BEWARE OF EXPLODING CAT-SUP BOTTLES.

Home canning can be a hobby, or a way of getting your own choice of flavors, (or, if you lack a productive inner life, a political statement) although it's hazardous if you don't know what you're doing.

In the early- to mid-1800s, Americans fermented tomato ketchup from a variety of home recipes. The first recorded recipe for a home-fermented tomato catsup was published in 1810, a descendant of British imitations of Asian “cat-sup,” or fermented fish sauce, that the British encountered on colonial voyages. Tomato catsup, which cooks made with ingredients such as apples and anchovies in addition to tomatoes, caught on quickly due to its bright flavor, which livened up an otherwise monotonous American diet. And because it was fermented, it boasted a shelf life of one to seven years.

After the Civil War, companies mass produced, bottled, and sold ketchup to a new class of urban consumers. This ketchup was generally thinner, less sweet, less vinegary, and more tomato-y than present-day ketchup. But while fermentation was a boon for home cooks, it was a liability for manufacturers. Fermentation turned ketchup sour, an increasingly unpopular characteristic as Americans gravitated towards sugar towards the end of the century.

The conclusion of this story might be a parable in the way safety regulations foster bigness in business.

Fermentation also sped up a more dangerous process: Occasionally, bottles of fermenting ketchup would explode. In 1895, the New York Sun reported, “A bottle of catsup exploded on the dinner table of a family at Michigan City, Indiana, recently, and the force knocked all of the dishes off the table.” A 1903 headline in the Saint Paul Globe read, “BOTTLE OF CATSUP EXPLODES IN HER HANDS: Twelve Year Old Emma Setley Is Badly Cut By Flying Glass.”

To protect customers and their bottom lines, ketchup companies embraced chemical preservatives. Smith cites turn-of-the-century studies in California, Connecticut, and Kentucky that found that the majority of commercial ketchup samples contained some form of antiseptic.

Then, in 1883, a man named Dr. Harvey Wiley became chief of the Division of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture, where he fought preservatives with the religious zeal of a man raised evangelical in rural Indiana. Born in 1844 in a log farmhouse, he spent his childhood tending to his family’s crops, then earned chemistry and medical degrees before shifting the Division of Chemistry’s focus to the food-safety problems that plagued the nation.

For the next two decades, he proposed countless Congressional bills on food safety, each of which was killed. But in 1904 he formed “The Poison Squad,” enlisting a group of healthy, young, male volunteers—mostly his colleagues at the Department of Agriculture—to eat all of their meals at work and ingest increasingly large quantities of preservatives. The results read like the last 10 seconds of a modern-day drug commercial: stomach cramps, headaches, sore throat, dizziness, decline in appetite, and loss of weight. Multiple trials stopped when participants became too sick to continue. Sensationalized in the press, “The Poison Squad” shifted public opinion against preservatives.

Don't the anaesthesiologists tell us that "dosage is poison?" So, too, with the stuff that's added "to retard spoilage" (or to head off overpressurized bottles exploding?)

THE ROAD DIET IS FINISHED IN TIME FOR CORN FEST.

I was skeptical that the project, which reduced the Lincoln Highway through downtown DeKalb from five lanes to three, would be done in time for Corn Fest.

Finished it was.

The wider sidewalks allowed some of the eateries to set up tables for their patrons to sit down, switch off, and quaff something in addition to the usual street fair fare.

The former House Cafe building has become a bar, "Le Calle" which was featuring a Selena tribute band on Friday.  It's strictly a tavern now, no longer the coffee house set in an excellent place for train watching.

The collegians are back in town, and the Corn Fest bands do not have a cover charge, although the beer garden is not as pleasant as a tavern.

There have been a few demographic changes over the year, with La Calle clearly catering to a Texican or Central American crowd, and there are a few more taco trucks among the corn roasters and dealers in corn dogs and elephant ears.

Corn Fest began as some sort of civic project by Del Monte, which once ran a large corn cannery on the south side of town.  The cannery is long gone, and one wonders how much longer the Troy Grove branch that served it is for the world with the Jarrett regency's war on fracking.  The Saturday complimentary corn roast endures.

Excellent work by the volunteers, as far as I know, nobody went away hungry.  The vacant lot at the northwest corner of that crossing, which has long been a casualty of Illinois being a tax hell, is useful space to set up picnic tables for the day.

The drill for the corn boil the last few years has been to use a steam traction engine to heat the water.  It's one of the regular traction engines at local threshing bees.

And, yes, I was teasing a train with one of those earlier pictures.

More domestic containers, trains running at reduced speeds through downtown.

A few years ago, the carnival moved to an area more easily fenced off.  That's still the case.

Looks like more fried foods on offer past security, plus, perhaps, the last gasp of the "-rama" craze.

There have been a few of the new-made-to-look-old buildings going up around downtown, including a few rental complexes.

That prohibition on food deliveries might also be a sign of the times: no legitimate food deliverer would ask to be let in, and that makes it harder for the troublemakers to get in.  On the other hand, are we seeing more evidence of the class incidence of corona tyranny?  Ordering in is one way to not spread the disease or expose yourself, and yet the people who do the delivering aren't treated well.

THE CONTINUING INTELLECTUAL WRECKAGE THAT IS PRESENTISM.

I still remember a refrain from seventh-grade social studies (which was an amalgam of civics and history) about the error of judging past practices by our standards.  That was an intellectual failure then, and it's an intellectual failure now.

Apparently, though, even the president of the American Historical Association can't remind his colleagues that it is an intellectual failure without getting hollered at.  His essay originally opened with what seemed like a sensible observation.

Twenty years ago, in these pages, Lynn Hunt argued “against presentism.” She lamented historians’ declining interest in topics prior to the 20th century, as well as our increasing tendency to interpret the past through the lens of the present. Hunt warned that this rising presentism threatened to “put us out of business as historians.” If history was little more than “short-term . . . identity politics defined by present concerns,” wouldn’t students be better served by taking degrees in sociology, political science, or ethnic studies instead?

The discipline did not heed Hunt’s warning. From 2003 to 2013, the number of PhDs awarded to students working on topics post-1800, across all fields, rose 18 percent. Meanwhile, those working on pre-1800 topics declined by 4 percent. During this time, the Wall Street meltdown was followed by plummeting undergraduate enrollments in history courses and increased professional interest in the history of contemporary socioeconomic topics. Then came Obama, and Twitter, and Trump. As the discipline has become more focused on the 20th and 21st centuries, historical analyses are contained within an increasingly constrained temporality. Our interpretations of the recent past collapse into the familiar terms of contemporary debates, leaving little room for the innovative, counterintuitive interpretations.

