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City, Good Ideas, Hip & Prosperous, Local Government

Model practices are the new exceptional

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The signs that welcome visitors to Whitewater assure newcomers that we are an exceptional community. It’s an odd slogan for a city: exceptional needn’t mean better. One can be exceptionally talented, for example, but exceptionally narrow and stodgy, too.

The slogan was meant, no doubt, to imply good qualities, but it’s a measure of our confused past that those promoting Whitewater as an exceptional community wouldn’t grasp an ironic, second meaning.

In any event, the time of Whitewater as a self-professed exceptional community now gives way to the city as an increasingly successful part of common and positive trends in America and Wisconsin.

It’s a gradual transition from ‘that’s the way we do things around here’ to ‘eagerly embracing of good ideas from places all across America.’

This transition is necessary if we are to have a prosperous future. Pretending all is perfect and peerless and exceptional is a dead-end.

This change of perspective will bring a more vibrant and prosperous community than anything we’ve yet seen.

Model practices are the new (but better!) exceptional.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.9.13

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Good morning.

It’s a sunny Wednesday for the Whippet City, with a high of forty-one, and west winds at 10 to 15 mph. We’ll have 9h 14m of sunlight, 10h 18m of daylight, and tomorrow will be one minute longer.

Discovery takes more than one form, and comes from more than one place. Consider the Ars Technica story, 15 potential planets in habitable zones found by citizen scientists:

It’s distinctly possible that the first truly Earth-like planet in another star system will be discovered by a non-scientist.

Well, that’s not quite true: the process of discovery is more complicated than that. However, volunteers working with exoplanet data from NASA’s Kepler telescope recently identified 42 planet candidates orbiting relatively nearby stars. Of those, 20 potentially lie within the habitable zone of their systems, meaning the basic conditions could be right for liquid surface water. One of these worlds, known as PH2 b, is definitely a Jupiter-sized planet clearly within its star’s habitable zone. While the planet itself is unlikely to harbor conditions suitable for life, perhaps it has moons that would.

These volunteers were from Planet Hunters, part of the Zooniverse family of citizen science projects. Several Zooniverse efforts have yielded a number of scientific papers, proving that real science can arise from crowdsourcing. The latest Planet Hunter paper, which will be published in the highly ranked Astrophysical Journal, credited more than 40 citizen scientists, a collaboration that does credit both to them and to the professional scientists they worked with.

On this day in 1493, a misidentification:

…Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing near the Dominican Republic, sees three “mermaids”–in reality manatees–and describes them as “not half as beautiful as they are painted.” Six months earlier, Columbus (1451-1506) set off from Spain across the Atlantic Ocean with the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, hoping to find a western trade route to Asia. Instead, his voyage, the first of four he would make, led him to the Americas, or “New World.”

From Google-a-Day, a question about Madison Square Garden: “The first fight ever held in the Madison Square Garden ring was lost by what former and future champ?”

 

Animals, Beautiful Whitewater, City, Good Ideas, Hip & Prosperous, Liberty, Local Government

The Backyard Chicken Trend

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We’re not alone among communities recently allowing urban chickens. A good and smart friend sent along news of Beloit’s urban chicken ordinance, now in effect in that city. She noted in her message that backyard chickens are a positive trend, and she’s right.

(For a prior post on this topic, see Common Council Session of 12.18.12: Backyard Chickens.)

Nice for this city to be part of a larger, genuine movement for sustainable, organic living.

Crime, Law

How to Tell a Tide’s Turning

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After National Review repeatedly questions a grand policy, and the Wall Street Journal prints an essay against that same policy, the tide’s turned in a meaningful way.

Bonus indicators: (1) defenders of the current policy have to justify it in ways they wouldn’t imagine necessary a decade earlier, and (2) David Frum – self-professed conservative most other conservatives ignore – argues for half-measures to steady a teetering status quo..

