COLD SPRING SHOPS.

The convention at Cold Spring Shops is to remove the Festive Season decorations at Three Kings.  That day, though, also signals the opening of Mardi Gras festivities along the Gulf Coast, and the resumption of Karneval, which commenced in November.


Whatever you call it, it's reason to continue in a festive spirit.  Before Aschermittwoch there will be a different sort of bonfire and it might involve singing and beer.  Then the sober times will come.

Strong Towns contributor Noah Toumert asks, "Why Do Cities Build Sports Complexes Instead of Neighborhood Fields?"  Maybe because the helicopter parents think of the local playgrounds as dangerous places, and the authorities crack down on unsupervised play as tantamount to neglect.

In "What's the Matter With Minnesota?," Michael Barone develops the argument that European social democracies might better be understood as advanced tribal societies, with an emphasis on Minnesota.

Minnesota? Somalis? Nine billion dollars in alleged welfare fraud?

To understand what's going on from a distance, it helps to understand basic culture. Minnesota was settled largely by people of Scandinavian and German ancestry.

In survey after survey, Minnesota has ranked No. 1 or No. 2 among states, often just behind neighboring and much smaller North Dakota, in social connectedness, civic participation, workforce participation and voter turnout. It has traditionally led the nation in levels of trust and conscientiousness.

This has been coupled with political behavior that resembles Scandinavian patterns. Minnesota, like North Dakota and its neighbor Wisconsin, had lively socialist-leaning third parties in the 1930s. It's still the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, the result of a fusion engineered by future Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1944.

As you might expect, Minnesotans have built a high-tax, high-spending state government. Like Scandinavians, they have trusted the state to provide services and have trusted individuals not to cheat in claiming benefits. Public support for these programs, as in Scandinavia, has traditionally been founded on confidence that aid goes only to the genuinely deserving.

The Somalis who have been the most visible and politically active migrants to Minnesota over the past generation provide a vivid contrast.

Or, Cynical Me notes, perhaps putting a bureaucrat in charge of bailing out improvident relatives is a good thing.  "It's your third cousin once removed that your taxes are supporting.  That might not be so easy once enough immigration changes the dynamic between tax payer and benefit recipient."  So it has been going in Denmark and Sweden.  Here's where that led, ten years ago.  "Europe's migration problem is worse to the extent that the self-despising multiculturalists enable third worlders to continue to behave badly and not prosper, and in like measure, provide evidence of the absence of cosmic justice and cause for further social reform. In the United States, migrants become mascots for ward-heeler politicians."

The Order of Perpetual Misery are at it again, with perpetual scold Stan Cox unleashing another jeremiad.  "How to Save the World: Give Up War, Cars, and Leaf-Blowers... and Unveil the Stars." The thinking becomes even more wishful in the subtitle. "It’s imperative that we stand up to the forces of ecocide, while developing a more realistic vision of the better world that awaits us once we’ve jumped off the growth-by-carbonization bandwagon."  Imperative, huh?  Well, I suppose a guy with a beard worthy of Nathan Forrest would want to keep up the skeer about a climate emergency that isn't.

The number of environmental disasters and their destructiveness are only ratcheting up in step with increases in global greenhouse gas emissions, ever more extraction of key minerals, the ever-greater exploitation of biological resources, and outbreaks of resource wars (most recently with the US assault on Venezuela). All of that is linked to one crucial phenomenon: the single-minded pursuit of economic growth by the owning and investing classes. Not surprisingly, they reap the lion’s share of the benefits from such growth and bear next to none of its devastating consequences.

Though it’s seldom highlighted, the world economy has indeed reached an astounding physical scale. During the past century, resource extraction has doubled every 20 years or so. Indeed, humanity reached a grim milestone in 2021, when the global quantity of human-made mass—that is, the total weight of all things our species manufactured or constructed—surpassed the total weight of all living plant, animal, and microbial biomass on this planet. And worse yet, that mass of human-made stuff continues to grow, year by year, even as the natural world diminishes further.

