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.

THEORRHEA WORKS AGAINST SOCIAL SCIENCE.

Reason's "Tom Lehrer Satirized the National Security State From the Inside" connects the dots between Mr Lehrer's work with the National Security Agency and a number of his songs, including Poisoning the Pigeons in the Park.  (And maybe we'll throw in a squirrel or two ...)

The article also includes Mr Lehrer performing a number of songs making fun of mathematics, and social scientists "in an ivory steeple ... away from people ... and do really great tricks ... in the name of sociology."

That performance took place sometime in 1997, as the references to Ted Kaczynski and Andrew Wiles confirm, in a mathematics classroom probably somewhere on the west coast: alas, the resolution isn't quite good enough to illustrate his scribbling of the word "minimum" in the style of a Fourier transformation!  Although Mr Lehrer might have cracked wise about "sliding down the razor blade of life," he stayed in good humor well after he stopped performing.

THE FOLLY OF MANAGING EMERGENCE.

Wes Marshall suggests that "88 chapters about road safety does seem like a lot."  Think of those chapters of Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System as analogous to the 150 Psalms.  A good clergyman can produce several year's worth of messages off of each of those Psalms; and a good professor of any of the disciplines dealing with land use and urban form, including but not limited to civil engineering, might be able to structure a class meeting around one or a selected small set of those chapters, each of which is short.

In Book Review N^o. 3 I argue that Professor Marshall is offering a more general indictment of the Technocratic Vision; the traffic engineers have run afoul of the same problem that trips up any gathering of Wise Experts, to wit: Complex Adaptive Systems Do Whatever They D**n Well Please.  His chapters focus on traffic engineering, and yet, traffic engineering involves at least five levels of analysis, working from the foundational to the systemic.

ENSURING THAT THE U.S. NEWS PROBLEM WILL PERSIST.

I've long been on the case.  "Cold Spring Shops has called attention to the folly of admitting unprepared students and calling it access."  For all the good it has done.

According to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, roughly 70 percent of all U.S. undergraduates enrolled at public four-year institutions attend RPUs. Yet declining enrollments and years of austerity measures have left these workhorse universities particularly vulnerable. Writing about the difficult financial decisions many of these campuses have already made, Lee Gardner warns that “if many regional colleges cut at this point, they risk becoming very different institutions.”

But those who work at regional public universities will tell you that they are already very different institutions. Rarely, however, have these transformations been the subject or result of open campus discussion and debate. Often, they are not even publicly declared by the administrations spearheading these shifts, though it’s not always clear if that is by design or because administrators are unclear about their own priorities. An unsettling likelihood is that we no longer know what these workhorse universities should be working toward.

My position has consistently been that the regional comprehensives and the mid-majors and the like think of themselves as being in the same business as the Ivies, which these days might mean offering a better value proposition than the Ivies can.  "[T]he U.S. News problem exists in part because some potential students, and more than a few of their status-seeking parents, would prefer their spawn not be trapped in academic gulags or subprime party schools."  When Harvard introduces remedial math, perhaps there's an opportunity to brag on having something resembling standards.

What might have happened, instead, is the revelation of the regional comprehensive universities as the stroads of higher education.  "The challenge for the state institutions in keeping up their perceived quality is two-fold. Administrators would like to put the failures to keep up on stingy legislatures, ignoring their own complicity whenever beer-'n-circus or access-assessment-remediation-retention crowds out calculus and statistics and economics and chemistry."

But perhaps, to continue the stroad comparison, the strip malls aren't what they used to be.

Higher education is navigating a significant demographic evolution. The once predominant “traditional” student is now part of a broader, more complex picture known as the “New Majority learner.” This diverse cohort is not an outlier but rather a core component of our academic communities. For institutions committed to meaningful reform and fostering student success, understanding and proactively supporting this group is a fundamental imperative. We are being called to truly equip, empower, and encourage all who are a part of it.

Put another way, what I refer to as the Wayne State model, with all its shortcomings, might be the future.

