Questions that must be asked

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Commenting on our newest residents’ piscatorial practices, reader Hank wrote:

Reminds my when I was a kid a few of us would take one of our Skimmars, go under the Mill St. bridge over the Byram River at night, catch pigeons, stuff them into a burlap bag and sell them to the China Lang restaurant in Port Chester for a quarter each.

I don’t know what stirs your mind at 4:00 AM, but Hank’s anecdote got me wondering about a critical side issue, so I asked ChatGTP:

Q. A reader of mine mentioned that, back in the early 60s, he and his friends would capture pigeons under a local bridge, "stuff them in a burlap bag" and sell them for a quarter to the local chinese restaurant around the corner. Ah, good times, but the thought occurred to me: what happened to burlap bags? Seems to me that we always had a few of them hanging around in our (suburban, not rural) garage, and put them to use for a variety of purposes. Obviously, or I assume it is, they were replaced by plastic sacks and packaging, but when did that occur, and is there still a burlap bag industry?

A.

Yes—your memory is tracking a real and fairly abrupt change in American material culture. Burlap sacks were still utterly ordinary in the early 1960s, and then largely disappeared from everyday American life during the late 1960s and 1970s. They didn't become obsolete, though. There is still a substantial jute/burlap industry; it just migrated out of the suburban garage and into some fairly specific commercial niches.

The important distinction is that burlap wasn't primarily a household product. Those sacks accumulated in garages and basements because enormous quantities of ordinary goods arrived in them: potatoes and onions, feed, seed, nuts, coffee, various agricultural products, industrial materials, etc. A sack would enter the local economy as packaging and then acquire a second life. Hence the garage supply. People used them for leaves, garden work, protecting shrubs, hauling junk, storing things, sandbags, Halloween costumes, sack races—and, evidently, pigeon commerce.

The disappearance happened mostly from about 1965 to 1980

There wasn't a single moment when America "switched from burlap to plastic." In fact, paper got there first. Multiwall kraft-paper sacks had already taken a substantial portion of jute's traditional packaging market in the 1950s. Plastic film began competing seriously with jute in the early 1960s. Then woven polypropylene—the familiar tough woven-plastic sack—became the real killer in the late '60s and '70s.

A remarkably good contemporary snapshot comes from a World Bank study of the American jute market. It says that polypropylene manufacturers entered the commercial packaging business "in full strength" around 1969. U.S. consumption of burlap and cotton for bags then fell sharply in 1969–71, while polypropylene-bag material went from about 70 million square yards in 1970 to an estimated 150 million in 1972. At the same time, disruptions in imported burlap supplies and rising jute prices made the old sacks increasingly uneconomical.

An EPA study from essentially the same period describes the transition as it was happening: disposable paper and plastic bags were replacing textile sacks because they were cheaper, strong, and moisture-resistant; woven polypropylene was also lighter, stronger and more resistant to rot and chemicals than burlap.

So if somebody remembers burlap sacks everywhere in 1962 but hardly at all by 1978, that isn't just nostalgia playing tricks. He lived through the transition.

There was another, less visible change too: bulk handling eliminated the sack altogether. Grain, fertilizer and other commodities increasingly traveled in bulk trucks, railcars, bins, pallets and larger containers rather than being divided into scores of individual sacks. A later World Bank survey found North American burlap imports dropping from roughly 250,000 tons annually in 1964–66 to about 80,000 tons in the early 1980s. It attributed the decline both to paper/plastic substitution and to the move toward bulk handling.

That's probably the missing piece in your recollection. Plastic didn't simply replace every burlap sack with a plastic sack. A lot of sacks vanished because the distribution system stopped requiring sacks at all.

Burlap is still very much alive

"Burlap" is essentially the American name for the coarse woven fabric usually made from jute; "hessian" is the term you're more likely to encounter in Britain and international trade. Jute remains a very large agricultural and manufacturing business centered particularly in India and Bangladesh.

And surprisingly large. India reports producing about 1.28 million metric tons of jute goods in FY 2025–26, with about 1.2 million tons consumed domestically. It has 120 composite jute mills and roughly 370,000 people directly employed in mills and diversified jute manufacturing, in addition to millions of farming families dependent on the crop.

A great deal of that production is still sacking. Indian industry figures for 2024–25, for example, record about 933,000 metric tons of sacking versus only about 101,000 tons of the lighter fabric classified as hessian.

