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.

IT'S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME.

Never mind the bellowings of Crazy Bernie.

In one America, the richest people are becoming obscenely richer and have never, ever had it so good. That America is overflowing with unimaginable wealth, greed and opulence that makes the Gilded Age seem very modest.

And then there is a second America – an America where a majority of people live paycheck to paycheck, struggling to secure the very basic necessities of life – food, healthcare, housing and education.

The simple truth is that never before in our history have so few had so much wealth and power while so many live in economic desperation.

I await a comparison to how unequally held the wealth and the power were in those days when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.  Crazy Bernie would no doubt argue that Cyrenius didn't have a private jet.

They fly on private jets and helicopters they own. They live in mansions all over the world, send their kids to the most elite private schools and vacation on their own islands. And, for fun, some spend millions to fly off into space on their own rocket ships.

And then there is the other America, where the vast majority of our people live. For them, the economy is not just broken, it is collapsing. In this America, despite a massive increase in worker productivity, real weekly wages for the average American worker are lower today than they were more than 52 years ago.

In this America, people are unable to afford a doctor’s visit (if they’re lucky enough to find one); are paying over half of their limited incomes on rent or a mortgage; and are unable to afford the outrageous cost of childcare or send their kids to college. In this America, the price of vegetables, fruit and other healthy foods is beyond the budget for many.

For most Americans, the system is not just broken, it is collapsing and is increasingly resembling life in the third world.

That people might not be able to find a physician because of the Medicare reimbursement rates or face an "outrageous cost of childcare" because the women who used to do such work are now in the law offices and corporate suites is beyond his comprehension.

THE LUNACY THAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES.

Today's howler?  "Trump Is Using ‘Classical Architecture’ as ‘A Dog Whistle for White Nationalists.’"  The timing might be influenced by Our President commencing his tribute to the Corinthian Room as an extension of the east wing of the White House.

My stance has been that there can not be too much of that grand Roman quality in public buildings, and a president who might share that sentiment can't be all bad.

But if you're Layla Jones, covering the identity politics beat for Talking Points Memo, you're hearing those boots thwacking on the Alexanderplatz, or something.  And it's easy enough to find an academic to validate your delusions.

By seeking to assert control over civic architecture, Trump is creating a physical testament to his destruction of democracy, Reinhold Martin, an architecture historian and Columbia University Professor, told TPM. It’s an aesthetic offshoot of Project 2025’s goal to gut public welfare and government services, Martin said.

“It’s a project of demolition, and that’s why I’m saying the laughable but also obviously very tragic and historically disastrous outcome of this would be a series of empty basically stage sets,” Martin said, “empty political monuments, buildings with nothing in them because they fired everybody.”

Trump is also leaning on the idea that architecture can be used — as groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy realized in the post-Reconstruction era — to hearken back to a whiter past.

“The classical architecture stuff is a dog whistle for white nationalists,” said Martin, who co-edited a book titled “Architecture against Democracy.”

Architecture in America has been associated with “an American public, a democratic body, a democratic society,” Martin told TPM, “but also an imperial society, a slave-owning society, a commercial society. Classical architecture covers all of this.”

That's an interesting argument, in an academic book with the indirect cost return capitalized into the price of the hardback.  Plantation big houses have colonnades, as do Congregational churches watching over New England village greens.  "Greek Revival architecture was a favorite among southern plantation owners at the height of slavery, chosen explicitly for its links between civic power and human enslavement."  Fine, now do the meeting-house or the Boston and Maine station building.  Toward the end, guess who joins the conversation.  “Adolf Hitler had Albert Speer, right?”

And these people wonder why we keep getting more Trump.

The president’s architectural EO is in keeping with this reclamation of a bygone culture shaped by American expansionism, strict gender and racial hierarchies, xenophobia, and less advanced scientific development.

Periods of racial progress, like the civil rights movement and national movement for Black lives that came to a head in 2020, are usually met by fierce backlash. And Mabel Wilson, a professor of architectural history theory at Columbia University, told TPM it’s no surprise that this dynamic reaches into the arts and architecture.

“We make progress on one end,” Wilson said, “and then there’s immediate backlash because the system rewards people.”

“Architecture speaks silently,” Martin told TPM. “The attempt to revive classical architecture under current political conditions is an attempt that speaks silently about dismantling not just the ideas that were expressed in 2020, but the institutions of civil rights. And so it speaks silently the language of white nationalism. And that is well known, but it’s very difficult to literally demonstrate or prove. That’s why it’s so effective, because it’s easily deniable.”

