A BICENTENNIAL ON RAILS.

The first commercial steam railway commenced operation in September, 1825, transporting coal and passengers.  A tribute train ran into Darlington.

Locomotion №1 doesn’t sound like other engines. It doesn’t go “chuff”. An ancient animal: an iron dinosaur of the Georgian age. In the early hours of Sunday it hauled itself on the East Coast Main Line at Darlington and, sighing, gently clunked off into history & into the night. pic.twitter.com/1fZq5Ll9xD

— Tim Dunn (@MrTimDunn) September 29, 2025

The bell, I understand, was presented to the operators of the original Locomotion when it visited Chicago in 1883.

Darlington is on the East Coast Main Line, and one of the newest passenger trains was on hand when this commemorative train arrived.

No, the train does not call at Anaheim, Azuma, and Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.  The train name comes from a Japanese word meaning "east," and I suppose you could use the A to Z to allude to the last word in transportation.  The formations are configured to run on diesels or using electric power.

In the Driftless Area of Illinois and Wisconsin, there is a Stockton in Illinois and a Darlington in Wisconsin, both with connections to mining, neither connected directly by rails, or on rails at all these days.

The absence of "chuffing," or as we have it in the States, "chugging?"  Learning by doing: subsequent generations of chief mechanical officers figured out that using the cylinder exhaust to create draft through the flues and boost performance was a good idea.  That might have been as early as George Stephenson's Rocket.

DECONSTRUCT BOURGEOIS NORMS AT YOUR PERIL.

New York's Times gives Roxane Gay the opportunity to do just that, and she heaves up "Civility Is a Fantasy."  It used to be that people offering that sort of argument had a working familiarity with Critique of Pure Tolerance and the like.  Today, a stance of "I'm in your face, deal with it" suffices.

Civility is the mode of engagement that is often demanded in political discourse; it is the price of admission to important political conversation, its adherents would have us believe; no civility, no service. But civility — this idea that there is a perfect, polite way to communicate about sociopolitical differences — is a fantasy.

The people who call for civility harbor the belief that we can contend with challenging ideas, and we can be open to changing our minds and we can be well mannered even in the face of significant differences. For such an atmosphere to exist, we would have to forget everything that makes us who we are. We would have to believe, despite so much evidence to the contrary, that the world is a fair and just place. And we would have to have nothing at stake.

In the fantasy of civility, if we are polite about our disagreements, we are practicing politics the right way. If we are polite when we express bigotry, we are performing respectability for people whom we do not actually respect and who, in return, do not respect us. The performance is the only thing that matters.

If diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" while reaching for a stick, Mx Gay is the dog deserving of stick.  Would she rather somebody came straight out with the bigotry?  That passage prompted a fisking from Pajamas Media's Jamie K. Wilson.

Right out of the gate, she redefines civility as some impossible demand for perfection. Wrong. Civility isn’t about being perfect or polite for politeness’ sake. It’s about keeping disagreement from spilling into violence. Without civility, you don’t get liberation — you get chaos, like the recent Texas ICE shooting where two detainees died while the targeted ICE agents walked away untouched. That wasn’t civility. That was incivility, and the powerless paid the price.

If civility were a fantasy, the American Revolution wouldn’t have birthed a republic through debate and petition before a single shot was fired. The Constitution itself is civility written down. Incivility didn’t protect the powerless; it killed them. Gay calls civility a cage. In reality, it’s the only shield the weak have left.

Someone who properly understands Repressive Tolerance will be conversant with the argument that civility protects the arguments of the Oppressor, and if you have identified the proper set of Oppressors, you have every right to tell them to shut up.  The lady doesn't even understand that part of the argument.

Civility obsessives love a silver-tongued devil, wearing a nice suit, sporting a tidy haircut, while whispering sweet bigotries. The conservatives among them push for marginalized people to lose their rights and freedoms and, sometimes, even risk their lives. They will tolerate a protest but only if you congregate in an orderly fashion, for culturally sanctioned causes, and if you don’t raise your voice or express anger or overstay your welcome.

Within this framework, incivility is refusing to surrender to hatred, refusing to smile politely at someone who doesn’t consider you their equal, refusing to carve away the seemingly unpalatable parts of yourself until there is nothing left. To be uncivil means pointing out hypocrisies and misinformation. It means accurately acknowledging what people have said, with ample documentation and holding them accountable for their words and deeds.

It means protesting injustice while recognizing that protest isn’t supposed to be demure or mindful. It means exercising one’s constitutionally protected right to free speech. It means believing in science and factual information and public education and other such heretical ideas. Civility is a cage that we’re supposed to lock ourselves into and then we are expected to be grateful for our incarceration.

Ms Wilson suggests civility restrains power, and science challenges orthodoxies.

THE FRUSTRATING FASCINATION THAT IS BASEBALL.

As March gave way to April, we noted, "It's a long season, you don't give up on it after a week."  Nor do you count coup until the final out is recorded.  Consider, two weeks ago, the Mets hosting the Padres in New York.

I should say that what happened before the game between the Mets and Padres was too sweet to ignore.

A performance of the national anthem is the norm before most professional sporting events, but the person who performed last night's rendition of the "Star-Spangled Banner" wasn't just any old musician. She is the wife of Mets' shortstop Francisco Lindor.

Katia Reguero Lindor played a beautiful version of the song on her violin, but what made it even more special was the way her husband and their three young children — Kalina, Amapola, and Koa — reacted. Francisco, who was holding baby Koa and standing next to their two daughters, couldn't hide his pride for his wife. He smiled, got emotional, and jumped up and down while she performed. It was just such a pure and wholesome moment — a nice change of pace from the news in recent weeks.

Here is the performance.

Francisco Lindor's wife Katia played the national anthem on the violin ahead of tonight's Mets game! pic.twitter.com/rIKuEGiIhn

— MLB (@MLB) September 16, 2025

The Mets and Padres were jockeying for wild card seedings behind the Phillies and Dodgers.  The Mets won that game.  You can't give up on the season with a week or two to go, either.

On June 12th👇

Mets had the best record in baseball at 45-24.

Brewers were 37-33 and 8.5 games behind the Mets.

Since then👇

Mets went 38-55 and missed the playoffs.

Brewers went 60-32 and earned the best record in baseball.

Incredible. pic.twitter.com/F7Ij4Rvrys

— Hunter Baumgardt (@hunterbonair) September 29, 2025

Sometime in May, one of the sports pundits who create power rankings, not because he knows anything, but because sports fans expect such things, suggested that the Cubs had finally shaken off the Brewers, who were playing somewhere near .500 baseball at the time and five or six games behind the Cubs.  Then came those three winning streaks, eight, eleven, fourteen games.  Yes, the Brewers did win a club-best 97 games this year, clinching the playoffs, the division, a bye, and the top seed without invoking any of the tie-breakers that they held.  The division clinch came on a day both they and the Cubs lost, and the top seed clinch came on a day both they and the Phillies lost.

On the final day of the season, the Brewers won that 97th game, which meant the Reds had to get some help from the Miami Marlins, who took the Saturday and Sunday games from the Mets.

It is the custom in Major League Baseball to offer visiting teams a suitable background for a photo shoot in the event of one of those clinches taking place.  Milwaukee's stadium staff were up to the occasion.

