GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS ARE INEVITABLY CENSORSHIP PER SE.

During the corona tyranny, a salutary side effect of the prolonged virtual education as the kids were confined to quarters was the ability of parents to see what passed for instruction, and, where there were elections, to turf out the school boards and replace them with people more respectful of their world views.  That didn't sit too well with some teachers.

“School District of Waukesha (SDW) students and staff [have] become aware of a significant increase in teacher resignations this school year.” So says the Alliance for Education in Waukesha in a June 7 press release.

“From April 1 to June 5, 2022, SDW has received at least 54 resignations from employees. In 2021, there were a total of 28 resignations from April to June 30. Because contracts from teachers are not due back to SDW until the 15th of this month, we anticipate there will be a surge in the already staggering 93% year to year increase in resignations.”

At the May board meeting, newly elected board member, Marquell Moorer, was puzzled by what he called the “hefty” number of teachers leaving. Were there exit interviews done with these resignations?

Sharon Thiede, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources, said that there was no formal system of exit interviews, but employees leaving were free to give the district feedback.  A lot of people are moving to schools closer to their homes, said Thiede.

At the June board meeting, several teachers who were quitting gave the board its answer.

“I am not leaving because I am moving or because my husband got a new job. I am not leaving because of a dispute with a colleague or administrator, or because of my students,” said Stacy Kolafa, a Spanish teacher at West High School for nine years. “In fact, it is because of the students that I have stayed here as long as I have. I do not agree with the direction the school district has taken in regards to diversity and equity.”

Monica Whaley reinforced what several other teachers said that night. Much of it came down to a school district that no longer accepted diversity. Signs in classrooms supporting Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ kids were taken down. Some were nothing more than rainbow signs that said “Safe Space.” Teachers were being monitored when they taught about race and diversity in their own classrooms.

It doesn't matter, dear reader, whether you agree with those reasons for leaving or whether you would just as soon have those culture-studies majors teaching elsewhere, or what side you take in the following exchanges.

Heidi Gerlach, who has 22 years in the district, was leaving for additional reasons. The workload had become unmanageable, Two to four meetings a week left little prep time for classes; every minute is micromanaged.

Parents chimed in as well. Jan Mandela’s family is removing their children from the Waukesha schools because of the school culture’s lack of acceptance and respect. What had taken over was an “antiquated ideology,” Mandela said. “We will be moving out of Waukesha next month so that our children can attend a district that aligns with our morals as civilized human beings of an extremely diverse and unique world that we live in.” Teachers are the “true heroes” here, Mandela added.

But not everyone agreed with that assessment.

Paul Reese, who speaks frequently at board meetings, began with “I love this board and what it has done.” He quoted the Bible and pushed for adherence to the dress code. “People don’t want to listen to what you have to say. Instead, they shout, ‘You are a homophobic’ because you disagree with them.” Teachers should stick to teaching the basics, Reese said. “Some teachers just want to indoctrinate our kids.”

Kathy Keller, a grandparent, said, “Thank you for getting back to basics.” Some teachers are leaving because they are unable to “sexualize and politicize” their students, she added, so let them go.

None dare call it censorship?

SCRATCH AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.

There's an instructive roundup of commentary nailed to Newmark's Door.

I note only that the Gray Lady probably got it partly wrong.  "NY Times opinion: Affirmative action mattered a lot for very few and very little for most."  John Sexton claims, "Obviously, you don’t need affirmative action to get into a school with a 70% or greater admittance rate. And since that’s most schools in the country, most students simply didn’t benefit from affirmative action."  That's unclear.  Yes, relatively few students matriculate at the schools with the U.S. News problem, and even fewer enroll as legacy admissions, or as legacy-adjacent spawn of prominent politicians.  To the extent, though, that the allegedly most selective institutions preferentially admit some people with weaker academic potential and exclude other people who claim to have stronger academic potential, the pool of applicants available to institutions elsewhere on the food chain (if you finish high school with 99th percentile college boards and a 4.0 plus grade point average, and your "safety schools" turn you down, that might be reason to go to court) is different, and, yes, there will be convergence of test scores and high school class rank further down the food chain, but there will be academic mismatches both of the weaker students in a more intellectual environment and of stronger students dealing with that less intellectual environment.

If you're looking for "The moral bankruptcy of Ivy League America," which was a few days ago Instalanched, it's also here.  "It is hard to think of a better system of elite perpetuation than that practised by America’s top universities."  Yes, and what eventually happened to Rome's inbred oligarchs, or several different cohorts of Chinese mandarins, is manifesting itself in Official Washington's ruling class.

IT BACKFIRED.

Years ago, Frederic Bastiat had some fun with the notion of "negative railways," the reductio ad absurdum of municipalities providing continued work for local stevedores, draymen, and warehousers by forbidding interchange.  One way to forbid interchange was to require a different gauge in your state, as, without the kind of traffic base East Broad Top had, swapping out the bogies would not be an adoption and the local strongmen could get a workout doing all the transloading.  (Permit me an impertinence: how much of that transloading might have been done by prison trusties sentenced to hard labor?)

The powers-that-be of Portland, Maine, caught the negative railway mania.

Maine forbid [c.q.] the railroad into Portland to change its track gauge. For, if it shifted to the standard 4-foot 8-inch gauge, goods would have hurtled right through Portland on their way to Boston. The legislation ensured that shipments would still have to be unloaded in Portland from one railroad line to another. All of this generated incomes for Portland’s laborers, truckers, and wholesalers. It also kept up the value of city lots and buildings. (Unfortunately it offered no long-run solution. Shippers began using cheaper, competing routes to market. Portland then failed to develop in its competition with Boston and Montreal as it might have but for that feat of policy, so shrewd in the short term.)

That sort of legislation was contrary to the war effort. Abraham Lincoln chose the Stephenson gauge for the Pacific Railroad, and Federal transportation corps civil engineers regauged all the Rebel rail lines they seized as contraband to the Stephenson gauge.  The property in question is the original Maine Central, which was built to a wider-than-Rebel-standard five feet, six inches, and after the Rebellion, subsequent managers saw the light and regauged it to the standard. 

SEVENTY YEARS OF PRESERVATION.

In 1953, ten ferroequinologists pooled their money to purchase an electric car from an Iowa interurban company and found a non-profit organization they called the Illinois Electric Railway Museum.

Seventy years later, the museum has expanded by subtracting the "electric" from that title, although they honor the museum's roots with a periodic parade of the electric cars.  That initial purchase, Indiana Railroad "high speed" car 65, is still operable, and it led off the parade of seventy pieces of electrically operated rolling stock last Saturday.

