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.”

GREAT MOMENTS IN LEFTIST LUNACY.

Crystal Davis rings all the changes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

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

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

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

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

That pressure might be having the desired effect.

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

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

GRASPING AT PINS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

HERBERT MARCUSE'S BODY COUNT.

Ideas have consequences.  Consider this passage from "Liberating Tolerance," explaining what the Frankfurt School types have in store for Normals.  "Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left."

Yes, we can have a Serious Conversation in the common room about the circumstances under which there is a moral justification of political violence.  That sort of conversation is out of order a year after Charlie Kirk was murdered at a campus appearance in Utah.

Herbert Marcuse's disciples are still at it.  "Marxist University Profs Spew Tone-Deaf Calls for Violence," notes Red State's Ben Sellers.  Perhaps his rogues gallery is edited, the video clips suggest that speaking pejoratively about faculty DEI hires is not off base.  The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, corroborates.  "After Kirk’s Death, a Third of Students Say Posting ‘MAGA’ Is a Fireable Offense."  That's reporting on a recent Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey of liberating tolerance in practice.  "Fifty percent of students reported that blocking other students from attending a speech event is OK at least in rare cases, down from 54 percent last year, and 69 percent said the same about shouting down a speaker, compared to 72 percent a year prior."

PATRIOTISM, THE LAST REFUGE OF SCOUNDRELS.

In September of 2023, the Walworth County Democrats were touting that Hope and Change.

In October, Hamas did what comes naturally to jihadis.  The following spring, Dementia Joe challenged frontrunner Donald Trump to a debate, taunting "I hear you're free on Wednesdays."  Dementia Joe's brain failed in prime time, and the party replaced him as nominee.  That was not an improvement.

Earlier this summer, the party primary barely rejected a Madison nutcase in favor of a Milwaukee ward-heeler to stand for governor.

Rather than call attention to their embrace of the crazy, this year's tent at the Walworth County Fair went all in on the Red, White, and Blue.

The absence of crowds might say nothing about how the general election will turn out.  The best thing to do with political displays at county fairs is not to engage, whether it's a major party, a minor party,  or those advocates for an Article V convention or some similar single issue.  Orwell's weirdos hang out with Democrats, no matter how much red, white, and blue they display.

IT'S CALLED PUBLIC CHOICE, SETH.

Labor Day weekend is upon us, and children socialist agitators of all ages, including Seth Sandronsky, are obligated to dial up the rhetoric.  "Placing the drive for profits before the needs of the human population is the normal operation of the capitalist system as ruling class interests use two-party politics to craft laws and policies that benefit elites, billionaires, and corporations."

That Complex Proposition is right out of Marxian political economy, where the "capitalist state" is the executive committee for the ruling class.  "Two-party politics," or as the Serious People on the Sunday shows call it, "bipartisan compromise" might have the interests of elected officials and their bureaucrats and court intellectuals in mind, not necessarily those of the hypothetical capitalists extracting ever more surplus value.

There's never been much good done by those who affect to trade for the public interest, and dressing it up with the rhetoric of Scientific Management doesn't change the reality.  "Public power is the power to generate rents, and yes, rent-seekers seek rents, politicians generate them, and the combined effect is often to dissipate rents."  Comrade Sandronsky could have made a case for limiting the ability of governments to generate and dissipate rents, and provide additional procedural checks on corrupt public officials and unelected bureaucrats, but, this being Labor Day weekend, the polemics come first.

The contradictions of economic nationalism and the world order are growing. An affordability crisis of working and poor people stateside as their tax dollars flow away from them and into the congressional-military-industrial complex is the tip of a proverbial iceberg. The worsening climate crisis that profits billionaires and corporations in the short-term as the political duopoly facilitates this ecocide is a wake-up call for movement politics.

