NOW THAT THE TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS ARE EASING.

Recreational train trips are again a possibility.

It was our good friend Nicky who gave us the idea. ‘If you’re already taking the night train to Vienna,’ she said, ‘then might I suggest you book tickets to Graz? The price will be the same and you’ll get to spend the morning following the Semmering Railway through the mountains. You can always have lunch in Graz and then catch a train back to Vienna in the afternoon…’

It sounded like a plan. The night train from Berlin was due in to Vienna at 7am. By staying on board to Graz, we had the possibility of a lazy morning eating breakfast in our compartment rather than a bleary eyed stumble onto the platform. In one journey, we’d get to combine our love of the night train (which we have written about here before) with a trip along one of the most famous stretches of railway in the Alps. Indeed, the Semmering Railway was the first to be inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998, “one of the great feats of civil engineering during the pioneering phase of railway building.”

That we knew of the Semmering Railway at all was also thanks to Nicky. Alongside Susanne Kries, Nicky Gardner is the editor of both hidden europe magazine and Europe by Rail, the definitive guidebook for independent travellers. One of the routes in Europe by Rail takes in the Semmering Railway, and its history as a UNESCO World Heritage Site was told by one of hidden europe’s regular email newsletters. So it had been on the list for a while, and as we set out from Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof on a sticky Saturday evening, it was hard to know which part of the journey we were looking forward to more.

The original Semmering Pass line is soon to be replaced by a long base tunnel. The mountain railroad will stay in operation for tourism.

The Semmering Railway begins at Gloggnitz and crosses the pass to Mürzzuschlag. In Gloggnitz we could see the workers busying themselves at the opening to the new tunnel that will eventually displace this route for most freight and long-distance passenger traffic, but for now the tunnel remained just a hole in the hillside as we passed by and began the long, sweeping assent up towards the village of Semmering.

If you look down the train through the windows, especially on the stretch between Gloggnitz and Semmering, you can catch a glimpse of the engineering marvel that is the Semmering Railway. The train curves around atop beautiful brick viaducts before plunging into dark tunnels. All the while you are being lifted up and over the mountains – an altitude difference of 460 metres over the 41 kilometres between Gloggnitz and Mürzzuschlag.

That "engineering marvel" builds on the work of the Baltimore and Ohio, and the historical material in Semmering acknowledges as much.  It's probably churlish to note that the Semmering Pass line opened in 1854, the same year as The Pennsylvania Railroad's Horseshoe Curve, which might have that Engineering Heritage designation as well.

On the other hand, if your plan, as these travelers had, was to spend some time in Graz (Mürzzuschlag has a few things to recommend itself, but perhaps the night train didn't call there) and return for the bulk of a day in Vienna, there's a lot more by way of passenger service on Semmering than on any of those North American counterparts.  Amtrak's Capitol Limited is the only passenger service on Sand Patch, which would be difficult to bypass with a base tunnel, while the Western Maryland Scenic runs a Mallet Compound out of Cumberland on excursions.  The original West End toward St. Louis now peters out somewhere near Athens, Ohio, although for now there is still a lot of coal to be moved.  That's a pity.  "It's also possible to imagine Brahms or Dvorak taking the air at Deer Park or the Glades and working on some music. The mind boggles at the thought of Brahms in Altoona or Gallitzin."  Horseshoe Curve is still among the busiest mountain railroads, although with Penn Central, Conrail, and Norfolk Southern all having ways of moving more traffic to the east coast along the former New York Central, it's not what it used to be, and the one sad day train only connects to the Capitol if timekeeping is good.

IS A POTATO FAMINE LOOMING?

We've documented the absence of peanut butter and baby formula in the stores, and more recently, there was the curious incident of a bin of Idaho russet potatoes on close-out, although the bin was ... empty.  There's a reason the potatoes have been missing lately.

“I’m not sure if you remember last June, but we had some just unbelievably hot temperatures here in Idaho. It did a number on our potato crop,” said Jamey Higham, president and CEO of the Idaho Potato Commission. “And so, our yields were significantly down last year.”

Now, keep that in mind when you learn that a previous year’s potato crop cycle is supposed to last through the following August. And before the 2022 harvest comes into the pipeline (it’s just now beginning), consumers are facing the shortage from last year’s crop.

”There is not a gap. There are just less [c.q.] potatoes being shipped right now than there normally are this time of year because of the shorter supply that we started the season with,” said Higham.

Stretching out the stockpile is as much an art as it ever was.

What, then, is the state of the spuds this season?  Perhaps less bad.  "2021 was a brutal year for water resources in Idaho, but moisture and cooler temperatures in early 2022 helped prevent a repeat in Southwest Idaho."  This year's monsoon rains are a little more generous.

And now, dear reader, I understand why Maine potatoes were being shipped to the west coast!

WHY COMPARE YOURSELF WITH THE WORST?

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Rummana Hussian visits some truly dreadful places in order to make her claim that people make do in a lot of maligned places.

Chicago isn’t the only place maligned by outsiders and dog-whistling politicians too lazy and arrogant to look beyond the headlines. The birthplaces and residences of thousands around the world are often deemed dangerous or uncivilized. There is violence, political unrest and oppressive regimes in many of these cities and nations. But as in Chicago, there’s more to the story. Just from chatting with locals or witnessing the pulsation of hope roaring up against the turmoil and heartache, preconceptions can be thrown out the window.

She is correct in observing, "The more you use your passport, the more your intellectual humility grows. Stereotypes are turned on their heads, and there is a realization that laughter and beauty can emerge anywhere."

DON'T GIVE THE JARRETT REGENCY ANY IDEAS.

Strong Towns contributor Jay Stange grapples with the post-corona school bus driver shortage (note First Student recruiting at Corn Fest) with a reflection on the long and winding road (that leads to your cul-de-sac) that led to the situation.

Many of our cities’ transportation systems and land-use frameworks are fragile: auto centric and spread out. If you want to know how car dependent our places are, just imagine—as Josh McCarty of Urban3 once suggested to me—what would happen if tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. all the gasoline in the world disappeared.

For now, these school bus shortages are a real-world, non-hypothetical example of the problem we face in North America. In a second year of these bus driver shortages, the tone is getting shriller. The answers are not easy and expose the fragility of our post-WWII Suburban Experiment, which relies on cheap oil and massive spending on infrastructure in a Growth Ponzi Scheme that just keeps making it all worse.