Saturday's weather might have put a damper on the festivities, literally, as there are cars the curators would prefer not venture out in the rain.  A delay of the start of the show, however, took advantage of a break in the rain long enough to marshal and parade the seventy cars.  I set up at the east end of the station platform, where the city car line diverges from the main line.  Thanks to the weather delay, there was still a lot of staging of the cars going on.

I am still putting together the video of the parade itself. Another ferroequinologist was recording west of Spaulding Tower, and captured all of the movements of long trains.

There are many preservation railways that would be delighted to lay on one train of more than one electric car, and here we see four operable wooden L cars, four early steel L cars, three of which are in revenue service, seven latter-day L cars, and the beat goes on ... plus four wood Roarin' Elgin cars, four steel Roarin' Elgin cars, three of which are in revenue service, five North Shore cars, and an Electroliner.  Oh, the city cars and the freight equipment also got in on the action.  Enjoy.

Then find yourself a preservation railway and support it.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Join the reality side.  "Conservatives must reassert the legitimacy of bourgeois norms."  The article also notes, "Questioning authority began as a philosophical enterprise in Classical Greece, but it became a political one with challenges to the divine right of kings and to the secular power of the church in premodern Europe."  That's fitting.  Evolution is mutation, selection, and adaptation.  Not all mutations confer advantage.  "That legacy of critique gathered steam in the twentieth century with the progressive view that change was always for the better, and that no novel assertion of rights by previously unrecognized groups can be illegitimate or unjustified."  No.  There are evolutionary dead ends.  Socialism fails every time it's tried.  Polymorphous perversity is unsustainable.  What social disease used to do, transition therapies on preadolescents now does.  Play stupid semantic games, win stupid prizes.  "Truth is truth no matter how much culture wants it to change."  Have fun while you're fighting.  "The rage without the joy just isn’t selling."  That applies to Dementia Joe and Ron DeSantis alike.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

PUBLIC FUNDING FOR SCHOOLS HAS ALWAYS BEEN CENSORSHIP PER SE.

Just before the celebration of a hundred years of American Independence, an obscure cavalry commander disregarded his orders and got his entire regiment wiped out.

What does that have to do with public funding of schools?  A lot, as General Custer had a politically active wife, who understood the right procedural buttons to push.

[H]ow did a defeat become viewed as one of the greatest noble tragedies in American history? A persistent lobbying campaign by Custer’s widow, for one, and because the story of Custer as a martyr fit neatly in the larger story that Americans wanted to tell about the nation’s push westward after the Civil War, historians say. Only in recent years have we begun to learn more about the perspective of Little Bighorn from its Native American victors, whose roots at that site go back decades before the settlers arrived—and started to rethink the legacy of the man who led the charge.

The focus of the article is on the efforts of a nearby historian to set the record straight about what happened in the Black Hills.

“When we think of Custer’s Last Stand or the Battle of Little Bighorn… we should think of it as a successful defense by Native people against an attempted act of genocide,” says Lindsay Stallones Marshall, assistant professor of history at Illinois State University, who got her start teaching about Custer as an AP U.S. History teacher.

Marshall is writing a book on how distorted narratives about the “Indian wars” after the Civil War made their way into schools. The answer reveals a potent mix of the powerful who engage in history making: soldiers burnishing their own reputations, loved ones honoring family members, lawmakers lobbying for federal dollars, and textbook writers mythologizing American Manifest Destiny.

“Textbooks are a specific kind of document designed for a specific purpose, and it’s not simply to tell students what happened in the past, but to give them a particular view, particularly of the American past,” says Marshall.

That's serious work in itself, and I regret that there will probably never be an accurate accounting of the effect of those new arrivals in the Americas with their sailing ships and iron tools, and by the time of the Black Hawk War, steamboats and steam trains, on the First Nations.  In that "Textbooks are a specific kind of document," though, is the prima facie case that public curriculum decisions are censorship, whether it's adding Howard Zinn or removing Gender Queer, or adding Special Creation to the science books or Manifest Destiny to American History.  That the Native Americans get to tell their side of the story is only right and proper.  School boards still have to decide what to include and exclude, and, as those are public officials, that's a government action.  I dare call it censorship, no matter what the criteria for inclusion and exclusion might be.

HARVESTING AN ECONOMY OF SCOPE.

For years, I was puzzled by the corporate name on the long-derelict West Allis Car Station that once supported streetcar and trackless trolley operations to the fairgrounds.

I later learned that The Milwaukee Light Heat & Traction Company was the civil engineering subsidiary of The Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company, and it was truth in packaging: the subsidiary designed and built the power lines, steam heat lines, and trolley tracks.

THE BALANCE OF NATURE.

A mama rabbit littered under one of my sedum bushes, which provide tree armatures for the railroad.

That night, Hooty the Great Horned Owl was surveying the neighborhood from atop a nearby house.

The lot of a little lagomorph is not a happy one.  The nest is now empty, and a partly-eaten carcass turned up during the weekend's mowing.  There are lots of possible suspects: several neighborhood Outdoor Cats, or perhaps Wile E. Coyote, or Reddy Fox, or Hooty.  The Outdoor Cats are probably not popular with any of the local birders, as going fowling is almost as much fun as worrying the bunnies.

IT FAILS EVERY TIME IT'S TRIED.

On the lighter side, Book Review N^o. 8 features Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World.  Although authors Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell are academic economists, with degrees from Florida State and George Mason, and, as of 2019, institutional affiliations with Southern Methodist and Texas Tech, theirs is defiantly not an academic tome (use Google Scholar, dear reader, to check out their scholarly work, should you be so inclined) and it is not a spoiler alert to point out that the beer on offer in the remaining socialist countries (Less filling!  No taste!) makes even the colored water in blue cans I revel in mocking taste good.

DISSENT IS THE QUINTESSENCE OF INDEPENDENCE.

What other meaning can we extract from "That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved?"

Independence Day, however, is behind only Thanksgiving in the ranking of contested Federal holidays.  It is only fitting and proper that it is so, as the Scottish Enlightenment notions of natural rights and perfect liberty is a long term bet on emergence.

THE LEGACIES SHALL YE ALWAYS HAVE.

With the end of race-based affirmative action, at least as practiced by the Crimson and the Tar Heels, there are constituencies suggesting legacy admissions go away.  "Next thing you know we’ll be hearing there was something wrong with admitting dummy Jared Kushner to Harvard because his father gave the school 2.5 million dollars Where the hell is this going?"

