open Government, Public Records, School District, Wisconsin

School Board Applicants’ Letters of Interest

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Last week, I posted on the applicant interviews with the Whitewater Unified School Board for a vacancy (following the resignation of board member Jean Linos). See School Board, 9.16.19: Applicant Interviews and Reporting. Seeing that the agenda for the meeting lacked key information, and a local newspaper’s reporting (Gazette; Beleckis) was deficient, I submitted a public records request to the district (for video of the meeting and the applicants’ letters of interest).

The district has promptly fulfilled my request: the video of the meeting is online and also embedded at this website; the letters of interest appear below. (The district – properly under law – submitted unedited letters of interest. I’ve chosen to redact contact information simply because it’s not relevant to the applicants’ substantive views which were the basis of their candidacies.)

There were four applicants (Andrew Crone, Maryann Zimmerman, Miguel Aranda, Nick Baldwin) and the board appointed Aranda for the remaining term to run to April 2020.

These are thoughtful letters of interest: they speak well of the applicants and of our community.

[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/WUSD-Applicants-Letters-of-Interest-.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.23.19

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater, the first day of fall, will be sunny with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:49 PM, for 12h 05m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 35.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Whitewater Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District Board at 7 PM. 

On this day in 1806,  the Lewis & Clark expedition (Corps of Discovery Expedition) arrives in St. Louis, ending their journey after two years, four months, and ten days.

Recommended for reading in full:

Seung Min Kim and Felicia Sonmez report Trump suggests he mentioned Biden in phone call with Ukrainian president:

President Trump appeared to confirm Sunday that he mentioned former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter in a phone call with the leader of Ukraine, as some senior Democrats revived talk of impeachment hearings over revelations that Trump had asked a foreign government to investigate one of his potential 2020 opponents.

The president and his close allies also escalated their attacks on Biden on Sunday, demanding probes into the former vice president and his son’s work in Ukraine, though no evidence has surfaced that Biden acted inappropriately and Trump’s allies did not provide any.

Across several networks Sunday, top administration officials, outside advisers and lawmakers close to Trump repeatedly raised the specter of impropriety on the part of Biden, whose younger son, Hunter, was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company that Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate, according to people familiar with the matter.

David Frum sees Trump’s attempt at diversion for what it is:


Rachael Bade and Josh Dawsey report ‘We’ve been very weak’: House Democrats decry their oversight of Trump, push Pelosi on impeachment:

Democrats’ frustration with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s unwillingness to impeach President Trump is reaching a fever pitch following reports that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate a political rival — a step the California Democrat declined to endorse Sunday.

An increasingly vocal group of pro-impeachment House Democrats are starting to dismiss their own oversight of Trump as feckless, even accusing their colleagues of emboldening the president by refusing to stand up to what they see as lawless behavior.

At the very least, these Democrats say, the House should be taking more aggressive action to break the unprecedented White House stonewalling, possibly even fining defiant Trump officials, an idea Pelosi dismissed this year.

The Rise of Solar Power: