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."

FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME?

"Cynical Publius" has a lot of fans at Twitchy, and his posts are often insightful.  A day ago I clipped an excerpt from one of his longer missives and reposted it.

"Literally millions of peaceful, law-abiding conservatives who just want to be left alone have been woken up and suddenly realize that most Democrats would gladly see them dead."@KurtSchlichter also lives in California, doesn't he? https://t.co/D5QXm7t4SW

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) September 11, 2025

This morning, it turned up as the graphic above a Craig Shirley post at Conservative HQ.  The post itself is a litany of Abufes and Ufurpations.  A sampling:

A Senator Bernie Sanders supporter shoots a GOP congressman and Sanders says nothing, tacitly endorsing it.

They burn and destroy Elon Musk’s auto dealerships simply because they disagree with him.

They try twice to assassinate Donald Trump and the left either yawns or cheers them on.

They killed Charlie Kirk because he dared to utter words and ideas they want to exterminate.

And when a prayer for Charlie Kirk and his family was offered on the floor of the House of Representatives, Democrats hoot and yell and shout it down.

It has come to this.

What it has come to is the punishment cycles of the grim strategy outcome.

It doesn't matter that for each item on the list, there is a deflection to something not on the list that the opposition doesn't like.

It doesn't matter that for each compare and contrast, e.g. "We are the producers. They are the consumers; We are the productive members of society. They are the destructive members of society; We believe in construction. They believe in destruction," there is, somewhere, a script-flipping invoking capitalist exploitation or environmental decay or cronyism or that Existential Threat to Our Democracy^(TM).

It doesn't matter that for each right-populist invocation of "walking on eggs" or "cancel culture" there might be a True Believer saying "So's your influencer."

But once again, lefties are held to a different standard from righties. And I’m frankly tired of having to be the one who is reasonable. One of these days I’m going to get very tired of being reasonable.

Kurt Schlichter could not have put it any better.

Breaking out of the punishment cycles becomes ever-more challenging.

CIVILIZATION IS NOT BUILT BY VIOLENCE.

Yesterday, Turning Point U.S.A. founder Charlie Kirk was shot while tossing red ballcaps into a crowd at a Utah university.  My title quotes Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux, who posted excerpts from several of the more restrained reactions to the news.  There's plenty of less restrained stuff circulating.  You won't find any of that here today.

Ezra Klein, who probably agreed with very little of the Turning Point policy plans, also writes wisely.

The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk — and his family — just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too.

We’ve been edging closer for some time now.

Yes.  At least for today, the "edging closer" is still in the form of invective on social media.

Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was gunned down during a speech at Utah Valley University.

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.

I submit, dear reader, that the "shifted sharply right" among younger voters might have been more about applying the brakes on the corona tyranny and the Student Affairs curriculum than a ringing endorsement of Trumpian populism; and yet, tossing red ballcaps around and inviting people who disagree to make their case is exactly what persuasion, nay, what the academic enterprise, is supposed to be about.

THOSE ENUMERATED AND LIMITED POWERS.

Law and Liberty's John McGinnis correctly notes, "More Government, More Gerrymandering."

Well, yes.  Cold Spring Shops suggests, at least once a week, sometimes once a day, that the best thing for government to do is to go away.

COMPETENT PEOPLE?

Inside Higher Ed editor Sara Custer laments the new strings the Trump administration is attaching to funding the universities (news flash: there have always been strings attached, there's a post in preparation noting the same) and asks, "Who is going to rebuild higher ed after it’s dismantled?"

Higher education has been doing a pretty good job of self-dismantling for thirty years.

Where are we now?  Regular "college bubble updates" on Pajamas Media.  A political economy of inequality that touches on tax cuts at the same time the U.S. News problem suggests a flight to perceived quality of higher education, a flight that I fear is more about being able to mingle with and form networks of high achievers, rather than to hear from the very best Mr Chips regularly.

Maybe money-hemorrhaging jokes run by idiots might do better by reclaiming the good of the intellect and returning to the norms of civilized discourse.  If that means turfing out more senior administrators and the editors of the house organs for all wokeness, all the time, and for business as usual publishing acts of contrition and retiring to their wine cellars all the better.

MY PARENTS SALVAGED THE PEARL HARBOR WEATHER LOGS AND ALL I GOT WAS A T-SHIRT.

Why did those weather logs wind up in California?

In the 1970s, Oretta Kanady was working at the Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California, when she noticed an old logbook in the trash. She didn’t know what it was, but she asked her superiors if she could keep it. They said yes.

When she got home, she gave the tome to her teenage son, Michael William Bonds. He never examined it closely—but he kept it.

“I’ve had it ever since.”

He's now 65, and he recently looked at it.

The volume turned out to be a logbook from the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Now, half a century later, the National Archives has recovered the text, which includes records from before, during and after the attack on December 7, 1941.

At more than 500 pages, the logbook contains “regular, handwritten entries from March 1941—when war in Europe was raging but prior to the entry of the United States—to June 1942 at the Battle of Midway,” according to a statement from the National Archives.

Bonds didn’t recognize the logbook’s significance until last year, when he moved in with his fiancée, Tracylyn Sharrit, in Hemet, California. She was helping him unpack his books when she noticed the mysterious volume. Every page that had been filled in featured a stamp at the top, which read either “Pearl Harbor” or “Pearl Harbor, T.H.”—short for Territory of Hawaii.

The logbook recorded the barometric pressure, air temperature, water temperature, wind direction, wind force and weather every four hours, as well as the names of the ships that came and went each day. It also featured a section at the bottom of each page titled “remarks.”

Yes, there were some interesting remarks.  I wonder if someone in the Pearl Harbor office brought it to California for safekeeping.  Strictly speaking, that logbook is still Federal property, and it has been delivered to the National Archives with a whole lot less fuss than any of the last two presidents' document boxes.  "A special agent with the National Archives flew to California, and the couple handed over their discovery. As gratitude, they received two National Archives T-shirts."  The pages have been saved to pixels.

And now you know the rest of the story.

ANTIRACISM IS A TOOL OF THE BOSSES.