Precisely nowhere.  "Three groups in Boston—the Chica Project, the African Community Economic Development of New England and the Greater Boston Latino Network—have asked the Education Department to investigate Harvard University’s practice of operating a legacy admissions program, in which the children of alumni are favored."

It's not as if the opinion journals aren't aware of the legacy dodge, which is at least more honest grift than getting pretend sailors or equestriennes into tony schools that maintain such country club sports.  I first learned about this practice from The Washington Monthly years ago, and wonkzines to their left and right are in agreement that the practice is corrupt, but then look at the institutional affiliations of their (unpaid?) summer intern classes and shake your head.

So you say the communist wing of the Jarret regency has thoughts?  "Democrats Take Aim At Legacy Admissions After Court Rulings."  Sorry, I'm not buying it.  That the spawn of prominent politicians of both parties wind up at the institutions that head up the U.S. News league tables is no accident.  Call it legacy-adjacent preferences.  "Biden Vows to Rein In 'Privilege' in Colleges, But Here's What He Did for His Granddaughter."  That's the daughter Hunter acknowledges, and I suppose we should be grateful she snuck in the old fashioned way, without pretending to be a lacrosse player.  Hunter?  Did he benefit from Bill Clinton making some calls to Yale Law?  You decide.

CALIFORNIA, REBELLING.

Two years ago, Our Intellectual Betters told us public outdoor gatherings to watch fireworks was hazardous to our health.  Even in California, the only proper response was McAuliffe at Bastogne's NUTS!

Red State's Bob Hoge notes that the Guardians of Public Morals had to scold, and scold.  "Of course, this show of defiance was not appreciated by state officials, who complained that the displays worsened air quality for the holiday."

The public shows returned last summer, and DeKalb's display and band concert were up to their usual high standard.  And yet, the private displays continue.  Apparently fireworks sales have stayed high since the corona tyranny abated, and people might be stocking up for New Year celebrations as well.

RECLAIMING THEIR HOMELANDS?

For years, Milwaukee area Boy Scouts could rough it at Indian Mound Reservation, which, yes, had an effigy mound on the grounds; and, toward the end of the American High, there was an all-county gathering of the troops and patrols to plant trees on a field that the council had recently acquired.

Those trees were gone within a few years for reasons I don't know.  But now the council has to sell some assets to cover the liability the Scouting movement has incurred thanks to generations of Akela Groomer.

Three Harbors Council paid $3,685,000 to the BSA Settlement Trust for survivors of abuse in Scouting, according to the website. That trust was formed through BSA's Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

With that payment looming, the council reviewed its two camps.

"In addition to the financial considerations of our contribution to the BSA Settlement Trust for survivors of abuse, the board’s committee reviewed multiple factors including camp usage, programs, facilities, and current and future Scouting membership trends," the council web site said."The decision to sell the camp was a necessary and important step as we support survivors of abuse in Scouting and continue our important mission," said Andrew Hardin, Three Harbors Council executive director, in a statement.

Three other Scout camps in Wisconsin, owned by other local councils in Wisconsin and Illinois, have been sold to support payments to the BSA Settlement Trust.  Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula still have 13 Scout camps.

Indian Mound's new owner will be the Forest County Potowatomi Community.

“While our reservation today is in Forest County, the Potawatomi continue to have a strong connection to our treaty homelands in southeast Wisconsin. Places like Waukesha, Oconomowoc, and Muskego are all named after Potawatomi words, and all places our tribe considers home,” said Forest County Potawatomi Chairman James Crawford, in a statement.

“We are excited about the opportunity to acquire this property and enhance our presence on our treaty homelands," he said.

I wonder if the site will be converted to a sacred place, or whether there's a business opportunity to build a casino there.

Those town names, incidentally, are also useful shibboleths, as flatlanders and other aliens have trouble pronouncing them in the local way.

HOLLYWOOD CELEBRATES MILWAUKEE-AREA HIGH SCHOOL SOCIAL STRATIFICATION.

That's incidental to a story about lost Milwaukee-area custard stands.  Several of the stands share a genealogy, either as family members set up their own shops, or as employees of established shops or chains went into business on their own; and the expression "butter burger" probably cannot be trademarked.  The article also offers an opportunity to remind readers of an important summer message.  "During the 1980s and ’90s, Steve Kalt operated his own eponymous custard stand in a former Boy Blue on the city’s northwest side – at 5653 N. 76th St. – after having learned the business from nearly two decades working at Kopp’s."  Boy Blue took ownership of a number of Carvel stands, after that chain retrenched to its ancestral East Coast haunts.  There's some confusion among people who aren't familiar with frozen treats.  Both custard and soft serve come out of mixing machines, but there are major differences in how they are made, and both are different from ice cream.  There's no way to swirl custard into a cone, it has to be scooped.

It's the now departed Milky Way custard stands that made the big screen.

One of three Milky Way restaurants opened by Arthur Richter, the Port Washington Road Milky Way is the only one that has something of an international profile. That’s because Tom Miller, who graduated from nearby Nicolet High School in 1958, was a regular at the drive-in. And when "Happy Days," the TV show that Miller created, launched on ABC-TV in January 1974, it brought Arnold’s (later Al’s) Drive-In into homes across the world.

Though some in Milwaukee claim Leon’s was the inspiration for Arnold’s, others say it was the Pig’n Whistle. Both are wrong.

On the north shore, there were enough hangouts that the cliques didn't have to mingle out of school.

"According to Miller, it was the Milky-Way (sic), and only the Milky-Way. And that’s only logical, because the Milky-Way was the place where all the North Shore 'kaleeges' (high schoolers bound for college) congregated. Miller was one of them. Across the street next to the old Clark station was the Redwood, where the 'hoods,' the ducktailed, leather-jacketed guys, hung out."

That was the social atmosphere in which Miller spent his teen years, and it was those experiences that he drew upon when he concepted "Happy Days."

"Arnold’s is really a compilation of everybody’s recollections of the drive-in of the ’50s," Miller told the Journal in 1977. "It’s just that the Milky Way was closest to me when I grew up on Bay Ridge (Avenue)."

It couldn't be Leon's, near Pulaski High School, because if that had been a hangout, the hoods and the kaleeges (terminology that was still current into the mid-1960s) would have clashed, the way the latter day greasers, freaks, and jocks tended to do at the Big Boy haunted by Milwaukee Hamilton students, as well as West Allis high schoolers who lived just the other side of Oklahoma Avenue.

A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM.

About the same time the Jarrett regency was installed, Second City Cop suspended publication.  The Combine could close their eyes and pretend nothing was going wrong in Chicago, but others picked up the slack.

