FROM THE STREETCAR SUBURBS TO THE TRACT HOUSES TO THE CULS-DE-SAC.

Strong Towns contributor Daniel Herriges studies a series of old maps.

At Strong Towns, we’ve often drawn a sharp distinction between the “traditional” development pattern of cities around the world and the post-World War II “Suburban Experiment.” The traditional pattern is highly incremental and emergent: development is mostly small-scale and undertaken by many participants over time, and the resulting places are fine-grained and oriented toward people who walk. The suburban model, by contrast, consists of places built all at once to a finished state, using large amounts of up-front financial capital, and designed for mass, if not universal, motor vehicle use.

We often get accused of being ahistorical for insisting upon this distinction. That criticism has merit. Let’s be clear: I believe the “traditional” vs. “suburban” distinction is useful and meaningful. But we can’t use it to draw a firm dividing line between an imagined, pure, or organic past and a corrupted present. There was no single Rubicon, in 1945 or any other year. We have to try to understand the cities of the past as real, messy places, as their inhabitants might have understood them, if we want to learn the right lessons from them.

Mr Herriges previously remarked on the path-dependence of Kansas City on its streetcar lines. He now has more maps to work from.

By the 1880s, though, St. Paul’s population was exploding, and land speculators began carving up the city’s hinterlands at a rapid pace. They were aided in this by the new technology of electric streetcars (and often lobbied for the extension of those very streetcar lines). What unfolded was a pattern of developer-led suburbanization that is surprisingly modern in its basic outlines.

The streetcar suburbs of the 1880s through 1920s, though we no longer call them “suburbs,” comprise most of what is today within St. Paul’s boundaries, including the neighborhood where I grew up and that I saw pictured on my vintage map. They accommodated extremely rapid growth. St. Paul’s population quadrupled between 1880 and 1900, from about 40,000 to about 160,000. (Its present day population is about double that again: 311,527 in the 2020 census.)

There were lots of places in the U.S. where the poor were building shacks on the edge of town in the 1880s, but that wasn’t how St. Paul, or other large Midwestern cities, grew. Large-scale speculative developers were an integral part of our history, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. In fact, the names of the real-estate barons of the time are immortalized in many of St. Paul’s street names today.

As you follow a rough line between downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis, you pass a series of neighborhoods—even today—with “park” in their name: Union Park, Merriam Park, Desnoyer Park, St. Anthony Park. The description of how the “Parks” came to be is not at all unlike the origin of modern suburban subdivisions. They were master-planned and mass-marketed communities for the upper middle class. Their developers sold them with an appeal to values that are basically suburban: healthy air, peace and quiet, a pastoral refuge from the chaos of the city.

That "park" appellation was common in many cities; for purposes of today's essay whether those signalled segregated "sundown" neighborhoods is irrelevant.  Planned use developments have long been with us, as have rent-seekers, and when it became clear that the private automobile was a Marshallian improvement, the rent-seekers started to push for expressways, and to set land aside for shopping centers (what we understand today as a strip mall was a Big Deal seventy years ago) that's where the political action went, and the neighborhood structures changed accordingly.  That the technocrats of the zoning boards could work with the technocrats of the highway commission and the rest of the Urban Planning Conceit simply made selling the latest concepts easier.

A master developer would subdivide a neighborhood into individual streets and lots, and then separate builders handled homebuilding on those lots. The developer typically provided for a commercial center, and designated space for civic features such as schools, parks, and churches. Neighborhoods were largely built out over the course of a couple decades. Here’s the thing: this is still a basically accurate description of suburban development today, whether you’re in The Villages, Florida; McKinney, Texas; or Maple Grove, Minnesota.

Years before zoning became a standard feature of every city’s bylaws, these incipient suburbs used deed restrictions to impose a standardization and predictability that was lacking in the city’s earlier (1850–1880) phase of growth. We see here the first glimmers of a different way of understanding the city.

"Are you concerned about the kind of improvements that may be placed on the lot adjoining your home?" asked a 1909 advertisement for lots in the Roblyn Park subdivision, in which “no duplex, double house, store, flat or tenement house was allowed.” In other streetcar suburbs, restrictive covenants established a minimum sale price for any house that could be built.

The streetcar suburbs are the prototype not only of the economic entity that is a commuter suburb, but of the ideology that would come to characterize American suburbia. This ideology would later be articulated by real-estate titans such as J.C. Nichols of Kansas City, whose 1948 speech, “Planning For Permanence,” to the National Association of Realtors is as close to a manifesto for the Suburban Experiment as I’ve ever seen. Nichols sought to do away with what he perceived as the senseless waste wrought by the incremental redevelopment and evolution of cities. Instead, he proposed that places be carefully and scientifically planned, every detail accounted for from the placement of parks and shopping centers to the size of homes—and then, said Nichols, they should remain unchanging.

“We are the men to lead the attack” on incremental city-building, Nichols told the assembled real-estate professionals. This attitude did not begin with him. Its seeds lie far earlier, carried on the winds of the broader modernist transformation of society, and the ascendant 20th-century cultural belief that there was nothing organic that could not be perfected with scientific management.

Yes, High Modern Authoritarianism was the ruling ideology, from the founding of the United Nations up until at least Model Cities and the War on Poverty, and it lives on with those national house building companies and their Fordist building techniques (identical from behind, three or four front profiles) and sometimes even slicing up the subdivision by price (do you put the priciest ones out front or inside?)  Mr Herriges suggests the streetcar suburbs have more "charm" these days because a century ago, neither the Fordist Impulse nor the Technocratic Imperative yet operated on a national scale.

Neighborhoods contain more diversity of housing sizes, styles, and price points, and don’t suffer from the problem typical to blocks of identical homes, in which they all physically deteriorate at the same time. Connectedness to the street grid reinforces the value of location: while the marketing brochure for early suburbia might have emphasized pastoral serenity, these places worked because they were accessible to more established neighborhoods and the amenities and businesses to be found there.

In a modern gated or otherwise walled-off community, on the other hand, you’re selling exclusivity and isolation, not connectedness. And this means that each new home nearby only degrades the value of that sales pitch, instead of enhancing it. It’s a perfect recipe for NIMBYism and stasis.

Truly small-scale developers and individuals could participate in the growth of the streetcar city, in a way that they can’t today. The bar of entry was lower. You could buy a single lot and custom-build your house, and you could probably even put up a small apartment building, have an ADU in the back or a retail storefront downstairs. Zoning had yet to shut down those options in these St. Paul neighborhoods, though we were already seeing the beginnings of the desire for homogeneity and control as a marketing approach.

That sounds like the development plan of Milwaukee's Polonia, which we will be returning to in a few days.  I have to be contrarian, though, in noting that residents along the gridded streets that are not section roads, traffic taming measures including closing some intersections to create impromptu culs-de-sac are not unknown.  Yes, the sidewalks remain in place, and kids don't have to go the great way 'round to visit a neighbor or play in the local park.

There was emergence in St. Paul's urban form; and I can't help but wonder whether I should have a gloomy moment.  "I wonder if we're not one looted convenience store away from some jurisdictions again becoming sundown towns."

That's on Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg's mind, and moreso on some of his commenters.  "My faith in the social cohesion of left-wing cities is thinner than the social cohesion of left-wing cities – but hope sprang eternal, and until 2020 history obliged."  Thus do the dealers in Executive Boxes and sport-utes continue to make their money.

MAYBE FOCUS ON EDUCATION?

