POLITICS DIVIDES.

Election Day commences in about six hours up in the White Mountains, and an Associated Press report breathes a sense of gathering gloom.

Voters across the United States are getting their word in, too, as they determine which party controls the Senate and the House and takes charge of governors' offices, legislatures and state leadership posts in the final two years of Republican Donald Trump's presidency.

What many of them see is that the America they've known is slipping away.

They see lawlessness coming from those who create the laws. They see hate stirred by politicians among neighbors, corruption at every turn, billionaires ruling the roost and a culture that doesn't speak to how they live — in short, American bedrock at risk of crumbling. Not to mention those crazy gas prices.

In dozens of Associated Press interviews with people who cast ballots at advance polling places or drop boxes across the country, the angst was palpable, most sharply from those who oppose Trump but also from many who support him.

Just another first Tuesday in November for libertarians, argues Reason's Nick Gillespie.

As someone who has never voted for a winning candidate at any level, nothing would please me more than to be able to cast a ballot for a major party politician who might actually have a chance at victory. I'm a principled small "l" libertarian, but that doesn't mean I'm a tough vote to win. All you have to do is be in favor of limiting the size, scope, and spending of government. But it turns out that neither major party ever seems to nominate politicians at any level who come close to following that groove. Which is depressing as hell.

It doesn't do his peace of mind, or mine, any good to contemplate that whoever secures a majority in a legislative body will immediately claim some sort of mandate to implement their plans, nevermind that the electorate are in the manner of old William Buckley, straddling history and yelling "Stop!"

CLEARING THE CUCKOOS OUT OF THE ACADEMIC NEST.

The so-called area studies departments, or critical studies centers, if you will, have long treated interesting working hypotheses as Articles of Faith.  "The fundamental problem confronting the 'studies' departments is that a lot of what passes as critical theory rests either on untestable priors, or is normative per se.  Don't say I didn't warn you."

It has long been my position that much of the work done in ethnic studies or critical theory can be handled, perhaps more properly, in existing academic departments, whether sociology or anthropology or English, and perhaps the presence of more conventional scholars might get the True Believers to offer better arguments.

GIVE EMERGENCE A CHANCE.

As pro baseball's regular season wound down, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed has a schadenfreudelicious moment.

I don’t quote Hegel often, but lately I’ve been thinking about his idea of the “cunning of history.” It’s his term for the times when circumstances conspire to get the outcome they want, against the intentions of actual actors. History seems particularly cunning lately.

There’s no way to note this without seeming insensitive, but the war on Iran has done quite a bit to encourage the shift to electric vehicles and hybrids. The longer that the price of gas is 50 percent or more higher than it was before the war, the more appealing it becomes to find ways to reduce or eliminate the use of gas. And that’s to say nothing of diesel, where the increases have been even worse, apparently to the benefit of railroads.

Hegel would have diagnosed the moment. The current administration has made no secret of its fealty to fossil fuels, but its foreign policy is creating market incentives to move away from them. And it’s easier to repeal a tax credit than it is to end a war. History has conspired to turn the administration’s moves against itself.

Of course, for anyone not blinded by ideology or tribal loyalty, that consequence of the war was utterly foreseeable.

Let's leave aside for the moment that North American railroads burn a lot of diesel: perhaps what he was getting at is they can roll more ton miles with a gallon of diesel than a big rig on the road, and we'll not call attention to the way he overlooked the corrupt bargain that kept Hormuz open (How do we add to that accounting the expense of letting the mullahs' tyranny over Iranians and their funding of proxies so that they look the other way while infidel oil transits the strait?) nor shall we make an issue of the curious overlap between people who want to keep fighting to the last Ukrainian for regime change in Russia while complaining about removing the mullahs after fifty years of their nonsense nor shall we call attention to the difficulty refining crude into diesel fuel when such refineries are thin on the ground in the United States, particularly on the Pacific coast.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Baptist Baseball Fans Torn Between Rooting For Team Named After Devil Or Team Named After Beer.

Friday is for fish fries in Wisconsin.  Just spitballin'.

Between the World Series and a communications upgrade at Cold Spring Shops (internet connected to the fiber backbone, landline phone number migrated to a mobile, old emergency mobile to be discontinued at the end of October) this compilation of Friday short takes is another emergency clearance of bookmarks.  Longer-form essays are likely to resume sometime next week.

HIGHER EDUCATION, PERSISTING IN MAKING THINGS MORE DIFFICULT THAN NECESSARY.

A week ago, the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, offered the worst deflection of all time from the professors' trade union.  "The American Association of University Professors president told the Commission on Colleges and Universities that institutions shouldn’t 'be expected to prioritize intellectual pluralism on settled scholarly questions.'"