Just in time for Freedom Weekend, dear reader, the sass is back.  "It's so refreshing to see that the media hasn't changed a single iota in the thirty months we were out of action."  When reporters don't describe the party of a corrupt politician, or the ascriptive features of a fugitive, does that trigger people to think the worst? "They do a better job describing the car than they do the actual suspects for some reason."  In that story, the car was being used by riflemen conducting expropriations in the Gold Coast and Albany Park neighborhoods.

FIND YOURSELF A PRESERVATION RAILROAD AND ENRICH YOURSELF.

Last year, we noted the possible role of a preservation railway as a way to enrich your kid's knowledge.

This year, the Fox River Trolley Museum offered the enrichment more directly.  Early in June came Rails to Victory, in which local World War II re-enactors set up camp on the museum grounds.

That's dune buggy technology adapted to the Kubelwagen.  Originals sometimes turn up, commanding hundreds of thousands of Reichsmarks, er, Euro.  On the other hand, adapting a Beetle chassis to something else has long been something for the car guys.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

America is screaming for another Reagan Revolution.  Stop being stupid, Republicans.  We need someone with Trump's policies without all of the drama.

Michael Ramirez cartoon retrieved from his Substack.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

BACKSLIDING BETTER?

An In These Times essay laments efforts by state legislatures to deregulate child labor.  The story starts, though, with the return of the Third World in these United States.  "In February, the New York Times published an extensive investigative report by Hannah Dreier about scores of undocumented Central American children who were found to be working in food processing plants, construction projects, big farms, garment factories, and other job sites in 20 states around the country. Some were working 12 hours a day and many were not attending school."  That's not good, but somehow looking the other way as the cartels and the coyotes sneak paying customers into the country isn't as important as those mean Republicans.

Lawmakers, mostly Republican ones, increasingly want to deregulate laws governing children in the workplace. According to EPI, at least 10 states introduced or passed laws rolling back child labor protections in the past two years.”

Among them is Arkansas, whose GOP governor is the former White House press secretary under Donald Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. In March, Sanders signed a new bill removing employer requirements to verify the age of children as young as 14 before hiring them, calling such protections “burdensome and obsolete.” Her Republican colleagues in Iowa and Wisconsin have passed similar laws. In Ohio, one Democrat even joined in to loosen the state’s child labor laws.

It’s already legal for teenagers to take on certain types of summer jobs and paid internships. In an ideal world, such employment can offer them valuable work experience in a safe environment and allow them to earn extra spending money to save up for nice things. Indeed, children from privileged backgrounds have traditionally been able to land such jobs over their less privileged counterparts, using family connections.

I wonder, does that category include the unpaid internships that go to Ivy League sophomores and juniors, the better to enhance their connections, that the opinion magazines are notorious for using, and if In These Times participate in that market. Silly me, it's not the spawn of the coastal cosmopolitans, let alone the underage braceros, let alone sex slaves, that are Today's Outrage. It's that fourteen-year-old slicing the onions at the pizzeria or washing the stemware at the bar.

Republicans are invoking such benign jobs as babysitting or lifeguarding to claim that deregulation will help kids earn money to save up for a car or prom dress. But children’s well-being is not driving their desires to ease child labor laws. These lawmakers are hardly concerned about making it easier for teens to deliver newspapers or wash cars during summer vacation. We would be hard-pressed to imagine their 16-year-old children or grandchildren serving alcohol for six hours a day at a bar past 9 p.m. on a school night and letting the bar owner off the hook if that child gets injured on the job — which is what Iowa Republicans have now legalized.

No, it's about undermining labor militancy. It always is.

What they appear to care about is businesses having a larger pool of vulnerable workers to exploit at a time when worker demands for higher wages and better working conditions are rising and strike activity has increased. Who’s more vulnerable than children, particularly undocumented and low-income ones?

Who, indeed, but those are not the kids washing stemware at the bar.  As far as responding to labor militancy, well, there's automation for that, whether it's placing orders for hamburgers (rather than have the current crop of McDonald's hires make a hash of the order) or sorting potatoes or grading coal.  The reality, whether in those farm fields, or those Iowa bars, or the coal breaking sheds, has always been the same.

Children work because their families are desperately poor, and the meager addition to the family income they can contribute is often necessary for survival. Banning child labor through trade regulations or governmental prohibitions often simply forces the children into less-desirable alternatives. When U.S. activists started pressuring Bangladesh into eliminating child labor, the results were disastrous.

The complications get more fraught if the Border Patrol starts raiding those fields (or those supper clubs?)  It didn't turn out so well when U.S. trade policy placed sanctions on Bangladesh's shirt factories.

Paul Krugman summarizes what happened more bluntly: "The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets—and that a significant number were forced into prostitution." [Yes, that Paul Krugman. — Ed.] Based on the information they have, families tend to choose the best available job for their children. Taking that option away does not eliminate the necessity of work; it forces them to take a less-desirable job. As repulsive as a child working in a sweatshop may be, it is not nearly as repulsive as a child forced into prostitution through the actions of unthinking Western activists.

That deregulation of child labor in the heartland states, though, is a symptom of falling living standards.

In rural Sub-Saharan Africa, the U.N. data also shows that girls often spend more time gathering wood and water than boys—time that could be spent in a classroom instead.

Fortunately, access to running water and electricity is rapidly spreading across the globe. As more households gain access to modern technologies, more children will leave behind backbreaking physical labor for school books and studying.

The backsliding, whether in the developed world, or in the United States as water conservation and sustainable electricity production reveal themselves in the form of deprivation for hoi polloi, is predictable.  Washing stemware becomes hoeing beans by hand becomes child marriages.  Reap what you sow, self-styled progressives.

CORRIDORS IMPROVED IN GEOLOGIC TIME?

Mixing passenger trains with North American freight trains has its challenges.  "North American freight railroads set the pace for the world, that Passenger Rail advocates who don't understand the freight technology hurt their own cause, that the passenger train authorities can do better by working with the freight railroads, that incremental improvements in the passenger service, including more frequent service topping out at 90 or 110 with interconnectivity has more potential than splashy bullet trains for their own sake, and that some freight railroads are unnecessarily precautionary."

WHEN VANGUARDS BECOME DIZZY WITH SUCCESS.