This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past; the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism—are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines. The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past. This sameness is ahistorical, a proposition that might be acceptable if it produced positive political results. But it doesn’t.

It doesn't produce positive academic results either, saying you're a history major means you're qualified to hold forth on potted social science, with little or no understanding of statistical inference or what constitutes a solid chain of causation. But I digress.

Within moments of his column appearing online, all hell broke loose on Twitter.

Incensed at even the mildest suggestion that politicization is undermining the integrity of historical scholarship, the activist wing of the history profession showed up on the AHA’s thread and began demanding Sweet’s cancellation.

I had no idea that social media was where peer review took place. Yes, there is, allegedly, something called "academic Twitter" which is a good place to mock people and watch them leave you alone after you mock them enough.  Apparently, though,a few sissies with blue checks can have the same force as a few Red Guards with guns and dunce caps.

In this branch of academia, it does not matter whether the 1619 Project was truthful or factually accurate. The only concerns are whether its narrative can be weaponized for a political cause or used to deflect scrutiny of the same. As is often the case in the pseudo-moralizing political crusades of academia, the loudest demands against Sweet also came from the least-productive academics – historians with thin CVs and little in the way of original scholarly research to their names, although they do maintain 24/7 Twitter feeds of progressive political commentary.

Thus, when you follow the link to Professor Sweet's column, it now opens with an Act of Contrition constructive self-criticism.

My September Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association.

A president’s monthly column, one of the privileges of the elected office, provides a megaphone to the membership and the discipline. The views and opinions expressed in that column are not those of the Association. If my ham-fisted attempt at provocation has proven anything, it is that the AHA membership is as vocal and robust as ever. If anyone has criticisms that they have been reluctant or unable to post publicly, please feel free to contact me directly.

I sincerely regret the way I have alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends. I am deeply sorry. In my clumsy efforts to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism, I left the impression that questions posed from absence, grief, memory, and resilience somehow matter less than those posed from positions of power. This absolutely is not true. It wasn’t my intention to leave that impression, but my provocation completely missed the mark.

Once again, I apologize for the damage I have caused to my fellow historians, the discipline, and the AHA. I hope to redeem myself in future conversations with you all. I’m listening and learning.

Who is the bigger chickenshit, the professor, or the unnamed colleagues who lack the intellectual chops to respond to the "provocation." It's the general chickenshittery that is wrecking higher education, not provocative essays.

Note that [Lora] Burnett and the other detractors never bothered to explain how Sweet’s argument was flawed or unsupported. Nor did they attempt to pen a rebuttal, which could have produced a constructive dialogue about the role of political activism in shaping historical scholarship. It was sufficient to denounce him as guilty for holding the wrong opinions. No matter the apology that Sweet made, the campaign to eject him from the history profession’s markedly impolite company would continue.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world began to take notice of the bizarre spectacle playing out at the main professional organization for a major academic discipline. As criticisms mounted on the AHA’s twitter feed, the organization moved to shut down debate entirely. They locked their twitter account, and posted a message to members denouncing the public blowback as the product of “trolls” and “bad faith actors.”

Indeed, we have noticed.

In sum: It’s wrong to criticize left-wing journalists writing about history if you know that criticism could be used by the right to discredit those efforts. There are no enemies on the left, regardless of what they say. Jonah Goldberg had a good response to this. Why not criticize the 1619 Project for being strident and shoddy instead of criticizing critics for pointing out it’s strident and shoddy?

We're laughing at them. "How do you tell the difference between 'trolls' and the tenured faculty members of most university history departments? And how pathetic are you as a supposedly premier academic organization that you have to 'protect' your Twitter feed?"

The explanation, as set out in the online house organ for all wokeness, all the time, illustrates just how pathetic the association is.

Soon the AHA’s Twitter thread was attracting comments from those outside the field—including one from ["white nationalist" Richard] Spencer, which said, “I just read this man’s offending column; it was reasonable in the extreme. Apparently, being a Rankean historian causes ‘harm’ and ‘pain.’ It’s ridiculous.”

The AHA then restricted public access to its Twitter feed, saying in a post that “A conversation about history has been invaded by trolls uninterested in civil discourse in last 12 hrs. This is appalling. Therefore conversation is temporarily limited to our community. AHA condemns all harassment of members of our community & others who replied in good faith.”

One. Critical. Tweet. Chickenshits. "Academic history is now worse than a waste of time nearly everywhere."

SHE'S ON FIRE.

Megyn Kelly, "Good riddance," Giftzwerg.

It's clear that her jive detector is working, and Oxford's J. A. Smith would likely credit her for arguing, persuasively, that der Giftzwerg has been talking rot.  The video is worth your twenty minutes watching: although Red State's Alex Parker collects a few of the better passages.  The real zingers, though, are in the full clip.

“What science evolved on the wearing of masks — something you admit you knew you were lying about at the time you first publicly commented? What science evolved on the vaccination level needed to allegedly get us to herd immunity? … He said he changed the number when he thought the public would tolerate a greater percentage — another lie that he admitted to. This wasn’t the evolution of anything besides Anthony Fauci’s con.”

Good riddance, Giftzwerg.

THE SOMETIMES FRUSTRATING GRIND THAT IS BASEBALL.

In the middle of July, the Milwaukee Brewers were still protecting a slim lead in the Central Division.

On the eighth of June, by the dark of moon, here we were.  "The Brewers got off to their best start ever during the first fifty games and as of this writing are half a game ahead of the Cardinals."  Brewer closer Josh Hader has had a few difficult outings since then, most recently allowing three home runs including a walk-off grand slam to a Yastrzemski; and the hits kept on coming with the next night's relief pitcher committing a bases-loaded balk;  and Sunday's bullpen game didn't turn out well.  Thus, here we are, at the All-Star break, with the Crew half a game ahead of the Cardinals, because of rain in Cincinnati.  That spectacular start?  Gone to Giants and Cubs and Cardinals, all of it.  "The Cardinals management understand that 'good enough' means capering on the field in late October."

