DOWN CELLAR TO ESCAPE THE HEAT.

This week's posts are going to be relentlessly documenting E-T-T-S moments.  There will be lighter fare, generally to conclude the day's posting.  Sunday was a good day for model railroading, first at the local model railroad club, where I was focussing on switching up the local industries, rather than recording train movements, and then at home, where some new track down is excuse to break out the clip leads and run a test train.

I hope to have more progress at home to document before the snow flies.

THERE ARE WORSE THINGS THAN YOUR TECHNICAL PAPER GOING UNREAD AND UNCITED.

That's the usual fate of the Minimal Publishable Unit.  "A Minimal Publishable Unit in Hypatia, a Minimal Publishable Unit in Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini: What Difference, at this point, does it make?"

We opened Friday's survey of encouraging developments in a world gone nuts with a story of engineering students mocking a thoroughly silly survey by, inter alia, claiming to "identify" as an Apache attack helicopter.

AN EMERGENT ANTHEM OF NORMAL MILITANCY.

Jason Aldean's Try That in a Small Town doesn't strike me as great instrumentation or great lyrics, and yet, because of the ongoing hectoring and scolding from Our Intellectual Betters, it has caught on as an unofficial anthem, and governors of the Free States have used their social media to endorse its performance and its premises.  "Jason Aldean ain’t getting canceled for this song. In fact, he’s getting more popular."

STINKING HIPPIES ARE AN EMERGENT EQUILIBRIUM.

Saturday's Power Line "Week in Pictures" included among the amusing headlines, "Mathematics explains why non-conformists always end up looking alike."  Look, you can do sensitivity analysis with evolutionary game theory, but logic and proportion feed your head, even if you've had some kind of mushroom.

While anti-conformists may, at first, succeed in devising their own personal brand of sartorial rebelliousness, it’s followed by an inevitable, if unintentional, synchronization around a single appearance. [Brandeis mathematician Jonathan] Touboul’s study looks at how such people seem to inevitably become synchronized. He suspects that a major influence on the way it happens may be the speed of propagation of styles through a culture.

Not everyone learns about or adopts new styles in the same way. Some follow fashion closely, some go by word of mouth, and some emulate the appearance of well-known individuals they admire. In the latter case, the tipping-point may occur after a mutually-revered celebrity adopts a new fashion.

The modelling is simple enough (two types of individuals, different speeds of propagation of a fashion choice, or a perception that stocks are trading at unsustainably high or unsustainably low price) and yet the outcomes are deterministic chaos.

In Touboul’s simple model, one is either a member of the mainstream or a hipster (no snarky connotation intended), and he explores different hipster-to-mainstream ratios. He also factors in different amounts of time it might take a hipster to detect a new style and respond to it.

Simple as his model is, Touboul has found that experimenting with those two factors produces a surprisingly complex set of behaviors, though synchronization always occurs. Even when he revises his model to allow for more than two types of people, synchronization still occurs.

Often, of course, roles may swap when there are so many hipsters that they become the mainstream. “For example,” says Touboul, “if a majority of individuals shave their beard, then most hipsters will want to grow a beard, and if this trend propagates to a majority of the population, it will lead to new, synchronized, switch to shaving.” An odd sudden swap occurs when the number of mainstreamers and hipsters is roughly equal — everybody winds up switching together between different trends.

The work appears to be in the simulation stage, calibration of the dynamics to such phenomena as long hair or tattoos or skirt lengths, let alone testable implications that might be susceptible to statistical analysis are for future research.

It's likely asking too much at this stage of modelling to capture whether mutations in style or behavior confer evolutionary advantage on adopters of them.

HISTORY IS LARGELY THE STORY OF EVERYTHING GOING TO HELL.

