INSIDERS INTERVIEWING INSIDERS DEVOID OF INSIGHTS.

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

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

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

IS SHE GOING TO SEND IT OUT FOR PEER REVIEW?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REALITY HAS NO RESPECT FOR YOUR EXPERTISE.

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

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

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

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

THE PERILS OF RAILWAY PRESERVATION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WIN SOME, WINSOME, LOSE SOME.

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

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

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

CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR GRIDLOCK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More to come, no doubt.

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

That post concludes with references.

DON'T GET YOUR HOPES UP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's too bad for consumers.

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

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

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

THE CHEQUAMEGON FOREST HEFFALUMP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE IVIES FOULED UP, COMMUNITY COLLEGES HARDEST HIT.

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

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

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

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

RECLAIMING THE CULTURE, ONE STARLET AT A TIME.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THINKING LIKE AN ECONOMIST?

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

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

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

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

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

EIGHTY YEARS AGO.

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

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

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

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

Truman gave the order. He dropped the bomb.

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

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

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

THE BONFIRE OF BODY POSITIVITY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GRADUALLY, THEN ALL AT ONCE?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CULTURE-STUDIES INCANTATIONS HAVE LOST THEIR POWER.

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

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

BAD STUDENTS CUT MORE THAN ONE CORNER.

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

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

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

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

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

HINTS OF ADVANCED AGE.

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

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

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

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

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

WILL SAVARIN CATER STATE DINNERS?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROCESS PRECLUDES PRODUCTIVITY?

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

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

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

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

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

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