HERBERT MARCUSE'S BODY COUNT.

Ideas have consequences.  Consider this passage from "Liberating Tolerance," explaining what the Frankfurt School types have in store for Normals.  "Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left."

Yes, we can have a Serious Conversation in the common room about the circumstances under which there is a moral justification of political violence.  That sort of conversation is out of order a year after Charlie Kirk was murdered at a campus appearance in Utah.

Herbert Marcuse's disciples are still at it.  "Marxist University Profs Spew Tone-Deaf Calls for Violence," notes Red State's Ben Sellers.  Perhaps his rogues gallery is edited, the video clips suggest that speaking pejoratively about faculty DEI hires is not off base.  The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, corroborates.  "After Kirk’s Death, a Third of Students Say Posting ‘MAGA’ Is a Fireable Offense."  That's reporting on a recent Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey of liberating tolerance in practice.  "Fifty percent of students reported that blocking other students from attending a speech event is OK at least in rare cases, down from 54 percent last year, and 69 percent said the same about shouting down a speaker, compared to 72 percent a year prior."

THIRSTDAY BITTERS.

Now fall semester commenceth, and sorority rush season is upon us.  A year ago, Jared Gould took a jaundiced view of the sorority recruiting videos out of the Southeastern Conference, at a time when nobody envisioned exiling Louisiana State, which caught on with the Wrong Sort of People.

Greek life is, in practice, a class marker. Those who can pay in gain access to mentorship, alumni networks, internships, and lifelong professional connections. Those who can’t are left outside the gates.

Nothing illustrates this more vividly than the recent “RushTok” phenomenon, which turned the University of Alabama’s sorority recruitment into a national spectacle.

Videos of young women in coordinated outfits dancing in front of columned mansions went viral. A friend of mine pointed out that many on the right embraced these clips as a sign of a cultural vibe shift. “In Trump’s America,” the videos implied that, “women are once again unapologetically hot, sociable, and patriotic.”

What the right misses, however, is that these clubs are for the wealthy, by the wealthy, and sustained by wealth. The New York Post reports that some recruits spent thousands on handbags to impress sororities, while parents hired consultants to polish résumés and wardrobes to improve their child’s chances of getting into top houses. Reports also suggest that some sororities weigh a recruit’s zip code—and body count!—as heavily as her GPA, effectively filtering out students from less affluent backgrounds.

The Greek-letter organizations have long been for students to engage in positional arms races.  The passage above follows Mr Gould's meditations on the same sort of thing in the Ivies, where there are eating clubs and there is nothing so crass as a kegger to be seen, and the positional arms race began in day care.  Yeah, right.  That's nothing Mad didn't notice way back in January 1962.  "The layout juxtaposed the idealistic promises of the fraternity recruitment pitches against the cynical, harsh reality of what membership actually looked like."

PATRIOTISM, THE LAST REFUGE OF SCOUNDRELS.

In September of 2023, the Walworth County Democrats were touting that Hope and Change.

In October, Hamas did what comes naturally to jihadis.  The following spring, Dementia Joe challenged frontrunner Donald Trump to a debate, taunting "I hear you're free on Wednesdays."  Dementia Joe's brain failed in prime time, and the party replaced him as nominee.  That was not an improvement.

Earlier this summer, the party primary barely rejected a Madison nutcase in favor of a Milwaukee ward-heeler to stand for governor.

Rather than call attention to their embrace of the crazy, this year's tent at the Walworth County Fair went all in on the Red, White, and Blue.

The absence of crowds might say nothing about how the general election will turn out.  The best thing to do with political displays at county fairs is not to engage, whether it's a major party, a minor party,  or those advocates for an Article V convention or some similar single issue.  Orwell's weirdos hang out with Democrats, no matter how much red, white, and blue they display.

DIAGNOSING AFTER THE FACT IS A TRICKY BUSINESS.