Did I say a half game up on the Cardinals at the All-Star Break? Long gone.  "The Brewers gave up only two hits yet somehow found their way to another gut-wrenching loss against the Cubs."  That was Friday night's ten-inning game, in which the Cubs scored four runs, two earned, on two hits, both Ian Happ home runs, and left nobody on base.  Thus did the Cubs clinch the season series, with at least ten wins in the nineteen games the teams play.  "A generally upbeat Milwaukee clubhouse was dismayed following the 4-3 extra-inning loss that saw a no-hitter carried through six innings by Freddy Peralta wasted and runners stranded in scoring position time and time again."

Freddy Peralta was just back from an injury, and the prudent decision, meaning fielding a team that is competitive regularly, would be to limit his pitches.

[Brewer manager Craig] Counsell indicated that he and pitching coach Chris Hook had seen some signs, including body language, from Peralta during the sixth inning to the point they felt it was best to take him out.

"It's really just from talking to Freddy, reading Freddy," Counsell said. "Obviously he pitched beautifully but he thought he was at the end of the line and going through the order again, we thought that was enough.

"Just talking to him, just listening to him and reading body language. Our goal is for Freddy to make eight more starts so we're not going to push him at a time when it's a little questionable whether he should be out there again."

The "runners stranded in scoring position" is indicative of a longer-term challenge to having that regularly competitive team.

It's almost hard to believe that the Brewers were four games up in the Central Division when the calendar turned to August. They walked out of a hushed clubhouse night trailing by six in the division and sunk to 2½ games back of San Diego for the final wild card spot.

Deflating, although to what degree depends on how much air one believes is left in the Milwaukee's balloon of a 2022 season. And right now, having lost 15 of 23 and also eight games under .500 since rocketing off to the best 50-game start in franchise history, that balloon is looking like it's filled with helium, slowly floating out of grasp.

That "best 50-game start" is misleading, as that gaudy early season featured a lot of series wins and sweeps against the Pirates and Reds, and things were going so poorly for the Reds early on that the Pirates were able to win a game without benefit of a base hit.  (In the baseball record books, a pitcher only gets credited with a no-hitter in a winning record.)  The team's record against other teams, including the Cubs, who this year have been no great shakes, was close to .500 even in those first fifty games.

The Brewers fell to 7-10 on the year against the Cubs and are 3-12 over their last 15 against the bottom three teams in the Central Division – the Cubs, Reds and Pirates. Since the hottest 50-game start in franchise history, they are 33-41. They have lost 10 games in the division standings in 26 days.

Put another way, when the San Diego Padres offered the Brewers multiple prospects for Josh Hader, the business decision to make the trade might have been the right one.  Yes, that might have been demoralizing to the clubhouse, trading an All-Star for promising prospects, and it's possible the trade was demoralizing to Mr Hader, whose struggles as closer for the Padres have prompted some schadenfreude in Brewer Nation.  From what I understand, the Padre clubhouse is not as harmonious as the Brewers (in basketball, choose any of Boston, Brooklyn, or Miami's locker rooms and compare them with the Bucks) and a career move at the same time your wife had a difficult delivery of a new baby might affect the performance of even the most focused of professionals.

At the same time, if that gaudy start was not indicative of the current team's playoff capabilities, the prudent thing for management to do might be to maintain that winning culture by developing future performers, rather than going all-in for a championship (which might work every hundred years, if you're the Cubs, but look how that 2016 corps has scattered) that you might not achieve.  We'll be watching developments, for instance, out of San Diego to see if they secure that final wild card.  With the Brewers doing Harvey's Wallbangers, er, Counsell's Crushers stuff on Saturday night, I'm not yet ready to give up on this season.  Consistently in the mix is not a bad place to be for a small-market team in a town known for beer.

SECOND SECTION.

Counsell's Crushers came through again today, winning 9-7 with a 4-6-3 double play to end the game.  Tradition calls for some Sprecher, and there are a few bottles in the cooler.

MORE COWBELL OPTIONAL.

Several Old Masters worked melodies inspired by the Alpenhorn into their scores.  The Freistadt Alte Kameraden Band here augments its forces with a troupe of Alpenhornists from Indiana.

There are still a few county fairs to enjoy, and Oktoberfest season is upon us.  Put the noise, noise, noise of the political world aside, and enjoy a cream puff, or a quaff.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Entirely too many leftists have mental disorders.  The time for pulling punches is over.

Indeed:  "[E]mphasize education over partying and colleges will lose half their enrollment."

Stick your "progress" where the sun don't shine!

The week's roundup of pithy reinforcements of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

NATIONAL COMMAND AUTHORITY CONFIRMS IT.

Last week, I asserted, "A Democrat is somebody for whom productive people never pay enough taxes."

Here's confirmation, straight from the coot's mouth. "Is it fair to people who...do not own multibillion dollar businesses? They see why these guys getting all the tax credits? Is that fair? What do you think?"

My representative in Congress and my senators at least had the opportunity to vote on those tax credits.  I doubt that a dementia-addled figurehead is making a subtle point about limiting government, something along the line of rent seeking is awful, no matter who is seeking the rents or how compelling the sob-story.

On the other hand, there is a deep muscle-memory of the mind present even in late stage dementia.  Years ago, a youngster thanked a badly-faded Ronald Reagan for facing down the Soviet Union, and the Gipper supposedly responded, "That was my job."

Deep in the muscle memory of a Democrat, even an alleged centrist in the mold of Bill Clinton or in the imagination of Joe Biden, is the notion that productive people don't pay enough taxes.  Whoop, there it is!

What is the logic there? It seems to be that because the government has hosed taxpayers in the past to give tax credits to big businesses (something most conservatives oppose), we should hose them again to pay off the loans of people with graduate degrees. But even then, that makes no sense because a tax credit does not have to be paid for by definition. It is simply the absence of the government levying a tax. When you “cancel” student debt, that money has already been paid out and the loan is now in default. That money has to come from somewhere.

Biden then moved from showcasing his senility to showcasing his casual racism, another staple of his time in public life.

Go to the column, dear reader, and consider whether that isn't more intellectual muscle memory from long ago.  John Hinderaker isn't impressed.

Today a reporter asked Joe Biden about the fairness of the debt forgiveness plan. Biden turned and tried to respond. To me, Biden has appeared pathetically frail and long gone in dementia for a while now. But this is perhaps the saddest performance I have seen from him. His response has something to do with multi-billionaires, but I can’t make it out. In any event it was not responsive to the reporter’s question, which Biden was entirely incapable of engaging. The man is on his last legs.