THE BETTER ORGANIZATION WILL PREVAIL IRRESPECTIVE OF OTHER INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS.

That's the title of a post from a summer ago, when the Milwaukee Brewers swept the Dodgers during regular season play, and Reason's Jason Russell, contemplating some sort of job action in organized baseball, engages the argument in "MLB's Salary Cap Fight Isn't About Competitive Balance, It's About Limiting Labor Costs."

In 2025, baseball fans wanting to avoid a lockout, a salary cap, or both, were rooting for the small market, small payroll Milwaukee Brewers to beat the goliath Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series (NLCS). The Brewers got swept. Now it's 2026, and guess what? Baseball fans wanting to avoid a lockout, a salary cap, or both, are rooting for the small market, small payroll Brewers to beat the goliath Dodgers in the NLCS. (At least the Brewers aren't getting swept this time!)

But what if none of that matters at all to the salary cap fight?

A small market World Series victory for the Brewers (19th in MLB payroll), the Tampa Bay Rays (28th), or, yuck, the Cleveland Guardians (30th) helps boost the theoretical argument that MLB doesn't need a salary cap for small market teams to succeed. But labor negotiations are not decided by debate club rules—you don't win with a better policy argument. It's all about the power dynamics and leverage of what is essentially a business negotiation between employees and employers. The policy argument might matter to public opinion, but it makes hardly any difference to leverage.

Competitive balance may not matter to the owners at all (in fact, some studies have found that salary caps don't create more balance, but revenue sharing does). The owners are almost certainly focused on keeping down their labor costs. A salary cap would likely give an immediate boost to team values—when Formula 1 teams recently agreed to a broad cap on their expenses, valuations shot up.

Tampa Bay will play the first two games of the World Series in Milwaukee, after Milwaukee returned the favor to the Dodgers.  The scholarly findings don't surprise me: a salary cap constrains the bidding for a productive resource, the players, and ceteris paribus the residual claimant, the owner, stands to do better; on the other hand, revenue sharing changes the bidding thinking of an owner, who now bids against other owners whose budget constraints might have been loosened.

I KNEW SOMEBODY WOULD GO THERE.

Somebody did.  "Brewers Playoff Hero Jake Bauers Makes Accidental Case for Medicare for All."

There's nothing like a Common Dreams contributor to turn a feel-good story about a nearly accidental most valuable player in the league championship series into tendentious leftist propaganda.

While generating headlines throughout the pennant race due to his outstanding hitting and field play, Bauers journey to the top of Major League Baseball has Cinderella elements. Just two years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Bauers was ready to retire from the sport’s highest level.

“He had been playing professional baseball since he was just 17, spending more than a decade bouncing across seven different organizations with little success,” the paper reported. “After batting .199 for the Milwaukee Brewers in 2024, he was frustrated, burned out, and ready to move on.”

Life outside baseball intervened, but in a way familiar to millions of American families, not just pro athletes who can earn millions in lucrative contracts and endorsement deals.

“Bauers’ wife, Lauren, learned she was pregnant with the couple’s second child,” the WSJ explained. “Suddenly, Jake’s plan to become a stay-at-home dad while Lauren returned to her teaching job no longer seemed viable. They needed health insurance—so Bauers begrudgingly decided to give his floundering athletic career one last chance.”

It's not as though a journeyman player who has been in the Cleveland and Tampa Bay organizations as well as with the Brewers has the lucrative contracts or endorsement deals of a Shohei Ohtani or Francisco Lindor.  And didn't the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act obligate school districts to provide health insurance coverage, and didn't the triumphantly-titled Family and Medical Leave Act ensure maternity leaves?

THIS DOES NOT HAVE TO BE DIFFICULT.

A Ryan Quinn essay in the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education asks "Can Colleges Achieve Viewpoint Diversity Without ‘Affirmative Action for Conservatives’?"  

As is often the case with these things, it's people who should know better using political party registrations as a proxy for faculty intellectual predilections, a form of potted demography only possible in states that require primary voters to declare a party preference (that's not necessarily an affiliation, as crossover voting is a thing) in advance of a primary election.

MAKING AESOP LOOK LIKE ADAM SMITH?

It's a clunky comparison, although George Washington Law's Jonathan Turley's "The Fair Share Myth And Other Socialist Fables" is spot on.

In my book, Rage and the Republic, I address the false claim that the wealthy are not “paying their fair share.” In fact, the top 10 percent already pay more taxes than the bottom 90 percent combined.

