Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
It has been my custom to post a video featuring vintage trains under the Christmas tree, and work on the permanent model railroad for the year appears.
Here is this year’s video.
Thanks for your interest and your comments. I’m taking a couple weeks away from the turmoil of social media.
Disney must have done a great job advertising the new mini series “Get Back!” featuring the Beatles. I say that because I don’t watch much TV but somehow the ads found me. I’m sure it was through football games.
My daughter has a Disney Plus subscription (i.e. I’m paying for it) so I considered it a sunken cost and decided to go for it. I have been a Beatles fan since I was in high school so it wasn’t too hard of a decision.
As previously mentioned on these pages, I decided a while ago (when the Chinese commie crud started) to get really good at a few things, rather than being really average at a lot. After analyzing my total free time and assessing my preferences, I ended up on basically two things that I want to do with my free time. Maintain physical fitness and learn French.
Learning a language is a long haul and I expected that. What I didn’t expect is how rapidly I am learning things with the help of the many free or practically free aids you can find online. The space is cluttered and extremely competitive. After 15 months of throwing myself at this I have made some really nice progress. My original plan was to be fluent in 5 years, but if I can keep up this pace I believe I can do it in 3.
Through an acquaintance I discovered Radio Garden. I don’t have time for a lot of tech in my life so any new widget or gadget has to have a couple of qualifications.
1) extreme and 100% ease of use
2) add value to my life
Radio Garden meets my qualifications.
We’re pretty cheap, so it took a celebratory night (46 years of fairly amiable tolerance of one another) to splurge on Prime’s “stream for pay” documentary: Shelby Steele’s What Killed Michael Brown?. We’d seen reviews* that sounded interesting. Steele’s voice and perspective define the film; it is directed by his son, Eli. It is polished, its music, use of historical footage smooth.
He interviews citizens from Ferguson, he compiles a brief but clear description of that fatal afternoon, uses clips of George Stephanopoulos’ interview of Darren Wilson. He notes Holder’s arrival in Ferguson after the shooting, the response of residents to his statements. A repeated presence is Al Sharpton, who seems to represent those who force incidents into patterns presented as “poetic truth” – prejudged, premade narratives that ignore the shifts in culture (and reality) over a hundred years. While the central focus is the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, it interweaves personal narrative to quietly honor the strength and integrity of his father’s choices. He traces his parents’ lives (we see the Kentucky community in which his father was born in 1900 and from which he joined the great northern migration as an orphaned boy at 14; by emphasizing the house ownership rate in the black communities of his youth and showing houses his parents bought in the forties and fifties in Chicago, he tells us much about a culture and a time, about the incremental nature but powerful force of economic liberty and responsibility). Less of his own life is described, but, born in 1946, he lived through the transition: he came of age in the Great Society era: we hear LBJ, we see the projects when as a young man he worked in St. Louis, and we see them implode.
But the touchstone for him lies in his parents’ choices: their civil rights activism reflected their values in the forties and fifties as were their hard-won and steady movement toward a secure home. He returns to the self-made man, a concept central to his father’s life as it had been to Frederick Douglass, two generations before. His argument, characteristic of a Hoover scholar, is familiar, if subtle, personal and complex. His father was not helpless, but the Great Society assumed helplessness; that assumption was destructive but accepting it was also a choice and also destructive. Steele seems intent on communicating what he has learned over a long lifetime, wisdom and appreciation that connects his father, his own maturation, and the present to the importance of making one’s self, accepting agency. (* Links of reviews below fold.)