TAIL TRACK.

Barring signal troubles, links to any posts of substance ought to work.

DETERMINISTIC CHAOS.

Could a Tilt-a-Whirl provide insights into the behavior of galaxies spinning around a black hole?

The Tilt-A-Whirl, for example, spins its passengers in one direction, then another, sometimes hesitating between forays and sometimes swinging abruptly from one motion to another. A rider never knows exactly what to expect next.

Yet these complicated, surprising movements arise from a remarkably simple geometry. A passenger rides in one of seven cars, each mounted near the edge of its own circular platform but free to pivot about the center. The platforms, in turn, move at a constant speed along an undulating circular track that consists of three identical hills separated by valleys, which tilt the platforms.  The platform movements are perfectly regular, but the cars whirl around independently in an irregular manner. Moreover, there is essentially just one adjustable parameter–the rate at which the platforms move around the track.

When the platforms travel at very low speeds, the cars complete one backward revolution as their platforms go over each hill. In contrast, at high speeds a car gets slammed to its platform’s outer edge and stays locked in that position. In both cases, the motion is predictable.

What happens at intermediate speeds?

To model dynamical systems like the Tilt-A-Whirl, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers use equations that describe how the positions and velocities of a system and its components change over time in response to certain forces.

It’s convenient to characterize a system’s dynamics by plotting how its position and velocity evolve over time. Each plotted point represents the system’s state of motion at a particular instant, and successive points generate a winding line through an imaginary mathematical space (known as phase space) representing all possible motions. Different starting points generally initiate different curves.

A simple, repeating motion, like the to-and-fro oscillations of a swinging pendulum, appears as a circle or some other closed curve. Such a plot shows that the system cycles through precisely the same state of motion again and again at regular intervals.

More complicated sequences of movements produce tangled paths that wander through phase space, sometimes never forming a closed loop.

That's without the clutch operator selectively reducing or increasing the speed of rotation the better to get a car into an extreme spin cycle.  You get sufficient deterministic chaos without the clutch operator.

To describe the Tilt-A-Whirl’s dynamics, physicists Bret M. Huggard of Northern Arizona University and Richard L. Kautz of the National Institute of Standards and Technology found a mathematical equation that approximates the motion of an idealized Tilt-A-Whirl. In essence, the movements of an individual car resemble those of a friction-impaired pendulum hanging from a support that is both rotating and being rocked back and forth while the pendulum swings. Solving the equation determines how a Tilt-A-Whirl car would behave under various conditions.

That's right, there was a publishable article on the physics of the Tilt-a-Whirl.

The resulting jumbled mixture of car rotations never repeats itself exactly, which gives the Tilt-A-Whirl its lively and unpredictable character. Indeed, no two trips are ever likely to produce exactly the same thrills and chills.

At the same time, the mathematical model used by Kautz and Huggard predicts that chaotic motion would occur at a speed close to the 6.5 revolutions per minute at which the ride is normally operated.

Interestingly, Tilt-A-Whirl fanatics know by experience that they can actually take advantage of this sensitivity. They can affect the motion of a car by throwing their weight from side to side at crucial moments, turning cycles with little or no action into thrilling whirls.

"Thus, it would seem that aficionados of the Tilt-A-Whirl have known for some time that chaotic systems can be controlled using small perturbations," Huggard and Kautz observed.

It turns out that Tilt-A-Whirl operators can also take advantage of this sensitivity. Software engineer Dave Boll described his experience one summer running a Tilt-A-Whirl, "which is easily the most entertaining carnival ride to operate."

Why? The operator can actually orchestrate the movement of individual cars. A single lever controls the ride's speed, so an operator can slightly retard or accelerate the ring of platforms at any moment. By applying just the right amount of velocity change at exactly the right time, it's possible to spin a particular car. For example, if a car is currently not spinning, is about to go uphill, and is positioned toward the inside, accelerating the platform will send the car into a very fast spin.

That orchestration might shake some change loose from a rider's pockets, or it might require that spinning car to be hosed out afterwards.  But I digress.

The scholarly article is "Chaos at the amusement park: Dynamics of the Tilt‐A‐Whirl" in American Journal of Physics, and the Computer Science club of the University of Waterloo have archived the reprint.  The laws of physics imply that at low rotational speeds of the platform, a car completes one backward circle from bottom to next bottom, while at high rotational speeds, centrifugal force wins and the car remains at the outer edge of its track.  What happens at intermediate speeds requires 39 equations to characterize.

According to Trentonian contributor Jeff Edelstein, the Tilt-a-Whirl is life.  "Dizzying. Chaotic. Uncertain. Filled with laughter and fear and a one-time ticket to ride."

