TAIL TRACK.

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

JOE MAGARAC'S NEIGHBOR.

Mike Ditka, the quintessential Chicago Bear, dies at 86.

Still revered as “Da Coach” and ringmaster of the 1985 Bears, one of the most dominant and perhaps the zaniest Super Bowl-winning team in league history. Ditka was enshrined in the College and Pro Football Halls of Fame and the Bears said during a ceremony in 2013 that his “No. 89″ jersey will be the last one retired by the team.

He was born in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, the son of a welder who changed the family name from Dyczko. He grew up in nearby Aliquippa, close to the coal-mining and steel-manufacturing plants that dotted the western part of the state, a big, talented, three-sport athlete and All-American at Pitt whose bruising style made his first nickname, “Iron Mike,” a good fit.

In Western Pennsylvania, you learn to play through the whistle.

The Bears play at Green Bay this Sunday at noon.  R. I. P.

THE LIBRARIAN AND THE CAR KEYS.

A fortnight ago. my Chicago Boyz colleague David Foster responded to "[Y]ou couldn't circulate a manifesto to millions of followers using a teletype machine and stepper switches; you couldn't run multiple errands on the way home from school or work without a motor vehicle; and somehow Super Sized humans are a different sort of public health problem than starving humans" with a Twitter exchange that inspired a full-length post in which he noted,

The invention of the printing press drove, over several centuries, the decentralization of information and opinion influence. But with the coming of the steam-powered printing press and associated equipment (expensive) and the telegraph network for information transmission across thousands of miles, there was a re-centralizing effect. This was further driven by the introduction of broadcast radio, and, especially, television, with their limited availability of frequencies / channels.

The early days of the commercial Internet, especially with the addition of message boards and blogs, drove a new decentralization in a way analogous to what the printing press had done. A single individual could now take on the factual errors or the misrepresentations of a heavily-capitalized news organization and actually win…the old saying that you can’t win against somebody who buys ink by the barrel was no longer so true.

But with the coming of social media, there has been a re-centralization effect: algorithms could be tuned to deemphasize or totally suppress certain voices or opinions. Facebook, YouTube, and the (pre-Elon) twitter all did this, sometimes at the best of the government.

There is a clear risk that AI will further drive the re-centralization, as popular LLMs become regarded as The Single Source of Truth and people lose the habit of searching more broadly. And there is a very serious danger that governments will seek to control this source of truth.

That's something that was already on my mind.

There are no solutions, only trade-offs. A future post will explore reasons to be wary of information companies with relatively free rein to develop new forms of machine learning, or artificial intelligence, or enhanced data scraping, as well as of governments either regulating that development, allegedly in the public interest, or in controlling it.

But Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein did most of the heavy lifting for me.  Their version of the tradeoff emerges as "What everyone should be afraid of: tyranny over truth itself."

I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT.

Our President hopes to do Andrew Carnegie, Elbert Gary, and Joe Magarac one better.  "President Trump Announces Largest-Ever Steel Plant Coming to Iowa."  The president's political allies in Iowa's Congressional delegation and in state and local government all join in hailing the development.  There's something off about the project, though, as I will argue at length below the jump.

THEATER KIDS DOING WHAT THEATER KIDS DO.

Today in first world problems?  "Watertown students stage silent protest during Spirit Week." Why?  "Students at Watertown High School used Spirit Week as an opportunity to make a statement Wednesday, staging a silent protest over the cancellation of the school's planned production of Flashdance."

The silent protest, complete with social media.

Unattributed montage retrieved from WTMJ.

Why the cancellation?  "Theater students and parents previously told TMJ4 that the musical had already been modified to address concerns about age-appropriate content."  Presumably the bits where the leading lady chucks a rock through a window and yells "Go f*** the blonde" are among the modifications.  But the district superintendent has spoken, and the drama faculty will select a new musical for the drama club to perform.

THE TEAM PLAYING ATLANTA ALSO WON.

The Milwaukee Brewers will have at least one more opportunity to thank their fans.

