THE WAR AT HOME.

Until we eliminate the safe harbor and hard cash that people like Saddam Hussein provided terrorists like al-Zarqawi, we will be forced to the defensive and hoping that we can simply catch people we don't know going to places we're not sure to attack almost anything they can.

Captain Ed (via The American Mind) reflects on the capture of some bad guys intending mayhem in a shopping mall.

Will at Vodka Pundit reports on an intercept from the bad guys that includes,

If the militants fail to take over Iraq, ''we will have to leave for another land to uphold the (Islamic) banner, or until God chooses us as martyrs,'' the statement says.

He goes on to ask,

Why isn't this the lead story for every American network and newspaper this morning? Isn't it just a tad more important than Bill Clinton's book?

QUOTE OF THE DAY.

I believe the Liberal left continues to treat “we’re smarter than you” as their trump card. It is the fount of their scorn. It is proof of their political qualification. It is the argument that “proves” that they are right and “those bastards” are wrong. It was their charge against Reagan. It is their charge against Bush. This is one of the mightiest planks of their platform.

There are two problems here.

First, the charge of intellectual inadequacy absolves the Liberal Left from having to take the ideas of the Right seriously. It is indeed a way of arguing that the Right does not have ideas, that it is merely the mouth piece of vested interests. Ironically, the claim to intellectual superiority serves as warrant for an anti-intellectual act.

Second, there is a vicious circle at work here. When the Liberal left supposes that they are smarter, they underestimate the opponent. When they underestimate the opponent, they lose when they might have won. By insisting they are smarter, they give up a chance for victory.

The post is evidence that scholars who start on the left can in fact mature. It also exposes a "strategery" that both President Reagan and the current President Bush have used to good advantage, namely, letting their opponents "misunderestimate" them.

As far as that "we're smarter than you" trope goes, that and $5.00 will get you a Metra weekend pass. As Deirdre McCloskey puts it in The Vices of Economists - The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie (details or compare prices), "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?" Her point is that if in fact there are great inefficiencies and other injustices in society that can be put right, there are plenty of incentives for individuals other than state actors to put it right. Social engineering, then, is a vice.

SOCIALIZATION. Former Chicago school superintendent Paul Vallas currently holds the equivalent position in Philadelphia. He likes the idea of observing a few of the traditional virtues. There are a few things he'd like to discourage.

Coming to school late. Not wearing the proper uniform. Bringing jewelry and cell phones and electronic gear into the schools. Using foul language, bullying and being disrespectful are all out. All those things. The bottom line is, we're not going to tolerate any of that stuff. But let's be clear, and let's communicate it to the students and parents up front. Let's be very specific about what we want, what we expect and what we don't want and what we don't expect.

He's rediscovered the merits of dressing for success.

Schools have become lax. You say, 'Great, you're wearing the school colors.' But the tops are like four sizes too small and the pants are four sizes too big. Or people are supposed to be in white shirts and black pants, so parents go out and buy their kids T-shirts that are five sizes too big - they go down below the knees. There needs to be more specificity. This is as much public education as it is enforcement. We think we'll get better behavior if we're more specific in what we want. If you raise the bar, children and parents will respond.

And he notes that contemporary fashion statements are, well, crude.

Shirts with collars. Pants worn correctly at the waist. Belts worn with trousers. Clothing that fits - not too tight, too big, too small, too short or too long. We just don't want to see your navel, and we definitely don't want to see your underwear.

Number 2 Pencil, who picked up the story upon returning from vacation, has some additional observations.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"Clinton had a lot of parties with celebrities, but [right after] his term, somebody flew two planes into the twin towers. What do you want -- somebody who keeps your children safe or somebody who throws nice tea parties?"

That's New Zealand's Rachel Hunter, who, despite living in Los Angeles, has not yet applied for citizenship. (Hat tip: The Corner.)

PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE. John Kass gets it.

We adopted Carter at our house. The consensus around the kitchen table was that Carter was a decent man. But we confused decency with strength.

The Soviets weren't confused. Carter was a hand-wringer.

Hand-wringers make fantastic equivocators and can rationalize bad behavior, explain subtle nuances, encourage other hand-wringers to increase the size of their bureaucracies. And hand-wringers can discuss all those shades of gray that the East Coast establishment keeps reminding us about in certain editorials.

But there's one problem. Hand-wringers know many things but don't believe in much. They're moral relativists. There is no right and wrong in them. Only those shades of gray.

And shades of gray can't lead human beings.

The Soviets figured Carter for a weakling and us for weaklings for electing him, and in a sense we were weaklings then. They moved in Central and South America, Asia and Africa and kept hold of Europe. And we didn't have the leadership to confront them or stop them.

But then came Reagan. He didn't care about satisfying the establishment by waxing on about shades of gray. He understood that there was good and evil in the world and that we weren't evil.

What he said.

This outraged the hand-wringers and the shades-of-gray crowd. It enrages them still, which is why they're so eager to diminish him, to peel him, even in death.

And what happened in the world?

They call it freedom. They call it the American Century. They don't call it the Soviet Century.

Thank you, President Reagan.

Here I stand, I can do no other.

NOT QUITTING MY DAY JOB:

Tuesday night was only the second time Moyer had seen the municipal band. She came to hear selections by John Philip Sousa.

While Moyer may have been fairly new to the experience, Steve Karlson of DeKalb was not. Tuesday night marked the 18th year Karlson has been perched in front of the stage to watch the band.

Karlson said the band plays an important role in the community.

"Just look around," he said. "You see people enjoying themselves, don't you?"

Full story from the DeKalb Chronicle.

HONORING PRESIDENT REAGAN. "Communism didn't fall. It was pushed." That's in a post by Will at Vodka Pundit, who reminds readers that Mr. Gorbachev's own hardliners tried to fire him in August of 1991, just before the Soviet Union ceased operations. The normally satirical Scott Ott notes,

[President Reagan] is survived by his wife, Nancy, three children and several hundred million men, women and children in the former Soviet Union, and around the world, who were set free from the hopeless terror of communist tyranny through his steadfast courage and unwavering faith.

In addition to recordings and transcripts of dozens of the most compelling, sincere and influential speeches ever heard, President Reagan also leaves behind an America that is no longer afraid to call evil what it is, and to do something about it.

ROBERT BYRD GETS RESULTS, as do Trent Lott and Bill Clinton.

France, Italy, Great Britain and Germany have lower GDP per capita than all but four of the states in the United States. In fact, GDP per capita is lower in the vast majority of the EU-countries (EU 15) than in most of the individual American states. This puts Europeans at a level of prosperity on par with states such as Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia.

Thus from a Swedish policy study picked up by Winds of Change. The study continues,

Poverty is a highly relative concept .... 40% of all Swedish households would rank among the low-income households in the USA and an even greater number in the poorer European countries. .....

The media image of the American poor is that they have great difficulties to contend with, that they are dossers and junkies and in various ways marginalized. There are of course such groups in the USA and they are relatively large, but -and this is an important "but" - such groups exist in European countries too. There is another image of poverty in the USA, namely that the great majority of those considered to be poor have a relatively good material standard of living. .....

What does it mean to be poor in the USA? Major living standard surveys carried out in the USA at regular intervals show the poor to have a surprisingly high standard of living. A large proportion (45.9%) own their own homes and have one or more cars. Domestic appliances of different kinds are also relatively common, as are one or more TV sets with video or DVD. Material prosperity, in other words, is relatively high and not associated with the material standard of living which many people in Europe probably associate with poverty ....

The report sounds like an echo of Cato and Heritage policy research in the States. Sometime this weekend, I shall endeavor to follow up on this story a bit more. There are hints that the vaunted "long European vacations" are an urban legend. Heck, I'm planning some research for this afternoon, classes not in session notwithstanding.

