THE MAKING OF A LIBERTARIAN TORY.

The correlation of forces creating such people might be strongest in ... New York City.  Reason's Zach Weissmueller raises that possibility.  "The troubling rise of Zohran Mamdani is about more than policy. It's about culture."  One of his sources is Inez Stepman, who describes herself as a libertarian turned conservative.  Her focus is on the possible error of challenging "socialism" using traditional political economy.

One unsettling possibility is that economic reality is secondary to cultural shifts when it comes to 21st-century U.S. politics, and the culture necessary to maintain a free society is slowly deteriorating.

"The pure economic analysis of Zohran just fails to account for the cultural worldview and ideology that is very clearly not only part of his candidacy, but to me is a central piece," says Stepman. "It does touch something in us that is deeper and somehow more politically potent than housing regulations."

That might be so, and yet the "cultural worldview and ideology" of the culture-studies types, which might or might not overlap with "socialism," is contributing to the deterioration of the culture, which means bourgeois norms, that maintains a free society.

Stepman describes Mamdani's anticolonial views as a "terrifying meld of third-world resentments and modern sort of elite, woke views" that somehow reconcile enthusiasm for Palestinian statehood with gay rights in the form of "queers for Palestine" signs.

"Don't you realize you'll be thrown off a building there?" asks Stepman.

The Venezuelan writer Carlos Rangel called the ideological blend of Marxism and anticolonialsm "third worldism," which rests on the idea that precolonial societies were socialist paradises. The so-called "noble savages" lived in communal harmony before European imperialists came to pillage their lands and impose savage capitalism, brutal individualism, and a rigid social hierarchy.

This iteration of socialism purposely conflates imperialism and capitalism, which helps explain why Mamdani has said that socialists and Palestinians are fighting "the same struggle."

Lots of high-concept stuff for the common room there, as well as in the balance of the article, which runs for many paragraphs beyond what I excerpted.  The [Not Detroit] Free Press contributor River Page, though, might have a more grounded, if less academically inclined, understanding of the deterioration that might lead to libertarian tories.

I’m a social democrat who campaigned for Bernie Sanders. You might think I’d feel more at home in a blue state like New York than in the Southern red states I lived in for my entire life until seven months ago. But I don’t. I hate it here—and I want to go back.

Here’s the difference: In a red state, the government doesn’t care about you. For example, when I lost my job in Florida during Covid, I gave up on trying to apply for unemployment benefits because, as Governor Ron DeSantis himself admitted, the website set up to process the claims had been intentionally designed with “pointless roadblocks” meant to frustrate unemployed Floridians into giving up their opportunity to receive benefits. Florida has also refused to expand Medicaid coverage under Obamacare even though 90 percent of the costs would be covered by the federal government. Red states may hardly help their citizens, but the upside is that they usually don’t bother them either. New York has bothered me since I got here.

After seven months of living in a blue state, I have come to the conclusion that the guiding principle of the Democratic Party isn’t really lukewarm welfarism combined with social liberalism. Instead, it is paternalism for the law-abiding masses and permissiveness for society’s antisocial underbelly. In other words, living in a blue state means that the government treats you like a child and does everything in its power to make your life just a little more annoying and inconvenient—unless you start openly smoking crack on the street.

Ignore for the sake of discussion, dear reader, the columnist's refusal to understand that Floridians pay Federal taxes and thus bear the costs of that Medicaid coverage, and focus on how "permissiveness for society's antisocial underbelly" is a fancy way of saying "enable dysfunction, get more of it."  The Tory part of his argument expands on how "progressive" policies enable dysfunction; the libertarian part notes the continued small annoyances of living according to all those rules.  "It’s the little things that break you; the small inconveniences that litter your life. Blue states have a million of them, and the world is no better for it."

In the bull session that accompanies his post, nobody has weighed in with a "These Policies are For Your Own Good (You Deplorable)" or a sardonic "And we'll all be better persons for it."

THE MAKING OF A MILITANT NORMAL.

Town Hall columnist Laura Hollis claims "Misguided 'Compassion' Contributes to Political Polarization."  She wrote the column after attending an event at Notre Dame University (no luck needed) that appears to combine the Protestant Social Gospel with the Catholic social teaching that originated with Paul.  The event she attended addressed the politics of cultivating hope, which is probably a fool's errand.  "Two weeks ago, Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., participated in a Q and A session on campus with Notre Dame's president, the Rev. Robert Dowd, CSC, during which McElroy offered his thoughts on ways to address political polarization in America."

ISN'T THIS LAST CENTURY'S NEWS?

Scientists Demand Ban on Bacon, Claiming Link to 54,000 Cases of Cancer.  Smoked meats, or preservatives in meats, or maybe meats themselves, have long given Wise Experts something to fret about.