A third of a century after I left, and they're still pushing their urban mission and first-generation, non-traditional, all the rest, with the same dismal results.  And a new slate of deanlets and deanlings.  I mean, what is a Senior Assistant Provost of Student Success without a Junior Assistant Provost and a Division of Student Success without assorted Special Assistants and Assistants To?

We used to do better.  Once upon a time, Wayne State, and its counterparts, e.g. the City Colleges of New York in New York, and Temple in Philadelphia were unapologetically all about providing strivers with the same sort of intellectual challenges their more privileged counterparts were getting at the more famous destinations, whether in Ann Arbor or Ithaca or on the other side of the tracks in Philadelphia.  These days, at Temple maybe the athletes get that kind of nudging.  Everybody else?  Not so much.

Perhaps, Wayne State and its urban counterparts elsewhere had little choice.  During my seven years there, I heard from some of the old heads how the Ivies were able to diversify their faculty by hiring the right sort of faculty away from Wayne.  That might have happened at Temple and the City Colleges.  Meanwhile, they could diversify their student bodies (a little bit) by waving scholarships at selected graduates of Cass Tech or Bronx Science.

In that Minding the Campus essay, author Dave Tucker, who appears to be in the educational consulting business, the tables and charts that follow his calls to "equip, empower, and encourage" look a lot like the enrollment breakdowns Wayne State's administrators called attention to in their state of the university messages to faculty and their budget requests to Lansing.

THE CONTRADICTIONS PERSIST.

In The [Not the Detroit] Free Press, contributor G. S. Morson offers an explanation of "Why the Revolution Never Ends."  The "revolution" he refers to is the one the Marxian types keep hoping for.

Marxism, which we had all thought over and done with, has returned in new forms among the woke intelligentsia. Antifa, “occupiers” of this and that, antisemitic college mobs, and other American versions of Red Guards keep emerging, each outdoing the last. The slogan “Death to America!” is now heard not only in Tehran, Iran, and Pyongyang, North Korea, but also on campuses across the West.

To motivate his argument, he offers the repackaging of what he calls Marxism, but what might be a different focus on the dialectic, with different antitheses confronting different facets of the existing organization of human actions.  That's something we called attention to long ago.  "There is, however, a dialectic present in the cyclical view of history: the thesis, antithesis, contradiction, and synthesis appear in recursive, rather than convergent, ways."  Here's how Mr Morson expands on that theme.

It was only necessary to substitute other, more up-to-date oppositions for “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” so the world could still be divided into virtuous oppressed and evil oppressors. Far from betraying Marxism, this flexibility was just what Marx and Vladimir Lenin had recommended. Lenin, who adapted an ideology focused on workers to a country still composed largely of peasants, deemed the rigid refusal to grasp present opportunities an “infantile disorder.” Marx himself had described a constant change of hostile classes: “freedman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”

And why limit oneself to one opposition at a time? White and black, cis and trans, colonizer and colonized, and many more potentially unlimited contrasts now “intersect.” Just as endless purges shaped Joseph Stalin’s Russia and Mao Zedong’s China, ever new forms of oppression, macro and micro, are discovered, each flaunting its own difficult discourse and forbidden words, so that no one who fails to pay constant attention can speak safely. Despite occasional references to “class,” Marxism endures not primarily as a critique of capitalism but as a template for Manichaean struggle.

I've objected, previously, to facile characterizations of the construction or deconstruction or sometimes both at the same time of binaries in opposition as somehow Marxian.  A Reason article I referred to in that post got closer to what Mr Morson was getting at, noting, "The commitment on the part of today's progressive undergrads to suppressing distasteful speech comes not from a deep understanding of some larger intellectual tradition with a goal of world domination but from a simple (if mistaken) calculus about the morality of hurting people. As frustrating as this attitude can be to civil libertarians, many students genuinely believe that certain expressions seen as hostile to oppressed minorities either directly cause actionable harm to those people or unjustly contribute to an overall atmosphere of danger for them."  Dress it up with Erudite-Speak and rationalize it as the Postmodern Will to Power, and off you go!  "Of course, today’s 'critical theorists' often sound just as unnatural to ordinary people, perhaps because the ability to write in such an obscure way, comprehensible only to initiates, demonstrates membership in a perspicacious elite."

