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Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2-11-11

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Good morning,

Today’s forecast calls for a high of twenty-six, with a chance of snow in the afternoon.

In Wisconsin history on this day, the Wisconsin Historical Society recalls a shooting…in the territorial legislature:

1842 – Shooting in the Legislature

On this date the Territorial Legislature of Wisconsin met in Madison, only to be interrupted by the shooting of one member by another. The legislature was debating the appointment of Enos S. Baker for sheriff of Grant County when Charles Arndt made a sarcastic remark about Baker’s colleague, James Vineyard. After an uproar, adjournment was declared and when Arndt approached Vineyard’s desk, a fight broke out during which Vineyard drew his revolver and shot Arndt. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes]

Arndt died within several minutes of being shot.

I’ve written before about bed bugs (Bed Bug Registry – Check Apartments and Hotels Across North America!), but not, I think, about fleas.  I’ll correct that omission with reference to a story at Wired, entitled, Fleas Jump Using Spring-Loaded Feet.  As it happens, they’re great jumpers:

Using new tools like high-speed video, researchers with the University of Cambridge in England have shown that fleas take off from their tibia and tarsi — the insect equivalent of feet — and not their trochantera, or knees. The researchers report their conclusion in the March 1 Journal of Experimental Biology.

Regardless of how fleas do it, the insects have always been famous jumpers, says study co-author Gregory Sutton. “There are even fairy tales that talk about how magnificent fleas are at jumping,” he says. And it’s not surprising: Fleas jump far. Some fleas — only a few millimeters long — can jump well over 10 centimeters, according to one study.

Watch them in action:



more >>

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2-10-11

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Good morning,

It’s a sunny day for Whitewater, with a predicted high temperature of eleven degrees.

Today is a dark day in Wisconsin history. The Wisconsin Historical Society remembers that, in

1763 – Treaty of Paris Cede[d] Wisconsin to England

On this date the Treaty of Paris ceded formerly French-controlled land, including the Wisconsin region, to England. [Source: Avalon Project at Yale University]

ScienceNews.org offers, in its News in Brief section, something about the subtle power of cell phones — frequent usage causes people to associate numbers with the corresponding letters of a keyboard:

5683 is all you need

Cell phones send messages on the sly — to their owners. People who frequently call and text others with these devices unthinkingly associate keyboard numbers with their accompanying letters, says psychologist Sascha Topolinski of the University of Wurzburg in Germany. Cell slingers recognize words faster after having dialed numbers that correspond to those words, such as 5683 for LOVE, she reports in an upcoming Psychological Science. In other experiments, cell users preferred dialing numbers that denoted positive words (37326 for DREAM) over numbers signifying negative words (75463 for SLIME) and preferred companies with business-related phone numbers, such as LOVE for a dating agency, over companies without them — a result with marketing implications. —Bruce Bower

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2-9-11

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Good morning,

Today’s forecast for Whitewater calls for a sunny and cold day, with a high temperature of eight degrees.

Today at 4 p.m., a Joint Review Board meets to consider distressed status for tax incremental district 4. The agenda is available online. Here it is —

Whitewater
Tax Incremental Finance District No. 4
Proposed Distressed TID Designation for District No. 4
Joint Review Board Walworth County Wednesday – February 9, 2011, 4:00 p.m.
Whitewater Municipal Center Lakefront Conference Room (2nd Floor)
312 W Whitewater Street, Whitewater, WI 53190

1. Call to Order and Roll Call
2. Discussion and Possible Action on Joint Review Board Minutes from January 5, 2011
3. Consideration of Proposed Distressed TID Amendment for Whitewater’s Tax Increment Finance District 4
4. Consideration to Disband Whitewater Tax Increment Joint Review Board
5. Adjourn

No surprises here — designation of distressed status is a foregone conclusion. That’s bad policy twice over — on the merits, and as an endorsement of the many lies and half truths about the cause and the effect of a distressed district. I’ll post later this week on all this, as what’s happend to this district is a fine example of bureaucratic mediocrity and mendacity. It’s also rare — only a small minority of Wisconsin communities have debilitating problems like this.