First they came for sugar, then they came for bacon. Will life be worth living once all the simple ‘unhealthy’ pleasures are banned? I haven’t read the study, but a first thought is whether people who eat lots of bacon aren’t unhealthy in other ways that might explain a higher incidence of bowel, breast and prostate cancers. That’s often the problem with these studies – there are so many potential factors that could explain an 18% increase in various maladies. They’ll have statistical techniques to try to deal with that, for sure. But trying to work out why diseases like cancer develop as a result of eating certain foods is never an exact science.

Academicians, though, like to have more attention than another Minimal Publishable Unit in Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini will get them.

A coalition of leading scientists says the refusal to ban nitrites - preservatives used to keep processed meats pink and long-lasting - has come at a devastating human and financial cost, with the NHS footing an estimated £3 billion bill to treat preventable cancers over the past decade.

Their analysis, based on figures from Cancer Research UK and the British Journal of Cancer, estimates that around 5,400 bowel cancer cases each year in the UK are caused by eating processed meats. Treatment costs for each patient average £59,000.

That the National Health Service have no clue how much any one treatment costs, or how much the quality of a life year without bacon is lessened, is immaterial to "leading scientists."  Read on, and consider the source.

The warning comes exactly ten years after the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen - placing it in the same risk category as tobacco and asbestos.

Despite this, ministers have done 'virtually nothing' to reduce Britons' exposure, according to Professor Chris Elliott OBE, founder of the Institute for Global Food Security and a former government adviser.

He said: 'A decade on from the WHO report, the UK Government has done virtually nothing to reduce exposure to nitrites - the curing agents that make these products pink and long-lasting but also create nitrosamines, compounds known to trigger cancer.

'Every year of delay means more preventable cancers, more families affected, and greater strain on the NHS.'

The scientists who worked on the original WHO report have now written to Health Secretary Wes Streeting urging him to ban nitrites in processed meats.

Ah, yes, the World Health Organisation, the international agency that did so well managing the Wuhan coronavirus a few years ago.  As far as "strain on the National Health Service," well, if you can't ration the medical care directly with those quality adjusted life years, you can ration it indirectly by rationing the purchase of cured meats.  How long until bangers and mash or those sausages at a Full English Breakfast come with warning labels?

CHICKIFICATION MIGHT BE TOO FRIVOLOUS A DESCRIPTION.

For years, the late Rush Limbaugh called attention to the "chickification" of American culture, not in a good way.

In a truly pathetic news story, this is deeply troubling. We have been talking recently on this program about the chickification of American culture, the feminization of American universities, the chickification of the news business. From the Associated Press, this a story by Melissa Dutton, and this is about man showers. Brian, you went to one of these just last week, a man shower.

In that excerpt, from 2008, he alluded to a more destructive phenomenon then presenting in the knowledge and information industries. The "man shower" was somebody's idea about how to make the concept of a bridal shower more inclusive.

THE BIG CITIES DEFUND THE POLICE ONLY FOR THE POORS.

Here's an observation that has Friday short take written all over it, but for us taking Hallowe'en off.  “San Francisco [is] a sort of market-segmented scheme [extracting] the basic comforts of civilization and licensing them back as upgrades.”

It wasn't always that way.  Eleven years ago, the fretting among the sort of people who fret was about how the superstar cities were inequitable, in that only high income owners could make the rents.  "I remain skeptical of cities going after Creative Class amenities as a way of attracting Creative Class employers who will hire Creative Class workers. Countervailing forces, including congestion and bid-rent curves remain at work."  That post predates the notorious poop maps, but closer to Cold Spring Shops headquarters, the ominous signs were there.  "We've seen that at work in Chicago, with the accompanying stratification into a lake-side quasi-gated community with gangland war-zones south and west."  We saw further deterioration in Chicago even before the corona tyranny.  "[A]t what point will the city no longer be able to maintain what is effectively a gated community surrounded by increasing despair and increasing frustration with Democrats?"  That frustration might be present, and yet Rahm Emanuel gave way to Lori Lightfoot gave way to Brandon Johnson.

The observation that opened this post led to the following.

I am not a filthy poor, and therefore conditions on the street level in Portland do not matter to me.

I drive my Jaguar to nice restaurants, give it to the valet to park, then go inside and order a fancy treat. So long as the valet parks my car, and the waiter brings my fancy treat for me to consoome in peace, I am utterly unaffected by conditions ten blocks away.

While I am technically forced to acknowledge that other humans exist — otherwise who would park my car or prepare my fancy treat? — I am not actually forced to consider what their lives are like.

