A MILWAUKEE PROMOTION TO COME.

Years ago, George Webb predicted that the (minor league) Milwaukee Brewers would win twelve straight games, and he promised to give away hamburgers.  Those Brewers never took him up on it.  Nor did the Milwaukee Braves, although they did win a World Series (and drop another one after winning the first three games.)

The current Milwaukee Brewers, though?  They opened the 1987 season with thirteen straight wins, in the American League at the time.  They closed out the 2018 season with twelve straight wins between the end of the regular season, a Game 163, and a sweep of the Colorado Rockies.  This year, Brewer fans were on Hamburger Watch a few weeks ago, when the team came out of the All-Star break with a pair of sweeps and subsequently notched eleven straight wins.  Seattle's current American League team frustrated Seattle's former American League team, now the National League Brewers, that time.

This year's Brewers?  Relentless.

Free burgers await.  "Milwaukee Brewers 12th straight win puts team one victory away from franchise history and revives iconic George Webb's historic burger giveaway."  The company will be announcing additional details for their promotion.  Meanwhile, there is meaningful baseball to come.

STOP CONCEALING DYSFUNCTION WITH WORD-NOISE.

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan has been following gunplay in the Old West.  There's one set of rationalizations when people go around the bend in Montana.  "Open carry, permitless concealed carry, everybody armed to the teeth, drifts of drunk depressed delusional army vets dotting the hills like a host of golden daffodils."  And troubled Montanans, even people known to be seriously troubled, aren't committed.

Says here there are three veteran-focused public mental hospitals in the state, and though a lot of the people listed here are all wrong for a vet with trauma, the list is very long. I understand the distance problem, but he clearly should have been resident in a hospital while getting treatment and of course someone should have taken his guns away if he was so dangerous to others. Are we going to be hearing from any of his family?

Okay. Family claims relevant hospitals turned him down. Need for more detail here. No primary care doc to prescribe meds? And why does a delusional schizophrenic who scares his family have guns? Why did the NFL shooter have guns? Why did this absolutely insane woman who killed her four daughters have guns?

Fact is, states like Montana get their high gun violence (suicide and homicide) rate because people there care much more about personal liberty than community safety. There’s a reason we call it the wild west.

It's not much different elsewhere, she notes, because the culture-studies rhetoric makes community safety arbitrary, and probably oppressive.

[A]ny intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.

She's being hyperbolic to make a point, and yet, some sixty years ago, Sensitive People responded to the likes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by mainstreaming the looneys rather than looking more carefully at what sorts of treatments for people resident in the mental institutions worked (which might have been the better way to end the frontal lobotomies and shock therapy and all the rest).  It's not that I haven't warned you.

Culture-studies normativity intrudes on the skepticism. What happens next is not amusing. "[Scholarship is] defensible only to the extent that researchers conduct their work with a sober sense of purpose and in a way that respects the moral status of other people. The other, which may have its roots in postmodern thinking, is that science per se disrespects the moral status of other people: pick any pejorative ending in -centric and reflect." (But the former representative's speech primarily addressed the disrespect of the moral status of people born female: do we accuse the dominant ideology of transcentrism?)

Yes, the looneys are people with a moral status, and yet, don't the people beset by looneys also have moral status?

SOME STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT ECONOMIC GROWTH.

DeKalb's public schools are back in session as of today, 13 August.  It's all too much for the editorial board at Chicago's Tribune.  "Back to school? Summer shouldn’t be over this early."  Something about balancing the semesters such that the fall semester wraps up before Christmas.  And the obligatory nod to "the very real learning loss that takes place when kids press pause on their studies for months on end."  I don't recall any such fretting in the Leave It to Beaver era, and I've undoubtedly triggered somebody by pointing that out.  Too bad.  If they're serious about balancing the semesters, why did DeKalb bring all the kiddos in this morning only to dismiss at 11 am?

Students will soon be returning to Northern Illinois University as well.  It might be that students come to university equipped with conventional wisdom that is wrong, or they might be exposed to faculty lounge commonplaces that are misleading.  Dominic Pino contemplates the ways.

The problem is that people believe that the New Deal ended the Great Depression, free markets caused the Great Recession, the Industrial Revolution led to increased poverty, and free trade hollowed out America. They really, sincerely, believe these things to be true. And that really does matter.

“Conventional wisdom firmly holds” that the myths in the book “constitute strong evidence for expanding government’s role,” Gramm and Boudreaux write. If you think a lot of that government expansion has been detrimental, as conservatives do, then that conventional wisdom is socially harmful.

It can be a bit uncomfortable sometimes for conservatives to say that people’s beliefs can be socially harmful, because too often the follow-up to that is some kind of imposition on people’s freedom. Climate activists, for example, have argued that dissent from their alarmist view of climate change should be criminally prosecuted.

The role of education, as ever, is to equip students with the ability to determine when a man is talking rot, and the intellectual chops to ask the right questions, rather than to go straight to questioning somebody's motives or accusing him of a thought crime.

WHEN THE BONANZA IS PLAYED OUT.

Trains recalls, 75 years on, the closure of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad.

After 80 operating years as one of the most glamorous transport agencies of the old American West, the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, running from Reno to Carson City and Minden, Nev., closed its books on May 31 and on that day its last train rolled down a clear track into the realm of legend. To the end it maintained a mixed freight and passenger service daily except Sunday. Its canary yellow coaches with their open platforms and Pintsch lighting fixtures, and its right of way innocent of the improvements of modernity, remained through the years tangible links with the simplicities of the golden age of western railroading.

The V&T was the last of the so-called bonanza railroads. It was financed in 1869 by the nabobs of the Bank of California to carry down the ores of the celebrated Comstock Lode from Virginia City to the banks of the Carson River at Empire. The completion of the Pacific Railroad in May of that year made a connection with the Central Pacific at Reno an obvious move, and for many years the V&T carried through Pullmans and Silver Palace cars from San Francisco on its night trains. In 1905, as the mines of the Comstock shut down one after another, a branch was extended to the dairy center of Minden in Carson Valley, and in 1938 the main line between Carson City and Virginia City was abandoned.

The ferroequinologist press was more open in what contemporary observers call "foaming," but perhaps as the diesels were taking over the main line trains, and pressurized airliners and the first limited-access highways were where High Fashion was going, a good wallow in the lifestyles of the Gilded, er, Silver Age was cathartic.

Just a month before its abandonment the V&T’s No. 26, oldest of its operating locomotives, was destroyed by fire together with its Reno engine house. Many hundreds of people, attracted by the publicity attendant upon the railroad’s abandonment, journeyed to Nevada during its last few weeks to take a last ride on “the little train to yesterday.” The private car Gold Coast, property of historians Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg. which had made the V & T its “home” railroad for the past three years, was one of the last pieces of rolling stock to be moved from Carson City and spotted on the Southern Pacific at Sparks, just outside Reno. A last shipment of Comstock gold and silver bullion was carried out in a Wells Fargo treasure chest from the Donovan Mine in Gold Hill. Throughout the West, newspapers lamented the passing of an old Nevada institution.

