FREE WHITEWATER

When Endorsements Are Effective

Political endorsements are effective when they bolster those who similarly believe, or when they persuade doubters to start believing.   

Otherwise, they’re no better than singing in the shower: they sound good to the singer, but no one else hears or enjoys the song.  

Good luck to print publications that don’t seem to grasp these simple truths. 

Scalding’s Not the Remedy to Freezing

A freezing person doesn’t improve his or her health by jumping into scalding water. 

Weak leaders, often weak for years, can’t assure better conditions by shifting wildly from cold indifference to scorching concern.

Daily Bread for 10.15.14

Good morning, Whitewater.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be an occasionally rainy day with a high of fifty-five.

On this day in 1989, Wayne Gretzky breaks a longstanding record:

During a game against his old team, the Edmonton Oilers, Canadian ice hockey great Wayne Gretzky breaks Gordie Howe’s National Hockey League career scoring record of 1,850 points.

Gretzky dominated professional hockey during the 1980s, setting numerous records and leading the Oilers to four Stanley Cup victories. In 1988, the “Great One” was traded to the Los Angeles Kings, where he continued to excel as one of the National Hockey League’s foremost players. He retired in 1999 as a New York Ranger, holding records for most career goals, 894; most career assists, 1,963; and most career points, 2,857.

Here are some of his top moments on ice:

Google-a-Day asks a question about baseball:

In what year did the manager and team depicted in the blockbuster film “Moneyball” finally win their first playoff series?

That’s Pretty Darn Funny, Actually

I’ve heard that some Republicans, including radio host Charlie Sykes, are upset that a few Democrats tweeted suggestions for good things Mary Burke might have said about Scott Walker in the first gubernatorial debate. 

Among those tweets was a suggestion from Lori Compas, formerly a state senate candidate, and currently a photographer and leader of a business group (the Wisconsin Business Alliance).

Here’s what Mrs. Compas wrote:

No one on the Right has a sense of humor? 

Honest to goodness that’s funny – it’s well & tersely expressed. 

I’m a libertarian, not a major-party supporter, but have Republicans (and Democrats in other circumstances) lost any appreciation for a well-delivered remark? 

I don’t know Lori Compas, but I did post a few times on her senate campaign

Less than a generation ago, politicians would often appreciate rivals’ or opponents’ jokes. 

It’s all so serious – too serious – now.

By the way, like almost all libertarians from old, movement families, I’ve no fondness for Charles & David Koch.  They walked away from our party and movement, trying unsuccessfully to gain control of the libertarian Cato Institute along the way.  They’ve now a seemingly unquenchable thirst for major-party influence.

Gov. Walker, Mary Burke, the Koch Brothers, etc., and their respective supporters should be able to take a joke with equanimity.

Especially, I’d think, a clever one. 

Does the Gazette‘s Editorialist Think that Janesville’s Residents Can’t Count?

All around, daily print newspapers are in decline. For most of them, there will be no more than several years of life left.  By 2020, almost all of them will be gone. (See, along these lines, Clay Shirky’s Last Call: The end of the printed newspaper.)

If a newspaper is at ideological odds with ordinary residents of its community, there’s even more difficulty.  That’s the problem that Lee Enterprises has with the State Journal in Madison, and it’s the smaller Gazette‘s problem in Janesville: self-professed conservative papers in blue cities.

One can make a go of it swimming against the community tide only if one writes and reasons very well.  A paper’s minority views can even be an advantage, if those views are powerfully argued.

For the Gazette, however, there’s a triple burden: (1) their community – both left and right – mostly rejects their version of insiders’ pro-government conservatism, (2) their version is ideologically flimsy, in any event, and (3) the newspaper expresses that flimsy, minority viewpoint poorly.  

Another example comes from the Gazette‘s Monday editorial (subscription req’d), Our Views: SHINE continues hopeful march toward medical isotopes factory.

Janesville has spent over nine million in grants and loan guarantees for a medical isotope project, and the federal gov’t another twenty five million, but here’s how the Gazette‘s editorialist defends that project against charges of corporate welfare:

Critics label these city and federal incentives nothing more than corporate welfare.

Nonsense. Company officials have projected they will have invested $180 million in construction, equipment and regulatory costs by the time the plant opens, and they hope that happens in 2017. SHINE figures it will generate $200 million in revenues in its first year.

Leaving aside that the $180-million figure is a mere projection, and that this projection may not be free of government-provided assistance, one still confronts this question:

Why is it ‘nonsense’ to contend that the thirty-four million from the city and federal government is an example of corporatism (that is, corporate welfare)? 