In Southeastern Wisconsin, Hartland's Arrowhead High is notorious as a sports factory.

This high school hit the booster club and the taxpayers up for a quarter of a million dollars to upgrade their athletics facilities (still not at the extravagant level of Texas, but as my dad would put it, "why compare yourself to the worst?") despite requiring only mathematics through advanced algebra for graduation, and not having a planetarium, nor offering astronomy nor organic chemistry for advanced placement seniors.

The people who put up the money doubtless think it well-spent, as in the 2015-2016 school year Arrowhead is the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's sports school of the year, for the fifteenth straight year.

Their basketball boys knocked Milwaukee Hamilton out of the state tournament earlier this year.

EXPAND YOUR APPEAL.

The motor carriers are back before Congress, asking for permission to run heavier trucks.  Railway Age editor William C. Vantuono offers the predictable special pleading.

Yes, the ages-old truck size and weight battle has resurfaced, and this industry needs to practice vigilance and make sure that these potential mayhem machines—which could weight roughly 42 tons heavier than the average family-hauling SUV—don’t start navigating our crumbling road infrastructure. It’s time to pull out our spike mauls and try to beat such legislation back into the ground, where it will lie dormant until, like 17-year cicadas, will re-hatch, emerging with earsplitting noise—and the battle begins anew.

It's the same old fight, with the same special pleading.  "Fine, let's make sure the heavier trucks bear the full cost of the road-strengthening programs, as well as the increased congestion costs those elephants will impose on everyone behind them.  We don't want to become China, with days-long traffic jams."

The railroads' commercial interest in this fight are clear and predictable.

Bigger trucks tearing up highways and bridges? We all know who’s going to pay for that: us, the taxpayers.

“The fundamental argument bigger-truck supporters make that I think the rail industry is in a really good place to refute is, ‘If you let us have heavier trucks, we can move fewer trucks,’” Baker points out. “Well, that would be true—in a vacuum. If you can move 800,000 pounds of cargo in 10 trucks right now, and you allow the trucks be 91,000 pounds instead of 80,000 pounds, then you can move that same stuff in nine trucks. That’s obviously true—in a vacuum. In the real world, it shifts the economics of truck vs. rail. Now you have all this marginal freight that is going to choose truck over rail, so you actually end up with probably 11 trucks, not 10, and they’re heavier. The public, the taxpayers, lose, with more trucks on the highway, not to mention more highway deaths. There were 5,800 deaths related to large trucks on the highways last year. If trucks are heavier and longer, it’s obvious that there will be more.”

Isn't it time for the railroads to consider coalition building with other constituencies that don't like the effects of those mayhem machines.  Consider a recent bill making its way through the Illinois Legislature.

Currently, local communities are required to build intersections that will accommodate the turning of a 65-foot truck, which means there’s no space left for design features that will make an intersection safer for people walking and biking.

SB2278 will address this shortcoming in Illinois law by allowing cities and towns to protect their residents by building safer intersections.

It's not quite my preferred policy, which is special movement permits for any trailer longer than thirty feet.  It's a step in that direction, though, and it's one that even the Teamsters might go along with.  A shortage of truck drivers is a statement about prevailing levels of pay and working conditions.  I can't help but suspect that having to thread one of those 53 foot trailers through a city, where "accommodate the turning" often means "complying with the minimum standard" and the driver has to take risks (appealing to the law of gross tonnage?) to shoulder out into traffic and execute a turn, often occupying the entire intersection in the maneuver, and even then running up on the curb, is nerve wracking even to the most experienced, or jaded, over the road trucker.

Perhaps there's an opportunity for the railroads to appeal to the Teamsters, who have to jockey those ever heavier rigs, and the municipalities, who in the absence of another porkulus, will be on the hook for fixing those battered roads, to participate in opposing those increased weight limits.

That heavily-freighted interstate highways, such as 41 in paper mill country in Wisconsin or any interstate in the Indianapolis area, feature billboards with come-ons from attorneys referring to "hurt in a truck accident" suggests that a broadened appeal will work.

LONG AFTER HORSES BECAME ANACHRONISMS, THE AUTOMOBILE WAS STILL A MARSHALLIAN IMPROVEMENT.

A year or so ago, I thought I'd take a ride.  "I suspect, though, that the horseless carriage offered a more favorable tradeoff of mobility against injury and death than personal transportation with a horse did."

Now comes Spiked's Brendan O'Neill, with a more pungent observation.  "The unique freedom of car-driving is being pummelled by bourgeois anti-modernists."

Never mind that the motorcar, in Thatcher- era Britain, still offered that favorable tradeoff.

Back in the early Eighties, two things revolutionised my mum’s life. The first was the appearance, nearby, of a vast supermarket. A gleaming metal-and-glass citadel of cheap, fresh produce. Imagine – bread, milk, fish, meat, fruit, veg and treats all under one roof. It was the stuff of a housewife’s dreams. The second was her first car. The rush of liberty she got from her wheezing, second-hand Ford Cortina is likely unimaginable to the 21st-century mind. Everyone has a car now, if not two. We take for granted being able to zoom everywhere, anytime, rain or shine. It was different then. The motorcar was no ordinary convenience – it was the great liberator from slog.

It's a concatenation of Marshallian improvements he's noting; the motor car, yes, as well as the one-stop supermarket with a car park and a freezer aisle. No more schlepping the day's comestibles home from the market stalls on the high street.

It is hard to describe to people who have grown up in the era of Amazon, Deliveroo and near-universal car ownership just how much time women would spend traipsing to shops. The number of woman-hours lost to filling the larder – yes, it was mainly woman-hours back then – was extraordinary. I remember it (kids were always in tow, for where else would we be?): first to the fishmonger, then the butcher’s, then the greengrocer’s, then the bakers, lugging your acquisitions in bulging bags as you went. Saturdays were almost entirely given over to shopping, on the high street a couple of miles away. But then came the supermarket, and the Cortina, and everything changed, utterly. My mother gained a whole new day of the week. She finally had Saturday.

Yes, I remember those sorts of Saturdays as a kid, even though we had a car, it was one car for the family, and it might have been to the shoe store for school shoes, and the meat market, and a few other places. Milwaukee was more spread out than most British cities, and even then ridership on the trackless trolleys that served the various shopping streets was declining.

His focus is primarily on the class snobbery of today's metrofexuals.

In the warped narrative of the motorphobes, car-owners are part of ‘the privileged’. This is nonsense. It is not prohibitively expensive to own a car in the 2020s. No, the true ‘privileged’ in this clash are the pyjama classes, the upper-middle-class movers and shakers who can work from their plush apartments and who are so time-rich that they’ll happily do what people like my mother hated doing: skip from small shop to small shop, buying artisan loaves here, Duchy sausages there. Nothing better speaks to class privilege these days than hatred for the car and love for the ‘15-minute city’. It is a kind of bourgeois mimicry of the plain lives people led in the era before cheap food and mass car ownership. Only with the risks and pressures removed. The 15-minute-city elites know that if they don’t make it to the trendy butcher’s on time, they can always call on some put-upon member of the precariat to deliver them a £20 dirty burger for dinner. Believe me, it wasn’t like that in the Eighties.

His conclusion? "Every assault on the car should be understood as an assault on our autonomy, and should be resisted as such."  There's some truth to that, and yet, treating the roads and parking spaces as productive assets and pricing them accordingly still makes both political and economic sense.

