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In 1932, economist Clark Warburton published an article through The American Academy of Political and Social Science analyzing the economic impacts of the American Prohibition Era. Contrary to popular belief, he argued that the nationwide ban on the sale of alcohol had limited economic practicality people would continue businesses as usual so long as they could access alcohol on their own. In other words, the economic effects were generally overestimated insofar as the efficacy of the Prohibition was also overestimated.

In the most rudimentary sense, this logic is just as applicable to the social economics of Hamilton, N.Y.s Old Stone Jug.

Most sophomores and upperclassmen of Colgate University understand the importance of the Jug within the Hamiltonian social scene. For years, it has provided students with an accessible and reliable outlet as the primary social space in town. But current first-years largely only understand the Jug via stories, rumors and word of mouth. Since the beginning of the new academic year, the Jug has remained closed. Beyond speculation, there have been no concrete answers as to why.

While the reasons for the closure are presently unknowable, the social impacts of this change are not. The elimination of Hamiltons 18+ dance club is sure to have a major effect on the party scene. One may be inclined to believe that the practical effects are obvious a decrease in social options necessitates a decrease in the social life itself. Partying and late-night excursions would presumably decrease. But, as Warburton explained, we must remind ourselves that a limit on an economic want is only strong if the people cannot access it on their own.

To understand the Jug as an economic actor, one must frame it vis--vis the social paradigm of Colgate. This is to say Colgate students create a particular type of demand for outlets such as the Jug. It is no secret that the Universitys social life can be, at times, restrictive. Greek Life Organizations (GLOs) remain a dominant force in this sense and are, by definition, exclusive. Colgates Panhellenic Council estimates that there are roughly 600 students involved in sororities alone this year, which amounts to nearly 20 percent of the entire student body. With limited exceptions, the remaining students face difficulties accessing this side of campus life. In these ways, the impermeability of Greek life acts as an amplifier to a Jug-prompted shortage of social options on campus.

So, what happens when there is a surplus of restrictions on campus social life? It is a decentralization of campus social outlets. As opposed to a centralized location the Jug for after-hours activities, students now gather late at night in smaller pockets across campus. These include residence hall study areas, the outer vicinity of the 113 Broad Street Complex and other localized hotspots likely unbeknownst to the general student body.

This trend of decentralization has serious implications as late-night social activities now occur with no regulation. Property damage correlated to these mini-gatherings is more likely to occur. Curtis Hall residents are familiar with the consistent damage charges that result from uncontrolled activity late at night.

The residence hall at 113 Broad Street is a particularly interesting case study. Any residents of 113 or the surrounding area have likely noticed the loud and wild gatherings taking place there on weekends. One can find boomboxes at maximum volume playing club-style music and swaths of first-years dancing fanatically. Perhaps the most conspicuous detail is the number of students openly carrying the infamous red college party cups. This is categorically bolder and more risky than previous decentralized attempts at party life, endemic to the strong desire by first-years to reclaim it. It is as if the Jug was never closed, but simply relocated.

My argument is that the Jug was necessary in controlling this type of chaos. The Jug, if nothing else, was a united hub for nightly activity. It ensured consistency, routine and as a consequence some degree of order. At the very least, after-hours activities were concentrated on a particular schedule and location. This, I believe, has two important implications for safety.

Firstly, by virtue of routine, it enables students to adapt to consistent expectations: individuals know exactly how wild the party scene will get, they know where their friends are if they get lost and will not find themselves in a new environment. It is common knowledge that new environments are most dangerous for students who are not in the right state of mind. The decentralization of social life likely proliferates this danger.

Secondly, there was some level of tacit authority implicit in the Jug. There are adults who, by owning a social space, have some degree of liability for the safety of customers. Furthermore, Campus Safety officers know exactly where students will gravitate at night, adding an extra safety net in the case of a medical emergency.

There were inherent problems with the Old Stone Jug as a function of student social life. This is no secret; there will always be a degree of uncertainty in the context of these settings. But, if the student population is a polity, the Jug was Hobbes Leviathan a de facto system of regulation that became central in an environment of limited alternatives. Without it, we observe an unregulated, anarchic state of decentralized social uncertainty.

Continued here:

The Social Economics of the Old Stone Jug - The Colgate Maroon-News

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The Washington Posts Jennifer Rubin published a piece not that long ago arguing that Democrats have an opportunity on K-12 issues:

Democrats would be wise to reclaim the issue of K-12 education, starting with a recognition that the United States has long been falling behind international competitors and suffered another blow with COVID. They might consider a multipronged approach at both the state and federal levels.