No doubt the doddering ficus would mumble something about that "beautiful transition" and praise Gaia for doing what his cancellation of pipeline permits and oil leases couldn't.  Never mind that it was government decisions that brought us to this pass in the first place.  "Some of that exurban expansion was strictly emergent, and some of it was at the urging of Wise Experts. Similarly, emergence played a big role in the exodus from the cities, but expertise gave us urban renewal."

School consolidation, which is one of several reasons why walking to school is no longer a possibility, occurred for a variety of reasons.

What interests me as the shortage is ongoing, is to recognize, as [Daniel Herriges] writes, that “we didn't have to be here. We've spent decades closing neighborhood schools, consolidating schools in unwalkable locations, and making our communities more dangerous places for kids to walk and bike, all while public transportation became less frequent and less available.”

School consolidation might have taken place in the hopes of having a critical mass of students and taxpayers to properly equip and staff the chemistry class, or that might have been to field a competitive football team.  A school site in each new subdivision plat used to be standard procedure.  For a while the youngsters (and there are plenty) in the subdivisions containing Cold Spring Shops headquarters and the distressed sale properties to the west were on school buses to the former Malta high school, which became an elementary school when the two districts combined.  I lose track of who goes where these days.  These days, there are residents who object to the construction of elementary schools nearby.  Might soft-on-delinquency suspension policies turn elementary schools into nuisance facilities, and the corona tyranny contributing to the driver shortages simply heightened the contradictions, in the Trotskyist sense?

That transition away from the streetcar suburbs was a long time in coming, and the transition back will take a long time.  Meanwhile, all that emphasis on converting motorists into electric car drivers does nothing to change commuting patterns, and when you're stuck in traffic, those batteries will be ticking down and you might have to shut off the radio or CD player to conserve power.

Where is the latter-day electric traction merchant to suggest that a car line that is also a corridor for the electric mains might be the most effective way to provide commuting options by day with the additional power to charge up all those electric cars overnight?

WHEN THE FOX RIVER INTERURBAN RAN SOUTH OF THE FOREST PRESERVE.

The Fox River Trolley Museum is one of the few electric preservation railways that has a car running on its home rails.  It's a relatively small collection that includes a few other "oldest" and "only" surviving cars, and well worth a look, even with the season winding down.

Hicks Car Works has posted another of its Illinois interurban retrospectives, this one featuring the Fox River Line as an active carrier in the 1920s.  Beware of elephants!

TWO CHEERS FOR THE SMOKE-FILLED ROOM?

Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor suggests a design flaw with the relatively undisciplined political parties in these United States.  "American parties are coordination problems with shared branding."  There's Contemporary Relevance in his discussion, in that several winners of major party primaries appear (to the dismay or delight) to be lousy general election hopes.  The story is an old one, though: at the national level George McGovern got through in 1972, Donald Trump in 2016, and no doubt people who follow these things closely have other stories to tell.

I remember only enough about election reforms to be dangerous, and it goes something like this.

The primary election is an attempt by self-styled good government types of a century ago to shift some of the power to select candidates from party insiders to voters.  Thus, voting in a primary election involves requesting a party-specific ballot.  In Illinois, a voter declares by making such a request at the check-in desk.  There is no such thing as a list of "registered" Republicans or Democrats, the way there is in other states.  Party operatives of all parties (in principle, you could have a libertarian primary in Illinois) prefer the closed primary, as crossover voting is a way for hard-core voters of one party to frustrate candidates of another party.

Party purists tend not to like the arrangement, except when it's convenient (cross over, vote for what looks like a sure loser, then hope for the best.)

The flaw, Professor Taylor notes, is in the primary design itself.

Events which are, as I constantly note, low-turnout affairs often driven by the more fringe portions of a party and especially susceptible to name recognition over policy debates (often driven by who has the most money to spend to get their name out into the public sphere).

And while it may be that the GOP is hoisted on its own petard this electoral cycle, which may cause it to lose its chance at controlling the Senate, the reality is that we are allowing the formation of parties, and therefore those who control our government, via a very precarious process.

That's the correlation of forces of the moment, and the way conservative influencers are tying all Democrats to the Squad suggests it's in the design, rather than being an anomaly of the moment.

That muted endorsement of the smoke-filled room is in a footnote.

Getting into what option might exist is a whole other topic. But I will stress that our current system is as close to open, self-nomination as you can get and still have some party structure involved. I am suggesting, at a minimum, that there needs to be some amount of centralized vetting of candidates, if not simply elite-level selection. I do think, as I have argued for years, that such a change would likely foster real third-party activity because it would take away the currently very easy route of just running in the D or R primary as entry into electoral politics.

Whether we are looking at yet another failure of "Progressive" Era reforms to deliver the promised improvement is for another day.

PRESENTISM IS RUINING ACADEMIC HISTORY.

In "Peer-Reviewed History is Dying of Wokeness," David Randall summarizes the articles in the latest American Historical Review (the discipline's flagship journal akin to the traditional American Economic Review.) Clearly, the discipline is full of people who have lost the good of the intellect.

The American Historical Review’s articles avoid the main trunk of European and American political and intellectual history, instead investigating topics of minor importance. The authors, moreover, build their “interpretive approaches” not on concrete facts but on a series of theoretical abstractions: capitalism, climate change, disciplining, discourses, dispossession, emotional trauma, fiduciary colonialism, hegemonization, heterosexuality, imperial peripheries, Indigenous ontologies, Orientalism, patriarchal mentalities, political ecologies, settler colonialism, sexuality, socioeconomic inequality, solidarities, transgressiveness, transnational diasporic communities, and violence. The last term is used so broadly, for everything from selective reporting to genocide, that it obscures rather than illuminating. The articles’ politicization rests on their dependence on these abstractions, which support radical and ill-founded polemics.

All told, the AHR is tendentious and trivial. It possesses some historical value, but it is a sad register of the decline of the American historical profession.

I didn't know there were so many people trained in psychiatry writing in history.  It's probably asking for trouble to suggest that "Indigenous ontologies" might have left practitioners thereof in a bad place to respond to "settler colonialism" fortified by more robust ontologies.

BEWARE OF EXPLODING CAT-SUP BOTTLES.

Home canning can be a hobby, or a way of getting your own choice of flavors, (or, if you lack a productive inner life, a political statement) although it's hazardous if you don't know what you're doing.

In the early- to mid-1800s, Americans fermented tomato ketchup from a variety of home recipes. The first recorded recipe for a home-fermented tomato catsup was published in 1810, a descendant of British imitations of Asian “cat-sup,” or fermented fish sauce, that the British encountered on colonial voyages. Tomato catsup, which cooks made with ingredients such as apples and anchovies in addition to tomatoes, caught on quickly due to its bright flavor, which livened up an otherwise monotonous American diet. And because it was fermented, it boasted a shelf life of one to seven years.