That has not deterred keyboard warriors from commenting on the recent mistrial, in Massachusetts, of Lindsay Clancy.  I recommend psychiatrist Sally Satel's "Here's What the Jury Should Have Found," in The (Not Detroit) Free Press.  Professor Satel is a skeptic of the therapeutic approach to everything (as well as being sister by a different mother to longtime libertarian Virginia Postrel) and her essay will reward careful study.  The abstract observes, "I believe psychosis drove this mother to kill her children. The jury deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial. If she is retried, she should not be found criminally responsible."

Therapeutic practice has led to a therapeutic culture in which ever more subtle explanations of people behaving badly has spilled over into explaining away, or enabling, people behaving badly.  Charges and counter-charges focusing on that popular therapeutic culture interfere with clinical understanding of psychosis, which, the professor argues, is real, if rare, and thus difficult to diagnose.  If anything, the professor makes a strong case to keep the research enterprise distinct from the policy environment.

There might have been warning signs, had clinicians noticed.

Clancy’s clinicians should have known that she had experienced boundless energy, racing thoughts, obsessive cleaning, and feelings of elation—a manic state—in the weeks after her son Dawson was born in 2019. Talking to her husband or parents or ob-gyn at the time could provide such data if the patient is not forthcoming. Importantly, a history of postpartum activation or mania is a risk for full-blown postpartum psychosis after the birth of subsequent children.

Clancy’s pharmacological treatment also came in for intense scrutiny by the defense. In all, she received mental-health care from at least six clinicians, who prescribed a total of 13 drugs, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and benzodiazepines (drugs in the Valium family).

Some of these medications exacerbated her already serious condition. Clancy’s first antidepressant, Zoloft, which she tried in the fall of 2022, triggered racing thoughts and a two-day period of no sleep—another suggestion of a bipolar disposition. Also, Zoloft’s strong activating effect on her suggests a potential for bipolar disorder.

None of which will bring her three children back, nor make her future life any better.  Sometimes bad experience can only make future postpartum psychoses (which Professor Satel argues are rare) have better outcomes.

YOU CAN'T RELEGATE US, WE'RE GOING INDEPENDENT.

The corona shutdowns led to the National Collegiate Athletic Association extending years of eligibility, primarily by allowing more generous "redshirting" or designating players for a variation of injured reserve status.  Recently the association reverted to its pre-pandemic eligibility and redshirting rules, but a few players who had corona-era eligibility left finished their collegiate careers and signed with the professional leagues.

At least for the time being.  Consider, dear reader, a college player who signed a pro contract, didn't make the team, and then treats that remaining year of eligibility as a kind of option to return to his college team.  Sounds like the sort of thing lawyers could litigate all day.

Does a collegiate coach, athletic director, or conference commissioner use a variant on "card laid, card played," to tell such returning players, NO, we are pleased to count you among our alumni, and our recruiting pitch offers opportunities to catch the eye of pro scouts, it does not guarantee it.

THERE'S A PROTOTYPE FOR EVERYTHING.

Illinois Railway Museum operated its night trains Saturday and Sunday.  The "coach train" included several of the usual heavyweight coaches, plus sleeper lounge Villa Real, dining car Galt House, not carrying passengers; and ten section observation Inglehome.  Power for the evening was a recently acquired Amtrak F40PH with Operation Lifesaver additional markings.

I wonder if George Gershwin got the idea for Rhapsody in Blue while riding a twelve-wheeled heavyweight car.  Inglehome had a drumhead for the evening.

I could put together a reasonable facsimile of this train, perhaps with a rainbow of paint jobs, and have it orbiting the basement during the upcoming open days.

Hicks Car Works have two photo albums featuring the daytime Saturday operations.

THE FOUNDATION FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND EXPRESSION ARE ON THE CHRISTMAS LIST.

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan might not phrase it that way, but she, too, sends money.

