THE ILLOGIC OF COLLECTIVE ACTION.

I confess to being troubled by the parsing of "collective punishment" in a war setting.  War is a fight among state actors, and state actors are undertaken with some notion of collective action therein.  I therefore have trouble squaring a collective action involving killing people and breaking things with doing that killing and breaking in a way that isn't collectively punishing the subjects or citizens of the state actor having war waged on it.

That's why there are rules of war, the Laws of Armed Conflict.  It sounds good in theory.  "A proportional targeted response is not collective punishment."  All the same, a pattern-bombing raid is targeted, it is "proportional" under some circumstances, and there will be a lot of collateral damage.

War, whether or not there are international conventions, remains cruelty, and refining it is difficult, whether it's besieging Vicksburg, sending Phil Sheridan's cavalry through the Shenandoah, or surrounding Gaza.

TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY.

I suspect that no matter how careful, or how active, university presidents are in performing their Public Intellectual role and Issuing Earnest Statements about the Latest Bad Thing (because what's the point of weighing in on the Latest Good Thing?) somebody is going to carp.

SMALL BEGINNINGS.

Contemporary information technologies make launching a musical career easier.

On Oct. 24, 2006, a little-known singer-songwriter from Wyomissing, Penn., released her self-titled debut album. That 16-year-old was Taylor Swift, who went on to become one of the most successful and influential recording artists of the past two decades — shattering sales, chart and box-office records.

But 17 years before she was selling out a historic six-night "Eras Tour" run at Los Angeles's SoFi Stadium (and four months before Taylor Swift came out), she performed at Yahoo Entertainment's office in Santa Monica, Calif., on July 12, 2006. She was in her very first era, just a kid with corkscrew curls, cherub cheeks and a dream.

Yahoo Entertainment had a rising entertainers campaign, "Who's Next?" and that kid with corkscrew curls performed a song that apparently is still part of her tour today.

People who claim to be Serious Musicologists carp about her performance, or perhaps they grouse about her politics.  It's not that the Custodians of High Culture have covered themselves with glory recently.  Moreover, establishing yourself in entertainment is probably easier these days than it was when Lily Pons or Jenny Lind were coming up.

A little chutzpah can go a long way, all the same.

“I decided I wanted a record deal when I was 10 years old,” she told us at the time, sounding incredibly well-spoken and grounded even at such a young age. “I came to Nashville for the first time when I was 11 and had this little demo CD of me singing [Dixie] Chicks songs, and walked into every major record label and was like, ‘Hey, I’m Taylor. I’m 11. I want a record deal. Call me.’”

The article gives no hint that her parents were living vicariously through her accomplishments, which is refreshing contemplating the early years of Britney Spears or Ludwig van Beethoven.

YE WHO NOW WILL BLESS THE POOR, SHALL YOURSELF FIND BLESSING.

The Canadian Pacific Holiday Trains will be roaming North America again in the run-up to the Festive Season.  There has been a railroad merger since the trains ran a year ago.  The Holiday Train (and I have an artistic interest in how the new corporate image will be applied to the boxcars) that runs in the United States will make a swing along the new Kansas City Southern metals during its tour.  I'm not sure about the first couple days; the tour will begin at Hermon, Maine (Northern Maine Junction, in railroad terms) and get to Montreal West and tie up in Jackman??

Never mind that.  Sunday, November 26 has the train at Pingree Grove, Illinois around 9 am, Byron, Illinois around noon, and Clinton, Iowa at midafternoon.  That's enroute to the end of The Milwaukee Road at Kansas City, after which the train will get on the Route of the Flying Crow.

The following Sunday, December 23, the train calls at Gurnee, Illinois, and Sturtevant, Wisconsin, tying up for the night in Milwaukee.

Kansas City Southern used to operate a Holiday Express train with a similar purpose, and that will also run this Festive Season, making calls along the Meridian - Vicksburg - Baton Rouge lines that Kansas City Southern acquired to connect with the big eastern railroads.

These trains run to provide entertainment and an opportunity to make cash or in-kind contributions, to the local food banks along the Holiday Train's routes, and to the Salvation Army where the Holiday Express calls.

Mark your calendars and make a note in your shopping list.

GET YOUR DEUTSCH ON.

John Kass turns his column over to Bill Melonides for Opa Oktoberfest.  Had the story involved Mr Melonides's grandfather, we could have some Greco-German wordplay, nicht wahr?

Gemütlichkeit is a German term used to convey an idea of a feeling of warmth, a state of friendliness, and of good cheer. My dad was not oblivious to the less glamorous side of Oktoberfest, but he chose to overlook the drunkenness and revel in the gemütlichkeit. He would return from Germany recharged and loaded up with bottles of German wines and cases of the local beer that he had personally sampled. Year after year his affection for this “spirit” grew.

It grew so much that on many Sunday mornings while driving to church we would all be subjected to the German hour on the radio. It was only broadcast for one hour each week and that unfortunately was from 9 to 10 on Sunday mornings. As kids we thought he was crazy, my mom thought he was crazy, even his mom thought he was crazy since we picked her up on the way to church. He was undeterred.

As the years went by, he took us to various local German restaurants, most of which are now sadly shuttered: Zum Deutschen Eck, The Golden Ox, Chicago Brauhaus…just to name a few.

Later, the extended family did their own cooking.

In addition to the local German restaurants that I mentioned earlier, and the various local German fests that we would go to, my dad would periodically visit nearby European markets like Kuhn’s or Meyer’s and come home with loads of German groceries and we would eat German food for days. In his post military days, our Labor Day barbecue morphed into a mini-Oktoberfest. Spero would run out to the German stores and stock up on bratwurst, knackwurst, Thüringen and German beers and my mom would prepare a selection of different foods and sides. My two grandmothers would come over and on occasion my aunt would make the prized Karlsruhe potato salad as only she had the recipe. This tradition continued until my mom passed. For a while my brothers and I would pick up my dad and go to one of the remaining German restaurants for dinner, until he passed.

Now the home cooking is part of campouts with the next generation.

They loved the food. One of the dads who was of German descent, said that he’d never had food as good in a German restaurant. As I watched them all eat, my heart was warmed, and my mind filled with memories of years past. I wished Spero could have been there with me. It was a very emotional night for me. It had been over 10 years since I had enjoyed these dishes and now with both my parents gone, I was again with friends sharing the gemütlichkeit.

