FREE WHITEWATER

City, Government Spending, Local Government, Marketing, School District

Kidney-Selling as a Threat to the City’s Future

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In a city where some have had an unfortunate tendency to favor marketing over actual accomplishments, and where ‘Whitewater Advocacy’ often amounts to the laughable exaggerations of a few insiders, loss of funding poses a double risk. First, communities across the state have to make do with less, and Whitewater (with a public campus) will feel those cuts as much as most places, if not more so.

Second, what’s especially hard for this city is that the desire of officials to appear successful is so strong that they’ll make cuts that look less significant, even if they will bring long-term loss of competitiveness and quality.

In this way, they’re like struggling people who would sell a kidney so long as they could continue to buy fine clothes and a nice tan: what’s outside still looks great, but health and vigor is compromised.

Whitewater’s town fathers are particularly reliant on public money, and even more reliant on the idea that outward appearances are almost everything.

Now I’m not a medical doctor, but I did once see an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, and I recall hearing that people naturally have two kidneys, and that it helps to have at least one. (It really does pay to watch a whole program, leaving the room for snacks only during commercials.)

Whitewater’s leaders would have done well to see that same episode – over and over – until its implications became clear. Not only should organ sales be a last resort, but using those sales to persuade others that one is still healthy is likely to be ineffective. Visitors and newcomers can tell the difference between a healthy person and an ailing one.

(The profound economic confusion in Whitewater’s politics, by the way, reaches so far that some key leaders probably wouldn’t be able to determine correctly whether vital organs were more likely to represent capital or labor. Lincoln knew the answer, almost intuitively it seems.)

Whitewater may hollow out the body in a futile effort to preserve outward appearances, at least for a bit.

No matter: in any event, kidney-selling isn’t a long-term health plan.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.21.15

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Tuesday will be breezy, with a high of forty-eight, and a one-in-five chance of afternoon showers. Sunrise is 6:02 and sunset 7:44, for 13h 41m 52s of daytime today. The moon is a waxing crescent with 9.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

Google has a doodle to commemorate the eighty-first anniversary of a famous photograph, the Surgeon’s Photograph, supposedly of a creature in Loch Ness (but now widely understood to be a hoaxed picture). That old photograph may not have been of an aquatic creature, but Google thinks something even more astonishing might be implicated:

81st-anniversary-of-the-loch-ness-monsters-most-famous-photograph-4847834381680640-hp

Here’s that original photo from 1934:

It’s John Muir’s birthday:

On this date John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland. He immigrated with his family to Wisconsin in 1849 and spent his youth working on his father’s farms in Marquette County, experiences that are recounted inThe Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913). In 1868 he moved to Yosemite Valley, California, where hebecame a conservationist and leader in the forest preserve movement. His work led to the creation of the first national parks, the saving of California’s redwoods, and the founding of the Sierra Club. [Source:  Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography, SHSW 1960, pg. 261]

Puzzability‘s Breaking the Monopoly series continues with Tuesday’s game:

This Week’s Game — April 20-24
Breaking the Monopoly
Go to solve. Go directly to solve. For each day this week, we’ll give you a series of clues, each of which leads to a word. You must drop one letter out of each of these answer words and put them together (in order), adding spaces as needed, to get the name of a space on a classic Monopoly board.
Example:
Square footage / home run, in slang / bad space in Monopoly / children’s author Dahl
Answer:
Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)
What to Submit:
Submit the space name and the smaller words (as “Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)” in the example) for your answer.
Tuesday, April 21
Leave untouched, as perfectly good food / uncooked / food-spearing utensils

 

WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN

Preliminary Questions about the Digester Proposal

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WGTB logo PNG 112x89 Post 2 in a series.

Considering what’s been presented about the digester proposal, what preliminary questions come to mind? Not in any particular order, but simply as topics?

I have answers to some of these, I think, but today I’m just listing general questions.

