ISN'T THE POINT TO DIVERSIFY RISK AWAY? Here's how a credit crunch begins.

Home loans became more affordable a few years ago when the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. Politicians of all stripes encouraged home ownership. But lightly regulated financial outfits began slicing and dicing the resulting mortgages into securities and selling them to investors.

Eventually, it all began collapsing, prices dropped, people started losing their homes and Wall Street went into a spin.

Here's how politicians respond.

As different as their policies are, they were united in their message to voters: It's not your fault.

Courting working class voters who gave him grief in the Democratic primary, Obama sounded an I-feel-your-pain note.

Obama lamented Republican policies over eight years that he said "encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans" and said: "Instead of prosperity trickling down, the pain has trickled up - from the struggles of hardworking Americans on Main Street to the largest firms of Wall Street."

McCain's words were sympathetic as well.

"America is in a crisis today," he said - then added: "The economic crisis is not the fault of the American people. Our workers are the most innovative, the hardest working, the best skilled, the most productive, the most competitive in the world. ... But they are being threatened today ... because of greed and corruption that some engaged in on Wall Street and we have got to fix it."

Some in the markets, he said, "have treated Wall Street like a casino."

The casino metaphor fails to convince. There's a difference between valuing risk, which is what insurance contracts, futures markets, and bond rating services do, and inventing risk for its play value, which is what casinos do.

The populist preachments are also incomplete. Sure, the Wall Street hustlers created the big bonuses for themselves by persuading people to take out interest-only loans or to use the equity in their houses as a source of cash, but people had to decide to take out those loans.

The upheaval at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., and American International Group Inc. - and the stunning reordering of the financial market that has following - gave the candidates an opening to press their economic ideas anew.

In line with historical positions of Democrats and Republicans, Obama generally supports stronger consumer protections, better regulatory oversight and more government intervention, while McCain broadly prefers a market system of less federal involvement and red tape.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution notes something else.

How are we going to stop all these consolidated financial entities from taking advantage of deposit insurance and other public sector guarantees?

I'll go further: why should anyone expect the consolidation of banking houses to provide more safety for investors? The slicing and dicing of mortgages the article refers to what I call diversifying risk away. An investment manager can look at the mix of thirty-year fixeds, interest-onlies, and variable rate subprimes in a fund and decide whether or not the expected return is worth the risk. More banks mean more investment managers making these decisions. Fewer banks mean the consolidated financial entities are holding the economy-wide mix of interest-onlies and subprimes, and therefore more likely to have to take advantage of deposit insurance ... that's before they start offering high-yield certificates of deposit to attract deposits, something that happened after Regulation Q was lifted.

ENGINEER DISTRACTED? The fatal collision between a Metrolink commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train on the Coast Line is the consequence of what the British call "signal passed at danger" and Destination Freedom shares my surprise at the severity of the crash.

The September 12 accident was made far worse because the commuter rail train’s engine was forced backward into the lead passenger car, nearly destroying it and the locomotive as well. That is unusual for American train wrecks, where high buffing standards (600,000 psi) are required for passenger rail cars. Normally, in a crash, most of the cars that derail will form a zig zag pattern on the ground.

The aftermath of the crash reveals organizational sloppiness at Metrolink.

Monday, the Metrolink spokeswoman who announced Saturday that the engineer's mistake caused the crash resigned. She said the railroad's board called her announcement "premature," even though NTSB officials later backed it up.

Metrolink did not return phone messages on the resignation.

The story about the engineer sending text-messages to some young train enthusiasts also will not go away.

Federal officials investigating a commuter rail collision that killed 25 people said they want to review cell phone records to determine if an engineer blamed for running a stop signal before the crash may have been text messaging at the time.

That story should be easier to confirm or rebut than the assertion, 21 years ago, that the Conrail crew who let a light engine get in front of a Northeast Corridor train at the Gunpowder River interlocking were distracted by a football game. Divers went into the river looking for a battery-powered television but found none.

There is also evidence either of problems with the railroad's communications, or with the crew's assiduousness at calling signals.

[Kitty] Higgins [of the National Transportation Safety Board] said audio recordings from the commuter train indicate a period of silence as it passed the last two signals before the fiery wreck, a time when the engineer and the conductor should have been performing verbal safety checks.

She cautioned, however, that the train may have entered a dead zone where the recording was interrupted.

Higgins said the NTSB would measure the distance between the signals along the track on Monday. Investigators also want to interview the conductor, who was injured, about the recording, she said.

"He'll be able to tell us whether he recalls the engineer calling out and him confirming those signals," Higgins said.

The possibility of mandatory positive train control in order to further ensure against train crews missing signals is out there.

Higgins said she believed the crash could have been prevented with technology that stops a train on the track when a signal is disobeyed. The technology was not in place where the collision occurred.

An NBC News segment on the crash mentioned positive train control, which, not surprisingly, protects the Acela Expresses. The segment also noted Sarah Palin's railroad has it.

CELEBRATING ON THE HIAWATHA? Milwaukee radio was reporting serious traffic congestion as the usual quitting time traffic mingled with Cub traffic going home after a two game sweep of notional home team Houston at Miller Park.

The 10.20 down Hiawatha delivers the beer-swilling widebodies downtown, with plenty of time to leave a few bills at the casino before the first pitch and then head to the stadium, or they could have gone directly over on the N^o. 10 streetcar. The game ended early enough for fans to catch the 5.45 up Hiawatha, or they could hoist a few near Marquette or at the Milwaukee Ale House or one of the other riverwalk watering holes before returning on the 7.30. (That schedule could do with a late evening departure in each direction, something that's been missing since the North Shore Line quit.)

I gave up on listening to last night's game. before it registered that Carlos Zambrano had a no-hitter going. Today, Ted Lilly carried one into the seventh inning, before ex-Brewer Mark Loretta broke it up.

Milwaukee Brewer management reacted to the disaster that has been September in the usual baseball fashion.

Now [manager Ned] Yost has paid the price.

Yost became a lightning rod for fan criticism in Milwaukee in recent years as he stubbornly stuck by players mired in slumps and refused to criticize them in public - even when they get in shoving matches in the dugout during games.

And the Brewers haven't looked like contenders in some of their biggest series this season, including a three-game sweep by Boston in May, a four-game sweep by Chicago at home in July and the just-completed four-game sweep by Philadelphia.

Yost was in his sixth season as the Brewers' manager. When Milwaukee hired him from Atlanta after the 2002 season, the team was in the midst of four straight seasons with 94 losses or more.

Under Yost, the young Brewers improved to records of 81-81, 75-87 and 83-79 in the past three seasons - a significant improvement for a franchise that hadn't had a winning record since 1992. But Yost seemingly couldn't get the Brewers to take the next step.

Some baseball pundits will argue the Brewers brought this on themselves, by appealing Pittsburgh's scorer, who ruled an error a hit. Perhaps so. I suspect, however, that it is the absence of a North Shore Line or a N^o. 10 streetcar that keep the Brewers out of the playoffs. Perhaps some of Milwaukee's pundits ought to rethink their position on light rail.

WE'VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU, MISTER BOND. Destination: Freedom publishes a translation from the German of a night with a European sleeping car attendant. The article describes the overnight ritual of the passports in care of the attendant.