A couple years later I was preparing to cook for another fall camp out and in keeping with my desire to mix up the menus, I asked the dads if there was anything in particular that they would want to eat.

One of the dads suggested, “maybe you could do the German food again?” I suppose that is how traditions begin because the fall campout for Princesses was an Oktoberfest for the rest of my tenure as chef. Last year I was contacted by my replacement and asked to share the recipes for the upcoming campout. I heard it was a tremendous success. The tradition lives on as others now spread the gemütlichkeit.

Perhaps the opportunity for that Greco-German wordplay will still arise.

As the Oktoberfest season begins I’ll often play the music in the car for my girls on the way to school in the morning. Initially they would cringe at the sound of this foreign music until I explained to them how much their Papou Spero loved this music, how he forced us to listen to it it as children and how I have grown to appreciate it. They eventually began to tolerate it and now even they have their favorite songs. Sowing the seeds of gemütlichkeit.

Opa! Opa!  Prosit!

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Biden has the Sadim touch.  Joe Biden is not our functioning president.  He's going to appear on 60 Minutes???  "It took four days for him to give [Tuesday's] speech is probably a sign that it’s taking them longer and longer to get him ready for even the tightly managed appearances."  (Yes, that announcement was for a noon start and it began around half past one, my time.)  Let the man nap, indeed.

Confound it, isn't there enough of the traditional stuff to elaborate on?  Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, numbers, number and number.  "The poor and unconnected don’t fly internationally to attend a 'rave for peace.'"

להזדיין ולגלות  What have I always said about process, nuance, failure?  "The peace process has been dead for years, but the mindset behind it survives."  These are not serious people.  Failure.  "Weak and failing leaders and systems make for interesting times."  Consequences.  "Hamas wanted an Old Testament war and now they’re going to get one."  Responsibility.  "Gaza has been on a path to destruction for a while."  Israel has the right to act.  "Imagine it was Brighton or Plymouth, and scores of armed men were pouring in."  Israel's unity government has no appetite for restraint.  Reap what you sow.  "Peace comes when a war ends, and wars usually end when one side loses decisively. That should be the Palestinians."  It's not a time for nuance.  "In total war, the situation in which Israel finds itself, destroying the will of the civilian population to resist is the ultimate military objective."  This is a death match.  "Seen Jericho lately?"

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

SOONER OR LATER THE INTELLECTUALS WILL REDISCOVER THE VALUE OF COHERENT BELIEFS.

Indiana political scientist Jeffrey Isaac recognizes where their absence leads us.  "Voices of sanity, and reason, are in too short supply, and in constant danger of being drowned out by the rhetoricians of all-out war."  I mean, when Albert Camus is providing the clarity!  “When violence answers violence in a growing frenzy that makes the simple language of reason impossible, the role of the intellectual cannot be... to excuse from a distance one of the violences and condemn the other... that role is clarify definitions in order to disintoxicate minds and to calm fanaticisms, even when this is against the current tendency.”

A lengthy essay follows.  It will reward careful study.

DEMOCRACY LOOKS A LOT LIKE ORWELL'S PIGS.

A middle school teacher conducts an activity.

My scary classroom social experiment demonstrating how tyrannies arise from democracies:

I gave a bunch of extra credit tickets to the first few students to arrive in class, then everyone else received 1-2 tickets.

The kids that came into class last were outraged by the “injustice” of those that came first getting a greater reward.

There were no rules or directions for this day in class. I just told them I’d act as an enforcer of whatever they decided to do in the 47 minutes.

The story suggests this activity took place some years ago; it illustrates the folly of making up extra credit as you go along, and I can't help but wonder whether some Karen lodged a gripe with the principal, whether about the arbitrariness of the extra credit or about that Gadsden flag on the wall.  There's a snapshot at the link showing both the flag and the young Napoleon who emerges as proconsul.

She used her charisma and charm to court the majority of her peers that had less coupons, and played off their resentment of the minority that had earned more tickets for arriving to class early.

In the allotted time she convinced her peers that if they voted to give her absolute power, she would confiscate the 40+ coupons held by the minority and distribute them equally.

The minority of students were frustrated, but powerless against the majority vote.

Emily was elected to a “supreme ruler” position, and as promised she confiscated all of the tickets from the minority of students that arrived to class first.

Wolves, sheep, dinner.  Oh, sorry, no, what happened next was "Some animals are more equal."

She kept the vast majority of tickets for herself, and distributed a few to some of her friends.

It was a microcosm of what has happened historically time and time again, and the danger our republic faces.

I asked the students to write a reflection on how they now viewed unrestrained majority-rules democracy, and their opinions has definitely changed from the day prior.

The essay ends here, with only the note that Young Napoleon went on to become a restaurant manager and a mom. Nothing about whether the teacher stepped in and voided the extra credit, or whether the reflection pieces (this was middle school) touched on either vanguardism or the administrative state. “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

Let the record show that Young Napoleon won the election by pretending to be public spirited.  Sometimes you don't see the advance auction of stolen goods until after the goods are stolen.

WITHDRAW YOUR SANCTION.

For years, I have called attention to the administrative usurpations turning the calling of professor into the chore of special education teacher whilst requiring the sort of input-measurement useful in crafting a control panel in such a way as to encourage derivative scholarship of the minimal publishable unit form, rather than engaging in creativity.

Do you want to know who is John Galt?  "The man who retires from public life, to think, but not to share his thoughts-the man who chooses to spend his years in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind, never giving it form, expression or reality, refusing to bring it into a world he despises-the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started, the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found-they are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike against your world and your values."

Little did I know, at the time, how prescient that John Galt quote was.  "The capture of American universities by this moral rot has left many professors who are committed to old-school ideas—like, say, the outlandish notion that universities should be dedicated to the pursuit of truth—heading for the exits."  Details at that link, and this.

Fine.  I can easily expand the scope of my posts.  "I have withdrawn my sanction in the strongest possible terms.  I reserve the right, though, to bring to your attention the struggles of embattled faculty to reclaim rights and responsibilities more properly theirs."

WE ARE ALL UNDEREMPLOYED COMPARED WITH OUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS.

I've noted that from time to time.  "We're all underemployed compared to our ancestors who had cows to milk and fields to plow, with no mechanical assistance. We're rich enough that scaling back ambition doesn't have to mean starving."  Sometimes, sex roles figure in the evolution of work.

