EVERYTHING ELSE IS ELABORATION.

The "academic culture" label is, by a wide margin, the most frequently used label for Cold Spring Shops posts.  The margin would likely be even wider had such classifications been available in 2002, when we started.

A fair number of those posts are elaborations of points I raised a quarter century ago in an essay I was invited to provide to the Northern Illinois University Faculty Bulletin (long since withdrawn from print) that I titled "The Costs of Correctness."

I recently referred to the opening paragraph.

Universities are failing to carry out their mission. Contributing to this failure is a collection of ideas we call "politically correct." The intellectual foundation of these ideas is an extreme relativism that questions the possibility of objective knowledge and seeks to dispel "coherent beliefs of any kind." A university built on such a foundation cannot stand. "Politically correct" activists are actively correcting "insensitivity," especially on the part of white males, toward women and minorities. That activism may be misguided, and it diverts attention from other, more serious failings of universities.

The good news from that recent post is that people with bigger platforms than mine are paying attention to those more serious failings.  When I wrote the essay, it was with the hope of persuading people to pursue a different course from the one the trendy scholarship was pursuing.

The words university and universal have common roots: a university is a storage of universal knowledge. Its mission is to acquire, expand, and transmit knowledge. Universities are failing at that mission. For example, some students wonder why people refer to a "second" World War; and large numbers believe that "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a constitutional right. Students in this country do not perform as well on multi-step mathematical problems as their counterparts in other countries. University graduates teach high school students, and, according to the National Association of Manufacturers, high school graduates write poorly (many cannot fill out a job application) and can't do simple mathematics.

Another quarter century of credential inflation, but at last Our President is making the case for the vocational arts (gripe about his speaking style if you must) and some states are naming the names of underachieving high schools.  I fear, though, that writing properly is lost, until voice-recognition writing programs become more accurate.  Essays that a columnist dictated to a smart-'phone leave clues throughout.  Try it.

I offered a defense of the Canon and the Curriculum, but what came in the next 25 years was beyond my anticipation.

Objective knowledge is all around us. It is costly to acquire and makes no allowance for "diversity." The Challenger crew, a diverse group of astronauts, all died when their shuttle exploded. This is objective knowledge in its starkest form: let a rubber gasket freeze, a joint fails and people die. Examples of objective knowledge abound in any course catalog. Divide by zero: most illogical. Promise "free" medical care without regard for the productive capability of your economy: welcome to Soviet life. Deny coherent beliefs of any kind: enjoy incoherence. Although objective, universal knowledge is difficult to grasp, to expand, or to transmit, imagine how much more difficult it would be for each generation to relearn it from scratch.

I could not have anticipated the Soviet Union shutting down for good, six months after the essay appeared, but the same thing manifesting itself in Venezuela and in the two-lies-for-the-price-of-one Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  Heck, I wrote that essay before anyone seriously anticipated a Bill Clinton presidency, and Hillarycare.

Relearning from scratch, though, seems to be where we are headed.  Consider privilege.  We could apply the argument to any other emergent phenomenon.  Take seriously the arguments from outrage about "inherited" or "unearned" advantage or privilege or custom or what have you: aren't you reduced to having to construct your rules of interaction ab initio?  Just for fun, dear reader, consider a future privilege training session in which a novice, skeptical of the message yet alert to the irony, asks the trainer what he (or she, or it, or whatever the pronoun conventions are) did to earn the right to conduct the training and introduce that material.  Sometimes you undermine them with mockery, and sometimes, you undermine them by asking difficult questions.

I then shifted to the perceived wrongs the politically correct were endeavoring to right.

There is incivility on campus. It may be a continuation of past prejudices, a lack of good manners, or a reaction to the excesses of institutional reverse discrimination. The "politically correct" accept the first explanation and "solve" the problem by creating "protected categories" of people, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment; by punishing "insensitive" statements about people in protected categories, in violation of the First Amendment, and by branding as "oppressive" some researchers who study problems facing "protected" people, in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

That's standard stuff, but a quarter century ago, the spats were in a few of the social sciences.  Is higher education better off now that mathematics is oppressive, and hegemonic masculinity taints the technical disciplines (and everything else?)

I then called for more research, as well as getting a zinger off.

In addition to being unconstitutional, the "politically correct" response to incivility may be the wrong therapy, since we have not yet established the cause of campus incivility. The therapy may nevertheless have value: the lack of basic skills in our youth will provide them with many opportunities to be "sensitive" to each others' ineptitude at work.

Unfortunately, the intersectionality disease has infected the human resources departments in the corporate world.  Left for future research: is the expansion of the gig economy and outsourcing a way for managers to limit the reach of the human resources types and deal more directly with the ineptitude they see?

Thus I called for rigor, as well as getting another zinger off.

Universities best serve their students through rigorous development of reasoning skills and respect for what we have learned. Rigor is likely to diminish incivility on campus, because students kept busy grappling with intellectual problems will have less time to fight with each other. Better that they be unhappy with a few demanding professors.

Alas, it has become easier to get rid of the demanding professors.  Complicating matters, though, is higher education's growing reliance on contingent faculty.

I also noted the trendy stuff crowding out the real learning once the high school graduates hit college.

The attention "correctness" receives is diverted from more serious problems in the university. For example, our Northern Star's editorializing on the "tenured radicals" of our English department who impose "political correctness" in writing conceals more serious problems. As an economist, I view language as useful if it is accurate. If women operate trains or win national sailing championships alongside men, an accurate language reflects those facts. In my experience, students are aware of those facts. They avoid using "him" or "his" as generic pronouns, but many have trouble spelling or arranging sentences coherently.

Yes, once upon a time student journalism asked difficult questions, rather than being complicit in the indoctrination.

I fear, though, that the difficulties I noted with speak-and-transcribe earlier are going to hamper the ability of students, going forward, to write properly.

The next quarter century was not going to turn out well for higher education.

