AMTRAK, THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

Milwaukee reporter Adam Roberts takes a train ride.  First, he asked a meta-question. “If we are this country that talks about choice, and freedom of choice, why would we design a city that limits the choice and dependency on one mode of travel?”  To ask the question is to answer it.  Urban form is emergent, and the talk of design or planning implicitly limits choice and reinforces dependence.

He then went for a train ride.

Amtrak’s Empire Builder first served customers in 1929, as the flagship train of the Great Northern Railway. It currently operates two lines between Chicago and both Seattle and Portland serving customers at up to 38 different stations depending on the line. One of those stations is the Milwaukee Intermodal Station downtown, where I hopped on board the train about 15 minutes behind my scheduled 4:45 departure time.

After boarding the Superliner, I took stock of my immediate surroundings. The first thing that stuck out: the legroom. As a six foot tall man, I was able to fully stretch out my legs and still had room in front of me to spare. Additionally, carry-on rules are a lot less strict than air travel; one of my bags was basically a cooler full of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and snacks for the trip.

After an attempted nap was thwarted by a nearby crying baby, I made my way to the dining car, where due to Amtrak’s communal dining policy, I was placed with Kevin and Moa. The Swedish couple was on their way to the Twin Cities to visit Kevin’s host family from his college days. Getting a European perspective on rail travel seemed like a smart idea.

“The biggest [thing] that plays a role is the environment” Kevin told me. “Most people say “Yeah I [ride the train] because going with my car is bad for the climate. And the government just pumps money into good trains and good buses, because they care about the climate.”

Moa added the idea of using a car as the sole mode of getting around didn’t make much sense to them, especially on long trips. “Yeah you can get where you want to go, but you deal with detours, and then you have to stay up and drive and find somewhere to sleep.”

After finally grabbing that nap we arrived an acceptable 20 minutes delayed in La Crosse at 8:30pm, basically the same time it would take to make the trip by car with a bathroom/gas stop.

His attempt to return, on the other hand, illustrates why people are willing to put up with congested roads and cranky kids in the back seat.

By the time my scheduled 11:37am Sunday departure arrived, the train was somewhere in North Dakota and delayed by nearly 12 hours. Suffice to say I had no plans to wait for a train that would get me home at 1:15am. With a few taps of my phone on the Amtrak website, I was able to book a Thruway bus that would get me on the road at 4:00pm and arrive in Milwaukee just before 9. Not everyone was so lucky, however. One passenger attempted to get on the bus right as we were about to depart, saying he didn’t receive notice about how long the train was delayed. With no ticket for the bus, he was denied entry.

Once he got home, he did some journalism.

How can delays on a mode of transportation in 2023 stretch to half a day long, and how can it be deemed a common occurance? Amtrak’s website has a whole page dedicated to the different reasons why your train might be delayed. The most common reason they cite is “freight train interference”, a side effect of Amtrak not owning a large portion of the tracks they operate their trains on outside the Northeast. But rail hosts only tell one part of the Empire Builder delay story.

“On that route, there’s a lot of things that can happen” Passenger Rail Correspondent for Trains Magazine Bob Johnston tells me. One of those many things is breakdowns of long-distance train equipment. Johnston tells me that a lot of the replacements for this equipment is still put away, as a cost-saving measure. “Amtrak has not, despite what they say, prioritized returning this equipment to service. So that means, if there’s no spare equipment, and there’s a mechanical problem, then the train can’t leave the station or it becomes disabled en route.”

That deferred maintenance affects the regional routes as well. I took that picture last Friday enroute to Milwaukee, the people-watching in the Great Hall, even with the discombobulated long distance service, is generally compelling.  At the time I booked a passage on the 1.05 departure, train 335, for Milwaukee, Amtrak advised me the train was 30% filled.  That morning, though, the 8.05 departure from Milwaukee had mechanical troubles before it got to the airport station, arriving Chicago around 10 am, and it was taken out of service with no replacement rake available.  Thus, those passengers who were expecting to go north at 11 am had to rebook, if possible, for 335, and the crew were announcing that they could not accommodate any passengers holding tickets on the earlier train.  At Milwaukee, there were people waiting for both the early afternoon train that didn't run, and the return trip of 335 as 338.  That's not good enough.

IF SOCIALISTS UNDERSTOOD POLITICAL ECONOMY, THEY WOULDN'T BE SOCIALISTS.

Monopoly^(TM) started as a manifesto for Henry George's single tax, and it has long been misunderstood by people who would like to scold us for our selfishness.  "And how is it that a game conceived as socialist propaganda becomes a metaphor for competitive capitalism that inspires refinements to keep players engaged and involved?"

The latest such scold is longtime Ohio politician Nina Turner, once a regular on MSNBC's Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews programs.

She often feuds with libertarians about "Medicare for All," minimum wage, and other economic policies.

This week, she tweeted the following: "There's literally a children's board game that demonstrates that 'free-market capitalism' always leads to one person controlling everything."

I think those MSNBC hosts brought her on because she was colorful, not because she was the sharpest knife in the drawer.  The article reviews that history of the game, originally "The Landlord's Game," before getting to the difficulties of one person ever gaining control of everything.

As such, the rules and game mechanics don't exactly undermine the legitimacy of the capitalist system. As most people know from playing the game—which is weirdly popular, despite being somewhat unrewarding at both casual and advanced levels of play—Monopoly involves rolling dice, moving game pieces onto game spaces, buying property, and collecting rent. Players earn more money from their properties if they also own neighboring spaces and then develop them. There are gains to be had from trading properties with other players, but market mechanisms are mostly absent.

For instance, the amounts of money earned by landing on spaces is prearranged by the game's rules. In a free market, a landlord might charge more or less in order to entice renters and compete against rivals; in Monopoly, rents are set in stone. If anything, this is an argument against government-imposed rent control.

The fact that players must go bankrupt, one by one, until only the game's winner remains is a function of the game's design, not of capitalism. Indeed, this mechanic is actually so poorly developed that games of Monopoly often end well before this point is reached: People frequently quit the game because it takes so long. Even under conditions artificially engineered to reach an end-state where "one person controls everything," per Turner's description, the game often doesn't work out that way.

So much for the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.

That the game does not have to have an end raises the possibility that many games will not end. So, also, can it be with business competition, whether as taught in the textbook or as observed in industries without strong scale economies or network externalities. With sufficiently many players, the pattern of initial ownership of railroads, utilities, and properties can be one in which no player acquires a monopoly in the first few trips around the board, and no proposed trades of properties (Boardwalk for Kentucky, Mediterranean, and $100) are mutually satisfactory. The resulting infinite loop is loosely a competitive equilibrium, although the game loses realism in that no housing gets built.

