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Crime, Daily Bread, Incarceration, Law

Daily Bread for 5.14.22: Convicted Murderer Douglas Balsewicz Is Unworthy of Parole

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 83.  Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:10 PM for 14h 38m 24s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1953, Milwaukee brewery workers go on strike:

Milwaukee brewery workers begin a 10-week strike, demanding contracts comparable to those of East and West coast workers. The strike was won when Blatz Brewery accepted their demands, but Blatz was ousted from the Brewers Association for “unethical” business methods as a result. The following year Schlitz president Erwin C. Uihlein told guests at Schlitz’ annual Christmas party that “Irreparable harm was done to the Milwaukee brewery industry during the 76-day strike of 1953, and unemployed brewery workers must endure ‘continued suffering’ before the prestige of Milwaukee beer is re-established on the world market.”

Oh, brother: ‘irreparable harm’ and ‘continued suffering.’ Considering history since 1953, supposed irreparable harm from a mere brewery strike would count as a national blessing today…

Scott Bauer and Todd Richmond report Wisconsin chairman rescinds killer’s parole at Evers request:

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Parole Commission’s leader agreed Friday to rescind a convicted murderer’s parole at Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ request after the governor came under criticism from rival Republicans looking to unseat him in November.

Evers sent a letter Friday to John Tate, the commission’s chairman, asking him to reconsider 54-year-old Douglas Balsewicz’s parole. He was set to be released from prison as soon as Tuesday after serving less than 25 years of his 80-year sentence for the 1997 stabbing death of his wife, Johanna Balsewicz. Evers lacks the power to rescind an convict’s parole on his own.

Evers met with Johanna Balsewicz’s family in the Capitol before sending the letter. The governor wrote that the family hadn’t gotten a chance to fully respond to the move.

“I do not agree with this decision, and I have considerable concerns regarding whether Johanna’s family was afforded sufficient opportunity to voice their memories, perspectives, and concerns before this decision was made,” Evers wrote.

Tate, an Evers appointee, later said in an email to The Associated Press and the Department of Corrections that he understands the governor’s concerns about the lack of victim input and that he was rescinding Douglas Balsewicz’s parole.

Earlier in the week, Tate told the Racine Journal Times that it was extremely unlikely Balsewicz’s parole would be revoked at this point unless he did something to warrant it. Tate, who is president of the Racine City Council, said rescinding Balsewicz’s parole would likely lead to a lawsuit that the state would lose. Tate didn’t immediately respond to an email from the AP Friday evening.

The crime: a husband stabbed his wife over forty times leading to her death in front of their daughter, for which the husband was lawfully convicted and sentenced to 80 years in prison. Parole almost 50 years before the end of the sentence amounts to unjustified leniency. A well-ordered society has a duty to confine the violent away from others, both as punishment and deterrent. Those lawfully convicted of violent crimes are yet able to live their lives in a confined setting. Douglas Balsewicz’s crime justified his sentence.

Tate’s concern about a possible lawsuit is expediency over principle. The right course here would have been to reject a parole request, after it was made, and then defend the denial of parole should there have followed a lawsuit from the murderous defendant. Win or lose that suit, at least Tate would have stood on principle. As it is, Parole Commission Chairman Tate made the wrong decision, tried to defend that wrong decision, and compelled Gov. Evers to urge reconsideration. If Tate had acted on principle (the general principle that violent killers should serve their sentences away from society), then the victim’s family would not have had to endure additional hardship, and there would have been no need for Evers to seek reversal of a bad decision.

Czechs open world’s longest suspension footbridge:

Conservative Populism, Daily Bread, Politics, Speaker Vos, Trumpism, WISGOP

Daily Bread for 5.13.22: Pyromaniac Complains About Smoke Inhalation

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 88.  Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:09 PM for 14h 36m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 90.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, the USS Planter, a steamer and gunship, steals through Confederate lines and is passed to the Union, by a southern slave, Robert Smalls, who later was officially appointed as captain, becoming the first black man to command a United States ship.