1. For the digester proposal, specifically, who benefits and at what cost? This is the key, compound question about any project. Because this digester proposal is a commercialization proposal (see question two, below) who benefits has more specific relevancy – some private interests stand to gain from a public investment for waste hauling.

2. What kind of digester proposal is this? City Manager Clapper contends, condescendingly, that it’s simply an upgrade of existing digester facilities (“When an issue as complex and technically detailed as the proposed upgrades to the wastewater treatment facility gets in the news, there are bound to be errors and points needing clarification….What is under consideration as part of the project is the installation of additional equipment within the digesters that would increase operational efficiency within the digesters.”)

It seems to me that the clear distinction between existing digester capacity and this proposal is not merely a two-million-dollar upgrade cost but a commercialization proposal: the importation of large quantities waste from other communities into Whitewater, supposedly for some benefit to the city.

There’s a profound difference of kind, for example, between a man who cleans his own dog’s waste and a man who hopes to make a living collecting and disposing of dog feces from other people’s yards.

I’m not sure – truly – why City Manager Clapper would think he needs a clarification of others’ work, when it’s more fitting to contend that his description of the project is misleading by omission.

3. How many broad ways can one look at the proposal? Previously, I’ve contended that there are four broad criteria from which to evaluate a proposal like this: (1) fiscally, (2) economically, (3) environmentally, and of (4) residents’ health.

The fiscal criterion involves the city’s budget and taxpayers’ obligations. The economic criterion considers the the city’s economy, including the perception of a city as a waste importer. The environmental standard involves how, if at all, the project alters the elements in the city’s air, water, or soil. A health criterion would measure how environmental changes, if any, might affect residents’ physical well-being.

There’s a fifth criterion, however, implicated in this new digester proposal: an examination of which private interests benefit from waste hauling to and from the city’s digester.

4. How much is publicly known about the proposal? I’d say a fair amount, but what’s been published by the city must be only a part of all public records available under the law (Wis. Stat. §§ 19.31-19.39). There’s more that’s missing.

5. How many consultant-vendors have been on the city’s payroll? Donohue and Associates is consulting now, but Trane was working on this project previously. Where is all the work from each? Why the handoff from one to the other?

6. How many meetings not publicly announced have city officials held about this project? How many of those meetings, if any, should have been publicly announced?

7. In some settings, City Manager Clapper and Wastewater Superintendent Reel tout possible commercial gains from the project, but in others they’re quiet or vague about those same aspects. What does that say about the nature of their commercial plans?

8. How much trucking of waste in and out of Whitewater will even a minimal commercial program require?

9. Is there a connection between truck traffic that would come from waste hauling and our local big-business lobby’s recent concern about truck routes through the city?

10. The new digester plan includes the commercial importation of waste in, and out, of the city to create an income stream for selected haulers. Who gets that business? How might they be connected to others now in office or in big business in the city?

11. Where would waste trucked from the city go under a commercial program? How would those in the city reliably know where it went?

12. What’s the current state of Whitewater’s drinking water, air, and soil?

13. What’s a good next step? I’d say it makes sense to publish a bibliography of every published, public record from the city on this new digester proposal. One could then assess each of those published, public records to form a list of specific questions, and to prepare a list of what seems missing from the published, public record.

(It’s fair to say that public records under law about this project are greater in number and scope than those few that the city has so far published, that is, placed online or distributed. It’s also true that the city has an obligation to produce unpublished, public records in response to a request even if a few officials may have circulated those records among themselves, or to third parties.)

So that seems the next step – publishing a bibliography of all the available, disclosed public records, from which one could generate direct & detailed questions.

WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN: Mondays @ 10 AM, here on FREE WHITEWATER.

