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Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 7.27.13

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Good morning.

It’s will be a mild day in Whitewater, with a high of sixty-three and a one-third chance of afternoon showers. Sunrise was 5:41 AM and sunset will be 8:21 PM. The moon is in a waning gibbous phase with 70% of the its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1953, an armistice brings an end to the Korean War, begun three years earlier by Communist aggression:

Tokyo, Monday, July 27–Communist and United Nations delegates in Panmunjom signed an armistice at 10:01 A.M. today [9:01 P.M., Sunday, Eastern daylight time]. Under the truce terms, hostilities in the three-year-old Korean war are to cease at 10 o’clock tonight [9 A.M., Monday, Eastern daylight time]….

The historic document was signed in a roadside hall the Communists built specially for the occasion. The ceremony, attended by representatives of sixteen members of the United Nations, took precisely eleven minutes. Then the respective delegations walked from the meeting place without a word or handshake between them.

The matter-of-fact procedure underlined what spokesmen of both sides emphasized: That though the shooting would cease within twelve hours after the signing, only an uneasy armed truce and political difficulties, perhaps even greater than those of the armistice negotiations, were ahead.

Signers Are Expressionless

The representatives of the two sides were expressionless as they put their names to a pile of documents, providing for an exchange of prisoners, establishment of a neutral zone for the cease-fire and a later political conference that would attempt to settle the tragic Korean questions, unsolved by three years of fighting that caused hundreds of thousands of casualties.

On this day in 1894, fire destroys most of a northern Wisconsin town:

1894 – Forest Fire Destroys Phillips
On the afternoon of this day, a forest fire swept over the Price Co. town of Phillips from the west, destroying nearly all the buildings and forcing 2,000 people to flee for their lives. When the sun came up the next morning, 13 people had been killed, the entire downtown was in ashes, and exhausted survivors were wandering through the ruins in a daze. The fire ultimately consumed more than 100,000 acres in Price County. Much of the town was rebuilt within a year.

Politics

‘More Than Sharks Love Blood’

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How does one explain politicians like Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, or Mark Sanford? They’ve kept returning no matter how risible their revealed conduct. Their particular motivations are known (if then) only to their families or therapists. It’s possible, though, that a suitable political explanation is available.

In the American version of House of Cards, Congressman Francis Underwood professes that he loves his political wife, Claire, ‘more than sharks love blood.’ It’s quite the description: Underwood’s describing his bond as a feeding instinct. Nothing higher-order about it: he simply needs Claire the way predators need food.

There’s something almost predictable about some politicians expressing that need, because there’s a part of politics (for some) that’s similarly elemental, beneath policy, programs, and philosophy: an insatiable desire to advance oneself, to promote oneself.

Some politics, even small-town politics, runs on the dangerous impulse to advance not a position but a person, not an idea but a man.

On a grand scale, the damage of this impulse is easily understood – most are taught to recognize insatiable ambition at a distance. Close at hand, one’s not so good at spotting its local equivalent. Personality and familiarity distort one’s judgment, and so we foolishly tolerate unprincipled striving, an overweening sense of entitlement, and ceaseless self-promotion.

We’d be foolish, though, to think that ambition of this kind exists only in faraway places, among New Yorkers or those living on the coasts.

It’s closer than that.

Posted also at Daily Adams.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 7.26.13

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Good morning.

We’ve a seventy-percent chance of daytime thunderstorms in Whitewater today, with a high of seventy-five.

On this day in 1775, Benjamin Franklin becomes America’s first postmaster:

William Goddard, a Patriot printer frustrated that the royal postal service was unable to reliably deliver his Pennsylvania Chronicle to its readers or deliver critical news for the paper to Goddard, laid out a plan for a Constitutional Post before the Continental Congress on October 5, 1774. Congress waited to act on the plan until after the Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.

Benjamin Franklin promoted Goddard’s plan and served as the first postmaster general under the Continental Congress beginning on July 26, 1775, nearly one year before the Congress declared independence from the British crown. Franklin’s son-in-law, Richard Bache, took over the position on November 7, 1776, when Franklin became an American emissary to France.