TITLE OF THE DAY: If this is the sexual revolution, consider me a counter-revolutionary. That's Michele at A Small Victory, expanding on posts noted here. Money quote:

You can blame the media, which goes to great lengths to give the sluttiest women the most coverage. You can blame the fashion industry, which seems to believe that little girls should dress like the sluts the media thinks they are. Or you can blame parents who teach their kids the basics of sex, but don't teach about the emotions and necessary respect involved.

It takes a village, indeed. And when that village has the values of a hippie commune ...

I THINK I CAN. I THINK I CAN. That sound has now echoed for 200 years. Britain's National Railway Museum held a festival to commemorate the bicentenary of steam locomotion. Tim Hall was there and has posted some pictures, including the only maroon Great Western engine east of Chicago.

CARE. PARTICIPATION. ASSISTANCE. Thus the three core themes of His Excellency Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, in a Chicago speech cosponsored by the University of Chicago's South Asia Language and Area Center and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. The Council member who introduced Mr Karzai was Margo Pritzker, recently returned from a Hyatt Hotel construction project in Kabul, who noted reconstruction was "really happening" and remarked on getting caught in a traffic jam. Can't be as bad as Chicago on a rainy day, with a lakefront festival, two home baseball games, and assorted other things going on, but noteworthy all the same.

Mr Karzai, who has family members in the Chicago area, came from the economic summit in Georgia, then departed to Washington DC for President Reagan's funeral services. His speech focused on the Group of Eight's broader Middle East initiative, which is stressing democracy, economic reform, and education, with a view to addressing the root causes of extremism and terrorism. Mr Karzai characterized these as a "problem that has -- had -- gripped Afghanistan for decades" and that was ignored by the rest of the world after the Soviet Union imploded until the world woke up to its "massive miscalculation." He noted some of his comrades-in-arms now in the United States who had been attempting to alert the developed world to the gathering danger, without effect, until September 11.

The current rebuilding efforts are what Mr Karzai describes as the "cooperation of civilizations," naming Japan, the States, Europe, Jordan, Norway, and China, to root out an extremism imposed by unnamed governments on an unwilling Afghan population. That extremism was "killing, destroying" the poorest and most pious of the Muslim world.

The state that is emerging has made tremendous strides. Mr. Karzai noted that the new Afghan Constitution calls for at least 25% of the seats in the parliament would be reserved for women. That remark drew a great deal of applause from the audience. He referred to great economic growth in 2002 and in 2003, with the Asian Development Bank projecting continued growth, contingent on continued help from the developed world, a point reinforced by Bank staff:

"Economic prospects are promising, but whether rapid development will continue depends largely on the commitment of the international community to Afghanistan's investment needs and security," says the ADO.

The single biggest impediment to the country's continued progress is the poppy mafia, which Mr Karzai described as a "menace" more serious than the extremist elements. He'd prefer to export fruits, saying "I challenge the guys from California" to match the Afghan crops. (The U.S. would have to do something about its agricultural protectionism, something that did not come up in question time.)

Mr Karzai faces seven challengers in the upcoming presidential election, including one Bellicose Woman (tm) who has chided him for making too many deals with warlords.

Question time was instructive, with one audience member whose son died in action in Afghanistan asking if there would be a democratic Afghanistan in the questioner's lifetime. Mr Karzai thanked the questioner for the family's sacrifice and noted that a democratic Afghanistan is emerging today.

RUNNING EXTRA: The Fourth Estate also covered the speech. Here is the Sun-Times and here the Tribune coverage, which benefits from some face time not offered to ticket buyers.

ON BECOMING AMERICAN. Francis Fukuyama:

The real Protestants are those Korean grocery-store owners, or Indian entrepreneurs, or Taiwanese engineers, or Russian cab drivers working two or three jobs in America's free and relatively unregulated labor market. I lived in Los Angeles for nearly a decade, and remember passing groups of Chicanos gathered at certain intersections at 7 a.m. waiting for work as day laborers. No lack of a work ethic here: That's why Hispanics have pushed native-born African-Americans out of low-skill jobs in virtually every city where they compete head-to-head.

The actual Anglo-Protestants, on the other hand, are a complex group. The old mainline Protestant denominations—Congregationalist, Anglican, and Presbyterian—were at the forefront of all of the liberal causes like multiculturalism and affirmative action that Huntington dislikes.

The "Huntington" Mr Fukuyama has referred to is Harvard's Samuel Huntington, who recently finished Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity (details or compare prices,) one of the recent arrivals in the Cold Spring Shops reading room.

Priorities and Frivolities, who links to the review, has comments from the perspective of a recent arrival in the States. Give him a look.

LIFE AFTER COLLEGE IS THE REVENGE OF THE NERDS. But you have to get there first:

Being working class -- in Massachusetts, in the 60's, anyway -- meant that it was possible to scrimp and save your way to a measure of economic safety, to imagine a future that included more than trying to survive. My mother's laserlike shopping skills were a source of rueful family humor. On double-coupon day, she could whittle $120 worth of groceries down to $60. The Mecca of college and the need to pay for it provided the justification for leaving many mundane yearnings unmet -- it was why we made popsicles instead of running after the ice cream truck; why we headed straight for the clearance racks; why the friends of shortsighted parents got to splash their way through the summer season in their aboveground pools. And when we were indulged, which was not infrequently, it was always with an eye to the future: savings went to piano lessons and summer camps and even restaurants, so we would feel comfortable in a restaurant world. ''Go explore,'' my mother would say when we went out to eat. Whenever we teased my mom about the vinyl coupon purse she carried, my normally mischievous father would chastise us: it represented hours and hours of worry and caution, tedious labor and her rightful fear for the family's vulnerability. And insofar as college was concerned, my parents' strategy of self-abnegation worked.

Is there a time to lighten up? Perhaps. (Hat tip: Apartment 11-D, who manages to put the latest celebrity "wedding" in perspective.)

THE NEW INDUSTRIAL STATE. Mandated employee benefits , good idea, right? Suppose it brings higher seller concentration with it? Deinonychus antirrhopus deploys the Viner-Wong diagram to good effect. Intermediate price theory students, take note.

ECONOMICS IS FUN.

Stephen J. Dubner, an author and journalist in New York City, and Steven D. Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, are writing a book about the economics of baby names, cheating, crack dealing and real estate.

Details at Marginal Revolution.

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS calls at Window Manager.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

A funny thing happened during the Reagan era. Young people became Republicans. Not all of them, of course, but a plurality. It was strange. After all, everyone knows you're supposed to be liberal and idealistic when you're young. You're supposed to vote for people like Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.
Yeah, right.

Those young people aren't young anymore. We're middle aged, and the world bears little resemblance to the one we grew up in. It is, despite its obvious ills, a lot better.

Whatever impressions nostalgic TV shows may leave with those too young to remember the real decade, the late 1960s and 1970s were a scary time to grow up. The world just kept getting worse and worse, and nobody seemed to know why.

The Soviets were expanding, and the Cold War seemed destined to end in defeat or destruction. When the joke issue of my college paper announced the Soviet invasion of Iran, lots of students believed it.

The Saudis could--and did--cut off the oil whenever they got mad. People in the northeast froze from lack of natural gas; my father turned our thermostats down to 65, as though it would help. (Deregulation, Reagan's first act on becoming president, helped more.)

Prices went up and up, not just on a few things but on everything. After taxes, cost-of-living raises couldn't keep up. Interest rates hit two digits. Nobody my age would ever be able to own a house.

Virginia Postrel.

SECOND SECTION. It was an even more scary time in England, according to Andrew Sullivan.

RUNNING EXTRA: The Seventies were also a scary time to be in the military, according to Private Peters, recruit. (Hat tip: Vodka Pundit.)