And if you try to force me to confront this, I will simply point out that you are a filthy poor, who is unable to live a lifestyle that insulates you from this sort of unpleasantness.

At which point I don’t have to pay attention to you, loser.

That prompted the proprietor of Quotulatiousness to respond with the essence of the Tragic Vision.

It probably costs slightly less than that to have zero drugged-out and/or schizophrenic bums urinating on your porch, but again, in Tennessee, this is a free service that comes with the “Western Civilization” package.

Also, it doesn’t cost anything go to a drugstore where nothing is locked behind glass, and be told “have a nice day” by someone at the register who actually means it.

And I’m told there is some sort of mythical beast called “graffiti”, but I have to go online to find out what it looks like.

In short, the argument that “civilization is just fine because I can still buy my way out of trouble” doesn’t hold any water, because it ignores the fact that you have to buy your way out of trouble, because civilization is shrinking.

You can’t have civilization without ass-kickings.

And if you forget that, you start having to buy your way into ever more and more exclusive clubs where the uncivilized can’t afford to go.

Until they figure out that they don’t have to pay, they can just push their way past the doorman. At which point you must be prepared to kick ass again.

All civilization rests on pillars made of violence. You are in danger until the moment you understand this.

Arguably, living in suburban or rural Tennessee where the drug stores and Wal-Mart supercenters don't keep everything under lock and key is a way of buying your way out of trouble, and that might include less access to the artsy places and frou-frou food.  Certainly that exchange does nothing to disabuse me of my fear that the "pillars made of violence" include suburbs or small towns one flash mob away from going sundown.

CHARLIE BROWN'S REAL LIFE ENCOUNTER WITH THE RED BARON.

Snoopy flies a Sopwith Camel in the comic strip.  In real life, Charlie Brown, of West Virginia, piloted B-17 The Pub, and on the cover of Adam Makos's A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II, you'll see The Pub with a Messerschmitt fighter tucked in off the starboard wing.  Mr Makos acknowledges the assistance of Larry Alexander.

Book Review N^o. 8 can tell you, dear reader, that the "combat and chivalry" part of the subtitle is accurate.  Recall, for instance, that Hermann Göring surrendered to an Army Air Force unit which treated him as a distinguished guest (as Hauptmann Göring in the first war, he was a pretty good fighter pilot) until higher command authority ordered he be remanded to Allied custody.  Fighter pilots on both sides considered themselves heirs to the knightly tradition and so conducted themselves, as pilots and as captors, and much of Higher Call relates that through the eyes of Franz Stigler, the Messerschmitt pilot whose plane is on the cover.  It's fair to use the Red Baron reference given the missions he flew during the war, particularly as the correlation of forces turned against his country.

I will not reveal here either why the Messerschmitt was flying formation (confirming a shoot-down? escorting to a safe place to land?) or whether the pilots had a chance, as many veterans of the War did, to compare notes late in life.  Why spoil a good war yarn, which this book is, by telling all of it?

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE PROGRESS DELUSION.

Crooked Timber contributor Lisa Herzog asks, "Does 'forward' still make sense?"  It doesn't and regular readers of Cold Spring Shops get that.  "Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they darn well please, and when a new social order is emerging, a Vanguard to Lead the Way has the same problems as everyone else, namely, Where Are We, and What's The Most Promising Way to Go?"

CALIFORNIA HITS BOTTOM, KEEPS DIGGING.

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through California, Governor Newsom scratched internal combustion cars off future gift lists.  Yes, that link goes to a satire post that nevertheless has some grounding in reality.

Among this year's proscriptions, because what is the use of a Democrat governor who doesn't issue foolish ukases, is any resale of full sized coaching stock.  "California governor signs bill banning resale of retired diesel rail equipment."  There is retired diesel rail equipment because the only part of the slowly-taking-shape high speed rail connection between San Francisco and Los Angeles is the electrification of the Bay Area commute zone from San Francisco to San Jose.  There is a ridge of hills between San Jose and the north end of the high speed line project that has not been surveyed for construction, and I bet a crew of Chinese immigrants with pickaxes and mules could build that stretch faster than whatever environmentally friendly concatenation of machinery California approves of these days will, if they ever will.

What good, dear reader, is a self-styled progressive who doesn't signal his virtue?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed into law a bill prohibiting state agencies from reselling or otherwise transferring older diesel-powered rail equipment after it has been decommissioned by a public agency.