You get Geoffrey Hodgson's Wrong Turnings: How the Left Got Lost, which he intends as a reproach to his comrades among the Anointed, and which Book Review N^o. 7 notes, works well as a defense of Scottish Enlightenment concepts that at one time might have been a logic manual for pushing that Social Progress.  That pivot to the Scottish Enlightenment begins with his introduction, where he notes, "Here the debased term Right now covers democrats and authoritarians, peacemongers and warmongers, nationalists and individualists, egalitarians and inegalitarians, and defenderes and opponents of human rights.  There is nothing about private ownership and markets that necessarily implies racism or belligerent nationalism.  Yet these different things are conflated under the same label."  Truly, truly, I say unto you, people who claim to be conservative also contest what, exactly, they are conserving.

POLITICIZED CLIQUES ARE NOT HEALTHY FOR HIGH SCHOOL.

A few days ago, we noted the privilege-shaming of one Kirk Swearingen, who read too much into the pecking order of a high school.  It's not that there weren't cliques and status hierarchies all along.  Once upon a time, there were the hoods, or perhaps, because of their Brylcreem-heavy ducktail haircuts, greasers — not an ethnic slur in that taxonomy — who were generally not as easygoing as Fonzie in Happy Days.  They were in a perpetual battle for status with the jocks, who got their most favorable treatment in the Beach Boys' California.  Then came the various nonconformists and malcontents. There were nerds or grinds who took finding the Hidden Meaning (it was always Death) in poems seriously, and who could prove the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra or tell you which compounds would yield a precipitate.  In Mr Swearingens's terms, they might not have bothered to be accepted, and if you were going to bet money on somebody being a future venture capitalist, or perhaps the hedge fund manager who put the effortlessly promoted captain of the football team in his place in middle age, it would be from that cohort.  There were people who might have been able to hold their own intellectually with the nerds but didn't bother, and then there were the druggies and burnouts.

THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN GLOBALIZATION IS ITS ABSENCE.

Predictably, women and minorities are hardest hit.  "Global South Reeling From High Cost of Basic Goods Amid Russian Invasion of Ukraine."  You mean local self-sufficiency isn't such a good idea?

"This pioneering research shows that since the onset of the war in Ukraine, the most vulnerable people around the world are bearing the brunt of skyrocketing food, fuel, and fertilizer prices, with women and girls the hardest hit," ActionAid global policy analyst Alberta Guerra said in a statement. "They are disproportionally affected by multiple crises that impact their food intake, education, their right to live free from child marriage, and their mental health and well-being."

Joy Mabenge, ActionAid's country director for Zimbabwe—a particularly hard-hit country where reported gasoline prices skyrocketed by more than 900%, the cost of pasta soared by as much as 750%, fertilizer was 700% dearer, and feminine hygiene pads increased sixfold in price—said that "food and fuel prices in Zimbabwe have been increasing on a near-daily basis, hitting the country's many families who live below the poverty line the hardest."

Russia and Ukraine might be sellers of grains and fertilizer (in part because the social democratic countries limit grain production and subject fertilizer production to all manner of environmentalist ukases?) and yet their absence shows up, bigly, in the developing world.

TODAY IN FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS.

Is there such a thing as pizza carbonara?  Not on the sidewalks of New York, if the environmentalists have their way.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection has drafted new rules that would order eateries using the decades-old baking method to slice carbon emissions by up to 75%.

“All New Yorkers deserve to breathe healthy air and wood and coal-fired stoves are among the largest contributors of harmful pollutants in neighborhoods with poor air quality,” DEP spokesman Ted Timbers said in a statement Sunday. “This common-sense rule, developed with restaurant and environmental justice groups, requires a professional review of whether installing emission controls is feasible.”

The rule could require pizzerias with such ovens installed prior to May 2016 to buy pricey emission-control devices — with the owner of one Brooklyn joint saying he’s already tossed $20,000 on an air filter system in anticipation of the new mandate.

As many pizzerias are downstairs with apartments upstairs, air filters made sense, regulations or not.

Oh yeah, it’s a big expense!” said Paul Giannone, the owner of Paulie Gee’s in Greenpoint. “It’s not just the expense of having it installed, it’s the maintenance. I got to pay somebody to do it, to go up there every couple of weeks and hose it down and you know do the maintenance.”

Giannone added that while the air filter is “expensive and it’s a huge hassle,” it also has some upsides.

“My neighbors are much happier. I had a guy coming in for years complaining that the smoke was, you know, going right into his apartment and I haven’t seen him since I got the scrubber installed.”

Coasian bargaining, with mushrooms and onions!  It being a government mandate, though, it brings out the rent-seekers.

Other iconic pizza joints facing the heat include Lombardi’s in Little Italy, Arturo’s in Soho, John’s of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, Patsy’s in Turtle Bay and the Upper West Side and Grimaldi’s near the Brooklyn Bridge — that pride themselves on having their pies baked in coal-and-wood-fired ovens.

A city official said that under 100 restaurants total would be impacted.

One pizza restaurateur, who requested anonymity, told The Post that sensitive negotiations are currently taking place with DEP officials on whether to grandfather in or exempt the dozens of coal-and-wood-oven-fired pizza joints from the mandate.

He said politicians and bureaucrats should stop messing with their crust.

“This is an unfunded mandate and it’s going to cost us a fortune not to mention ruining the taste of the pizza totally destroying the product,” the restaurateur, who has a coal-fired oven, fumed.

The special pleading, it goes on and on and on. Not surprisingly, the architects and engineers get to wet their beaks.

THE SUPERFICIAL APPEAL OF DECONSTRUCTING NORMS.

Salon contributor Kirk Swearingen offers one.  Trumpism has purchase, he argues, as an easy form of grievance for people accustomed to being insiders.

Well, they were reminded that there was such a thing as white privilege. They had forgotten about it, possibly on purpose.

They were told that, yes, white privilege is a thing, and it's pretty obvious. They fumed and feigned outrage at this accurate report on the state of the real world until they convinced themselves that it was a huge lie and an outrage. Coached by their favorite enablers in the media, they worked themselves up into an emotional lather until they could act their parts somewhat convincingly, even with all the unrealistic lines. Think of the Stanislavsky Method in acting, except this was the Limbaugh Method of acting out.

Of course it wasn't just about white privilege; that's just the most obvious aspect of the advantages that individuals or groups enjoy (or do not enjoy) in our society, without having to show any particular merit. When the renewed discussion of privilege was extended to male privilege, white men — incongruously led by an obese man-boy in orange makeup sporting a spun-sugar combover — embarked on their White Men's Campaign of Endless Grievances.

That's a predictable riff, it being easier to privilege-shame people than to engage in the serious work of encouraging the insiders to be receptive to the efforts of outsiders to participate in the social order, as well as to encourage the outsiders to appropriate the useful features of that order as their own.  Never mind that it's easy, it antagonizes the insiders, and it's wrong.