Apt. 11-D, Invisible Adjunct, and Sara at Crescat Sententia weigh in on the tensions between moms caring for their kids full time, women caring for their kids and doing paid work, and women without kids doing paid work. (I hope that distinction is consistent with 11-D's and Invisible's observation that raising kids is work and not really equivalent to a hobby.)

But there is a deeper theme running through several of the paid media posts inspiring the commentaries linked above. In Ellen Ostrow it's this: "The problem, it seems to me, is that issues of equity have been framed in the context of balancing work and family life. Understandably, this renders the concerns of people without children or other family obligations as irrelevant." Cady Wells puts it this way: "As a childless faculty member I wonder why the ability for me to have evenings and weekends is not as important. I'm sympathetic to the difficulties of the faculty parent, but it's not necessarily easier being childless. The pressures are just different." And Lisa Belkin goes beyond the Battle of the Sexes: "Women started this conversation about life and work -- a conversation that is slowly coming to include men. Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too -- the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men."

But methinks Belkin doth claim too much, and Ostrow and Wells doth protest too much. We are all ... whether raising children or not, whether working late with the help of artificial light or not, whether tenured or not, whether taking derivatives or playing on the Internet ... seriously underemployed compared to our ancestors of 100 or 150 years ago. Consider, for example, the time squeeze that comes from making time to work out, or to run, or to get the kids to a sporting event. Fast-rewind to a time when we got PAID to work out, shoveling coal into a locomotive, or walking behind a plow, or doing the laundry on a washboard, or chopping wood for the cookstove, or gathering water. Whether I'm keying into Maple or checking the math with paper and pencil, I'm not burning anywhere near the calories I would on any of those other jobs.

That post is twenty years old, and a lot of those links have rotted.  There are also a lot of moving parts in there, many of which might provide inspiration for an economic historian who gets demography.

DO UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS HOLD FORTH AS PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS OUT OF A SOCIAL OBLIGATION?

Duke political economist Michael "Kids Prefer Cheese" Munger suggests they resist the temptation.

The only choices are:

A. Don't issue public statements on things that do not directly affect your university. DIRECTLY.

B. Issue statements on some things, but not others, and THEN be prepared to issue a statement on why you choose not to issue a statement.

CORRECT Answer: A

He's responding a statement from a Stanford dean, Jennifer A. Frey, who seeks to codify when Senior Administrator qua Public Intellectual is doing the Responsible Thing.  "But as a dean, it isn't my job to weigh in with my students on current affairs unless they are somehow disrupting the work of the college I oversee."  Within her post is a statement from the president and provost of Stanford.  That statement might refer to things that DIRECTLY affect Stanford, ranging from "triggering" chalkings on the sidewalk to demonstrators yelling at each other.

Stanford University is a community of scholars. We believe it is important that the university, as an institution, generally refrain from taking institutional positions on complex political or global matters that extend beyond our immediate purview, which is the operations of the university itself. Maintaining university neutrality allows for our individual scholars to explore them freely. In recent years, many universities have gotten into the habit of issuing frequent statements about news events. This creates a number of difficulties. The decision to take a position about one event or issue yields implications for silence with regard to other issues; given that different subsets of a campus community may be more or less affected by particular issues, this inconsistency is felt acutely. It can enmesh universities in politics and create a sense of institutional orthodoxy that chills academic freedom. In addition, crafting each message is challenging, from gathering facts and context on complex issues at the speed of online media and the news cycle while also walking a line between platitudes and overly political positions.

And yes, the culture warriors are in full cry, particularly when other institutions of higher learning you might have heard of unleash the Hamas cheerleaders.

LET'S HEAR IT FOR FREQUENCY.

Florida's Brightline only recently began serving Orlando, and they've added more trains.

Brightline has announced that train service between Miami and Orlando will double to 30 trips daily starting Monday.

The news comes less than two weeks after the company's inaugural trip to central Florida.

Brightline said there will be 15 trains in each direction to and from Orlando. The company currently runs eight trips each way.

The first train will leave Miami at 6:41 a.m., arriving in Orlando at 10:19 a.m., and the last train of the day will leave Miami at 9:41 p.m.

Meanwhile, the first train will leave Orlando at 4:38 a.m., and arrive into Miami at 8:11 a.m. The final train will leave Orlando at 8:54 p.m.

Brightline also has stops in Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and West Palm Beach. Additional early morning and late-night trains will operate between these stations.

There are some operational considerations, to be elaborated on in a future post, that militate against an on-the-hour memory pattern schedule.

We'll be paying attention to how well the extra frequencies draw passengers, and to whether that quasi-commuter service along the southeast coast pays off.

PLAYING TO THE BASE.

I don't have much respect for ward-heeler politicians.

There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents.  A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits.  Better to have constituents rendered helpless by years of Democratic policies.  That's how Gwen and Bobby and John and Maxine achieve seniority in the Democratic caucus.

The phenomenon is apparently international.  Hamas is to Gaza as Black Lives Matter is to Chicago.

Yes, you might argue that one organization calls attention to militarized policing in Gaza, while the other began by calling attention to overzealous policing in Ferguson or Minneapolis.

The politics of both organizations, though, have the effect of encouraging the self-destructive behavior.  "There is no shortage of repulsive expressions of anti-Semitic hate in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel, but it is hard to top this one from the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter."  Yeah, paragliding into a dance party to rape, pillage, and murder is going to win friends and influence people.

In other words, BLM Chicago really is no better than the Hamas terrorists who paraglided into that festival and murdered, kidnapped, and raped innocent people in the name of "freedom" from the so-called "occupation" or whatever.

Not that we didn't know this already, but it's important to document it for the record all the same.

Seriously, dear reader, how hard is it to screw up BEACH FRONT PROPERTY?  By putting it in the hands of the Levantine version of ward-heeler politicians, that's how.

Entire books have been written on how the Gaza Strip came in to being. We’re not going to go back to Biblical times on today’s post, but we will stick to living memory that goes back to 1950 when the Gaza Strip had a population of about 120,000. Today, it has a population of about 2.3 million. The various Arab-Israeli wars ebbed and flowed around Gaza over the decades, but even in peace Egypt never wanted it back. Israel tired of being an occupying force, and under pressure from local and international Smartest People in the Room™, they hoped for the best in 2005 & unilaterally withdrew its settlements and security forces from Gaza. The Gazans then had “elections” and in the end Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and have had it ever since.

