BACK TO SCHOOL.

Yes, there are lots of Eventful Things going on.  Those can wait for next month.  We'll close out August, and the summer season, with the University of Wisconsin Marching Band playing their way off a heritage trolley.

Enjoy the long weekend.  Find yourself a preservation railway and ride it.

ON MY WORKBENCH.

There have been a few itinerant circuses touring the State Line this summer.  The Karlson Brothers Circus also went on tour, showing at the Circus Model Builders national gathering in Auburn, New York.

Years ago, when the model builders showed in Auburn, it was in an honest-to-Hoxie Tucker big top, complete with ten large scale circus wagons alongside the models in more easily transported scales.  The summer show was in the Finger Lakes Mall, which in the manner of malls nationwide, has a lot of vacant space available for banquets or exhibitions.

There was light foot traffic through the show hall the three days of the show, and there was ample time to do model building.

HOW DO YOU SCOUT BLOCKING AND TACKLING?

So ran the lament during the Lombardi era in Green Bay.

There are fundamentals in baseball as well.

People in baseball keep warning me: Don’t get carried away with the Milwaukee Brewers.

The Brewers’ batted-ball luck is insane, they say. Their 53-17 record since May 24 might be a classic case of peaking early. Come the postseason, they could be headed for another quick flameout.

All true. But even though the Brewers’ 14-game winning streak ended Sunday with a 3-2 loss to the Cincinnati Reds in 10 innings, their record is best in the majors by six games. The team that opened the season with the sport’s eighth lowest payroll is putting the competition to shame.

There’s a lesson here, if anyone in baseball cares to heed it. The lesson is in every ball the Brewers put in play and every runner they advance, every cutoff man they hit and every extra base they take. The Brewers are not perfect – Sunday’s loss included a critical error to open the ninth by Brice Turang at shortstop and two botched bunts in the late innings. But they at least try to play the game properly at a time when most teams place too little emphasis on fundamentals and too much on the next big analytical thing.

Baseball is a different sort of game, in that you can't put the ball in Bart Starr's or Giannis's hands in a tight situation, and beginning players ought be coached in Little League (and here is where the helicopter parents really ought chill) in the ways each player can keep the line moving, or stop the other team's line from moving.

Can someone please explain why clubs fixate on enhancing pitchers’ fastball velocities and hitters’ exit velocities but fail to properly instruct players on running the bases and hitting the cutoff man? Why can’t organizations focus on both?

The Brewers are an outlier, exploiting a new market inefficiency – knowing how to play baseball. They obsess over little things, in part, because they generally do not pay for superstars who do big things. Most Brewers make too little money and possess too little service time to defy their detail-oriented leader, manager Pat Murphy. And the team’s highest-paid player, left fielder Christian Yelich, practices what Murphy preaches, inspiring his teammates to do the same.

The advantage in the playoffs might be with the big payrolls, and yet if you take care of the base running and the position of fielders on each ball put in play, the World Series might take care of itself.

The Brewers entered Sunday tied for fifth in sacrifice bunts and sixth in sacrifice flies, and also were second in stolen bases. They scrap. They drive opponents to distraction. They beat teams in any number of ways.

“I think we need to take a page out of the Brewers’ book,” Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder Bryan Reynolds said Wednesday. “They just do everything right. They base run, they take the extra base, they put the ball in play, swing at strikes. I think we could benefit a lot from trying to have the same kind of game style.”

It’s not just the small-market teams that could benefit, it’s every team. Here’s to the little things that make baseball beautiful. Here’s to baseball’s version of David using slingshots on the sport’s Goliaths. Here’s to the Brewers, however long they continue the fun.

Indeed.

IN SIGHT IT MUST BE RIGHT.

It took Canadian Pacific nearly twenty years to scrap their motion mark and restore the beaver to their herald.  Cracker Barrel thought better of their meaningless mod, and the current herald shall remain.  Was it "customer backlash?"  "Conservative backlash?"  "Right-wing backlash?"  Or none of the above?  "When people get tired of things being broken, they seek to restore a state of good repair."

Perhaps, as Pajamas Media's Matt Margolis argues, it was much ado about very little.

To me, this looks more like a fairly common branding move than culture warfare—though plenty of people are eager to frame it that way.

The logo change comes as part of bigger shifts inside Cracker Barrel. Over the past year, dozens of locations have been remodeled with a brighter, more modern interior design aimed at drawing younger diners. To longtime customers, that feels like betrayal; to the boardroom, it looks like survival.

Rebrands always carry risk. Some companies pull off modern updates, others flop—but in an age of sleek, minimalist branding built for smartphones and social media, Cracker Barrel is hardly the first to try.

The problem is that chasing trends often means alienating the very customers who made you successful. That’s exactly what happened here. It happens.

For me, though, this isn’t a hill conservatives need to die on. Sure, Cracker Barrel has pandered to the left before, and the new logo is unimpressive. But does it really change your life? There are real battles in the culture war worth fighting—a restaurant chain’s sloppy logo refresh isn’t one of them.

Perhaps so, although in a world of consumers weary of service degradation being spun as an "improved experience" or something similar, that it was Cracker Barrel's remaining diners pushing back might be part of a general trend of the Normals saying Enough to Their Progressive Betters.

CIRCUS DAYS.

At the beginning of summer, the Carden International Circus worked with the Zor Shrine Temple to put on a performance in Janesville, Wisconsin.

The Culpepper and Merriweather Circus have also been touring the State Line, and on August 10 had a muddy lot in Richland Center and a large turnout of children of all ages to entertain.

The training thunderstorms that caused a great deal of havoc in Milwaukee and drenched the interstate highways in the Rockford area mostly went to the southeast, thus the people of Richland County weren't worrying about flooded basements.

MEANINGLESS MOD.

Once upon a time, Canada meant red-coated Mounties and Canadian Pacific trains tackling the Selkirks and the Rockies.  From far and wide, a beaver stood on guard for that company.

Sometime during the declining years of the American High, a lot of railroads engaged in makeovers, sometimes, it seemed, to conceal the fact that they even were railroads.  It might have been putting new paint on rusty steel without chipping it first.

Had the Tonight Show recorded in Boston, the whole country would know about the Boston & Maine and New Haven of the era.  "Herbert Matter could put new paint on the New Haven and on the Boston and Maine, but if the trains were unreliable, it made no difference."

What of Lippincott and Marguiles?  "There were other memorable railroad image updates, some of them tied to Lippincott & Margulies. One was notorious, the “mating worms” logo of the new Penn Central of 1968. Another was Amtrak’s “pointless arrow” and patriotic red, white, and blue of 1971."