It is now a race to eight wins.  Fittingly, Aaron Ashby, who recorded double-digit wins in relief, highlighting his team's ability to break ties or come from behind in the middle or late innings, pitched three innings for the win, and the baseball gods showed their sense of humor, with Garrett Mitchell taking a game-tying home run away from Manny Machado, perhaps the current Padre and former Dodger most disliked by Brewer Nation.

There's Sprecher as well as some Oktoberfest beers chilling in the 'fridge.

BUYING INTO AMERICA.

My position on immigration and assimilation has long been "Give these kids an America to buy into, and an America that buys into these kids, and we'll be OK."

That picture is from the 2016 Oktoberfest season at the Bavarian Bierhaus near Milwaukee.  The youth soccer players doing some fundraising for the Bavaria youth soccer program are now young adults, and, who knows, some might be starting families and bringing up the next generation of Bavaria's players.

Last weekend brought us Milwaukee's lakefront Oktoberfest, which shared the weekend with baseball playoffs, and buying into American cultural appropriation was in Ordung.

That's a candid shot, several of those festival goers had been posing together for photos to share alike.  As you see, they're serious about their beer, with a half-liter cup and a liter souvenir Maß or two on that table.

DINNER, WITH A SIDE OF TRAINS.

Ralph Spielman offers Trains readers a list of twenty independent restaurants coast to coast that offer rail cars to dine in, depots to dine at, and trains to watch between courses.

Some have an on-site railroad car to dine in, others have train-watching sites, and a few have both. Many are family-friendly. While some chain restaurants would work for the rail-minded, the listings here are all independently owned restaurants. Check whether adult beverages are on offer; they are not always a given.

His list covers much of the country, including the intriguingly named Notch 8 Grille in the former Boston and Maine station in Northampton, Massachusetts; Wallingford, Connecticut's Trackside Brick Oven Pizzeria, using a Philadelphia rapid transit car in a nod to the old trolley diners; Valhalla Crossing in Valhalla, New York, the station that once rated a note in the passenger timetable, "Remains will be checked to Valhalla;" and the Whistle Stop at the junction of the Hoosier Line's main routes in Monon, Indiana, which includes among its artifacts the late Ralph Johnson's Best Brothers Circus.

The article got me thinking about some of the logical eateries that didn't make the cut.  The Berea Depot, using the old New York Central station at Berea, Ohio, the crossing point of the New York Central's Big X, is closed although the station remains.  Michigan Central's Ann Arbor station now houses the Gandy Dancer, which appears to cater only to private parties such as wedding rehearsal dinners.  The Milwaukee Road Oconomowoc station is now Maxim's at the Oconomowoc Depot (I must go to Maxim's again, I must go to Maxim's again) which includes a vintage coach set up as a table car.  Hard by Cold Spring Shops headquarters is Pizza Villa, where the upstairs dining area includes picture windows with a view of the Overland Route.  Seating is first-come, first-served.

WILLIAM BLACKSTONE'S LOSS FUNCTION.

In statistical inference, the loss function is, loosely, a way of quantifying the consequences of a deviation of your estimate from reality.  I was looking for something precise and intuitive with the help of a search engine, and down the rabbit hole that quickly goes as apparently the people writing artificial intelligence algorithms make all sorts of use of loss functions, and whether they put more weight on positive or negative deviations of algorithm from reality might be an art form.  Ah, the joys of being pensioned off.  Here's my fortysomething self.

In statistical inference, there are two serious mistakes a researcher can make. The first type, which practitioners call Type I error, involves the rejection of a true null hypothesis. In many circumstances, people will describe such a case as a "false positive," because the null hypothesis is commonly absence of something (a disease, a price effect) and its rejection involves a mistaken diagnosis or a "statistically significant" coefficient (particularly troublesome if said coefficient also has the "wrong sign.")

The second type, per corollary a Type II error involves the failure to reject a false null hypothesis. Here, a sick person tests as healthy, or a coefficient that ought to differ from zero prints out as "statistically insignificant."