Next Monday: A Working Bibliography.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.20.15

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Monday in town will be rainy with a high of fifty-one. Sunrise is 6:04 and sunset 7:43, for 13h 39m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 3.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

It’s Tito Puente’s birthday:

Ernesto Antonio “Tito” Puente (April 20, 1923 – June 1, 2000)[1] was an American salsa musician and Latin jazz composer. The son of native Puerto Ricans, Ernest and Ercilia Puente, living in New York City’s Spanish Harlem community, Puente is often credited as “The Musical Pope”, “El Rey de los Timbales” (The King of theTimbales) and “The King of Latin Music”….

Tito Puente served in the Navy for three years during World War II after being drafted in 1942. He was discharged with a Presidential Unit Citation for serving in nine battles on the escort carrier USS Santee (CVE-29). The GI Bill allowed him to study music at Juilliard School of Music, where he completed a formal education in conducting, orchestration and theory. In 1969, he received the key to the City of New York from former Mayor John Lindsay. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Congressional Record, and in 1993 he received the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal from the Smithsonian.[5]

During the 1950s, Puente was at the height of his popularity, and helped to bring Afro-Cuban and Caribbean sounds, like mambo, son, and cha-cha-cha, to mainstream audiences. Puente was so successful playing popular Afro-Cuban rhythms that many people mistakenly identify him as Cuban. Dance Mania, possibly Puente’s most well known album was released in 1958.[6] Later, he moved into more diverse sounds, including pop music, bossa nova and others, eventually settling down with a fusion of Afro-Cuban and Latin jazz genres that became known as “salsa” (a term that he disliked). In 1979, Puente won the first of five Grammy Awards for the albums A Tribute to Benny Moré, On Broadway, Mambo Diablo, and Goza Mi Timbal. In 1990, Puente was awarded the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal. He was also awarded a Grammy at the first Latin Grammy Awards, winning Best Traditional Tropical Album for Mambo Birdland. In 1995, he appeared as himself on the Simpsons episode “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” In early 2000, he shot the music documentary Calle 54, wearing an all-white outfit with his band.[7] After a show in Puerto Rico on May 31, he suffered a massive heart attack and was flown to New York City for surgery to repair a heart valve, but complications developed and he died during the night of May 31 – June 1, 2000.[8] He was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003.

On this day in 1836, before we are even a state, our territorial legislature founds a library:

1836 – Oldest Library in the State Founded

On this date an Act of Congress created the Territory of Wisconsin and in the sixteenth and final section of that Act appropriated funds for the Wisconsin State Library to support the needs of the fledgling government. The library is still functioning but has been renamed as the Wisconsin State Law Library [Source: Wisconsin State Law Library]

Puzzability has a new weekly series beginning today, entitled, Breaking the Monopoly. Here’s Monday’s game:

This Week’s Game — April 20-24
Breaking the Monopoly
Go to solve. Go directly to solve. For each day this week, we’ll give you a series of clues, each of which leads to a word. You must drop one letter out of each of these answer words and put them together (in order), adding spaces as needed, to get the name of a space on a classic Monopoly board.
Example:
Square footage / home run, in slang / bad space in Monopoly / children’s author Dahl
Answer:
Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)
What to Submit:
Submit the space name and the smaller words (as “Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)” in the example) for your answer.
Monday, April 20
Punctuation mark used for a pause / widespread operating system developed by Bell Labs / astronomer Brahe / sunrise direction

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.19.15

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Sunday in Whitewater will have a high of sixty-five, and a forty-percent chance of late afternoon showers. Sunrise is 6:05 and sunset 7:42, for 13h 36m 27s of daytime. We’ve a new moon today.

On Friday’s FW poll, readers had a chance to vote on whether ambulances should pick up animals, after the London Ambulance Service mistakenly made a call to a victim who turned out to be a pigeon, not a person. Over ninety percent of respondents felt that ambulances should be for people, not pigeons.