Yes, I'm deliberately borrowing a communist commonplace.  "Racism is a tool of the ruling class to divide the working class and to stop them locating the root of their exploitation."  Now, maybe that's not a proper commonplace.  "Examples of such analyses are unfortunately abundant in the Marxist-Leninist movement. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) provides only the most blatant of these analyses in their documents on divisions within the working class. For example, they state, 'Racism is the bosses’ key weapon...to keep workers divided and unable to challenge union misleadership and exploitation of all workers – Black and white.'"  Is there anything so pathetic as the sectarian disputes among communists?  So many big words.  So many run-on sentences.  So little content.  And yet, the commonplace persists.

Racism is among the myriad tools capitalism relies on to keep workers ground down, distracted and failing to see the class reality at the core of the system. Workers can improve their own lives only by casting off the divisions spurred by racism and all such oppression. Likewise, racism can be ended only when the economic structures that uphold it, along with all other forms of oppression, are destroyed and replaced by a system geared around meeting people’s needs, not generating profit. This was the political conclusion of Marx’s Capital, and it remains as relevant today as when it was written.

Capital does none of those things, although it posits an interesting business cycle of capital accumulation that culminates in the destruction of those economic structures.  But nowhere in the twenty-odd chapters leading up to that apocalypse do we find anything referring to the so-called "late stage" capitalism that generations of communists have proclaimed to be all around us.

DEVELOPING YOUR INTUITION.

I've long been a fan of Armen Alchian and William Allen's University Economics (there are variations using different titles that are also useful) in part because of the end-of-chapter imponderables.  As the academic year gets into full swing, here's Econ Log's David Henderson offering one of my favorite questions.

Evidence of the very extent of specialization of knowledge is provided by Albert Einstein’s assertion just prior to his death (Socialist International Information): “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is in my view the main cause of our evils. Production is carried on for profit, not for use.” Give evidence of your superiority over Einstein by exposing his error in economic analysis.

It's easy enough to answer if you understand trading for mutual gain, and yet there are enough conscience-cowboys running around who think "production for use" is a Deep Profundity that knowing how to ask the right questions of such a conscience-cowboy is a useful skill.

The post concludes with another Imponderable that will reward careful thought.  "We often see apparently intelligent people, observing that the share of income of the bottom 20% has fallen, argue that the poor are getting poorer."

The reward in teaching, dear reader, whether it is kindergarteners or doctoral candidates, is in allowing the youngsters to grapple with the Imponderables until the penny drops.

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT.

It's possible that the millionaire next door dresses the kiddos in hand-me-down clothes, or goes thrifting.

Northern Star columnist Byrdie Seda advises her classmates to live like the millionaire next door.  "It’s OK to wear thrifted, second-hand or cheaper clothes."

The subtext of her column?  Students at a regional comprehensive mid-major ought live prudently.

It can be difficult to find fashionable, current and affordable clothes in today’s economy— especially with social media usage growing rampantly, wanna-be influencers portraying lavish lifestyles and fancy outings that feature countless luxury items.

It can be difficult for people to not feel left out if they aren’t also having those experiences.

The reality is, most people overhype their life on social media and post the highlights of their life and nothing else. They often splurge on things they don’t need such as, fancy cars, expensive jewelry and lavish decor, just so that they can show off.

This sort of mindset also tends to follow people into the real world, causing them to feel that they not only have to follow trends on the internet, but also in real life.

This mindset also causes many young people, especially Generation Z, to feel an immense amount of pressure when it comes to how they present themselves and what they wear. The amount of money that people spend under the mindset of wanting to fit in and the culture of overconsumption causes a lot of mental, environmental and social consequences, which is why buying second-hand clothes is a far better option for people nowadays.

I'm eleven years into retirement, and thus cannot offer any from the field observations of sorority rush these days.  I do not recall the sort of positional arms races that seem to be all the rage in the Southeastern Conference these days going on in DeKalb.

GOVERNMENTS WORK FOR THE PEOPLE.

Virginia senator and failed vice-presidential hopeful Tim Kaine got himself nominated for the Golden Moutza award for sort of suggesting it's the other way around.

Kaine, a self-professed Catholic who supports abortion, shocked Americans a few days ago when he declared it “extremely troubling” to say rights come from God rather than the government.

“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, they come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” Kaine said Sept. 3 during a Senate hearing. “So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.”

It’s extremely troubling to me that a Malaka can be a Senator. You fool Kaine. Ever hear of the Democrat from Virginia Thomas Jefferson? He wrote the Declaration of Independence explicitly stating that our rights come from God.

My Chicago Boyz colleague Mike calls out "The Malignant Idiocy of Tim Kaine."  The idiocy is even deeper, as the senator elaborated on his Iranian remark this way.  "It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator."  Put another way, the mullahs base their rule on a corollary to the Divine Right of Kings.  "The 'endowed by their Creator' passage vesting rights in individuals is a rebuttal to the divine right of kings: it was not the Hand of God that made the Stuart Tudor Hanover Battenberg Windsor family Defenders of the Faith, Emperors of India, and sovereigns over British North America."  Writing to a slightly different situation, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed explains that passage in the Declaration thus:  "There may be hierarchical roles for various reasons, but the people occupying those roles are just people. They have the same human flaws as everybody else. And the power they’re granted is both a grant—that is, removable—and for a limited purpose. It is not license. Nobody is entitled to abuse anyone else, and nobody deserves abuse."

A MILLION BUCKS DOESN'T GO AS FAR AS IT USED TO.

Common Dreams contributor Paul Buchheit has long provided us with entertainment, and, despite retiring from his academic gig, he's still amusing.  "A Challenge for Democrats: Getting the Stockholders to Embrace a Stockholder's Tax."  By which he's referring to that misnamed "income tax" in Monopoly, in which the player can decide to fork over $200 to the bank, or work out his net worth.  Apparently it's prudent to fork over the $200 rather than make the calculation after the third trip past Go.

Paulie thinks it's a good idea.  "There are many good reasons for stockholders to welcome a modest annual tax on stock holdings, chief among them that this would be an investment in America. But somebody is going to have to make that argument."

Why?  Follow the money.

The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93 percent of the stock market. (The richest 10% of U.S. adults approximately matches the number of U.S. millionaires.) And fortuitously, for them, most of their windfall has derived passively as the S&P 500 has gained a pre-inflation average of over 10 percent annually over the past half-century.

Put another way, there's been enough inflation that just about anybody who salted any money away was in a position to become a millionaire.  That pre-inflation increase in the value of stockholdings?  Not so spectacular.

GENAU.

