POLITICS DIVIDES.

Before the votes were counted, Trumpian populists were circulating memes about establishment media engaging in a demoralization operation.

Our President well might have been engaging in an information operation of his own, encouraging his camp followers to vote as if he were on the ballot.  This morning, it's clear his detractors were also so voting.  A wipe-out of proportions that, had the parties been reversed, would fall into Peter Jennings temper tantrum territory, followed.  That sort of commentary, suggests Steven Taylor with Outside the Beltway, commits a category error.  "I am not absolving individual voters for their moral choices. But if the goal is to find where the core problems are, blaming 'the voters' or 'Americans' requires a fair assessment of whether or not the system is measuring what 'the voters' want."  As he develops his thesis, he notes,

Look, if a majority of a country really wants fascism, no rules are going to stop a fascist takeover (or insert your extreme ideology of choice). Our problem is not that a majority of the population actually wants MAGA. Our problem is that it is possible for MAGA to control one of two parties.

And yes, in a perfect world MAGA should be enough to get people to flee the GOP en masse.

There's something charming about academic political scientists' conceit? belief? that governing? governance? can simultaneously be benevolent, effective, and accountable, isn't there?

THE CASE FOR LIMITING GOVERNMENT.

Last week, John Puri entertained National Review readers with "A List of Things Democrats Might Do If They Retake Power."  I think it was seasoned with postmodern irony, and his concluding "Truly frightening stuff. Obviously, any party that would do such things should never be given complete political power" should have been the tell.  Scroll through the list, dear reader, and put yourself in the position of a nodding donkey braying "Trump did that, Trump did that."

REVEALED PREFERENCES.

Soon-to-be-retiring Northern Illinois University president Lisa Freeman presented her goals for the university to the Faculty Senate.

President Lisa Freeman highlighted some of 2026’s accomplishments and spoke about the progress toward the university’s goals.

Themes

1. Empowerment and shared responsibility
2. Student recruitment, success and experience
3. Academic excellence and curriculum innovation
4. Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging
5. Research, scholarship, artistry and engagement
6. Resource development and fiscal responsibility

Freeman provided a progress report.

The article is in The Northern Star, and it opens with a clarification.  "A clarification was added to NIU’s themes by grouping together 'Student recruitment, success and experience.' A clarification was also made by paraphrasing President Lisa Freeman’s statement on a new sexual consent training to explain a misspoken word that was previously quoted."

Whatever.  Once upon a time, the McGovernicks and their enablers in the faculty lounge spoke of a "fundamental reordering of priorities," which in a faculty senate setting might be as simple as putting "academic excellence" first, without "curriculum innovation" cluttering the works, and "research, scholarship, artistry and engagement" second.  You know, a university acting like a university.

THE POWER OF COMPOUND INTEREST.

During the World Series, Capital One called up a commercial that I have long enjoyed.

It touches on two of my pet themes, financial fitness and life after college being the revenge of the nerds.  Even when the kiddos don't call on the astronaut.  Stay in school.

That's all for this month.  The Packers didn't get the most satisfying win on Thursday, but football on any Thursday that isn't Thanksgiving is a foolish idea anyway, and they have work to do, win or not.  Safety Xavier McKinney did get fined by the league for criticizing the officiating in Detroit and Packer spokesman Wes Hodkiewicz, who, note, speaks for the Packer organization, noted "McKinney spoke the truth, and his words were worth every cent it may cost him."  The officiating crew in question have been exiled, if not to Siberia, from Sunday prime time to a game between New England and Miami.  "If this reassignment is actually a sign that the league is finally taking those complaints seriously, great. But if it's just an attempt to keep bad officiating out of the primetime spotlight, fans aren't likely to be all that impressed."

So mote it be.  Yes, there is a fraught election coming up, yes, people continue to write foolish things on Common Dreams, and yes, higher education continues to be run by terminally stupid people.  Those things will still be true come November.

Enjoy your Hallowe'en, and your World Champion Milwaukee Brewers.

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.

YOU'RE AN INTERIM COACH WHETHER THE JOB TITLE SAYS "INTERIM" OR NOT.

Fourteen years ago, North Carolina State recruited Northern Illinois head football coach Dave Doeren right in the middle of Northern Illinois earning an invitation to play in the Orange Bowl.  "North Carolina State created the vacancy late last week, under circumstances that prompted Jane Shaw at Phi Beta Cons [the link is long dead — Ed.] to make invidious comparisons between the sacking of coaches and the sacking, or not, of professors."