As sleeper coach conductor he locks away their passports. They don’t bluff anymore as he, the sleeper coach conductor already knows about them. Their nationality, the age of a supposedly young woman, Honorary and professional titles, neat signatures, sloppy signatures, black-ink fingerprints on official paperwork, gaudy visa stamps from sunny island nations, or from rouge states, mindlessly glued-on baggage tags from some airport, child passports, provisional passports, and diplomatic passports. Prestele, the sleeper coach conductor, has already checked-out the sleeper coach occupants before they even had taken notice of him. He stores their documents in locked cassette, he the high priest of discreteness in the night.

I'd encountered that ritual on the Donau Kurier and didn't ask any questions, although it is an odd practice given that I made the reverse run, by day, and never had to show a passport let alone leave it with the car attendant.

With the end of the Cold War, the honey traps on the Muinchen-Milano are for the financial security of immigrants, no longer matters of state security.

YOU HAVE TO PLAY THE WHOLE GAME. The Packers built an early 21-0 lead at Detroit, then gave all of it back, then converted three interceptions into touchdowns, two of them without involving the offense, to take an early lead in the division.

ALL POWER TO THE PROVODNITSA. En route to Gori and beyond, Michael Totten encounters train service to the khanates, which brings back memories of the Evil Empire.

I didn't know it at the time, but the train I took from Baku to Tbilisi is identical to the train you'll see in the nail-biting thriller Transsiberia currently playing in theaters and starring Woody Harrelson and Ben Kingsley. The film takes place almost entirely on a Russian train from Beijing to Moscow. Whoever wrote and directed the movie is familiar with the train system in the former Soviet Union and took pains to get even the small details right. The film was shot on one of the these trains. I recognized the cheap wood paneling, the formica tray tables, the broken light switches, and the dirty windows that wouldn’t open.

I must make time to see this movie.

Some of the train staff remember their Cold War era doctrine, when any foreigner riding the strategically important railroads was a spy, and anyone taking any interest in the railroad's operations was a particularly clumsy spy.

The severe and bullying women who run these trains and watch over the passengers like prison guards are portrayed with precision. They bark orders at every passenger and seem beaten down as if they’re treated the same way by their superiors. They stare holes through you if you smile and act as though your very existence is an offense that may get you thrown off the train at any moment.

It's a very different experience from being a guest on a private train, with two sleeping car attendants and a glass of tea in a metal holder first thing in the morning.

Mr Totten enlists the help of a local to engage in some proper speculation.

He summoned the angry attendant and spoke to her in Russian.

“She wants to know if you have ten manats,” he said. Ten Azeri manats is about twelve American dollars. I sighed, pulled a ten manat note out of my pocket, and handed it over. Then she nodded as if to say I could move wherever I wanted without being harassed.

I walled myself off in my private compartment and edited a long essay that will soon appear in a quarterly magazine. The air conditioning had kicked on and the train was finally comfortable. Then I let myself be rocked to sleep by the wide swaying of the old communist train as we slowly made our way to the border with Georgia.

Border crossings still have the old thrill of the long delays for careful inspection (the better part of a day to move ten miles from Erlian to Dzamyn Uud, with the added risk of being shot.

BIZARRE WORLD. Early in June, I observed,

Consider two teams. One has a new field with a retractable roof. Another has a Eugene Debs era open air field. At the end of May, which team do you think had 33 of its first 56 games at home, and which one had 31 of its first 56 games on the road?

Now comes September. Hurricane Ike ripped up Houston's ballpark, and the public relations disaster of restoring lighting while the power is out in the neighborhoods is too much for baseball. The pennant races, however, must go on.

The Cubs and Houston will play two of their postponed games at 7:05 p.m. Sunday and 1:05 p.m. Monday at Miller Park in Milwaukee, Major League Baseball announced late Saturday night.

The third postponed game will be played only if it affects the postseason situation, and not until the day after the end of the regular season.

Because of the clear-channel regulations, I have to make do with WGN's broadcast of the Cubs' game. Houston is the home team for this game, but a majority of the crowd are Cub fans (probably including a few Wisconsinites who acquired a taste for Chicago teams) who are enjoying their team's early lead, and cheering as the scoreboard keeps track of the continuing Milwaukee disaster in Philadelphia.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Bill Sjostrom at Atlantic Blog finds European columnists who have not succumbed to Palin Derangement Syndrome.

Religious fanaticism. A good description of the Democrats this year. And some European pundits have the sense to spot it.

Go. Read. Understand.

Obama voters: get a grip.

Disclaimer: Bill and I hired out at Northern Illinois at the same time and we wrote and graded the doctoral candidacy exams for years.

SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL? Profane reports athletics at the University of Nevada have been cleared of alleged gambling violations. The linked story (from a Reno newspaper) hints at a sub-plot.

The NCAA launched an investigation into the program after women's soccer coach Terri Patraw filed a whistle-blower complaint alleging she was fired in retaliation for reporting rules violations within the Nevada athletic department. The most damning allegation claimed that men's golf coach Rich Merritt, who has since resigned, bet on sports.

The former coach runs several weblogs. On one she notes that inter alia Northern Illinois University served a year of probation for NCAA violations during Nevada athletic director Cary Groth's tenure as athletic director here. The details of that probation are here (top two posts) It had nothing to do with gambling. Perhaps Ms Patraw has valid disagreements with Ms Groth, but her innuendo about an attempt by an academic staff member to help a young lady in a difficult position, contrary to the pose of "amateur athletics" is not the same offense as sports betting.

What amuses about this story is that current Nevada womens' basketball coach Jane Albright might have been retaliated against at Wisconsin in the fallout of sanctions there involving shoe contracts.

I'm not surprised that spats within the athletic department might become as vicious as those in academic departments.

Disclaimer: Cary, Jane, and I all hired out at Northern Illinois at about the same time and we'd on occasion hang out after work.

JUST SLIGHTLY AHEAD OF MY TIME. McDonald's attempt to redefine the coffee house has reached the Boston area, which gives Boston Globe columnist Jenn Abelson something to write about, and University Diaries readers an opportunity to indulge in the finest blue-state smug. I'm still waiting for Grant McCracken or Virginia Postrel to weigh in.

The McCafe Ms Abelson writes about is in Saugus. Saugus. I rest my case.

EXCEEDING THE BUFFING STRENGTH. Hurricanes, flood alerts in Huskie country, restroom stabbings at the old high school, now a fatal collision of a commuter train with a freight train.

A Metrolink commuter train believed to be carrying up to 350 people collided with a freight train Friday, killing four people and injuring dozens of others. Firefighters extinguished a blaze under part of the wreckage and were working two hours after the wreck to free people from a commuter car left mangled, toppled on its side with the train's engine shoved back inside it. Two other cars in the Metrolink train remained upright.

The crash dissipated enough forces to derail most of the freight train as well. That the diesel, which was leading the train, and the first coach telescoped disturbs me. North American coaches are supposed to be sturdier than that.

TOUGH TIMES AT HAMILTON HIGH. I recently received information about this year's alumni scholarship winners. Today comes news of a security system cut in a bit too late.

A new $50,000 airport-quality metal detector made its debut at Hamilton High School this morning, but it was used only on students tardy to class while school officials learned to use the new equipment.

Police said a 16-year-old girl stabbed a fellow student multiple times inside a bathroom this morning at the school, 6215 W. Warnimont Ave.