Although people have modified a number of the rules (payments directed by cards go into a pot gathered by the next player to land on Free Parking) I know of no local variation in which individual properties can be improved.  Even the combined intellect of all those Socialist Advocates has not produced a local variant in which there's a General Crisis of Accumulation affecting one of the players.

GET YOUR DEUTSCH ON.

Wisconsin's Oktoberfest season will begin later today, when German Fest opens in Milwaukee.

Regional Oktoberfesten are more of a thing in the United States, so much so that a fictional one involving a fictional biohazard in Chicago opened the One Chicago season, where there's no copyright infringement on the original in München.  In Germany, the regional event is more likely a sport shooting competition, a Schützenfest, and we'll feature some of those festivities as the deer get into the rut.

For now, though, a stirring performance by the massed Musikkorps that will participate in the Bürgerschützenvereins 1849 Grevenbroich Sharpshooters' Parade, fittingly honoring Alte Kameraden.

Find yourself an Oktoberfest and go to it.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The loopy left love their useful idiots, and currently Donald Trump is serving the role, by being a martyr to their lawfare.  "Trump, despite his vast legal problems, remains the GOP front-runner, but there are serious doubts about his electability." whilst Dementia Joe is literally serving that role.   "Joe Biden is too far gone, both in physical stamina and mental acuity to handle the job of the Leader of the Free World."  The one bright spot is that the loopy left are relatively few in number.  "Establishment Democrats and their liberal media mouthpieces expect total electoral loyalty from leftists while offering us little in return."  Yes, but let us count those leftists.  "The radical wing of the party can still fit our representation in Congress in a three-row SUV. And perhaps we’ve waited long enough to recognize that there’s no reason to expect better in the near future."  They continue to pin their hopes on the young.  "More than half of [Dementia Joe's] own party has been telling pollsters for months they don’t want him to run again. The sentiment is especially strong among young voters, whose turnout in large numbers is essential for Democrats nationally."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

ONLY IN WISCONSIN.

Mark Judge goes clickbaity on us.  "Why Oppenheimer Has Hotter Women Than Barbie."

We used to call them “cool chicks.” They were the girls who, when I was in college in the 1980s, were left-wing, wore their hair in an unorthodox or punk style, read books and didn’t take shit from anyone. They loved Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion and Anne Sexton, but could also talk to you about Henry Miller, Tom Wolfe and Naked Lunch. I still remember one, Tess. I fell for her when we met in a DC bar. A New Kids on the Block video popped up on the nearby video screen. “Twinkies,” Tess sneered, then smiled at me and lit a cigarette. She was self-confident. She wasn’t what Gen Z feminists are—hectoring, didactic, nasty.

The foremothers of the “cool chicks” of the 80s are probably the women depicted in the new film Oppenheimer. The main one that illuminated the screen for me is Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, a communist who has an affair with Robert Oppenheimer in the 1930s. Whereas in Barbie the male characters are useless morons, Tatlock and Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” set off sparks through a exhilarating back-and-forth about books, art, and politics. When they first meet at a party filled with communists, she starts explaining the dogma of Marx. He retorts that it’s different when you read it in German. She marvels that his library has so many books that aren’t related to science or physics. One of them is the Bhagavad Gita—in Sanskrit. She plants herself on top of him, opens the book, and tells him to read a line: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” That leads to sex.

He's trying to be funny while he's being serious.  Reality might be even more compelling.

“I don’t think Barbie and Oppenheimer want to be tied together in any capacity,” Miss America Grace Stanke told WTMJ’s Erik Bilstad on Wisconsin’s Morning News. “I’m super excited for both Barbie and Oppenheimer. Specifically for Oppenheimer as a Nuclear Engineer.”

Stanke, of Wausau, is perhaps the one person who can relate to both films. Stanke, who studied Nuclear Engineering at UW-Madison, was posed the tough question ‘Who is more influential? Barbie or Robert Oppenheimer?’ — a difficult choice to make.

“100% Robert Oppenheimer,” she said. “For me, seeing someone who is able to utilize science and think about it critically is really an incredible thing and an important part of human history and an important part of human future as well.”

Spoiler alert: she went to Oppenheimer first. The meming potential is pretty in pink.

#barbenheimer pic.twitter.com/CNB7VUN3lh

— Nuclear Power Memes (@nukepowermemes) July 21, 2023

I wonder if we can get the doomsday environmentalists to take nuclear electric power seriously for base load power plants and railway electrification without hoping for Mattel or Hollywood to bring out Nuclear Engineer Barbie.

THAT DEEP BENCH IN WOMEN'S FOOTIE.

The Stritch Wolves might be finished as a program, but an observation I made at a game they played is still relevant.  "That's how it went, all game, every ball contested, nobody wanting to let a ball go out of bounds if at all possible."  It might be Stritch recruited overseas players who wanted to play against the best.  So too might it be with Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Olivia McDaniel, a 2020 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, enjoyed a magical match in goal for the Philippines early Tuesday, making nine saves and leading her squad to an historic 1-0 upset of host country New Zealand in the FIFA World Cup.

The Philippines, appearing for the first time in its history in a men's or women's World Cup, registered its first-ever victory and moved to 1-1-0 in pool play.

Eighteen of the 23 players on the roster are American-born, including the California-born McDaniel and her sister, Chandler, who also played at UW-Milwaukee and didn't appear in the match. Indiana native and Marquette University alumna Ryley Bugay checked in at the 83rd minute.

The incentive to play against the best extends beyond college.

The team even trained in the United States, coming together in storybook fashion with players who have familial ties to the Philippines.

The McDaniel sisters' parents, Filipina mother Lindy and soccer-coach father Clint, first helped get the ball rolling for a Philippines soccer program in 2012, securing a complex in Corona, California, for the first tryouts.

Well, why not? Footie is popular with eight year old girls in the United States, and adolescent males nearly everywhere else, and the allocation of resources to sport reflects that.  "Perhaps U.S. policy contributes to its omnipresence.  In Brazil, by contrast, the resources tend to go to the adolescent males."

There's something Pareto-improving about wanting to pit yourself against the best on the pitch, and maybe secure a college education to go with it.  Yes, of late, the United States team has injected itself, probably to its disadvantage, into the culture wars.  The easiest way to deal with that noise is to tune the game out.

Sometimes, though, it's best not to fret over Geopolitics or whether a woman can kick like an early adolescent male, and just let the players rediscover their inner eight year old.

NO KIDDING.

David Marcus has an E-T-T-S moment at the cinema.

Ticket prices are up (the national average is $10.53 from $9.16 in 2019) and the quality of the experience is way down.

It's not just the threat of physical violence that mars the post-pandemic excursion to the cinema.

The whole experience is a dank, depressing metaphor for a society that barely knows how to function in public anymore.

Walking into your local theater, once a buzz with video game sounds, wild kids, coy couples on charming first dates, and an air of excitement, feels like trudging into some kind of [overpriced, understaffed] Soviet-era Costco.