Kurt Schlichter's We'll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America is his chronicling of the concatenation of E-T-T-S moments that followed the Pinnacle of American Greatness, which he identifies as late February, 1991, when his armored carwashing unit had precisely ... no tanks or trucks to decontaminate, as the Vaunted Republican Guards decided being martyred in a losing cause wasn't going to curry much favor with Allah.  Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union ceased to function, and Gosplan stopped doing the balances on abacuses, and all was well with the world.

In Book Review N^o. 10, we'll shift focus from the Earnest to the Satirical.  There is a serious message in We'll Be Back, which is that national fragmentation and civil war is a condition people should avoid.  The way in which everything went to hell, however, might be more satirical than earnest.  While the Colonel was prepared to have his decontamination station contaminated, I was approaching middle age, and exposed to some of the forces that might have shaped history in that inferno-bound direction.  It's possible, as he notes at page 25, that after a half-century of Crisis Mentality and Grand Constructions, people wanted a blow.  "We were rich.  Why not party, since there was nothing else to do?  So, of course, we elected the perfect party president in Bill Clinton."  That might be how things turned out, but during that 1992 election, I heard a lot of "after twelve years of Reagan and Bush," generally as prologue to productive people not paying enough taxes, or health care as a matter of right, or the continuing statistical disparities in school leaving or imprisonment or what have you.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We never lack for opportunities to observe the trouble with technocrats.  "To save democracy, 'specially trained' elites had to control it."  Yes, that worked out so well for that Vietnamese village, didn't it? The only safeguard of liberty is the restraint of power itself.  Thus,  "It’s folly to propose – or even to tolerate – the expansion of government power as a means of reining in power."  To save us from the technocrats, we must destroy their conceits.  "When we observe a 'broken market,' there is usually a government intervention causing a disruption, often hidden well beneath the surface and causing unplanned ripple effects to other places."

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

HERE COMES THE WEEKEND. LET'S OWN THE LIBS.

It's always refreshing when the campus cut-ups send up the Excessively Earnest types.  "Students list ‘Apache attack helicopter’ as gender on ‘engineering culture’ survey, angering scholars."  I suppose, for arbitrary values of scholar.

Titled “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interesting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences,” the paper reported on “individuals exercising discursive power in their language to target researchers and tamper with data.”

The authors wrote that the “backlash” to the project “reflects characteristics of contemporary far-right or fascist political movements in the U.S., such as the synthesis of antisemitism with anti-Black and anti-feminist rhetorics.”

About 25 percent of the “malicious responses” provided some airplane-related response to gender, including several who specifically identified as an “Apache helicopter.”

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. "The scholars had sent the questionnaire link to over 3,000 email addresses associated with 'department chairs, program administrators, and faculty at accredited engineering bachelor’s degree-granting institutions,' who could then forward the survey to undergrads."

Look, just because it's so easy to construct and distribute surveys doesn't mean you should, and a case study that infers all sorts of things about the mental state of students whose inboxes probably get a lot of this sort of clutter isn't valid research under any reasonable standard of scholarship, but who said that minimal publishable units had to meet reasonable standards of scholarship these days?  It's not clear that the bulletin in question is peer reviewed as I understand the term to mean.

COME SEE THE RENT-SEEKING INHERENT IN THE NEW URBANISM?

I shy away from the sort of polemical disquisitions about how the self-styled progressives want people living in small apartments along streetcar lines, in good Pruitt-Igoe or khrushchoba fashion.

Recently, I came across the heirs of Leon Trotsky coming to grips with the rent gradient in Sydney, Australia.  "Amid a general cost of living crisis which is acute across all essentials, including food and utilities, rising housing costs are pushing hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions to the financial brink."

I could have noted that the rising rents in the capital cities of Australia were the manifestation of rent-seekers bidding up the rents and dropped the mike, couldn't I?

A protracted property boom means that house prices remain at unprecedented highs, with the median house price in Sydney, the country’s most-populous city, now pushing $1.5 million. With stagnant or falling wages, home ownership is out of the reach of broad layers, especially younger people.

