MORE ON THOSE TUITIONS: Truck and Barter notes that a majority of college students working full-time report themselves as "employees enrolled in school" rather than as working their way through colleges. There may be more to his story than meets the eye ... recently, entering classes have a larger proportion of adults mugged by reality, some of whom might be more interested in a credential, or perhaps a signal, than in thinking ideas through. And, at least in Illinois and Minnesota, there are explicit efforts in place to enable community college students to transfer from two-year to four-year programs without the usual credit matching hassles. Officially, no "inferior" here. (And we haven't even looked at the credential deflation implied by inflated grades at the more famous universities.)

THE ROLE OF THE COUNCIL ON ECONOMIC ADVISORS. Common Sense and Wonder speculates on Paul Krugman's descent into madness. Krugman supposedly advised President Clinton that Presidents can really do relatively little to "manage" the economy (something President Clinton discovered after he took office, in his famous imprecation of the bond traders) after which the President named Laura d'Andrea Tyson as chief economist. Something about Common Sense's hypothesis doesn't ring completely true ... the Washington gossip section at Washington Monthly (sometime in early 1993?) called the President out for looking too interestedly at Professor Tyson. Professor Krugman has contributed to the Monthly and would likely have known the story ... no point going 'round the bend just because a President has picked an advisor to serve as eye candy.

PREACHING TO THE CONVERTED. Madison's Capital Times proposes that the Democratic National Committee take its message among the heathen.

MAKING SCHNEIDER. If the reports are correct, three aces and three tens are good enough for schneider. Wizbang has a roundup of skepticism pending the report from the Coroner's jury.

TRAINING CAMPS OPEN. Right Wing News posts a list of favorite athletes. American Mind proposes some additions. Packers report to camp this week.

THE IOWA CAR CROP. Atlantic Blog fact-checks the New York Times on trade policy. Clearly everyone has forgotten federal supervision of transportation rates, where the Supreme Court once had to hold that a live chicken, or a dead chicken, is still a chicken. (The issue was whether dead chickens, because someone had killed them, qualified as manufactured goods subject to rate regulation, rather than as agricultural products eligible to travel under negotiated rates not otherwise regulated.) The punch line: any trade protection is a decision to screw some producers in order that others might do better. Consumers who are unable to buy from the screwed producers suffer, as do consumers who pay more to the protected producers. The subject line refers to a metaphor I've seen several experts use. It refers to producing cars in a cornfield: harvest the corn, rail it to the port, load it in a ship, ship sails over the horizon, ship returns later with cars in the hold. Protect the manufacturers of cars in a car factory, screw the manufacturers of cars in cornfields. The harm to the consumers is left as an exercise.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES calls at Wizbang, who pays tribute to Tom Wolfe (not to be confused with rail romantic Thomas Wolfe.)

TWENTY GREATEST FIGURES in American History, as selected by readers of Right Wing News. Interesting mix of political, military, and industrial figures. How quickly we forget James Jerome Hill. Bill Gates is comparatively a derivative tinkerer.

PARSIFAL ONLY FEELS LIKE A MARATHON. Truck and Barter evaluates Baumol's cost disease in service industries in light of evidence of improvements in record marathon times. There's a bit more to the story. First, the marathon record time curve looks a lot like an asymptotic curve: there are limits. Second, orchestras have other ways to collect the gains from trade. In Haydn's day, the orchestra could collect gains from trade only from the patron or from a relatively small audience in a hall. Today, radio and the various recording media provide ways to collect gains from trade from people who might want to nap through Parsifal without putting on tie-and-tails and sitting in the loge.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Would conscription promote civility among policy-makers? Latest Economic Principals considers the possibility.

THE DATE-RAPE SCAM. Not just for professional basketball players in Colorado resorts. Critical Mass finds a story similar in some details involving an Irish trackman, and contrasts (registration required) his experience under due process of law with his likely experience under campus process of feminism. (What was that Camille Paglia line about the woman who regrets her fling in the morning now having the option of crying rape?)

HARVESTING THOSE GAINS FROM TRADE. Arg Max looks at recent tuition increases among some well-known state-located universities. (These used to be state-supported, and for some time state-tolerated, but the correlation of forces has shifted.) As state universities are notorious sources of subsidy to upper-middle-class residents, advocates of horizontal equity ought to be pleased. To the extent that a degree is simply a signal ("credential," for those of you in Palm Beach County), a signal that is more costly to acquire might be more accurate.

UPDATE. Public reaction to California's tuition increases garners some scorn from SCSU Scholars. Apparently politicians still have trouble with the rationing function of prices. There is one component of the California plan that bears further scrutiny. The University of California has proposed a surcharge for rich undergraduate students. The way in which it is being introduced is clumsy. Higher education already operates in the spirit of Adam Gimbel: nobody pays list price. The way in which the special discounts operates is cumbersome: everybody sees the same base price, then a special committee evaluates "need" and works out a price cut in the form of financial aid, or a subsidized loan. The formula by which this magic takes place is only slightly less convoluted than the PHRF rating system for keelboats (you can be first to Mackinac Light and not win the race) but it conceals the surcharge to richer families (their students don't get any financial aid.) Although the surcharge is isomorphic to the existing system, its transparency works against it. The universities might better have copied the airlines, where everyone confronts the same base price, but depending on when you book and a number of other things, you get a special discount. There are surcharged services, called first class or business class, but those surcharges provide the payer with a wider seat, beverage service during boarding (d**n suits delay the loading almost as much as the pack rats who attempt to schlep all their goods aboard) and first crack at the storage bins.

I sometimes present classes with a hypothetical tariff including a Custom Class option (for an extra $2000 per course payable to me, the student gets the right to ring me at home, something that I discourage in a number of ways.) Other features include higher rates for enrollments in excess of 25, enrollments on the first day of class, enrollments after the first day of class, and enrollments the day before the final. (Am I selling a crash course too cheaply at $1x10^6?)

SPELLING OUT YOUR LOSS FUNCTION. There is more to statistical inference than reporting coefficients with suitably many asterisks on the "significant" coefficients. Although many economists -- not always students -- have yet to grasp this point, Prime Minister Blair apparently does. Consider the following passage (via Andrew Sullivan) from his speech to a joint session of Congress:

"Can we be sure that terrorism and WMD will join together? If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive. But if our critics are wrong and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in face of this menace, when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive."

The first couple of lines spell out his loss function in the case of a false positive (Saddam neither has nuclear, chemical, nor biological weapons, nor provided them to terrorists, despite what Intelligence concludes) and his argument that the consequences of removing Saddam are still to be preferred to leaving Saddam alone. The remainder of the passage spells out his loss function in the case of a false negative (Saddam deceives enough people into believing that he has no such weapons, then uses them himself or finds an agent to do so). His loss function is not symmetric with respect to false positives (small consequences from acting anyway) and false negatives (large consequence from failure to act.) No two-tailed t-test here.