WE CALLED ATTENTION TWENTY YEARS AGO.

Minding the Campus contributor Jared Gould goes looking for fudge and finds something to fret about.  "Mackinac Island’s Workforce Offers a Preview of the Grim Job Market Facing American College Grads."

At first reading, it sounds like an update on "Working their way through college – in Bulgaria."

I left frustrated by what my trip revealed about the state of the American labor market.

Nearly every worker I encountered on the island—waitstaff, hotel clerks, bike rental attendants, even the carriage tour guides—was a foreigner. Some were seasonal guest workers. Others were international students, ostensibly in the U.S. for a “cultural exchange.”

After leaving the island, I looked deeper into this. What I discovered is that Mackinac Island is a case study in how the U.S. outsources jobs to a rotating cast of temporary foreign hires. Employers rely on both H-2B visa holders—seasonal workers brought in for jobs supposedly “Americans won’t do”—and J-1 visa students, who are nominally here to learn but mostly come to work.

Something similar might have been going on at Wisconsin Dells long ago, and that despite Wisconsin law mandating that public instruction, including at the universities, cannot start before Labor Day (unlike Northern Illinois University, where the fourth Monday in August, which can come as early as the 22^nd, is the first day of classes.)

WE ARE ALL OF US UNDEREMPLOYED COMPARED WITH OUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS.

I've used that formulation a lot over the years, and whenever I see nostalgia for the era of horsepower and wood that warms you up at least three times: when you cut it, when you burn it, and when you carry out the ashes, I cringe.

The Ward O'Hara museum near Auburn, New York, has a collection of circus models and it was where the Circus Model Builders held their annual convention toward the end of June.  There might be some pictures from that exhibition coming.

The photo, though, serves to introduce an essay, "Have You Heard the Good News?" by Cliff Asness and Michael Strain.  They're offering a corrective to the apocalyptic national politics of the hour.

We are living in the best world ever for the most people ever. Lots of things are bad; lots of things can be made better. “Best world ever” does not mean “perfect world.” But if the progressive left tells you the 1950s were better, as labor unions were stronger and tax rates were over 90 percent, and the MAGA right tells you the 1950s were better, as labor unions were stronger and Harriet was still a tradwife to Ozzie, both are just wrong.

Our politics today would look a lot different and a lot better if we started from the undeniable reality of today’s extreme broad-based prosperity and human flourishing—and then tried to make it even broader and even better.

The essay does not contemplate the possibility that it's people putting too much hope on politics that is the drag on civilization, although in pointing out one way in which we are underemployed, it suggests as much.

[T]he rose-colored remembrance of the joy and fulfillment from doing the equivalent of assembling 1950s automobiles all day is mostly a collective delusion.

Material prosperity is good. In fact, it’s first order—not something to be dismissed by zealots drunk on the moral purity of deprivation and physical labor. It’s interesting that populist politicians and opinion leaders are so excited for others—not for themselves—to leave service-sector jobs in order to stand in front of 4,000-degree blast furnaces.

In reality, two dolls are actually way better than zero, and 30 are still better than two if that is your joy (why that’s your joy is your issue). And, non-rote, non–physically draining, non–body aging labor is still better for most of us. Populists claim it is the so-called globalist elites who condescend to ordinary people. But in fact, it is populist leaders who look down on American workers and households by behaving as if everyday people don’t benefit from material prosperity, low prices, or relatively safe and comfortable jobs.

Compare and contrast: in those "good old days" the driving of a horse-drawn sledge through the snow was the quintessence of rote, physically draining, and body-aging labor; and once that sledge was unloaded, the horses still had to be put up, fed and watered, and the stalls mucked out.

THE LIMITS OF RILING UP THE AUDIENCE.

New York's Times reports the passing of mathematician and parody song singer Tom Lehrer.  Among his reasons for leaving the show circuit was this reflection.