NO PROTOTYPE, NO LIABILITY

On the other hand, if I were modeling the Union Pacific, I would be expecting higher prices, or fewer models, in the near future. From Omaha,

Union Pacific Railroad has filed a lawsuit against two model train manufacturers, claiming trademark infringement and unfair trade practices.

At issue are U.P.'s current shield logo, its Building America slogan and its locomotive colors of yellow, gray and red. U.P. holds trademarks for the use of the designs and colors on products.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Omaha, claims that Lionel LLC and Athearn Inc. are selling model trains bearing the logos and colors and that those products could confuse or deceive consumers. U.P. asks for the companies to comply with the trademarks and for unspecified damages. Lionel is based in Chesterfield, Mich., and Athearn in Compton, Calif.

A Lionel official declined to comment on the lawsuits. Athearn officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Union Pacific Railroad started its brand-licensing program about two years ago, charging fees for use of its logo or the logos of railroads it has purchased over the years. The program aimed to land the logos on a wider range of merchandise, from clothing and lunchboxes to mugs and plates, resulting in significant revenue.

"We've said from the beginning that we were going to protect the rights to our identity," said Bob Turner, senior vice president. "We waited almost two years from when we announced the licensing program, so I think we've given everybody plenty of time to work with us."

The problem Union Pacific faces is that this licensing program is relatively recent. Other railroads have attempted to implement such programs from time to time, and on occasion backed down when the snicker factor became sufficiently large. (Oh, and Penn Central, a diesel era railroad, was too broke to make much of an issue over some Penn Central steam locomotive decals a manufacturer offered, but that's a story for another day.) The legal problem -- and it is not a trivial matter -- is whether or not the railroads have, by letting the hobby manufacturers use these logos for all these years, implicitly consented to that use. Will the cases rise to the level of "Coke" or "Xerox" or "Kleenex?" Not for me to judge.

In other litigation involving basement empires, Lionel (yes, the supplier of Christmases past, present, and yet to come) has been convicted of stealing designs from a rival train manufacturer.

I have avoided the use of the term "model railroad" in the preceding paragraph as the two manufacturers currently limit their production to three-rail trains for maneuvering in tight spaces, such as under Christmas trees. Mike's Train House has plans to introduce some two-rail models in the near future.

TRANSIT OF VENUS. Got up this morning, looked toward the east, saw a fair amount of haze around the sun, decided to go about my day.

Fortunately, NASA's TRACE spacecraft is above the haze and pointed in the right direction. The full transit was visible by day in Europe.

Imagine," said Bologna astronomer Corrado Bartolini. "We can't even tell when a car will reach Zamboni Gate in traffic, but we know to a fraction of a second when Venus meets the sun every 122 years."

Yup. Complex adaptive systems, including road networks, do what they darn well please. Hence Hayek and his Fatal Conceit. On the other hand, Venus transits always come in pairs (conjugate pairs?) with two in eight years and then the 122 year interval to the next one. Tonight, that rare performance of Sousa's "Transit of Venus" March. Looks like the weather will hold off for the concert.

HONORING PRESIDENT REAGAN. Ronald Reagan's boyhood home is in Dixon, Illinois, not far from DeKalb. This week, the crowds at the presidential library and the Capitol will make most of the news, but the boyhood home has been drawing a great deal of traffic and tributes as well. I went there today and observed others coming and going and taking pictures. Among the tributes left was a computer-generated card from a woman who has been doing Christian missionary work in the former Soviet Union since 1992. Tear down this wall, indeed.

This Nikita Demosthenes tribute includes a picture from Illinois.

Fox News have provided a schedule of official events. The coverage is likely to be pool coverage, meaning these times will likely govern programming on other networks.

POLICY WONKERY IS NOT EASY. Dan Drezner writes a book review. An observer with a differing point of view begs to differ. Professor Drezner responds.

Actually, what I was saying that there was a need for an economist to use the language of the average Joe. That requires two things -- a good economist and a good writer.

Ayup. My guess is that economics turns off a lot of students with dense prose and a surfeit of graphs -- used to be guilty of presenting it that way myself. On the other hand (tradeoffs, always tradeoffs) there are a lot of aspiring literary critics out there, and those folks take the cake when it comes to murky writing.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

The same number of young hopefuls, 70,000, are receiving letters from Harvard University this year inviting them to participate in a competition with a similarly high failure rate. The letter sent to each recipient, selected mostly on the basis of test scores, says "congratulations on your academic achievements" from America's oldest university and urges them to apply for the class of 2009.

The "American Idol" contestants mostly knew how lousy their chances were. They had seen the show before and realized that almost no one got anywhere near Hollywood. But the impressionable high school juniors who are persuaded to apply to Harvard this year because of the unexpected attention from its admissions office are going to be less well informed of their chances.

Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews, who is worth reading, is less than impressed with the marketing efforts of the most selective colleges.

If memory serves, some of the academic league tables use "selectivity" as a criterion for ranking the college. The harder it is to get in, the higher the ranking. Positive first partial derivative and all that. To repeat: incentives matter. (Hat tip: The Cranky Professor.)

RONALD REAGAN, TERMINATOR. Outside the Beltway and Andrew Sullivan compare and contrast the Reagan and current Bush presidencies, and the continuing tussle between the libertarian and traditionalist constituents of the Republican Party.

GET TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER. Hugh Hewitt finds a Peter Robinson tribute to President Reagan that is on point.

'Some people think I'm simplistic and being simple. My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose. What do you think about that?

HOME RULE. The transition to civil authority continues in Iraq, with nine militia organizations agreeing to disband, or to become army or police units.

THE TITLE OF THE ACADEMIC POSITION THAT I HELD AT THE TIME WAS PREPOSTEROUS. Read the whole thing. (Via Newmark's Door, where there are links to several other articles worth reading.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

President Bush's comparison the other day of the war on terrorism with the war on Nazi Germany was not without validity, although few historians probably would sign on to the idea. In each case, U.S. men and women launched an invasion to free people from a brutal and despotic regime. In each case, Americans became liberators, even if Iraq's prospects over the long term remain uncertain.

And 60 years ago, though we tend to forget this, there were critics who blamed the president for what they considered a trumped-up war rather than blame those who had attacked America.

The editorial board at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel tackle the parallels, and lack thereof, between the war against the fascists of the 1940s and the war against the fascists of the 00s.

A little historical perspective. Some of President Roosevelt's critics on the right came unhinged, to the detriment of the right opposition in the 1950s. President Reagan had a similar effect on some of his critics on the left, which continues to affect the left opposition these days.

WHEN NEW YORK FREEZES OVER. I have now viewed The Day After Tomorrow. Jed at Boots and Sabers has reviewed it. I concur, especially this.

This Ice Age is a duplicate of the last Ice Age, appoximately 10,000 years ago. The implication early on was that this was a cyclical event brought about by Mother Nature, and we could look forward to another Ice Age sometime in the future. Yet, somehow, when the Ice Age actuallly arrived, Mother Nature was off the hook, and it became something we managed to bring on ourselves.

There is also the little matter of the helicopter flying around near a tornado, but anything can happen in a cartoon.

HONORING PRESIDENT REAGAN. President Reagan will return to Washington on Wednesday, June 9. Friday, June 11, is a national day of mourning. Outline of the schedule as the press now has it is here.

THE ICE IS FINALLY MELTING. Here it is, the seventh of June, and the ice hockey season is about to end. The Stanley Cup will be settled tonight, in Tampa, (Tampa??) even if it takes a count, a recount, a second recount, and a Supreme Court ruling to settle it. In the north country, the Milwaukee Admirals completed a sweep of the Wilkes-Barre Penguins to win the American Hockey League's Calder Cup, which looks like a hockey trophy, not like something that ought to be placed in the lobby of an office building, its name notwithstanding.