Red State's Ward Clark correctly notes, "If you have to adulterate a beer, then it's not good beer."

Exactly.  "A proper beer has only water, barley, yeast, and (not too many) hops."

Mr Clark demonstrated an appreciation for those traditional Milwaukee brewers.  "We Boomers grew up in the halcyon days of cheap American lagers that were best drunk ice-cold, and after a long, hot day out in the sun, there was nothing quite like an icy-cold can of good old American lager."

These days, alas, those traditional Milwaukee beers all come out of the same factory.  They're still closer to proper than not, as in not overly hopped, not given overtones of citrus (and who let those wine snobs into the conversation), and as for that wedge of lime in a Corona, well, Mr Clark might have just caused an international incident.  "I'm reliably informed that the original purpose of that, in Mexico, was to keep flies out of your beer (yuck), and besides, Corona tastes like river water anyway, so a lime or lemon wedge could only help."

It IS Oktoberfest season, and there are a few more pleasant evenings to quaff a Marzen, and maybe enjoy the sunset and the moonrise.

Prosit!

WE COULD RETURN TO THE NORMS OF INTELLIGENT DISCOURSE.

So suggests Reason's J. D. Tuccille.  "The idea that you wait your turn to speak and then express your disagreement must be based on expectations of civility and enforcement of the same. If you can't stay quiet when it's somebody else's turn, or refrain from throwing punches over disagreement, that needs to carry consequences."

Unfortunately, the universities he calls attention to are guilty of breaking that norm and calling it Enlightenment.

Today it might be students in a Michigan political science or public administration class fretting about something they said about Our President going on their permanent record; a few years ago, it might have been Michigan students fretting about something they said coming to the attention of a bias response team.  "Does it come as a surprise that a Glenn Youngkin or Ron DeSantis [or latterly, a second act for Donald Trump] emerges as a corrective?"  I'll let people who pay closer attention to the nuances of law and politics work out whether Republican complaints about Democrats "weaponizing government" were the tat and Our President's "politicized Justice Department" are the tit; and his complaint that "Campus officials are trying to decide how to respond to government orders to remove ideas" is amusing in light of all the things Student Affairs types have done to remove; or failing to remove, to "problematize" or to cast as secular sins inconvenient ideas.  The professor attempts to flip the script on that history.  "For example, it seems silly to write an op-ed fulminating that some employees at a university proposed an unofficial list of words it wants people to avoid using when the federal government is formally purging a much longer list of words."

You could propose to end the punishment cycles and restore Western norms.

Unfortunately, restoring Western norms of intelligent discourse means extending tolerance to dangerous ideas, which means Western norms are repressive tolerance.  But, as Mr Tuccille notes, when the heckler's veto becomes part of Liberating Tolerance, the people so subjected might not be interested in the Strongly Held Opinions that might underpin that heckling.

It's a given that if one party to a disagreement keeps breaking the rules in order to harm opponents, the other participants will eventually sink to the challenge and adopt—or escalate—out-of-bounds tactics themselves. That's bad enough in any conflict, but it can be disastrous for a free and open society if the rules being broken by all parties are fundamental free speech norms. For years, we've seen left-leaning students and faculty on college campuses shout down and sometimes assault speakers with whom they disagree. Now right-leaning students have joined the party, embracing the heckler's veto and even the use of violence to muzzle dissent.

Well, the 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."  Have your counter-protest ready to go.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) maintains a database of efforts to silence speakers, most of them far less dramatic in nature. The majority over the years have come from the left, but not exclusively so. FIRE now suggests that enthusiasm for the heckler's veto is growing on the right.

"Until recently, these vices primarily belonged to Democratic students, with a staggering 79% of students who identify as strong Democrats agreeing that shouting down a speaker is at least rarely acceptable," Chapin Lenthall-Cleary wrote last week for the organization. "Republicans have finally, perhaps belatedly, arrived at the party, with over half of strong Republicans now saying it's acceptable to shout down a speaker."

The practitioners of liberating tolerance liked their new rules, until somebody made them play by them.  "Kurt Schlichter frequently cautions the Angry Left that Militant Normals can play by the new rules. 'The pushback is going to be impolite. It’s going to be mean. It’s going to lack decorum. But hey, aren’t those are the new rules?'"

They are, but who will be first to speak for restoring the norms of intelligent discourse?

It's not hard to guess why opinions have shifted on this issue. If you've seen your events disrupted and your speakers drowned out and roughed up for years by people who insist that such tactics are perfectly acceptable, it's inevitable that you'll finally take them at their word. If shouting down anybody who disagrees with one side is fine and dandy, then it must be equally acceptable if other groups return the favor. And so, taking on an engagement at a college campus threatens to become an exercise in frustration if not a contact sport, no matter whose views are represented.

Who will be first to take the bourgeois conventions seriously?

LAKEFRONT LIBERALS' LUXURY BELIEFS.

Our President is contemplating sending National Guard troops to support immigration enforcement efforts in major cities.  It's muddled and authoritarian, according to Matt Bernius at Outside the Beltway.

Separately this week, Trump indicated that he and his team are in the planning process of deploying the National Guard to three cities: Baltimore, Chicago, and New Orleans. The [impetus] (?? — Ed.), according to official comments, was over the issue of crime.

Meanwhile, in those fifteen square miles of privilege surrounded by the Third World, Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker has been assuring all and sundry that Chicago is safe and the local authorities can handle it.  John Kass is having none of it.

Hey Gov. Pritzker, if Chicago is so safe why not prance around the West and South Sides at night without your phalanx of  armed bodyguards? You might go it alone. But you wouldn’t dare do that. You expect minority women of low-incomes to take the filthy and dangerous CTA at night to and from work. And to vote Democrat, for you. You must think them to be stupid.

Of course you do. They keep voting Democrat. They’re not stupid. Those women are good people. And they don’t deserve the garbage thrown at them by politicians and the press.

Angry? Yeah, I’m angry, with good reason. Because there is another deadly game going on in America, a political game of Russian Roulette that unfortunately is not so obvious.

And who loses? Not the American political class. But some lose. They lose everything.

This game is played by Democrats seeking to maintain power in the mapping and gerrymandering of Congressional Districts. And it has killed many Americans and broken many American families and killed many children.

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.