Unfortunately, it was responsive. It's a deflection, and it, or others like it (stadium subsidies! corona bailouts!) are being heaved up as if argumentam ad anecdotam has the force of a mathematical proof.  I'm capable of condemning regressive transfers, wherever they are, and of understanding that those corona bailouts were a consequence of governments locking down too harshly for too long.

THE CASE FOR THE GRIM STRATEGY.

Democrats are corona tyrants who are soft on crime and in thrall to their freakazoid fringe.  As bad as some of the Republican choices are, treat the Democrat choices as worse.

American Greatness's Jeffrey Anderson issues a call to arms.  "Over the final 11 weeks of the campaign, Republicans would be well-served to focus on these 10 issues on which Biden and the Democrats are particularly vulnerable (in no particular order)."  Call it a restoration of a state of good repair.  Secure borders.  Crack down on crime.  End the corona tyranny.  Stop calling deprivation "a transition."

It's there for the taking, but it will take work to take it.  "Biden has governed with an unprecedented blend of radicalism and incompetency [c.q.], and a party that can’t capitalize on that had better rethink its approach."

LOOK FOR THOSE GAINS FROM TRADE.

China's ruling Communists would like to reclaim their "renegade province" a century after the nationalist government fled the mainland to recently liberated Formosa.  That sort of campaign is going to be more difficult in the wake of the ruling Communists abridging, in the name of ideological purity, the freedoms supposedly guaranteed to inhabitants of Hong Kong.  For the same reason, it's unlikely that the ruling party will remove the single largest obstacle to a peaceful reunion with Taiwan, which is their Mickey Mao communist system.

That's at least material for public consumption.  Privately, it has long been the case that Taiwanese investors are major owners in mainland factories.  That's true of other capitalist investors, including some whose strategic interests are at odds with the communists.  "Some major manufacturers that have had to halt operations in Sichuan include the Japanese carmaker Toyota and CATL, the Chinese lithium battery giant."  Hero water projects work out no better under portraits of Chairman Mao than they do with the endorsement of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the rains don't come.  And letting Taiwanese capitalists run mainland sweatshops is apparently a marriage of convenience.  Much-maligned Foxconn, which has yet to build anything major in Wisconsin, did not envision hiring a highly-skilled work force, and part of that maligning involved stories of suicides in mainland factories.  Foxconn's headquarters, and its major investors, are Taiwanese.

As is the world's largest manufacture of semiconductor chips, TSMC.

The truth is, no part of the world is in a position to do without the chips that TSMC supplies. And that may be one thing that is actually protecting Taiwan from an invasion. Because the reality of an invasion would lead to a disruption to the supply of chips that would cause a global downturn in the economy.

Including chips going to those Toyota works and consumer electronics plants on the mainland.  Any hard-power move on Taiwan is likely to lead to unemployed masses on the mainland.

TSMC may make the world’s most advanced chips, but as I explained here, the machines that make those chips are produced by one company in the Netherlands (ASML) using components and expertise from many other free countries around the world. The moment China seizes Taiwan by force, TSMC’s ability to purchase those machines or even have them serviced by experts from abroad ends immediately. How long could China keep them operating? A few months? Maybe a year or two at best?

And that’s assuming Taiwan doesn’t embrace the “broken nest” approach to discouraging such an invasion. The idea behind that paper from the Army War College was that Taiwan could vow to destroy assets such as the TSMC foundry if the country were invaded, denying China any chance of profiting from the invasion technologically.

The bottom line here is that China continues to put on a good show but there’s no way for them to really win this conflict by force. They could perhaps seize the territory but they can’t seize the assets because Taiwan’s leadership in chipmaking is entirely dependent on continued cooperation with the free world.

At some level, I suspect even the party ideologues understand this. On the other hand, ideologues are people whose priors are sometimes so strong that no evidence will persuade them to revise theirs.

IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER.

Power Line's Steven Hayward offers a tribute to Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary."

Some examples:

The Administrative State: Rule by an overwhelming minority.  Recommended elaboration: "a fiction by which rent-seekers receive cover in the guise of expertise."

Dialogue: A monologue where the Left explains and the Right agrees.  Recommended corrective: "don't hector me and call it 'dialogue'."

Some of the entries are of long pedigree.  Herewith, a new one::

Voter Suppression: Elimination of Democrat election fraud.

It's more important that these clarifications of reality make their way into general use than that they get circulated around the populist internet.  The problem with today's social media siloes is that the people who might be uneasy about the way the Jarrett regency has been wrecking the country might also be uneasy about going to the sites where such clarifications are available.

A PRIMER ON THE TRAGIC VISION.

Peter Norton's Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving elaborates on the argument laid out in the title, and Book Review N^o. 6 will turn to that in due course.

The post title, however, proposes a deeper lesson.  "Autonorama" is a play on "Futurama," which is probably a play on "panorama" or perhaps "cyclorama," although readers of my age will remember when "-rama" (not to be confused with the Vedas) was a suffix suggesting some sort of spectacular, such as a "bowl-a-rama" with fifty lanes, or the annual "scout-o-rama" showing the latest in projects and skits.  The kind of budget busting appropriation bill that might be a "spend-a-palooza" these days would be a "spend-a-rama:" and you knew the concept had grown stale when the local gas utility, piped natural gas being a new thing, offered "Gas-o-rama" as an assembly program for junior high schoolers to tout the wonders of the new fuel, and then the valley girls had their bonarama ...

DON'T BE A USEFUL IDIOT.

The obligation of a scientist, or any other scholar, is to be receptive to conflicting evidence, even if that means shedding cherished prior beliefs.  Public health talking head Leana Wen, M. D., is learning the hard way that compromising her integrity in support of The Narrative does not end well.  "America’s colleges are so left-wing that even a progressive doctor who once headed Planned Parenthood is facing calls that she be canceled as a speaker."  I first encountered the doctor, early on in the coronavirus shutdowns, when she was fretful about policy advocates pivoting from "harm reduction" (meaning Chinese style quarantines) to "harm mitigation" (the first step in analyzing different risks to different populations.)  She stayed a shutdown hard-liner long beyond when that policy made any sense, but, even so, there came a time when the evidence was more than compelling to discarding those priors.