HALF OF LIFE IS SHOWING UP. Does it come as any surprise that if a school grants students 50 out of 100 possible points simply for being enrolled,

we have students who have successfully completed the first three marking periods and they are, with pen and pencil, calculating how little work they can do and still receive a passing grade.

Hey, nobody ever said slackers weren't clever. Joanne Jacobs, who picked up the story, notes that teacher's unions in the affected districts are objecting to the policy as an infringement on academic freedom.

That students will figure out how to game the system ought not to surprise any economists. People. Respond. To. Incentives.

RESTORING THE NORMAL APPEARANCE. Thanks for your patience with the temporary template. I have been able to reconstruct something resembling the original template, with a few features borrowed from the newer templates, and the link list will be restored and brought up to speed over the next few days. I have also saved the template text to disk so as to avoid the kind of hassles that plagued me earlier in the week.

AMERICAN KAMIKAZE. The things one learns when one goes to a breakfast fly-in (this morning, the 40th annual DeKalb Chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Association, with a little help from the DeKalb-Sycamore vintage car club -- what does it tell you when the station wagon you rode around in as a kid now qualifies as vintage?) One of the displays inside the mess hangar had the title that heads this post. We're really talking about a first-generation cruise missile. Before the Luftwaffe's V-1 ramjets, there was the Interstate TDR-1 attack drone, and 189 of these things were built at the aircraft works in DeKalb. Here are the specifications for this aircraft, here a listing of some others. Perhaps it might be more accurate to call the TDR a first-generation smart bomb, as it had to be controlled by a pilot flying a control plane with what we now understand to be a Weapons Service Officer.

In the second seat, directly behind the CPP, is the Drone Control Pilot DCP. This is his primary job He is hunkered down over a small (six inch face) television screen receiver. The picture is transmitted from a TV camera located in the nose of the drone. The TV picture he sees is what he would see if he were in the drone looking straight ahead. As soon as he has a picture of the target on his TV screen he notifies the CPP.

At this point, the Control Plane Pilot can leave the area - increase his "open out" or "standoff range" from the target, since the Drone Control Pilot has taken over and guides the drone on its "run-in". He finally crashes the drone against the target or performs other functions such as dropping bombs or laying smoke.

One of these cruise missiles was used to sink a Japanese freighter during the Guadalcanal campaign, and several were used during the siege of the Japanese navy base at Rabaul. (Do I have enough books? -- details or compare prices.)

MR. GORBACHEV, TEAR. DOWN. THIS. WALL. Thank you, President Reagan.

CLANG, CLANG, CLANG GOES THE TROLLEY. That streetcar gong is there for a reason. Shot in the Dark suggests some Minnesotans will learn that lesson, the hard way. Nothing new there, either. Did you know that the first Secret Service operative to die in the line of duty died in a collision between a trolley car and President Theodore Roosevelt's horse-drawn wagon? The Service remembers and recently took actions to honor the operative, William Craig, who once also guarded Queen Victoria. President McKinley's physician also remembers.

The President himself was seriously injured in the collision of his automobile with a trolley car in which one of the secret service men was killed. It was part of my service to accompany the President on his outing trips, hunting, riding, walks, etc. We rode horseback from twenty-five to one hundred miles a day. We had many long walks, wading or swimming streams. The hunting trips were for all kinds of game, big game being his preference. My services on these trips were frequently required, not only for the President but for others who might be of the party. When at the close of the Roosevelt administration I was reIieved of duty as White House physician I realized how great had been my sense of responsibility.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Terrorists have declared they intend to fight until we are finished, however long that takes. They have the big-picture view that many Americans lack. I pray that we do not endure more attacks like those of Sept. 11 before we cast aside our divisions in favor of the concepts that unify America. I pray that happens, but in my heart I know more attacks are coming and more death will be visited upon us because of what we represent.

I am a Sept. 11 American. I know the world has changed and that Americans must defend America. Everything else we do, everything else we believe, pales in comparison to that duty.

That's Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell. Read the rest. (Via Real Clear Politics.)

LET THEM EAT CAKE? The new cross-Lake Michigan carferry is arriving in Milwaukee somewhere near the old Grand Trunk Western ferry docks, in the shadow of the old coke works and not far from the cement warehouse. It's a long walk to the nearest bus stop, which will put you on a bus that will take you into the heart of the South Side. There are free transfers to the crosstown buses. Does any of this bother the carferry company? No.

Lake Express spokesman Jeff Fleming stepped in to insist bus service wasn't as important as rental car, taxi and limousine service, all of which will be available. Fleming said the Lake Express would attract "high-end" passengers who would no more board a public bus at a ferry terminal than they would at an airport.

Details here. (Hat tip: Live from the Third Rail.)

RUNNING EXTRA: The editors at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel welcome the carferry, and propose that a Muskegon-Milwaukee service will complement, rather than cannibalize, the Ludington-Manitowoc service. "Nerve-racking Straits of Chicago." I love it.

BY THEIR FRUITS SHALL YE KNOW THEM. Laura at Apartment 11-D is not happy:

You know, feminism has taken a lot of hits in recent years. Sometimes even from me. But I think during times like this, we could stand a little bra burning. More empowerment. More angry chicks.

The backlash against feminism has meant a loss of the many good things about this movement. Young teenage girls should be standing up for themselves.

And what's bothering her?

Sunday NY Times magazine had an article on teenagers and hooking up. Apparently, teenagers today are avoiding dating and instead looking in chat rooms for sex partners. Even more disturbing than slutty teenagers is the fact that most of the hooking up involves girls servicing the guys. Here, read Belle Waring's take on it.

Excuse me, that's no "backlash" you're seeing. That's the predictable outcome of forces the so-called second wave feminists, back when some people thought Gloria Steinem was a hottie, set in motion, oh, somewhere between 1965 and 1970. Weblogging, alas, is a young person's game, and the young, alas, don't remember their history. Let me remind readers of a few ideas that were popular in those days. "Women say yes to men who say no" was a slogan at more than a few protests against the drafts, and "make love not war" was not for banners only. Abortion? If the pill failed, that was the fall-back position, noble talk about rape, incest, birth defects, and the life of the mother notwithstanding. Smash monogamy, nuke the nuclear family, so much for "bourgeois" constructs. Does it come as any surprise that after forty years of "affirming" alternative life-styles, anyone should be surprised that the youngsters have begun to embrace them.

SECOND SECTION: The Elder at Fraters Libertas has some thoughts, noting that some of the younger girls are rejecting the fashions of their older sisters.

WHAT TEACHER SHORTAGE? Fabio at Marginal Revolution looks at proposals to raise the pay of schoolteachers, reminds readers "The salary one makes is determined by supply and demand. A price doesn't indicate how important the job is, or even if people think it is important. Take a simple example: water - it's cheap because there is plenty of it, not because we don't think it is important!" Apparently the National Education Association and the certification cartel have not done well at restricting output and raising prices.

Some solutions for low teacher pay are non-starters. For example, simply demanding higher pay for public school teachers isn't going to cut it because that means shifting money from other public services. There is a political solution - limit by fiat the number of teaching certificates awarded each year. That's why the orthodontist makes a lot of money - there are few orthodontists relative to the demand for nice teeth. This might have undesirable consequences. Wealthier school districts might employ all the teachers. Perhaps the best response to low teacher pay is to realize that it's a signal that fewer people should go into teaching. Next time you see someone express a desire to be a teacher, just tell them that we have too many!

I'M SHOCKED! SHOCKED! to find out that there's gambling ... No, not at Rick's in Casablanca. This gambling house is D.J.'s Tavern in Maple Park, Illinois, and the village president has been charged as an accessory, along with several bartenders and the bar owner, and there is a possibility that the Prefect of Police has been looking the other way.