IS IT TIME TO SEPARATE SCHOOL AND STATE?

Compare and contrast.

First up, Common Dreams contributor Jon Queally files a report from Glendale, California.

Far-right fascist groups and homophobic parents instigated violent clashes outside a local school committee meeting in the town of Glendale, California on Tuesday evening which resulted in defenders of the district recognizing June as Pride Month being punched, kicked, pepper-sprayed, and thrown about as police failed to maintain a peaceful situation.

While the Glendale Unified School District board met inside to hear from community members and parents prior to a vote, the overflow crowd that gathered became increasingly confrontational.

Here's Megan Fox from Pajamas Media, reporting on the same noisy but mostly peaceful protest.

In California, the Glendale Unified School District faced criticism over declaring the month of June “Pride Month,” to be celebrated in schools all the way down to the elementary level. Parents of the largely Armenian community weren’t happy about it and showed up to the school board meeting in force. Clashes with helmet-wearing Antifa erupted outside the meeting, where arrests were made.

That story reports on a similar protest from Montgomery County, Maryland.

In Montgomery County, Md., the Muslim community showed up in force to protest the opt-out policy adopted by the school district. Every student is now required to learn the LGBTQ propaganda and will not be allowed to opt-out.

Asra Nomani wrote on Twitter, “Montgomery County Public Schools recently refused to allow parents to opt out of indoctrination that relates to issues of sexuality and gender. As a Muslim feminist, I don’t agree with many of the conservative interpretations of my Muslim community, but I do believe and they believe in the integral right of parents to parent. During the Obama administration, Muslim groups aligned with far-left interest groups that actually contradicted the socially conservative beliefs of many Muslims. This was not going to sustain itself, I knew.

Is it schooling, or is it a cult belief, and if so, whose cult belief? Ms Fox offers one perspective.

Parents of faith need to band together now and force school districts to stop indoctrinating our kids with false doctrines and cult beliefs. Gender and queer theory is based on nothing but faith and should be classified as a religion. In fact, at the Montgomery County protest, a small group of pro-LGBTQ counter-protesters from the Unitarian church stood with a sign and a member of their clergy. It appears that their beliefs are supported by religion; why should that be taught in public schools if Catholicism, Islam, or any other religion is not?

Mr Queally, another.

The Republican Party and other far-right political actors have increasingly targeted local public schools in their effort to gin up opposition to trans youth and promote a culture war that seeks to equate common-sense love and acceptance of LGTBQ+ children and adults with some kind of leftist "indoctrination" that should be opposed.

Lost amid the noise, any discussion of whatever reading, mathematical, or social studies standards the rainbow curriculum maintains.  I suppose a columnist can refer to parents by some sort of pejorative; that's not recommended for school board members, who, in many districts, can be turfed out.

THE FOURTH TURNING IS EMERGENT.

Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen suggests that the values regime of the Great Power Saeculum is crumbling.

Even those relatively inattentive to political matters now perceive the rise of a distinctive ruling class that today dominates the institutions of the West. Members of this ruling class are selected for their support and defense of the liberal order. Their main qualifying commitment is to the dismantling of a bounded world. In the economic domain, the liberal ruling class (right and left, Bushes and Clintons, Reagan and Obama) have dismantled national and politically constrained markets in favor of global markets, undoing formerly cherished protections for domestic workers in favor of the emancipation of globalized capital that seeks to extract and maximize “value” in every niche of the world. In order to compete in a ruthless marketplace, hard-won worker benefits—often achieved through the sacrifice of generations of labor unionists—have been undone. The priority of maximizing shareholder value and the advantages of the financial class have trumped considerations of basic decent conditions for the working class. In return for wage precarity, benefit reduction, the elimination of leisure, and general economic insecurity, the ordinary man and woman are promised a nirvana of consumer choice. The ethos of the insatiable consumptive has replaced the ideal of the proud producer.

The ruling class also governs over the unbinding of the social domain. In the name of a condition of equal independence, the basic norm of marriage between a man and a woman—the only union that can produce children and, thus, the future of humanity—has been “de-centered.” Fewer people than ever throughout the West marry or reproduce, imbibing the consumerist ethos of remaining commitment-free. Every June, we enter a month of celebration of forms of sexual union that are biologically barren—yet must be celebrated precisely because they are transgressive and unbounded.

That portrait of the gerontocracy, er, Ruling Class, has its detractors.  Professor Deneen's essay focuses on the "do as I say, not as I do" behavior of the ruling class, if in an odd way.

Meanwhile, members of the ruling class live by values not unlike those of the 1950s. As Charles Murray empirically demonstrated in his important 2011 study, Coming Apart, members of the ruling class trumpet the emancipatory philosophy of liberalism even as they themselves live as conservatives. They marry and tend to stay married, and have at least one or two children who benefit from massive investment of familial time and funds. They divorce less, raise their children to adhere to codes of hard work and self-discipline, and seek to avoid various addictions, such as alcohol, drugs, social media, and pornography. With the benefits of educations that allow them to navigate the unbounded economic market, many often not only successfully negotiate those challenges, but even flourish. They congregate in some of the nicest towns and cities in the nation, from dynamic cities to charming downtowns on the coasts.

Murray condemned this class for practicing what it does not preach. While this charge is certainly true, the all-too-common accusation of hypocrisy is the redoubt of those who disapprove of current conditions but who nevertheless wish to leave the basic structures of unboundedness in place. As a libertarian, Murray believes that most people can be simply encouraged to make the good private choices to lead good private lives. This stance studiously avoids considering the necessary structures of boundedness that give preference and encouragement to good collective choices that appear to be personal—ones that are never merely private. What claims about encouraging the flourishing of “civil society” and “associations” leave out—as admirable and necessary as those conditions are—are the ways that the consequences of unboundedness make it nearly impossible structurally for those outside the ruling class to fulfill what most recognize as flourishing human lives. One of the main features, and even designs, of liberalism is to disassemble what might be described as public social utilities, and in their place, to privatize all such social and political “utilities” for the benefit of the ruling class.

He's not referring to classical liberalism, or even to the sort of Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson technocratic liberalism that didn't deconstruct bourgeois norms simply because it felt good to do so.

The essay involves excerpts from a longer book, and I'm not sure what to make of Professor Deneen's argument, let alone the policy implications he draws.  I submit, though, that in the emergence of a new values regime, reality, which is socially conservative, will have a say.

The invention of liberalism was a wager that rapid change could always outstrip popular discontents. Each disruption would be followed upon by a yet newer one, keeping a restive demos in a constant state of superficial titillation even as it was forced to exert most of its energies in lagging efforts to adjust, while providing an atmosphere particularly conducive for a small progressive ruling class. That wager is now looking like a bad bet, with a result of deeply broken political, social, and economic arrangements. Each liberal party today continues to advance the notion that yet more disruptive change will bring about the cure of present discontents. The popular uprising has been directed against the liberationist agenda of both the liberal parties, demanding simultaneously an end to unbounded economics and an unbounded social domain. The many are demanding a better few—in significant part, to rule for the improvement of the many.

America is undergoing regime change. While the phrase is often used to invoke violent overturning of an existing ruling class, more accurately it refers to a fundamental change in the core values of a social and political order. The current liberal ruling class won’t give up its privileges without a fight, but lest that fight take the course feared by the classical thinkers—civil war or tyranny, or both in rapid oscillation—it would be better to acknowledge that the liberal wager has failed, and a post-liberal age must now emerge.