Franklin had already made a significant contribution to the postal service in the colonies while serving as the postmaster of Philadelphia from 1737 and as joint postmaster general of the colonies from 1753 to 1774, when he was fired for opening and publishing Massachusetts Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s correspondence.

Puzzability’s Sun Screens series ends today:

Sun Screens
If you can’t stand the heat, we’ve got just the ticket. For each day this week, we’ll give a three-by-three letter grid in which we’ve hidden the title of a movie that’s set during the summer. Each has 10 or more letters and any number of words. To find the title, start at any letter and move from letter to letter by traveling to any adjacent letter—across, up and down, or diagonally. You may come back to a letter you’ve used previously, but may not stay in the same spot twice in a row. You will not always need all nine letters in the grid.

Example:
F S U
O M A
R E M

Answer:
Summer of Sam

Here’s Friday’s puzzle:

J D P
A E N
Y C I

Science/Nature

A View from the International Space Station

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(21 July 2013) Storm clouds over Southern California. Early morning lightning can be seen as a white blotch just to the right of center. The yellow colored area, beneath the grey clouds, which almost shines because of night lights, is part of the highly populated area of Los Angeles and San Diego.

CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Government Spending, Marketing, Planning

How You, Too, Can Be a Smooth-Talking, Super-Sophisticated Marketeer (Assuming You’d Be Foolish Enough to Want to Be One).

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Real marketing is a legitimate pursuit. By contrast, manipulative, smooth-talking, super-sophisticated men & women spend hours convincing others that the next big thing is, in fact, the Next Big Thing.

They declare that millions of taxpayers’ money spent on white-collar projects, while truly needy people receive no benefit whatever, are Astonishing Feats of Global Significance Worthy of Perpetual Praise.

How do these marketeers speak so well and elegantly? What’s their powerful secret?

They’d probably tell you the same thing they whisper to themselves while looking into their mirrors each morning: that they’re naturally gifted, possessed of insights and secrets unknown to mere mortals.

I doubt that’s true, but no matter, Dear Readers: I can show you how to sound just like these undoubted treasures of the age.

Why read closely of works generations before have profitably studied over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years?

Why, even, go the smooth-talking person’s route of whole hours spent scanning trendy magazines for catchphrases to seem insightful?

The Secrets of the Super-Sophisticated Marketeer can be had, or at least mimicked, more quickly and easily.

Better still, you can imitate these great men and women for only $10.50 (plus shipping.).

Over at Amazon, they’re selling a small box of refrigerator magnets that will confer on any purchaser the same level of insight and knowledge held by smooth-talking, super-sophisticated, public-project hawking marketeers: The Magnetic Poetry Office Kit.

One would not be spending $10.50 on the kit – the purchase would be an investment in our common future.

Look:

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Amazing, isn’t it?

These two-hundred or so tiny magnets have on them all the jargon, cant, buzzwords, slang, and argot you’ll need to sound at least as unctuous as anyone who’s ever hawked a publicly-funded boondoggle.

One can mix the letters in countless empty phrases to feign the knowledge others acquired through actual reading.

Here’s just one example, using only a few of the many words the kit provides:

20130725-124010.jpg

Impressive, no?

Soon, you’ll be ready to tackle the heady and high-octane world of marketing crony capitalism and white-collar welfare.

The pleasure’s been mine, I’m quite sure.

City, Government Spending, Local Government, Marketing, Planning

The Failure of Marketing (and the Marketing of Failure)

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I respect the work of those honest people who practice or study marketing. There’s a place for marketing, and even a place for marketing public projects. In the end, though, it’s the product or service, not the presentation of it, that matters most.

There should be nothing startling in so declaring, but for the marketeers of public projects to say as much is unwelcome. There are any number of men and women who will insist that presentation is everything, and that if one can simply describe a thing in an effective way, it will be – necessarily – an effective thing.

Still, a thing is not the description, presentation, characterization, spin, selling, relationship-building, or marketing, etc., of it.

That’s the failure of marketing: that it cannot make a truly bad thing good, as it cannot compellingly refute the irreducible distinction between object and description.