Canadian Pacific, which at the time was a transportation company flying planes, sailing Empress class ocean liners on the seven seas, operating trucks to go where the trains did not (something that was heavily regulated Stateside) and for all I know stabling sled dogs to meet the trucks where the road ended and the snow pack began, and operating hotels in the big cities and the resorts of the Rockies, engaged in one of those image updates, in which lots of money went into creative types coming up with a Motion Mark.

These were colour-coded, orange for the Concorde they never flew and the conventional jets they did fly, green for the funnels (a square shape on a raked funnel is an abomination, but that's the way they sailed) and brown or gold for the china at the hotels.

With that background in mind, dear reader, let us contemplate, with Pajamas Media's Matt Margolis, Cracker Barrel's simplified herald.

When Cracker Barrel unveiled its new logo this week, the company framed it as a blend of tradition and progress. Conservatives, however, erupted with outrage. Personally, I think folks need to take a breath, and I’m going to tell you why. I have a feeling many of you won’t agree with me, but hear me out.

“Anchored in Cracker Barrel’s signature gold and brown tones, the updated visuals will appear across menus and marketing collateral, including the fifth evolution of the brand’s logo, which is now rooted even more closely to the iconic barrel shape and word mark that started it all,” the company explained in a press release.

It's the same sort of corporate-speak that accompanies the roll-out of a new herald, whether at a corporation or at a university.  Northern Illinois University was way ahead of Cracker Barrel coming up with a simplified herald that looked like a Stratego piece the better to conserve pixels on their web page.  The faculty didn't like it, but, oh, well.

WOKE RUINS EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES.

The latest in metrofexual silliness, courtesy of Vox.  "Gen Z created a new type of man to avoid."  Well, yes, if you apply the concept of "man" loosely.

If you live in a major city, you might have seen what looks like a hipster drag show playing out in a park or on a sidewalk recently: a parade of young men strutting with tote bags, holding up feminist literature, and showing off their newly purchased vinyls.

That guess wouldn’t be totally wrong. Over the past month, Gen Z has been holding public contests all over the country, and even internationally, awarding the best impressions of a “performative male,” the latest meme taking off on TikTok.

The slang is a bit misleading. A “performative male” doesn’t perform traditional masculinity à la a “gym bro.” Rather, he’s curated a notably alt, intellectual, and, in Gen Z terms, “soft” aesthetic, often with the purpose of attracting progressive women. Other markers of a “performative male” include drinking matcha, reading bell hooks, listening to women singer-songwriters, and carrying emergency tampons.

Figures.  Once upon a time it was bad form to refer to strident women or mincing men, and now perhaps the mincing men are attempting to score with the strident women.  Or not.

The trend seems to be largely in good fun, poking fun at men who do, in fact, genuinely like matcha and Mitski. It’s partially inspired by the slew of celebrity lookalike contests last year that highlighted people’s enjoyment of dressing up in silly costumes, as well as their desire for a public square. As Seattle’s “performative male” contest winner, Malik Marcus Jernigan, told me, most of the men participating, including himself, casually embody the joke.

“My friend had sent me the flyer saying I had a good chance at winning, so I decided to participate to make them proud,” says Jernigan, a 24-year-old musician. “I feel as if for the most part it is either ‘performative males’ poking fun at themselves or women poking fun at them online — all lighthearted in nature.”

The article being a Vox article, you just know that the culture studies types are going to inject themselves, and not in a good way.

But there’s also a darker interpretation: Maybe these men are not what they seem, and perhaps their tastes and behaviors are all a deception. The “performative male” has joined a group of suspicious masculine archetypes that came before it, like the two-faced “wife guy” and toxic “male manipulator.”

So how did these signifiers of a “performative male” come to fall under suspicion? Should you really be worried about dating a man who listens to Clairo? Is it so bad to be “performative,” when gender is inherently a performance?

From “hipsters” to “soft boys” to its more derogatory offshoot, “cuckboi,” the internet has long questioned the integrity of this genre of men who eschew traditional representations of masculinity, either through their personal style or consumption habits.

In the age of TikTok, the average person, even one who doesn’t live in Bushwick, has become a lot more familiar with men who embrace a sense of freedom around gender. According to Jordan Foster, assistant professor of sociology at MacEwan University, the app has given average men a “historically novel public visibility, making a significant difference to their public presentation and also their ability to play with their gender presentation.”

Still, this exposure to and wider acceptance of this genre of men hasn’t exactly made us less confused about them. On the one hand, they’re often assumed to be emotionally intelligent and “unproblematic,” politically progressive if not outrightly feminist. But is it really all an act?

Of course it all is.  Remember "Chicks say yes to guys who say no?"  Or Blind Date with the bad boys getting all the reality TV action?  So there might be a few people genuinely unburdened by any sense of convention, and there might be lots of players.  As well as a few Minimal Publishable Units.

It seems like the internet is caught in a perpetual cycle of glorifying and later questioning the integrity of these men whenever they gain publicity. Pop singer Harry Styles, for example, was once lauded for dancing with men in his music videos and wearing feminine articles of clothing. For a time, though, he also faced charges of “queer-baiting,” a term to describe the appropriation of queer aesthetics by straight, cis men for their own personal and professional advantage.

Foster finds that skepticism around men who don these aesthetics is partly a conversation around privilege. “The critique is that men are reaping the sort of social and symbolic set of rewards for participating in these feminized and sometimes queer aesthetics without bearing any of the costs that have typically circled around queer and marginalized men or women,” Foster says.

It isn’t just that these signifiers seem strategic or shallow, but rather, they can read as misleading. The MeToo movement showed us that even supposed “nice guys” could be capable of alleged manipulation and abuse — that in fact, they could use their enlightenment as a kind of shield. Now, the kind of guy who goes to therapy while also treating his partner badly has become flattened into a starter-pack-style meme. And the faux-enlightened man has become a frequent observation in pop culture.

In what could be read as an effort to rehabilitate his image following allegations of domestic abuse from his ex-wife Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt has taken on a more gender-fluid approach to fashion. Before actor Jonathan Majors received two misdemeanor charges in a domestic-violence case last year, he did a viral magazine shoot wearing all pink and discussed how his idea of masculinity involved “kindness” and “gentleness.” These were major celebrities with PR teams. Could their gender flexibility have been an attempt to ward off bad press? It’s impossible to say, but what observers have seen does color the discourse.