What was once a random spot-check will become routine at the onetime flagship high school of the Milwaukee system, and now a place where potential academic achievers coexist with a dropout factory.

OPERATION TRIBUTE TO FREEDOM. This performance of Twilight Tattoo at Fort McNair is dedicated to the State Line National Guard units that have been shipping out to Afghanistan.

The Republic remains safe because of the efforts of the men and women of the Armed Forces.

OUR NEIGHBORS AT WAR

2,996.

THE SMART PEOPLE'S PARTY? First up, the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party first asserting Palin primary qualification is she hasn't had an abortion, and later apologizing. If memory serves, your party was the majority in the Cradle of Secession. Next up, a columnist from territories that were not liberated in 1812, with this and other observations. (Our domestic Establishment elites have to live in the same country. Expats and commentators from other countries are not subject to that constraint.)

Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade's woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression. Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the "pramface." Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting. What normal father would want Levi "I'm a f***in' redneck" Johnson prodding his daughter?

James Lileks deconstructed it.

Rural people generally don’t like cities. That’s why they’re rural. As opposed to certain urbanites, who love the rural, as long it’s all there and interesting with faded painted signs and lovely small towns with farms and antique shops in case they want to go for a drive and get some apples or a lamp or something.

He's also nailed the mind-set of critics of globalization who mourn the loss of age-old customs, and I'm not referring to Prussian parades in Chile. Indigenous nose-flute bands and La Belle Province how charming, come and see the peasants starving is what I have in mind.

University Diaries, who has been doing a lot of writing about what she calls the Age of Palin, does describe the Eastern Liberal Establishment as an "influential and alienating class." Commenters note, correctly, that the polity is more complicated than the caricatures.

Finally for today's roundup, Reason's Radley Balko likes the (unintended) nod to the libertarian vote in the McCain-Palin ticket.

But of all the aspiring politicians McCain could have boosted into the national spotlight of a presidential campaign, he could have done a lot worse than Palin. If she manages to hold on to her more individualist, limited-government instincts, she'd be a welcome force in a party that has generally abandoned its "leave-us-alone" constituency—thanks in no small part to the man at the top of the ticket.

"Generally abandoned," indeed.

PROLIFERATING LEGALESE. Course outlines have a tendency to become longer than the Consolidated Code of Operating Rules, particularly if the professor wishes to anticipate all possible disciplinary problems and comply with student affairs' interpretation of the legal protections offered to whoever the local protected classes are.

At EclectEcon, these provisions could become the basis for a list of Frequently Asked Questions. There are a few items probably not provided for in the Consolidated Code.

I'm a pushover for many things, but that does not include unwillingness to accept responsibility for your own actions or inactions.

Perhaps that's provided for under "To obtain promotion, ability must be shown for greater responsibility."

Then there's this.

If you are failing this course, do not make sly little suggestions about what you might do to earn a passing grade. You are failing the course — why should I think your performance would be better in any other areas?

Perhaps I am at the age to try this one.

I will wish I had the courage and integrity to tell you that not everyone is meant for university, and in my curmudgeonly dotage, I just might!

There's also a key to the code for letters of recommendation.

I will write a letter that, while not direct, will let the program or job you are applying for know what kind of a student you are. Remember that things like, “She was often on time,” or, “From my conversations with him, it is clear that he very much wants to go to graduate school,” are not really compliments.

Hee.

WASTED OPPORTUNITIES. I was looking forward to the Brewer home stand as an opportunity to gain some ground on the Cubs. The Brewers won the getaway game to complete the stand 3-7. The Cubs also played badly. The Brewers have to take care of business on the road now, with games at wild-card follower Philadelphia and then at division leader Chicago.

LIMA FLAG, please.

CASE DISMISSED. The City of Milwaukee will not foreclose on the house of a Verona Court resident who neglected to pay a parking ticket.

There's something creepy about issuing a parking ticket to a vehicle that's parked on a driveway, otherwise known as private property. If the man had made room in his garage, would anyone have been the wiser?

WHAT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND THEY TRASH. Kevin Phillips has made a pretty good living predicting doom, collapse, and despair, and he hasn't written about global warming. Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism continues the theme. I'm tempted to leave Book Review N^o. 40 to Robert Solow, a much better macroeconomist and probably a better chessplayer than I. He probably received payment from The New Republic for his efforts, and I do this stuff for fun.

I will note, briefly, that Mr Phillips draws parallels between the U.S. and other global powers that went into decline. (Where Amy Chua focuses on culture, Kevin Phillips focuses on finance.) Yes, other leading powers were displaced by upstarts, and no, the United States holds no exemption. But the self-inflicted decline is more likely to be from content-free education and beer and circuses than from hedge funds. Yes, debt implies the risk of default. Debt also implies the creation of productive assets with gains from higher living standards servicing the debt. Yes, there can be rational expectations hyperinflations, or asset bubbles. That we can describe the problem means we can understand it and learn to avoid it. And where risk is present, the division of that risk into smaller pieces has the potential to expose each investor to less risk of loss.

And yes, oil is an exhaustible resource, with the next energy technology not yet invented.

Thus, yes, there are challenges. The ominous signs, however, are not necessarily the signs Mr Phillips sees.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

CORRELATION OF FORCES. University Diaries files a report from Charles Murray's presentation to the American Enterprise Institute. The final installment takes down his proposal to reduce the scale and scope of higher education.

You’re creating a small number of very high-profile, madly lusted after, colleges and universities. In them you’re concentrating a tiny super-elite to whom most of the nation’s higher education resources will be devoted. Isn’t this set-up very likely to increase their arrogance to a spectacular degree, however much canned failure you add to the mix? You’re basically describing something very like the French system of écoles normales supérieures – schools notorious for producing unspeakable twits.

And here I go back to the dawning of the age of Palin. America already loathes and distrusts its elites. It reviles the idea of being led by the best and the brightest. Murray’s scheme will make this national tendency far, far worse.

That "loathes and distrusts" is over the top. Has the proper skepticism of people who put more weight on credentials than performance, or on theoretical consistency of policy proposals than whether or not they work, yes. Oh, and national taxpayers pick up the full tab for the Acela Express while the Eastern elite requires Pacific Coasters, Mainers, and Midwesterners to put up state money for trains.

Megan McArdle offers a mea culpa.

People from a handful of schools, most of them hailing from a handful of major metropolitan areas, dominate academia, journalism, and the entertainment industry. Our subtle (or not-so-subtle) distaste for everything from their entertainment to their decorating choices to the vast swathes of the country in which they choose to live permeate almost everything they read, watch, or hear. Of course we don't hear it--to us, that's simply the way the world is.

Perhaps there's a power law at work, and the outcome is optimal.

On the other hand, perhaps it's the failure of the elite classes' policy options (Mr Obama offers the same old Crolyism, Mr McCain would have you believe he's running against the same old cronyism) that's behind what Professor Soltan calls the Age of Palin and what I believe is a populist strain of long standing. Great Society. National Greatness Conservatism. Fatal conceit. Discuss.

Or feel the anger. (Although The Empire Strikes Back is on Spike tonight, I'm not running it in the background.) Here's Jim Treacher.

Isn't it kind of elitist to imply that somebody's not worthwhile unless they went to the right schools? Are there no idiots in the Ivy League? Do you really want to alienate all the voters who had to settle for less?