Today’s an important day in American science and government — as the Wisconsin Historical Society recalls:

1870 – National Weather Service Authorized

On this date President Ulysses S. Grant signed a joint resolution authorizing a National Weather Service, which had long been a dream of Milwaukee scientist Increase Lapham. Lapham, 19th-century Wisconsin’s premier natural scientist, proposed a national weather service after he mapped data contributed over telegraph lines in the UpperMidwest and realized that weather might be predicted in advance. He was concerned about avoiding potential disasters to Great Lakes shipping and Wisconsin farming, and his proposal was approved by Congress and authorized on this date. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers, edited by Sarah Davis McBride]

Liberty, Politics

God and gods

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I’ve mentioned something of Nietzsche recently, but it’s another German philosopher I’ve in mind today. (Of Nietzsche, see Nietzsche and the Dark Hope Against a Better Local Politics.) Centuries before Nietzsche, a German theologian observed that everyone has a god, if not a faith in God:

So, too, whoever trusts and boasts that he possesses great skill, prudence, power, favor friendship, and honor has also a god, but not this true and only God. This appears again when you notice how presumptuous, secure, and proud people are because of such possessions, and how despondent when they no longer exist or are withdrawn. Therefore I repeat that the chief explanation of this point is that to have a god is to have something in which the heart entirely trusts.

(This is why there is no better aspiration for a man or woman than to be of the common people.)

Even those of the deepest skepticism have a god of some sort. That it’s merely a god — a human desire of theirs — is variously tragedy or farce. Farce, for example, from those who live with exaltation of politics as though it were a divine calling, rather than a human thing. (See, Public Choice Theory and Its Opposite.)

Tragedy, for example, when people turn human wishes into inviolable and unalterable rules, by which some dominate others. Many a victimized spouse is victim not through brutality alone, but through another’s manipulative demand that her condition must be so, as an expression of a (false, supposedly inviolable) principle.

Some who place their trust falsely, through another’s lies, come to see better of it. Others remain deluded and damaged.

One would hope that a child would not learn to walk only to do so, as an adult, on his or her knees.

It is a notably sad thing that some — even in a free society — remain forever servile before political authority and bureaucracy.

There’s no need, though, to enlarge that group by even one more person. They may keep only their own company, as they do now, perpetually.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2-8-11

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Good morning,

Today’s Whitewater forecast calls for a cold day, with a high temperature of about eight degrees.

At Lincoln School tonight, there’s a PTO meeting at 6 p.m. in the school library.

Today is an anniversary of Wisconsinite pugnaciousness:

1858 – Wisconsin Congressman Starts Fight in Legislature

Just before the Civil War, the issue of slavery tore apart the U.S. Congress. On February 8, 1858, Wisconsin Rep. John Potter (considered a backwoods hooligan by Southern aristocrats) leaped into a fight on the House floor. When Potter embarrassed a pro-slavery brawler by pulling off his wig, the gallery shouted that he’d taken a Southern scalp. Potter emerged from the melee covered in blood and marked by slave owners as an enemy.

Two years later, on April 5, 1860, he accused Virginia Rep. Roger Pryor of falsifying the Congressional record. Pryor, feeling his character impugned, challenged Potter to a duel. According to Southern custom, a person challenged had the right to choose weapons. Potter replied that he would only fight with “Bowie knives in a closed room,” and his Southern challenger beat a hasty retreat. Republican supporters around the nation sent Potter Bowie knives as a tribute, including this six-foot-long one. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes]

Charity, City, Politics

Public Choice Theory and Its Opposite

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Over at the Library of Economics and Liberty, there’s a section on public choice theory.

Here’s a definition from that website:

As James Buchanan artfully defined it, public choice is “politics without romance.” The wishful thinking it displaced presumes that participants in the political sphere aspire to promote the common good. In the conventional “public interest” view, public officials are portrayed as benevolent “public servants” who faithfully carry out the “will of the people.” In tending to the public’s business, voters, politicians, and policymakers are supposed somehow to rise above their own parochial concerns.

In modeling the behavior of individuals as driven by the goal of utility maximization – economics jargon for a personal sense of well-being – economists do not deny that people care about their families, friends, and community. But public choice, like the economic model of rational behavior on which it rests, assumes that people are guided chiefly by their own self-interests and, more important, that the motivations of people in the political process are no different from those of people in the steak, housing, or car market. They are the same human beings, after all. As such, voters “vote their pocketbooks,” supporting candidates and ballot propositions they think will make them personally better off; bureaucrats strive to advance their own careers; and politicians seek election or reelection to office. Public choice, in other words, simply transfers the rational actor model of economic theory to the realm of politics.

There’s nothing new about this — either as a field or as a practical understanding. (In fact, it’s clear that America’s Founders understood self-interest in politics very well. It’s impossible, for example, to understand clearly a collection like the Federalist Papers otherwise.)

