AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE, WILL THEY RECOGNIZE THE RENT-SEEKING?

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan hopes that the current election-influence imbroglio might lead to serious thinking about the way the Swamp operates.  Peter Schweitzer wrote a book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends. about the Swamp People you won't see on reality TV.

By all means read his column in full, but consider, dear reader, whether another Comprehensive Reform will really fix anything.

The personal financial disclosure rules for American public officials should be expanded to include details concerning all their immediate family members (and not just their spouses, as the law currently states), and any dealings with foreign governments.

To the public, closing a loophole this glaring seems anodyne, a no-brainer. But lawmakers set the system up this way for a reason; they will not stop the foreign cash influence game voluntarily. That’s why we need a Washington Corrupt Practices Act, one that clearly shuts down foreign influence and self-enrichment for some of America’s most powerful families on both sides of the aisle.

I suppose it's too much to ask that the corrupt practices be expanded to include domestic lobbying and reporting activities. Chelsea Clinton and Jenna Bush as national TV personalities without any seasoning in Little Rock or Longview or LaCrosse.

I also doubt whether laws that make it more difficult to cash in will discourage people connected to the political class from attempting to cash in.  Whether you agree with me, dear reader, on the usefulness of Technocratic Expertise, or not, consider that the spending of public money generates incentives to seek rents (or get in on the bezzle?) whether we're talking about setting the location where the Sierra slope begins, which affects payments for the construction of the Pacific Railroad, or whether we're condemning properties for a casino, or, for that matter, doing anything in Illinois.

TIME TO REDISCOVER NOTIONS OF PROPRIETY.

An alumnus of Penn State, Johnstown resident Dave Petersen, asks the football coach to field a less scruffy team, and a woke-fest of monumental proportions ensues.

Petersen said he did not intend for the letter to have a racist message.

"Was not the intent at all," Petersen told the [Johnstown] Tribune-Democrat. "I would just like to see the coaches get the guys cleaned up and not looking like Florida State and Miami guys."

Petersen added that his letter "wasn't threatening or anything. I was just disgruntled about some of the hairdos that we're seeing. You think of Penn State as a bunch of clean-cut guys. And you do see so many who are clean cut. But the tattoos and the hair -- there are a lot of guys with hair coming down their backs and it just looks awful. And it's the same for the NFL and NBA, too."

Regardless of whether it was Petersen's intent, the Penn State football players have taken the letter as an attack on them and who they are.

Mr Petersen may have a point.

Do hip-hop style and prison tattoos and idiosyncratic pronunciations of even more idiosyncratically spelled names confer any evolutionary advantages to practitioners within a culture, let alone to adopters (appropriators?) from outside?  Or does possession of any or all of these elements of social (or is it cultural?) capital serve as a proxy for indicators of poor performance, of drug use, of welfare dependency?  Or perhaps as markers for schools that will disillusion even the most idealistic of teachers?

Dial back the misguided authenticity and perhaps the human capital will gain value.

In sports, though, perhaps it doesn't matter.

Penn State's spokesmen stand with their players.

Penn State issued a statement on Twitter: "While we don't know the source of this letter or the authenticity, obviously its content does not align with our values. We strongly condemn this message or any message of intolerance."

Sandy Barbour, Penn State's vice president for intercollegiate athletics, added her own tweeted statement: "I stand with our Penn State student athletes and appreciate how they represent PSU in competition, in the classroom and in the community. Their dress, tattoos, or hairstyle has no impact on my support, nor does their gender, skin color, sexuality or religion!"

Perhaps Penn State have more reason than many universities not to put a lot of weight on coaches attempting to present a well-scrubbed image: both successful women's basketball coach Rene Portland and legendary football coach Joe Paterno encouraged that sort of public face.

Moonbattery's Dave Blount is thinking more generally.  "For preferring a clean-cut look to the repulsively skeevy appearances some athletes now cultivate, Petersen has been subjected to the Two Minutes Hate."  He's not wrong to raise the issue of looking skeevy and calling it authentic.

AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE, INFRASTRUCTURE DIVISION.