Pedestrians can't walk downtown without being accosted by the homeless and illegal beggars. Kids can't play in the parks without navigating "tent cities" and dodging needles and fentanyl zombies. The Fire Department is responding to out-of-control fires in these encampments at least weekly. The rat and bedbug infestations are rampant and as we mentioned, the buckets of human waste, piles of garbage and discarded gas cylinders make Chicago look and smell like a Third World shithole.

The fact that enforcement is suddenly on the table makes it obvious the polling numbers are massively supportive of what's coming in the next week or so.

There's much more material from assorted keyboard warriors urging additional law enforcement in Chicago, and other major cities.  That is for another post on another day.

LET OKTOBERFEST SEASON BEGIN.

In Milwaukee, the Oktoberfest season begins with German Fest, the final weekend of July, and continues into early October.  Here are highlights of the opening ceremonies there and the rituals elsewhere.

In Wisconsin, and at selected locations in the State Line area south of the Cheddar Curtain, there are several Oktoberfesten to choose among.

Find yourself an Oktoberfest and go to it.

TWENTY-THREE YEARS AND COUNTING.

On this day in history, the Cold Spring Shops opened.

A few things have changed over the years.  The template (although that required some improvisation a few years ago to keep it as is) and the platform have not.  I might shift the focus as events, or my mood, dictate, but migrating to a different platform strikes me as a lot of work for not much payoff.

Thank you for your continued readership.

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT.

Associated Press contributor Matt Sedensky reports, "Millionaires multiply across the US, but most find it’s not all mansions and champagne."  Well, yeah, even adjusting for inflation.

Apparently the modest life styles of millionaires, as documented in The Millionaire Next Door, are modest because a million doesn't buy what it used to. Or so a quick visit to the gated communities and private resorts and yacht showrooms suggests. It takes a billion to get into Richistan, and that billion often comes from a business startup that the owner sells to a corporation for a large sum of money. That dynamic has been recognized in business journalism at least since "Adam Smith's" Supermoney, albeit the acquiring corporation is no longer a conglomerate, the source of the supermoney in those days, at least as long as the accountants could perpetuate the rising pattern of earnings right up to bankruptcy day. (I'm borrowing shamelessly from Supermoney for that passage.) That, however, is not the focus of Richistan. It's where the money goes: to gaudy yachts and trophy houses to house trophy wives who have to be appeased. Not a pretty picture, but in all likelihood, a small sample.

The small sample Mr Sedensky starts with is consistent with what we understood about those millionaires next door, twenty years or so ago.

As a child, Heidi Barley watched her family pay for groceries with food stamps. As a college student, she dropped out because she couldn’t afford tuition. In her twenties, already scraping by, she was forced to take a pay cut that shrunk her salary to just $34,000 a year.

But this summer, the 41-year-old hit a milestone that long felt out of reach: She became a millionaire.

A surging number of everyday Americans now boast a seven-figure net worth once the domain of celebrities and CEOs. But as the ranks of millionaires grow fatter, the significance of the status is shifting alongside perceptions of what it takes to be truly rich.

“Millionaire used to sound like Rich Uncle Pennybags in a top hat,” says Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point Capital Advisors, a wealth management firm in El Segundo, California. “It’s no longer a backstage pass to palatial estates and caviar bumps. It’s the new mass-affluent middleweight class, financially secure but two zeros short of private-jet territory.”

That's always been the case: the millionaire next door is that Someplace who bought a house suitable to fill up with kids, held it for a long time, and probably put a lot of sweat equity into a business.  There are many more millionaires who got the net worth that way, rather than by waiting for a will to be read.  Mr Sedensky hints at something else that is at work.

Thirty years ago, the IRS counted 1.6 million Americans with a net worth of $1 million or more. UBS — using data from the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and central banks of countries around the globe — put the number at 23.8 million in the U.S. last year, a nearly 15-fold increase.

The expanding ranks of millionaires come as the gulf between rich and poor widens. The richest 10% of Americans hold two-thirds of household wealth, according to the Federal Reserve, averaging $8.1 million each. The bottom 50% hold 3% of wealth, with an average of just $60,000 to their names.

That last sentence bundles the millionaire next door in with the venture capitalists, entertainers, and those professional athletes who learned enough personal finance to salt away some of their earnings during their playing days in order not to wind up cut, disabled, and broke.  That bottom 50%?  "There is more than money that separates prosperity from poverty, in the office or on the field."

So it is, dear reader, in the Barley household.

Barley was working as a journalist when her newspaper ended its pension program and she got a lump-sum payout of about $5,000. A colleague convinced her to invest it in a retirement account, and ever since, she’s stashed away whatever she could. The investments dipped at first during the Great Recession but eventually started growing. In time, she came to find catharsis in amassing savings, going home and checking her account balances when she had a tough day at work.

Last month, after one such day, she realized the moment had come.

“Did you know that we’re millionaires?” she asked her husband.

“Good job, honey,” Barley says he replied, unfazed.

It brought no immediate change. Like many millionaires, much of her wealth is in long-term investments and her home, not easy-to-access cash. She still lives in her modest Orlando, Florida, house, socks away half her paycheck, fills the napkin holder with takeout napkins and lines trash cans with grocery bags.

This son of Depression babies approves!  Those takeout napkins suggest frugality but not to excess, if you cook all your meals at home you aren't taking any fast food out, or the napkins that come in the bag.  And lining trash cans with grocery bags?  If I were dictator, I'd issue a ukase mandating paper bags, for just that reason.

CONTINUING THE THERAPEUTIC DELUSION.

How else respond to John K. Wilson,  "The Myth of Antisemitism at Harvard," in the house organ for all wokeness all the time inside and outside higher education?

The Trump administration’s assertion that Harvard has committed antisemitic discrimination against Jews is a series of falsehoods fabricated by an antisemitic president and his obedient bureaucrats who seek to punish their perceived political enemies on fraudulent grounds.

Higher education has been inflicting the sorts of wounds on itself that brought another dose of Trump, and it's unlikely the Militant Normals are going to be sympathetic to Professor Wilson's weeping and wailing.  "Years ago, I wrote, 'Universities best serve their students through rigorous development of reasoning skills and respect for what we have learned. Rigor is likely to diminish incivility on campus, because students kept busy grappling with intellectual problems will have less time to fight with each other. Better that they be unhappy with a few demanding professors.'"  Weep and wail, though, he does.