As examples of “unsafe” or “unscientific” recommended practices, the letter cited several op-eds by Wen, including one suggesting that COVID-19 infection should be understood as a “new normal,” another arguing that COVID-19 closure learning loss has harmed children, and a third suggesting that municipalities should lift some COVID restrictions.

Apparently in the world of academic public health, "data driven" is trumped by various -isms and -phobias.

Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and epidemiology professor at the University of California, San Francisco, tweeted a video of himself criticizing the letter on Wednesday. “Open letter to APHA says Leana Wen was on wrong side of abortion debate (She is not pro-choice enough as former Pres of Planned Parenthood!) & is ‘fatphobic’ b/c she says eating Krispy Kreme EVERY DAY is bad,” he tweeted….The statement concluded with demands that the American Public Health Association rescind its speaking invitation to Wen and replace her with “someone who is capable and can speak to evidence-based practices rooted in a collective responsibility for health equity.”

The status of things these days is apparently "Politics, not public health, was behind most decisions to keep schools closed." With professors of public health politicized themselves.

It came to this, Dr. Wen, when you first fulminated against "harm mitigation" without offering an argument based on evidence under which harm reduction was the more productive policy.  In addition, the role of public health officials is to recommend courses of action to elected officials, not to issue the ukases themselves.

GIVE US THAT OLD TIME RELIGION.

It has long been a topic of inquiry, among academicians and practitioners of politics alike, why people vote or align with political movements or coalitions that don't really serve their best interests, at least as the academicians and practitioners see them.  That dates back in my memory to the Vietnam War and civil rights era: it was the hard-hats and bowling-shirt ethnics who were getting drafted and doing the dying, and yet they did not make common cause with the war protesters.  Most horribly, they gave Richard Nixon a landslide win in 1972.  (It probably didn't occur to most of the people I encountered who held such views that the kind of Marxian intellectual analysis they were engaging in came bundled with the socialist freak show so ably sent up by George Orwell.)

ONE WAY TO REDUCE THE FREEWAY FLYING FACULTY.

For some reason, "strategic planning in an era of downsizing" at Northern Illinois University included creating, with great fanfare, and with faculty job descriptions changed to require travel there, extension campuses in Naperville, Rockford, and most spectacularly, Hoffman Estates.  The university participated in a deal that included Sears and operators of the formerly Allstate, now Sears Centre, Arena to provide new classrooms more convenient to local working adults.  (Like Democrats shunning the coot at campaign events, Allstate purchased naming rights to the Rosemont Horizon hard by O'Hare.)

Anybody seen Sears lately?

Now the university's complex has been sold.

In a special meeting called on Thursday, the NIU Board of Trustees confirmed that the Hoffman Estates campus, 5555 Trillium Blvd, has a potential buyer and that the university should close on the sale quickly.

On March 18, 2021, the Board had determined that the Hoffman Estates campus was “surplus to the university needs” and began the selling process. Offers were made later that year, but they fell through because the property “did not meet the needs of the potential buyers,” according to the agenda.

We're at the "selling the family silverware" stage of the college bubble.  "The net proceeds from the sale will be put into a restricted cost center that will be used for campus deferred maintenance and emergency repair requirements, according to a Sept. 2021 meeting agenda."  The spin from headquarters does not disabuse me of that notion.

When the campus was made available for purchase, Holly Nicholson, president of the University Advisory Committee, raised concerns, pointing out that it will look like NIU is leaving that community and that NIU isn’t thriving. Eric Wasowicz, Board of Trustees chairperson, said that the university is handling the money of the people of Illinois and the university needs to be responsible for it.

At the time, NIU president Lisa Freeman said that students taking classes at the campus were typically commuter students who work a full-time job. COVID-19 and an increase in online classes were factors in NIU’s decision to sell the property.

There are fewer people in Illinois, the governor's corona tyranny has not induced people to stay, and an abortion sanctuary state is going to mean fewer young people to provide schools and colleges for in the future.  Better that the university sell off assets that might have higher value in alternative uses, and put a shrunken physical plant in something resembling a state of good repair.

THE INSURGENCY CONTINUES TO SIMMER.

I've used the flag sale tents at threshing bees and county fairs as a barometer of sentiment far from where the coastal cosmopolitans roam.  Whether it's the confederacy of the frustrated or simple discontent with those high fuel prices and empty shelves where the baby formula or peanut butter should be, it's still out there.

That's the flag sales tent at the recently-concluded Winnebago County Fair.  Yes, Confederate battle flags are still on offer.  I didn't see anyone offering those "In this house we believe ..." yard signs.

The fair recently observed its centennial, which means that the Rockford and Interurban ran past this site until 1930.  None of the material I have on that interurban mentions specific service to the fair grounds, although cars on the Freeport line would stop on signal at any road crossing.

Did you know that "feeding frenzy" applies to sheep?

An orange dish pan in the hands of a biped means "food" and these pens were making quite the racket until they got theirs.

There's still cause to set up a side-show banner line and conduct a side-show.

Free admission, and, as the blurbs note, "family friendly."

Sorry, Elon Musk, somebody beat you to demonstrating a working hyper loop!

The 4-H animal presentations are anything but "udder confusion."

You don't just hook the cow up to the milking machine!

The milk likely goes to market, and at today's prices, it's good not to waste any.  Roasted ear of corn, $4; cream puff, $5; pork chop sandwich $6; elephant ear $9.

There's still summer to find a county fair and go to it, and enjoy that corn and that cream puff.

NO REASON TO PUT WOMEN ON A PEDESTAL.

When writers for the at-the-time conservative Badger Herald makes that argument, maybe the self-styled progressives will roll their eyes and consider the source.

The demands of feminism required certain concessions on the part of men. Men had to be willing -- or forced -- to open their career ladders to the likes of women. They also had to cease to understand fidelity and commitment as prerequisites to sexual relationships. Needless to say, the second "concession" made the first much easier to swallow. It quickly dawned on men that there was now no reason to put women on the proverbial pedestal.

What will their reaction be when a self-styled feminist, Louise Perry, makes a similar argument?

It’s precisely because I’m a feminist that I’ve changed my mind on sexual liberalism. It’s an ideology premised on the false belief that the physical and psychological differences between men and women are trivial, and that any restrictions placed on sexual behavior must therefore have been motivated by malice, stupidity or ignorance.