The astronomy or cosmology?  I'll leave that to others.

FISCAL INCONTINENCE.

In Reason, Veronique deRugy notes, "Lawmakers have to show they'll back the national debt with future fiscal surpluses, which means reining in government spending."  That echoes the ancient Keynesian policy prescription of balancing the federal budget over the business cycle, which back in the day came bundled with the idea that a fiscal policy so conceived could help fine-tune the economy, with the deficits mitigating the pain in downturns and the surpluses putting a check on investors and consumers during expansions.

IT'S STILL SURRENDERING WITH A SHRUG.

Here I have long stood.

For a long time, Cold Spring Shops has called attention to the folly of admitting unprepared students and calling it access.  "[S]tate institutions that were separate but not equal during Jim Crow remain less than equal today.  And thus, does access beget assessment and remediation and fretting about retention."  We've always been clear-eyed about where that leads.  "When you admit unprepared students and call it access, what do you have to do to boost retention?"

Apparently, you retain by accommodating the unpreparedness.  “Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates.”

PROFESSIONAL SPORTS IS A YOUNG PERSON'S GAME.

The Milwaukee Brewers last night secured their fourth straight division championship.  "Yelich, Woodruff relish standing as last ones left from 2018 division champs."  That's Christian Yelich, 2018 Most Valuable Player, and Brandon Woodruff, the last pitcher not named Shohei Ohtani to hit a home run in a playoff game.

The Chicago Cubs will likely be a playoff team, although for the third straight season since they recruited Craig Counsell away from the Brewers, their coaching staff and their big payroll has not won the division.  There has been a Central Division for years, with good Cardinals or Reds teams being all over the record books, and yet, neither of those teams put together four straight division wins.

There's still a lot of playoff baseball coming, and we'll see how well the Brewers, with a roster of relative newcomers, fare.  There is Sprecher chilling.

THE THOUSAND DESCRIPTIONS OF RENT SEEKERS.

In The Daily Economy, Vincent Geloso comes up with an infelicitous new one, "beefsteak socialists," brownish on the outside, red on the inside, that brown referring to a shirt, to describe a Rube Goldberg-esque accretion of reform upon reform that provides plenty of work for bureaucrats and rent-seekers, each accretion further reducing allocative efficiency.

Two problems immediately emerged. First, this enlargement of government power raised the value of possessing government. Second, government interventions produce unintended consequences. As a result, rather than repeal the original measure, governments frequently respond with another intervention, followed by another. The unintended consequences multiply, and so do the interventions. Growth grinds down to a halt.

There is a risk in blowing all the interventions up and starting over.  Mr Geloso uses the accretion of interventions in Chile leading to a quasi-Marxist government gaining control over a corpse, after which a military coup and shock therapy might have been the most extreme form of starting over.  On a smaller scale, abolishing the Interstate Commerce Commission and privatizing Conrail might have done some good, that is, until the regulatory state started adding on again.

That, Mr Geloso argues, is the nature of public choice: rent-seekers and careerists in the saddle.

The danger for the United States is not that it has reproduced Chile in 1973. It plainly has not. (Yet.) The danger is that American politics is beginning to reproduce the underlying dynamic: rival movements encouraging one another to abandon liberal restraints.

By "liberal restraints," he means modestly ambitious governance with enumerated, separated, and limited powers.  That's not how one makes a name in "public service," and that's how things go wrong.  "There must first be a long process of politicization of every aspect of social and economic life. Reverse that politicization and you halt the weakening."

GREAT MOMENTS IN LEFTIST LUNACY.

Crystal Davis rings all the changes.

As a Black woman who works at the intersection of parks and water, I am watching the ongoing push to restore protections at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante closely. We know that access to the outdoors is already racialized in this country, much like access to clean air or safe drinking water.

Is that intersection north or south of wells and water?  Somehow an ongoing spat between ranchers and conservationists in Utah, with Barack Obama expanding the boundaries of western monuments it's probably wise to have an air-conditioned four-wheel drive car to get to, only for Donald Trump to shrink them for Joe Biden ... you know how this is going to play out.

In her weird anthropology, the industrialization that made the Great Migration North possible somehow provides a new unity in oppression, or something.

Today, many Black neighborhoods are cut off from the waterways that sustained earlier generations. Despite their cultural and ecological importance, many lakes and streams across the Midwest and the country have been industrialized, polluted, or paved over. This has real consequences for community health and safety, from deadly flooding to toxic taps.

