POLITICS IS EXHAUSTING.

In "Weeping and Wailing Over the Cave," Barbara "Maha" O'Brien, after taking stock of the pillage wing of the Democrats and their angry moocher base bewailing what might be an end to the current government shutdown, at least until the end of the Festive Season, complains, "Staying angry is too exhausting."  You could take a chill pill, Barbie, and rethink your Trump derangement.  And yes, at best there will be a couple of business-as-usual appropriations now and more wrangling about what to leave in or take out of the next continuing resolution.  It's as if nobody in Washington wants to be bothered with regular order appropriations.

As MSNBC’s report added, “Even if, as expected, both chambers pass the bill and President Donald Trump signs it, most of the government will only be funded through that stopgap bill going until Jan. 30.”

In other words, this new agreement funds the government through a temporary spending package known as a continuing resolution (also known as a CR). If signed into law, it will expire in 11 weeks, at which point most of the federal government will face the prospect of another shutdown.

Did I say the moocher base was angry?  Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor suggests there might have been a better way to channel that anger.

The goal of shutting down the government to force the ACA subsidies to be restored was a non-starter from the beginning because the Democrats are in the minority in both chambers. They don’t have the votes, and no majority party is going to capitulate to a massive (in their minds) policy change on the basis of a shutdown.

I am currently a bit vexed by some political journalists/commentators and folks with PhDs in political science on Blue Sky who seem to think otherwise.

I will note from the beginning that I preferred that the Democrats, if they were going to go the route they went, should have made the shutdown about Trump’s authoritarian actions. Moreover, if they really wanted a clear goal, they should have insisted from the beginning that the GOP would have to end the filibuster to reopen the government (a demand Trump made, but to my knowledge, not a single Democratic Senator made, although Fetterman endorsed the notion).

Whether changing the rules to reduce the ability of a legislative minority to obstruct things is wise or not, whether calling attention to a president's authoritarian actions by prolonging a government shutdown when the governing majority favors reducing the scope of the federal government is wise or not, that's not how it played out.  Moreover, Professor Taylor probably did not offer a way around the shutdown-continuing-resolution theater.  "Even better, it would be nice if we would join pretty much the rest of the world in having spending continue at the previously voted on levels in these circumstances."  That's kinda-sorta what's going on, with spending levels creeping up at approximately the rate of inflation what with no regular order appropriations in this century, but would we be surprised if the political class simply put all spending on autopilot and came up with other ways to pillage the voters?

His colleague James Joyner takes stock.

Ultimately, Democrats fought and lost. The Trump administration figured out how to minimize the pain of the shutdown for its own supporters early on by shifting funds to keep paying military personnel and federal law enforcement. And refused to do the same for SNAP recipients when existing funds dried up. That, and leveraging the crisis at airports caused by unpaid TSA agents and, especially, air traffic controllers calling out sick to order flights canceled upped the pressure.

There was no end in sight. There are enough institutionalists left in the Senate that totally ending the filibuster was just out of the question. Having the shutdown extend into Thanksgiving would have been devastating for all concerned.

No, taxpayers lost.  Money for food stamps will be forthcoming once the House acts.  No discussion of whether those benefits go to deserving poors only.  No discussion of rolling back the security theater at the airports or selling the air traffic control infrastructure to a private operator.  No contemplation of the ways by which simple voting majorities in Congress will whipsaw voters whenever able.  No thought about how those parties claim mandates when what really matters is voters wanting to stop the excesses of the current governing coalition, not to implement a different bundle of excesses.

NO KREMLIN PARADE FOR YOU.

It's 108 years since Great October Socialist Revolution.  I don't know whether there's inchoate socialist revolution in United States electoral politics, tavarish.  I submit, though, that Babylon Bee have proper perspective on current socialist mania.

Enjoy, and don't forget to thank Student Affairs for providing education!  Do svidanya.

WHO IS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY'S OAKES AMES?

Common Dreams writer Brad Reed sees the rent-seeking in the latest "internal improvements" frenzy.

Tech giant OpenAI generated significant backlash this week after one of its top executives floated potential loan guarantees from the US government to help fund its massive infrastructure buildout.

In a Wednesday interview with The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar suggested that the federal government could get involved in infrastructure development for artificial intelligence by offering a “guarantee,” which she said could “drop the cost of the financing” and increase the amount of debt her firm could take on.

When asked if she was specifically talking about a “federal backstop for chip investment,” she replied, “Exactly.”

Hours after the interview, Friar walked back her remarks and insisted that “OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for our infrastructure commitments,” while adding that she was “making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity, which requires the private sector and government playing their part.”

Despite Friar’s walk-back, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a podcast interview with economist Tyler Cowen that released on Thursday that he believed the government ultimately could be a backstop to the artificial intelligence industry.

“When something gets sufficiently huge... the federal government is kind of the insurer of last resort, as we’ve seen in various financial crises,” he said. “Given the magnitude of what I expect AI’s economic impact to look like, I do think the government ends up as the insurer of last resort.”

Friar and Altman’s remarks about government backstops for OpenAI loans drew the immediate ire of Robert Weissman, co-president of consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, who expressed concerns that the tech industry may have already opened up talks about loan guarantees with President Donald Trump’s administration.

“Given the Trump regime’s eagerness to shower taxpayer subsidies and benefits on favored corporations, it is entirely possible that OpenAI and the White House are concocting a scheme to siphon taxpayer money into OpenAI’s coffers, perhaps with some tribute paid to Trump and his family.” Weissman said. “Perhaps not so coincidentally, OpenAI President Greg Brockman was among the attendees at a dinner for donors to Trump’s White House ballroom, though neither he nor OpenAI have been reported to be actual donors.”

JB Branch, Public Citizen’s Big Tech accountability advocate, said even suggesting government backstops for OpenAI showed that the company and its executives were “completely out of touch with reality,” and he argued it was no coincidence that Friar floated the possibility of federal loan guarantees at a time when many analysts have been questioning whether the AI industry is an unsustainable financial bubble.

“The truth is simple: the AI bubble is swelling, and OpenAI knows it,” he said. “Big Tech is building a mountain of speculative infrastructure without real-world demands or proven productivity-enhancing use cases to justify it. Now it wants the US government to prop up the bubble before it bursts. This is an escape plan for an industry that has overpromised and underdelivered.”

An MIT Media Lab report found in September that while AI use has doubled in workplaces since 2023, 95% of organizations that have invested in the technology have seen “no measurable return on their investment.”

There's a lot going on in that passage.  The concluding paragraph brings to mind a Paul Krugman quip from at least a quarter century ago about information technologies showing up everywhere but in the productivity statistics.  But wherever the Next Big Thing looks like it might be an internal improvement, as surely as Packer fans hold their team to a high standard, the rent-seekers will do what they can to wet their beaks.  "The public roads and waterways have long been a federal project, all the way back to the American System of Internal Improvements, and there are still people who labor under the delusion that these can be paid for out of general revenues.  I'm still waiting for the penny to drop."  Public Citizen types might have particular distrust of Our President, notorious rent-seeker and grifter after subsidies for sketchy entertainment ventures: their argument generalizes.  "[R]esources devoted to early public works, whether the National Road or the various canals or the land-grant railroads, might have been prematurely and inefficiently allocated, and that it took subsequent private investment to put the Pacific Railroad in a state of good repair."