The V&T was probably the most written about, most photographed, most painted and most admired short line railroad in history. No history of Nevada or the Comstock failed to mention it as one of the wonders of its engineering age. It occupied a notable chapter in Gilbert Kneiss’ Bonanza Railroads, and Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg wrote an official book-length history entitled Virginia & Truckee, A Story of Virginia City and Comstock Times. It was painted by such railroad artists as Sheldon Pennoyer and Howard Fogg and was photographed by many hundreds of railroad fans. During its last days it was not uncommon for 20 or 30 cameras to be trained upon its morning arrival and switching operations in the Carson yards.

Trains subsequently ran a feature on that roundhouse fire (the locomotive was spotted on the turntable over a pit that had filled with oil, and steam locomotives have ash pits) titled something like "A Case of Suicide?" in the same issue of the magazine that grudgingly acknowledged the tour of a demonstrator freight locomotive with the title "The Diesel that Did It."  That Lucius Beebe was a New York grandee who had the means to live the high life and write Social Commentary for that city's Times likely contributed to the fame of the railroad.

Starting in 1972, an enthusiast began rebuilding segments of the Virginia and Truckee as a tourist railroad.  There was a steam-powered Polar Express during the 2024 Festive Season.  True to the line's Gilded Age roots, de luxe steam cars run on the train.

STOP ENABLING DYSFUNCTION, YOU MIGHT GET LESS OF IT.

It's unlikely that any influential Democrat will take advice from Cold Spring Shops.

Last year, it was "Yes, without food, healthcare, and safety initiatives, Americans will die or get sick, whether they voted for Trump or not."

This year, it's more of the same.  "The Republican War Against the Working Poor Continues."  Because all that social spending has worked so well at enabling a more broadly shared prosperity.  But the populist froth can be so frothy, can't it?  "They hate people who need benefits. Those people are a drag on the ability of rich people to not pay taxes."  Don't you dare say "stop enabling dysfunction, you'll get less of it!"  It's so much easier to keep the punishment cycles going by asserting "Republicans hate you."

They might do well to pay attention to Ruy "Liberal Patriot" Teixeira, who when his coalition of the ascendant failed to ascend checked his premises and rediscovered the median voter.  Now, he's noticing that the values regime of the Great Power Saeculum has crumbled, in no small part as a consequence of the academy's denial of coherent beliefs and the experts getting a lot wrong.

If the social order problem is as serious as these quotes and survey findings suggest—and I think it is—it raises troubling questions about the current state of the Democratic Party. It’s bad enough that favorability toward the party has hit a 35-year low and that 70 percent of voters think the Democratic Party is out of touch with the concerns of most people in the country today. And that swing congressional district voters feel Democrats are “more focused on helping other people than people like me”, don’t respect work, don’t share their values, don’t look out for working people, don’t care about people like them, and don’t have the right priorities. And that working-class voters prefer Republicans to Democrats on representing their values, focusing on the issues they care about, valuing hard work and being patriotic.

What’s worse is that Democrats don’t recognize that underneath these views is the roiling crisis of the social order and voters’ sense that Democrats are utterly useless at resolving it. Why on earth would voters believe Democrats will restore and rebuild the social order when they have seemed so oblivious to the problem, both in their governing practices and in their norm-shattering cultural radicalism and contempt for common sense? Democrats embody the “social and moral detachment” of educated elites alluded to by Brooks, whereby these elites preside over the deteriorating social order and then blame those affected for lashing out in unapproved ways.

Sooner or later it dawns on the losing skipper that the loss was not the fault of the wind or of the crew or of the course.

That’s why so much of Democrats’ attempt at “reform” rings so hollow. They’re not even asking the right question—how to rebuild the social order—so naturally their solutions see woefully inadequate. Typically they amount to little more than fervently opposing Trump and promising to be a bit less crazy and bit more populist the next time they’re in control. This is not nearly radical enough for the situation. As Brooks also points out, Republicans and Trump, despite their chronic overreach, are at least in the game. Democrats aren’t even on the field.

Naturally, this leads to suspicion in voters’ minds that most Democrats are basically okay with their place in the broken social order, so they just aren’t that motivated to fix it. This suspicion is justified. Democrats’ revealed preference is for the very social order—or lack thereof—that ordinary voters, especially working-class voters, despise. That is why what passes for radicalism in Democratic ranks is advocating more generous—preferably free—social programs, twinned with bracing calls to “fight the oligarchy” and (somehow) bring down the cost of living. The daunting task of rebuilding the social order is simply ignored.

That won’t work going forward, no matter how badly Trump screws up. Sure, Democrats can eke out some narrow electoral wins but the fundamental problem will remain: Democrats aren’t offering voters a social order they want to be a part of. Instead, they are insisting voters must adapt to the currently broken social order and make their way as best they can (with Democrats’ help of course). That is an offer many millions of voters will never accept.

Whether there is any voice in national politics that can make the case for a values regime some sort of national majority will accept remains an open question.  The Trump presidency brought a lot of irregular voters to the polls, but whether they will participate post-Trump is yet to be determined.  And the to-ing-and-fro-ing of slim legislative majorities that attempt as much of their fervent base voters' wish lists and erasure of the opposition's fervent base voters' wish list doesn't build confidence in electoral politics.  Mr Teixeira has anticipated that.  "Things fall apart and Democrats are currently just poking around in the wreckage. Only fearless, open debate that admits of no heretics has a prayer of moving forward."

Suggest that the best thing for the national government to do is to govern less, though, is not in the nature of Democrats.

PROGRAM, MORON.

One of the most liberating moments in college came in an introductory computer science class.

At one time, the term "moron" referred to an individual who could carry out tasks that were well-defined and sequenced. As my first computer science professor taught me, a computer could be thought of as an electric moron.

That liberated me, early on, from putting too much stock in so-called artificial intelligence.

An artificial intelligence algorithm, admittedly a very good algorithm, is the Moriarty manipulating social media and doing a number of other things, but you'll have to read the book to find out what those other things.  An artificial intelligence algorithm, though, is only as good as its programming, which is to say, it is still an elaborately scripted moron, and, let's say, in implementing its instructions according to the priorities assigned to it.

Moreover, dear reader, here is the good news.  Dan Brown can conceive of a malevolent algorithm.  The programmers, though, have had less luck.

In a recent pre-print paper, researchers from the University of Arizona summarize this existing work as "suggest[ing] that LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text." To pull on that thread, the researchers created a carefully controlled LLM environment in an attempt to measure just how well chain-of-thought reasoning works when presented with "out of domain" logical problems that don't match the specific logical patterns found in their training data.