After the Civil War, companies mass produced, bottled, and sold ketchup to a new class of urban consumers. This ketchup was generally thinner, less sweet, less vinegary, and more tomato-y than present-day ketchup. But while fermentation was a boon for home cooks, it was a liability for manufacturers. Fermentation turned ketchup sour, an increasingly unpopular characteristic as Americans gravitated towards sugar towards the end of the century.

The conclusion of this story might be a parable in the way safety regulations foster bigness in business.

Fermentation also sped up a more dangerous process: Occasionally, bottles of fermenting ketchup would explode. In 1895, the New York Sun reported, “A bottle of catsup exploded on the dinner table of a family at Michigan City, Indiana, recently, and the force knocked all of the dishes off the table.” A 1903 headline in the Saint Paul Globe read, “BOTTLE OF CATSUP EXPLODES IN HER HANDS: Twelve Year Old Emma Setley Is Badly Cut By Flying Glass.”

To protect customers and their bottom lines, ketchup companies embraced chemical preservatives. Smith cites turn-of-the-century studies in California, Connecticut, and Kentucky that found that the majority of commercial ketchup samples contained some form of antiseptic.

Then, in 1883, a man named Dr. Harvey Wiley became chief of the Division of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture, where he fought preservatives with the religious zeal of a man raised evangelical in rural Indiana. Born in 1844 in a log farmhouse, he spent his childhood tending to his family’s crops, then earned chemistry and medical degrees before shifting the Division of Chemistry’s focus to the food-safety problems that plagued the nation.

For the next two decades, he proposed countless Congressional bills on food safety, each of which was killed. But in 1904 he formed “The Poison Squad,” enlisting a group of healthy, young, male volunteers—mostly his colleagues at the Department of Agriculture—to eat all of their meals at work and ingest increasingly large quantities of preservatives. The results read like the last 10 seconds of a modern-day drug commercial: stomach cramps, headaches, sore throat, dizziness, decline in appetite, and loss of weight. Multiple trials stopped when participants became too sick to continue. Sensationalized in the press, “The Poison Squad” shifted public opinion against preservatives.

Don't the anaesthesiologists tell us that "dosage is poison?" So, too, with the stuff that's added "to retard spoilage" (or to head off overpressurized bottles exploding?)

THE ROAD DIET IS FINISHED IN TIME FOR CORN FEST.

I was skeptical that the project, which reduced the Lincoln Highway through downtown DeKalb from five lanes to three, would be done in time for Corn Fest.

Finished it was.

The wider sidewalks allowed some of the eateries to set up tables for their patrons to sit down, switch off, and quaff something in addition to the usual street fair fare.

The former House Cafe building has become a bar, "Le Calle" which was featuring a Selena tribute band on Friday.  It's strictly a tavern now, no longer the coffee house set in an excellent place for train watching.

The collegians are back in town, and the Corn Fest bands do not have a cover charge, although the beer garden is not as pleasant as a tavern.

There have been a few demographic changes over the year, with La Calle clearly catering to a Texican or Central American crowd, and there are a few more taco trucks among the corn roasters and dealers in corn dogs and elephant ears.

Corn Fest began as some sort of civic project by Del Monte, which once ran a large corn cannery on the south side of town.  The cannery is long gone, and one wonders how much longer the Troy Grove branch that served it is for the world with the Jarrett regency's war on fracking.  The Saturday complimentary corn roast endures.

Excellent work by the volunteers, as far as I know, nobody went away hungry.  The vacant lot at the northwest corner of that crossing, which has long been a casualty of Illinois being a tax hell, is useful space to set up picnic tables for the day.

The drill for the corn boil the last few years has been to use a steam traction engine to heat the water.  It's one of the regular traction engines at local threshing bees.

And, yes, I was teasing a train with one of those earlier pictures.

More domestic containers, trains running at reduced speeds through downtown.

A few years ago, the carnival moved to an area more easily fenced off.  That's still the case.

Looks like more fried foods on offer past security, plus, perhaps, the last gasp of the "-rama" craze.

There have been a few of the new-made-to-look-old buildings going up around downtown, including a few rental complexes.

That prohibition on food deliveries might also be a sign of the times: no legitimate food deliverer would ask to be let in, and that makes it harder for the troublemakers to get in.  On the other hand, are we seeing more evidence of the class incidence of corona tyranny?  Ordering in is one way to not spread the disease or expose yourself, and yet the people who do the delivering aren't treated well.

THE CONTINUING INTELLECTUAL WRECKAGE THAT IS PRESENTISM.

I still remember a refrain from seventh-grade social studies (which was an amalgam of civics and history) about the error of judging past practices by our standards.  That was an intellectual failure then, and it's an intellectual failure now.

Apparently, though, even the president of the American Historical Association can't remind his colleagues that it is an intellectual failure without getting hollered at.  His essay originally opened with what seemed like a sensible observation.

Twenty years ago, in these pages, Lynn Hunt argued “against presentism.” She lamented historians’ declining interest in topics prior to the 20th century, as well as our increasing tendency to interpret the past through the lens of the present. Hunt warned that this rising presentism threatened to “put us out of business as historians.” If history was little more than “short-term . . . identity politics defined by present concerns,” wouldn’t students be better served by taking degrees in sociology, political science, or ethnic studies instead?

The discipline did not heed Hunt’s warning. From 2003 to 2013, the number of PhDs awarded to students working on topics post-1800, across all fields, rose 18 percent. Meanwhile, those working on pre-1800 topics declined by 4 percent. During this time, the Wall Street meltdown was followed by plummeting undergraduate enrollments in history courses and increased professional interest in the history of contemporary socioeconomic topics. Then came Obama, and Twitter, and Trump. As the discipline has become more focused on the 20th and 21st centuries, historical analyses are contained within an increasingly constrained temporality. Our interpretations of the recent past collapse into the familiar terms of contemporary debates, leaving little room for the innovative, counterintuitive interpretations.

This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past; the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism—are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines. The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past. This sameness is ahistorical, a proposition that might be acceptable if it produced positive political results. But it doesn’t.

It doesn't produce positive academic results either, saying you're a history major means you're qualified to hold forth on potted social science, with little or no understanding of statistical inference or what constitutes a solid chain of causation. But I digress.

Within moments of his column appearing online, all hell broke loose on Twitter.

Incensed at even the mildest suggestion that politicization is undermining the integrity of historical scholarship, the activist wing of the history profession showed up on the AHA’s thread and began demanding Sweet’s cancellation.