Now come the playoffs, and identifying a favorite is a fool's errand.  The Brewers await the winner of the wild card Cubs and Padres, who will play in Chicago, while the Phillies will play the winner of the Dodgers, who had the fewest wins among the division champions and who will host the Reds.  In the former junior circuit (with realignments and interleague play, is there such a thing as the National or American League any more?) the Blue Jays are the top seed, awaiting the winner of the wild card Red Sox at the Yankees, the Yankees losing a tie-breaker to the Blue Jays, and the Mariners will play the winner of Cleveland, a division winner with one fewer win than the Red Sox, hosting the Tigers, with one fewer win than the Indians Guardians.  First pitch will be at noon (Central) Tuesday, in Cleveland.

GENAU.

Alle aufstehen!

Yes. Next question?

Is this the best Oktoberfest song? 🍻🇩🇪 #oktoberfest #einprosit #greatest... https://t.co/OYr2CnBYeB via @YouTube

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) September 23, 2025

Oktoberfest season continues for a couple more weeks, and here in the Upper Lakes, the weather is favorable for cellar-chilled beer and outdoor singing.  Find yourself an Oktoberfest and go to it.

Prosit!

HERE WE GO AGAIN.

Another end of September, another summer of no regular order appropriations, another government shutdown.  Only this time it is a Democrat opposition that wants to shut the government down in order to keep a few payoffs to favored constituents in the latest continuing resolution.

ANALYZING THE PUNISHMENT CYCLES.

Every day comes a new development making breaking out of the punishment cycles of the grim strategy outcome more difficult.  It's too late, though, suggests Craig "Streetwise Professor" Pirrong for turning the other cheek.

Though he’s not really worth the pixels, the hue and cry over the suspension (not firing–yet, anyways) of the beyond execrable Jimmy Kimmel compels me to respond. A reply is warranted primarily because of the alleged hypocrisy of those who criticized (and criticize) cancel culture yet called for and applauded his current hiatus (again, apparently temporary). This implicates issues far more important than the fate of a single media twat. It is essentially an attempt to beat back a social revolution that threatens those who occupy the commanding heights in media, academia, and government.

First, the criticism is a pitch perfect example of the “no punchbacks,” “no fair mommy, he hit me back!” mentality of the left. Deferring to this mentality out of fear of being called hypocritical is a recipe for submission to abuse into the infinite future. In a repeated prisoners’ dilemma, which accurately characterizes politics generally and current American politics specifically, tit-for-tat (i.e., punchbacks, and bigtime) is an evolutionarily successful strategy. Always cooperating in the face of defection (i.e., bending over when your adversary screws you) is a strategy that ensures extinction.

It's worse than that, dear reader.  The evolutionary success of tit-for-tat is in rewarding cooperative behavior with cooperative behavior and keeping the cooperation going.  A few punchbacks as a message to an opportunistic defector might work.  Restoring cooperation once it breaks down is hard.  And here we are.

Practitioners of Liberating Tolerance made those rules, didn't they?  "[W]e're in the punishment cycle of a grim strategy equilibrium.  It came to this, though, when the Nash equilibrium of reasoned discourse became one more bourgeois (that was a sneer word back in the day) convention to be deconstructed."

Here's how Professor Pirrong breaks down what has followed.

It is therefore an issue of whether it is right to object to, and in some cases sanction or even suppress, speech. And here the difficulty is that like almost everything in life, categoricals are counterproductive. There are trade-offs. Judgments must be made.

That is, the costs of some kind of speech exceed the benefits. The question is deciding when that occurs–and crucially, who decides. And that is the real issue.

The reality is that as the result of its successful march through the institutions, the left has achieved a near monopoly on deciding. And it has decided that speech that deviates from (today’s!) leftist orthodoxy is unacceptably costly, and that virtually any action (not just spoken or written words) that conforms to that orthodoxy is sacrosanct. “Your speech is violence! My violence is speech!” With “your” being conservative/right, and “my” being progressive/radical/left. And it enforces this decision with myriad coercive means. Social ostracism. Intense harassment. Deletion from social media. Expulsion from school. Loss of job and income.

The counterrevolution against cancel culture is driven by a deep conviction among a large number of people that this monopoly of social force and the means it employs are wrong and must be overthrown. They are wrong because they enforce an Animal Farm all-animals-are-equal-but-some-animals-are-more-equal-than-others hierarchy that violates the equality of citizens, and the equality of human beings. It is wrong because it is fundamentally coercive, and applies this coercion to behavior that those who are not ideological leftists strongly believe is not only not harmful to others, but is in fact in many cases is quite beneficial both to individuals and society. (Religious devotion and speech are examples of the latter).

In brief, the beef is “who died and made you God?” At root, it is an argument about social equality–of which equality before the law is only a part.

Thus, in the end it comes down to what is beyond the pale, and who decides what is beyond the pale. Vast swathes of people who have not been privileged to be deciders, and who have been persecuted by those who are so privileged, have taken it upon themselves to decide that what Jimmy Kimmel said about Kirk’s murder and responsibility for it is far, far beyond the pale. And that what all too many doctors, “educators” (gag), government employees have said is far, far beyond the pale. And that they should pay a price for these transgressions.

He notes, "The argument has always been about where the pale lies, who establishes it, and who enforces it."

IN WAR, YOU HAVE TO PERFORM ALL THE TIME.

I have confessed, previously, to enjoying (perhaps a little too much) Special Forces: World's Toughest Test, which just kicked off with eighteen celebrities, a few of whom I had prior knowledge of, rappelling from a helicopter "behind enemy lines" and then having to go to a hut to draw supplies, which they then had to schlep, uphill.

THINKING REALISTICALLY ABOUT URBAN TRANSIT.

Streetsblog's Hayden Clarkin offers an instructive "What I've Learned From Getting Transit Wrong."  It's worth reading in full.  Let me highlight a few observations.  He first tackles a myth, "people choose not to ride transit."  Sorry, no.  "Years ago, I believed that if someone drove instead of taking the train or bus, it meant they were rejecting transit. That not riding was an active choice against it."

Look no further, dear reader, than any of the Chicago "expressways," several of which have rapid transit lines in the median strip (at the cost of stations the riders have to play Frogger to get to) and a few of which have a Commuter Rail line close alongside.  Those people who are stuck in traffic when the expressways aren't expressing aren't blind to those trains going past: rather, they'll put up with the traffic rather than whatever is less appealing about the L trains or the scoots.  As Mr Clarkin puts it, "Transportation isn’t a binary; it’s a marketplace. People weigh their options and pick what works best for them in that moment, whether that’s transit, a car, a bike, or walking."  He notes that Metro-North's New Haven line serves some of North America's richest suburbs, and people of means use it.  (We'll leave go for the moment the presence or lack of subscription club cars and bar cars.)

TAKING STOCK AS THE DAYS PASS.

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THE SHAPE OF THE POPULISM TO COME?

Matthew Continetti asks, "Is Erika Kirk the Future of MAGA?"

That’s why Erika Kirk is now at the summit of American politics and culture. The size of the platform mattered less than the character of the messenger. Even as one laments the promise of a life cut short, never knowing what Charlie Kirk might have accomplished, one must also recognize Erika’s potential.

She’s bound to have a lasting and wide-ranging influence on the country. With her powers of communication, moving story, and personal connection, Erika Kirk could end up the next Billy Graham. She could lead a generation to Christianity. She could be the first woman president.

This isn’t idle speculation. The future of MAGA is up for grabs. There’s a widespread desire for God, for meaning and purpose and a return to tradition. Who will channel it after Trump?

That is a bit of a stretch.  Reason's Nick Gillespie takes stock of the heightening contradictions.

