NOTICE OF RESUMPTION OF SERVICE. James Lileks returns, posts an explanation for the disruption of service, compares entertainers-turned-gubernatorial hopefuls in Minnesota and California, and weighs in on the election of Bishop Robinson in New Hampshire. "This story has irritated me from the start, and it has nothing to do with Rev. Robinson’s sexual orientation. The guy left his wife and kids to go do the hokey-pokey with someone else: that’s what it’s all about, at least for me. Marriages founder for a variety of reasons, and ofttimes they’re valid reasons, sad and inescapable. But 'I want to have sex with other people' is not a valid reason for depriving two little girls of a daddy who lives with them, gets up at night when they're sick, kisses them in the morning when they wake. There's a word for people who leave their children because they don't want to have sex with Mommy anymore: selfish."

Fact checker's note: Hitler's dog did not go to his funeral. Blondi served as the laboratory animal to determine that the poison capsules Frau und Herr Hitler intended to take were still effective.

WANNA MAKE A BET. No, you can't buy a Saddam Hussein put, but you can take odds on the Kobe Bryant case, note the SCSU Scholars.

NAME YOUR CHAMPION: SUPERMAN, OR SITH. No postings yesterday in order to make a trip to Six Flags Great America and sample the rollercoasters. Among the newer ones, I passed on Vertical Velocity and Deja Vu, the two shuttle coasters, and test flew Superman. It's a bit odd to go through the bottom of a loop on your back, but I survived. To help visitors pass the time, the park has posters describing various parts of the Superman legend, which has changed some since when I was a kid. It transpires that Superman can be undone by magic, or by tele-kinesis, or by telepathy. Guess the Force isn't with him.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The French, it seems, have no word for laissez-faire." Hat tip: The Knowledge Problem.

A GROUCHO MARX MOMENT. Atlantic Blog looks at the club that won't have the provisional government of Iraq as a member.

WELCOME MAXSPEAK READERS. MaxSpeak provided a roundup of a subcategory of his Reciprocal Switching list that he calls "Readable Righties." Thanks for the visit, perhaps we can quibble about whether the Superintendent is "righty" or "libertarian" once the school year starts. Regular visitors to the Shops might want to hit Max Speak's front page: he's got a rip-off of the Wizard of Oz that might be funny, or it might be derivative.

BLUSH

You are...Condoleezza Rice, National Security
Advisor! Naturally brilliant, you are
successful and put your work first. Even
though you don't have as many tight personal
relationships as others, its a sacrifice you
are willing to make to pursue knowledge and to
faithfully serve in your duties. A keen
intellect and sense of purpose characterize
you.


What Political Diva Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Hat tip: Ghost of a Flea.)

POLITICALLY INCORRECT. Balloon Juice discovers that Bill Maher is learning to produce a weblog.

... TUNGSTEN, TIN AND SODIUM. Just in time for the new school year, Mendeleyev's periodic table online. (One of my recollections from Russia was how all the tour guides stressed the Russian origins of the periodic table. There is still a Soviet-era wall mural in Piter showing the table.)

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION? University of Massachusetts President William M. Bulger resigns account an investigation of his role in helping his mobster brother hide. There is no evidence that Bulger did anything wrong. This statement from trustee Lawrence Boyle is priceless: ""Having the governor and attorney general pitted against you, certainly isn't going to help the university going forward. I don't see that the storm clouds are ever going to lift over the university when he's there. His departure, I think, is going to abate all this ancillary discussion about grand juries and death pits and let us focus back on books and scholarships."

As. If. Anybody. At. ZooMass. Cares. Isn't that the university that recently considered yet another mascot change, for the purpose of selling more caps and hoodies?

WHAT TURNING IS IT? Hard to tell. Thomas Friedman sees Iraq's neighbors being shaken up, perhaps in a salutary way. James Bowman deplores the continuing media fascination with "gotcha" politics. Ralph Peters sees a failure for the al-Qaeda wannabes in the Indonesia hotel bombing. Meanwhile, a media frenzy awaits Kobe Bryant's plea.

LINE RELOCATION. Daniel W. Drezner is up and running.

PAGING ELDER BREWSTER: Doxagora calls on the Episcopal Church to note a potential scandal. Midwest Conservative Journal and Greatest Jeneration are seeking new churches.

UPDATE: Is the schism underway/

THE EVOLUTION OF SEPARATE BUT EQUAL? Mark Steyn sees the possibility, at least for some constituencies. Some speculations: "Even presidents have been damaged by high school, as Bill Clinton revealed after Columbine, when he said he could still feel the sting of humiliation at being the useless lardbutt who was last to be picked when they were choosing teams. He put it better, I thought, when he told his Whitewater confrere Susan McDougal a few years back that he loved being governor because ''women are throwing themselves at me. All the while I was growing up, I was the fat boy in the Big Boy jeans.

"Who knows? If those big-haired cheerleaders at Hot Springs High hadn't given him the brush-off, Paula might never have had to suffer that unwanted pants-drop, nor Kathleen that breast-grab, nor the Sudanese the bombing of their aspirin factory. Perhaps today he'd have transferred to Hot Springs Gay High and become our first gay president instead of our first black one, and it would have been George Stephanopoulos who brought the sexual harassment suit." (Hat tip: Common Sense and Wonder.)

