Embedded Files
We will put new ideas, articles, videos here for a week or two, before we move it to the appropriate section.
Feel free to cut and paste and send it to your elected officials or leaders.
December 1, 2025
Thanks for stopping by. Here are a few quick summaries of how data centers are dangerous for the people of Wisconsin.
Data center builders have lied about their plans.
Here’s a cautionary tale from Iowa. Why should we trust them to do good?
They are bad for our mental-emotional-societal health:
Our modern world has already become too efficient with technology replacing our physical labor, our routine mental labor, and now our creative labor. If technology can do everything humans can do, and do it faster and better than we, what meaning does a human life have?
Because we are colonized by corporations, each with a singular vision to maximize profit and investor return, if we continue our digital course, humans will be replaced by machines en masse, rendering most humans obsolete, and causing a crisis with our individual and collective mental-emotional health.
We and our children are already creating better relationships with our screens than our friends, our families, and our communities. Please stop the expansion.
Ruskin says that we can make a human into an adult or a machine, but we can’t do both. I want to stay a human being.
AI will be the death of democracy
AI is becoming so powerful that we cannot distinguish between real information and fake information. If we cannot trust our eyes and ears, if we cannot discern what is true and what is false, how can we function as a democracy?
They are bad for our environment:
The data centers required by AI’s expansion are already threatening the Great Lakes, one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world. Technology corporations are finding willing governments who will permit massive data centers all around the great lakes. They will require massive amounts of electricity as well.
Data centers represent more corporate colonization, and accelerate the centralization of power and income disparity.
Ever since 1626, when the Dutch West India Company bought Manhattan for 60 Dutch guilders, corporations have been promising the native populations riches and prosperity for their land, only to deliver exploitation and misery. From Liberian rubber plantations to Congolese cobalt mines, from oil drilling in the Amazon to copper mines in Bolivia, every corporation's prime directive has been to maximize profit by any means necessary. Oftentimes they create environmental and social disasters, only to extract the wealth, be it land or labor.
Now they are coming to promise jobs and wealth to Wisconsin. Rest assured that both wealth and jobs will be temporary. They are here to extract wealth from our state, not to develop the wealth of our state.
November 18, 2025
Here are a few letters I’ve been sending to places who are fighting against data centers (I have no idea why the first one didn’t stop all of them dead). Feel free to cut and paste and share as you wish. Clickity, click . . . done!
I’ve included emails for Janesville, DeForest, Ozaukee, and Sheboygan at the bottom, in case you’d like to email their reps as well . . .make sure you change the name of the city if you cut and paste! Don’t ask how I know :-/
Subject line
In Iowa QTS drilled 40 ilegal wells on one data center site. How can we trust them?
Hello,
Please vote no on any data center construction. Here’s a cautionary tale from Iowa.
In Iowa, QTS drilled 40 illegal wells for one data center. Forty! Why does anyone trust these companies? They should get their corporate charters revoked.
Here’s a link to the news story:
Ever since 1626, when the Dutch West India Company bought Manhattan for 60 Dutch guilders, corporations have been promising the native populations riches and prosperity for their land, only to deliver exploitation and misery. From Liberian rubber plantations to Congolese cobalt mines, from oil drilling in the Amazon to copper mines in Bolivia, every corporation's prime directive has been to maximize profit by any means necessary. Oftentimes they create environmental and social disasters, only to extract the wealth, be it land or labor.
Now they are coming to promise jobs and wealth to Wisconsin. Rest assured that both wealth and jobs will be temporary. They are here to extract wealth from Wisconsin, otherwise they would go somewhere else.
Thank you for reading and serving the people,
Subject line:
Please vote no on data center construction
Hello,
I am writing to urge you to refuse to approve building a data center in DeForest.
Our modern world has already become too efficient with technology replacing our physical labor, our routine mental labor, and now our creative labor. If technology can do everything humans can do, and do it faster and better than we, what meaning does a human life have?
Because we are colonized by corporations, each with a singular vision to maximize profit and investor return, if we continue our digital course, humans will be replaced by machines en masse, rendering most humans obsolete, and causing a crisis with our individual and collective mental-emotional health.
The data centers required by AI’s expansion are already threatening the Great Lakes, one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world. Technology corporations are finding willing governments who will permit massive data centers all around the great lakes. They will require massive amounts of electricity as well.
Ruskin says that we can make a human into an adult or a machine, but we can’t do both. I want to stay a human being.
Thanks for reading and for your consideration,
Subject line:
Data centers are more corporate colonization
Hello,
Please do not permit the construction of a data center near DeForest.