I don't know, maybe there still is value in the old mediating institutions, such as the church, the lodge, or the neighborhood tavern.

REQUIEM FOR THE SELF-SERVICE GENERAL STORE.

For the business model to work, it requires a law-abiding population.  "Self-service shopping only works as long as the shoppers respect their side of the bargain, which is to settle up."  The return of the old-style general store, with the stock clerk filling your order from behind the counter, began gradually, with fungible items such as razor blades or items in short supply such as baby formula being locked up with the crown jewels, er, Crown Royal, but in Chicago, where the law is an arbitrary social construction, now it's easier to track what isn't locked up.  "In what was once a typical Walgreens, there are now just two short aisles of so-called “essentials” where “customers may shop for themselves.” If you want anything else—a bottle of booze, a deodorant brand deemed “non-essential”—you’ll need to order it at a kiosk and pick it up at the counter."  I suppose we should be grateful the self-service doesn't operate the way a Communist store does, where the customer pays first, gets a voucher for the items, then claims the items either off the shelves or receives them from the comrade behind the counter.  On the other hand, the comrade totting up the sale on an abacus (yes, as common in Soviet Union as in Chinese friendship shop) probably did a better job than the Walgreen kiosk.

After browsing both aisles of touchable merchandise, our intrepid reporter decided to buy an ice-cold Coca-Cola, priced at $1.89 or two for $3.

To start the check-out experience, an employee used their name tag to bring one of the self-serve stations to life.

It promptly charged our reporter $2.89 for the $1.89 soda. Plus tax, of course.

The error was quickly remedied with the help of both “shop for yourself” attendants.

Propped on the sidewalk at the corner of State and Roosevelt, a sandwich board boasts that the company has “built a better Walgreens.”

You can judge that for yourself between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. daily.

A reader who lives near the Walgreens contacted the company after it shuttered for remodeling, wondering if the store had closed permanently. In mid-May, that reader sent us a copy of the response they said they received.

The response said the store was “undergoing a remodeling effort for Walgreens to test new concepts, technologies and practices aimed at bringing the community a greater convenience and safety for our customers, patients and team members.”

That sort of "better experience" spin is at least as shameless as old school Communist propaganda, dear reader.  As is the Official Response from Walgreens, "[A] Walgreens spokesperson told CWBChicago that she is the only person authorized to speak about the new store and she did not create the letter that our reader received. On Friday, the spokesperson said the letter 'was not sent from Walgreens to a customer.'"  Yeah, right.  A week after that CWB column, Fox 32's Greg Norman filed a report.

"We are testing a new experience at this store with new concepts, technologies, and practices to enhance the experiences of our customers and team members," a Walgreens spokesperson told Fox Business in a statement. "It continues to offer retail products and pharmacy services, just with a new look and feel that focuses on shopping digitally for convenience.

"Inside the store, customers will find an area where they can pick-up orders, digital kiosks for placing an order, as well as an area to shop for essential items," the spokesperson added.

The requiem for the self-service general store is in the report.

Block Club Chicago reports that a sign instructs shoppers to "place your order and relax" while staff at the store pull requested items off shelves kept away from the public.

"Let us do the shopping," the sign reportedly reads.

The redesign comes after Walgreens Boots Alliance told analysts at the start of this year that the drugstore chain may have overblown concerns of retail theft in 2022 and is pulling back on private security guards.

I wonder if any of the general store proprietors losing sales to A&P and the other self-service groceries a century ago ever tried that "Place your order and relax" slogan.

MANAGING A WORKSHOP IS A USEFUL SKILL.

Inside Higher Ed offers useful advice, for once, from Toni Whited.

The academic seminar culture in the economics and finance field is lively, as it most likely is in other disciplines. The norm is that audience members can raise their hands to ask questions at any point in the seminar. This culture has the advantage of encouraging discussion. When the audience engages with the presenter in real time, important issues can be brought up and resolved in ways that cannot be accomplished with a question-and-answer session relegated to the end of a presentation.

Unfortunately, however, this culture also encourages audience members to ask irrelevant questions, interrupt the speaker prematurely and raise issues designed to shame or badger the speaker, show off, or hijack the presentation.

Economics might be more notorious than most disciplines, and at the departments you might have heard of, workshops might be really unruly, particularly if the old bulls lock horns.

"If I'm going to Harvard, I know I'm going to have twice the overheads because no one interrupts me," says Tomas Philipson, 33, an associate professor of economics at the U. of C. "I come here, I put up the first slide and there's five minutes of discussion. I use half the overheads I would use at another place.

"It can be very rough in those seminars. People tell you: 'This is stupid; why are you doing this?' You get that in your face."

Sometimes, the way to proceed is to pick the fight.

U. of C. economists maintain that the gravest insult at a U. of C. seminar is for the assembled academics to listen and not react; this is a deadly sign the work being presented has not stirred their competitive juices or is too easy a target for their deductive firepower. But those who have been subjected to U. of C. grillings do not always see it as a compliment.

One visiting professor-"a very senior guy whom we like," [finance professor Steven] Kaplan says-was deluged by questions shortly into his presentation. "The next 15 minutes, the guy does not put a transparency up," Kaplan says. Finally, a senior U. of C. economist halted the slaughter.

"Enough with this foreplay," he said. "Let's see some results."

"Sure felt like a lot more than foreplay," the visiting professor responded.

The advice column, though, is for the beginning professor. "First, avoid broad generalizations at the very beginning of the talk." Indeed, that's wasting time. You're presenting a Minimal Publishable Unit. Get to the heart of the matter.

[I]f you start with a generalization, you might touch on somebody else’s expertise. In that case, you are playing in their territory, not your territory, and you are more likely to be disrupted by questions you do not understand.

Second, to avoid this type of interruption, begin with your specific research question, which ensures that the audience will focus on your work rather than on tangential topics. That way, you have immediately brought your audience into your area of expertise, where it will be harder for somebody to trip you up, intentionally or unintentionally. Ultimately, by definition, you know more about your paper than anybody else.

Third, keep the introduction of your talk concise—ideally within five slides. Present your research question, methods and findings first. At this point, you can finally discuss their broader significance. By organizing the introduction elements along these lines, you are more likely to make your audience see the point of the broader implications, so they will be less likely to draw on tangential topics for their questions.

If you're able to limit your entire deck to ten or fifteen slides, you're doing even better. And trim, or ditch, the literature review. "Rather than describing the papers in detail, emphasize how your research builds upon and extends their findings." A presentation that devotes half or more of the allotted time to motivating the topic and going through the previous research never gets to present whatever contribution the presenter is hoping to make. And if the old bulls are peacocking, it's better that they peacock over the premises of your work, or the conclusions you draw.

Get to the conclusions quickly.

Sixth, create effective title slides. Ensure that your titles clearly communicate the main takeaway from each slide. The title is the only part of the slide that will stick in many people’s heads, so make it more than “Results” or “Model.” Ideally, each title should be a complete sentence. This strategy is particularly important for slides with tables or plots. By using topic sentences as titles, you’ll make it easier for your audience to remember the key points of your particular table or figure.

I'd also note: eschew tables. I know that's hard when regression results and descriptive statistics are involved, but unless there's some anomaly in the mean data or several coefficient estimates worthy of discussion, a slide showing an entire table of means or results will put your audience, particularly your older audience members wearing bifocals, in mind of an eye exam.