BEGGAR-THY-NEIGHBOR. Daniel Drezner is unimpressed with rich country agricultural subsidies. Candidate for Quote of the Month (by default, I guess it's Quote of the Day): "Weak states thrive in stagnant economies. A failure to move forward in the WTO makes it that much more difficult for governments to stop the spread of terrorist networks. Further trade liberalization would also provide a boost to a lumbering global economy." Read and understand.

POSTURING. Transcript of Rep. Bernie Sanders berating Alan Greenspan. My between-the-lines reading suggests the two men appear to be talking past each other.

PREPARE TO BE ABSORBED. Charlie Sykes notes that Health and Human Services Secretary, and former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, is now negotiating with McDonalds on the content of food. Nothing like government creep. Meanwhile, Nightline covers the Fast Food Wars tonight, with the usual suspects. To repeat: in order for Stephen Hopkins to get into trouble selling beer to the Puritans on Sunday, there have to be Puritans who want to buy beer on Sunday. Fast food and fat people, no difference that I can see.

PARKINSON'S LAWS AT WORK? St. Cloud State University's administration has seen fit to recommend that all voice mail messages spell out that University offices are closed Fridays (is that to conserve on air-conditioning, Thursday nights to Monday mornings as is the case at Northern Illinois?) There is something to be said for opting out of summer school. My voice mail message stipulates that classes resume August 25, and regular office hours and regular call returns will commence then. If there's anything in the system for me, well, August 25 will come. There is, however, at least one assistant-to at St. Cloud who has just made a case for being made a beer vendor at Vikings games, or perhaps designing catenary poles for the Hiawatha Corridor, or removing all the Eurasian milfoil from Lake Minnetonka.

QUAKER MEETING HAS BEGUN, NO MORE LAUGHTER, NO MORE FUN. Apparently that's the new rubric for Roman Catholics, according to a Sun-Times story. One priest, Father William Kenneally, is less than impressed: "If I was an actor and some director was insisting that my head should be turned this way, and I was missing my lines, I would just be thinking, 'Don't you understand what's important any more?'" The problem of misbehaving priests arose because headquarters stopped correcting the small mistakes long ago. First you ignore irreverent behavior in the church and ultimately the priests stray. I once read some recollections of a new trainmaster on the Missouri Pacific who learned early on that if he enforced stringent sanctions for small violations, he had very few major violations because even the most independent-minded railroader didn't want to find out what would happen in the case of a large violations. My students hear something similar from me, in a somewhat more modern vein. "Take care of the O-rings, and the Space Shuttle will take care of itself." You have to take care of the tank cladding, too, but there is accumulating evidence that management shrugged off early hints of trouble with that system. From that perspective, returning a sense of reverence to church services is a step toward ensuring that the pastors behave properly. Father Brankin, whose church still offers the Latin Mass at noon (perhaps worth a trip on a Packer bye week?), sees it that way. "If we do that right, then it's an indication that maybe everything will at least follow in some sense. If the act of worship . . . is out of control, is it not possible that everything else could be out of control?" Sounds like a man who could keep his head in a dispatcher's office, or a large class of beginning students.

FOOTNOTE. Via Vodka Pundit, more about the consequences of neglecting that cladding.

AND AN ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN. On Transport Blog, Brian Mickelthwait comments on a recent Lileks bleat about progress on the Hiawatha Corridor light rail line in the Twin Cities.

(First, some geographical context: The Twin Cities are Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota, the Manchester Metrolink is a U.K. example of a light rail line that reuses some existing railroad tracks, with some new construction downtown linking the two intercity railroad stations, and "Strib" is "Minneapolis Star-Tribune" for Viking fans.)

Methinks Lileks doth protest too much about the overhead wires: do they really block the view that much? On the other hand, the people who build modern trolleys have this propensity for imitating the Japanese Shinkansen when it comes to holding up the wires. We used to do well with a simple span wire linking poles on each side of the street, and the boulevard bracket arms of New Orleans have ornamental ironwork rather than simple angle bracing.

On the other hand, half-hourly Sprinter service linking St. Cloud to the Cities makes sense, perhaps one of the latest generation of rail diesel cars (DMUs, for those of you in the Commonwealth) can be made up to satisfy crashworthiness requirements.

There is a future Bleat just waiting to happen. I have seen renderings of the new trolleys being built for the Twin Cities. They have artsy solid-black ends. (Well, artsy if you're into Star Wars, I suppose.) But come November, the morning and evening rush hours are after dark, and we're dealing with Minnesota drivers. It's just a matter of time until someone "doesn't see" a black tramcar. Credit to former Illinois Central conductor Richard Lukin for first pointing this flaw out. There was a bad collision on the Illinois Central in 1972, when some new-look electric cars had black ends, and after that collision among the changes we saw were orange ends on the new cars.

As an aside, Mickelthwait mentions the trolley buses in Reading. Funny Milwaukee story about those ... one of them was doing 40 mph plus in a 25 mph zone, and a traffic cop attempted to give the motorman (he has a steering wheel and foot pedals, why are you calling him a motorman?) a speeding ticket and the Transport Company's lawyer got the ticket thrown out. Why? Legally, those things were trackless trolley cars and therefore not subject to the speed limits applicable to motor vehicles. And if you search the pictures of Milwaukee trolley buses closely, you'll see ... no license plates! License plates and driving licenses are for motor vehicles. Trackless trolley cars have no license plates, and they have motormen.

WE WEREN'T ALL HIPPIES. Lileks notes the passing of psychedelic nostalgia, to InstaPundit's approval. If memory serves, Richard Nixon outpolled George McGovern by the widest margin among the 18-21 year olds who had only recently won the right to vote (and to drink beer in many states) despite the hour-long waits to vote at the Madison precincts adjoining the University.

DISCRIMINATING FOR EQUALITY. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow considers the effects of Grutter v. Bollinger.

IN MEMORIAM. Joanne Jacobs notes a sale of the estate of Miss Frances. She may have hosted Ding Dong School on television, but we didn't have television in our house in those days. She did write some pretty good Ding Dong School books. Those, and the Little Golden Books, continue to serve the next generation of readers.

PUBLIC CHOICE? An Imponderable: do states that vote Democratic or vote Republican get more money sent back from D.C. than they send in taxes? Details here. Paul Krugman, before he started channeling James Carville, wrote a column along similar lines.

LOWERING THE BAR. Month-old post from Governor DuPont. Worth a read.

IN DEFENSE OF SHOP CLASS. Betsy's Page picks up Joanne Jacobs on industrial arts (duly noted here) and adds her own observation, "The nation is facing a shortage of qualified auto repair mechanics. Even if a student wasn't planning on working as a mechanic, this is a useful skill. As we plan to take our car in for repair next week, both my husband and I realize that we could have benefited from a car repair class in high school. We'd have used that much more often than four years of Spanish." I have to wonder how you can teach auto technicians these days without teaching algebra and computer literacy. The self-diagnostic gadgets in cars are marvelous, but nowhere near as intuitive as the old timing lights, dwell tachs, Allen keys, and the good ol' finger in the butterfly valve were.