SB 30 was introduced last December by Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose) in response to Caltrain’s sale of retired equipment for use to start a commuter rail operation in Lima, Peru [see "“Caltrain equipment …,” Trains.com, Nov. 15, 2024].  When the bill was passed by the Senate in May, Cortese said in a press release, “I believe California should be leading the world in clean energy — not shipping our pollution problems elsewhere.” But at the time the bill was introduced, a Caltrain representative pointed out a U.S. State Department study had determined the transfer of the equipment to Lima would take 4,000 cars off the road and remove 20,000 metric tons of pollution from the air [see “Caltrain equipment sale to Peru sparks legislation …,” Trains.com, Dec. 8, 2024].

The bill bans such sales unless the diesels involved meet EPA Tier 2, 3, or 4 standards; the diesel engines are removed; or the sale is approved in a public hearing. It was one of dozens that Newsom announced he had signed or vetoed earlier this week.

I am at a loss for how best to mock a policy that, as a commenter at Trains notes, leaves residents of poorer countries in their cars.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE.

The country's Newspaper of Record has fun with a recent sports-betting scandal.  "WNBA Players Assure FBI They Weren't Missing Layups To Throw Games, They Just Suck At Basketball."  It takes skill to make a deliberate miss look like an accident, which is one way point-shaving might manifest itself.

A group of players met with FBI agents Thursday afternoon to vehemently deny such rumors, clarifying that they were just all really awful basketball players.

"I know it seems like a scam, but we're all just really, really bad at this game," said Chicago Sky star Angel Reese. "The truth is, we're just not that good at making the ball go into the little circle. We really are trying. It's just a lot harder than it looks."

According to insiders with knowledge of the federal investigation, the FBI was grateful for the WNBA's cooperation even though the organization was not on their radar. "I've never even heard of women's basketball," FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said. "In fact, the whole league sounds like some sort of scam."

Although the sports-betting investigation continues, it might be that the large winnings Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker reported are on the up and up.  ‘He’s a whale in Vegas.’  That might not be the best choice of words.

In Chicago’s business community, Pritzker has long been known for his affinity for cards. A poker book has been seen on the shelf of his Chicago office, and he’s been spotted sidling up to a table while traveling.

That interest in poker goes beyond the personal. Pritzker teamed up with Jim Gray, who founded OptionsXpress, to start the Chicago Poker Challenge, a high-profile charity tournament that raised millions for the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, which Pritzker also helped establish.

Though Pritzker no longer plays in the event, its reputation is legendary. It was once held at the exclusive Casino Club that sits in the shadow of the John Hancock Building, not far from Pritzker’s residence.

The guest list has included an impressive roster of Chicago’s elite, including Citadel’s Ken Griffin, billionaire entrepreneur and ComPsych founder Rich Chaifetz, and OptionsXpress Holdings founder Gray. Even poker pro Phil Hellmuth Jr. has been a regular attendee.

“He is a very thoughtful player,” Ariel Capital Management founder and Democratic donor John Rogers Jr. said of Pritzker. “He has a very good understanding of the game’s nuances. He is really comfortable around a poker table. He’s always one of the better players at these tournaments.”

All the same, if evidence surfaces of Democrat donors laundering campaign contributions at the poker table, there isn't enough popcorn in the house!

PIE SLICING IS A POOR METAPHOR FOR ECONOMIC ACTIVITY.

Years ago, before the staff went crazy, Charles Peters's Washington Monthly ran an article comparing the relative merits of pie-slicers, meaning people who worried how much a pie of a given radius each eater got, as opposed to pie-arrangers, who worried about how to produce larger pies.  I liked the metaphor so much I used it to mock a silly classroom plan long ago.

Pie-slicing, though, continues to be an obsession of the socialists.  Here's Robert Reich from 2004.  "If I’m right, and the current lopsided apportioning of the American economic pie between wages and profits is permanent, mark my words: It’s only a matter of time before the vast American middle class demands a fair portion of the pie. That may mean, at the least, higher taxes on profits and lower taxes on wages."

Twenty years later, two Common Dreams contributors sound the same theme.  "The share of the U.S. wealth pie owned by the top 0.1 percent grew 59.6 percent from 1989 to 2024, according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Federal Reserve data, while the share of the U.S. wealth pie owned by the bottom 50 percent of households has declined 26.1 percent, adjusted for inflation."

I DON'T GIVE A DARN.

"The Los Angeles Dodgers Are America’s Team," according to Peter Savodnik in The [Not Detroit] Free Press.  He continues, "You might find the Dodgers hard to root for in the World Series. Here’s why you should do it anyway."

Why?  Because.

It’s been a doozy of a year for La La Land. The fires, the ongoing Hollywood contraction, our hapless, hopeless mayor (and the dearth of any serious challengers in 2026).

That’s to say nothing of the graffiti and the housing market and the homeless. We’re told by the powers that be that things are getting better, but literally no one here thinks things are getting better.