Listen Up, Washington: No. New. Roads.

One thing that we know for sure is wrong is the way this country spends money on transportation. Whether it’s North Carolina destroying a small town to widen a highway, Louisiana running a new highway through the middle of a neighborhood, or any number of similar crazy projects moving ahead in zombie-like fashion, there is seemingly no end to the destruction being wrought with federal transportation dollars.

And while, sure, there is the occasional sidewalk or bus route that gets a little bit of money, the tradeoff for those crumbs is literally billions in spending on some of the lowest returning, most destructive projects imaginable. We’ve long called for #NoNewRoads — a freeze on all new transportation spending until there is significant reform — and fought against those in the Infrastructure Cult who self-servingly call for for more transportation spending, even when the numbers supporting that call are ridiculous.

There's more here.

I did not see any calls to treat the roads as assets, but perhaps that, too, will change.

AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE?

In the midst of a defense of properly-structured "college success" courses, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed recognizes why such courses might now be useful.

We can’t assume that students have picked up the folkways of the professional middle class at home or in high school. We can’t assume that they come in knowing exactly what they want and/or that they have infinite time to figure it out. They’re too embedded in the realities of daily life where the rules are often different.

If that portrait of the typical student is substantially true, then learning the folkways of higher education specifically, and the professional upper middle class more broadly, is often a sociological challenge of a high order. It’s the sort of challenge that requires study, and that merits credit.

I’m intrigued by the Ethnographies of Work model developed by JFF and adopted by CUNY and the New Hampshire CC system, among others. Brookdale is running its own version this semester, and early reports are encouraging. Spelling out the rules of what has become a sort of alien culture, and having students do actual research and fieldwork in that culture, is exactly the sort of transferable skill that has come to be the model of gen ed. It acknowledges that the students of today are different from the students of 100 years ago, because they are.

That's what fifty years of deconstructing bourgeois norms gets you.  It might be a useful first step to recognize that navigating a university is part of the cultural capital of the middle class, though.

The kind of course I have in mind isn’t the old “do a scavenger hunt to find the library” model. This is more like applied sociology. But it starts with the assumption that students are located in a political economy and that they’ve been isolated from certain kinds of knowledge.

We can take up the root causes of that isolation, or the more general ways of working the problem, another day.  Perhaps that includes taking the trepidation out of faculty office hours.

Students often don't know what office hours are – or what they're for, or how they're different from class time.

They're part of what some students say is a hidden curriculum – the set of rules on a college campus that no one ever tells you about. And then, what students do know is that you have to meet one-on-one with your professor, which in some cases means talking to the smartest, most powerful person you know (remember, professors are the ones giving out the grades!).

I've had dozens of current college students describe office hours to me as "intimidating" or "terrifying."

I'll leave to readers still active in higher education to weigh the arguments in the article; my own strategy was to encourage students to take advantage, and when I knew there would be a large turnout, to seek a larger space. (I actually got into some trouble once for using an otherwise unused area of the student center for such a session!)  I'll even let a Harvard guy have the final word on office hours.

For students who are still wary, Harvard's Anthony Abraham Jack has this advice: "Never, ever, be afraid to ask for help: It is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength."

Plus, he says, when you go to office hours, you're letting the professor do their job.

Exactly.

SHOULDN'T CONSUMPTION RATES CHANGE LESS RAPIDLY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF EQUILIBRIUM?

There's a reason the Marshallian Cross is a useful teaching device.  US unemployment rate hits a 50-year low even as hiring slows.  I have enough suspicions about the legacy press to be just a bit fearful that somebody is interpreting reported figures in such a way as to raise recession fears.

Here's the lede.  "The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 3.5% in September, the lowest level in nearly five decades, even though employers appeared to turn more cautious and slowed their hiring."  Burn your economics textbook if you ever read something like "there is a price at which the production and consumption rates are the same," let alone something that suggests "in the neighborhood of equilibrium those rates are unlikely to change by much."

Here comes the editorializing.