Imagine, dear reader, what the total weight of stuff would be if all those Third Worlders who used to eke out a living on a dollar a day had to devote their higher earnings to buying the radio or record player or land-line telephone they might have purchased but for the current generation of entrepreneurs having provided the same capabilities with a much lower material intensity.  Economists don't have a good grasp of economic growth in the sense of more stuff and more people, let alone what it would look like with rising living standards shared among fewer people using advanced stuff.  I note, further, that an increasing share of what we used to understand as the middle classes are participating both in the growth, and perhaps treating the noise of those leaf blowers as a tolerable consequence.

A heavenly news report from The Babylon Bee.  "At publishing time, Scott Adams had been moved into a shared cubicle with French philosopher Blaise Pascal."

Populist froth is populist froth, no matter who peddles it.  "Trump pushes a 1-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates."  Dear reader, for all the happy talk about bipartisanship and gauzy memories of Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill quaffing a few after hours, bipartisanship is the political class doing dumb things.

Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who said he talked with Trump on Friday night, said the effort is meant to “lower costs for American families and to rein in greedy credit card companies who have been ripping off hardworking Americans for too long.”

Legislation in both the House and the Senate would do what Trump is seeking.

Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., released a plan in February that would immediately cap interest rates at 10% for five years, hoping to use Trump’s campaign promise to build momentum for their measure.

Hours before Trump’s post, Sanders said that the president, rather than working to cap interest rates, had taken steps to deregulate big banks that allowed them to charge much higher credit card fees.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., have proposed similar legislation. Ocasio-Cortez is a frequent political target of Trump, while Luna is a close ally of the president.

If the lender can't price the risk premium in the finance charge, he can either refuse to make the loan, as the article notes is the case in states with existing usury laws, or increase the penalty for late payment.

Ever since the second coming of a Trump presidency, higher education types have protested that the administration is conditioning its financial support on obeisance to that administration's policy goals.  Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops have long understood what Reason's Jack Nicastro put bluntly.  "Federal Funding for Universities Comes With Strings. Now Trump Is Pulling Them."  His focus is on the appropriability of patent royalties: yes, on occasion federally sponsored research comes up with commercially successful things.  His concluding paragraph, however, notes the broader implications of Our President's actions.

Getting the government involved in subsidizing higher education was always a Faustian bargain. The Bayh-Dole Act may have supported the tenfold increase in university patents in the two decades following its passage, but it did so at the expense of attaching government strings to academic research. It should come as no surprise that the Trump administration is now tugging on them to cow academia into compliance with its political agenda.

As if the other government strings didn't have the same effect.  The post's title comes from a Rikki Schlott essay, "How Ideologues Infiltrated the Arts," which ran in The (Not Detroit) Free Press midway through the Jarrett regency, during which the foundations and the national endowments shared a common view of what was True and Beautiful.  Choreographer Lincoln Jones got the equivalent of a "recant or be excommunicated" missive from Pope Linus the people who write the checks.

“Fundraising felt impossible,” he added. “The requirement on grants comes down to this: If you don’t agree with this very particular and recently adopted approach to social justice, we won’t fund your art. Behind the scenes, so many people in the arts world told me just to say the words.”

“Every time I spoke to funders, the first conversation was about diversity. It just felt like, okay, this is how you get funding now. Honestly, it felt like somebody was holding a gun to my head and saying, ‘Your integrity or your life’s work.’”

That bargain—pledge allegiance to the new orthodoxy or stick to your mission and risk your career—is one now faced by many in the world of American fine arts.

I mean, when the director of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Obama presidency, Rocco Landesman, recognizes there's a problem, there's probably a problem.

Landesman, 75, who has produced multiple Tony-winning shows including Angels in America and The Producers, said he worries about what is happening to the world where he has dedicated his entire life and career.

“We’re taking first-rate artists and making them into third-rate political activists,” he said.

“Art is supposed to unsettle us; art challenges what we feel about ourselves,” he continued. “But most of the art today affirms commonly held views of our society. You either fit in or you perish.”