The prospects for skilled workers whose work cannot be sent overseas electronically look relatively better. Much of the data entry that used to be done in cubicles in big U.S. cities, before it went to Sioux Falls, and then to Ireland, is now on its way to India (and once the electricity is reliable, Baghdad??) Troubleshooting a car on the internet is a bit harder.

This Highered Intelligence post on the subtexts of "no child left behind" is worth a look. Furthermore, the cheap-labor-subsidy from immigrants ultimately does come to an end: there is nothing like the difficulty keeping good workers to get inventors thinking about how to make the task easier and cheaper. I heard an interesting story about vacuum-cleaner technology being adapted to chicken farms to harvest the chickens....

Or would you rather have the French attitude toward industry?

DEPORTATIONS AND REPARATIONS. Dissecting Leftism has some thoughts. Shall we take it one step further and have reparations for people whose ancestors were kicked out for free-thinking?

The Kiwis tell a joke on the Australians: How do you tell a New Zealander from an Australian? Have him roll up his trouser leg. (The joke, which escaped me until my guide explained, refers to the permanent sun-tan line the shackle left on the Australian.)

WHO IS ABSORBING WHOM?

Claudia Rosett and John Derbyshire have differing perspectives on the future of Hong Kong and the possibility of another popular uprising in China.

The picture shows the countdown clock running in Tienanmen Square in late June (22 or 23) of 1997, just before the transfer of Hong Kong to China. At the time I suspected from all the construction in Peking, providing office space for lobbyists from Hong Kong corporations, that the notionally Communist government wasn't fully aware of what it was in for. Rosett and Derbyshire suggest that my speculation might be right in part, wrong in part. Perhaps it's China, not Iran, that bears careful watching for popular sovereignty.

The photograph is from a travel journal first hinted at here. There will be more to the story, as time permits.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES visits Caerdroia this week. The itinerary through mid-November is here.

VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY. Professor Adams seeks to manage the diversity boondoggle, with the purpose of ending it. (Via Critical Mass.)

NIT-PICKING. It's not just for railfans, any more, as Cox and Forkum illustrate. (Hat tip: Little Green Footballs, with extensive commentary.)

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Qualifying for a skilled trade is more demanding than qualifying for most colleges." Joanne Jacobs has more, including indirect confirmation that you don't track students who aren't college material into shop class.

THE NEGLECTED "R". Policy paper here, related but independent comments here and here, why your kid's teacher may not care here, what the academicians would rather think about here.

PRIMPING FOR COURSE EVALUATIONS? Hey, if it gets teachers and professors to dress professionally. Substance at Atlantic Blog.

INTERNAL CIVIL STRIFE. Porphyrogenitus has a couple of lengthy posts. Scroll and click to read more, he's outdoing Bill Whittle or Den Beste in Chicago Great Western style essays.

CURIOUS CORE CURRICULUM. The SCSU Scholars have an extensively-researched post on this year's required pre-enrollment reading at the University of North Carolina. After last year's excursion into Koranic studies, this year the University requires Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickeled and Dimed (It's no Keep The Aspidistra Flying but you can read reviews or comparison shop.) My colleagues to the North were particularly disappointed with the discussion questions. Quite so. How informed are entering freshmen going to be about Law or Political Science or Education? For that matter, where is economics on that list, and is it a scandal that economics students might not learn about induced innovation until graduate school? The Scholars are correct about the supplemental readings being somewhat skimpy. John Derbyshire's observations ought to be good for an argument or three.

POSSIBLE SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL? Provided the Buggy Professor delivers that "daily buzz of biting political and economic commentary."

LINE RELOCATION. Truck and Barter has moved off Blogspot. The new site has a new riff on "he who sells his product for less knows what it's worth."

LOOK WHO'S BACK. Letter from Gotham has returned, as has The Spoons Experience. (Instapundit flagged the latter, has yet to note the former.)

John has a long moustache.

PATIENCE. Instapundit's mentor builds the case for a Saddam-Osama nexus. Right Wing News hints at accumulating evidence for biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons in Iraq. The Washington Post reports on leads, leading to better leads, leading to better information about the location or the fate of the 22 of 55 senior Iraqi officials not yet accounted for. As I type, the evening news is again following up on the styrofoam sausage slugging.

SPRAWL IS GOOD FOR THE THIRD WORLD. Andrew Sullivan commends Victor Keegan's proposal to abolish agricultural subsidies by the developed countries. If anything, Keegan is understating the costs. Many candy factories have been moving their production lines from the Chicago area, which used to be Candy Maker for the World (to go with Hog Butcher for the World, now in Nebraska, and Player with Railroads, where these are the Good Old Days) to Canada, in order to benefit from U.S. sugar subsidies, which mandate tariffs on imported sugar and subsidize exports, so it's cheaper to buy U.S. sugar at subsidized prices in Canada and convert it into candy there, which, as a "manufactured good," qualifies under the North American Free Trade Agreement to cross without tariff.

In other trade news, I understand that the World Trade Organization has raised an objection to the U.S. steel tariffs, which hurt the same sugar farmers the sugar subsidies are supposed to protect. Got that?

BIN LADEN, LOSER. It is difficult to conceive of a story more September 10 than Pittsburgh Pirate Randall Simon's prank gone wrong. The story, however, was all over the national newscasts, the topic of conversation on national, regional, and local talk radio. I was travelling toward points north that day and the family and friends I met with along the way all had a lot to say, most of it in a jocular vein, about the story. Betsy's Page had the story, as did Best of the Web (go here for commentary.) The resolution is about right: Simon gets a suspension for doing something dumb, and pays a $432 fine for disorderly conduct. Both of the employees who fell down receive autographed bats and an apology from Simon. This Dale Hofmann essay got it about right. Dave Barry weighs in. as does Scrapple Face.

PLUS CA CHANGE. Just finished David Lindsay's Mayflower Bastard (details or comparison shop.) Lindsay is a descendant of Richard More, a man with a convoluted pedigree who along with his brother and sisters travelled on Mayflower. Richard More was either a foster child or an indentured servant of William Brewster. Some of the side stories merit note. Consider entrepreneur Isaac Allerton. At p. 68, Lindsay combines speculation with fact. "At the same time, as Allerton dropped in on Brewster more often to discuss such things, he began to let his gaze rest a little longer than usual on the body of Richard's foster sister, the twenty-year-old Fear Brewster. A cynic might say that he was taking out a little insurance. In any event, the same year saw both his marriage to Brewster's daughter and his appointment to the task of straightening out Plimouth's accounts." Puts Chelsea Clinton's entry level job in perspective, doesn't it?