Unfortunately, there’s nothing new about the opposing, airy, and vainglorious notion that public officials are benevolent “public servants” who faithfully carry out the “will of the people.” The politician/bureaucrat-as-altruist is a false, self-serving notion. A public official espousing these airy notions is either dishonest, dim, or deluded. (That’s why someone who declares, “I represent this or that constituency, etc.” is admirable. So much better to say: here’s what I advocate, specifically, narrowly, concretely.)

Yet, in some places great and small (Whitewater, Wisconsin being among them), the notion of public office as a nearly holy order persists. It’s no more believable than the now-discarded notion that the earth must be flat. It persists as much from a bureaucrat’s vanity as anything else. (When politicians and bureaucrats describe themselves as though they were of the clergy, they don’t lift themselves up; they bring the clergy down.)

America’s greatest men and women have always been serious, thoughtful, and honest. They deserve better from us than officials’ airy & selfish ideas, servilely accepted.

A private man or woman who contributes to the community without office or official position is preferable to a career bureaucrat. We have many such private men and women, but not so many as we need, as the loss of even one is a hardship.

Music, Review

Ben Sommer’s america’d

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I grew up in a jazz-loving household, not jazz as stuffy, artistic presumption, but simply the music of the house. One knew that there were kinds of jazz, and each had its place (the exception was fusion, that everyone agreed had none at all). Glenn Miller, for example, was considered sufficiently tame that his albums were bedtime music. (‘Jazz for Republicans’ was my father’s teasing view of Miller’s conventionality.)

There’s great opportunity for a person or household that holds to uncommon music, art, or literature: one finds something novel there and then, and is primed to enjoy new experiences later. The chance to review an album — something I wouldn’t have imagined even a few years ago — doesn’t seem daunting, but is instead inviting.

It’s in that spirit that I’ve accepted a recommendation to review Ben Sommer’s america’d, an album of eight prog rock songs. It’s a fine album, one that I think you’re sure to enjoy, too.

Although you may find your own reference, Sommer’s work reminds me — in the best way — of the late Warren Zevon’s songs, with a sharp and insightful perspective on American life. Zevon, himself, was a successor to a tradition of political songwriters, including many in the folk movement.

(Quick aside on Zevon: his perceptiveness wasn’t always found outside the recording sudio. I once met a former girlfriend of his, who was Zevon’s former girlfriend because he gave her a small kitchen appliance on a supposedly sentimental occasion.)

There are eight songs on america’d, and there’s a consistent theme of liberty — of the individual free of state, bureucaracy, opperssive communalism — that runs through the album. Good and enduring political songs aren’t good and enduring because they extoll the virtues of the state, but beacuse they see its vices. That’s very much true on america’d.

It’s well past time, for example, that someone wrote a song about Kissinger, and in Henry Kissinger Sommer has him right: “…flowering of evil genius/The ends achieved would justify to deceive us…” That’s about right, I’d say — calculating beyond the limits of normal compassion, producing a policy by turns amoral and immoral. If Watchmen showed Nixon and Kissinger as odd (and they were), Sommer describes the danger underneath that kind of ‘odd.’

In particular, I think you’ll like and remember Adult Children, a witty, biting take on the child-like selfishness that grips so many: “…we’re eating hamburgers and frosties/and jelly donuts, too/and if we get a little hefty/we’re gonna lawyer up and sue…” I wish the song weren’t so true, but I’m glad that Sommer writes candidly.

It’s not for lyrics alone that you’ll remember Adult Children; the mimicing of a baby’s crying — but meant from the mouths of adult babes, so to speak — is both clever and catchy. You’ll want to hear the song more than once, and from it explore more of Sommer’s work.

America’d takes insight, pours it into clever lyrics, cradles those lyrics in fine guitar work, and offers a memorable album as a result.

Enjoy!



Adams’s rating, out of four stars:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2-7-11

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Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast calls for a chance of snow, with a high temperature of twenty-three degrees.

There are a few public meetings scheduled for Whitewater today. At 4 p.m., there’s a meeting of the Parks & Recreation Board. The agenda is available online. Later, at 6:30 p.m., there’s a meeting of Common Council, also with an agenda now available online.

On that agenda, this consideration stands out:

Recommendation from Community Development Authority CDA for amendment to TIF 4 (Distressed TIF) (CDA Request)

Note: I will later write about distressed status, having been recommended unanimously (and predictably) from the Community Development Authority. It’s sure to win a majority tonight, too, with the consequence only of bad policy.

The Huffington Post (now part of AOL), had a headline last night that described the Packers of Super Bowl XLV well:

From Repository