I'd prefer not to see the battle of the transcripts again this year. Both Vice President Gore and Senator Kerry had weaker transcripts than President Bush. Perhaps there's adverse selection, with the legacy admits to Harvard and Yale (son of a senator, Boston Brahmin roots, and son and grandson of Yalies respectively) going into politics while the strivers go into business.

MAKING CHARLES MURRAY'S POINT FOR HIM? In a Washington Times interview, Mr Murray recapitulates claims he makes in Real Education.

In an ideal world, everyone would get a liberal education. It is a wonderful thing to have acquired. But start with the reality that lots of people don't want to go through the process - spending day after day studying philosophy and history and literature is not something they enjoy doing, and it's hard to make people get a liberal education if they aren't interested.

A recent Northern Star column says that's a feature.

Student’s racking their brains over what to do with their time may be disappointed to discover that without each other, all that’s left to do is study. And let’s face it: we didn’t come to NIU to hide away in our rooms with a book.

Although this concept may seem obvious, going out and meeting people is the only way to establish a healthy social life. Social skills aren’t dished out to incoming freshmen with their move-in packages.

That possessive of "student" is a large DISREGARD ME sign, and the passage would work better with "solely" in front of "to hide away." Further into the column, however, comes the observation that quality time with friends might include arguing about ideas.

Everyone likes to have their alone time or spend a quiet evening at home with close friends. I get it. For one, it’s comfortable and convenient. Not to mention, a night out partying could put a hole in your wallet.

Particularly if the party environment is a noisy replication of a dance club, something a counterpart columnist would like to change. That column also mentions "quiet conversation." It does go on at Northern Illinois. Sometimes it's more fun to eavesdrop on conversations at the Starbucks than to work on the calculations I bring with me. The columnist I've been quoting from hasn't caught on.

It’s too easy, and frankly too boring, to sit inside every night watching the paint dry. If you came to a large university, chances are you’re looking to meet new friends and hoping to network with people for professional and social reasons.

The honor students might be inside, but they're not watching paint dry.

ANTIPODEAN TEUTONICA. The Chilean military received a great deal of technical assistance from the Prussians. That assistance included the parade manuals, as demonstrated on Navy Day. The video is of the start of the 21 May 2008 parade. It looks like a miserable late fall day. Think November in the Baltics. The day is also Opening Day for Parliament, and President Michelle Bachelet has a State of the Union address to deliver later. The music is Gottfried Sontag's Nibelungen March, the march of Chile's Naval Academy.

Chile is not the only case of an emerging power preserving military traditions abandoned at home. A colleague told me about Indian military ceremonies that induce nostalgia in Britishers. Here's a Chilean army review from 1992, to Preussens Gloria.

Look closely and you'll see the band's Turkish Crescent, as Frederick the Great intended.

The comment threads that accompany these videos make for interesting reading, in Spanish, German, and English. Some people get worked up about military units that look like something out of Triumph des Willens and some people like to see the Prussian tradition. I'll leave that to the reader. There's material in the second video that a viewer could interpret either way.

Chile will be celebrating the bicentennial of its declaration of independence from Spain next year. The independence treaty came a few years later, and the country later had a civil war.

TUNDRA POPULISM. The Republican presidential ticket plays to enthusiastic crowds. At Right Wing Nation, a hypothesis.

McCain and Palin have something Obama and Biden never can have. Authenticity. Note the people who showed up because “she’s just like us.” Authenticity is either there or it isn’t. You can’t manufacture it. This is why Palin is becoming a folk hero and not merely a candidate, and the Democrats and the media don’t understand it now and never will understand it.

We shall see if it's a winning formula.

During the campaign kickoff, last Friday, in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, the national press corps got a reception reserved for Bear or Viking fans.

Hundreds of angry people in this small town outside Milwaukee taunted reporters and TV crews traveling with Sen. John McCain on Friday, chanting "Be fair!" and pointing fingers at a pack of journalists as they booed loudly.

Part of the problem is that Big Media, much like professional sports and much of higher education, has too many legacies. Sure, it makes sense that a kid will learn Dad's or Mom's craft, but that kid will propagate Mom's or Dad's shortcuts and biases.

And every so often somebody absolutely NAILS the cosmopolitans.

Meghan Groppe, 12, of Cedarburg explained the enthusiasm.

“Because if they get voted in she’ll be the first lady vice president,” Groppe said, flashing a smile missing a few teeth.

More expansive but similarly enthusiastic was Cheryl Hauswirth of nearby Grafton, Wis.

“She's a real woman, she's a real feminist but she's not strident — she's like us,” said Hauswirth, a middle-aged mother who didn’t offer her age. “She’s strong, powerful and opinionated, all the things a women should be, while still retaining her femininity, her womanhood.”

The next two months will be fun.

PRETTY DARN ENTERTAINING. Aaron Rodgers starts for keeps. Packers win.

NEITHER MOLECULES, NOR BUGS. Many years ago, a colleague wrote a paper about the distribution of traffic speeds in which he suggested that drivers sorted themselves into the fast and slow lanes, rather than reacting in ways that could be simulated with fluid dynamics. Now comes Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says about us.) The author also operates a traffic weblog that was the recipient of an Instalanche in mid-August.
There's a lot in the book that's routine at Cold Spring Shops, meaning a short Book Review N^o. 39 tonight. I'll just take it idea by idea. Mr Vanderbilt starts with "Why Does the Other Lane Always Seem Faster?" The answer is, when all lanes are equally congested, it doesn't. Queuing, however, is a behavior for which the social norms, or governing institutions if you insist, aren't well defined. Thus McDonald's can get away with its chaotic system in which you might be served next (or not) while banks (notorious for sending dial-up customers through voice-mail obstacle courses) and the post office (enough said) use a single queue for the next available agent. On the road, the norm is even less well-defined, leading to the single greatest source of anger on the roads, the lane closure. Most people immediately get into the lane that will remain open, which slows it down, and a few optimists sail ahead in the lane that will close, in order to barge just before the barricade. That behavior exacerbates the congestion at the choke point, and it breeds enough ill-will that truckers and some operators of other large vehicles will position themselves in such a way as to block the lane that will close behind them.

Mr Vanderbilt's analysis of the situation is straightforward enough (he suggests staying in the lane that will close and participating in a zipper merge at the barricade). He neglects an economic incentive that might help, namely the Principle of Indifference at the Margin. (The bargers expect more than enough time saving from going to the choke point to compensate from any antagonism when it comes to barging. If both lanes are equally unattractive, there's no point in barging. His suggestion, if followed by all drivers, would take away that incentive. I belabor this because he's going to be led astray later for not understanding the principle.)