ASSERTION, INSINUATION, AND CHEAP SHOTS.

It's long been so easy for the self-styled progressives to push their preferences on others by being nasty.  Of late, the Militant Normals have decided to fight back in kind.

Is there a more annoying collection of people who never learned how not to be stupid about being supposedly smart than the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media?  You'd think after Barack Obama became a laughingstock over "bitter clingers" and his anointed successor Hillary "Elphaba" Clinton talked herself out of the Oval with that "basket of deplorables" they'd learn.

But no.  Recently Katie Couric (why is she still relevant?) went on Bill Maher's show and went right on with the scolding.  "'The socio-economic disparities are a lot and class resentment is a lot and anti-intellectualism and elitism is what is driving many of these anti-establishment [people] — which are Trump voters — so, I think that is a huge problem that we have to address,' Couric explained to Maher, referring to the MAGA movement that got its name from the ex-president’s campaign slogan."  Yes, peddle your technocratic delusions in a less condescending way, that's a winner for you.  "I mean globalization and the transition from an industrial to a technological society — I don’t know if you’ve ever been jealous of someone else or resentful — it is such a corroding and bitter, almost bile feeling."

I wrote that in the spring of 2024, before Dementia Joe face-planted in the debate and the Militant Normals finally tired of being polite.  Recently a review article from fifty years ago, in Commentary, when that journal was evolving in a conservative way, featuring Thomas Sowell engaging Ken Galbraith's Money, came to my attention, and in it one sees that Professor Sowell was onto the progressive con-job long ago.

For about 200 of the 312 pages of this book, Galbraith meanders through a selective history of money in the Western world. It is hard to see where the tour is going, but the scenery is nice and the guide calls our attention to various points of interest. Then suddenly there is what Galbraith calls “The Coming of J. M. Keynes,” and the grand design of the book falls into place. Throughout history the story of money has been the story of knaves and fools, but now the Truth has been seen.

What is the Keynesian truth for which all the earlier monetary history of the world was only a preamble? According to Galbraith, Keynesian theory and history both demonstrate that controlling the money supply does not control aggregate demand, and therefore cannot restore full employment after a depression. The Keynesian reason is that when the money supply is increased in an effort to spur demand, fearful individuals and institutions may choose to hold the additional money during the depression. Therefore direct government spending is necessary to get the money into circulation and restore full employment. Nowhere does Galbraith reveal that this sophomore Keynesianism has been under attack—and generally retreating—over the past thirty years. The reader gets no pros and cons. Instead, he is conned by a pro.

Robert Lucas's "Expectations and the Neutrality of Money" and the rational expectations modelling associated with Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace with assorted other Minnesota math jocks getting in on the fun were getting a lot of attention in the workshop circuits and in imitative dissertations.  "Sophomore Keynesianism," though, we still have with us, as it was a concept Dementia Joe might still have been capable of grasping.

THE FANS KNOW WHAT THE STANDARD IS.

A Barstool Sports contributor called Hubbs asserts, "Matt LaFleur Has No Balls And Needs To Give Up Play-Calling For The Packers."  Well, yes, that Sunday fiasco in Green Bay made the absence of any coffee at the Baird Center for Train Fest look like the smallest of First World problems, at least in the sports world.

The Packers might be the most confusing 5-2-1 team you'll ever come across. After their convincing win against the Steelers on SNF I think most people felt they had no choice but to respect the Pack and consider them a legitimate Super Bowl contender.

Well, after Sunday's dud of all duds, losing as a 13.5 point home favorite to the Carolina Panthers, how can they be? I mean how does a game like that happen, especially when Bryce Young going 11 for 20 for 102 yards and an interception? How do you lose to a team that had give up 40+ to New England and Buffalo? If you're this Super Bowl contender you should be right on par with those teams.

That 13.5 point favorite scored all of 13 points and couldn't stop the Panthers from getting into reasonable field goal range to walk off as winners.  The columnist wants a change in play-calling responsibilities.

I think it's been a long time coming for LaFleur to give up play-calling. This offense needs a new voice. Do I expect a team that's 5-2-1 to make a drastic change like this? No, but they absolutely should. This Packers offense leaves far too much on the table every week. Whether they're starting slow like in the Pittsburgh and Arizona games, or playing with their food like the Bengals game. It's never a full 60 minute complete effort where they just run away with a game because the offense was relentless. When you look at the numbers under the hood you see it's a play-calling issue.

Listen, I don't know if this Packers team can overcome Tucker Kraft's season ending ACL injury. He was their number one option and really made them special. They have plenty of talent besides him, although LaFleur would rather feature Savion Williams than Matthew Golden so it might not even matter.

There are voices among the Packer faithful who are calling for a coaching change.  At the time Matt LaFleur introduced himself to the fourth estate, we reminded readers "The standard is still five championships in six championship games in eight seasons."  Over the past thirty years, Packer teams have had the window of opportunity to make a run at that standard, or at least to repeat, or to win a couple titles over five years, and that has not come to pass.  People with long memories might not be satisfied with a change in the play-calling responsibilities.

GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.

Reason's J. D. Tuccille might be provocative to make a point.  "Americans need to go cold turkey from Uncle Sugar."  I like his argument, because it follows lines I have been calling attention to for years.

That the "government shutdown" is disruptive is an indictment of just how far we've let the federal Leviathan intrude into areas it doesn't belong. Of course, it's not really a shutdown; it's a temporary suspension of nonessential activities while lawmakers posture over budget issues for the edification of their core supporters. But we still see the air traffic control system in chaos and all too many Americans complaining that they won't get full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits because government officials always inconvenience the public first even as most of the federal behemoth chugs on as always. They want to convince us we need the state and get us begging for it to reopen.

Instead, we should ween ourselves from government and relegate the federal apparatus to the irrelevance—or even nonexistence—that it deserves.

That the current so-called shutdown has the party notionally of smaller government holding the presidency, a slim majority in the House, and a filibusterable majority in the Senate suggests there might be at least passing interest in rolling back some of those governmental excesses, subject, though, to the permanent bipartisan establishment rolling its logs.

Fortunately, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have been able to secure a monopoly on demonization, marginalization, or suppression, and the fanatical moochers in the Democrat base and the fanatical believers in the Republican base counteract each other in numbers sufficient to secure gridlock, which is preferable to the tyranny either of Kenyan socialism or potted theocracy.

To the likes of Mr Schieffer and the legions of wannabe Influential People that gather Sunday mornings in front of pictures of the Capitol to hold forth on the Latest (manufactured) Crisis, however, that is as garlic to vampires. Offer public affairs programming that takes seriously the idea that Government is Big because Government Generates Rents and Rent-Seeking Creates Gridlock and the whole Pundit Industry will collapse.

That post concluded, "[I]t is gridlock that protects the liberties of the people."  After an extended review of the principal stumbling blocks of the current shutdown showdown: and I cannot completely shake the idea that it's a dodge to again avoid the regular order appropriations, particularly with another Christmas continuing resolution, possibly including a patch to those insurance subsidies, looming,  Mr Tuccille concludes, "Dependence on Government is a Bad Choice"  Why?  Because.