Still, it’s important to examine this absurd finding of antisemitism at Harvard in depth, because it sets a standard that all colleges will be expected to obey, and because it requires the worst attacks on free speech ever ordered by the federal government.

Most of the government’s report comes not from any investigation of its own, but from Harvard’s own self-examination of antisemitism on campus.

That investigation turned up some troubling things.

The other primary evidence against Harvard cited by the Trump administration was a 2024 Harvard survey of 2,295 students, faculty and staff that found 61 percent of Jewish respondents felt there were academic or professional repercussions for expressing their political beliefs, and 15 percent of Jewish respondents said they did not feel physically safe on campus. But the Notice of Violation completely omits the fact that the same survey found that a much higher proportion of Muslims feared professional repercussions (92 percent) and feared for their physical safety (47 percent).

Which means the therapeutic delusions will continue.

The surveys indicate that Islamophobia at Harvard is a far worse problem than antisemitism. Yet Harvard hasn’t taken any significant actions against Islamophobia, and Harvard hasn’t adopted a new definition of Islamophobia to prohibit double standards in criticizing Muslim nations. And the Trump administration has done nothing despite the far greater fears expressed by Muslims at Harvard.

Is there antisemitism at Harvard? Sure, there’s antisemitism everywhere, just as there is racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia and every other form of bigotry. But we don’t hold universities responsible for banning these ideas under threat of massive government retaliation. In fact, we demand exactly the opposite: Colleges must protect hateful ideas and refuse to censor them.

No, universities do a pretty good job of banning all those made-up -isms and -phobias without any coaching from government.  Is it too much to ask that people in higher education stop referring to "Islamophobia" and recognize that there is a strain in Islam that people have good reason to be skeptical of?  Is it too much to ask that people in higher education stop invoking "homophobia" and "transphobia" and recognize that polymorphous perversity is at best a mixed blessing and at worst enables mental illness?

But Professor Wilson is not done being silly.

The government will make a list of every protest and controversial view expressed on a campus, quote a few right-wing students looking for a Columbia-style payday about how they are trembling in fear at hearing ideas they don’t like, and conclude that the university failed to do enough to protect the sensitive feelings of conservative students against the horrors of being criticized.

Although this charade of antidiscrimination law has begun with the Trump administration pretending to care about antisemitism, it won’t be long before men start complaining about the hostile environment caused by feminists, white guys express their fear of anyone uttering the word “diversity” and, of course, all the straight people and devout Christians who are oppressed by the gays. If this kind of ridiculous evidence of “harassment” is accepted against a university for allowing free speech, then it can be equally applied by the Trump administration to any college that permits students and faculty to criticize right-wing dogmas about race, gender or sexuality.

Dear reader, does that not sound like the perfect opportunity for some procedural jiu-jitsu?  Make the diversity deanlets and the curriculum-usurpers in Student Affairs play by their own rules!

NO BAD IDEA EVER GOES AWAY.

So it is with "industrial policy."

The last time national industrial policy – where the government picks winners and losers in the market – was in vogue was the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Japan’s fast-growing economy was all the rage – with nearly a dozen bestselling books marveling over the “rising sun.” Campy economists like MIT’s Lester Thurow (aka “less than thorough”) lectured us that America had to be more like them, toss out our antiquated devotion to free markets, and allow politicians to choose what companies and strategic industries to invest in.

Of late, Japan has become a country of old people and disaffected young people, and they're no longer getting rich.  (Via Cafe Hayek.  There's more good stuff in today's links.)

Image retrieved from Unleash Prosperity.

Unfortunately for the public, each election becomes an opportunity for a different set of grifters to claim they have earned their spurs, and they should don boots and saddle their constituents with more burdens.

But now we have Republicans supporting a handout of $10 billion to Intel, and Democrats still pouring tens of billions more into green energy flops like Solyndra as if they were genius stock pickers, like Warren Buffett. Even more dangerous is the rise of big government Republicanism, sometimes called National Conservatism, which espouses industrial policy.

Here we go again!

It's always the same category error.  If it isn't Japan envy, it's China envy.  A few years ago it was the Jarrett regency.  "[I]ndustrial policy is a way of generating rents and creating a swamp that has to be drained. I thought we had enough of Government Czars forty years ago, but Donald Boudreaux notes no bad idea ever goes away."  This time around it's Donald Trump playing text-a-tariff.  Mostly that's choking off shipments of European model train components to the States and other minor inconveniences.

PRESERVATION RAILWAYS HAVE THEIR BASKET CASE PROJECTS, TOO.

Last month, we saw some model railroading projects that included swap meet purchase, acquired cheaply, that will require a good deal of work before they run.

Preservation railways also take on basket case projects, as that is frequently the condition in which old and rare examples of the railroading art present themselves.

Such is the case with Car 162 at the East Troy Electric Railroad.  It might be the oldest extant car from a 1915 order Brill built for the Chicago and Milwaukee Electric Railway.  Sister car 160 is in regular service at Illinois Railway Museum.  Builder records suggest 162 was finished and delivered first.

The car was in the collection of a Connecticut museum for many years, where it was stored outside, and museum curators recognized they couldn't conserve everything, and perhaps cars representing railways closer to home ought be conserved first.  Thus it arrived at East Troy, and it is in the well-equipped repair shop to be worked on until the active-service cars rotate in for their winter overhauls.

WHY CHICAGO MIGHT GET A DOSE OF HOMELAND SECURITY.

Our President has been feuding with Chicago's mayor and his party comrade in the governor's office.

This camera man is going viral for filming Illinois Governor JB Pritzker declare, "I live rent free in the president's head!" and then panning DIRECTLY NEXT to where Pritzker is standing - TRUMP Tower.🤣

"I live rent free in the president's head. I wish he would spend some time… pic.twitter.com/hVpGrz29ZD

— Joni Job (@jj_talking) August 25, 2025

Chicago has given Our President two opportunities to appeal to the median voter on seriously skewed issues: its status as a sanctuary city, and its mostly peaceful summer weekends.  And yes, as CNN's Stephen Collinson notes, these United States are still a constitutional republic, and separation of powers is still a valid concept (if flung down and danced upon in the expediency of the moment by politicians).  "When Pritzker on [August 25] told Trump, 'Do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here,' he was echoing tensions fundamental to the American system of governance that were stirred at notable moments of US history — for instance, in the run-up to the Civil War and around federal enforcement of civil rights laws."