And you've probably encountered genuine burlap sacks recently without thinking much about them. Green coffee beans are still commonly shipped in jute sacks, as are cocoa and some other agricultural commodities. There are American companies today selling traditional burlap coffee sacks alongside modern polypropylene bulk bags. In fact, the European coffee and cocoa industries issued a new specification for food-contact jute bags just this year.

So I'd date the phenomenon you're remembering approximately like this: ubiquitous through the 1950s and early '60s → rapid displacement beginning in the later '60s → conspicuously disappearing during the 1970s → largely a specialty/commercial material in America by the 1980s.

And there is a nice irony to the story. Burlap lost because the new disposable materials were cheaper, lighter, cleaner and more convenient. Half a century later, jute is being promoted again precisely because it is natural, biodegradable and reusable, while its plastic replacements have become an environmental problem.

The burlap bag didn't really die. We just stopped bringing its contents home in one—which meant we stopped getting the bag for free.

I can't tell whether this is an actual student's essay or a compilation, but it's no different from what I heard in my own college years, so ....

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or perhaps it was written to order by a kenyan

It's possible that at least a few of the students who’ve been racking up college debt shouldn’t have been there in the first place

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off to take Biff’s and penelope’s examinations


AI Overview

Total outstanding student loan debt in the United States is approximately $1.86 trillion.

Education Data Initiative

Breakdown of the Debt

  • Federal Student Loans: About $1.72 trillion, which makes up roughly 91% of all student debt.

  • Private Student Loans: About $138.8 billion to $166 billion, which makes up the remaining 7% to 9%.

  • Total Borrowers: Roughly 42.6 million Americans hold federal student loan debt.

  • Average Balances: The average federal debt per borrower is about $40,467, while total balances including private loans can average up to $43,521

UPDATE: PowerLine’s John Hinderaker has more on the NYT article. His conclusion is the same as mine, basically.

AI Kills Jobs!

In this case, by making cheating cheaper and more efficient. The New York Times headlines: “Kenyans Did College Students’ Homework for Years. Then A.I. Arrived.”

Hailing from a farming village in Kenya, Mr. Bundi moved to the capital, Nairobi, in 2011 to be the first in his family to attend university. There, a friend suggested he try a new online job: writing essays for cheating overseas college students.
***
Mr. Bundi estimates he wrote more than 2,500 essays over the next 12 years, sometimes three a day. He balanced completing his public health degree with helping faraway students studying engineering, medicine and computer science to finish theirs. Some students gave him their school login information so he could keep up with their assignments.

Alas, those halcyon days are over:

In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. At colleges worldwide, students made a simple calculation that has become more pronounced today: Why pay a freelancer in Kenya when ChatGPT could do the job?

Essay work began to thin. Rates fell, and assignments dwindled. Before long, the industry shrank to almost nothing. “I never would have expected A.I. could do this,” Mr. Bundi said.

Is that a sad story, or what?

Actually, it is one more reminder of the corruption of “higher education.” A side benefit of AI might be a total rethinking of our education system.

Diversity is our strength (?)

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you want a Third-world culture, bring in the third-world

Not content with illegally stripping the world’s fisheries (“Chinese deep-water fishing fleet is the world’s most rapacious”) our new Asian friends have brought their country’s fishing tactics to their new home. (Hint: cormorants are not involved.)

They did do it, and now they're DEIng

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Many reasons, but driving away 1/2 your customer base can’t help.

S&P 100 Drops Nike: Formerly Disruptive Shoe Company Is Now Out of Fashion

In a sign of the changing times, the S&P 100 is delisting Nike. To reiterate, the S&P 100 – not the S&P 500 – is delisting Nike, which is a reflection of the company’s poor performance on Wall Street and elsewhere. If you want to buy a share of the stock these days, it’s floundering around $38 to $40 per share, which is as low as it’s been in about 12 years. The delisting will take effect Sept. 21.

That’s a 75% drop from its peak in 2021 ,,..

As for Nike, its problems are multifaceted. From a business perspective, the company hired a bean counter and not a sports or marketing visionary to run the company. The bean counter shook up his management team and many of its long-standing partnerships and distribution channels. This provided opportunities for the company’s competitors.

Nike Is a Fashion Brand

Nike is as much a fashion brand as an athletic performance shoe company. Things go in and out of fashion every day as fickle consumers’ tastes change. For the longest time, just having that Nike swoosh logo on a shirt or a hat or your shoes was enough to signal that you’re on trend, that you buy a certain quality, and that you maintain a certain image.

This branding was reinforced by Nike's status as the dominant sponsor of the major pro athletes in sports. From Tiger Woods to Michael Jordan, if you were a pro athlete, you weren’t “somebody” until you got that Nike shoe contract.

