No real surprise about FreeRepublic.com taking this position, but other rightwing sites may follow, and that’s the bigger deal for Romney.
I’m no fan of Romney, but I wouldn’t consider him an enemy of the Constitution. (He’s more like a younger McCain in his politics, but that similarity only cements his reputation as an enemy of the Constitution for some conservatives.)
Just when one thought 2012 might be a dull rematch match between Obama and McCain Romney….
See, POLITICO.
Good morning,
I hope you had a happy Halloween, one of all treats, no tricks. Today will be mostly sunny day with a high of sixty-two in Whitewater – unseasonable, but pleasantly so.
Whitewater’s Common Council resumes budget deliberations tonight. The meeting’s agenda is available online.
At Science News, Rachel Ehrenberg reports that Facebook value overstated, study finds: Researchers warn of a social networking bubble in the offing. She writes that
“It’s not the same volume of the dot-com bubble. That was really widespread,” says coauthor Didier Sornette. Nevertheless, he and colleague Peter Cauwels conclude, a social networking bubble — and its impending pop — loom.
The ETH Zürich researchers argue that determining the value of social networking sites is vastly simpler than with other companies, because there’s a relatively direct link between the number of users and profit. This boils the math down to a simple equation: the number of users times the profit per user. Calculated that way, Facebook’s value is probably in the neighborhood of $15 billion to $20 billion, the team reports online October 6 at arXiv.org.
Twenty billion’s still a huge sum; the discrepancy between the lower figure and the higher one matters most to those basing commitments or investments in the company on a larger number. For day-to-day users, and (day-to-day vendors of Facebook), the company’s dependable. As a matter of valuation, though, it’s significant, as being wrong by a factor of five, for example, is a huge error.
Best bet for a price estimate on any particular day – what people would pay to buy a company. If that’s higher than the study’s estimate, then it’s the study’s estimate that’s in error.
I saw this animated penguin .gif today, although I’m not sure it’s an undoctored photo. If it should be real, then I’d like to thank the penguins involved for their contributions to human amusement. Enjoy.
Here’s the FREE WHITEWATER list of the scariest things in America for 2011. I’ve done a scariest things in Whitewater for years, and here’s the national version. (The 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 local editions are available for comparison.)
The list runs in reverse order, from mildly frightening to super scary.
10. Empire. We’re a republic, not an empire, but that doesn’t stop proud schemers from dreaming of perpetual empire, in Iraq or elsewhere. Pres. Obama is right to bring Americans in Iraq home: we’ve been there long enough. Americans have served there well and ably, beyond any other nation’s ability.
Our strength lies not in control over foreign territory, but in the openness of our institutions and strength through the freedom of our markets.
9. Delicacy and Sensitivity. In Wisconsin, someone intentionally dumped beer on Assemblyman Robin Vos as a protest. It was wrong to do, but to hear people tell it, Vos was shockingly assaulted.
Beer, as a bad thing in Wisconsin – can no one shake anything off? He might even have made a joke of it (“Domestic or imported?”), but instead he’s portrayed as a true victim. A man got wet, from beer, in Wisconsin – he’ll survive, and would have done better to take it in stride (and insist against charges being pressed).
Hundreds of graduate students could profitably write on how America’s Greatest Generation led to America’s Most Sensitive Generation…in just a generation.
8. Occupy This or That. We’ve had ant-war protests, Tea Party protests, and now Occupy protests. We’re still standing, and these protests have involved little if any violence despite vast numbers attending. I don’t agree with much of the Occupy rhetoric, but no matter. America will be just fine, and the protests are no harm – but much benefit – to society.
7. Classes. No one’s supposed to talk about class in America. Now some are talking about classes (and divisions with classes). Why not? Go ahead, have at it. Anne Applebaum’s right, by the way. See, Can America survive without its backbone, the middle class?
6. Public Employee Unions. All those state workers are thugs you see, wrecking America. No one looks at the state legislators, governors, county executives, county boards, mayors, town councils, and school boards that gave them them what they have and asks for accountability from those givers.