Who's on first? "There was probably no better seat to observe industrial decline than that of a tenure-tracker at Wayne State."  But during that hitch, the Detroit Tigers caught fire in 1984, winning 104 games in the regular season, ultimately winning the World Series, after which the fans set the neighborhood on fire.

Make of it what you will that Kirk Gibson, Michigan State athlete, who hit a home run to seal the deal at Tiger Stadium a few years later hit a home run to seal another World Series deal with ... the Brooklyn Trolley Los Angeles Dodgers.

WAIT FOR THE DEBT CEILING TO CRASH IN.

Don Wolfensberger, a contributor to The Hill with lots of experience in Congress, including as chief of staff for the Rules Committee (those are the Members of Congress who decide what gets marked up for debate and vote) some thirty years ago, takes stock of the current horsetrading over what additional pet projects ought be stuffed into the latest evasion of regular order.

Theoretically, the support of House and Senate Republican majorities for the president’s unilateral funding cutbacks may qualify as small “d” democracy in practice. Two things that may (or may not) validate that assumption are public opinion and Congress’s ability to finesses constituent needs and national priorities.

Public opinion and politics go hand-in-glove though there is often a lot of finger-pointing and wrist twisting hidden in the mittens. The president’s powers of persuasion and direct pressures on members will wax and wane as members’ own political fortunes teeter on the brink of next year’s midterm elections.

President Trump has already responded to some of his party’s expressed concerns by transferring research and development funds in the Pentagon to pay the salaries of uniformed military personnel, and by temporarily restoring some of the funding for the Center for Disease Control’s missions that were being zeroed-out.

The American people seem to be inured by all this, having seen government shutdowns come and go like the seasons. The standard public response seems to be, it’s just politics as usual, compromises will be struck, and life will go on. However, any drying-up of resources affecting the broader public will eventually bear down on the constituents of individual members.

It is politics as usual.  I have not seen any argument from pundits who pay attention to such things or from political scientists who analyze, well, politicking, to disabuse me of my view that Members of Congress would rather not report out regular order appropriations, particularly when the majority party at least pays lip service to appropriating and spending less money and terminating some projects with extreme prejudice.

I think Mr Wolfensberger fears that, at least in part.

In previous government shutdowns, the assumption was always that once a shutdown showdown is resolved, the status quo ante would be restored and life would resume as before. Those assumptions may be dated given today’s shutdown in which government will not likely emerge and function as it once did. Those consequences will truly represent a turn of the screw on how our system of government will function and persevere in the future.

Buckle in, that "turn of the screw" might be reinforced by the bond market further discounting Treasuries.

IT'S CALLED RENT SEEKING.

Is anybody surprised that Our President, who was not above using eminent domain to clear space in Atlantic City for a failed casino venture, is not above putting the touch on a few fellow rent-seekers to reconstruct the Savarin Room on the White House grounds.  Red State's Brandon Morse notes, "The People Helping Fund the New White House Ballroom Are a Who's Who List of Big Names."  At The Hill, Brett Samuels adds editorial comment.  "Amazon, Apple, Google and other major companies are among those donating to help cover the cost of President Trump’s massive new ballroom at the White House."  He hints that there might be rent seeking at work.  "Many of the companies, such as Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google, have sought to strengthen ties with the Trump administration."

Jake Johnson at Common Dreams finds a commentator willing to expand on "strengthen ties."

“Demolishing the East Wing is bad enough, but carving the names of corporations and billionaires into the White House walls would mark a permanent scar on the People’s House,” said Jon Golinger, a democracy advocate with Public Citizen, said in a statement Thursday.

“Money buys access and influence and, in this case, a long-term presence on the White House wall,” Golinger added. “This is easily understood and blatantly disgusting.”

Ah, yes, Public Citizen, when they're not grousing about people buying access and influence in the federal government, they're looking for ways to expand the scope and influence of the federal government, which is harder for people to understand whilst more blatantly disgusting.

WE'VE ALWAYS BEEN UNGOVERNABLE.

Emory's Mark Bauerlein, who knows a thing or two about teaching English, looks at historic and fictional famous figures and concludes, "One begins to suspect that the true American tradition is less that of our Fourth of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks . . . than, quite simply, that of riding somebody out of town on a rail."

Well, yes, as we noted in response to another of his essays,

Reality, which is emergent, tends to be socially conservative,  And the snooty-ass gentry have, inter alia, erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance; declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatever; and excited domestic Insurrections among us.  And they fret about the Incomprehensible Others thinking of torches and pitchforks.  It is the Right of the People to Alter or Abolish.

Which means, as the professor notes, sometimes you bet on emergence and light out for the territories.