We are only beginning to see the consequences of our failure to carry out our mission. The employers who hire our students and the legislators who underwrite our efforts are questioning our effectiveness. There is some evidence that those earning higher incomes in the U.S. are getting rich more rapidly. One explanation blames cuts in marginal tax rates. A competing hypothesis views incomes as rewards that reflect the relative scarcity of human capital. Rising incomes may be rewards to people who learned careful reasoning, mathematics, and science, and who sold their skills to employers who valued them. That others are losing ground may be evidence of the diminished skills of more recent graduates of high schools and universities. Economists are sorting out these hypotheses, and we will soon have a better understanding of what has happened.

Where are we now?  Regular "college bubble updates" on Pajamas Media.  A political economy of inequality that touches on tax cuts at the same time the U.S. News problem suggests a flight to perceived quality of higher education, a flight that I fear is more about being able to mingle with and form networks of high achievers, rather than to hear from the very best Mr Chips regularly.

I was pessimistic then, and I'm pessimistic still.

I have drawn most of my examples of objective knowledge from economics, engineering, and the physical sciences. The costs of "political correctness" may be highest in the humanities, from which its relativistic theory comes. That theory undermines standards. When protestors at Stanford University inverted civil rights to establish a Western Civilization course because of the color of the authors' skins rather than the content of their writings, nobody asked them to make a case that Aristotle, Bacon, or Marx had nothing universal to say. Given all the competing demands on our time, that people have continued to read and appreciate these dead white males suggests that their work has value. I am not persuaded that their works have been replaced by other works of equal or greater value. The University of Pennsylvania's Houston Baker argues that choosing between Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck is "no different than choosing between a hoagy and a pizza." I'm sympathetic to his claim: specifically, I prefer any Tom Clancy novel to anything I've ever read in a literature class. But what Baker means is that art and literature are purely private matters. Universities therefore could replace humanities requirements in their catalogs with one sentence: "Satisfy yourself." They could close music, art, and literature programs. Governments could abolish programs such as the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Imagine how many resources would be freed for further transmission of objective knowledge, or for further tax cuts. In addition to ruining the livelihoods of my colleagues in the humanities, such steps would hurt the rest of us. For example, Supreme Court opinions are full of allusions to classic works. Future students may never hear Dave Brubeck's rhythms or see Rembrandt's portraits, which were fringe benefits of my college years. As with the speculative philosophers, the work of some composers, painters, novelists, and poets continues to appeal to people, which suggest their works have value, and that there will be costs if those works are replaced by other works that do not have equal or greater value.

But others are making similar points, and perhaps the academy can yet be restored to a state of good repair.  The music, too.

That is where I stood.  That is pretty much where I still stand, although the School of Tom Clancy sometimes pleases, sometimes disappoints.

Time for a sabbatical.  Perhaps posting will resume early in the summer.  Thanks for looking in.

ONLY ACELA PASSENGERS DESERVE AMENITIES.

Well, maybe not even them, because it's more important for Our President and Chuck U. Schumer to get into a pi**ing contest.  "Lost in the fight between President Trump and U.S. Senate minority leader Schumer over fixing Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor—the blood between them now so bad that whatever one of them wants, the other opposes—is the fact that a credible solution to the steady deterioration of this asset lies in front of us."

The fix involves a quasi-privatization, in which Amtrak leases the Corridor to a private company that does the maintenance.  There are some details to be worked out.  First, The Pennsylvania Railroad has not been available for going on fifty years.  Second, as long as the Acelas and the Regional or Northeast Direct or whatever they run as these days are subject to Metro-North dispatching between Rye and New Haven, the asset is unlikely to achieve its full potential.

IN PRAISE OF TOASTERS.

Classic Trains's Kevin P. Keefe reflects on the preservation of an AEM-7 "Toaster" in Cold Spring Shops's backyard.

An AEM7 as a museum piece? It seems like only last week these nimble little Swedish-design units began showing up on the Northeast Corridor — but it was nearly 40 years ago.

I remember standing on the platform at Princeton Junction in those days and for the first time watching one of these compact motors go whooshing past with a long train of Amfleet cars. With its boxy body, ribbed sides, and jumble of resistors atop its roof, it looked every bit “the toaster” it came to be called. It also looked like the future.

Of course, all eras become classic if you wait long enough, and that’s obviously the case here.

That just means he, and I, are still on this side of Valhalla, and capable of reminiscing.

The Toasters once had to give way to diesels on trains headed east of New Haven.

They began running through to Boston at the beginning of the current century.

I have some Atlas O models of Toasters, including one that's undecorated.  The purists might not like what I have in mind for a paint job.

MILLIONS FOR BASKETBALL, NOT ONE CENT FOR PHILOSOPHY.

I don't like the metaphor of intercollegiate athletics as a university's front porch, particularly when administrative revealed preferences put a fancy porch on a shotgun shack.

Our latest example:  Loyola of Chicago, lately the basketball feel-good story.  "Instructors in the College of Arts and Sciences and the English Language Learning Program started picket lines Wednesday morning at the Rogers Park campus and held a rally in the afternoon to support efforts to secure better pay, health benefits and job security."

A MYSTERY IN THE ROCK VALLEY.

The headline, from Rockford's Register-Star.  Sheriff’s department investigates double murder-suicide at home of RVC professor P.S. Ruckman Jr.  Peter once had an office just down the hall from mine, before his department's recommendation for continuing tenure being rejected somewhere up the chain of command.  He subsequently hired out with Rock Valley College and continued his work on presidential pardons.

Two boys and their father were found dead in their bedrooms from gunshot wounds Saturday morning in what authorities are investigating as a murder-suicide about three miles south of Cherry Valley.

The home in the 4600 block of Chandan Woods Drive is owned by local professor and nationally renowned political expert P.S. Ruckman Jr. and his ex-wife Heidi Ruckman, according to property tax records filed with the Winnebago County Treasurer’s Office.

His work on presidential pardons had value to the pundit class. Applied and empirical research is like that.