On this day in 1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord change America’s relationship to Britain irrevocably:

The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War.[9] They were fought on April 19, 1775, in Middlesex County, Province of Massachusetts Bay, within the towns ofLexington, Concord, Lincoln, Menotomy (present-day Arlington), and Cambridge, near Boston. The battles marked the outbreak of open armed conflict between the Kingdom of Great Britain and thirteen of its colonies on the mainland of British America.

In late 1774 the Suffolk Resolves were adopted to resist the enforcement of the alterations made to the Massachusetts colonial government by the British parliament following the Boston Tea Party. An illegal Patriot shadow government known as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress was subsequently formed and called for local militias to begin training for possible hostilities. The rebel government exercised effective control of the colony outside of British-controlled Boston. In response, the British government in February 1775 declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion. About 700 British Armyregulars in Boston, under Lieutenant ColonelFrancis Smith, were given secret orders to capture and destroy rebel military supplies that were reportedly stored by the Massachusetts militia at Concord. Through effective intelligence gathering, Patriot colonials had received word weeks before the expedition that their supplies might be at risk and had moved most of them to other locations. They also received details about British plans on the night before the battle and were able to rapidly notify the area militias of the British expedition.

The first shots were fired just as the sun was rising at Lexington. The militia were outnumbered and fell back, and the regulars proceeded on to Concord, where they searched for the supplies. At the North Bridge in Concord, approximately 500 militiamen engaged three companies of the King’s troops at about an hour before Noon, resulting in casualties on both sides. The outnumbered regulars fell back from the bridge and rejoined the main body of British forces in Concord.

Having completed their search for military supplies, the British forces began their return march to Boston. More militiamen continued to arrive from neighboring towns, and not long after, gunfire erupted again between the two sides and continued throughout the day as the regulars marched back towards Boston. Upon returning to Lexington, Lt. Col. Smith’s expedition was rescued by reinforcements under Brigadier GeneralHugh Percy a future duke (of Northumberland, known as Earl Percy). The combined force, now of about 1,700 men, marched back to Boston under heavy fire in a tactical withdrawal and eventually reached the safety of Charlestown. The accumulated militias blockaded the narrow land accesses to Charlestown and Boston, starting the Siege of Boston.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his “Concord Hymn“, described the first shot fired by the Patriots at the North Bridge as the “shot heard round the world“.[10]

On this day in 1852, Wisconsin establishes a specialized school:

1852 – Wisconsin School for the Deaf Established
On this date a bill was passed by the State Legislature for the establishment and maintenance of a school for deaf children in Walworth County. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers edited by Sarah Davis McBride]

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.18.15

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-six. Sunrise is 6:07 and sunset 7:40 for 13h 33m 44s of daytime.

Summer will be here soon, and among its offerings will be a plentiful supply of watermelon. They’re delicious, but they can be beautiful, too:

On this day in 1906, an earthquake devastates San Francisco:

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18.[6] Devastating fires broke out in the city that lasted for several days. As a result, about 3,000 people died and over 80% of San Francisco was destroyed.[7]

The earthquake and resulting fire are remembered as one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States[8] alongside the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.[9] The death toll from the earthquake and resulting fire remains the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California’s history.

Health, Misconduct

The Tragedy of Dr. Oz

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Dr. Mehmet Oz is a cardiothoracic surgeon and vice chairman of the surgery department at Columbia University’s medical school. 

Most people know him, sadly, as a celebrity,  television star, or as a promoter of quack remedies. 

Other prominent physicians across America, at leading institutions, have had enough of the embarrassment that Oz’s sales pitches are to medicine.  They’ve asked
Columbia to remove Oz from his position:

In the letter sent via e-mail this week by Dr. Henry I. Miller of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, the doctors refer to Oz warning his viewers about arsenic in certain apple juice brands and other stances he has taken.

“Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops,” the letter states. “Worst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”

See, Physicians urge Columbia University to cut its ties with Dr. Oz @ Washington Post.   See, also, Half of Dr. Oz’s medical advice is baseless or wrong, study says @ Washington Post.