The results suggest that the seemingly large performance leaps made by chain-of-thought models are "largely a brittle mirage" that "become[s] fragile and prone to failure even under moderate distribution shifts," the researchers write. "Rather than demonstrating a true understanding of text, CoT reasoning under task transformations appears to reflect a replication of patterns learned during training."

You can program a moron to recognize the dimensions of a box.  But thinking outside the box?  You might as well be saying "Upward, not Northward" in Flatland.

To test an LLM's generalized reasoning capability in an objective, measurable way, the researchers created a specially controlled LLM training environment called DataAlchemy. This setup creates small models trained on examples of two extremely simple text transformations—an ROT cypher and cyclical shifts—followed by additional training that demonstrates those two functions performed in various orders and combinations.

These simplified models were then tested using a variety of tasks, some of which precisely or closely matched the function patterns in the training data and others that required function compositions that were either partially or fully "out of domain" for the training data. For instance, a model trained on data showing two cyclical shifts might be asked to perform a novel transformation involving two ROT shifts (with basic training on what a single example of either shift looks like). The final answers and reasoning steps were compared to the desired answer using BLEU scores and Levenshtein Distance for an objective measure of their accuracy.

As the researchers hypothesized, these basic models started to fail catastrophically when asked to generalize novel sets of transformations that were not directly demonstrated in the training data. While the models would often try to generalize new logical rules based on similar patterns in the training data, this would quite often lead to the model laying out "correct reasoning paths, yet incorrect answer[s]." In other cases, the LLM would sometimes stumble onto correct answers paired with "unfaithful reasoning paths" that didn't follow logically.

"Rather than demonstrating a true understanding of text, CoT reasoning under task transformations appears to reflect a replication of patterns learned during training," the researchers write.

For the moment, it appears that a truly Heuristic Algorithmic computer does not exist, as even the Heuristics that these learning models are using are Algorithmic and can't recognize what's outside the box.

YOU KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN.

A pedestrian is dead after being hit near the Milwaukee Public Market.  Why?

A 39-year-old has died after being hit by a semi near the Milwaukee Public Market.

Milwaukee Police responded at 11:17 a.m near Broadway and St. Paul. A semi struck a pedestrian crossing the street while the truck was making a turn.

The pedestrian died from their [c.q.] injuries.

The driver of the semi stayed on the scene and is cooperating with the police.

How many times, dear reader, must I call attention to the folly of using 53 foot trailers for urban deliveries?

Unattributed photograph retrieved from WTMJ Radio.

Broadway at St. Paul is down by the Milwaukee Public Market where the streetcar bends the corner around.  It is not the kind of place one would want to maneuver a long trailer under the best of circumstances, which on a Tuesday morning with the coffee shops and delis already in operation, and the bars about to open, and the Milwaukee Brewers hosting the Pittsburgh Pirates.  And the "efficiency" of bringing a larger lot of cargo into the Third Ward (a few weekends ago, while I was there, I saw another 53 foot trailer attempting to maneuver at the corner of Water and St. Paul: fortunately no pedestrians were hurt and no fenders were bent) doesn't make any sense.  "Are the people of Venice unable to obtain food without semi tractor trailers? Of course not; I’ve eaten some of the best food of my life there. How is this food distributed if not by tractor trailer? More slowly, one delivery boat at a time, the same way stuff was distributed in American cities during the first half of the 20th Century."

INSIDERS INTERVIEWING INSIDERS DEVOID OF INSIGHTS.

By any normal standards, Donald Trump should never have come anywhere near the White House again.  Pick your transgression: claiming victory before the absentee votes came in, injecting himself into the Georgia senate runoffs of 2020-2021 in such a way as to destroy the last opportunity to gridlock the Biden presidency, then there was that futile and stupid gesture at the Federal Capitol; and in the 2022 Congressional elections, almost all of the aspiring senators he endorsed (Herschel Walker???  Mehmet Oz???) lost, and the Democrats didn't have to keep a bottle of bourbon at the head desk in case the vice-president had to break a tie.  And yet, here he is, and the analyses of "What on earth just happened" are coming out.

Book Reviews N^o. 4, N^o. 5, and N^o. 6 cover Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, written by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, who previously collaborated on Shattered and Lucky after, respectively, the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections; Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, by Chris Whipple; and 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf.

In these reviews of the after-action reviews, I frequently lament the absence of a writer working in the style of Theodore H. "The Making of the President" White, wherein the author attempts to get beyond the insiders and their machinations to consider what might be going on in the minds of voters.  If anything, those three books only make the absence of reasoned thought more plain to see.  Consider how Fight opens.  "The former House Speaker, still in perpetual motion at eighty-four, fixed her wide brown eyes on a rarely used television screen.  If not for the vanishing supply of chocolate ice cream in the freezer, and the quick naps she caught between busy days, there was usually little evidence that anyone lived in her posh Washington crash pad at all."  If you're writing for Vanity Fair, yes, you do want to tell readers who designed political reporter Kaitlan Collins's fuchsia dress and let readers figure out how much money she spent.  Fashion reporting in a political story, not so much.  But when you later introduce future chief of staff Suzy Wiles, at page 24, as "Soft-spoken and grandmotherly in appearance, she cut a striking contrast in a Trumpworld stocked with men who looked like bouncers and women whose surgical enhancements were as garish as their clothing."  And Beltway reporters and pundits still cannot figure out why Donald Trump's "fake news" digs register so well with his voters.  Authors Allen and Parnes only confirmed that potty-mouthed Democrats were sounding off that way long before somebody suggested that to do so made them sound more authentic, or perhaps more angry.  Uncharted?  Look for copies on the cheap in the remainder bins and used book stores.  Author Whipple (Please don't squeeze my Schumer) writes, page 163, how "Tampon Tim," which resonated at Trump rallies, reflected "his support of women's reproductive rights."  No, the governor was all-in on the vanishingly small number of mentally disturbed women who claimed to be men having the men's room stocked with ... tampons.  The authors of 2024 are establishment writers, Mr Dawsey at The Wall Street Journal, Mr Pager a White House correspondent with New York's Times, and Mr Arnsdorf having that portfolio with Washington's Post.  And their biases show.  Penguin continue the annoying practice, in 2024, of using numbered endnotes to cite sources, while using reference marks to introduce asides as footnotes, such as, at page 213, calling attention to Hillbilly Elegy as a case study in victim-blaming; and the authors suggest campaign operative Corey Lewandowski and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem were an item, later extending the insinuation to suggest that it was he who recommended the governor, rather than Stephen Miller head Homeland Security, and that doing so, see page 338, offers a "gentler face for deportation."

IS SHE GOING TO SEND IT OUT FOR PEER REVIEW?