{FWIW: years ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article on the collapse of Izod, and quoted an analyst who said she’d liquidated her entire position in the company when she learned that 75% of its sales were to teenage girls: “nothing changes faster than 16-year-old girl’s tastes”.]

Age

Nike founder Phil Knight is still as important to the Nike brand as Richard Branson is to Virgin Atlantic, and as the late Hugh Hefner once was to Playboy. But Knight is 88 years old now. Branson is 76, and Hefner is long gone, along with the relevance of his brand.

People get old, and if they’re personally integrated into a brand built around youth-driven disruption, the brand starts to be seen by younger demographics as an older brand. Michael Jordan is long retired. Tiger Woods will never again be the Woods who sold a lot of red golf shirts.

Marketing Channels Have Changed

Young people aren’t sitting for appointment TV anymore. Even when they watch sports, the advertising isn’t hitting in the same way as it used to. You have to do different things to appeal to the demographics Nike’s targeting, but the kind of things you can do and should do aren’t that expensive when compared to a Super Bowl ad. That levels the playing field for competitors who, in the past, couldn't keep up with Nike's spending in order to compete. We're talking about digital, online, and social media marketing as well as influencer marketing, among other tactics.

And then there’s this:

BREAKING: Nike is set to be removed from the S&P 100 after nearly 18 years.

The stock is now down almost 80% from its 2021 peak, turning one of the market’s most iconic consumer brands into one of its biggest recent disappointments. pic.twitter.com/3uJNIxcg4j

— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) September 5, 2026

In the end, to climb back into the S&P 100, Nike would have to generate significant revenue increases, address its China manufacturing and marketing challenges, and improve profit margins. Again, “Duh?!”

To do that, however, it will have to do something all of the world’s most successful brands have had to do, and that is to reinvent itself without discarding the things that give it a fighting chance. Don’t change the logo. In fact, think about bringing some things back, like the “Just Do It” slogan with a fresh approach. The key is for Nike to get back to its roots — to shake up the marketplace. To be a disruptor once again. But don’t disrupt in such a way that you alienate half your market.

By that measure, the company should heed the advice of the brand’s number one superstar of all time, Michael Jordan, who once said, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Words to live by, and to build a brand around, if I may say.

UPDATE:

No suprise here

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Although I suppose we could have just as easily expected a lawyer or Wall Street trader

The slur-spewing plane passenger who was duct-taped and zip-tied to his seat after an alleged mid-flight meltdown has been identified as an Arizona realtor.

Layne Arthur Lundeen, 67, of Tucson, forced American Airlines flight 618 from Dallas to Newark to land prematurely in Baltimore after his obscene outburst Thursday night — during which the bigot hurled the N-word at a flight attendant and spouted anti-gay insults, according to police.

Lundeen’s LinkedIn said he was a vice president at Long Realty in Tucson, however, his profile had been scrubbed from the site.

It’s probably wise to stop at 16 of those little nips while flying.

Here's something I hadn't thought of, but it provides another reason not to buy a battery car

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What will happen when everyone on my street gets an electric car and tries to charge it at the same time? Do we need to upgrade all our old electrical distribution systems to handle this new surge of power required to “fuel” our electrical vehicles?

If we did indeed have 70 households plugging in 70 cars to charge while they are cooking dinner and putting on the electric heating when they come home from work, we would certainly exceed the capacity of the local supply circuits built to support those households.

Fortunately, three things help.

The first is simple diversity. People get home at different times, cook dinner at different times, put on the heating at different times, and so on. That spread is easy to measure and remarkably predictable.

The second is that EV chargers in countries with modern regulatory systems have smart charging, so the charging can be automatically set to start when other demand is lower. I tell my EV charger that I need the car at 7am tomorrow morning, and it schedules the charging to complete by then, typically charging between about 1am and 6am.

The third is that electricity supply companies in open markets set dramatically different prices that reward avoiding that peak period of demand, whenever that is. I pay 1/4 of the daytime price for scheduled overnight charging, so I am strongly incentivised to use it.

There are still problems. Californians, for example, have proven less amenable to price signals than you might expect, and also are prone to using “dumb” scheduling with their vehicles that creates a demand peak at midnight if they schedule at all. But that behaviour does seem to be changing.

The writer’s optimistic answer notwithstanding, cities are going to need massive overhauls of their local electrical infrastructure, especially when NY State's, California’s, and the People’s Republic of Berkley’s mandate for all-electric housing takes effect.