P.S. Ruckman, 58, is a political science professor at Rock Valley College and an instructor at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. He is the editor of PardonPower.com, a website dedicated to his study of presidential pardons. He has written two books: “Pardon Me, Mr. President: Adventures in Crime, Politics and Mercy” and “The Pardon Power in the 21st Century.”

Ruckman has been quoted in political reports across the country since at least the early 2000s. He was the expert voice in stories for The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today and The Associated Press. He’s been interviewed on National Public Radio and has appeared on the BBC, PBS, MSNBC television networks.

Mr Ruckman's colleague and coauthor Mark Osler received the pardon data, then learned the news.  "At the end of my book on criminal law, I wrote about how this field is all tragedy, and about the struggle to comprehend and control that tragedy. But this... this is beyond what I have imagined. Help me, if you can, to make sense of this world."

Gannett Newspapers' Gregory Korte had asked Mr Ruckman for the pardons data once the research projects were done, and he also received them, then learned the news.

I was crashing on deadline when the emails started flowing into my inbox. Hope Hicks, the White House communications director — who had been with President Trump since long before he announced his candidacy — had just unexpectedly resigned.

I got confirmation of Hicks' departure at 4:36 p.m. A minute later, I started getting a flood of emails from P.S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor who taught at Northern Illinois University and Rock Valley College. In 10 emails containing 65 spreadsheets, he was sending his entire data set of more than 30,000 presidential pardons and commutations.

The first email said simply, "Would want you to have this and use freely."

I had already gotten nine of the emails before I noticed them, but I immediately recognized that this was the data set — the one that made him such an essential expert on any story about presidential pardons. It was data I had often asked him to share, unsuccessfully, and now here it was, unsolicited, and out of the blue.

"I was just thinking about you today — and your data. I’ll call you when I’m off deadline," I responded.

I didn't make that call until almost 48 hours later. I left a message asking if everything was OK. But if I had called right away, would he have picked up? And if so, would I have recognized that he was about to do something so terrible? Could I have stopped it?

It's a terrible burden, and one I would soon learn that I shared. "The amount of second-guessing we're doing now is unbearable," one of Ruckman's former colleagues told me.

Yes, and making sense is difficult.

I've also heard from dozens of people who knew Ruckman better: colleagues, friends and former students — as well as friends of his ex-wife or people who knew the Ruckman boys through their school or their music.

What emerged is a complicated and sometimes contradictory portrait: A dedicated professor who took pride in the success of his students. An arrogant and insecure academic. A Christian still coming to terms with the severe theology of his father, a well-known evangelist preacher. A devoted father. An emotionally unraveling colleague. A narcissistic monster.

A close friend of Ruckman’s ex-wife — the boys' mother — reached out to me with a plea. Like many who spoke to me, she did not want her name used.

"Please, do not glorify him," she said. "I beg you, do something positive with that data and publish it in the memory not of him, but of Christopher and Jack, who deserve to leave a legacy. They had no choice. You do."

Pajamas Media's Lauren Spagnoletti adds material from Twitter.

RIP.

"DAS RHEINGOLD" FEATURES AN ALLEGORICAL STEEL MILL.

Apparently, playing viola in front of the brass section is like standing on the pilot of a locomotive.  "In the first case of its kind, viola player Christopher Goldscheider claimed he suffered hearing loss while playing at the Royal Opera House in 2012."  A judge agreed.

Do not perform without proper protective gear.

"[The ruling] effectively says an orchestral workspace is no different from a factory," said Mark Pemberton, director of the Association of British Orchestras.

"What it says is that musicians will need to be wearing their hearing protection at all times."

It has hammered the square peg of these regulations into the round hole of the beautiful music that orchestras and opera companies produce on a daily basis."

That prompts Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen to ask, "What or how much are we willing to sacrifice to continue to promote some of mankind’s greatest creative achievements, namely classical music?"

[The violist's] hearing was irreversibly damaged, despite wearing ear plugs.

At the High Court on Wednesday, Mrs Justice Nicola Davies ruled in Goldscheider's favour saying there was "a clear factual and causal link" between the noise levels and the musician's hearing loss.

She noted that the Control of Noise at Work Regulations "recognise no distinction as between a factory and an opera house".

If the Royal Opera House had "complied with its statutory duty the claimant would not have been exposed to the level of noise which he was," she concluded.

That ruling presumably generalises to other performances.

The Ring tetralogy is already difficult to play, and perhaps the traditional orchestra pit is too much of an echo chamber.

The Noise at Work Regulations came into force in 2006, with a two-year delay for the music and entertainment industries, allowing them time to draw up specific guidelines for live music.

Introducing those guidelines, the Health and Safety Executive said "the loudest pieces may be played less often" - making specific reference to Wagner's thunderous operatic works.

"The Royal Opera House for example will still do the Ring Cycle, but schedule the performances to allow the musicians recovery time in what is anyway a physically demanding work," it said in a "myth-buster" document published in 2007.

The guide offered suggestions regarding "orchestra layouts and elevating the brass so that they can be heard without having to play through five rows of fellow musicians".

Goldscheider's solicitor Chris Fry told the court that, despite that, his client had been positioned directly in front of the 18-strong brass section in the Royal Opera House's "cramped" orchestra pit.

The viola player, who says he has been forced to give up playing or even listening to music, is claiming £750,000 in lost earnings.

Yes, there's no reason the brass players should be heard but not seen. That noted, the strings up front (the traditional orchestra layout reflecting the relative strengths of the sounds produced) are still in the position of a railroadman on the front pilot. The railroader is relatively lower than the locomotive's horns, and still wearing ear protection.

FIFTY YEARS AGO.

April 1968 began with Lyndon Johnson having announced on March 31 that he would not stand for re-election.  There was a sanitation workers strike in Memphis.

Ozy image retrieved from Google Images.

The strike offered Martin Luther King an opportunity to emphasize his more general Poor People's Campaign.  The campaign continued after Reverend King's assassination.  Two influential figures, however, had passed from the scene.  "Johnson became the nation's greatest presidential champion of racial justice since Abraham Lincoln. He forged a close working relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."  These events turned out to be only the opening acts of what proved to be a wild year.

