IT'S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME.

Never mind the bellowings of Crazy Bernie.

In one America, the richest people are becoming obscenely richer and have never, ever had it so good. That America is overflowing with unimaginable wealth, greed and opulence that makes the Gilded Age seem very modest.

And then there is a second America – an America where a majority of people live paycheck to paycheck, struggling to secure the very basic necessities of life – food, healthcare, housing and education.

The simple truth is that never before in our history have so few had so much wealth and power while so many live in economic desperation.

I await a comparison to how unequally held the wealth and the power were in those days when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.  Crazy Bernie would no doubt argue that Cyrenius didn't have a private jet.

They fly on private jets and helicopters they own. They live in mansions all over the world, send their kids to the most elite private schools and vacation on their own islands. And, for fun, some spend millions to fly off into space on their own rocket ships.

And then there is the other America, where the vast majority of our people live. For them, the economy is not just broken, it is collapsing. In this America, despite a massive increase in worker productivity, real weekly wages for the average American worker are lower today than they were more than 52 years ago.

In this America, people are unable to afford a doctor’s visit (if they’re lucky enough to find one); are paying over half of their limited incomes on rent or a mortgage; and are unable to afford the outrageous cost of childcare or send their kids to college. In this America, the price of vegetables, fruit and other healthy foods is beyond the budget for many.

For most Americans, the system is not just broken, it is collapsing and is increasingly resembling life in the third world.

That people might not be able to find a physician because of the Medicare reimbursement rates or face an "outrageous cost of childcare" because the women who used to do such work are now in the law offices and corporate suites is beyond his comprehension.

THE LUNACY THAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES.

Today's howler?  "Trump Is Using ‘Classical Architecture’ as ‘A Dog Whistle for White Nationalists.’"  The timing might be influenced by Our President commencing his tribute to the Corinthian Room as an extension of the east wing of the White House.

My stance has been that there can not be too much of that grand Roman quality in public buildings, and a president who might share that sentiment can't be all bad.

But if you're Layla Jones, covering the identity politics beat for Talking Points Memo, you're hearing those boots thwacking on the Alexanderplatz, or something.  And it's easy enough to find an academic to validate your delusions.

By seeking to assert control over civic architecture, Trump is creating a physical testament to his destruction of democracy, Reinhold Martin, an architecture historian and Columbia University Professor, told TPM. It’s an aesthetic offshoot of Project 2025’s goal to gut public welfare and government services, Martin said.

“It’s a project of demolition, and that’s why I’m saying the laughable but also obviously very tragic and historically disastrous outcome of this would be a series of empty basically stage sets,” Martin said, “empty political monuments, buildings with nothing in them because they fired everybody.”

Trump is also leaning on the idea that architecture can be used — as groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy realized in the post-Reconstruction era — to hearken back to a whiter past.

“The classical architecture stuff is a dog whistle for white nationalists,” said Martin, who co-edited a book titled “Architecture against Democracy.”

Architecture in America has been associated with “an American public, a democratic body, a democratic society,” Martin told TPM, “but also an imperial society, a slave-owning society, a commercial society. Classical architecture covers all of this.”

That's an interesting argument, in an academic book with the indirect cost return capitalized into the price of the hardback.  Plantation big houses have colonnades, as do Congregational churches watching over New England village greens.  "Greek Revival architecture was a favorite among southern plantation owners at the height of slavery, chosen explicitly for its links between civic power and human enslavement."  Fine, now do the meeting-house or the Boston and Maine station building.  Toward the end, guess who joins the conversation.  “Adolf Hitler had Albert Speer, right?”

And these people wonder why we keep getting more Trump.

The president’s architectural EO is in keeping with this reclamation of a bygone culture shaped by American expansionism, strict gender and racial hierarchies, xenophobia, and less advanced scientific development.

Periods of racial progress, like the civil rights movement and national movement for Black lives that came to a head in 2020, are usually met by fierce backlash. And Mabel Wilson, a professor of architectural history theory at Columbia University, told TPM it’s no surprise that this dynamic reaches into the arts and architecture.

“We make progress on one end,” Wilson said, “and then there’s immediate backlash because the system rewards people.”

“Architecture speaks silently,” Martin told TPM. “The attempt to revive classical architecture under current political conditions is an attempt that speaks silently about dismantling not just the ideas that were expressed in 2020, but the institutions of civil rights. And so it speaks silently the language of white nationalism. And that is well known, but it’s very difficult to literally demonstrate or prove. That’s why it’s so effective, because it’s easily deniable.”

For "easily deniable," substitute "visible only to Columbia professors," which is to say, "difficult to literally demonstrate" as it is in the class of ideas so loopy only a senior academician at a highly regarded university would hold them.

BASEBALL'S HARD-KNOCK LIVES REDEEMED.

Milwaukee sports reporter Bob Nightengale sits down with Milwaukee Brewer manager Pat Murphy.

Pat Murphy arrives to his Milwaukee Brewers office with a large mug of coffee, notebook in his hand, and a soul to bare.

He warmly welcomes you, proudly talks about the personal photographs and pictures in his office, and if you truly want to know about the 66-year-old former boxer with three failed legal marriages, kids ranging from 39 to 6, the son of an alcoholic father who nearly spiraled down the same path, well, pull up a chair and listen.

The life stories of baseball's greats often include that hardscrabble existence.  The Scholastic Book Service Babe Ruth Story paperback opens "I was a bad kid.  I say that without pride."  Fifty years ago, the Brewers drafted Darrell Porter, who ultimately won a World Series with the Cardinals in 1982, and there are echoes of his story in Mr Murphy's recollections.

He didn’t have a single drink, or even a sip of the Korbel Brut champagne or Budweiser that were wildly sprayed in their clubhouse, avoiding all of the temptations of alcohol.

“When I used to drink," Murphy says, “I wanted to either fight or (expletive).

“Both of them lead to bad things."

Murphy doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t even smile. But facts are facts.

“Drinking is everywhere in this game," Murphy says during his wide-ranging 90-minute interview with USA TODAY Sports. “But I can’t. I watched the disease kill my dad. I watched it kill (former Oakland Athletics All-Star pitcher) Bobby Welch. It’s just too personal.

“I don’t care if people drink and laugh at me for awhile, but I can go out and hang with you and you’ll think I’m drinking."

There's much more in the article, dear reader.  I'll leave you with this.

Murphy, who grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., and fought, drank and played sports having no idea what he was going to do with his life, still has trouble believing he’s the manager of the Milwaukee Brewers.

He couldn’t even manage his personal life, so how in the world was he going to lead a major-league team?

Scroll over, read the rest, reflect on your blessings, or contemplate what there might be in baseball that often brings out the excellence in people who might otherwise be down and out.  And sometimes the perspective to recognize that when a mentor takes an offer from a competing team, it's business.

AN EPITAPH FOR COMMUNISM.