ASSESSMENT FOLLIES? Newmark's Door calls it the "assessment scam" (I thought I was being acerbic calling it "assessment of the obvious") and links to a NAS Forum (if you're so smart, why haven't you coded permalinks?) essay that's pretty critical of the practice.

The unthinking faith in student success means that the advocates of assessment never want to ask students to work harder, learn more, or indeed do anything unpleasant. Instead, the advocates invariably put the onus on faculty to change something or other about what we do as teachers. We should stop playing the "sage on the stage," and become the "guide on the side." Or we should assign more group projects, so that students learn more collaborative skills. Or we should provide more constant and more positive feedback to our students, becoming more "accessible" and more "nurturing." No doubt each of these nostrums contains some useful pedagogical advice.

It's better than that. I now have, courtesy of the therapeutic bureaucracy, some information on medical reasons why some students have trouble coping with these wonderful fads. More about this after Sunday's fly-in breakfast.

Back to the essay at hand:

But already we should notice something of a disconnect. Students are being assessed to see what they have learned. (Or are they? We'll take that up in a moment.) But every conversation about assessment to which we have been privy talks endlessly about what faculty can do to improve their "inputs" into the learning process, and never at all about what should be expected of students in terms of their "outputs." Of course, all faculty truly interested in teaching want to know how they can do their work better. But somehow it seems that assessment mavens want to have only half of a necessary conversation.

The real breakdown of all semblance of seriousness on the part of assessment advocates arrives when we ask, How exactly will student achievement be assessed if the grades students earn and the content of courses are irrelevant? In many disciplines in which students major -- let alone in general education programs -- true "exit exams" are simply not possible. Take a typical history major in any department with at least a half dozen faculty. Once he is past his introductory courses, he might take anywhere between seven and ten more advanced courses of his choice, from among ancient Mediterranean civilizations, modern Asian history, women's history, the Civil War, modern intellectual history, medieval Spain, military history, American religious history . . . well, you get the idea.

Perhaps all the fads will lead us, by a circuitous route, to rediscover the core curriculum and other eternal truths.

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO. The value of a graduate degree, or an ABD, as either credential or intellectual training, continues to be debated at Mt. Hollywood, Wolf Angel, Critical Mass, and SCSU Scholars.

READ AND UNDERSTAND

Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone that truth can be found.

Would that contemporary university administrations were that forthright.

LEARNING BY DOING. King at SCSU Scholars discovers one youngster who did well on a history quiz involving D-Day because he played a computer simulation. Before computer simulations, there was Avalon Hill, who produced, in addition to numerous World War II and other battle simulations, C&O-B&O (the Pere Marquette division used to generate a lot of automotive traffic for the C&O) and Dispatcher.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

(Go out and) pick up a great work of classic literature and enjoy the reading. You know, like the kind they used to assign in college when English professors taught English instead of homosexuality and feminism.

That's Mike Adams at North Carolina-Wilmington (motto: Fort Fisher has fallen) on his summer reading plans. His column upset a reader from Ithaca, New York, and Professor Adams did a little work on the research specialties of the English faculty at Cornell (where the hockey team once gave up five goals to Wisconsin in ten minutes with the national finals on the line; surrendering comes as naturally to Cornell as it does to the French, but I digress.) The column makes for some interesting reading, with a sting in the tail.

RUNNING EXTRA: The comments to King's post on Professor Adams's column link to these reasoned comments and this more spirited riposte suggesting inter alia that Professor Adams has quoted selectively from the field descriptions at Cornell's website. Professor Adams has already written a response to some of his critics.

PRICE THEORY GOES ONLINE. Professor David Tufte at Southern Utah University has set up a weblog as a class project. The Superintendent notes, approvingly, that project grades will depend on spelling and grammar.

TEMPLATE TROUBLES? I'm not sure what happened on June 2 while I was editing my template but if you haven't been able to read anything new recently, sorry, and thanks to the folks at Blogger for putting it right.

RUNNING EXTRA: I have requested that the old template be restored from backup, but still no word from Blogger on whether they will be able to do that. I have saved what I had of it and may be able to restore it on my own, or perhaps tweak this version to look more like the old one. Anyway, back up and running.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST."But...American soldiers made prisoners stand on wooden crates with masks over their heads and they scared them real bad!"
Read the whole thing.

UNCOMMON VALOR WAS A COMMON VIRTUE. Although the Marine Corps memorial in Arlington Cemetery is a tribute to the Corps in all wars, Betsy's Page prefers it as a World War II monument to the official monument, dedicated this weekend. I quite agree. Charles Krauthammer calls the monument a "parenthesis to history."

The memorial's major feature -- 56 granite pillars 17 feet high, adorned with wreaths and marked with the names of the states and U.S. territories -- is a conception of staggering banality. One descends the main entry to the monument and the pillar to the left is marked American Samoa; on the right, the Virgin Islands.

I must confess, while I was watching the video explaining the symbolism of the pillars joined by the bronze ropes, to thinking something a bit naughtier.

Night photo of the pillars, part of a tribute at Alphecca that is worth reading for its tribute to the war dead.

The naughty thought that occurred to me:

Albert Speer would feel right at home.

(To be polite, the monument does capture some of the Roosevelt Gothic of such buildings as the Milwaukee County Court House and the University of Michigan central campus, which might have been on the designer's mind.)

A REPUTATION ONCE SULLIED? The Sports Economist notes some changes in the management of the athletic program at the University of Colorado (give me a home where the buffalo roam and I'll show you a disorderly house?)

Being an economist, perhaps [Colorado President] Hoffman understands a factor which many might miss. Barnett and Tharp are handsomely paid at Colorado, but are worth essentially zilch, zip, nada to any other campus in the country. If Ms. Hoffman is serious about reform, she wants people in the Athletic Department that have a significant stake in achieving it. Most coaches and ADs are alike - like anyone else, they are in large part creatures of the incentives they face. But Barnett & Tharp are now unique in one important sense: if they fail to do what Ms. Hoffman wants, they are toast, finished, unemployable. They have every incentive to deliver the goods to President Hoffman.

As some of the commenters to the post noted, in college sport it's all about winning. Bob Knight, Jerry Tarkanian, and the like seem to be able to land on their feet.

PORT HURON IS IN MICHIGAN. Mary Laney is amazed to see the faces of the future college graduates, and in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is where the amazing thing happened. When Whitford said, ''President George Bush was at Concordia [University] yesterday,'' the students erupted with applause and cheers. They were cheering for George W. Bush! The University of Wisconsin -- where Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, was born; the place known to be so far left it's off the charts -- had students cheering for a Republican president!

It appeared to surprise the speaker as his speech abruptly turned to a list of suggestions -- a formula, so to speak -- on how to achieve their goals in life.

It was surprising to hear this show of support for the sitting president, who is anything but liberal. And it made me wonder how the campus had taken such a radical U-turn.

Although Wisconsin students were involved at the creation of the Students for a Democratic Society (California representative Tom Hayden, otherwise known as one of "Hanoi" Jane Fonda's ex-husbands is a plank owner) the organization set itself up in a conference in Port Huron, Michigan in June of 1962 to issue this statement. Excerpts:

As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.

While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all men are created equal . . . rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.

We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nationstates seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people."

And years later, the gray-ponytail set continues to approach race relations as if Bull Connor is still director of public safety in Birmingham, rather than chairman of the state public utility commission (his last public office), continues to see Osama bin Laden as a Southwest Asian Ho Chi Minh, and continues to deny that there was a bloodbath in Southeast Asia after the Communists won.

In fairness to the kids of Madison, it is worth recalling that unofficial campus newspapers with a conservative or libertarian perspective did not begin with the Dartmouth Review. In the late 1960s, a few such students started the Badger Herald, which has since gone a bit wobbly, although this column captures the old spirit. (Disclosure: the Superintendent is eligible for membership in the Badger Herald Alumni Association, currently planning a 35th anniversary party.)