So many things in our society can be understood by thinking back to high school. Think of nearly any Hollywood film about suburban teenagers, in which the good-looking spoiled brats of the country-club set get their comeuppance in the third act after reveling in all sorts of bad behavior. These days, roughly a third of the country seems to be rooting for the obvious villains in a new version of that story, now unfolding in our troubled being democracy. It could be called "White Men Whining III: The Retribution," but honestly we've already been gifted the best possible title: "Florida: Where Woke Goes to Die."

Joking aside, the privileges afforded by stereotypical or conventional "good looks" — which generally implicate categories of race and class — are undeniable. Like all other forms of privilege, it provides people with entrée, a form of soft power that can corrupt one's thinking pretty quickly. Handsome boys and beautiful girls often age into vapid adults as a result of this privilege; they never had to put any effort into being accepted.

By Mr Swearingen's standards does the Columbine shooting of thirty years ago qualify as a comeuppance?

JUDGED BY THE MONUMENTS WE'VE DESTROYED.

Bulwark contributor Benjamin Dueholm raises the possibility that Casual Classical isn't going to bring in the concertgoers.

When we choose to enter these spaces with their fraying etiquette and bicentenary warhorse repertoire, what need are we fulfilling?

The world of classical music performance has entered a perilous and disorienting era. Ensembles old and new are having to address themselves to the revealed preferences and ineffable desires of an audience in transition.

Repudiating your cultural patrimony will have the same effect at the concert hall that it has had at the church.

I suspect that, not so long ago, the stodginess was actually a selling point. When I went to classical concerts as a child, it never occurred to me that the decorum was meant to be really exclusive, screening out the rabble. It was, instead, an opportunity for members of the rabble with aspirations for more to try on clothes and manners we would not normally adopt. The tuxedoed gentleman on the stage a short distance from the Midwestern hometown of Tom Wambsgans and Garrison Keillor, focused intently on his violin and the music of Mozart, was doing something so elevated and important that I felt I should really put off shuffling through the program until the cadenza wrapped up and the movement was over. The gradation—between movements, you may shift, cough, turn pages, or be seated but must not talk or clap; at the end of the piece you can clap and cheer and talk again—has a gamelike spirit that a young concertgoer may be eager to learn and internalize. And in any case, it was part of the meaning and function of the enterprise to embrace its rituals. We had come to be elevated; for entertainment, no doubt, but entertainment that was set apart from the general run of things by its content and form. For the space of the event, we were set apart, too: We were there to become cultured.

It's called socialization, and the customs of the concert hall might recognize that there was something about the presentation of the high culture that reflected the evolutionary advantages its development conferred.

HALFWAY TO CHRISTMAS.

Let the Excessively Earnest People be grouchy.  We can't offer unrelenting coverage of Things Gone Wrong.

Freedom Festival season approaches for these United States and Canada.  The county fair season has begun, with Oktoberfest to follow.  There might be an itinerant circus to go to before the pennant races get serious.  Trick or Treat!  That should get us to the Festive Season.

THE VALUE OF THOSE PROTECTIVE PANELS.

The autorack cars of today are locked at the ends and enclosed all around, in order to protect the cargo from vandalism, theft, or use by stowaways.

Usually, the panels are supposed to withstand a thrown rock from trackside.  Every so often, though, there's a batted ball.  With a departure velocity of 100 mph from home plate.  "Minor leaguer’s home run hits passing train."

Worcester’s Polar Park didn’t make the magazine — although it’s in this Trains.com article — but it’s clear it qualifies.

In fact, you can not only see the trains, you can hit them with a batted ball.

At least, Boston Red Sox farmhand Bobby Dalbec can. While it’s hard to see in the accompanying video clip, broadcasters and subsequent news reports say Dalbec’s home run Tuesday night against the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs carried beyond the ballpark and hit a passing train — one of the five to 10 CSX freights that passes daily.

He'll always have that story, it's something that many Red Sox hitters past or present, won't have, no matter how many times they've hit one over the Green Monster.

A PERFECT STORM OF COMPLEXITY CONFRONTING INCOMPETENCE?

Might two columns from distinctive perspectives have outlined how scary a Fourth Turning could become?

Let's start with Richard Heinberg in Common Dreams.

The Cascade Institute notes that “a global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected.”

Evidence of polycrisis is usually separated into two buckets—environmental and social. Signs of environmental crisis include climate change, the disappearance of wild nature, relentless resource depletion, the increasing chemical pollution of air and water, soil loss and degradation, and fresh water scarcity. Evidence of social crisis includes increasing economic inequality, poverty, racism and other forms of discrimination, the rise of authoritarianism, and impacts of rapid technological change (such as automation).

Pretty standard stuff, and no surprise to readers of long standing.  Will the saecular crisis be resolved over the time it takes to raise the next generation, or, this time, is a protracted era of stagnation a possibility?

Our current set of crises can be described as a polycrisis because self-reinforcing feedbacks between ecological breakdown and social breakdown are strengthening and growing more numerous. For example, climate-driven human migration presents challenges to political systems while also eroding traditional cultural norms that support environmental stewardship. Societies in the midst of social crisis, and ones turning toward authoritarian regimes, are seldom able to muster efforts toward resource conservation, emissions reduction, and habitat preservation; indeed, under such circumstances, past efforts in these directions may be undermined.

All of this is happening in the wake of a couple of decades’ worth of historical studies that show societal collapse to be a normal, predictable, and even inescapable periodic occurrence throughout the past few thousand years. It appears that societies tend to become more complex, develop new technologies, accumulate wealth, and grow more unequal over time. Their leaders start to quarrel with one another, weakening overall social cohesion. Finally, after two or three centuries of this, almost anything can push a society over the brink—a natural disaster, resource depletion, war, insurrection, epidemic, or financial crash. Scholars who engage with the accumulating literature on societal collapse can hardly help noting the relevance for today’s world. We’ve built a global civilization of unparalleled complexity, wealth, and inequality, all based on depleting, polluting fossil fuels. What could go wrong?

Well, for one thing, that complexity has emerged concurrently with the incompetence.  Let's go to Harold Robertson in Palladium.

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

Yet another polycrisis, this one self-inflicted by a different pathology?

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

I don't know, the Technocratic Experts who have made such a hash of the first quarter-century of the 21st Century keep appealing to their Credentials.  It's not as if all the box-checking tokens of the Jarrett regency don't have degrees from the Best Universities, is it?

Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

Rather, it's that Complex Adaptive Systems tend to do what the Damn Well Please, and the Men (or Women, or Hermaphrodites) of System aren't as smart as they think they are. Maybe, contra that earlier post, High Modern Authoritarianism will be a casualty of the ekpyrosis.

MINNESOTA NUTS.

Competition stiffens for Illinois’ title as the Midwest’s progressive paradise.  Chasing the productive people out is what Democrat governors do, and Minnesotans are discovering what Illinoisans have long understood.

If you read this “goodbye column from the StarTribune, you might think it’s just another of similar ones we’ve seen by Illinoisans. But it’s about Minnesota, written by a native of the state and prominent founder of a public company named Howard Root.

“What used to be Minnesota Nice has become Minnesota Nuts, and I’m out,” he wrote.

Root’s column is far from one man’s opinion. The numbers increasingly show he is not alone. Last year’s election and the most recent legislative session locked Minnesota into the radical progressivism now popular in much of America, just as Illinois has done over a longer stretch of years. The impact on the Midwest may be significant, altering interstate migration of people and employers, and matching Illinois as a top choice for residents who prefer one-party dominance that will be difficult to change.

Sure, Minnesota has long been solidly liberal, but it was tempered by some degree of business friendliness and practicality. Its economy generally performed well in recent decades and its population increased a healthy 7.6% from 2010 to 2020.

I used to think of Illinois as having sensible, non-Trumpian Republicans, and enough Adlai Stevenson type Democrats to keep the place from going nuts.  Both states, though, have become sanctuary states for abortion seekers, which might make sense, as neither strike me as worth considering as a place to raise children, particularly Normal children.

In last year’s elections, progressives captured all three branches of government and immediately proceeded with measures to lock in their control. They passed automatic voter registry, expanded early registration for minors and allowed felons to vote. They raised the legal requirement for major party status to assure no challenges from what Minnesotan’s call “marijuana” third parties. All high schools must now provide an ethnic studies course to indoctrinate progressive views on race, gender, class, sexuality, religion and legal status.

“So add it up,” a Minnesota political scientist wrote. “The DFL [Minnesota Democrats] and governor have expanded the electorate to their likely advantage, created a new curricular and preregistration pipeline for shaping young DFL voters, and crushed those troublesome marijuana parties.”

That should all sound familiar to Illinoisans, aside from the marijuana thing. Much of the progressive election success in Minnesota can be attributed to campaign lies, as described here in Townhall, which also should sound familiar to Illinoisans.

With their new control over state government, Minnesota progressives rapidly passed a range of the far left’s favorite programs, again much like those Illinois passed in recent years.

Those are opportunities for Wisconsin, and perhaps for the Free State of Iowa, should people in those states do the right things.

It’s safe to expect Wisconsin to begin poaching Minnesota businesses as successfully as it has in Illinois. The Wisconsin-Minnesota border has long been a battle line in that fight much like the Wisconsin-Illinois border.

While Scott Walker was Wisconsin governor several years ago, he told me how easy it was for his economic development folks to steal Illinois businesses. They’d just look for companies in Northern Illinois with leases coming up for renewal, then contact those businesses and lay out the advantages of moving. Southeastern Minnesota is full of businesses ripe for picking. The Wisconsin border is only 30 miles from Minneapolis-St. Paul.

In the longer run, and perhaps most importantly, the extreme shift leftward along with locked-in one-party status means Minnesota will play a larger role in the great national reshuffling caused by political migration that we’ve written about earlier.

That article concludes, "'Good riddance,' Illinois progressives often say to fleeing centrists and conservatives, and 'welcome' to progressives."  They say "good riddance" now, but will they, in the way of communist states, and possibly California, want to hit them with exit taxes later?  And who is saying "welcome" to those arriving illegal immigrants in Woodlawn these days?

THREE SCORE YEARS OF INSTITUTIONAL DRY ROT?

It's not as if we haven't noticed higher education has a problem.  Peter Wood, who is my favorite former college administrator, offers "The coming cultural collapse of American higher education."  I've long suspected that the lamentations about students being too careerist are self-made purgatories.  But why else might anyone matriculate?

Why does anyone go to college? The most popular answer given by American college freshmen from 1991 to 2019 was, “To be able to get a better job.” The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, which conducted an annual survey of full-time students at some 200 four-year colleges, routinely found 75 to 85 percent gave that answer, though many also said, “To make more money.” The next most popular answer during those decades was, “To learn more about things that interest me.” Trailing these answers but still widely endorsed was the ambition, “To gain a general education and appreciation of ideas.”

I don’t have access to more recent results but I suspect the students are still saying much the same. Those answers, however, merely scratch the surface. The real reasons, then and now, that students go to college are hidden in a mixture of social expectations, family dynamics, ambitions, emotional longing, and inertia, covered with a veneer of socially acceptable rationalizations.

The beginning of that UCLA survey coincided with the more cheerful bits of the Consciousness Revolution, but after those first heady summers, reality came to bat.

Especially notable are changes in two contrasting value statements: The importance of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” and of “being very well off financially.” In the late 1960s developing a meaningful philosophy of life was the top value, being endorsed as an “essential” or “very important” goal by more than 80 percent of the entering freshmen. Being very well off financially, on the other hand, lagged far behind in the late 1960s, ranking fifth or sixth on the list with less than 45 percent of the freshmen endorsing it as a very important or essential goal in life. Since that time these two values have basically traded places, with being very well off financially now the top value (at 73.6 percent endorsement) and developing a meaningful philosophy of life now occupying sixth place at only 43.1 percent endorsement.

Yes, and the tenured radicals might have completed the long march through the English Department and installed all sorts of Diversity Weenies in Student Affairs and otherwise let their freak flags fly, and yet, once they filled the area studies departments with their star students, Starbucks hired their other graduates.  Ever since, though, that shift from "meaningful philosophy" (perhaps assisted by pre-herpes casual sex and Acapulco Gold?) to "being well off" (because more than a few hippies of the Sixties became yuppies in early middle age during Morning in America?) has been something that the Student Affairs types lamented, but (read that philosophy essay in full) failed to address in a meaningful, meaning rigorous, and therefore oppressive, or hegemonic, or downright evil, way.

THE WALL HAD TO COME DOWN.

Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green quipped, "The Soviet Union looked very strong to most outsiders right up until it didn’t."  The Deutsche Demokratische Republik attempted to present an impression of strength.  Look closely at this recently released recording of the fall 1984 35 Jahre DDR military parade, and note that colorfully decorated khrushchobas are still khrushchobas, and the morale-building slogans are shop-worn.