The problem is the differences aren’t trivial. Sexual asymmetry is profoundly important: One half of the population is smaller and weaker than the other half, making it much more vulnerable to violence. This half of the population also carries all of the risks associated with pregnancy. It is also much less interested in enjoying all of the delights now on offer in the post-sexual revolution era.

Reality was leading by two runs thirty years ago.

Remove the progressive goggles, and the history of the last 60 years looks different. The sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood. It is also a story about the triumph of the playboy.

The new sexual culture isn’t so much about the liberation of women, as so many feminists would have us believe, but the adaptation of women to the expectations of a familiar character: Don Juan, Casanova, or, more recently, Hugh Hefner.

It gets better. Here's more from that Herald article.  Prescient, nicht wahr?

One has to wonder how different things would have been if feminism had demanded economic freedom for women and denounced the sexual revolution in the interest of preserving womens' traditional roles as the guardians of chastity. This would have gained for women the equal pay and opportunity they deserved while at the same time ensuring that women who wanted to raise families would find willing husbands-to-be.

Such a situation would also have spread the gains from feminism. Today the only victors in the sexual revolution are those men and women who are good-looking and clever enough to enjoy multiple partners with a minimum of emotional and financial commitment. The dowdy and the not-so-clever (or not-so-unscrupulous) are used by the well-endowed and find loneliness and frustration where, in a previous generation, they would probably have been able to start families.

Here's Ms Perry.

If we are to challenge the social costs of the sexual revolution effectively, then we can’t redesign society on the back of an envelope. We have to look at social structures that have already proven to be successful and compare them against one another, rather than against some imagined alternative that has never existed and is never likely to exist. The technology shock of the Pill led many liberals to the hubristic assumption that our society could be uniquely free from the oppression of sexual norms and function just fine.

The last 60 years have proved that assumption to be wrong. We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stating the obvious: Sex must be taken seriously. Men and women are different. Some desires are bad. Consent is not enough. Violence is not love. Loveless sex is not empowering. People are not products. Marriage is good.

And, above all, listen to your mother.

Reality is socially conservative, and evolutionary stability is real.

I'll give her the final word.

Feminism needs to rediscover the mother, in every sense.

Until we do, each individual woman will have to learn on her own the lie of the promise of sexual liberation—the lie that tells us, as Andrea Dworkin phrased it, that “fucking per se is freedom per se.”

It was a lie all along. It’s time, at last, to say so.

Put another way, contemporary mating practices might not be evolutionarily stable.

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS GO BACK TO COLLEGE.

Tomorrow will be the fourth Monday of August, and that means the first day of classes at Northern Illinois University.  The relatively early start means two weeks of instruction before the Labor Day weekend, which I never decided for sure was worse than the later start leaving one week of instruction ahead of the weekend.  More students are returning to campus, where there is a relatively new residence hall (It was recently named for some long-ago student who checked the right identity politics boxes) set up as four single bedrooms en suite with a central kitchen.  Those rooms have lots of wall space for the students to display their aesthetic sense.

At least, that makes sense to Amanda Zuckerman, the CEO and founder of Dormify, a company focused on college dorm and apartment furnishings.

And beyond personal style, Zuckerman said that functionality and comfort shouldn’t be overlooked.

“Your parents want to send you away feeling comfortable, like you’re in a space that sort of supports everything that you're doing on a daily basis at college,” Zuckerman said. “Because if you’re not starting and ending your day in a space that’s functional and inspiring and warm and cozy, then how are you expected to be your best self on campus?”

That sort of thinking has the usual sort of fretters engaging in the usual fretting over How Unfair That All Is.

On average, American families spend about $1,200 on back-to-college costs, according to the National Retail Federation. While some spend much more, buying from retailers like Dormify, Dormco and others that specialize in dorm furniture and decor, paying for personal style consultants and even entering decorating contests, others are financially strapped with just the minimum college expenses, and are put in a difficult position when faced with “invisible” costs, such as making a dorm room livable.

“The kids who can’t afford a mini fridge are going to feel bad when it comes time to split the cost in the dorm room,” said Susan Dynarski, an education professor at Harvard University.

It's typical, isn't it, of the people in higher education causing a problem and then fretting about it.

Here is what once greeted matriculants to the University of Wisconsin and assigned a bunk in Ogg Hall.

That Ogg Hall had to go, something about it not being charming enough.  Somehow, though, the even older Lakeshore dorms remain.  "Years ago, the rooms there still had government issued gooseneck desk lamps and two or three rooms shared an electrical circuit."  Newer residential complexes were built along the lake shore as well.

[Adams and Tripp], which the state architect modeled on the Oxford enclosed-quadrangle college, probably don't have the electrical system contemporary students expect, but they have a lot more character than today's palaces offer.  Inside, the way the various houses (Botkin, Gregory, Frankenburger, and the rest) were laid out, nine rooms shared a restroom with two sinks, three toilets, and one shower.   We learned to share.

The electrical systems started getting into trouble once component stereo systems became the rage, generally in addition to the AM-FM clock radio that replaced the spring-wound alarm clock.  Then personal portable televisions became part of the moving-in-day burden, and university housing managers really began to fret about the demands on dorm electrical systems once computers and peripherals got into the mix.  (And still, the university issued printers were the ones that got overloaded when assignments were due.)

If there is an inequity here, the universities are complicit.

Students who live in the dorms make up only a small percentage of college goers, since many students commute to college, live off-campus or study online. At private, nonprofit colleges, about 60 percent of students live in the dorms, and at public colleges, about 36 percent live in the dorms, according to a 2016 report from the Urban Institute. The share of low-income students varies by how selective the institution is, but 70 percent of all students at public colleges receive Pell grants and 30 percent of students at private, nonprofit colleges receive Pell grants, according to an analysis by The Institute for College Access and Success.

Dynarski said that for the students who do live in dorms, the inequality is a manifestation of the outside world. She said that entering a four-year, residential college is often like entering into an upper-middle-class life.

“And if you’re not arriving with the accoutrements of upper-class life, then it’s difficult to engage with your peers socially, and then ultimately academically as well,” Dynarski said.

The common schools no longer inculcate the habits of the middle class, which means students arriving from neighborhoods where the families don't instill the behavioral accoutrements quickly figure out they don't fit in; and they're not assigned to austere Ogg Hall style dorms, which would be filled to excess with the stuff today's matriculants are able to set up in those individual rooms en suite.

THE TROLLEY TO THE FAIRGROUNDS.

The Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Washington, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh, are close enough to the county fair grounds to provide a park and ride service in the traditional manner.

People rode to all sorts of recreational activities. Trolley companies even constructed amusement parks along or at the ends of trolley lines. One of the first trolley parks in Pennsylvania was Kennywood constructed in 1899 by the Monongahela Street Railway Company. There are only eleven trolley parks still in operation in the United States and four of those are in Pennsylvania: Lakemont Park in Altoona, Dorney Park in Allentown, Kennywood in West Mifflin, and Waldameer Park in Erie.

The trolleys and the county fairs had traditional ties as well.

The Washington County Agricultural Fair has a storied history that began well before streetcars came along. However, it was in the streetcar era that the fair really began to see success. They found their permanent home, saw increased participation, and increased attendance. From the beginning of the trolley era, riding the streetcar to the Fair has been a big part of the experience. Pittsburgh Railways Company (PRC) ran service to Arden, a simple two minute walk from the Fair. Trolley service to the Fair ran from 1911 when the Fair moved to its current location until the interurban service from Pittsburgh to Washington ended in August of 1953. By then, the trolley era had been in a steep decline. As soon as February of the following year, the founders of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum had purchased a portion of the abandoned PRC track. Both the Museum and the Fair have grown and changed over time, but the tradition of riding the trolley to the Fair has somehow managed to survive.

The trolley ride adds some play value to the fair visit.  Alas, this weekend's destination, the Winnebago County Fair in Pecatonica, Illinois, no longer has rail service.

The gravel path is the former Galena and Chicago Union, later Chicago and North Western, that got as close to Galena as Freeport.  If the fair was established early enough, the Rockford and Interurban would also have transited the grounds here.  Alas, it's only motor cars these days, although perhaps some locals can ride in on a horse.

There are still a few weeks of summer.  Find yourself a county fair, or a preservation railway, and go to it.  Oktoberfest season is also under way.

A RESOURCE FOR THE ECONOMICS FACULTY.

There might be some readers still active in the classroom.  My advice to the teachers of the introductory course is to keep it simple.  "The life of an economics student is easier if he keeps in mind such things as substitution, arbitrage, opportunity cost, and indifference at the margin." There might be reason for a second course to tackle the subtleties, preferably in such a way as to retain one's basic reliance on incentives and decision making at the margin.

A resource called Economic Forces in the Classroom on the Price Theory substack includes elaborations on a variety of topics, classified by subject area and relevance to the first or second course, might be useful,dear colleagues.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

A Democrat is somebody for whom productive people never pay enough taxes.  Consider these stylized facts about tax incidence.  "The highest-earning 20% of taxpayers will earn 60% of the income this year, yet pay 76% of all federal taxes, including 93% of all income taxes. The much-maligned top 1% of earners will earn 19% of the income, yet finance 29% of all federal taxes, including 43% of all income taxes."  A juvenile temperament is also useful.  "That these professors and pundits think of themselves as scientific – and are widely regarded as being especially intelligent, thoughtful, and scientific – testifies to the strength of the cult of democratically rubber-stamped coercion."

The weekly roundup of pithy reinforcements of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE.

The following headline is a candidate for a Friday short take.  "New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell warns police shortage 'could mean there will be no Mardi Gras'."

Reimagine that.  "A surge in NOPD retirements and trouble recruiting new officers have resulted in a police staffing crisis. The NOPD now has the fewest commissioned officers in decades."

Soft on crime Democrats have made many big cities dangerous places to live for their own constituents.  Does it come as any surprise that their policies leave the tourists at risk?

THE PEOPLE WHO CAUSED THE PROBLEM WILL FIX THE PROBLEM. NO WORRIES.

The government causeth the problem, the government will fix it.

Based on projected water levels for 2023, the tier 2 shortage will force drought-ravaged Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico to draw less from the Colorado River, upon which 40 million people in seven states and Mexico rely. Arizona will face the biggest cut—592,000 acre-feet, or about one-fifth of the state's annual allocation, while an 8% reduction in Nevada is expected to have little impact in a state that recycles most of its indoor-use water and does not use its full allotment. Mexico's allotment [c.q.]

The move came after Colorado River Basin states failed to meet a federal deadline at the end of Monday to come up with a plan to achieve a 15% reduction in water use, an amount scientists say is needed to prevent water stored in dangerously depleted reservoirs from dropping even further.

Strictly speaking, a shortage always exists relative to a price, but to an order of people that refuse to think of treated water as a commodity, there will be no discussion of that excess demand at a zero price, only one of changing by politics the allotments that the Great White Father in Washington doles out (and that water rate paying residents along the Great Lakes subsidize.)

FOLLOW THE MONEY.

The Swamp takes care of its own.

While Liz Cheney lost among Wyoming voters, one contest where she emerged victorious was the money race against her Trump-endorsed opponent.

According to the most recent filings, Cheney raised over $15 million for her campaign versus $4.4 million for Harriet Hageman. The bigger bankroll didn’t help her much on Tuesday, however, with Hageman decisively winning by nearly 40 percentage points.

But Cheney responded to her widely-expected defeat with a quick pivot. She launched a new political group for herself aimed at a possible run for president and, flush with cash, the new group's website was up and accepting donations by Wednesday morning.

Barbara Comstock, a Cheney ally and GOP donor, told Yahoo Finance that the money from supporters like her would “definitely” keep flowing, adding she is “thrilled [Cheney] is going to continue to stay active” as a leader of the effort by anti-Trump Republicans to take on the former president.

Who is her intended audience?

THE LINES ARE FOR GETTING HANDSY.

That's borrowing from Gutfeld! regular Kat Timpf, who has recently explained amusement parks and movie theaters are for teenagers to put their hands on each other with no adults watching.

The adults, apparently, make imaginative use of ... the Ferris wheel?  "32-year-old man, woman arrested for having sex on amusement park ride."

Yes, seriously.  The Ferris Wheel in question is one of those large wheels with seating that looks a little like small hot tubs, and these riders apparently got the idea.

Police say several witnesses told them they saw a man and woman performing sexual acts, while on the Giant Wheel ride. They also told police they felt their cart shaking while the two were above them.

“The group said the couple knew they were being watched and started laughing and continued their behavior,” a police report read.

The department said a witness told police that she was very shaken up about what she saw, saying the incident was very traumatizing.