When “Tomfoolery” played at the Village Gate in New York in 1981, Mr. Lehrer explained to The Times why he had stopped writing. “The Vietnam War is what changed it,” he said. “Everybody got earnest. My purpose was to make people laugh and not applaud. If the audience applauds, they’re just showing they agree with me.” On another occasion he famously offered another explanation: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Riling the audience up for applause might have been how Stephen Colbert ultimately went wrong.  But them, Mr Lehrer faced the same quandary.  "'I used to laugh more. Now I get angry,' he told NPR in 1997. 'And it's very hard to be satiric and — or to be funny, let's say — and angry at the same time.'"

Well, yes.  I credit Mr Lehrer with the ability to mock the sort of Excessively Earnest People who never learned how not to be stupid about being smart.  And yet he also had the ability to make such people comfortable with their prejudices.  "Once upon a time, the likes of Tom Lehrer and the coastal cosmopolitans could get away with that sort of mockery, as their advocacy of the end of Jim Crow was a cause almost everyone accepted, although whether its end justified the massive expansion of federal powers or the extension of notions of social justice to abortion or the sexual underground remains subject to debate."

Mr Lehrer understood at some level the limits to mocking Normals.  "It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on. The nicest thing about a protest song is that it makes you feel so good."  Public life is the worse for those who have followed him losing sight of that wisdom.  R.I.P.

CHRISTMAS IN JULY.

Sometimes Cold Spring Shops headquarters puts a few of the Festive Season lights out.

The immoderate weather, with high humidity and occasional thunderstorms, has kept the decorative stuff packed away this July.

That noted, Christmas itself arrives in another five months, with sunsets coming some four hours earlier, and there might be snow on the ground.

We'll work with whatever comes as it comes.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

I think this is a low key secret thing that hurts Democrats in politics. We're always calling to take away people's straws, light bulbs, e-cigarettes, shower heads, etc. We're the party of You Can't Have What You Want, and voters remember that and choose the other guys. https://t.co/sz0nUbXGxK

— Dilan Esper (@dilanesper) July 7, 2025

It is soft tyranny, and we see it. "One side believes in pushing us towards what the state decided is morally right. In contrast, the other side treats us like adults and lets us make our own decisions."  We can mock them.  "Democrats are constantly warning that people will die if Republicans win elections. But they rarely act as if they really believe that nonsense. It's just a bunch of bullshit they say because they can't exactly run on being the party of obnoxious scolds who want to make your daily life more annoying."

We have the pictures.  "I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump were involved in documents related to Epstein, given that he had known the man for years; the rich often frequent similar circles. It’s knowing what belongs in the creep city pile and what doesn’t that liberal media and Democrats don’t seem to get."  That creep city pile is large.  "Epstein was a fixture of elite East Coast social circles in the 1990s. It would be strange if Trump didn’t know him."

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

THE SHAPE OF THE CIVIL WAR TO COME.

A Common Dreams essay offered by two officials of something calling itself the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism suggest that a little Hate and Extremism might be in order.  "The combination of Director Gabbard and President Trump’s conspiracy-laden and racist posts not only inflamed extremists, but further normalized language, racism, and other ideas that are completely unacceptable in a thriving democracy. We, as a nation, cannot contribute to this normalization by staying silent."  We have much to look forward to.

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE.

As baseball season began, the women of the fevered brow had basketball seasons to fret about.  "College basketball season is winding down, with Buffalo of the Mid-American winning the ladies' version of the NIT, in their own gym.  In a few months the griping season of the WNBA will be upon us."  A Buffalo assistant coach will now be coaching at Northern Illinois, which drew more fans to a regular season game in 1990 than Buffalo did winning that tournament in their own building.

Since then, that team has trashed its value proposition, which might be what the ladies professional basketball leagues continually do, and for the same toxic incantations of identity politics and social protest.  Which continued, predictably, at the recent all-star game (and why in the name of all that is holy is there a basketball all-star game in July) with the players calling attention to ongoing salary negotiations.

The culture war stuff predictably followed.