In 2023, the top 1 percent paid an estimated 38.4 percent of all federal individual income taxes. One can certainly raise the need for additional taxes to support public works, but it is simple demagoguery to claim that the wealthy do not pay their fair share when the top 10 percent pay an estimated 75 percent of federal income taxes. The U.S. income tax system is already the most progressive in the developed world, even before additional New York state and city taxes are added in.

Regular readers are aware of that algebra as well as the tussles over tax treatment of capital gains.

The record of ever-more-generous welfare states is not encouraging.

Amid a rash of capital flight, many ask why Mamdani would want to continue taunting the wealthy and portraying them as freeloaders. The fact is, wherever it gets a foothold, socialism becomes self-perpetuating. Wherever ruinous policies destroy an economy, demand increases for government services and welfare. Citizens become more dependent on government as wealth is diminished.

Gooder and harder, whether it's Britain or California or New York City.

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."

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.

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.

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."

THE SECRET IS OUT.

Advice to beginning faculty members: deans might not read, but they can count.  "Does it come as a surprise that much of the research enterprise turns into a quest for the minimal publishable unit?  Or that average people cut corners?"  Now comes frequent Instapundit source, Wisconsin Law's Ann Althouse, with confirmation from within the enterprise, in the form of Fields Medalists objecting to people, not necessarily academic mathematicians, using algorithms to solve the famous open problems in mathematics.

The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned. We see these as part of broader alignment issues impacting other scientific and creative professions, as well as the whole of society.

Research mathematics deals with understanding basic structures of shapes, numbers, and natural phenomena. Over the course of generations, it has built a large corpus of sophisticated ideas, methods, abstractions, and other tools to comprehend the mathematical landscape. In turn, modern technologies and sciences are based on mathematical tools.

A retired mathematician's comment suggests the use of algorithms might not affect the academic enterprise much in any event.

I have literally never used AI in any of my research. My area is obscure enough that I doubt AI would have much interest any time soon in the research I do. Slightly more broadly, the big unsolved problems in my field (e.g. the Alperin weight conjecture) could maybe be finished by AI, but (best case scenario for AI) it would be pretty transparent that it was putting the finishing touches on a project that humans had been building up for decades (for instance, the McKay conjecture and the Height Zero conjecture were around in my field for decades, and have recently been solved by humans - humans who spent years putting the finishing touches on work that others had spent decades building up).

His concluding remark, however, motivated my thesis. "And a person reading about the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem might be inspired to sharpen their analytical skills, learn some math, and that could develop into something useful.  Like developing AI, oddly enough."

AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE.

Regular readers have known since at least 2020 that parking lots are productive assets and pricing them as such makes economic sense.  Maybe, rather than assessing homeowners and hoteliers for street repairs, ask the beneficiary to bear the burden.  "Milwaukee drivers could pay more to park under proposed 2027 budget to help fund road repairs."

TAKE THE MULLAHS' STOOGE UP ON HIS OFFER.

"In defiant speech, Pezeshkian calls out Trump and says Iran will fight 'until our last breath'."

Because of course he did.

Iran's president said Wednesday that his people have been "victims of terrorism" by the United States, delivering a rare wartime speech at the U.N. General Assembly a day after President Donald Trump said he may "annihilate" the Islamic Republic if a deal isn't reached soon to end the nearly seven-month war.

The defiant speech by President Masoud Pezeshkian marked a striking instance of a foreign leader addressing the world body while their country is at war with the host nation. While defending his country, Pezeshkian held up large photos of the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the more than 150 Iranian schoolchildren killed on the first days of the war.

"We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists," Pezeshkian said at the General Assembly. "Our innocent people have been the targets of cowardly attacks and aggressions imposed upon our country. And we defended ourselves with utmost strength. America and Israel attacked us."

Gee, you think riling up your starveling base to yell "Death to Israel, death to America" for nearly a half century is a good way to win friends and influence people?  Reap what you sow, stooge.

Our diplomats are having none of it.

He added of the United States: "Yes they did hit us, but we did not bend the knee." Toward the end of his speech, Pezeshkian called out Trump by name.

"It must be understood by Mr. Trump and those who seek to bully us that we are ready for dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations without accepting the language of force," he said.

Shortly after, both U.S. and Israeli officials blasted the speech, saying that it was hypocritical for the Islamic Republic to present itself as the victims of the world.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters: "I don't know what standing Iran has to lecture anyone on human rights or the international system when they habitually violate it."

The stooge had to posture that way because his political masters in Teheran speak their own language of force.  "Iran has presented the US with a roadmap to end the war that echoes the two countries' June agreement — a 60-day ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and groundwork for further talks — The National reported."  Same nonsense, different talking head.  Renounce the nukes, Iran, and stop funding those proxies, and then we can lift the sanctions and let your leaky ships sail.