The economy added a modest 136,000 jobs, enough to likely ease worries that an economy weakened by the U.S.-China trade war and tepid global growth might be edging toward a potential recession. The government on Friday also revised up its estimate of job growth in July and August by a combined 45,000.

Still, a drop-off in the pace of hiring compared with last year points to rising uncertainty among employers about the job market and the economy in the face of President Donald Trump's numerous trade conflicts. Pay growth has also weakened, reflecting the hesitance of employers to step up wages.

Large increases in hiring accompany the first few months of recovery from recession, or they might be markers of a rapidly growing sector that well might turn into a bubble.

It might be that tightness in the labor market is manifesting itself in the form of different contracts.

Julia Pollak, a labor economist at jobs marketplace ZipRecruiter, said the pay that employers are advertising has declined this year after rising sharply in 2018. And she noted that the number of part-time workers who would prefer full-time work has risen over the past two months.

Those trends "show that employers are increasingly risk-averse as global uncertainty and recession fears rise," Pollak said.

Possibly, although in an environment where there's a lot of labor force participation by women and a lot of talk about work-life balance, perhaps employers are rethinking their one-size-fits-all terms of employment.

In addition, we might be seeing employers in some sectors looking for ways to make use of people who might not have the usual credentials.

The big gains last month were in health care, which added 41,400 jobs, and professional and business services, which include such higher-paying areas as engineering and accounting but also lower-paying temp work. That sector added 34,000 positions.

Friday's jobs data underscored the benefits of a hot job market for lower-paid Americans and traditionally disadvantaged workers. The unemployment rate for workers without high school diplomas fell to 4.8%, the lowest level on records dating to 1992. The rate for Latinos fell to 3.9%, also a record low.

Amy Glaser, senior vice president at Adecco USA, a staffing firm, says companies are still willing to raise pay for blue collar workers. Some are also paying retention and signing bonuses and in some cases double pay for overtime.

"We're still seeing strong demand, we're still seeing more job opportunities out there than candidates," Glaser said.

The so-called broadly shared prosperity of the Victory Dividend years was in part a consequence of manufacturing technologies that could augment the powers of people with modest skills (at the cost of a lot of soul-deadening jobs) in a way that made those people richer. I suspect the incentives to develop such technologies are still present, if, perhaps, harder to find, in the presence of new information technologies.

MIKE ROYKO NOTICED THE PROBLEM YEARS AGO.

I've referenced his observation previously.  "He had written a column about the proliferation of beggars in the Loop, in which he suggested that closing the asylums and condemning the flophouses in the name of urban renewal provided the cause."

What's it going to take, a full-on outbreak of the bubonic plague before the Smart People catch on?  "America abandoned a custodial approach to mental illness a half-century ago, and the results have been obvious in the nation’s streets and public spaces ever since — and never more so than on the Bowery early Saturday morning." "Bowery," dear reader, is New York for "skid row," and, although it has always been with us, New York Post columnist Bob McManus is making the same point Mr Royko made about Chicago, in the pre-digital era.  (The Tribune might slowly be putting a digital archive of Royko columns together, but Cold Spring Shops is unlikely ever to subscribe.)

Beggars, addicts, scammers of every stripe and the helpless, severely mentally ill have overwhelmed the city’s boulevards, parks and mass transit.

Thus it has been to one degree or another for 50 years, ever since ideologically inspired mental-health policy makers began to shut down large state insane asylums — those words used to mean something — in favor of non-coercive, so-called community-based treatment.

The new policies, made possible by advances in psychotropic-drug therapy, largely were driven by 1960s-era “liberation” activists not dissimilar to today’s so-called ­“social-justice” zealots.

They subordinated clinical needs and realities to ideology, and the new ways led directly to concentrations of blighted hotels and shelters for drugged-up, non-functional former patients; long prison terms for those who ­reacted violently to the pressures of unsupervised life; the legions of hopeless street dwellers and, inevitably, to homicidal subway pushers and associated maniacs.

It's somebody else who ends up paying the price for the virtue signal.  The best we can do might be to add "progressive" mental health policy changes to all the other failed technocratic impulses of the past fifty years.