It’s politicians who’ve failed here. Giving government more power by dissolving union rights only compounds a long-standing political failure.
5. Mormons. I’m not a member of the Latter Day Saints, and doubtless very few readers are. Still, we’re sure to learn more about that faith over the next year, much of it from among those topics designed to scare us into voting against Romney.
There are many reasons to be doubtful of a Romney presidency. His Mormon faith isn’t one of them. That won’t stop the Right (and later the Left) from saying that we should be very afraid indeed.
4. Free Marketeers. Either free marketeers are falsely portrayed as agents of indifference, or big-government types long guilty of indifference are portraying themselves as free marketeers. Either way, advocacy of free markets in capital, labor, and goods is misunderstood. Proponents will have to do a better job; we’ll not find help from others.
3. Contest Shows. Having watched little of them, I now know why I’ve previously avoided Dancing with the Stars, America’s Got Talent, etc.: there’s a level of manipulation and melodrama found elsewhere only from television news or political commercials.
Add into the mix that some on of both sides of the judging table are utter loons, and these shows are just too odd for prolonged viewing.
2. Individual Mandates. Government’s outrageous requirement that you buy a product or service will only grow if left unchecked — and you though you lived in free society.
1. Big Government. It’s back — and nothing has kept it down. 2010’s Tea Party wins haven’t changed the 2012 presidential election prospects, at least not yet. If you’re looking at an Obama-Romney race, you’re not looking at a race between men committed to limited government. The Tea Party might want to explain how, despite all their efforts, we’ve landed here. They’ll find their answer in the many diffuse, disparate, distracted efforts they’ve undertaken in the last year.
Small government, and small government alone, would have been the better bet, for the Tea Party and for America. They haven’t taken that path.
2012 may wind up looking like 2008, to America’s detriment.
Scary, indeed.
Here’s the FREE WHITEWATER list of the scariest things in Whitewater for 2011. The 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 editions are available for comparison.
The list runs in reverse order, from mildly frightening to super scary.
10. Snow. Is every snowflake Armageddon? No. It’s Wisconsin – we’ve had snow before — and here’s a guess — we’ll have snow again. If Americans can fight the Taliban in Afghanistan (and despite the sadness of that conflict, do so with honor and stoicism), we can endure a little rain and snow back home in Whitewater.
9. Potholes, Gravel, Cracked Roads. Some day — some day in 2012 — we’ll have a new bridge along North Street. Until then, and long after then, many other streets will look like roads left over from ancient Rome.
8. Protesters. Tens of thousands protested at the Capitol, for weeks, with scarcely any trouble, yet it was the very end of civilization for some. Mobs, etc. everywhere, each assumed to be vandals (to the point of being, well, Vandals). Here in Whitewater, a few protesters on a sidewalk were a horde of pickets, threatening our tender and delicate community. Such fussy, prissy nonsense — no one was threatened, no one was harmed. A heavy police presence at one protest, and watching officers nearby at another, were a waste of time.
Those who are whining about supposed ‘threats’ to the social order are — almost invariably – new men parroting what they think an established man would say in these circumstances (“Oh dearie me, can you imagine these savages, running amok? What ever will we do?”) Complainers’ fussiness gives them away: an established man would be – should be – must be – nonplussed.
The sky isn’t falling.
7. Federal Testing Standards. There are lots of reasons to worry about education. National No Child left Behind standards are not among them. One-size-fits-all fits poorly.
6. Independence. Is there a policy that says those on a commission should be beholden to those they are meant to oversee? Too many people have somebody else’s back, in demonstrations of grinning so obvious they might as well be from of a litter of Cheshire Cats.
5. The Poor. We seldom talk about the poor, in a town teeming with them. It’s all so down-market and depressing, after all. Let’s accentuate the positive (and for goodness’ sake, stop talking about the rest)!