It came to this when "bourgeois" became a pejorative, didn't it?  Thus, "[M]any people have lost sight of what a healthy level of discernment in dating looks like."

ECHOES OF THE KAISER'S NAVY.

Schützenfest season continues, and here's video of Sunday's Königsparade (there are several excuses to break out the flags and the bands) from Dormagen-Delhoven, which is upriver a few kilometers from Düsseldorf.  I'm learning a few more things about the participants.  You'll see pioneers in seventeenth-century headgear carrying polished axes and saws; they would be clearing the way for the troops.  I've also seen more than one parade group in naval uniform carrying the Kaiser's version of the Navy Jack.

Those units all marched in the opening of the parade.

DON'T THEY KNOW THERE'S A WAR ON?

Reuters reports, "Parts of Russia face gasoline shortages after Ukraine struck refineries."  Apparently, the right kind of drone can sometimes get through.

Since early August, Ukraine has targeted a number of oil refineries including Novokuibyshevsk, Syzran, Ryazan and Volgograd in response to Moscow's missile and drone attacks.

In Russia's far eastern region of Primorye, local media reported lines stretching back kilometres (miles) as motorists queued to fill up with gasoline. Authorities blamed an influx of tourists.

NNK, an oil company, said many of its gasoline carriers in the region were stuck in traffic jams for three to six hours at a time due to repair works on the roads, according to local media.

Tourists, not refugees?  Additionally, there aren't many improved transcontinental roads into Siberia and the Far East.

Yevgeny Balitsky, Moscow-appointed governor of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region, which is mostly under Russian control, said on Thursday that gasoline retail sales in several areas were suffering problems because of peak demand and refinery maintenance.

"In the Zaporizhzhia region, the fuel shortage is further complicated by logistics issues and the threat of enemy attacks on fuel trains," he said.

Sergei Aksyonov, the head of Crimea - which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 - also acknowledged fuel problems in an interview with a local TV station this week.

"This is an objective situation, which could last for up to a month more," he said, while adding that the issue would not be fully resolved until the conflict ends.

Russians might be more patient with their government.  I remember gripes, a few months into IRAQI FREEDOM, about the Army in Iraq and civilians at the mall.

WAIT THE CRAZIES OUT?

Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor recognizes that the punishment cycles of the grim strategy outcome are playing out with the state legislatures engaging in unprecedented reapportionments of their Congressional districts.

It is an honest and disturbing sign of the times that there isn’t even a token attempt at justifying this behavior. Trump demands more seats; the party provides.

This will likely spark other states to follow suit. In the abstract, I don’t think any of this is good for the health of American democracy, but I also fear we have crossed a threshold in which tit-for-tat is unavoidable.

I am normatively opposed to this kind of manipulation and empirically think it is bad for representative democracy. The next likely move is by California, which will require a referendum to amend the state’s constitution.

It should be noted that the core problem with US House elections is that, for a number of reasons, they are not competitive, but are instead foregone conclusions on balance (only about 10% of seats in 2024 were truly competitive). This is a huge problem for American democracy, to the point that even without this mid-cycle manipulation, there are days when I wonder how democratic things are/have been. Making elections even more predestination instead of competitive takes us in the wrong direction on that count.

One of these days there will be a political scientist who looks at all the ways in which legislatures can go wrong, and how those ways proliferate as the population being governed increases, and come out with a vigorous endorsement of those Ninth and Tenth Amendment powers wherever possible?  Once the punishment cycles start, getting out, as he notes, is hard.  But he has his pet remedy (is there an academician, anywhere, who does not?)

The issue on the table to me, at this point, is not a debate about what is the best way to district; it is a question of whether one party should be allowed to further manipulate the system while the other party unilaterally disarms out of a sense of principle. And the context here is that the party seeking to further manipulate the system is actively supporting an authoritarian agenda.

As such, do voters in CA stand by and allow the pro-authoritarian party to further consolidate power, or do the voters of CA provide a somewhat anemic push to forestall that consolidation?

Given that Trump will have two full years to govern after the midterms, the question is, what can be done to at least slow him down? Democrats winning control of the House is probably the closest thing to a bulwark that can be generated against his onslaught on the system. Making an already highly flawed system to elect the House even more flawed, but in a way that fights authoritarianism and hopefully increases representativeness on the national level (even as it damages it on the state level), is worth the price, in my view.

Of course, I ultimately would prefer we move to multi-seat districts and [proportional representation] elections.

I'm waiting for the Fans of Parliament Caucus in the American Political Science Association to endorse an Article V Convention of the States in order to debate a resolution favoring such a restructuring of Congress.  That convention might be even more fun if the cube root rule came up.

Again, this is not new and is one of many problems with single-seat districts. There is no incentive for an elected representative to actually represent all of their constituents. Ironically, one of the arguments deployed against multi-seat districts is that citizens won’t know who “their” representative is, but the reality of winner-take-all single-seat districts is that the winner only feels the political need to represent their co-partisans (or, worse, just the faction that can re-nominate them in the primary). There is a reason, for example, as to why so many Republicans see no need to hold town halls these days.

Another aspect of the piece that should be raised, the authors ignore the fact that prior to the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” the Democratic Party was a far broader coalition of liberals and conservatives, and was dispersed geographically in ways that are no longer the case.

Expand the House, get more Lauren Boeberts and more Ilhan Omars.

INDIRECTLY ENDORSING A CORE CURRICULUM?

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed reconsiders the right to repeatedly fail.

If someone needs to fail calculus several times to figure out that engineering might not be the path for them, this camp would say, then so be it. Sometimes the ninth time is the charm. Failure may be the best teacher, but sometimes even the best teacher needs some repetition to get the point across.

Early in my career, I was sympathetic to this viewpoint. After all, it applies in many other spheres of endeavor. For example, it became brutally clear at a young age that professional baseball was not in my future; I indulged my right to fail nearly every time I swung a bat. Crashing out as hard as I did, as early as I did, spared me the frustration that many players feel later in life when they top out in the minor leagues but keep trying to redeem years of sunk cost. Sales positions involve rapid and frequent failure. Actors and comedians know well what it is to crater an audition or to bomb in front of a crowd. Learning what doesn’t work is part of learning what does. Why should academia be any different? Besides, some people are late bloomers, and community colleges are all about second chances.

We'll return, some other day, to why entertainment and organized sports can get away with high performance standards, while Soft America holds sway nearly everywhere else, including higher education.

ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.

Long-time Milwaukee Brewer announcer Bob Uecker, who departed this life in January, had a self-deprecating way of describing his career as a Major League catcher.  The story around Milwaukee these days is about the Heavenly Host hearing all about how well the Brewers have been playing since he left.