HEY, CHI-COMS, BAN THIS!

"You gotta lower your ideals of freedom if you want to suck on the warm teat of China."

HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU?

The Sunday "public affairs" shows are pro wrestling for nerds.

Last Sunday's cage match featured Chuck "Truculent Chipmunk" Todd with Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, a businessman with enough F.U. money to win a Senate race, and it was the usual format with the Republican guest on a remote site.

Why would Republican appear on the "mainstream" Sunday shows? You could wonder after Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) was disgusted by moderator Chuck Todd's "very biased opening" segment on Meet the Press, and Todd openly fought with him and wouldn't let him finish a point as Johnson tried to tell him what he should ask John Brennan later in the show. Brennan received gooey sympathy.

Todd moaned and groaned and then said “I have no idea why Fox News conspiracy propaganda stuff is popping up on here. I have no idea why we’re going here." When Johnson said this is why people hate the media, "This is not about the media! Senator Johnson, please!!” As in "please stop criticizing the heroic press."

Once upon a time the Sunday shows might have been the way for the Permanent Bipartisan Government to set the boundaries of Acceptable Disagreement and work toward some kind of compromise. Fifty years of Failed Technocracy, though, isn't a good environment in which to hold a simulacrum of a public administration seminar.  The cage match draws the eyeballs.

But the Truculent Chipmunk is self-aware enough that from time to time he gives away the game.

Last Sunday, they again had Senator Johnson at a remote site, while a tame Democrat from Connecticut was in studio.

Todd turned to liberal Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy, who's used to softball interviews. Murphy was allowed to uncork long 180-word answers without Todd interjecting. Then Todd complained to Murphy, like they were teammates: "We have a major problem here. I mean, the-- the comfort level that the senator had to character assassinate the show and us-- in this-- in this bizarre, personal way I think shows you where we're headed. What do we do?"

As the Blogfather has it, just think of the main press as Democrat operatives with bylines, and you're not far wrong.  Mr Todd might be playing his role as a pro wrestling heavy, but his masters realize they have a problem.  When I hear the latest "Real News, real reporting" tagline from CBS or the similar slogan from the Peacock, I'm tempted to ask "who are you trying to convince?"

I also suspect that the Republicans are often on that remote set-up because they are doing something in their actual states, which are a few day's hard riding from the Swamp, as well as the remote set-up making misunderstandings or Don Lemon-style plug pulling easier.

HERE I STAND, I CAN DO NO OTHER.

Gary Varvel does not disappoint.

Not to mention we were all supposed to be extinct by now.

SLAM.

Today's not a regular Saturday bridge column features a game in which the simulation and I were able to get together on a proper contract for six tricks.

With 23 high card points, a long Club suit, and the wrong distribution for a No Trump bid, I open with Two Clubs.  Partner bot responds with Two Diamonds on seven high card points and five Diamonds.  From among the available choices I essay Two No Trump, which the simulation characterizes as "invitational" in a variety of ways, and the partner bot responds with Three Hearts, something the simulation describes as a signal of strength in the minors.  That gets interesting with no Hearts in Hand, and my response of Three Spades is similarly idiosyncratic, but gives the bot several options, and Four Diamonds follows.  That, the simulation tells me, is a serious bid (the ones that are intended as signals or cues get highlighted with a red border).  I bid a game of Five Clubs and the bot overcalls with Six Diamonds.

In previous experience with the computers, I've often found myself in an impossibly optimistic contract.  But not this time.  Because the North bot declared Diamonds, the lead is in East: ♣7, bottom of a sequence.  Perhaps attacking Hearts might have sufficed to set the contract.

The closed hand is North: with proper play there are four good Spades, and the Three a candidate discard on the long Club suit controlling the board.  There are no Hearts in hand, but it might be prudent to lead the two from the board and trump them in hand.

There are four Diamonds headed by the Seven outstanding.  The fourth row of Pascal's Triangle tells us that eight of the sixteen possible combinations of four cards will be three to one side.  I'm going to want two in hand to take care of the Hearts.  In Clubs the board assures no losers in the hand, but I'd better not find myself in a position where I'm leading those little ones.