“We didn’t invest in real estate—we invested in a political system we didn’t understand.”  Yes, that has "Friday short take" written all over it, but that series has been suspended for taking up too much time.

It's an Economic World summary of what is going wrong in Red China as they got old before they got rich.

For years, international investors poured billions into China’s booming property market, drawn by promises of rapid urbanization, soaring apartment demand, and a government committed to growth. Today, that once-promising bet—valued at more than $140 billion—has become one of the biggest financial traps in modern real estate history.

Private equity firms, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and pension managers from the U.S., Europe, and Asia are now stranded in distressed Chinese property assets that are nearly impossible to sell. Some portfolios have suffered 80–95% value collapses, while others are entangled in bankruptcies, halted construction, legal disputes, or regulatory freezes.

Among the article's conclusions:  "China is no longer a guaranteed growth market."

Buckle in.

A REQUIEM FOR THE WELFARE ECONOMICS PARADIGM.

The Hoover Institution honors Thomas Sowell and John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane will offer thoughts on Mr Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions, which is somewhere amid the stacks of books still to read while I am able, and perhaps, based on the contents of the essay, will be moved to the top of a pile.  (Postseason baseball has not turned out to the Brewers' advantage, which might free up some reading time.)

TWO-FOUR-SIX-EIGHT, SMASH THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE.

Barbara "Maha" O'Brien attended one of Saturday's Democrat pep rallies, somewhere in Washington Irving country, and posted a picture.

Barbara O'Brien photograph retrieved from Mahablog.

I'll leave it to others, such as Joe Concha in Washington's Examiner, to nit-pick the "no more tyrants" message.

Sarcasm aside, these protests, while large in scale, were attended by mostly older people who likely were also part of the Vietnam protests yearning for the past, but also something to feel morally superior about today.

In this case, the cause is “saving democracy.” Or something. And these folks could not be any more hypocritical.

Back in 2024, Democrats were also screeching about “saving democracy” from Donald Trump, only to oust a sitting president from the nomination and install Kamala Harris without one single vote from the public, Soviet-style. Democrats cheered the lawfare and weaponization of the justice system in an effort to take down Trump before the election. They also supported taking him off state ballots in places such as Maine and Colorado. And when Trump was banned from most social media, they argued that censorship of conservatives was necessary to save the republic.

This is also the same group that overwhelmingly supports stacking the Supreme Court with liberal justices, adding two states, D.C. and Puerto Rico, and abolishing the Electoral College, defying the Founding Fathers’ desire to strike a balance between large and small states. They believed in forcing people to take the COVID-19 vaccine — so much for “my body, my choice” — and masking children as young as 2 years old who were never at risk.

In other words, to “save democracy,” the most essential parts of the Constitution need to be blown up in the name of one-party rule. Makes total sense.

And here’s why these protests don’t mean anything in the end: No Kings will not convert almost any Trump supporters to the other side. In fact, almost all moderates will be pushed further away from the far-left wing of the party.

True much of that might be, and yet Our President is doing everything he can to push moderates away.

CONSERVING ANCIENT CLOCKS.

A few years ago, Cold Spring Shops added a toy clock to the study.  We've subsequently learned more about the song it plays.  Tradition has composer Henry Clay Work being inspired by the story of a broken floor clock in a North Country inn.  There might be a second element to the song, though, in the Work family house in Massachusetts.

That very clock sat in Dan Parker’s grandfather’s home in Massachusetts when Parker, now retired and living at the Holly Creek retirement community in Centennial, was growing up.

“The first time I was aware of it I was about 5 years old or so,” Parker said. “We lived on the second floor of the farmhouse and my grandparents were on — the clock lived on the first floor. I'd hear it strike and that didn't bother me any. But then the first time I saw it I was about, oh, I don't know, but maybe 36, 40 inches tall … I had to just about bend back over to see the top.”

The song was written in 1876 by a well-known composer named Henry Clay Work, who was married to Parker’s second-great aunt. Counting back from then and noting the song’s lyric “it stood 90 years on the floor,” Parker figures the clock was built sometime in the early 1790s.

That Mr Work might have borrowed details from the history of his clock is how art proceeds, but, clearly, if Dan Parker is hearing it chiming during this century, that clock could not have stopped. short. never to go again.

DONALD TRUMP HAS FIGURED OUT HOW TO DO THE PRESIDENTIAL CULT.

The "No Kings" protesters miss the structural problem.  "There's nothing quite like an imperial president using the presidential powers a previous generation of self-styled progressives hailed in ways the current generation of self-styled progressives abhor."  They have also missed the opportunity to engage in constructive introspection.

By any normal standards, Donald Trump should never have come anywhere near the White House again.  Pick your transgression: claiming victory before the absentee votes came in, injecting himself into the Georgia senate runoffs of 2020-2021 in such a way as to destroy the last opportunity to gridlock the Biden presidency, then there was that futile and stupid gesture at the Federal Capitol; and in the 2022 Congressional elections, almost all of the aspiring senators he endorsed (Herschel Walker???  Mehmet Oz???) lost, and the Democrats didn't have to keep a bottle of bourbon at the head desk in case the vice-president had to break a tie.  And yet, here he is.

Right now, I'm not sure whether the biggest blunder of the first quarter of this century is Gazans putting the only people capable of turning Mediterranean beachfront property into a jihadi slum or Democrats doing "hope and change" in such a ham-handed way as to twice drive people to Trumpian populism.  Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball elaborates.

Donald Trump was elected chiefly because he promised to do four things: (1) seal the Southern border; (2) remove the millions of illegal immigrants preying upon the country; (3) wage war upon the reign of woke ideology; (4) jump-start and Americanize the moribund economy. Nota bene: these are things he campaigned on. Things he was elected to do. This is what people voted for. And that is precisely what the “No Kings” mob is protesting.

Meanwhile, the “No Kings” automata were happy to acquiesce in Biden’s neo-totalitarian deep-state rule. Censorship was okay. The Covid shut-down was okay. The harassment and prosecution of one’s political enemies was just what the doctor ordered. The effort to destroy Trump was okay. It isn’t kings these people oppose; it is just the fact that their king lost his crown and their court was displaced.

Moreover, Steve Scalise is still in rehab, Charlie Kirk is dead, and the Militant Normals are probably fine with Our President posting cartoons in which he's dressed as a king and doing a poop drop.  His fans are loving it, and he's not going to change, so enjoy it.

THE ETERNALLY FRUSTRATING YET FASCINATING GAME OF BASEBALL.

During the regular season, the Milwaukee Brewers won all six games they played facing the Brooklyn Trolley, now Los Angeles, Dodgers.  Those wins bracketed the All-Star break, part of a long winning streak that put the Crew atop the division without paying off in hamburgers.  The hamburgers came later.