Those who are manipulative marketeers would deny this claim of failure as naive, as an underestimation of their supposed powers. Clever, glib men believe that anything can be sold. Anything.

They exalt the power of marketing, and so they’ll market even failure, describing it as success.

They are practitioners of a would-be, modern-day alchemy – the transformation of lead into gold. The actual project matters less, for example, than how a sycophantic reporter describes it, because the parroted headline, itself, turns coal into a diamond.

One might be looking, for example, at a multi-million-dollar shell (waste at public expense), but if one glances aside for even a moment at a toady’s fawning words, to look back is to see the Taj Mahal.

That’s why advocates of just about every big public project devote ample time to how they’ll market their latest and (assuredly!) greatest.

It’s as though they saw Wag the Dog, with its satire of political spin, and thought that it was a how-to guide for legitimate policy.

To the gentlemen who think that repeating the same false claims eight or even eighteen times, believing that so doing transforms dross into fine alloys, or beguiles others into believing in that transformation: such repetition neither transforms nor beguiles. A good thing sells itself.

One need only examine the projects themselves, objectively and against the claims made on their behalf, to see the fundamental truth.

Next: How You, Too, Can Be a Smooth-Talking, Super-Sophisticated Marketeer (Assuming You’d Be Foolish Enough to Want to Be One).

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 7.25.13

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be increasingly cloudy with a high of seventy-eight. We’ll have an even chance of thunderstorms tonight.

Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets this morning at 8 AM, and at 7 PM there will be a Police and Fire Commission meeting with members of Common Council in attendance.

CNN offers a a dog meets (same) dog story:

On this day in 1897, Jack London begins a fateful trip:

Jack London leaves for the Klondike to join the gold rush, where he will write his first successful stories….

From an early age, London struggled to make a living, working in a cannery and as a sailor, oyster pirate, and fish patroller. During the national economic crisis of 1893, he joined a march of unemployed workers. He was jailed for vagrancy for a month, during which time he decided to go to college. The 17-year-old London completed a high school equivalency course and enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where he read voraciously for a year. However, he dropped out to join the 1897 gold rush.

While in the Klondike, London began submitting stories to magazines. In 1900, his first collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf, was published. Three years later, his story The Call of the Wild made him famous around the country. London continued to write stories of adventure amid the harsh natural elements. During his 17-year career, he wrote 50 fiction and nonfiction books. He settled in northern California about 1911, having already written most of his best work. London, a heavy drinker, died in 1916.

On this day in 1999, a new member of the Hall of Fame:

1999 – First Brewer Inducted into Hall of Fame
On this date Robin Yount became the first player inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in a Brewer’s jersey. Yount entered the major leagues at the age of eighteen and spent his entire career with the Milwaukee Brewers as number 19 at short stop and center field. His awards are numerous, including being selected as an all-star three times as well as American league MVP twice. [Source: Milwaukee Brewers]

Puzzability’s current series is called Sun Screens:

Sun Screens
If you can’t stand the heat, we’ve got just the ticket. For each day this week, we’ll give a three-by-three letter grid in which we’ve hidden the title of a movie that’s set during the summer. Each has 10 or more letters and any number of words. To find the title, start at any letter and move from letter to letter by traveling to any adjacent letter—across, up and down, or diagonally. You may come back to a letter you’ve used previously, but may not stay in the same spot twice in a row. You will not always need all nine letters in the grid.

Example:
F S U
O M A
R E M

Answer:
Summer of Sam

Here’s Thursday’s puzzle:

W G X
D N O
E L P

Business, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Development, Local Government, Planning

Bad Policy Cannot Hold the City

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If one can count The Three Ways Policy Goes Wrong and if one can answer the question If Policy Goes Bad in Three Basic Ways, What Should Be Done About It?, where does that leave the city?

It leaves the city, over time, better off: bad policy cannot hold the city.

There are only so many times that a few can insist that pigs’ ears are silk purses. Those times are nearly used up, albeit at a vast cost.

This underlies optimism: that experience itself refutes past and present claims in favor of big-ticket, but bad-policy, solutions.

That’s an uncomfortable spot for the advocates of the big projects of the past, but a good spot for Whitewater.