If anything, the one-hundred and eighty million that SHINE contends it will raise (even if all from private funds) only makes stronger the case against local and federal funding: if the idea should be so strong as backers contend, why can’t SHINE raise all of its capital privately?

Either public money is superfluous, because the project is sound, or investors have legitimate doubts, and want taxpayers to allay that skepticism with tens of millions in subsidies for the project. 

The additional private investment does not negate the charge against the public expenditures.  It makes that public investment more questionable. 

SHINE is getting a huge subsidy that ordinary people wouldn’t get even fractionally, all in the promise of producing a sliver of the jobs that GM did, for a more elite group of medical workers than any factory in the auto industry ever employed. 

If the Gazette writes about a $180-million possibility, do they think that Janesville’s residents won’t notice an actual $34-million subsidy?

Deriding criticism of that subsidy as ‘nonsense’ is merely another example of weak or lazy reasoning – it’s easier to use the word in criticism than to justify the expense by argument.  

And that, really, is why that paper is in so much trouble: at odds with its community, wedded to a selfish defense of powerful insiders, and unable even to explain that defense either powerfully or cleverly. 

Film: Tiny Planet

Jonas Ginter is a German journalist with a knack for creative filmmaking. With the help of a 3-D printer—and a free template—he built a custom mount that holds six GoPro cameras at once. Each camera records from a different face of the cubed mount, which means that when all the footage is edited together, it shrinks the world down to a cartoonishly distorted time-lapse. The effect is especially great when Ginter tracks a car driving through city streets, as seen above in the above video, which he made for the juvenile goods company Cybex.

Daily Bread for 10.14.14

Good morning, Whitewater.

Tuesday in town brings a probability of thunderstorms and a high of sixty-two. Sunrise today in 7:07 AM and sunset 6:14 PM. The moon is a waning gibbous with sixty-one percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM, and Cable Television committee meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1947, Captain (later Brigadier General) Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to break the sound barrier:

Yeager remained in the Air Force after the war, becoming a test pilot at Muroc Army Air Field (now Edwards Air Force Base). After Bell Aircraft test pilot “Slick” Goodlin demanded $150,000 to break the sound “barrier,” the USAAF selected Yeager to fly the rocket-powered Bell XS-1 in a NACA program to research high-speed flight.[13][14]

Yeager in front of the Bell X-1, which, as with all of the aircraft assigned to him, he named Glamorous Glennis (or some variation thereof), after his wife.

Yeager in the Bell X-1 cockpit.
Such was the difficulty in this task that the answer to many of the inherent challenges were along the lines of “Yeager better have paid-up insurance.”[15] Two nights before the scheduled date for the flight, Yeager broke two ribs falling from a horse. He was so afraid of being removed from the mission that he went to a veterinarian in a nearby town for treatment and told only his wife, as well as friend and fellow project pilot Jack Ridley about the accident. On the day of the flight, Yeager was in such pain that he could not seal the X-1’s hatch by himself. Ridley rigged up a device, using the end of a broom handle as an extra lever, to allow Yeager to seal the hatch of the X-1.

Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, flying the X-1 at Mach 1.07 at an altitude of 45,000 ft (13,700 m).[16][N 2] Yeager was awarded the MacKay and Collier Trophies in 1948 for his mach-transcending flight, and the Harmon International Trophy in 1954. The X-1 he flew that day was later put on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

Yeager went on to break many other speed and altitude records. He was also one of the first American pilots to fly a MiG-15, after its pilot defected to South Korea.[18][19] Returning to Muroc, during the latter half of 1953, Yeager was involved with the USAF team that was working on the X-1A, an aircraft designed to surpass Mach 2 in level flight. That year, he flew a chase aircraft for the civilian pilot Jackie Cochran, a close friend, as she became the first woman to fly faster than sound.[1]

Also on this day, in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt is shot in Milwaukee during his third-party run for the presidency:

On the night of October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in Milwaukee. Roosevelt was in Wisconsin stumping as the presidential candidate of the new, independent Progressive Party, which had split from the Republican Party earlier that year. Roosevelt already had served two terms as chief executive (1901-1909), but was seeking the office again as the champion of progressive reform. Unbeknownst to Roosevelt, a New York bartender named John Schrank had been stalking him for three weeks through eight states. As Roosevelt left Milwaukee’s Hotel Gilpatrick for a speaking engagement at the Milwaukee Auditorium and stood waving to the gathered crowd, Schrank fired a .38-caliber revolver that he had hidden in his coat.