It destroys our independence and makes us vulnerable to government failures and disputes in the political process. I illustrate that point with SNAP and air traffic control because those are issues grabbing attention this week. But there are so many other areas into which government officials have intruded to convince us that they're indispensable. The shutdown emphasizes the importance of reducing, if not eliminating the government's role, in as many of those areas as possible.

We may need some government. But some government is far less than we have now when disruptions in the budget process affect one in eight Americans' meal planning and prevent passenger jets from crossing the skies. The government should be doing less, subsidizing fewer people and businesses, and it certainly shouldn't be encouraging a class of clients whose fortunes depend on politicians' largesse.

CNN reports that "a small group of fed-up lawmakers in Washington are furiously trying to end the standoff as soon as this week" so the federal government can resume its suspended activities. But that's the wrong approach. We need a real shutdown to make Americans go cold turkey. We need to rediscover our independence, kick the government habit, and learn how to live without Uncle Sugar.

We'll eventually learn how much, if any, government we really need. For now, keep it closed.

Unfortunately, that "class of clients" includes the narrative-setting punditry who think that sitting around under pictures of the Capitol dome is somehow securing the blessings of liberty or protecting Our Democracy^(TM).  Let's see how long the bond traders continue to put up with Washington's fiscal incontinence.

A POLITICAL ECONOMY LESSON ON A GAME BOARD.

That's how Monopoly got started.  "And how is it that a game conceived as socialist propaganda becomes a metaphor for competitive capitalism that inspires refinements to keep players engaged and involved?"

A board game to challenge the ruling classes still has potential.  "After facing constant roadblocks in opening a neighborhood cafe, an artist in Savannah, Georgia, created a board game that mimics the frustration of small-scale development."

Unlike Monopoly, or some sessions of Risk, where the slow strangulation of the weaker players diminishes the play value, the slow strangulation of any player's initiative is the point of Clinton Edminster's Red Tape Game.

Clinton did something unexpected. As an artist, he turned his frustration into expression by designing a board game called “Red Tape.”

The game mimics his experience of navigating city approvals:

• Neighborhood Association: Roll to gather petitions.
• Parking Requirements: Lose a turn while you redesign.
• The Bank: Roll for financing delays.
• Construction & City Council: Try again, or move back three steps.

Every square captured the illogical, discouraging hoops he had to jump through just to bring life back to a building the city had left to decay.

When the game was played at a Housing Savannah summit, it struck a nerve. City staff, elected officials, and community leaders rolled the dice and found themselves equally stuck and unable to move forward in a game designed to mirror real-life barriers. Barriers imposed by the very players of the game.

That was the “aha” moment: Red tape isn’t just frustrating; it kills good projects before they ever begin.

Instead of brushing it off, city staff took the criticism seriously. They began looking for ways to simplify and improve their processes so that residents and small business owners could invest without getting trapped in bureaucratic limbo.

Good.  I'm sure that each of the bureaucratic obstacles originated with The Best of Intentions, and I suspect that one can find peer-reviewed endorsements of many of them in Journal of Urban Economics or Environment and Planning or an archaeological journal.  Over time, though, the accretion of process is as if barnacles on a hull.  In Monopoly, maybe no houses get built because nobody gets the two or three lots of the same color group; in Savannah or Savanna or anyplace else, sooner or later somebody takes a hard look at why no houses get built.  "Every community has its version of the Red Tape Game. The rules are invisible, but the outcome is the same: vacant buildings stay vacant, and citizens give up on making their place better."  In the Strong Towns world, it might be that there's as much unsustainable Suburban Experiment construction going on as there is because the existing communities might have good bones, but for those accretions of process barnacles preventing the upgrades.  Whether those upgrades become gentrification is left to the reader as an exercise.

LET SWAP MEET SEASON BEGIN.

In Milwaukee, Oktoberfest season begins at the end of July with German Fest, and model railroad swap meet season begins toward the beginning of November with Train Fest.  This year's event took place in the downtown Baird Center, and the vendors were showing their wares and the local modellers' clubs with portable layouts were featuring their sight gags.

That might be one of the more over-the-top Lionel offerings, and I hope that any young lady with an interest in trains will prefer her FT in the Santa Fe Warbonnet.

GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.

Market tests have a way of concentrating the mind.  "Rivian’s CFO hints the end of EV tax credits means manufacturers are being forced to finally make more affordable electric cars."

STRONG THE ENTITLEMENT IS IN THIS ONE.

Hot Air's David Strom sees "Women's Health: Being Single Makes You Happy!," has doubts.

The current cultural elite narrative that being single and childless is great is contradicted by every credible study ever done.

Single women, it has consistently been found, are about half as likely to report being "very happy" as married women.

Not that you would know this if you read Women's Health Magazine. In fact, being single gives women "joy," so quit dating and enjoy your freedom, gals!

And yes, the article does open with a good-news-is-bad-news-is-wrong vibe.

Single women, by and large, are actually quite happy, quite fulfilled, and quite content, thankyouverymuch. And as their numbers continue to grow, their experiences and wisdom could help shape the way we all approach our mental and emotional well-being. We just have to listen, as the whispers grow to a roar.

Read on, dear reader, and ask whether the article's author, and perhaps a few of the authorities the author consults, are due for a privilege check.

“It’s more doable to be single,” says Bella DePaulo, PhD, a social scientist and the author of Single at Heart. “If you don’t want to cook, there’s takeout. If you don’t want to do your laundry, there’s laundry service. If you don’t want to do repairs in your house, you can go online and find people.”

Our interconnected world also means we don’t need to rely on a live-in partner for socializing or emotional support. “Communication technologies have made it much more fulfilling to be single,” DePaulo says. “If you’re single and you live alone, you’re not isolated. You are one text message, email, chat room away from the rest of the world.”

While stigmas still persist around singlehood—especially for women—DePaulo also notes that the increase in unmarried people may be self-perpetuating.

The effect of all those creature comforts on income and wealth inequality are left as an exercise.  When the television is on at headquarters, there's a good chance that a few of the advertisements are for those sorts of service: it's also possible to hire in a cleaning service or to have the dog food delivered as well as to interact selectively with people online rather than take pot luck at the bar, coffee house, or library.  And Professor DePaulo has long been a critic of the marriage-industrial complex.

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE.

I never lack for opportunities to reflect on the same things.  "Maybe the best thing for urban neighborhoods is for Wise Experts and their Urban Renewal to go away.  Those hero projects of the 1960s and 1970s tended not to turn out well."

SELF-AWARENESS IS NOT THE WOKESTERS' STRONG SUIT.

James "Long Emergency" Kunstler notes, "You might have noticed by now that the most hysterical voices crying about 'fascism' are exactly the people who yearn to push everybody else around, tell them what to think, run your life, wreck every institution and relationship in society, and take all your stuff. The Left never notices how all that resembles their notion of what fascism is."

TRANSCENDING COMPLEXITY.

Physicists Have Mathematically Proven the Universe Is Not a Simulation.  It's unlikely that somebody could program the universe as a simulation for the same reason that it's difficult to write a climate extrapolation model.  "The short form of Steven Hayward's argument is 'in a complex adaptive system it is impossible to capture the behavior of the system without fully describing it in your model.' There's something Cantorian, or perhaps religious about the problem." Add more code, run out of computing capacity.