I had no idea that social media was where peer review took place. Yes, there is, allegedly, something called "academic Twitter" which is a good place to mock people and watch them leave you alone after you mock them enough.  Apparently, though,a few sissies with blue checks can have the same force as a few Red Guards with guns and dunce caps.

In this branch of academia, it does not matter whether the 1619 Project was truthful or factually accurate. The only concerns are whether its narrative can be weaponized for a political cause or used to deflect scrutiny of the same. As is often the case in the pseudo-moralizing political crusades of academia, the loudest demands against Sweet also came from the least-productive academics – historians with thin CVs and little in the way of original scholarly research to their names, although they do maintain 24/7 Twitter feeds of progressive political commentary.

Thus, when you follow the link to Professor Sweet's column, it now opens with an Act of Contrition constructive self-criticism.

My September Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association.

A president’s monthly column, one of the privileges of the elected office, provides a megaphone to the membership and the discipline. The views and opinions expressed in that column are not those of the Association. If my ham-fisted attempt at provocation has proven anything, it is that the AHA membership is as vocal and robust as ever. If anyone has criticisms that they have been reluctant or unable to post publicly, please feel free to contact me directly.

I sincerely regret the way I have alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends. I am deeply sorry. In my clumsy efforts to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism, I left the impression that questions posed from absence, grief, memory, and resilience somehow matter less than those posed from positions of power. This absolutely is not true. It wasn’t my intention to leave that impression, but my provocation completely missed the mark.

Once again, I apologize for the damage I have caused to my fellow historians, the discipline, and the AHA. I hope to redeem myself in future conversations with you all. I’m listening and learning.

Who is the bigger chickenshit, the professor, or the unnamed colleagues who lack the intellectual chops to respond to the "provocation." It's the general chickenshittery that is wrecking higher education, not provocative essays.

Note that [Lora] Burnett and the other detractors never bothered to explain how Sweet’s argument was flawed or unsupported. Nor did they attempt to pen a rebuttal, which could have produced a constructive dialogue about the role of political activism in shaping historical scholarship. It was sufficient to denounce him as guilty for holding the wrong opinions. No matter the apology that Sweet made, the campaign to eject him from the history profession’s markedly impolite company would continue.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world began to take notice of the bizarre spectacle playing out at the main professional organization for a major academic discipline. As criticisms mounted on the AHA’s twitter feed, the organization moved to shut down debate entirely. They locked their twitter account, and posted a message to members denouncing the public blowback as the product of “trolls” and “bad faith actors.”

Indeed, we have noticed.

In sum: It’s wrong to criticize left-wing journalists writing about history if you know that criticism could be used by the right to discredit those efforts. There are no enemies on the left, regardless of what they say. Jonah Goldberg had a good response to this. Why not criticize the 1619 Project for being strident and shoddy instead of criticizing critics for pointing out it’s strident and shoddy?

We're laughing at them. "How do you tell the difference between 'trolls' and the tenured faculty members of most university history departments? And how pathetic are you as a supposedly premier academic organization that you have to 'protect' your Twitter feed?"

The explanation, as set out in the online house organ for all wokeness, all the time, illustrates just how pathetic the association is.

Soon the AHA’s Twitter thread was attracting comments from those outside the field—including one from ["white nationalist" Richard] Spencer, which said, “I just read this man’s offending column; it was reasonable in the extreme. Apparently, being a Rankean historian causes ‘harm’ and ‘pain.’ It’s ridiculous.”

The AHA then restricted public access to its Twitter feed, saying in a post that “A conversation about history has been invaded by trolls uninterested in civil discourse in last 12 hrs. This is appalling. Therefore conversation is temporarily limited to our community. AHA condemns all harassment of members of our community & others who replied in good faith.”

One. Critical. Tweet. Chickenshits. "Academic history is now worse than a waste of time nearly everywhere."

SHE'S ON FIRE.

Megyn Kelly, "Good riddance," Giftzwerg.

It's clear that her jive detector is working, and Oxford's J. A. Smith would likely credit her for arguing, persuasively, that der Giftzwerg has been talking rot.  The video is worth your twenty minutes watching: although Red State's Alex Parker collects a few of the better passages.  The real zingers, though, are in the full clip.

“What science evolved on the wearing of masks — something you admit you knew you were lying about at the time you first publicly commented? What science evolved on the vaccination level needed to allegedly get us to herd immunity? … He said he changed the number when he thought the public would tolerate a greater percentage — another lie that he admitted to. This wasn’t the evolution of anything besides Anthony Fauci’s con.”

Good riddance, Giftzwerg.

THE SOMETIMES FRUSTRATING GRIND THAT IS BASEBALL.

In the middle of July, the Milwaukee Brewers were still protecting a slim lead in the Central Division.

On the eighth of June, by the dark of moon, here we were.  "The Brewers got off to their best start ever during the first fifty games and as of this writing are half a game ahead of the Cardinals."  Brewer closer Josh Hader has had a few difficult outings since then, most recently allowing three home runs including a walk-off grand slam to a Yastrzemski; and the hits kept on coming with the next night's relief pitcher committing a bases-loaded balk;  and Sunday's bullpen game didn't turn out well.  Thus, here we are, at the All-Star break, with the Crew half a game ahead of the Cardinals, because of rain in Cincinnati.  That spectacular start?  Gone to Giants and Cubs and Cardinals, all of it.  "The Cardinals management understand that 'good enough' means capering on the field in late October."

Did I say a half game up on the Cardinals at the All-Star Break? Long gone.  "The Brewers gave up only two hits yet somehow found their way to another gut-wrenching loss against the Cubs."  That was Friday night's ten-inning game, in which the Cubs scored four runs, two earned, on two hits, both Ian Happ home runs, and left nobody on base.  Thus did the Cubs clinch the season series, with at least ten wins in the nineteen games the teams play.  "A generally upbeat Milwaukee clubhouse was dismayed following the 4-3 extra-inning loss that saw a no-hitter carried through six innings by Freddy Peralta wasted and runners stranded in scoring position time and time again."

Freddy Peralta was just back from an injury, and the prudent decision, meaning fielding a team that is competitive regularly, would be to limit his pitches.

[Brewer manager Craig] Counsell indicated that he and pitching coach Chris Hook had seen some signs, including body language, from Peralta during the sixth inning to the point they felt it was best to take him out.

"It's really just from talking to Freddy, reading Freddy," Counsell said. "Obviously he pitched beautifully but he thought he was at the end of the line and going through the order again, we thought that was enough.