IS PERFECT THE ENEMY OF GOOD, WHEN THE STATUS QUO IS "NOTHING"?

For a long time, we've been following the attempts, by private interests, to develop faster Passenger Rail in Texas.  Those attempts have come in train with special pleading by rent-seekers, and the NIMBY roam.  Thus, ten years on, no new trains.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

A debate between the dedicated high-speed passenger line advocates and the advocates of less costly combined freight-passenger-toll truckway projects brings with it the risk that no rail improvements will be forthcoming. That leaves Texas with the impossibly slow Heartland Flyer and Eagle and the try-weakly Sunset Limited, all of which made better times with handfired Harriman Standard 4-6-2s and their counterparts.

Impossibly slow? Yup.

Train originates at San Antonio this day, at 6.45 the conductor says, "Let's go for a train ride."  Leave San Antonio 7 am, on time.  First stop San Marcos, 52 miles away, 8.32, double stop, away 8.39.  Texas Central wishes to get from Houston to Dallas in 90 minutes.  I'm enjoying a good breakfast and conversation in the diner, yet have flashbacks to those German trains of two months previous.

There are, however, two proposals seeking assent from Texas authorities.  One proposal has the imprimatur of the French Societe National de Chemin de Fer, or perhaps they simply go as SNCF for continuity, the way the private Canadian National are still CNR.  Whatever the affiliation, the logic is impeccable. "'Look at the state as a whole. Instead of creating a link, create a network,' said SNCF America president Alain Leray."

Yes, and build it by increments.

Maryland-based SNCF America, a branch of the French National Railway, pitched its "Texas T-bone" idea to the Federal Railroad Administration in 2008 and 2016. The plan calls for "higher speed rail" service of 125 mph.

The railroad administration has instead proceeded to work with Texas Central Partners on a Dallas-to-Houston bullet line featuring speeds up to 210 mph and using Japanese technology.

"Of course, SNCF, the state-owned and highly-subsidized French National Railway would declare they are against competition and block the world's best high-speed train technology from coming to the U.S.," Texas Central said in a prepared statement.

Perhaps you make the case for faster trains by improving timings, frequency, and connectivity on existing lines. Compare and contrast the two proposals.

Retrieved from Dallas News.

The French plan uses the large Fort Worth intermodal terminal, already served by the two intercity Amtrak trains and the Dallas area suburban trains, and existing rail lines linking existing cities.  Yes, a direct line between San Antonio and Houston would be nice, but adding frequencies on both of those routes, properly timed, means lots of rail opportunities for passengers north of Temple.  That's going to be important in the beginning, weaning Texans from their pickup trucks will require frequency and dependability, and more frequent trains running at 79 mph, with acceleration to 110 and 125 as improved signalling and more robust diesels arrive strikes me as a more sure way of building ridership.

The Texas Central plan appears to envision a new Dallas to Houston Electric Air Line, perhaps in the median of a toll road dedicated to trucks (what, there won't be any paths for stack trains overnight?) as well as another Air Line to San Antonio, and perhaps new construction paralleling the existing route of the Eagle, all of which seeks a home where the nimbrods roam.  "Much of the opposition to the Texas Central plan comes from landowners opposed to eminent domain."  Thus, Texas Central might find themselves in the position of California, building relatively useless track where there is little resistance, thus ending up with no opportunities to build ridership.  Worse, they're neglecting a development the French project might be embracing. "While North Central Texas Council of Governments officials are working with planners for a commuter line from Fort Worth to Waco, Temple-Killeen, Austin, San Antonio and Laredo, Texas Central is not committed to providing that service."  That "commuter line" ought not be confused with Chicago's Metra or New York's Metro-North, although intermingling regional trains, e.g. Waco-Fort Worth, Georgetown-Austin, San Antonio-Laredo with cross-country trains running the full distance or partial distance (would it be too much to ask for a Dallas-Laredo sleeper overnight?) is the kind of thing European railroads do as a matter of course.

Cold Spring Shops prays that if the T-Bone plan becomes a Passenger Rail network, that there be one operator honoring all tickets, this business of no interline ticketing between Amtrak and any of the urban Commuter Rail operators being bad business.

Recall, dear reader, that the French TGV trains rolled out as incremental improvements, and they still use the same tracks into the urban stations as their steam-powered predecessors.

REPLENISHING THE COFFEE FUND WITH BITCOIN?

How many of these stories must I report?  NIU loses over $1.6 million in equipment.  "Items missing since the 2016 inventory cycle include approximately 520 computers, servers, CPUs and other electronic storage devices."  I'm being facetious, but with the algorithms for mining Bitcoin becoming more challenging, that computing power might have value.

THE SOUND OF A SAECULAR ORDER FRACTURING.

Tom Nichols contemplates the Trump presidency, and enunciates his own vision for Restoring America's Greatness.

By electing Trump and tolerating [foreign policy gadfly John] Bolton, we have shown that we are not a nation that can be consistently trusted with the stewardship of the free world. It’s not that Trump, in the end, will collapse NATO, plunge us into a great depression, or start World War III — although with Bolton by his side he is capable of doing all of those things — but rather that the American voters have shown the world that we are capable of astonishing selfishness and petulance. We have abandoned our civic virtue not just at home but also overseas, and once lost, that position cannot be recovered.

Perhaps this is all too pessimistic. Americans have elected men of weak moral character and shallow political commitment to office before. But not when it mattered so much, and certainly not since the advent of the era in which the president of United States — the sole steward of an arsenal of weapons that can extinguish civilization itself — became the leader and protector not only of millions of his own citizens, but of the billions of others who rely on America as a friend and ally.

The most optimistic outcome is that decades from now, the memory of the Trump years fades away, and both we and the world look upon this period as an aberration, a kind of fever or temporary insanity from which we awoke just before we lost any possibility of an American restoration. But the damage is getting deeper by the day.