Win the opening lead with the ♣Q on the board, lead the ♦6 back toward the ♦8, there's no reason to cash the high ones when the little ones suffice, then lead the ♦5 to the ♦J with West showing out.  The odds are that East will hold more than two Hearts, lead the ♥Q and trump it with the ♦9; then the ♣10 to cash the ♣K followed by the ♥10 trumped with the ♦10.

Now I require six of the remaining seven tricks.  The lead is in the hand.

In hand there are ♠ K J 9 7 3, ♦ K, ♣3.

On the board, ♠ A Q, ♦ A Q, ♣ A 5 4.

There's nothing quite so frustrating as having potential winners and not being able to activate them.  This time, no problem: ♣3 to the Ace; ♣5 to the ♦K (and just in time with East pitching a Heart); ♠9 to the Ace; two rounds of Diamonds draw that outstanding ♦7 with the two low Spades discarded; now cover the ♠Q with the King and the ♠J picks up two Hearts (including the Ace) and that little Club.

Plus One, and it's Oktoberfest time.

THE LAST TRADITIONAL INTERURBAN CARS BUILT?

That might be an accurate description of the 451-460 series of cars built by St. Louis Car for the Chicago Aurora and Elgin.  Several of the cars were preserved in a quasi-rapid-transit and museum role at a Cleveland area mobile home park, and one of them went as far east as Scranton, Pennsylvania, until museum curators there decided to concentrate on conserving rolling stock from closer to home.

That car, 453, is now at Illinois Railway Museum, in good mechanical condition although requiring cleaning and painting.

The Trolley Dodger decided to tackle the definition of an interurban car.

It has often been stated that the ten curved-sided CA&E cars were the “last” interurbans built in the United States. To accept this, some caveats come into play.

First of all, what constitutes an interurban? Depending on how you define this, why wouldn’t the PATCO Speedline, which runs between Philadelphia and Camden County, New Jersey qualify as an “interurban,” even though it did not begin service until 1969?

What about the double-ended cars built by St. Louis Car Companyfor the Philadelphia Suburban Transportation Co. (aka Red Arrow) in 1949? They ran on the line between Philadelphia and West Chester, which is generally considered an interurban. But they resembled PCC cars, although they had conventional motors and were not “offically” considered PCCs.

Actual PCC cars were used in interurban service by Pittsburgh Railways, to Charleroi and Washington, PA until 1953.  Some of these cars were built in 1949.

That Lindenwold High Speed Line probably wouldn't qualify as an interurban, what with rapid-transit style high level platforms at all stations, turnstiles creating a paid fare area in each station, and grade-separated rights of way.  On the other hand, there are newer cars on the South Shore Line, where you still find cars running in city streets, and a few crossroad shelters to flag down a train (setting a rolled-up newspaper afire at night optional.)  But do contemporary commuters think of the South Shore as an interurban?

Perhaps it is fair to say that the CA&E cars were the last classic or conventional interurban cars built in the United States. There have been other interurban cars built since 1945 outside of the US, such as the cars operated on the South Shore Line.

An interurban is as much a sociological concept as anything, and has come to represent a particular era in American history. Pacific Electric ran an interurban between Los Angeles and Long Beach until 1961. But when service between those two cities was restored in 1990, via the Blue Line Metro, it was called light rail, even though much of the line runs in the same alignment that Pacific Electric used.

For that matter, is the South Shore Line, the so-called “last” interurban that survived, still an interurban?  Or would most of its riders today think of it as commuter rail?

For the moment, there is enough interurban tradition on the South Shore that I still think of it as such, those full-size coaches and trailers notwithstanding.  A longer train of Roarin' Elgin steel cars on the Illinois Railway Museum main line is pretty cool, too.

HOW MUCH EXCESS CAPACITY IS THERE IN THE ROADS?

Arian Horbovetz says "a lot."  Specifically, "When we look at the incredibly excessive land use, build cost and annual roadway maintenance in comparison to the abysmal average daily traffic counts that they cater to, the reality of the often overlooked and 'overbuilt infrastructure' comes clearly into focus."