Sometimes, a researcher will speak of the power of a hypothesis test against Type I (or Type II) error, something that might be of great value if you don't want sick people tested as healthy, or as innocent people tested as guilty.

In a hypothesis test, the alternative hypothesis is the statement that the null hypothesis is false. If the alternative hypothesis is actually true, the power is the probability that one will correctly reject the null hypothesis. The most meaningful application of statistical power is to decide before initiation of a clinical study whether it is worth doing, given the needed effort, cost, and in the case of clinical experiments, patient involvement. A hypothesis test with little power will likely yield large p values and large confidence intervals. Thus when the power of a proposed study is low, even when there are real differences between treatments under investigation, the most likely result of the study will be that there is not enough evidence to reject the H₀and meaningful clinical differences will remain in question. In that situation a reasonable question to ask would be, was the study worth the needed time and effort to get so little additional information.

The usual question asked involving statistical power is: what sample size will result in a reasonable power (however defined) for the primary hypothesis being investigated. In many cases however, a more realistic question would be: what will the statistical power be for the important hypothesis tests, given the most likely sample size that can be obtained during the duration of the proposed study?

In statistical inference, "significance" and "confidence intervals" are artifacts of sample size, and generally loss functions and calculations of power are symmetric with respect to the divergence of estimator from reality.  Thus, for example, "least squares" regression, minimizing the sum of the squared residuals (a fancy way of saying estimator differing from reality) more harshly penalizes larger errors compared with smaller.

DOING EVERYTHING BUT SOLVING THE PROBLEM.

Today's levity from Common Dreams is Michael Waldman's "The One Issue the Midterm Victors Must Solve? Corruption."  The secondary headline continues, "If they do not, we will be sentenced to one election after another where parties club each other with populist anger, alternating in power with little changing."  That might be an opportunity to caution partisans not to treat their temporary majority as a mandate to implement their full wish list, the way things have gone throughout this century in these United States.

I suspect both major parties are more interested in playing to the hopes of their bases than in coming up with policy tweaks that would attract some voters who are choosing the least unappetizing prix-fixe dinner being doled out.  What the voters seem to be doing is gridlocking the national government to gum up the swill-cooking, and relocating to more convivial states or localities within states.  But the communist coalition within the Democrat caucus still hasn't gotten the memo.  "If that means the national Democrats pay more attention to the interior of the country and less to the aesthetic preferences of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the Northeast Corridor, that might be for the good."

But after Donald Trump handed the Democrats a gift in those Georgia runoff elections, the Democrats thought they had an opportunity for Christmas by July.  "A common observation this week is that Joe Biden cannot pass Franklin Roosevelt- or Lyndon Johnson-scale legislation without first having Franklin Roosevelt- or Lyndon Johnson-scale Congressional majorities."  Which they don't have, and whatever schmoozing skills the president might have once had don't work so well.

Mr Waldman recognises that changes in the control of a Congress, and sometimes of the party holding the White House, is the only tool the voters have to stop the current government from implementing their wish list in full.  "Political scientists call this a thermostatic election. Voters adjust the temperature by turning the dial away from perceived overreaches."  He could, at that point, have suggested a change in the apportionment of Congress in order to provide a policy bundle less unpleasant to median voters.  There are serious suggestions circulating in formal and informal ways.  That's not where he wants to go.  "But at times candidates have an agenda, detailed or implicit. Those are the years that produce the biggest change."  Yes, the Silent Generation's Watergate Caucus, the Boomers' Contract with America, and what he interprets as the early Millennials' social-democratic-populism.  But, it being a Common Dreams column, it has to be about "But Trump" rather than about working the perceived discontent voters have with corruption.  In so doing, he misses the opportunity to work the problem.

A survey by the Brennan Center earlier this year found an unusual and wide revulsion against corruption. It also found that voters blame Democrats as well as Republicans.

As they should.  Corruption is the natural outcome of bipartisan consensus and compromise, which sounds nice as it generates rents for the political class to share.  Suggest that a massive rollback of federal powers, say to the enumerated and limited powers the Federal Constitution spells out, though, and you probably don't get published on Common Dreams any more.