Molly Beck reports Robin Vos on facing attacks from his own party: ‘A sad statement about politics today’:

Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch has suggested the Assembly Republican caucus should fire Vos, despite receiving his endorsement. Marine veteran Kevin Nicholson has spent months calling him a failure. State Rep. Tim Ramthun wants the speaker prosecuted. And construction executive Tim Michels said Vos needed “training.”

Vos’ crime? Not doing more about Trump’s loss, including by taking the impossible and illegal step of decertifying the 2020 election.

….

“The fact that people need to use me as a punching bag to make themselves look better. I think it’s kind of a sad statement about politics today. I think people should be running on their own ideas.”

See Vos, Now on the Trumpists’ Menu, Deserves No Sympathy, Shreddin’ and Deletin’ Vos, and Vos Primly Lectures Fanatics on the Dangers of Fanaticism.

Milky Way’s Black Hole imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope:

Conservative Populism, Daily Bread, Politics, Religion

Daily Bread for 5.12.22: The Populists’ Politics Devours Their Ostensible Faith

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 90.  Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:08 PM for 14h 34m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1949, the Soviet Union lifts its blockade of Berlin.

Tim Alberta, an evangelical Christian, writes How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church (‘The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it’s at war with itself):

“Before I turn to the Word,” the preacher announces, “I’m gonna do another diatribe.”

“Go on!” one man yells. “Amen!” shouts a woman several pews in front of me.

Between 40 minutes of praise music and 40 minutes of preaching is the strangest ritual I’ve ever witnessed inside a house of worship. Pastor Bill Bolin calls it his “diatribe.” The congregants at FloodGate Church, in Brighton, Michigan, call it something else: “Headline News.”

Bolin, in his mid-60s, is a gregarious man with thick jowls and a thinning wave of dyed hair. His floral shirt is untucked over dark-blue jeans. “On the vaccines …” he begins.

For the next 15 minutes, Bolin does not mention the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, or the life everlasting. Instead, he spouts misinformation and conspiratorial nonsense, much of it related to the “radically dangerous” COVID-19 vaccines. “A local nurse who attends FloodGate, who is anonymous at this time—she reported to my wife the other day that at her hospital, they have two COVID patients that are hospitalized. Two.” Bolin pauses dramatically. “They have 103 vaccine-complication patients.” The crowd gasps.

“How about this one?” Bolin says. He tells of a doctor who claims to know that “between 100 and 200 United States Congress members, plus many of their staffers and family members with COVID, were treated by a colleague of his over the past 15 months … with …” Bolin stops and puts a hand to his ear. A chorus of people responds: “Ivermectin.” Bolin pretends not to hear. “What was that?” he says, leaning over the lectern. This time, they shout: “Ivermectin!” Bolin nods.

This isn’t my first time at FloodGate, so none of what Bolin says shocks me. Yet I’m still struggling to make sense of the place.

Having grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pastor at another church in town, I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It’s heartbreaking. So many people who love the Lord, who give their time and money to the poor and the mourning and the persecuted, have been reduced to a caricature. But I understand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ. To his credit, even when my dad would lean hard into a political debate, he was careful to remind his church of the appropriate Christian perspective. “God doesn’t bite his fingernails over any of this,” he would say around election time. “Neither should you.”

Now, I am a mainline Protestant (with Catholic relatives), and not a conservative evangelical. Alberta’s account, however, is unfortunately commonplace. Too many conservative populists are quick to declare that they’re for GOD, GUNS, and TRUMP, without seeing how close to a traditional heresy that is.

While these populists often insist that others are soft, or weak, or insufficiently devoted, in the case Alberta recounts it is these congregants who are left without a sound moral formation, and perhaps an adequate general formation.

They are quick to exercise their right to criticize other religious or political views, but even quicker to take umbrage (what, what? what!) when someone suggests they might read more, or think more, before speaking or writing. (A perpetual embarrassment to America: the native born who defend in their nativism while revealing their inability to speak, read, and write in standard English. I don’t believe in adopting a national language — America is beautiful in any tongue — but those born here might take a bit more time to express their views with proper grammar and usage.)

Saying as much as infuriates the populists, and they owe a good part of their success to fits, tantrums, and threats that intimidate others. In small towns that are meant to be congenial and comfortable places, the populists advance by crude intimidation. See (Local) Fear of a Red Hat.