He then explains "Why You're Not as Good a Driver as You Think You Are" (the task is generally not challenging, which leads people into difficult situations) and "How Our Eyes and Minds Betray Us on the Road" (our reactions being selected over millennia for walking speeds). Then come the bugs. "Why Ants Don't Get into Traffic Jams ..." It's complicated. In a swarm of locusts, the bugs toward the rear might be nibbling on each other because the front of the swarm has eaten all the food. The problems, again, are lack of social norms, here reinforced by lack of methods for drivers to communicate information-rich messages to other drivers. It's easy to signal irritation (the analog to biting another locust in the leg) but not to signal other information about road conditions. Next comes "Why Women Cause More Congestion Than Men." It's prosperity, overscheduled kids, and subdivisions without sidewalks, not the second income or the second car alone. Next, "Why More Roads Lead to More Traffic." Obvious. But here's where Mr Vanderbilt could use a refresher on the Indifference Principle, He tells a parable of a slow, narrow street that guarantees you a 1 hour trip, and a (wider? he doesn't specify) road that, when not crowded, gets you there in half an hour. He proposes that a traffic cop direct traffic onto the narrow road or onto the wide road in such a way that some people will get the faster trip. That sounds like a good way to breed contempt for the law, a funny thing to be advocating given a later correlation he draws between corruption and bad traffic, as well as a logically silly idea. In equilibrium, travel times will be equal, or the narrow road might get you there faster but with more traffic lights or wear and tear on your car. He also misinterpreted an interesting peak-shifting phenomenon in which a higher toll for a high-occupancy toll lane led more drivers to use it, because they inferred a severely congested substitute. There's definitely room for more research on high-occupancy tolling, a policy that emerged without any formal economic models to help the road commissioners implement it. Perhaps that's for the better.

A chapter with the provocative title "When Dangerous Roads Are Safer" surveys some of the traffic-taming methods we've reviewed previously. One of these days, the road commissioners will discover that simpler is better, and perhaps they'll be more inclined to synchronize traffic lights when there are fewer of them.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THERE'S NO i IN NORWAY. Check out this performance by His Majesty the King's Guard (of the Norwegian Army) at the 2006 Basel Tattoo. The poster, who disabled embedding for this video, has put up performances of various units at several military reviews.

MILESTONES. It's been a year since I closed the deal on the new train room. (It's hidden underneath a house.)

The train room goes UNDER the garage. This view is from under the garage toward the crew relief facility and crew lounge. There is space for two tracks and a 27 inch aisle between the column at center and the crew relief facility.


The concrete has had a year to cure and the first work will be in the northwest corner.

The wall of the baseball field at Rockport will go along the wall at left. Here's a model railroading paradox: the mainline will require two peninsulas, but the branch line, which serves Cape Ann, equivalent to a peninsula, can end in a corner.

A DIFFICULT START TO THE SEMESTER. David Tufte's Voluntary Xchange has been covering an airplane crash in which ten people, five with connections to Southern Utah University, died. One post notes,

When you don't live in a small town, the scale of the problem is hard to grasp.

Some arithmetic shows that the death rate is 60% higher than that in the World Trade Center attack: 10 people dying out of Cedar's micropolitan population of 43,526 is the same proportion as the final toll of 2,750 in the World Trade Center attack is to 11,969,650 - a figure that is 1/3 smaller than New York's metropolitan population.

The university's total enrollment is one-fifth that of Northern Illinois University, where I would estimate no more than two degrees of separation between any community resident and somebody who died on February 14. The regional effect is also large, as this crash killed the staff of a dermatology clinic that served several states.

The university made its convocation center available for a memorial service, a gesture that will strengthen the affection the community probably already has for the university.

Professor Tufte observed that media coverage of the event was limited in scope with little notice in the U.S. outside Utah. I found out about it only by reading his weblog and offer my sympathy to the people of Cedar City and Southern Utah University.

The absence of media coverage as your community recovers will be a benefit.

THEY CALL IT "WALK OFF". Tonight's Padres at Brewers game went eleven innings. The Brewers won (sorry, Matt) in eleven. The Cubs, Cardinals, and Phillies all lost. That calls for a Sprecher, it being Friday. The batter-by-batter summary (which is the least distracting of the constant-update services available online) concludes,

Brewers eleventh. Rivera singled to center. Escobar pinch-running for Rivera. Counsell bunted into fielder's choice, pitcher Falkenborg to shortstop Kazmar, Escobar out. Durham singled to center, Counsell to third. Hardy singled to left, Counsell scored, Durham to second.

Is Durham required to touch second, and Hardy first?

SOMEWHERE IN ILLINOIS, A COMMUNITY IS MISSING ITS ORGANIZER. Earlier in the week, I noted the recent death toll among Chicago schoolchildren. A Chicago television station has tracked the summer murders. Their comparison is with the military death toll in Iraq, which is probably not the best metric. (Gang murders here, sectarian murders there strike me as a better comparison.)

Thomas Lifson notes that one Chicago precinct with a large death toll is Woodlawn, the poor neighborhood adjacent to Hyde Park in which one Barack Obama attempted to ameliorate the condition of steel workers rendered unemployable by the obsolescence of their factories. A companion piece by Russ Vaughn suggests that it's all that Democratic fighting for the working class that has left Woodlawn so desperate.

What the O's minions are failing to take into consideration is that much of the economic hardship brought upon his unfortunate constituents was the consequence of actions by two other major Democrat Party constituencies, Big Labor and environmentalists, both over-empowered by an over-regulating federal government.
Yes, culpable steel industry executives were too slow to recognize the new foreign competition that was developing and adapt accordingly, but it was the greedy unions, the hyper-vigilant EPA and the U.S. Labor Department's newly released pit bull, OSHA, hungry for regulatory red meat, which made the needed adaptation impossible to attain.
Too-high wages with too-cushy benefits, too-extreme environmental demands and harassing over-regulation by big government drove the steel industry from America and straight into the hands of growing Asian economies, leaving those unfortunates in South Chicago to wonder just what the hell had happened to their high-paying jobs and the rosy retirements their union-backed, Democratic political machine had promised them.

That's at best a partial picture. Richard Longworth's work, which I discuss here, (that was in January of this year -- it feels like a lot longer ago) points out additional forces at work, some of which implicate the Republican brand of populism in the economic difficulties of the midwest, and the willingness of established U.S. businesses to ignore domestic competitors has contributed in particular to the closure of steel mills in southeastern Chicago.

What's more cautionary has been the failure of Democratic-dominated government in Illinois to do the people's business. The state Republican party has abdicated to prison or to true believers, and the Democratic governor engages in continual squabbles with the Democratic speaker of the House and the Democratic president of the Senate. The prospect of a Democratic president of the United States dealing with a Democratic speaker of the House from a district not likely to reflect the median voter and a Democratic majority leader in a Senate with Senator McCain and Senator Clinton both having motive and opportunity to block the president's legislative proposals ought give pause to Democratic voters hoping for a united government.

TUNDRA POPULISM. Reason offers its counter-Establishmentarian view of the Republican ticket.

Chip Bok's Friday Funnies:

Introducing Governor Sarah Palin.

Tim Cavanaugh's Snobs Vs. Saabs (isn't that an equivalence class?) argues that identity politics isn't limited to the Officially Oppressed Minorities.

The Republicans are taking white middle-class identity politics to the next level.

White identity politics have been around for a while, in the form of cracker culture humor, Gretchen Wilson records, and the war on arugula. But these forms tend to have a spiky, in-your-face defiance. The brilliance of vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin's roof-raising speech lay in its supple, open-ended technique.

I remember "pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals who couldn't park a bicycle straight." Such brass-knuckled methods, however, are not required. The so-called progressive (one-time) consensus has failed to deliver on its promises, and its political economy is suspect.