The same thing might be happening to decorated laboratory scientists in universities you might have heard of, according to Minding the Campus contributor J. Scott Turner.

There is nothing unlikeable about any of the scientists whose stories Blonigan and Liu tell. They are justly proud of what they do, and of their devotion to science. As someone who spent a multi-decade research career in a never-ending scramble for funds and living with perpetual uncertainty, I feel their pain.

Nevertheless, they are in the grips of a prideful delusion: that they are valued as scientists, that the funding, privilege, and prestige they enjoy have been conferred on them so that they might advance science, and that what they do is valued by their universities as science. They are blind to the reality that they are galley slaves, chained to the oars, valued not for the science they do nor for their good intentions, but for the revenue streams they generate.

Doubt me on this? Here’s a thought experiment. Decide to dedicate your career to an intellectually promising line of inquiry that doesn’t cost much money to pursue, or even better, that can be funded without grants. What do you suppose will happen to your academic career? Here’s my hypothesis: you will soon have no academic career.

And where is nemesis in all this? Pull away the mask, and her identity is revealed. Nemesis is the mighty river of federal research funding, roughly $100 billion that streams into universities nationwide every year.

Note further, dear reader, that any institution of higher (cough!) learning that wants to participate in federally funded research or performance or guaranteed student loans must comply with, you guessed it, government guidelines.  Cynical Me suggests that the guidelines, pre-Trump, enforced agreements among the universities that the universities could never reach among themselves.

Downstate Illinois would just as soon have nothing to do with Chicago.  Inland and mountain Oregon and Washington resent the political aesthetic of Portland and Seattle.  There might be Minnesotans asking Paul Bunyan to chop the Cities off.

That's a parable from four years ago.

[I]magine a room full of whole peanuts, with kids let loose to eat the peanuts while they're required to leave the shells in the room as they eat. Early on, it's easy to find the whole peanuts, but as the room fills up with shells, it's harder to find them.  Locating exhaustible resources is like that, and we even have a Hotelling principle for the pricing of exhaustible resources that ought manifest itself if peak oil is indeed at hand.

Peak oil might not be upon us just yet, and yet, notes Paul Krugman, Our President's Venezuelan oil play might be failing its market test.  "None of the oil executives were willing to make specific commitments to invest in Venezuela, although some of them talked about possible increases in Venezuelan production."

Yen Ching to close after 4 decades in DeKalb.  The family business serves good food, and some years ago they moved from downtown near the railroad crossing to near the university.

After being in DeKalb for nearly 44 years, Yen Ching has decided to close its doors.

The restaurant is owned by husband and wife John Yin and Marilyn Yin. Their only other staff member is Marilyn’s sister, Caroline Zinger. John serves as the sole chef, while Marilyn manages the restaurant’s finances and paperwork.

Yen Ching is an Asian restaurant in DeKalb that offers authentic Chinese cuisine with items such as sweet sour chicken, egg drop soup and crab rangoons.

John Yin began working in his family’s restaurant at the age of 10, which made it second nature for him to manage an entire kitchen on his own. Although there have been other employees over the years, none ever proved to be a complete fit.

“We’ve had employees, but over the years we realized the easy way is to do it yourself,” Marilyn Yin said.

Even when things get hectic, as it often does at an eatery with a strong local following, the ladies manage to stay cheerful.  This year, the owners will be offering lunch Tuesday through Sunday and dinner each day.  The regulars, which include long-time DeKalb residents from all walks of life, wish them well.

Eight years ago, we called attention to National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke, noting how one Donald J. Trump's version of the Cult of the Presidency was reason for Democrat Keepers of the Cult to rethink the role of a strong central government.

There might be a general principle at work, and its emergence is encouraging.

Having watched the rise of Trumpism — and, now, having seen the beginning of violence in its name — who out there is having second thoughts as to the wisdom of imbuing our central state with massive power?

