Unfinished post #2.   It’s a two-fer. This is what I’d like to see happen with college sports. Imagine that, somehow, the revenue-generating college sports become de facto minor league teams, sponsored by the colleges but with paid athletes who may or may not choose to take classes in the off-season either at that college or at a nearby community college.  Colleges don’t have to maintain the pretense that these players are students, the government can collect the now-lost tax... Read more

I just sat down to my computer and looked at the list of posts — four drafts, one right after the next, with unfinished thoughts.  So I’m going to try to finish these, or at least offer my rough draft ideas to the world.   OK, no one’s said that — yet.  But sometimes I think that’s where we’re headed. Yesterday, one of my pro-gay-marriage facebook friends posted a link where — in the comments to the article was the... Read more

So we spent a couple days at my parents’ house, and one of our outings was the Detroit Institute of Arts, which reminded me of my pet idea for a new kind of museum. I should start by saying that I think the notion that art is meant to challenge the viewer is a bit silly, and contemporary art which requires lengthy explanations to tell the viewer what the various components of the work symbolize is not really worth very... Read more

So Megan McArdle is writing about homebuying today, and I thought I’d just comment there referencing something I wrote about the topic — but, it seems, I never actually wrote about this!  The closest was an article on Germany and the baby bust there, in which I observed that the very conditions that make Germany a progressive’s dream (dense housing, high mass transit use), are part of what produces such a low birth rate, as it’s just awfully inconvenient to... Read more

So we’re visiting my parents in Detroit for a couple days (yeah, we had The Talk with them about moving to a condo; they replied “we’ll think about it.  But that’s another story), and we headed out to the Detroit Historical Museum for the afternoon. Well, it was a short visit, actually, as it’s a fairly small museum:  the Streets of Old Detroit is a nice reconstruction of Detroit in the 1900s, 1870s, and 1840s, with a general store, a... Read more

When immigration activists say, “our immigration system is broken,” I’m not persuaded by their arguments.  Their fix for the supposed brokenness is a combination amnesty + guest-worker program.  Does the “brokenness” lie in our claimed (I don’t buy it) shortage of workers?  Or in our failure to enforce immigration law in the past? But here’s an example of the actual brokenness of the system:  our court system doesn’t seem to be able to manage to keep deported immigrants out of... Read more

So for a while, I’d periodically see someone collecting petition signatures for a proposed term limits amendment to the Illinois constitution.  (We don’t have a referendum process for legislation in Illinois, only constitutional amendments.)  And I’m not really excited about this proposal — though such a law would, after it begins to affect legislators in eight years after passage, finally take down Michael Madigan, it’s just a sad, sad commentary on our system that Madigan is considered “All-powerful House Leader... Read more

So I just thought I’d throw this out there: We’re very behind in our summer vacation planning (late July/early August). The thought is that the corvette plant in Bowling Green has a minimum age of 7 for its factory tours, which means this is the first year our youngest son is old enough to do this. So our itinerary includes: Mammoth cave Corvette plant tour The Parthenon (in Nashville) But we’re clueless about how to round this out and where... Read more

So over at Ann Althouse’s blog, a discussion on black families in poverty and some throw-away lines on the welfare state as the cause of the surge in unmarried parenting.  And my first thought was this: Many of the reasons that are offered are specific to the history of the black community.  Legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination.  The loss of jobs in the 70s.  The willingness of men, but not women, to intermarry.  Men in prison. But the rates... Read more

Here’s the first paragraph in the lead article in the Chicago Tribune today: Illinois Democrats went all-in Thursday with their election-year class warfare theme as Speaker Michael Madigan pitched the idea of asking voters to raise taxes on millionaires, Senate President John Cullerton advanced a minimum-wage increase and Gov. Pat Quinn compared wealthy opponent Bruce Rauner to TV villain Mr. Burns. The last two of these are unsurprising — we can expect to see a lot more along the same... Read more