Anyone who took up arms against the Crown had to have a streak of defiance somewhere in his character.  We should appreciate it as an essential part of the American personality.  In the panorama of our history, we see this brash “Damn the torpedoes!” attitude surface again and again, sometimes in our most hallowed figures, and not as an accidental feature.  Ben Franklin begins his adult career as an outlaw, fleeing Boston and legal servitude to his brother, sneaking into Philadelphia with little money and no prospects.  John Adams is a great statesman, Sam Adams is not, nor are the vandals of the Boston Tea Party.  “Give me liberty or give me death!” is a tempestuous outcry.  The first pioneers on the frontier bet their lives on an uncertain future.

Other times, you protect your vision of the future by breaking out the tar and feathers.

FUN TRIGGERS THESE LOONS.

Thus did Pajamas Media's Stephen Kruiser expand on yesterday's observation about joyless footie fans.

Dems have been heavily invested in misery since long before Trump came on the political scene, though. Their core political beliefs can only be sold to people who are deeply unhappy and wallowing in despair to the point that they believe only the seemingly benevolent hand of a politician can save them.

Even the ones who are making millions off the grift are cheerless; you can see it in their faces. When your sole function is to try and make people feel awful, it rubs off on you. Look at Bernie Sanders's face. Elizabeth Warren is always yelling. Squeaky is the most constipated-looking young woman I've ever seen in politics.

Had George W. Bush been the Republican president who wanted to build a White House ballroom, the reaction would have been almost as laden with hysteria.

With Hallowe'en coming at the end of next week, no doubt the guilt-tripping both political and cultural will proliferate along with the house decorations and the defrosting of Mariah Carey.  This Badger Herald alum from the days when that paper epitomized campus dissent endorses succeeding generations of Normals in their "laughing the rabid Left into impotence."

THERE IS NO END TO THE ENVIRONMENTALIST WACKO LUNACY.

Now footie's World Cup has to go.  For the polar bears.  "We’re football fans who see no alternative: The CO2 party must end."

Never mind that footie has been enough of a leftist virtue signal that "soccer mom" became a political category.  Never mind that Rush Limbaugh called attention to the adverse health effects of heading the ball with his "Keep Our Own Kids Safe" campaign.  The latest compression of the intersectional singularity is Urgently Necessary.

Football is more popular than Jesus of Nazareth and John Lennon combined. And at first glance, it seems like a pastime that doesn’t harm the environment: Players just need a ball, some space, and the desire to run. But the data are shocking: Football is directly responsible for 0.3-0.4% of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to Denmark’s emissions. The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2024 the sport generated more than 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels as a source of energy, equivalent to 150 million barrels of oil. Every match at the men’s World Cup finals emits between 44,000 and 72,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases, the same as 30,000 to 50,000 cars on British roads each year. Recent studies estimate that emissions from the cup will range between 1.65 and 3.63 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent between 2000 and 2026.

Let’s also consider football’s basic equipment: boots and balls. Generations of kangaroos have been slaughtered, with the blessing of the Australian government, as raw material for “k-leather” boots, while balls from Pakistan are made from petroleum-derived synthetic leather, rubber, and cotton extracted from plant species, and leather and glue obtained from animals slaughtered before their natural lifespan. The 60 million balls sold in 2010 travelled from the sewing workshops in Sialkot to the professional football pitches of Europe and the Americas. The balls emerge from these frequently clandestine sewing workshops to a carbon cycle of transport companies, customs administrations, equipment, the advertising industry, sporting goods retailers, and department stores. The chain turns a ball costing 63 rupees (€0.62) into a product retailing for over €100.

No, that is not parody, it's offered In All Earnestness.

Sponsorship by companies with high CO2 emissions alone is responsible for 75% of sports emissions, as it stimulates demand for highly polluting products and lifestyles. The large eco-laundering multinationals use football to cover up their environmental shame. For example, shortly after Repsol spilled thousands of barrels of oil on 1,400 hectares of Peru’s Pacific coast in 2022, killing native life and destroying the livelihoods of thousands of people, the company signed a sponsorship with the national team. The motto of the project, also associated with supporting youth and women’s representatives, was “Let’s look to the future.” In Spain, Repsol and Petronor have signed an agreement to supply renewable energy to Athletic Club de Bilbao that supposedly demonstrates the multinational’s commitment to decarbonization. But the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority found Repsol distorted its environmental commitment by highlighting production of synthetic fuels and biofuels, which only account for a small fraction of its core business—fossil fuels.

The accounting doesn't bother to fret over that larger fraction of the fossil fuel use accounted for by all those minivans schlepping all those aspiring Carli Lloyds and Leonel Messis to practice and camp and the games.  That's because they have much bigger things to fret about.