IT COULD BE MORE INANE. John Lemon's Barrel of Fish finds a Senator Hollings inanity: "at the end of World War II we had 40 percent of our workforce in manufacturing. And now we're down to 10 percent. We've got 10 percent of the country working and producing, and we've got the other 90 percent talking and eating. That's all they're doing." It could be worse. At the end of the Mexican War we had close to 80 percent of our work force in farming. We're now down to 2 or 3 percent. Common Sense and Wonder are happy to see Senator Hollings go.

COORDINATED GANGBANGERS. John Lemon has lost all interest in professional basketball.

IF I ONLY HAD SOME NERVE. The August 2003 issue of Railfan and Railroad visits Stampede Pass, the Northern Pacific Railway's crossing of the Cascade Range. The article tells of an abortive attempt by the War Department to survey the pass. The commanding officer "did the least. Fearful of rumors of deep snow, he kept to the eastern flanks of the range. His only penetration was along two already well-known routes, Naches Pass and Yakima Pass, the latter of which he mistook for Snoqualmie [Pass, the Milwaukee Road's crossing, which features in a contemporary SUV commercial]. He had missed them all, Stampede, Snoqualmie, and Stevens [the last named for the Great Northern Railway engineer who confirmed the existence of Marias Pass in Montana, the crossing Lewis and Clark reported rumors of but did not map. Stevens Pass provides the Great Northern a relatively easy approach to its Cascade Tunnel.]

And who was this commanding officer? None other than George B. McClellan, who made this list of the worst figures in American history.

THAT AMNESTY APPRENTICESHIP. Presto Pundit points to a Fred Dickey report (in the Los Angeles Times, use your Chicago Tribune registration) suggests (read critically and you'll see what I mean) that the perceived probability of amnesty for illegal immigrants is too high. The article also speculates on the connection between illegal migration and out-migration from California. (There has also been net migration from Illinois to Wisconsin, something that I will touch on in the near future.)

PLAYING BY THE RULES IS CHEATING. Common Sense and Wonder asks whether using a so-called Progressive Era rule equates to a coup. Why not? Some people still get away with describing a vote count using rules in place BEFORE the polls opened as a "stolen" election.

UPDATE: Hit and Run's take.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Highered Intelligence fisks a mis-named Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens.

RULE 108. Apparently the Japan Rail rulebook makes no provision for taking the safe course in the event of doubt or uncertainty. (The safe course would be to flag the train into the station and disembark the passengers, rather than keep them confined a kickoff return from the station.)

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES travels Across the Atlantic.

THE INTELLECTUAL'S PARTY? If the Democratic Party has so many court intellectuals, why must their instructions to Members of Congress read like "Rallies for Dummies?" (Via Betsy's Page.)

SURVIVOR. General Custer's bugler at the Little Big Horn, subway ticket-taker, ship fitter, drummer boy for Giuseppe Garibaldi. (Via Ben Muse.)

BACK CHANNEL. Instant-messaging and laptops aren't always a way of zoning out at a conference or workshop.

THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION. One Hand Clapping surveys the hidden costs of hook-ups and shack-ups. He also recommends a Christina Hoff Summers essay on the right and wrong way to socialize boys. Sample: "Efforts to civilize boys with honor codes, character education, manners, and rules of good sportsmanship are necessary and effective, and fully consistent with their masculine natures. Efforts to feminize them with dolls, quilts, non-competitive games, girl-centered books, and feelings exercises will fail; though they will succeed in making millions of boys quite unhappy." You'd think kibbutzniki would understand this, but evidently not.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM. Why would the bounty for shooting at a US soldier increase? Hints here and here.

JUST PASSED 12,000 HITS. That's better than a thousand a month, thanks for your interest.

SOME PUZZLES FOR THE ACADEMIC LEFT. Monday night's Extension 720 focused on Phyllis Chesler's The New Anti-Semitism. Ms. Chesler and Jonathan Levine, along with Professor Rosenberg, explored the phenomenon in its latest European incarnation and among the academic Left. Four questions come to mind.

1. Consider Marx's assertion that religion is the opiate of the masses. Wouldn't a backward-looking form of Islam be something for a Marxian to criticize?

2. Consider the extension of Marxian thought that views racism as a tool of the bosses. Isn't there something wrong with notionally socialist governments in Europe looking the other way while their Islamic masses agitate against Jews, perhaps so they don't notice the coming collapse of their welfare states?

3. And if women hold up half the sky, by what standard can you affirm honor killings or the veil?

4. What ever happened to the distinction, circulated by Barrington Moore, jr., between reactionary and revolutionary violence. Can you really treat the Fedayeen Saddam the same way as the Khmer Rouge?

Porphyrogenitus has thought about this point at some length.

HAIL, HAIL TO MICHIGAN, THE CESSPOOL OF THE WEST. The Spoons Experience comes to that conclusion upon returning from the Detroit area.