Rich Lowry of National Review has it right:

Every alternative has its pitfalls. The mandatory treatment now being implemented in New Jersey, although better than a jail sentence, is often less effective than advertised. But we are exiting the era when a focus on the harmful effects of illegal drugs excludes all consideration of the harmful effects of their hard-fisted prohibition. The debate is becoming less susceptible to cheap rhetorical bullying.

Lowry’s final sentence describes what was, but is no longer, a winning habit of drug warriors: “cheap rhetorical bullying.” Questions about costs, effectiveness, militarization of civil society, and disproportionate arrests by particular race or class are no longer swept aside with a few dismissive phrases about law and order.

The proper questions have always been which laws, for what order, at what price?

There’s still an audience for big-government enforcement solutions, and it’s as diehard as ever, but its numbers are fewer each year.

Ahead: a tipping point. Elsewhere first, but eventually even here, in America’s Dairyland.

Posted also at Daily Adams.

Crime, Health, Law

Looking at the Forty-Years’ Drug War

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Over at the Wall Street Journal, Nobel laureate in economics Gary Becker and Univ. of Chicago economist Kevin Murphy ask, “Have We Lost the War on Drugs?”

Their answer is that we have, and what Richard Nixon began in 1971 has been a forty-years’ failure:

President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971. The expectation then was that drug trafficking in the United States could be greatly reduced in a short time through federal policing—and yet the war on drugs continues to this day. The cost has been large in terms of lives, money and the well-being of many Americans, especially the poor and less educated. By most accounts, the gains from the war have been modest at best.

The direct monetary cost to American taxpayers of the war on drugs includes spending on police, the court personnel used to try drug users and traffickers, and the guards and other resources spent on imprisoning and punishing those convicted of drug offenses. Total current spending is estimated at over $40 billion a year.

Becker and Murphy see the impossibility of winning this war:

The paradox of the war on drugs is that the harder governments push the fight, the higher drug prices become to compensate for the greater risks. That leads to larger profits for traffickers who avoid being punished. This is why larger drug gangs often benefit from a tougher war on drugs, especially if the war mainly targets small-fry dealers and not the major drug gangs. Moreover, to the extent that a more aggressive war on drugs leads dealers to respond with higher levels of violence and corruption, an increase in enforcement can exacerbate the costs imposed on society.

This was true of Prohibition, and it’s now true of the Drug War: natural human responses to incentives make the problem worse as one grows more assertive in prosecuting this effort. Enforcement has created a market for criminal enterprise at the same time local governments have pushed this war to pad their budgets with state and federal money.

Worse still, it is actually harder to free oneself from addiction to an illegal substance, as

It is generally harder to break an addiction to illegal goods, like drugs. Drug addicts may be leery of going to clinics or to nonprofit “drugs anonymous” groups for help. They fear they will be reported for consuming illegal substances. Since the consumption of illegal drugs must be hidden to avoid arrest and conviction, many drug consumers must alter their lives in order to avoid detection.

Usually overlooked in discussions of the effects of the war on drugs is that the illegality of drugs stunts the development of ways to help drug addicts, such as the drug equivalent of nicotine patches. Thus, though the war on drugs may well have induced lower drug use through higher prices, it has likely also increased the rate of addiction. The illegality of drugs makes it harder for addicts to get help in breaking their addictions. It leads them to associate more with other addicts and less with people who might help them quit.

The immediate financial incentive, for government and traffickers, is to keep fighting this war, for funding and profit, without end.

Yet, for all that fight, this war cannot be won, and so one only hears the same hollow claims of victory, followed by more headlines about how bad the problem still is.

Becker and Murphy’s full essay is well worth reading, both for the strength of its arguments and what it says of the future. In the end, it’s neither liberals nor libertarians who will be most responsible for the end of the Drug War: conservatives will, in time, finish off this mistaken, wasteful, destructive policy. Afterward, America will focus far more on drug treatment, and far less on aggressive anti-narcotics enforcement.

The War on Drugs won’t end tomorrow, or even (everywhere) a decade from now, but end it will, a consequence of its own big claims and small results.