BEYOND SLAPSTICK AND TIN PAN ALLEY.

The Avalon Quartet, now entering their twentieth year in residence at Northern Illinois University, opened the 2026-2027 recital season with a screening of Ménilmontant, a 1926 production, with musical accompaniment composed by a member of the ensemble.

LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

At CNN, David Goldman argues, "Trump backed Iran into a corner. The regime isn’t blinking."  That might be for the benefit of the Never Trumpers and the remaining sane Democrats.

The US-led blockade and sanctions against Iran are working. Their success could determine the next phase of the war.

Iran's remaining oil for sale is nearly exhausted. Its crude production has been cut in half. The regime's primary source of revenue is drying up. Hyperinflation has left the economy in ruins.

Meanwhile, the flow of oil from other Gulf nations through the Strait of Hormuz, over which Iran had once wielded considerable influence, has effectively returned to normal.

But Iran shows no signs of folding yet. The regime isn't willing to give any concessions on its nuclear program, and negotiations on freedom of transit through the Strait of Hormuz have repeatedly stalled.

Why, when Iran's government acknowledges its economy faces a historic catastrophe, is the regime refusing to give in?

Iran has been here before. Five decades of operating successfully through punishing sanctions have taught the Iranian regime a thing or two about how to cope. Its brutal and ongoing crackdown on protests has quelled a public revolt. And the high cost of America's ongoing operation has made the status quo politically toxic for Iran's enemy.

That's why the regime may be in a far better position than it seems.

It's the Middle East, and people playing double games means it must be Tuesday.

Iran's lack of willingness to bend suggests sanctions evasion is still taking place, said Michelle Brouhard, head of policy and geopolitical risk at Kpler.

"The Iranian regime is really good at managing their country without resources," she said. "I don't think Iran is at a tipping point. So they must be receiving funds from somewhere."

Where there's smoke, there may be fire, but detecting sanctions evasion is tricky.

Iran may be transporting oil over land to Khazakstan and Russia, or by water via the Caspian Sea, suggested Brown, who noted Iran has routinely disguised its exported oil as Iraqi, and it has transferred oil to other nations' ships to get crude out of the strait. And the regime has trustees in many surrounding nations who secretively conduct transactions for the regime in the form of US dollars, cryptocurrency or other means to avoid detection, according to Brown.

Among the most intriguing possibilities, Brouhard said, is that Gulf nations exporting oil are surreptitiously paying Iran fees in exchange for safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz – even as they're secured by US military escorts. No hard evidence of such an arrangement exists, but Mazarei and Brown also said they heard rumblings that oil producers were delivering Iran a security toll to ensure safe passage.

Iran has continued to attack some tankers shuttling oil through the strait – but those could be ships that refused to pay a toll, Brouhard suggested.

News accounts suggest eleven ships hit by something explosive over the weekend.  There are no news accounts of the Iranians losing 33 ships as Our President has threatened.  It could be the mullahs and their True Believer enforcers are waiting past the Israeli and United States elections.  "That unsustainable status quo could be why Iran has been patiently waiting out the Trump administration. It may have lost its leverage in the oil market, and its economy has been battered, but Iran may be able to outlast the United States' willingness to stay the (expensive) course."  Or it might be True Believers with matchbooks and sections of gas main to play with.  Perhaps clarity will soon come, or perhaps Israeli and United States intelligence analysts are counselling forbearance, refraining from bombing that might make Iranian civilians less unfavorably disposed toward their facsimile of a government.

That's one way for the thing to be pressed.

JUST A LITTLE BIT OUTSIDE.

The Milwaukee Brewers hosted the first two divisional round playoff games Saturday and Sunday.  Milwaukee's Oktoberfest was also in progress, with the Hoan Bridge illuminated in Brewer colors.

A fireworks display launched from the breakwater went into its Grand Finale at almost exactly the moment that Brewer catcher William Contreras hit a go-ahead home run.  Nobody at the stadium saw it, though, as the roof and side panels were closed.  Something about not making adjustments to the playing conditions during a playoff game.