Rents, however, are also skyrocketing. Figures released by the property group Domain for the June quarter and the last financial year show unprecedented annual increases, as well as a continuing acceleration of rental costs.

Across the country’s capital cities, median asking rents for houses increased by 11.5 percent over the 2022–23 financial year. Slight falls in smaller cities, such as Hobart and Canberra, masked far greater increases in larger population centers.

In Perth, the Western Australian capital, median asking house rents increased by 16 percent, from $500 a year ago to $580 now. In Melbourne, the increase was 13 percent, Sydney 12.9, Adelaide 12.5 and Brisbane 11.5 percent. Some 6.1 percent of the yearly increase in Sydney occurred in the June quarter alone.

The hikes were even starker in apartments. That is significant because the apartment market caters to lower-income people who cannot afford to rent a house.

In that "slight falls in smaller cities" is evidence of internal migration, affecting the rent gradients.  Who, pray, is bidding up the housing prices?  That ought not be difficult, dear reader.  "To the extent that people are willing to pay a premium for the opportunity to walk to work, that rent gradient is going to get steeper."

That's so much bourgeois formalism.  The very policies that mandate more high-density housing are, to the properly jaundiced view, a grift.

In New South Wales, the newly-elected Labor administration is centering its housing policies on a campaign for the further watering down of restrictions on property development. Premier Chris Minns has outlined a vision of more and more high-rise apartment buildings, especially in inner-city areas.

The transparent aim of this, and other policies, is not to increase housing supply so that rents go down. Instead the purpose is the opposite: to do everything possible to ensure property developments and high-end investors continue to rake in profits on the back of deepening social misery.

Whatever.

TAKE THAT FAST TRACK TO NUMERACY.

I first flagged Tom Knighton's "If everyone couldn’t succeed academically, it seems, no one should" as a candidate Friday short take, but for the material I've been noting, for years, about how equity as dumbing down the curriculum is an evolutionary dead end.  Let's start with Mr Knighton's elaboration.

So rather than step up their efforts to make sure more black and Latino students can get into the accelerated classes, they just did away with them entirely.

Now, I get being cautious about the message you provide kids. They pick up plenty and you don’t want them getting the wrong idea.

Yet what Fernandez has basically said is, “There’s no way you’ll make it in these advanced classes, so we’re just going to make them go away.” There doesn’t appear to have been any effort to address the disparity by raising up those who fall short, only by eliminating the need.

It’s downright pathetic.

It’s also how equity in education tends to play out. It’s never addressed by trying to get black and Hispanic students up to the point where they’re on par with white and Asian kids in a situation like this, it’s simply eliminating the advanced class itself so that the disparity just doesn’t matter.

It’s laziness on the part of the teachers and administrators.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s incredibly difficult to find something that would raise all those kids to that level, especially over the span of the few years a middle school has them.

We'll get to the good news, at the end, that raising kids to higher levels is possible.

Let me first note that recognizing the students who have high academic ability is a more desirable course than throwing them in with the general population.  "None of the above is likely to sit well with the so-called progressives and all their feel-good fads that do nothing to inculcate bourgeois habits in feral youth, whilst killing ambition among young people not yet feral."

NICE RESTAURANT YOU'VE GOT. IT WOULD BE A SHAME FOR SOMETHING TO HAPPEN TO IT.

We've long called attention to Chicago's hostility to business, heck to productive people generally.  "The efforts by Illinois politicos -- primarily Chicago Democrats -- to impose additional taxes on everything from carbonated drinks to the privilege of doing business -- I am not making that up -- might drive some of the financial services and technology businesses out of Chicagoland."  The new mayor, a communist-adjacent hack named Brandon Johnson who would rather posture for the loudest voices on his city council than, oh, provide a livable city, has the funny idea that productive people don't pay enough taxes.  I mean, when Lori Lightfoot calls you soft on crime ...

DER PROZESS.

When I think of Pennsylvania's big cities, my inclination is to think of Philadelphia as Mediterranean and Pittsburgh as Slavic; then comes Salena Zito calling attention to Pittsburgh's Teutonia Männerchor.

