TAIL TRACK.

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

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.

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."

GIVE THE KIDS SPACE TO PLAY.

The women's professional basketball season in the United States is taking a two week pause for the international World Cup competition in Berlin.  The team and player descriptions suggest there are, in fact, ways of ranking players' capabilities, and some of the ladies who grade out well might not be making the trip.

Perhaps, when the professional season resumes, the playoffs begin, and the speculation about contract renewals and the like goes on, we might be able to have a reasoned conversation about the cagermetrics.  There might even be a simple summary statistic out there, something along the lines of "wins above replacement."  Rather that than a resumption of the culture wars.

PUT YOUR FAITH IN EMERGENCE.

Religious dogma might be useful.  Consensus is poison.

So argues Matthew Continetti in "Inoculated Against Tyranny," asserting, "The Constitution’s separation of powers and guarantee of individual rights kept America’s revolution from devolving into fratricide."

THE FATAL CONCEIT, OR BEGGING THE QUESTION.

Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn notes, "Most planning processes begin with a hidden assumption: we already know the solution and simply need public buy-in."

There's probably a generalization to the behavior of the people who "facilitate" meetings by structuring the order of business in order to nudge, or coerce, participants to the outcome the facilitator wants.

Nobody talks like that.

My neighbors don't. The people I run into at church don't. The parents dropping their kids off at school don't. The survey wasn't asking residents to describe their lives. It was asking them to answer a planning question, one presented and framed in a way that will feel completely foreign to nearly all of them.

Years ago, Steve Jobs made an observation about focus groups that has become famous.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

That statement is often misunderstood as an argument against listening to customers. It isn't. Apple listened obsessively to customers. What Jobs understood was that customers experience frustrations, desires, and obstacles. They do not necessarily experience solutions.

The story he tells is of focus groups who might think in terms of an improved Walkman rather than a portable computer with music-streaming capabilities.

Residents know where they struggle. They know which intersections feel dangerous. They know which streets their children are afraid to cross. They know whether housing feels attainable. They know whether a neighborhood feels welcoming.

What they often don't know — and shouldn't be expected to know — is whether the answer involves mixed-use zoning, form-based codes, parking reform, traffic calming, tax increment financing, or some other technical intervention.

Those are planning tools. Residents are experts in something much more important: their own experience.

A recent article from the American Planning Association discusses innovative public engagement techniques. The article correctly identifies a real problem. Traditional public meetings often don't work very well. Dot-voting exercises become predictable. SWOT analyses are tedious. Attendance is low. Participants are frequently unrepresentative.

Fundamentally, planning is about attempting to impose some Man of Systems' scheme on messy reality.  On the other hand, placing a bet on emergence based on some notion of the individual experiences of residents who are not regional planners might be reason for the planners to get away from the notion of System or Vision.  "What's the next smallest thing we can do to address it?"

LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

Over the weekend, United States Central Command claim to have destroyed drones or rockets carrying mines (or perhaps trash bags or beachballs) in order to effect some kind of closure of Hormuz, or at least the spooking of energy traders.  In retaliation, the mullahs flipped some flying gas mains toward United States bases in Jordan, apparently without effect.  We'll see what Our President orders up.

EXCESSIVE SPORTS HYPE?

In the course of a lament over gridiron parents taking the joy out of youth football, Pajamas Media's Tim O'Brien notes, "Little League baseball players should not have 'walk-up music' any more than youth league football players should have 'recruiting videos,' but they do."  I might still have some of my nephew's Greendale Youth Football trading cards (no, they did not come in Topp's bubble gum packs) but I digress.

Rather, dear reader, I want to consider a recent high school football game in which St. Joseph took an early thirty point lead over Mount Carmel, only for Mount Carmel to rally back and win the game.

It made for compelling television.  Television?  Television.  "Mount Carmel football stuns by overcoming 30-point deficit to win on national TV."  Specifically,  on ESPN.

There might not be another game as thrilling as Mount Carmel played on Friday night.

In a nationally televised game, New Jersey visiting St. Joseph Regional High School went up 30-0 on the Caravan just one play into the second quarter. It was the definition of a rout.

Until, the Caravan staged a comeback for the ages. They stunned the high school football world, as Jordan Lynch's Mount Carmel squad overcame that 30-point deficit to shock St. Joseph and win its first game of the season.

That's right, a nationally televised, if on sports cable, game, involving a New Jersey team visiting the Chicago area.

EXCESSIVE COMPLEXITY PRODUCES DIMINISHING RETURNS.

Anyone who has suffered through endless faculty meetings knows that.  The Credentialed Experts who worship process are beginning to figure it out.