THE MAKING OF A LIBERTARIAN TORY.

The correlation of forces creating such people might be strongest in ... New York City.  Reason's Zach Weissmueller raises that possibility.  "The troubling rise of Zohran Mamdani is about more than policy. It's about culture."  One of his sources is Inez Stepman, who describes herself as a libertarian turned conservative.  Her focus is on the possible error of challenging "socialism" using traditional political economy.

One unsettling possibility is that economic reality is secondary to cultural shifts when it comes to 21st-century U.S. politics, and the culture necessary to maintain a free society is slowly deteriorating.

"The pure economic analysis of Zohran just fails to account for the cultural worldview and ideology that is very clearly not only part of his candidacy, but to me is a central piece," says Stepman. "It does touch something in us that is deeper and somehow more politically potent than housing regulations."

That might be so, and yet the "cultural worldview and ideology" of the culture-studies types, which might or might not overlap with "socialism," is contributing to the deterioration of the culture, which means bourgeois norms, that maintains a free society.

Stepman describes Mamdani's anticolonial views as a "terrifying meld of third-world resentments and modern sort of elite, woke views" that somehow reconcile enthusiasm for Palestinian statehood with gay rights in the form of "queers for Palestine" signs.

"Don't you realize you'll be thrown off a building there?" asks Stepman.

The Venezuelan writer Carlos Rangel called the ideological blend of Marxism and anticolonialsm "third worldism," which rests on the idea that precolonial societies were socialist paradises. The so-called "noble savages" lived in communal harmony before European imperialists came to pillage their lands and impose savage capitalism, brutal individualism, and a rigid social hierarchy.

This iteration of socialism purposely conflates imperialism and capitalism, which helps explain why Mamdani has said that socialists and Palestinians are fighting "the same struggle."

Lots of high-concept stuff for the common room there, as well as in the balance of the article, which runs for many paragraphs beyond what I excerpted.  The [Not Detroit] Free Press contributor River Page, though, might have a more grounded, if less academically inclined, understanding of the deterioration that might lead to libertarian tories.

I’m a social democrat who campaigned for Bernie Sanders. You might think I’d feel more at home in a blue state like New York than in the Southern red states I lived in for my entire life until seven months ago. But I don’t. I hate it here—and I want to go back.

Here’s the difference: In a red state, the government doesn’t care about you. For example, when I lost my job in Florida during Covid, I gave up on trying to apply for unemployment benefits because, as Governor Ron DeSantis himself admitted, the website set up to process the claims had been intentionally designed with “pointless roadblocks” meant to frustrate unemployed Floridians into giving up their opportunity to receive benefits. Florida has also refused to expand Medicaid coverage under Obamacare even though 90 percent of the costs would be covered by the federal government. Red states may hardly help their citizens, but the upside is that they usually don’t bother them either. New York has bothered me since I got here.

After seven months of living in a blue state, I have come to the conclusion that the guiding principle of the Democratic Party isn’t really lukewarm welfarism combined with social liberalism. Instead, it is paternalism for the law-abiding masses and permissiveness for society’s antisocial underbelly. In other words, living in a blue state means that the government treats you like a child and does everything in its power to make your life just a little more annoying and inconvenient—unless you start openly smoking crack on the street.

Ignore for the sake of discussion, dear reader, the columnist's refusal to understand that Floridians pay Federal taxes and thus bear the costs of that Medicaid coverage, and focus on how "permissiveness for society's antisocial underbelly" is a fancy way of saying "enable dysfunction, get more of it."  The Tory part of his argument expands on how "progressive" policies enable dysfunction; the libertarian part notes the continued small annoyances of living according to all those rules.  "It’s the little things that break you; the small inconveniences that litter your life. Blue states have a million of them, and the world is no better for it."

In the bull session that accompanies his post, nobody has weighed in with a "These Policies are For Your Own Good (You Deplorable)" or a sardonic "And we'll all be better persons for it."

THE MAKING OF A MILITANT NORMAL.

Town Hall columnist Laura Hollis claims "Misguided 'Compassion' Contributes to Political Polarization."  She wrote the column after attending an event at Notre Dame University (no luck needed) that appears to combine the Protestant Social Gospel with the Catholic social teaching that originated with Paul.  The event she attended addressed the politics of cultivating hope, which is probably a fool's errand.  "Two weeks ago, Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., participated in a Q and A session on campus with Notre Dame's president, the Rev. Robert Dowd, CSC, during which McElroy offered his thoughts on ways to address political polarization in America."

ISN'T THIS LAST CENTURY'S NEWS?

Scientists Demand Ban on Bacon, Claiming Link to 54,000 Cases of Cancer.  Smoked meats, or preservatives in meats, or maybe meats themselves, have long given Wise Experts something to fret about.

First they came for sugar, then they came for bacon. Will life be worth living once all the simple ‘unhealthy’ pleasures are banned? I haven’t read the study, but a first thought is whether people who eat lots of bacon aren’t unhealthy in other ways that might explain a higher incidence of bowel, breast and prostate cancers. That’s often the problem with these studies – there are so many potential factors that could explain an 18% increase in various maladies. They’ll have statistical techniques to try to deal with that, for sure. But trying to work out why diseases like cancer develop as a result of eating certain foods is never an exact science.

Academicians, though, like to have more attention than another Minimal Publishable Unit in Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini will get them.

A coalition of leading scientists says the refusal to ban nitrites - preservatives used to keep processed meats pink and long-lasting - has come at a devastating human and financial cost, with the NHS footing an estimated £3 billion bill to treat preventable cancers over the past decade.

Their analysis, based on figures from Cancer Research UK and the British Journal of Cancer, estimates that around 5,400 bowel cancer cases each year in the UK are caused by eating processed meats. Treatment costs for each patient average £59,000.

That the National Health Service have no clue how much any one treatment costs, or how much the quality of a life year without bacon is lessened, is immaterial to "leading scientists."  Read on, and consider the source.

The warning comes exactly ten years after the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen - placing it in the same risk category as tobacco and asbestos.

Despite this, ministers have done 'virtually nothing' to reduce Britons' exposure, according to Professor Chris Elliott OBE, founder of the Institute for Global Food Security and a former government adviser.

He said: 'A decade on from the WHO report, the UK Government has done virtually nothing to reduce exposure to nitrites - the curing agents that make these products pink and long-lasting but also create nitrosamines, compounds known to trigger cancer.

'Every year of delay means more preventable cancers, more families affected, and greater strain on the NHS.'

The scientists who worked on the original WHO report have now written to Health Secretary Wes Streeting urging him to ban nitrites in processed meats.

Ah, yes, the World Health Organisation, the international agency that did so well managing the Wuhan coronavirus a few years ago.  As far as "strain on the National Health Service," well, if you can't ration the medical care directly with those quality adjusted life years, you can ration it indirectly by rationing the purchase of cured meats.  How long until bangers and mash or those sausages at a Full English Breakfast come with warning labels?

CHICKIFICATION MIGHT BE TOO FRIVOLOUS A DESCRIPTION.