Hamas. You know, the terrorist organization. Those guys.

The fact Gaza became a terrorist run safe space didn’t stop the “International Community (IC),” the internationalist left, and useful idiots from turning it in to a global welfare state that never had to earn support through constructive behavior. Humanitarian aid came in from all over the place, and with each passing year it became a stronger and more effective proxy for Iran. There was never a popular uprising against Hamas by the residents of Gaza, just the opposite. They own this. They are “this.”

Well, yes.  If the residents of Gaza, after the War, had developed those beaches and become a tourist destination, the internationalist left and the Islamists would not have had a population kept in a parlous state, the better to mau-mau Israel or neoliberalism or American hegemony or whatever with.  Chicago might be facing a similar fate.  That is, unless that Democrat base in Chicago tires of the ongoing crime and the importation of even more people to be kept in a parlous condition.

THE WRONG INTELLECTUAL ARGUMENT TO MAKE.

Abbie Hoffman might have quipped, "Sometimes the best intellectual argument is 'f*ck you!'"

It's not the best argument to make when a state senator is watching.

Aggressive trans activist wearing a mask harasses people outside Penn State University.

He then verbally abuses a Pennsylvania State Senator screaming obscenities at him for attending the women’s speaking event.

🎥 @CollegeFix @thelogandubil

pic.twitter.com/8S1jbI7hf4

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) October 11, 2023

State senator Cris Dush, who represents State College, kept his composure quite well in his interaction with that exemplar of our Woke Intellectual Betters.  I doubt that the punk understood the full import of "Want to lose $150 million?"  It's hard enough to stand up for Penn State in light of the football scandals, and these exemplars suggest there's more than the odd couch burning behind some grousing I've seen on urban planning social media about State College restricting the extent of zoning for student housing.

THE CRAFT OF DOING ECONOMICS.

The economics commentariat are weighing in on Claudia Goldin's Nobel, with several observations that might be useful to the aspiring researcher.  Let's start with an observation from Brian Albrecht at Economic Forces.

[T]o truly appreciate her contributions, one must dive deep into her comprehensive body of work. Unlike last year's prize, where half of it focused on a single model of bank runs, Goldin's legacy sprawls over decades of research. If you look at her citations, you don’t see one HUGE paper. You see decades worth of hard work. There’s generally a bias against this work for the Nobel, compared to one flash of insight, and Claudia’s work probably has something to say about that…

I'm not sure about that characterization; years ago we understood the Nobel as recognition for a body of work, although if it's Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, perhaps we're talking about a HUGE doctoral dissertation!  And carp, if you must, about Paul Krugman's award being politically motivated; he adapted a number of insights from regional economics into trade theory, and influenced all sorts of derivative scholars and policy wonks.

For what it's worth, Mr Albrecht might have alluded to the two Pauls in his essay.  "My conjecture is that it is because those papers represent a culmination of years of study. This stands in contrast to a more-typically-male form of genius like one sees in some mathematical insight generated as a 20-year-old grad student."

POLITICS DIVIDES.

Dear reader, does the following list of authoritarian strategies remind you of anybody?

1. Encourage anti-intellectualism.
2. Undermine moral standards, especially among lawmakers. 
3. Pursue power for power's sake.
4. Develop a spiritual connection with loyal followers.
5. Rewrite national history.
6. Create political chaos.

Perhaps "both-sides-do-it" deflection is so popular with the political class because it works.  It's easier to point out the moral failings of one's opponents than it is to recognize that politics is a drag on civilization, and it's easier to shore up support with people who generally agree with you by boosting their self esteem, even at the expedient of running down the Others.  I'm being deliberately provocative, again, but will we ever learn that reality is emergent, and it will find ways around the most carefully constructed and polemically advocated governance structures.

RIDDEN HARD AND PUT AWAY WET.

A few weeks ago, Britney Spears posted a video involving dances with knives.

Pop superstar Britney Spears finally decided to address a recent wellness check she received from local law enforcement after posting a video that went viral featuring her doing a little jig with a couple of very realistic-looking knives. Spears’ mental health has been questionable at best for years now, but folks were convinced she was doing much better these days. It wasn’t that long ago that she was finally released from a conservatorship, during which her parents ran her estate, due to her not being stable emotionally and psychologically.

Leave the legalities aside and look closely at the lady's face.

That's the beaten down look of an adulthood of poverty, not the countenance of somebody leading a comfortable life.

I'd draw comparisons with Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," except that the Migrant Mother's children built a competence for themselves after the War.

KUDOS.

To Claudia Goldin, "For having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes."

Professor Goldin was completing a dissertation at Chicago under Robert Fogel's supervision when she taught a principles of microeconomics class at Wisconsin.  I took that class.

Professor Goldin was being recruited by Princeton at the time and subsequently called to Harvard.  We've noted some of her work on those labor market outcomes, as well as research on the effect of third-party payments on tuitions.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution posted much more.  Let me highlight this.  "Goldin wasn’t just downloading datasets she discovered and developed them!"

Yes.  How many times did I dress students down for saying "there's no data" when they meant "I can't find a government file to download?"  Sometimes when you dig it out yourself, you can tackle anomalies, and the fun is in the anomalies.

Yes, that's a high-risk, possibly high-reward research strategy, and the prudent thing to do might be to stick to the safe topics.  The recognition, though, might go to the people with the chops and the persistence to track down the anomalies and analyze the heck out of them.

Well done.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR.

It was so easy to posture about being a sanctuary state when the border was closed.  Open borders are another matter.  "Pritzker calls on ‘someone’ to stop Texas from sending migrants ‘only to blue cities’."  Heck, he even took his gripe to regime media.  "'Someone needs to work in Texas with these border politicians to have them stop sending people only to blue cities!' Pritzker told Face the Nation on Sunday."  It came to this, dear reader, when mayors and common councils of those cities thought posturing as "sanctuary cities" was a good way to Own The Deplorables.  Many of those cities are also gun-free zones, but I digress.

Don't ask Dementia Joe to help you.  He's sleeping.  “The president of the United States and the White House has the ability to help disperse folks across the country. That will help a lot.”  So might building a wall.  "Ocelots don't vote. Woodlawn residents do. A potbellied dictator of a governor, and a potted plant of a president, can grasp that."

