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Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.10.14

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater looks to be beautiful, with sunny skies and a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:06 PM. The moon is in a waxing gibbous phase with eighty-two percent of its visible disk illuminated.

The results of Friday’s FW poll, Friday Poll — Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford: Optimist or Reprobate? are now in: 78.57% of respondents doubted Ford’s supposed break with a troubled past.

Perhaps you’ve never seen a rabbit eating raspberries. You’re one click away from changing that:

On this day in 1869, America goes truly transcontinental:

The First Transcontinental Railroad (known originally as the “Pacific Railroad” and later as the “Overland Route“) was a 1,907-mile (3,069 km) contiguous railroad line constructed between 1863 and 1869 across the western United States to connect the Pacific coast at San Francisco Bay with the existing Eastern U.S. rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa, on theMissouri River. The rail line was built by three private companies: the original Western Pacific Railroad Company between Oakland and Sacramento, California (132 miles (212 km)), theCentral Pacific Railroad Company of California eastward from Sacramento to Promontory Summit, Utah Territory (U.T.) (690 miles), and the Union Pacific Railroad Company westward to Promontory Summit from the road’s statutory Eastern terminus at Council Bluffs on the eastern shore of the Missouri River opposite Omaha, Nebraska (1,085 miles).[1][2][3]

Opened for through traffic on May 10, 1869, with the driving of the “Last Spike” with a silver hammer at Promontory Summit,[4] the road established a mechanized transcontinental transportation network that revolutionized the settlement and economy of the American West by bringing these western states and territories firmly and profitably into the “Union” and making goods and transportation much quicker, cheaper and much more flexible from coast to coast.

Poll

Friday Poll — Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford: Optimist or Reprobate?

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368px-Rob_Ford_Mayor


Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, the admittedly crack-smoking and heavy-drinking chief executive of that large city, now finds himself in rehab after yet another revelation that he’s still an addict.

After checking himself into in rehabilitation, here’s how Ford described his initial experience in that facility:

“I feel great,” he said. “Rehab is amazing. It reminds me of football camp. Kind of like the Washington Redskins camp I went to as a kid. I am working out every day and I am learning about myself, my past and things like that.”

He’s also looking ahead:

Of course, I am coming back and I am going to kick butt,” Ford told the paper. “I will be on the ballot for mayor in October, guaranteed, and I will do well. On Oct. 28, there will be no need to change the locks. There will be no need to clean out my office because I am coming back.”

So, what do you think, from this distance: does Rob Ford strike you as a sunny optimist, or more like an incorrigible reprobate?

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.9.14

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Good morning.

Morning showers on Friday will give way to a partly sunny day with a high of sixty-nine.

On this day in 1914, Pres. Wilson proclaims a holiday:

President Woodrow Wilson issues a presidential proclamation that officially establishes the first national Mother’s Day holiday to celebrate America’s mothers.

The idea for a “Mother’s Day” is credited by some to Julia Ward Howe (1872) and by others to Anna Jarvis (1907), who both suggested a holiday dedicated to a day of peace. Many individual states celebrated Mother’s Day by 1911, but it was not until Wilson lobbied Congress in 1914 that Mother’s Day was officially set on the second Sunday of every May. In his first Mother’s Day proclamation, Wilson stated that the holiday offered a chance to “[publicly express] our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.”

On 5.9.1950, the first event at the Arena:

First Sporting Event Held at Milwaukee Arena
On this date, in the first sporting event at the new Milwaukee Arena, Rocky Graziano scored a fourth-round TKO over Vinnie Cidone in a middleweight fight that drew 12,813 fans. The new Milwaukee Arena actually opened on April 9, 1950, but with a civic celebration rather than a sports event. [Source: Milwaukee Journal].

Puzzability concludes its Cine-Ma series with Friday’s game:

This Week’s Game — May 5-9
Cine-Ma
It’s a Mom-and-Popcorn operation this Mother’s Day week. For each day, we started with the title of a movie and replaced all the letters with asterisks, except for letters that spell out the word MOTHER. (Those letters may appear elsewhere in the title as well.)
Example:
***M**  O*  T**  HE*R*
Answer:
Crimes of the Heart
What to Submit:
Submit the movie title (as “Crimes of the Heart” in the example) for your answer.
Friday, May 9
M**  ***  ***O**  TH***ER****

City, Good Ideas, Local Government

Rethinking Fort Atkinson

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It has often been said of ancient Israel that her excellence lay in how she differed from her less thoughtful and less civilized neighbors.  Not the common and vulgar practices of others, but her own singular beliefs and practices, made her great. 

Nearby Fort Atkinson has, over recent years, been both an economic rival and source of good ideas for Whitewater.