Healing it will take more than just electing a new president: It will require years of painful self-examination, and calling ourselves to account honestly and transparently. Only then will we begin to earn back the presumption of trust and leadership that was once one of our proudest achievements as a free nation.

That position of leadership came after a major war with regime changes in three other world powers, only after the use of the most destructive weapons the winners were capable of creating, and that leadership also required a clear-headed understanding of right and wrong, in order that the Soviet partner in that victory renounce its delusions of being on the right side of history.

ALBERT HUNT CHECKS HIS PRIVILEGE.

Getting mugged by reality can have that effect.  "When you insult voters you may need someday, they probably aren't going to vote for you; and when you mud-wrestle with pigs, the pigs enjoy it."  Better to rely on logic and content.  "There are legitimate criticisms of Trump's policies, personnel choices, temperament and integrity. These should be pointed and sharp without getting in the pit."  Exactly, and consider the possibility that a Trump presidency might be the consequence of decades of failures of the Received Wisdom.  "But there were many non-bigots who voted for him, venting their anxieties and frustrations, feeling that elites -- politicians, personified by Clinton, academics, the media, Wall Street -- looked down on them. They relished that Trump was giving those elites hell."

Feeling that elites looked down on them.  Why would that be?

Fine.  There's a strong case that the Wise Experts have gotten it wrong, and politer Democrats are still apologists for Wise Experts.

A FOUNDER PASSES.

Years ago, I wrote for The Badger Herald, conceived as an independent student newspaper in the belly of the Radical Monster, the University of Wisconsin Itself.  From time to time, I've drawn on writings of the era, many of which are still current.  (We refer to Weimar America for a reason.)

Word reaches Cold Spring Shops of the passing of one of the Herald's founders, longtime Washington conservative figure and onetime Supreme Scribe of the Knights of Columbus, Patrick Korten.

And nearly 50 years since founder and first Editor-in-Chief Patrick Korten published his editorial “A Monopoly Ends,” The Badger Herald has remained true to the vision of being a truly independent newspaper that serves as an experiment — constantly adapting to the tidal waves of change in the always evolving world of journalism.

The Badger Herald began as an experiment — a conservative counterpoint to a campus then captured by the wave of liberalism of the 1960s. While it has since shied away from its conservative roots, it has remained firm in Korten’s original vision: To run a newspaper that would focus on Madison and issues facing University of Wisconsin students.

That shift of political focus might have been anticipated by the founders. Consider an editorial by Nicholas Loniello, in the registration week issue of August, 1970.

The Daily Cardinal afforded the first reasons for beginning. It wasn't a paper for us and our friends -- its coverage is relevant only to the radical movement, not to the bulk of varied interests on the campus. The Cardinal prints the latest on the riot, demonstration and strike scene, but little about the Ag students and the Engineers. The GE recruiter and the Army Math Research Center hardly qualify as the biggest things that ever happened to this campus, yet they and a few other selective subjects are consistently danced around and beaten on the monotonous pages of the Daily Cardinal.

So we started the Badger Herald, determined there was a need for a student newspaper with wider-ranging news coverage. We have avoided in our news reporting the Cardinal's political myopia by refusing to become ideological nymphomaniacs, and will continue to do so next year.

That editorial went to press before the local heavies bombed Sterling Hall, and the ideological nymphomaniacs, along with their intellectual children and grandchildren, continue to run Student Affairs and the likes of MSNBC.  The struggle continues.

NOW THAT THE NETS ARE CUT DOWN.

The feel-good story of the men's basketball tournament had to be Loyola of Chicago, snagging a bid the only way they could snag it, and continuing to win until Michigan stopped the party.

The Ramblers played five unforgettable, unexpected NCAA tournament games in 17 days, reaching the Final Four and capturing America’s imagination simply by being themselves. Their authenticity and innocence created a cynicism-free zone around Loyola basketball, as hard as some out-of-touch folks tried to pollute it with silly controversy. The players were like the good kids who grew up in your neighborhood and Moser like that guy next to you on a flight who keeps talking long enough that you want his business card. Loyola’s support staff, from sports information director Bill Behrns to Tom Hitcho, Mr. Loyola who pushed Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt’s wheelchair, treated everyone with respect and sincerity even as the bandwagon got more crowded.

The national fascination with Loyola, by the way, went beyond Sister Jean, the adorable 98-year-old team chaplain who can pray more privately now. The Ramblers tapped into something else within everyone. They proved not everything about college sports is corrupt and suggested the hyphen in student-athlete actually applies. They played smart and selfless basketball on the court and acted humble and kind off it, appreciating everything they accomplished without taking anything for granted along the way.

Unfortunately, the collegiate sports cartel understands it has to rig the system to prevent the emergence of a separate tournament run exclusively by and for the so-called power conferences. "The NCAA Selection Committee clearly sent the message that playing Power Five schools factors into a team’s criteria, but nobody will want to play Loyola now."

Never mind that there's great play value in the Chicago area.

Wanted: Power Five foes for Loyola. Loyola-Northwestern at the United Center sounds fun. A Loyola-Notre Dame matchup makes sense. And who in Chicago wouldn’t love to see Loyola play Illinois or DePaul?

Let's enjoy the sailing season, oh, and baseball, first.

ARE YOU TIRED OF ALL THE WINNING?

The regional winners in the women's basketball tournament were all the top seeds.  Them that has gets, and all that, but them that gets has parity, at least for one weekend.  The Women's Hoops Blog has more links than you can shake a rosary at, starting with Friday evening's semifinals.  First game,  last year's runner-up, Mississippi State, playing Louisville.  Less than a minute to go, Louisville leads by five, Mississippi State ties it, then dominates the overtime.  Second game, last year's Evil Empire, Connecticut, playing former conference nemesis Notre Dame.  Notre Dame rallies in the second half, less than a minute to go, leads by five, Connecticut ties it.  Overtime remains tight to the very end.  "In overtime, with both teams hitting big shot after big shot, it was Notre Dame’s Arike Ogunbowale who stole the show, knocking down a game-winner with one second remaining on the clock, giving Notre Dame it’s [c.q.] final lead at 91-89."  That's correct, dear reader, two games, both decided in overtime.  As Whitney Medworth notes, "UConn’s dominance has raised the level of the game in ways most don’t recognize."  That, dear reader, is how to get tired of all the winning.  If that sounds like "make a better product, sell it at a better price" with sneakers and balls, so be it.