GENDER IS A GRAMMATICAL TERM.

Gerard Casey, libertarian Tory, contemplates the etiquette of conversation.

In the controversy over pronouns, could we get clarify something once and for all, and that is the difference between addressing someone and referring to someone.

In English, we address someone using a second person pronoun. In modern English, that pronoun is you or some local variant thereof. This pronoun is not linked to sex. There are languages where polite forms of address use third-person pronouns but English is not one of them.

Heck, we even got rid of "thou" and "thee" which might have been adopted from the informal, or familiar, du and the formal Sie of German.

RESTORING THE INDIANA INTERURBAN.

Wouldn't it be useful, if you were going to bring your bicycle on the train, to have a baggage car to carry it?  The North Shore Line and South Shore Line, years ago, would marshal a combination car (in the case of the South Shore, sometimes more than one) in a train of interurbans.

The more common practice was to run a single car with a baggage compartment, and there might be cut flowers, frozen fish, a crate of chickens, or a few cans of milk in it.  In Indiana, steel cars were ubiquitous toward the end.  A very few survived the end of interurban service, other than on the South Shore, as construction offices or lake refuges.

Now, Union Traction 429, formerly a construction office, is back on wheels and under power.

A century ago, Indiana’s high-speed, interurban, electric trains empowered Hoosiers to pursue an education, expand economic opportunity, visit loved ones, quickly ship perishable goods, and electrify rural communities. Now, No. 429 and the Hoosier Heartland Trolley Co. are poised to reprise that role in a historic sense. The company is working to develop a working interurban line interpreting life during the interurban heyday.

Hoosier Heartland have at least one more steel combine under restoration.  They've documented the restoration of 429.

The group have acquired components to build an electrically operated preservation area somewhere in Indiana.  Preservation railway season has mostly wound down for the year, apart from the seasonal trains for Hallowe'en and Christmas; preservation work goes on year round, and financial assistance from armchair ferroequinologists is always welcome.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Game, set, and match.  "The moral of the story is that big government doesn’t work well on the national level, it doesn’t work well on the state level, and it doesn’t work well on the local level."  Turfing it out is hard.  "Voters mostly signal that we won't punish them for poor performance."

New Deal politics, now turned upside down?  "Modest-income voters think Republicans 'care about people like me' not because they expect them to shovel out government money but because they expect Democrats to push policies that, while providing psychic income for affluent college graduates, will cost them more money for gas and food or force them to buy electric cars that conk out, washers that don't wash, dryers that don't dry and heat pumps that don't heat."

The Republicans are a mess right now.   Americans' overall perception of the economy is sour.  Entitlement spending is unsustainable.  Out of chaos, freedom.  Neither party has a working majority.  Despite our epidemic of fantasy, there remains reality. (Which bats last.) All we need to do is stop taking their guff.  Get it down to two non-Trump candidates FAST!

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

DEMENTIA JOE CAN'T PRINT ENOUGH MONEY.

That Illinois budget surplus of a year ago?  "Illinois state government received all sorts of fiat money from the Democrat state bailout masquerading as a 2021 coronavirus relief appropriation."  Oh, and all that posturing about Chicago being a sanctuary city and Illinois a sanctuary state?  There's no more printed money coming in, and the potbellied dictator has had enough.

On Monday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker sent a letter to President Joe Biden telling him of the unbearable burden of the 15,000 illegal immigrants that have arrived in Chicago and Illinois over the past 13 months. We just had more than 10,000 illegal immigrants cross the border in a single day (though Katrine [c.q.] Jean-Pierre won't admit it).

Pritzker tells Biden something must be done. He recommends, first and foremost, "that there be one person in the federal government who works directly for you in the White House who can lead the oversight of our nation's efforts at the border." Hmm … one person who works directly with Biden.

That's Twitchy, finding the receipts that the ditzy valley girl has that portfolio.  More buses will be coming. The bond markets will have something to say about the money printing the midwest's most progressive governor prays for.  "The governor recommends that President Biden create a single office with an identified leader to oversee the border and coordinate with cities and states, give the state more money for housing, food and social services and speed up the work authorization process for asylum-seekers."

STOP ENGAGING IN SPECIAL PLEADING FOR UNHAPPY PEOPLE.

Push any economist far enough, and you'll unearth skepticism about anthropology, psychology, and sociology.

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."

I've long suspected that the discipline became special pleading for unhappy people long ago.  "Somewhere, though, anthropology narrowed its focus, turning the attempt to understand the varied ways in which people interact into yet another manifestation of identity politics and vulgar Marxism."

That's unfortunate, because there are a lot of ways in which people interact that do not involve prices, scarcity, or the sorts of incentives amenable to economic analysis.  The problems in those disciplines, though, might be a consequence of preference cascades of long standing getting in the way of dispassionate inquiry.  Consider a recent cancellation of a session at the anthropologists' conference.  "Present the evidence that persuades me to revise my priors.  At the anthropological association, though, those priors are so tight that I have to behave myself rather than unleash the sort of scatological reference they deserve."

BECOMING WOKE IN GALEWOOD.

Galewood is an economically stressed neighborhood of Chicago, in part thanks to farm policies that encourage the export of sugar to factories in third world countries to the detriment of neighborhoods once home to Mars and Brach, among others.  I'm using woke in its original sense, which is to say, becoming aware of reality.  The reality I have in mind is dawning on constituents of ward-heeler politicians.

There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents.  A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits.  Better to have constituents rendered helpless by years of Democratic policies.  That's how Gwen and Bobby and John and Maxine achieve seniority in the Democratic caucus.

Yes, that's an old roll call, and yes, some of those Members of Congress have crossed the final summit.

THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC SAFETY COMES FOR STARBUCKS.

When a Stalinist terror begins, nobody is safe.  "Once known for its progressive politics, Starbucks’s labor practices have soured its reputation in the eyes of many college students. Now some want the chain booted from campus."

NO RUNS, NO HITS, THE SPRECHER LEFT IN THE COOLER.

Well, that went to heck in a hurry, didn't it?  At the start of the baseball season, the Milwaukee Brewers were a team of new players in a division the pundits had the Cardinals winning, but early on it looked like nobody was interested in winning the division.  That changed as summer went on.  At the Labor Day weekend, even a ten game Brewer winning streak couldn't make the Cubs, at  1 1/2 games behind, go away.  Too many late season day games in the continuing summer heat did that.  Blame it on climate change.