They sue on behalf of professors whose free speech rights have been violated by mindless ideologues at universities. Professors like this computer science guy at U Wash who made fun of the land acknowledgement language that the university urged instructors to put on all their syllabi. Said jesting made somebody significant there vewy vewy mad and the school put the prof under investigation and tried to fire him for harassment blahblahblahblah.

The Foundation sued, and they won.

Land acknowledgements are for mocking.

Cold Spring Shops headquarters is on land that was in Wisconsin Territory before Illinois became a state. We recognize the labor applied by those settlers marking the trails that contemporary Illinoisans use to visit Lake Geneva, the Dells, and Door County, and to watch their teams get owned in Milwaukee and Green Bay.

Another winning season for the Brewers, and playoff preparations might be in the discussion shortly.

A CENTENNIAL.

Somewhere on the midway there ought to be a Tilt-a-Whirl.

The first of these operated at the 1926 Minnesota State Fair.

With screams and giggles, whipping ponytails and white-knuckle grips, Minnesota fairgoers are taking delight in the magic of the Tilt-A-Whirl ride as it turns 100 years old.

The iconic ride and its brightly colored cars debuted at the Minnesota State Fair in 1926, and it has been a mainstay at fairs across the country ever since.

The inventor originally hoped to create a watergoing carroussel that would offer less predictable motion than the up-and-down of a horse on a sliding pole.

Herbert Sellner “created a water merry-go-round and, basically, one boat was driving, and all the other boats were tied together,” [Rice county historian Jenna] Nelson said. “It got destroyed by a storm in 1925.” Herbert’s brother, Martin, suggested adapting it for land.

In January 1926, Sellner started sketching drawings for this new ride, calling it the Tilt-ulator. On April 24, he filed a patent in Minneapolis, and a month later, according to Sellner’s notes, he had made a significant change: The new ride — with nine cars, as one advertisement put it, “tilting, sweeping, spinning, swooping, swaying, speeding, sliding, skidding, rounding, rotating, rising, revolving, hesitating, flying, falling, curving and circling” — would be called the Tilt-A-Whirl.

The concept is elegant.  Motors power a segmented undulating turntable on which nine (now seven) cars freewheel around a center pivot on each segment.  Sometimes a car simply rocks back and forth.  Other times, it gets into a positive feedback loop and pivots ever faster, which might be what the hardcore riders are hoping for.

The ride is powered by seven individual motors around a circle — and gravity makes the car spin around its dips. Weight from the riders shifts the cars’ positions as they lean, sending the cars off balance, said ride operator Thomas Lauthier, who brings his Tilt-A-Whirl to fairs around the country.

Lauthier has been operating the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Minnesota State Fair for the last 12 years. He said Midwesterners have a particular affinity for the ride.

The Sellners were skilled in the woodworking and mechanical arts.

Herbert Sellner was born in Faribault in 1887. His father was a skilled cabinetmaker, and Herbert inherited his father’s creativity and talents. In 1912, at the age of 25, he established the Sellner Woodcraft Company in Faribault to manufacture mission furniture, lamps, and other wood articles. Sellner also created the Ideal Lamp Company. A 1917 catalog listed magazine racks, smoking and telephone stands, folding dining tables, and lamps with leaded stained glass shades. When World War I affected supply availability, Sellner began manufacturing wood toys for children.

By 1923, Sellner’s creativity evolved, and he invented both a water toboggan slide and a water wheel that became popular items at bathing beaches. The slide was thirty feet high, featured a 100-foot-long track, and occupied a space of 18 by 100 feet. With 12 toboggans priced at 50 cents a ride, the owner could earn $6.00 every hour.

During the War, the Tilt-a-Whirl factory retooled to produce bomb carts.  Larson International in Texas subsequently purchased the Sellner firm and they continue to produce Tilt-a-Whirls.

A century ago, Minnesota creativity gave us Burma-Shave and its roadside signs, and a midway classic, as long as your stomach is up to it.

LET THE REPOSITIONING FOLLIES CONTINUE!

I've long been on record doubting using college football to attract enrollment.