(Hat tip for the Laney column: Newmark's Door.)

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE. Years ago, I learned in the course of volunteering at a preservation railway that the Milwaukee buses in the museum's collection could not be used on the local roads account they were six inches too wide to be used as commercial vehicles on those roads. Why? As one of the old heads explained rather colorfully to me, "Mrs. Milwaukee's bucket is a bit wider than average." Anybody who recalls stopping by Schusters on the day of a sale will know precisely what I mean. Perhaps Milwaukee was just a bit ahead of its time on transit accommodation, as this story, picked up by Live from the Third Rail suggests.

WORKING CONDITIONS MATTER. Cold Spring Shops, last week:

I would note further that working conditions matter: higher teacher pay might call forth more teachers, but the supply curve is likely to be more elastic if teachers can be more confident of weeding out the troublemakers in their classroom -- a development that would have a salutary effect on the performance of the universities as well.

Joanne Jacobs, linking to Tipping Point.

Lower class sizes, clean and safe schools, up-to-date materials, and state of the art technology are among the incentives some districts are using to lure personnel to their hard-to-staff schools. While these are important, the single most important incentive for principals and teachers—the one that has the greatest chance of convincing them that they can make a difference in these highly demanding schools—is the promise of membership on a competent and committed team of teachers and administrators.

Then there's Walter Williams (via Dissecting Leftism), seeking efficiencies in weeding out troublemakers.

Educational triage would acknowledge that there are black youngsters who cannot benefit academically no matter how many educational resources are spent on them. They have little or no family support. Their very presence in school, through disruptive and criminal behavior, makes education impossible for others. Spending resources on these youngsters is the educational equivalent of medical practitioners spending resources on disaster victims who'll die even if treated. These youngsters should be removed and not allowed to take resources from and make education impossible for those who do have a chance for academic achievement.

Some might suggest that the idea of educational triage represents a callous lack of concern for students most in need. But would that same argument make sense when there's a terrorist or battlefield disaster? In other words, would it also be seen as callous for doctors not to treat victims most in need -- those who're going to die anyway? Efficiency criterion dictates that resources be allotted to those who can best use the resources as opposed to those who best need it.

By the way, there's another triage category that doctors won't own up to, and that's disaster victims who will survive only if they don't receive medical treatment. The educational equivalent of this category, where education victims are made worse off, is found in programs such as bilingual education and fuzzy math.

Superintendent's note: it is not simply black students who might benefit by triage, or who have been made worse off by fuzzy math and other faddish practices.

SWIFT OF FOOT WAS HIAWATHA. Despite troubles elsewhere on the Amtrak system, the Hiawatha Service trains between Chicago and Milwaukee uphold some of the old traditions. Last evening, the Chicago gate attendant looked back into the departure lounge for stragglers, keyed the green light on the platform, and at precisely 8 pm according to the new digital clocks, the train started to move. The last arrival from Milwaukee was running about 5 minutes early, setting up a sweet three-train meet involving it, the 8.40 Chicago-Elgin, and the 8.40 Chicago-Geneva, which had to wait at Western Avenue for the Elgin and the Amtrak to free the crossing.

In other railroad news, there was a long line of these retired diesels, some 30 years of service behind them, outside the Western Avenue Hiawatha ramp, and some of the even older smooth-side bilevel coaches at the Spaulding interchange with the EJ&E. Destination: the scrap yard. Either of these vehicles would be more deserving of a fitting farewell procession than a Nahsville bus.

COULD THEY FURTHER VANDALIZE IT? Interesting Truck and Barter post about Amtrak trying to have it both ways, keeping their current station and getting the use of the concourse area of the post office across Eight Avenue at no extra charge.

While it's true Amtrak doesn't have to pay to rent for Penn Station, it's also true they don't collect rent from another company. The real cost to Amtrak of owning Penn Station is the highest sale price or rent they could receive if they were to put it to its best alternative use.

The Pennsylvania Railroad tried that dodge forty years ago, destroying the original Pennsylvania Station (impressive enough to be the cover photo of
this book; see more here) to create the rabbit warren underneath Madison Square Garden that most people know as the ONLY Penn Station. (That rabbit warren had enough wasted space left over from the original station to provide a new boarding concourse for New Jersey Transit over the low-numbered stub tracks on the south side of the station. I believe that concourse is now open.)

What is funny about the Penn Station rent story is that Amtrak mortgaged it a couple of years ago to keep the trains running. This story reports that the mortgage was to tide the carrier over until the Acela Express revenues picked up. K. J. Lopez took occasion to advocate winding up Amtrak, or privatizing it. Some rail advocates were unimpressed with the mortgage, noting inter alia,

We’re tired of documented stories from vendors, some holding Amtrak accounts receivables that are over six months old. How many small businesses, thinking they were dealing with the United States Government, instead found themselves the victims of poor Amtrak financial management, and are financing this billion dollar corporation through nonpayment of receivables?

We’re tired of amateur railroading, such as not being able to handle the annual PREDICTABLE snowfall in December in Chicago, and annulling trains because somebody forgot to plug in the heaters.

THE SECRET IS OUT:

Exactly how much free time did I have while working in academia? I know I did a lot of work while there, but everything was so flexible that I could not work just about whenever I wanted, only to catch up on the weekend or into the early morning hours. Now things are a little different. The people I'm encountering in my everyday business are different, too. They work. Hard. I'm starting to think that academia isn't just an ivory tower; it's an ivory tower with a big feather bed right in the middle of it. Am I the only ex-academic to notice that?

It's not just the former academicians that are on to the Academic Game. Some years ago an anonymous professor penned This beats working for a living; the dark secrets of a college professor, which is out of print although copies turn up from time to time. There are two aspects of academic work that are particularly annoying: the time devoted to committee meetings, and the inevitable wrangle that arises attempting to schedule extra committee meetings, when some individual who lives at a distance from campus rules out meetings on days he's not committed to teaching. Why are the research days of people who live closer to campus and set up to work from home less valuable?

SUCK IT UP. Joanne Jacobs:

Six-year graduation rates range from less than 10 percent to almost 100 percent. Some colleges and universities do much better than others with comparable students. For example, University of California at Riverside, the least competitive campus in the elite UC system, "has an overall graduation rate of 66%, 15 percentage points better than the 51% median rate of its 33 peer institutions. . . . success at UC-Riverside is equally distributed across groups. The graduation rate is 65% for white students, 67% for Asian students, and 68% for Latino students."

Might that have something to do with California doing a better job of matching students with universities? Discriminating for equality leading to unequal retention rates: imagine that?

King at SCSU Scholars notes,

Four-year rates at SCSU are in the low teens, and the last six-year graduation data I saw for here was a bit under 40%. We emphasize retention, but retention for its own sake is pointless. Rather than folks wondering if we're spending too much money, shouldn't they ask why we don't meet UNI's performance?

Contemplating enrolling at Northern Illinois? Your teaching assistant might not be your ally in a crisis.

U of IL's policy: less than 1.0 GPA in your first semester? Don't let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya on your way outta here...and if you want to come back? work hard somewhere else and PROVE it...we'll be happy to take your money.

The balance of that post is somewhat more colorful.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Apartment 11-D is home to some thoughts about obtaining good teachers.

Teachers need to act more like white collar workers than blue collar workers. They ought to not punch a clock, but work overtime for free if needed. They should be paid according to their effort and ability, just as any other career. Bad teachers should be quickly fired. Of course, the teachers unions hate these proposals.

The thought is one among several, sometimes mutually interfering suggestions (don't you love tradeoffs?) I would add only this: put the coats and ties back on. It is rather difficult for the schools to crack down on bare midriffs or butt cleavage (yes, INCLUDING in the shop classes!) when the faculty and administration look picnic-ready, or perhaps prepared to go bowling themselves.