In Palin's delivery, the ancient battle cry of the American working class—"You think you're better than me?"—was emptied of its narcissism and butch bluntness, reconfigured with qualities we don't ordinarily associate with salt of the earth Americans: dry wit, newsy allusiveness, a confidence that the people you're addressing don't need to have the jokes explained to them. It wasn't surprising that the hockey mom pounded Barack Obama bloody with sallies against his alleged elitism (though whoever put out the pre-speech disinformation that Palin would not be used as an "attack dog" deserves an award at this year's Rovies). It was surprising that she did so while maintaining such a sunny, gracious, genteel demeanor. Through 3,000 words of political aikido, Palin seemed to be doing something the left and right agree working people should never be allowed to do. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

The one thing the Establishment, and its Excessively Earnest Acolytes on the talking-head shows and in the common rooms can't stand, is to be laughed at. The original intent of the Badger Herald, set up as a conservative counter-establishment paper at Wisconsin, and the Alternative, a similar project at Indiana that became The American Spectator, was to poke fun at the prevailing pretensions. (We have yet to consider the full implications of the point guard trash-talking the small forward. Watch for that to come out.) The approach works very well. The Establishmentarians can dish it out (Ann Richards, Phil Donahue, Michael Moore) but they have trouble taking it. Thus Mr Cavanaugh's prediction is likely to come true.

The aw-shucks quality and class warfare elements here are familiar. The indirection, sarcasm, and unembarrassed intelligence are new. It's a measure of how surprising Palin's style was that so many of her detractors could respond only with rage, incomprehension, and irrelevant complaints. In particular, Palin's Democratic counterpart Joseph Biden's predictable-as-Pickett's-Charge objection that the speech lacked substance sets up a very plausible scenario for the vice presidential debate: I'm willing to predict that the hyper-informed Biden will demonstrate his mastery of the facts, leave no doubt about his flair for complex policy questions, get his ass handed to him in the debate, and never understand what went wrong.

That is, if Senator Biden doesn't put everybody to sleep first. Remember Vice President Gore, with his reference to some obscure yet important to him piece of legislation?

It's also likely that the ticket's appeal to libertarian voters, west of the 100th meridian or not, will bring the kind of intellectual ammunition to back up the proper challenge to a social engineer (If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?) with accessible theoretical and empirical evidence to rebut the substance of those anticipated complex responses.

That makes the give and take of political culture war more complex. Obama and Biden are both agile enough politicians that they could probably (between bites of brie and sips of pinot grigio) handle the sort of flat-footed regular guy attack George W. Bush used against the ossified Al Gore and John Kerry. John McCain is a different type of opponent, while Sarah Palin is a type they have never seen before.

McCain's choice of Palin now looks less like an attempt to replicate Hillary Clinton than to put in place an anti-Hillary Clinton: soft-edged rather than hard, tough where Clinton was brittle, and familiar enough with trailer park America to speak ordinary people's language without treating them like chumps.

The attempts to paint Obama as a toffish fancypants throughout this year have been mostly absurd. But Palin managed to make them all seem relevant again, and it won't be so easy for the Democrats to change the subject to economic, rather than social, class. Every poor American thinks he's got a rich American inside, fighting to get out. And Americans at all levels have a deep distrust of hipsters. As Obama and Biden begin their autumn of hunting and beer-drinking photo ops, they might want to keep that in mind.

Particularly with the tundra populists aroused, as this week seems to have done.

IT'S SIX YEARS FOR HIM, TOO. Bill Sjostrom started Atlantic Blog six years ago and he found a variation on the lawyer and catfish joke.

What's the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?

One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let's be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.

The other kills her own food.

MILESTONES. Six years and counting.

REAL ANALYSIS.

Charles Murray's Real Education promises, in its subtitle, Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality. Book Review N^o. 38 will demonstrate simple inconsistencies in the book that mislead readers. I'll use Mr Murray's plan. His first "simple truth" is "Ability Varies." He goes on to note seven dimensions of ability (there may be more, but those suffice for me to get rolling): bodily-kinesthetic, musical, spatial, linguistic, logical-mathematical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. He intends to lay out a framework of analysis that everybody can accept. He destroys that framework at page 21 (which, if the book were properly paginated, would be page 5).

Educational measures such as test scores and grades tend to make differences among schoolchildren look as though they are ones of degree when in reality some of them are on differences in kind. For example, a timed math test limited to problems of addition and subtraction, administered to a random cross-section of fourth-graders, yields scores that place children along a continuum distributed in a shape resembling a bell curve.

That "resembling" is a critical hedge. With a small sample a statistician will not be able to reject the hypothesis that the frequency count is a collection of random draws from a normal distribution. That failure to reject is the basis for grading on a curve (top 10% A and bottom 10% F and fill in the rest as you wish, a 20-40-20 pattern is easy to implement).

Those scores appropriately reflect differences in degree: Some fourth graders can add and subtract faster and more accurately than others, but they are all doing the same thing and almost all children can be taught to add and subtract to some degree.

The purpose of No Child Left Behind and its attendant testing is to evaluate schools' effectiveness at teaching addition and subtraction, and teaching methods that enable students to make use of their differing capabilities to do the operations helps. To a great extent, one gets good at simple calculations the same way one gets good at shooting free throws, by repetition.

The same is not true of calculus. If all children were put on a mathematics track that took them through calculus, and then were given a test of calculus problems, the resulting scores would not look like a bell curve. For a large proportion of children, the scores would not be merely low. They would be zero. Grasping calculus requires a certain level of logical-mathematical ability. Children below that level will never learn calculus, no matter how hard they study. It is a difference in kind. Not only that: The child withouth the logical-mathematical ability to learn calculus cannot do a wide variety of other things in mathematics that are open to the child with the requisite level of logical-mathematical ability.

We're in agreement on one thing. Calculus is different from algebra. The middle-school student will not encounter "The solution can be guessed at and then verified." That suggestion comes at about page two of any presentation of differential equations. There's also the "there is a delta such that f(x) - L is less than epsilon whenever ...", which says nothing about motion, accompanying language such as "x approaches ...". These things can be taught. Good teaching matters. To what audience? Mr Murray suggests a smaller audience. Pay particular attention, dear reader, to that "would not look like a bell curve." Perhaps we can transform the score frequency count to a bell curve by taking the logarithms of the scores, creating a log-normal distribution. (Perhaps some professors use this dodge to establish grading scales with 80 or better out of 100 as an A.) Alternatively, perhaps we're looking at a Pareto distribution, or power law. Almost all students learn to add and subtract. A relatively few of them get through calculus. The phenomenon appears elsewhere: here's a Newmark's Door opening to a Mark Perry analysis of scoring in professional basketball. One fifth of the players score four fifths of the total points. (Whether that generalizes to scoring with Basketball Annies is outside the scope of this post.)

HABIT PERSISTENCE.

Laura at 11-D posed a deceptively simple question. The ensuing discussion did become a flame war, but one observer offered a sensible comment about the continuing drama of Palin Place.

The upper middle class narrative of staying in school, getting a degree, going to grad school, working to get ahead, marrying at 30, and having children even later, is admirably productive, but it isn't the life trajectory most Americans choose.

High school cheerleader Bristol Palin's pregnancy by high school hockey player Levi Johnston is out of another narrative. Much of the conversation I've heard describe the pregnancy as an "accident". Reality is more complicated. First, one has to consider the neighborhood. Although Alaska is a northern state, its outlook is Appalachian. That's evident from this story, which suggests the two had intended to marry for some time.