The thought process of some university administrators must run something like this:  Flagship universities are visible in football.  There are lots of people in the stadium six or seven Saturdays in the fall.  So let's get some football visibility and play in a big stadium.

It hasn't worked so well for the University of Massachusetts.

Or Rutgers.

There was some controversy about turning back time in Ann Arbor, but I'm not going to get into that.  Rather, it's the follies that get administrators in New Brunswick thinking about playing in the Big Ten and administrators in Amherst seeking a return to the Mid-American.  "UMass turned a second-quarter takeaway into the decisive scoring surge and defeated Rutgers 37-21 for a Fly the Flag victory to open the 2026 season on Sept. 3."  Plus Pop-Tarts.

Those two programs are perennial poster boys for making relegation a thing in college football.

Yes, years ago Julius Erving played for the Minutemen, and their men's hockey team recently won a national championship, perhaps begging forgiveness from the wokies for that Minutemen. That "storied athletic tradition" also included the Minutemen serving as crash test dummies for the Northern Illinois football team, at least until the football-only affiliation with the Mid-American ended.

Massachusetts scheduled a home-and-home with Northern Illinois in 2024 and 2025 and they learned a lot.  Now Northern Illinois play football in the Mountain West, and their latest attempt to be the next Boise State ran into reality at Iowa City.

Over the years, our meditations on attracting students by offering that game day (note, not game night) experience have raised the possibility that offering beer-'n-circus doesn't attract the studious sort of student.

OUR SILVER JUBILEE YEAR BEGINS.

Cold Spring Shops opened for business on the afternoon of Tuesday, 5 September, 2002, the day after Labor Day.  Our Silver Jubilee year will thus commence during the long weekend.

Britain's investor owned railways recognised the Silver Jubilee of King George V with a train named, er, titled, as they have it there, Silver Jubilee and a series of mixed traffic locomotives named for the countries and colonies of the Dominion and the Commonwealth and for prominent figures or events.  Canadian Pacific got in on the honours with two classes of 4-4-4 fast passenger locomotives.  A representative of the smaller series occasionally polishes the rails at Cold Spring Shops headquarters.

We'll see what the upcoming year brings.  There are a lot of things I carried on about early on that I can still carry on about, although I cannot characterize all the developments of the past quarter century as for the worse.

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE.

Good news as the academic year begins in earnest.

VICTORY! After a FIRE lawsuit, the University of Washington paid $600,000 after punishing Professor Stuart Reges for parodying a university-approved “land acknowledgment” in his syllabus. 🧵 https://t.co/unrBuf5yNU pic.twitter.com/0q63E9Nfx5

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) September 3, 2026

The best thing to do with those ridiculous land acknowledgements that do nothing to offer, oh, returning that land to the previous claimants, is to mock them, and Professor Reger got himself in some trouble with the Guardians of Correct Thought for doing so.  He took them to court, and rightly so.  His course outline was nowhere near as over the top as it could have been.  “University administrators turned me into a pariah on campus because I included a land acknowledgment that wasn’t sufficiently progressive for them. Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court. I am pleased that FIRE joined with me to fight back against University of Washington’s illegal viewpoint discrimination.”

It's not as if he noted the Tsar's claims to the Pacific Northwest, or invoked Holy Scripture.  "I wonder if any academic institutions in Bethlehem have a land acknowledgement that refers to the house and lineage of David."

Cold Spring Shops headquarters is on land that was in Wisconsin Territory before Illinois became a state. We recognize the labor applied by those settlers marking the trails that contemporary Illinoisans use to visit Lake Geneva, the Dells, and Door County, and to watch their teams get owned in Green Bay and Milwaukee.

IT'S CALLED PUBLIC CHOICE, SETH.

Labor Day weekend is upon us, and children socialist agitators of all ages, including Seth Sandronsky, are obligated to dial up the rhetoric.  "Placing the drive for profits before the needs of the human population is the normal operation of the capitalist system as ruling class interests use two-party politics to craft laws and policies that benefit elites, billionaires, and corporations."