Katya "Everyman Commentary" Sedgwick weighs in on selling good genes, er, jeans.  "When it comes to American Eagle's Sydney Sweeney ad, using sex, race or DEI to sell products is just part of modern marketing. But adding 'controversy' to the mix is what makes it effective."  I don't know, put the wrong sort of controversy out there and you might lose business.  And maybe she should have left the culture studies stuff well enough alone.

I talked to several men who said that of course the blond Floridian is attractive, but what’s with the baggy pants? Being straight men, they have no idea that flare trousers are all the rage at the moment; they only know what they like. The look might be flattering on most body types, but it’s a fashion statement and a model’s role is to mainstream that statement. Although Sweeney is young and healthy, for somebody modeling pants she should be leggier. And her face is not exactly chiseled.

Still, look what she is following. Once upon a time, models were a select group — the Twiggys and Cindy Crawfords of this world. They were tall and skinny and the very best of them had the kind of faces that defined decades.

For the most part, Gen X girls learned to deal with this kind of intimidation, but there was resentment, too, and following the Barack Obama presidency it was racial unrest that propelled the resentment. I can’t decide if the biggest middle finger to conventional beauty was the Calvin Klein “I speak my truth” campaign which featured a morbidly obese female rapper, or the Bud Light transvestite ads. And speaking of eugenics, it was easy to see what the woke ideal defined itself against — white couples disappeared from commercials.

It’s fun to apply Hegelian dialectics to the workings of the advertising industry. Hegel thought that in history where one idea or thesis reigns supreme, another, an antithesis, emerges to challenge it. And as they battle it out, the contradiction ultimately gets resolved in a synthesis. So, if 90s supermodels were a thesis, an obese black hijabi senior citizen amputee is an antithesis. And when that conflict boils over, you get a Sidney Sweeney.

Is she an improvement on the grievance caricature antithesis? You betcha. Is she the new incarnation of the supermodel ideal? Hardly. Girls today are simply not accustomed to having very beautiful women sell them products; instead, they have above average influencers to fill this niche.

Sweeney’ secret is being appealing to men without being intimidating to women. As American Eagle itself said, “Great jeans look good on everyone.” On everyone. Just like everyone. Sweeney is the everywoman the age demanded — she doesn’t need to personify every possible handicap because it’s already baked into the cake. She stands for the attractive average circa 2025.

Sweeney doesn’t have particularly great genes — except for her blue eyes. Until a few years ago, equating eye color with good genes was unproblematic — after all, it is a trait that people fancied. And unfortunately for the intersectional feminists who hope that their numbers alone give them power to redefine beauty, blue eyes are especially prized in societies where they are rare. In the Western world, a white woman has to have nice features to be considered good-looking. In any place where light complexion is rare, the cerulean gaze is often enough in and of itself.

Maybe she should have sent it out for peer review, gotten a few pointers on how to conceal the incoherence with enough theorrhea to make it sound erudite.  That's the only power the intersectional feminists ever had.  And badonkadonk butts?  Please.

It’s worth pointing out that in Freudian theory breasts and eyes are symbolic of each other, and that advertisement industry is historically adept at using Freudian scripts. In the American Eagle commercial in particular, the camera zooms in on Sweeney’s bosom as the actress admonishes “my eyes are here” prompting the lenses to jump to her face. Her rack is great, no question, but don’t you forget about the color of her peepers.

And regardless, the female form is racially charged these days. In the few years that followed the COVID closures and the explosion of BLM in our private lives, America apparently shifted its breast obsession to butts. In the 1990s, the mainstream considered derrière comical — “OMG look at her butt” joked Valley Girls in the Sir Mix-a-lot hit “Baby Got Back” — but in 2020 women were encouraged to adopt strenuous workout routines to give themselves great buttocks, the kind that black girls have. Posterior is black coded — and breasts are not. A new, ethnic beauty standard was ascendant.

Anybody who claims "posterior is black coded" is too young to have been at Goldmann's on a sale day.

REALITY HAS NO RESPECT FOR YOUR EXPERTISE.

At least once during July and August, somewhere in the Upper Midwest, the beginning of the fall cool-down leads to a wringing out of the atmospheric water somewhere, with what the weather types call "training" thunderstorms.  That got DeKalb on the national news just before classes began in 2007.  Over the weekend, the trains followed the route of the old Milwaukee and Mississippi into Greater Milwaukee.

“This is something that Milwaukee hasn’t seen in a decade or more,” Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said Sunday at a press conference near 105th Street and West Silver Spring Drive. The northwest side of Milwaukee has been among the hardest hit areas, with a Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District gauge recording more than 14 inches of rain near 81st Street and West Florist Avenue.

Milwaukee Fire Chief Aaron Lipski says the department has responded to approximately 614 emergency situations between 8:00pm Saturday and 7:00am Sunday. That includes a major fire at a 10-story industrial building near Water and Mineral in the Walker’s Point neighborhood.

The train has run over the Milwaukee area previously, including a June 2008 event that raised the level of Pewaukee Lake but did not stop an Olympic sailing fund-raiser the evening of the storm.  The "industrial building" is the old Milwaukee Cold Storage warehouse, which, in the way of such buildings, doesn't have the windows or floor spacing to permit easy conversion to loft dwellings or paint-ball complexes.  There are still a few areas officials are asking people to avoid.  Somehow, the baseball stadium, which is in the Menomonee River flood plain, remains open for business and the home team shrugged off another leaky roof Saturday night and a five run early lead by the Mets to keep winning.  Pittsburgh Pirates are coming ashore today.

THE PERILS OF RAILWAY PRESERVATION.

Maui fire destroys Sugar Cane Train rolling stock. There were railroads on four of the Hawaiian Islands, mostly serving the sugar cane business.  A tsunami in 1946 put several out of business, and what remained of those carriers converted to the tourist trade.  What floods could not accomplish, sometimes fire can.

Wild fires continue to take a toll across the country. Earlier this week a brush fire consumed the shops of the Lahaina, Kaanapali & Pacific Railroad — the Sugar Cane Train — near Kaanapali. Lost in the fire were two steam locomotives and numerous passenger cars. A diesel locomotive was also damaged.

The fire consumed approximately 90 acres, according to statements from the county. Local roads were closed during the fire fighting effort and an evacuation was ordered for some Kaanapali residents.

The Sugar Cane Train, running on 6 miles of 3-foot-gauge track, was once part of a 200 mile rail network that carried harvested cane to the Pioneer Mill in Lahaina. Trucks replaced trains for cane hauling by the 1950s, with the line becoming a tourist operation in 1969.

Since 2019, the railroad has been dormant with its last operations being holiday trains during November and December 2018. Regular operations ceased in 2014, followed by various unsuccessful revival attempts over the next several years. The rolling stock and locomotives were put up for sale in July 2021.

Lost in this week’s fire were locomotives No. 1 Anaka and No. 3 Myrtle. Both were 2-4-0s built by H.K. Porter of Pittsburgh in February 1943 for the Carbon Limestone Co. Both locomotives had been heavily modified over the years. No. 1 was originally delivered as an 0-4-0 tank engine. The LK&P completed the conversion to a 2-4-0.