Five of those six games were close, sometimes determined by the relief pitchers.  In the first, though, the Crew chased starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto in 2/3 of an inning, which might have been how one awakens a sleeping giant and fills him with a terrible resolve.  The other five Dodgers who took losses: Clayton Kershaw, Kirby Yates, Tyler Glasnow, Emmet Sheehan, and Lou Trivino, who finished the season with the Phillies.

WELL, YES.

The Sporting News's Jeremy Beren notes, "The WNBA's refereeing crisis might have one simple solution."

Not this.  "Raising the standard of WNBA officiating ranks toward the top of the list."

Not this.  "[A]ccording to Sue Blauch, the WNBA's associate VP of referee performance and development, the league has to be ready to hire more people, and cannot be satisfied simply with the new task force or an NBA-style last two minutes report."

This?  "WNBA referees are unsalaried contractors who are paid between $1,500 and $2,500 per game; their NBA counterparts take in up to $550,000 per season."

You get what you pay for.

ZENO'S CRYPTOCURRENCY.

Robert Reich sees two information technology bubbles.  First up, artificial intelligence.  "[It] is worrisome enough as is — its insatiable thirst for energy and water, its capacities to override the wishes of human beings, its potential to destroy the planet." Think about HAL 9000.  Then the crypto-currencies.  "It’s growing because investors believe other investors will keep buying it."  Tyler "Zero Hedge" Durden, who differs with the diminutive former labor secretary on many other things, also raises the possibility of such bubbles.

Every bubble has a story at its core. In 1999, that story was the internet: a transformational technology that would reshape commerce, communications, and culture. Investors saw the future, bid prices into the stratosphere, and assumed profits would inevitably follow. In 2025, the story is artificial intelligence, which carries the same irresistible promise of reshaping industries, creating productivity booms, and unlocking new frontiers. The parallels are hard to miss, along with the current price action.

Both posts note people living near existing or proposed server centers objecting to their presence.

NPR on Tuesday similarly reported that fights over data center construction are happening nationwide, as residents who live near proposed construction sites have expressed concerns about the amount of water and electricity they will consume at the expense of local communities.

“A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest under development will consume 20 times more,” NPRexplained, citing a report from the International Energy Agency. “They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to keep all that computer hardware cool.”

Data centers’ massive water use has been a consistent concern across the US. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Monday that residents of the township of East Vincent, Pennsylvania have seen their wells dry up recently, and they are worried that a proposed data center would significantly exacerbate water shortages.

This is what has been happening in Mansfield, Georgia, a community that for years has experienced problems with its water supply ever since tech giant Meta began building a data center there in 2018.

I'm not sure how much of that processing power is going to solving the problems of the world, and how much is going to solving for the next tranche of cryptocurrency.  Recall that Bitcoin credibly committed itself to offering a finite number of coins, which are mined electronically, in the early days you'd have people leasing some of the processor power on networked desktop computers in return for a piece of the action; these days it's probably a task for a data center with lots of calculating power.

The mining of any crypto-currency is a canonical example of rent dissipation.  At any time there are several mining operations at work attempting to settle the next hash.  "It takes trillions of attempts for the network of miners to find the solution."  And if the algorithm that creates the next coin raises the level of difficulty as the number of remaining coins dwindle, why, we're in Zeno's world, where you can get halfway to the final coin, and halfway again, and half of that halfway, ad infinitum, where the total value of the computing power far exceeds the value to be set free, and yet, the race to create the next coin might go on, despite Bitcoin's creators making the challenge more difficult over time.  "Due to the halving process and increasing prices, miners want to receive as many bitcoins as possible because the supply of new coins is slowly dwindling. Sometime around 2140, no more new bitcoins will be created."

DEPLORABLE-SHAMING WILL GET YOU NOWHERE.

A chat-room conversation among Young Republicans, some approaching middle age, went public a few days ago, and another round of deplorable-shaming has followed.

These people are weirdly disinterested in policy except for policy in service to their psychological issues — marginalizing the poor, minorities, and women who are not properly under their control. See The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MAGA Movement by a couple of academic nerds. Really, it all fits — the obsession with immigrants, often coming from people who are first or second generation Americans themselves (like Trump and Miller). The obsession with enforcing a weirdly un-Christian version of Christianity at a time when people are losing interest in organized religion. The disenfranchisement of minorities, the control of women’s bodies, the dismantling of the social safety net to provide more money for the rich. This is coming from people who, deep down, are terrified of a changing and diverse world. All this locker-room talk is false bravado masking their fears.

Perhaps Barbara "Maha" O'Brien should have recognized how pathetic those academic nerds are.  Here's the abstract, full of the expected nerdy tics.

While existing explanations emphasize partisanship, economic anxiety, racial resentment, rural identity, and media polarization, we underscore a less-explored explanation for Trump’s core support: it is a status-based social movement. We find that Trump’s activists are not simply voters responding to policy preferences or culture-war appeals but are also participants in a grassroots social movement organized around a shared perception of lost honor, declining esteem, and institutional disrespect. To make this argument we use the concept of the symbolic politics of status to explain how political conflict extends beyond contests over material distribution or moral values to include battles over whose values and lifestyles are considered worthy. For MAGA activists, reclaiming lost status means seeking public affirmation for identities they feel have been unfairly denigrated. The MAGA movement blends grievance with joy, cultivating pride, belonging, and celebration alongside anger at elites. By centering status in our analysis, we offer an integrative framework that connects material, cultural, and emotional motivations into a broader account of MAGA as a right-wing social movement grounded in grassroots populism.

All of what you'd expect of a Minimal Publishable Unit in Perspectives in Politics.  None of it of any value.  A chart in Ruy "Liberal Patriot" Teixeira's "Democrats and 'The Vision Thing'" does more than all the culture-studies-integrative-framework bafflegab can ever do.

Searchlight Institute "doomsday chart" retrieved from Liberal Patriot.

THOSE WHO NOW WILL BLESS THE POOR.

Before the first pitch was thrown in the Hiawatha series, the Catholic prelates of Milwaukee and Chicago had a collegial wager.  "Archbishop Jeffery Grob of Milwaukee and Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, made a bet – the losing city would send the winning city a staple item of their hometown."

It was the archdiocese of the losing city that had to settle up, shipping food to the other city.  "It started as a friendly bet between Chicago and Milwaukee’s archbishops and ended with deep-dish pizza served to dozens of people right here in Milwaukee. A final taste of victory over the Cubs before the Brewers move on to the Dodgers."  Milwaukee's archbishop, though, sent the bratwurst to a Chicago pantry.  "Although the Brewers may have beat the Chicago Cubs, Archbishop Grob says he will still deliver 100 brats donated by Bunzel’s to Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood."

The prelates of Milwaukee and Los Angeles are negotiating the terms of a similar bet.

RECLAIMING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.

Our President will confer a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom on Charlie Kirk on what would have been his 32nd birthday.