That Complex Proposition is right out of Marxian political economy, where the "capitalist state" is the executive committee for the ruling class.  "Two-party politics," or as the Serious People on the Sunday shows call it, "bipartisan compromise" might have the interests of elected officials and their bureaucrats and court intellectuals in mind, not necessarily those of the hypothetical capitalists extracting ever more surplus value.

There's never been much good done by those who affect to trade for the public interest, and dressing it up with the rhetoric of Scientific Management doesn't change the reality.  "Public power is the power to generate rents, and yes, rent-seekers seek rents, politicians generate them, and the combined effect is often to dissipate rents."  Comrade Sandronsky could have made a case for limiting the ability of governments to generate and dissipate rents, and provide additional procedural checks on corrupt public officials and unelected bureaucrats, but, this being Labor Day weekend, the polemics come first.

The contradictions of economic nationalism and the world order are growing. An affordability crisis of working and poor people stateside as their tax dollars flow away from them and into the congressional-military-industrial complex is the tip of a proverbial iceberg. The worsening climate crisis that profits billionaires and corporations in the short-term as the political duopoly facilitates this ecocide is a wake-up call for movement politics.

Comrade Sandronsky is giving the same sort of speech about worsening conditions and contradictions of capitalism that have been popular for over 150 years.  We keep hearing the call for that movement (pronounced mewve-ment) politics for years, to no lasting effect.

LET THE POSTURING CONTINUE.

Trust a quartet of Washington Post reporters to put the most favorable spin on it.  "Under pressure, Iran lashes out and ramps up rhetoric."  I suspect they're running out of gas mains to dig up and pack with propellant.  But whatever.  "Amid economic pressure and a fight to retain diplomatic leverage via control over the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran is lashing out with increasingly bellicose rhetoric and, on Thursday, a strike on U.S. forces in Kuwait."

AROUND, NOT THROUGH, MAJOR CITIES.

A city produces and receives a lot of rail traffic.  It's also not the best place to sort freight cars or interchange them, which was the rationale for Canadian National acquiring Elgin Joliet & Eastern to connect all four coasts of North America without going through Chicago, and it was the hope behind the ill-conceived Great Lakes Basin railroad of a few years ago.

The same logic works in the steppes of Central Asia.  "Construction of a 127 km railway bypass to divert freight traffic including hazardous goods away from Ulaanbaatar is progressing."  The avoiding line transits the Khushig river valley between Emeelt and Bagakhangai.  I'm not sure how planned Mongolia's economy is some thirty years after their freedom from the Evil Empire: the railway will expedite the passage of trade goods between China and Siberia, and perhaps divert traffic off the roads.  "Once completed, the bypass is expected to remove up to 1 800 heavy lorries per day from Ulaanbaatar’s roads. It is initially designed to handle around 3.5 million tonnes of freight annually, with capacity potentially increasing to 20 million tonnes."  We're talking about a single track avoiding line with three passing sidings, not the double tracking of the Chicago Outer Belt that Canadian National have been undertaking.

And yet, it is refreshing to read about a railway project that is taking place and is not some hero project for fast passenger trains.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE COURT INTELLECTUALS.

I've argued that much of the propensity for university faculty to register as Democrats is self-interest concealed in the rhetoric of Governance by Wise Experts.

Tonight, a parable.  Suppose that it's hard to be a Man of System because those refractory citizens recognize what it is the Men of System are doing and change their behavior to take advantage of, or to protect themselves from, the policies those Wise Experts drew up (as if in Vince Lombardi's playbook) and the policy doesn't deliver what its designers anticipated?

In political economy, particularly in macroeconomic policy, what I've hinted at has a short descriptor, "Lucas critique," for the Chicago income theorist who worked through all the possible audibles the refractory citizens might call.