THANKS, FEMINISTS.

"A Hypothesis Becomes Harder to Reject" concludes,

Fifty to sixty years ago the second-wave feminists, seeing only the upside potential of the Pill with abortion-on-demand as the backstop plan were all about those "casual sexual encounters," with or without "an ethic of care," and the "alternative lifestyles" fetish offers quite the diversity of sexual encounters.  And cracking down on the Greek letter organizations?  Sometimes that's all the rage, sometimes it's not.

Because culture is a type of shared consciousness, it is an emergent phenomenon, and it might be simpler to bet on emergence, and let the evolutionary dead-ends, whether of the rabbit culture or the Consciousness Revolution or of privilege-shaming, collapse of their own inconsistencies.

Nothing has changed in the eighteen months since that post, or in my evaluation of those fifty to sixty years of allegedly progressive social change.  The inconsistencies go on and on and on.  Combine an alternative lifestyle version of a casual sexual encounter in a Cornell fraternity house, and when the election cycle demands a new outrage to rile up the women of the fevered brow, the rage resumes.

You can be certain that nobody involved in the Cornell U fraternity gang-bang circus is going to come out looking good, not the frat boys, not the girl, not the county DA, not New York AG Letitia James, and not NY Governor Kathy Hochul. The latter two have decided to showboat what has become a rape case in an election year when both are up for another four-year term.

First, the incident itself: October 19, 2024, a Saturday night when upstate New York is at its fall color peak and the campus is jumpin’, 20-year-old “Jane Doe” starts drinking at her sorority, Delta Delta Delta (Δ Δ Δ, “Tri-Delt”) whose motto is Let Us Steadfastly Love One Another. Around eleven o’clock Jane goes into downtown Ithaca to do more drinking at a bar. She’s legally underage, but manages to get served.

Meanwhile, messages are zinging around on social media, Snapchat, etc. There’s a party going on at the Chi Phi fraternity (ΧΦ). Jane communicates with one of the members there. He cordially invites her over for “a threesome.” Jane apparently has a reputation as a lively girl around campus. She accepts and heads over to Chi Phi with a load on, “five out of ten” on the intoxication scale, she later writes in a nine-page statement she gave to campus police.

She arrives at Chi Phi around midnight. More drinks. Pretty soon she’s in that threesome in a bedroom. The frat boys are also pretty hammered. Things get even wilder. Four other frat boys enter the picture. On top of the alcohol, they start doing ketamine, known to produce a dissociative “floaty, out-of-the-body feeling.” One’s judgment is not too good on it, even worse when mixed with booze. The scene at Chi Phi is Animal House plus. Various shenanigans ensue. Eventually, Jane Doe gets home.

The story, sans the obligatory home videos you know 'phone owners are recording, and the ketamine, is one of long pedigree.  The cause years ago was "date rape," perhaps modified to "acquaintance rape" in order to portray the woman involved as being deprived of her agency, whether it was assisted by beer or booze or enhanced by other stimulants or perhaps sedatives, and thus a victim of circumstances.  Never mind that, as appears to be the case in this Cornell story, the lady had her evening of what she thought was fun, then, a day or so later thinks, ewwww, I shouldn't have done that.  Now there's a whole therapeutic bureaucracy for her to lay out her victimization case.  A colleague correctly described that situation as the complainant simply lacking any character: she could have dialed back the pregaming, turned down the invitation, or excused herself when the drinks and the pharmacopeia started to circulate at Chi Phi.

YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY.

Others might have their Florida Man Friday.  A Florida fish story will have to do here.

An ocean fishing charter off the Florida Coast near Eglin Air Force Base had an unusually large, scaleless catch. The large gray behemoth in question was a U.S. military LUCAS drone, a one-way attack aircraft derived from a design modeled after Iran’s Shahed-136.

Base officials confirmed to Task & Purpose that the drone went down Sept. 17 during routine testing on the base’s range, two days before fishermen found it floating in the Gulf.

Before you let the authorities know you've found something they might be interested in, you make use of what the fish make use of a large floating object.