One can’t answer for others, except to note that if someone is a true believer in religion, politics, art, philosophy, etc., then one grasps that the principles from those beliefs should, if believed, govern one’s actions. Those who believe in free will can nonetheless acknowledge without contradiction that principle determines — indeed, compels — action even in the face of opposition or risk.

Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe Portrait Sells for Millions:

Conservative Populism, Daily Bread, Libertarians, Newspapers, Populists, Press

Daily Bread for 5.11.22: The Neediness of Conservative Populists

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 84.  Sunrise is 5:35 AM and sunset 8:07 PM for 14h 32m 00s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 74% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1997 Deep Blue, a chess-playing supercomputer, defeats Garry Kasparov in the last game of the rematch, becoming the first computer to beat a world-champion chess player in a classic match format.

Anthony Nadler and Doron Taussig report Conservatives’ mistrust of media is rooted in the feeling journalists want to ostracize them:

Tune in to a conservative podcast or scroll through conservative Facebook feeds and there’s a decent chance you’ll encounter the terms “mainstream media,” “liberal media,” or just “the media,” used in a tone suggesting that the audience all should know exactly who that refers to and exactly what they did wrong.

Polling shows that trust in the media among conservatives is low and dropping. Much of the American right is hostile toward the press, but there’s not much research seeking to understand why, or what it means.

Sometimes, journalists and academics view research into conservative communities as disrespectful and tinged with condescension. Other times, this research is viewed as too respectful, focusing on a group whose influence on American politics is greater than its proportional share of the population.

We understand these objections. But in studying political media, we have come to believe that the alienation of conservatives from journalism presents a problem in a society where people are supposed to govern themselves using shared information. And we view that problem as worth exploring to understand it.

So, for a research paper published by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, we and our collaborators Andrea Wenzel and Natacha Yazbeck held focus groups and conducted individual interviews (between September 2020 and May 2021) with 25 people in the greater Philadelphia region who self-identified as conservatives. Our questions focused on their perceptions of, and feelings about, coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

Our interviewees expressed animosity toward the press. But they weren’t primarily upset that the media get facts wrong, or even that journalists push a liberal policy agenda. Their anger was about their deeper belief that the American press blames, shames, and ostracizes conservatives.

Well. While I’m sympathetic to the concern of Nadler and Taussig that “the alienation of conservatives from journalism presents a problem in a society where people are supposed to govern themselves using shared information,” I’ve neither sympathy nor empathy for those who complain that the private press is ostracizing them. One can be sure that many conservative populists do feel alienated, as they complain often and loudly (what, what? what! with heads shaking and hands in the air) that they’re not respected.

(Here the discussion is about private publications, not public institutions. Government has a duty to equal treatment with regard to basic rights, e.g., regardless of race, religion, gender, or orientation. For private publications, there is no similar duty, nor should there be in a free society. If the New York Times wants to ignore conservatives, so be it; if the Wall Street Journal wants to ignore the center-left, so be it.)

The proper solution for the perpetually slighted: those who feel that existing, private publications ostracize them should create their own publications.

This is how the conservative populists are different from long-standing libertarians, this libertarian blogger among them. (I’m from a libertarian family, so I would be called an ‘old’ or ‘movement’ libertarian). The populists are often, if not invariably, needy. The libertarian by contrast makes his or her own way, and states his or her own case, to the best of his or her own ability. It’s sensible and right to consider principled critiques, but that consideration is intellectual, not emotional.

(A good motto: I believe that I am right, but am open to being proved wrong.)

The contention, the claim, the declaration — they are delivered without needing approval or support from others. Individual rights don’t come from plebiscite, they inhere in the individual even when the majority disapproves.

The worry of populists of being ostracized, disrespected, or ‘canceled’ is overwrought. If they don’t like how other private institutions view them, they can create their own institutions or quit the field.

Each day requires a new effort. One begins the day humbly and diligently as a dark-horse underdog, knowing that there is more to do and learn. None of that effort should involve worry or emotional insecurity.