North Carolina State University just fired its football coach. Tom O’Brien had a winning record over six seasons (but not in the school’s conference, the ACC). He had taken the team to four bowl games, and his team had beaten its chief rival, UNC–Chapel Hill, five times. But the athletic director, Debbie Yow, wants more “aggressive” recruiting. As one fan said, O’Brien was “pretty good,” just not good enough.

Nothing changes in Raleigh.  "NC State's McMurray Family Director of Athletics Boo Corrigan has announced that Wolfpack head football coach Dave Doeren has been relieved of his duties effective immediately."

REPLAY REVIEW MAKES THE REFEREEING WORSE.

Red State's Kyle Becker calls attention.  "Something Feels Very 'Wrong' About the NFL. Fans Are Noticing."

At one point, if you looked up at the myriad of big screen television sets one could see what can only be described as a herd of zebras.

On every set, a referee, calling a holding penalty on this play, but not on the fifty plays before where the exact same thing happened.

Whether or not you subscribe to the theory that sports gambling is "ruining" the sport, it has become undeniable that NFL games are being decided as much by the referees as the players.

If football is a game of inches, then you could say that is now 13.5". That is the length of an official NFL penalty flag.

The impossible has happened: NFL officiating is getting worse. A recent analysis by Warren Sharp drives home that this is not your typical season for bad officiating.

During the corona shutdowns, Dave Barry anticipated the phenomenon.  “We’re thinking of just showing 60 minutes of referees throwing penalty flags and peering at replay monitors.”  That was supposed to be a humor columnist calling attention to a bad situation in a humorous way.

The problem is the replay technology.  "Expect the officials to do their job, and they'll likely do a better job than they do now, when they can make mistakes and have them corrected by Mission Control."  There's less reason for a professional to do a professional job when there's a second-guesser ready to guess.  "What incentive, other than pride, does an official have to get a close call right as the half or the game ends, when there's always the eye in the sky to issue the corrections?"

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.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The World Series field is taking shape.  No Braves.  No Dodgers.  No Yankees.  No Red Sox.  Hey, Chicago, whaddaya say?  No White Sox.  No Cubs, no.  What the heck is a uniqlo, anyway?

The entire three-peat dream was built on the idea that this rotation was unbeatable in October. In 48 hours, Milwaukee solved it.  "They may have a bunch of Hall of Famers, but we've got a bunch of gamers.  And the gamers won this week."

The following meme is not authorized by the Milwaukee Brewers or any sports broadcasting outlet.

The compilation of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes is a way of clearing out assorted bookmark entries.  I do not intend to resume weekly Friday short takes.  By all means follow the links.

RAILWAY PRESERVATION IS CHALLENGING ENOUGH WITHOUT GETTING LAWYERS INVOLVED.

The Northeast's last narrow-gauge coal railroad, East Broad Top, ceased common carrier operations in 1956, but the owners never sold it for scrap, perhaps contemplating catering to tourists in the manner of Rio Grande's Silverton Branch.  The owning family ultimately conveyed the railroad to a foundation dedicated to preservation although with only a short stretch of track in excursion service.

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.

HIGHER EDUCATION IS BEYOND PARODY.

It's hard to top "What’s Wrong With Civility?" in the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education.  It's about what you'd expect of the colleges of deaducation these days.  "Civility can be a tool of engagement. But history has shown it can also be used to oppress the powerless."

Never mind that "civility" and "civilization" refer to being able to live among others, which is to say, being able to rub along tolerably well with others, and up until, well, if not last week, at least in the days before the corona shutdowns when Donald Trump first came on the campaign trail and the remnant Militant Normals on campus were making fun of Student Affairs silliness, calls for civility on campus might well have served to make those Militant Normals live by bourgeois norms.  "Those traits confer evolutionary advantage among their adopters, and their absence among non-adopters serves as stranger danger."

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ARE FOR MOCKING.

Last month, we noted and noted Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan noting the University of Washington backing down from their attempt to deplorable-shame a professor who injected a political economy lesson into his alternative land acknowledgement.  “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”  Undermining the Excessively Earnest People with mockery is the only way to go.  "I wonder if any academic institutions in Bethlehem have a land acknowledgement that refers to the house and lineage of David."

THE LIBRARIAN AND THE CAR KEYS.

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

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

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

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

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

That's something that was already on my mind.

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

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

I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT.

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

THEATER KIDS DOING WHAT THEATER KIDS DO.

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

The silent protest, complete with social media.

Unattributed montage retrieved from WTMJ.

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

WILLIAM BLACKSTONE'S LOSS FUNCTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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