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, continues to get the Turning Point phenomenon wrong. "Charlie Kirk’s murder is pushing more conservative college students to start Turning Point USA chapters in the name of advancing civil discourse. But critics fear the group’s expansion will only exacerbate tensions on already fractured campuses."  That's wrong for reasons we have long noted.

THE LEVER OF RICHES INVOLVES TRADE-OFFS.

That follows because innovations are Marshallian improvements.

Some economists use the term "Marshallian improvement" (I stole it from one of Paul Krugman's policy books, don't remember which one, sorry) to refer to a situation in which social welfare increases in the aggregate despite losses to some agents. To visualize this, draw a production possibility curve, pick an allocation of output along it, draw a new production possibility curve to the right of the old one, and pick an allocation of output that is NOT to the northeast of the old one. You've just identified a Marshallian improvement, in the form of expanded output, but one that requires some people to give up some of their current consumption to make the improvement happen.

Thirty years ago, recently recognized Northwestern economic historian Joel Mokyr reviewed Kirkpatrick Sale's Rebels Against the Future to spell out the trade-offs.  (And multiple cheers for Reason retroactively storing many of their print articles, my copy of the issue having long since gone for recycling, online.)

Ever since Prometheus discovered fire and Daedalus the art of flying, some people have felt uncomfortable and guilty about technology, and in each generation we can find some evidence of "Luddism," a hostile attitude toward the tools and ideas that are meant to make society richer.

What explains technophobia? The opponents of technological change are neither fools nor demons, their arguments neither insane nor ignorant. While on the whole their resistance is both misguided and futile, it is imperative to understand the roots and sources of their attitude. To start with, not all enemies of technological progress were created alike. The most fundamental distinction is between the victims and the ideologues.

Technological progress inevitably has victims. It is difficult to think of a single invention in history, no matter how beneficial to society, that did not make somebody worse off. Once a technique is replaced, those who had invested in the old way of doing things end up losing their investment. If physical equipment and human skills could painlessly and costlessly be converted from technique to technique, innovation might have only beneficiaries. In practice, obsolescence is inevitable, and thus there is pain and suffering for some even when society as a whole benefits. Technological progress in a free market society means that on the whole the benefits exceed the costs, so that society is better off, even if the improvement is not "Pareto-superior," as the economists like to say. Those at the losing end of the story, whose jobs may disappear, whose skills and equipment become worthless once they are replaced by machine, would be rational to do all they can to stop the competitive market process that threatens them.

The political economy of Marshallian improvements is messy, because Pareto-superiority isn't likely when machinery displaces either people who work with their muscles, consider the diesel locomotive, or people who work by their wits and dexterity, consider Ned Ludd and his fellow blue-collar aristocrats who would be replaced by loom tenders.

IT TURNS OUT I'M THE GENTLEMANLY BEER SNOB.

I limit myself to referring to India Pale Ale as headache in a glass.  The notionally Christian Babylon Bee eschews any Christian charity.  "Popular New Craft IPA Just Bottle Of Pine-Sol."  It's a re-issue of an August 2019 post, which is really uncharitable, and yet, with Oktoberfest season winding down, it's worth re-issuing with elaboration.

A popular new craft IPA created by Stonemission Point Brewery is actually just a bottle of Pine-Sol, sources at the brewery admitted Thursday.

"Our new Pine-Sol IPA has that piney, hoppy flavor you love, plus it kills 99.9% of germs," said Paolo Antony, head brewer for Stonemission Point. "We source only the best cleaning agents, ethoxylated undecyl alcohol, pine oil, benzoic acids, and of course, way more hops than any beverage should ever have. Then, we brew it with care for several weeks before we serve it to our happy customers at any of our fine tasting rooms across the greater San Diego region."

When the beer was introduced, bearded hipsters across the city were seen lining up around the block for a taste of the coveted Pine-Sol IPA.

"I used to like Ballast Point's Grapefruit Sculpin IPA because I love the taste of Grapefruit with just a hint of Pine-Sol," said Aaron Balder as he twirled his mustache. "But when I heard that Stonemission Point was introducing a brew that was basically just pure Pine-Sol, I poured all that Scuplin down the drain. I'm a Pine-Sol man now, through and through."

Let's say that what America's Newspaper of Record^TM has Stonemission working on next isn't according to Reinheitsgebot standards either!

THE MAN OF SYSTEM CANNOT FLIP THE LEVER OF RICHES.

Marginal Revolution manager Tyler Cowen notes, "Nobel Prize in economics goes to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt and Joel Mokyr."  It's encouraging to see the award recognizing something other than the technocratic Welfare Economics Paradigm.

Excellent choices.  Here is the press release with links to longer discussions of their works.

This is a prize for economic growth, and for the ideas of creative destruction.  Those are some of the most important ideas in economics, so I could not be happier with this pick.  Joel Mokyr in particular has been a long-time associate of GMU and Mercatus, so I would like to congratulate him in particular.

Aghion is at INSEAD in France, Howitt at Brown, and Mokyr at Northwestern.  It is also nice to see some people outside of “the usual schools” winning the prize.  Aghion and Howitt, of course, worked together to produce a model of creative destruction and economic growth.  Here are their key papers together.

Joel Mokyr is an economic historian, and best known for his pioneering work in explaining the Industrial Revolution in England.  Here are his best-known works.  Read The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena and A Culture of Growth.  I have benefited most from The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850.  He has a new book coming out in November, with Tabellini and Greif.  It is correct to consider him as an “Enlightenment thinker.”  Brian Albrecht has a good thread on this.

Below you can find individual posts on Aghion, Howitt, and also Mokyr.  Here is Alex’s post on the prize.

By all means surf over to all the links!

WHEN AMERICAN FLYER OWNERS GET TENURE?

Years ago, the owners of American Flyer trains would slag on Lionel owners because the former had two-rail track in S gauge while the latter made do with the easier-to-wire three rail track in approximately O scale.  In public life, the most famous advocate for American Flyer is probably atheist libertarian tory George Will, who, along with the rest of Cub Nation, is dealing with their nine's exit from the major league playoffs.

FENCING DISCOUNT SNEAKERS.

That's one way to get inventory cheaply.

Authorities have arrested Adeel Shams, founder of popular sneaker resale platform CoolKicks, after discovering more than $500,000 in stolen Nike goods during a raid at the company’s Santa Monica warehouse.

Police said the merchandise — including 2,100 pairs of shoes and 150 cartons of apparel, some unreleased — had been stolen from an intermodal train in Southern California.

The Oct. 2 operation was conducted in coordination with the Union Pacific Railroad Police, Los Angeles Port Police, Los Angeles Airport Police, and the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office Bureau of Investigation.

Shams, 34, was booked on suspicion of receiving stolen property and released the following day. Three others were also arrested.

We've long suspected that there's organized looting of container trains, possibly including insiders at the docks or railway billing departments tipping off the muscle to which trains to stop and which containers to pilfer.