One of the few Brewers who knew last year how ill Mr Uecker was was outfielder and designated hitter Christian Yelich, who had a Bob Uecker bat made up for the 2024 Players Weekend.  (There are rules governing the use of special bats.)  Because of an injury, he could not use that bat last season.  Instead, he used the bat Friday evening in Cincinnati, when it looked like the winning streak would end at twelve games with the hamburgers secured.

Four marks for four hits that Brewers fans will never forget. Christian Yelich on the comeback, the bat, and what Bob Uecker meant to him. pic.twitter.com/oLDl1m06Or

— Adam McCalvy (@AdamMcCalvy) August 16, 2025

Yes, the Crew rallied from seven down to win the game.

Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Christian Yelich went sicko mode on Friday night against the Cincinnati Reds, perhaps in part because of his bat.

Of course, that’s a necessary piece of equipment for any baseball player. You don’t do anything without a bat in your hand. But Yelich’s bat had an abnormal, yet special, twist from the normal Louisville Slugger you tend to see.

It’s Player’s Weekend in the MLB, which means that anyone who wants to make a bat with a special design can. Yelich chose to honor the late, legendary Brewers broadcaster Bob Uecker with his, after he passed in January 2025.

There must have been some magic in that special bat he found, because when he put it in his hands the team rallied 'round.

Evidently, that twig brought him some good luck. Yelich would go 4-5 on the night with two home runs and a double in a 10-8 win for the Brew Crew.

The Reds did end the Brewer winning streak at fourteen on Sunday and the Cubs still have a few things to say about the outcome of the division race.  The hamburgers are being served up in Milwaukee this afternoon.

BACK TO SCHOOL.

Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux offers a warm-up challenge to economics students.

[T]he naive protectionist (of which there are many today) will reply with what he or she supposes is a “Gotcha!” This protectionist will note the obvious fact that food is necessary for life. From this fact the protectionist will proceed to argue that if the nation isn’t producing enough food to feed its own people, the people of the nation are dependent upon foreigners for their very lives. This situation (the protectionist continues by asking about the event of war) is intolerable. “We must restrict food imports so that we once again build, here at home, the capacity to feed ourselves. We simply cannot be dependent on foreigners for something as vital as food.”

To economically uninformed people, this protectionist sounds reasonable, and perhaps even unanswerable. But economics alerts us to several problems with this protectionist way of thinking.

So here’s the contest. Using no more than 500 words, identify one of these several problems with this protectionist’s argument, and email your answer to me.

There might be more than one problem with the objection as he poses it, and his rules allow for keen students to identify more than one problem, but each problem merits a separate entry.  He will publish the best responses in some future post.

THE TRAGIC VISION COMES FOR C.J. POLYCHRONIOU.

He has often provided us with amusement, and more recently, with a taste of the desperation among self-styled progressives.  Now reality might be dawning.  "Ukraine and Gaza Confirm That the Post-War International Order Is Obsolete."

Well, yeah, Poly, you're a little late to the party.

Twenty years after Victory, the victory babies we knew as the Baby Boomers chafed at the regimentation of the American High, and perhaps their parents, who knew not how to exist without all that structure, vicariously enjoyed their children throwing it off.  And thus, to use the Fourth Turning typology, the Consciousness Revolution gives way to an unraveling of everything, and that eventually exposes the weaknesses of the old values regime.  "Normals put up with the nanny state as long as its nannying was limited in scope and duration.  Thus the 55 mph speed limits after the 1974 oil embargo or the security theater after the airplane hijackings or even the financial bailouts after affordable housing proved to be a sham did not prompt the rebellion."  Then came the corona tyranny.  The lies are the problem.  And "the public is becoming accustomed to being lied to."

That brings us to our present.  "Just like that, 'government is force' hit everyone in the face, and 'the Wise Experts ... aren't' dawned on more than a few among us.  And that, dear reader, is the way saecular orders fracture."

Poly, however, continues to hope for the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Alexandra Boutri: Under what circumstances can you imagine the restructuring of the current world order architecture and the end of capitalism?

C. J. Polychroniou: Unfortunately, I cannot imagine the restructuring of the world order architecture or the end of capitalism in my own lifetime. Such radical transformations would mandate, first and foremost, the end of the nation-state and the subsequent rise of cosmopolitanism. The driving force behind the formation of the nation-state was capitalism itself, so the two are deeply intertwined even though global capitalism gives the impression that it seeks to transcend the nation-state framework but, in reality, depends on it for its own expansion. Be that as it may, the point is that neither international law nor the UN collective security system work in preventing wars and resolving conflicts. Certain progress in human affairs notwithstanding, we continue to live in a dark and brutal world.

Efforts to end the nation-state in favor of whatever that "cosmopolitanism" means might be the most effective way to make the darkness, and the brutality, worse.

WHAT'S NEXT, MORE BONUS ARMIES FOR HOLDING AFRICA?

When you start fretting about the Mercator Projection, you've probably run out of Third World Problems, or perhaps, you'd rather not deal.  "African Union Wants End to Mercator Projection Map Use Over 'Disinformation'."  For the reasons that anyone with a smattering of geographical knowledge is long familiar with.

“It might seem to be just a map, but in reality, it is not,” AU Commission deputy chairperson Selma Malika Haddadi told Reuters, saying the Mercator fostered a false impression that Africa was “marginal”, despite being the world’s second-largest continent by area, with over a billion people. The AU has 55 member states.

Such stereotypes influence media, education and policy, she said.

Criticism of the Mercator map is not new, but the ‘Correct The Map’ campaign led by advocacy groups Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa has revived the debate, urging organisations to adopt the 2018 Equal Earth projection, which tries to reflect countries’ true sizes.

“The current size of the map of Africa is wrong,” Moky Makura, executive director of Africa No Filter, said. “It’s the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop.”

Fara Ndiaye, co-founder of Speak Up Africa, said the Mercator affected Africans’ identity and pride, especially children who might encounter it early in school.

It's not that other projections haven't existed.  My grade school political geography book used the Goode homolosine projection with interruptions in the oceans to keep the major land masses together.  The front matter in that book explained the construction of the map as comparable to peeling an orange and keeping the skin flat.  It would not be useful as a map to plot a course from Alameda to Hong Kong by way of Midway, Wake, and Manila.  "On a Mercator projection, a meridian bears true (rather than magnetic) north and it appears as a straight line. On other projections, straight lines pose challenges, particularly where variation of longitude is concerned."  A Mercator projection preserves the orthogonality of east-west and north-south, at the expense of distortion of space away from the equator.  South America and Africa straddle the equator, thus their projection is to a smaller scale than Greenland or Australia.