At the concession stands, when they are open, one can wait in lines for hours for the privilege of spending the approximate price of fine dining in Paris for a bucket of stale popcorn or hot dogs of a strange greenish hue.

Shelves – once packed with a wide variety of candy and treats – are empty.

With a second mortgage worth of inedible snacks in your hands, you fumble on your phone to find your exact seat, which was purchased online, of course. God forbid, we have too much human interaction.

Not that the experience was any good before the corona tyranny.

Perhaps it is time for the people who run the theaters to rethink their business model, which seems to be based on upselling at the concessions, and endless commercials. Nearly half an hour of previews? Seriously? We're already doing the theaters a favor by purchasing tickets and their popcorn, and we can tolerate the high prices intended for popcorn lovers at the concessions. When the scheduled start time for the feature is 1.30, start it no later than 1.35.

With both the performers and the script writers on strike, though, there won't be many summer blockbusters coming to antagonize the curious.  The streaming services are likely to win the battle with the movie houses the same way they won the battle with the cable companies, by default.

A CONCATENATION OF MISBEHAVIOR.

When I noted, "you have the fraternity and athletic culture of the sub-prime party school, at a higher list price,"  Northwestern University's investigation of hazing rituals in athletics involved only football and baseball.  Turn the rock over, though, and look closely.

Northwestern athletics tried to protect their image over their own athletes, keeping up a facade to cover the rotten underbelly of the athletic department. Before I go any further, let me be clear. AD Derrick Gragg was hired in 2021 after Jim Phillips (who was very oddly gone without many questions being thrown at him) left for the ACC commissioner job, and president Michael Schill was hired last September, so the problems within the football program predate them. However, the baseball team’s problems? A cheerleading team that faced allegations of harassment and racism? That’s on their hands, and a symbol of a problem much larger than any one scandal.

This problem is larger than Northwestern football. It’s larger than Northwestern baseball and cheerleading. It’s a problem within the university, protecting their self-image and reputation over doing the right thing, and the leaders at the institution have nobody to blame but themselves.

The cheerleader's lawsuit is a few years old, and for all I know sports journalists treated the story as business as usual.

Hayden Richardson filed a federal lawsuit against Northwestern University on Friday, detailing repeated instances of harassment while a member of the cheerleading program, according to the Chicago Tribune's Elyssa Cherney.

Per the 58-page complaint, Richardson experienced being groped by drunken fans and alumni at university-sanctioned events. The program's head coach, Pam Bonnevier, apparently required women cheerleaders to "mingle" with donors for the school's financial gain.

“It became clear to [Richardson] that the cheerleaders were being presented as sex objects to titillate the men that funded the majority of Northwestern’s athletics programs,” the lawsuit read, per the Tribune. “After all, the happier these men were, the more money the University would receive from them.”

Richardson says that in 2018 to '19, older men touched her breasts and buttocks over her uniform, picked her up without her consent and made “sexually-charged comments” about her appearance, per the Tribune. Despite being underage, Richardson says men offered her alcoholic beverages and asked to meet with her later at said events.

The lawsuit suggests Richardson's complaints were ignored by numerous university officials. It also states that Bonnevier told cheerleaders to socialize independently despite requests to visit donor tailgates and events in pairs. The women team members were required to take photos with fans, regardless of whether the fans acted inappropriately.

Makes sense: if the recruiting coordinators can line up "dates" for high school prospects, the fundraising coordinators can call on the cheer team to schmooze the donors.

CHRISTMAS IN JULY.

It is July 25, isn't it?

We've mostly worked off the Naughty List for this month.  We intend to close each day's posts with something cheerful, and to offer more cheerful fare as the month progresses.

There's no guarantee, though, as the crazies never stop giving me material.

THE GREAT SOCIETY WAS THE TRAGEDY. BIDENOMICS IS THE FARCE.

I'm on record as skeptical of the entire arc of the Democrats' technocracy.  "Perhaps the simpler explanation is that the New Deal failed as a macroeconomic policy."  My elaboration, with footnotes, is

At one time, academic historians were in general agreement that President Lyndon Johnson would be recognized as the greatest of all presidents. A few funerals later, he's probably fallen to the stature of a minor post-Rooseveltian. Perhaps one reason is that the Great Society's record is not what the true believers would have others believe. I am on record as attributing much of the now-missed-by-self-styled-"progressives" unionized, monopolized, and cartelized 1950s to the unusual position the U.S. economy enjoyed after World War II.

That post foreshadowed the "victory dividend" line of argument I have subsequently used.  Having the resources to attempt to build back better is one thing, but it's not the same thing as having the knowledge to do so, and the capability to make it happen.

The "wouldn't it be nice" ratchet has been screwing over people much longer than that: the interstate highways, and urban renewal, and the Great Society, and the story is always the same: self-congratulation over good intentions never compensates for bad policy.  Go, read and understand Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed.  I'll wait.

That's the tragedy. What are the elements of the farce?

LET US CALL IT WHAT IT IS: MAKE-WORK FOR FAILED SCHOLARS.

Minding the Campus contributor Robert Weissberg draws a felicitious comparison between cooking a stew and curating a matriculating class.  Reduced to one sentence, it would be something like "bean counting aggregates among fava, great northern, green, lima, and pinto; and there are some that enhance a chili but would fail in a casserole."

Imagine a cookbook-like course description that specifies in advance the demographic and ideological mix of those to be enrolled. In sum, there is no guarantee that whoever shows up will be the optimal mix for improved instruction.

“Diversity” is an empty vessel whose main purpose is to advance a political agenda, and it has always been that way. When Harvard in the 1920s decided that there were too many urban Jews of Eastern European extraction, it “diversified” its student body by admitting “more well-rounded” young men residing outside the big eastern cities, who excelled in leadership and sports. The number of big-city Eastern European Jews fell, and the WASP ascendency continued, at least for a few more decades. Today’s Left predictably prefers to diversify schools exclusively with students drawn from groups that overwhelmingly vote Democratic, namely, blacks, Hispanics, women, and gays.

This “diversity game” might be played across the ideological spectrum. Conservatives should abandon viewpoint diversity—which is hopeless, given the multitude of beliefs on everything “conservative”—and instead focus on diversity of life experiences to advance their agenda.

It's a fool's errand, he concludes. Perhaps, as Reason's Emma Camp suggests, the best thing to do with all those diversity hustlers is turf them out.

The survey provides further support for concerns that American college students are increasingly unwilling to tolerate political opinions they disagree with. Most troubling, it seems that the bounds of what is deemed "offensive" has continued to expand. Not only do students now bristle at tolerating truly hateful speech, but they also seem unable to stand even basic observations on popular political issues.

An easy way to fix this problem would be for universities to stop making it so easy to tattle to administrators over minor political disagreements—and stop setting students up with the expectation that any offense deserves administrative involvement.