4. Studies and Risks. Want to stop a project you don’t like? Forget about about causality and good science – trot out any study and make any claim you can. Pronto. Say something terrible might happen “on occasion,” without any way for others to assess that likelihood against countervailing harms. Fear, uncertainty and doubt: it’s your ticket to policy-success-through-scaremongering, and it saves you the trouble of thinking clearly while still getting what you want.
Is there a study that shows that Presbyterians in Omaha in 1972 sometimes threw dead fish at passersby during basketball games? Perfect – use it to show that seafood sales in Whitewater should be watched and monitored closely, very closely. While you’re at it, regulate Presbyterianism in the city through a mandatory ankle-bracelet-monitoring ordinance. One can, after all, never be too careful.
3. House Parties. If over-drinking is a problem, make sure you avoid dealing with it effectively. That’s hard work, and requires genuine outreach and real community policing. Instead, take the lazy man’s path to avoiding a solution: stage a big raid once a year, crow about it, and post headlines in your How I Spent My October scrapbook.
Of course drinking will keep going on — but if it’s not in the news, did it really happen?
2. Immigrants. Unemployment, poverty, empty spaces, foreclosed homes, and general malaise? Why not expand state power, detain supposedly illegal immigrants on any suspicion, regardless of actual criminality, and ship them out of town?
There is — and as long as human nature endures there can be — no better general allocation of resources in a society than a free market in capital and labor. There are exceptions, but none so great that a market solution is not generally preferable in most cases.
A rounding up immigrants of any kind is economically irrational, and it’s no less irrational than believing that stars and planets shape one’s destiny.
Worse, of course, is the rending of the social fabric an anti-immigrant policy would inflict on Whitewater. It’s simply impossible to yield or overlook the economic and social harm from something like Assembly Bill 173.
There’s a Know-Nothingism about this; it will fare no better as policy now than it has in the past. America is an open and welcoming place – we’ll stay that way (as so many will fight to remain that way), a few narrow legislators not withstanding.
1. The Plain and Simple. Here, one finds a recurring ailment. America yearns for the plain and simple, and assumes they still thrive in small-town America. Those standards are around us, but they’re hardly thriving.
It’s all big ideas and big plans, with the allure of municipal-led development trumping efficient and impartial delivery of basic services. When a city manager tries to convince town squires that his role as a so-called development leader means more than his administration’s delivery of basic neighborhood services, then we can conclude that we’ve truly lost our way.
Whitewater’s city government doesn’t need a financier, a wheeler-dealer, or a mover-and-shaker; that role belongs elsewhere, in a separate and independent organization. If the job of city management isn’t thrilling enough, the fault doesn’t rest with, and shouldn’t fall on, the residents of this beautiful but struggling town.
Ben writes about his latest song Deo Gracias Angliafrom his latest album, a song featured here originally last Friday. One dates oneself to write about liner notes, but there was great value in reading what a musician thought about his or her music that’s been lost without those notes. Commentary like Ben’s restores that additional value – and value it is, I think – to a song. (He adds, too, a kind and teasing mention of this website.) I’ll review the full album after the release of the next, and final, track.
Here’s track #11 off the new album: Deo Gracias Anglia. The most awesome President John Adams features the track over at FreeWhitewater.com.
This is a straight up “cover song,” though the songwriter is unknown and died in the 1400s. Its an ode to Henry V and his victory against the stinky French in the battle of Agincort. Its considered the oldest example of a “carole” in music.
I first encountered the song in graduate school studying Renaissance music. Along with the whacked out rhythmic complexity of the ars subtilior style, tunes like this – or at least the recording I first heard – struck me as completely bad-ass in the way that hard core punk or doom metal did. Turns out this song rocks balls set to a heavy metal rhythm section. It struck me to do this when I was searching for “political” material for my last album america’d. This one got cut from that album, but is included here.
Although my intrepid mastering engineer Chris Roberts heard the solo drum more as a kind of Apache ceremonial drum – its really an irish bodhrán I borrowed. The nasal-sounding horns are shawms – ancient but cool-sounding wind instruments that likely accompanied the song in 15th century performances, too. The break-down in the middle is as authentic a performance of the original as my long-forgotten early music training could muster.
