FREE WHITEWATER

Open Government, Police

The Predictable, Dead-End Response

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Writing about the feud between Milwaukee’s Chief Flynn and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Bruce Murphy writes that

Experts on police departments will tell you that criticism from outside inevitably results in everyone on the force circling the wagons.

That’s very true. So true and predictable, that it’s more predictable and regular than Old Faithful has ever been. It’s why I’ve mentioned previously that bad organizations often don’t get better, they get worse.

One might think that failed leaders would see this, and would correct past mistakes through a routine of openness and new ideas. They don’t; typically they huddle more closely together. Mostly, this is because weak leaders would prefer the easy path of a small, sycophantic cadre to the better, but harder, scene of a dynamic organization. (It’s also because they isolate and delude themselves from growing criticism.)

In drawing ever closer and inward, the members of a weak organization only compound their mistakes and deficiencies.

The best option for a community is, of course, organizational reform. The second best, though, is exactly the organizational wagon-circling of which Murphy writes. Huddling together only exacerbates existing problems, speeds decline, and makes the case for reform stronger.

One would prefer the first option; as a reformer, one would still readily accept the second, knowing the eventual result is reform.

Via Inside Milwaukee.

City

Residency and the Decline of a Small-town Elite

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Small-town Whitewater has a residency requirement for public leadership positions in city government. It’s a sign of the decline of Whitewater’s town squires that they cannot consistently enforce a rule of their own making

Ironically, although I don’t support Whitewater’s mostly narrow and short-sighted town fathers, I’ve supported the residency requirement for two reasons.

First, it applies to leaders who should set an example of living in the community they serve, enjoying its benefits and sharing its burdens. If they’re compensated from the community, they should live in the community that taxes residents for that compensation.

Second, it’s a lawful requirement now, that should be applied equally and fairly to all who fall within its range. (I’d even apply this rule to interim leaders, on the same first reason, listed above.) The residency rule for leaders doesn’t say sometimes, maybe, or when someone feels like following the rules. Within the city – for services and tax purposes — actually means within the city, not kinda, sorta close by.

(If the rule changes, so be it; as long as it’s in force, all leaders should have to comply with it equally.)

Imagine how absurd it would be for someone to say he’d pay his taxes a year from now, or maybe a year after that, or thereafter if Whitewater’s Common Council thought it absolutely necessary.

Similarly, if he ran a stop sign into an empty oncoming street, no one would excuse him for being, well gosh, just halfway out into the road. On the contrary, it would be the municipal offense of the century that a common person did something like that. If he lived near the city, no one would allow him to vote in city elections just because he kinda, sorta lived near the city line.

Although some of Whitewater’s leaders have long been in the habit of making exceptions for themselves, the real story here is that Whitewater’s leaders cannot assure the enforcement of simple rules they, themselves established. Residency was supposed to be evidence of a commitment to Whitewater, to the ‘exceptional’ quality of life here, to all that these leaders had uniquely achieved.

Yet, they lack even the confidence to insist on their own standards. (If they’d really wanted those standards enforced, they would have chosen a better negotiator for the city’s position, too.)

Residency rules? Here today, gone tomorrow.

A stodgy town faction’s ability to enforce even its own standards? Just plain gone.

Politics

Gov. Walker’s Actual Political Standing in Wisconsin (October 2011)

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I’m not a Walker supporter, because Gov. Walker’s far from libertarian.

If one is a Walker supporter – as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute surely is – it’s right to see Walker’s political prospects honestly. Despite a bit of spin in a WPRI narrative, a recent poll commissioned and published by WPRI reveals Gov. Walker’s weak political standing.

He’s underwater – 42% approve, 56% disapprove:

11. Now let’s turn to the political scene here in Wisconsin. Overall, do you strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove, or strongly disapprove of the way Scott Walker is handling his job as Governor of Wisconsin?

Strongly approve 24
Somewhat approve 18
Somewhat disapprove 11
Strongly disapprove 45
Don’t know / Refused 2

These results, by the way, are more reliable than airy talk about how well the governor’s policies are being received, or results from dodgy pollsters that partisans reflexively prefer. WPRI has a preference, of course, but they’ve nonetheless candidly published results inauspicious to their own camp.

Via The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.

Politics

Conservative Website FreeRepublic.com to Romney Supporters: ‘ENEMIES OF THE CONSTITUTION … ARE NOT WELCOME HERE’

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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.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.1.11

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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.

Holiday

Boo! Scariest Things in America, 2011

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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.

City, Holiday

Boo! Scariest Things in Whitewater, 2011

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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.

Music

Monday Music: Ben Sommer on Deo Gracias Anglia

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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.

Deo Gracias Anglia

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.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 10.31.11

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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.

Economy

Anne Applebaum: Can America survive without its backbone, the middle class?

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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?

Technology

A £15 computer to inspire young programmers

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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.