I would note further that working conditions matter: higher teacher pay might call forth more teachers, but the supply curve is likely to be more elastic if teachers can be more confident of weeding out the troublemakers in their classroom -- a development that would have a salutary effect on the performance of the universities as well.

NEGATIVE INCOME TAX? Tyler at Marginal Revolution suggests the Earned Income Tax Credit (is it a cleverly designed rebate of social security taxes for some wage earners?) might be the "best antipoverty program." To call it a negative income tax, in the Robert Lampman or Milton Friedman tradition, might be too much.

ONLY YESTERDAY? John Derbyshire with a retrospective on events a quarter-century ago (was it that long?):

Western civilization had turned to face its enemies, both those inside the walls and those without. The war that then commenced is not yet over. Perhaps it never will be; but it was in 1979 that we got our nerve back, picked up our discarded weapons again, and resolved to fight. This was the year it all changed, the year the ice cracked.

(Hat tip: Betsy's Page.)

LOTS OF SCHOOL NEWS. It will have to wait for tomorrow, however.

CRUNCH. Newmark's Door points to a lurid comparison of the integrity of the passenger compartment of automobiles and trucks. Nice to see that my colleague Marc Ross is still working on technology policy. (The reference is en passant, you may have to work through a reprise on the psychology of sport-ute buyers to find it.)

RARE RAPID TRANSIT. In this case we are referring to the transit of Venus (it will pass between the Earth and the Sun on the morning of June 8.) Talk about your path dependence ... the Antipodes might be British owing to Captain Cook doing some geometry with the 1769 transit ... and getting to Polynesia before the French did. But Polynesians as the first blue-water sailors? In the Pacific, perhaps. (Hat tip: Live from the Third Rail for the astronomy history.

Closer to home, the DeKalb Concert Band will perform its first summer concert on the evening of June 8. On the program will be Sousa's Transit of Venus. Apparently the sheet music has been well-hidden for a long time, as the march (which is a bit different from the usual Sousa march and trio with the orchestration augmented in the reprise of the trio) is not played frequently. It is, however, available on the Detroit Concert Band collection of all the Sousa marches. I learned about this band and its collection while working in Michigan; the march collection was once upon a time offered by the Musical Heritage Society and I bought the CD set. Transit of Venus, on demand, in my office.

ONLY IN THE STATES. Rapid transit escalators (there are such things) serve both dashing commuters and tourists. In Washington, D.C., the difference in styles is evident at rush hour. At the Pentagon - Crystal City station, just about everybody understands that the convention is stand right, dash left. At the tourist locations such as Archives or the various Mall and Capitol Hill stops, not enough people do. Going Underground finds it amusing that at one time, the escalators were marked "Walk Left, Stand Right" but Official Washington had them removed with the view that walking (or running) on the escalators is an unsafe practice not to be encouraged, if not exactly prohibited. As Dave Barry (channelling Anna Russell?) would put it, I am not making this up, you know.

WILL THEY PUT CHARLIE OFF THE TRAIN? Eszter at Crooked Timber links to coverage of new security measures on Boston's rail lines, including identification checks and possible questioning. No mention in the story of whether the increased security is protection for the Democratic Party convention, which will nominate Senator Kerry, whether he accepts the nomination or not. (Don't you just love the unintended consequences of campaign finance "reform?" Weren't the Donks the big advocates of this law, and aren't they getting bitten by it more often?

On the transit security front, a Type I error has surfaced in the Philadelphia area. A motion detector found in a Philadelphia area coach yard has been placed by a worker apparently desiring early warning of the yardmaster's approach.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Today's educational establishment is making actual illiteracy look good, like an act of humanity and rebellion. Writing, which ought to nurture and give shape to thought, is instead being used to pound it into a powder and then reconstitute it into gruel.

The thoroughly modern grade-A public-school prose style is not creative or interesting enough even to be wrong. The people who create and enforce the templates are, not to put too fine a point on it, people without understanding or imagination, lobotomized weasels for whom any effort of thought exceeds their strength. I recently read one of the many boilerplate descriptions of how students should write their essays. "The penultimate sentence," it said, "should restate your basic thesis of the essay." Well, who says? And why?

Crispin Sartwell is not impressed with what passes for writing instruction at the secondary level. The column provides some insights into the questions students sometimes ask about writing assignments, without letting the collegiate composition course off the hook. (The last is simply venting. We just started offering a capstone paper course to our students, and discovered that we have to do a lot more to develop basic expository and research skills.)

QUALITY DISTORTION? Interesting Econ Log post on self-segregation in schools (the rich refused to mingle with the poor, so they sent them down below where they were the first to go?) with some thoughts on the implications for vouchers.

One of the economists of the late nineteenth century (was it Dupuit?) proposed that railways deliberately made third class more uncomfortable in order that rich passengers would pay the first-class fares (parlors and sleepers were the first to be air-conditioned in the States, and coaches tended to be marshalled closer to the locomotive where the cinders were thicker?)

The metaphor breaks down to an extent with schooling, although as states continue to starve their universities of resources, the pattern may recur by default, with academic-minded parents of means being driven to the big-name private universities, despite any evidence of those universities conferring any permanent advantage on their graduates.

THIS DEFIES PARODY. As Betsy's Page observes, "This is NOT an Onion satire."(Full particulars.)

Because of plans for several new Wal-Mart Supercenters across the state, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has placed the entire state of Vermont on its 2004 list of the most endangered historic places in the United States.

We are fortunate that the National Trust is only able to pursue its reactionary agenda within the United States, and only as an advocacy group. Imagine such an organization, with governing powers, recommending that the entire country of North Korea be preserved in place because it had intact collective farms and gulags at risk of being overwhelmed by "chain retail businesses" or Green Revolution farming or basic human rights for prisoners. (or perhaps, consider a less extreme example, in which an entire tribe of hunter-gatherers be preserved in place, as a living link to our prehistory.)

PROFILING AND STALKING:

Before the broader issues of crime and punishment are broached, the university community must know whether this student was being stalked. If she was, did the university know about it? If they did, what measures did they take to deal with the problem?

Professor Adams is following a rather disturbing story from his own university.

LIBERTARIAN COMMUNIST? Joanne Jacobs offers a humorous political quiz with some insights into maintaining classroom discipline.

PUTTING PROFIT AHEAD OF PRINCIPLE. The University of Louisville, a basketball school, has a little problem. The local klavern of the Ku Klux Klan distributed leaflets requesting the opportunity to offer a differing point of view. Critical Mass has picked up the story, including coverage of the chapter's request for "equal time" and an honorarium for the local imperial wizard to rebut Sister Souljah, a paid guest of the university. (The request made no mention of the entertainer's academic credentials, or lack thereof.) The university denied the request. (The article captures in microcosm one of the great cultural divides in the U.S. Note on the one hand the klavern's request and on the other hand the names and the titles of the university officials involved in the request.)

The story gets more interesting after the Klukkers started distributing leaflets. To prevent any non-approved advertisements from being posted on university kiosks, the university removed all the kiosks. (How will students find out where Casablanca and Citizen Kane are playing, or am I showing my age again?) Furthermore, university officials, confusing themselves with kings, sought to banish Klan members from campus grounds. Or perhaps not. As Dr O'Connor notes,

Consider, too, that the ban not only bars them from setting foot on campus in their present capacity as KKK promoters, but also from registering to study at U of L (they can, however, attend athletic events, where, presumably, their money talks louder than their views).

Presumably the athletic department will refuse any donations or paid advertisements in the programs.

That's a pretty extreme punishment for having failed to obey the U of L's posting policies.One wonders whether less offensive groups who stick flyers on cars and such get similar treatment.