DENY COHERENT BELIEFS, FREE-RIDE ON THE EFFORTS OF THOSE WHO HAVE SOME.

My case is familiar.

I've been fighting it out on this line since before there was a Cold Spring Shops.  "Yeah, when you deny coherent beliefs of any kind, you get incoherence."  That cannot turn out well.  "If you're going to deny coherent beliefs, everybody else has to be in on the con."  That post also noted, "Arguments from authority only work when people respect your authority."

But people in authority have been undermining their authority for a long time, while dressing up in the skin suits that Erudition and Expertise have become.  Thus does Arthur Brooks, writing in The (Not Detroit) Free Press, conclude, "Millions of Americans aren’t just misinformed. They’re searching for coherence in a world that no longer provides it."

It's still up to people who don't buy the postmodern wordnoise to uphold standards.  Kurt Schlichter argues, "All This 'Feelings' Nonsense Should Make You Feel Sick."  That's notionally about the legal distinction between being out of sorts or being nuts.  In the course of his argument, though, he fires a broadside against the notion of people living "their truth."

The legal issue really has to do with whether the jurors believe she had a mental defect that made her unable to tell right from wrong, but this isn’t a hard case. It’s an easy case. It’s only made hard because a significant percentage of our society has decided that reason is inconvenient, as it leads to results that they don’t prefer, so they’ve decided to jettison it completely in exchange for a paradigm in which feelings determine reality. The advantage of a feelzocentric paradigm is obvious. You always get the result you want because the only criterion for any issue is how you feel.

Left unchecked, this idea would be the death of civilization. But of course, the irony is that only civilization can allow the frivolity of a feelzocentric paradigm to persist. Its practitioners are made safe and secure by those of us bound to the harsh rigors of reason. Basically, we create a world where they can act like idiots and not get themselves killed by other people who are controlled by their emotions. You know, kind of like the entire Third World.

It's an absence of bourgeois norms, perhaps seasoned by tribal politics and the cult of Mohammed that makes the Third World what it is, not because Third World universities are on the cutting edge of high concept philosophy.  Well, OK, that's for arbitrary values of "third world" that include France.

Bad ideas, though, have a way of trickling down from the ivory tower into common discourse.

We used to look down on people who weren’t rational. But now we look on them as sensitive, as caring and compassionate. Our Oprahized society celebrates those who prioritize the feelz. How it’s caring and compassionate to let a woman who throttled a trio of babies escape punishment is beyond me. Like you, my mind can’t wrap around people who are entirely bereft of reason in favor of emotion.

We see it online, too, with irrational people babbling endlessly about stupid nonsense in defiance of objective fact.

"Nonsense in defiance of objective fact" might not be what hangs that Plymouth jury.  As long, though, as we live in a world where "reality has no regard for your feelings" is a right-wing talking point, and uttering it might get the campus bias response team on you, it's going to be on the people who insist that logic and content must carry the day to protect themselves, and the people not so inhibited. from the consequences of denying coherent beliefs.

CONFLICT CREEP.

Outside the Beltway's James Joyner, who knows a few things about international relations (countries boffing each other, mostly), suggests that what goes on across the Berezina might be worth paying attention to.

Whether this is “state sponsored terrorism” really depends on the nature of the attack. If it was simply aimed at a cargo plane transporting materiel to Ukrainian forces, it is a legitimate military target and any incidental loss of civilian life would be collateral damage. If, on the other hand, it was intended to destroy civilian infrastructure to send a political message, it’s terrorism.

Regardless, it represents an escalation in the proxy war with Russia. While we’ve supported—rightly, in my view—Ukraine against Russia’s illegal invasion, supplying intelligence support and ever-more-lethal weapons, we’ve been careful not to directly participate in hostilities against Russia. Until now, Russia has assiduously avoided kinetic attacks into NATO territory, although there have been violations of NATO airspace and some stray shots that have made it across the border into Poland.