CargoNet data shows theft activity reached a record 3,798 incidents in 2024, with rail thefts emerging as a growing weak spot. Overhaul estimated about 65,000 freight-rail thefts in 2024, a 40% jump from the prior year and more than $100 million in losses.

Though rail thefts remain a smaller portion of total cargo crimes, analysts warn that organized theft rings and underreported losses are driving risk higher across trucking, warehousing, and intermodal supply chains — particularly around major freight hubs such as Los Angeles.

Authorities also arrested 17 people after raids at three San Bernardino County locations last week, reportedly recovering more than $375,000 worth of merchandise stolen from BNSF Railway trains and more than $61,000, cash, according to a KTLA-TV report. The Victor Valley News reports another 14 people were arrested Monday (Oct. 6) by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department in conjunction with BNSF police. In that incident, investigators said they recovered $42,500 in property stolen from BNSF, along with approximately $55,000 in cash.

The parcels tossed out of containers that don't have the sneakers and other items requested by the merchants are harder to recover, as those get picked over by individual scavengers.

NEITHER PATIENT PROTECTION NOR AFFORDABLE CARE.

Here I stand, I can do no other.  "I must continue to fight it out on this line.  'Is it that crazy to suggest that the Authority Figures back off and let emergence find a way?'  The current approach isn't working.  'How far must the unraveling go until our political masters consider trade-tested betterments?'"

The Democrats are currently refusing to pass a short continuing resolution in the hopes that the standoff will be painful enough to get a few Republicans on board with continuing the insurance premium subsidies that went into Dementia Joe's so-called "American Rescue Plan" by the margin of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.  All that seems to be doing is holding up the drafting of the regular order appropriations we were supposed to have by now and that might be deferred, again, to Christmas: which is to say, business as usual.

SHAKING UP THE RULES-BASED INTERNATIONAL ORDER?

This year's Nobel Peace Prize goes to Maria Corina Machado "for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy."

Code Pink organizer for Latin America Michelle Ellner doesn't like it.

When I saw the headline “Maria Corina Machado Wins the Nobel Peace Prize,” I almost laughed at the absurdity. But I didn’t, because there’s nothing funny about rewarding someone whose politics have brought so much suffering. Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.

If this is what counts as “peace” in 2025, then the prize itself has lost every ounce of credibility. I’m Venezuelan-American, and I know exactly what Machado represents. She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.

The lady is on a roll, keep reading her essay to see that she's not laughing, she's cursing the Establishment. "Real peace is built by women organizing food networks during blockades, by Indigenous communities defending rivers from extraction, by workers who refuse to be starved into obedience, by Venezuelan mothers mobilizing to demand the return of children seized under U.S. ICE and migration policies and by nations that choose sovereignty over servitude."

PRE-EMPTING THE GREAT PUMPKIN.

Last April, there were rumblings of a changing international trade environment affecting Christmas decorations.

The local home improvement stores start setting out their Christmas stuff sometime around Labor Day.  Yes, seriously, the Hallowe'en stuff is often marked down the last week of October.  We'll see how the Festive Season supply chain shakes out, and whether that will affect the blinging out of the houses nearby.

A week or so ago, one of the local home improvement center stores had the pre-decorated Christmas trees set up and positioned in front of the Hallowe'en house decorations, which are available in free-standing or inflatable versions, and very much popular with the neighbors.

THE HIAWATHA DIVISION SERIES.

The Milwaukee Brewers and Chicago Cubs are playing for the right to play in the National League's championship series, which for the moment still means representing the National League.  On Wednesday, the Brewers worked with Amtrak and the state operators of the Hiawatha to decorate train 332.  "The 8:05 a.m. departure train on Wednesday will be transformed into the themed Brewers Express, complete with the famous Racing Sausages, the Brewers 4-1 Force, and other members of the Brew Crew who will send off fans headed to this afternoon’s crucial game."

The stock of 332 turns as the 11.08 Borealis from Chicago to the Cities.  The game itself started at 4 pm, and no special return working was laid on.

Fans had to figure out their own transportation from Union Station to Wrigley Field.  Get to the L in the State Street subway and board a train signed for Howard.  Or, for that North Shore Line experience, get on a Ravenswood train at Washington and Wells and ride around the Loop.

Once upon a time, there was a North Shore Line experience on game day.

To the end, the North Shore Line's timetable noted that trains would set down southbound and pick up northbound at Addison on the days the Cubs or Bears played.  The five Electroliners each way (this is the 801-802 set northbound) featured a tavern-lounge section with beer and sandwiches.

LET'S START BY BUILDING CULTURAL CAPITAL.

Baa Ram sociologist Steven P. Dandaneau makes a suggestion.  "Stop Labeling Students ‘First-Gen’."

To put it bluntly, what business is it of ours, or anyone’s, what a student’s parents’ educational attainment happens to be? The usual answer is that we inquire because we aim to foster upward social mobility, and because we know from research that students who are the first in their families to attend college do not succeed at the same cohort rates as so-called continuing-generation students. But I emphasize cohort rates because we are not talking about a group, defined by self-awareness and interaction, but indeed a cohort, defined by impersonal and ill-defined criteria. At the level of individuals and families, first-gen discourse presumes deficits, is intrusive and can be off-putting and condescending.

Neither of your parents (you have two, right?) earned a bachelor’s degree?

I’d venture that most who work with first-gen students would agree that there are enduring questions about how best to define who is and is not first-generation using one of several plausible definitions. And even after four decades of promotion, I think it’s fair to say that few students arrive on campus as self-conscious “first-gens,” however defined.

Well, yeah.

Is it too much to ask that the people who want to influence higher education stop treating the nontraditional students as somehow less capable?  "It is a libel to think of first-generation or non-traditional as synonymous with less capable of handling college work."

Yes, there are students who hit college with less intellectual capital, but how often might that be the consequence of bad decisions they made earlier, or bad work beginning in grammar school?  Let's pay careful attention to the following descent from the lofty to the mundane.

In that "you have two, right" you get an idea where that essay might be going.  What is it about educated cosmopolitans that they might be down for the struggle in principle and yet live their lives according to the success sequence?

FIRE PREVENTION WEEK.

In the early days of Cold Spring Shops, we offered a trivia question borrowed from a newspaper Sunday supplement.  "Late in the 19th Century, a tragic fire occurred in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in which more than 1,500 lives were lost. Yet this event was journalistically overshadowed by a simultaneous tragedy in which only 300 lives were lost. Where did this latter tragedy occur, and why is this question on the website today?"

Because we post out of Illinois, we had correct answers in the Haloscan comments the same day.

SURF'S UP!

I've had occasion to pass through Milwaukee a few times over the past few weeks, and the Second Summer that came in after the false fall of Labor Day weekend included a few days with high temperatures pushing ninety.

A Milwaukee booster called Isaac Rowlett had his drone up over Bradford Beach last weekend.  The volleyball nets were getting a lot of use two weeks previously, and, yes, there are people getting in another swim before the Gales of November come stealin', the lifeguards off duty after Labor Day notwithstanding..