Wasilla mom Jennie Johnston, whose son Jade played hockey with Levi, saw the young couple in January at a game.

"She was in a cute little outfit like young girls wear," said Jennie Johnston, who is not related to Levi. "She was with Levi."

She said her son told her the two were already engaged.

"They've been together quite a while, more than a year," she said. "I hope everything comes out well. These are local kids."

Here's a confirmation of that explanation, from a reporter who did reach Mr Johnson's mother.

The young parents-to-be haven't faced any pressure to wed, says the boy's mother, Sherry Johnston, reporting that the two teens planned to marry before it was known she was pregnant.

"This is just a bonus," Johnston said.

Evaluated with the perspective of that upper-middle-class narrative, that decision looks wrong, and the reference to a "bonus" misguided. Seventeen. Dating for less than a year. Engaged. That, however, was a narrative years ago. Consider the Beach Boys' "Be True to Your School," where the singer is a two-letter athlete and his girlfriend is on the cheer squad. We don't know if they married just after graduation. I suspect (my preferences running to Stephen Meader whose The Long Trains Roll, which commands a steep price these days, embellishes things that really happened, rather than to syrupy plots) that was the plot of some of the adolescent novels in the high school library, although there were probably other novels in which the second-stringer connects with the cheerleader or the outcast girl wins the athlete's affection. (That's one possible outcome of I Am Charlotte Simmons.) Those adolescent novels left the seamier side of winning those affections to the reader as an exercise (and at one time Grace Metalious took stick for helping the reader complete the exercise).

PROMOTING ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM?

The Charles Murray column about excessive college attendance induces Professor Soltan to suggest that bad ideas can have bad consequences.

A lot of Americans don’t seem to like highly educated people, and they don’t want them running the country. They prefer people with poor academic backgrounds, like John McCain, whose class rank in college was 894 out of 899, and like Sarah Palin, who got a degree in communications at the University of Idaho, a Tier 3 school in the US News and World Report rankings. Mike Huckabee, who had a very parochial college education, did extremely well in the primaries. If John McCain drops Palin from his ticket, he might well pick up Huckabee, who seems to share her genial indifference to large parts of the world outside of the United States.

I'm not sure another "Democrats=smart, Republicans=dumb" squabble is the best counter-argument. I recently reacted to the column, and subsequently finished Real Education, the basis for the column. With the hurricane moving in, I will have time to post a proper review. (I'm embellishing. The rainy low-pressure system moving in came ashore as Gustav. Kerry is dealing with Hanna. Anybody remember the Walt Disney documentary in which a previous Hannah had its name retired for five years?) Mr Murray's thesis relies on faulty statistical inference, in ways that go beyond technical quibbles at the third decimal place. That calls for a proper review. My focus tonight is on Professor Soltan's summation.

Given this preference for intellectually average and below-average folk in positions of power, I think we need — with Country First the watchword — to take a position as far away as possible from Charles Murray’s. We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents’ religion. If they don’t get this in college, they’re not going to get it anywhere else.

That's part of Mr Murray's larger complaint, actually: the common schools have failed to do that work, which leaves it to the colleges. High schools that do a better job could mean less access-assessment-remediation-retention for college faculty (and many of us who work at the mid-majors, or "fourth-tier" institutions in Professor Soltan's ordering, would like to do less of that work and do more for our eager students who might be optimizing under constraints that place George Washington University outside their feasible sets).

TUNDRA POPULISM. The governor's speech simultaneously reinforced the Republican themes of counter-establishment and real-world experience. I suspect she was a pretty good trash-talker on the basketball court. The usual suspects probably live-blogged the speech. You know where to look.

DRILL, BABY, DRILL. I'm posting and listening to Mayor Giuliani's keynote speech. The red meat on offer is of Bull Moose proportions. Now comes Governor Palin. More posting after she finishes.

SALARY COMPRESSION IS EFFICIENT? Smith College's James D. Miller applies the logic of compensating differentials.

Assistant professors in many ways have harder jobs than tenured professors do. They have more pressure to publish. They usually spend more time on class preparation because they have taught their classes relatively few times. And, keeping in mind their looming tenure bids, they often feel compelled to be more deferential to their senior colleagues than they would prefer. Those who care about economic fairness consequently should support the idea of assistant professors making more than tenured professors. And those who care about markets should understand that the less pleasant the job, the higher salary you must pay to attract top talent.

Job security is a large part of tenured professors’ compensation. So even if a tenured professor has a somewhat lower monetary salary than an assistant professor does, he probably, over all, receives more total compensation than his non-tenured colleagues. After all, I suspect few tenured professors who are not superstars or close to retirement would agree to exchange, say, $3,000 in extra salary in return for abandoning tenure.

I'm not persuaded by a passage that follows.

For reasons economists don’t fully understand, employers almost never decrease their workers’ nominal salaries. So if a college gives a raise to a tenured professor, it is stuck paying this raise until the professor retires. In contrast, if an assistant professor becomes too expensive the college can simply not reappoint him.

All tenure means is that the faculty member will be paid. The college can authorize a nominal salary increase that is a real salary decrease, or to avoid having to lay people off, not authorize a salary increase at all.

Such a salary policy will induce people who have more discipline-specific human capital (current grants, and recent publications) to look elsewhere. I don't deny the possibility of an assistant professor becoming "too expensive," but that suggests professional jealousies or other dysfunction in the department or in the college.

Perhaps Professor Miller is hinting at such dysfunction with this passage.

I’m actually surprised that the academic market doesn’t induce more colleges to pay greater salaries to assistant professors than to non-superstar tenured professors. Tenured professors, however, have on average vastly greater bureaucratic power than their untenured co-workers and perhaps such power discrepancies explain why at most colleges tenured professors earn more than assistant professors.

The essay does not address other influences on pay, such as unionization, seniority, or egalitarian tendencies. I'm not sure whether the ensuing bull session has turned into a bar-room brawl. It's instructive reading.

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT. Compare and contrast.

WHY THIS SIGN IS DIFFERENT. Most Wisconsin state highway markers provide a highway number and no other decoration.


The 32nd Division is now a National Guard Unit, and it receives kudos from unit veterans of earlier wars.

The red arrow was worn on their shoulder in battle, and now it's worn on the hats and lapels of the veterans of the famed 32nd Infantry "Red Arrow" Division.

It signifies loss, sacrifice and pride — the loss of soldiers on battlefields in Europe and the South Pacific, the sacrifice of Wisconsin and Michigan National Guardsmen who left their homes, jobs and schools to fight, and the pride that comes with serving in a unit the French nicknamed for piercing German battle lines during World War I.

The entire unit will be shipping out to Iraq. We wish them well, and a safe return.

PLAY LIKE IT'S A PENNANT RACE. Perhaps Milwaukee Brewer fans ought advocate for the return of light rail to the Beer City. Although the Crew still hold the wild card, it's difficult to get enthusiastic about their chances after today's Mets sweep coming in the wake of that late July Cub sweep, also at Miller Park, and that early-season Red Sox sweep in Boston.

SECOND SECTION. Cubs, Cardinals, and Phillies also lose. Talk about wasted opportunities.