MONEY-HEMORRHAGING JOKES RUN BY IDIOTS.

That's Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan referring to Ohio University's Richard Vedder calling attention to the money-suck that College Sports has become.  Some of those links might now be gone to the Happy Linking Grounds, but the self-destruction and self-beclowning of higher education, and the money-hemorrhaging, goes on and on.

Professor Vedder has continued to call attention, most recently in Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education, which is a follow-on-if-only-you-had-listened to his Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs too Much of two decades ago.

I'm able to keep Book Review N^o. 7 brief as the "Ten Cardinal Sins" he enumerates to open Let Colleges Fail are the kind of thing regular readers of Cold Spring Shops have been hearing from me for years.  It's much easier sometimes to simply agree, and then sigh as we have been fighting it out along these lines for years and the craziness goes on and on and on.

CALVINBALL ONLY MAKES THE GRIDLOCK MORE AMUSING.

I usually present that position using more restrained language.

Dalibor Rohac, who writes for The Bulwark, provokes the reader.  "Too Much Democracy Is Killing Democracy."  His wish?  "A more boring politics, populated by forgettable yet basically competent figures instead of fame-craving clowns and provocateurs would be a great place to start."  These days, politics is anything but, whether in Hungary or the United States or ... France or Canada???

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.

It's amusing, though, to watch Democrats attempting to use the normative political science of their court intellectuals to rig the rules in such a way as to be able to rule forever.  "The Democrats have plans to expand the Supreme Court, eliminate the filibuster, and more."  Their latest It Girl without irony hopes Team Donk can prevent any more wild swings in policy from occurring.

Jasmine Crockett tells a crowd in Martha’s Vineyard that “once the Democrats get control,” they must “get bold” by expanding the Supreme Court, passing “ethics” reform, and eliminating the filibuster.

Translation: The Democrats will run the same playbook — undermining the… pic.twitter.com/QOhBQJUf8f

— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) August 15, 2025

It hasn't occurred to her, has it, that boldness plus overreach plus loosened restraints on changing laws will lead to course corrections far beyond what is possible now.  You think jamming changes through on bare majorities using reconciliation is annoying?  Try jamming all possible changes through on bare majorities.

THE STROAD IS THE CULPRIT.

We first noted the folly of North Carolina officialdom charging parents with child neglect when Reason's Lenore Skenazy called attention, as we'd expect Reason contributors do, to the excesses of the Nanny State.

The children involved in a fatal car crash were attempting to cross what is effectively a limited-access highway in Gastonia.

The "1000 block of West Hudson" is Hudson west of Lyon, and if the kids were headed from a residence southeast of that corner to the store on the northwest corner, they might have been hard-pressed to find a crosswalk along Hudson, let alone a sidewalk on the south side of Hudson.  Standard car-brain infrastructure, undoubtedly someone, somewhere, figured that nobody would be walking there.  Nobody bothers to walk there, no injury accidents to document in order to provide crosswalks or sidewalks, no crosswalks or sidewalks.  Then a kid goes there.  Thus, Gastonia; thus, downtown Springfield, Massachusetts.

There's more thinking to do about the "level of service" obsession of road planners.  Many of the exurbs that began as neighborhoods for people with disposable income have been left behind for a variety of reasons.  "[N]eighborhoods that might have been zoned in all earnestness for automobile owners to have become neighborhoods where car ownership is not necessarily a given for the new residents."

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS DOING WHAT THEY PLEASE.

In "Hurricane Warning Warning," Power Line contributor Bill Glahn notes, "It’s that time of the year. Time to frighten everyone to death for every thunderstorm in the Atlantic basin for the next three months."  Or, perhaps, to give The Weather Channel travelling squad opportunities to travel, or perhaps to collect overtime.

From the National Hurricane Center, the state of play as of midafternoon Tuesday, is Erin drawing on lots of warm sea water and causing beach warnings along the Outer Banks.

National Hurricane Center graphic.

Mr Glahn continues,

Media outlets are desperate for clicks, but few readers will feel the impacts of this distant storm.

Erin has already caused significant problems in the eastern Caribbean, and authorities are already taking precautionary measures in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. But the rest of the Northern Hemisphere can relax. Until the next overhyped, megastorm forms.

Around 4 pm yesterday, The Weather Channel were running an Erin special going through all the possibilities for the beaches further north, and the desk staff seemed a bit apologetic about having to break away from their hurricane speculations to report on training thunderstorms rolling into Chicago.  (The electrical storm displays were spectacular.)  Last weekend the trains rolled into Milwaukee, now it's Chicago's turn, and the trains will keep running until all that extra atmospheric water from an undersea volcanic eruption precipitates out.

It is too soon to draw any conclusions about how the 2025 hurricane season will play out.  Last year, it was quiet toward the end of August but then came a couple of hurricanes bringing major flooding and a possible blot on the Jarrett regency's copybook.  There have been five named storms thus far in the Atlantic.  There are currently no tropical cyclones in the eastern or central Pacific.

THE SOUNDS OF FREEDOM.

I understand the value of stealth technology.  "It probably defeats the purpose of having a stealthy drone to make it sound like a B-17 or a formation of Mustangs."

Sometimes, though, you want the sound.

And if you don't see it coming and then you hear it?

He was cookin lol https://t.co/578I43qxh0 pic.twitter.com/ijrb4va8f8

— Chris Combs (iterative design enjoyer) (@DrChrisCombs) August 16, 2025

No, the Milwaukee Brewers were not softening up the opposition with shock and awe.  The latest generation of performance fighters have the capability to loosen windows even without going to 'burners.

Or perhaps you're welcoming a foreign leader to territory once part of his empire that your country bought fair and square in the 1860s.

Donald Trump flies a stealth bomber directly over Vladimir Putin's head.

Welcome to America!

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/2SRQEiPo1k

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) August 15, 2025

"You can see it, Vladimir Vladimirovich, but your radar can't."  It's enough stagecraft to impress the Trump-skeptical Jonathan Karl.

President Trump "does...know stagecraft. That was a made-for-television moment seeing him walk down one red carpet greeting Putin, walking down another red carpet, and then getting in to the presidential limo...He sees this is -- he has brought the Russian president to American soil. This is a home game for Donald Trump. He has brought him to -- to American land. He has done that flyover of the B-2 bomber, just like the B-2 bombers that took out the -- the air campaign against the Iranian nuclear facility, twalking by American firepower, and getting into the -- the most sensitive personal vehicle in America, the presidential limousine."