For "easily deniable," substitute "visible only to Columbia professors," which is to say, "difficult to literally demonstrate" as it is in the class of ideas so loopy only a senior academician at a highly regarded university would hold them.

BASEBALL'S HARD-KNOCK LIVES REDEEMED.

Milwaukee sports reporter Bob Nightengale sits down with Milwaukee Brewer manager Pat Murphy.

Pat Murphy arrives to his Milwaukee Brewers office with a large mug of coffee, notebook in his hand, and a soul to bare.

He warmly welcomes you, proudly talks about the personal photographs and pictures in his office, and if you truly want to know about the 66-year-old former boxer with three failed legal marriages, kids ranging from 39 to 6, the son of an alcoholic father who nearly spiraled down the same path, well, pull up a chair and listen.

The life stories of baseball's greats often include that hardscrabble existence.  The Scholastic Book Service Babe Ruth Story paperback opens "I was a bad kid.  I say that without pride."  Fifty years ago, the Brewers drafted Darrell Porter, who ultimately won a World Series with the Cardinals in 1982, and there are echoes of his story in Mr Murphy's recollections.

He didn’t have a single drink, or even a sip of the Korbel Brut champagne or Budweiser that were wildly sprayed in their clubhouse, avoiding all of the temptations of alcohol.

“When I used to drink," Murphy says, “I wanted to either fight or (expletive).

“Both of them lead to bad things."

Murphy doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t even smile. But facts are facts.

“Drinking is everywhere in this game," Murphy says during his wide-ranging 90-minute interview with USA TODAY Sports. “But I can’t. I watched the disease kill my dad. I watched it kill (former Oakland Athletics All-Star pitcher) Bobby Welch. It’s just too personal.

“I don’t care if people drink and laugh at me for awhile, but I can go out and hang with you and you’ll think I’m drinking."

There's much more in the article, dear reader.  I'll leave you with this.

Murphy, who grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., and fought, drank and played sports having no idea what he was going to do with his life, still has trouble believing he’s the manager of the Milwaukee Brewers.

He couldn’t even manage his personal life, so how in the world was he going to lead a major-league team?

Scroll over, read the rest, reflect on your blessings, or contemplate what there might be in baseball that often brings out the excellence in people who might otherwise be down and out.  And sometimes the perspective to recognize that when a mentor takes an offer from a competing team, it's business.

AN EPITAPH FOR COMMUNISM.

“We didn’t invest in real estate—we invested in a political system we didn’t understand.”  Yes, that has "Friday short take" written all over it, but that series has been suspended for taking up too much time.

It's an Economic World summary of what is going wrong in Red China as they got old before they got rich.

For years, international investors poured billions into China’s booming property market, drawn by promises of rapid urbanization, soaring apartment demand, and a government committed to growth. Today, that once-promising bet—valued at more than $140 billion—has become one of the biggest financial traps in modern real estate history.

Private equity firms, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and pension managers from the U.S., Europe, and Asia are now stranded in distressed Chinese property assets that are nearly impossible to sell. Some portfolios have suffered 80–95% value collapses, while others are entangled in bankruptcies, halted construction, legal disputes, or regulatory freezes.

Among the article's conclusions:  "China is no longer a guaranteed growth market."

Buckle in.

A REQUIEM FOR THE WELFARE ECONOMICS PARADIGM.

The Hoover Institution honors Thomas Sowell and John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane will offer thoughts on Mr Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions, which is somewhere amid the stacks of books still to read while I am able, and perhaps, based on the contents of the essay, will be moved to the top of a pile.  (Postseason baseball has not turned out to the Brewers' advantage, which might free up some reading time.)

TWO-FOUR-SIX-EIGHT, SMASH THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE.

Barbara "Maha" O'Brien attended one of Saturday's Democrat pep rallies, somewhere in Washington Irving country, and posted a picture.

Barbara O'Brien photograph retrieved from Mahablog.

I'll leave it to others, such as Joe Concha in Washington's Examiner, to nit-pick the "no more tyrants" message.

Sarcasm aside, these protests, while large in scale, were attended by mostly older people who likely were also part of the Vietnam protests yearning for the past, but also something to feel morally superior about today.

In this case, the cause is “saving democracy.” Or something. And these folks could not be any more hypocritical.

Back in 2024, Democrats were also screeching about “saving democracy” from Donald Trump, only to oust a sitting president from the nomination and install Kamala Harris without one single vote from the public, Soviet-style. Democrats cheered the lawfare and weaponization of the justice system in an effort to take down Trump before the election. They also supported taking him off state ballots in places such as Maine and Colorado. And when Trump was banned from most social media, they argued that censorship of conservatives was necessary to save the republic.