Let the highway departments treat their roads as assets, and there will likely be some that fail their return on investment tests.  Then, practice fiscal responsibility.  "If our first thought when we see an empty bus is that it is 'a waste of money and resources,' we must look at the countless miles of expensive and relatively empty road and highway space in our country’s infrastructure, draining our tax dollars at a rate that is sending this nation, its states and communities into financial peril."

IT'S NOT GOING TO BE EASY TO IMPEACH THE PEOPLE AND INAUGURATE ANOTHER.

John Kass gets to the heart of the matter: Donald Trump spoke truth to large numbers of oppressed and marginalized people.

They'd been marginalized and dismissed by bipartisan establishment elites for years, in rural and suburban America. Their silent desperation and pain were ignored, as was the loss of jobs, place and culture, and many died young from stress or embraced opiates to dull their pain.

They played by the rules. They knew they'd been betrayed.

They also knew who Trump was when they voted for him. They wanted revenge on the Washington that had abandoned them. Trump was their blunt instrument, and he brought blunt-force fear with him to the palaces of Versailles on the D.C. Beltway.

Kevin Portteus continues, in a similar, perhaps more forceful way.

The entire globalist neoliberal order is teetering on the brink. Trump was nominated and elected by people who are tired of endless wars of supposed democratization for people uninterested in it and unfit for its responsibilities. They are tired of the mass importation of illegals and refugees who don’t understand or care about our principles or way of life. They are tired an economic system that brings ruin to the American working and middle classes and of the intensifying persecution of normal Americans.

The anti-globalist reaction is, well, global. Benjamin Netanyahu keeps winning in Israel. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Narendra Modi in India. Viktor Orban in Hungary. Boris Johnson. Brexit. There are anti-globalist movements in Germany, Italy, and Austria. The global elites are losing control of the world order they labored to create for decades: a borderless oligarchy that empowers and enriches them at the expense of the people they rule.

Mr Portteus is using the term "neoliberal" more in the sense Charles Peters proposed for it, than as the leftist pejorative that sometimes stands in for "late capitalism."  In that post I asked, "How long, though, until sufficient voters recognize that they're being played for fools by the political class?"

The impeachment theater, which is attempting to accomplish through process and spin that which once could have been accomplished by literacy tests (just require anyone registering to vote to be able to explain "liberating tolerance" these days) is unlikely to persuade many Trump voters to repent.

WHEN YOU DENY COHERENT BELIEFS.

Joel Kotkin's Elites Against Western Civilization concludes,

If one does not even know about the complex legacy underpinning democracy, including the drive for individual freedom and open discussion, one is not likely to understand when it is in peril. If we are to save our uniquely open civilization, we must counter the clerisy’s efforts to discredit our past and demolish our future.

That's long been a message of mine.

By all means read and understand Mr Kotkin's essay.

Then, note the incoherence in Ralph Nader's most recent effort at discrediting our past to demolish the future.  It's the usual egalitarian stuff.  "There has never been so much but so little for the majority."  That's wrong, either confined to the United States, or contemplated globally.

The substance of Mr Nader's argument, though, is often lacking.

Consider "Never have there been more communications technologies, yet it is harder to get through to people personally than fifty years ago."  Maybe privacy, which used to be something maintained by armed guards or liveried butlers, is more available to that majority than it once was.

He continues, "Never have people been able to use their right to free speech so unencumbered, yet a torrent of lies are now spread so freely and are often unchallenged."  On balance, that might be desirable: it's less easy for a one percent, whether in the corporate suites or some government agency or the Council on Foreign Relations or at Auric Goldfinger's place to suppress inconvenient speech.

What can one make of this?  "Never have there been more medicines to alleviate pain, yet far too many of these pain killers have caused massive fatalities and addictions."

Or this? "Never have there been more exercise outlets, exercise machines and apps, yet obesity is still rampant."

Or, finally, "Never has there been more free access to information, yet so little retained knowledge."  Wait, haven't other self-styled progressives told us that facts are social constructions, and rote learning is a form of oppression?