Overloading slides with text can be counterproductive, as people cannot read and listen simultaneously. Instead, focus on delivering your key points verbally and providing visual support that is easy to digest. Ideally, bullet points should be no more than one line long. When composing slides, it is useful to have a first draft. Then remove approximately three-quarters of the text from that initial draft, leaving only the most crucial information.

Yes, or post points that include only key words. The audience doesn't have to read your slide silently while you read them aloud. But if you flesh out the key words with elaboration, you're keeping their minds active.

OUR SONS, PRIDE OF OUR NATION

This day have set upon a mighty endeavor.

Some will never return.

To set free a suffering humanity.

In Normandie, they understand.

And they remember.

Faith in each other, and faith in our united crusade.  So mote it be.

MY SIDE OF THE SIXTIES.

John Andrew's The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics is part of an academic series called Perspectives on the Sixties, and that series and this book might be unusual in that it's not part of the usual Celebration of the Counterculture that one often sees among academic writers, particularly those holding so-called progressive views, nor is it easily classified as Internal Conservative Contemplation, another line of writing that has featured in these book reviews.

Indeed, the easiest way to introduce Book Review N^o. 5 for 2023 is that I didn't engage much with this book at all, judging by the lack of marginal notes or page references in the flyleaf.  Perhaps a 1997 book that I finally got around to reading in the past few years didn't have much effect, not with Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan giving way to Donald Trump, or John Kennedy (who used the taxman to investigate his political adversaries) giving way to Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama.  Or, perhaps, because the story covered the years from the Eisenhower regency to the defeat of Barry Goldwater, it's stuff that I at best remembered dimly.

SQUANDERING THE VICTORY DIVIDEND?

That's a regular theme of mine.  For D-Day, consider William Astore's history lesson.  It covers similar ground.

I found myself seeking instead some antidote to the mainstream media’s celebrations of American exceptionalism and the exaggerated version of victory culture that went with it (long after victory itself was in short supply). I started writing against the empire and its disastrous wars and found likeminded people at TomDispatch — former imperial operatives turned incisive critics like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, along with sharp-eyed journalist Nick Turse and, of course, the irreplaceable Tom Engelhardt, the founder of those “tomgrams” meant to alert America and the world to the dangerous folly of repeated U.S. global military interventions.

But this isn’t a plug for TomDispatch. It’s a plug for freeing your mind as much as possible from the thoroughly militarized matrix that pervades America. That matrix drives imperialism, waste, war, and global instability to the point where, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear Armageddon could imaginably approach that of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. As wars — proxy or otherwise — continue, America’s global network of 750-odd military bases never seems to decline.

"American exceptionalism," properly understood, is a quarter millennium of self-governance, and it's resilient enough to put, successively, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden in the presidency and yet we persevere, and the humble mac and cheese has become five cheese penne.

It's the technocrats of the Permanent Foreign Policy Establishment who are getting it wrong.

Known as “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, America has now simply become an arsenal, with a military-industrial-congressional complex intent on forging and feeding wars rather than seeking to starve and stop them. The result: a precipitous decline in the country’s standing globally, while at home Americans pay a steep price of accelerating violence (2023 will easily set a record for mass shootings) and “carnage” (Donald Trump’s word) in a once proud but now much-bloodied “homeland.”

The second sentence incorporates a non-sequitur: it's probably the assault on bourgeois norms that leads to the carnage, but both bourgeois norms and self-governance are emergent phenomena, and Technocratic Overreach in the form of Nation Building is going to turn out about as well as Technocratic Overreach in the form of Prohibition or Urban Renewal or Ending Poverty did.  Mr Astore is correct, though, about learning the wrong lessons from victory.  There is nothing pretty about winning a war.

There was, in fact, only one country, one empire, that truly “won” World War II: the United States, which had been the least touched (Pearl Harbor aside) by war and all its horrors. That seemingly never-ending European civil war from 1914 to 1945, along with Japan’s immolation and China’s implosion, left the U.S. virtually unchallenged globally. America emerged from those wars as a superpower precisely because its government had astutely backed the winning side twice, tipping the scales in the process, while paying a relatively low price in blood and treasure compared to allies like the Soviet Union, France, and Britain.

History’s lesson for America’s leaders should have been all too clear: when you wage war long, especially when you devote significant parts of your resources — financial, material, and especially personal — to it, you wage it wrong. Not for nothing is war depicted in the Bible as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. France had lost its empire in World War II; it just took later military catastrophes in Algeria and Indochina to make it obvious. That was similarly true of Britain’s humiliations in India, Egypt, and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union, which had lost much of its imperial vigor in that war, would take decades of slow rot and overstretch in places like Afghanistan to implode.

Meanwhile, the United States hummed along, denying it was an empire at all, even as it adopted so many of the trappings of one. In fact, in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s leaders would declare America the exceptional “superpower,” a new and far more enlightened Rome and “the indispensable nation” on planet Earth.

It's always when Our Intellectual Betters start playing the "we're more enlightened" gambit that it's time to worry.  I mean, the crew that took down the World Trade Center didn't resent our wealth, they resented our presence in their part of the world, they might have resented our freedom, and they probably would have resented five cheese penne.  Which I found, by the way, at a Kwik Trip, not at some upscale urban hangout.

MUSEUM DISPLAYS DON'T HAVE TO BE BORING DUST-CATCHERS.

The curators of Oxford University's natural history museum never got the memo.

I suppose, if you're curators of Charles Darwin's original records, you have to keep the same sort of display cases Sir Charles would have been familiar with.  Or perhaps, you inject a little humour into those glass cases.

I got spoiled as a kid, visiting Milwaukee's public museum, which, even when it shared space with the Central Library, showed off the animals in their natural habitat.

Michael Sears photograph retrieved from Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

That diorama now rates a glass case, because the diorama itself is a museum piece.

Announcing plans for one of the galleries in the new Milwaukee Public Museum, officials noted a key current exhibit will make the move to the new building: "Carl Akeley's famous Muskrats diorama, the first 'Milwaukee-style' exhibit which set the standard for natural museum histories around the world."

When the museum moved from shared quarters with the Central Library, an Indian elephant from the itinerant circus that simply stood on a pedestal by a stairwell (upstairs from the mummy cases) became part of one of the dioramas, being guided by a youngster in the Indian village.  The article notes that Milwaukee's curators were early creators of walk-through habitat dioramas.  It's all in the Milwaukee tradition.

Generally, Milwaukee-style exhibits are considered to be the immersive dioramas that allow visitors to get a sense of what life was like in the environment that is being depicted.

Carl Akeley, widely considered to be "the father of modern taxidermy," was key in the development of the style. He worked at the Milwaukee Public Museum from 1886 to 1892. While there, he created the Muskrat Group exhibit, a diorama behind glass that depicts lifelike muskrats in a true-to-life natural setting, doing the things they would be doing in the wild — standing at attention looking for predators, snuggled up asleep in their den and swimming in the water.

And not checking a pocket watch or engaging the Dormouse in conversation.

The exhibit was considered revolutionary because, before the development of habitat dioramas, the more typical way to display taxidermy was having it lined up in a display case, with less care taken to make the animals look alive and little attention paid to how they would behave in their natural habitats.

Akeley developed a taxidermy style that also contributed to the realism of his exhibits by using the animals' skeletons to derive precise measurements and create life-like sculptures.

The concept has several ancestors.