That's testable. Louisville readers: do you get adverts for clothing sales or summer work placed under your windshield wipers?

TODAY'S ENERGY ROUNDUP comes from Chicago Report, with discovery of an environmental scientist who suggests nuclear power can prevent global warming, refining capacity might help with the spot shortages of gasoline, and that perhaps part of the U.S. dependence on imported oil reflects unwillingness to develop domestic resources.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Minimal skills should be reflected in grades, not in graduation tests. Ninth-grade teachers should be able to trust eighth-grade teachers to give grades that are meaningful, and eighth-grade teachers need to be able to trust that seventh-grade teachers give grades that are meaningful. Conversely, eighth-grade teachers need to be given a curriculum (goals and standards) that will bring students from the seventh-grade level to the ninth-grade level; if the eighth-grade teacher is teaching sixth-grade level skills and knowledge, then the "passing" grades are not meaningful.

That's Jonathan at Cliopatria, comparing and contrasting the Japanese primary and secondary education system with what passes for a system in the United States, and making a case for earned promotions rather than proficiency exams. Worth a look.

DEAL THE VODKA PUNDITS IN. Will at Vodka Pundit has picked up the coverage of Emory's Assistant Dean for Campus Life, Vera Dixon Rorie, who has been looking foolish whilst hassling Republicans. Nice to see the big boys picking up the story. Dean Rorie was named nine of hearts (because all the weaker cards were taken) on St. Patrick's Day. The snakes have not all been driven from the academy, alas.

SCHADENFREUDE. Newmark's Door has little sympathy for observers of the social scene who neglect the information content of prices, in this case gas prices. A Mercedes econobox for $20K? If it is capable of towing a Laser ...

IF YOU'RE SO SMART, WHY AREN'T YOU RICH? Perhaps you are. Alex at Marginal Revolution has turned up research to that point. It transpires that being able to follow directions can extend your life.

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS calls at Startup Skills, with a promise of a Second Section to be run later in the day.

IS THE FORCE WITH US? Supercells to the north of me, twisters to the south, cool and dry here. There is a lot of picking up to do nonetheless.

WORKING ON THE RAILROAD. All blog and no trains makes for a cranky Superintendent. On the other hand, figuring out how to hang crossheads is not good for the state of mind, either. Here's what's currently on the workbench.

The Andreyev class 4-14-4

This monster has two crossheads, in order to keep the reciprocating mass down. One crosshead has a pivot for the main rod, and the other supports the piston rod. Each has its own guide. The cylinder has a 31" stroke, and the crosshead guides are not much longer than that, if the one side elevation I have (if there are any Soviet readers who have found an archive of railway plans, please advise) and the photos are accurate. Thus getting the guides in the right place such that nothing binds is going to be quite a challenge.

RUNNING EXTRA: In Kettleski!, Tim at Where Worlds Collide asks, "But just how does that thing go round corners?

The prototype couldn's solve that problem, so I'm not going to worry about it too much. A Trains article on Soviet steam experimentals noted, "Wherever it went, it left its mark on the tracks. Wherever it arrived, no turntable could hold it." It had a habit of breaking switches, which is a bit of a problem. I am building a roundhouse layout with a 128' turntable to display this engine and the Pennsy duplex that had a similar problem.

ASSIMILATE. A public official has a bad time at McDonald's. (No big surprise: the company is at least modest enough to no longer brag on its "Speedee Service System" or suggest that "You Deserve a Break Today.) What was his problem? The order-taker had insufficient grasp of English to take his order. What is the surprise is that the public official, the former governor of Maryland, took occasion to brand multiculturalism as "crap." Power Line has the details. Michelle Malkin riffs on the story, with a litany of complaints of shoddy service. (Methinks she doth protest too much about the cash dispensers, however. It is darn convenient to find a cash dispenser in Taipei with an English option, and I'm sure the German tourists at the Beatles Museum appreciated the German option at the cash dispenser there. I didn't check at King's Cross to see if any wizardly dialects were offered.) H. George Hahn builds on the story to note that the various multicultural offerings have crowded the serious stuff out of the curriculum. Perhaps the times, they are a-changing.

LOSING PATIENCE ON THE TARMAC. The city you don't want to leave has an airport that can take you anywhere, provided you have time to spare. Lynne at Knowledge Problem discovers that the air traffic controllers, whilst public employees, are hardly public servants.

Another Friday night, another ground hold trying to fly home to O’Hare. This time we sat on the ground in Austin, Texas for an hour and a half. The pilot was really frank; he said that we were two minutes from liftoff and everything was fine, and then they said they would hold us for an hour and 20 minutes. I had called home earlier so I knew that there was no weather/radar reason, and other passengers around me calling people corroborated that information. The pilot later said over the speaker that he knew of no weather events going into O’Hare.

That means it was an air traffic control hold. It’s bad enough for me to get home to my family an hour and a half late, but the worst thing is that I’m surrounded by many fellow passengers who were all supposed to be making connections through O’Hare to someplace else. Now we won’t arrive in O’Hare until after 10, well after many of the last flights have departed. They’ll be stranded and have to spend the night in O’Hare. That is, of course, unless there are other planes full of people whose lives and priorities have been disregarded as much as ours have.

The FAA’s disregard of its constituents is unconscionable and utterly reprehensible. I cannot believe, with all of the soul searching and introspection that federal officials are supposed to have been doing in the past two and a half years, that the FAA and the Department of Transportation can still get away with this appalling indifference to the harms that their bureaucratic policies impose on so many people. The reply I would expect from them, that we may be home late or tomorrow but at least we get home all in one piece, is a pathetic excuse for an unwillingness to engage in some forward-looking thinking and openness to new (or not so new) ideas.

Sometimes it is experience, not ideology, that leads people to call for a rollback of State functions.

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES.

The surest way to get lower prices tomorrow is to put up with higher prices today, The surest way to get higher prices tomorrow is to insist on lower prices today.

This is a matter not of theory but experience. When Ronald Reagan scrapped oil and gasoline price controls in 1981, critics said prices would soar. They did, but not for long. Supplies rose, consumption fell and prices began a long decline, which left us all swimming in cheap gas and spoiled beyond belief.

That's Steve Chapman, with a reality check on gas prices, as well as the gratifying news that Hummer sales are off again.

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMM....

We are all familiar with the Mars robots that are cruising around the Red Planet looking for signs of life. Suppose that they were unable to find a single bit of evidence for it; no water, no carbon, no primitive fossils, nothing. Then, on the last day of their exploration, one of them finds... a spoon.

Hugh Hewitt (via Betsy's Page) expands.

SOME RENAMINGS ARE NOT CAVINGS. Professor Ray's Political Correctness Watch notes with dismay the transformation of the Confederate Air Force into the Commemorative Air Force, bringing the Sounds of Freedom to an air show near you. An air travel newsletter from across the pond suggested that the CAF renamed itself for "politically correct" reasons. The Ghost Squadron's official page suggests something different.

Changing the name was first discussed in July 1999 and again in February 2000. Many members were of the opinion that the name did not accurately reflect the primary objectives of the organization which are: 1) to restore, maintain, and fly World War II aircraft; 2) to maintain museum facilities for aircraft as a tribute to the thousands of men and women who built, serviced, and flew the planes; and 3) to perpetuate in the memory and hearts of all Americans, the spirit in which these great planes were flown in the defense of this nation.

(Ghost Squadron, which is the name for the squadron of planes that calls at major air shows, came in second.) As there are plenty of Confederate reenactors in the States, the organization's attempt to avoid confusion is logical. The person most likely to attend a reenactment is unlikely to be too upset about the use of the term "Confederate." I have been to a number of Civil War reenactments over the years, and the modal response I have heard parents give to kids that ask "who are the bad guys" is "That's not easy to answer."