It would all be amusing but for the author still enjoying status as a Respected Elder Scold in Intellectual Circles.

I'M GOING TO HAVE TO LOOK FOR THE SELECTION EFFECTS.

Corey DeAngelis, an affiliate of Reason Foundation and Cato, asserts, "Yet another study shows school choice programs reduce crime."  Not just any studies, either: Harvard working paper, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Social Science Quarterly.  School assignment might be by lottery, but somebody has to sign the kids up for the lottery.

Read on and ponder.

Traditional public schools hold significant monopoly power because of residential assignment and funding through property taxes. Families upset with the quality of their public school only have three limited options: They can purchase an expensive new house that is assigned to a better public school, pay for a private school out of pocket while still paying for the public school through property taxes, or complain to the school leaders and hope things change.

Because these options are expensive and inefficient, there is not a lot of pressure for residentially-assigned public schools to provide the best character education possible. In contrast, private and charter schools must cater to the needs of families if they wish to remain open.

School choice puts power into the hands of families. And families usually know what’s best for their own kids.

The selection effect is particularly salient given that compound noun, "character education."  Residentially-assigned public schools in prosperous neighborhoods, which is to say where your good school comes bundled with a granite countertop, tend to be public schools where bourgeois norms are honored in the observance, no matter how woke the residents might pretend to be.  Thus, the people who have the means to buy the bundle tend to be people who insist on their common schools doing a proper job.  (Put another way, the expensive house buys the equivalent of a high-status private school with school leaders accountable to the constituents.)

That's where that "families usually know what's best" matters.  The sentence presupposes some semblance of a family: not necessarily the case in the poorer quarters where serial shacking up might be the way people exist, and frequent moves might accompany the domestic turmoil.

That makes comparing like-with-like in school districts offering charter schools harder.  "School choice could also reduce crime by matching students to schools that interest them, and by exposing students to peer groups and school cultures that discourage risky behaviors." What we might be seeing is that the parents most interested in passing along responsible habits to their children are reinforcing those habits in their children and doing what they can, including signing up for the charter schools, to obtain institutional support, including in the form of classmates to interact with.

THE STATE IS THAT GRAND FICTION.

When a recipient of road socialism gripes about inconvenient roads, it might rate an Instalanche.  "Is the answer to more cars really less pavement? Can Denver really solve the congestion problem by making congestion even worse, through road rationing, parking restrictions or other tactics designed to make motorists miserable?"

The answer is not less pavement, it is treating the existing pavement like the income-earning asset it can be, and rationing the capacity by price rather than by traffic jams and construction delays.

THE EXPECTATIONS ARE HIGHER.

In May, with the Milwaukee Brewers in a battle of attrition in the Central Division, I wrote, "The Brewers had a good start to the season, then regressed to the mean, with a schedule that has so far been full of Dodgers and Cardinals. It's now time for the Cubs and Cardinals to have their battle of attrition."

For most of the season, the Brewers stayed a few games above an even record, but never falling below 0.500, although as September began, neither the division lead nor a wild-card game seemed within reach.  Then the Cardinals knocked the Cubs into a tail-spin that culminated with World Series winning manager Joe Maddon not having his contract renewed (is it really on the manager that Yadier Molina and Christian Yelich figured Craig Kimbrel out?) while the Brewers went on a winning streak that put them in a position to catch the Cardinals if the Cubs got enough pay-back.

That didn't happen, and today we're observing the Washington Nationals winning the wild-card game and packing to play in Los Angeles.  "'If you could have told me we'd hand the ball with six outs to go with [leverage pitcher] Josh Hader, that would have fit our script really, really well,' Brewers manager Craig Counsell said. 'It just didn't play.'"

Sometimes, the other guy makes the plays.

The good news is I have heard nobody talking about how "If anyone had told us in July that the team would be in the playoffs, we would have been delighted."  It's about taking stock and keeping the team strong and signing the relevant free agents, and hoping the injured list will be shorter.

OKTOBERFEST ON RAILS.