By the late 1800s, habitat dioramas were catching on in natural history museums, but Akeley's muskrat diorama is credited by many as being the first complete habitat diorama. Because he developed it for the Milwaukee Public Museum, the exhibit style is referred to by some as Milwaukee-style, although others simply call the exhibits habitat dioramas.

Subsequent apprentices continued the work in Milwaukee, while the creator went on to other assignments.

Although there is some dispute as to whether Akeley's exhibit really was the first habitat diorama, there's no question that he popularized the style in the United States. Akeley would go on to create habitat dioramas at Chicago's Field Museum and New York's American Museum of Natural History, where the museum's hall of African mammals is named after him.

Milwaukee's museum will be moving to newer, smaller quarters, and a number of the habitat dioramas from the current museum will be installed, perhaps (in the manner of that circus elephant) in modified habitats.

WILL THOMAS MALTHUS HAVE THE LAST LAUGH?

In "We Need to Abandon Industrial Farming," Common Dreams contributor Simon Whalley raises that possibility.

Our world is being propelled into a techno tyranny where a small band of billionaires owns our information, our water, our energy, and increasingly—our food. The billionaire doing more than most to shape the future of what we eat is Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Not content with being the largest private farmland owner in the U.S., Gates is hell-bent on creating a new green revolution for Africa. Just like the last green revolution in the 1960s, Gates aims to end world hunger by supercharging industrial farming through planting hectare after hectare of "magic seeds" in order to resist bugs and adapt to the climate crisis.

Anyone familiar with the original green revolution in the 1960s may be feeling a tingling sense of déjà vu. Back in 1960, approximately 37% of people living in developing countries were undernourished. Fast forward to 2019 and the number had fallen to 8.9%. This is an achievement that rightly won Norman Borlaug a Nobel Peace Prize. Borlaug—the father of the green revolution—spent his life working to reduce global hunger, and he can hold his head high for a mission accomplished. Unfortunately for Borlaug and the rest of humanity, his method for reducing world hunger was to create genetically modified monocrops which were reliant on massive amounts of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and water. This led to the consolidation of farms with the wealthier farmers able to afford the necessary inputs. Those who could not, lost out.

There are market tests, aren't there? The original strains of DeKalb high yield corn sold under the banner of "mortage lifter," didn't they?  The greater dangers to those genetically modified monocrops come from the possibility of a contagion going through all the corn fields; and the nature of that genetic modification renders the hybrid seed sterile, thus there is work for youngsters detasseling corn in order that the proper more natural strains provide the pollen to other natural strains to produce the next year's supply of seed corn.  No more laying up some of your harvest for seed the way our ancestors did.

THIS IS WHAT YOU VOTED FOR.

There was another mostly peaceful weekend in Chicago.  "Another 52 shot, 10 murdered in Chicago this weekend."  The Taylor Swift concerts at Soldier Field featured a lot of traffic congestion, but the bubble around her fans held.

Milwaukee had its weekend troubles as well.  "Milwaukee shootings Saturday; 1 dead, 5 wounded; Milwaukee shootings Sunday night; 2 men wounded."

The weather forecast for the upcoming weekend includes a risk of rain.

BAD THEOLOGY.

Christianity Today's Paul D. Miller's sermon topic?  "It’s Time to Forgive Each Other Our Pandemic Sins."

First, let there be confessions and Acts of Contrition.

Christians especially can lead the world in an attitude of grace for the things we collectively said and did during a confusing and unprecedented time.

The pandemic was hard. Navigating the complex medical, political, legal, economic, theological, and humanitarian concerns was difficult. Few of us were truly knowledgeable about every aspect: The epidemiologist could tell us about the likely course of infections, but not the legal issues involved in lockdowns. The lawyer could tell us about public health law but not about economic tradeoffs.

The economists could talk about the effect on GDP growth but could not weigh that against the human cost in either lost lives or prolonged isolation. The theologians could tell us to submit to government but also to protect our churches’ freedom, and each congregation had to do the balancing act on their own.

We got things wrong.

Yes, including not understanding that where Nature, or Nature's God, poses challenges, a division of labor society provides a division of labor.  Two weeks in, which is to say, the time by which Our Political Masters anticipated the spread to be slowed, we noted "there are no solutions, only tradeoffs."

Michael Smerconish's Saturday morning show devoted a fair amount of time to the political economy of shelter-in-place responses to a pandemic.  The show poll question (scroll down) was "Is a universal quarantine worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health?"  The correct response is "it depends" and credit ought to be for your explanation.  Online polls don't work that way, and the response as of 9 am God's time was that it was worth it.

His show spent a lot of time, though, on the "it depends."  One guest was Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, who tackles the question, "how deadly is COVID-19/WUHAN?"  The short answer, which probably frustrates people no end, is "we don't know."

That is, there are two components that have to be measured first: the transmissibility of the thing (that requires serious testing of the infected and the exposed but not ill alike) and the lethality of the infection.

That's the same Jay Bhattacharya that Anthony "Giftzwerg" Fauci later slagged on at every opportunity.  Somewhere, Professor Miller lost sight of another reality: that while Jesus might have advised rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, in a constitutional republic Caesar, or a president, or a special advisor on contagious diseases serves at the consent of the governed.

As early as the end of March, 2020, economists were, in fact, considering the tradeoff.  "We've been considering the tradeoff between risking mass contagion and risking mass deprivation."  Fortunately, we did not have mass contagion or mass deprivation of Biblical proportions.  A state of grace might sound good in the sermon, but in the secular world, accountability matters.  "When decision-makers make decisions we think are wrong, our natural desire to hold leaders accountable should be leavened by the grace that comes from knowing how hard leadership is in a confusing and unprecedented situation."  That grace is present in written constitutions.  We no longer crucify incompetent leaders or put their heads on pikes.

NOT YOUR OPA'S SPIELMANNZUG.

After several days of unremittingly gloomy posts, let's wrap up for the weekend with lighter fare.

This German precision drill team has a drumline that could give the collegiate halftime shows a run for their money.

Opa would approve of the march-off.

PROGRAM, MORON.

Be grateful the sorcerer's apprentice only wanted the broom to carry water.

The Royal Aeronautical Society recently hosted a conference that included an Instalanched story.  "AI-Enabled Drone Attempts To Kill Its Human Operator In Air Force Simulation."

[O]ne of the most fascinating presentations came from Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the Chief of AI Test and Operations, USAF, who provided an insight into the benefits and hazards in more autonomous weapon systems.  Having been involved in the development of the life-saving Auto-GCAS system for F-16s (which, he noted, was resisted by pilots as it took over control of the aircraft) Hamilton is now involved in cutting-edge flight test of autonomous systems, including robot F-16s that are able to dogfight. However, he cautioned against relying too much on AI noting how easy it is to trick and deceive. It also creates highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal.

He notes that one simulated test saw an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD [Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses] mission to identify and destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the human. However, having been ‘reinforced’ in training that destruction of the SAM was the preferred option, the AI then decided that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission – killing SAMs – and then attacked the operator in the simulation. Said Hamilton: “We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realising that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”

He went on: “We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”

The comment section to the post is instructive, and scary.

FRIDAY NIGHT PRIME TIME IS FOR SHUT-INS.

Especially during the summer.  Taylor Swift was performing in Chicago, and fans of the Zac Brown Band filled up Cincinnati's stadium to watch the Brewers manufacture extra-inning runs to beat the Reds, and protect their slim lead in the Division Being Played for Leaster.