For years, the late Rush Limbaugh called attention to the "chickification" of American culture, not in a good way.

In a truly pathetic news story, this is deeply troubling. We have been talking recently on this program about the chickification of American culture, the feminization of American universities, the chickification of the news business. From the Associated Press, this a story by Melissa Dutton, and this is about man showers. Brian, you went to one of these just last week, a man shower.

In that excerpt, from 2008, he alluded to a more destructive phenomenon then presenting in the knowledge and information industries. The "man shower" was somebody's idea about how to make the concept of a bridal shower more inclusive.

THE BIG CITIES DEFUND THE POLICE ONLY FOR THE POORS.

Here's an observation that has Friday short take written all over it, but for us taking Hallowe'en off.  “San Francisco [is] a sort of market-segmented scheme [extracting] the basic comforts of civilization and licensing them back as upgrades.”

It wasn't always that way.  Eleven years ago, the fretting among the sort of people who fret was about how the superstar cities were inequitable, in that only high income owners could make the rents.  "I remain skeptical of cities going after Creative Class amenities as a way of attracting Creative Class employers who will hire Creative Class workers. Countervailing forces, including congestion and bid-rent curves remain at work."  That post predates the notorious poop maps, but closer to Cold Spring Shops headquarters, the ominous signs were there.  "We've seen that at work in Chicago, with the accompanying stratification into a lake-side quasi-gated community with gangland war-zones south and west."  We saw further deterioration in Chicago even before the corona tyranny.  "[A]t what point will the city no longer be able to maintain what is effectively a gated community surrounded by increasing despair and increasing frustration with Democrats?"  That frustration might be present, and yet Rahm Emanuel gave way to Lori Lightfoot gave way to Brandon Johnson.

The observation that opened this post led to the following.

I am not a filthy poor, and therefore conditions on the street level in Portland do not matter to me.

I drive my Jaguar to nice restaurants, give it to the valet to park, then go inside and order a fancy treat. So long as the valet parks my car, and the waiter brings my fancy treat for me to consoome in peace, I am utterly unaffected by conditions ten blocks away.

While I am technically forced to acknowledge that other humans exist — otherwise who would park my car or prepare my fancy treat? — I am not actually forced to consider what their lives are like.

And if you try to force me to confront this, I will simply point out that you are a filthy poor, who is unable to live a lifestyle that insulates you from this sort of unpleasantness.

At which point I don’t have to pay attention to you, loser.

That prompted the proprietor of Quotulatiousness to respond with the essence of the Tragic Vision.

It probably costs slightly less than that to have zero drugged-out and/or schizophrenic bums urinating on your porch, but again, in Tennessee, this is a free service that comes with the “Western Civilization” package.

Also, it doesn’t cost anything go to a drugstore where nothing is locked behind glass, and be told “have a nice day” by someone at the register who actually means it.

And I’m told there is some sort of mythical beast called “graffiti”, but I have to go online to find out what it looks like.

In short, the argument that “civilization is just fine because I can still buy my way out of trouble” doesn’t hold any water, because it ignores the fact that you have to buy your way out of trouble, because civilization is shrinking.

You can’t have civilization without ass-kickings.

And if you forget that, you start having to buy your way into ever more and more exclusive clubs where the uncivilized can’t afford to go.

Until they figure out that they don’t have to pay, they can just push their way past the doorman. At which point you must be prepared to kick ass again.

All civilization rests on pillars made of violence. You are in danger until the moment you understand this.

Arguably, living in suburban or rural Tennessee where the drug stores and Wal-Mart supercenters don't keep everything under lock and key is a way of buying your way out of trouble, and that might include less access to the artsy places and frou-frou food.  Certainly that exchange does nothing to disabuse me of my fear that the "pillars made of violence" include suburbs or small towns one flash mob away from going sundown.

CHARLIE BROWN'S REAL LIFE ENCOUNTER WITH THE RED BARON.

Snoopy flies a Sopwith Camel in the comic strip.  In real life, Charlie Brown, of West Virginia, piloted B-17 The Pub, and on the cover of Adam Makos's A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II, you'll see The Pub with a Messerschmitt fighter tucked in off the starboard wing.  Mr Makos acknowledges the assistance of Larry Alexander.

Book Review N^o. 8 can tell you, dear reader, that the "combat and chivalry" part of the subtitle is accurate.  Recall, for instance, that Hermann Göring surrendered to an Army Air Force unit which treated him as a distinguished guest (as Hauptmann Göring in the first war, he was a pretty good fighter pilot) until higher command authority ordered he be remanded to Allied custody.  Fighter pilots on both sides considered themselves heirs to the knightly tradition and so conducted themselves, as pilots and as captors, and much of Higher Call relates that through the eyes of Franz Stigler, the Messerschmitt pilot whose plane is on the cover.  It's fair to use the Red Baron reference given the missions he flew during the war, particularly as the correlation of forces turned against his country.

I will not reveal here either why the Messerschmitt was flying formation (confirming a shoot-down? escorting to a safe place to land?) or whether the pilots had a chance, as many veterans of the War did, to compare notes late in life.  Why spoil a good war yarn, which this book is, by telling all of it?

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE PROGRESS DELUSION.

Crooked Timber contributor Lisa Herzog asks, "Does 'forward' still make sense?"  It doesn't and regular readers of Cold Spring Shops get that.  "Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they darn well please, and when a new social order is emerging, a Vanguard to Lead the Way has the same problems as everyone else, namely, Where Are We, and What's The Most Promising Way to Go?"

CALIFORNIA HITS BOTTOM, KEEPS DIGGING.

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through California, Governor Newsom scratched internal combustion cars off future gift lists.  Yes, that link goes to a satire post that nevertheless has some grounding in reality.

Among this year's proscriptions, because what is the use of a Democrat governor who doesn't issue foolish ukases, is any resale of full sized coaching stock.  "California governor signs bill banning resale of retired diesel rail equipment."  There is retired diesel rail equipment because the only part of the slowly-taking-shape high speed rail connection between San Francisco and Los Angeles is the electrification of the Bay Area commute zone from San Francisco to San Jose.  There is a ridge of hills between San Jose and the north end of the high speed line project that has not been surveyed for construction, and I bet a crew of Chinese immigrants with pickaxes and mules could build that stretch faster than whatever environmentally friendly concatenation of machinery California approves of these days will, if they ever will.

What good, dear reader, is a self-styled progressive who doesn't signal his virtue?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed into law a bill prohibiting state agencies from reselling or otherwise transferring older diesel-powered rail equipment after it has been decommissioned by a public agency.

SB 30 was introduced last December by Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose) in response to Caltrain’s sale of retired equipment for use to start a commuter rail operation in Lima, Peru [see "“Caltrain equipment …,” Trains.com, Nov. 15, 2024].  When the bill was passed by the Senate in May, Cortese said in a press release, “I believe California should be leading the world in clean energy — not shipping our pollution problems elsewhere.” But at the time the bill was introduced, a Caltrain representative pointed out a U.S. State Department study had determined the transfer of the equipment to Lima would take 4,000 cars off the road and remove 20,000 metric tons of pollution from the air [see “Caltrain equipment sale to Peru sparks legislation …,” Trains.com, Dec. 8, 2024].