RAILROAD MOVIES. Transport Blog posted some impressions of railroad-themed movies. Not too long ago, Trains (the same issue that featured this) did a roundup of railroad themed movies. The ten best:

1. The Train (1964, United Artists)
2. The General (1927, United Artists)
3. North by Northwest (1959, M-G-M)
4. The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (1974, Palladium)
5. Human Desire (1954, Columbia)
6. Silver Streak (1976, 20th Century Fox -- anybody note the origins of that big 20 in their logo?)
7. Emperor of the North Pole (1973, 20th Century Fox)
8. The Silver Streak (1934, RKO)
9. Twentieth Century and Broadway Limited (1934, Columbia and 1941, United Artists)
10. Danger Lights (1930, RKO)

As noted here, the 1976 Silver Streak is a weak excuse for a movie (there are all too many movies in which the runaway train pulls apart and the automatic air brake does not apply, usually on nearly level ground with the train-line fully charged. Missing from this list are three other pictures worthy of note: Union Station, from the late 1940s (if you can get past the transfer from the Chicago freight tunnels to the Pacific Electric red cars), the mid-1970s Murder on the Orient Express, and the late-1970s Great Train Robbery, based on Michael Crichton's book about the real event from the early days of railways.

(And is there a better suggestion of a sex scene than that closing shot in North by Northwest?)

Trains saw fit to name their ten worst train movies. Here, without comment, are their choices.

1. End of the Line (1988, Orion)
2. Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995, Warner Brothers)
3. Emperor of the North Pole (1973, 20th Century)
4. The Cassandra Crossing (1977, Associated General Films)
5. Chattanooga Choo-Choo (1984, Chattanooga Choo Choo)
6. Terror Train (1980, Sandy Howard Productions)
7. Runaway Train (1985, Golan-Globus)
8. Von Ryan's Express (1965, 20th Century Fox)
9. Breakheart Pass (1975, United Artists)
10. Money Train (1995, Columbia.)

In the same issue, a trainman from the South channels Dr. Zhivago.

WEAK EXCUSE. Number 2 Pencil is unimpressed with the excuses the Lawrence, Mass. school superintendent made for not passing a basic language skills test. It's not as if the General Counsel of the railroad failed the test for setting valve gear, and it brings to mind a point economist and commentator Walter Williams makes to students who grouse about losing points for spelling errors on an exam not in an English class: "But you're using English."

AN AVIATION QUIZ. The Air Venture commemoration of the centennial of powered flight included a drawing and a poll to vote for the greatest aviation innovation. The choices offered, in no particular order, are

1. Learjet
2. Jet engines
3. Piper J-3 Cub
4. DeHavilland Comet and Boeing Dash 80
5. Boeing 747
6. Air Traffic Control
7. The Wright Flyer
8. Sikorsky VS-300 Helicopter
9. Controllable-Pitch Propellers
10. Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-3

I have my own ideas about which of these is the greatest innovation, but in the spirit of the other such surveys that are going around the blogosphere, I solicit your suggestions. Communicate with me here with a subject line of "aviation poll". A summary and my comments will be available next week.

PRIVATE ENTERPRISE IN SPACE. No, not an essay on contraction mappings in Banach space. InstaPundit links to coverage of recent developments in the X Prize competition to develop a reusable space transportation system.

FILL YOUR HAND, VISSARIONOVICH. IMAO tells us what really happened when Stalin ordered the MGB to kill John Wayne. (Hat tip: Outside the Beltway.)

SEX, DEATH, AND WHY THE LINES ARE LONGEST AT THE ROLLERCOASTER. Atlantic Blog has a spot-on comment about interesting questions to an economist: "I have never met a capable economist who would describe sumo wrestling as a trivial topic for a paper." Quite. Sometimes, the most-innocuous-sounding problems are the hardest to model, let alone test the implications.

THE NATURE OF THE FACULTY SENATE. Invisible Adjunct explores the membership criteria for the faculty senate. The senate she's envisioning appears to be one in which all full-time, tenure-track faculty members are ex officio faculty senators. The reality at many universities is that there is an elected faculty senate (or several elected governing bodies), and the principle of comparative advantage applies to membership (more prolific researchers stay away), and the academic standing of the university may be inversely proportional to the ease with which the body achieves quorum.

UPDATE: Invisible Adjunct notes that her post addresses eligibility to stand for election and to vote for members. In the early days of the Northern Illinois University faculty senate (If it were a ship, I would be a plank owner) there was a debate over whether adjunct faculty qualified as colleagues or as a distinct constituency. The default position back then was that only tenure-trackers could vote or serve. I believe that is still the case. On current trends, it wouldn't matter whether adjunct faculty could stand for election, or be counted toward apportionment, given the minutiae the Faculty Senate currently considers as its purview.

LOW WAGES = LOW PRODUCTIVITY, with major doses of start-up costs and contracting costs. Reason's Jeff Taylor and American Prospect's Robert Kuttner offer differing perspectives on the use of overseas professionals by U.S. companies.

ENUMERATED AND LIMITED POWERS. Three distinguished economists recite the usefulness of the concept in obtaining prosperity in Africa.

LINE RELOCATIONS. Visit Midwest Conservative Journal (closely following the developing schism in the Episcopal Church) and Newmark's Door (treading water and observing economists) at their new sites.

LOW WAGES = LOW PRODUCTIVITY. The Conceptual Guerilla proposes the epithet "cheap-labor conservative" as a bumper-sticker putdown of (or is it an attempt to end arguments with) advocates of open markets. Misha devotes somewhat more than a bumper sticker to responding to it. The bumper-sticker response is the header for the post. The short form of the argument can be put in one of two ways: if cheap labor were really the be-all and end-all of capitalist development, the unemployment rate in Bangladesh or the Mississippi Delta would be low, or employers would never bemoan the difficulty of getting and keeping skilled workers.