However, that would require scaling back the huge bureaucracies that have exploded at many colleges for the express purpose of refereeing student and faculty speech—something most universities are unwilling to do.

No, those bureaucracies have to justify their existence, and their catechism, excuse me, their priors, like those of the Holy Inquisition, insure that there will always be demons to exorcise.  "Catholic university teaches 'transphobia' and 'fatphobia' are products of racism perpetuated through religion."  Am I supposed to be grateful that "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me" is not a constraint on the curriculum, or troubled that the priors structuring the workshop are tighter than stretch pants on Hillary Clinton's tush?

This workshop will explore the ways that systemic racism creates, co-creates and perpetuates all intersectional forms of oppression and marginalization by systematically limiting access to the agency, autonomy, opportunity, health, information and even pleasure necessary to dismantle oppressive systems; which promotes divisiveness both against and between targeted groups. Together we will explore how we can use our positionality in conscious, daring dialogue to explore our intersectional privilege and oppression through the lens of the most marginalized/vulnerable voice of the moment.

I seriously doubt that that "daring dialogue" includes "privilege and oppression comprise a false dichotomy."  The "learning objectives" are a narrowing of the notion of Original Sin:  "Briefly learn the historically racist roots of several ongoing forms of oppression including–but not limited to–racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, fatphobia, classism, ableism, ageism and more, through systems including education, religion, eating disorder treatment, gender-based violence, toxic masculinity, health care access and more."

If any of those secular sins overlap with the sins the priest recognizes, wouldn't it be simpler for the Worst Sinners in the workshop to go to confession and say a few Hail Marys?

EVEN FURTHER BEYOND RUSH LIMBAUGH'S ABILITY TO PARODY.

He came up with the concept of "male lesbian," and even that attempt to demonstrate absurdity by being absurd wasn't as absurd as where the gender studies types went earlier this year.  But even that absurdity fell within normal bounds, as the gender studies types were fretting about crossers who couldn't get a date.

What, though, can we make of "Lesbians are non-men attracted to non-men and not specifically for women."  No, seriously.

Typically, we would like to believe that lesbians are women who like other women.

A few weeks back, Johns Hopkins’ hospital changes the definition of lesbianism to non-men. Newsweek states, Johns Hopkins’ portrayal of women as “non-man,” is deeply offensive to women who strongly identify with their womanhood. Furthermore, they firmly believe that such labeling diminishes the importance of women’s biological essence, impacting their understanding of identity.

This characterization undermines women’s rights and equality, which they are tirelessly striving for. Drawing from personal experiences, the speaker notes that most women in professional settings take pride in their identification as women, considering it integral to their self-identity. 

So much going on in there: on the one hand, "biological essence" is too much essentialism for the victim studies types; on the other, with the reflection essay reified as a Minimal Publishable Unit, there's no longer a logical error in generalizing from one's own experience.

DOWN CELLAR TO ESCAPE THE HEAT.

This week's posts are going to be relentlessly documenting E-T-T-S moments.  There will be lighter fare, generally to conclude the day's posting.  Sunday was a good day for model railroading, first at the local model railroad club, where I was focussing on switching up the local industries, rather than recording train movements, and then at home, where some new track down is excuse to break out the clip leads and run a test train.

I hope to have more progress at home to document before the snow flies.

THERE ARE WORSE THINGS THAN YOUR TECHNICAL PAPER GOING UNREAD AND UNCITED.

That's the usual fate of the Minimal Publishable Unit.  "A Minimal Publishable Unit in Hypatia, a Minimal Publishable Unit in Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini: What Difference, at this point, does it make?"

We opened Friday's survey of encouraging developments in a world gone nuts with a story of engineering students mocking a thoroughly silly survey by, inter alia, claiming to "identify" as an Apache attack helicopter.

AN EMERGENT ANTHEM OF NORMAL MILITANCY.

Jason Aldean's Try That in a Small Town doesn't strike me as great instrumentation or great lyrics, and yet, because of the ongoing hectoring and scolding from Our Intellectual Betters, it has caught on as an unofficial anthem, and governors of the Free States have used their social media to endorse its performance and its premises.  "Jason Aldean ain’t getting canceled for this song. In fact, he’s getting more popular."

STINKING HIPPIES ARE AN EMERGENT EQUILIBRIUM.

Saturday's Power Line "Week in Pictures" included among the amusing headlines, "Mathematics explains why non-conformists always end up looking alike."  Look, you can do sensitivity analysis with evolutionary game theory, but logic and proportion feed your head, even if you've had some kind of mushroom.

While anti-conformists may, at first, succeed in devising their own personal brand of sartorial rebelliousness, it’s followed by an inevitable, if unintentional, synchronization around a single appearance. [Brandeis mathematician Jonathan] Touboul’s study looks at how such people seem to inevitably become synchronized. He suspects that a major influence on the way it happens may be the speed of propagation of styles through a culture.

Not everyone learns about or adopts new styles in the same way. Some follow fashion closely, some go by word of mouth, and some emulate the appearance of well-known individuals they admire. In the latter case, the tipping-point may occur after a mutually-revered celebrity adopts a new fashion.

The modelling is simple enough (two types of individuals, different speeds of propagation of a fashion choice, or a perception that stocks are trading at unsustainably high or unsustainably low price) and yet the outcomes are deterministic chaos.

In Touboul’s simple model, one is either a member of the mainstream or a hipster (no snarky connotation intended), and he explores different hipster-to-mainstream ratios. He also factors in different amounts of time it might take a hipster to detect a new style and respond to it.

Simple as his model is, Touboul has found that experimenting with those two factors produces a surprisingly complex set of behaviors, though synchronization always occurs. Even when he revises his model to allow for more than two types of people, synchronization still occurs.

Often, of course, roles may swap when there are so many hipsters that they become the mainstream. “For example,” says Touboul, “if a majority of individuals shave their beard, then most hipsters will want to grow a beard, and if this trend propagates to a majority of the population, it will lead to new, synchronized, switch to shaving.” An odd sudden swap occurs when the number of mainstreamers and hipsters is roughly equal — everybody winds up switching together between different trends.

The work appears to be in the simulation stage, calibration of the dynamics to such phenomena as long hair or tattoos or skirt lengths, let alone testable implications that might be susceptible to statistical analysis are for future research.

It's likely asking too much at this stage of modelling to capture whether mutations in style or behavior confer evolutionary advantage on adopters of them.

HISTORY IS LARGELY THE STORY OF EVERYTHING GOING TO HELL.

Kurt Schlichter's We'll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America is his chronicling of the concatenation of E-T-T-S moments that followed the Pinnacle of American Greatness, which he identifies as late February, 1991, when his armored carwashing unit had precisely ... no tanks or trucks to decontaminate, as the Vaunted Republican Guards decided being martyred in a losing cause wasn't going to curry much favor with Allah.  Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union ceased to function, and Gosplan stopped doing the balances on abacuses, and all was well with the world.