Good morning,
It’s a partly cloudy Halloween ahead for Whitewater, with a high temperature of fifty-one. Trick or Treat in Whitewater runs from 4 to 7 PM today. It’s one of the traditional and quaint features of life in Whitewater that we’ve kept the celebration of the holiday on the holiday, rather than moving it about to the weekend preceding. Have fun, be safe!
The Wisconsin Historical Society marks today as a memorable day in Bucks franchise history:
1968 – Milwaukee Bucks Win First Game
On this date the Milwaukee Bucks claimed their first victory, a 134-118 win over the Detroit Pistons in the Milwaukee Arena. The Bucks were 0-5 at the time, and Wayne Embry led Milwaukee with 30 points. Embry became the first player in Bucks history to score 30 or more points in a regular season game. [Source: Milwaukee Bucks]
They’ll only have the chance to win more games if there’s a season in which to win them. A recent story in the New York Post offers the latest on the NBA’s ever-shrinking 2011-2012 season.
I’ve been reading Anne Applebaum’s essays for years, and she’s invariably sharp and insightful. She typically writes on foreign affairs, but some essays are for a foreign audience, describing aspects of American politics and culture. In a recent essay for the Telegraph, she succinctly describes America’s middle class, and the problems it faces. Applebaum writes of
….the American upper-middle class, a group which is now sociologically and economically very distinct from the lower-middle class, with different politics, different ambitions and different levels of optimism. Thirty years ago, this wasn’t the case. A worker in a Detroit car factory earned about the same as, say, a small-town dentist, and although they might have different taste in films or furniture, their purchasing power wasn’t radically different. Their children would have been able to play together without feeling as if they came from different planets. Now they couldn’t.
Despite all the loud talk of the “1 per cent” of Americans who, according to a recent study, receive about 17 per cent of the income, a percentage which has more than doubled since 1979, the existence of a very small group of very rich people has never bothered Americans. But the fact that some 20 per cent of Americans now receive some 53 per cent of the income is devastating.
I would argue that the growing divisions within the American middle class are far more important than the gap between the very richest and everybody else. They are important because to be “middle class,” in America, has such positive connotations, and because most Americans think they belong in it. The middle class is the “heartland,” the middle class is the “backbone of the country”. In 1970, Time magazine described middle America as people who “sing the national anthem at football games – and mean it”….
This is profoundly true – it’s the anxiety of slipping away from the upper-middle class, and not the rich, that animates recent protests (from Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party). (There’s also the anxiety of some in the upper-middle class of falling from that comfortable group, as some surely have and will, never to return.)
To see the upper-middle class as ‘sociologically and economically very distinct from the lower-middle class,’ is the key insight. They are different, and are becoming only more so.
See Can America survive without its backbone, the middle class?
Admirable innovation:
It’s not much bigger than your finger, it looks like a leftover from an electronics factory, but its makers believe their £15 [$25] computer could help a new generation discover programming.
The games developer David Braben and some colleagues came to the BBC this week to demonstrate something called Raspberry Pi. It’s a whole computer on a tiny circuit board – not much more than an ARM processor, a USB port, and an HDMI connection. They plugged a keyboard into one end, and hooked the other into a TV they had brought with them….
See @ BBC – dot.Rory: A 15 pound computer to inspire young programmers.
For how long? Netflix Consumes a Third of America’s Peak-Hours Internet Bandwidth – The Atlantic Wire bit.ly/srXemP
28 Oct
Cap Times sticks up for Joe Biden (someone, somewhere had to): Biden’s populism is right for Wisconsin bit.ly/tEkRfX
26 Oct
GOP rejects Dem-sponsored resolution on free speech rights in Assembly gallery bit.ly/sKTjtQ
26 Oct
Why the world Is surprisingly angry about the end of Google Reader’s sharing features bit.ly/sJ18V0
26 Oct
A Debilitating, Lower Standard Needn’t Be Ours « FREE WHITEWATER bit.ly/tpg4r7
25 Oct
Meet the New Press Release, Same as the Old Press Release « FREE WHITEWATER bit.ly/s1HiNM
25 Oct
Worse at dull papers? Despite tenacious reporting: Journal Communications reports sharply lower profits bit.ly/uHo3cB
25 Oct
‘Officers who run afoul of the law often aren’t fired or prosecuted’ Milwaukee’s lax accountability over policing bit.ly/tgnbHA
25 Oct
Framing the Left – Althouse: At Occupy Madison, the occupation is accomplished not so much with human beings. bit.ly/ohcMPN
24 Oct
A Merrie Melodies cartoon for 1951 – Canned Feud. Enjoy.