The bill bans such sales unless the diesels involved meet EPA Tier 2, 3, or 4 standards; the diesel engines are removed; or the sale is approved in a public hearing. It was one of dozens that Newsom announced he had signed or vetoed earlier this week.

I am at a loss for how best to mock a policy that, as a commenter at Trains notes, leaves residents of poorer countries in their cars.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE.

The country's Newspaper of Record has fun with a recent sports-betting scandal.  "WNBA Players Assure FBI They Weren't Missing Layups To Throw Games, They Just Suck At Basketball."  It takes skill to make a deliberate miss look like an accident, which is one way point-shaving might manifest itself.

A group of players met with FBI agents Thursday afternoon to vehemently deny such rumors, clarifying that they were just all really awful basketball players.

"I know it seems like a scam, but we're all just really, really bad at this game," said Chicago Sky star Angel Reese. "The truth is, we're just not that good at making the ball go into the little circle. We really are trying. It's just a lot harder than it looks."

According to insiders with knowledge of the federal investigation, the FBI was grateful for the WNBA's cooperation even though the organization was not on their radar. "I've never even heard of women's basketball," FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said. "In fact, the whole league sounds like some sort of scam."

Although the sports-betting investigation continues, it might be that the large winnings Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker reported are on the up and up.  ‘He’s a whale in Vegas.’  That might not be the best choice of words.

In Chicago’s business community, Pritzker has long been known for his affinity for cards. A poker book has been seen on the shelf of his Chicago office, and he’s been spotted sidling up to a table while traveling.

That interest in poker goes beyond the personal. Pritzker teamed up with Jim Gray, who founded OptionsXpress, to start the Chicago Poker Challenge, a high-profile charity tournament that raised millions for the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, which Pritzker also helped establish.

Though Pritzker no longer plays in the event, its reputation is legendary. It was once held at the exclusive Casino Club that sits in the shadow of the John Hancock Building, not far from Pritzker’s residence.

The guest list has included an impressive roster of Chicago’s elite, including Citadel’s Ken Griffin, billionaire entrepreneur and ComPsych founder Rich Chaifetz, and OptionsXpress Holdings founder Gray. Even poker pro Phil Hellmuth Jr. has been a regular attendee.

“He is a very thoughtful player,” Ariel Capital Management founder and Democratic donor John Rogers Jr. said of Pritzker. “He has a very good understanding of the game’s nuances. He is really comfortable around a poker table. He’s always one of the better players at these tournaments.”

All the same, if evidence surfaces of Democrat donors laundering campaign contributions at the poker table, there isn't enough popcorn in the house!

PIE SLICING IS A POOR METAPHOR FOR ECONOMIC ACTIVITY.

Years ago, before the staff went crazy, Charles Peters's Washington Monthly ran an article comparing the relative merits of pie-slicers, meaning people who worried how much a pie of a given radius each eater got, as opposed to pie-arrangers, who worried about how to produce larger pies.  I liked the metaphor so much I used it to mock a silly classroom plan long ago.

Pie-slicing, though, continues to be an obsession of the socialists.  Here's Robert Reich from 2004.  "If I’m right, and the current lopsided apportioning of the American economic pie between wages and profits is permanent, mark my words: It’s only a matter of time before the vast American middle class demands a fair portion of the pie. That may mean, at the least, higher taxes on profits and lower taxes on wages."

Twenty years later, two Common Dreams contributors sound the same theme.  "The share of the U.S. wealth pie owned by the top 0.1 percent grew 59.6 percent from 1989 to 2024, according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Federal Reserve data, while the share of the U.S. wealth pie owned by the bottom 50 percent of households has declined 26.1 percent, adjusted for inflation."

I DON'T GIVE A DARN.

"The Los Angeles Dodgers Are America’s Team," according to Peter Savodnik in The [Not Detroit] Free Press.  He continues, "You might find the Dodgers hard to root for in the World Series. Here’s why you should do it anyway."

Why?  Because.

It’s been a doozy of a year for La La Land. The fires, the ongoing Hollywood contraction, our hapless, hopeless mayor (and the dearth of any serious challengers in 2026).

That’s to say nothing of the graffiti and the housing market and the homeless. We’re told by the powers that be that things are getting better, but literally no one here thinks things are getting better.

Who's on first? "There was probably no better seat to observe industrial decline than that of a tenure-tracker at Wayne State."  But during that hitch, the Detroit Tigers caught fire in 1984, winning 104 games in the regular season, ultimately winning the World Series, after which the fans set the neighborhood on fire.

Make of it what you will that Kirk Gibson, Michigan State athlete, who hit a home run to seal the deal at Tiger Stadium a few years later hit a home run to seal another World Series deal with ... the Brooklyn Trolley Los Angeles Dodgers.

WAIT FOR THE DEBT CEILING TO CRASH IN.

Don Wolfensberger, a contributor to The Hill with lots of experience in Congress, including as chief of staff for the Rules Committee (those are the Members of Congress who decide what gets marked up for debate and vote) some thirty years ago, takes stock of the current horsetrading over what additional pet projects ought be stuffed into the latest evasion of regular order.

Theoretically, the support of House and Senate Republican majorities for the president’s unilateral funding cutbacks may qualify as small “d” democracy in practice. Two things that may (or may not) validate that assumption are public opinion and Congress’s ability to finesses constituent needs and national priorities.

Public opinion and politics go hand-in-glove though there is often a lot of finger-pointing and wrist twisting hidden in the mittens. The president’s powers of persuasion and direct pressures on members will wax and wane as members’ own political fortunes teeter on the brink of next year’s midterm elections.

President Trump has already responded to some of his party’s expressed concerns by transferring research and development funds in the Pentagon to pay the salaries of uniformed military personnel, and by temporarily restoring some of the funding for the Center for Disease Control’s missions that were being zeroed-out.

The American people seem to be inured by all this, having seen government shutdowns come and go like the seasons. The standard public response seems to be, it’s just politics as usual, compromises will be struck, and life will go on. However, any drying-up of resources affecting the broader public will eventually bear down on the constituents of individual members.

It is politics as usual.  I have not seen any argument from pundits who pay attention to such things or from political scientists who analyze, well, politicking, to disabuse me of my view that Members of Congress would rather not report out regular order appropriations, particularly when the majority party at least pays lip service to appropriating and spending less money and terminating some projects with extreme prejudice.

I think Mr Wolfensberger fears that, at least in part.

In previous government shutdowns, the assumption was always that once a shutdown showdown is resolved, the status quo ante would be restored and life would resume as before. Those assumptions may be dated given today’s shutdown in which government will not likely emerge and function as it once did. Those consequences will truly represent a turn of the screw on how our system of government will function and persevere in the future.

Buckle in, that "turn of the screw" might be reinforced by the bond market further discounting Treasuries.

IT'S CALLED RENT SEEKING.

Is anybody surprised that Our President, who was not above using eminent domain to clear space in Atlantic City for a failed casino venture, is not above putting the touch on a few fellow rent-seekers to reconstruct the Savarin Room on the White House grounds.  Red State's Brandon Morse notes, "The People Helping Fund the New White House Ballroom Are a Who's Who List of Big Names."  At The Hill, Brett Samuels adds editorial comment.  "Amazon, Apple, Google and other major companies are among those donating to help cover the cost of President Trump’s massive new ballroom at the White House."  He hints that there might be rent seeking at work.  "Many of the companies, such as Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google, have sought to strengthen ties with the Trump administration."