Before we get down to business, I have to wonder how Pittsburghers pronounce "Teutonia."  The German "eu" diphthong pronounces as "oy," hence "TOY-tone-ya."  In Milwaukee, there are people who will pronounce the eponymous avenue as "TYE-tone-ya," which might be a survival of the German, although the most common locution is as "too-TONE-ya."

In any event, that German presence in Pittsburgh, maybe not quite back to William Penn but surely to the era of Carl Schurz and Franz Sigel.

The Teutonia Mannerchor club (translated means a choir honoring Teutonia, one of the oldest tribes in Germany) was founded in 1854, the same year Franklin Pierce was president of the United States.

[Hausmeister Kevin] Varrato said the organizational predecessors included the first German singing society Liederkranz in Allegheny County in 1851, which later became the Freier Maennerchor, and finally, the Teutonia Maennerchor.

“The Teutonia first met in the basement of the Old Weiterhausen Church on Canal Street in Allegheny City,” he explained.

The members finally settled here in 1887 on Phineas Street on the North Side. To join then, one must have been male and a U.S. citizen. Membership records show they had 108 members that year. Women were allowed to join in 2017; today, there are 3,000 active members — a stark contrast to other fraternal groups across the country who have faded away in the past 20 years.

You don’t have to be a man to belong anymore — nor German — however, you do still have to be a citizen. The mission of the Teutonia Maennerchor has never changed, and that is to promote and preserve German American songs and dances and it does wonderfully. The choir is a member of the North American Singers Association and participates in various functions all across the country.

There are such German singing associations elsewhere, although their numbers are dwindling.

It's not the singing, though, that is the trial.  Rather, it's the issuance of building permits.

Call it a wicked sense of humor, or an act of exasperation after spending nearly a decade in bureaucracy hell trying to get a permit. If you look close enough at the base of the newly erected Maibaum (maypole) towering over the beer garden here at the Teutonia Mannerchor club, there is a 3-inch etching of a house with the number 849 over its tiny front door.

Seems odd, right? Well, not if you had to spend all of this time getting the permit, and the only way the city bureaucrats would sign off on it was if the pole met one wild requirement: an address.

And, yes, after eight score years it's only fitting and proper that the clubhouse have its Maibaum.

Salena Zito photograph retrieved from Washington Examiner.

Sometimes the way to demonstrate the folly of a rule is to comply with it.

The erection of the Maibaum, a 55-foot telephone pole lavishly decorated with colorful scenes honoring the history of the people and volunteers of this club over its nearly 200-year history, was truly a labor of love.

Each scene in this Maibaum is representative of the organizations of the club; at the top one is the club logo, the next shows two monks drinking with a barrel of Jagermeister beside them, and the following is the hausmeister and his volunteer crew.

Varrato explained that it all began two decades ago as a pipe dream for then-club President Cornelius Van Murick, who died two years ago. Van Murick may have missed the crowded celebration honoring the presentation of the Maibaum, but he was here in spirit as his family from all around the region came to celebrate the dedication.

Varrato was a little let down that the maypole wasn’t raised on the traditional May 1 celebration of the end of a long winter, but that disappointment faded away as the rod iron doors of the beer garden opened and hundreds of club members poured in to see the towering pole festively decorated in the tradition of German Maibaums, and the folks music began to warm up for the choir.

It's up in time for Oktoberfest season, which begins toward the end of July.

That's on the Summerfest grounds in Milwaukee, and there are a lot of German heritage organizations combining to make German Fest happen, including a Masonic lodge.

German Fest is the closing weekend of July, but the Spanferkl and bratwurst will continue to be available into ... Oktober.

That's the somewhat stylized Maibaum on the grounds of the Bavarian Bierhaus.  The oom-pah music and the dancing takes place in the pavilion behind.