REALITY ENTERS THE WASHINGTON BUBBLE.

The editorial board at Washington's Post offered thoughts on the federal government's fiscal incontinence.  Today, though, we'll mine the essay for a nugget toward the end.

Democrats have demanded that Republicans agree to extend the covid-era insurance subsidies without proposing any way to pay for it. The Congressional Budget Office estimates this will cost $350 billion over the next decade. These temporary benefits were included in the American Rescue Plan of March 2021 and extended the next year in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act until the end of 2025.

The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act was never actually affordable. President Barack Obama’s signature achievement allowed people to buy insurance on marketplaces with subsidies based on their income. The architects of the program assumed that risk pools would be bigger than they turned out to be. As a result, policies cost more than expected.

To salvage the program, Democrats expanded subsidies to entice more people to buy plans. Many poor families wound up getting insurance for free, and the rolls grew.

Yes, just as regular readers of Cold Spring Shops have known for years.

HOW THE PALACE GUARD MEDIA LOSES ALL RESPECT.

Yesterday, we noted a fire at a house owned by a South Carolina judge that Yahoo News reported with a misleading headline.  We noted, "Let law enforcement and the fire investigators do their work. We do not yet know whether the judge's rulings or the husband's political affiliation caused somebody to take action."  The Militant Normals at Twitchy were, predictably, ready to rip Time a new one.  "Maybe we should wait and see what the investigators find."

None of which has stopped the social media True Believers from screeching at each other.

YOUR SCOLDING HAS NO POWER HERE.

The palace guard media's power to shame is finished.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins can’t believe the Trump admin is doubling down with memes and mariachi music in the WH briefing room:

“They simply don’t care about the criticism."

Correct — and that's exactly what’s driving the propaganda press insane. They're powerless. pic.twitter.com/hduEvgFT3q

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) October 2, 2025

A good tactic is one you enjoy.  Twitchy's Warren Squire is enjoying it.

When Democrats have said every insult, pushed every lie, and made every threat, there’s nothing left - the Democrat Party's power is gone. Irrelevancy is here for Hakeem Jeffries. He's weakness personified. Trump can destroy him or anyone in his party with a meme, even one featuring a sombrero and mariachi music.

Yes, and deplorable shaming people who are on the majority side when it comes to closing the borders, cracking down on urban crime, thinning out the Federal Register, and maybe, just maybe, throwing less money at failed projects, isn't going to change many minds.

Meeting the Militant Normals somewhere closer to the median might.

THANKS ANOTHER MILLION.

The Google page view counters recently rolled over to seven million views.  The six millionth viewer came early in July, and the five millionth in mid-May.  As I noted previously, I'm not sure how many of those hits are people engaging the posts; there are some days with tens of thousands of views and some with a hundred or so.

I surely do not lack for material to carry on about.  Thank you for looking in.

AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE, WILL THEY TRY SOMETHING THAT WORKS?

Early on in the implementation of the two lies for the price of one Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, I complained,  "There has to be a way to end the rigidities of in-network or out-of-network reimbursement, no matter what the insurance contracts are."

There also ought to be a way to end the to-ing and fro-ing over network memberships and reimbursement rates.

Springfield wanted to be reimbursed for offering high end services, while the Blues were trying to convince Springfield to accept Medicare reimbursement rates.  The article linked above does not mention that dimension, although it came up on the radio discussion.

Don't say I didn't warn you.  "Apparently, the government wishing that hospitals and clinics accept a greater discount, or requesting hospitals and clinics to lower their usual and customary charges, is by some magic transmuted into lower outlays for taxpayers. Whether fees rise for cash patients or for participants, if any remain, in private insurance plans, is apparently for another day."

Don't say I didn't call attention to what was likely to happen.  "Yes, and what happens when that Federal Insurance Provider takes sole control of the reimbursement rate to health care providers? Does anybody seriously expect that Wal-Mart-like methods to bend down the cost curves are going to work any better because it's Washington optimizing against the marginal factor cost schedule?

That was almost exactly three years ago, and what played out in Illinois then is playing out in Wisconsin now.  "Ascension Wisconsin facilities are no longer in-network for those on UnitedHealthcare health insurance plans after the two companies failed to reach an agreement over reimbursement rates."  What did I tell you, dear reader?  "Until there are more trade-tested betterments, there will be shenanigans."

MAXWELL SMART EIGHTY-SIXES THE HOUSE.

Late in her career, Margaret Hamilton assured viewers that Maxwell House coffee was good to the last drop, and although you could melt sugar in it, you could spill it and it wouldn't melt you.

Somebody at Kraft Heinz, the current owner of the label, must have decided that future buyers live on the other side of the yellow brick road.

Today, Maxwell House rebrands to “Maxwell Apartment” to meet the needs of today’s consumer and remind fans the brand is synonymous with great tasting, affordable coffee. In a time where value matters now more than ever, Americans seek value in areas of their everyday, including where they live with nearly a third opting to rent versus purchase a home.

Seriously? "What you're about to read might just be the most ridiculous thing you'll read all day."  That was Mike Miller at Red State, and the corporate boilerplate is, indeed, ridiculous.

As a real coffee for real people, with its “Good To the Last Drop” legacy, the name change celebrates the same principle that guided Maxwell House for more than a century – smart choices add up and choosing Maxwell House means enjoying a quality cup of coffee without the cafe price tag. To celebrate, the brand is offering consumers even more value with a 12-month “lease” of Maxwell Apartment, designed to stock up coffee lovers nationwide.

An 'extra discount' is an indication of a product's worth, and offering a twelve month subscription purchase seems pitched for the hoarder market.  Mr Miller continues, "I know, you can't make it up; the woke fools at Kraft Heinz already did."

Indeed they did.

Beginning on National Coffee Day (Sept. 29), Maxwell House’s 12-month “lease” offer of Maxwell Apartment coffee is available on Amazon.com, while supplies last. For under $40, fans can stock their pantry with a full year of coffee – designed to save coffee enthusiasts more than $1,000 annually, compared to daily café runs, which on average can add up to more than $90 per month. Along with the rebranded canisters, the year-long supply of coffee will come with an official Maxwell Apartment “lease” to sign.

Apparently, the hoarders have already subscribed all the subscription coffee.  Whether the repackaging for the next year will turn up in Cora's grocery store, and all the other grocery stores, and at what prices remains to be seen.  The company's release suggests some other foolishness is yet to drop.

The limited-time rebrand to Maxwell Apartment delivers the same delicious taste, aroma, quality and ingredients – in fact it’s all the same except the name. An extension of the brand’s “Good to the Last Drop” platform, Maxwell Apartment is one of two campaigns debuting from the coffee brand this fall as it continues to emphasize its dedication to rich, consistent flavor people can count on while doubling down on offering the best value in coffee.