Taking the stage after Erika Kirk, Trump averred, "He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don't want the best for them." While some Trump supporters insist that the president was engaging in a self-deprecating display to honor Charlie Kirk's memory, even they show discomfort. As PJ Media's Tim O'Brien grants, "On paper or online, this is an easy line to misread. A short video clip of it may also remove tone and context. To be fair, Trump's patented deadpan delivery doesn't help with some people, who, even when they watch him say his words, still aren't able to pick up his self-deprecation. Then, of course, is the fact that there is a certain degree of truth in what he says."

Indeed, Trump is nothing if not vindictive to opponents big and small, real and imagined.

The correlation of forces, he goes on to note, do not favor the president.

By politicizing every aspect of everyday life, Trump and MAGA have exhausted more and more of us. Coupled with policy failure, the result is falling support for a candidate who captured just shy of 50 percent of the popular vote against arguably the worst Democratic candidate of the past 50 years. It's meaningful that Trump gained voter share among young people and many ethnic and racial minorities—that's a testament to the awfulness of Joe Biden's presidency and the public's interest in reversing course.

But Trump's collapse is on his hands, not those of any conspiracy. Per RealClearPolitics' average of polls, the last time Trump's approval rating was higher than his disapproval rating was back in March. Currently, his disapproval is at 52.6 percent, just 0.1 of a point below his worst ever rating since January.

His conclusion?  "But to the extent that the broader MAGA movement doubles or triples down on its policies and rhetoric on display, it will only become even less popular."  It's also possible, as Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor suggests, that the religious will give up on the Trumpism.

For Christ-followers to so deeply cleave to Trump, who brazenly proclaims his hatred of his enemies, is pretty hard to take. In some ways, it is harder to take the obviously opposite of Christ’s lifestyle that Trump has led (you know, the greed, adultery, and whatnot).

Christians have a way of being able to tell themselves that the past is the past if a profession of faith is made, and hence, we know that cover of this type was provided for Trump by people like Franklin Graham and James Dobson, who told the masses back in the first term that Trump had accepted Christ as his personal savior.

Christians, like any other voters, can decide for themselves which policy bundle they'd rather support.  As bad as Our President might appear to Professor Taylor, it's possible that voters find competing bundles more repellent.  "Part of me hopes that someone will read this and, to stick with the biblical theme, have the scales fall from their eyes and realize what a threat Trump is to the very fabric of their country, and to the souls of those who follow him."  A Kat Rosenfeld observation, in a different context, seems on point here.

[T]he criticism directed at Erika is also a stunning example of how alienated some of the most strident members of the left have become not just from reality, but from any sense of how such commentary is received by the average normie American who may not agree with Erika’s politics but are nevertheless impressed as hell by her as a person.

As divided politically as this country is, we still share an admiration for resilience—particularly in the wake of a devastating event. And to virtually anyone who wasn’t already determined to hate her, Erika’s battle cry does not register as shamelessness, opportunism, or grifting. It makes her look like a superhero. When she stands onstage and vows that she’ll carry forward her murdered husband’s legacy, she’s demonstrating the same unstoppable spirit that animates our history, our most beloved narratives, and our proudest moments as a nation.

"Normie Americans" might find in Professor Taylor's use of that "threat to the fabric" an example of that alienation from reality Ms Rosenfeld mentions.  And Trumpian populism, Pajamas Media's Eric Florack suggests, might have more in common with Christ-follower principles than the professor would grant.

I suggest further that continuing down that path is a threat to the rights that philosophy affords us. If the cultural values we hold dear find their basis in the Judeo-Christian ethic, then what happens to our rights, which find their basis in that ethic, are abandoned in the efforts we see to eliminate that ethic and remove those religious philosophies and their expression, not just from our government but from our society as a whole? Put another way, what happens to a building when you remove the foundation? Can anyone honestly say that the unsuccessful attempts on the life of Donald Trump and the successful attempt on the life of Charlie Kirk were performed in support of the values we’ve discussed here?

I submit we are on the leading edge of the answer to those questions. I suggest further, the reaction to those attacks (and of course, much more) is an estimated 200,000 people who showed up from all over the country and around the world on short notice, to squeeze into a stadium designed for 70,000 people, for Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, and the multiple millions more who streamed that same event, as evidence of widespread recognition of that cultural relationship and the need for returning to that basic philosophy. That response heartens me, and I see it as evidence that the move back to those basics is already well underway.

But if the cheering section for Norms and Institutions is right, and Trumpian populism a bundle of contradictions, what will follow?

NO, THE BIG CITIES ARE INSUFFICIENTLY SAFE.

Consider Chicago.

Yes, often in those districts that keep voting Democrat, in part because no other political party has offered a better value proposition.  Enterprise zones, less restrictive zoning, and no broken windows, anyone?  I mean, stopping crime is one of those eighty-twenty issues, and those fifteen square miles of privilege aren't as safe as they once might have been.

Meanwhile, the federal immigration authorities are openly playing to disaffected Chicago cops in recruiting additional officers, the city and state are going broke with no printed Biden bucks on offer, and Young Voices writer Ed Tarnowski offers the simple truth.  "The American City Cannot Blossom in Lawlessness."

American cities are failing to keep residents safe and make metropolitan living broadly desirable. America is the wealthiest nation in history – our cities should be beacons of innovation, creativity, and human potential. And while most of our metropolises face many roadblocks that restrict thriving urbanism, one thing is clear: The American City cannot blossom in lawlessness.

It’s a common pastime in urban circles to poke fun at those who fear city life. And often, those fears are exaggerated, frequently shaped more by sensational media than lived experience. City dwellers take pride in their neighborhoods and know they are typically not the war zones often portrayed on cable news and in clickbait articles.

Nevertheless, Americans should never settle for “not a war zone” as the standard for where they work, live, and create. Concerns about crime and disorder are valid; statistics make that clear. Until they are meaningfully addressed, trust and a sense of safety will remain out of reach. People cannot be expected to embrace public spaces if they are constantly worried about harassment, or worse, threats to their lives and families.

That's standard stuff in conservative circles.  It's refreshing to find the same sentiments from Noah "Noahopinion" Smith.

For many years, I’ve been involved with the urbanist movement in America. I want to see my country build more dense city centers where people can walk and take the train instead of driving. That doesn’t mean I want to eliminate the suburbs; I just don’t want to have San Francisco and Chicago and Houston feel like suburbs. If we have dense cities and quiet suburbs, then every American will get to live in the type of place they want to live in. Currently, the only dense city we have is NYC.

But I think my fellow urbanists are often a bit naive about what it’ll take to get more dense, walkable city centers in America. They often act as if car culture is an autonomous meme that just happened to develop in America, and that real considerations like violent crime played no role in driving Americans — both white and nonwhite — out of urban cores in the 20th century.

A fair amount of research around the world shows that shows that fear of violent crime keeps a lot of people from using public transit. Urbanists can shout all they like about how driving is far more dangerous than taking the train or bus, but telling people what not to be afraid of has a very poor track record as a method of persuasion. Air travel and terrorism are both examples where dangers that are out of people’s control are scarier than dangers people feel they can avoid, such as car accidents. We devote huge societal resources to minimizing the risks of plane crashes and terrorist attacks, and if we want more Americans to embrace life in dense cities, we’re going to have to do the same with the risk of crime on public transit.