Columbia has refused, citing Dr. Oz’s academic freedom to speak in public forums as he wishes. 

That’s a tenuous defense, as Stanford’s Miller notes that “Oz’s promotion of worthless products that might have side effects and that delay patients’ seeking safe and effective therapies threatens public safety.”

(There’s no First Amendment issue here, as Columbia is a private university.  Academic freedom is a separate claim, but it seems weak to me: it’s junk science Oz is peddling, and an academic program has a justification to reject him for demonstrably false bio-medical claims.)

The principal tragedy in all this, of course, is that impressionable people might rely on Oz’s claims and become ill, or waste vast amounts of money without improvement.

There’s another tragedy, though: Oz legitimately earned his position at Columbia, but he’s thrown away a commitment to science for personal financial gain, or additional notoriety, or something else that’s a debasement of medicine.

Neither his past accomplishments, nor his celebrity status, are an excuse for using his abilities for selfish and false ends.   That he earned his faculty position does not make right the wrongs he’s been doing by luring people into scams.

Dr. Oz needn’t have done this, but he did do this. 

No one in all the world owes him his error, especially since his error may lead to the injury of vulnerable people seeking necessary cures. 

No one owes greedy hucksters their quackery. 

Each day and every day, one is obligated to use all one has, to the best of one’s abilities, to try – at least to try – to meet the best standards of science and reasoning. 

There is no past accomplishment, there is no present status, that relieves the fortunate from their obligation on behalf of the less fortunate to recommit to these goals each morning. 

It’s more than sad that Dr. Oz either doesn’t see, or doesn’t care, about this large obligation. 

It’s there, nonetheless.

Animals, Poll, Weird Tales

Friday Poll: Ambulances for People or Pigeons?

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In England, a four people called for an ambulance for a sick pigeon. (It’s English slang to refer to women as birds, and so the dispatcher sent the ambulance, assuming the victim was a person, not an animal.)

Medics Rush To Help 'Collapsed' Woman Who Turns Out To Be Pigeon

So, were the callers right to call the London Ambulance Service, or was this a waste of resources properly reserved for humans? (The pigeon, by the way, did not survive.)

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.17.15

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Friday will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 6:08 and sunset 7:39, for 13h 30m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1970, Apollo 13, beset by mechanical problems, successfully returns to Earth with all crew after orbiting the moon:

Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. The craft was launched on April 11, 1970, at 13:13 CST from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the Service Module (SM) upon which the Command Module (CM) depended. Despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and the critical need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, the crew returned safely to Earth on April 17.

The flight was commanded by James A. Lovell with John L. “Jack” Swigert as Command Module Pilot and Fred W. Haise as Lunar Module Pilot. Swigert was a late replacement for the original CM pilot Ken Mattingly, who was grounded by the flight surgeon after exposure to German measles.

On this day in 1897, playwright Thorton Wilder is born:

On this date Thornton Wilder was born in Madison. A renowned author and playwright, he taught at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1937. His plays Our Town (1938) and The Skin of our Teeth (1942) won Pulitzer Prizes and have been performed countless times by school and amateur theatrical companies in the decades since.You can read a 1928 article about his Wisconsin roots in our Wisconsin Local History & Biographies collection. [Source: Thornton Wilder Society]

Here’s Friday’s game in the Puzzability Series Capital Gains:

This Week’s Game — April 13-17
Capital Gains
We’ve got filers all over the globe this week. For each day, we’ve taken the name of a world capital, added a letter, and scrambled all the letters to get a new word that is a type of person or people. The answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the capital followed by the longer word. The clue includes the lengths of the answer words in parentheses.
Example:
Simpletons from Scandinavia (4,5)
Answer:
Oslo fools
What to Submit:
Submit the phrase, with the capital first (as “Oslo fools” in the example), for your answer.
Friday, April 17
Skilled craftsman from southeastern Europe (6,7)