Looking Inside the Fed’s Monetary Policy Toolbox:

Business, Daily Bread, Restaurant, Retail/Merchants, Technology

Daily Bread for 5.10.22: A Server Robot for a Short-Staffed Restaurant

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a chance of an afternoon thundershower, and a high of 88.  Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:06 PM for 14h 29m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 64.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 28 BC, Han dynasty astronomers observe a sunspot during the reign of Emperor Cheng of Han, one of the earliest dated sunspot observations in China.

Natalie Yahr reports For shortstaffed BBQ spot, Servi is the droid they’re looking for:

Deployed in the West Towne Mall barbecue restaurant late last month, she may be the first robot working inside a Madison restaurant. Other food delivery robots began roaming Madison streets a year and a half ago. That’s when the University of Wisconsin-Madison rolled out a fleet of Starship Delivery robots — which my colleague Rob Thomas described as looking like “a cross between a picnic basket and a Stormtrooper” — to send takeout orders from dining halls to hungry students and faculty. 

….

Like many restaurants, Doc’s Smokehouse has struggled to hire enough employees following COVID-induced closures in 2020, but Jimmy Hall, general manager of the Madison location, said the robot isn’t intended to reduce the number of human workers. 

“It’s not replacing anyone. It is only reducing the amount of steps, literally and figuratively,” Hall said. Before the robot, every time a chef yelled, “Hands!” a server would rush to the kitchen to carry out the food while it’s hot, Hall said. That’s especially important for barbecue, as the meats are smoked overnight and then held in a 151-degree oven, beginning to cool down as soon as they’re removed and sliced. 

“Time is of the essence,” Hall said. “We are in a constant state of being shortstaffed … so (BBQ-1) allows us to maintain our quality control.”

If the robot can save a server 60 steps with one order, or perhaps 1,000 steps in a day, Hall said, “that’s a win for us.” He knows staff are already stretched thin, picking up more shifts than they want during the week in order to help out. The robot wasn’t his idea, but he likes it. “It’s nice to see an employer that’s willing to invest in making things easier for the people that are here,” Hall said.

Bear Robotics makes different versions of the Servi robot. They’re not suited for every establishment, as they’re pricey for smaller shops. There is, however, sure to be a growing demand for automated assistance. As the labor market changes (and technology improves) workplaces and stores will see more robots in support roles.

Giant Landslide in Alaska Caught on Camera:

Conspiracy Theories, Daily Bread, Weird Tales, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 5.9.22: Rest Easy, People of Waunakee!

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 77.  Sunrise is 5:37 AM and sunset 8:05 PM for 14h 27m 34s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 54.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1662, the figure who later became Mr. Punch makes his first recorded appearance in England.

Ali Swenson reports Wisconsin school district does not have ‘furry protocol’:

CLAIM: The Waunakee Community School District in a suburb of Madison, Wisconsin, has a “furry protocol” that allows students who identify as “furries” to opt out of speaking in class, sit and lick their paws during gym class and bark and growl in hallways.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The district does not have a protocol for students who identify as animals, and it does not allow disruptions at school, according to Superintendent Randy Guttenberg.

THE FACTS: A baseless rumor that students who dress up as animals are getting special treatment in a Wisconsin school district is circulating widely online this week after a conservative radio host said she’d received an email about the issue last month.

Vicki McKenna, who hosts a show on a Madison AM radio station, said on a March 17 podcast that a she received an email from a grandparent of students in the Waunakee Community School District saying the students were being told to “normalize” the behavior of classmates who preferred to dress and act like animals.

“The Furries can choose whether they want to speak in class or not,” read part of the purported email, shared onscreen in a video version of the podcast hosted by a University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, professor. “The Furrys [sic] are allowed to dress in their choice of furry costumes. The Furries can choose not to run in gym class but instead sit at the feet of their teacher and lick their paws. Barking hissing and similar animal noises are common place [sic] in the hallways at the schools.”

The claim is completely false, according to Guttenberg, who clarified in an email to The Associated Press that “the Waunakee Community School District does not have protocols for Furries, nor do we allow disruptions in our school and classrooms.”

McKenna did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

So help me God, I have no idea what I would say if something this asinine circulated in Whitewater. This small city has enough challenges.