As the colony developed, tensions grew between the Believers and the Adventurers. By 1636, religious tensions developed: ""Founded by the Dutchman Hendrik Niclaes in the sixteenth century, familism sometimes went by the name 'the Family of Love.' Its central tenet held that mankind had become sinless since the Crucifixion; thus, any human impulse should be deemed pure. Familists freely practiced adultery (with one early adherent going so far as to marry his own daughter) and sometimes held property in common. The most pernicious aspect of the sect, however, was the tendency of its members to infiltrate normal society, attending church and holding positions of prominence. Caught, familists would renounce their ways, then simply continue to observe them on the sly." Ye hippie communes and coate and tye radicals, forsooth!

The concluding pages, on the collapse and re-emergence of the Puritan tradition, now coexisting with the commercial tradition, is worth reading, particularly in light of the efforts of Old Believers to equate Iraq with Vietnam, and other returns to the skirmishes of the Sixties.

GEWITTER, STURM. Big blob of red and orange on the radar, heading this way, thunder rumbling. Toodles.

HABIT PERSISTENCE? The July issue of Backtrack features a provocative article: "How the Great Western threw away the Churchward Legacy." The author touches on streamlining, noting that CME Collett could have done better by imitating the Australian 38 class 4-6-2, which, in turn, borrowed heavily from the New Haven I-5 class 4-6-4. Advantage, Cold Spring Shops.

SILENCE FROM THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA. The Iranian general strike is today. Winds of Change has a roundup.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES visits Winds of Change. Time to rediscover the Concerto for Horn and Hardart.

IMMODERATE WEATHER MOVING IN. 'Net difficulties fixed. Close some slow-loading windows and reopen from scratch and get the work done. But now there are tornadoes to the north of me. More later.

DARWIN CANDIDATES? I'm inclined to agree with Milton Friedman that we are not property of the Public Health Service, and that motorcycle helmet laws are an abomination. But that doesn't preclude common sense. I would have to think that a biker babe wearing a spaghetti-strap top on the expressway would pick up a lot of road rash, despite riding in the biker-babe position.

MORE SUMMER READING. Recently finished (rather quickly) Robin Moore's The Hunt for Bin Laden. It's written by a reporter who has been a colleague of the Special Forces for a long time (details -- comparison shop.) Makes me wish the word about the Special Forces had been out many years ago -- perhaps I would have taken gym class more seriously and followed up in a different way on the aptitude I showed for languages. There's a lot of interesting stuff once the forces get in country, including their efforts to avoid being used by one warlord against another (some of the Northern Alliance people followed the maxim, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, as long as the Main Enemy was Taliban, then all bets were off,) and one English-speaking, former-biker warlord, who later discovered a Koranic justification for primum nocte, and no longer received support from the Special Forces.) In the epilogue, p. 319, is a passage that might shed some insight on "bring 'em on." "Occasionally, a quiet and humble man brought his wife along to visit the wounded in Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In the rare moments when there was a small opening in his schedule, he would take the time to visit his soldiers.
One day, on a visit, kept quiet as usual for security reasons, the couple paused to see a soldier whose distraught wife had just arrived. Laura Bush hugged her close, not knowing what else to do.
After eight long years of neglect and embarrassment, the U.S. military finally had a real commander and chief."

RECOMMENDED RAILROAD READING. Just finished J. W. Orr's Set Up Running (details or comparison shop -- looks like the press run was a bit optimistic,) a tribute to Orr's father O. P. Orr, who retired from 45 years on the Pennsylvania Railroad with a perfect service record, despite some close calls after World War II. Most of that service was on the secondary freight lines in the Susquehanna River Valley northwest of Harrisburg. The elder Orr took quite an interest in getting the best out of his engines, and some of the firemen taxed his patience, particularly after the automatic stoker came into use. But as long as the train got over the road without a steam failure that blocked the main line, he had no cause for official complaint. On p. 261 is a useful insight for professors: ""[Students] and locomotive engineers both fell into the same types of categories, those at the top of the class, the A students; those that were average; those that were lower in the class but tried; and those who might have had higher grades but did not care. The only time the latter group was interested was when report cards [or pay day] came out. ... Then too there were some engineers who could run an engine capably but couldn't handle a train properly no matter how hard they tried. For them, running a train proved to be a frightening experience." Comparative advantages, even on the branches of the Standard Railroad of the World.

IN PRAISE OF SMALL-TOWN FOURTHS. Despite the immoderate weather elsewhere, viewing conditions were severe clear with not too much humidity. The Concert Band did its usual good job with the accompaniment, and the fireworks show did not disappoint. It appeared to be more heavily-attended, with a lot more little kids around, than I recall in previous years. The setting allows the kids room to run around, play catch, chase fireflies, use the playground equipment, or nap. I have to wonder if attendance isn't rising because the DeKalb show has Chicago's beaten in a number of ways: less crowded, shorter traffic tie-ups afterward, better viewing angles (if you don't mind the odd tree in the way), musical accompaniment you can hear, and more ordnance shot off for more minutes.

I must confess to being a bit spoiled in my youth when it comes to viewing angles. So far, I have seen no fireworks-viewing site that matched Milwaukee's Juneau Park bluff when the north throat of the C&NW Depot was at its base. (I don't go back to 1911 but note some of the other landmarks we've lost.)

AVOIDING THE IMMODERATE WEATHER. Conditions, however, have been nastier elsewhere in the neighborhood. Freeport, Rockford, Belvidere, and Libertyville all suffered storm damage. As of Saturday evening, about half of Rockford's houses did not have electricity. One television station brought in a temporary generator. (The list of emergency advice and news stories there is typically Midwestern, in that a golf course that will be hosting a local charity tournament is scrambling to have everything ready.) The winds toppled another station's broadcasting tower. There will be no broadcasts for at least a week. The Chicago area also suffered damage, with as many as seven swimmers washed into Lake Michigan by storm effects on the eastern shore.

PRODUCTIVITY GAINS OR LOSSES. The Atlantic (scroll down) looks at the college basketball tournament, with particular reference to Challenger, Gray's look at the lost work attributable to office pools. (The report appears to have been withdrawn, so any further discussion is speculation on my part.) I have to wonder if the article overstates the cost of the office pools: don't people work together better if they have some reason to view each other as human? (Steven Landsburg wrote, long ago, about how drinking coffee might make people more, not less, productive. I'm simply revisiting the same argument.) Furthermore, office pools are intellectual ammunition for economists.

NOT ABLE TO DO MUCH CATCHING UP: The Internet has become quite sluggish in the past half hour. Perhaps there will be time to post a few things this evening.