Consider, dear reader, that "dangers people feel they can avoid, such as car accidents."  My intuition suggests that a lot of car crashes, to use Strong Towns's preferred locution, occur on weekends at bar-closing time, and motorists have agency to time their trips to avoid the more dangerous roads, intersections, and times of day.

SNOWFLAKERY AT THE COUNTY FAIR?

Organizers at the Ashland County, Ohio, county fair kicked a Democrat booth out for seeking to 86 47.  The Democrats, predictably, squealed like castrated pigs.

The Ashland County Democratic Party was ejected from its booth at the Ashland County Fair yesterday, September 18th, 2025.

Three Republican members of the Ashland County fair board, backed by two Republican County sheriff deputies, ordered the Ashland County Democratic Party to leave the county fair and shut down their booth because they disapproved of Ashland Democrats criticizing the Republican administration. Deputies told the residents staffing the booth that they had to leave.

Both county parties have had booths at the county fair each year for over five decades. This is the first time county officials have ever ejected anyone from the fair for strictly political reasons.

The Sheriff told FOX News in Cleveland that he was informing the Secret Service.

This incident is not an isolated event but part of a dangerous pattern. We have seen instances of abuse of power before. Nixon kept an enemies list and attempted to use the IRS to target journalists. McCarthy dragged writers, actors, and reporters before hearings and wrecked careers with blacklists and loyalty oaths. Those were shameful chapters. However, even then, the machinery of the state was not routinely deployed to silence the chairs of opposing parties at local community events.

The use of law enforcement to suppress political speech at the local level represents a grave threat to our democracy and the foundational principle that government officials cannot use their power to punish dissent. As Senator Ed Markey warned us this week, what we are witnessing is “censorship in action.”

Our party remains committed to engaging with the voters of Ashland County and fighting for the democratic principles that are under attack.

The party booths at county fairs tend to be more restrained than some of the vendors.  The Wisconsin Democrats had this merch on offer at the Wisconsin State Fair in 2017.

The county fairs give visitors a read on that slow-simmering populist insurgency, as with these flags on offer at the 2022 Walworth County Fair.  With Donald Trump back in the White House, the material has become more restrained.

Under normal circumstances, it's supposed to be the oh-so-sophisticated urban leftist types, embracing their inner Sinclair Lewis, who cringe at the county fair displays.  It might be that the Militant Normals can shrug off a little moonbattery from the local defenders of Our Democracy^(TM).

Perhaps, though, those local defenders had a bad sense of timing and failed to read the national mood shift.

We hear those in our own party and those in opposition who feel those buttons were in poor taste. In retrospect, given the emotions running high in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and subsequent scrutiny of criticism by the government, we should have thought about this more. We strongly oppose many of the policies of the Trump administration. We feel they are damaging the country. We express our ideas using our words and peaceful demonstrations. We do not and will never endorse political violence.

Seriously?  With the national party looking for ways to win back the votes of Normals, there was nobody in the Ashland County party organization who didn't suggest such messaging might not have been in good taste?  So it goes when you deconstruct bourgeois norms. Red State's Bob Hoge isn't having that non-apology disclaimer, concluding "evil still walks among us."

HERDING BIG CATS IS HAZARDOUS.

Tiger trainer Ryan Easley explained at his Show Me Tigers performances in Baraboo that the art of training big cats was in observing what they liked to do and coming up with prompts to put an act together.

No more.  "Ryan Easley, the operator of the Growler Pines Tiger Preserve near Hugo, Oklahoma, was mauled to death on Saturday in what the site portrayed as an 'accident' with a tiger under his care."

Circus cats, like house cats, have similar mannerisms, which is why prompting a tiger with a cracking whip has the same effect as prompting your mouser with a string of yarn.  But when a big cat is playful, the effects can be fatal.

Wildlife biologist and TV host Forrest Galante told “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” that the tiger “didn’t want to kill” Easley, calling the mauling a “mistake.”

Galante compared the fatal accident to instances when people play with their house cats and unintentionally provoke them, causing minor scratches.

However, the key difference, Galante noted, is that when a tiger lashes out, “it can be absolutely fatal,” much like the “poorly placed bite” that killed Easley.

Galante emphasized that the tiger “didn’t want to kill” Easley, and that the mauling underscores the “unpredictability that large cats exhibit.”

Galante, who also works with large animals, says “it’s never the animal’s fault” and that he and others who put themselves in proximity to dangerous animals assume the “huge risks involved.”

Easley’s father echoed Galante’s sentiment to reporters, calling the attack a “love bite.”

Professionals who work with exotic animals all understand that no such animal will put up with deliberate abuse.  Even routine and respectful interactions can turn deadly.  R.I.P.

RECLAIMING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT?

Charlie Kirk was shot during one of his "Prove Me Wrong" events, which provides Inside Higher Ed's Ryan Quinn with a reality check.  "The provocateur supercharged the right’s depiction of campuses as intolerant, leftist spaces. Then he was killed on one while exercising free speech and debating students."

THE NEWSPAPER OF RECORD FILES A DESPATCH FROM HELL.

Satan: 'I've Made A Huge Mistake'

Surveying the hundreds of thousands gathered for Charlie Kirk's memorial service, along with the millions watching across the globe, a despondent Satan declared that he had "made a huge mistake."

"Well, this isn't going like I planned at all," sighed Satan, as churches once again were filled to overflowing around the nation. "Listen to all that worship. How are even more people praising God in the face of death? Ugh. I've really screwed the pooch this time."

At publishing time, an enraged Satan had learned that thousands more souls had slipped out of his grasp.

So mote it be.

THE COOLER HEADS STILL PREVAIL.

The late Charlie Kirk's celebration of life has ended, and the worst-case scenarios we feared immediately after the event have not come to pass.

Outside the Beltway's James Joyner suggests we've seen "A shocking, but not surprising, event. I fear it's a harbinger rather than an outlier."  Perhaps there is a trend already in progress.  Power Line's Scott Johnson is thinking along similarly gloomy lines.  "If we did not represent the forces of constitutional order, it feels like it could be the opening salvo of a civil war. It provokes us to wonder what might have happened if the assassination of President Trump had succeeded during last year’s campaign."

The editors at The [Not Detroit] Free Press were similarly fearful.

We fear his assassination represents a watershed moment for free expression in this country. We worry that his murder will have a profound chilling effect—that people will shy away from open discussion, that they will avoid honest debate, and that they will turn away from sticking their neck out for fear that engaging with their fellow citizens might mean an engraved bullet will be meant for them.

We must not let that happen.

The principles we once took for granted in this country—that civil debate is how Americans sorted out their differences; that losing an election was not an apocalyptic event but simply meant we had to try harder to persuade our fellow citizens in the next one—feel endangered in a way they didn’t a decade ago.

That editorial raises a point that calls for a follow-on post.

There are many guilty parties in the rise of political violence. But to our minds, among the biggest culprits are the universities. In the same way that madrassas radicalize jihadis, America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate. Where they preach “inclusion,” they actually practice exclusion—shouting down speakers they disagree with, for instance. Where they promote “diversity,” they actually enforce a uniformity of thought, denying tenure to dissenters.

The very fact that Kirk had to have armed bodyguards and appears to have been wearing a bulletproof vest is a sign of how far things had already unraveled.

There are several points to ponder in that paragraph, which would take us far afield.

For today, we focus on the reassuring, which wasn't a given considering early reactions among some students.  "His Death Felt Personal."

A REQUIEM FOR HIGH MODERN AUTHORITARIANISM.