Those days are probably drawing to a close.  That city’s adopted a closed-government posture on the departure of her last city manager, has floated a one-person interview process to ‘learn more’ about a replacement, is busying hounding food trucks while denying doing exactly that, and to look at Fort Atkinson’s streets is to see more empty shops than in recent memory.

There’s a common theme in this, and it seems to confirm what commenter JB remarked about the departure of Fort Atkinson’s city manager recently, in reply to my post, Young Doesn’t Always Work:

I won’t pretend to know the whole story here, but perhaps the reason for leaving is of her own doing. After all, when someone comes in and challenges the “status quo”, there are bound to be a few disagreements. Perhaps her vision for the future of the city didn’t quite match that of the establishment? I’m not sure if it’s fair to chalk it up to “she’s too young to handle this”.

That sure looks right after all that’s happened recently. 

I doubted Evie Johnson’s youth; I should have looked more closely at others’ old ideas.  

If it should be true that Fort Atkinson will slide backward, the loss is hers, but only ours if we make the mistake of copying the bad ideas of our neighbors. 

Being open to best practices – as we should always be – requires first actually finding those worthy practices.

Sadly, we likely have to look farther than Fort Atkinson to find them.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.8.14

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Good morning.

We’ll have a partly sunny day, with a high near 82, and just a one-in-five chance of thunderstorms later in the day.

It’s the anniversary of V-E Day:

On this day in 1945, both Great Britain and the United States celebrate Victory in Europe Day. Cities in both nations, as well as formerly occupied cities in Western Europe, put out flags and banners, rejoicing in the defeat of the Nazi war machine.

The eighth of May spelled the day when German troops throughout Europe finally laid down their arms: In Prague, Germans surrendered to their Soviet antagonists, after the latter had lost more than 8,000 soldiers, and the Germans considerably more; in Copenhagen and Oslo; at Karlshorst, near Berlin; in northern Latvia; on the Channel Island of Sark—the German surrender was realized in a final cease-fire. More surrender documents were signed in Berlin and in eastern Germany.

Here’s the Thursday game from Puzzability:

This Week’s Game — May 5-9
Cine-Ma
It’s a Mom-and-Popcorn operation this Mother’s Day week. For each day, we started with the title of a movie and replaced all the letters with asterisks, except for letters that spell out the word MOTHER. (Those letters may appear elsewhere in the title as well.)
Example:
***M**  O*  T**  HE*R*
Answer:
Crimes of the Heart
What to Submit:
Submit the movie title (as “Crimes of the Heart” in the example) for your answer.
Thursday, May 8
***  ******M  O*  TH*  **ER*

Elections, Politics

Nass Runs for 11th Senate District

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Of course he’s running:

Longtime GOP state Rep. Steve Nass will run for the open 11th Senate District, an aide tells WisPolitics.com.

Nass is jumping into the race for the 11th SD after Sen. Neal Kedzie, R-Elkhorn, announced yesterday he would not seek re-election to the heavily GOP seat in southern Wisconsin.

A reminder to the candidate: limited government means smaller government, not simply redistribution of current spending to political allies, and open & limited government is incompatible with legislators who sign confidentiality agreements against disclosure of public matters.

The seat is sure to be Nass’s – what he does with it is what will matter. 

Via Nass to run for open Senate seat @ WisPolitics Election Blog.

Corporate Welfare, Press

The Foul Air in Which Chicanery Breathes Easily

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In nearby Janesville, they’ve a state senatorial candidate hinting that he’ll bring General Motors back, and a big talkin’ developer (with whom the candidate is associated) now saying the same thing.

These economic promises are no sounder than the hooting and screeching of apes.  (Less sound, actually, as even foul quadrupeds in the rain forest usually mean something genuine by their vocalizations.) 

How did this happen, that the city’s overrun with schemers and scoundrels? 

Economic desperation may be a cause, perhaps.  Hunger paves the way for the manipulative. 

There’s another cause, though: a press that’s lost its way, and caved often to white-collar welfare programs, now finds itself too weak and disrespected to critique effectively the bad ideas before its own city. 

Yielding to bad proposals has polluted Janesville’s political air. 

Although it may be hard for ordinary residents to breathe without choking, it’s just the foul atmosphere in which chicanery breathes easily, and on which it thrives.   

Government Spending, Local Government, Marketing

Structural Limits and Wishful Thinking

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If there’s a limit to a fraud (like Enron), it’s not simply because a swindler is discovered; it’s because some swindles (Ponzi schemes, for example) are impossible to sustain everlastingly.

Cleverness doesn’t matter – there are structural limitations that cannot be overcome (only so many people, only so many future victims, only so much money from those victims, etc.). 