Lost in the company's attempt to cater to whoever it wants to cater to, which itself could be a fool's errand: consider the urban gentrifiers filling up those four-story designer apartments that are ubiquitous these days, are they really going to forswear their Starbucks runs or their artisanal coffee, is that "Maxwell House" refers to a Nashville hotel that might have gotten good word of mouth for their coffee a century ago.  It's still operating, now part of the Millennium Hotels group, and they will continue to serve Maxwell House coffee under Kraft Heinz's temporary brand.

We'll see what the public reaction to this latest product degradation in the name of something is.

THE PUNISHMENT CYCLES CONTINUE.

House of South Carolina Judge Criticized by Trump Administration Set Ablaze.

The home of South Carolina Circuit Court judge Diane Goodstein was set on fire after she had reportedly received death threats.

State law enforcement is investigating the house fire on Edisto Beach which began at around 11:30 a.m. E.T. on Saturday, sources told local news outlet FITSNews. Goodstein was reportedly not at home at the time of the fire, but at least three members of her family, including her husband, former Democratic state senator Arnold Goodstein, and their son, have been hospitalized with serious injuries. According to the St. Paul’s Fire District, which responded to the scene, the occupants had to be rescued via kayak. Law enforcement have not disclosed whether the fire is being investigated as an arson attack.

Let law enforcement and the fire investigators do their work.  We do not yet know whether the judge's rulings or the husband's political affiliation caused somebody to take action.

Once the punishment cycles start, stopping them is hard, and waiting for the evidence to come in before denouncing the other side, even harder.

FEIGNING IGNORANCE WITH A SMIRK.

Kaitlan Collins is one of several CNN reporters the Militant Normals love to hate, and her countenance likely has something to do with it.  Delivering nitpicky Donk talking points only brings more fury.

Kaitlan Collins: People who are in the country illegally cannot get these subsidies.

Scott Jennings: Sure they can. Who do you think pays when they go to the emergency room?

Collins: Going to the emergency room is not getting an Obamacare subsidy.

Karen Finney: You're… pic.twitter.com/OxnInk2sgS

— Blue Georgia (@BlueATLGeorgia) October 2, 2025

Amid the frivolity, there is a serious conundrum.  Ethical medicine means treating the patient first.  In These United States, that's codified in Federal Law.

The way this operates is that illegal aliens use ER facilities, and the hospitals are bound by law to treat them. This is a result of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), passed back in 1986. The way this operates is that while at the hospital, the alien is placed on Emergency Medicaid, and then that program reimburses the hospital for the expenses.

All that process makes for some amusing nit-picking, which Nasty Smirky of the Expensive Fuchsia Dress, who came into political TV by way of Tucker Carlson, gets paid to do.

On the matter of illegals getting health coverage, she first tries to insist that it is illegal for non-citizens to get that coverage. She is trying to elide the fact that the Democrat proposal is looking to roll back that very detail. Then she tries to deflect by saying no illegals are covered by Obamacare.

That is a pure dodge on her part, as the issue concerns Medicaid coverage for illegals, which they do in fact receive. Jennings does not allow Kaitlan to slither with this maneuver, and he even ties up Collins ally Karen Finney, who at first denied conflating Obamacare and Medicaid, but then shortly after had to admit they are in fact separate healthcare operations.

It doesn't matter what account the federal money comes from: whether you call it Medicaid or it comes out of some assigned risk pool among the insurance exchanges, where policy holders might get a premium subsidy, ultimately the money is extracted from taxpayers, borrowed on the bond market, and printed.  It's a Samaritan's Dilemma.  "When I'm feeling provocative I sometimes suggest that claimants of gratis emergency room services be charged with theft."  The Twitchy types are more charitable, at least where illegal aliens are concerned.  "They should be stabilized and then returned to their own country."

That, though, is the other side of the conundrum.  Emergency room physicians and assisting staff have the obligation to serve.  Because rationing by price is not permitted, and people cannot be turned away, what remains is rationing by waiting time.  "Is there a more effective way than rationing by waiting time to discourage inefficient use of the emergency room?"

That brings us to another set of challenges for another day, involving adverse selection among people who might have the means to purchase coverage and see their primary care physician regularly, but who instead choose to do without coverage and hope for the best, or for the charity of the emergency room.  The so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was supposed to fix that.  It didn't.  "How far must the unraveling go until our political masters consider trade-tested betterments?"

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATION.

Typepad, which was one of the early subscription web log hosting services, ceased business at the end of September.  Retired North Carolina State economist Craig Newmark, not to be confused with the Craigslist Craig Newmark, has moved to a new site and continues to post.  Looks like he's managed to move the older posts to the new host.

A TEAM THAT WILL LIVE IN IGNOMINY.

For years, some sports pundit has offered "Bottom Ten" rankings for college and professional teams.  I'm old enough to remember one iteration listing Bay (Green) along with Bay (Tampa), the aftermath of the Lombardi Era being nearly thirty years in the wilderness with a team not much better than an expansion team, and another iteration featuring the Los Angeles Lambs.

These days, the pundit is Ryan McGee with ESPN, and he hits close to home.  Go, Northern Ill-ugh-noise.

The Other Other Huskies are one of a whopping six #MACtion team stuck at 1-and-something, but won, er, lost out for this spot over the other five because: 1. They actually played a game last weekend; C. They lost to San Diego State, which isn't terrible, but the final score of the game was 6-3; and secondly, we wanted a chance to hype this week's Pillow Fight of the Week, when they host My Hammy of Ohio, which is now 1-3 after beating Lindenwood, a school you've never heard of unless you are a big Pierre Desir fan.

That's the way to motivate fans on homecoming weekend at the teachers' college that claims to have invented homecoming.

THE PROGRESS MYTH.

Hot Air's Mark Judge draws on Ryszard Legutko's The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, to push back on the notion of some sort of Progressive Arc to History.

Legutko argues that both liberal democracy and communism have a similar concept of time. Both view history as moving inexorably towards a utopia of perfect egalitarianism, health and tolerance, and that it’s the job not just of politicians but of all right-thinking people to facilitate that bright tomorrow: “What the enemy of progress defended was by definition hopelessly parochial, limited to one class, decadent, anachronistic, historically outdated, and degenerate; sooner or later it had to give way to something that was universal, necessary, and inclusive for of the whole of humanity.”

This move toward utopia has meant greater and greater intrusion into private life and traditional institutions.

Underlying that claim is a tension between continuing the institutions and traditions that work and encouraging improvements thereto.  We could do worse, dear reader, than consider how innovations in the visual and performing arts come to be.

[W]hat is the proper balance between freedom for the avant-garde and continuity of the stable society that makes the avant-garde possible? And what happens when, as many German voters perceived during the Weimar era, and many U.S. voters currently perceive, the avant-garde is monopolizing the institutions of higher learning, of the performing arts, and of the entertainment in ways that are destabilizing the society?