In "The Rise of Blandville," Mark "Car Free America" Brown takes stock of all the ways planning land use to combine the commerce of the city with the wide open spaces of the country goes wrong.  Call the roll: parking mandates, stroads, zoning.

America wanted to have it all with no limits. Open space. Fast traffic. Big yards. Highways. Quiet neighborhoods. Lots of stores and lots of jobs. When you combine all of them, you get the average American city. Miles of low-density R1 zoning that doesn’t even allow a corner cafe. Urban highways cutting through struggling (and often empty) downtowns filled with useless open space. Big box stores with huge parking lots. Suburbs with huge yards built on former farmland.

We’ve created Blandville.

Blandville: A term for American cities that, in trying to blend urban and rural ideals, end up with soulless, sprawling suburbs, overly wide streets, and dead downtowns, creating a monotonous, car-dependent landscape that’s neither vibrant city nor charming country.

Read down, though, and discover the lede, buried deep in the essay.

The farmland is gone, so the neighborhood can’t really be described as “country”, but since corner cafes or any kind of retail/commercial is banned through zoning, the livability and convenience benefits of cities is also negated. It’s not country. It’s not the city. It’s also not a charming small town where you would run into your neighbor at the market square. They were also created with massive FHA and FHWA subsidies and outright federal spending. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but let’s not pretend that auto-centric American suburbs were conceived based on market demand or private spending.

That's right, you might not be interested in the fatal conceits of Technocracy, but sooner or later, Technocracy's conceits prove to be their undoing.  Add to that the fundamental problem of socialism, running out of other people's money, and that's the way the infrastructure crumbles.

TRACTION ORANGE AND PUMPKIN ORANGE.

The harvest fest trains return to East Troy.  Railway preservation is a volunteer-operated, volunteer-built enterprise, using, in East Troy, a stretch of track the village purchased in 1939 to keep carload freight service to local industries.

“The volunteers took ownership of the whole thing without the village, and we've been running ever since,” said Jim Feyerherm, the operations manager.

Today, trains operate on weekends after Labor Day and include themed experiences such as dinner trains, Harvest Fest rides, and Christmas trains that feature Santa’s workshop.

“It's fun, it gives you a mission, and it's filled with happy people,” said volunteer Tammy O’Connell, who has been with the railroad for two years. “The volunteers are just a big happy family.”

The Harvest Fest train takes passengers on a 30-minute ride from East Troy to the Elegant Farmer.

“We take people from here down to the Elegant Farmer where they can get off so they can pick their apples. They can go on hayrides, they can do all of that—a lot of fun things,” Feyerherm said.

Their peak season is fall, and we've documented all sorts of events on the East Troy Railroad.

That's the last post for the week.  Time for some time away.  Find yourself a preservation railroad, or an Oktoberfest, and go to it.

CONSTITUTION DAY.

Joel Kotkin offers what might be a back-handed compliment.  "[H]ow does an America led by mediocrities succeed? The secret sauce lies in two great assets – America’s geography and its constitution."

Read on, though, and understand his appreciation.

America’s greatest asset may lie in its centuries-old constitutional order. This is very different to the much ballyhooed, bureaucratic ‘rules-based’ system so attractive to Eurocrats and their American admirers. In Europe, decisions are based on the political fashions of the moment. Only a bureaucracy in thrall to green ideology, for instance, could have ignored all the warning signs of the current energy crisis and placed ever more bets on unreliable wind and solar in the name of stopping climate change – even while China, by far the world’s biggest emitter of CO2, is building more coal plants to power its homes and industries. Today, coal is now being consumed more than at any time in history.

Although it looks less ‘professional’ than the Brussels bureaucracy, the US’s constitutionally directed democratic governance has survived other chaotic periods like this one. As bad as our leaders may be, they are fortunately not omnipotent. In contrast, while unencumbered leaders can at times make enormous strides in catching up with more advanced countries, they almost always fail in the long run – bad news for Xi and Putin.

These lessons have still not been learned in academia and the media, which continue the old Western intellectual habit, visible in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, of eulogising foreign despotisms.

Those Men of System always envision themselves as being in charge, until they hear "Hands behind your backs there!"

HOW HOPELESS IS HIGHER EDUCATION?

Just when you thought the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, couldn't get any sillier, along comes Josh Moody to fret, "Universities are making exceptions to institutional neutrality policies to issue statements on Charlie Kirk’s death as some take aggressive action against some faculty remarks."

He's referring to the practice of senior deans, provosts, chancellors, and the like holding themselves forth as public intellectuals in ways that besmirch their offices.  "I hold the position that university officials be circumspect in issuing statements about Matters of Public Import.  At the time, I noted, 'Too often, those statements make the professional protest communities within the university comfortable with their prejudices.'"

LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS.

Today in celebrity gossip:  "Cardi B announces she’s expecting her fourth child, first with NFL star Stefon Diggs."

Strong the authenticity is in this one.

The Grammy-winning “I like It” artist is already a mother to three young children — Kulture, eight, Wave, three, and Blossom, one — that she shares with ex-husband, fellow rapper Offset. The former couple began dating in early 2017 before tying the knot in a secret wedding that September. After years of an on-and-off relationship, Cardi filed for divorce a second time in July 2024.

In October 2024, she sparked dating rumors with the 31-year-old New England Patriots wide receiver. They made their first public appearance together as a couple in May at a New York Knicks game.

She has figured out how to keep her spawn in Pampers.

“Now y’all can buy my album, so I can buy Pampers and diapers and all that type of stuff,” Cardi quipped. “I told ya, now go support my album because I’m a mother of four now.”

Her audience?  Maybe not so much.

American Mind's Dan McCarthy summarizes.  "The natural and traditional ties between people are subjected to a constant acid bath." In his view, what the self-styled thought leaders are doing is neither stressing the organism, in the sense of "whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger," nor assisting in the emergence of a fitter organism through mutation, adaptation, and selection. It's maladaptiveness for its own sake. "Outside the family, our culture of celebrity individualism is indistinguishable from underclass irresponsibility."  That's a point going back at least as far as Emmett Tyrrell's The Liberal Crack-Up, wherein what trickled down from Hollywood to the poorer quarters was the bastardy and drug dependence, but in the poorer quarters there are neither expensive fixer lawyers nor cheap illegal immigrant nannies.

Thus, while Cardi is selling albums and the celebrity journalists and influencers will have plenty of baby bump photos to peddle for clicks and subscriptions, her fans in the paradises of the likes of Chicago might be hoping that the food pantry is stocked, that the EBT server doesn't crash at the grocer, that the violent baby-daddy soon to be released from prison will stay away.  And some things never change.  There are still pundits suggesting, in the wake of the disaster that was the Biden-Harris-Walz campaign, that their party isn't McGovernist enough.  That was a foolish argument in 2004, it is no better now.

The problem, dear Poor Man, is that the national Democratic Party has taken the morality out of poverty issues. As in avoiding being "judgemental" about bastardy, drug use, or being foolishly "authentic" is more important than noting the value of a few simple things, such as learning one's sums or being careful about who one gets naked with, or simply showing up, in avoiding to be poor.

It's on Normals to figure out the success sequence, despite the efforts of the sports and entertainment types to pretend it doesn't matter.

PRIVILEGE CHECKING AT MILWAUKEE COMMUNITY COLLEGE.

The Milwaukee Brewers have ways of keeping players from getting too full of themselves.

Those in the Brewers organization insist there is no classified formula for their success, but the answer might be best summed up in an internal game the organization plays called the "Check Game."