NATIONAL MONUMENTS REQUIRE MAINTENANCE.

“Two Bells”, Dianne Feinstein.  "Dianne Feinstein saved the cable cars all over again, a third of a century after Friedel Klussmann rescued them from oblivion in 1947."  Yes, there was federal infrastructure money involved.  As mayor, she also got the heritage trolley line started.  Those are vintage cars from Italy and North America doing regular service on Market Street and the waterfront.

TIME TO DISCONTINUE THE GERIATRIC TRAIN.

Michael Walsh's "Good-Bye to All That" makes that case.

Despite the polls, which at this point only offer a choice between two superannuated, erratic geriatrics, the voting public understands that neither Trump nor Biden is the way forward. Both are running in large part on resentment of the other, and of the nearly -- nearly -- 50 percent of Americans who, at the moment, support them. But there is a near-zero chance that either man will be on the ballot in November of 2024 when the only poll that matters takes place. (Ask Hillary Clinton if she disagrees.) Biden is visibly crumbling before everybody's eyes, while Trump's King Lear imitation on his vanity social-media platform, Truth Social, has become a national embarrassment.

Further, the increasingly surly Biden's performance in office is the best argument against returning him to power, while Trump's disgraceful final year in office, which includes both turning the country over to the sinister Tony Fauci and summoning the demons of January 6 to challenge an election even his closet advisers later admitted under oath they knew was lost, disqualifies him from another turn in the Oval Office.

The two presidential opponents are particularly bad. Their cohort is past its sell-by date.  We saw something similar as the G.I. politicians aged out.

Thus Generations begins with a comparison of President Kennedy's inaugural parade with that of President Bush the elder.  Both Presidents served with distinction in World War II, and their inaugural parades were slices in time of the G. I. Generation in rising middle age and in elderhood.  Working hypothesis: epochal events shape cohorts of individuals, in the case of the G.I.s a massive coming of age challenge combining economic distress and global war.

At the time, Jimmy Carter was preseasonal, according to that logic, and failed. Joe Biden is postseasonal, whether it is he doing the failing or his minders isn't relevant.  What comes next has a Fourth Turning vibe to it, irregular cadences of history notwithstanding.

With neither octogenarian (Trump would be 82 at the close of a hypothetical second term) in the race, the way would be clear for a long-overdue changing of the Boomer and even pre-Boomer guard that has long dominated U.S. politics. A Trump- and Biden-free election opens up vast new vistas for a rapidly changing country, allowing frank if not always friendly discussion about today's particularly thorny problems, including the untrammeled invasion across the southern border, the rolling back of Critical Theory and all its unholy spawns, and returning the libertine genie of "non-binary" sexuality to its bottle and burying it at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

That might be so, and Mr Walsh hopes for a restoration of a state of good order.

The removal of Trump and Biden from the lists would also immediately make clear the stark distinctions between the parties, unencumbered by their outsized, media-fueled personalities. On the left, the death of modern Liberalism, which began with the McGovern campaign of 1972, would be laid bare, and the "woke" minority exposed for the malignant civilization-killers they are. On the right, the post-presidential poison of Trumpism would dissipate into the atmosphere, to be replaced by a fair contest among Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence (representing some form of Trumpism minus Trump), and perhaps even Glenn Youngkin, currently lurking in plain sight.

Possibly, although there are four political parties stuffed into those two major parties, and the people controlling Dementia Joe are going to continue to have to placate the True Believers, no matter how much destruction of the big cities there will be, and the populists calling themselves Republicans will find other champions.  Mr Walsh might exhort, "So imagine a world without Biden or Trump; it's easy if you try. Now go out there and make it happen."  That new saecular order might still hold surprises.

I'M FROM THE GOVERNMENT, AND I'M DOING IT FOR THE CHILDREN.

Asked:  "Why is Baby Formula Kept Under Lock and Key?"

Answered:

Collectivists, look no further than your beloved, doughty statesmen. The cogent, provable explanation is an array of government restrictions, each of which drives up retail prices on an already difficult-to-produce good. Patent restrictions, a deliberate oligopoly, protectionist tariffs, and the highest inflation in four decades have resulted in an extremely expensive product at the end of a frangible production process and supply chain. Explosions of civil unrest and the rapid growth of shoplifting (now approaching a $100 billion problem) have led vendors to physically restrict access to products that are frequently stolen. Those include, but are not limited to, baby formula.

There is indeed, as the memesters and social media wags suggest, a severe moral delinquency at work. But it is neither with the shopkeeper nor the choice of lock and key. It lies in the muster of interests which, through political power, conspire to prohibit the unhindered manufacture and distribution of critical goods.

The regulation-induced shortages choking the baby formula supply only make the stuff more valuable to hustlers who will steal it in order to sell it at a discount on the street.

TURF THE MALCONTENTS OUT.

Special Forces is airing again on Fox, opposite the first half of Monday Night Football.  I liked the first season.

I confess to enjoying a new reality show, Special Forces, in which real veterans of special operations put assorted celebrities, most of whom are a little too old for ordinary boot camp, through a few drills.  It's cathartic, in particular, to hear lines like "You can go back to your luxurious houses and your Instagram followers and feel sorry for yourself" or "Your personal assistant isn't here to help out."  And yes, if you neglect to keep your water bottle (no longer a canteen?) topped off or put your gear in the pack without first putting it in waterproof bags, there are consequences.

That first season was in the heat of the Jordanian desert, this season it's alpine and winter training in New Zealand.  Reality comes quickly for some of the participants.  There's an instructive lesson about strength requirements that might generalize to fire and police departments.   "[Tara] Reid began to complain that it wasn't fair for her to carry the same weighted backpack as others because she was older and had back problems. Reid was ultimately given the option to accept it or quit, and she did the latter."  It's only her kit, which better include several changes of clothes.  What, dear reader, is the over-under on somebody being disciplined for not properly packing, let alone bringing along, the full complement of spare socks and shirts?  It's not as if they're each schlepping a few parts of a mountain howitzer or a grenade launcher the way a real mountain unit would.

UNDERMINE THEM WITH MOCKERY.