(For an earlier post on how Wisconsin will likely lag much of America, as all this winds down, see Wisconsin and Marijuana and the Drug War.)

Posted earlier at Daily Adams.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.8.13

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Good morning.

A mild Tuesday unfolds before us: mostly sunny, south winds at 5 to 15 mph, and a high of thirty-nine.

Over at c|net, there’s a twenty-four photo slideshow of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers’ photos from Mars. The photos are both astonishing and a source of pride, that we’re a people that has achieved so much in science and exploration.

Today over a century ago, Crazy Horse fights his last battle:

On this day in 1877, Crazy Horse and his warriors–outnumbered, low on ammunition and forced to use outdated weapons to defend themselves–fight their final losing battle against the U.S. Cavalry in Montana.

Six months earlier, in the Battle of Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse and his ally, ChiefSitting Bull, led their combined forces of Sioux and Cheyenne to a stunning victory over Lieutenant Colonel George Custer (1839-76) and his men. The Indians were resisting the U.S. government’s efforts to force them back to their reservations. After Custer and over 200 of his soldiers were killed in the conflict, later dubbed “Custer’s Last Stand,” the American public wanted revenge. As a result, the U.S. Army launched a winter campaign in 1876-77, led by General Nelson Miles (1839-1925), against the remaining hostile Indians on the Northern Plains.

Combining military force with diplomatic overtures, Nelson convinced many Indians to surrender and return to their reservations. Much to Nelson’s frustration, though, Sitting Bull refused to give in and fled across the border to Canada, where he and his people remained for four years before finally returning to the U.S. to surrender in 1881. Sitting Bull died in 1890. Meanwhile, Crazy Horse and his band also refused to surrender, even though they were suffering from illness and starvation.

On January 8, 1877, General Miles found Crazy Horse’s camp along Montana’s Tongue River. U.S. soldiers opened fire with their big wagon-mounted guns, driving the Indians from their warm tents out into a raging blizzard. Crazy Horse and his warriors managed to regroup on a ridge and return fire, but most of their ammunition was gone, and they were reduced to fighting with bows and arrows. They managed to hold off the soldiers long enough for the women and children to escape under cover of the blinding blizzard before they turned to follow them.

Though he had escaped decisive defeat, Crazy Horse realized that Miles and his well-equipped cavalry troops would eventually hunt down and destroy his cold, hungry followers. On May 6, 1877, Crazy Horse led approximately 1,100 Indians to the Red Cloud reservation near Nebraska‘s Fort Robinson and surrendered. Five months later, a guard fatally stabbed him after he allegedly resisted imprisonment by Indian policemen.

On this day in 1910, a Janesville labor dispute:

1910 – Vagrant Snow Shovelers Strike for Pay
On this date 228 vagrants were brought in to shovel snow at the Chicago & Northwestern rail yard in Janesville. Shortly thereafter, they went on strike for 25 cents an hour and better food. Two days later, they went on strike again, asking for 30 cents an hour. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

From Google-a-Day, it’s a history question: “When the president of Haiti fled the country following a 1991 coup, in what country did he first find asylum?”

Local Government, Press

About the Administrator’s Equal Time…

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There’s a story at the Gazette from 1.5.13 about how Walworth County Administrator David Bretl’s columns started.

The story’s odd, but the title’s odder: ‘Bretl writes columns as a self-check on county government.’

That’s funny, as the true check on government isn’t a so-called self-check from an administrator, but a check from the newspaper itself, and from residents, generally.

As for a self-check on his administration, Mr. Bretl should be performing that each and every day, with or without a twice-monthly column. An administrator’s self-check (such as it is) comes from within, not from another’s offer of a helping hand.

Mr. Bretl is quoted toward the end of the story joking that he has a small readership. I’ve no idea.

Readership, however, wouldn’t be low because of what he writes; it would be low because those who cover Administrator Bretl and other officials write as though they were officials’ biographers & press agents.