A number of the other recent stealth fighters were parked along the apron where the meeting took place.

"SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR" IS A PRETENTIOUS WAY OF SAYING "CREDENTIALED POPINJAY."

The United Nations use the term "special rapporteur" to identify an area specialist working under the rubric of human rights.  There are other terms for other sorts of area specialists.  In an ideal world you'd have somebody with extensive theoretical and practical knowledge of some area of human interaction, with a network of dispassionate colleagues to exchange ideas with, and a disposition to pay attention to the evidence.

We're talking about the United Nations, though, so throw the Platonic perfection into the East River.

Francesca Albanese is the UN special Rapporteur for Gaza, and she isn't just biased against Israel--that would be everybody at the United Nations--but a moral monster.

If you follow the news on Gaza in Pravda Media, you would think that Albanese is a voice of reason fighting for human rights. She speaks up for those with no voice.

"An advocate for Hamas," contends David Strom with Hot Air.  Jessica Corbett with Common Dreams (predictably) takes a different stance.

Albanese also shared her new joint statement with Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, special rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. They said that "in addition to bearing witness to an ongoing genocide we are also bearing witness to a 'medicide,' a sinister component of the intentional creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza which constitutes an act of genocide."

"Deliberate attacks on health and care workers, and health facilities, which are gross violations of international humanitarian law, must stop now," the pair continued. "There is a moral imperative for the international community to end the carnage and allow the people of Gaza to live on their land without fear of attack, killing, and starvation, and free from permanent occupation and apartheid."

Dear reader, what, precisely, is "the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health?"  Might that bar be set higher if, oh, public officials put the looneys into treatment, preferably not subject to the tender ministries of Nurse Ratched?  Might the remaining residents of Gaza attain a higher standard of physical and mental health if, oh, they had a government that put life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ahead of the jihad?

HOW PATHETIC IS WOMEN'S STUDIES?

Going into last year's presidential election, we had Dana Bash putting on a long face and noting that Democrat men were "low testosterone and don’t identify with real men."  But perhaps they were not toxic, at least not in her dating circles.  After the vote was certified, the girls cried and the (toxic?) boys played Minecraft.  And the people who make their living fretting about such things fret about how "right wing" the young men have become.

The cultural rot has reached a state, dear reader, in which even the soft boys are toxic.  "Soft Boys, Sad Boys & Bad Boys: What 'The Summer I Turned Pretty' Reveals About the Perception of Masculinity."

A MILWAUKEE PROMOTION TO COME.

Years ago, George Webb predicted that the (minor league) Milwaukee Brewers would win twelve straight games, and he promised to give away hamburgers.  Those Brewers never took him up on it.  Nor did the Milwaukee Braves, although they did win a World Series (and drop another one after winning the first three games.)

The current Milwaukee Brewers, though?  They opened the 1987 season with thirteen straight wins, in the American League at the time.  They closed out the 2018 season with twelve straight wins between the end of the regular season, a Game 163, and a sweep of the Colorado Rockies.  This year, Brewer fans were on Hamburger Watch a few weeks ago, when the team came out of the All-Star break with a pair of sweeps and subsequently notched eleven straight wins.  Seattle's current American League team frustrated Seattle's former American League team, now the National League Brewers, that time.

This year's Brewers?  Relentless.

Free burgers await.  "Milwaukee Brewers 12th straight win puts team one victory away from franchise history and revives iconic George Webb's historic burger giveaway."  The company will be announcing additional details for their promotion.  Meanwhile, there is meaningful baseball to come.

STOP CONCEALING DYSFUNCTION WITH WORD-NOISE.

Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan has been following gunplay in the Old West.  There's one set of rationalizations when people go around the bend in Montana.  "Open carry, permitless concealed carry, everybody armed to the teeth, drifts of drunk depressed delusional army vets dotting the hills like a host of golden daffodils."  And troubled Montanans, even people known to be seriously troubled, aren't committed.

Says here there are three veteran-focused public mental hospitals in the state, and though a lot of the people listed here are all wrong for a vet with trauma, the list is very long. I understand the distance problem, but he clearly should have been resident in a hospital while getting treatment and of course someone should have taken his guns away if he was so dangerous to others. Are we going to be hearing from any of his family?

Okay. Family claims relevant hospitals turned him down. Need for more detail here. No primary care doc to prescribe meds? And why does a delusional schizophrenic who scares his family have guns? Why did the NFL shooter have guns? Why did this absolutely insane woman who killed her four daughters have guns?

Fact is, states like Montana get their high gun violence (suicide and homicide) rate because people there care much more about personal liberty than community safety. There’s a reason we call it the wild west.

It's not much different elsewhere, she notes, because the culture-studies rhetoric makes community safety arbitrary, and probably oppressive.

[A]ny intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.

She's being hyperbolic to make a point, and yet, some sixty years ago, Sensitive People responded to the likes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by mainstreaming the looneys rather than looking more carefully at what sorts of treatments for people resident in the mental institutions worked (which might have been the better way to end the frontal lobotomies and shock therapy and all the rest).  It's not that I haven't warned you.

Culture-studies normativity intrudes on the skepticism. What happens next is not amusing. "[Scholarship is] defensible only to the extent that researchers conduct their work with a sober sense of purpose and in a way that respects the moral status of other people. The other, which may have its roots in postmodern thinking, is that science per se disrespects the moral status of other people: pick any pejorative ending in -centric and reflect." (But the former representative's speech primarily addressed the disrespect of the moral status of people born female: do we accuse the dominant ideology of transcentrism?)

Yes, the looneys are people with a moral status, and yet, don't the people beset by looneys also have moral status?

SOME STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT ECONOMIC GROWTH.

DeKalb's public schools are back in session as of today, 13 August.  It's all too much for the editorial board at Chicago's Tribune.  "Back to school? Summer shouldn’t be over this early."  Something about balancing the semesters such that the fall semester wraps up before Christmas.  And the obligatory nod to "the very real learning loss that takes place when kids press pause on their studies for months on end."  I don't recall any such fretting in the Leave It to Beaver era, and I've undoubtedly triggered somebody by pointing that out.  Too bad.  If they're serious about balancing the semesters, why did DeKalb bring all the kiddos in this morning only to dismiss at 11 am?

Students will soon be returning to Northern Illinois University as well.  It might be that students come to university equipped with conventional wisdom that is wrong, or they might be exposed to faculty lounge commonplaces that are misleading.  Dominic Pino contemplates the ways.