In Book Review N^o. 10, we'll shift focus from the Earnest to the Satirical.  There is a serious message in We'll Be Back, which is that national fragmentation and civil war is a condition people should avoid.  The way in which everything went to hell, however, might be more satirical than earnest.  While the Colonel was prepared to have his decontamination station contaminated, I was approaching middle age, and exposed to some of the forces that might have shaped history in that inferno-bound direction.  It's possible, as he notes at page 25, that after a half-century of Crisis Mentality and Grand Constructions, people wanted a blow.  "We were rich.  Why not party, since there was nothing else to do?  So, of course, we elected the perfect party president in Bill Clinton."  That might be how things turned out, but during that 1992 election, I heard a lot of "after twelve years of Reagan and Bush," generally as prologue to productive people not paying enough taxes, or health care as a matter of right, or the continuing statistical disparities in school leaving or imprisonment or what have you.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We never lack for opportunities to observe the trouble with technocrats.  "To save democracy, 'specially trained' elites had to control it."  Yes, that worked out so well for that Vietnamese village, didn't it? The only safeguard of liberty is the restraint of power itself.  Thus,  "It’s folly to propose – or even to tolerate – the expansion of government power as a means of reining in power."  To save us from the technocrats, we must destroy their conceits.  "When we observe a 'broken market,' there is usually a government intervention causing a disruption, often hidden well beneath the surface and causing unplanned ripple effects to other places."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

HERE COMES THE WEEKEND. LET'S OWN THE LIBS.

It's always refreshing when the campus cut-ups send up the Excessively Earnest types.  "Students list ‘Apache attack helicopter’ as gender on ‘engineering culture’ survey, angering scholars."  I suppose, for arbitrary values of scholar.

Titled “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interesting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences,” the paper reported on “individuals exercising discursive power in their language to target researchers and tamper with data.”

The authors wrote that the “backlash” to the project “reflects characteristics of contemporary far-right or fascist political movements in the U.S., such as the synthesis of antisemitism with anti-Black and anti-feminist rhetorics.”

About 25 percent of the “malicious responses” provided some airplane-related response to gender, including several who specifically identified as an “Apache helicopter.”

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. "The scholars had sent the questionnaire link to over 3,000 email addresses associated with 'department chairs, program administrators, and faculty at accredited engineering bachelor’s degree-granting institutions,' who could then forward the survey to undergrads."

Look, just because it's so easy to construct and distribute surveys doesn't mean you should, and a case study that infers all sorts of things about the mental state of students whose inboxes probably get a lot of this sort of clutter isn't valid research under any reasonable standard of scholarship, but who said that minimal publishable units had to meet reasonable standards of scholarship these days?  It's not clear that the bulletin in question is peer reviewed as I understand the term to mean.

COME SEE THE RENT-SEEKING INHERENT IN THE NEW URBANISM?

I shy away from the sort of polemical disquisitions about how the self-styled progressives want people living in small apartments along streetcar lines, in good Pruitt-Igoe or khrushchoba fashion.

Recently, I came across the heirs of Leon Trotsky coming to grips with the rent gradient in Sydney, Australia.  "Amid a general cost of living crisis which is acute across all essentials, including food and utilities, rising housing costs are pushing hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions to the financial brink."

I could have noted that the rising rents in the capital cities of Australia were the manifestation of rent-seekers bidding up the rents and dropped the mike, couldn't I?

A protracted property boom means that house prices remain at unprecedented highs, with the median house price in Sydney, the country’s most-populous city, now pushing $1.5 million. With stagnant or falling wages, home ownership is out of the reach of broad layers, especially younger people.

Rents, however, are also skyrocketing. Figures released by the property group Domain for the June quarter and the last financial year show unprecedented annual increases, as well as a continuing acceleration of rental costs.

Across the country’s capital cities, median asking rents for houses increased by 11.5 percent over the 2022–23 financial year. Slight falls in smaller cities, such as Hobart and Canberra, masked far greater increases in larger population centers.

In Perth, the Western Australian capital, median asking house rents increased by 16 percent, from $500 a year ago to $580 now. In Melbourne, the increase was 13 percent, Sydney 12.9, Adelaide 12.5 and Brisbane 11.5 percent. Some 6.1 percent of the yearly increase in Sydney occurred in the June quarter alone.

The hikes were even starker in apartments. That is significant because the apartment market caters to lower-income people who cannot afford to rent a house.

In that "slight falls in smaller cities" is evidence of internal migration, affecting the rent gradients.  Who, pray, is bidding up the housing prices?  That ought not be difficult, dear reader.  "To the extent that people are willing to pay a premium for the opportunity to walk to work, that rent gradient is going to get steeper."

That's so much bourgeois formalism.  The very policies that mandate more high-density housing are, to the properly jaundiced view, a grift.

In New South Wales, the newly-elected Labor administration is centering its housing policies on a campaign for the further watering down of restrictions on property development. Premier Chris Minns has outlined a vision of more and more high-rise apartment buildings, especially in inner-city areas.

The transparent aim of this, and other policies, is not to increase housing supply so that rents go down. Instead the purpose is the opposite: to do everything possible to ensure property developments and high-end investors continue to rake in profits on the back of deepening social misery.

Whatever.

TAKE THAT FAST TRACK TO NUMERACY.

I first flagged Tom Knighton's "If everyone couldn’t succeed academically, it seems, no one should" as a candidate Friday short take, but for the material I've been noting, for years, about how equity as dumbing down the curriculum is an evolutionary dead end.  Let's start with Mr Knighton's elaboration.

So rather than step up their efforts to make sure more black and Latino students can get into the accelerated classes, they just did away with them entirely.

Now, I get being cautious about the message you provide kids. They pick up plenty and you don’t want them getting the wrong idea.

Yet what Fernandez has basically said is, “There’s no way you’ll make it in these advanced classes, so we’re just going to make them go away.” There doesn’t appear to have been any effort to address the disparity by raising up those who fall short, only by eliminating the need.

It’s downright pathetic.

It’s also how equity in education tends to play out. It’s never addressed by trying to get black and Hispanic students up to the point where they’re on par with white and Asian kids in a situation like this, it’s simply eliminating the advanced class itself so that the disparity just doesn’t matter.

It’s laziness on the part of the teachers and administrators.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s incredibly difficult to find something that would raise all those kids to that level, especially over the span of the few years a middle school has them.

We'll get to the good news, at the end, that raising kids to higher levels is possible.

Let me first note that recognizing the students who have high academic ability is a more desirable course than throwing them in with the general population.  "None of the above is likely to sit well with the so-called progressives and all their feel-good fads that do nothing to inculcate bourgeois habits in feral youth, whilst killing ambition among young people not yet feral."