THE NEW ACELA IS SLOW.

The latest set of Amtrak fixed-formation electric trains are going into service, and although their suspensions have been improved to allow top speeds of 160 mph either side of Providence and 160 mph in the vicinity of Princeton Junction, they're still hampered by the nineteenth-century track they run on.

The existing track is twisty because it was stitched together out of numerous older railroads, many of which were optimized to the technology of the 1840s, and which originally existed to haul manufactured goods from town to port. The Washington to New York still uses Civil War era routes and tunnels through Baltimore that are almost that old. The electrification on that segment was added during the Depression, using Reconstruction Finance Corporation money. It was enough of an improvement to handle the logistics of World War II. But a high speed line? No. In Depression and War, the fastest and most flexible corridor service in the world was Chicago to St. Paul via four different routes. The New York to New Haven is primarily a commuter railroad that became electrically operated (primarily to comply with Manhattan smoke ordinances) early in the twentieth century. North of New Haven, there is a state-of-the-art electrical distribution system, but the rights of way date to railroading's Pleistocene era. Most of Rhode Island was still empty in those days, making straight line operation possible and providing today's racetrack for the Acela. But the right of way suitable for a high speed line is ... that of Interstate 95. The New Haven Railroad once acquired sufficient real estate for a faster line through Connecticut and western Rhode Island, but, to obtain temporary succour, it sold that real estate to the turnpike authority and then turned a freight profit hauling building materials.

An illustrated elaboration with the distressing details is available for your reading pleasure. "The biggest issues with this section are typically the wires, the age of the infrastructure, and sharing the inconsistent number of tracks."  For example, the Manhattan Gateway is still as Alexander J. Cassatt envisioned it around 1905.

First, we have the Dock Bridge, immediately outside Newark Penn Station, that will be getting a revamp for capacity and strength.

Second, we have the Sawtooth Bridges, east of Newark. These structures are over a century old, and are only double-tracked, but are being given 2 extra tracks, including more separation between the carriers that use it.

Third, we have the Portal Bridge, another century-old structure that’s currently being replaced by the Portal North Bridge directly next to it over the Hackensack River.

Fourth, and I’d argue most notably, the tunnels under the Hudson River.

Dock Bridge is an interesting bit of railway engineering, it is set up to provide a path for PATH (the old Hudson and Manhattan) trains for or from Newark even when the span is raised to clear most Hackensack River traffic; the four former Pennsylvania Railroad tracks get boated.  Portal is an old two-track swing bridge and the machinery is wearing out.  Sawtooth and the North River tunnels are a survival of the Standard Railroad of the World.  Commuter trains leaving Newark would head into Exchange Place station in Hoboken, leaving the tunnels for long distance Pennsylvania Railroad trains.  These days, though, the commuter trains share the tunnels with Amtrak's trains, and single-seat service trains off the Erie-Lackawanna get into the mix at Secaucus.

North of The Pennsylvania Station, those continual curves of the original New Haven Shore Line take their toll.  "Despite rocketing toward Providence at speeds approaching 160mph, the Acela’s average speed between New Haven, CT and Providence, RI is a meandering 68mph."  Any time savings over Amtrak's regional trains come from skipping stops such as New London or Westerly that the regionals make.  But the trains call at Metro Park in New Jersey and Route 128 near Boston, which perplexes the author of the post.  Simplest explanation: not all train riders travel city center to city center, and a peripheral parking lot near an expressway (Metro Park or 128) or an airport (Baltimore-Washington on the Northeast Corridor, Milwaukee Airport on the Hiawatha line) offers that sort of passenger a convenience.

The author of the post calls on readers to volunteer to open their wallets.  "As an American public, it is ultimately up to us to make our elected officials aware of our desire for our tax dollars to be spent responsibly and properly when it comes to passenger rail infrastructure."  That's a Cold Spring Shops point from six years ago.  "But nobody wants to put any money into more direct trackage. News flash: widening the turnpikes isn't going to help either."  Moreover, the road socialism the author contrasts with the penurious appropriations for Amtrak isn't the flex he thinks it is.  "The U.S. interstate highway system took $2 trillion and more than 60 years to complete. $25 billion in one-time capital spending for Amtrak isn’t going to get us even remotely close to what the average NEC train passenger deserves or expects."  The Interstate Highway System is crumbling under the weight of the ever-heavier semi-trailers clogging it, and the political support for spending more on it might not be there either.

PUT NOT YOUR FAITH IN EXPERTS.

We repeatedly ask, "What would we ever do without experts?" and we do so more in sorrow than in anger.  "Thus, the Fatal Conceit of the latter-day Platonists (the self-styled progressives) is in creating that cadre of Wise Experts who are going to protect the masses from their own foolishness."  We thus welcome "Another Reason Not to Trust the ‘Experts’"  Particularly because pronouncements from organizations claiming to represent Expertise have a lot of members who, in the manner of Junior Birdmen, sent their boxtops in.  "Five boxtops, Four bottle bottoms, Three wrappers, Two labels, And one thin dime!" Partridge in a pear tree optional.

One of the great lessons of the past decade is that when you read a variation of “experts say” in a headline, you ought to think twice and for yourself.

This week, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) voted on a resolution that accused Israel of committing genocide in its war against Hamas. Like moths to a flame, the mainstream press ran wild with the story of the organization’s declaration.

To be precise, the usual suspects within the mainstream press, you know, the organizations that are bent on baiting Our President into calling them fake news.

The Guardian quoted the president of the association, Melanie O’Brien, declaring that the resolution represented “a definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies that what is going on on the ground in Gaza is genocide.” In another interview with ABC News Australia, O’Brien boasted that the resolution passed with nearly 90 percent support.

There might be people within that organization with solid academic accomplishments and diplomatic experience.  These days, though, it takes more than a thin dime to become a member.

Let’s start with the organization itself. According to O’Brien, the members of her organization “mainly consist of people who are academics, so scholarly experts, but our membership is also made up of people who come from different communities within the field of genocide prevention, education, and punishment.”

On Tuesday evening, Salo Aizenberg, a board member of Honest Reporting and contributor to NGO Monitor, tested that proposition. After exploring the IAGS website, he found that he could become a member of the organization with just a $30 contribution. “This organization that purports to be a leading organization of scholars is open to anyone who is interested,” he told The Free Press.

