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Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.21.14

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Good morning.

It will be sunny and cold today, with a high of four degrees, and wind chill values between ten and twenty below.

Whitewater’s Alcohol and Licensing Committee meets at 6 PM, and Common Council at 6:30 PM this evening.

We’re not the only ones with interesting weather. A Russian videographer recorded a sundog in Moscow recently. It’s lovely (and more so by contrast with the dull and uniform architecture of the neighborhood):

On this day in 1959, Carl Dean Switzer of the original Our Gang Little Rascals dies in a fight that a jury later determines was justifiable homicide:

Carl Dean Switzer, the actor who as a child played “Alfalfa” in the Our Gang comedy film series, dies at age 31 in a fight, allegedly about money, in a Mission Hills, California, home. Alfalfa, the freckle-faced boy with a warbling singing voice and a cowlick protruding from the top of his head, was Switzer’s best-known role.

On this day in 1935, one Janesville teen seems incorrigible:

1935 – Five Janesville Youths Arrested
On this date five Janesville boys, ages 13-16, were arrested for a string of burglaries, including the thefts of cigarettes, whisky and blankets. While in the police station, one of the boys tried to crack the safe in the chief’s office. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

Here’s Puzzability‘s game for Tuesday:

This Week’s Game — January 20-24
Alternative Musicians
Some people can really sing their hearts out. For each day this week, we began with the name of a solo singer who has won a Record of the Year Grammy Award. Then we removed any spaces and punctuation and deleted every other letter, leaving just the odd letters. The day’s clue shows those remaining letters in order.
Example:
MCALAKO
Answer:
Michael Jackson
What to Submit:
Submit the singer’s name (as “Michael Jackson” in the example) for your answer.
Tuesday, January 21
RBRALC

Economy, Planning, Politics

Frédéric Bastiat’s Gift to Whitewater

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Of course, Frédéric Bastiat‘s work offers not one gift but many, and not merely for Whitewater, but for all people in all places. Still, today, one might consider just one essay from his powerful understanding for our small city.

If Whitewater were to look to one place for guidance, on rights, responsibility, and a sound political-economy, then she would do well to look to Bastiat’s That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen (Ce qu’on void et ce qu’on ne void pas). It’s true and beautiful in original and translation (so true and beautiful that one almost imagines it cannot be translated poorly).

(About a century later, Henry Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson as a gloss on Bastiat, of That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen, and really just an introduction to Bastiat for an American audience.)

The introduction to the essay That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen:

In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause – it is seen. The others unfold in succession – they are not seen: it is well for us, if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference – the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favourable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.

In fact, it is the same in the science of health, arts, and in that of morals. It often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences. Take, for example, debauchery, idleness, prodigality. When, therefore, a man absorbed in the effect which is seen has not yet learned to discern those which are not seen, he gives way to fatal habits, not only by inclination, but by calculation.

This explains the fatally grievous condition of mankind. Ignorance surrounds its cradle: then its actions are determined by their first consequences, the only ones which, in its first stage, it can see. It is only in the long run that it learns to take account of the others. It has to learn this lesson from two very different masters – experience and foresight. Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should like, if possible, to substitute a more gentle one. I mean Foresight. For this purpose I shall examine the consequences of certain economical phenomena, by placing in opposition to each other those which are seen, and those which are not seen….

In years past, today, and for years yet ahead, Whitewater’s policymakers would have profitted and will profit by reading and embracing Bastiat’s teaching.

Few have, some will, others won’t.

Those who have, and those who will, by doing so offer much to their fellow residents. All of it is simple and clear, by design to be readily intelligible.

Those who won’t (just as those many over the years who haven’t) will give the city nothing but disappointment and failure, however fancily adorned. When their schemes go awry, they will have only themselves to blame.

A new year begins – the more deeply policymakers think about their choices, the better the city’s prospects. The more superficially they consider their proposals (as some have so embarrassingly done in years past), the more disappointment they will experience, and inflict on their fellow residents.