Rubins argument is intuitive: theres ample evidence that the pandemic left U.S. kids academically and socially reeling. Theres also proof that American families are worried about their kids well-being and academic progress.

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As kids struggle, as parents and caregivers fret, some prominent conservatives are currently exploring whether public schools can be meaningfully improved if we give enough families public vouchers for private schools and/or if we can figure out precisely which books to ban. These are not serious responses to the problems and anxieties most American families face. Democrats would benefit if they offered something more substantive than this low bar.

But what? Rubin suggests a three-pronged framework. Democrats should:

Its a reasonable starting point. Education funding increases improve public schools. Teacher pay is low, relative to other professions requiring extensive credentialing, and it hasnt increased enough to keep pace with inflation. U.S. teacher training programs are not particularly effective, particularly when it comes to preparing candidates to teach students to read.

The educational benefits of decentralization are less obvious: U.S. history is pretty clear that local control of schools often sustains inequities and fosters civil rights abuses. Absent top-down pressure to focus on equity, local (and state) decisionmakers regularly default to decisions that are convenient, comfortable and bad for historically marginalized communities.

Funding inequities generally thrive under decentralization. The erosion of federal pressure to integrate schools gave local authorities room to resegregate schools through housing policies, gerrymandered enrollment zones and other surreptitious changes. Combine these trends, and its easy to see how funding inequities are systemically racializedits easier to underfund children of colors educational opportunities when Black and brown children have been concentrated into segregated campuses.

Still, theres some promise in a governance approach along the lines that Rubin suggests: giving local authorities more room to innovate on process while holding them accountable for showing evidence of academic improvement.

But wait. Does that idea sound familiar? It should. Arne Duncan, President Obamas first secretary of education, famously described his reform strategy as tight on goals, loose on means. This tight-loose approach is also a key facet of the public charter school model and its delivered some real improvements for kids.

This is the trouble with the opportunity that Rubin outlines: her new education platform for Democrats sounds an awful lot like the (again, constantly dying) education reform movement. The playbook sounds a whole lot like Duncans old reform one: more funding with tighter goals and more flexibility for how schools and districts reach them.

Same goes for Rubins push to raise teacher pay and standardsthats an echo of core reform initiatives like former DC Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhees effort to reshape the capitals teaching force. And the reformers over at the National Council on Teacher Quality have been pushing to improve teacher preparation programs for years.

Say it plain: thats why Democrats will struggle to retake command of K12 education as a political issue. Even though education reform is politically stalled after a decade of criticism and the utterly toxic embrace of Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump theres no alternative, actionable progressive slate of ideas to improve schools.

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Its true that Democratic policymakers have some education policy ideas. California and other blue places have launched models for community schools offering wraparound social services like health, nutrition, dental and career-training services. Early education investments like universal pre-K remain popular with progressives (and several conservatives).

But none of these progressive ideas provide a theory of action to address unfairness and dysfunction in K12 schools. Theyre all Very Good Things with solid evidentiary support from prior studies (and support from reformers like Duncan and Rhee, incidentally). They just dont address the core challenge of improving you might even say, reforming the foundations of elementary and secondary education in the United States.

Why is this so difficult? Its partly because reforms ideas arent as substantively useless as their political unpopularity suggests. For all the angry discourse about standardized tests, for instance, they generate data that protect students civil rights and provide key proof points for lawsuits identifying how states or districts school funding choices harm families of color.

The real reason that progressives cant quit reform, though, is that we havent yet figured out how to dissolve a core tension in our public education thinking. On the one hand, progressives have grown correctly suspicious of the structural biases built into public systems. On the other hand, progressives are prone to waxing nostalgic about the fragile, diminishing greatness of American public schools. Many of us tend to imagine that this system was, at some point before No Child Left Behind or Teach For America or the Reagan administration, etc., a shining exemplar of democratic investment in fairness and social mobility.

This tension makes progressives stalwart defenders of public education as a concept, so much so that we generally resist efforts to substantially overhaul its governance as attacks on public education. But its also clear that the long history of American public education is saturated with examples of schools replicating and amplifying social inequities. Some of the most sacred elements of American public education have reliably served as toxic firewalls against progress towards racial justice in the United States.