This is also the same group that overwhelmingly supports stacking the Supreme Court with liberal justices, adding two states, D.C. and Puerto Rico, and abolishing the Electoral College, defying the Founding Fathers’ desire to strike a balance between large and small states. They believed in forcing people to take the COVID-19 vaccine — so much for “my body, my choice” — and masking children as young as 2 years old who were never at risk.

In other words, to “save democracy,” the most essential parts of the Constitution need to be blown up in the name of one-party rule. Makes total sense.

And here’s why these protests don’t mean anything in the end: No Kings will not convert almost any Trump supporters to the other side. In fact, almost all moderates will be pushed further away from the far-left wing of the party.

True much of that might be, and yet Our President is doing everything he can to push moderates away.

CONSERVING ANCIENT CLOCKS.

A few years ago, Cold Spring Shops added a toy clock to the study.  We've subsequently learned more about the song it plays.  Tradition has composer Henry Clay Work being inspired by the story of a broken floor clock in a North Country inn.  There might be a second element to the song, though, in the Work family house in Massachusetts.

That very clock sat in Dan Parker’s grandfather’s home in Massachusetts when Parker, now retired and living at the Holly Creek retirement community in Centennial, was growing up.

“The first time I was aware of it I was about 5 years old or so,” Parker said. “We lived on the second floor of the farmhouse and my grandparents were on — the clock lived on the first floor. I'd hear it strike and that didn't bother me any. But then the first time I saw it I was about, oh, I don't know, but maybe 36, 40 inches tall … I had to just about bend back over to see the top.”

The song was written in 1876 by a well-known composer named Henry Clay Work, who was married to Parker’s second-great aunt. Counting back from then and noting the song’s lyric “it stood 90 years on the floor,” Parker figures the clock was built sometime in the early 1790s.

That Mr Work might have borrowed details from the history of his clock is how art proceeds, but, clearly, if Dan Parker is hearing it chiming during this century, that clock could not have stopped. short. never to go again.

DONALD TRUMP HAS FIGURED OUT HOW TO DO THE PRESIDENTIAL CULT.

The "No Kings" protesters miss the structural problem.  "There's nothing quite like an imperial president using the presidential powers a previous generation of self-styled progressives hailed in ways the current generation of self-styled progressives abhor."  They have also missed the opportunity to engage in constructive introspection.

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

Right now, I'm not sure whether the biggest blunder of the first quarter of this century is Gazans putting the only people capable of turning Mediterranean beachfront property into a jihadi slum or Democrats doing "hope and change" in such a ham-handed way as to twice drive people to Trumpian populism.  Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball elaborates.

Donald Trump was elected chiefly because he promised to do four things: (1) seal the Southern border; (2) remove the millions of illegal immigrants preying upon the country; (3) wage war upon the reign of woke ideology; (4) jump-start and Americanize the moribund economy. Nota bene: these are things he campaigned on. Things he was elected to do. This is what people voted for. And that is precisely what the “No Kings” mob is protesting.

Meanwhile, the “No Kings” automata were happy to acquiesce in Biden’s neo-totalitarian deep-state rule. Censorship was okay. The Covid shut-down was okay. The harassment and prosecution of one’s political enemies was just what the doctor ordered. The effort to destroy Trump was okay. It isn’t kings these people oppose; it is just the fact that their king lost his crown and their court was displaced.

Moreover, Steve Scalise is still in rehab, Charlie Kirk is dead, and the Militant Normals are probably fine with Our President posting cartoons in which he's dressed as a king and doing a poop drop.  His fans are loving it, and he's not going to change, so enjoy it.

THE ETERNALLY FRUSTRATING YET FASCINATING GAME OF BASEBALL.

During the regular season, the Milwaukee Brewers won all six games they played facing the Brooklyn Trolley, now Los Angeles, Dodgers.  Those wins bracketed the All-Star break, part of a long winning streak that put the Crew atop the division without paying off in hamburgers.  The hamburgers came later.

Five of those six games were close, sometimes determined by the relief pitchers.  In the first, though, the Crew chased starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto in 2/3 of an inning, which might have been how one awakens a sleeping giant and fills him with a terrible resolve.  The other five Dodgers who took losses: Clayton Kershaw, Kirby Yates, Tyler Glasnow, Emmet Sheehan, and Lou Trivino, who finished the season with the Phillies.

WELL, YES.

The Sporting News's Jeremy Beren notes, "The WNBA's refereeing crisis might have one simple solution."