Comrade Sandronsky is giving the same sort of speech about worsening conditions and contradictions of capitalism that have been popular for over 150 years.  We keep hearing the call for that movement (pronounced mewve-ment) politics for years, to no lasting effect.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE COURT INTELLECTUALS.

I've argued that much of the propensity for university faculty to register as Democrats is self-interest concealed in the rhetoric of Governance by Wise Experts.

Tonight, a parable.  Suppose that it's hard to be a Man of System because those refractory citizens recognize what it is the Men of System are doing and change their behavior to take advantage of, or to protect themselves from, the policies those Wise Experts drew up (as if in Vince Lombardi's playbook) and the policy doesn't deliver what its designers anticipated?

In political economy, particularly in macroeconomic policy, what I've hinted at has a short descriptor, "Lucas critique," for the Chicago income theorist who worked through all the possible audibles the refractory citizens might call.

DENY COHERENT BELIEFS, FREE-RIDE ON THE EFFORTS OF THOSE WHO HAVE SOME.

My case is familiar.

I've been fighting it out on this line since before there was a Cold Spring Shops.  "Yeah, when you deny coherent beliefs of any kind, you get incoherence."  That cannot turn out well.  "If you're going to deny coherent beliefs, everybody else has to be in on the con."  That post also noted, "Arguments from authority only work when people respect your authority."

But people in authority have been undermining their authority for a long time, while dressing up in the skin suits that Erudition and Expertise have become.  Thus does Arthur Brooks, writing in The (Not Detroit) Free Press, conclude, "Millions of Americans aren’t just misinformed. They’re searching for coherence in a world that no longer provides it."

It's still up to people who don't buy the postmodern wordnoise to uphold standards.  Kurt Schlichter argues, "All This 'Feelings' Nonsense Should Make You Feel Sick."  That's notionally about the legal distinction between being out of sorts or being nuts.  In the course of his argument, though, he fires a broadside against the notion of people living "their truth."

The legal issue really has to do with whether the jurors believe she had a mental defect that made her unable to tell right from wrong, but this isn’t a hard case. It’s an easy case. It’s only made hard because a significant percentage of our society has decided that reason is inconvenient, as it leads to results that they don’t prefer, so they’ve decided to jettison it completely in exchange for a paradigm in which feelings determine reality. The advantage of a feelzocentric paradigm is obvious. You always get the result you want because the only criterion for any issue is how you feel.

Left unchecked, this idea would be the death of civilization. But of course, the irony is that only civilization can allow the frivolity of a feelzocentric paradigm to persist. Its practitioners are made safe and secure by those of us bound to the harsh rigors of reason. Basically, we create a world where they can act like idiots and not get themselves killed by other people who are controlled by their emotions. You know, kind of like the entire Third World.

It's an absence of bourgeois norms, perhaps seasoned by tribal politics and the cult of Mohammed that makes the Third World what it is, not because Third World universities are on the cutting edge of high concept philosophy.  Well, OK, that's for arbitrary values of "third world" that include France.

Bad ideas, though, have a way of trickling down from the ivory tower into common discourse.

We used to look down on people who weren’t rational. But now we look on them as sensitive, as caring and compassionate. Our Oprahized society celebrates those who prioritize the feelz. How it’s caring and compassionate to let a woman who throttled a trio of babies escape punishment is beyond me. Like you, my mind can’t wrap around people who are entirely bereft of reason in favor of emotion.

We see it online, too, with irrational people babbling endlessly about stupid nonsense in defiance of objective fact.

"Nonsense in defiance of objective fact" might not be what hangs that Plymouth jury.  As long, though, as we live in a world where "reality has no regard for your feelings" is a right-wing talking point, and uttering it might get the campus bias response team on you, it's going to be on the people who insist that logic and content must carry the day to protect themselves, and the people not so inhibited. from the consequences of denying coherent beliefs.

SECTARIANISM TODAY, SECTARIANISM TOMORROW, SECTARIANISM FOREVER.