This quote from Conceptual Guerilla is particularly precious: "That same period – especially from the late forties into the early seventies – was the "golden age" of the United States. We sent men to the moon. We built our Interstate Highway system. We ended segregation in the South and established Medicare. In those days, a single wage earner could support an entire family on his wages. I grew up then, and I will tell you that life was good – at least for the many Americans insulated from the tragedy in Vietnam, as I was." Has he really, without recognizing it, denounced the opening of the labor force to women?

I explored the site a bit more, and found this gem here: "Many people today regard the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869, as a project that was so self-evident as to be inevitable. It was not. The transcontinental railroad was not finally authorized until after southern members of congress had left Washington as their states seceded. Before that, it languished for ten years as southerners resisted it. It seems they didn’t want small non-slave owning farmers with easy access to the rich farmland of the Great Plains. After all, admission of new “free states” in the plains would only tighten southern encirclement." Bad history. Southern interests advocated a Pacific Railroad from New Orleans to either Los Angeles or San Diego, which would provide a shorter route from Gulf to Pacific, and an easier crossing of the Continental Divide than the central route, but Northern interests would have no part of it. Moreover, the route best suited to trans-Pacific trade, namely the Twin Cities to Seattle, was not on the radar screen of any public official.

OVERBOOKING bites Cal State-Disneyland, notes The Irascible Professor. Question: who can compel state universities to provide the equivalent of denied-boarding compensation?

INSTITUTIONS EVOLVE TO REDUCE TRANSACTION COSTS. The vacationing Professor DeLong grapples with the topic.

THE MELTING POT. The idea of a separate womens' and childrens' entrance to a mosque that looks a lot like the service entrance is somehow difficult to square with being an American, notes On the Third Hand.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. John Lemon: "A more diversified learning environment could be achieved by giving out more D's and F's than colleges currently do."

NO MORAL AMBIGUITY. From Atlantic Blog, a reminiscence from Mike Royko that nails the allure of John Wayne movies, and a list of favorite movies. (That's a list you'd be unlikely to see here ... I am the despair of my colleagues when it comes to the talkies, they'll name a picture, my reaction will be "dunno," they'll name the performers (as if that helps) ... and when it comes to railroad themed movies, Silver Streak involves a Burlington Zephyr delivering an iron lung, no Gene Wilder seducing Jill Clayburgh, no Canadian Pacific signal gantry bending when a bad guy bumps into it.

MORE ON OPEC AND IRAQ. Claudia Rosett provides one set of answers to the questions raised here.

MORE ON TRANSACTION COSTS. Sonia Arrison 07/29/2003 looks at file-swapping, and down-loading music. The solution likely lies in bundling something the seller can monitor with the music. You'd think the music recording industry would be more imaginative. Years ago there was a court case involving blanket licenses sold to radio stations. (background as .pdf)

ALLOCATIVE EFFICIENCY? James V. DeLong 07/29/2003 looks at the difficulties of price=marginal cost, particularly with irreversibilities and non-storability of goods. The transaction costs of negotiating a price also matters ... what would happen if coalitions of air travelers formed for the purpose of negotiating rates to occupy the empty seats on a plane about ready to push back? Could you do something similar with the queue line at a roller coaster?

CRASHWORTHINESS MATTERS. First attempt to legislate fuel use in passenger trucks fails in the Senate. (Yes, I deliberately linked to a site dissatisfied by that development.)

PADDOCK FOR IRON HORSES. From Where Worlds Collide, some pictures from the recent Doncaster Open Day. Alas, if you wanted to see the paddock for some even faster iron horses, namely the West Milwaukee Shops, all you'd find would be some athletic fields and a casino.

LIFE IMITATES SCRAPPLEFACE? In lieu of Amtrak, Amcanal? The reality, if anything, is more ridiculous. Ever hear of the Tulsa Port of Catoosa, which brags on itself as the "most inland, ice-free river port in America." Yup, as in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The upper reaches of the Missouri River are open to barge traffic, after a recent agreement involving dredging and environmental protection, in order that a few barges can participate in the harvest in the Dakotas. There is, however, little job-protection for low-skilled Democratic constituents. The Army Corps of Engineers maintains the canal systems. No Belomor Kanal here, comrades!

The subsidies are completely reversed on the waterways. Passenger rail transport is a net recipient of subsidies, both from Amtrak legislation and the various commuter transportation districts, while the freight railroads pay taxes. About the only passenger river transport operating is on gambling "boats" (for many of them, a "cruise" involves pulling in the brow, casting off, then anchoring against the current) while the freight barges are net recipients of subsidies from the Corps of Engineers.

SENDING YOUR KIDS TO COLLEGE? Wendy McElroy has some suggestions for parents (via Betsy's Page.)

EVALUATING RISKS IS NOT THE SAME THING AS MANUFACTURING THEM. Take a day off to go to the air show and the story of a sting to smoke out terrorists surfaces. A bipartisan coalition of economically illiterate Members of Congress trashed the futures market in terrorist events. The ever-alert InstaPundit has roundups here and here. The American Mind offers a bit of economic analysis (if you wanted to forecast conditions over an entire summer, would you consult the National Weather Service or futures prices in May?) and additional links.