Of course, it may not be the problem it appears to be at first blush, because street bums will strip the chargers of their copper wiring within weeks, and the EVs won’t require any electricity at all while they’re immobile in their parking spaces.

Not “tone deaf”, deliberate

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Mamdani Draws Outrage by Signing 9/11 Order — Then Giving Pen to Worst Possible Person

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order honoring the victims of 9/11 on Friday.

Then he handed the ceremonial pen to a lawyer who once represented an al-Qaeda terrorist.

The surreal ceremony unfolded at City Hall just one week before the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. 

Mamdani gathered senior administration officials to sign two executive orders related to the tragedy. 

The first “order” establishes September 11 as an official New York City “Day of Remembrance and Service,” complete with a citywide moment of silence honoring those killed in the attacks and those who later died from 9/11-related illnesses. 

The second updates the city's emergency preparedness and continuity plans.

… After Mamdani finished signing the documents, he handed the ceremonial pen to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and quietly instructed her, “Can you pass this?”

Tisch then gave the pen to Mamdani's chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem.

Kassem isn't an innocuous City Hall attorney. Before joining the Mamdani administration, Kassem spent years representing detainees at Guantánamo Bay and litigating national-security cases. 

His former clients included Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi al-Qaeda member who pleaded guilty before a military commission to terrorism charges arising from the 2002 bombing of the French oil tanker MV Limburg off Yemen.

And al-Darbi had a sinister connection to September 11: his sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the five hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon.

So, naturally, this was the man who ended up with the ceremonial pen used at the mayor's 9/11 commemoration.

Video of the event shows Kassem grinning as he accepted the pen.

We all know exactly what it is. It's a couple of Islamist fellow-travelers sharing a private joke at the expense of gullible Americans.

The moment immediately drew fury from some 9/11 families and New York City officials.

“It’s bulls–t,” Dennis Warchola, whose firefighter brother Michael was killed in the North Tower, told the New York Post.

“How can you defend a guy like that who wants to do Americans or any innocent person harm?”

Republican Queens Councilwoman Joann Ariola called the episode “breathtakingly tone-deaf and disrespectful.”

“The families who lost loved ones on 9/11 have every right to be outraged,” Ariola told the Post. “On the 25th anniversary, City Hall should be honoring their sacrifice with dignity, not forcing those families to endure yet another insult.”

I’m with the professor:

Retired NYPD detective and John Jay College adjunct professor Michael Alazar went further, telling the Post he believed the gesture was intentional.

“It was calculated,” Alazar said.

“It happened during a ceremony meant to be about the victims, and no one else,” he added. “9/11 families didn’t come to City Hall to watch Mamdani spotlight someone whose work intersects with the very ideology that took their loved ones.”

The sequence was made stranger by the fact that Kassem is the mayor's chief counsel.

Kassem is also a prominent attorney and CUNY School of Law professor who founded the school's CLEAR clinic. According to CUNY, he and his students have represented 15 Guantánamo prisoners, and his litigation has included national-security, wartime-detention and war-crimes cases. 

And, surprise!

He also served as a senior policy adviser in the Biden White House from 2022 to 2024 before being tapped as Mamdani's chief counsel.

Judges vs America

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Convicted of murder in El Salvador, illegally entered U.S., convicted of machete assault on homeless man in Monterey in 2023, released, found and seized by ICE in San Diego in 2026, judge rules that he can’t be detained until he has his day before an Immigration judge – average wait, 4 years.

Machete-wielding MS-13 gangster wanted for murder walks free after Biden-appointed judge releases him: DHS

An MS-13 gang member convicted in a savage execution-style murder is out of federal custody in California after a federal judge ordered his immediate release, igniting fury from the Trump administration.

U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta ordered the release of David Antonio Aviles Perez, 35, aka "the witch," after finding that immigration officials held him for five months without giving him a bond hearing or determining whether he posed a danger to the public or a flight risk.

"This is now the SECOND time this dangerous illegal has been released back onto the streets in California," he added. "Because sanctuary politicians want to play politics from the bench, innocent Americans are in danger."

The case centers on a brutal 2014 gang killing in El Salvador and a legal fight over the Trump administration’s authority to detain immigrants while removal proceedings unfold.

Alvise Perez, identified by Salvadoran prosecutors as an active MS-13 member also known as "La Bruja," or "The Witch," was convicted while outside El Salvador in December 2025 and sentenced to 20 years in prison for aggravated murder.