STILL FRACTIOUS AFTER ALL THESE YEARS. At the time Solomon Hopkins, Jeremiah Hopkins, and Tracy Ballard took up arms in New York, and Enoch Crosby began spying on the Regulars, maybe one-third of the colonists favored independence, one-third remained loyal to the king, and one-third were willing to give up the choice. The more things change .... In 1821, John Quincy Adams noted the following in praise of Independence:

"But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." Read the rest of the speech. Some things may have changed. Jacob Hornberger: "Let’s not mince words: The “freedom” that Americans celebrate today is opposite to the freedom that Americans celebrated on, say, July 4, 1890.

"Think about it: In 1890, Americans were celebrating a way of life in which there was no income tax, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, drug war, gun control, or immigration controls. There were virtually no economic regulations, mandatory government schooling (public schooling), or welfare. There was neither foreign aid nor involvement in wars thousands of miles away. There was no paper money or monetary central planning. Americans and foreigners alike enjoyed the rights of habeas corpus and due process of law."

Sheldon Richman: "How else to explain that few people give a hoot that we were obviously lied into war by the president of the United States, the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and others, without a proper congressional declaration, and led to believe that Saddam Hussein was both willing and able to launch so-called weapons of mass destruction against us on 45 minutes’ notice?

"How else to explain that hardly anyone notices that with respect to criminal suspects the Constitution has been all but consigned to the paper shredder, with American citizens and others being held indefinitely without charge and without the right to go before a judge to challenge such treatment?"

John Nichols: "Should we celebrate the founders themselves? Yes, within reason. It is true that many of the men who made this nation were flawed. The best of them admitted as much at the time. The worst were revealed in time. But no one who cherishes liberty should hesitate to raise a cheer for old Tom Paine, who wrote of Americans in 1776: 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of the new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months.' "

Natalie Maynor: "I plan to celebrate July 4 with hope that the damage the current U.S. administration is doing to the country can be contained, with hope that American voters will put an end to the terrible turn this country has taken by ousting the deceitful and dangerous leaders. Serious damage has surely been done. After four years of the Bush administration, getting this country back on the right track won't be easy. But it can be done. After eight years, it might be impossible. I urge you to celebrate July 4 by thinking of ways to help turn things around."

Everybody is hyperbolic, over the top, selectivly indignant, offering food for Fiskers (TM) once the holiday ends. As it should be. Gentlemen, the project goes on.

JOINING FORCES? Crooked Timber is a new joint venture by Chris Bertram, Maria Farrell, Henry Farrell, Kieran Healy, and Brian Weatherson. Looks to be in the testing stage at the moment.

HOGWARTS CALIFORNIA? Virginia Postrel finds lots of magical thinking about policy.

ARE YOU A POWER FREAK? That was the topic of discussion on Extension 720 earlier this week. The guests designed some quizzes which are available, without the usual weblog tags. I scored a six on the power quiz, which the scorer assured me was in the normal range, although if "normal" is 4-6, I probably scored close to one sigma toward the power freak end. The Field Marshal site is also worth a look.

BUYING BOOKS? Kieran Healy is not impressed with the offerings of his university bookstore or those of the mega-stores. He's particularly bothered by the share of space devoted to logo clothing relative to that devoted to optional books. Perhaps there's a technology shift at work. One of these days Reason will get its July-August stuff up, including an interesting bit on the learning potential in computer games. (Try Carlisle 1957 for great frustration.)

A QUOTE FOR INDEPENDENCE DAY. "Some people believe rights are what you can afford when you become rich. But rights are what make countries rich." Meelis Kitsing provides the context.

RECOMMENDED RAILROAD READING: "Could anyone mistake a Russion locomotive running today in the Ukraine for an American locomotive in Wisconsin?," teases J. W. Swanberg in Trains. Yup, notes the print article, which also notes that parts of Ukraine aren't that different from Wisconsin. Indeed not. The first picture in the article shows a locomotive and train standing in Toporishche. That's the center of the Prussian Baptist colony in Volhynia. Many of those Prussian Baptists, including my mom's mother and several grand-aunts and grand-uncles lived not far from there, in Valki, and they migrated to Coleman and Pound in northern Wisconsin. (Is there a way to combine a steam trip with a research trip? Thinking, thinking ....)

WORKS WELL WITH OTHERS? Nightline is doing a brief look at the possible commitment of U.S. troops to Liberia. Put in context, there are troops deployed in some 130 countries, including 10,000 in Afghanistan and 130,000 in Iraq. That's as good a time as any to mention a little bit of my summer reading and join the conversation about the international institutions and the role of the United States within them. Victor Davis Hanson prefers to look inward: " Keep quieter and carry a far bigger stick. Methodically and politely transfer, redeploy, and reduce troops from countries that have opposed our efforts of the past two years or whose populations simply profess no overt support for the United States." Two presenters to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, on book tours, presented a different perspective (first mentioned in these pages here.) Newsweek's Michael Hirsh, recent author of At War with Ourselves (details or comparison shopping) advances the thesis that go-it-alone in either the Clintonian or Bush the Younger model doesn't quite work, and both administrations eased, ultimately, toward working more with others. Perhaps that's what's at work with respect to Liberia -- some U.S. cooperation in Africa, some French and U.N. help in Iraq. Hirsh notes that U.N. workers are already active in Afghanistan doing what he characterizes as the "scutwork" of nation building. In addition, German and Norwegian forces have gone in harms way there.

Such cooperation would please Clyde Prestowitz, a trade negotiator during the Reagan Administration. He was touring his somewhat more polemical Rogue Nation (details -- compare prices.) Prestowitz's book is a bit hard to figure -- it is as if he concedes all the criticisms of the blame-America-first crowd and then offers a series of "yeah, but ..." responses. For instance, he proposes a reorganization of the U.N. Security Council with a European Union representative rather than the U.K. and France. He notes that President Bush may have missed an opportunity in September 2001 to assure the U.S. that the rest of the world doesn't hate us, and to thank the rest of the world for their outpouring of support (you may recall the unofficial "thanks" websites that went around the internet in those days.) His proposal that the U.S. ratify the Kyoto Treaty as amended rings a bit hollow, as does his complaint that one or two key Senators can hold up a treaty. If memory serves, it was more like 95 Senators that held up Kyoto, and the U.S. Constitution ought to count for something in our decision making. (To grant unelected international bureaucrats the ability to trump the Constitution is to grant somebody -- in the best case a benevolent bureaucrat -- despotic powers easily abused.) His thinking about the euro as a competing reserve currency has strengths and weaknesses. Many years ago, Jane Jacobs (I think it was in Life and Death of Great American Cities) noted that the currency union called the United States inflicted steep adjustment costs on cities that fell on hard times, because they could not devalue their currency relative to other cities. Something similar will be at work within Europe -- France can no longer devalue the franc (or have franc traders bid it down relative to other currencies) to cope with its recent difficulties exporting to the United States. Lots of food for thought.