"It started in the coach's room," Brewers manager Pat Murphy told ESPN recently. "To remind us, it's not about us. It's about the team. Anyone is fair game."

The rules of the Check Game are simple. If you talk about your own accolades, you get a check. If you try to defend yourself, that's a check. If you pass on blame to someone else, that might be a check as well.

"And if you bitch about a check, you get a bigger check," Murphy said with a smile.

"[General manager] Matt Arnold was a two-time defending champion. If he said something about a player like, 'We drafted him in Tampa,' that was a check."

It's not privilege shaming.  It's a tradition a generational player might not buy into.  It works as a team-building activity.

The point of the game exemplifies the concerted effort across the organization to align the different departments, so every voice is heard and valued -- and the game makes it clear to everyone that making the team better is more important than who gets the credit.

"The Check Game is a really important game inside the clubhouse and the culture and the ecosystem of the team," Brewers play-by-play announcer Brian Anderson said. "It's a little bit of a borderline shaming game, so if you're in it for yourself, you're going to get a check and you're going to be on that board.

"No one wants to be on that board."

The way baseball works, it might be the bottom of the order that has to start the rally and bring the top of the order up to bat, and thinking of yourself as that Little League kid remembering to protect the plate with two strikes and make the pitcher pitch to you gets you on base more effectively than trying to be what you're not.

The Brewers can go toe-to-toe with the $300 million powerhouses at the top of the National League standings because instead of trying to compete dollar for dollar, they've created the kind of unique environment that the Check Game fosters. It's a vibe that feels more like the atmosphere in a college locker room than what you would expect in a professional clubhouse.

As you make your way through American Family Field on game day, you come to understand that notion when you hear the team's manager, known simply as Murph throughout Milwaukee, refer to his first- and second-year players as "freshmen" and "sophomores."

Murphy, 66, coached 22 years at the collegiate ranks, first at Notre Dame and then Arizona State, and old habits die hard.

"We joke around with each other and say that it's Milwaukee Community College just because that's how we play the game and that's the kind of guys we have," Christian Yelich said. "And Murph's the manager and there's a lot more talks about fundamentals and baserunning and little details of a game that you might hear in college."

Murphy waves off any talk that his team performs fundamentals better than most. He even gets text messages about his club's ability to do the little things from friends -- but he won't take the bait and risk receiving a check in the game he helped cultivate.

"I don't think we have a secret sauce, and I don't think we do things that much better than anyone else," he said. "We've got a great group that competes. We're under construction. We're not setting limits on what we can do. How do we get better today? That's the emphasis. That will always be the emphasis."

So this season has gone.  "After making history at Yankee Stadium for a number of the wrong reasons, the Milwaukee Brewers won their home opening series."  You don't give up on the season after a week, you steal a lot of bases on Easter Sunday, you cash in on the George Webb promotion, and you better not let up once you're the first team into the playoffs.  Maybe mentioning the playoffs too loudly gets you a check.

THEIR SALARIES DEPEND ON "DOING SOMETHING."

According to Reason's J. D. Tuccille, "After Charlie Kirk's Murder, Politicians Can Back Away From the Brink, or Make Matters Worse."  A suspect, and perhaps some accomplices, are in custody, but it's the usual slanging match in Washington.  In the manner of Shakespearean actors, the elected officials play to the groundlings.  "In a country of widely disparate values, divergent ways of life, and policy preferences to match, people are moving to live with their political tribes and apart from their opponents even as the political class increasingly centralizes power and rules from the top down."  You get a lot of sound and fury, and it signifies nothing, because each faction, upon securing a controlling majority in Washington, uses that power to the benefit of its own groundlings.

Republicans and Democrats alike treat winning political office as winner-take-all opportunities to transform the country and jam their agendas down the throats of the losers. The result has been escalating frustration and a willingness to look to extreme tactics against political enemies.

Maybe, in the way Winston Churchill has it, as a last resort, Americans will try the right thing.

Charlie Kirk's assassination was a very unwelcome example of offline action.

So, will the political class keep beating war drums? Or will they step back from escalating the conflict? If they really seek to improve matters, politicians could start by shutting up and leaving us alone.

As we prepare to post, the protest and demonstration scene is calm apart from a few campus skirmishes.  We'll have an opportunity to take stock next week.

MANAGING EMERGENCE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

When there are no visual cues to drive slowly, people don't drive slowly.

Posting speed limits?  That's a fool's errand.

Too many streets, though, give drivers all sorts of clues that it's OK (not legal, not safe for kids, dogs, or basketballs) to go fast. There's a neighborhood speed limit of 25 governing the streets serving Cold Spring Shops headquarters, and yet the street in front of headquarters provides a convenient, relatively free of parked trucks, shortcut from the townhouses to the mile road. I'm not saying it's an expressway, and yet an early evening on my deck with a radar gun might be instructive.

All over northern Illinois, the neighborhood speed limits are at odds with the visual cues.

Eric Olson explains the phenomenon to readers of DeKalb's Daily Chronicle.

After driving long enough on a regular basis, people tend to develop a kind of intuition about what the speed limit should be in an area just by surveying how many lanes there are, what kind of pavement there is, how many stoplights there are, whether the road is in the country or in town.

What intrigues him is the proposal by Sycamore authorities to reduce the speed limit on a stretch of road that's signed for 45 yet winds around in such a way as to appear more safe at 40 or so.  What's more commonly the case in Illinois is roads that provide visual cues to go faster.  Such roads, which perhaps might better be described as stroads, have speed limits that appear to be too low.

Indeed, and thus the bizarre phenomenon that the same two-lane section road might be signed anywhere from 25 to 45 in otherwise similarly settled areas, while the stroads and boulevards might be posted from 35 to 55. This week, DeKalb posted a stretch of a section road still in farm country that was 55 down to 45, and the stretch that was posted 45 is now 35.  For all the attention anyone is paying to the change.

HIGHER EDUCATION IS BEYOND PARODY.

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, lets Cherian George sound off.  "The killing of Charlie Kirk highlights the need for universities to foster counter-polarizing dialogue, not commodified debates."

Any time somebody uses "commodified" In All Earnestness, you know that the nonsense will flow freely.  So let it be with Cheri.

The killing of political activist Charlie Kirk has thrown into sharp relief the hostility between conservatives and progressives and between champions of free speech and crusaders against hate propaganda. It also highlights a less obvious dichotomy: between a marketplace of commodified opinion, on the one hand, and seedbeds for deliberation and dialogue, on the other. The former dominates the political culture in open societies. The latter is what universities urgently need to cultivate.

The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein privileged the ethos of the marketplace in his immediate response to the news of Kirk’s death. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.

Because universities have been doing such a good job cultivating deliberation and (genuine) dialogue.  As far as Mr Klein's column, I excerpt heavily from it here.

CUT THE CRAP AND TALK LIKE A NORMAL ADULT.

Josh "Disaffected Newsletter" Slocum has had enough of "I feel" where "I claim" or "I suspect" are more to the point.

Adults did not sound like this in the 1980s. Almost no one said “I feel that taxes are too high.” They said, “Taxes are too high.” Notice that they didn’t even qualify it with the slightly more assertive “I think.” Why? Because we all already know that, because you are making this statement, this statement is “what you think.”

“I think” became “I feel,” and both became necessary to buffer simple, direct statements. Or, seen another way, typically masculine statements.