Jake Johnson at Common Dreams finds a commentator willing to expand on "strengthen ties."

“Demolishing the East Wing is bad enough, but carving the names of corporations and billionaires into the White House walls would mark a permanent scar on the People’s House,” said Jon Golinger, a democracy advocate with Public Citizen, said in a statement Thursday.

“Money buys access and influence and, in this case, a long-term presence on the White House wall,” Golinger added. “This is easily understood and blatantly disgusting.”

Ah, yes, Public Citizen, when they're not grousing about people buying access and influence in the federal government, they're looking for ways to expand the scope and influence of the federal government, which is harder for people to understand whilst more blatantly disgusting.

WE'VE ALWAYS BEEN UNGOVERNABLE.

Emory's Mark Bauerlein, who knows a thing or two about teaching English, looks at historic and fictional famous figures and concludes, "One begins to suspect that the true American tradition is less that of our Fourth of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks . . . than, quite simply, that of riding somebody out of town on a rail."

Well, yes, as we noted in response to another of his essays,

Reality, which is emergent, tends to be socially conservative,  And the snooty-ass gentry have, inter alia, erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance; declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatever; and excited domestic Insurrections among us.  And they fret about the Incomprehensible Others thinking of torches and pitchforks.  It is the Right of the People to Alter or Abolish.

Which means, as the professor notes, sometimes you bet on emergence and light out for the territories.

Anyone who took up arms against the Crown had to have a streak of defiance somewhere in his character.  We should appreciate it as an essential part of the American personality.  In the panorama of our history, we see this brash “Damn the torpedoes!” attitude surface again and again, sometimes in our most hallowed figures, and not as an accidental feature.  Ben Franklin begins his adult career as an outlaw, fleeing Boston and legal servitude to his brother, sneaking into Philadelphia with little money and no prospects.  John Adams is a great statesman, Sam Adams is not, nor are the vandals of the Boston Tea Party.  “Give me liberty or give me death!” is a tempestuous outcry.  The first pioneers on the frontier bet their lives on an uncertain future.

Other times, you protect your vision of the future by breaking out the tar and feathers.

FUN TRIGGERS THESE LOONS.

Thus did Pajamas Media's Stephen Kruiser expand on yesterday's observation about joyless footie fans.

Dems have been heavily invested in misery since long before Trump came on the political scene, though. Their core political beliefs can only be sold to people who are deeply unhappy and wallowing in despair to the point that they believe only the seemingly benevolent hand of a politician can save them.

Even the ones who are making millions off the grift are cheerless; you can see it in their faces. When your sole function is to try and make people feel awful, it rubs off on you. Look at Bernie Sanders's face. Elizabeth Warren is always yelling. Squeaky is the most constipated-looking young woman I've ever seen in politics.

Had George W. Bush been the Republican president who wanted to build a White House ballroom, the reaction would have been almost as laden with hysteria.

With Hallowe'en coming at the end of next week, no doubt the guilt-tripping both political and cultural will proliferate along with the house decorations and the defrosting of Mariah Carey.  This Badger Herald alum from the days when that paper epitomized campus dissent endorses succeeding generations of Normals in their "laughing the rabid Left into impotence."

THERE IS NO END TO THE ENVIRONMENTALIST WACKO LUNACY.

Now footie's World Cup has to go.  For the polar bears.  "We’re football fans who see no alternative: The CO2 party must end."

Never mind that footie has been enough of a leftist virtue signal that "soccer mom" became a political category.  Never mind that Rush Limbaugh called attention to the adverse health effects of heading the ball with his "Keep Our Own Kids Safe" campaign.  The latest compression of the intersectional singularity is Urgently Necessary.

Football is more popular than Jesus of Nazareth and John Lennon combined. And at first glance, it seems like a pastime that doesn’t harm the environment: Players just need a ball, some space, and the desire to run. But the data are shocking: Football is directly responsible for 0.3-0.4% of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to Denmark’s emissions. The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2024 the sport generated more than 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels as a source of energy, equivalent to 150 million barrels of oil. Every match at the men’s World Cup finals emits between 44,000 and 72,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases, the same as 30,000 to 50,000 cars on British roads each year. Recent studies estimate that emissions from the cup will range between 1.65 and 3.63 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent between 2000 and 2026.

Let’s also consider football’s basic equipment: boots and balls. Generations of kangaroos have been slaughtered, with the blessing of the Australian government, as raw material for “k-leather” boots, while balls from Pakistan are made from petroleum-derived synthetic leather, rubber, and cotton extracted from plant species, and leather and glue obtained from animals slaughtered before their natural lifespan. The 60 million balls sold in 2010 travelled from the sewing workshops in Sialkot to the professional football pitches of Europe and the Americas. The balls emerge from these frequently clandestine sewing workshops to a carbon cycle of transport companies, customs administrations, equipment, the advertising industry, sporting goods retailers, and department stores. The chain turns a ball costing 63 rupees (€0.62) into a product retailing for over €100.

No, that is not parody, it's offered In All Earnestness.

Sponsorship by companies with high CO2 emissions alone is responsible for 75% of sports emissions, as it stimulates demand for highly polluting products and lifestyles. The large eco-laundering multinationals use football to cover up their environmental shame. For example, shortly after Repsol spilled thousands of barrels of oil on 1,400 hectares of Peru’s Pacific coast in 2022, killing native life and destroying the livelihoods of thousands of people, the company signed a sponsorship with the national team. The motto of the project, also associated with supporting youth and women’s representatives, was “Let’s look to the future.” In Spain, Repsol and Petronor have signed an agreement to supply renewable energy to Athletic Club de Bilbao that supposedly demonstrates the multinational’s commitment to decarbonization. But the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority found Repsol distorted its environmental commitment by highlighting production of synthetic fuels and biofuels, which only account for a small fraction of its core business—fossil fuels.

The accounting doesn't bother to fret over that larger fraction of the fossil fuel use accounted for by all those minivans schlepping all those aspiring Carli Lloyds and Leonel Messis to practice and camp and the games.  That's because they have much bigger things to fret about.

The 2026 men’s World Cup is expanding to include 48 national teams. For the first time, matches will be held in three huge countries: Canada, Mexico, and the United States, across four time zones, in 16 venues separated by several thousand kilometers, each with derisory public transport. Five and a half million spectators are expected, who will need to use the map to locate the venues: Mexico City will mark the southernmost point, Vancouver the north, Boston the east, and San Francisco the west. In terms of logistics, practically all travel will be by air due to a primitive railway infrastructure. Radio France refers to this as a “very carbonated cocktail.” The New Weather Institute with Scientists for Global Responsibility estimates that aviation emissions “will increase by 160% to 325% in each of the three tournaments in 2026, 2030, and 2034” compared to recent World Cups.

The horror!  But environmentalist wackos, like any other puritanical sect, are people perpetually fretful that somebody is having fun.  Have no fun, they urge.  "We’re football fans who see no alternative: The CO2 party must end. Abolish the World Cup!"