In Pittsburgh, or Milwaukee, or New Braunfels, or New Ulm, or Princeton, Illinois, or wherever you might be, dear reader, find yourself an Oktoberfest and go to it.

THE GREAT SUMMER SMOKE-OUT.

The Walworth County Fair takes place Labor Day weekend, part of the formalities of summer vacation ending and the new school year, or perhaps the pro football season, beginning.

That does have a county fair look about it, what with the portable Ferris Wheel and the always obligatory Paratrooper and Tilt-a-Whirl, as well as the flea market.

The photo is from last Friday, though, and the main event involved food.

The Elkhorn Rib Fest is back after a couple years hiatus thanks to the corona tyranny.  The banner line is definitely not the side show, it is the main event, and apparently the itinerant pitmasters have these banners and trophy displays ready to go, and, as you see, the participating vendors are from all over.

Memphis, Tennessee, and Woodstock, Illinois, no smoked groundhog, please.  Although the weather got nasty later in the evening, with a few tornadoes and strong storms presenting along the State Line and to the east, a lot of people were getting their treats in.

There were two tents dedicated to live bands, and the free parking on the fairgrounds was all occupied by six p.m.  It's possible that the event, which coincided with the end of the Harley-Davidson 120th birthday party in Milwaukee, brought in more than a few tourists.

Yes, Aussom Aussie would put a stick of shrimp on the barbie, if you were so inclined.  A bottle of their "Blue Flame" sauce went home with me.

There's an emergent diversity among the pits, as there are many ways to prepare smoked meat, and the audience at the festival is beginning to reflect that.  A Rib Fest, though, is not a safe space for vegetarians.  Or dieters.  Among the itinerant vendors on the grounds was one selling a cream puff that was probably eight inches tall from the base of the puff to the powdered sugar on the upper half of the puff.

Yes, there's still a lot of crazy stuff going on in the country and around the world, and yet: when it's high summer, and the sunsets are beginning to come perceptibly earlier, and there are two or three days running when the air conditioner can rest and the nights are cool enough to throw all the windows open, the best thing to do is enjoy the moment.  The opportunities to post on the crazy stuff will be there tomorrow, or next week.

SO MANY CARS RUNNING, THEY OVERLOADED THE SUBSTATION.

There's lots of video now available of the Illinois Railway Museum parading over seventy pieces of electric railway equipment, from breezer to freight motors.

I finished editing my video, which includes a lot of the narration, sometimes that previews the next car up, and sometimes it's useful anecdotes.  The recording ends before the rolling stock with pantographs ran.  Was that because I had places to go, or there was rain moving in, or the camera battery running low?

Steven Jam set up further to the east.  His video allows viewers to jump to several highlights of the parade.  From there, he was able to record some of the putting-away activities during breaks in the parade.  That might have included a derailed car being re-railed.

The Trolley Dodger has posted a compendium of videos, movement by movement, allowing the browser to pick and choose among the rolling stock.

This weekend and next, the museum will be hosting Thomas, Percy, and thousands of toddlers.  I understand the new model railroad exhibit will feature all manner of Really Useful Engines in several scales.

Find yourself a preservation railroad and support it.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

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

THE SELF-STYLED PROGRESSIVES ABANDONED PATRIOTISM.

Of late, some among their number have discovered that aggressive, in-your-face deconstruction of everything is an evolutionary dead end.

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.

None of which stops the factions of today from seeking to score rhetorical points.  I start with a Politico essay by Cristina Beltrán, "It’s Time For Progressives to Reclaim the Fourth of July."  She notes that the so-called progressives might have abdicated their claim.

It didn't have to be that way.  Concurrently with official Bicentennial celebrations, none of which were Federal projects, except for a special quarter, an idea that has subsequently gone from classic to dadaist, there was a People's Bicentennial Commission, which offered its own approach to "live up to the true meaning of its creed."