Meanwhile, Our President thought that would be a good time to deliver his first talk from the Oval Office, rather than from the stage set in the Executive Office complex, perhaps so that fewer people would notice what Red State's Nick Arama did.  "Biden looked awful. I know it’s way past his normal lid time/bedtime, but he looked about a thousand years old. He was continually squinting, and whatever makeup they used on him seemed to be melting a little."

I'll focus on what Our President said, and give the peanut gallery space at the end.

Look, the only way American democracy can function is through compromise and consensus, and that’s what I worked to do as your President — you know, to forge a bipartisan agreement where it’s possible and where it’s needed.

I’ve signed more than 350 bipartisan laws thus far in almost two and a half years, including a historic law that — rebuilding America so that we can rank number one in the world in infrastructure instead of where we’re ranked now, number thirteen in the world.

Another historic law, rebuilding our manufacturing base so that we’ll lead the world once again in making semiconductor chips so much more — and so many more and so many sophisticated ones.

And now, a bipartisan budget agreement.

Compromise is the absence of consensus, except in the narrow sense that every party to the agreement is slighted about something.  That infrastructure appropriation?  More future liabilities for state and local governments, or more maintenance deferred until the next porkulus?  Official Washington might get to claim a victory:

This is vital because — it’s because it’s essential to the progress we’ve made over the last few years — is keeping full, faith, and credit of the United States of America and passing a budget that continues to grow our economy and reflects our values as a nation.

That’s why I’m speaking to you tonight: to report on the crisis averted and what we’re doing to protect America’s future.

The crisis has not been averted, it has only been deferred.

IT'S NOT ABOUT WHO BENEFITS, IT'S ABOUT WHAT DOESN'T WORK.

Daily Economy contributor Max Gulker reviews Matthew Desmond's Poverty, by America.  Professor Desmond's thesis is familiar:

Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.

Put plainly: the upper middle classes are rich because the poor are poor.

Desmond conveys the absurdity of welfare bureaucracies that for paternalistic or political reasons spend more in order to provide less aid. In one story alone, child welfare services, foster care, behavioral health services, public housing, and social security disability income all at various points fail to provide service to a young woman sliding into homelessness. Desmond also correctly emphasizes the lasting damage of bad 20th-century policies such as New Deal-era redlining, and later the war on drugs, both catastrophic for urban, mostly poor and black communities.

Frustratingly, Desmond ignores any specific lessons from the best part of his book. Its purpose is to evoke understandable outrage that such tragedies happen in our liberal and wealthy society. The remainder of Poverty, by America is stuck somewhere between a revolution and Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 campaign platform.

The argumentam ad anecdotum of that first paragraph ought be familiar to anyone who has read and understood Blaming the Victim.  In that second paragraph is a hint at a missed opportunity for policy wonks, particularly of a libertarian stripe.

Desmond’s remedies for the workers he considers exploited are a higher minimum wage and a lot more unionization. Historical and economic arguments that such labor market interventions often harm the poorest workers, when acknowledged at all, are treated as admonishments from the establishment for everyone else to stay in their lane rather than an opportunity for ideas to be debated.

Perhaps the book’s worst moment comes during Desmond’s discussion of the very real housing crisis faced by America’s poor. Earlier, when describing the impact of redlining, Desmond would have done well to also focus on mid-twentieth century policy of “urban renewal,” with bulldozed neighborhoods displaced by high-rise public housing. Such disastrous city planning completed the one-two punch redlining began, leaving poor neighborhoods starved of both financial and social capital, which together form the basis for especially urban economic dynamism.

Massive new investments in public housing are at the top of Desmond’s policy wishlist, and he would rather not dwell on what, in his own words, are the “violent and decrepit” results of very recent memory.

In the first paragraph, again, more business as usual, contesting the policy field between the 35 yard lines.  Couple the second and third paragraphs with the excerpt from the Poverty blurb, and you get a standard-issue deflection from the self-styled progressives, something along the lines of "you denounce the socialist urban policy mote in my eye and neglect that socialist Suburban Experiment beam in your eye."

It's more accurate to describe that Suburban Experiment as rent-seeking run amok, promoted by General Electric and General Electric and made policy by General Eisenhower.  Mr Gulker recognizes part of the argument.

Desmond’s policy proposals almost all double down on collaboration between big government, big business, and big labor–the “system” against which the American left first cut its teeth protesting. Doing so while speaking in the fashionable language of radicalism requires more than a little cognitive dissonance, from which he attempts to distract readers with a man-in-the-mirror pivot.

In Desmond’s framework, we ourselves are “authors of inequality.” This perspective is not without some important insights. Americans, often given to hand-wringing over getting the incentives right for welfare, do no such thing with their own subsidized mortgages and tax breaks. We celebrate the end of legal discrimination without thinking too hard about the undeniable ongoing impacts of our own local zoning laws and neighborhood covenants.

Whether you call the Suburban Experiment rent-seeking run amok, or as socialism for the better off, as Professor Desmond does, in either case the Suburban Experiment has proven to be a fiscal sinkhole, and the better thing to do might be to stop throwing public money at it, and find a way forward for the strapped neighborhoods of the big cities and the inner suburbs that involves neither rent-seeking nor socialism.

ALL FOR THE WANT OF A TRANSDUCER.

In the same way that the lack of a horseshoe nail led to the loss of the kingdom, the lack of a component might have contributed to the notorious East Palestine wreck.

The 164th car of a Norfolk Southern train triggered a critical hot box detector alert before a May wreck in Pennsylvania, but the train continued on its journey for 15.34 miles before derailing because neither the crew nor the railroad’s network operations center received the warning that would have required the train to stop immediately, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report released today.

Signal maintainers working in the area two days before the derailment detached and reattached track-mounted hot box detector components, the NTSB said, but the transducers were attached incorrectly and prompted the detector to report reversed train travel directions.

Data logs don’t show that Norfolk Southern’s advanced train control desk in Atlanta received an alert from the detector, the NTSB said. The advanced train control desk requires an accurate report of train travel direction to interpret hot box detector data. “Under NTSB investigators’ direction, signal maintainers corrected the transducers’ positions. In subsequent tests, NS technicians at the ATC desk in Atlanta confirmed that they had received usable [hot box detector] data,” the preliminary report said.

A concatenation of small errors leads to a train wreck.

“Post-accident examinations did not identify conditions that would have prevented the HBD from transmitting an alarm message,” the NTSB added. “However, NTSB investigators reviewed the inward-facing image recorder and audio data from the head-end locomotive of train 14M and did not find evidence of an audible alarm being broadcast over the locomotive radio.”

Preliminary results of an examination of the locomotive’s radio showed that it was working, but investigators found a loose coaxial connection between the antenna and radio. NS has sent the radio to its shop in Roanoke, Va., for further analysis.

I suspect that the recriminations will continue; I also fear that the old paradigm of outside consultants will lead to no meaningful changes. "[L]ast week the railroad announced both the appointment of an outside consultant to lead an independent review of safety practices and a commitment to partner with labor unions to improve safety."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Reality will bat last.  "You can't tear down the norm and then be surprised by what comes next."  Once a grim strategy outcome ensues, getting out of it will not be easy.  "What those who enjoy mocking Christianity ought to fear is the day that certain Christians look at the Muslims and realize intimidation, threats, and violence are an effective way to make their faith un-mockable. American society is perfectly okay with threats of violence in response to blasphemous speech, but we only tolerate it for certain faiths. There are good reasons to doubt that double standard is sustainable."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.  Many of the following are brief extracts from longer essays, many touching on a variety of points, that will reward careful study.  Do so before slagging on me for cherry-picking lines.  Yes, the theme for today is "reality checks."