To move beyond education reform, progressives need to face this uncomfortable incoherence in our thinking. Our post-reform public education platform cant just be about adding grades in the early years and enveloping K12 schools with more social services. Sure, public schools could use deeper resources and broader systems of support. But many of the central mechanisms of the K12 system are themselves unfair against communities of color, low-income families, linguistically diverse childrenand other historically marginalized groups. Schools wont serve those students better without being made to do so.

If Democrats want the political benefits of credibility on public education, they need to center, and solve for, those inequities. And if their best proposals for doing so keep circling back to education reform ideas, perhaps thats a hint that they abandoned that movement too early.

Dr. Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and a partner at the Childrens Equity Project. He is also a working father with three kids. These views are his alone, and are not necessarily shared by his employersor his kids.

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Wait. Did Education Reform Just Become Inescapable? - The 74

In poll after poll, the majority of Democratic voters say they do not want Joe Biden to run for reelection next year. And his age, the data shows, is by far the biggest snag. At 80, Biden is already the oldest president in US history and would be 86 by the end of a second term.

And yet, despite such polling, those close to Biden have contrived an entirely different explanation for why his candidacy might fail. Whether its left-wing academic Cornel West, a presidential candidate running for the Green Party nomination, or a pending moderate candidate, third-party challengers have become the main source of worry in Bidenworld, according to an NBC News report Monday. Its pretty fucking concerning, a person familiar with White House discussions about the matter told the outlet.

According to two sources, the president even discussed the matter during a recent White House visit from Hillary Clinton. As NBC notes, many of Clintons allies have spent the past six years blaming the Green Partys Jill Stein for her loss to Donald Trump in 2016. Of course, Clintons defeat was likely caused by numerous factors, including her high disapproval marks among voters and a wildly dysfunctional campaign that failed to contend with the changing political wind in Rust Belt states that had previously voted for Barack Obama.

No matter. Clinton, per NBC, spent her conference with Biden this month urging him to prioritize third-party threats and combat them. She shared the same warning ahead of the 2020 race, accusing Republicans of grooming an unnamed candidate favored by the Kremlinlikely an allusion to former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbardto run as a third-party choice, thereby hurting Democratic odds in the general election.

A recent poll from NBC News does suggest that third-party options could hamper Bidens reelection efforts. When the outlet asked respondents to choose between Biden and Trump, the result was a 46-46 tie. And when presented with additional options for three notable alternative partiesthe Green Party, the Libertarian Party, and the moderate No Labels groupa plurality of respondents, 39%, backed Trump, giving him a three-point lead over the president.

Other recent head-to-head polls have put Trump and Biden at a deadlock; a CBS News poll last week even had Trump leading Biden by one point. If that data is borne out in a handful of key states, the minuscule percentage of voters who back third-party candidates could be enough to tilt the election. With a tight election, every vote counts, a Biden ally told NBC News. Is it in the back of many peoples brains? Absolutely. Do we have to be careful as we move out? Yes, we do.

Compounding these pressures is the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is currently running for the Democratic nomination but has not ruled out a third-party bid. Over the summer, Kennedy, an anti-vaxxer and all-around crackpot conspiracist, even began courting the Libertarian Party, according to The New York Times. He emphasized that he was committed to running as a Democrat but said that he considered himself very libertarian, Angela McArdle, Libertarian Party chair, told the Times when asked about her July meeting with Kennedy.

Biden, meanwhile, could also face a primary challenger from within his own party. For example: Congressman Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat, revealed recently that he is weighing a presidential bid. Im concerned that there is no alternative, Phillips told political strategist and pundit Steve Schmidt. Possibly alluding to Bidens unprecedented age, the lawmaker added that something could happen between now and next November that would make the Democratic Convention in Chicago an unmitigated disaster.

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Hillary Clinton Urges Joe Biden Not to Sleep on Third-Party Spoilers ... - Vanity Fair

To supportersit is a conservative North Star -- that rare example of a political movement willing to put the little guy first and stand against corruption and waste in Washington.

To its detractors, the House Freedom Caucus is a far right, democracy-threatening cabal with a predilection for anarchy and nebulous aims beyond burning down the establishment.

Love it or loathe it, the renegade Republican faction is impossible to ignore. Just ask party leaders blaming its antics on Capitol Hill for a political deadlock that almost led this weekend to a damaging government shutdown.

Angered at the deal their party leader, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, struck with Democrats late Saturday to prevent the shutdown, the group now intends to push for his ouster in the week ahead.