"Just talking to him, just listening to him and reading body language. Our goal is for Freddy to make eight more starts so we're not going to push him at a time when it's a little questionable whether he should be out there again."

The "runners stranded in scoring position" is indicative of a longer-term challenge to having that regularly competitive team.

It's almost hard to believe that the Brewers were four games up in the Central Division when the calendar turned to August. They walked out of a hushed clubhouse night trailing by six in the division and sunk to 2½ games back of San Diego for the final wild card spot.

Deflating, although to what degree depends on how much air one believes is left in the Milwaukee's balloon of a 2022 season. And right now, having lost 15 of 23 and also eight games under .500 since rocketing off to the best 50-game start in franchise history, that balloon is looking like it's filled with helium, slowly floating out of grasp.

That "best 50-game start" is misleading, as that gaudy early season featured a lot of series wins and sweeps against the Pirates and Reds, and things were going so poorly for the Reds early on that the Pirates were able to win a game without benefit of a base hit.  (In the baseball record books, a pitcher only gets credited with a no-hitter in a winning record.)  The team's record against other teams, including the Cubs, who this year have been no great shakes, was close to .500 even in those first fifty games.

The Brewers fell to 7-10 on the year against the Cubs and are 3-12 over their last 15 against the bottom three teams in the Central Division – the Cubs, Reds and Pirates. Since the hottest 50-game start in franchise history, they are 33-41. They have lost 10 games in the division standings in 26 days.

Put another way, when the San Diego Padres offered the Brewers multiple prospects for Josh Hader, the business decision to make the trade might have been the right one.  Yes, that might have been demoralizing to the clubhouse, trading an All-Star for promising prospects, and it's possible the trade was demoralizing to Mr Hader, whose struggles as closer for the Padres have prompted some schadenfreude in Brewer Nation.  From what I understand, the Padre clubhouse is not as harmonious as the Brewers (in basketball, choose any of Boston, Brooklyn, or Miami's locker rooms and compare them with the Bucks) and a career move at the same time your wife had a difficult delivery of a new baby might affect the performance of even the most focused of professionals.

At the same time, if that gaudy start was not indicative of the current team's playoff capabilities, the prudent thing for management to do might be to maintain that winning culture by developing future performers, rather than going all-in for a championship (which might work every hundred years, if you're the Cubs, but look how that 2016 corps has scattered) that you might not achieve.  We'll be watching developments, for instance, out of San Diego to see if they secure that final wild card.  With the Brewers doing Harvey's Wallbangers, er, Counsell's Crushers stuff on Saturday night, I'm not yet ready to give up on this season.  Consistently in the mix is not a bad place to be for a small-market team in a town known for beer.

SECOND SECTION.

Counsell's Crushers came through again today, winning 9-7 with a 4-6-3 double play to end the game.  Tradition calls for some Sprecher, and there are a few bottles in the cooler.

MORE COWBELL OPTIONAL.

Several Old Masters worked melodies inspired by the Alpenhorn into their scores.  The Freistadt Alte Kameraden Band here augments its forces with a troupe of Alpenhornists from Indiana.

There are still a few county fairs to enjoy, and Oktoberfest season is upon us.  Put the noise, noise, noise of the political world aside, and enjoy a cream puff, or a quaff.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Entirely too many leftists have mental disorders.  The time for pulling punches is over.

Indeed:  "[E]mphasize education over partying and colleges will lose half their enrollment."

Stick your "progress" where the sun don't shine!

The week's roundup of pithy reinforcements of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

NATIONAL COMMAND AUTHORITY CONFIRMS IT.

Last week, I asserted, "A Democrat is somebody for whom productive people never pay enough taxes."

Here's confirmation, straight from the coot's mouth. "Is it fair to people who...do not own multibillion dollar businesses? They see why these guys getting all the tax credits? Is that fair? What do you think?"

My representative in Congress and my senators at least had the opportunity to vote on those tax credits.  I doubt that a dementia-addled figurehead is making a subtle point about limiting government, something along the line of rent seeking is awful, no matter who is seeking the rents or how compelling the sob-story.

On the other hand, there is a deep muscle-memory of the mind present even in late stage dementia.  Years ago, a youngster thanked a badly-faded Ronald Reagan for facing down the Soviet Union, and the Gipper supposedly responded, "That was my job."

Deep in the muscle memory of a Democrat, even an alleged centrist in the mold of Bill Clinton or in the imagination of Joe Biden, is the notion that productive people don't pay enough taxes.  Whoop, there it is!

What is the logic there? It seems to be that because the government has hosed taxpayers in the past to give tax credits to big businesses (something most conservatives oppose), we should hose them again to pay off the loans of people with graduate degrees. But even then, that makes no sense because a tax credit does not have to be paid for by definition. It is simply the absence of the government levying a tax. When you “cancel” student debt, that money has already been paid out and the loan is now in default. That money has to come from somewhere.

Biden then moved from showcasing his senility to showcasing his casual racism, another staple of his time in public life.

Go to the column, dear reader, and consider whether that isn't more intellectual muscle memory from long ago.  John Hinderaker isn't impressed.

Today a reporter asked Joe Biden about the fairness of the debt forgiveness plan. Biden turned and tried to respond. To me, Biden has appeared pathetically frail and long gone in dementia for a while now. But this is perhaps the saddest performance I have seen from him. His response has something to do with multi-billionaires, but I can’t make it out. In any event it was not responsive to the reporter’s question, which Biden was entirely incapable of engaging. The man is on his last legs.

Unfortunately, it was responsive. It's a deflection, and it, or others like it (stadium subsidies! corona bailouts!) are being heaved up as if argumentam ad anecdotam has the force of a mathematical proof.  I'm capable of condemning regressive transfers, wherever they are, and of understanding that those corona bailouts were a consequence of governments locking down too harshly for too long.

THE CASE FOR THE GRIM STRATEGY.

Democrats are corona tyrants who are soft on crime and in thrall to their freakazoid fringe.  As bad as some of the Republican choices are, treat the Democrat choices as worse.

American Greatness's Jeffrey Anderson issues a call to arms.  "Over the final 11 weeks of the campaign, Republicans would be well-served to focus on these 10 issues on which Biden and the Democrats are particularly vulnerable (in no particular order)."  Call it a restoration of a state of good repair.  Secure borders.  Crack down on crime.  End the corona tyranny.  Stop calling deprivation "a transition."

It's there for the taking, but it will take work to take it.  "Biden has governed with an unprecedented blend of radicalism and incompetency [c.q.], and a party that can’t capitalize on that had better rethink its approach."

LOOK FOR THOSE GAINS FROM TRADE.