Les Leopold asks, "Can DSA’s Brand of Socialism Attract the Broader Working Class?"

No, for reasons that are not too removed from my assessment of a few weeks ago.

When DSA candidates take to the field, they focus almost entirely on populist economic demands—housing and food affordability, fair taxes on billionaires, and Medicare for All. These are socialist in the sense that Social Security, libraries, fire departments, and our current Medicare are socialist, and yet they are also firmly embedded in our capitalist system.

I have yet to encounter a DSA candidate who discusses truly socialist reforms, like the elimination of large private enterprises and workers’ control of the corporations that employ them.

A strict understanding of things socialist suggests that anything "embedded in our capitalist system" involves acceptance of the wages system, and there is no requirement that libraries, fire departments, or pensions, let alone things like roads and water mains, must be government services (the old "mixed economy" compromise.  It is also no accident, dear reader, that Mr Leopold, good communist that he is, will be dismayed that Marxism-DeLeonism is a foreign concept to the priviligentsia who align with "democratic socialism."

PUTTING THE WORST POSSIBLE SPIN ON GOOD NEWS.

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

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

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

THE RENT GRADIENT COMES FOR YOUR BOWLING LANES.

Fortune contributor Catherina Gioino lodges a lament.  "Bars, bowling alleys, and movie theaters cost too much to run and visit. Americans have run out of places to hang out and we’re paying with our health."

Well, yes.

That's the down-side of the emergence of the Creative Class.  [Long] ago, I noted, "One, the premium to locating in the most creative communities bids up rents. That produces an arbitrage opportunity, even in recession."  Apparently, though, gentrification leads to a more valuable bundle of urban services, something that has value to Creative Class types.

Cater to the Grabowskis or salt-of-the-earth types of whatever ethnic origin when the yuppies show up, and suddenly your favorite hangout goes away.

Using Census data, researchers tracked 12 categories of what sociologists call "third places"—among them coffee shops, libraries, museums, recreation centers, and restaurants—and found widespread closures across every single category from 2019 to 2021, with the losses hitting hardest in rural areas and communities with larger Black, Hispanic, and less-educated populations.

Not only are these places disappearing, the ones still standing cost more to walk into than they used to. Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the study's researchers, immediately agreed when asked how much of this is an affordability story. "Absolutely. I mean, everything costs more," she said. "Cost of living is so much more, and gentrification is absolutely happening." It's a dynamic she's watched shrink the pool of people who can still afford to be regulars anywhere.

The article focuses on urban clustering during and after the corona shutdowns.  The dynamics would have worked out the same irrespective of whether Dr. Faustus Fauci got his way or was properly told to sod off.  "Sooner or later, urban agglomeration economies come for neighborhoods an easy journey to the central business district."

Finlay sees gentrification cutting the same way as rising costs elsewhere: It can bring in new services, but not necessarily to the people who were already there. Drawing on interviews conducted across the Twin Cities, where she has based part of her research, Finlay described participants who said a revitalized neighborhood no longer felt built for them, with people saying they were followed in stores, or were told her they had to dress differently just to shop nearby.

New arrivals don't have to pass judgement on yobbish neighbors if the bid-rent curve prices the yobs out.

DENY THERE'S A PROBLEM, CHANGE THE SUBJECT, AND QUESTION THE CRITIC'S MOTIVES.

That's the standard politician playbook for avoiding doing the necessary work, and two contributors to the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education adopt the formula in their "Enough With the Performative Apologia."

YOU AND WHOSE NAVY?

"Iran threatens 45 tankers with fines, confiscation in Hormuz escalation."  Regime dead-enders think they've identified the ships participating in the shuttle operation transloading Gulf Arabian product to ships sheltering well away from the mullahs' putative blockade.

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE.

The "progressive" vision of a better world, summarized in one sentence.  "At the time, I hated riding on the subway. But more than 50 years later, I’m grateful for that commute—for the way it forced a visceral reminder of our shared humanity."