THE BEAT GOES ON.

Our President:  Let's put tariffs on primary metals from China.

China:  hold my beer.

China announced new tariffs on 128 American imports yesterday, primarily targeting agricultural products such as pork, nuts, fruit, and wine. In a statement, the Chinese government said it was imposing the new tariffs "in order to safeguard China's interests and balance the losses caused by the United States' additional tariffs."

You don't have to be a reader of Cold Spring Shops to see this coming.  "Chinese tariffs will hit a wide range of American-grown fruit as well, including apples, oranges, watermelons, strawberries, raspberries, cranberries, cherries, grapes, and pineapples."  And ginseng.  "Ginseng growers in Wisconsin are worried about the future of their business after a tariff went into effect overnight in China."  Canadian ginseng farmers will see an export opportunity, never mind that connoisseurs of the stuff have awarded Wisconsin the blue ribbon for quality.  There's no futures market for ginseng, which is going to make life interesting for people who dislike futures markets.  (Farmers cannot hedge against a price drop by contracting now for delivery in September.  Sometimes the speculators guess wrong.)  The retaliatory tariffs might also affect the Foxconn factory deal.  "Ginseng growers throughout central and upper Wisconsin are hoping that their own deal with tech giant Foxconn can help them reach new markets."

I may have been groggy this morning, but I thought I heard the tariffs also included scrap metal.  That's priceless.  Our steel producers complain about Chinese steel dumping, and somehow the feedstock goes overseas, gets recycled into steel, then sent back here: and all those transportation costs aren't enough of a trade barrier for the domestic industry?  Sad.

Meanwhile, Stephen Moore expands on the second-best-optimal-trade-war argument.  "In recent weeks, Trump apparently delivered two big and underappreciated victories as a result of his threat of stiff tariffs and renegotiated trade deals."  Somewhere, Pyrrhus is nodding.

First, Seoul has agreed to reduce long-standing non-tariff trade barriers ‎that have reduced American exports to South Korea. Though the details are still sketchy, it appears that the Koreans will buy more Ford and General Motors cars and trucks and other U.S.-made products. ‎ This can be only good news for American workers. The Koreans have also agreed to increase reimbursement rates to American drug and vaccine producers.

Even The New York Times begrudgingly conceded that the deal the president secured "represents the type of one-on-one agreement that Mr. Trump says makes the best sense for American companies and workers." The Koreans called it "significant progress" in the U.S.-Korea trading relationship. But make no mistake about it: The nation that made concessions here was Korea, not the U.S.

Also in recent days this week, China folded in response to Trump's jarring announcement of a record $50 billion in tariffs on Chinese products. China at first reacted by threatening to retaliate with barriers on American soybeans, wheat, blue jeans and bourbon. The American financial markets tumbled and some bears even moaned we were facing a 1929 crash.

Perhaps, also, Mr Moore is correct on national security grounds.  "You can't have free trade with a country that steals $500 billion and arms your enemies. Period. End of argument. Why couldn't George W. Bush and Barack Obama figure this out?" He continues,

Trump was announcing to the world that if you want to continue to have open access to America's multitrillion-dollar consumer market — and nearly every nation in the world, most of all China, needs that passport — you are going to play by rules that benefit Americans, abide by the rule of law and promote American security interests.

Yes, this is a dangerous game Trump is playing for sure. He risks upending three decades of progress in opening markets for international trade that have benefited the citizens of the world in lower prices for nearly everything. He may be risking another 1930s-style trade tariff war that shut down global trade and cratered the world in depression.

If that happens, Trump's trade strategy will have clearly backfired.

But Trump recognizes what many of the globalists don't: the enormous leverage ‎America has on the world economic stage. He told voters that he can get a much better deal for American companies and workers. He punched China in the nose with the tariff announcement, and guess what? China, at least for now, has backed down.

Singeth the skald, Praise ice when you're across it, and (more expensive?) beer when it's drunk.

THE VALUE OF A TRAIN IS IN THE INTERMEDIATE STOPS.

Trains' Malcolm Kenton makes the point.  "A long-distance train should be thought of as serving multiple corridors with one vehicle, thus minimizing the net unit costs of equipment and crews by spreading them out over more passenger-miles. Instead of thinking of the Southwest Chief as a Chicago-Los Angeles train, for example, think of it as Chicago-Kansas City, Kansas City-Newton/Wichita, La Junta-Albuquerque and Flagstaff-Los Angeles corridors, and many more, all rolled into one."  Yup.  Connectivity matters too.

Going back to the Southwest Chief example, the train doesn’t just serve city pairs between Los Angeles and Chicago. By offering convenient same-day connections at each end, it serves an even greater number of origins and destinations. Kansas City to Detroit or Washington, Flagstaff to Oakland or San Diego, and Albuquerque to Memphis or Cincinnati are just a few examples. Requiring even more transfers for trips like these would greatly reduce their viability.

Yes, and in a perfect world, you could include Jefferson City and St. Louis to the mix.

Expanding the Passenger Rail network is likely to be cheaper, too, than building more roads.

The main obstacle to growing the network, however, is the lack of equipment. Procuring new cars and locomotives — something Amtrak has so far been unwilling to do for the national network trains — will be the most significant share of the added cost of an expansion effort. Given that lead times of at least four years are required for such purchases — from the initial decision to purchase to the final delivery of the last car or locomotive — it’s unclear how much longer we can afford to wait before frequent equipment failures pose an existential threat to the service. And there’s no existing manufacturer with experience in producing both Buy America-compliant rolling stock as well as sleeping, dining and comfortable long-distance coach cars.