Even a little Bastiat, properly applied, would go a long way to making the city a better place.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.20.14

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Good morning.

We’ll have an even chance of a wintry mix of freezing rain and snow in Whitewater today (with slight accumulation), and a high of twenty-two (before dropping into the teens).

Friday’s FW poll was about the likelihood of victory for each of the NFL’s four remaining teams, and respondents favored Seattle (31.43%) and Denver (28.57%) from among the four. That’s how it turned out, although not without close moments along the way (in the Seattle-San Francisco game, at least).

Google has a new doodle on its webpage for MLK Day:

martin-luther-king-jr-day-2014-5114554967130112-hp
On this day in 1942, officials of the Nazi state meet at the Wannsee Conference, “to ensure the cooperation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the final solution to the Jewish question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to Poland and exterminated.”

The conference followed an earlier, December 12, 1941 meeting at the Reich Chancellery where Hitler met with principal leaders of the regime to authorize extermination of Europe’s Jews (from Goebbels’s diary for December 12, 1941: “With respect of the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they again brought about a world war, they would live to see their annihilation in it. That wasn’t just a catch-word. The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”)

Puzzability has a new weekly series, entitled Alternative Musicians:

This Week’s Game — January 20-24
Alternative Musicians
Some people can really sing their hearts out. For each day this week, we began with the name of a solo singer who has won a Record of the Year Grammy Award. Then we removed any spaces and punctuation and deleted every other letter, leaving just the odd letters. The day’s clue shows those remaining letters in order.
Example:
MCALAKO
Answer:
Michael Jackson
What to Submit:
Submit the singer’s name (as “Michael Jackson” in the example) for your answer.
Monday, January 20
FAKIAR

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.19.14

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Good morning.

We’ll have a mostly sunny Sunday with a high of thirty.

Luca Iaconi-Stewart has finished a 1:60-scale model of an Air India Boeing 777 from manila folders. The level of detail on his years-long project is truly extraordinary.

It’s likely that one has never seen anyone command a greater attention to a paper project than this one. Iaconi-Stewart has a flickr album and YouTube Channel that show his admirable progress, a photo and video from which I’ve embedded below.

It’s Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday.

On January 19, 1939, a world record for a Wisconsinite:

1939 – Chicken Plucking World Record
On January 19, 1939 Ernest Hausen (1877 – 1955) of Ft. Atkinson set the world’s record for chicken plucking. [Source: Guinness Book of World’s Records, 1992]

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.18.14

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Good morning.

We’ve a likelihood of snow today, of about an inch, with a high of nineteen. Sunrise this Saturday is 7:21 AM, sunset is 4:50 PM, and the moon is in a waning gibbous phase with 94% of its visible disk illuminated.

Every so often, while film makers are recording penguins, a bird of prey, such as striated caracara, will come along and steal a hidden egg-cam positioned to film the penguins. When that happens, here’s the view of the theft and afterward from the purloined egg-cam:

In the checkered history of public spending, at least this was a good expenditure:

On this day in 1803 [1.18.1803], Thomas Jefferson requests funding from Congress to finance the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Jefferson officially asked for $2,500 in funding from Congress, though some sources indicate the expedition ultimately cost closer to $50,000. Lewis was joined by his friend William Clark and 50 others on the journey, including an African-American slave and a female Indian guide named Sacagawea. The team, which Jefferson called the Corps of Discovery, first surveyed the territory that comprised the Louisiana Purchase, a vast expanse that reached as far north as present-day North Dakota, south to the Gulf of Mexico and stopped at the eastern border of Spanish territory in present-day Texas. The team then crossed the Rockies and navigated river routes to the Pacific coast of present-day Oregon. Upon their return, the duo’s reports of the exotic and awe-inspiring new lands they had encountered sparked a new wave of westward expansion….