The woke university is an ongoing experiment against reality.  "To support transgender men, a number of colleges put period products in men’s bathrooms. Now Clemson, in an apparent nod to political pressure, has eliminated them."

THE CARTOON CAPTURES THE HALF OF IT.

I forget where I found the following cartoon.

Never mind the scent of the tree, apparently it's cost-effective these days to turn out pre-lighted artificial trees in a Hallowe'en style.

Want one all in purple?

Now that Oktoberfest season contemplates tapping the final kegs, the blinging out of houses for Hallowe'en (perhaps encouraged by cheaper electricity when the sun shines and the wind blows) is well underway.  As long as tooling up for purple and orange lighting has commercial promise, why not use the tooling for those inflatable snowmen with orange plastic and jack o'lantern faces?  Those, too, are available in a variety of designs, including some stacks that look like they'd fall over.

Perhaps there is still enough frivolity left in life that the gloomiest outlook I often succumb to is, well, being afraid of ghosts?

RECOGNISING THAT THE MOTORCAR IS A MARSHALLIAN IMPROVEMENT?

That might be what London's Express call attention to.  "Massive success for road users as Tories declare war on drivers is over!"

What, exactly, are the terms of the armistice?

Councils will be stopped from treating motorists as cash cows through over-zealous enforcement of minor offences. Revealing a package of measures ahead of his keynote speech to the Tory party conference on Monday, Transport Secretary Mark Harper said he would halt the anti-car campaign of a metropolitan elite.

The Cabinet minister also vowed he will not give in to militant unions even if it means rail strikes continue to the general election, as a “politically motivated” walkout brings the network to a halt again today.

Mr Harper told the Daily Express he will protect the public’s freedom to use their cars and declared: “We are the party of the driver,” he said.

Yes, Great Britain is a thickly settled island, with ample regional rail service, and yet North American style supermarkets and strip malls with car parks are a feature outside the city centers.  That might be recognition of the value of personal mobility on your own schedule, never mind what the metrofexuals push for.  I read elements of such populism in Mr Harper's stance.

“We’re taking action to end the punitive measures that unfairly target ordinary drivers.” Changes will prevent blanket 20mph zones in England and it will be easier to challenge major road restrictions.

A review will look at stopping councils generating excessive profits from traffic offences and zealous enforcement such as at yellow box junctions.

Bus lanes will be enforced only when there is enough demand and low-traffic neighbourhoods that lack sufficient support may be reviewed.

Mr Harper said: “It’s a plan for drivers and setting out a proper structure to say we recognise for most people the car is really important.

“It’s a big part of people’s freedom and independence and getting to work and how they live their lives. We want to make sure that people have got proper choices about how they travel.

“So they can cycle, they can walk, but they can also drive and that you’re not feeding this what appears to be a conversation where people are always anti-car, anti-driver and making life difficult for people who drive, which is most people in the country.”

Rishi Sunak last night also attacked “hare-brained schemes” such as LTNs and 20mph zones “forced” on drivers.

The Prime Minister said penalising motorists for going about their daily lives “doesn’t reflect the values of Britain” as he vowed to ensure drivers are not “aggressively restricted”.

He added: “There is just this relentless attack on motorists and a common misunderstanding from politicians in Westminster about the fact that most people around the country depend on their cars.

“They depend on their cars to get to work, take their kids to school, do their shopping, see the doctor.”

Mr Harper told the Express there is a divide between the “metropolitan bubble where people talk about cars like they’re a bad thing” and most of the rest of the UK who rely on them.

That noted, I can't help but wonder whether in that "overzealous enforcement" we aren't seeing dawning recognition that Britain's version of the Suburban Experiment isn't paying its own way.

SEX IS BINARY, PERSONALITY IS A CONTINUUM.

Yes, Richard Dawkins, who has the relevant intellectual capital, has trouble selling that message.

No less than Richard Dawkins has recently taken stick for maintaining that sex is binary whilst race, and I contend, personality, are better understood as existing on a spectrum (his word) or in a continuum in n-space.

The disciplines of psychology and psychiatry, unfortunately, aren't yet well-enough developed to be able to assess such claims in a systematic way.  We're a century or so away from eugenics and sterilization, three score and ten years or so away from frontal lobotomies, and forty years ago Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union had regime psychiatrists diagnosing dissidents as schizophrenic, in order to make the dissenters go away whilst claiming the corrective labor camps were for more conventional criminals alone.  There is a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for neuroses and psychoses, but the committee that revises it responds to Popular Sentiment.  That is not the behavior of scholars confident in their paradigm.

Current academic thinking is complicit in some sort of experiment against reality, but I'm not sure which experiment that is.

It doesn't matter much whether I take a side in that argument, or not, but perhaps I cannot resist the temptation to mock the anthropology establishment.  "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."

DO THE CHINESE CALL THESE DIESELS PEPSI CANS?

A recent China Daily article hails the return of cross border services between Ereenhot (Erlian) in China and Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, with a picture of a passenger train.

Unattributed photo retrieved from China Daily.

ZWEI OKTOBERFESTE MIT EISENBAHNEN.

Oktoberfest season is winding down, with Hallowe'en soon to come.  Over the weekend, two Oktoberfeste took place alongside the rails.  An extensively illustrated essay follows below the jump.

SARAH HOYT'S SHOCKED FACE TAKES A REST.

In "Running in Midair" (try not to think of coyotes chasing rabbits or roadrunners) she suggests the crop of new arrivals in the big cities aren't going to be celebrating diversity.

Look, the thing is, these people are completely unvetted by us, and I’d be shocked if they’re not “undesirables” their government is trying to get rid of. Some will be or pretend to be convinced communists and there’s a non-trivial overlap of that and violent criminals. So likely a large group of them is here for free benes, plus to terrorize the locals and steal from us. Partly because they resent and envy us and — because of our media — think us soft.

But here’s the thing: they are used to a disarmed and submissive population, partly everywhere else in the world. Peasants, you know? We’re not that. Not even in the big cities. They’re going to try their games, and it’s going to blow back, and then it’s– I don’t know. I know they don’t win, but I don’t know what comes next. I know the places controlled by the left will go from treating them as pets to concentration camps by any other name. Which would be bad, because once you have the camps– Well, people become numbers to run through.

But I don’t know how all that breaks in the end. I know there is almost no way it won’t be very bad for the people coming in by the tens of thousands per day. NO. Possible. Way.