The air show was worth the day missed from the internet. Great weather, got my fill of barnstormer loops, hammerhead turns, and ten snap-rolls on the vertical axis downward. Sufficiently many vintage jets have been restored that they are a show in themselves within the war-bird fly-pasts, but there's nothing to match the sound of a formation of P-51s. Show organizers recognized that this is still a country at war. The conclusion of the war-bird fly-past was a minute of silence, Taps, and a perfectly-executed "Missing Man" formation at the end of Taps.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES calls at Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.

NO THANKS, JOANNE. Joanne Jacobs looks at an extension of identity-politics beyond finding qualified teachers of ethnic studies to finding qualified teachers of core courses. "U.S. history should be taught by white teachers, preferably white males whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower." Provided the school districts can cover such teachers' opportunity costs.

TO REMEMBER. One Hand Clapping links to biosketches of the fallen heroes and a story of Bob Hope's successors, including family members who are September 11 widows or parents.

THE WORLD POSES PUZZLES, THE UNIVERSITY OFFERS DEPARTMENTS. John A. Baden sees the value in crossing disciplinary boundaries.

PROLONGING THE MISERY. Hit and Run predicts that Amtrak is likely to limp along for a few more years. Some of the commenters remarked on the usefulness of an excursion and sightseeing type service. Such things already exist, many as private operations (go here for a few hints at their existence.) Amtrak is unlikely to be able to offer a truly deluxe service without being criticized as a subsidy to the rich, so the deluxe-class service such as the American Orient Express runs on an intermittent basis as an excursion train, and Amtrak cannot concentrate on a few high-speed corridors such as the Northeast Corridor or Milwaukee-Chicago without losing the support of Representatives from rural districts, and Senators, some of them powerful (anybody remember the North Coast Hiawatha?), from rural states.

PROVIDING THE EVIDENCE. The Ba'ath Party supplies the precedent.

RECOMMENDED RAILROAD VIEWING. Chicago Rapid Transit posters. (Hat tip: Peter Kaminski.) The main L site appears to be a City of the Big Shoulders version of this London Underground guide.

VERTICAL RESTRAINT. Number 2 Pencil is less than impressed by the efforts of management at the new Philadelphia stadium to ban carry-in food.

SACRAMENTHOLM? EconoPundit looks at the possibilities. (It is worth remembering that average Swedish living standards are lower than average Californian living standards.)

PRICE LEADERSHIP. Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein suggests that the occupying powers in Iraq take the opportunity to end OPEC's effectiveness as a price leader. At the moment, OPEC is relatively ineffective as a price leader, but the occupying powers (U.S. and U.K.) have some interest in the price their oil producers see, as do some of their neighbors (Mexico and Norway) that are not OPEC members. It is worth remembering that OPEC inherited the output-restricting role once enjoyed by the Texas Railroad Commission. As the nature of the trust fund for Iraqi citizens has not yet been spelled out, the interest of the Iraqi authorities in attempting to price their oil (cheap or dear) has not yet been determined. Simplest solution is to make no efforts to manipulate the price of crude, as attempts by OPEC to function as a price leader simply make it more attractive for nonmembers to produce more, which reduces the sales of the OPEC participants.

FIFTY DEFINING MOMENTS IN U.S. HISTORY summarized at Electric Venom. The Pacific Railroad properly made the list.

CREATING A HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT. Common Sense and Wonder report that the Berkeley chapter of College Republicans have demanded an apology from the Berkeley administration, for hyping a derogatory psychological profile of conservatives. Time to use a little jiu-jitsu and find PC elements of the Berkeley judicial code to use against the university. The best way to demonstrate the folly of a rule is sometimes to comply exactly with it.

THE ACCUMULATION OF SMALL ADVANTAGES. Cal Pundit provides some perspective on Lance Armstrong's victory margin.

BOYCOTTING THE PARIS AIRSHOW? Air Venture opens Tuesday. If there were a way of bringing an antitrust suit against NASA ...

If postings are light next week, you've just been offered an explanation.

GET UP, GET UP, GET OUTTA HERE, GONE to the Hall of Fame. (Note to readers outside God's Country: the same Bob Uecker who has appeared in Miller Lite commercials is the announcer for the Milwaukee Brewers, and he has been for most of the team's existence, and his home run call comes from his playing days, when he noticed that the players in the dugout would urge the ball on using those words.) Congratulations.

THE RETURN ON AN MBA. Some time ago, I questioned the value of an MBA, and a reader asked if I had any evidence. At the time, I emailed to the effect that I had seen it "someplace." Found it during the summer cleanup and catch-up on reading. Economist, print edition of 27 July 2002, p. 56, cites Pfeffer and Fong, "The End of Business Schools: Less Success than Meets the Eye," Academy of Management Learning and Education, volume 1, no. 1. (No .pdf available yet, and it doesn't appear to be stored on J-STOR.) Short form (from Economist): "there is little evidence that getting an MBA has much effect on a graduate's salary or career."

PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE DOUBLEHEADER. No sooner do I comment on the fecklessness of the Silent Generation than do I discover two shining examples of their feckless thought to comment on. Here's Ira Chernus: "Change need not require war. A society that chooses stalemate because war is the only alternative it can imagine is an impoverished society. It has no way to pursue, or even consider, new possibilities for cooperation and progress. Genuine security eludes it. After fifty years, it is time for the U.S. to move beyond the frighteningly narrow policies of containment and conquest, to look for new approaches to genuine cooperative peace, in Korea and all over the world." Mightn't it be time for the North Koreans to consider new possibilities, such as joining the rest of the modern world and throwing off Communism? Might even make for a good doctoral dissertation or so. Then there's Hubert Locke, who no doubt knuckled under each time the administration cut his budget: "Yet at some point, we will have to turn Iraq back to its citizens and, given the demographics of the country, inevitably this will mean a nation in which a Shiite majority holds the reins of political power. That reality likely will give us a nation that looks politically, and perhaps religiously, very much like its next-door neighbor -- Iran." Sounds like a good reason to stick around and convince all the participants in the constitutional convention of the value of an Establishment Clause, not to dismiss the whole exercise as a quagmire.

IRAQIS MORE DANGEROUS WHEN THEY'RE NOT AIMING? Via Betsy's Page, news that 31 Iraqis died as collateral damage to celebratory gunfire (also a Detroit habit). More seriously, Iraqi partisans (or are they copper thieves?) have been attacking the infrastructure and key managers of the power authority.

PATIENCE. Quote of the day, from Victor Davis Hanson (via Betsy's Page, National Review's archives are not working -- and mine are!): "But if anyone on September 12, 2001, had predicted that 22 months later there would still be no repeat of 9/11; that bin Laden would be either quiet, dead, or in hiding; that al Qaeda would be dispersed, the Taliban gone, and the likes of a Mr. Karzai in Kabul; that Saddam Hussein would be out of power, his sons dead, and an Iraqi national council emerging in his place; that troops would be leaving Saudi Arabia, Arafat ostracized, and Sharon seeking negotiations; that new Middle East agreements under discussion — and all at a cost of fewer than 300 American lives — then he would surely have been written off as a madman." The Economist reviews its case for war, concluding, "Again, a long-term, costly commitment is going to be needed."

DEPOLITICIZING THE SEVENTH INNING STRETCH? A proposal.

CALIFORNIA BUDGET FOLLIES. I purchased a print copy of Newsweek for its coverage of California's fiscal troubles. Waste of four bucks. Here's all you have to read. From "Tarnished Gold," the true state of California's fisc: "The state government’s financial woes began with the tech recession, but Davis and legislators continued to spend money on popular programs long after tax revenues dropped. During the boom, state coffers were filled with taxes on capital gains and stock options from all those tech execs and dot-com millionaires. In the 2000-01 fiscal year, these revenues leapt to $17 billion, representing 25 percent of all state income taxes collected. But by last year, that tax revenue had sunk to just $4.7 billion." No Gini coefficient for tax incidence here, but it seems likely that most of those revenues were transitory, and any careful analysis of the tax forms ought to have discovered that. Then in "State of Siege" comes this lament: "Even if there is a deal—and one could come as early as this week—it will inevitably lead to draconian cuts in social services, highway construction and education; the state’s vast public-university systems—the invaluable source of upward mobility in a state founded on the idea—are likely to raise tuition at least 25 percent just as they are being flooded by a new generation of immigrants’ kids." Maybe it's time to take a look at those public colleges, particularly the community colleges. They might be a source of upward mobility, but here's a dissenting view. Perhaps higher tuitions will encourage some self-selection among students.

SYMBOLIC ANALYSTS ONLY? Probably mistaken academic policy, notes Photon Courier, coming to the defense of shop class. (Where do you suppose the Superintendent learned to drill and to tap? And posting may have been light the past few days, but twelve bad-ordered cars have returned to service.)

NO FISHING OFF THE COMPANY PIER. There are limits to the protection membership in a protected class provides.

ANKLE-BITING? Once upon a time, Newsweek made for good reading, or perhaps I've just grown. Out of curiosity, I purchased a copy for its coverage of the California budget and political problems (see infra -- if the infra comes at the top of the page where's the supra?) and I find an article on the African uranium flap. Reading carefully, I find, "According to this CIA official, an agency analyst cautioned him not to include the Niger reference. The NSC man asked if it would be all right to cite a British intelligence report that the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium from several African countries. The CIA official acquiesced. Though the British have not backed off that claim (a British official told NEWSWEEK that it came from an East African nation, not Niger), CIA Director Tenet publicly took responsibility for allowing a thinly sourced report by another country to appear in the State of the Union. (The White House last week denied that the Niger reference had ever shown up in an SOTU draft.) What Bush said in his address: 'The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'" It strikes me that Director Tenet really has nothing to apologize for, and Newsweek's chasing of the Niger-Italy-wherever document is wasted space in the magazine.

EVEN MORE ON THAT BERKELEY SURVEY. There's more to it than inverting the psychological profile of a wimp. The SCSU Scholars brand it a "stupid Berkeley study" (more redundancy than on the leading edge of a Shuttle wing there, King) and recommend that you go down under and keep scrolling -- ayup, and promptly! Ipse Dixit has lots (go to the post headed "Bovine expression" if I provided the wrong permalink). InstaPundit is still on the story, as is Virginia Postrel (if you compare a big-time academic to Ann Coulter, is that creating a hostile work environment?). Kind of hard to muster much sympathy for the administrators at Cal, especially in light of a sympathetic Newsweek story that places "keeping a diverse campus" at the top of institutional priorities, never mind the lack of viewpoint diversity.