NICE RESTAURANT YOU'VE GOT. IT WOULD BE A SHAME FOR SOMETHING TO HAPPEN TO IT.

We've long called attention to Chicago's hostility to business, heck to productive people generally.  "The efforts by Illinois politicos -- primarily Chicago Democrats -- to impose additional taxes on everything from carbonated drinks to the privilege of doing business -- I am not making that up -- might drive some of the financial services and technology businesses out of Chicagoland."  The new mayor, a communist-adjacent hack named Brandon Johnson who would rather posture for the loudest voices on his city council than, oh, provide a livable city, has the funny idea that productive people don't pay enough taxes.  I mean, when Lori Lightfoot calls you soft on crime ...

DER PROZESS.

When I think of Pennsylvania's big cities, my inclination is to think of Philadelphia as Mediterranean and Pittsburgh as Slavic; then comes Salena Zito calling attention to Pittsburgh's Teutonia Männerchor.

Before we get down to business, I have to wonder how Pittsburghers pronounce "Teutonia."  The German "eu" diphthong pronounces as "oy," hence "TOY-tone-ya."  In Milwaukee, there are people who will pronounce the eponymous avenue as "TYE-tone-ya," which might be a survival of the German, although the most common locution is as "too-TONE-ya."

In any event, that German presence in Pittsburgh, maybe not quite back to William Penn but surely to the era of Carl Schurz and Franz Sigel.

The Teutonia Mannerchor club (translated means a choir honoring Teutonia, one of the oldest tribes in Germany) was founded in 1854, the same year Franklin Pierce was president of the United States.

[Hausmeister Kevin] Varrato said the organizational predecessors included the first German singing society Liederkranz in Allegheny County in 1851, which later became the Freier Maennerchor, and finally, the Teutonia Maennerchor.

“The Teutonia first met in the basement of the Old Weiterhausen Church on Canal Street in Allegheny City,” he explained.

The members finally settled here in 1887 on Phineas Street on the North Side. To join then, one must have been male and a U.S. citizen. Membership records show they had 108 members that year. Women were allowed to join in 2017; today, there are 3,000 active members — a stark contrast to other fraternal groups across the country who have faded away in the past 20 years.

You don’t have to be a man to belong anymore — nor German — however, you do still have to be a citizen. The mission of the Teutonia Maennerchor has never changed, and that is to promote and preserve German American songs and dances and it does wonderfully. The choir is a member of the North American Singers Association and participates in various functions all across the country.

There are such German singing associations elsewhere, although their numbers are dwindling.

It's not the singing, though, that is the trial.  Rather, it's the issuance of building permits.

Call it a wicked sense of humor, or an act of exasperation after spending nearly a decade in bureaucracy hell trying to get a permit. If you look close enough at the base of the newly erected Maibaum (maypole) towering over the beer garden here at the Teutonia Mannerchor club, there is a 3-inch etching of a house with the number 849 over its tiny front door.

Seems odd, right? Well, not if you had to spend all of this time getting the permit, and the only way the city bureaucrats would sign off on it was if the pole met one wild requirement: an address.

And, yes, after eight score years it's only fitting and proper that the clubhouse have its Maibaum.

Salena Zito photograph retrieved from Washington Examiner.

Sometimes the way to demonstrate the folly of a rule is to comply with it.

The erection of the Maibaum, a 55-foot telephone pole lavishly decorated with colorful scenes honoring the history of the people and volunteers of this club over its nearly 200-year history, was truly a labor of love.

Each scene in this Maibaum is representative of the organizations of the club; at the top one is the club logo, the next shows two monks drinking with a barrel of Jagermeister beside them, and the following is the hausmeister and his volunteer crew.

Varrato explained that it all began two decades ago as a pipe dream for then-club President Cornelius Van Murick, who died two years ago. Van Murick may have missed the crowded celebration honoring the presentation of the Maibaum, but he was here in spirit as his family from all around the region came to celebrate the dedication.

Varrato was a little let down that the maypole wasn’t raised on the traditional May 1 celebration of the end of a long winter, but that disappointment faded away as the rod iron doors of the beer garden opened and hundreds of club members poured in to see the towering pole festively decorated in the tradition of German Maibaums, and the folks music began to warm up for the choir.

It's up in time for Oktoberfest season, which begins toward the end of July.

That's on the Summerfest grounds in Milwaukee, and there are a lot of German heritage organizations combining to make German Fest happen, including a Masonic lodge.

German Fest is the closing weekend of July, but the Spanferkl and bratwurst will continue to be available into ... Oktober.

That's the somewhat stylized Maibaum on the grounds of the Bavarian Bierhaus.  The oom-pah music and the dancing takes place in the pavilion behind.

In Pittsburgh, or Milwaukee, or New Braunfels, or New Ulm, or Princeton, Illinois, or wherever you might be, dear reader, find yourself an Oktoberfest and go to it.

THE GREAT SUMMER SMOKE-OUT.

The Walworth County Fair takes place Labor Day weekend, part of the formalities of summer vacation ending and the new school year, or perhaps the pro football season, beginning.

That does have a county fair look about it, what with the portable Ferris Wheel and the always obligatory Paratrooper and Tilt-a-Whirl, as well as the flea market.

The photo is from last Friday, though, and the main event involved food.

The Elkhorn Rib Fest is back after a couple years hiatus thanks to the corona tyranny.  The banner line is definitely not the side show, it is the main event, and apparently the itinerant pitmasters have these banners and trophy displays ready to go, and, as you see, the participating vendors are from all over.

Memphis, Tennessee, and Woodstock, Illinois, no smoked groundhog, please.  Although the weather got nasty later in the evening, with a few tornadoes and strong storms presenting along the State Line and to the east, a lot of people were getting their treats in.

There were two tents dedicated to live bands, and the free parking on the fairgrounds was all occupied by six p.m.  It's possible that the event, which coincided with the end of the Harley-Davidson 120th birthday party in Milwaukee, brought in more than a few tourists.

Yes, Aussom Aussie would put a stick of shrimp on the barbie, if you were so inclined.  A bottle of their "Blue Flame" sauce went home with me.

There's an emergent diversity among the pits, as there are many ways to prepare smoked meat, and the audience at the festival is beginning to reflect that.  A Rib Fest, though, is not a safe space for vegetarians.  Or dieters.  Among the itinerant vendors on the grounds was one selling a cream puff that was probably eight inches tall from the base of the puff to the powdered sugar on the upper half of the puff.

Yes, there's still a lot of crazy stuff going on in the country and around the world, and yet: when it's high summer, and the sunsets are beginning to come perceptibly earlier, and there are two or three days running when the air conditioner can rest and the nights are cool enough to throw all the windows open, the best thing to do is enjoy the moment.  The opportunities to post on the crazy stuff will be there tomorrow, or next week.