Ever since 1626, when the Dutch West India Company bought Manhattan for 60 Dutch guilders, corporations have been promising the native populations riches and prosperity for their land, only to deliver exploitation and misery. From Liberian rubber plantations to Congolese cobalt mines, from oil drilling in the Amazon to copper mines in Bolivia, every corporation's prime directive has been to maximize profit by any means necessary. Oftentimes they create environmental and social disasters, only to extract the wealth, be it land or labor.
Now they are coming to promise jobs and wealth to Dane County. Rest assured that both wealth and jobs will be temporary. They are here to extract wealth from the DeForest area, otherwise they would go somewhere else.
The data center boom is another step on their march of colonization. You have the power to stop them. Please use it and deny their request to build on land near DeForest.
Thank you for reading and considering,
Janesville’s leaders’ emails
citycouncil@ci.janesville.wi.us
burdicka@ci.janesville.wi.us
squirel@janesvillewi.gov
cassm@janesvillewi.gov
erdmanj@janesvillewi.gov
millerh@ci.janesville.wi.us
Neenor@ci.janesville.wi.us
williamsp@ci.janesville.wi.us
lahnerk@ci.janesville.wi.us
Deforest
cahillwolfgramj@deforestwi.gov
allent@deforestwi.gov
cordsb@deforestwi.gov
littlec@deforestwi.gov
simpsonj@deforestwi.gov
steffenhagenhahnj@deforestwi.gov
williamsa@deforestwi.gov
changb@deforestwi.gov
Ozaukee
tneitzke@portwashingtonwi.gov
pneumyer@portwashingtonwi.gov
rstrohm@portwashingtonwi.gov
rharris@portwashingtonwi.gov
swesterbeke@portwashingtonwi.gov
eryer@townofcedarburgwi.gov
nherlache@cityofmequonwi.gov
michael.mcmahon@pwssd.k12.wi.us
Sheboygan
ryan.menzer@sheboyganwi.gov
john.belanger@sheboyganwi.gov
michael.close@sheboyganwi.gov
alanza.grawien@sheboyganwi.gov
robert.lafave@sheboyganwi.gov
susann.boorse@sheboyganwi.gov
dean.dekker@sheboyganwi.gov
grazia.perrella@sheboyganwi.gov
zach.rust@sheboyganwi.gov
trey.mitchell@sheboyganwi.gov
joe.heidemann@sheboyganwi.gov
May 20, 2025
Greetings!
What an exciting time to be a leader in government and public schools! Lots of titanic social changes present some great challenges and some great opportunities.
For over 100 years, our schools have been saddled by ‘Carnegie Units’, established in 1906 to meet the needs of oligarchic industrialists more interested in exploiting human potential than encouraging the flourishing of the best parts of us.
Our modern world has created a huge bio-psycho-social crisis, dramatically exposed by Dane County’s two school shootings, as well as the more private despair, loneliness, phone addiction, and anxiety of our citizens. What in our modern culture is creating such pain and anguish, and what can our schools do in response?
Our world is going through rapid, profound changes which schools need to face. MMSD’s vision is that “every child will graduate from high school ready for college, career and community.” However, nobody knows what the world will look like in 20 years: what will the role of college be? What sort of careers will exist? And what will ‘community’ look like? I hope before MMSD spends any of our $500 million, it can answer these fundamental questions. Not doing so is like laying phone wires during the advent of cell phones.
Trump’s destruction of the Dept. of Education. As Abbé Faria said to Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo, “Abandonment becomes neglect, and neglect becomes our ally.” Our schools can finally choose to become human-centric places that meet the universal bio-psycho-social needs of our staff and students, catalysing human flourishing and an epidemic of eudaimonia!
Now is the chance to overhaul education to meet the bio-psycho-social-spiritual needs of the people: What will education look like, Human-reducing big box stores or human-nourishing Portuguese villages? What will be our foundational principles? An exciting time indeed!
Attached is a draft of a chart of universal human needs and some ideas of how our communities and schools can meet them.
And another that briefly outlines some concrete steps showing how schools and local governments can immediately address these trying times.
Thanks for reading. Do reach out if you’d like to talk further.
Richard Wagner
www.humane-dane.org
Hello,
In deciding how to respond to the recent school violence, we need to ask the right question: not “Why the shooting?”, but rather “Why the pain? Why the despair?” While the first question addresses the symptom, the second addresses the cause.
The short answer is that we have created a modern world that does not meet the universal, bio-psycho-social needs of humans; in fact, this modern world works to de-humanize us. Young people are canaries in the coal mine. We don’t blame the canary; instead, while we work to cure the canary, we also determine how the mine is deficient, and how we can re-form the mine so as not to harm more canaries. The question is, “Is our modern world meeting the needs of humans? And what can we do to change that?”