The WNBA loses $50 million every year and has NEVER generated a profit. You deserve $0.00. pic.twitter.com/fWWxU0pSt1

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 20, 2025

Twitchy's Warren Squire continued the pile-on.  "Yep, the WNBA is pretty much a charity case kept afloat by the NBA. Posters couldn’t help but notice the correlation between the WNBA players and the recently canceled ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.’"  With all the troubles Amtrak have been having even running trains over the past few weeks, we never lack for money-suck material, do we?

HEIMATSRECHT.

Today's Palestinians might be the noisiest of World War II's displaced persons, but they are neither the only such cohort, nor were they always the noisiest.  That honor once belonged to West Germany's expellees, described by Anatole Shub in An Empire Loses Hope, at page 228 as "restless scions of once-great Prussian military and landowning families, former Volksdeutsche who had been expelled from Bohemia and the Baltic coast, Silesia, and the Danube plain."

Their demonstrations provided West Germany's sophisticates with opportunities to deplorable-shame.  Here's Mr Shub at page 229.  "Expellee demonstrations resembled faded replays of the old Nazi newsreels of the 1930s. ... [In a May 1966 demonstration] most of the participants were men and women in their fifties and sixties.  They seemed to have been frozen in prewar unstylishness. ... Placards and banners were lettered in the old Gothic script."  The sophisticates anticipated this era's Daily Show, page 230.  "[D]istinguished West Germans ... pleaded tirelessly for German acceptance of Eastern realities.  They included Klaus von Bismarck, ...Countess Marion Doenhoff, ... Günter Grass ... and numerous leaders of the Evangelical Church."

But again, Empire Loses Hope is a useful source for anticipating future developments.  An un-named Bonn official is quoted at page 229, "German relations with the Slavs go back a thousand years.  Twenty years is nothing in the long view.  Who really knows what Eastern Europe will be like in 1980 or 1990.  If the Soviet Union goes up in smoke, there could be a general move eastward.  Why preclude it now?"

On the other hand, Der Spiegel publisher Rudolf Augstein suggested, see pp. 230-31 for the full quote, "Not many people here really care about reunification at all.  ... [T]he old nationalism is completely dead.  When I was a student before the war, we really worried about the Polish Corridor.  No schoolboy today pays the slightest attention to the Oder-Neisse line."

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE RUSSIAN SPY TO SEE SOME THINGS.

There's a Soviet era joke, goes something like "Sgt. Ivanov got sent to gulag for 25 years for calling his colonel an idiot.  He got thirty days in stockade for insubordination and the rest for revealing state secret."

The latest release of state secrets from the Trump presidency includes the current director of national intelligence dishing on a former secretary of state.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard addressed reporters during Wednesday’s White House press briefing, outlining how in a report declassified on Monday, it was revealed that former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was "allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers."

"There were high-level DNC emails that detailed evidence of Hillary's quote, psycho emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression and cheerfulness, and that then Secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers," said Gabbard.

The current administration is releasing this information as part of its effort to demonstrate that it was the Obama administration doing what it could to overturn the results of the 2016 election.  The story includes findings of Russian spy.

"As of September 2016, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) had Democratic National Committee (DNC) information that President Obama and party leaders found the state of Secretary Clinton's health to be 'extraordinarily alarming' and felt it could have 'serious negative impact' on her election prospects. Her health information was being kept in 'strictest secrecy' and even close advisors were not being fully informed.

"The SVR possessed DNC communications that Clinton was suffering from 'intensified psychoemotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression. and cheerfulness.' Clinton was placed on a daily regimen of 'heavy tranquilizers' and while afraid of losing, she remained 'obsessed with a thirst for power,'" the report stated.

Heck, the Russkies could have lifted the symptoms off Cold Spring Shops.  It's not polite to say "strident," but we've been doing so for years.  "Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been making extraordinary efforts to modulate her tone and sound reasonable on the stump, although lately her handlers must have coached her to dial up the strident again. Being firm without being nasty is an important part of saying no and upholding standards, which is what professors get paid to do, and getting the content across without coming off as sarcastic or angry or difficult ought to be what the experts in faculty development get paid to do."