SO MANY CARS RUNNING, THEY OVERLOADED THE SUBSTATION.

There's lots of video now available of the Illinois Railway Museum parading over seventy pieces of electric railway equipment, from breezer to freight motors.

I finished editing my video, which includes a lot of the narration, sometimes that previews the next car up, and sometimes it's useful anecdotes.  The recording ends before the rolling stock with pantographs ran.  Was that because I had places to go, or there was rain moving in, or the camera battery running low?

Steven Jam set up further to the east.  His video allows viewers to jump to several highlights of the parade.  From there, he was able to record some of the putting-away activities during breaks in the parade.  That might have included a derailed car being re-railed.

The Trolley Dodger has posted a compendium of videos, movement by movement, allowing the browser to pick and choose among the rolling stock.

This weekend and next, the museum will be hosting Thomas, Percy, and thousands of toddlers.  I understand the new model railroad exhibit will feature all manner of Really Useful Engines in several scales.

Find yourself a preservation railroad and support it.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

THE SELF-STYLED PROGRESSIVES ABANDONED PATRIOTISM.

Of late, some among their number have discovered that aggressive, in-your-face deconstruction of everything is an evolutionary dead end.

Independence Day, however, is behind only Thanksgiving in the ranking of contested Federal holidays.  It is only fitting and proper that it is so, as the Scottish Enlightenment notions of natural rights and perfect liberty is a long term bet on emergence.

None of which stops the factions of today from seeking to score rhetorical points.  I start with a Politico essay by Cristina Beltrán, "It’s Time For Progressives to Reclaim the Fourth of July."  She notes that the so-called progressives might have abdicated their claim.

It didn't have to be that way.  Concurrently with official Bicentennial celebrations, none of which were Federal projects, except for a special quarter, an idea that has subsequently gone from classic to dadaist, there was a People's Bicentennial Commission, which offered its own approach to "live up to the true meaning of its creed."

In 1971 a group of Americans angry over the state of the nation and the perceived betrayal of the values of the American Revolution formed the People’s Bicentennial Commission. Over the next few years they engaged in rowdy protests, including burning the president in effigy and disrupting official commemorations of the Boston Tea Party and Battle of Concord. They claimed the legacy of the patriots of 1776, and used TEA as an acronym for their feelings about tax policy.

However, they were not angry about being “taxed enough already,” but wanted the “tax equity for America” with the wealthy paying their fair share. They excoriated the East India Company as a typically nefarious corporation, blaming the Boston Tea Party not on taxes but on that corporation’s corrupt bargain with the British government to get a monopoly on the sale of tea in the colonies. They did not decry socialism, but instead boldly advocated for what they called “economic democracy.” In their words modern American corporations were nouveau “Tories” bent on strangling the will of the people.

A movement from the Left drenched in patriotic trappings confounds our present-day expectations. In the 1970s the political Right had not yet established a monopoly over the legacy of America’s founding. The People’s Bicentennial Commission, formed out of the New Left movements of the prior decade, sought to use the Bicentennial as an avenue for attracting ordinary Americans to an explicitly leftist agenda, and it almost worked. Its story offers a fascinating mirror to the present day, and some lessons and warnings about our current day History Wars.

Well, the Scottish Enlightenment is a collection of coherent beliefs, and the intellectual tendencies of the loony left have over the past fifty years favored the denial of such things.

A COMMUNIST FAIRY TALE.

Francis Spufford opens his Red Plenty with "This is not a novel.   It has too much to explain, to be one of those.  But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story ... The idea is the hero. ... Best to call this a fairytale, then — though it really happened, or something like it."  A blurb on the cover of my paperback edition adds, "A hammer and sickle version of Altman's Nashville, with central committees replacing country music."  There's even a web site providing all sorts of contextual material, should you be so inclined.

I'm going to limit Book Review N^o. 9 to the material I'm more conversant with, namely mathematical economics and political economy, and keep still about the forms of fiction.  When it comes to fiction, give me readable stuff with clear outcomes.  Division of labor is a useful thing, which the characters real and imagined in Red Plenty never could wrap their minds around.  My Chicago Boyz colleague David Foster posted a review a few years ago that fleshes out some of the details, and introduces the dramatis personae.  In the comments are links to all sorts of observations from diverse perspectives, and many of those are technically daunting.

IF YOU GO CHASING RABBITS.

The simplest explanation for the news out of Brown University might be ... it's news out of Brown University.

New survey data from Brown University’s student newspaper provides further evidence that the increase in LGBT identification is driven by social pressures.

The latest data show that between 2010 and 2023, identification as LGBTQ+ has almost tripled among the student body at Brown (from 14% in 2010 saying they were not heterosexual to 38% now). "The Herald’s Spring 2023 poll found that 38% of students do not identify as straight — over five times the national rate," The Brown Daily Herald reported. "Over the past decade, LGBTQ+ identification has increased across the nation, with especially sharp growth at Brown." Other sexual orientations have seen massive increases. "Since Fall 2010, Brown’s LGBTQ+ population has expanded considerably. The gay or lesbian population has increased by 26% and the percentage of students identifying as bisexual has increased by 232%," the student newspaper reported. "Students identifying as other sexual orientations within the LGBTQ+ community have increased by 793%."

The idea of LGBT identification as a social contagion is one that continues to draw criticism among academics. For example, the head of an academic journal that published a paper that supported the theory of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria faced a cancellation attempt, along with the Northwestern University professor who wrote the paper.

Brown, recall, has long been a hothouse of goofy thinking, and it is so notorious as a safety school for the people who don't have the juice to get legacy-adjacent admissions for their spawn that it didn't figure in that celebrity-fake-athletic scholarships scandal of a few years Before Corona.

TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY.

Of late, I have been writing repeatedly about government schools, and the censorship therein implied.  "The unifying theme in that conversation is that Somebody in Public Office is establishing content standards, and the tussle among Critical Studies pedagogues or school board members endorsed by teachers' unions or school board members elected by conservative populists is over who gets to be the censor, even if it's under the rubric of establishing content standards."

SEX IS BINARY.

Dear reader, we begin thus.  "Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?"  The idea is so difficult to understand that it takes an academic discipline to screw it up.

In my first year of graduate school at Rutgers, I attended a colloquium designed to forge connections between the cultural and biological wings of the anthropology department. It was the early 2000s, and anthropology departments across the country were splitting across disciplinary lines. These lectures would be a last, and ultimately futile, attempt to build interdisciplinary links between these increasingly hostile factions at Rutgers; it was like trying to establish common research goals for the math and art departments.