The 2026 men’s World Cup is expanding to include 48 national teams. For the first time, matches will be held in three huge countries: Canada, Mexico, and the United States, across four time zones, in 16 venues separated by several thousand kilometers, each with derisory public transport. Five and a half million spectators are expected, who will need to use the map to locate the venues: Mexico City will mark the southernmost point, Vancouver the north, Boston the east, and San Francisco the west. In terms of logistics, practically all travel will be by air due to a primitive railway infrastructure. Radio France refers to this as a “very carbonated cocktail.” The New Weather Institute with Scientists for Global Responsibility estimates that aviation emissions “will increase by 160% to 325% in each of the three tournaments in 2026, 2030, and 2034” compared to recent World Cups.

The horror!  But environmentalist wackos, like any other puritanical sect, are people perpetually fretful that somebody is having fun.  Have no fun, they urge.  "We’re football fans who see no alternative: The CO2 party must end. Abolish the World Cup!"

I have no plans to attend or to watch any World Cup games.  Where can I sell carbon offsets?

IS GRADUAL BECOMING "ALL AT ONCE?"

The real debt ceiling is not a number on an engrossed bill.  It is an event, specifically, when bond buyers buy Treasuries only at deep discounts.

Are we there yet?

Sustaining order requires securing investors for the tens of billions of dollars in debt which are sold every week.

This effort has gotten more challenging over the past two years, as the Federal Reserve has reduced its holdings of government bonds.  Finding replacement buyers hasn’t been too problematic, but there are increasing signs of strain.  The implied “term premium” that the Treasury pays to borrow has been increasing, contributing to higher yields.

Recent auctions of debt have occasionally disappointed. The appetite of investors for newly-issued government securities is gauged by several measures. The “bid-to-cover” ratio compares offers to buy with the amount on offer; a lower number indicates weaker demand. This metric has slipped in several recent cases.

In order to ensure that debt auctions are fully subscribed, the U.S. Treasury works with a series of primary dealers. These banks step in to purchase bonds when bids from private investors aren’t sufficient; that support has been drawn on more heavily in recent months.

Given the poor state of the American fiscal situation, auctions will likely remain large for the foreseeable future. The risk that markets will push back is rising. No amount of fast talk from politicians will hide the fact that we may be selling a lot of bull.

Are we there yet?

Several factors have contributed to the shifting landscape of Treasury buyers. The Federal Reserve, for example, is no longer a consistent buyer of bonds; instead, it is actively shrinking its balance sheet. To date, the Fed has sold off $2.3 trillion worth of assets, primarily Treasury securities. Meanwhile, foreign central banks have begun to back away from purchasing US Treasuries. Recent sanctions and the confiscation of foreign assets have heightened concerns about the safety of parking reserves in US dollars.

Moreover, what did I tell you, dear reader, about the laws of conservation in economics?  "Moreover, to the extent that tariffs reduce current account deficits, they reduce capital account surpluses pari passu."

It's unseemly to say "See, I told you so," and yet:

In addition, the ongoing tariff disputes have created chaos that has, in turn, reduced international capital flows. With diminished global trade, there are fewer trade surpluses, which means fewer dollars are available to be invested in US Treasuries. Compounding the issue, the recent struggle with extremely high inflation has caused investors to worry about the value of the dollar, which underpins the attractiveness of US Treasuries.

Solvency concerns are also mounting as the US continues to run persistent and protracted deficits of $2 trillion annually. This staggering amount of red ink is occurring during times of relative peace and economic prosperity, raising important questions about what might happen during a recession or war.

Indeed, and where is the traditional Keynesian conventional wisdom about balancing the budget over the business cycle?

FROM RAINING MEN TO HEMORRHAGING MEN.

No, that's not a Hallowe'en makeover of a Weather Girls hit from 1982.  Rather, it's Hill contributor John Mac Ghlionn having none of the Donks' latest effort to secure enough votes from guys to win a presidential election (perhaps that will spill over to the local elections that matter as well) without antagonizing the fractious Weimar coalition that comprises their base voters.

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging men. Across the U.S., they are leaving in waves — from the unions that once powered the party’s muscle, from classrooms that once echoed with idealism, and from a movement that now talks at them rather than to them. Polls show young men flocking to the right in numbers not seen for generations.

The trend isn’t a blip but a brutal reckoning. And no amount of branding or beer ads will stop it.

The party’s latest efforts to woo men are almost painful to watch. The Democratic National Committee has poured money into influencer partnerships, podcast cameos and clumsy “masculinity” campaigns filmed in gyms. Spokespersons drone on about “kitchen-table issues,” as if men are sitting there waiting to be emotionally validated between spoonfuls of reheated stew.