In 1971 a group of Americans angry over the state of the nation and the perceived betrayal of the values of the American Revolution formed the People’s Bicentennial Commission. Over the next few years they engaged in rowdy protests, including burning the president in effigy and disrupting official commemorations of the Boston Tea Party and Battle of Concord. They claimed the legacy of the patriots of 1776, and used TEA as an acronym for their feelings about tax policy.

However, they were not angry about being “taxed enough already,” but wanted the “tax equity for America” with the wealthy paying their fair share. They excoriated the East India Company as a typically nefarious corporation, blaming the Boston Tea Party not on taxes but on that corporation’s corrupt bargain with the British government to get a monopoly on the sale of tea in the colonies. They did not decry socialism, but instead boldly advocated for what they called “economic democracy.” In their words modern American corporations were nouveau “Tories” bent on strangling the will of the people.

A movement from the Left drenched in patriotic trappings confounds our present-day expectations. In the 1970s the political Right had not yet established a monopoly over the legacy of America’s founding. The People’s Bicentennial Commission, formed out of the New Left movements of the prior decade, sought to use the Bicentennial as an avenue for attracting ordinary Americans to an explicitly leftist agenda, and it almost worked. Its story offers a fascinating mirror to the present day, and some lessons and warnings about our current day History Wars.

Well, the Scottish Enlightenment is a collection of coherent beliefs, and the intellectual tendencies of the loony left have over the past fifty years favored the denial of such things.

A COMMUNIST FAIRY TALE.

Francis Spufford opens his Red Plenty with "This is not a novel.   It has too much to explain, to be one of those.  But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story ... The idea is the hero. ... Best to call this a fairytale, then — though it really happened, or something like it."  A blurb on the cover of my paperback edition adds, "A hammer and sickle version of Altman's Nashville, with central committees replacing country music."  There's even a web site providing all sorts of contextual material, should you be so inclined.

I'm going to limit Book Review N^o. 9 to the material I'm more conversant with, namely mathematical economics and political economy, and keep still about the forms of fiction.  When it comes to fiction, give me readable stuff with clear outcomes.  Division of labor is a useful thing, which the characters real and imagined in Red Plenty never could wrap their minds around.  My Chicago Boyz colleague David Foster posted a review a few years ago that fleshes out some of the details, and introduces the dramatis personae.  In the comments are links to all sorts of observations from diverse perspectives, and many of those are technically daunting.

IF YOU GO CHASING RABBITS.

The simplest explanation for the news out of Brown University might be ... it's news out of Brown University.

New survey data from Brown University’s student newspaper provides further evidence that the increase in LGBT identification is driven by social pressures.

The latest data show that between 2010 and 2023, identification as LGBTQ+ has almost tripled among the student body at Brown (from 14% in 2010 saying they were not heterosexual to 38% now). "The Herald’s Spring 2023 poll found that 38% of students do not identify as straight — over five times the national rate," The Brown Daily Herald reported. "Over the past decade, LGBTQ+ identification has increased across the nation, with especially sharp growth at Brown." Other sexual orientations have seen massive increases. "Since Fall 2010, Brown’s LGBTQ+ population has expanded considerably. The gay or lesbian population has increased by 26% and the percentage of students identifying as bisexual has increased by 232%," the student newspaper reported. "Students identifying as other sexual orientations within the LGBTQ+ community have increased by 793%."

The idea of LGBT identification as a social contagion is one that continues to draw criticism among academics. For example, the head of an academic journal that published a paper that supported the theory of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria faced a cancellation attempt, along with the Northwestern University professor who wrote the paper.

Brown, recall, has long been a hothouse of goofy thinking, and it is so notorious as a safety school for the people who don't have the juice to get legacy-adjacent admissions for their spawn that it didn't figure in that celebrity-fake-athletic scholarships scandal of a few years Before Corona.

TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY.

Of late, I have been writing repeatedly about government schools, and the censorship therein implied.  "The unifying theme in that conversation is that Somebody in Public Office is establishing content standards, and the tussle among Critical Studies pedagogues or school board members endorsed by teachers' unions or school board members elected by conservative populists is over who gets to be the censor, even if it's under the rubric of establishing content standards."