One should, however, be compassionate: each and every person who believed this rumor should receive a free-of-charge wellness check. It’s the least society can do to assure that these addled Wisconsities don’t injure themselves while operating appliances or driving.

Emperor penguins in Antarctica monitored by robot:

Books, City, Culture, Daily Bread, Libertarians, Liberty, Local Government, Politics, Populists, School District

Daily Bread for 5.8.22: Manufacturing Panic

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Good morning.

Mother’s Day in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 64.  Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:03 PM for 14h 25m 17s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1869,  the First Transcontinental Railroad, linking the eastern and western United States, is completed at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory with a golden spike.

Trip Gabriel reports He Fuels the Right’s Cultural Fires (‘Christopher Rufo helped make critical race theory a conservative rallying cry. Now he sees L.G.B.T.Q. issues as an even more potent line of attack’):

GIG HARBOR, Wash. — Christopher Rufo appears on Fox News so often that he converted a room in his Pacific Northwest house to a television studio, complete with professional lighting, an uplink to Fox in New York and an “On Air” light in the hall so his wife and two children don’t barge in during broadcasts.

“I’ll do ‘Tucker’ and then pop out and have dinner,” Mr. Rufo said recently at his home in Gig Harbor, Wash., thousands of miles from the nation’s media and political capitals.

Mr. Rufo is the conservative activist who probably more than any other person made critical race theory a rallying cry on the right — and who has become, to some on the left, an agitator of intolerance. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, he has emerged at the front of another explosive cultural clash, one that he sees as even more politically potent and that the left views as just as dangerous: the battle over L.G.B.T.Q. restrictions in schools.

….

He has acknowledged twisting hot-button racial issues to achieve his aims. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote on Twitter last year.

….

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, said conservatives had falsely and intentionally linked child sex predators with opponents of the Florida law. Mr. Rufo, he said, had provided fuel for their arguments.

“This is the stock-in-trade of Rufo’s brand of activism — creating these very negative brands and then associating things that might have much more popular support with those brands to put people on the defensive,” Dr. Moynihan said. “That’s the through line you see between the C.R.T. stuff and the current ‘groomer’ effort.”

Now, this libertarian blogger is neither a member of a racial minority group nor the LGBTQ community. (On the contrary, by demographics, I am situated in more than one majority group. For it all, I am, and always will be, simply an emissary of one.) Critical to libertarian belief: those minority groups can — and in a free society must — be able to speak for themselves.

It is impossible to believe in liberty as a fundamental principle and condition and not see the threat to the individual rights of millions of Americans from book-banning and closet-confining. In communities large and small, that threat has reached the threshold of schools and city halls. Leaving aside the theological implications of the injunction (as I am in no position to send anyone anywhere), nevertheless for Rufo and his ilk the rebuke go to hell comes to mind.

(Worth noting: some of those who claimed their response to the pandemic was a battle of ‘hope’ over ‘fear’ are themselves embarrassingly overcome with fear at the mere publishing of books or the expression of individual identity.)

The question for Whitewater: if a lumpen horde gathers to destroy the lives of some of our fellow residents, falsely claiming the authority to do so, what will happen to those residents? Will city and school district officials permit the victimization of a few by the dark efforts of others? Officials who cater to the worst impulses of a mob deserve no deference while doing so; they merit only a critique more through, repeated, and effective than the bleating of any horde.

In small towns across America, people of goodwill can each play a small part, assuring that their communities remain places of individual liberty.

These French tiny homes are giving homeless people practical skills and a place to live afterwards:

Participants in the project in Brittany take part in all aspects of the construction of the mobile homes and are given the keys afterward.

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, May 10th, 1 PM @ Seniors in the Park, West Side Story

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Tuesday, May 10th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of West Side Story @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Musical/Drama/Romance

Rated PG-13; 2 hours, 36 minutes (2021)

This reimagining of the 1961 classic musical was nominated for Best Picture, and garnered a best support actress Oscar for Ariana DeBose. Directed by Steven Spielberg, it stars Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, and Rita Moreno.

One can find more information about West Side Story at the Internet Movie Database.

Enjoy.