That’s a serious, not a rhetorical, question. I would genuinely love to know how many “liberals” have begun to suspect that there are some pretty meaningful downsides to the consolidation of state authority. I’d like to know how many of my ideological opponents saying with a smirk that “it couldn’t happen here” have begun to wonder if it could. I’d like to know how many fervent critics of the Second Amendment have caught themselves wondering whether the right to keep and bear arms isn’t a welcome safety valve after all.

There's more in that vein at the article. By all means, read and understand.

I cannot guarantee the reliability of links to National Review from eight years ago, it's hard enough to guarantee those week to week.

Remember "patriarchy and meat?"

Perhaps the Huffington Post writer has spent time in the fever swamps of cultural studies, in which the commercial butchering of animals becomes an example of the absent referent.

I was struggling to find a way to explain why people eat animals and why it is so difficult to discuss the issue. I realized that it was because of what I call the structure of the absent referent: Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The "absent referent" is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our "meat" separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep something from being seen as having been someone.

Never in the history of intellectual endeavour has so much effort been devoted by so many to so little. From that we get The Sexual Politics of Meat, which I skimmed one lazy afternoon years ago, to be unimpressed by its efforts to treat housewives preparing roasts for their husbands and deer hunting as manifestations of the same hierarchy of dominion, but the author saw fit to offer a sequel, The Pornography of Meat, and the late unlamented Lingua Franca suggested there would soon be a new library category, "patriarchy and meat." Sometimes the only thing to do is to snicker.

Carol Adams is still at it, and Town Hall's "Ranty Amy" Curtis is snickering.  "She's hitting all the Leftist talking points like she's collecting woke Pokémon."  Sounds like the professor is still working off the same lecture notes from thirty years ago.

Last fall, we noted an essay by Streetsblog's Hayden Clarkin, who was not a fan of making motorists miserable, and might have recommended that advocates of a certain stripe lose the smug.

Our President has been musing about buying or annexing or occupying Greenland.  A polar map makes the island's strategic importance to North America clear.

Inside Higher Ed columnist Rachel Toor asks, "Can we in higher ed, the true 'life-long learners,' think hard about what we’ve gotten wrong, admit our mistakes without shame and then change and adapt to the world we all now live in?"

The irregular Saturday-only bridge column has previously featured some of the strange bids the algorithms make.  So it is with this recent simulation.

The Candy Cane Lane neighborhood of West Allis is several blocks of tract houses from the American High that over the years has developed a tradition of blinging out the houses for the Festive Season.

When does borrowing for countercyclical Keynesian economics begin to work against itself?

Among the 47 studies that find nonlinear threshold levels at which debt begins to adversely affect economic growth, mean and median threshold levels can be calculated. The mean threshold level is 74% of GDP, while the median threshold is 73%. If we remove estimates from developing country samples to focus on the threshold level for advanced economies, the mean and median threshold levels are marginally higher, at 75% and 76% respectively. These estimates are largely consistent with prior estimates for advanced countries.

That's the money quote from "The Impact of Public Debt on Economic Growth: What the Empirical Literature Tells Us," an ongoing Mercatus Center round-up-cum-meta-analysis of research on, to put it loosely, when tax, spend, and borrow becomes counter-productive.

Understanding the relationship between public debt and economic growth is of paramount importance to both economists and policymakers. High and rising debt levels raise concerns about fiscal sustainability, intergenerational equity, and potential constraints on future policy space. On the other hand, fiscal stimulus funded by debt is often used as a policy tool during economic downturns, particularly in liquidity traps where monetary policy may be constrained. The key policy question, therefore, is not whether public debt is inherently good or bad, but rather under what conditions it becomes harmful to long-run economic performance.

Put another way, those policy issues that make teaching macroeconomics a futile struggle between the positive economics of income-expenditure models and the normative economics of policy tradeoffs will not go away.  And once public debt, a stock, rises to about three-quarters of gross domestic product, a flow, the anticipated magic multipliers and all the other policy tools lose effectiveness.

In the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, inside not-so-higher education, Austin Sarat asks, "How Many Vice Presidents Does a College Need?"