The notorious Lahaina fire of 2023 previously destroyed the railway's station and turntable.

WIN SOME, WINSOME, LOSE SOME.

Indiana Fever forward Sophie Cunningham quietly joined the return of the hot girl to marketing with a product endorsement.

You can put on a tee-shirt calling attention to your pay packets, or you can come up with a value proposition that supplements your income.

To repeat: It's not as if she has to call attention to her tush, don't those legs do a pretty good job of their own accord?

CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR GRIDLOCK.

The decennial census leads to a reapportionment of the House of Representatives which leads to state legislatures creating new Congressional districts each of which contains roughly equal numbers of the residents so enumerated.  Legislatures, though, are political bodies and they draw district boundaries in such a way as to ... best serve their idea of governance.  Which brings us to this summer's political spectacle, minority-party members of the Texas legislature fleeing to the friendly confines of Illinois in order to delay a reapportionment that, like World War II, will not turn out to their party's advantage.  Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor, a student of comparative politics, looks on the follies and despairs.  A political power play?  Yes.  Mid-reapportionment cyclical chaos as a consequence?  Yes.  Every legislature does it?  Two wrongs do not make a right.

Perhaps, the drawing of new districts has become so fraught because there are too few districts.  More districts, more opportunities to pack your voters into something resembling polygons rather than gerrymanders, more opportunities to create majority-minority districts, no matter what the voting rights laws are dictating, more opportunities for Members of Congress to get to know, oh, their constituents, rather than the party bundlers and money-raisers.  There is a risk, though: smaller districts with more opportunities for voters to meet their representatives in compact bundles of like-minded voters might mean more Lauren Boeberts and Ilhan Omars.

Today, though, let us contemplate something Professor Taylor offers as a different way of allocating seats.  "I have noted for years (decades?), there are deeply problematic issues with single-seat districts, especially in the US."  As the Texas spat evolved, he wrote, "The Core Problem is Single-Seat Districts."  That core problem comes close to the status of a theorem in politics.

I cannot stress enough: there is no such thing as truly fair maps that are also democratically competitive. For example, while the new maps in Alabama are fairer and more representative, they are mostly utterly uncompetitive. That is, the ratio of Rs to Ds (now 5:2 instead of 6:1) is better than it was and closer mirrors the state’s overall ratio of Rs to Ds, but almost all the seats are uncontested.

And that is treating party registration or estimated party alignment as a decent proxy for a voter's preferred policy bundle.  I used to do regional economics, nonexistent equilibrium or multiple equilibria don't bother me.

Darren of Right on the Left Coast reminds us, "Our governmental system is designed to ensure that passions are moderated."  That might be a good way to start a fight with political scientists.  Over the years I have had a few frank and open exchanges of views with political science types about things like voting efficiency and representation.  I've not yet figured out where positive political science leaves off and normative policy prescriptions begin.  Nevertheless, I maintain that political bundles are too big, and disequilibrium the most likely outcome.

That noted, let us turn to Professor Taylor's alternative.

Let me be clear: the solution to all of this is to elect the US House of Representatives in multi-member districts using some version of proportional representation.

More to come, no doubt.

BTW, I used the original gerrymandering political cartoon because it fits, but I would stress the issue is not primarily gerrymandering (although, yes, the Texas case is blatant partisan gerrymandering), but rather it is using single-seat districts full stop. Rank choice voting does not solve this problem, by the way, as long as it is used in single-seat districts.

That post concludes with references.

DON'T GET YOUR HOPES UP.

Red State's Ward Clark suggests "The One Big Beautiful Bill May Bring Back the Station Wagon."  Although that has long been the Cold Spring Shops position, it's unlikely.

Trump is again planning to roll the CAFE standards back. But Congress did him one better. Rather than wait for regulators to rewrite the rule, which can take years and be subject be endless lobbying and litigation from various interest groups – lawmakers simply zeroed out the penalty as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Now, if a car company sells cars that, on average, exceed whatever the fuel-economy limit is technically in force in a given year, they pay… nothing. The mandate is still in place, but the penalty is now $0.00. (Republicans pulled off the same trick with the dreaded Obamacare insurance mandate — zeroing out the penalty rather than trying to get the mandate repealed.)

Yet, despite this breakthrough, the death of CAFE got no coverage – as in zero – from the mainstream press, which was too busy trying to find birthday cards that Donald Trump allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein.

But automakers noticed. As one car enthusiast noted on Instagram: “The immediate industry response proves how quickly things can change when regulations lose their bite. Stellantis just brought its legendary Hemi V8 engines ‘back from exile’ and announced the return of its SRT speed shop, famous for cranking V8s to extreme power levels. This marks a dramatic reversal of the downsizing trend that saw turbocharged 4-cylinder engines replace V6 powerplants across midsize cars, SUVs, and even large pickups over the past decade.⁠”

Environmentalist scolds and Democratic socialists won’t be happy with this turn of events, and Trump still needs to officially end the federal CAFE mandate.

I forget how much of the fuel economy mandate is Act of Congress and how much a ukase issued by the Environmental Protection Administration.  The penalty, however, qualifies as a fiscal matter and gets the "reconciliation" carve-out.  Thus, we're unlikely to see any re-tooling of the assembly lines, no matter how much Mr Clark hopes.

The difference is that while the government is compelling manufacturers to abide by an agenda-driven regulation, when left alone, the manufacturers will react to their customers. They will build cars and trucks that the public wants.

Will the giant station wagon come back? I'm guessing they won't. The public has become accustomed to SUVs, and honestly, they're more comfortable, provide better views of the drivers' surroundings, and modern, high-tech vehicles actually get far better mileage than an equivalent vehicle from, say, 1975.

With the penalty for violating the standards being a token fine of $0, Stellantis can put those Hemi V8s into Rams or into whatever muscle cars they're tooled up to make now.  But a latter day LeBaron or Town and Country with space for the kiddos to stretch out in back and the torque to tow an Airstream?  Probably not.  What today's Congress can reconcile out, a future Congress can reconcile back in, and they might make the penalty retroactive.

That's too bad for consumers.

With the car companies working to make even the big sport-utes and pickups fuel efficient (heck, the current Cold Spring Shops crossover gets almost as good mileage as our three previous Golfs and Rabbits), perhaps now is the time to abolish all the fuel economy standards and mandates, because a family sedan or station wagon that exceeds an automobile-specific fuel economy standard still, using contemporary construction techniques, be less guzzling than that crew-cab Ram or three-row Navigator with two pull-down video screens for the kiddos.