Business, Daily Bread, Federal Government, Hubris, Local Government, Planning, State Government

Daily Bread for 5.7.22: Fordlandia’s Folly

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 62.  Sunrise is 5:39 AM and sunset 8:02 PM for 14h 22m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 35.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1992,  Michigan ratifies a 203-year-old proposed amendment to the United States Constitution making the 27th Amendment law. This amendment bars the U.S. Congress from giving itself a mid-term pay raise.

Planning of a basic kind is necessary for most activity, and assuredly for large-scale projects. Nonetheless, central planning (from government or from the direction of a single, private individual) presents a knowledge problem that leaves centrally-planned projects at risk of failure. Hayek (as cited in Israel M. Kirzner’s excellent Economic Planning and the Knowledge Problem):

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess, the economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

See Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, American Economic Review. XXXV, No. 4. pp. 519-30 (1945).

Henry Ford’s planned community (‘Fordlandia’) in the Amazon (yes, the Amazon) is an example of failed central planning (of one wealthy man trying by his own lights to create an entire community):

In the 1920s, Henry Ford created a utopia in the middle of the Amazon jungle. The plan was to produce enough rubber to feed his auto empire, but the dream soon turned into a nightmare. Disease, riots, mud – and caterpillars – were too much for Ford’s millions.

It is the interaction and transaction among thousands of private people that assures an enduring basis for community. The central planners of government or corporations can begin a community, but their central planning will not sustain a community.

Russian Oligarch’s Superyacht Seized in Fiji:

Another week, another yacht: A Russian oligarch’s superyacht has been seized on behalf of the U.S.—this time in Fiji. The luxury boat belonged to Suleiman Kerimov, a billionaire businessman and member of the Russian Senate.

Daily Bread, Never Trump, Politics, Republicans, Trump, Trumpism

Daily Bread for 5.6.22: Well, of course MAGA is the GOP’s future…

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 60.  Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:01 PM for 14h 20m 38s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1916, Babe Ruth, then a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, hits his first major league home run.

Thomas Edsall writes With or Without Trump, the MAGA Movement Is the Future of the Republican Party:

“Anti-establishment conservatives found him refreshing,” [author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, Matthew] Continetti adds. “Not one iota of Trump was politically correct. He played by no rules of civility. He genuflected to no one. He despised the media with the same intensity as the conservative grass roots.”

Millions of voters may have found Trump “refreshing,” but there continue to be dissenters on the right who see the consequences as disastrous.

David French, a senior editor at The Dispatch, warned in an interview with Sean Illing of Vox:

Here’s what’s the terrifying thing on the right that can be a career- and reputation-ending allegation: “You’re weak. You’re a coward.” So the transformation, this flipping upside down of morality, turning bullying into strength, turning restraint into vice, all of that, what has then happened is it enables the Trumpists and the Trumpist world. They’re wielding this sword that is very sharp culturally in red spaces, this accusation of weakness and cowardice, as a weapon to keep people in line, because they’ve defined support for this movement as evidence of your strength.

Yuval Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (and a contributing Opinion writer for The Times), described a transformation on the right that began before Trump but has accelerated under his direction. Speaking at a March 2021 Harvard Kennedy School forum, Levin said: “I think conservatives are naturally defenders of a society’s institutions — not blindly, they’re also reformers — but they believe in the purposes of those institutions.”

The Republican Party, he continued,

has gradually become hostile to Americans’ institutions. It sees them as possessed by the other party. It sees them as corrupt. It looks at them through a populist lens as the source of the problem, rather than the source of solutions.

In the fall of 2016, with Trump as the Republican presidential nominee, Levin wrote in Politico magazine:

This election cycle has revealed serious fault lines and weaknesses on the right, and the Republican Party will be working to make sense of it all for years. But for conservatives — I mean those who champion some version of the difficult balance of traditionalism in the moral arena, market mechanisms for addressing our economic challenges, and American strength in a dangerous world — all bound by a limited-government constitutionalism — this sorry year’s lessons have one overarching implication: We can no longer treat the G.O.P. simply as our own.

Well, yes, what Trump has brought — at least what Trump has brought to the forefront — is the future of his party. To live in rural America, is to see that Trump has transformed (or unleashed) his party. See Man and Movement.