That is where Mr Judge leads us, only generalizing to movements in politics.

Liberals love to quote the phrase that America is moving toward “a more perfect union” because it then allows them to claim we have not gotten there. There will always and forevermore be work to be done. Yet there are times in life when we feel sated, satisfied, and even touched by the grace of God.

That's the tension between stability and improvements.  We've been there before.

It's not so much slipping into "social reform" as it is sliding into generalized incoherence that conservatives ought be pushing back against.  "The social destruction that erupted in the 1960s began with the premise that the machinery of prosperity would always be working, no matter how outrageous the mockery of the avant-garde or the hippies or the race hustlers was.  Woodstock could always coexist with moon shots." The institutions the avant-garde own? Not so much.

Thus, in generational morphology, sometimes the avant-garde have more cultural power, and sometimes the squares do.  Because of those tussles between selection and mutation, there is adaptation, but no Progressive Arc of History.  Nor is that a bad thing.

[T]he new values regime is a response to the contradictions inherent in the old values regime, and in the Strauss and Howe approach, there is no remorseless Hegelian dialectic under which all the contradictions can be ground out for once and for all, and no Vanguard to Lead the People to The Glorious Future.  (In Strauss and Howe, that's actually desirable, as the Inexorable March of Progress inevitably sacrifices all generations before the Glorious Future becomes the Glorious Present on the Altar of Progress.  Never mind that the Romans had the saeculum but they didn't have steam locomotives or smart 'phones.)

We now have the smart 'phones, but the jury is still out on the extent to which they represent Progress.  Mr Judge suggests that change for its own sake is not always desirable.  "There are in fact times in our lives when we feel satiated, when we feel loved by our spouse or by God, when we look at children with joy and love or are stunned by a world of art. When life is good and we don’t need an arc to 'bend towards' anything."  Yes, or when the Progressive Thinkers are offering changes that are evolutionary dead ends.  Who knows, maybe the real dialectic involves taking unalienable rights seriously.  "The tussle, however, is one in which the next step forward in individual autonomy is wresting power from the philosopher kings who supplanted the hereditary kings."  Which might not be a bad thing.  "That does not preclude extinction for the maladapted. Including the legacy political parties and their court intellectuals and their talking points."

A HUMILIATION RITUAL.

That sounds about right.

The season premiere of Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test was just one big humiliation ritual.

And something tells me this is going to be the toughest season yet, and by “toughest,” I’m talking about the most difficult season to watch.

Yet, I couldn’t take my eyes off the installment, as we watched privileged princesses like the Giudices get shoved face-first into the mud, and Jussie Smollett already got one of the roughest edits yet for someone intent on using this for his second chance.

It sounds like TV Fanatic's Jasmin Blue shares my guilty pleasure.  She also, as one might expect of somebody who writes columns dealing with television, is much more familiar with the foibles of this year's recruits.  "It’s one of the most questionable casts, and that’s coupled with it already coming across as one of the most degrading seasons yet."

Former Green Bay Packer Randall Cobb, who joined the Aaron Rodgers receiver reunion with the Jets, is also in camp, so far not coming to the attention of the training staff.

And, contrary to last week's post, the show airs on Thursdays, freeing up Wednesdays to deal with Chicago's budgetary woes getting in the way of all the fishing off the company pier at the firehouse and the detectives' bullpen.

THERE IS NOTHING MORE PERMANENT THAN A TEMPORARY ARRANGEMENT.

That's an aphorism that might go back to the Scottish Enlightenment, and Reason's Christian Britschgi invokes Milton Friedman's use of it to open his discussion of the latest Washington shutdown drama.

Milton Friedman liked to quip that there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.

We're seeing more evidence for this adage as the government shut downs following Democrats' refusal to vote for a spending bill that did not include an extension of "temporary" Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, subsidies passed during the pandemic.

Those enhanced subsidies were passed as a temporary measure as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021, and then extended through the end of 2025 by the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Obamacare always provided subsidies for individuals to purchase insurance plans on ACA marketplaces set up by the law. The 2021 Act passed enhanced subsidies eliminated the income eligibility caps for those subsidies and also made them more generous for current recipients.

Making these subsidies permanent would not be cheap. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would cost $340 billion a year.

On the flip side, letting the tax credits expire would result in about 1.6 million higher-income earners losing subsidies completely. Millions more would continue receiving a smaller subsidy and see their premiums rise as a result.

We've long understood that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was two lies for the price of one, while the Inflation "Reduction" Act did only in the sense that the second derivative was negative.

URBAN ECONOMICS SHOULDN'T BE THIS HARD.

It isn't.

"Walkable urban areas are popular but have an affordability problem."  Well, yeah, you don't have to buy an indulgence any more to live next to the cathedral, but if you're able to make markets all over the world using contemporary information technology, and you want to walk to the office, isn't that going to make the rent gradient steeper?  "Remove the constraints, watch the reallocation to housing and office towers commence." So it is, yet again, and the poor and the ethnics are hardest hit.

It's an emergent phenomenon, and the sort of technocratic order the article suggests is not likely to work well. "To spur walkability and equitable access to walkable areas, cities can advance zoning reform, foster non-car transportation options, preserve and invest in affordable housing, and plan for walkable neighborhoods to be resilient to climate impacts, the report states."  The problem is, the preservation of the houses closest to the office towers is going to make precisely those houses more valuable, and the implicit transportation cost of walking, even with slow motor car traffic in cities, and even slower bus or rail transit, makes the rent gradient even steeper.

There's no end to the wishful thinking.  Consider "Could Charlotte transportation referendum price people out of their houses?"

YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.

Oktoberfest season is winding down, the baseball playoffs are headed to the divisional round, and Phoenix's Mercury will play Las Vegas's Aces for the women's professional basketball title, in case anybody cares.  Confirmation of a suspicion of mine, "[I]f the WNBA officials come from the same talent pool that calls Mid-American games, the quality of officiating will be low," has arrived from highly placed sources in the league.

Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve had something to say after her team's Game 3 loss to the Phoenix Mercury, and it's probably going to cost her.

An 84-76 defeat saw Reeve ejected in the final minute after running onto the court to berate the officials, on a play that left Lynx star Napheesa Collier needing to be helped off the court. Mercury star Alyssa Thomas made contact with Collier's knee on a steal and caused her ankle to roll as well, adding injury to a game-sealing breakaway layup.

Reeve was so livid she had to be restrained by multiple coaches and players as she attempted to charge back toward the refs.

The public face of the league these days is a coach with a sour expression, but in this case she might have reason to be sour.

Reeve entered the room for her post-game news conference, unloaded on the officials and the WNBA for two minutes, then left without taking questions. In the process, she revealed that Collier had potentially sustained a fracture from her run-in with Thomas, with a shoulder issue earlier in the game too.

Without Ms Collier, the Lynx went home after four games, taking their purple hair with them.