GREAT MOMENTS IN IDENTITY POLITICS.

America's True Newspaper of Record strikes again!  "Experts Believe Lindsay Clancy Case May Set Feminist Movement Back Decades, But There May Be Some Negative Effects As Well."

The story continues.

The current feminist wave, which includes the belief that women are inherently superior leaders due to their peaceful nature, has been undercut by millions of women openly cheering homicide. "The Clancy trial has somehow caused feminists to argue that women are completely controlled by their hormones," said legal expert Ben McCray. "They now vehemently say that women are so weak and feeble that they can't even be held responsible for their own actions. The nation now agrees with their assessment."

Psychiatrist Sally Satel had thoughts about that argument.  Satire or not, the women of the fevered brow do a pretty good job of bringing on the mockery simply by being their authentic selves.  Not too long ago, Indiana Fever reserve Sophie Cunningham, who shies away from the culture wars, noted, "You can be girly, and you can go out and kick someone's a**."

WHAT PRICE IGNORANCE?

Contemplate, dear reader, the wry description of a mathematician as an organism that converts coffee into theorems.

Does that half-liter of water produce more theorems in the mathematician's coffee pot or somewhere off in the cloud?

For today, dear reader, we will not be too fussy about what data a "data center" processes.  A center might provide the servers that store your photographs, music videos, social media posts, and cribbed term papers.  As the Unofficial Newspaper of Record notes, "New Data Center Built To Handle Influx Of Online Rants Against Data Centers."  These days, mass storage using solid state components apparently does file allocation among servers so seamlessly that disk defragmentation is no longer necessary.

National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke's "Your Data Center Life" suggests the civilization-advancing capabilities of a variety of information technology complexes lumped together as data centers.

If, during the next Super Bowl, even 10 percent of the nation’s data centers were to be summarily switched off, the people of the United States would be on the verge of revolution.

The term we have chosen to describe the technology I have discussed here is “the cloud.” But, of course, there is no such thing. There are just data centers and the computers that run inside them. Conceptually, “the cloud” is a useful abstraction. But if taken too literally, it blinds us to an important reality: Each one of the 5,427 data centers in the United States is a real place, full of rows of real machines, that run on real electricity, and that are maintained by real people. Your data — by which I mean your emails, your bank account, your business files, your photographs of your kids — are sitting somewhere on a real hard disk. If I drove to where that hard disk is and smashed it up with a pickaxe, it would break, and the only reason that you probably would not permanently lose the data that it once held is that the data also exist in some other real location, on another real disk, in another real person. Bluntly put: The integrity of your data — and of your ability to access it whenever you want — is the result of your having cheap access to lots of different data centers, in lots of different places, so that if something bad happens to one of them, your stuff is backed up elsewhere.

Thus, a data center might be a switching center to keep the wireless internet and cell phone conversations working, something it does so well that the eternally ditzy former vice president could wave her hands about that data "cloud" being all around us, sort of like Yoda's Force but lacking the capability to lift your spacecraft, er, your campaign, out of the swamps of Dagoba.  Or it might include actual computers, although Tyler Cowen recently noted that computing capacity is still a constraint on artificial intelligence doing anything intelligent.  That doesn't surprise me: businesses and universities might have phased out their legacy mainframes, but true supercomputers still exist and they're still useful.  That Chat GPT prompt the above message complains about is going through that water and power to search through the information at its disposal, way more rapidly than the most assiduous of file clerks with the best associative memory.  Those data centers might be coming up with another "most strikeouts against switch hitters by any major league pitcher since 1908," or more quickly comparing millions of x-rays or gene sequences, and perhaps the computing capacity is finding a proof of Fermat's Theorem that does fit the margin of a Renaissance textbook.

Now contemplate replacing that file clerk with stepper switches and relay stacks.

That's a simple relay stack connecting two old-school dial telephones in a museum of telephony on the Iowa State Fair grounds.  A docent there told me that younger kids interpret "dial" as putting their finger on the number, as they've never had to physically dial in a number.  Now, you could build a computer network out of such relays and stepper switches, although it would be seriously impractical.  For that matter, the first mainframe computers replaced the relay and stepper switch accumulators with vacuum tubes to handle the logic, and the electrical, cooling, and maintenance requirements (one engineer replacing bum tubes, full time) extracted a much larger price on that "most critical resource."

FISCAL INCONTINENCE.

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

IT'S STILL SURRENDERING WITH A SHRUG.

Here I have long stood.

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

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