The retooling won't happen.  It wouldn't happen if one of the major parties abolished the Senate's filibuster.  Think it through.  "Reconciliation" limits the set of policies a new administration can change.  In the past quarter-century, when a party secures a working majority in Washington, rather than tinker at the margins, it attempts to implement as much of its less incremental plan as it can get away with: abolishing the filibuster is the way to rig the rules so as to implement even more of it.  Then another party secures the working majority, and, again, rather than tinker at the margins, attempts to implement as much of its platform as it can get away with.  It's all rather frustrating to voters who are not True Believers and who would rather not have so much of their lives dictated by whichever True Believers are calling the shots.

Filibuster or no, reconciliation or no, no car company is going to tool up to produce those family sedans or station wagons, even if to do so reduces the aggregate fuel use of motor vehicles, because the zero penalty of today becomes a restored penalty tomorrow; and the regulation removed under simple majority today has a very good chance of being a regulation restored tomorrow.

THE CHEQUAMEGON FOREST HEFFALUMP.

A real-life Christopher Robin gets involved in the rescue.

Jayme Morey is the medical coordinator for Chequamegon Humane Association in Ashland, Wisconsin. She's used to getting the word out about missing dogs and cats. This time, it involved a bear in a potentially dire predicament.

Morey had been tracking the bear all week. It was spotted regularly. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources said the bear was finally found near Cable in Morey's neighbor's yard on Sunday.

"Earlier this week, I was just like, 'There's no way.' I'm like, 'This story is not going to end.' Well, it's not going to be this hero story, and lo and behold, the bear is alive, and it does not have a bucket on its head," said Morey.

Department staff responded and tranquilized the 2-year-old female bear before cutting off the jar. The DNR said the bear was then relocated and released in the woods.

To the best of my knowledge, the bear was not conniving with Piglet to capture a Heffalump.  In Wisconsin's North Woods, wild game getting caught in a Heffalump trap happens.

"We've seen this come up from time to time, often with a bear, occasionally a deer," said Randy Johnson, a large carnivore specialist with the Wisconsin DNR.

The bear was still able to drink by dunking its head into water.

"You could tell the animal was skinny. It obviously had been wearing it for some time," said Morey.

The bear weighed roughly 70 pounds when she was rescued. DNR officials say a bear her age typically weighs somewhere between 100 and 150 pounds during the summer.

The bear was in good shape with no noticeable injuries when she was found, the DNR said. As for how long she could have survived trapped in the jar, Johnson said that's hard to say, but he said it's thanks to all the tips from the public that this bear has a good shot at surviving.

"The good news is this is the time of year when food is the most abundant in the woods, and she's got two months to kind of get back into healthy shape going into winter, so she's certainly got a good chance," said Johnson.

The bear has been tagged, and progress reports on her recovery might be forthcoming.

THE IVIES FOULED UP, COMMUNITY COLLEGES HARDEST HIT.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed has returned to community college administration and to writing a bi-weekly column for Inside Higher Ed.  The column will run on Mondays and Thursdays, which is a more dependable schedule than some Amtrak trains keep.

He opens with a stock-taking, "How the climate for public higher education has changed over the past 25 years."  Mostly for the worse, but we'll get to that.

When I started in the community college world in the early 2000s, I saw them as fully mature institutions that had been around forever. If anything, they felt a little stodgy, and I saw trying to modernize them as part of my mission. The first time I attended a conference of the League for Innovation, I remember being struck that some of the senior leaders still referred to “the community college movement.” The phrase landed sideways with me; as I saw it, community colleges were no more a movement than post offices were. They were simply parts of the landscape, and their major challenges, other than funding, were internal.

Perhaps so.  His Confessions of a Community College Administrator, on the other hand, suggested very much that there was a movement, one part expanding access to higher education, one part avoiding being thought of as high school with ashtray.  Meanwhile, doing, and with limited funding, some liberal arts core curriculum stuff, some auto mechanics and allied health technology, some eligibility for big time college athletes.

RECLAIMING THE CULTURE, ONE STARLET AT A TIME.

I've long been critical of the efforts of the so-called Smart People to deconstruct the institutions, because in so doing, they deconstructed civilization itself.  Those efforts could not be sustained.  "Like anything else, when people figure out that something useful is missing, they'll figure out a way to reclaim it."

How destructive was the deconstruction?  Townhall's Tom Knighton has a litany.

The side that screams about "trusting the science" can't decide what a woman is and claims there's no link between obesity and heart disease, even as "fat acceptance" advocates die at incredibly young ages, but they want to infect you with a potentially life-threatening disease because they're convinced "meat is murder."

Of course, since they also can't seem to explain why every climate change model to date has failed to come close to accurately predicting anything, this shouldn't be surprising.

See, what we need to understand is that to your garden-variety leftist, there is no objective truth. Everything is subjective in some manner, which is why they claim things like "violent crime is a social construct," or that race is one, too. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but if you think an obese woman prancing around a stage in a super-tight onesie isn't beautiful, you're a bigot. If you think that the attractive, blue-eyed, blonde actress in the jeans ad is attractive, you're a fascist, because they've subjectively decided what objective reality would be.

Does that make any sense? Of course not, but tell me it's not true. Tell me honestly that the left doesn't present literally everything they discuss in just that way.

Unfortunately, far too many people have heard the sesquipedalian words and figured concatenating a few of them made them sound Enlightened, but even out of the mouths of Authoritative Intellectuals, it's often nonsense on stilts.  The epigones who might have heard the words but never composed the articles, not so much.  "[I]t's not as though the gate-keepers didn't abdicate some of their own responsibilities, particularly those who put sneer quotes around words such as truth, or who gave the impression that any emergent phenomenon, because it was emergent, was an arbitrary construction that could be deconstructed without consequence."  That post suggested what went wrong.  "[T]he youngsters have had their skulls turned to mush by mushy-skulled adults."

THINKING LIKE AN ECONOMIST?

The fall semester will soon be upon us, and here is a question, borrowed from Alchian and Allen, that I used to torment students with.  "Why can we count on finding warm clothes in the stores before winter and swimming suits in the summer?"

Partial credit for recognizing entrepreneurial alertness, in the form of being aware of what might be in fashion or what people might be looking for.

Full credit for acknowledging competitive conditions.  "As long as there are dollar bills on the sidewalk, though, somebody's going to pick them up."  A simple, spot-on answer might be "If I can't find a swimsuit at your store, I'll be able to find one someplace else."

My approach to teaching introductory price theory was contrarian in part, which no doubt bothered some students.  Recall the standard form of the competitive model, with large numbers of buyers and sellers, dealing in fully interchangeable products, able to easily participate or to withdraw, and with all agents perfectly informed.  I sometimes modified that fourth property as "people can quickly discover and act upon the relevant information."  I further cautioned students intending to go on in economics that there were all sorts of philosophical and theoretical weeds one could get into over how large those "large numbers" had to be (do your own research into "continuum of traders" or "hyperreal agents") or what was a meaningful, as opposed to a mathematically convenient, restriction on being able to participate.