A direct attack on a core NATO ally could certainly trigger enforcement action under Article 5. There will be little appetite for a direct war with Russia, but this may result in further lengthening of the leash put on Ukraine’s use of Western assets.

The dogs of war have been given longer leash for some time, possibly for nearly twenty years looking back to that color revolution in Ukraine that put the current government in power.  Arguably, the War was festering for many years prior to 1939, considering the Spanish civil war, Japan's imperial ambitions in China, and the colonies of the nineteenth century empires changing hands.  Buckle in.

HIGHER EDUCATION IS LIKELY DOOMED.

In American Greatness, Stephen Soukup uses the cautionary tale of Syracuse University, once a pretty good private university with solid sports programs, as a metaphor for higher education's more general breach of what once was a social contract with the public.

The distinction between hard-science discovery and social-science discovery is, as I said, endemic to the structure of the contemporary university, but the manifestation of that difference as social-science fatuousness/indoctrination wasn’t necessarily inevitable and, in any case, didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, steady process of infiltration and degradation that featured many players, some of whom believed that their efforts were genuinely directed at educational improvement, and others who manipulated the structure of academia in pursuit of personal and ideological power. The members of the Frankfurt School, especially its most enduring American representative, Herbert Marcuse, fall into this latter category, while educational “reformers” like John Dewey comprise the former. Dwight Waldo, a public administration theorist and the godfather of the “New Public Administration” movement, also falls into the former category, although one can hardly imagine that his legacy could possibly have been more destructive than it is had he been a power-mad ideologue. Unlike the Cultural Marxists, Waldo didn’t see his mission as one in which he was preparing the ground for the eventual revolution. Rather, like Dewey, he believed he was helping to foster a better, more productive interpretation of his field of expertise but in so doing undermined any pretensions his adherents might have to objectivity or adherence to neutral evidence.

In 1948, Waldo wrote a book called The Administrative State, which challenged the standard interpretation of public administration, attacking the longstanding expectation that administrators should be “value neutral.” In essence, he argued that administrators should be advocates of policies that aligned with their personal beliefs. He more or less told them to let their freak flags fly.

There might be no such thing as "value neutral," in the same way that there might be few or no eternal truths.

I've been calling attention (at length) for years.

Dear reader, it's straightforward enough: think of "the humanities" as "those disciplines that deconstruct reality as a hobby" and you won't go far wrong.  That reality has a say in what gets deconstructed never ceases to catch the academy by surprise.

They could have listened.  People with platforms bigger than mine have been calling attention for thirty plus years.  The late Jason Arday is simply the most egregious recent example of virtue signalling at the expense of education.  Let that hard rain fall.

A LATTER-DAY RED BALL EXPRESS?

A report describing Syria's attempt at geographic arbitrage, giving local teamsters a slice of the Hormuz maritime risk premium, opens with a photograph.

Unattributed photograph retrieved from Yahoo News.

SECTARIANISM TODAY, SECTARIANISM TOMORROW, SECTARIANISM FOREVER.

Les Leopold asks, "Can DSA’s Brand of Socialism Attract the Broader Working Class?"

No, for reasons that are not too removed from my assessment of a few weeks ago.

When DSA candidates take to the field, they focus almost entirely on populist economic demands—housing and food affordability, fair taxes on billionaires, and Medicare for All. These are socialist in the sense that Social Security, libraries, fire departments, and our current Medicare are socialist, and yet they are also firmly embedded in our capitalist system.

I have yet to encounter a DSA candidate who discusses truly socialist reforms, like the elimination of large private enterprises and workers’ control of the corporations that employ them.

A strict understanding of things socialist suggests that anything "embedded in our capitalist system" involves acceptance of the wages system, and there is no requirement that libraries, fire departments, or pensions, let alone things like roads and water mains, must be government services (the old "mixed economy" compromise.  It is also no accident, dear reader, that Mr Leopold, good communist that he is, will be dismayed that Marxism-DeLeonism is a foreign concept to the priviligentsia who align with "democratic socialism."