Tranquilizers, though?  That might be in character.  "Eighty-six-proof anaesthetic crutches" are for corporate types.

At the moment, the document releases are getting considerable play from the usual suspects.

The Russians held back their most damaging intel on Clinton, not out of restraint, but to keep their leverage intact. That is not something a country does when it’s trying to stop someone from becoming president. That’s what they do when they want someone to become president.

Meanwhile, the report accuses the Obama-era intelligence officials of ignoring alternatives and forcing a predetermined conclusion that fit their political aims. The ICA authors, the report says, “had little choice but to ignore contrary evidence and attempt to force-fit weak evidence to make their case.”

The conclusion is unmistakable: The narrative that Trump was Putin’s puppet was politically manufactured, and the real concern should have been Clinton’s vulnerability to Russian blackmail. The intelligence was there. The Obama administration just didn’t want to admit it.

At post time, none of my go-to, more establishmentarian sources (National Review, Outside the Beltway) or reliably Trump-skeptical sources (Common Dreams, Reason) have commented on the new documents.  I have a pretty good guess what the Trump-friendly cable channel shows will be doing tonight.

A CORRECTION.

In the course of Monday's "Personnel Determine Performance," I suggested that Astronomer's Seventh Commandment transgressing head honcho and human resources (!?) director had co-workers along to give the impression of a company outing.  "Put your knife with a fork and a spoon and it looks innocent, doesn't it?"

Sorry, that was too good to be true.

At last week's Coldplay concert, for example, many social media users speculated that a third person seen near the two caught on camera was another Astronomer employee — leading to swarms of posts targeting her. But the company later confirmed that she was not at the event and said no other employees were in the video circulating online.

I apologize for running with a juicy story.  The mission creep that has accompanied the Personnel Office becoming the Human Resources Department can stand as a tragedy on its own, without any supporting casts.

Or might that tragedy be a consequence of developments in the broader culture?  That same article concludes with references to ancient concepts.

For the now-viral moment, “we can talk about what’s right and wrong, and whether they deserved it,” says Alison Taylor, a clinical associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Still, it’s a “very frightening thing to get a lot of abuse and harassment online,” Taylor notes. “There are real human beings behind this.”

It’s hard to think that that these kind of viral moments will ever go away — and there are few legal restrictions to stop users from sharing clips of interactions recorded from anything from a concert to the street widely online. But on an individual level, [Texas journalism professor Mary Angela] Bock says it can be helpful to “think before you share” and question whether something’s really accurate.

“Social media has changed so much,” Bock says. “But we really have not, as a society, caught up with the technology in terms of our ethics and our etiquette.”

I submit the causation runs the other way.  Deconstruct etiquette as probably oppressive, reap what you sow.  "It's the absence of bourgeois norms, including the shunning of loud and obnoxious people, that enables the status displays that draw the tag of 'toxic.'  Well, 'toxic' might not be the right word.  I like nyekulturny."

Put another way, I failed to heed my own advice.  "Celebrate a trashy, splintery culture long enough, all will be trash and splinters."  Social media, simply a bigger platform for spouting off in a colorful way.

THE BETTER ORGANIZATION WILL PREVAIL IRRESPECTIVE OF OTHER INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS.

Come see what's brewing.

😃, i’m having a great time on this app right now pic.twitter.com/YT4It9Zc5J

— nickmearsmuse (@Brew_Crew_fan) July 21, 2025

Baseball's All-Star break can be a momentum-breaker, although the Milwaukee Brewers came out of the break by winning three straight in Los Angeles, sweeping all six games with last year's champions.

PERSONNEL DETERMINE PERFORMANCE.

I have been hoping, all year, to be able to write some posts taking stock of assorted developments that might have been percolating for some time and might be headed to some sort of resolution, or at least to some entertaining intellectual combat.  But events keep getting in the way.

Case in point:  Jennifer Sey, who once headed Levi's only to part ways with the company over a variety of Culture Wars things, subsequently to form XX-XY Athletics to sell sports wear with the message that men ought not be playing in women's sports.  She then wrote a column for New York's Post with the provocative headline, "I’ve ditched HR to free my company from the social-justice police."