UTTERLY PATHETIC.

More folly from the self-styled progressives.  "‘Utterly Unsustainable’: Employer-Sponsored Healthcare Costs Set to Keep Surging."  Search the essay in vain for any acknowledgement that such "healthcare costs" have nothing to do with trade-tested betterments.  You get the usual talking points.  "While Democratic leadership continues to oppose a Medicare for All system overwhelmingly favored by their party’s voters, progressives point to studies showing that such a program will save lives and money."

DESPERATELY SEEKING A UNICORN.

In "Taxes Need a Rebrand," Michael Jarvis makes an argument straight out of the early days of the Clinton presidency, when Hillary was actually wearing the pants.  "Too often, tax is framed as a burden instead of a form of shared investment and discussed as a technical obligation rather than the foundation that allows modern societies to function."  Just reframe 'em as "contributions."  (Try not to think of George Lakoff.)

Too often, tax is framed as a burden instead of a form of shared investment. It is discussed as a technical obligation rather than the foundation that allows modern societies to function. Schools, healthcare systems, transportation networks, courts, emergency services, climate resilience measures, and public safety systems do not emerge on their own. They depend on sustained and predictable collective investment, and taxation remains the primary way societies make that investment possible.

You get your Common Dreams commentator card revoked if you even admit of the possibility that many of the items in that passage emerged through the discovery of trade-tested betterments.

LET THE KIDS PLAY.

Last week, Red State's Terri Christoph urged, "Leave Sophie Alone: Conservatives Don't Need to Co-Opt Cunningham."  Let her cook, and don't let's color her appeal by tying it to the "right's influencer ecosystem."  So too, suggests Dan Wolken, with her team-mate Caitlin Clark.  "Given a clear lane to weigh in and plant her flag on one side of the issue or the other, Clark did what she always does on an inflammatory topic: Hit the eject button as fast as she can."

As we noted in a previous post using the same headline, "In women's sports, though, you can claim not to be interested in the culture wars, but the culture wars are interested in you."  Red State's Jerry Wilson, for instance, would rather keep pushing.  "The WNBA Delivers a Glorious Opportunity to Preach the Conservative Evangel."

In part, he continues, because the league's coaches keep stepping in it.  That prompted Clay Travis, who, fittingly for a radio talker given the Rush Limbaugh franchise, demonstrated absurdity by being absurd.

That's boosted the morale of Militant Normals since he dropped his plan to staff a "WNBA" roster with crossers as well as his challenge to set up a charity match between the Las Vegas Aces and a high school boy's championship team, proceeds to go to Tunnel to Towers.

It might be, though, that Miss Cunningham wouldn't take much pushing to take a side.

It’s not clear when exactly Cunningham decided to make her political views her personality, though she’d been nicknamed MAGA Barbie as early as her college days at the University of Missouri, likely because she followed and interacted with Candace Owens and other conservative names on social media. Unfortunately for everyone, it seems her latest nightmare collab is with Riley Gaines, the biggest anti-trans gadfly for MAGA sports.

Yes, Riley Gaines is on board with the Militant Normals, and former sideline reporter Michelle Tafoya is running for United States Senate from Minnesota, and it might be that former Levi's executive and onetime gymnast Jennifer Sey will be pushed into that ambit.  It's more likely, though, that each of those women stands where she does because each was mugged by reality while the identity politics mob suggested there was nothing to see.

THE DEMOCRATIC SPLITTISTS OF AMERICA.

It is the nature of Puritan congregations and socialist movements to read heretics out of the congregation, and surely the heirs to Leon Trotsky can do a better job on the Democratic Socialists of America than I ever could.  "It has to be galling to a century of Leon Trotsky wannabes that their granny glasses, goatees, and jargon gets them nothing by way of elective office, while adherents of the Democratic Socialists of America hold a few prominent elective offices."