The problem is that people believe that the New Deal ended the Great Depression, free markets caused the Great Recession, the Industrial Revolution led to increased poverty, and free trade hollowed out America. They really, sincerely, believe these things to be true. And that really does matter.

“Conventional wisdom firmly holds” that the myths in the book “constitute strong evidence for expanding government’s role,” Gramm and Boudreaux write. If you think a lot of that government expansion has been detrimental, as conservatives do, then that conventional wisdom is socially harmful.

It can be a bit uncomfortable sometimes for conservatives to say that people’s beliefs can be socially harmful, because too often the follow-up to that is some kind of imposition on people’s freedom. Climate activists, for example, have argued that dissent from their alarmist view of climate change should be criminally prosecuted.

The role of education, as ever, is to equip students with the ability to determine when a man is talking rot, and the intellectual chops to ask the right questions, rather than to go straight to questioning somebody's motives or accusing him of a thought crime.

WHEN THE BONANZA IS PLAYED OUT.

Trains recalls, 75 years on, the closure of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad.

After 80 operating years as one of the most glamorous transport agencies of the old American West, the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, running from Reno to Carson City and Minden, Nev., closed its books on May 31 and on that day its last train rolled down a clear track into the realm of legend. To the end it maintained a mixed freight and passenger service daily except Sunday. Its canary yellow coaches with their open platforms and Pintsch lighting fixtures, and its right of way innocent of the improvements of modernity, remained through the years tangible links with the simplicities of the golden age of western railroading.

The V&T was the last of the so-called bonanza railroads. It was financed in 1869 by the nabobs of the Bank of California to carry down the ores of the celebrated Comstock Lode from Virginia City to the banks of the Carson River at Empire. The completion of the Pacific Railroad in May of that year made a connection with the Central Pacific at Reno an obvious move, and for many years the V&T carried through Pullmans and Silver Palace cars from San Francisco on its night trains. In 1905, as the mines of the Comstock shut down one after another, a branch was extended to the dairy center of Minden in Carson Valley, and in 1938 the main line between Carson City and Virginia City was abandoned.

The ferroequinologist press was more open in what contemporary observers call "foaming," but perhaps as the diesels were taking over the main line trains, and pressurized airliners and the first limited-access highways were where High Fashion was going, a good wallow in the lifestyles of the Gilded, er, Silver Age was cathartic.

Just a month before its abandonment the V&T’s No. 26, oldest of its operating locomotives, was destroyed by fire together with its Reno engine house. Many hundreds of people, attracted by the publicity attendant upon the railroad’s abandonment, journeyed to Nevada during its last few weeks to take a last ride on “the little train to yesterday.” The private car Gold Coast, property of historians Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg. which had made the V & T its “home” railroad for the past three years, was one of the last pieces of rolling stock to be moved from Carson City and spotted on the Southern Pacific at Sparks, just outside Reno. A last shipment of Comstock gold and silver bullion was carried out in a Wells Fargo treasure chest from the Donovan Mine in Gold Hill. Throughout the West, newspapers lamented the passing of an old Nevada institution.

The V&T was probably the most written about, most photographed, most painted and most admired short line railroad in history. No history of Nevada or the Comstock failed to mention it as one of the wonders of its engineering age. It occupied a notable chapter in Gilbert Kneiss’ Bonanza Railroads, and Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg wrote an official book-length history entitled Virginia & Truckee, A Story of Virginia City and Comstock Times. It was painted by such railroad artists as Sheldon Pennoyer and Howard Fogg and was photographed by many hundreds of railroad fans. During its last days it was not uncommon for 20 or 30 cameras to be trained upon its morning arrival and switching operations in the Carson yards.

Trains subsequently ran a feature on that roundhouse fire (the locomotive was spotted on the turntable over a pit that had filled with oil, and steam locomotives have ash pits) titled something like "A Case of Suicide?" in the same issue of the magazine that grudgingly acknowledged the tour of a demonstrator freight locomotive with the title "The Diesel that Did It."  That Lucius Beebe was a New York grandee who had the means to live the high life and write Social Commentary for that city's Times likely contributed to the fame of the railroad.

Starting in 1972, an enthusiast began rebuilding segments of the Virginia and Truckee as a tourist railroad.  There was a steam-powered Polar Express during the 2024 Festive Season.  True to the line's Gilded Age roots, de luxe steam cars run on the train.

STOP ENABLING DYSFUNCTION, YOU MIGHT GET LESS OF IT.

It's unlikely that any influential Democrat will take advice from Cold Spring Shops.

Last year, it was "Yes, without food, healthcare, and safety initiatives, Americans will die or get sick, whether they voted for Trump or not."

This year, it's more of the same.  "The Republican War Against the Working Poor Continues."  Because all that social spending has worked so well at enabling a more broadly shared prosperity.  But the populist froth can be so frothy, can't it?  "They hate people who need benefits. Those people are a drag on the ability of rich people to not pay taxes."  Don't you dare say "stop enabling dysfunction, you'll get less of it!"  It's so much easier to keep the punishment cycles going by asserting "Republicans hate you."

They might do well to pay attention to Ruy "Liberal Patriot" Teixeira, who when his coalition of the ascendant failed to ascend checked his premises and rediscovered the median voter.  Now, he's noticing that the values regime of the Great Power Saeculum has crumbled, in no small part as a consequence of the academy's denial of coherent beliefs and the experts getting a lot wrong.

If the social order problem is as serious as these quotes and survey findings suggest—and I think it is—it raises troubling questions about the current state of the Democratic Party. It’s bad enough that favorability toward the party has hit a 35-year low and that 70 percent of voters think the Democratic Party is out of touch with the concerns of most people in the country today. And that swing congressional district voters feel Democrats are “more focused on helping other people than people like me”, don’t respect work, don’t share their values, don’t look out for working people, don’t care about people like them, and don’t have the right priorities. And that working-class voters prefer Republicans to Democrats on representing their values, focusing on the issues they care about, valuing hard work and being patriotic.

What’s worse is that Democrats don’t recognize that underneath these views is the roiling crisis of the social order and voters’ sense that Democrats are utterly useless at resolving it. Why on earth would voters believe Democrats will restore and rebuild the social order when they have seemed so oblivious to the problem, both in their governing practices and in their norm-shattering cultural radicalism and contempt for common sense? Democrats embody the “social and moral detachment” of educated elites alluded to by Brooks, whereby these elites preside over the deteriorating social order and then blame those affected for lashing out in unapproved ways.