Even if expanding service does improve the operating ratio, keeping long-distance trains going may still require a modest federal subsidy. This pales in comparison to the many direct and indirect ways in which travelers who drive or fly are subsidized, and is a small price to pay for Americans — especially those who can’t drive or fly for health or other reasons — to have travel choices, and for local and regional economies to reap the ancillary benefits of a robust multi-modal transportation system.

Long-distance train riders tend to be stereotyped as wealthy retirees with unlimited time on their hands motivated by a sense of romantic nostalgia — a class of people not worthy of government subsidy. In reality, as I’ve seen again and again when I ride long-distance trains (and I’m by no means a wealthy retiree), the customers of long-distance trains are Americans from all walks of life with a myriad of reasons for choosing the train. Why should our government policy or boardroom decisions made over balance sheets deny them that choice?

He's right about the demographics. You can learn more about the country in three days on a cross-country train than in three weeks watching public affairs television or listening to public radio.

IS A STEEL TRADE WAR SECOND-BEST OPTIMAL?

I'm no fan of Our President's tariffs on primary metals imports, because of their predictable direct effects on customers, and because they injure our export industries, something Our President has never understood.

There's reinforcement from Veronique deRugy.

What really matters is that on net, the economy, the American people and American firms will suffer more than the steelworkers and moguls in the steel industry will benefit. What Ross, of course, forgot to mention is that the specific impact of the steel tariffs on those workers and firms in steel-consuming industries is not only negative but large.

As if the carelessness of our commerce secretary weren’t enough, I draw your attention to a new report by a steel lobbyist group called the Coalition for a Prosperous America. It argues that the Trump tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will create 19,000 jobs and reduce the United States’ gross domestic product by only $1.4 billion.

In addition, she notes there has been serious creative destruction at work, creatively destroying steel jobs.  "This explains why steel employment peeked [c.q.] in 1953 at 650,000 and stands at 143,000 today."  We are all underemployed compared with Joe Magarac in the days of Andrew Carnegie.

Then, there are some truly clueless attempts -- from paid columnists, no less -- to defend the tariff.

Critics claim tariffs will raise steel prices. That's questionable. The opposite is more likely to happen, industry experts suggest. Tariffs will shift demand to domestic steel, enabling plants here to operate closer to capacity. That will bring down the unit price of American-made steel -- not raise it. That's Econ 101.

Bunk. With most of the steel production taking place in electric furnace plants operating under conditions of approximately constant returns to scale, those increases in output aren't going to be realizing much in the way of exploiting scale economies.  Perhaps a few of the integrated works will operate closer to capacity, although this feel-good story from Granite City isn't encouraging.

The small Illinois steel town outside St. Louis felt the bedrock shift in 2015 when one of its biggest and best-paying employers, U.S. Steel, said it would idle its Granite City plant and cut 2,000 jobs. On Wednesday, the company said it will restart one of two blast furnaces — where the steelmaking process begins — next month.

U.S. Steel announced the move, which will involve calling back about 500 employees, just a day before President Donald Trump’s Thursday action to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum from all foreign countries, with the exception of Mexico and Canada.

“Our Granite City Works facility and employees, as well as the surrounding community, have suffered too long from the unending waves of unfairly traded steel products that have flooded U.S. markets,” U.S. Steel President and Chief Executive Officer David B. Burritt said in a news release. The Pittsburgh-based company says restarting the furnace could take up to four months.

Good news for the furnacemen returning to work, yes, but harvesting an economy of volume with a half-active blast furnace shop, and a partially active basic oxygen shop? I'm skeptical. (Not to mention, what prevented U.S. Steel from running the works at capacity in 2015 the better to undersell the competition?)

Ramesh Ponnuru applies additional reality checks, in case you're interested.

Perhaps, as Martin Feldstein argues, there's something else at work.

[T]he real target of the steel and aluminum tariffs is China. The Chinese government has promised for years to reduce excess steel capacity, thereby cutting the surplus output that is sold to the United States at subsidized prices. Chinese policymakers have postponed doing so as a result of domestic pressure to protect China’s own steel and aluminum jobs. The US tariffs will balance those domestic pressures and increase the likelihood that China will accelerate the reduction in subsidized excess capacity.

Because the tariffs are being levied under a provision of US trade law that applies to national security, rather than dumping or import surges, it will be possible to exempt imports from military allies in NATO, as well as Japan and South Korea, focusing the tariffs on China and avoiding the risk of a broader trade war.

Thus, it's not so much about imposing trade barriers here as it is removing trade barriers and other mercantilist policies there.

In my view, US negotiators will use the threat of imposing the tariffs on Chinese producers as a way to persuade China’s government to abandon the policy of “voluntary” technology transfers. If that happens, and US firms can do business in China without being compelled to pay such a steep competitive price, the threat of tariffs will have been a very successful tool of trade policy.

Town Hall's  Steve Sherman offers similar reasoning.

[T]ariffs may be necessary to leverage true free trade agreements. Countries that cheat need to be punished with tariffs and exemptions undermine the whole goal of leveraging true free trade between nations. One way to protect American competitiveness and jobs is to remove the exemptions that will allow the flow of cheap steel and aluminum to flood our markets from Mexico, Canada and EU member nations.

Perhaps, what we have is tariff critics living in a first-best world (trade barriers are a departure from optimality) whilst tariff advocates perceive a second-best world (there are inefficiencies elsewhere in the world economy.)  The General Theory of Second Best is an important idea in political economy, but one to use carefully.

The problem of second best presents a tempting, but not justified, refuge for sloppy policy-wonkery. Put simply, the argument runs this way: if not all resources are being allocated efficiently, a partial-equilibrium policy intervention that addresses the inefficiency in one market does not imply a more efficient allocation of resources generally. The temptation policy-wonk types sometimes fall victim to is to respond to a criticism of inefficiencies remaining under their policy with an appeal to a second-best argument, which is dangerous, because as Whinston et. al note, "the conceptual distinction between first-best and second-best problems is not sharp," to which I would add, the ability of a policy wonk to identify an inefficiency that contracting agents hadn't already identified and attempted to rectify is likely limited. General equilibrium thinking has its uses.