TRAPPED BY YOUR PREJUDICES. Newmark's Door links to a San Francisco Chronicle survey that cannot conceal its surprise that a majority of the Baby Boomers support Operation Iraqi Freedom. Key mistaken inference, by Republican pollster Frank Luntz: "They went through college in rebellion, and have been trying to make amends ever since." (Todd Gitlin can be excused his claim that the results are "counter-intuitive." He probably runs in the circle of people who to this day remain surprised that Ronald Reagan won (or John Anderson lost) in 1980, because nobody they knew voted for Reagan (or everybody voted for Anderson, mutant but true.) Here's a little demographic reality: the majority of the Baby Boom cohort is born from 1954 or 1955 on to 1962 or 1964, depending on whether you look at birth rates or the Kennedy assassination as determining the end of that epoch. That means they came of age during a time marked by a rising tide of social pathologies and ran smack into the downside of the Great Society programs so enthusiastically supported by their next-elders (the folks who were born on third base and devoted their adult lives to stealing second: never in human history has so much been given by so many to so undeserving) whose nostalgia for process, nuance, and failure manifests itself in their disapproval of the liberation of Iraq.

THE FATAL CONCEIT, REDUX. Invisible Adjunct looks at the pros and cons of tenure in light of a suggestion that academics take "a more holistic approach to our work, where what we write about is also what we practice and strive to experience in our daily lives. This means increased civic engagement and political participation in working to improve society." Invisible Adjunct attempts to unbundle this proposal from the campus culture wars, which she proposes to address in a subsequent post, expressing reservations about such an "academic culture change."

Huh, and again, huh??? The campus culture wars are the root of the problem, not tangential to the problem. Isn't one element of Profscam and other books along those lines the lack of viewpoint diversity in the faculty, which inter alia leads to a multiculturalism that looks the other way when bastardy, cannibalism, clitorectomies, jihad bombing, or protected status loutishness manifests itself? Put less provocatively, when a college president charges the graduating class to live a credo of "service and social justice," does the modal faculty member think of Thanksgiving at the Rescue Mission or supporting higher tax rates, or does he think of Mapquest and cheaper oil? One cannot address the difficulties of the university, including the budget woes that lead to reliance on cheap and contingent labor in many disciplines, without looking at the loss of status the universities have brought upon themselves by setting themselves up as experimental prototype communities for social transformation, where that transformation has been informed by dumb ideas, to put it bluntly.

MORE ON THAT BERKELEY STUDY here, with related topics here and here.

POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT. Some coverage and editorial comment on the effectiveness of "not everybody is doing it" antidrinking campaigns in college.

PATIENCE. Professor Drezner has posted progress reports on Afghanistan and Iraq. On the lighter side, Deborah Pickett (maybe there's a reason people don't take the Sun Times as seriously) complains that the opposition still has a pretty good poker hand (best I could find was a full house, kings high, or a flush in spades).

DANGEROUS ILLINOIS DRIVERS. Chicago chooses symbolism over substance.

EARLY FRIDAY GETAWAYS. India West looks at the thesis that labor is a normal good. (Your mileage may vary. Just about every introductory economics course I have taught looks at the curious case of labor supply, and most of my colleagues look at it as well.) To be sure, higher wages raise the opportunity cost of goofing off, but they also enable the seller to enjoy more money and more goofing off. The heirs to Herbert Croly in Europe are erring in attempting to mandate time-off. They might complain about the notionally Dickensian work schedules in the United States, but good luck finding anybody in the office this afternoon. (Gorgeous afternoon, the pool beckons. The wind is sufficient to race sailboats without playing too much havoc with golf shots.)

COMPENSATING DIFFERENTIALS, this time as "combat" pay for inexperienced teachers in rough schools.

REVEALING THEIR PREJUDICES. Steven Den Beste, who produced a column-length essay for Opinion Journal, collected a round-up of sneering reactions to the recent deaths of Uday and Qusay in a firefight. These reactions tell us more about the mind-sets of the war critics than they do about the progress of the campaign. One popular trope with the less reflective Leftists is the notion of a ruling class, with a Command Central someplace from where all shots are called. (A simple version of Marxism holds that it suffices for The People to discover and take control of that someplace, thereafter the resources can be directed for the benefit of all.) It does not surprise that adherents of such a primitive Leftism would speculate that President Bush knew all the time where those guys were, and offed them when the campaign hit a rough patch. (But why not off the guys before May 1, and have the frozen corpses delivered to the carrier?) It isn't necessary to be an unreflective Marxist to give voice to such speculations. There used to be a popular mode of model-building in economics, in which individual agents lack knowledge about something important, such that an inefficiency arises, but a sufficiently informed government could issue the right commands or calculate the right tax such that all else comes out right. That sort of thinking might also lead to the conclusion that a sufficiently informed government could time the showdown with the Hussein brothers. I suppose it's churlish to ask, well, if Intelligence could smoke out two Hussein brothers attempting to hide in Iraq, why couldn't it smoke out nineteen Saudis and Egyptians in plain sight in California, Florida, and Washington, D.C? But perhaps it's not so churlish: what has battered the reputation of the aforementioned strand of economic theorizing was a relatively simple question, made popular by Professor McCloskey: If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? In economics, any inefficiency leaves unexploited gains from trade, which provide powerful incentives to fix the inefficiency and harvest the gains from trade. It's that sort of alertness, not sufficiently informed governments, that usually fixes the inefficiencies.