After Aizenberg posted about his new membership to X, others joined in on the fun. Newly minted genocide scholars now include Emperor Palpatine, the villain of the Star Wars franchise; Adolf Hitler of Gaza City; and our favorite, “Mo Cookie,” who turns out to be the Cookie Monster wearing a green scarf with the Hamas logo.

And even with all that, and no boxtops or bottlecaps required, the membership is around 500 with fewer than 200 signatories to the declaration.  The general lesson, though, applies to any other invocation of Experts.

Whatever one wants to call this, it’s not scholarship. But it’s also—at this point—to be expected. To read a headline with “[Insert Topic], Experts Say” today begs disbelief on the part of the reader, in part because of stories like this one. Activists are dressed up as scholars and subject matter experts, and their words are taken as gospel in news reports.

Newsies can go shopping for sympathetic "experts" who will provide impressive sounding explanations in support of whatever Narrative the newsie in question seeks to support.  It all makes for more work for people who seek an approximation of the truth, because deconstruction of coherent beliefs simply compounds the incoherence.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

Pajamas Media contributor Jamie K. Wilson offers one system of belief under the rubric of "toxic masculinity."

Walk into almost any school today, and you’ll see it: boys being told, in a hundred subtle ways, that their very nature is a problem. They’re too loud. Too restless. Too competitive. Too aggressive. If they’re not sitting still and coloring quietly, something must be wrong with them.

The phrases we use are damning — toxic masculinity, patriarchy, problematic behavior. And the message comes through loud and clear: There is something inherently bad about being a boy.

It doesn’t stop at the classroom. Media and advertising make fathers look like bumbling idiots. Hollywood pushes anti-masculine agendas, praising movies with girlbosses and trans messaging. Publishers, under pressure to meet ideological quotas, push books that prize grievance or identity politics over adventure and responsibility. Contemporary children’s series feature main characters who are passive, self-absorbed, or perpetually “discovering” new identities — while the daring, loyal, adventurous boy hero has all but vanished.

Taken together, schools, teachers, culture, and publishing form an echo chamber that tells boys, You are guilty before you’ve even begun.

Narrative psychology would predict the result. This is the field that studies how the stories we tell ourselves shape who we are. People build their identities like a story, with characters, conflicts, and resolutions drawn from the tales around them.

When you hand children a story of shame, they internalize it. Some will suppress their instincts until they can barely function. Others will rebel by embracing destructive caricatures of manhood, because that is the only model of strength they see. And some learn to hate themselves and their bodies so much that they embrace transgender ideology, believing escape from boyhood is their only hope of acceptance.

Either way, their true nature is submerged, drowned under a world that demands they be tame, quiet, compliant — and, frankly, feminine. This isn’t just bad for boys; it’s bad for all of us. Civilization needs both halves of humanity, masculine and feminine, yin and yang. Cut one off, and the whole body limps.

Common Dreams contributor Ishimwe Felicien offers a second belief system.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is now the second leading cause of death among males aged 15-29, and suicide rates among young men in the US have risen by roughly a third since 2010. Across much of Africa, where I work as a public health and gender equality practitioner, men make up the vast majority of suicide deaths, and in Lesotho, the country with the highest suicide rate globally, men are dying at three times the rate of women.

Rigid gender roles may be to blame. Masculine representations rooted in ideals that reward toughness, emotional suppression, and dominance are quietly accelerating a mental health crisis among young men. These rigid norms don’t simply discourage boys from seeking help; they actively shame vulnerability, equate emotional expression with weakness, and isolate those who are struggling. In cultures where being “a real man” means staying silent, mental distress festers in the dark. Unless we confront and transform these harmful ideals, any global response to youth mental health will be incomplete—and too late for many.

Those two belief systems might well be irreconcilable.  Mr Wilson proposes exposing young boys to those masculine representations.  "Little boys don’t need moral lectures—they need imagination, loyalty, and persistence."

[Stories that] teach boys that their energy and strength are not shameful but essential — when channeled through honor and sacrifice. They remind girls that courage, loyalty, and virtue are not limited to one sex. They give both boys and girls heroes to look up to, adventures to imitate, and virtues to practice. And parents and grandparents can discuss the stories later, ensuring their young ones absorb the great lessons inherent in these works.

This is also why publishing new works matters. The classics are irreplaceable, but children deserve fresh stories that carry the same moral weight.

In Africa, though, there's too much honor and sacrifice and not enough feminism.

This means introducing gender-transformative education that teaches emotional literacy and normalizes help seeking as strength. We need male-friendly, culturally grounded safe spaces in schools, sports clubs, faith groups, and online where boys can be vulnerable without judgment. Mental health professionals must adopt gender transformative approaches that understand masculinity’s impact on behavior.

Above all, media and storytelling must shift the narrative so boys grow up knowing that feeling is not failure. Imagine a generation of boys brave enough to ask for help, a future where strength includes compassion, and manhood means connection, not isolation. This is the future we owe boys and men. No young man should have to choose between silence and survival.

It seems, though, that it's the absence of opportunities for boys to become men, whether by the machinations of the Caring Classes in the United States and other rich countries, or by the absence of emergence and market economies in Africa, that is behind the troubles with boys.

In many parts of Africa, young men grow up under intense pressure to become providers, protectors, and problem-solvers. These roles and expectations are deeply tied to their perceived worth. But when systemic barriers like poverty, unemployment, or lack of education make these ideals unreachable, the emotional toll can be devastating. With mental health services scarce and stigma-free spaces almost nonexistent, many suffer in silence.

Instead of seeking support through therapy or confiding in someone they trust, many young men cope with inner distress by turning to alcohol, aggression, or silent withdrawal. These internalized ideals of “staying strong” act like slow-burning fuses. Left unaddressed, emotional strain builds until it erupts often into breakdowns, which spiral into isolation, and eventually, into tragedy. Many of these young men appear perfectly “fine” on the surface, attending school, church, or work, making it easy for their pain to go unnoticed, even by those closest to them. While many girls and young women are increasingly accessing mental health resources even in under-resourced settings, young men remain notably absent from these services.

I don't know, maybe if you stop telling boys that they're toxic, you'll get better-adjusted men.

A FISKING.

Former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines has been doing women's sports a solid.