One reads that the county administrator started his column years ago after requesting equal time in reply to a reporter’s coverage. Fair enough: coverage then did involve a certain measure of scrutiny, and newspapers have always been free to give officials whatever space they want to give.

It cannot be true, however, that Administrator Bretl is still writing to get equal time in the print press: there’s scarcely any scrutiny of government to be found, and there has been none whatever from the story’s reporter.

It’s all County Administrator Bretl’s time now, so to speak.

How telling that these gentlemen can’t see that.

Corporate Welfare, Government Spending, Local Government, Taxes/Taxation

Grant-Chasing

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Janesville now has her hundreds of thousands for a bus.

It should be no surprise that those who have flacked every possible public program as the Next Big Thing (no matter how neglectful of dire needs) would herald state and federal grants as though they were genuine, private productivity.

The fawning need to tout the redistribution of private workers’ earnings as public bureaucrats’ finest accomplishments satisfies neither left nor right: the right sees it as excessive spending, and the left sees it as spending on the wrong priorities.

There aren’t many people remaining who truly think that the highest value of others’ earnings is to acquire still more, from the many, for the benefit of the few.

As is true with projects now forgotten or struggling, the justifications for these schemes will change. People who have taken hundreds of thousands from others will shift and dissemble to explain what they’re doing with all that money. Explanations will change, supposedly fundamental goals will metamorphose, each announced as though nothing contradictory had been said only days or weeks earlier.

When a public-man, whose own poor are mostly neglected as bad copy and depressing headlines, tells you that some taxes can be used to leverge still more from others’ earnings, you may be sure he’s lost both his perspective on need and his sense of private accomplishment.

Those large grants aren’t from his pockets, but others; they won’t fill the pocketbooks of the needy, but instead fund his pet projects.

Of course, these men are thrilled, just thrilled: they see their projects ever so clearly, but beyond that, where other needs persist, it’s all a haze.

Music

Monday Music: Heather Rigdon, Young and Naive

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Sometimes one hears a song, or singer, of whom one has (sadly) never before heard. The world’s a big place; so very many fine singers and songs too long escape one’s notice.

For me, here’s a find like that… Heather Rigdon.

Enjoy.



Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.7.13

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Good morning.

We’ll begin our week with sunny and breezy skies, with a high of thirty-five, and southwest winds 10 to 20 mph. Our sunrise is at 7:25 AM and our sunset at 4:37 PM.

At 5 PM today, there’ll be a meeting of the Parks & Rec Department.

I’m not sure what to make of a proposal for a fishing pole with a built-in accelerometer that would tell a fisherman when there’s a tug on the line: isn’t detecting a tug on the line simply a fundamental skill of fishing? The Smart Rod would automate that task:

 

If it ‘does all the thinking for you’ are your really concentrating on catching fish at all? It’s clever, to be sure, but others must be skeptical, too, as the prototype pole hasn’t attracted, as of this post, much funding.

On this day in 1953, Pres. Truman announced that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb:

In his final State of the Union address before Congress, President Harry S. Truman tells the world that that the United States has developed a hydrogen bomb.

It was just three years earlier on January 31, 1950, that Truman publicly announced that had directed the Atomic Energy Commission to proceed with the development of the hydrogen bomb. Truman’s directive came in response to evidence of an atomic explosion occurring within USSR in 1949.

In our state’s history, Jan. 7th, in 1901:

1901 – Robert Marion La Follette Inaugurated as Governor
On this date Robert M. La Follette was inaugurated as governor after winning the November 6, 1900 election. La Follette was born in Dane County in 1855. A Wisconsin Law School graduate and three-term member of congress, La Follette was renowned for his oratorical style. He was the first Wisconsin-born individual to serve as governor. [Source: Dictionary of Wisconsin History]

Google-a-Day has a sports question for us: “The famous defensive tackle who died during a game against the New York Dragons, played in how many games for the Panthers during his career?”

 

Twitter

Recent Tweets 12.30 to 1.5

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