A commenter noted the parade took place just after the Cubs partied away a shot at the World Series in the discos of San Diego, while Ronald Reagan was about to reassure voters he was up to the job, and would carry 49 states in the presidential election.  Among the distinguished visitors were Yasser Arafat and Nicole Ceaucescu.  The diplomatic row at Communist parades featured all sorts of rogues and ne'er-do-wells.  Konstantin Chernenko was too old and addled to show up, so some deputy boss communist was the evil emperor's stand-in.

If the khrushchobas don't look old, check out the Chaika staff cars the general officers are riding in.  Cadillac tail fins as interpreted by Soviet artists.  The parade: standard German march music, with a few Soviet revolutionary tunes thrown in.  The motorized units: the new ones are grinding a kilogram of metal shavings into the oil sumps, and all of them give the impression of ancient Plymouths with bad PCV valves.

Three years later, President Reagan issued his "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall" challenge, and five years later the DDR came apart a few days after the parade.

Are the remaining Communist powers inwardly weak whilst appearing outwardly strong?  "China Is A Dying Paper Dragon."  But no Reagan and Bush to manage the transition.  And who has the biggest red button?  "Kim Jong-un facing revolt as North Koreans call for US to attack their country."

We still have to face down the fellow travellers in higher education and in the Jarrett regency.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Americans have had enough.  Americans started paying attention.  The punishment cycles of the grim strategy begin.  "Normally polite and courteous citizens can only be pushed so far, before returning insult for insult."  Temporarily unhinged Americans are slowly reviving.  The left is America's narcissistic abusive spouse.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

JUST. DO. YOUR. JOB.

An Iowa television weatherman walks away from it all.

The chief meteorologist for a Des Moines news station announced Wednesday he is stepping down after receiving violent threats for his frank coverage of the climate emergency and how it could affect his viewers' lives—something he considered a mission as he regularly delivered news about the weather to Iowa residents.

Chris Gloninger joined CBS affiliate station KCCI in 2021 after receiving recognition for his coverage of the climate crisis and the environment at NBC10 in Boston.

He immediately set to work connecting the warming planet with rising sea levels, intense hurricanes, and other extreme weather events in his work on air. In recent reports he has told his audience that the wildfire smoke that enveloped parts of the U.S. this month was the result of the climate crisis.

"A lot of these fires are gaining steam and seeing explosive growth because of the warming planet," Gloninger told viewers earlier this week.

It's nyekulturny for viewers to threaten the lives of television personalities, even though the job of teevee weatherman during the growing season is often that of the bearer of bad news.

SOME PEOPLE DESERVE TO BE SHUNNED.

Seriously?  "Macon Bacon, collegiate summer league baseball team, faces call to change name over 'glorification of bacon'."

ECHOES OF HISTORY.

From time to time, I have dipped into Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series to take stock of what has changed, and what we're still dealing with.  In one of those posts, I was under the impression that the series ended in 1972.  In those posts, I had occasion to call attention to the excessive Washington process worship that he chronicles and that the Sunday talkers pontificate about.  "Perhaps, one of these years, we will come to understand the implications of 'The Presidency had become a job of paralyzing complexity and bloated power' and ask whether the White House really ought be the 'center of action' for 'the price of your milk' or the school curriculum or the hangnail you're suffering from."  Richard Nixon was the Coastal Chattering Classes' warning bell, and the 1972 election set the stage for much of what followed.  "It's fitting, I suppose, that one Joseph Biden, who benefitted from Richard Nixon's short coat-tails, might end up holding the bag for those McGovernite nostrums."

THE ABOLITION OF ANTHROPOLOGY.

The discipline lost the good of the intellect long ago.  "When cultural-studies types take over anthropology departments and remove science on the grounds that it's a social construct, possibly a gendered rape manual, they have lost the good of the intellect in an assault on coherent beliefs of any kind, the end product being an academic culture in which a university that operates as a subprime party school is no less useful than a university that insists on coherent thought."

THE COUNTRY'S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS.

Inside Higher Ed contributor Vicki Baker, a professor of economics and management at Albion, notes "A Title Does Not Make a Leader."

She then calls the roll of habits of ineffective leaders.

1. Poor-performing leaders have big egos; they believe they are the smartest people in the room.
2. An ill-equipped leader listens to react.
3. An insecure leader demands loyalty.
4. An unseasoned leader censures communication; they restrict or eliminate diverse channels of interaction.
5. An immature leader places blame on others as a first response.
6. A misinformed leader is single-mindedly focused.

We could do away with the elegant variation and repeat the adjective "ineffective" or "lousy" in each line.

The article offers what she calls "counterbehaviors" that might be habits of highly effective leaders.

I suggest, though, that you keep that list with you the next time you watch an interview with an elected official or sit through a Sunday public affairs show.  The ineffectiveness is on display for all to see.

Thus does Donald Trump's "We are being governed by stupid people" assertion gain purchase.

THE NEGLECTED ROLE OF THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT?

I purchased Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World on the basis of a skeptical evaluation of its thesis from another member of the Fifty Book Challenge community.

Whilst very readable, at times I really struggled to follow what Marshall was talking about. He seems to shudder from topic to topic within a few paragraphs - this book would have benefitted significantly from some headings within each chapter. I also really struggled with Marshall's argument that Africa is not a world power because it didn't have navigable rivers or the appropriate coastline for deep water harbours. The fact that significant parts of Africa have relatively comfortable weather and therefore good access to food, unlike Europe (which meant Africa did not need to invent farming like Europe), seems lost of Marshall. There was an air throughout that Marshall views America as the best thing since sliced bread, and that he takes a decidedly Western view on appropriate nation-state building. This ended up tainting this book for me, and I struggled towards the end. I think if Marshall had bothered to discuss the South Pacific, Canada and Antartica, I would have enjoyed this book more.

I can launch Book Review N^o. 6 directly from that reader's struggle.  That coasts, rivers, and mountain ranges determine location patterns and tribal or national groupings make sense.  That Old Pharaoh was able to sustain the same sort of civilization for four millennia based on the largesse from the Nile didn't stop latter-day Egyptians from damming the Nile at Aswan, the better to ... control the floods.  China has maintained civilizational continuity for almost that long, and they have the Yellow and Yangtze to replenish the coastal plains for farming, and yet, latter-day mandarins dammed the Three Gorges, the better to ... control the floods.

THE MILWAUKEE MILLION?

Milwaukee's current mayor Cavalier "Chevy" Johnson would like to attract sufficient people within city limits to report a population of a million.  He's battling headwinds in the form of summer peaceful weekends that sometimes spill over into public gatherings of long standing.