What earthly connection "this" has to do with the latest round of cowboys and Indians in Utah I don't know, but at Common Dreams, emoting trumps logic.

Fortunately, parks and clean water are two areas where people across the political spectrum agree: The public good must be put above corporate profit, keeping public lands in public hands, and preventing pollution at the source to ensure safe and affordable water in every home in America. And we’re seeing people rise up.

Nowhere in her lament over those western monuments do we see any acknowledgement of how badly those public lands have been mismanaged by those public hands.  Sad!

TRAINS ARE MADE FOR RUNNING.

Facebook keep offering me unsolicited Advice For Elderly Persons including "13 Things Model Train Dealers Quietly Notice About Collections Owned by Someone Over 70 in the First 5 Minutes."

The article is about people who treat trains as investments, and they behave like speculators in matchbooks and sports cards.  The first item on the list seems sensible.  "Whether the Original Boxes Are Still There."  Not because those boxes are useful for protecting the rolling stock in the event of a move and when the owner crosses the final summit.

The very first thing a dealer scans for isn’t the trains themselves. It’s the cardboard sitting next to them.

Original packaging protects against dust, moisture, and warping, and its presence signals a collector who understood what they had. A box in solid shape quietly raises the offer before a single piece even changes hands.

There's even a category called "new in box" referring to rolling stock that has not been taken out of the box.

I suppose we could have figured the article was going to be crazy based on one of the images of the appraiser at work.

Gemini image retrieved from Climate Cosmos.

If you know, you know.

Let the record show that if it's property of Cold Spring Shops, it's going to run.

THAT MOSLEM BABUSHKA.

In Belgium, it's apparently a prohibited political statement.

Hadija Amajoud, who has taught at a provincial special education school in Assenede since 2022, was wearing a headscarf when she began working at the school, accoridng to local broadcaster VRT as cited by Anadolu Agency.

A disciplinary procedure was launched after Amajoud made clear that she did not intend to remove her headscarf while teaching.

The ACOD trade union said it intends to challenge the dismissal before the Chamber of Appeal in Brussels, saying that the case could establish an important precedent concerning religious freedom and neutrality in education.

Amajoud questioned how far an employer can go in restricting a teacher's personal freedom and described the provincial administration's interpretation of neutrality as "purely political."

"Actually, no one is neutral. Every teacher stands in front of a class with his or her own convictions," she said.

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan objects to that very postmodern "his or her own convictions."

In free societies, teachers strive to keep their convictions away from the front of the class, so that liberal, exploratory discourse can prevail.

This woman – who has lost her teaching job because she refuses to take off her hijab while in front of a room of students in Belgium – thinks God commands her to express her religious convictions, and model female modesty, at all times. Her conviction of this is so intense that she – unlike many Muslim women – would never think of removing her scarf for the duration of her classes. She would rather ruin her life than follow the law on this. The law is secular, and in this instance that doesn’t count.

That might say more about life in an industrialized tribal society, which is what Belgium is, as distinct from a free republic in which tribe is secondary.  That Moslem babushka might, to European eyes, be a symbol either of the submission of women under the submission that is Islam, or of the hopes of Islam to conquer Europe.

But for the name of all that is holy, we are talking about a teacher in a special education class.  We are not contemplating a judge of Jewish extraction who covers himself, or a traffic cop with a crucifix, and in These United States, none of these ought to be (perhaps on rare occasion it is) grounds for a civil rights suit.

The professor's question about another school setting is also a chance to defend classical liberalism.  "How free would a budding feminist in a middle school feel to talk about cultures that hide women under hijabs and heavy robes, and call for sex-restricted swimming and other forms of gender separation?"  There might be more polite ways to frame that question.  There might be more peer pressure on that budding feminist to not be weird.  There might also be opportunities for that teacher in a babushka to question some of what she had been taught, and there's a good chance any of her own children, should such children exist, rebel against mom's old country ways.

SOONER THAN YOU THINK.

The crashing in of the real debt ceiling, that is, which is when bond traders buy Treasuries only at deep discounts.  How deep is deep?  Ask the man who trades them for a living?  "Ballooning US debt is a ticking time bomb, billionaire investor David Rubenstein says."

Economists have long contemplated, in the abstract, government activity crowding out private sector investing or consumer spending.  Mr Rubenstein is fretting about government interest payments crowding out government spending on armaments.

"We have, as everybody now knows, $40 trillion of debt. Now, historically, if you go back over the last, let's say, 300 or 400 years, whenever a country paid more interest on its debt than it did for its national security, that's a sign of weakness in the country. Right now, we've crossed that threshold. We're now paying more in interest every year than we are paying on our national defense, and we're paying a trillion dollars in interest, a little bit more than that now, but we pay about a trillion dollars in national defense. And as that continues, the interest goes up, and the money available for defense goes down. That tends to weaken your national security."