Limits apply even for the honest (in fact, they apply more so). 

All people live in conditions of economic scarcity.  Capitalism manages those conditions more productively and efficiently than any command-system alternative, but it does not eliminate them. Humanity has no ability to eliminate conditions of scarcity, properly defined.  (That would be a divine, not human, power.)

About debt, generally, consider these remarks from Michael Pettis (writing with Chinese state-capitalism in mind, but applicable generally):

….Debt always matters. Either it must be repaid out of the proceeds of the investment that was funded by the debt, or – if the debt funded consumption or was misallocated into insufficiently productive investments – it must be repaid by transfers from some other sector of the economy, and these transfers reduce growth by reducing real demand….

And Pettis again, on sound economic predictions:

….Those who worried about rising consumer credit in the US were not wrong every single year until 2007-8, when they accidentally became right. They were right every single year, and were proven right in 2007. Those who have been arguing that China is experiencing an unsustainable increase in debt have not been wrong every quarter that China has not collapsed. They are almost certainly right and it is hard even for the most foolish of bulls any longer to deny it.

An analysis that points to an unsustainable trend is always right if the trend turned out indeed to be unsustainable. The fact that it may have taken many years before the limits were reached is not an indication that the model was wrong. It is simply how the economy works….

In a place like Whitewater, one sees so much talk about the need for marketing plans, how to market the city, etc.  There are few places as small as Whitewater with this much big talk about the need for marketing the community.  

There’s a place for marketing (it’s a legitimate field) but it’s wildly over-used here. (See, along these lines, The Failure of Marketing (and the Marketing of Failure).)  

Mediocre leaders rely on the talk of marketing to conceal their structural failures, or to convince residents that there are no structural limits (and so can be no failures). 

We’ve wasted millions of others’ earnings on empty promises and lies.  We can spend millions more now, too. 

Doubt not, though, that we’ll have to pay it all back, one way or another.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.7.14

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Good morning.

We’ll have a mostly cloudy but warm day in the Whippet City, with a high of seventy-four.

On this day in 1945, Germany surrenders unconditionally:

…the German High Command, in the person of General Alfred Jodl, signs the unconditional surrender of all German forces, East and West, at Reims, in northwestern France.

At first, General Jodl hoped to limit the terms of German surrender to only those forces still fighting the Western Allies. But General Dwight Eisenhower demanded complete surrender of all German forces, those fighting in the East as well as in the West. If this demand was not met, Eisenhower was prepared to seal off the Western front, preventing Germans from fleeing to the West in order to surrender, thereby leaving them in the hands of the enveloping Soviet forces. Jodl radioed Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, Hitler’s successor, with the terms. Donitz ordered him to sign. So with Russian General Ivan Susloparov and French General Francois Sevez signing as witnesses, and General Walter Bedell Smith, Ike’s chief of staff, signing for the Allied Expeditionary Force, Germany was-at least on paper-defeated. Fighting would still go on in the East for almost another day. But the war in the West was over.

Since General Susloparov did not have explicit permission from Soviet Premier Stalin to sign the surrender papers, even as a witness, he was quickly hustled back East-into the hands of the Soviet secret police, never to be heard from again. Alfred Jodl, who was wounded in the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, would be found guilty of war crimes (which included the shooting of hostages) at Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, 1946-then granted a pardon, posthumously, in 1953, after a German appeals court found Jodl not guilty of breaking international law.

On 5.7.1932, a discovery in Janesville:

1932 – Illegal Distillery Discovered in Janesville
On this date Rupert E. Fessenden, Rock County’s chief deputy, discovered the largest ever illegal liquor distillery in southern Wisconsin. The distillery was found on the old Frances Willard estate south of the Wisconsin School for the Blind. Ironically, Willard was one of the founders of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. [Source: Janesville Gazette].

Imagine if Rock County had not found that illegal operation: Janesville might have lost its GM plant, been saddled with lying officials, and beset with scheming businessmen telling tall tales to advance dubious development schemes. Thank goodness those things didn’t happen…

Here’s Puzzability‘s midweek game:

This Week’s Game — May 5-9
Cine-Ma
It’s a Mom-and-Popcorn operation this Mother’s Day week. For each day, we started with the title of a movie and replaced all the letters with asterisks, except for letters that spell out the word MOTHER. (Those letters may appear elsewhere in the title as well.)
Example:
***M**  O*  T**  HE*R*
Answer:
Crimes of the Heart
What to Submit:
Submit the movie title (as “Crimes of the Heart” in the example) for your answer.
Wednesday, May 7
MO*T*  ***H**  ***  **E  ****   *R***