Sooner or later it dawns on the losing skipper that the loss was not the fault of the wind or of the crew or of the course.

That’s why so much of Democrats’ attempt at “reform” rings so hollow. They’re not even asking the right question—how to rebuild the social order—so naturally their solutions see woefully inadequate. Typically they amount to little more than fervently opposing Trump and promising to be a bit less crazy and bit more populist the next time they’re in control. This is not nearly radical enough for the situation. As Brooks also points out, Republicans and Trump, despite their chronic overreach, are at least in the game. Democrats aren’t even on the field.

Naturally, this leads to suspicion in voters’ minds that most Democrats are basically okay with their place in the broken social order, so they just aren’t that motivated to fix it. This suspicion is justified. Democrats’ revealed preference is for the very social order—or lack thereof—that ordinary voters, especially working-class voters, despise. That is why what passes for radicalism in Democratic ranks is advocating more generous—preferably free—social programs, twinned with bracing calls to “fight the oligarchy” and (somehow) bring down the cost of living. The daunting task of rebuilding the social order is simply ignored.

That won’t work going forward, no matter how badly Trump screws up. Sure, Democrats can eke out some narrow electoral wins but the fundamental problem will remain: Democrats aren’t offering voters a social order they want to be a part of. Instead, they are insisting voters must adapt to the currently broken social order and make their way as best they can (with Democrats’ help of course). That is an offer many millions of voters will never accept.

Whether there is any voice in national politics that can make the case for a values regime some sort of national majority will accept remains an open question.  The Trump presidency brought a lot of irregular voters to the polls, but whether they will participate post-Trump is yet to be determined.  And the to-ing-and-fro-ing of slim legislative majorities that attempt as much of their fervent base voters' wish lists and erasure of the opposition's fervent base voters' wish list doesn't build confidence in electoral politics.  Mr Teixeira has anticipated that.  "Things fall apart and Democrats are currently just poking around in the wreckage. Only fearless, open debate that admits of no heretics has a prayer of moving forward."

Suggest that the best thing for the national government to do is to govern less, though, is not in the nature of Democrats.

PROGRAM, MORON.

One of the most liberating moments in college came in an introductory computer science class.

At one time, the term "moron" referred to an individual who could carry out tasks that were well-defined and sequenced. As my first computer science professor taught me, a computer could be thought of as an electric moron.

That liberated me, early on, from putting too much stock in so-called artificial intelligence.

An artificial intelligence algorithm, admittedly a very good algorithm, is the Moriarty manipulating social media and doing a number of other things, but you'll have to read the book to find out what those other things.  An artificial intelligence algorithm, though, is only as good as its programming, which is to say, it is still an elaborately scripted moron, and, let's say, in implementing its instructions according to the priorities assigned to it.

Moreover, dear reader, here is the good news.  Dan Brown can conceive of a malevolent algorithm.  The programmers, though, have had less luck.

In a recent pre-print paper, researchers from the University of Arizona summarize this existing work as "suggest[ing] that LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text." To pull on that thread, the researchers created a carefully controlled LLM environment in an attempt to measure just how well chain-of-thought reasoning works when presented with "out of domain" logical problems that don't match the specific logical patterns found in their training data.

The results suggest that the seemingly large performance leaps made by chain-of-thought models are "largely a brittle mirage" that "become[s] fragile and prone to failure even under moderate distribution shifts," the researchers write. "Rather than demonstrating a true understanding of text, CoT reasoning under task transformations appears to reflect a replication of patterns learned during training."

You can program a moron to recognize the dimensions of a box.  But thinking outside the box?  You might as well be saying "Upward, not Northward" in Flatland.

To test an LLM's generalized reasoning capability in an objective, measurable way, the researchers created a specially controlled LLM training environment called DataAlchemy. This setup creates small models trained on examples of two extremely simple text transformations—an ROT cypher and cyclical shifts—followed by additional training that demonstrates those two functions performed in various orders and combinations.

These simplified models were then tested using a variety of tasks, some of which precisely or closely matched the function patterns in the training data and others that required function compositions that were either partially or fully "out of domain" for the training data. For instance, a model trained on data showing two cyclical shifts might be asked to perform a novel transformation involving two ROT shifts (with basic training on what a single example of either shift looks like). The final answers and reasoning steps were compared to the desired answer using BLEU scores and Levenshtein Distance for an objective measure of their accuracy.

As the researchers hypothesized, these basic models started to fail catastrophically when asked to generalize novel sets of transformations that were not directly demonstrated in the training data. While the models would often try to generalize new logical rules based on similar patterns in the training data, this would quite often lead to the model laying out "correct reasoning paths, yet incorrect answer[s]." In other cases, the LLM would sometimes stumble onto correct answers paired with "unfaithful reasoning paths" that didn't follow logically.

"Rather than demonstrating a true understanding of text, CoT reasoning under task transformations appears to reflect a replication of patterns learned during training," the researchers write.

For the moment, it appears that a truly Heuristic Algorithmic computer does not exist, as even the Heuristics that these learning models are using are Algorithmic and can't recognize what's outside the box.

YOU KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN.

A pedestrian is dead after being hit near the Milwaukee Public Market.  Why?

A 39-year-old has died after being hit by a semi near the Milwaukee Public Market.

Milwaukee Police responded at 11:17 a.m near Broadway and St. Paul. A semi struck a pedestrian crossing the street while the truck was making a turn.

The pedestrian died from their [c.q.] injuries.

The driver of the semi stayed on the scene and is cooperating with the police.

How many times, dear reader, must I call attention to the folly of using 53 foot trailers for urban deliveries?

Unattributed photograph retrieved from WTMJ Radio.

Broadway at St. Paul is down by the Milwaukee Public Market where the streetcar bends the corner around.  It is not the kind of place one would want to maneuver a long trailer under the best of circumstances, which on a Tuesday morning with the coffee shops and delis already in operation, and the bars about to open, and the Milwaukee Brewers hosting the Pittsburgh Pirates.  And the "efficiency" of bringing a larger lot of cargo into the Third Ward (a few weekends ago, while I was there, I saw another 53 foot trailer attempting to maneuver at the corner of Water and St. Paul: fortunately no pedestrians were hurt and no fenders were bent) doesn't make any sense.  "Are the people of Venice unable to obtain food without semi tractor trailers? Of course not; I’ve eaten some of the best food of my life there. How is this food distributed if not by tractor trailer? More slowly, one delivery boat at a time, the same way stuff was distributed in American cities during the first half of the 20th Century."