I have no plans to attend or to watch any World Cup games.  Where can I sell carbon offsets?

IS GRADUAL BECOMING "ALL AT ONCE?"

The real debt ceiling is not a number on an engrossed bill.  It is an event, specifically, when bond buyers buy Treasuries only at deep discounts.

Are we there yet?

Sustaining order requires securing investors for the tens of billions of dollars in debt which are sold every week.

This effort has gotten more challenging over the past two years, as the Federal Reserve has reduced its holdings of government bonds.  Finding replacement buyers hasn’t been too problematic, but there are increasing signs of strain.  The implied “term premium” that the Treasury pays to borrow has been increasing, contributing to higher yields.

Recent auctions of debt have occasionally disappointed. The appetite of investors for newly-issued government securities is gauged by several measures. The “bid-to-cover” ratio compares offers to buy with the amount on offer; a lower number indicates weaker demand. This metric has slipped in several recent cases.

In order to ensure that debt auctions are fully subscribed, the U.S. Treasury works with a series of primary dealers. These banks step in to purchase bonds when bids from private investors aren’t sufficient; that support has been drawn on more heavily in recent months.

Given the poor state of the American fiscal situation, auctions will likely remain large for the foreseeable future. The risk that markets will push back is rising. No amount of fast talk from politicians will hide the fact that we may be selling a lot of bull.

Are we there yet?

Several factors have contributed to the shifting landscape of Treasury buyers. The Federal Reserve, for example, is no longer a consistent buyer of bonds; instead, it is actively shrinking its balance sheet. To date, the Fed has sold off $2.3 trillion worth of assets, primarily Treasury securities. Meanwhile, foreign central banks have begun to back away from purchasing US Treasuries. Recent sanctions and the confiscation of foreign assets have heightened concerns about the safety of parking reserves in US dollars.

Moreover, what did I tell you, dear reader, about the laws of conservation in economics?  "Moreover, to the extent that tariffs reduce current account deficits, they reduce capital account surpluses pari passu."

It's unseemly to say "See, I told you so," and yet:

In addition, the ongoing tariff disputes have created chaos that has, in turn, reduced international capital flows. With diminished global trade, there are fewer trade surpluses, which means fewer dollars are available to be invested in US Treasuries. Compounding the issue, the recent struggle with extremely high inflation has caused investors to worry about the value of the dollar, which underpins the attractiveness of US Treasuries.

Solvency concerns are also mounting as the US continues to run persistent and protracted deficits of $2 trillion annually. This staggering amount of red ink is occurring during times of relative peace and economic prosperity, raising important questions about what might happen during a recession or war.

Indeed, and where is the traditional Keynesian conventional wisdom about balancing the budget over the business cycle?

FROM RAINING MEN TO HEMORRHAGING MEN.

No, that's not a Hallowe'en makeover of a Weather Girls hit from 1982.  Rather, it's Hill contributor John Mac Ghlionn having none of the Donks' latest effort to secure enough votes from guys to win a presidential election (perhaps that will spill over to the local elections that matter as well) without antagonizing the fractious Weimar coalition that comprises their base voters.

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging men. Across the U.S., they are leaving in waves — from the unions that once powered the party’s muscle, from classrooms that once echoed with idealism, and from a movement that now talks at them rather than to them. Polls show young men flocking to the right in numbers not seen for generations.

The trend isn’t a blip but a brutal reckoning. And no amount of branding or beer ads will stop it.

The party’s latest efforts to woo men are almost painful to watch. The Democratic National Committee has poured money into influencer partnerships, podcast cameos and clumsy “masculinity” campaigns filmed in gyms. Spokespersons drone on about “kitchen-table issues,” as if men are sitting there waiting to be emotionally validated between spoonfuls of reheated stew.

Party elders have recognized that they were pushing men away for some time, although turning Olivia Julianna into their "male outreach coordinator" gave Townhall and Pajamas Media types lots of ways to mock her, but ultimately it was that fractious Weimar coalition that got her to call it a day.

“It is one of the most heartbreaking and difficult lessons you have to learn when you’re working in this space, especially as a young person, is that people are inherently imperfect,” Julianna said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “Sometimes that imperfection means doing selfish or mean-spirited things with the intention of making positive change.”

She says problems included nepotism, a push for rigid agreement on a set of standard policies, and internal Democratic Party squabbles over strategy. Julianna also says she recognized that she needed to move beyond her political bubble.

Now, Julianna says she is stepping back from campaign work in hopes that speaking out in her newsletter and social media posts can help fix the problems and enable Democrats to eventually flip Texas blue.

Not much chance of that as long as the Donks have their intersectional purity tests that pretend to be inclusive and yet exclude anybody normal.

Partisan critics come with the political spotlight, but Julianna also gets attention from Democrats saying she was too supportive of Biden and that she has sacrificed some of her original progressive positions in order to fit in with the mainstream party.

While Julianna still describes herself as having progressive views, her positions are nuanced. She thinks that there should be a secure border but also that the government should expand pathways to citizenship, add more immigration judges and protect DACA recipients. Some people have criticized her for that stance, arguing that it is more aligned with Republican positions.

There's a lot more in the article, which runs in the Donk-friendly Texas Tribune.

HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY.

Oklahoma girls’ basketball team returns championship after realizing they lost.  Like so many sports stories, it begins with "after review."

The story stems from the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association, where a crucial scoreboard error early in the game gave the girls basketball team at Academy of Classical Christian Studies the edge over its Apache high school counterpart, as CBS News recently reported.

Academy coach Brendan King told the network: “As soon as I walked out of the locker room, my stomach kind of turned into knots. And I said: ‘I’m going to need to know if we really won this game or not.’”

King went home that night and watched a recording of the game. He meticulously watched each play and recounted every basket – eventually discovering his team had actually lost.

The game ended with Academy, of Oklahoma City, winning 44-43 on a last-second shot. But King discovered the score was actually 43-42, with the opposing team from Apache High having actually outscored his team – and Academy being erroneously given more points than they had actually earned amid confusion about the scoreboard at one juncture of the game.

Strictly speaking, once the final horn sounds, the result is official.  Sometimes, though, how you play the game does matter more than the result.

King’s team would have legally retained its championship had it stood pat on the result. The Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association rules say that once a game is finished, the score becomes permanent, and there is no way to change the outcome of a completed game.

But King approached his team to tell the players of his video review’s findings. And the players all unanimously decided to appeal their own victory with the association, asking for the other team to be recognized for their rightful win – and for them to be assigned a defeat in the game.

The appeal – described by CBS as having no precedent – succeeded. And King hand-delivered the championship plaque to Apache.

Apache’s head coach said she was glad to have won the title. But the coach, Amy Merriweather, also said Academy’s act of honesty and integrity meant more than the actual victory.

“It showed us, you know, there are still good people in this world,” Merriweather said. “It’s something we’ll always remember.”

Students from Academy also spoke with CBS. One student told the outlet that “it would have felt wrong, I think, to have taken the trophy, regardless”.

Another student from Academy said it was a “really good teaching moment” to establish that winning “is not the whole point”.

That was the Academy of Classical Christian Studies, and, truly, truly I say unto you, those players will have parables of their own to refer to as they mature and age.