Police said the man and woman initially denied the allegations. The woman reportedly told officers she bent over to pick up a pack of cigarettes she had dropped while the man was helping her.

However, Sandusky police said the two later admitted they had sex on the ride. They were arrested and taken to the Erie County Jail.

Yes, that was at Cedar Point. A colleague from years past worked there and he did not object to my description of the lines as deliberately long for the teens to get acquainted!

If that witness found the incident "traumatizing" I wonder how she'd react at the monkey island at the zoo, or at some of the animal pens at the county fair.

At some county fairs, though, the only Ferris Wheel is your classic Jacksonville Iron, which does not have seats conducive to getting frisky.

FLORIDA MAN RAILWAY.

Your tax dollars at work.

Tracks used by the nation’s deadliest railroad will see added fencing to keep pedestrians away and safety improvements at crossings under a $25 million federal grant announced Monday.

Brightline and government officials announced the grant as the privately owned passenger line continues to be plagued by deaths along its tracks between Miami and West Palm Beach.

In the past two weeks, Brightline trains have killed three people, and 68 since the service began its first runs five years ago. That’s about one death for every 33,000 miles (53,000 kilometer) its trains travel, and is the worst fatality rate among the nation’s more than 800 railroads, according to an ongoing Associated Press analysis of Federal Railroad Administration data.

The grant, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity program, will cover safety features, including 33 miles (53 kilometers) of fencing at locations of frequent trespassing along with extensive crossing improvements at all 333 crossings along the corridor, which will eventually stretch from Miami to Orlando, Brightline President Patrick Goddard said.

It's not until the sixth paragraph that the report clarifies that "nation's deadliest railroad."

None of the deaths involving Brightline have been blamed on the railroad, its equipment or its crews. Law enforcement investigations showed most victims were either suicidal, intoxicated, mentally ill or had gone around barriers at an intersection in an attempt to beat the trains, which travel up to 79 mph (128 kph) through densely populated areas with stops in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.

There's a reason, dear reader, for the seemingly expensive elevated structures that accompany Chinese and Japanese bullet trains, and for the concrete supports marching across the San Joaquin valley.  An economics professor of my acquaintance used to provoke students by suggesting that if a society really placed an infinite value on human life, there would be no level crossings on school bus routes, as for a finite sum of money it would be possible to avoid any loss of a child in a school bus that got in the way of a train.

BREAKING OUT OF THE GRIM STRATEGY EQUILIBRIUM?

In a recent American Spectator commentary, Gary Anderson notes, "For the first time in the nation’s history, one political party is trying to use the law to prevent a potential presidential candidate from another party from running again. This is a very slippery slope. Biden is certainly no Caesar and Trump is no Pompey, but we are definitely headed in the wrong direction."  Mr Anderson seeks to blame the Democrats for that use of the law; perhaps it's more accurate to lay that blame off on Official Washington, with the squad-adjacent Democrats along for the ride.

It is in his continuation that the Grim Strategy arises.

I personally think Trump is a creep. I voted for him twice because I like most of his policy positions better than either of his opponents in the last two elections, and I will vote for him again in 2024 if he is running against any of the leftist loons that the Democrats will likely nominate. I hope I have better choices, but things do not look promising. However, one thing that would be good for the republic’s political health would be for the 2024 debate moderators to elicit a promise from all candidates not to prosecute their defeated opponents during the time that they are in office. The repetition of the “lock her up” chants was one of the more distasteful elements of the 2016 campaign. Yet, despite the rhetoric, Trump — to his credit — did not make a serious effort to prosecute Clinton. That has not been the case with the present administration and its party. Biden has accused Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin of using police-state tactics against his opponents. Somewhere in the Kremlin, Putin is probably giggling hysterically.

I sincerely hope that the civil war rhetoric cools down, but the current situation leaves many conservatives wondering this: “If they come after Trump, can they come after me?” Thinking Democrats should be asking the same question because what goes around has a tendency to come around.

It is already the case that Permanent Establishment types are coming after Trump-aligned Republicans.  That's the whole punish-Republicans-for-nominating-Trumpians-by-voting-Democrat, and Democrats might perceive that sentiment among more centrist Republican-leaning voters as strong enough that there will be no punishment for the Democrats pushing the margin of Manchin and Sinema (and anonymous others in the Senate) to get as much of the Squad agenda into law as is practicable.

I speculated about that in a different set of circumstances.

[Robby Soave's] call would be correct if the social norm was that nobody does this kind of thing.  But when the principle is honored only in the breach, and a long train of abuses and usurpations by the cancel culture of the left signifies a desire to subject anyone who disagrees to absolute despotism, that principle is no longer valid.  We are in a grim strategy situation, and it's clear to the culture warriors that offering the other cheek no longer elicits cooperation.  Restoring the old social norms of disagreeing without being disagreeable is going to be difficult.

Think about the situation this way, dear reader.  In Wisconsin, the incumbent Trumpian senator, Ron Johnson, is facing the squad-adjacent former lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes.  Are the Never Trumpers, whether with a big platform like Charlie Sykes, or the voters calling in to Milwaukee radio, really going to vote for the squad agenda simply to send the Trumpians a message?  Moreover, how easy might it be for what goes around to come around?  Centrist voter of any partisan affiliation: is it the January 6 unpleasantness that led to higher gas prices, to peanut butter and baby formula being missing from the stores?  Why not vote Republican until the Democrats stop nominating squad-adjacent candidates?  That works in my district in Illinois: after the redistricting, the squad-adjacent incumbent faces a conventional Republican.  Vote Republican.  It gets more interesting in the gubernatorial election, where the corona tyrant incumbent faces a Trumpian Republican.  The most effective way to stop the corona tyranny might be to vote the Republican in, although the breakdown in cooperation that follows will not be pretty.  So it always goes in grim strategy situations.

The Grim Strategy is apparently a blunt instrument for humans with long memories.  "Our findings suggest that in this framework even relatively simple pricing algorithms systematically learn to play sophisticated collusive strategies. The strategies mete out punishments that are proportional to the extent of the deviations and are finite in duration, with a gradual return to the pre-deviation prices."

At the moment, there are plenty of things Democrats have done that call for massive punishment.  Bear in mind, dear reader, that Grim Strategy outcomes are outcomes in which both the punisher and the punishee wind up in a worse place than they would be in either the repeated Nash or the cooperative outcome.  That's what a "tendency to come around" looks like.