Tracking cookies and smart 'phones and all the other impedimenta of the so-called information economy were becoming more common as I wound up my career, and I'd refer to some of those things and caution all students, whether they were considering going on in economics or contemplating any other course of action, including but not limited to which major to pursue or which bar to go to that weekend, that they might not find life in a perfect-information economy appealing: nay, the vulgar Welfare Economics Paradigm that treats the imperfection or incompleteness of information as a market failure is tragically wrong.  And so, dear reader, it has come to pass.  Below the jump is an elaboration on several ways that completing information about the preferences of agents becomes something more like an invasion of privacy.

EIGHTY YEARS AGO.

Sometimes, an air mission can change the course of a war.

Eighty years later, the Manhattan Project remains controversial.  Town Hall columnist Arthur Schaper asks the right questions.

How do you break an enemy whose civilians threw themselves off cliffs, with their children? How do you defeat an enemy prepared to lose their lives and the lives of all their loved ones to defend the empire?

Truman could. He would stop this war. He would win.

Truman gave the order. He dropped the bomb.

It was not a necessary evil, as the self-righteous claim. It was a necessary good.

There was no better means to victory than by dropping the bomb. The sheer destruction of one nuclear device outstripped all the blood, sweat, and tears of kamikaze pilots and [banzai] jingoism.

It was still a close-run thing.  Mr Truman promised a rain of ruin.  After Little Man and Fat Boy, there were no more marbles in the fish bowl to deliver a third blow.

THE BONFIRE OF BODY POSITIVITY.

Our President recently brought back the circa-1966 version of the Presidential Fitness Challenge, which provoked Michael Levenson with New York's Times.  "Generations of Americans who struggled to complete a pull-up in front of their classmates winced as President Trump announced that he was reinstating the annual assessment."  I wonder how those interviews came to be.  "Hello, I'm Michael Levenson with the New York Times.  Were you able to do a pull-up in grade school?"  He got the interviews.

Ivory Burnett, 41, does not have fond memories of taking the Presidential Fitness Test.

It felt like a military recruitment exercise, she said, with all of her classmates watching as she struggled to run a mile and complete a sit-and-reach, a pull-up and other exercises.

“Doing that pull-up in front of everybody — that was the worst,” said Ms. Burnett, a freelance writer who described herself as taller and “a little chubbier” than her classmates at Carter and MacRae Elementary School in Lancaster, Pa.

“I never did a pull-up,” she said. “My jam was just to hang there and cut jokes.”

Ah, yes, the pull-up. "Do as many as you can plus one."  Might not have been the best motivation to get everybody to at least do one, but that was the standard line from school gym teachers and YMCA exercise leaders alike.

The reality, though, is that if you skipped a grade, gym class sucked.

While some still proudly remember passing the test with flying colors and receiving a presidential certificate, many others recoil at the mere mention of the test. For them, it was an early introduction to public humiliation.

“You would see it,” Ms. Burnett said. Her classmates “would feel body shamed if they didn’t perform as well.”

I don't know if schools still do that, but grade-skipping was the practice during the American High, notionally to "level the playing field" for the mediocre students by removing the high performers to the next grade, which supposedly levelled the playing field for the high performers as well, although the mediocre students in the next higher grade resented the introduction of a new crop of average raisers among them.

GRADUALLY, THEN ALL AT ONCE?

David Hebert asks "When Will America Max Out the National Credit Card?"  It's notionally about the origins of the so-called debt ceiling, and it includes a reminder that Keynesian economics used to be about counter-cyclical fiscal policy, balancing the federal budget over the business cycle.

In the throes of the First World War, Congress found itself having to repeatedly authorize new debts to continue funding the war effort. Recognizing that they were constituted as a slow moving and deliberative body and that the needs of war were quickly changing and required additional flexibility, Congress passed the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917. This Act created a “debt limit” of $15 billion. Originally intended to provide temporary flexibility during wartime, the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917 created the scope for fiscal malfeasance.

But then came the economic calamity of the Great Depression. Keynesian economics, conceived initially as a relatively benign idea that promised to be simple in application and profound in impact, provided the supposed cure. When faced with an economic downturn, government officials could engage in deficit spending and thereby provide the stimulus needed to prevent catastrophe. In times of plenty, the government could run surpluses and either pay off previously accumulated debt or establish a rainy-day fund for a future downturn. The implication of this is that the federal government need not balance its budget on an annual basis; the budget would balance itself over a sufficiently long run as government officials wisely responded to the changing business cycle.

Unfortunately, this fundamentally changed the relationship between debt, federal budgets, and the economy. The days of fiscal prudence were over. Now, not only was incurring debt viewed as morally good, but it came with a powerful economic justification. The issuance of debt was no longer viewed as a last resort, to be used only in cases of extreme necessity. Instead, deficits became a vital component of federal budget policy. The debt limit allowed Congress to spend money it did not have without the need for onerous project-specific authorization and tedious debate. What’s more, the fear of repeating the Great Depression gave something that policymakers could guard against through deficit spending.

Which morphed into deferring the tax increases or spending cuts that Keynesian style macroeconomics used to teach, under the rubric of "automatic stabilizers."  Sooner or later the real debt ceiling will crash in on us.

Our fiscal trajectory is unsustainable. Political promises to “rein in spending” have failed in the past and will fail in the future. We need institutional reform that transcends elections, not just political promises that might last during a candidate’s time in office. A return to project-specific debt authorization would be a wise and prudential step in the right direction.

"Wise and prudential" are not the dispositions I have come to expect of any Congress or any presidency.  We have much to look forward to.

THE CULTURE-STUDIES INCANTATIONS HAVE LOST THEIR POWER.

American Eagle, referring to the clothier, not to the unlamented regional service of American Airlines, recently hired one Sydney Sweeney to endorse the company's denim wear.

As Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg notes, "For crying out loud - it was just an ad. One of hundreds of thousands like it, before and since."  Caroline Downey concurs in National Review.  "It’s about a pretty girl in blue jeans, not the superiority of one race."

BAD STUDENTS CUT MORE THAN ONE CORNER.

As students return to campus, so too do the plagiarizers to the term papers.  "Knowing a student used AI is not the same as being able to prove it, Leonard Steinhorn writes."

Well, yes, academic misconduct is a serious charge to bring, and you'd better have a case that goes beyond a reasonable doubt.

I couldn’t definitively prove it, but I knew it.

If you’ve taught in a college classroom these last two years, you no doubt know exactly the dilemma I’m describing. The rabbit hole of makeshift detective work that resulted may feel familiar, too.

Well, yes, and demonstrating that somebody has lifted it from the textbook or a common source is a lot easier than finding the algorithm the corner-cutting student used. "AI evolves second by second, and there are now multiple sites that with a simple click produce papers and essays, I could not find any exact examples of plagiarism."

HINTS OF ADVANCED AGE.