SEX IS BINARY.

Dear reader, we begin thus.  "Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?"  The idea is so difficult to understand that it takes an academic discipline to screw it up.

In my first year of graduate school at Rutgers, I attended a colloquium designed to forge connections between the cultural and biological wings of the anthropology department. It was the early 2000s, and anthropology departments across the country were splitting across disciplinary lines. These lectures would be a last, and ultimately futile, attempt to build interdisciplinary links between these increasingly hostile factions at Rutgers; it was like trying to establish common research goals for the math and art departments.

This time, it was the turn of the biological anthropologists, and the primatologist Ryne Palombit was giving a lecture for which he was uniquely qualified — infanticide in Chacma baboons. Much of the talk was devoted to sex differences in baboon behavior and when it was time for questions the hand of the chair of the department, a cultural anthropologist, shot up and demanded to know “What exactly do you mean by these so-called males and females?” I didn’t know it at the time but looking back I see that this was the beginning of a broad anti-science movement that has enveloped nearly all the social sciences and distorted public understanding of basic biology. The assumption that sex is an arbitrary category is no longer confined to the backwaters of cultural anthropology departments, and the willful ignorance of what sex is has permeated both academia and public discussion of the topic.

That's Skeptic contributor Robert Lynch, and he continues at some length.  The problem might be as simple as a word, "gender," being overused.  When I started messing about with the National Income and Product Accounts and something called "quality of labor," there was a five-way taxonomy of occupations, by sex, age, education, experience, and nature of the work.  Open any economics journal these days, and you see references to "gender," which might be current noodling in the income accounts, or it might be something from the culture studies crowd, and it's likely that saying "quality of labor" gets you scolded.

THE CENSORSHIP GOES ON AND ON.

An Associated Press meditation on the meaning of patriotism touches on two themes that have dominated, for good or ill, recent postings.

IT'S NOT THAT HARD.

Somebody at The Babylon Bee attempts to be funny.   "Satan Miraculously Turns Water Into Bud Light."

There's no trans-substantiation involved.

THERE ARE PRODUCTIVE ASSETS IN THE GOVERNMENT'S PORTFOLIO.

I've called attention to them for years.  "Make people aware of just how much they're relying on other people's money to keep their roads passable and watch the fireworks. But it's an idea that might just catch on, after Our Political Masters have tried everything else."  It doesn't matter who gets the credit for selling the idea.

I think we should do something eminently American: we should tell the suburbs to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

That doesn't mean abandoning them. Rather, it's a call for a frank, down-to-earth conversation between the taxpayers and the suburbs; the type of conversation any responsible parent would have with a teenager who's living beyond his means. Let's start taxing users based on the amount of public money they're consuming. If we spend gobs of money on providing infrastructure to sprawling suburban streets, then let's start taxing those streets proportionately to their consumption. Who could argue with that? Why should the townhome dweller be forced to subsidize the McMansion resident?

Too often, the claim that suburban sprawl is a tax sink comes from the sort of doomsday environmentalist that would bring back the khrushchoba. The argument, though, is one that people who would rather reduce government involvement in land use can adopt.

The suburban version of the American Dream might start looking more like a nightmare if people realized the price tag.

Generally, we subsidize things in society that we want to see. The Suburban Experiment is something, however, that has never been put to a vote. While it could be argued that many people voted with their feet, we also know that nowadays people are increasingly tired of all the negative externalities it breeds within our cities: traffic, environmental degradation, loss of community, and a dangerous and hostile environment along our streets for anyone not inside a car. Despite auto-oriented suburbia’s ugly side effects, I don't even think we need to "ban" it. All we have to do is stop subsidizing it.

That sort of flips the script on "subsidize things we want to see," doesn't it? As a practical matter, almost any subsidy in practice leads to inefficiently much production of whatever is being subsidized, no matter how pretty the blackboard economics version of the policy is.