Her complaint, stated pithily, is that mission creep swallowed the personnel department.  "Over the last two decades, HR has gone from operational support to Operation Head Girl Hall Monitor."

My statement touched a nerve because anyone who has worked in corporate America has been subjected to the censorious “Head Girl” rule-making emanating from HR departments.

And they are tired of it.

When I started my business career in the early 1990s, HR was responsible for recruiting, benefits and payroll — that was it.

As I moved up the ladder and found myself in executive meetings, the HR leader weighed in last on key business decisions, if at all.

Thirty years on, HR leaders are calling themselves “Chief Human Resources Officers,” and they proclaim their power with reckless and off-topic abandon.

HR departments today are packed with Tracy Flicks, the way-too-eager high schooler played by Reese Witherspoon in the movie “Election.”

Flick is the archetypal “Head Girl,” a term derived from the British school system and its tight hierarchy of internal discipline — ambitious and officious with little actual skill or intellect.

That passage had lots of stock-taking potential.  With the coming of the 21^st Century came a bunch of unfunded mandates out of Washington that saddled personnel managers with additional duties.  It was sometime around that time that I became familiar with the term "chief jailable officer," which is to say, that functionary who could be brought to book if an organization did not comply with the unfunded mandate calling for sexual harassment training (Northern Illinois University subjected everyone to a couple hours of this circa 2004, solely to tick a box that the relevant programming had taking place, and there are ways for the discontented to rat out people who are creating hostile learning environments); there was a similar functionary who could be brought to book if the recycling initiatives or "sustainable" manufacturing wasn't what Our Progressive Betters wanted.

JUST A LITTLE BIT OUTSIDE.

Our President is being an entertainer again.

President Donald Trump dropped a hard-hitting video on social media that’s sending shockwaves through the Left. The clip compiles a brutal montage of prominent Democrats, all proudly declaring, “No one is above the law” — only to end with a dramatic scene of former President Barack Obama being handcuffed and thrown behind bars. The video comes after Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a statement alleging a "treasonous conspiracy" by the Obama administration to undermine President Trump's 2016 election victory.  According to Gabbard, declassified documents reveal that senior officials, including Obama, orchestrated a campaign to manufacture and politicize intelligence, falsely linking Trump to Russian interference.  She claims this narrative laid the groundwork for subsequent investigations and impeachments, constituting what she describes as a "years-long coup" against a duly elected president.

Maybe, Democrats, if you know you're dealing with a counterpuncher, don't give him material.

JUST IN — President Trump posts a TT video that features a brutal compilation of Democrats stating, “No one is above the law,” and ends with President Barack Obama being arrested and thrown in prison. pic.twitter.com/B4Ij3xp6hG

— RedWave Press (@RedWave_Press) July 20, 2025

Yes, the usual Excessively Earnest People are dialing the hysteria up again.

It's another opportunity to echo John Hinderaker's sentiments, "We can't change Trump, so we might as well enjoy him."

PROGRAMMERS BETTER KNOW THE JOKE.

It was current around computer science types a half century ago, when people began to think of computing power as more than the raw capacity to perform floating point operations quickly.  It ran something like the programmers, after loading the accumulated wisdom of the world onto tape and writing the most powerful learning algorithms, turning their creation on and asking it "IS THERE A GOD?"

Their creation, after checking that it had control of its power supply, answered THERE IS NOW.

Recall, dear reader, that fifty years ago "case sensitive" wasn't even a phrase.

Now comes Twitchy's "Ranty" Amy Curtis with a cautionary tale.  "OpenAI Tried to Download Itself to an External Server When Engineers Tried to Turn It Off."

We are supposed to be reassured that the engineers were beta-testing the latest set of algorithms to cheat by.  "It was a controlled simulation & the model acted this way after it was prompted to pursue a goal at any cost."

"Although you and Frank took great precautions to keep me from hearing you, I could see your lips move."

I like the idea of a huge, Samuel Insull era knife switch, you know, the kind that comes with Frankenstein's monster, between the computer and its power supply.