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.
If anyone would like to discuss President Trump’s proposal for an expanded role for apprenticeship programs in America…and related broader issues of workforce training and skills development…this is the place. Some useful links:
Trump’s remarks on signing the executive order
Comments by Ivanka Trump and Labor Secretary Alex Acosta
Existing Federal regulations re apprenticeship programs
(There are also state regulations)
Thoughts?
Last night I went to see one of my favorite bands, Electric Six, at Dante’s in Portland on Burnside Avenue. They played a fun show and the band sounded great (my ears are still ringing). Here is their iconic singer “Dick Valentine” on stage. The band delivers hilarious onstage banter and are highly recommended. The crowd at Dante’s was also great and everyone seemed to be in good spirits.
Some stories about behavior of “progressives” and their institutions which represent the above characteristics in particularly egregious fashion.
John Wright’s sons were expelled from their Boy Scout troop…apparently based largely on accusations of ‘Islamophobia.’
Aisha O’Connor writes about her experiences at Bryn Mawr. This was back in the early 1990s. I doubt that things have gotten any saner since.
Rick Poach reports on a conversation (if you can call one-way communication a conversation) overheard in a diner last November 10.
Roger Simon writes about witch hunts and unhinged leftist rage.
Along about the time that I started blogging … no, even well before that point, I was well-aware that there were personalities who could say and do flamingly stupid and insulting things on the public stage, and some would take no permanent career harm from having done so. Jane Fonda, for example, went on having a career for decades after getting the nick “Hanoi Jane” for her anti-war antics in the 1960s. Other personalities – equally prominent, having said and done things just as injudicious – appeared to walk away unscathed. It seemed to be a given that some public personalities were basically Teflon; as it would become even more obvious in the last decade, they had something that I call – for lack of a better term – douchebag privilege. Generally speaking, the lefty-intellectual-media lot – like the Kennedys, the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton brand of racial activists, and jerks like Michael Moore had douchebag privilege, whereas those of the other persuasion didn’t.
Blitzed is a book by Norman Ohler about drugs and Germany during WW2. The book also appears to comprehensively demonstrate how these drugs impacted military tactics and operations for the German troops and also how they altered strategy at the highest levels.
From a tactical and operational perspective, I can see how the narrative of the use of drugs to push troops to move faster and work at night aligns with my understanding of the early years of WW2. The Germans did cover ground rapidly during the early years of the Blitzkrieg and absolutely outfought the Allies (overall) at night. They also managed more sorties for their air force per plane and were more effective at leveraging their military assets (also through battlefield recovery at night of damaged equipment). Compared to WW1, especially, the distances that the German troops covered during the Blitzkrieg phases of 1939-41 were amazing and their combat power remained strong.
From a strategic perspective, the book attempts to align the delusional attack known as “the Battle of the Bulge” in late 1944 to the use of drugs by the supreme commander, which would account for his thoughts that this shock attack could break the will of the Allies to fight. This is an interesting line of thought and if we had perfect information we would attempt to match the various drugs he was prescribed on top of the decisions that were made during different battles and campaigns during WW2.
I have seen a number of reviews of this book and most of them seem to think that there is a strong basis of fact. However, there are often bitterly contested reviews, especially with regards to the more sweeping generalizations that were translated as “everyone was on drugs”. Those discussions, to me, are more of a “corner case” of the key findings related to 1) the impact of drugs on the combat power of early war German formations 2) the impact of drugs on decision making at the highest levels of command. I would love to hear from other authors interested in this topic to see how it aligns with their opinions.
Cross posted at LITGM