FREE SPEECH ZONES UPDATE. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports a partial victory at Citrus College and seeks extension of spontaneous assembly areas at Texas Tech beyond a gazebo. There's something telling in the story: Tech attempted to enforce its rules for the use of the gazebo against anti-war demonstrators. FIRE's position is that their intervention stopped that enforcement. War protestors used to be made of sterner stuff. During the major bombing and mining efforts late in the Vietnam war, all it took was a few "Rally at Noon, Library Mall" notices chalked on sidewalks and blackboards to get people out.

COALITION OF THE UNWILLING? France, and U.N. Secretary General Annan, are soliciting U.S. military help in Liberia. Right Wing News is neither impressed nor being facetious, "evil hegemon" imagery not withstanding. Common Sense and Wonder suggest that the situation will resolve itself, unlike, say, Osama's Taliban or Saddam's bankroll. Both Little Green Footballs and Best of the Web note Governor Dean's sudden hawkishness. Still no war manifesto on Common Dreams, however.

BATTLE OF THE SEXES. Wednesday's Rush Limbaugh show turned into a dish session after he quoted at length from Susan Reimer's essay complaining (for the n-th time, for n large) about young adult men acting badly. Hasn't anybody thought through the implications of "if it feels good ('for the present' usually goes unstated) do it?" Does it come as any surprise that if there are no consequences for behaving badly, people will behave badly? Dig down, and note the separating equilibrium conditioned on whether Mom and Dad are married, or not. Newmark's Door finds an article on a related topic that offers a slightly different perspective from the Popular Perspective.

AT WAR. The Superintendent notes with respect and regret the deaths of U.S. and allied troops in the various theaters of war. Best of the Web (scroll down to "Homer Nods") has some information about U.S. military and police losses. Training is dangerous, as are activities such as mine clearing and bomb defusing.

SAYING NO THANKS. What would James Carroll do without rhetorical questions? Resurrect the arguments of the Sixties, of course. Reminds me of a Tom Lehrer song from just before that era: "Remember the war against Franco?/That's the kind where each of us belongs/Though he may have won all the battles/We had all the good songs."

SAYING THANKS. Little Green Footballs provides a list of organizations that are providing support to troops overseas, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Philippines, Liberia (?!), and elsewhere, and their families at home.

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE. Diane Ravitch proposes a laugh test for future bowdlerizations of the curriculum (otherwise known as Ignorance is Inclusive.) She's on to something. Many of the guardians of the curriculum, and the pious pontificators on university committees, not to mention the fans of Senator Clinton, are people who have trouble distinguishing earnestness from seriousness.

PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE. Karyn Strickler laments the corrosive effects of "realism" and "consensus" on "progressive" political organizing. Hint: any organization that has a "steering committee" is an organization headed nowhere. The skipper handles the steering. Perhaps there is a tactician to call the shifts. Anything further breeds misdirection, or winding up in stays.

THAT WAY I'M SURE THEY'LL UNDERSTAND: General Patton supposedly "gave it to 'em loud and dirty" when that was his objective. It may not be the approved teaching method any more. Go to Critical Mass and start scrolling. Number 2 Pencil has a Wild Professor story of her own, to the approval of Betsy's Page and Joanne Jacobs.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: "Explain to me again how it helps minority students to be admitted to colleges for which they are not ready?" Details at Number 2 Pencil.

ZACHARY TAYLOR IS MY COUSIN.

Betsy's Page links this Mayflower pedigree page. (The page appears to be incomplete, as it doesn't provide President Bush's descent from Governor Bradford, which makes him a cousin of Hugh Hefner!) For the record, here's mine:

Stephen Hopkins Karlson → John Hopkins Karlson → Lucile Irene Hopkins → Ira Lincoln Hopkins → Francis E. Hopkins → Ira Hopkins → Joseph Hopkins → Jeremiah Hopkins → Solomon Hopkins → Mary Berry → Mary Freeman → John Freeman → Mercy Prence → Patience Brewster → WILLIAM BREWSTER

(Typesetting conventions borrowed from the Mayflower History page.) The line I provided is one line ... the best thing that happened to the Hopkins family might have been moving to Wisconsin when they quit marrying their cousins. My pre-1800 family tree looks more like a network. You might, for example, want to look at the Bing Crosby entry further down. He's got some common Hopkins ancestors not shown on the page. The elder Nathaniel Crosby married Bethia Hopkins.

TRAILING INDICATOR? Economic growth returns to September, 2000 levels, but unemployment rates are up. No word on whether that's an adjustment of the discouraged worker population.

EXTENDING MARKET SHARE? Invisible Adjunct comments on a Jeffrey Selingo report from Washington, D.C. on the credentialling going on at the University of Phoenix. Her take: it poses less of a threat to traditional universities than many believe, but doesn't really teach anything new. There are problems: when the modal opening phrase in class discussions is "At my company," you're not too far from "People of the same trade seldom gather together, even for diversion or merriment, but that the conversation turns to some conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." (I'm quoting from memory, the words might not all be right.) Nothing new there either: my dad used to supplement his income by teaching the night circuits course at Marquette University. He didn't have much use for the younger Marquette students, but it was a great chance for the practitioners to compare notes on solutions to industrial control problems. (As far as I know, there was no calendar with moon phases in the classroom, only a clock and a crucifix.) Moreover, Phoenix might be functioning as a sub-contractor. Businesses spend lots of money on training because the high schools and the colleges have graduated people who can't quite do it. Dad had an interesting story of a trainee engineer, fresh out of a good engineering college, who hooked the starting circuit to itself, and these guys had no concept of voltages measured in the hundreds. The real threat to the conventional university is in its failure to decide whether it's heir to the monastery, or trade school with frat houses, or heir to the Gulag. (I'm only half-kidding about that last; read this for some thoughts on all three.)

CREDENTIALS WITHIN CREDENTIALS? Newmark's Door links, and Invisible Adjunct comments at length, on Patrick Healy's feature on competition among name universities to land name professors who usually get ample administrative reassignment to do research, meaning the tasks of grading, and to some extent serving on committees, fall to others, often assistant professors chewed up and released without tenure, or adjuncts. (Healy commits the usual journalistic sin of focusing on Deirdre McCloskey's surgery rather than her work on the rhetoric of economics, but provides her rationale, "We want an urban public university with high standards for the great unwashed," which is substance to which I wish to speak.)

Invisible Adjunct's site provides link captures by which people can find links to her posts. Kind of cool. This Planned Obsolescence post is worth a look.