Riley Gaines has taken up the cause of keeping crossers with residual male musculature out of women's sports.  That's having salutary effects on public perceptions of higher education.  "If you're going to deny coherent beliefs, everybody else has to be in on the con.  A gratifyingly large cohort of current students is not.  Nor should they respect anyone, holder of a terminal degree or not, who is condescending, disrespectful, or too full of himself."

For taking up that cause, she has apparently crossed Ruth Graham, Dallas stringer with New York's Times.  "The former college swimmer has used her race against Lia Thomas, a trans athlete, to propel her career as an influential, and unsparing, activist."

CONCLUDING SCHÜTZENFEST SEASON.

We've noted the continuation of Prussian military traditions in the local Schützenfest street parades, and so too with the closing ceremonies, the Großer Zapfenstreich.  The title literally refers to the drawing of a string to finish the tapping of the beer, although it is the military equivalent of securing the colors with Retreat.

Usually the Zapfenstreich occurs after dark, hence the torchbearers, and traditionally after the national anthem comes Beethoven's Yorkscher March.

With the Germans again establishing a presence in Livonia, and recently resuming conscription, it's possible we'll be seeing those Prussian military traditions more frequently.

WE'RE BETTER PEOPLE. WE CARE MORE.

Rush Limbaugh had at least one opportunity a week to call out the Smug Intellectuals who took that stance.

Collectivists (those who stand for government control of the means of production and how people live their lives) promise heaven but deliver hell. For them, the promised end justifies the means.”

Meaning, it doesn’t matter how many times our programs don’t work. It doesn’t matter how many times our programs fail. It doesn’t matter how much misery our programs cost and cause, it is our intentions that you must examine, our good intentions. We are good people. We are better people than you. We care more. We love more. We are more tolerant and we know what’s better for you than you do, and we want, and we demand, and we will make. And whenever it fails we’re not allowed to examine the details of the failure. We’re always supposed to focus on their good intentions. The promised end, that carrot dangling way out there in the future, all this utopia that they claim to be able to bring, it never happens.

Arnold Kling runs with a variation on that argument.  Are you ready for a throw-down?

My sense is that the central dogma of partisan Democrats is that they are the best political party because they are morally and intellectually superior to other Americans.  Contemplating otherwise is as difficult for the moderate wing of Klein and Yglesias as it is for the wokest of the woke.

The classic analysis of this core belief is Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.  Sowell argues that people on the left who are politically engaged behave as if they were anointed with wisdom that others lack.  This belief is so strongly held that nothing counts as evidence against it.  It is an axiom, not an empirically falsifiable proposition.

The anointed see opposition not in terms of a mere difference of opinion.  It is illegitimate.  Their yard signs that say “We believe” in science, justice, and so on are nothing less than an accusation that you don’t believe in such things unless you are on their team.

Voltaire supposedly said something like “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  The anointed will instead condemn what you say as hate speech or misinformation.

Strong stuff.  It's possible that the people who consider themselves "anointed" proffer what they consider "sophisticated" or "nuanced" arguments in support of their positions, and they understand just enough of their own position to be able to brush off most objections as "simplistic."  That "intellectual superiority?"  Credentials, carefully burnished.  Think of the institutions that top the U.S. News league tables as tack rooms where graduates are issued their boots and spurs and turned loose to saddle and ride the "benighted."  Never mind that those people are, to borrow from Salena Zito, "highly educated scolds" who cling to their "ideologies and abstractions."  Which is to say, simplistic thinking dressed up in wordnoise.

It's all too much for Mr Kling.

For the anointed, losing the confidence of the public is like falling off a horse. The “abundance movement” is, like the ill-fated Robert F. Kennedy candidacy, a campaign to get the anointed back on to the horse.

The blind spot of the anointed is their inability to see that they do not belong on the horse to begin with. There is no class of Americans that is morally and intellectually superior to everyone else. Instead, each of us should be modest about what we claim to be the best way to approach political problems.

You can stir up resentment in America by talking about inequality. You can rail against “oligarchs,” landlords, and grocery stores. Or you can champion “abundance,” meaning the ability of government to build things without its own regulations getting in the way. But if you do so from the standpoint of assuming your own moral and intellectual superiority, you will find your popularity is limited, and deservedly so.

To which I can only add, "sophisticated" and "nuanced" are highfalutin' ways of describing "complicated" and "wrong" and "dressed up in wordnoise," which I refer to as "inclusive euphemism" and Pajamas Media's Jamie Wilson calls the euphemism treadmill.  "The fight for language is the fight for reality itself. If we lose our words, we lose our world."

NONE DARE CALL IT GENTRIFICATION.

A long time ago, when Our Political Masters still had illusions of nation building, I opted to be provocative.

I claim no expertise in matters geopolitical, but wish to observe that the liberation of Iraq has a lot in common with urban gentrification.  [Say what??] (Bear with me)  People who get into urban gentrification like to find fancy old houses that they can buy on the cheap and fix up over the course of years. That often involves living in neighborhoods that are, well, trashed. From my experience with the phenomenon, such people do not like to be thought of as urban pioneers, as that image gives the suggestion that all was wilderness before they came. Think of Iraq as a fixer-upper in an old neighborhood (goes back to the Garden of Eden and Hammurabi and Scheherezade.) It's a fixer-upper with a lot of potential (some of the upper-middle-class Baghdad neighborhoods I saw in the 1991 Gulf War coverage had a Californian look to them, and the schools and agriculture and energy industries used to work well, although it has been a few years since the Baghdad Orient Express left for Istanbul.) One of the downsides of gentrification is that your work will attract the attention of thieves, and you might have to exercise some effort to persuade the dope peddlers and hookers to ply their trade elsewhere. (Substitute Islamofascists and Ba'athist nostalgics.) Thus, expect some trouble. The difficult test will be for the coalition to find the right mix of power and example to deal with the trouble (sometimes you have to send in the cops and take a few crack houses down, sometimes success in one neighborhood will lead to imitation in other neighborhoods.)

That didn't turn out too well for the Iraqis, whether Arab, Kurd, or any other ethnicity.

EIGHTY YEARS AGO.

This is what victory looks like.

USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
Unattributed photograph retrieved from Ace of Spades.

The way the surrender came to pass continues to provoke people.  There's a provocative hypothesis nailed to Newmark's Door:  "Did the Nagasaki bomber ‘miss’ on purpose to save lives?"