I recently learned that Eduard Strauss, one of the composer sons of Johann Strauss the Elder, composed a series of what he called Polka-schnell, including several with a railroad theme.

Here's Ohne Aufenthalt.

Prosit!

PASS THE POPCORN!

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has unleashed the Committees of the House to conduct an "insane" impeachment inquiry.  Her problem, argues George S. Bardmesser, is that her majority depends on the support of voters in notionally contested districts who might have a dim view of the policy preferences of the party's third world constituencies.  "This is about Pelosi losing control of her caucus should she continue to resist impeachment, and Pelosi sensing a looming electoral disaster of monumental proportions should impeachment be launched outside the parameters she defines."  According to Mr Bardmesser, the hopheads are already in the saddle.

Pelosi understands perfectly that an election where the Democratic Party is framed as a single-issue party, whose sole concern is an impeaching a president over two casual sentences in a phone call, will be catastrophic. But she has run out of rope.

Impeachment proceedings are a given, because her caucus now almost unanimously demands it, and her caucus demands it because the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the Resistance crazies and the hard left. Pelosi has also run out of cute euphemisms for impeachment—the usual Pelosi mumbo-jumbo, like “inquiry,” “investigation,” and “official inquiry,” no longer work without giving the crazies the real deal.

Mr Bardmesser is clearly hoping for a fight.  Pajamas Media's Matt Margolis is also of the view that the hopheads are in the saddle, and that the House Democrats will reveal themselves as crazy.  "One Democrat senator who spoke anonymously said that Nancy Pelosi wants to keep the scope of the impeachment inquiry as 'narrow' as possible. This anonymous senator supports a broader inquiry but said that 'people are worried' about an internal political fallout."

AN AVERAGE HAND CONTAINS A STRAIGHT, ACE HIGH.

Do the math, dear reader, there are four hands of thirteen cards in contract bridge, thus, although in social play there is an above-the-line bonus for holding the cards of a royal flush in one hand, that's only ten high card points, and it helps to have a few more honor cards to essay a contract.

Seventeen high-card points and distribution in my hand; ten high card points and some strength in the suits other than Hearts.  Here's what I mean about a not-regular Saturday bridge column: this simulation dates to late June, while I was still attempting to understand how the bots bid, thus I did a simple raise, and the partner bot interpreted that (correctly) as sufficient length in Hearts.  Game on.  West leads the ♥2 (leading conventions are not something I fully understand, particularly bottom from three in the trump suit): Three, Six, Eight.  Cheap trick: perhaps that was intended to take one ruff in Clubs or Spades away, given West's short holdings.

No obvious way to avoid losing a trick each to the ♠A and the ♦A; there's a ♣K and a lot of establishable Clubs outstanding should I make a major error.  Otherwise, looks like ten tricks, forced.

I opt for what I understand to be a safe course: ♣2 to the Ace (there aren't enough Clubs in my control to worry about combinations); lead the ♣Q to a ruff (all the Hearts in hand are controlling); lead the ♠K with the intent of smoking out the Ace and promoting the Queen and Jack; West covers, so far so good, returns the ♦2 (again, bottom of three?): Three, Eight, Queen.  The ♦A is still out, we'll see that it's immaterial whether playing it now or saving it to cover the King.  (But there was one time, in a simulation I didn't record, when the East bot was holding the King to guard the Queen and it didn't grasp that when West showed out, I had that King surrounded, for at least one overtrick.  Information technologies aren't necessarily more clever than humans.)  Again, I opt to drive out the Ace with the ♦5: Four, King, Ace.  But now there are no Diamonds left in hand, and when East returns the ♦6, I cover with the ♥J, lead out the three remaining Hearts, then the ♠Q that I promoted at the fourth trick, the ♠7 to the ♠J and we're done.  In retrospect the ♠2 in hand to the Jack, then back with the Six to the Queen, and lead out the Seven for an overtrick rather than having to lead the ♣J to West's King in garbage time might have been better practice.  It takes time to develop sufficient sight of the table to consider that possibility, or to watch for West covering the Two with the Three, which promotes the Nine ...