Party elders have recognized that they were pushing men away for some time, although turning Olivia Julianna into their "male outreach coordinator" gave Townhall and Pajamas Media types lots of ways to mock her, but ultimately it was that fractious Weimar coalition that got her to call it a day.

“It is one of the most heartbreaking and difficult lessons you have to learn when you’re working in this space, especially as a young person, is that people are inherently imperfect,” Julianna said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “Sometimes that imperfection means doing selfish or mean-spirited things with the intention of making positive change.”

She says problems included nepotism, a push for rigid agreement on a set of standard policies, and internal Democratic Party squabbles over strategy. Julianna also says she recognized that she needed to move beyond her political bubble.

Now, Julianna says she is stepping back from campaign work in hopes that speaking out in her newsletter and social media posts can help fix the problems and enable Democrats to eventually flip Texas blue.

Not much chance of that as long as the Donks have their intersectional purity tests that pretend to be inclusive and yet exclude anybody normal.

Partisan critics come with the political spotlight, but Julianna also gets attention from Democrats saying she was too supportive of Biden and that she has sacrificed some of her original progressive positions in order to fit in with the mainstream party.

While Julianna still describes herself as having progressive views, her positions are nuanced. She thinks that there should be a secure border but also that the government should expand pathways to citizenship, add more immigration judges and protect DACA recipients. Some people have criticized her for that stance, arguing that it is more aligned with Republican positions.

There's a lot more in the article, which runs in the Donk-friendly Texas Tribune.

HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY.

Oklahoma girls’ basketball team returns championship after realizing they lost.  Like so many sports stories, it begins with "after review."

The story stems from the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association, where a crucial scoreboard error early in the game gave the girls basketball team at Academy of Classical Christian Studies the edge over its Apache high school counterpart, as CBS News recently reported.

Academy coach Brendan King told the network: “As soon as I walked out of the locker room, my stomach kind of turned into knots. And I said: ‘I’m going to need to know if we really won this game or not.’”

King went home that night and watched a recording of the game. He meticulously watched each play and recounted every basket – eventually discovering his team had actually lost.

The game ended with Academy, of Oklahoma City, winning 44-43 on a last-second shot. But King discovered the score was actually 43-42, with the opposing team from Apache High having actually outscored his team – and Academy being erroneously given more points than they had actually earned amid confusion about the scoreboard at one juncture of the game.

Strictly speaking, once the final horn sounds, the result is official.  Sometimes, though, how you play the game does matter more than the result.

King’s team would have legally retained its championship had it stood pat on the result. The Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association rules say that once a game is finished, the score becomes permanent, and there is no way to change the outcome of a completed game.

But King approached his team to tell the players of his video review’s findings. And the players all unanimously decided to appeal their own victory with the association, asking for the other team to be recognized for their rightful win – and for them to be assigned a defeat in the game.

The appeal – described by CBS as having no precedent – succeeded. And King hand-delivered the championship plaque to Apache.

Apache’s head coach said she was glad to have won the title. But the coach, Amy Merriweather, also said Academy’s act of honesty and integrity meant more than the actual victory.

“It showed us, you know, there are still good people in this world,” Merriweather said. “It’s something we’ll always remember.”

Students from Academy also spoke with CBS. One student told the outlet that “it would have felt wrong, I think, to have taken the trophy, regardless”.

Another student from Academy said it was a “really good teaching moment” to establish that winning “is not the whole point”.

That was the Academy of Classical Christian Studies, and, truly, truly I say unto you, those players will have parables of their own to refer to as they mature and age.

IT'S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME.

Never mind the bellowings of Crazy Bernie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE LUNACY THAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And these people wonder why we keep getting more Trump.

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

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

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

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

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

BASEBALL'S HARD-KNOCK LIVES REDEEMED.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Both of them lead to bad things."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AN EPITAPH FOR COMMUNISM.

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

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

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

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

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

Buckle in.

A REQUIEM FOR THE WELFARE ECONOMICS PARADIGM.

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

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

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

Barbara O'Brien photograph retrieved from Mahablog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONSERVING ANCIENT CLOCKS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ETERNALLY FRUSTRATING YET FASCINATING GAME OF BASEBALL.

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

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

WELL, YES.

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

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

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

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

You get what you pay for.

ZENO'S CRYPTOCURRENCY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEPLORABLE-SHAMING WILL GET YOU NOWHERE.

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

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

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

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

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

Searchlight Institute "doomsday chart" retrieved from Liberal Patriot.

THOSE WHO NOW WILL BLESS THE POOR.

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

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

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

RECLAIMING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT.

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

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

THE LEVER OF RICHES INVOLVES TRADE-OFFS.

That follows because innovations are Marshallian improvements.

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

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

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

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

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

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