Thus, as this Economist briefing notes, "[T]he second-best scenario may require that other of the necessary conditions for optimality also be absent—maybe even all of them. The second-best may look starkly different than the first best."  When I was breaking in as a professor, I probably missed this: consider a monopolist selling cigarettes:  is monopolistic restriction of output in the absence of any corrective taxes inefficient or not?  Would your answer be any different if the monopolist obtained its monopoly by underselling manufacturers of hand-rolled cigarettes?  Thus, the briefing concludes, "The best policy-oriented economists, both left and right, are second best economists in the sense that they grasp the lesson of their fictions, but aim at truly feasible ideals, not blackboard utopias."

Will we, when the dust settles, finish with no primary metals tariffs imposed by the United States and fewer trade barriers imposed by China?  That might be what Professor Feldstein envisions.

MAKING THE GRADE.

The Mid-American Conference just released its Women’s Basketball Academic All-MAC Team.  "To qualify, a student-athlete must have at least a 3.20 cumulative GPA and have participated in at least 50 percent of the contests for that particular sport."  They're proud at Northern Illinois, where eight players qualified.  (The list would be even longer, I suspect, but for injuries affecting playing time.)

One of the obligations of playing a sport is to be available for a photo shoot.

Unattributed photograph retrieved from Northern Illinois University.

Two seniors, and a six-choose-five combinatorial problem of possible starting lineups in that shot, with at least a hint that the season did not end the way these kids would have liked.

Seems like a cheerful human interest story, with the Mid-American being the strongest conference not regarded as Power Five, and with a goodly number of participants upholding the ideal of the student athlete.

Yes, let's enjoy that, and let's also consider that this, too, might be fleeting.  The political economy of the Mid-American is no better now than it was several years ago,  with all the sports programs still dependent on student activity fees.  At Buffalo and Eastern Michigan, athletics directors are looking for ways to spend less money, and that's being coupled with planned reductions in academic offerings at Eastern Michigan.  Then an internal audit finds more money being misallocated at Northern Illinois.  "As the accounts were reviewed, a $2.5 million net transfer from closed system resources to the public-private partnership was observed, which violated university bond law. On Feb. 2, the university returned $2.6 million from the public-private partnership accounts to the closed system funds."

Has the little tin box been opened one time too many?

Thinking more generally, how sympathetic are legislators or donors going to be to academic-side budgetary stringency at a collection of converted normal schools, when the most visible bits of higher education seem bound and determined to reinforce the enterprise's reputation as a place making the likes of Hillary Clinton comfortable with their prejudices.

THE TRENCHANT OBSERVATION OF THE DAY.

Life has steep grading curves.  "I prefer that [students] get a bad grade and learn to give it their best shot on the first try, rather than to hear years from now that they’re still struggling."  There's a dissenting view here, one that seems to miss the point. “Students will take many tests over the course of their lives, such as a driver’s exam, the SAT, the LSAT, and the MCAT, to name a few,” she writes. “All of these examples allow retakes.”  Yes, and we keep aspiring drivers off the road until they pass, and those retakes of the various college boards are inducements for aspirants to lift their game. In a class scheduled for fifteen weeks (or shorter) looking for a pattern of improvement strikes me as a more efficient use of time than granting retakes.

Joanne Jacobs is hosting a bull session.  Consensus appears to be "don't incentivize mediocrity."

EASTER.

The message, for believers, is straightforward.

Apparently, even straightforward is too much for one correspondent at National Public Radio.  "Feeling the need to Eastersplain to their postmodern, 'no objective truth' fans, someone wrote an article for the NPR website that described Easter as 'the day celebrating the idea that Jesus did not die and go to hell or purgatory or anywhere like that, but rather arose into heaven.'" That's harsh; arguably it's not in keeping with the spirit of forgiveness and redemption.  And yet, how can a secular world profess to value difference when its self-appointed thought leaders don't understand their own history?

Christianity is the religion, or at least the religious background, of the overwhelming majority of Americans. The crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ on the Cross on Good Friday is one of the basic teachings of the religion. The name — which is used in English-speaking countries — is presumably meant to observe the paradox that the day on which God was murdered turned out to be eternal victory over death. This is why it is “Good”.

Second, the teaching that Jesus arose from the dead on Easter, and ascended into heaven 40 days later, is basic Christianity. You ought to know this as a matter of elementary cultural literacy.

Rod Dreher continues.

I’ve said in this space on many occasions that as I travel to Christian colleges, one of the biggest complaints I hear from faculty is that young people have next to no theological knowledge. They are the products of parishes, congregations, and (especially) youth groups that have reduced the faith to mere relationality. I was once in the presence of a college student who had been raised in the church, been involved since childhood, and had been active in a parachurch youth ministry. She knew that Jesus was her best buddy, but she did not realize that he had been physically raised from the dead.

We’re not talking about expecting laymen to explain the hypostatic union here. We’re talking about the Resurrection.

Perhaps it's on National Public Radio to expect that its commentators understand the orchestral works the stations sometimes perform.  Jan Swofford surely gets Beethoven.

Here are the relevant bits of the Credo.

Et in Jesum Christum, Filium ejus unicum, Dominum nostrum, qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria virgine, passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus, descendit ad infernos, tertia die resurrexit a mortuis, ascendit ad coelos, sedet ad dexteram Dei Patris omnipotentis, inde venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos.

Suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, died, buried, decended into Hell (the Harrowing of Hell), rose on the third day.  That's Good Friday to Easter Sunday.  Up from the grave He arose, to put it succinctly.  Ascension Day (Himmelfahrtstag) comes forty days on in the church calendar, and the return to judge the living and dead is the not yet realized Second Coming.

For 2018, Easter Sunday is Conrail Day, and Ascension Thursday is Golden Spike Day.  That combination will recur in 2029.