Prosecutors said Aviles Perez and another MS-13 member chased a man through a mountainous area in La Unión before fellow gang members forced the victim to stop and kneel.

The victim was held by the shoulders as Aviles Perez and his accomplice approached, prosecutors said.

The gang members then shot the man in the chest, back and face before fleeing. Both defendants were tried and convicted while outside the country.

Aviles Perez entered the U.S. at an unknown date and location, according to DHS.

He was arrested in Monterey, California, in 2023, after allegedly swinging a machete at a homeless man at Laguna Grande Park near Monterey State Beach. He allegedly hid the weapon before officers recovered it from a nearby Holiday Inn parking lot.

Aviles Perez was charged and convicted after the incident but later released from custody. DHS blamed California’s sanctuary policies, which limit cooperation between local authorities and federal immigration officials.

ICE agents arrested him again in San Diego on March 26 and took him into custody pending his removal to El Salvador.

He was held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center pending removal to El Salvador until Ohta ordered his immediate release Aug. 26, federal court records show.

After nearly five months in immigration custody, Aviles Perez filed a petition challenging his detention and seeking his immediate release.

Ohta ruled that immigration officials violated his Fifth Amendment due process rights by holding him without an individualized assessment of whether he was dangerous or likely to flee.

"Although Petitioner appears to have previously been convicted following a fight with another individual in May 2023, the government has offered no evidence that it detained him after considering those facts and making an individualized determination of his danger to the public or flight risk," Ohta wrote.

Ohta ordered his immediate release and barred ICE from detaining him again unless an immigration judge first holds a bond hearing and determines that renewed detention is warranted.

…. The ruling did not clear Aviles Perez of wrongdoing or find that he posed no danger. It focused on whether immigration officials followed the required process to justify keeping him detained.

…President Joe Biden nominated Ohta to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in September 2021. The Senate confirmed her that December, and her judicial commission was issued later that month, according to the Federal Judicial Center.

Very much related to the preceding post

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Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century. Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who invented the long march through the institutions. Everything that followed — the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society’s operational model, the WEF formation pipeline, the captured university, the HR department enforcing approved speech — is downstream of what he wrote in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, in code, between 1929 and 1935. 1. His central question: why hasn’t it happened? The working class was supposed to rise. The contradictions of capitalism were supposed to produce the revolution. They hadn’t – not in the West. Gramsci’s answer was precise and devastating: because the ruling class does not maintain power through force alone. It maintains power through cultural hegemony – the control of the ideas, values, and frameworks through which people understand the world. The worker who accepts that the existing order is simply how things are will not revolt, regardless of his material conditions. The revolution requires cultural change first.

2. The instrument was the long march through the institutions. Not the barricade. The school, the university, the media, the judiciary, the civil service, the cultural establishment – every institution through which a civilization transmits its values to the next generation. Capture these, fill them with people who share the counter-hegemonic project, and the cultural assumptions that maintain the existing order gradually dissolve. No barricades. No visible moment of rupture. Just the slow replacement of one cultural hegemony with another.

3. The educational capture was the masterpiece. Control the curriculum and you control the categories of thought available to the next generation. Not by telling them what to conclude – by shaping what questions they think to ask, what they consider obvious and what they consider unthinkable. The generation educated after the long march does not need to be told what to think. It thinks what it was formed to think – and experiences that thinking as its own.

4. He also theorized the organic intellectual – the person who translates the theoretical framework into stories and assumptions that circulate through the culture without appearing ideological. The film that makes the existing order seem absurd. The journalist who frames every story within the approved assumptions. Gramsci understood that culture is politics by other means – and that the side that controls the culture wins, regardless of who wins the elections.

5. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a published, documented, widely taught strategy that the left implemented consciously across the entire Western world. The 1968 generation put it into practice in the universities. They became the professors, the journalists, the civil servants, the judges, the HR directors of the decades that followed. The march took fifty years. It worked.

6. Mussolini’s prosecutor said at his trial: "We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years." The brain did not stop. It produced thirty-three notebooks – smuggled out, published, and became the most widely read Marxist text in the Western academy after Marx himself. Gramsci died in 1937, six days after his release, at forty-six. He did not see the march he theorized. He did not need to.

7. Every captured institution, every transformed curriculum, every HR department enforcing approved speech, every content moderation policy suppressing the unauthorized voice – all running the program Antonio Gramsci designed in a prison cell, by a brain that was supposed to have been stopped. It wasn’t. And neither was the march. Until now – because the distribution monopoly that made its outcomes enforceable is cracking. The counter-march has begun. It just doesn’t have a name yet.