That might depend on the going concern value of the United States, as people might still be willing to hold Treasuries to finance the production of Tomahawks and Patriots and all the other tools the Pentagon possess to stay protected against flying Iranian gas mains and whatever else the primitives are cobbling together, and the dollar might still be less shaky than all the other candidates for global reserve currency.

That noted, those deep discounts might present gradually at first.  "Surging US Treasury yields are starting to spook investors."  All at once, sooner than you think?

A "disorderly bond sell-off" is now the top market tail risk. Investors remain bullish, however, on corporate earnings, the AI investment cycle, and economic growth.

US Treasury yields have faced upward pressure throughout September, driven by persistent signs of inflation and elevated crude oil prices.

"Disorderly bond sell-off" is trader-speak for "all at once."  Buckle in.

LET'S GET REAL ABOUT CRUDE OIL PRICES.

Markets adapt.

Oil prices are very far away from crisis levels in real and nominal terms.

Brent is near $96 per barrel. In today's dollars, the 2008 crisis peak was $202, the Arab Spring $183, the 1980 oil shock $162 and the 2022 Ukraine war spike $139.

Each geopolitical event creates new… pic.twitter.com/MA9T1WIVkC

— Daniel Lacalle Official Account (@dlacalle_IA) September 9, 2026

I've had ample occasion to contemplate the real price of crude oil and its distillates over the years.  It's up to somebody else to do the research capturing the effect of additional interfuel substitutions that might not have been on the market twenty years ago.  I'll leave it to others to put together a Mark J. Perry Venn diagram involving people objecting to the current war against Iran while favoring the continuation of Ukraine's war with Russia when the subject of, oh, disrupted diesel fuel supplies comes up.

THROWING MONEY AROUND.

You can take the proposal seriously, as National Review editors do.

Reflexive apologists for Trump’s proposal have tended to focus on the sins of the other party — pointing, for instance, to the unnecessary and inflationary stimulus checks that the Democrats issued in 2021, and to President Joe Biden’s illegal attempt to forgive student loans. But this isn’t a defense, so much as a confession. Those policies were bad, and the Republican Party opposed them. That they were attempted was a disgrace; it was not a catch-all excuse for further reckless behavior. Whatever problems may exist in the American economy in 2026, there is no need for a round of debt-financed $5,000 checks. The central problem of our political era is the persistence of inflation and the associated increases in the cost of everyday goods. Trump’s suggestion would worsen, rather than improve, that issue.

The role of the federal government within the U.S. economy ought to be to provide a stable framework within which free people may thrive. When it taxes, it ought to tax predictably and consistently, with the purpose of covering its spending. When it spends, it ought to spend on those functions that only the national government can fulfill. President Trump’s proposal cannot be squared with the federal government’s proper role — nor, for that matter, can it be justly described as “policy.”

Or, following the Babylon Bee, satire is the best response. "Trump Pledges That If Voters Defeat Socialism In November, They Will Each Get An Equal Redistribution Of Wealth From The Government."  I vaguely remember something called Ricardian equivalence, and Robert Barro asking, "Are Government Bonds Net Wealth?"  There might be a corollary involving helicopter droppings, er, printed money, although even in a hyperinflationary environment, having a windfall of helicopter droppings leaves you slightly less badly off than if they fall on your neighbor.

LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

The mullahs' cheering section at Common Dreams includes one Negar Mortazavi, who asserts, "Trump Cannot Win the Iran War."  Scroll down, though, and enjoy the cope.

Iran does not need to defeat the United States conventionally. To deny Washington a decisive political victory, it needs only to preserve its governing institutions, retain sufficient retaliatory capacity, and make continued warfare costly enough that the United States cannot impose its preferred outcome at an acceptable price.

How many pallets of rial did she get paid for that clanker, and how valuable will they be next week?

Iran cannot match the United States and Israel militarily. But it benefits from geography, a strategy tailored to a stronger adversary, and the advantages of fighting on its own territory, as well as a leadership that views the conflict as existential and has shown a willingness to absorb enormous costs rather than surrender. After six months, that military pressure has still not brought Washington closer to securing its demands. The United States can continue to destroy targets and degrade Iranian capabilities, but unless that pressure changes Iran’s political calculations, further escalation risks producing more destruction without producing a settlement.

That pressure might be having the desired effect.