Daniel Arsenault photograph retrieved from Task and Purpose.

Subway cars get splashed as artificial reefs, so why not a floating drone?  "Arsenault said they cast around the waterlogged drone, which had attracted smaller fish seeking cover in the open water, and caught mahi-mahi and tripletail before hauling it aboard."  It's among the "five most unusual things" he's snagged whilst fishing.

A CHILLY CAMPUS CLIMATE IN ILLINOIS.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression continues to release collegiate free speech ratings, mostly documenting the lack thereof.  "Overall, the findings suggest some improvement in campus free speech climates, while also showing that many students still report difficulty discussing controversial topics and remain skeptical of allowing controversial speakers on campus."  That improvement is from on average, failing to provide a setting for the free exchange of ideas, at least as understood by the organization's compilers, to doing a poor to fair job.  (See John Warner, "The Limitations of FIRE’s Database," for the contested nature of that understanding.)

In Illinois, the organization evaluates twelve colleges and universities.  At the top of the list is the University of Chicago, which ranked first nationwide, albeit earning a B- at 81 points.  Generous grading curve.  Next, Northeastern Illinois, with a solid D at 64 points, but showing improvement.  Going on down, Northwestern, several of the state universities including both Southern Illinois campuses, Ronald Reagan's old Knox, and the two Chicago basketball schools come in with failing scores.  Loyola was edged out by DePaul, 53 to 51.

NUTS!

"Iran indicates it's received an official US response to its latest offer on ending the war."  That response might have been framed more politely.

Iranian officials indicated Wednesday they have received an official U.S. response to Tehran's latest proposal to end the seven-month war, which U.S. President Donald Trump had publicly rejected just days earlier.

The officials did not say what the response contained and whether it was a rejection.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi presented the U.S. response to President Masoud Pezeshkian at a Cabinet meeting, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani told the state-run IRNA news agency.

"We will make every effort to bring the agreement to fruition and will firmly stand up for the rights of the Iranian people," Pezeshkian said. "The agreement must now be based on a win-win strategy."

Not that it matters in any case, as Messrs Araghchi and Pezeshkian are figureheads.  Once their diplomatic courtesy visit to New York for the opening of the United Nations fall session timed out, Secretary of State Rubio asked them to leave.

There is literally no reason to allow these people to remain in the United States. The regime, no matter who it sends to any meeting, is not, will not, and never has negotiated in good faith. They will not keep any agreement struck. They will lie to the American negotiators and they will lie to their own people. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the only way out is through; that the only way we will see a real end to this problem is with the final ending of the Islamic Republic.

In the waiting game, the United States Navy escorting shuttle tankers through the Strait of Hormuz is preventing crude oil prices from rising to levels the doomsayers were anticipating last spring.  But refining capacity outside the Gulf is under strain, and ferrying refined product, even heavy distillates, rather than crude, is asking for trouble as long as there are True Believers with sections of gas main and a box of matches.

The war has become an economic endurance test. Iran has tried to push world energy prices higher with attacks on the region's oil shipping routes; the United States, in turn, has aimed to wreck Iran's economy by blockading its ports since June and slapping it with increasingly tough sanctions.

As election seasons in Israel and the United States come to their end, perhaps will come clarity.

KEEP MY REFRIGERATOR SIMPLE.

As information technologies improved, and my academic career wound down, I would caution students that perhaps the full-information economy we so blithely assumed in order to make the blackboard equilibrium equilibrate might not be such a good thing to live in.  If it's connected to the internet of things, there's the risk of somebody hacking it, or your private life revealed even if you never take your illicit date to a sporting event.  (That refrigerator is cycling an awful lot for a kitchen supposedly supplying one, isn't it?)  There's another, mundane dimension to that argument.

Simple: the more electronic components there are, the more ways there are for stuff to go wrong. An appliance repairman recently suggested I stick with my old school appliances (circa 2007 is old school these days) for as long as they last, as the new ones have a mean time to some sort of failure of less than a year. Most of his service calls these days are for the new ones, and one of the advanced features tends to be what fails.