IT TAKES MORE THAN MONEY. The first day of school in Chicago included some civic theater as state senator James Meeks brought several busloads of Chicago residents to New Trier Township to register them in a well-to-do school district.

New Trier Township spent nearly $17,000 per student in 2005-06 and Sunset Ridge spent about $16,000, while Chicago Public Schools spent an estimated $10,400 per pupil.

People in the New Trier district supported the effort, although state rules require that the students who applied for admission will probably be denied because they're not district residents.

Although differences in resources matter, living conditions also matter. There are many weekends when the Chicago school system has the equivalent of a Northern Illinois shooting to deal with on the Monday. That was the case over Labor Day, with one ten year old girl who took her blind sister for a walk being killed in a gang shootout and a thirteen year old girl visiting relatives also apparently being killed in another gang shootout. That girl's parents had moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the hopes of providing a safer environment, including safer schools for her.

GETTING INTO TRAINING. The Labor Day weekend means the trains are strained.

With delays, airport congestion, and sky-high jet fuel prices draining the romance and convenience out of air travel, Americans have increasingly turned to Amtrak for summer travel, the story continued.

The railroad was expecting 322,000 riders over Labor Day weekend, a 10 percent increase from last year, while the airline industry projected a decline of 6.5 percent in domestic travel over the holiday period.

Another Destination:Freedom post notes an Amtrak proposal to provide more cars for the Acela Express. A careful reading of the article reveals the shortcomings of a special-design quasi-fixed formation train. Although additional trailing cars are relatively easy to build, the locomotives (call me old fashioned, but a "power car" at each end that is dedicated to a control stand and the electrical equipment is a single-ended locomotive) will be taxed by longer formations. And the Acelas are not the only trains that could use more capacity. (Elsewhere in the country, the practice of setting up additional locomotives in multiple and cutting in additional coaches, if the coaches could be had, provides the additional capacity.)

It's also standing room only on the Chicago commuter services.

The [Rapid Transit] is removing all the seats from some of its rail cars and reducing seats on some buses as part of an experiment beginning this fall to pack in more riders.

To boost its seating, Metra ended bar-car beverage service Friday and plans to remove some on-board toilets. The commuter railroad is also rehabbing five 1950s-era bilevel coaches that it had sold to a Virginia commuter line and bought back earlier this year.

Even the Pace suburban bus system, the unfortunate symbol for years of how the car is king in the suburbs, is packing them in these days on routes that feed Metra and CTA rail stations and business parks. Pace reduced special express service to Cubs and Bears games to free up buses for regular evening service, officials said.

Managers expect further increases in traffic, and expect further strain on the stock as the state capital spending plan is still delayed in Springfield.

There's frustration on the lines.

Most Metra riders aren't as lucky, traveling up to 50 miles each way, in some cases while standing in the aisles and vestibules or sitting on the steps of packed trains.

When the trains are too crowded, the conductors don't always collect cash fares, so revenue is lost, Deborah Moore pointed out after her morning Union Pacific North Line train arrived last week in downtown Chicago more than an hour late.

"Metra, the way to really fly," said Moore, mocking the commuter railroad's slogan. "Oh, yeah, how could I forget? Flying doesn't seem like a good idea these days, either."

Thus far, neither the Transit Authority nor Metra have asked to borrow some of their retired rolling stock from local museums. There's the makings of a pretty good retro Evanston Express, with plenty of standing room, running at East Troy and at Union.

OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. A Scotsman discovers college football.

I discovered, quite by accident, that my former home of Washington, D.C. was actually an ideal location for falling in love with college football, precisely because there’s no football power in the city. Each fall I’d become aware of a deep divide between my friends who attended Ivy League universities and those who studied at public universities in the South or across the Midwest. At parties, the former group would be immersed in the usual Washington small talk: the prospects for social security or immigration reform and the usual political and media gossip; the latter, by contrast, were liberated by the return of something much more important—the opening kickoff.

The author began his discovery at Michigan, where the team on the field is often good, and the band is always boring. His observation, however, might say much about the positional arms race in which the most selective universities (as measured by their "selectivity" or perhaps their yield management) are not necessarily the football powers, let alone the public flagships with pretty good football programs. On one hand, he might have discovered the secret of the Eastern Establishment: they lack a life. On the other hand, he might have discovered that the graduates of the less selective universities are more easily distracted.

(Via Phi Beta Cons.)

IN HEAVEN THERE IS NO BEER.

The editorial board at the DeKalb Chronicle would prefer that less be drunk here.

We know, last week was Corn Fest weekend, and it was the first time returning NIU students had seen their friends since last spring.

It’s nice to get together and relax with few drinks; we get it. But DeKalb Police issued so many alcohol-related citations, most in neighborhoods with heavy student populations, it took the Daily Chronicle extra pages and several days to run them in the daily police blotter.

Most of the citations were related to underage drinking and having open containers on the public way. Some were written at the same address hours apart. We’re all for students socializing and celebrating the start of the new school year, but there have to be better ways to celebrate.

On one hand, perhaps a school year that starts without major flooding on move-in day will continue with December final exams as scheduled, and a February when we will pause to reflect but look forward to spring break is something to drink to.

JUST ACTIVATE THE CARDS. Once upon a time, telephone activation of a credit card was easy: ring the 1-800 number, enter the account number, enter a few digits of a social security number (probably a misuse of a number that's NOT supposed to be used for identification, see the old cards for details), be advised to sign the card and remove the paper tape.

No more. Ring Discover and get quizzed about what changes would induce you to use the card more (bigger cash-back bonuses and interest-free cash advances). Or ring Amoco, which under BP auspices has sold the credit card operation to Chase, and wait for someone to ask you the name of the bank you use to make payments on the account, as a prelude to offering Chase services.

If there's anybody at Amoco or Discover that's reading this site, hear this. I can get along without your cards. I am giving preference to those card issuers that don't play twenty questions with me. And enough unsolicited credit card offers arrive in my mailbox each month that I can fire credit card companies at will.

IT'S A PENNANT RACE. I had some time this afternoon to listen to sports call-in radio from Milwaukee and from Chicago. The Cubs, Brewers, and Cardinals all lost and there are plenty of people with ample time to get worked up about absolutely nothing.

As of this afternoon, the Cubs are 4 1/2 games ahead of the Brewers and about ten games ahead of the Cardinals. That Cub margin over the Brewers is exactly the outcome of a Cub sweep in Milwaukee in late July, and the Brewer margion over the Cardinals the outcome of two series with St. Louis, one in July and another in August.

Why the radio yakkers have to take calls from people who want to vent about the Cubs' having played more home games (that will be remedied shortly) or against weaker opponents (if the National League standings were an income distribution a politician would want to redistribute the wealth) and go along with the call escapes me. (I'm not referring only to Milwaukee radio here. Cub fans have that er, tradition of September collapse, to worry about.)

Look at the schedule.

Image courtesy The Wisconsin Sports Bar.

Note the six remaining games between the Brewers and the Evil Empire, er, Yuppie Bears. The schedule reminds me of the end of the 1982 pennant race, where the Brewers held a small lead over Baltimore at Labor Day yet had to win the final game of the season, in Baltimore, to qualify for the playoffs (in those days, there were two divisions). Either Milwaukee or Chicago can win the division. The team that takes care of business in those six games is likely to do so.