Returning to the substance, several ideas come to mind. First, McCloskey left Iowa for Illinois-Chicago. Iowa has been rather stingy with the academic side of its public universities in order to find a successor to Hayden Fry and build up the Cyclones to occasionally beat Hayden Fry's successor; I met two very good industrial economists in Taiwan who had recently left Iowa for Vanderbilt. Second, one has to wonder about the effectiveness of the star strategy. Given that the prestige colleges recruit their superstars with the inducement of additional research time and light committee work, and engage in grade inflation to boot, what value does a degree from a prestige college have anyway? (The signal loses its value if it doesn't help employers separate students.) Will transcripts have to give the names of the professors? Third, the phenomenon of recruiting star professors has elements of a positional arms race. Robert Frank and Philip Cook criticized these in The Winner-Take-All Society (usual details, it's also available in paperback.) Their thoughts (pp. 222-223 of the hard cover version) address part, but not all, of the problem:

"This competition is driven largely by the imperatives of the research agendas in the various disciplines. And there is no reason to suppose that the criteria by which, say, literary critics or economists score points in this competition are even loosely correlated with the interests of taxpayers.

"It is one thing for a state to recognize a public interest in ensuring that all citizens receive a solid primary and secondary education. A case can also be made for public support for higher education in the increasingly sophisticated skills required in the modern workplace. And, from the perspective of state governments at least, there is even a case for subsidizing elite education at the university level, lest the state's best students migrate to other states and thereby vanish from the local tax rolls. But it is far from clear that taxpayers should subsidize the competition for elite status across a broad range of disciplines in each of several separate state universities.

"Both efficiency and fairness favor a narrower and more focused pursuit of excellence. Those states that wish to maintain elite public institutions of higher learning would be well-advised to consider charging tuitions comparable to those charged by elite private institutions. Equity requires that a talented student not be denied access to the top institutions merely because of his or her family's inability to pay. But this goal can be served with need-based financial aid, rather than with across-the-board tuition subsidies, which largely benefit rich and upper-middle-income familiies.

"The case for tuition reform is clearest perhaps in the case of law schools. Although the country already has far more lawyers than could possibly be justified on efficiency grounds, most states continue to subsidize the production of still more lawers."

In 1995, when the book appeared, Professor Frank was at Cornell and Professor Cook at Duke. There are hints in Frank's writing that he began his research into positional arms races on a recruiting visit to Northwestern, when he discovered that he would be competing with private-sector upper managers for the kind of house in the kind of neighborhood he had become accustomed to in Ithaca. Leave that aside for a moment, and leave for another day the reality that state universities forever lament their brightest leaving the state for greener pastures. (Wisconsin exports degrees to flatlanders, and there's a large alumni club in Chicago, and a goodly number of economics Ph.D.s in Washington, D.C. During the recession of the earlly 1980s, the interesting women were all leaving Michigan, but I digress.) Their point on tuitions is spot-on: why should the state be in the business of picking winners? (John Lemon sees a way out of that dilemma incidental to solving affirmative action.) On the other hand, wouldn't higer tuitions mean more gains from trade to share with professors, which might attract even more potential superstars? See Frank and Cook's chaper 6, "Too Many Contestants," for a positive theory of the glut of humanities Ph.D.s.

EXPATS. Atlantic Blog (if you think being a Displaced Cheesehead (TM) among Flatlanders is challenging, try being a conservative Yank in an Irish college) has information about Independence Day observances overseas. I have spent exactly one Fourth of July outside the U.S. -- in Russia! The staff at the hotel was kind enough to bake a Stars and Stripes cake (You really should post those travel pages) that nobody wanted to cut and eat, and we rode past a reconstructed cathedral that figures in fireworks concerts all over the U.S. We later flew -- on a 727-ski -- to St. Petersburg, where the people with more energy stayed up for a twilight fireworks show at the Hard Rock Cafe.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is visiting Amish Tech Support this week.

WE'D BELIEVE YOU IF YOU DIDN'T SHOUT SO MUCH. Andrew Sullivan recommends Spinsanity's evaluation of Ann Coulter's Treason (usual details or compare prices.) I'm inclined to agree. I bought the book and started regretting the purchase almost immediately. It ought to be possible to make the case that some worldviews have been consistently wrong, perhaps in a humorous way, without casting doubt on your own credibility. (Or does the University of Michigan Law School have to include some East Coast Hotties as part of its diversity program?)

NEW CATEGORIES: "Common Carriers" refers to services with paid staff. "Express Messengers" refers to services that post on a variety of topics and generally refrain from mentioning their tip jars. "Company Mail" refers to services that focus on economics, the academy, or things that run on rails. "Reciprocal Switching" refers to services that have been kind enough to link to these pages,

SIMPLE PLEASURES. It's not always easy being a Displaced Cheesehead (TM) (How can a native Down East Yankee be a Displaced Cheesehead?) but every once in a while a bright moment happens. I was tidying stuff in the office after fixing a paper, and tuned to a baseball game, to catch Bob Uecker's analysis of the Chicago Cubs' bullpen: "Driven to right and deep ... HEY ... Get up, Get up, GET UP, Get outta here .... GONE!" Usually two "get ups" serve.

TRASHING THE ACADEMY. There is a bunch of good stuff out there, but I'm in too much the summer rest-and-research mode to post on it. Perhaps by week's end.

POSITIVE DEFRAGMENTATION. Neither Transport Blog nor Where Worlds Collide like the fragmentation of operating companies for British passenger trains (there are separate fragments for Wales, Scotland, Ulster, Cornwall, and Yorkshire, just to be inclusive). In Chicago there's a proposal to further fragment Metra Electric into a Chicago Transit Authority operation within the city, and a suburban service beyond. There is reason to rethink Metra Electric. Former conductor Richard Lukin gave a presentation to the Central Electric Railfans' Association in which he noted that some genius from the Chicago and North Western snarled the Electric schedules. It might make sense operationally for off-peak trains on the C&NW to all leave at about the bottom of the hour, because a rider can remember to be to Madison Street by half-past and make the train, and the lines split immediately beyond the station. It makes less sense on the Electric, where the first branch occurs near the Museum of Science and Industry. Passengers headed to or from McCormick Place, the University of Chicago, or the Museum have a choice of three trains within a few minutes or a wait of the better part of an hour. Dumb idea.

BEAT THE TRAFFIC. It's difficult enough driving into Chicago under normal circumstances, and many people use the suburban trains for recreational trips. It is not uncommon for the Saturday afternoon hourly service on the Burlington line to run in two sections, a relief train running as a second section ot the previous trip, leaving five minutes ahead of the scheduled regular train, making the first stop at Downers Grove. (Normal Saturday service is locals on one- or two-hour headways.) There is ample extra service after the fireworks -- note the Metra Electric running in streetcar fashion (load and go). Flyers are available on train and at many stations detailing the extra service, and noting the no-drinking rules, the placement of the family coaches, and the usual departure tracks for the service.

IT'S HARD TO STOP A TRAIN. Service on the Metra Electric (the old Illinois Central electrification) has resumed a day earlier than expected. A trestle under repair caught fire at a particularly bad time, just before festival week (Taste of Chicago and the downtown fireworks on July 3.) Metra crews expected to be running again by July 2, but had temporary repairs in place this morning. Railroads are subject to all sorts of abuse, from Nature, from truckers misjudging the height of bridges, and from their own equipment taking a dislike to the tracks. Military observers have discovered that bombing tracks generally doesn't disrupt train service for long, because crews have had lots of practice putting unintentional damage right.