China's ruling Communists would like to reclaim their "renegade province" a century after the nationalist government fled the mainland to recently liberated Formosa.  That sort of campaign is going to be more difficult in the wake of the ruling Communists abridging, in the name of ideological purity, the freedoms supposedly guaranteed to inhabitants of Hong Kong.  For the same reason, it's unlikely that the ruling party will remove the single largest obstacle to a peaceful reunion with Taiwan, which is their Mickey Mao communist system.

That's at least material for public consumption.  Privately, it has long been the case that Taiwanese investors are major owners in mainland factories.  That's true of other capitalist investors, including some whose strategic interests are at odds with the communists.  "Some major manufacturers that have had to halt operations in Sichuan include the Japanese carmaker Toyota and CATL, the Chinese lithium battery giant."  Hero water projects work out no better under portraits of Chairman Mao than they do with the endorsement of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the rains don't come.  And letting Taiwanese capitalists run mainland sweatshops is apparently a marriage of convenience.  Much-maligned Foxconn, which has yet to build anything major in Wisconsin, did not envision hiring a highly-skilled work force, and part of that maligning involved stories of suicides in mainland factories.  Foxconn's headquarters, and its major investors, are Taiwanese.

As is the world's largest manufacture of semiconductor chips, TSMC.

The truth is, no part of the world is in a position to do without the chips that TSMC supplies. And that may be one thing that is actually protecting Taiwan from an invasion. Because the reality of an invasion would lead to a disruption to the supply of chips that would cause a global downturn in the economy.

Including chips going to those Toyota works and consumer electronics plants on the mainland.  Any hard-power move on Taiwan is likely to lead to unemployed masses on the mainland.

TSMC may make the world’s most advanced chips, but as I explained here, the machines that make those chips are produced by one company in the Netherlands (ASML) using components and expertise from many other free countries around the world. The moment China seizes Taiwan by force, TSMC’s ability to purchase those machines or even have them serviced by experts from abroad ends immediately. How long could China keep them operating? A few months? Maybe a year or two at best?

And that’s assuming Taiwan doesn’t embrace the “broken nest” approach to discouraging such an invasion. The idea behind that paper from the Army War College was that Taiwan could vow to destroy assets such as the TSMC foundry if the country were invaded, denying China any chance of profiting from the invasion technologically.

The bottom line here is that China continues to put on a good show but there’s no way for them to really win this conflict by force. They could perhaps seize the territory but they can’t seize the assets because Taiwan’s leadership in chipmaking is entirely dependent on continued cooperation with the free world.

At some level, I suspect even the party ideologues understand this. On the other hand, ideologues are people whose priors are sometimes so strong that no evidence will persuade them to revise theirs.

IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER.

Power Line's Steven Hayward offers a tribute to Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary."

Some examples:

The Administrative State: Rule by an overwhelming minority.  Recommended elaboration: "a fiction by which rent-seekers receive cover in the guise of expertise."

Dialogue: A monologue where the Left explains and the Right agrees.  Recommended corrective: "don't hector me and call it 'dialogue'."

Some of the entries are of long pedigree.  Herewith, a new one::

Voter Suppression: Elimination of Democrat election fraud.

It's more important that these clarifications of reality make their way into general use than that they get circulated around the populist internet.  The problem with today's social media siloes is that the people who might be uneasy about the way the Jarrett regency has been wrecking the country might also be uneasy about going to the sites where such clarifications are available.

A PRIMER ON THE TRAGIC VISION.

Peter Norton's Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving elaborates on the argument laid out in the title, and Book Review N^o. 6 will turn to that in due course.

The post title, however, proposes a deeper lesson.  "Autonorama" is a play on "Futurama," which is probably a play on "panorama" or perhaps "cyclorama," although readers of my age will remember when "-rama" (not to be confused with the Vedas) was a suffix suggesting some sort of spectacular, such as a "bowl-a-rama" with fifty lanes, or the annual "scout-o-rama" showing the latest in projects and skits.  The kind of budget busting appropriation bill that might be a "spend-a-palooza" these days would be a "spend-a-rama:" and you knew the concept had grown stale when the local gas utility, piped natural gas being a new thing, offered "Gas-o-rama" as an assembly program for junior high schoolers to tout the wonders of the new fuel, and then the valley girls had their bonarama ...

DON'T BE A USEFUL IDIOT.

The obligation of a scientist, or any other scholar, is to be receptive to conflicting evidence, even if that means shedding cherished prior beliefs.  Public health talking head Leana Wen, M. D., is learning the hard way that compromising her integrity in support of The Narrative does not end well.  "America’s colleges are so left-wing that even a progressive doctor who once headed Planned Parenthood is facing calls that she be canceled as a speaker."  I first encountered the doctor, early on in the coronavirus shutdowns, when she was fretful about policy advocates pivoting from "harm reduction" (meaning Chinese style quarantines) to "harm mitigation" (the first step in analyzing different risks to different populations.)  She stayed a shutdown hard-liner long beyond when that policy made any sense, but, even so, there came a time when the evidence was more than compelling to discarding those priors.

As examples of “unsafe” or “unscientific” recommended practices, the letter cited several op-eds by Wen, including one suggesting that COVID-19 infection should be understood as a “new normal,” another arguing that COVID-19 closure learning loss has harmed children, and a third suggesting that municipalities should lift some COVID restrictions.

Apparently in the world of academic public health, "data driven" is trumped by various -isms and -phobias.

Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and epidemiology professor at the University of California, San Francisco, tweeted a video of himself criticizing the letter on Wednesday. “Open letter to APHA says Leana Wen was on wrong side of abortion debate (She is not pro-choice enough as former Pres of Planned Parenthood!) & is ‘fatphobic’ b/c she says eating Krispy Kreme EVERY DAY is bad,” he tweeted….The statement concluded with demands that the American Public Health Association rescind its speaking invitation to Wen and replace her with “someone who is capable and can speak to evidence-based practices rooted in a collective responsibility for health equity.”

The status of things these days is apparently "Politics, not public health, was behind most decisions to keep schools closed." With professors of public health politicized themselves.

It came to this, Dr. Wen, when you first fulminated against "harm mitigation" without offering an argument based on evidence under which harm reduction was the more productive policy.  In addition, the role of public health officials is to recommend courses of action to elected officials, not to issue the ukases themselves.

GIVE US THAT OLD TIME RELIGION.