So too let it be with owners of the latest smart refrigerators.  "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges."  Absurd, embarrassing, and totally unnecessary.

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”

There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.

“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.

Hard pass.  All I want my refrigerator to connect to is a power grid, and all I want to start my car is an ignition key.  Other internet-connected home appliances?  No thanks.

The obvious alternative, of course, is to avoid fridges that get updates altogether. Dumb fridges can suddenly break too, but that usually doesn’t happen if that fridge’s hardware components are all working properly and if it’s just a year or two old.

While most of the complaints this week center on rotten food, an abruptly broken fridge can cause other serious problems, like ruining medication. As other poorly issued smart home gadget updates have proven, extraneous technology can spoil a simple product.

I'm willing to use electric or gas appliances connected to the respective mains.  Adding internet connectivity brings avoidable first world problems that might not be worth the convenience of having the roast defrosting or the wine chilling or the oven preheating or food in the doggie dish (don't you have to activate the robot to get that out of the 'fridge?) before the owner gets home.

A PRODUCTIVE PERSON'S FAIR SHARE OF TAXES IS NEVER ENOUGH.

The sort of achievement-resenting egalitarian who complains about wealthy people being "undertaxed" is often an innumerate who cannot distinguish stocks from flows.  It's one of my pet peeves.  "Tax incidence is messy, and distinguishing stocks from flows is hard, but never let that get in the way of The Narrative."

Meet the latest innumerate achievement-resenting egalitarian, Chuck Collins representing a nest of whiners calling themselves "Inequality."  It's the predictable rile-up-the-losers Common Dreams stuff.  "These 22 California Billionaires Don’t Want to Pay Their Fair Share."

EVERYTHING ELSE IS ELABORATION.

Jonathan Turley concludes his "Why We Shouldn’t Cancel the Supreme Court" with "In revolution after revolution, newly-established courts carried out the purported will of the people with terrible consequences. In an age of rage, it is too often reason itself that is canceled."

His essay, as befits a student of constitutional law, focuses on the role of the United States Supreme Court.  In the course of establishing his argument, he makes the following points about the American Founding.

Today’s attacks on the American judiciary do indeed harken back to the rhetoric that raged before the advent of “The Terror” in revolutionary France—the rhetoric that gave rise to the kind of “mobocracy” that the Founders sought to avoid by designing our constitutional order as they did.

To help understand this, it is useful to recall the fundamental differences between the American Revolution, which led to the world’s oldest and most prosperous republic, and the French Revolution, which led to a short-lived, blood-soaked tyranny. Both revolutions were based on Enlightenment ideas. But America’s revolution was closely tied to the political philosophy of John Locke, who held that our rights come not from the government, but from God. The institutional arrangements of the Constitution, including the independent court system, were designed to protect these God-given individual rights.

Conversely, the French Revolution was inspired in the end not by Lockean principles but by the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which extolled the “general will” of the people and opposed institutions (including courts) that interfered with that will. This concept of a general or popular will served as a license for French revolutionaries like Robespierre—who declared that “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible . . . a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy”—to unleash a torrent of executions that would eventually come to turn on the revolutionaries themselves.

There is a radical movement rising in the U.S. with chilling parallels to the French Revolution. Demands for the elimination or packing of the Supreme Court and other measures are ripped from the French revolutionary handbook.

My stance, more as citizen with some knowledge of political economy than as constitutional or legal scholar, is that perhaps in a quarter millennium we got a few things right, as witness the Declaration and Constitution still governing, while France has had Bonapartism and four or five republics over the same time horizon.  Steven Hayward introduces the likely instabilities of any such reforms more directly.  "Progressive reforms would likely cause greater instability in our already unstable politics."  Why?  "If you think government is slow and ineffective now, that Americans are dangerously polarized, and that policy instability is a drag on the public interest, just wait till the Progressives get their way, and then demand another round of constitutional 'reform' when it doesn’t work out the way they hope."  Indeed, or perhaps mais oui!