BAD SENTENCE STRUCTURE IS ARTISTIC. Tightly Wound and Common Sense and Wonder observe the missing clothing on the emperors of contemporary poetry. I think the epidemic of writing badly and passing it off as art began with Edwin Estlin Cummings and his unwillingness to use the shift key. The art has only gotten worse since.

MISSION CHANGE FOR THE MID-MAJORS? Forget about losing your integrity to get into the final four, or emulating the prestige colleges. This Edward C. Smith essay (via Atlantic Blog) notes the corrosive effects of the consumer mentality at a prestige university. Is it me, or do the students at mid-majors have better work habits or less of a sense of entitlement? (It is hard to run a controlled experiment. Perhaps there is something about twisting the screen pull-string into a noose on the first day of class ...)

BASKETBALL IS SO SEPTEMBER 10? Kitchen Cabinet considers the latest phenom. Perhaps one of these days cities and states will take a close look at the losses they're incurring subsidizing sports teams, or sweetening their offers to steal someone else's subsidized sports team, and perhaps fans will stop cutting thuggish athletes so much slack. Or perhaps I will tolerate a GWR Hall painted red and named for a Castle.

IT'S POP. Jay Solo finds a Velociblog post on regionalisms that revisits the less-preferred names for pop. Anybody ever ask for a Faygo Red "Coke?" I doubt it.

BREEDING UNEMPLOYED HUMANITIES PH.D.S? Once all the postulants aspired to be the next star of Madonna studies, now it's Harry Potter criticism. (Via Betsy's Page.) The Superintendent reserves judgement, for now, on the propriety of painting a GWR Hall red and aiming it in the general direction of Denmark, but promises to recommend better power for the Hogwarts Express before long.

RULES WRITTEN IN BLOOD. Tenement houses have long had back porches, which originally provided landings for fire exits, a place to reeve a clothesline (somebody had to shinny up a nearby power pole to provide the outer block), and sometimes space for a chair or two and maybe some potted plants. Many tenement houses have provided fodder for gentrification, which involves rearranging the insides to provide bigger rooms and track lighting, and redoing the back porches to imitate the decks popular with free-standing houses. Set up as such, the decks provide space for social gathering on a scale not imagined by the original builders of tenements. In theory, there is a maximum live load for such a deck, although most people leave that calculation undone. Consequence: porches collapse. (The Rockford news broadcast reported a balcony failure with injuries on Sunday, details are eluding me.) Whether insurers or building inspectors will insist on more rigorous inspection of porches or the posting of load limits remains to be seen. Northern Illinois University and the University of Chicago Law School (still no mention of the accident at Crescat Sententia) have lost students, and many people have lost friends. The Chicago Tribune has extensive coverage including a report from the fire house and a reader's forum in which the second-guessing has already begun.

PLUS CA CHANGE? Boots and Sabers reports that Milwaukee's Summerfest has gone away from booking acts popular with the younger set, because the younger set uses the time away from adult supervision to misbehave. Instead, the festival is booking acts popular with older people. Might these be the same acts that appealed to slightly-younger editions of those older people some 30 years ago, when Summerfest had problems with young music fans misbehaving?

THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION? Highered Intelligence comments on the windshield murder case. His main point: "Without some sense of morality, laws are just mechanical procedures." Perhaps, and perhaps to an economist, everything involves an incentive, but if Mr. Lopez's hypothesis that the driver was willing to risk greater consequences in order to evade lesser consequences, does it not follow that morality itself is a mechanical procedure? Specifically, if you mess up, isn't it usually better to 'fess up and face the music, rather than have to evade and face more serious consequences later?

AND LEAD US NOT INTO PENN STATION, BUT DELIVER US FROM GRAND CENTRAL. Doxagora, with a new template, further examines postmodern relativism's pernicious effect on the Anglican Communion. Thanks to the Establishment Clause, dissidents no longer have to migrate to Leyden, let alone to Virginia (yes, Virginia, Plymouth Rock is a navigational error) to find suitable doctrine.

THINKING 100 YEARS HENCE. General Electric has been running a commercial during some of the Sunday shows in which the Wright Flyer sports the latest turbofan mounted on the top wing. It's part cartoon, part tribute. But it raises a question: what will businesses be able to do to exploit the centenary of space exploration? Aviation has been open to commercial exploitation from the beginning. The value of airplanes for war and other State projects came later. Space exploration, on the other hand, has been a government preserve. Does that status hamper innovation?

SERIOUS CHEDDAR ISN'T YELLOW. Dean Esmay discovers Pinconning Super Sharp, one of the prize exports of Lower Michigan. There are some pretty good aged cheddars from Wisconsin. If they age long enough, they turn white and somewhat crumbly when you cut them, certainly nobody mistakes them for American let alone Velveeta.

RULE 17. The reference here is to Strunk and White, "Omit needless words." From Newmark's Door comes this confirmation that the more baroque the communication, the less truthful the communication. Note in particular this: "I think, John, some of it probably goes back to business school where we are kind of taught that talking smart makes you seem smart. It just obscures what is really happening." Quite. The second-most-frequent comment I make on bluebooks (the first is "Amplify" or words to that effect) is "Don't use big words you can't spell." Turns out there may be a market test for companies that attempt to baffle to appear with it.

LOSING THE RACE? Joanne Jacobs observes, in light of the Michigan affirmative action rulings, that the real educational inequalities begin in kindergarten. She has a weblog entry and a column on racial differences in attitudes toward achievement. (This linked article is useful reading.) I'm old enough to remember when civil rights meant getting the segregationist agent of government out of the schoolhouse door, and something about denigrating academic effort as "white" suggests that some elements of the civil rights community have left me behind.

WINNING THE PEACE. Is there such a thing as the best-case scenario not being best? Thomas Friedman (registration required) looks at the unintended consequences of too quick and too overwhelming a regime change in Iraq. (Via Milt's File, June 25 entries.) On a related topic, Power Line speculates about strategic disclosure of discoveries in Iraq.

SEEKING WILLIAM BREWSTER? Midwest Conservative Journal is all over the latest crack-up of the Episcopal Church. I liked this: "The Episcopal Church is like the UN. It has committees for every single topic or problem in the entire world. It probably even has a Standing Committee To Identify Topics or Problems That Don't Have Their Own Standing Committees Yet(SCITPTDHTOSCY)." University senates have the same obsession. Then there's this on the self-marginalization of the Episcopal Church: "[i]f the conservatives walk, the liberal remnant becomes the United Church of Christ and nobody cares what those guys think about things." And if the conservatives view their mission as purifying, all sorts of things are possible. The Nigerian bishop gets it.