A reader kindly passed along an email from UW President Kevin Reilly to the entire UW System about additional budget cuts proposed for Wisconsin’s public universities. I’ve included the content of Reilly’s message below.
Readers may have different opinions about all this, but even staunch supporters of the Walker Administration should see this as (at least) a partial failure in planning, of a type sure to present itself again and again. State efforts to impose solutions from the center on communities and organizations across Wisconsin are sure to fail, as they rest on flimsy calculations, of the kind that are inevitable at a distance.
Even mere months after a biennial budget, in one Midwestern state, it’s clear that legislators were wrong in estimates of both revenue and expenditures. As they were wrong in this case, they’re likely to be wrong again and again, despite their earlier professions of certainty and assurances of success. Their self-certainty has been nearly boundless.
Similarly, attempts to repair the state budget through blanket changes to collective bargaining, for example, will not work, as they’re centrally imposed. There would have been a time when Republicans would have seen this, and laughed at the idea of a one-size-fits-all approach.
It’s true that the budget accounted for the possibility of gaps through a lapse provision; it’s no more true than saying a papier-mache bottle will tend to leak, and so need constant reinforcement. Failure is endemic to the approach.
The fewer plans from imposed from the center, the better. In the meantime, no one has reason to be confident of success through state-government planning.
Oct. 28, 2011
Dear Faculty, Staff, and Student Colleagues,
These are difficult economic times, and we face many challenges in our efforts to preserve broad access to a high-quality college education and continue groundbreaking research on behalf of Wisconsin citizens.
I want to provide you with up-to-date information about the latest issues – new state budget reductions – and tell you what we’re doing to advocate for UW System institutions, employees, and students.
We learned on Oct. 14 that the Department of Administration (DOA) would implement a $174.3-million ‘lapse,’ as authorized in the 2011-13 state budget. This tool allows the state to withdraw a portion of taxpayer funding already allocated to agencies. As part of that lapse, our colleges, universities, and extension networks have been asked to prepare for the loss of $65.6 million more over two years. This represents 38% of all new reductions to state spending, despite the fact that the UW System represents about 7% of the state’s expenditures.
It comes on top of $250 million in cuts already imposed on the UW System in the biennial budget.
See UW System’s Oct. 18 statement regarding the lapse.
We’re working hard to shine a spotlight on this important public policy discussion. Together with the 14 UW Chancellors and the 13 UW Colleges Deans, I co-authored an editorial in today’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the disproportionate allocation of these new cuts.
That editorial states that “We are working to get answers to these concerns through civil and constructive dialogue. We are also reiterating the UW System’s role as an economic engine, and asking state leaders to develop a fairer plan – one that protects UW students.” To that end, we provided DOA budget staff with a detailed memo that outlines a more equitable approach.
We are doing everything we can to encourage a more proportionate lapse amount, so we can preserve the high-quality teaching, research, and outreach that people both need and expect from the UW.
The lapse proposed by DOA is subject to review by the legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance, so there is still time for our voices to have an impact.
Thank you for your attention to this important topic. I encourage you to work collaboratively with your shared governance groups, your chancellors, and other campus/institutional leaders to advocate for the UW System’s vital educational mission. In the midst of the economic restructuring our country faces, your work is more important than ever, and it’s worth fighting for.
Thank you.Kevin P. Reilly
President
University of Wisconsin System