Chicago's voters are already unhappy with the way the city government is attempting to provide sanctuary.  If you're not troubled already, now consider what happens when one cohort of people used to a disarmed and submissive population tangles with another such cohort.

Venezuelan migrant teenagers who were attacked with a bat after school in Rogers Park last week were not the victims of a hate crime, according to Ald. Maria Hadden (49th). Instead, she says, the brawl resulted from “cultural differences” with Afghan students.

WGN aired a video of last Wednesday’s after-school fight between Sullivan High School students and spoke with two Venezuelan teens who were reportedly struck with baseball bats.

Mirna Mendez, the mother of a 15-year-old boy who was struck, told the station he suffered broken ribs and a black eye after being kicked and hit twice with a baseball bat. WGN reported that the boy “said he’s always been looked at differently for being new and learning the language, but he never imagined it would have led to this.”

Another Venezuelan student was also struck with a bat, according to the report.

In a letter to constituents on Friday, Hadden insisted the incident was not a hate crime.

“The fight broke out between a group of Afghan students and Venezuelan students over cultural differences,” she stated, without explaining what those differences were. A lack of familiarity with or exposure to cultures different from ours can be the source of misunderstandings and conflict,” the alderman continued.

“A couple of the young men involved in the fight are recent immigrants from Venezuela, and their families initially thought they were the victims of discrimination because of their immigration status,” Hadden wrote.

“A parent of one of the Venezuelan students went to the media before engaging with the school or being aware of the root cause of the conflict,” Hadden claimed.

She explained that “the majority of the student body” at Sullivan is “from immigrant and refugee families.”

“The school is adept at helping newly arrived students adjust to their new home and culture, but it’s not a process without conflict,” she continued.

I suppose, dear reader, we should be grateful that a dust-up can only become a hate crime when people share enough understanding of bourgeois norms to grasp that there are rules for disagreeing.  It's not as if, as was the case during my adolescence and early adulthood, a brawl between the Serbians and the Croatians at the soccer pitch of a Great Lakes city was a hate crime, let alone the next coming of the Balkan Wars.

A PEACENIK CHANNELS TOM CLANCY???

Common Dreams contributor Joseph Gerson argues, "Past Time for Ukraine Ceasefire and Negotiations."  What does the settlement look like?

Fortunately, at this stage in the war, unlike February 24, 2022, “victory” may consist of an armistice that leaves Moscow in control of Crimea and the devastated districts of Donetsk and Luhansk which it now occupies rather than the total defeat and functional elimination of the Ukrainian state.

The greatest danger we face would be if Kyiv threatened Moscow’s hold of Crimea, home to Moscow’s Black Sea fleet for almost three centuries. As one Russian general said in a Track II exchange, if Crimea is threatened “All bets are off” in terms of Russia resorting to its nuclear arsenal. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 violated the U.N. charter, but it was consistent with Russian history, with the current Russian empire’s perceived vital interests, and with popular support of the Russian-identified majority there.

He continues,

Crimea will not be returned to Ukraine in our lifetimes, if ever. That is simply a fact of life. This war is stalemated, and the sacrifice of thousands of Ukrainian warriors’ lives to regain a few villages is a fool’s errand that also risks catastrophic military—including nuclear—and geographic escalation of the war.

General Milley was correct when he warned that neither side can win this war militarily. Now, with its infinitely smaller economic and military production capacity, its much smaller population compounded by millions of its people displaced across Europe, many of whom will never return to Ukraine, and with diminishing international support for a costly and endless war, it is in Ukraine’s national interest as well as ours to press for a ceasefire and negotiations.

President Zelensky does face threats to his rule, and maybe even his life, if he reduces his demands. This underscores the need for President Biden to stop allowing the Ukrainian tail to wag the American dog. Biden should give Zelinsky cover by insisting on negotiations and a ceasefire.

Why, it's as if Tom Clancy was an optimist. "That is, something like the Tom Clancy outcome, only with more death and destruction, is still a possibility."  In Command Authority, the Russians gained Crimea and everything east of Mariupol, with relatively little loss of life.  The territorial outcome Mr Gerson advocates is similar, only with the puppet oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk picked over and destitute.

THE SPRECHER IS CHILLING.

Toward the end of August, the Milwaukee Brewers took a three game lead in the National League's Central Division.  The Cubs got as close as a game and a half around Labor Day, and then, reverted to form.

The Cubs of early June to early September hit like a playoff team, pitched like a playoff team, fielded their positions like a playoff team and — let’s see, what else? — won like a playoff team, too.

We watched with our very own eyes as they put together a 50-28 stretch over essentially half a season. There’s no faking 50-28, folks. It takes a good team — a well-oiled machine — to run up a record like that.

But the Cubs the rest of the way? They turned out to be a ridiculous team, one that was allergic to leads, prone to stultifying gaffes and, bereft of any hints of confidence, in no way, shape or form capable of winning important ballgames. It took a bad team — a burned-out car sputtering along the shoulder of the highway, just trying to make it to the off ramp — to play its way out of the National League wild-card race the way the Cubs did.

Sun-Times sports pundit Steve Greenberg concludes, "This season just needs to be over."  It now is.  Even a ten game winning streak by the Brewers that had the cognoscenti chattering about free hamburgers wasn't enough to finish off the Cubs.  That, Mr Greenberg says, was self-inflicted.

[T]his was a Cubs collapse. No, they didn’t go into the season as one of the NL favorites. Yes, they played pretty well on the whole, perhaps even exceeding expectations. Certainly, there are reasons to be hopeful about what’s in store. [Manager David] Ross believes the Cubs are a year away from a special opportunity, along the lines of the jump the Orioles made from 2022 to 2023.

But, again, let’s not pretend the Cubs didn’t blow a shot at the playoffs. Those don’t grow on trees, you know.

It's a familiar story. "Despite a difficult July and early August, the Milwaukee Brewers have recently won four of six games from the Cubs, and are in a position to overhaul the Cubs for the division lead, if the end of the season endurance grind wears the Cubs out."  That was 2018, and it took 163 games for the Brewers to overhaul the Cubs.  Professional baseball has since gone to a tie-breaker formula, under which the Brewers winning the season series with the Cubs determines seeding.  By the time the final games came around, the Brewers taking two out of three and the season series in Milwaukee was moot.