POST HOC, NEC ERGO PROPTER HOC. Most economists understand this, the general populace does not, notes Econo Pundit. The post may be half in jest. Perhaps Stanley Fish's Road Map to the White House also is, although the Chicago Sun-Times treated it as straight news in its Thursday print edition. Get this, it's Dean Fish on the adverts the Donks should have run more aggressively (one of the local Donk court intellectuals was circulating something like it among the faculty at Northern Illinois University): "The ads on the economy could be a version of the ads the party should have run a thousand times a day in 2000. Uncluttered, black and white, with good production values and someone like James Earl Jones or James Garner or Sam Elliott saying, "The last time someone named George Bush was president, the nation's deficit was ___, the unemployment numbers were ___, and the stock market stood at ___. Now, after eight years of a Democratic administration the corresponding figures are ___." Yes, and how much of that tax revenue was capital gains taxes on stocks trading at 30-300 times earnings, reflected in the major market indices, and totally unsustainable (even Paul Krugman noted that.) Postmodern accounting, I love it. Fish goes on: "The ad on the environment could be largely visual (and in color): pictures of land before and after it was drilled for oil or strip-mined, wetlands disappearing in the wake of developers' bulldozers, water with arsenic levels marked in red, forests detimbered, public lands given to private special interests, children forlornly playing on concrete slabs, and then the slogan (delivered by Steven Segal) 'This land used to be your land; don't you want it back?'

To be sure, this would be crude hit-and-run, no details, no nuance, relentlessly negative, no positive proposals. But that's what's good about it. The message is so simple no one could mistake it; and after a short while no one will forget it. And not only does it do the defining-the-party job, it does the unifying job
." Leaving aside the obvious point that if it's your land, you ought to be able to drain the swamp, clear the brush, build a house, or extract the minerals thereunder, it also has the effect of defining the Donks as "I've got mine" elitists happy to stop any further development along their lakeshores or in their suburbs.

Perhaps Dean Fish has provided an explanation for why there are so many unemployed or underemployed humanities Ph.D.s: anyone can write an essay that gives bulls*** a bad name, and a few can prosper by it. Thus, many try. It's the same delusion that grasps a lot of kids with a good jump shot.

IN PRAISE OF GOOD SERVICE. On a recent trip through Milwaukee, I had a watch band and battery replaced. I later discovered that the alarm functions on the watch were no longer working. Called the company, sent the watch in, they replaced the electronics and sent it back within a week. No voicemail hell or long wait on hold either. The company is called Time Square, and their stores are in several Milwaukee malls. No website, either, but find their locations here.

CONSTRUCTING CONSERVATISM. InstaPundit points to Angry Clam's assessment of recent research on the psychology of conservatism. If you work out the antonyms of the structural characteristics (and isn't that "terror management" just the least bit ad hoc?), doesn't the psychology of non-conservatism equate to the psychology of a wimp? More seriously, it ought to be easy enough to work out the structural characteristics of the psychology of a liberal. If you read the post, read the comment section, and go here. Professor Ray has researched authoritarian personalities extensively and is unimpressed with the Berkeley effort.

LOYALTY. New York resident, Packer fan. (Via The American Mind.)

REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME. An assembly district that has been a safe seat for the same party for 75 years changes hands. Reason: a property tax freeze the winning candidate supports, which the Governor intends to veto.

PATIENCE. Today's roundup of commentary on the Iraq Campaign includes an InstaPundit meta-post, Phil Carter on some lessons headquarters has yet to learn, Jane Galt provides some perspective on the Marshall Plan, You Big Mouth on the quagmire in 1945 (post immediately below the picture of a German-commanded military parade in Paris), a Command Post essay on the Werwolf Saddam (or was that Fedayeen Hitler?), with additional cross-references.

THE JOYS OF SHODDY SERVICE. James Lileks reports his adventures on hold with tech support. What is it about the so-called high-tech companies, anyway? One of the telephone companies in Chicagoland has what I perceive as a rather effective ad featuring a frustrated customer who couldn't stay on the line any longer, because he was out of vacation days.

EIGHT DAYS A WEEK. Milt's File discovers Beatles goodies online.

WORKIN' ON THE RAILROAD. Postings will continue to be intermittent until the fall term begins. It hasn't been all research (or home maintenance), there's nothing that says model railroading is for winter only.

More pictures here, and thanks to the Fox Valley O Scalers for their help testing things on the weekend.

PATIENCE. Today's roundup of war commentary includes Andrew Sullivan, quoting a lengthy report filed by a Special Operations trooper; Vodka Pundit on the uncertain end of a campaign; Chicago Boyz, linking to the same report; and Den Beste with a Chicago Great Western style rundown on the nature of the war (in which Iraq is a campaign) and the progress to date.

THE THINGS YOU LEARN. Crooked Timber points to the Social Science Research Network. Might be something the Superintendent of Working Papers (guess who?) could use.

HYPOTHETICAL. Scrappleface looks at the intelligence success that might have been.