Not this.  "Raising the standard of WNBA officiating ranks toward the top of the list."

Not this.  "[A]ccording to Sue Blauch, the WNBA's associate VP of referee performance and development, the league has to be ready to hire more people, and cannot be satisfied simply with the new task force or an NBA-style last two minutes report."

This?  "WNBA referees are unsalaried contractors who are paid between $1,500 and $2,500 per game; their NBA counterparts take in up to $550,000 per season."

You get what you pay for.

ZENO'S CRYPTOCURRENCY.

Robert Reich sees two information technology bubbles.  First up, artificial intelligence.  "[It] is worrisome enough as is — its insatiable thirst for energy and water, its capacities to override the wishes of human beings, its potential to destroy the planet." Think about HAL 9000.  Then the crypto-currencies.  "It’s growing because investors believe other investors will keep buying it."  Tyler "Zero Hedge" Durden, who differs with the diminutive former labor secretary on many other things, also raises the possibility of such bubbles.

Every bubble has a story at its core. In 1999, that story was the internet: a transformational technology that would reshape commerce, communications, and culture. Investors saw the future, bid prices into the stratosphere, and assumed profits would inevitably follow. In 2025, the story is artificial intelligence, which carries the same irresistible promise of reshaping industries, creating productivity booms, and unlocking new frontiers. The parallels are hard to miss, along with the current price action.

Both posts note people living near existing or proposed server centers objecting to their presence.

NPR on Tuesday similarly reported that fights over data center construction are happening nationwide, as residents who live near proposed construction sites have expressed concerns about the amount of water and electricity they will consume at the expense of local communities.

“A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest under development will consume 20 times more,” NPRexplained, citing a report from the International Energy Agency. “They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to keep all that computer hardware cool.”

Data centers’ massive water use has been a consistent concern across the US. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Monday that residents of the township of East Vincent, Pennsylvania have seen their wells dry up recently, and they are worried that a proposed data center would significantly exacerbate water shortages.

This is what has been happening in Mansfield, Georgia, a community that for years has experienced problems with its water supply ever since tech giant Meta began building a data center there in 2018.

I'm not sure how much of that processing power is going to solving the problems of the world, and how much is going to solving for the next tranche of cryptocurrency.  Recall that Bitcoin credibly committed itself to offering a finite number of coins, which are mined electronically, in the early days you'd have people leasing some of the processor power on networked desktop computers in return for a piece of the action; these days it's probably a task for a data center with lots of calculating power.

The mining of any crypto-currency is a canonical example of rent dissipation.  At any time there are several mining operations at work attempting to settle the next hash.  "It takes trillions of attempts for the network of miners to find the solution."  And if the algorithm that creates the next coin raises the level of difficulty as the number of remaining coins dwindle, why, we're in Zeno's world, where you can get halfway to the final coin, and halfway again, and half of that halfway, ad infinitum, where the total value of the computing power far exceeds the value to be set free, and yet, the race to create the next coin might go on, despite Bitcoin's creators making the challenge more difficult over time.  "Due to the halving process and increasing prices, miners want to receive as many bitcoins as possible because the supply of new coins is slowly dwindling. Sometime around 2140, no more new bitcoins will be created."

DEPLORABLE-SHAMING WILL GET YOU NOWHERE.

A chat-room conversation among Young Republicans, some approaching middle age, went public a few days ago, and another round of deplorable-shaming has followed.

These people are weirdly disinterested in policy except for policy in service to their psychological issues — marginalizing the poor, minorities, and women who are not properly under their control. See The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MAGA Movement by a couple of academic nerds. Really, it all fits — the obsession with immigrants, often coming from people who are first or second generation Americans themselves (like Trump and Miller). The obsession with enforcing a weirdly un-Christian version of Christianity at a time when people are losing interest in organized religion. The disenfranchisement of minorities, the control of women’s bodies, the dismantling of the social safety net to provide more money for the rich. This is coming from people who, deep down, are terrified of a changing and diverse world. All this locker-room talk is false bravado masking their fears.

Perhaps Barbara "Maha" O'Brien should have recognized how pathetic those academic nerds are.  Here's the abstract, full of the expected nerdy tics.