It has long been a topic of inquiry, among academicians and practitioners of politics alike, why people vote or align with political movements or coalitions that don't really serve their best interests, at least as the academicians and practitioners see them.  That dates back in my memory to the Vietnam War and civil rights era: it was the hard-hats and bowling-shirt ethnics who were getting drafted and doing the dying, and yet they did not make common cause with the war protesters.  Most horribly, they gave Richard Nixon a landslide win in 1972.  (It probably didn't occur to most of the people I encountered who held such views that the kind of Marxian intellectual analysis they were engaging in came bundled with the socialist freak show so ably sent up by George Orwell.)

ONE WAY TO REDUCE THE FREEWAY FLYING FACULTY.

For some reason, "strategic planning in an era of downsizing" at Northern Illinois University included creating, with great fanfare, and with faculty job descriptions changed to require travel there, extension campuses in Naperville, Rockford, and most spectacularly, Hoffman Estates.  The university participated in a deal that included Sears and operators of the formerly Allstate, now Sears Centre, Arena to provide new classrooms more convenient to local working adults.  (Like Democrats shunning the coot at campaign events, Allstate purchased naming rights to the Rosemont Horizon hard by O'Hare.)

Anybody seen Sears lately?

Now the university's complex has been sold.

In a special meeting called on Thursday, the NIU Board of Trustees confirmed that the Hoffman Estates campus, 5555 Trillium Blvd, has a potential buyer and that the university should close on the sale quickly.

On March 18, 2021, the Board had determined that the Hoffman Estates campus was “surplus to the university needs” and began the selling process. Offers were made later that year, but they fell through because the property “did not meet the needs of the potential buyers,” according to the agenda.

We're at the "selling the family silverware" stage of the college bubble.  "The net proceeds from the sale will be put into a restricted cost center that will be used for campus deferred maintenance and emergency repair requirements, according to a Sept. 2021 meeting agenda."  The spin from headquarters does not disabuse me of that notion.

When the campus was made available for purchase, Holly Nicholson, president of the University Advisory Committee, raised concerns, pointing out that it will look like NIU is leaving that community and that NIU isn’t thriving. Eric Wasowicz, Board of Trustees chairperson, said that the university is handling the money of the people of Illinois and the university needs to be responsible for it.

At the time, NIU president Lisa Freeman said that students taking classes at the campus were typically commuter students who work a full-time job. COVID-19 and an increase in online classes were factors in NIU’s decision to sell the property.

There are fewer people in Illinois, the governor's corona tyranny has not induced people to stay, and an abortion sanctuary state is going to mean fewer young people to provide schools and colleges for in the future.  Better that the university sell off assets that might have higher value in alternative uses, and put a shrunken physical plant in something resembling a state of good repair.

THE INSURGENCY CONTINUES TO SIMMER.

I've used the flag sale tents at threshing bees and county fairs as a barometer of sentiment far from where the coastal cosmopolitans roam.  Whether it's the confederacy of the frustrated or simple discontent with those high fuel prices and empty shelves where the baby formula or peanut butter should be, it's still out there.

That's the flag sales tent at the recently-concluded Winnebago County Fair.  Yes, Confederate battle flags are still on offer.  I didn't see anyone offering those "In this house we believe ..." yard signs.

The fair recently observed its centennial, which means that the Rockford and Interurban ran past this site until 1930.  None of the material I have on that interurban mentions specific service to the fair grounds, although cars on the Freeport line would stop on signal at any road crossing.

Did you know that "feeding frenzy" applies to sheep?

An orange dish pan in the hands of a biped means "food" and these pens were making quite the racket until they got theirs.

There's still cause to set up a side-show banner line and conduct a side-show.

Free admission, and, as the blurbs note, "family friendly."

Sorry, Elon Musk, somebody beat you to demonstrating a working hyper loop!

The 4-H animal presentations are anything but "udder confusion."

You don't just hook the cow up to the milking machine!

The milk likely goes to market, and at today's prices, it's good not to waste any.  Roasted ear of corn, $4; cream puff, $5; pork chop sandwich $6; elephant ear $9.

There's still summer to find a county fair and go to it, and enjoy that corn and that cream puff.

NO REASON TO PUT WOMEN ON A PEDESTAL.

When writers for the at-the-time conservative Badger Herald makes that argument, maybe the self-styled progressives will roll their eyes and consider the source.

The demands of feminism required certain concessions on the part of men. Men had to be willing -- or forced -- to open their career ladders to the likes of women. They also had to cease to understand fidelity and commitment as prerequisites to sexual relationships. Needless to say, the second "concession" made the first much easier to swallow. It quickly dawned on men that there was now no reason to put women on the proverbial pedestal.

What will their reaction be when a self-styled feminist, Louise Perry, makes a similar argument?

It’s precisely because I’m a feminist that I’ve changed my mind on sexual liberalism. It’s an ideology premised on the false belief that the physical and psychological differences between men and women are trivial, and that any restrictions placed on sexual behavior must therefore have been motivated by malice, stupidity or ignorance.

The problem is the differences aren’t trivial. Sexual asymmetry is profoundly important: One half of the population is smaller and weaker than the other half, making it much more vulnerable to violence. This half of the population also carries all of the risks associated with pregnancy. It is also much less interested in enjoying all of the delights now on offer in the post-sexual revolution era.

Reality was leading by two runs thirty years ago.

Remove the progressive goggles, and the history of the last 60 years looks different. The sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood. It is also a story about the triumph of the playboy.

The new sexual culture isn’t so much about the liberation of women, as so many feminists would have us believe, but the adaptation of women to the expectations of a familiar character: Don Juan, Casanova, or, more recently, Hugh Hefner.

It gets better. Here's more from that Herald article.  Prescient, nicht wahr?

One has to wonder how different things would have been if feminism had demanded economic freedom for women and denounced the sexual revolution in the interest of preserving womens' traditional roles as the guardians of chastity. This would have gained for women the equal pay and opportunity they deserved while at the same time ensuring that women who wanted to raise families would find willing husbands-to-be.

Such a situation would also have spread the gains from feminism. Today the only victors in the sexual revolution are those men and women who are good-looking and clever enough to enjoy multiple partners with a minimum of emotional and financial commitment. The dowdy and the not-so-clever (or not-so-unscrupulous) are used by the well-endowed and find loneliness and frustration where, in a previous generation, they would probably have been able to start families.

Here's Ms Perry.

If we are to challenge the social costs of the sexual revolution effectively, then we can’t redesign society on the back of an envelope. We have to look at social structures that have already proven to be successful and compare them against one another, rather than against some imagined alternative that has never existed and is never likely to exist. The technology shock of the Pill led many liberals to the hubristic assumption that our society could be uniquely free from the oppression of sexual norms and function just fine.