BEER, CIRCUSES, AND STATUS.

Northwestern University publicists don't want those U.S. News guides to go away, as they're able to promote their selectivity and recruit social justice warriors.  Reality, though, is harsher: you have the fraternity and athletic culture of the sub-prime party school, at a higher list price.  "So much of which to be proud," quips Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan.  The fraternity saga goes on and on, and if Sigma Alpha Epsilon aren't involved, Alpha Epsilon Pi are.  The Animal House antics have been ongoing, even during the brief recent run of football success in Evanston.  Who knew, maybe the players played better in order not to be voted off the island compelled to go through the car wash.

"One player I heard from who graduated in 2007, he confirmed the wash activity in which players would rub against each other naked in the shower occurred when he was an active player," said Bradley Locker, a Northwestern student, and co-editor-in-chief for Inside NU, who has reported on the hazing allegations.

Locker added, "The player who I talked to who was recent said this was a widespread issue, including Pat Fitzgerald and the assistant coaches."

Now Mr Fitzgerald is out. Sometimes you have to hang an admiral pour encourager ...

In explaining the reason for Fitzgerald's firing, [university president Michael] Schill added, "The head coach is ultimately responsible for the culture of his team. The hazing we investigated was widespread and clearly not a secret within the program, providing Coach Fitzgerald with the opportunity to learn what was happening. Either way, the culture in Northwestern Football, while incredible in some ways, was broken in others."

The Daily Northwestern also published reports on Monday that detailed possible racism within the football program.

Sometimes, when there is bad news, there is a media feeding frenzy.

Also, on Monday, Northwestern's baseball coach Jim Foster came under fire after 670 The Score reported a toxic environment in the program, including allegations of coaches making sexist and racist comments that led to a human resources investigation. He just finished his first season in Evanston.

The investigation of Guyland behavior in the football program began as last season wound down.  Now, if the Washington press corps would show the sort of initiative a Chicago radio reporter did.

Danny Parkins, afternoon co-host at The Score, reported on his show Monday that Northwestern baseball coach Jim Foster “was the subject of an HR investigation that found him to have violated university policy by engaging in bullying and abusive behavior.” But Parkins said the school did not speak with any players on the team.

“I received a tip Sunday on the heels of the spotlight on the athletic department because of football,” Parkins said. “And then as you pulled at the thread, it just kept going and going and going.”

“Our department’s annual review of all aspects of the Wildcats baseball program is ongoing,” an athletic department spokesperson said. “The well-being of our student-athletes remains Northwestern’s top priority.”

First the evidence, then the verdict. Not surprisingly, Chicago Sun-Times reporters found students who were willing to pass the sentence before the evidence was developed.

Abbie Farley, a rising junior who has been in the Northwestern marching band since her freshman year, said she was aware of the allegations involving the baseball and football teams. The reports coming from different university sports teams warrant investigation, she said. Farley, who studies psychology and cognitive science, said she would like to see more accountability overall throughout key university activities and organizations.

“Northwestern is only one of how many D1 schools?” Farley said. “I can almost guarantee that we’re not the only ones that are having this problem. I would hope that other people, other schools feel empowered to speak up and help advocate for change and feel comfortable to do so.”

"Rising junior" is contemporary usage meaning "will register for fall classes with junior standing."  But where the university administration cows faculty who make controversial claims, and appeases the wokies, is anybody surprised that "verdict first" is a default setting?

The hits, though, keep on coming.  "Wealth Inequality Is Subverting Higher Education at Northwestern."  Somebody got the idea that an enlarged football stadium (!?) that could double as Summerfest Grounds South was a value proposition.  No, seriously.  [Northwestern's] project seeks to attract top pop/rock concerts that would perform from late spring through early fall. Its proposal acknowledges that most students would be away when the concerts occurred. Only incidentally would the proposed stadium also host a handful of college football games."

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.