Israel's Channel 14 reported from sources inside the regime that Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the blusterous blowhard serving as Iran's Parliament Speaker, was caught admitting to others inside the government that the regime won't be able to stand this economic pressure much longer.

That's Duane Patterson in Hot Air, itself a propaganda site, and yet the anaconda's coils well might be tightening. The current national role model is Wimpy, paying you Tuesday for a lamb shank today, "The same way the regime is — by putting everything on credit. As long as everyone just borrows from everyone else but no money actually changes hands, it'll work for a while until the food runs out and the banks collapse."

GRASPING AT PINS.

In July, we noted the National Hurricane Center anticipating a relatively quiet North Atlantic hurricane season.

The National Hurricane Center's Atlantic hurricane forecast is out and it relies on that stronger El Niño.  "NOAA predicts below-normal 2026 Atlantic hurricane season."  There was already at least one named Atlantic tropical storm this season.  That heat wave east of the Mississippi during Freedom Weekend?  We used to call that the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.

That doesn't deter breathless journalists from breathlessly anticipating stirrings in the doldrums.

The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season is tracking significantly behind historical norms and may set a new record for its delayed activity. As of this week, the first hurricane of the season has yet to form, far behind the average first occurrence date of August 11.

The current record for the latest first hurricane formation in the Atlantic is September 11, set by Hurricane Gustav in 2002 and tied by Hurricane Humberto in 2013.

"Historical norms" refers to a moving average over the past eight decades, give or take, and it is the same category error your weather reader says when he predicts tomorrow will be way hotter or way colder "than it should be" or when a month's rainfall comes in above or below that moving average.  Complex adaptive systems do what they do.  As of Saturday, "Atlantic Hurricane Season Sets Record for Latest First Hurricane Formation," in the vacuously true sense that there were none yet.

FACULTY REQUIRING MINDERS?

I'm not sure what to make of a Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression story out of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

Student journalists with The Alestle at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville wanted to do something reporters do every day: interview university employees.

But SIUE’s communications office insisted on coming along and sitting in on multiple interviews between Alestle journalists and university staff. When a student journalist tried to arrange a solo interview, the director of communications said her presence was “non-negotiable” and that “approval of the interview is ultimately [her] decision.”

A branch campus of a directional state university with a history of corruption might be so placed on the academic food chain that one might wonder whether the minders are to protect the faculty from being exposed as career minor leaguers or to protect the students from doing the sort of thing Normal's rejects might do.

PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN.

Venezuela might be better known for exporting baseball players than exporting oil.  Recently, Eugenio Suarez, of the Cincinnati Reds, passed his citizenship test.

His team changed his walk-up music the day he returned to the lineup.

🔥 THIS is how you become an American.

Cincinnati Reds slugger Eugenio Suárez fled Venezuela, missed two games to take the citizenship test, passed, and came back to the ballpark as a U.S. citizen.

His teammates changed his walk-up song to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”…

— Louis Montoya (@montoyalouis1) September 6, 2026

Tomi Lahren spent way too much time carping about Colin Kaepernick rather than the music and the home runs.

THE NOT-SO-COLLATERAL DAMAGE OF LIBERATING TOLERANCE.

There's something of a Mark J. Perry Venn diagram to be contemplated featuring "People who denounce white Christian extremism" and "People who denounce people who denounce radical Islamic terrorism."  The good news: one of the family members reading names in New York this morning denounced "radical Islamic terrorism" to the applause of the crowd.

A 9/11 widow just rent rogue in NYC…

She read her husbands name and then called out Islamic terror and Saudi Arabia.

She called out Bush, Obama, Biden and JD Vance/Trump while they sat right in front of her. The entire crowd at ground zero cheered. pic.twitter.com/xICEZL6FOv

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) September 11, 2026

She's undoubtedly getting grief from the usual suspects.

The first step in undoing the deleterious effects of liberating tolerance, and its obnoxious manifestations in cancel culture is to recognize that it exists, and it is wrong.  Consider, dear reader, the Katyn massacre.

Herbert Marcuse might have been early into his exile, and the 1950s, 1960s attempts by leftist thinkers to distinguish revolutionary from reactionary violence were a few years away.  The institutional left of that era, however, involved cancel culture.  As long as the Hitler-Stalin, Ribbentrop-Molotov agreements to carve up Poland were in place, nobody in the American left would dare say what they ought to have been saying about Nazi Germany.  During the carve-up of Poland, it was Soviet organs of state security murdered those Polish officers, and it was Soviet propagandists who asserted those dead officers were simply another day at the ditch for the Einsatzgruppen.

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 (aw 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.