Birthed in the cauldron of ultra-conservative Tea Party politics in the Obama era, the invitation-only bloc launched in 2015 under the working title "The Reasonable Nutjob Caucus," according to founding member Mick Mulvaney.

The group of roughly 40 lawmakers -- it doesn't make its membership public -- accounts for just one-fifth of the House Republican conference.

But it wields outsize power as the party has a majority of just four seats, and it takes only a few lawmakers to throw the agenda of the House leadership into chaos.

Its members, moreover, tend to represent safe Republican seats, giving them the leeway to stir the kind of controversies that more precariously placed lawmakers would shy away from.

This gets them noticed on cable news, which in turn bolsters their online profiles, creating a feedback loop that keeps the fundraising dollars spinning.

Three of the bloc's most prominent members and allies-- Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert -- are social media stars with a combined following on X, formerly known as Twitter, in excess of 10 million.

Whereas once they might have relied on the Republican National Committee or the Washington conservative establishment for help with fundraising, now they can appeal directly to their fans, giving them significant autonomy from the party whip.

- Rightward lurch -

This year alone, 19 Freedom Caucus members threatenedto sink McCarthy's bid for the speaker's gavel, and a handful forced a government debt crisis that almost led to a catastrophic US debt default.

The zealous pursuit by many of those same lawmakers of deep and unpopular spending cuts was behind this weekend's shutdown drama that would have disrupted the lives of millions of Americans.

Now they are furious with McCarthy for the stopgap compromise he made with Democrats to keep the government funded for another 45 days at current spending levels.

And McCarthy is vulnerable because, in order to secure the speaker's post, he had made a key concession to the caucus -- a rule allowing individual lawmakers to call a snap vote to remove him.

"I do intend to file a motion to vacate Speaker McCarthy this week," key caucus ally Gaetz told CNN on Sunday.

"I think we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy," he said.

- Agent of chaos -

Latterly, the fringe group has inveigled itself into the upper echelons of the party, with founding member Jim Jordan becoming chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee.

Jordan has been spearheading an impeachment investigation against President Joe Biden that has irritated mainstream colleagues, as witness after witness called by Republicans has undercut their narrative that the president is corrupt.

The Freedom Caucus is not immune from the schisms that beset every political grouping, with cracks emerging over alliances and tactics.

Membersvoted to boot out Greene, the far right Georgia flamethrower,in July for calling Boebert "a little bitch" during a caustic exchange on the House floor.

And Boebert herself reinforced the group's rabble-rousing image when she was thrown out of a performance of "Beetlejuice: The Musical" in Colorado in September after openly vaping and being disruptive at the family show.

Mulvaney argues, however, that some of the attention the group has received has been unfair and that its reputation as an agent of chaos is inaccurate.

"The Freedom Caucus has rules. Some are unwritten, but most exist in writing," he said in an op-ed for politics news outlet The Hill last week.

"I know because I wrote them."

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The hardline 'Nutjob Caucus' holding Republican feet to the fire - Yahoo News

The Ilkley & District Good Neighbours over 90s Afternoon Tea Party has been held at the Clarke Foley Community Centre in Ilkley.

The event brought together over 80 residents along with the Lord Mayor of Bradford, Ilkleys Town Mayor Cllr Karl Milner, West Yorkshire's Deputy Lieutenant Suzanne Watson, Ilkley Town Crier Isabel Ashman and Robbie Moore MP for a very special occasion.

Ilkleys Being Me Sunshine Trio provided the musical entertainment and a sing-along for attendees.

Afternoon tea was provided by the catering team at the Clarke Foley, with members of the 1224 (Wharfedale) Squadron helping out with the event.

Robbie Moore, Ilkley's MP, said: "It was brilliant to spend the Saturday at Ilkley & District Good Neighbours Over 90s Afternoon Tea Party held at the Clarke Foley Community Centre in Ilkley. It was great to stop until the end and spend time speaking to all around the tables.

"A huge well done to everyone who helped organise the event and a special thanks to Ilkleys Bring Me Sunshine for the fantastic musical entertainment and for the great sing-along. The afternoon tea was superb and the catering team at the Clarke Foley have done an amazing job once again. Well done also to members of Ilkley Royal Air Force Air Cadets for helping out - you are all such a credit to your squadron."

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Annual over 90s tea party held in Ilkley - Rombalds Radio