It’s a socially required ritual apology. You may not ever have though about it directly the way I’m putting it out there under the microscope here, but you know it’s true. Somewhere inside, you “feel” that you “have to” pre-apologize for making a direct or declarative statement.

Readers, friends, countrymen—this is fucking nuts. It’s a lunatic feminine overreach and I’m well tired of it.

Every day online, and now in the real world, I feel the pressure to pre-apologize. To qualify. I’ve internalized the idea (and you have, too) that making declarative statements is a per se act of aggression. That it’s normal for others to react to declarative, unbuffered statements as the speaker “judging” them.

This is not normal. It’s bullshit. It’s kindergarten-teacher bullshit.

I resent it, which is why I’m writing this. Secondarily, I hope this gooses the “I feel like” out of some of you, maybe for the first time.

While it started with women in the simpering professions, it has metastasized to all professions and industries. Men are doing it as much as women. And also? Women didn’t speak this way when I was a kid. They were actual grown-ups just like men.

Years ago when I first slipped into this habit of “I feel,” or “In my view only, not saying it’s true for you,” I resented it but I didn’t know why. I knew something about it was smarmy and dishonest, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Now I know what it is. It’s feminine longhouse control. The unspoken demand to pre-apologize and pre-soften any statements is a filtering mechanism. It shows others who is pliant and plastic, who will mouth the right phrases, who will perform the required self-abnegation ritual, and who will not.

Flaccid speech betrays a flaccid mind, indeed.  But so it goes in the world of Inclusive Euphemism.  Now, apparently, the Royal Yachting Association has pronounced anathema on "Man Overboard."

The national governing body for sailing, which was founded in 1875, urges members to use language which "honours and values" women and non-binary people within the sport and recreational activity and avoid the terms that "might not be comfortable for a person who recognises themselves to be a woman or non-binary".

The guide suggests that the phrases can still be used to "raise the alarm where a person has fallen overboard to initiate the emergency procedures", but outside of these situations "person in water" is advised.

Critics said the new language guidance would have past sailors from previous eras "turning in their graves".

The Royal Yachting Association guide states: "Some language in sailing and boating environments might not value or represent people who identify as female or prefer gender neutral terms.

Some people are crusin' for a keel-haulin'.  And founded in 1875.  Youngsters in the scheme of Wisconsin yacht racing.  Ahoy, non-binary swabs!

‘When you're reaching for a rubber ring, the first thing you think of isn't your language.’@CamillaTominey amusingly reacts to the Royal Yachting Association's new guidance on language, saying to stop using ‘man overboard’. pic.twitter.com/oEjzGjGoaK

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 14, 2025

Talk like a normal adult, indeed.

DALLAS DID NOT KILL JACK KENNEDY.

What turned out to be Charlie Kirk's final tweet invoked another story that has riled up the Normals.  I'm only able to quote the text of the post.  "If we want things to change, it's 100% necessary to politicize the senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska because it was politics that allowed a savage monster with 14 priors to be free on the streets to kill her."

Weekend public protests in the wake of Mr Kirk's death tended to be mannerly mourning.  Perhaps the cooler heads will prevail.

EMERGENCE CAN NOT BE NUDGED.

Regular readers know why.  I never lack for opportunities to riff on that phenomenon, though, particularly when people who think they have the answers neglect the laws of conservation in economics.  "For decades, a misleading narrative about mental illness among the unhoused obscured the true source of the crisis: hyper-commodified housing."  That's Ben McCarthy in The (Misnamed) Progressive.  As is often the case, the problem is not too much "commodification," it is too little.

[E]lected officials and the coalition of policy advocates behind them argue that untreated mental illness and substance use are a core cause—if not the core cause—of skyrocketing homelessness in the United States. Unhoused people, the narrative goes, are primarily homeless because they have failed to accept treatment and can no longer be easily forced into it. In fact, the primary cause of homelessness is a nationwide shortage of affordable housing. Millions of units of government-subsidized housing from decades past have been lost even as market-rate housing grows astronomically more expensive.

In casting the problem as an epidemic of individual pathology rather than one of political economy, these leaders have ignored the obvious economic reality: The rise of homelessness has resulted primarily from the hyper commodification of housing. In New York City and much of the United States, urban studies scholars Peter Marcuse and David Madden write in their book In Defense of Housing, “housing is becoming ever less an infrastructure for living and ever more an instrument for financial accumulation.”

The truth is that [New York mayor Eric] Adams’s and others’ rhetoric surrounding mental illness and homelessness stems from a decades-old misleading narrative that has fundamentally distorted the public discourse around both housing and mental illness alike. As private equity firms have purchased hundreds of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments in New York City over the past twenty-five years, this false narrative has served the interests of a political class beholden to the entire real estate industry. In doing so, it has caused real harm to some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers by attempting to decouple their material conditions from the economic and political forces that shape them.

Look, this is not difficult.  Note, there is no shortage of housing per se, there is what the authors refer to as a shortage of "affordable housing," and they persist in their delusion that if you pass a law that makes housing "affordable," there will be affordable housing.  Sorry, no.  On Manhattan, and in San Francisco, and anyplace else where there are serious agglomeration economies favoring high-value-added work, the real estate on which those rent-stabilized apartments sit will be seriously expensive.

Two principles of land use immediately emerge.  First, [the highest value added activities]have a ceteris paribus advantage in bidding for any parcel of land.  Second, activities that encounter higher transportation costs lose advantage at greater distances.  Thus, in the two-century old model, dairy products command a high price and spoil (we're before mechanical refrigeration or railroads, recall) quickly, thus those will be closest to the city, but dairies will be out-bid by timbering or cornfields or ranching.

Introduce mechanical refrigeration and railroads and motor trucks, and the highest bidders for land might be factories or restaurants or households.  The principle is the same, though, the value of a parcel of land will be one at which a householder is indifferent between locating there, or locating somewhere else.  The model as modified still predicts falling land values at distances from the city center.  Thus, we'll see additional margins along which people might substitute, such as suffering the transportation costs but being able to live in a bigger house: easier for a faculty member at Cornell than it might be at Northwestern or at Stanford, where faculty qualify for housing subsidies.  The underlying principle is the same: in equilibrium a householder will be indifferent among the bundles of location and housing type offered.  Because that equilibrating tendency leads to similar houses clustered together, providing temptations for builders to put down cookie-cutter developments, Wise Experts think they can dictate neighborhood form with zoning codes.  That works until new price incentives emerge.

But will we ever see a central business district that generates so much in the form of locational rents, in the presence of so small a transportation cost, for knowledge or financial industries (and there are reasons to suspect that it will be knowledge or financial industries, not manufacturing) that the service businesses get priced out, and the only land devoted to housing of any kind is at a distance, as appears to be happening in San Francisco, but not yet in Chicago?

If I remember correctly, New York's "rent stabilized" apartments stabilize the rents for the duration of the tenancy or until the property changes hands.  Thus, the current residents of those apartments might be people who landed on Central Park West and thought they were Aaron Judge, and they're making a good living in finance or broadcasting or entertainment, squatting, if you will, on the affordably priced rentals.  The logic of the land rent gradient, though, suggests that at the passing of those tenants, or at sale, those properties are worth a lot more than the capitalized value of those stabilized rents.

Isn't rent control marvellous?  In stabilizing the rents in the face of locational agglomeration economies, public policy makes the buildings themselves so valuable that only private equity can buy them.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE WEEK?

Plus Size Model Ashley Alexiss Says It’s ‘Really Sad’ She’s Not Considered a Role Model After 100-Lb. Weight Loss.  I can't very well say this post is on the lighter side, can I?