All these ways of seeing our world converge dynamically in the current historical moment: this Fourth Turning, or Long Emergency — however you label it — in the arc of our techno-industrial order of things. A lot of these things are coming apart now, and in astounding ways, and it remains to be seen what we will do with these broken and discarded parts, and whether any of it can be put back together in a satisfactory way.

Saecular entropy, properly understood, cannot be reversed.  The saecular order to come will hold surprises.

THERE'S NO ESCAPING OPPORTUNITY COSTS.

A post reacting to widespread closures at Red Lobster offered an economics lesson suitable for the start of the semester.  "Recall, years ago, our coverage about the Six Flags amusement parks being a long-term real estate speculation? Opportunity cost sure got the better of many a small amusement park or kiddieland over the past quarter century, didn't it?"

LESBOS, PSYCHOS, PHOBOS, PATHOS.

Sing unto me, O Muse, of the restraint of Victor "Blade of Perseus" Hanson.

There are three explanations for the unhinged and nihilistic behavior of WNBA players, staff, and owners.

One, in racist and sexist fashion, these left-wing actors deeply resent being saved by a white, heterosexual player who towers over others in skill—and to such a degree that they are willing to metaphorically strangle the very goose that lays their golden eggs.

Or, two, they feel the more violence and controversy they can spark in trying to neuter and hurt Clark, the more attention—money—they will attract.

The more they gin up racial and sexual-orientation frenzy in World Wrestling Entertainment-style, the more they can inflate profits and gain popular attention.

But these gladiator-like women seem clueless about this possibility: if the battered Clark is permanently injured, quits, or joins another league, the WNBA temple of riches she built could come crashing down upon them.

That passage cries out for unleashing the Furies or the wrath of Hera.  The classical reference comes in his conclusion.  "In sum, the WWE has turned into a Roman Colosseum blood sport. Thousands now watch it nightly, in anger or glee that their popular heroes are bloodied—or may soon be even maimed or killed."

LOOK TO YOUR RIGHT, LOOK TO YOUR LEFT.

I never heard that speech in any classes, nor did I ever offer it.  "In the Bad Old Days when College was Not. For. Everybody., incoming students would allegedly encounter the curmudgeonly professor who would continue, 'By semester's end, one of those people will be gone.'"

Perhaps, notes Timothy "Conversable Economist" Taylor, a variation on that theme should be in order.

Some of the negative reaction to elite institutions is of their own making — a sense of superiority that we’ve got the answers figured out. If you’re inside the gates, you deserve something that people outside the gates don’t. If you think back to the very early days of the preeminent, Northeastern institutions, which all arose from one version of Protestantism or another, the president would have said to incoming students, “You are all worthless sinners. You’re here entirely by the grace of God. You haven’t earned it. What you should hope to achieve is a true sight of your own sinfulness and your own imperfection.” The speech today is: “Welcome to our great university. You are the best and brightest who have ever walked through the gate. We’re privileged to have you here.” That message should be mitigated or modulated.

He's quoting Columbia's (!) Andrew Delbanco in a not-linked essay in the house organ for business as usual in higher education.

Perhaps, as the evidence accumulates that business as usual is not working, most notably in the Ivies, reflection in the higher reaches of higher education on the failures of business as usual is a desirable outcome.  It's long overdue: the stresses involved in getting into Japanese universities were such that matriculation was the goal and a four-year party the reward, and that "we're privileged to have you here" rhetoric could have the same effect.

PUTTING THE WORST POSSIBLE SPIN ON GOOD NEWS.

Bloomberg's headline is straightforward enough.  "Hormuz Oil Flows Rising as Gulf Giants’ Ramp Up Accelerates."  The first paragraph of the article, however, is a clanker.

The flow of crude through the Strait of Hormuz is creeping higher as producers across the Middle East boost exports in the face of Iran's lingering threat to shipping. The increase is keeping global crude oil prices in check.

The reports I'm seeing of gas lines that Iranian wags, if there are any wags, might be calling "Jimmy Carter's revenge," and the news of the gangbangers that used to raise havoc in Iraq or Lebanon being mobilized to cow the population, strongly suggest to me that if those are the effects of Iran's "threat to shipping," I'd hate to see what defeat looks like.

WE EMBRACE OUR AUGUST MILLION.

Sometime between morning coffee and midafternoon pop break (with much of the back yard mowed) Google's visit counter ticked over fifteen million.  The view count for individual posts suggests some interest in our observations on energy movements.

Whatever your motivation for looking in, and whether you are carbon-based or silicon-based, thank you for your continued interest.

The back yard is mowed.  I'm beginning the fall shortening-up program a week or two early.