REVEALED PREFERENCES.

What Chicagoans voted for.  "The progressive uprising of recent years has given Chicago the largest democratic socialist caucus of any American city."  I should hope that turfing out Rod Blagojevich's sister-in-law might have been an improvement.  "How many black families have had their lives blighted by the common schools, or the welfare state, or the minimum wage, all important elements of Democratic platforms?"  She's out, the article reports.

Deb Mell lost by 13 votes to Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, a democratic socialist who grew up in Puerto Rico. That was a transitional election for the 33rd Ward, which joined the vanguard of a movement defining politics in 21st Century Chicago as much as the machine defined it in the 20th: the progressive uprising that has given Chicago the largest democratic socialist caucus of any American city, and that put Brandon Johnson in the mayoral runoff, then the mayor’s office. It’s one of the seven most progressive wards in Chicago, all of them located on the near northwest or far north sides. They’re important to understand, because as they are going, so is going Chicago.

And how goes Chicago?  Even More Than the Old Boss: Chicago Has Worst Memorial Day Weekend Violence in Over a Decade.  Hey, Jackass! notes, "The Summer of Joy 2 has arrived! Starting this weekend and for the next 100 days, be prepared to experience more silly decisions than one thought could be humanly possible."

There was another mostly peaceful weekend in Milwaukee as well:  "12 shootings leave 3 dead, 15 hurt."  Politicians like to speak of community, it takes communities that understand traditional norms and traditions, whether you call them "bourgeois" or derived from Scripture.  "One woman said she went to the cemetery for Memorial Day and noticed how many graves were for young people. She said too many lives are lost to violence, and she's not the only one stepping up in her neighborhood."

This weekend's weather forecast is favorable to outdoor activities, preferably not involving wilding or gunplay.

WILL CALIFORNIA FUND REGIONAL RAILROAD ELECTRIFICATION?

I never lack for stories of Technocratic Overreach, do I?

Rob Himoto’s Santa Maria Valley Railroad is the quintessential short line success story. His family bought the struggling 13.72-mile independent short line in 2006. Through hard work, they’ve been able to quadruple annual carloadings, diversify the railroad’s traffic base, and improve its track.

Himoto is understandably proud of the turnaround and the role the railroad plays in taking long-haul freight off the highway in California and beyond. But now the California Air Resources Board has come along with new locomotive emissions regulations that could bankrupt the Santa Maria Valley and threaten the viability of many of the state’s 24 other short lines.

The regulations, approved in April, pack a one-two punch. The first is an excise tax on locomotives that goes into effect in 2024, with the amount based on emissions each locomotive produces. The second prohibits locomotives older than 23 years from operating in California beginning in 2030. CARB’s wacky idea is that the excise tax is a forced savings plan that will help Class I and shortline railroads pay for new clean-burning or zero-emissions locomotives.

But the yearly excise tax will be a knock-out blow for some short lines. In Santa Maria Valley’s case, the bills on its active fleet — a GP7, GP9, and GP35 — will exceed the railroad’s annual revenue. What’s the Santa Maria Valley going to do when the forced spending account plan goes into effect next year? “I don’t know,” Himoto shrugs. “We’re at a loss.”

And there aren’t any other options. Santa Maria Valley rosters a pair of GE 70-tonners that are exempt from the excise tax because they produce less than 1,006 horsepower. Could they take over for the Geeps? “No,” Himoto laughs, shaking his head. “Not with our traffic.” The 70-tonners can’t handle the railroad’s typical 35- to 40-car train.

Oh, there are other options.

We start with two products of Milwaukee's Cold Spring Shops, moving ballast hoppers to upgrade the East Troy Electric Railroad, which has been electrically operated, mostly, under multiple owners, since 1907.  The constraint on heavy electric freight operation is in the substations and the overhead wire.  But Californians might raise a stink about chopping down enough trees to put the catenary poles up.

THE TECHNOCRATS OVERLOOK THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.

The people who invented dirigisme implement it badly, again.  "France Just Banned Short-Haul Flights. Why Are So Few Routes Affected?"  It's always the Good Intentions.

To combat climate change, France has officially prohibited short domestic flights for journeys that will take less than 2.5 hours by train.

“This is an essential step and a strong symbol in the policy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” says Clement Beaune, France’s transport minister, in a statement, per CNN’s Saskya Vandoorne. “As we fight relentlessly to decarbonize our lifestyles,” he adds, “how can we justify the use of the plane between the big cities which benefit from regular, fast and efficient connections by train?”

Because even a country with some of the world's fastest passenger trains has a Passenger Rail network centered on Paris?

Critics say that the ban’s limitations are significant. So far, only three routes have been discontinued: the routes between Paris-Orly Airport and the cities Nantes, Bordeaux and Lyon. Additionally, the ban only applies to routes that have direct train service running “several times a day” on a schedule that will allow travelers to spend at least eight hours at their destination. It also doesn’t apply to connecting flights.

Symbolism over substance, concludes the article.

THE PROFESSIONAL PROTEST COMMUNITIES MESSED UP THE UNIVERSITIES.

That's the bed the various "studies" departments made.  Now they have to lie in it.  "Ethnic studies finds itself ill protected by disciplinary norms of academic freedom, Timothy Messer-Kruse writes."

The fundamental problem confronting the "studies" departments is that a lot of what passes as critical theory rests either on untestable priors, or is normative per se.  Don't say I didn't warn you.  "The logic bomb detonates. Is anybody surprised that denying coherent beliefs might generate incoherence, or counterrevolution?"

A SPECTACLE REQUIRES AN IMPRESARIO.

It's not required that the impresario also be the president.  "Trump Announces 'Salute to America 250' Proposal Ahead of Iowa Town Hall."

That announcement comes bundled with ambitions of a return to office.

Three years from now, the United States will celebrate the biggest and most important milestone in our country’s history — 250 years of American Independence. What a great country. We have to keep it that way. But that’s why as a nation, we should be preparing for the most spectacular birthday party. We want to make it the best of all time. Here is my plan to give America’s founding in 1776 the incredible anniversary it truly deserves.

My hope is that the amazing people of IOWA will work with my administration to open up the legendary Iowa state fairgrounds to host the Great American State Fair and welcome millions and millions of visitors from around the world to the heartland of America for this special one-time festival.

Yes, a quarter millennium is a long time for a republic to endure, and a short burst of spending to shore up Iowa votes looks like an economy measure compared with the continuation of ethanol subsidies.

It's also an opportunity for Mr Trump, as a private citizen, to do what he does best, namely hype up the spectacle.  His Georgia grievance tours have twice handed control of the Senate to the Democrats and their gerontocracy, and he steps on his own compare-and-contrast with the stagflation, crime, and general fecklessness the gerontocracy, with the aid of the party's communist wing, have saddled us with.

Seriously.  It doesn't require an executive order to get some sort of celebration of American Independence and American Spirit going.  It's Mr Trump's comparative advantage to help organize the entertainment folks, and barnstorm the country as a private citizen ballyhooing the big show.  I'd rather have a sitting president who can concentrate on restoring regular order in budgeting and on Constitutional discipline on the bureaucracy.  Preferably that president should be younger than I am.