This time, it was the turn of the biological anthropologists, and the primatologist Ryne Palombit was giving a lecture for which he was uniquely qualified — infanticide in Chacma baboons. Much of the talk was devoted to sex differences in baboon behavior and when it was time for questions the hand of the chair of the department, a cultural anthropologist, shot up and demanded to know “What exactly do you mean by these so-called males and females?” I didn’t know it at the time but looking back I see that this was the beginning of a broad anti-science movement that has enveloped nearly all the social sciences and distorted public understanding of basic biology. The assumption that sex is an arbitrary category is no longer confined to the backwaters of cultural anthropology departments, and the willful ignorance of what sex is has permeated both academia and public discussion of the topic.

That's Skeptic contributor Robert Lynch, and he continues at some length.  The problem might be as simple as a word, "gender," being overused.  When I started messing about with the National Income and Product Accounts and something called "quality of labor," there was a five-way taxonomy of occupations, by sex, age, education, experience, and nature of the work.  Open any economics journal these days, and you see references to "gender," which might be current noodling in the income accounts, or it might be something from the culture studies crowd, and it's likely that saying "quality of labor" gets you scolded.

THE CENSORSHIP GOES ON AND ON.

An Associated Press meditation on the meaning of patriotism touches on two themes that have dominated, for good or ill, recent postings.

IT'S NOT THAT HARD.

Somebody at The Babylon Bee attempts to be funny.   "Satan Miraculously Turns Water Into Bud Light."

There's no trans-substantiation involved.

THERE ARE PRODUCTIVE ASSETS IN THE GOVERNMENT'S PORTFOLIO.

I've called attention to them for years.  "Make people aware of just how much they're relying on other people's money to keep their roads passable and watch the fireworks. But it's an idea that might just catch on, after Our Political Masters have tried everything else."  It doesn't matter who gets the credit for selling the idea.

I think we should do something eminently American: we should tell the suburbs to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

That doesn't mean abandoning them. Rather, it's a call for a frank, down-to-earth conversation between the taxpayers and the suburbs; the type of conversation any responsible parent would have with a teenager who's living beyond his means. Let's start taxing users based on the amount of public money they're consuming. If we spend gobs of money on providing infrastructure to sprawling suburban streets, then let's start taxing those streets proportionately to their consumption. Who could argue with that? Why should the townhome dweller be forced to subsidize the McMansion resident?

Too often, the claim that suburban sprawl is a tax sink comes from the sort of doomsday environmentalist that would bring back the khrushchoba. The argument, though, is one that people who would rather reduce government involvement in land use can adopt.

The suburban version of the American Dream might start looking more like a nightmare if people realized the price tag.

Generally, we subsidize things in society that we want to see. The Suburban Experiment is something, however, that has never been put to a vote. While it could be argued that many people voted with their feet, we also know that nowadays people are increasingly tired of all the negative externalities it breeds within our cities: traffic, environmental degradation, loss of community, and a dangerous and hostile environment along our streets for anyone not inside a car. Despite auto-oriented suburbia’s ugly side effects, I don't even think we need to "ban" it. All we have to do is stop subsidizing it.

That sort of flips the script on "subsidize things we want to see," doesn't it? As a practical matter, almost any subsidy in practice leads to inefficiently much production of whatever is being subsidized, no matter how pretty the blackboard economics version of the policy is.

BEER, CIRCUSES, AND STATUS.

Northwestern University publicists don't want those U.S. News guides to go away, as they're able to promote their selectivity and recruit social justice warriors.  Reality, though, is harsher: you have the fraternity and athletic culture of the sub-prime party school, at a higher list price.  "So much of which to be proud," quips Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan.  The fraternity saga goes on and on, and if Sigma Alpha Epsilon aren't involved, Alpha Epsilon Pi are.  The Animal House antics have been ongoing, even during the brief recent run of football success in Evanston.  Who knew, maybe the players played better in order not to be voted off the island compelled to go through the car wash.

"One player I heard from who graduated in 2007, he confirmed the wash activity in which players would rub against each other naked in the shower occurred when he was an active player," said Bradley Locker, a Northwestern student, and co-editor-in-chief for Inside NU, who has reported on the hazing allegations.

Locker added, "The player who I talked to who was recent said this was a widespread issue, including Pat Fitzgerald and the assistant coaches."

Now Mr Fitzgerald is out. Sometimes you have to hang an admiral pour encourager ...

In explaining the reason for Fitzgerald's firing, [university president Michael] Schill added, "The head coach is ultimately responsible for the culture of his team. The hazing we investigated was widespread and clearly not a secret within the program, providing Coach Fitzgerald with the opportunity to learn what was happening. Either way, the culture in Northwestern Football, while incredible in some ways, was broken in others."

The Daily Northwestern also published reports on Monday that detailed possible racism within the football program.

Sometimes, when there is bad news, there is a media feeding frenzy.

Also, on Monday, Northwestern's baseball coach Jim Foster came under fire after 670 The Score reported a toxic environment in the program, including allegations of coaches making sexist and racist comments that led to a human resources investigation. He just finished his first season in Evanston.

The investigation of Guyland behavior in the football program began as last season wound down.  Now, if the Washington press corps would show the sort of initiative a Chicago radio reporter did.

Danny Parkins, afternoon co-host at The Score, reported on his show Monday that Northwestern baseball coach Jim Foster “was the subject of an HR investigation that found him to have violated university policy by engaging in bullying and abusive behavior.” But Parkins said the school did not speak with any players on the team.

“I received a tip Sunday on the heels of the spotlight on the athletic department because of football,” Parkins said. “And then as you pulled at the thread, it just kept going and going and going.”

“Our department’s annual review of all aspects of the Wildcats baseball program is ongoing,” an athletic department spokesperson said. “The well-being of our student-athletes remains Northwestern’s top priority.”

First the evidence, then the verdict. Not surprisingly, Chicago Sun-Times reporters found students who were willing to pass the sentence before the evidence was developed.

Abbie Farley, a rising junior who has been in the Northwestern marching band since her freshman year, said she was aware of the allegations involving the baseball and football teams. The reports coming from different university sports teams warrant investigation, she said. Farley, who studies psychology and cognitive science, said she would like to see more accountability overall throughout key university activities and organizations.

“Northwestern is only one of how many D1 schools?” Farley said. “I can almost guarantee that we’re not the only ones that are having this problem. I would hope that other people, other schools feel empowered to speak up and help advocate for change and feel comfortable to do so.”

"Rising junior" is contemporary usage meaning "will register for fall classes with junior standing."  But where the university administration cows faculty who make controversial claims, and appeases the wokies, is anybody surprised that "verdict first" is a default setting?

The hits, though, keep on coming.  "Wealth Inequality Is Subverting Higher Education at Northwestern."  Somebody got the idea that an enlarged football stadium (!?) that could double as Summerfest Grounds South was a value proposition.  No, seriously.  [Northwestern's] project seeks to attract top pop/rock concerts that would perform from late spring through early fall. Its proposal acknowledges that most students would be away when the concerts occurred. Only incidentally would the proposed stadium also host a handful of college football games."