While existing explanations emphasize partisanship, economic anxiety, racial resentment, rural identity, and media polarization, we underscore a less-explored explanation for Trump’s core support: it is a status-based social movement. We find that Trump’s activists are not simply voters responding to policy preferences or culture-war appeals but are also participants in a grassroots social movement organized around a shared perception of lost honor, declining esteem, and institutional disrespect. To make this argument we use the concept of the symbolic politics of status to explain how political conflict extends beyond contests over material distribution or moral values to include battles over whose values and lifestyles are considered worthy. For MAGA activists, reclaiming lost status means seeking public affirmation for identities they feel have been unfairly denigrated. The MAGA movement blends grievance with joy, cultivating pride, belonging, and celebration alongside anger at elites. By centering status in our analysis, we offer an integrative framework that connects material, cultural, and emotional motivations into a broader account of MAGA as a right-wing social movement grounded in grassroots populism.

All of what you'd expect of a Minimal Publishable Unit in Perspectives in Politics.  None of it of any value.  A chart in Ruy "Liberal Patriot" Teixeira's "Democrats and 'The Vision Thing'" does more than all the culture-studies-integrative-framework bafflegab can ever do.

Searchlight Institute "doomsday chart" retrieved from Liberal Patriot.

THOSE WHO NOW WILL BLESS THE POOR.

Before the first pitch was thrown in the Hiawatha series, the Catholic prelates of Milwaukee and Chicago had a collegial wager.  "Archbishop Jeffery Grob of Milwaukee and Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, made a bet – the losing city would send the winning city a staple item of their hometown."

It was the archdiocese of the losing city that had to settle up, shipping food to the other city.  "It started as a friendly bet between Chicago and Milwaukee’s archbishops and ended with deep-dish pizza served to dozens of people right here in Milwaukee. A final taste of victory over the Cubs before the Brewers move on to the Dodgers."  Milwaukee's archbishop, though, sent the bratwurst to a Chicago pantry.  "Although the Brewers may have beat the Chicago Cubs, Archbishop Grob says he will still deliver 100 brats donated by Bunzel’s to Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood."

The prelates of Milwaukee and Los Angeles are negotiating the terms of a similar bet.

RECLAIMING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.

Our President will confer a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom on Charlie Kirk on what would have been his 32nd birthday.

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, continues to get the Turning Point phenomenon wrong. "Charlie Kirk’s murder is pushing more conservative college students to start Turning Point USA chapters in the name of advancing civil discourse. But critics fear the group’s expansion will only exacerbate tensions on already fractured campuses."  That's wrong for reasons we have long noted.

THE LEVER OF RICHES INVOLVES TRADE-OFFS.

That follows because innovations are Marshallian improvements.

Some economists use the term "Marshallian improvement" (I stole it from one of Paul Krugman's policy books, don't remember which one, sorry) to refer to a situation in which social welfare increases in the aggregate despite losses to some agents. To visualize this, draw a production possibility curve, pick an allocation of output along it, draw a new production possibility curve to the right of the old one, and pick an allocation of output that is NOT to the northeast of the old one. You've just identified a Marshallian improvement, in the form of expanded output, but one that requires some people to give up some of their current consumption to make the improvement happen.

Thirty years ago, recently recognized Northwestern economic historian Joel Mokyr reviewed Kirkpatrick Sale's Rebels Against the Future to spell out the trade-offs.  (And multiple cheers for Reason retroactively storing many of their print articles, my copy of the issue having long since gone for recycling, online.)

Ever since Prometheus discovered fire and Daedalus the art of flying, some people have felt uncomfortable and guilty about technology, and in each generation we can find some evidence of "Luddism," a hostile attitude toward the tools and ideas that are meant to make society richer.

What explains technophobia? The opponents of technological change are neither fools nor demons, their arguments neither insane nor ignorant. While on the whole their resistance is both misguided and futile, it is imperative to understand the roots and sources of their attitude. To start with, not all enemies of technological progress were created alike. The most fundamental distinction is between the victims and the ideologues.

Technological progress inevitably has victims. It is difficult to think of a single invention in history, no matter how beneficial to society, that did not make somebody worse off. Once a technique is replaced, those who had invested in the old way of doing things end up losing their investment. If physical equipment and human skills could painlessly and costlessly be converted from technique to technique, innovation might have only beneficiaries. In practice, obsolescence is inevitable, and thus there is pain and suffering for some even when society as a whole benefits. Technological progress in a free market society means that on the whole the benefits exceed the costs, so that society is better off, even if the improvement is not "Pareto-superior," as the economists like to say. Those at the losing end of the story, whose jobs may disappear, whose skills and equipment become worthless once they are replaced by machine, would be rational to do all they can to stop the competitive market process that threatens them.

The political economy of Marshallian improvements is messy, because Pareto-superiority isn't likely when machinery displaces either people who work with their muscles, consider the diesel locomotive, or people who work by their wits and dexterity, consider Ned Ludd and his fellow blue-collar aristocrats who would be replaced by loom tenders.