Roosevelt was hit in the right side of the chest and the bullet lodged in his chest wall. Seeing the blood on his shirt, vest, and coat, his aides pleaded with him to seek medical help, but Roosevelt trivialized the wound and insisted on keeping his commitment. His life was probably saved by the speech, since the contents of his coat pocket — his metal spectacle case and the thick, folded manuscript of his talk — had absorbed much of the force of the bullet. Throughout the evening he made light of the wound, declaring at one point, “It takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose,” but the candidate spend the next week in the hospital and carried the bullet inside him the rest of his life.

Schrank, the would-be assassin, was examined by psychiatrists, who recommended that he be committed to an asylum. A judge concurred and Schrank spent the remainder of his life incarcerated, first at the Northern Hospital for the Insane in Oshkosh, then at Central State Hospital for the criminally insane at the state prison at Waupun. The glass Roosevelt drank from on stage that night was acquired by the Wisconsin Historical Museum. You can read more about the assassination attempt on their Museum Object of Week pages.

Google-a-Day asks a science question:

What type of arthropod limb branches into two, with each branch then comprised of a single series of segments attached end-to-end?

‘No One Left to Lie To’

That’s the title of a book by the late Christopher Hitchens.  Although I share neither his atheism nor his support for the Iraq War, I’d suggest that for his book title alone Hitchens deserves to be remembered well. 

It’s just perfect.  There’s a point at which, after years of dissembling, distracting, and excuse-making, shifty leaders find themselves out of an audience for their mendacious claims, even for the sweetest of their lies.

The way to avoid that sad end – when there’s no one left to lie to – is simply to refrain from dissembling, distracting, and excuse-making.  (The other way is to get out of town, so to speak, before one has exhausted one’s supply of marks, pigeons, and dupes.)

Honesty lives eternally; dishonesty dies prematurely. 

Even the hardest of circumstances may be addressed credibly and creditably if one will speak about them directly and clearly.  One doesn’t have to worry much about persuading when one has a good case – no one worries about being caught in a truth

By contrast, mediocre leaders and charlatan gurus have to fret over every one of their dishonest pitches and fraudulent claims, for fear that they will be caught in a lie. 

I’d guess, thinking about these last few years on our campus, that this is an administration that should have turned over sooner.  It would have been able to claim credit for a construction boom, before observers had time to see whether the expense was justified, and before problems far greater than building-space came to the fore.

Thereafter, there would have been a chance for a more perceptive leadership to address problems of social relations that have been ignored or papered over.  

Too late now. 

This is a university administration near the end its supply of mendacities and the audience for them. 

Daily Bread for 10.13.14

Good morning, Whitewater.

A new week begins in town with a high of sixty-five, and a likelihood of afternoon and evening thunderstorms.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

Friday’s FW poll asked whether an ebola-themed costume seemed like a good choice for a Halloween party. Just under 9 of 10 respondents said that it wouldn’t be their pick.

Russian foreign policy brings violence to others, and her domestic policy brings oppression to her own people. Of those people, however, there are sure to be some who are good-hearted. This happy man, perhaps, is among them:

On this day in 1775, Congress authorizes a navy, not yet the United States Navy, but still an American predecessor:

The Continental Congress authorizes construction and administration of the first American naval force—the precursor of the United States Navy.

Since the outbreak of open hostilities with the British in April, little consideration had been given to protection by sea until Congress received news that a British naval fleet was on its way. In November, the Continental Navy was formally organized, and in December Esek Hopkins was appointed the first commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy. His first fleet consisted of seven ships: two 24-gun frigates, the Alfred and the Columbus; two 14-gun brigs, the Andrea Doria and the Cabot; and three schooners, the Hornet, the Wasp, and the Fly.

During the American Revolution, the Continental Navy successfully preyed on British merchant shipping and won several victories over British warships. After being disbanded for several years, the United States Navy was formally established with the creation of the Department of the Navy in April 1798.

Google-a-Day asks a question about discovery:

In what year was an uninhabited island located 1,404 miles away from the nearest human discovered?

Sunday Animation: Brain Divided

Brain Divided from Cartoon Brew on Vimeo.

A film by Josiah Haworth, Joon Shik Song and Joon Soo Song debuting online exclusively in Cartoon Brew's 4th annual Student Animation Festival.

WATCH
Josiah Haworth's Animation Reel: https://vimeo.com/63448192

Joon Soo Song's Animation Reel: https://vimeo.com/66196390

Joon Shik Song's Animation Reel: https://vimeo.com/66089657

To learn more about the production of this film, visit:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/brewtv/braindivided-85851.html