Ashley Alexiss is opening up about how her 100-pound weight loss has changed the way some people view her and why she’s determined to stay true to herself.

“I often get comments and stuff that I’m no longer a role model or I’m no longer someone that someone can look up to,” Alexiss tells PEOPLE exclusively. “And I think that that’s really sad because I went through a life-changing loss. I lost my dad, and my dad was my best friend.”

The former Sports Illustrated model, who spent 15 years building a career in plus-size fashion, says the transformation wasn’t intentional. “About two and a half years ago, I gave up drinking. I was kind of just tired of feeling like a--. Like, having a few hours of fun and then having to essentially pay for it for two days with a hangover. My body just didn’t metabolize alcohol well. And also in the midst of that, my dad was battling cancer and he actually passed away a year ago yesterday.”

Just like those solipsistic woke folks.  The lady loses her dad and she's doing a couple of things that will be good for her health and the identity politics types shame her for taking care of herself.

Alexiss explains that grief had profound physical effects. “It changes your mind, it changes how you operate. And it had physical effects on me as well,” she says. “I think that a lot of people assumed that I wasn’t happy in my body or that I was ashamed of it, which is so far from the truth because I spent 15 years being a plus-size model, and my motto has always been, ‘Beauty is not a size.' And I think that still rings true. Being 100 pounds lighter, it doesn't change."

But navigating a new body hasn’t been easy. “I will say that it has become more difficult to learn to really appreciate this body because I spent so long fighting for my plus-sized body to be accepted and to be noticed in a way that was respected based on societal standards. And it's been a challenge,” she says.

“A lot of people think, ‘Well, now you’re skinny.’ And I’m like, ‘Mm, yeah. But I’m also getting the attention and respect that I should have gotten 100 pounds heavier.’ Like, that doesn’t change. A person is still a person whether they’re 215 or 115 [pounds].”

Yes, a person's a person, no matter how small (or large); and yet those "societal standards" might confer evolutionary advantage (and save air passengers from having to buy two seats?)  Note who she's putting a ring on it with.

I’m recently engaged and I’m prepping for our wedding. And doing all the things of being a bride while also grieving is a challenge, but I’m trying to do the things that make me feel the best version of me so I can be the best version for my fiancé, as well."

Her fiancé has also been a source of constant support. “He is a fitness addict. Like, he's in the gym every day, It's nice because he doesn’t push that on me. He lets me still be me. And whatever that looks like, whether it’s being a couch potato or wanting to go run around Coachella, he supports that, and I think that’s really important.”

Mazel tov.

TURNING POINT, AMERICA?

Along with the measured responses to Charlie Kirk's murder there's a lot of seething online anger.  Start, dear reader, with Hot Air's David Strom smacking the critical theory commonplaces down.

You have to understand the fundamental principle of modern Critical Theory, which is that words are weapons, and using the wrong words, even if they are "true," is an act of violence. And, modern leftists believe, violence of this kind should be met with violence in the world. Shooting Charlie Kirk because he said the wrong things wasn't violence, but self-defense.

That's an idea so crazy only an intellectual can believe it, and, unsurprisingly, they do.

It shouldn't shock you that randos on the internet celebrated Kirk's death, but it should shock everybody that teachers, professors, and Deans of colleges are. They are not random people, but ones who are in positions of responsibility who teach the next generation how to think and behave.

As do street preachers.

This Chicago-born suburbanite brought all of the racial innuendo to political speech and rhetorically violated the safety and security of Blacks, people of-color, the LGBTQIA community, perverted the history of race and racism in America, attempted to legitimize the nation as a white bastion of civilization and Christianity, and in general perfected the use of racial and hateful language and molded it into a form of acceptable and legitimate political debate and viewpoint.

But the legitimate debate aspect was far from legitimate historical benign speech, nor was it nonviolent in character. In fact, it touched all of the refrains of the vile language of the past that resulted far too many times in lynchings and other forms of racial violence and upheaval.

That seems to be the talking point at Common Dreams.

We can honor the sadness millions are feeling over Kirk’s murder, and maintain basic civil human decency, while also being honest about the deeply harmful and offensive things Charlie Kirk said. We can condemn political violence and Kirk’s murder while also condemning Charlie Kirk for the rotten, vile hatred he fomented.

And yes, while respecting that many are mourning, this is precisely the time to remind people of the hatred and division Kirk sowed and profited handsomely from.

That post goes on to argue that words are violence.  Such a totalitarian idea, and it's breeding resistance.  Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, who cheats on his wife, is not doing much to lower the temperature.  “We're in a war right now to save this country. And so you have to be willing to do whatever is necessary in order to save the country.”  That's what some of the participants in the futile and stupid gesture in the Federal Capitol also believed.

POLITICAL ECONOMY IS HARD.

Look, it's probably not sporting to pick on Common Dreams contributors such as Jackson Diianni.  "Every other developed country guarantees healthcare to all citizens as a basic human right. We’re essentially the only ones that decided to turn our health into a commodity."

YOUR LUXURY BELIEFS GET PEOPLE KILLED.

I've long feared that there are suburbs and small towns one flash-mobbed convenience store away from going sundown.

It might be that one knife attack on the rapid transit will have the same effect.  Free Press contributor Kat Rosenfeld builds that case.

Until the aforementioned security footage from that night was released—footage that shows not just the moments leading up to [Iryna] Zarutska’s murder, but the horrifying aftermath as Brown stalks up and down the car leaving a literal trail of blood in his wake—the story oddly flew under the radar. It did so for the same reasons that it’s now become a flashpoint in the online discourse about crime, disorder, and public safety in American cities today.

For conservatives, this incident seems a slam-dunk indictment of the progressive attitudes toward policing and criminal justice that emerged in the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd—and accompanying policies that make it virtually impossible to keep serial offenders off the streets. Commentators on the right have noted, correctly, that Brown had a history of violence, a lengthy criminal record, and well-documented mental health issues; he never should have been on the train that night, and if not for having been released pending trial for his most recent offenses by a sympathetic judge, he wouldn’t have.

The greater issue is a cultural one: a growing frustration with what often feels like limitless tolerance for public disorder and antisocial behavior—and with it, a sense that one must not only avoid discussing these things to remain a liberal in good standing, but actively pretend they don’t exist.

Can you think of a better indictment of luxury beliefs?  Suggest that maybe some people ought be in prison or the insane asylum for a long time, and risk not being invited to the next wine tasting.

The problem with this taboo around certain uncomfortable truths about public disorder is that when you make discussing those truths a thing that is Simply Not Done by decent progressive people, you leave the field of discourse wide open to the kind of person who cares about neither progressive politics nor decency. That is where we are now.

Good liberals, for instance, would rather die than address the fact that Decarlos Brown Jr. is not just homeless and mentally ill but black, as people who perpetrate this kind of violence disproportionately are. In lieu of a thoughtful, data-driven conversation about why this might be and how to solve it, discussing this fact is now the gleeful and exclusive purview of trollish accounts.

Catch the False Dilemma, dear reader?  It is simple enough to have a thoughtful, data-driven conversation about the way luxury beliefs don't work out, on the rapid transit or in the streets, that establishes the indecency of progressive politics.  Ms Rosenfeld sort of gets it.  "Nowhere is that clearer than in a well-intentioned attempt to give the mentally ill more agency that instead resulted in vastly fewer people accessing the care they desperately needed."