Gabor Mate says that evaluating a culture is easy: “to what degree does it meet the needs of human beings, and to what degree does it undermine the needs of human beings?” Let’s see what our culture is creating:
As is (and this is PRE covid; don’t blame the quarantine)
Conclusion
Our (Civilization? City? Way of life? Unsure of the word) is in crisis. The canaries are dying in the coal mine. Of course we need to heal the canaries, but we must also transform the coal mine. We have created a largely unnatural world that does not meet our needs and produces mental/emotional dis-ease. We need huge change, and huge change often requires courageous, profound, systemic change in both schools and in our county. We must create a civilization that meets the basic, universal, bio/psycho/social needs of the people.
Here are my recommendations for both school and county:
School recommendation
Creating in the district a culture of compassion and humanity by--
Training the existing staff from school board to (fill in with whomever you feel has the least power in schools) in Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model of the Brain and Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication.
Taking advantage of the incredible plasticity of the young human brain, and pour the lion’s share of our resources into PK-2nd(?) grade by--
Making the meeting the universal needs of staff and students, along with the skill of self-regulation, the prime directives of 4K to 2nd(?) grade by--
Revolutionizing early curriculum to emphasize community, curiosity, play, and wonder over academic rigor, and--
Teaching, explicitly and through modeling, the skills of emotional and social intelligence to everyone.
Recruiting/hiring/equipping an army of ‘mental health nurses’ to adopt classrooms or children in classrooms to be a positive, regulating presence in the child’s life. I imagine lots of retirees would love to be part of this.
Stopping the giving of unhealthy, food-like substances (and creating terrible eating habits and bad mental and physical health) to children. Serve them healthy, delicious, made-from-scratch, whole foods in order to build good eating habits and health.
And continuing this approach through the rest of their schooling, adding the opportunity to engage in real work, starting cottage industries, working with hands, negotiating a life plan. . . One example: bring aquaponics into the schools, gradually releasing responsibility to students: it’s real work, and it’s interdisciplinary (biology, chemistry, culinary, construction, business(?)).
---------------
Sadly, producing healthy children only to send them into an unhealthy world is cruel. So we need to change the world we have created into a world that meets our universal human needs. We need to transform the coal mine.
We live unnatural lives in a profoundly unnatural civilization. In the following chart, the first column describes how humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years; the second describes how we now live:
from The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate
County recommendation
Make this the vision of Dane County: walkable neighborhoods filled with locally-funded, locally-owned businesses selling locally- produced goods and services, all connected by rail-based public transportation. (Like every great metro area in the world).
Use the gems of Dane County as a model of development: Willy Street, Monroe Street, State Street, Atwood Avenue, downtown Sun Prairie. . . all places that create community, create wealth, and are worth caring about.
Immediately stop approving auto-based developments. No huge, single-family houses on windy streets or huge apartment buildings that sentence each resident to an isolating, alienating, auto-based future and whose maintenance is massively expensive.
Immediately stop approving franchises and transnational businesses, the companies that extract wealth from a community instead of developing the wealth of a community.
Start developing walkable neighborhoods filled with locally-funded, locally-owned businesses selling locally-produced goods and services, all connected by rail-based public transportation.
Establish a local investment exchange, so all citizens of Dane County can invest in locally-owned businesses.
Establish a ‘make-up-the-difference fund’ so everyone can afford to buy locally-produced goods and services, especially food.
Establish a rail-based transportation system today.
Thank you for reading. I, and the citizens or Dane County look forward to your response,
Richard Wagner
Resources
School changes
Dr. Gabor Maté Speaks to Psychotherapists
Bruce D. Perry: Social & Emotional Development in Early Childhood [CC]
Jonathan Haidt: The Three Terrible Ideas Weakening Gen Z and Damaging Universities and Democracies
Emotional Intelligence Curriculum
Dance and Drama and mental health and emotional intelligence
A trauma-informed plan for MMSD's welcome back conference
Prevent Alzheimer’s, improve Depression, Anxiety, and Brain Fog: The Food's Power | Episode 17 of 18
Do Gut Microbes Control Your Personality? | Kathleen McAuliffe | TED
County changes
we shape our places; then our places shape us
Why We Won't Raise Our Kids in Suburbia
The Suburbs are Ruining Your Mental and Physical Health
How the franchise system is rigged (with Marshall Steinbaum) - Pitchfork Economics
Interested in setting up a local investor exchange in Dane County
The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry | Climate Town (feat. Not Just Bikes)
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