Trumpist appetites once whetted are nearly insatiable. The party that twice nominated Trump will not, in our time, be going back.

Splashdown! SpaceX Crew-3 astronauts back on Earth:

Astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, Kayla Barron, and Matthias Maurer are back on Earth after splashing down off the coast of Florida on May 6, 2022 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon.

Business, City, Daily Bread, Government Spending, Local Government, School District

Daily Bread for 5.5.22: What It Means When Even the World’s Richest Man Has to Look for Financing

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 59.  Sunrise is 5:43 AM and sunset 7:59 PM for 14h 15m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 12% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM, the Police and Fire Commission at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Fire Department, Inc. Board at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1862, troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza halt a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla in Mexico.

About two weeks ago, a post here at FREE WHITEWATER highlighted Matt Levine’s insightful assessment of Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter. See Levine Elon Checks His Pockets and FREE WHITEWATER Levine About Musk About Twitter.

Levine’s key point:

“One problem with Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter Inc. for about $40 billion is that he does not have $40 billion. Of course he is very rich — the richest person in the world, worth $260 billion by Bloomberg’s estimate — but most of that money is tied up in the stock of Tesla Inc., SpaceX, the Boring Co., etc., and it is not obvious that he would want to sell enough of those things to buy a new thing. “

There’s more news this morning about the Musk bid. Lauren Hirsch reports Elon Musk has brought in new investors to fund his Twitter deal, a filing shows:

Elon Musk has brought in more than a dozen new investors to help fund his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, including the billionaire Larry Ellison and the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, according to securities documents filed Thursday morning.

The investors together will contribute $7 billion to help fund Twitter’s purchase, with the rest coming from Mr. Musk’s own pocket or through loans.

Mr. Musk had said that he would fund the deal in part with a $12.5 billion loan against his shares in Tesla, the electric vehicle company he runs. As a result of the new equity commitments, Mr. Musk said he was reducing the size of that loan against Tesla shares to $6.25 billion from $12.5 billion.

He has also said that he has secured $13 billion in other loans from seven banks and committed $21 billion of his own cash. Mr. Musk has not yet outlined the sources of that cash.

What would Musk’s large deal have to do with a small town like Whitewater?

Well, there are lessons from large events that, properly refined, apply to small events, too. That was, after all, the point of the earlier post here at FW:

And if the world’s richest man’s business plans haven’t always panned out, then it’s prudent to be cautious (if not skeptical) about the plans of government and businesses. 

Dare, one might say, for the plans of local government and local businesses, too. 

Even Musk is not so wealthy that he cannot manage a deal like this on his own. In a small town, where the community has less than Musk has individually, there is an even smaller margin for adjustments or errors. (Musk, after all, will never go hungry.)

In a town like Whitewater, there is a limit to what government can afford to spend, and so it must spend every dollar only after careful planning. It should be needless to say Whitewater that doesn’t have the margin for error and adjustment of Elon Musk (or the federal government). See The Limits of Local Politics: ‘posts at FREE WHITEWATER have addressed the limits of local politics in the community: local public (or powerful private) institutions have a limited power of action (with harmful actions likely to be more immediate than helpful ones).’

While some local officials live as though this were not true, it is true nonetheless.

A better underlying policy for what must be spent in an economically troubled place: Local Public Policy as if Charitable Assistance (‘When policymakers look at the city – if they are to be of value to Whitewater’s residents – they need to think of all their actions as if those actions were service to those in need (because in many cases that will be, regrettably, true). In this way, An Oasis Strategy that looks away from government – or in this case reshapes government’s attitude and perspective – is needed even more than it was in 2016′).

Jumping robot leaps to record heights:

Roboticists have designed all sorts of jumping robots over the years, and many of them have been inspired by biology. But, as diverse as the natural world is, evolution hasn’t cracked every option. Now a team of researchers has investigated the differences between biological and mechanical jumpers – and have managed to design a device capable of leaping over 30 meters into the air. This is 3 times the current record for a jumping robot, and they did it with a technique unavailable to the biological world – work multiplication.

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