When I hired out at Northern Illinois University, the Chicago and North Western's Bi-Level Commuter Streamliners were still running in their English Stagecoach Yellow and Forest Green, even though the trains were being subsidized by what became Chicago's Metra.  A few years later, one such train joined the collection at Illinois Railway Museum.  Sometimes, when the museum do their July 3 re-enactment of the abrupt end of Chicago Aurora and Elgin interurban service, the Commuter Streamliner serves as the rescue train.

Sunday was Vintage Transportation Expo, and with the owners and friends of vintage motor vehicles on the grounds, the seating capacity of Roarin' Elgin interurbans and the Commuter Streamliner alike proved useful.

Arguably, commuter trains that were new when I was in elementary school are of a vintage that merits preservation.  Now meriting preservation, the diesels that were Amtrak's first new passenger power as well as early alternating current diesel locomotives of the late 1980s.  The power the museum detailed to pick them up at the interchange, one each from Burlington Northern and from Santa Fe, also strikes me as too new for a museum.

The two from Amtrak, 231 and 6976, initially Amtrak 644, are operable and might be part of the parade of diesels during the upcoming "Diesel Days" weekend.

All three were spotted on the diesel shop leads for the car aficionados to contemplate.

WILL SAVARIN CATER STATE DINNERS?

Our President and a few of his well-heeled friends are putting up the money to put up a new formal dining room in the East Wing of the White House.  Long overdue, suggests Victory Girl Tori Williams.

Elementary schools generally have a multi-purpose room. That’s find when you are young. Flex spaces are fine for young families, but we are a world leader nation. We have been using the East Room in the White House as a multi-purpose room, but we are the world leader and we need a ballroom. Our 250th anniversary is next year, for crying out loud.

Yes, I attended such an elementary school, the hot lunches were prepared elsewhere and warmed up and served there, indoor gym took place there, as did concerts, PTA meetings, and Cub Scout gatherings.

What happens if there's a large crowd expected for a state dinner?  Well, you pitch a Big Top and call it a "specially built pavilion."  If the weather is foul, all those elegantly gowned women and their elegantly bought off escorts might have to schlop (Our President's words) through the mud to get there.

JÄGERMEISTER, JÄGERMEISTER, I'LL. HAVE. SOME.

"Gebirgsmusikkorps der Bundeswehr Garmisch-Partenkirchen - Mussinan Marsch - Olper Schützenfest 2025" suggests that Bundeswehr musicians participate in Schützenfest parades and concerts.

That's all to the good. Watch the Hunt Club member at the left of your screen!

PROCESS PRECLUDES PRODUCTIVITY?

Last weekend was for getting Oktoberfest  and Karneval (Fasching, for those of you in Austria and Bavaria) season going in Wisconsin.

Once Hoppeditz has been roused from hibernation, it is time to tap the ceremonial first keg, which you see stage left.

On the way home, though, comes a moment of clarity.  On a lightly-loaded early evening Metra departure for Elburn, the carrier cycles through the usual litany of announcements including "Do not flip the seats unless your party is three or more people" and "Do not place luggage or packages on the seats," the latter leading a passenger (not me) to mutter "As if that's going to be a problem today."

Well, no, but remember last month's meditation on the chief jailable officer.  Or, perhaps, compliance with the rule, even unto the absurd, is job security.

Alexander Dolgun's Story includes an explanation of why a Soviet "corrective labor camp" where the dead would have their skulls split with an axe before the corpses were dumped in a mass grave would also have a state-of-the art medical clinic (although good luck being able to call in sick.) Camp commandants maintained all the facilities called for by some policy posted somewhere in Moscow (or is it stitched into a briefing book?) in order to avoid being turned from Citizen Colonel into prisoner on denunciation of professionally jealous functionary.

The more ways a manager can go wrong, though, the more ways the professionally jealous subordinate can make trouble?

THE ROT WAS ALREADY SETTING IN.

California resident and regular Reason contributor Steven Greenhut stands up for his state.

One of the dumbest memes I've seen recently shows a photo of a Los Angeles rioter waving a Mexican flag with the tagline, "California 2025." Underneath that image is a photo of young, wholesome folks leaning against a Mustang with their surfboards at a Southern California beach with the words, "California 1965." It's absurd for various reasons, but it's laughable that the meme picks 1965 for the comparison.

Here's the meme.

Mr Greenhut continues, showing his work.

That's the same year as the "Watts Rebellion" or "Watts Riots."  (The differing titles are a testament to the ongoing culture-war battle over the use of language.) Sparked by frustrations about police brutality and discrimination after the arrest of an African-American man, the riots (yes, they were riots) claimed 34 lives, more than 1,000 injuries, and $40 million in property damage. State and federal officials called in the National Guard.

Seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time. The Los Angeles mayhem is inexcusable. If those protesting against ICE wanted to sway opinion, they shouldn't be waving the flags of other countries. They should protest peacefully. But the heavy-handed nature of the ICE raids threw fuel on the fire—and the administration has used the crisis to vastly expand its power.

Mr Greenhut concludes, comparing and constrasting that era's cold civil war with the present unpleasantness.

The main parallel between 1965 and 2025 is that they are tumultuous years. Sixty years ago the nation largely moved in a positive direction to address the festering problems that sparked the Watts riots. I'm feeling less confident about where the country goes from here.

Five years ago, about now, were those fiery but mostly peaceful protests.  Those procedural changes might not have changed much in Watts or anywhere else.  And moving in a positive direction?  By 1965 most of the Beach Boys' greatest hits had been displaced at the top of the charts by the increasingly psychedelic Beatles, and was anybody even playing Jan and Dean any more?  California dreaming became the California nightmare.

California, for a short time, seemed to be the land of endless summer, and hassle-less cruising.  Even before the first hippies showed up in San Francisco, though, the ominous signs were there.

[Time] chose to celebrate the Palisades High Class of 1965 as representing the youth of the future.  If you want the more perfect paradigm of being born on third base and thinking you'd hit a triple, that might be the place to look, and at that time, upscale southern California was still the Beach Boys' California, and the future looked bright.  Two years later came the Summer of Love, and that might have been California's first (of what would become many) E-T-T-S moments.  For that matter, the ten-year retrospective on the class of 1965 was kind of sad, actually, tales of opportunities lost.

I mean, when Johnny Rotten grouses about the state of Venice Beach?

The fate of that Class of 1965, though?  Upscale neurotic Californians, particularly in show business and the professions, were already material for the edgier comedians of the day.  Does it come as any surprise that the spawn of upscale Hollywood types would become neurotic Californians themselves?  Make of it what you will how few of those most favored youngsters Time featured and What Ever Happened followed up with were into cars or surfing.

California these days?  Neofeudalism, with the nobility forting up against the lumpenproletarians while raging against the immigration authorities rounding up the illegal aliens.  Not much reason to be confident about that situation either.