The last 60 years have proved that assumption to be wrong. We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stating the obvious: Sex must be taken seriously. Men and women are different. Some desires are bad. Consent is not enough. Violence is not love. Loveless sex is not empowering. People are not products. Marriage is good.

And, above all, listen to your mother.

Reality is socially conservative, and evolutionary stability is real.

I'll give her the final word.

Feminism needs to rediscover the mother, in every sense.

Until we do, each individual woman will have to learn on her own the lie of the promise of sexual liberation—the lie that tells us, as Andrea Dworkin phrased it, that “fucking per se is freedom per se.”

It was a lie all along. It’s time, at last, to say so.

Put another way, contemporary mating practices might not be evolutionarily stable.

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS GO BACK TO COLLEGE.

Tomorrow will be the fourth Monday of August, and that means the first day of classes at Northern Illinois University.  The relatively early start means two weeks of instruction before the Labor Day weekend, which I never decided for sure was worse than the later start leaving one week of instruction ahead of the weekend.  More students are returning to campus, where there is a relatively new residence hall (It was recently named for some long-ago student who checked the right identity politics boxes) set up as four single bedrooms en suite with a central kitchen.  Those rooms have lots of wall space for the students to display their aesthetic sense.

At least, that makes sense to Amanda Zuckerman, the CEO and founder of Dormify, a company focused on college dorm and apartment furnishings.

And beyond personal style, Zuckerman said that functionality and comfort shouldn’t be overlooked.

“Your parents want to send you away feeling comfortable, like you’re in a space that sort of supports everything that you're doing on a daily basis at college,” Zuckerman said. “Because if you’re not starting and ending your day in a space that’s functional and inspiring and warm and cozy, then how are you expected to be your best self on campus?”

That sort of thinking has the usual sort of fretters engaging in the usual fretting over How Unfair That All Is.

On average, American families spend about $1,200 on back-to-college costs, according to the National Retail Federation. While some spend much more, buying from retailers like Dormify, Dormco and others that specialize in dorm furniture and decor, paying for personal style consultants and even entering decorating contests, others are financially strapped with just the minimum college expenses, and are put in a difficult position when faced with “invisible” costs, such as making a dorm room livable.

“The kids who can’t afford a mini fridge are going to feel bad when it comes time to split the cost in the dorm room,” said Susan Dynarski, an education professor at Harvard University.

It's typical, isn't it, of the people in higher education causing a problem and then fretting about it.

Here is what once greeted matriculants to the University of Wisconsin and assigned a bunk in Ogg Hall.

That Ogg Hall had to go, something about it not being charming enough.  Somehow, though, the even older Lakeshore dorms remain.  "Years ago, the rooms there still had government issued gooseneck desk lamps and two or three rooms shared an electrical circuit."  Newer residential complexes were built along the lake shore as well.

[Adams and Tripp], which the state architect modeled on the Oxford enclosed-quadrangle college, probably don't have the electrical system contemporary students expect, but they have a lot more character than today's palaces offer.  Inside, the way the various houses (Botkin, Gregory, Frankenburger, and the rest) were laid out, nine rooms shared a restroom with two sinks, three toilets, and one shower.   We learned to share.

The electrical systems started getting into trouble once component stereo systems became the rage, generally in addition to the AM-FM clock radio that replaced the spring-wound alarm clock.  Then personal portable televisions became part of the moving-in-day burden, and university housing managers really began to fret about the demands on dorm electrical systems once computers and peripherals got into the mix.  (And still, the university issued printers were the ones that got overloaded when assignments were due.)

If there is an inequity here, the universities are complicit.

Students who live in the dorms make up only a small percentage of college goers, since many students commute to college, live off-campus or study online. At private, nonprofit colleges, about 60 percent of students live in the dorms, and at public colleges, about 36 percent live in the dorms, according to a 2016 report from the Urban Institute. The share of low-income students varies by how selective the institution is, but 70 percent of all students at public colleges receive Pell grants and 30 percent of students at private, nonprofit colleges receive Pell grants, according to an analysis by The Institute for College Access and Success.

Dynarski said that for the students who do live in dorms, the inequality is a manifestation of the outside world. She said that entering a four-year, residential college is often like entering into an upper-middle-class life.

“And if you’re not arriving with the accoutrements of upper-class life, then it’s difficult to engage with your peers socially, and then ultimately academically as well,” Dynarski said.

The common schools no longer inculcate the habits of the middle class, which means students arriving from neighborhoods where the families don't instill the behavioral accoutrements quickly figure out they don't fit in; and they're not assigned to austere Ogg Hall style dorms, which would be filled to excess with the stuff today's matriculants are able to set up in those individual rooms en suite.

THE TROLLEY TO THE FAIRGROUNDS.

The Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Washington, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh, are close enough to the county fair grounds to provide a park and ride service in the traditional manner.

People rode to all sorts of recreational activities. Trolley companies even constructed amusement parks along or at the ends of trolley lines. One of the first trolley parks in Pennsylvania was Kennywood constructed in 1899 by the Monongahela Street Railway Company. There are only eleven trolley parks still in operation in the United States and four of those are in Pennsylvania: Lakemont Park in Altoona, Dorney Park in Allentown, Kennywood in West Mifflin, and Waldameer Park in Erie.

The trolleys and the county fairs had traditional ties as well.

The Washington County Agricultural Fair has a storied history that began well before streetcars came along. However, it was in the streetcar era that the fair really began to see success. They found their permanent home, saw increased participation, and increased attendance. From the beginning of the trolley era, riding the streetcar to the Fair has been a big part of the experience. Pittsburgh Railways Company (PRC) ran service to Arden, a simple two minute walk from the Fair. Trolley service to the Fair ran from 1911 when the Fair moved to its current location until the interurban service from Pittsburgh to Washington ended in August of 1953. By then, the trolley era had been in a steep decline. As soon as February of the following year, the founders of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum had purchased a portion of the abandoned PRC track. Both the Museum and the Fair have grown and changed over time, but the tradition of riding the trolley to the Fair has somehow managed to survive.

The trolley ride adds some play value to the fair visit.  Alas, this weekend's destination, the Winnebago County Fair in Pecatonica, Illinois, no longer has rail service.

The gravel path is the former Galena and Chicago Union, later Chicago and North Western, that got as close to Galena as Freeport.  If the fair was established early enough, the Rockford and Interurban would also have transited the grounds here.  Alas, it's only motor cars these days, although perhaps some locals can ride in on a horse.

There are still a few weeks of summer.  Find yourself a county fair, or a preservation railway, and go to it.  Oktoberfest season is also under way.