Local Government, Politics

If Policy Goes Bad in Three Basic Ways, What Should Be Done About It?

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If policy goes bad in one of three principal ways, then are the solutions to errors as easily stated (and brought into effect)? (See, from yesterday, The Three Ways Policy Goes Wrong.)

Most of the time, there are.

If the errors are from bad information or bad ideas, then positive change isn’t so hard. One simply contends and contends again, with a marketplace of ideas gradually replacing poor information or poor ideas with better ones.

This is the most common problem of policy, and it’s (fortunately) most easily managed.

If the mistakes are from the rarer case of bad motives, then there’s a different approach. That’s because bad information or bad ideas can be overcome easily in currently-serving policymakers, but those who are mired in bad motives are resistant to change. These stubborn policymakers are best removed and replaced.

The most severe policy problems are of motive (and motivation), coming from laziness, a sense of entitlement, needy self-promotion, and excuse-making. A sense of entitlement will get a community the also-independent wrong of conflicts of interest. (Fortunately, few bad motives involve bigotry or outright theft, wrongs one sees only infrequently by comparison with other problems of motive.)

As for the problems of this third kind, there’s a longer slog against stubborn policymakers of junk policy and sub-par performance. Bad loses to good (or at least better) in a free society. That’s why one can, reasonably, be an optimist about policy in America.

But truly troubled policymakers (Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner among national figures of the moment) won’t go away. They’ll keep trying again and again as long as they’re ambulatory, and are beyond persuasion of fact or idea. If they retreat, it’s only to return again.

As they’re shameless, self-promoting, and gripped by their own outsized sense of entitlement, they’re simply resistant to ordinary reason or persuasion. Appealing to them, directly, is useless.

Instead, one commits to a long game, played each day, contending for a better way and critiquing rigorously the rotting produce of those very few that laziness, a sense of entitlement, needy self-promotion, or excuse-making has so powerfully and inescapably ensnared.

The supposed accomplishments of that ilk are, in any event, ephemeral, sham achievements. What they do rots and rusts, all the boasting in the world notwithstanding. Such is true nationally and locally.

That’s a commitment to a long game, but a winning one.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 7.24.13

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Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be sunny and mild, with a high of seventy-three and calm winds.

Whitewater’s Fire & Rescue Task Force meets this morning at 9:30 AM.

614px-80_-_Machu_Picchu_-_Juin_2009_-_edit.2

On this day in 1911, American archeologist Hiram Bingham discovers the Inca settlement Machu Picchu:

Tucked away in the rocky countryside northwest of Cuzco, Machu Picchu is believed to have been a summer retreat for Inca leaders, whose civilization was virtually wiped out by Spanish invaders in the 16th century. For hundreds of years afterwards, its existence was a secret known only to the peasants living in the region. That all changed in the summer of 1911, when Bingham arrived with a small team of explorers to search for the famous “lost” cities of the Incas.

Traveling on foot and by mule, Bingham and his team made their way from Cuzco into the Urubamba Valley, where a local farmer told them of some ruins located at the top of a nearby mountain. The farmer called the mountain Machu Picchu, which meant “Old Peak” in the native Quechua language. The next day–July 24–after a tough climb to the mountain’s ridge in cold and drizzly weather, Bingham met a small group of peasants who showed him the rest of the way. Led by an 11-year-old boy, Bingham got his first glimpse of the intricate network of stone terraces marking the entrance to Machu Picchu.

Puzzability’s current series (7.22 to 7.26) is called Sun Screens:

Sun Screens
If you can’t stand the heat, we’ve got just the ticket. For each day this week, we’ll give a three-by-three letter grid in which we’ve hidden the title of a movie that’s set during the summer. Each has 10 or more letters and any number of words. To find the title, start at any letter and move from letter to letter by traveling to any adjacent letter—across, up and down, or diagonally. You may come back to a letter you’ve used previously, but may not stay in the same spot twice in a row. You will not always need all nine letters in the grid.

Example:
F S U
O M A
R E M

Answer:
Summer of Sam

Here’s Wednesday’s puzzle:

O E B
T H A
K C V