INTO THE ROUNDHOUSE FOR INSPECTION.

The Iowa Interstate Railroad purchased two mudsuckers from China that generally run in excursion service, helping local volunteer fire companies and the like raise money, although one of them set a 21st century world record for heaviest freight train (but not longest freight train) pulled by a steam locomotive.

The one active mudsucker is due for its elapsed time inspection, and it might be going into storage for some time.  Not, though, before moving a few more freight cars in Iowa.  "The aim is to use the remaining coal for the locomotives before they are placed in storage."  Waste not, want not.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

There is more bipartisan agreement on the use of dogs in medical experiments than there is on the miseducation of youngsters in the common schools.

1.  The Militant Normals are noticing.  "Every week, [university] administrators pitch another porterhouse at reactionaries."

2.  Biden has no answers.  Think of his failures.  "The reality of the matter is that his problems, by and large, are self-inflicted, with the American people bearing the brunt of the harsh consequences for them."  Good and hard.  "Those that chose to vote for Biden when [his senescence was] apparent before the election are getting what they paid for."

3.  Reality bats last.  "If society is deprived of the idea of normal and abnormal, it loses the capacity to draw a line between desirable and undesirable forms of behaviour."

4.  Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.  "Democrat policies kill jobs and disincentivize productivity, yet Democrats continue to be elected."

5.  Enjoy the incoherence.  "In pure form, postmodern arguments—such as those in radical feminism, critical race theory, and related fields—are unfalsifiable."  Empiricism must be defended.  "People who fear nonexistent demons are also likely to propose costly and unnecessary witch hunts."

6.  A self-made purgatory?  "Biden chose to abandon efforts to transcend the current political paradigm, choosing instead to appease his base."

7.  Raggedy Antoinette: "She’s laying into this administration’s favorite target, the kulaks – I mean the successful middle class."

8.  All pain, no gain.  "It is beyond doubting that those resisting mandates are in the right, and those insisting are them are in the wrong."

9.  Surely you have seen for yourself–barely alive–and what there is left is pure vanity.

10.  The condescension comes through.  "Seldom has the Progressive [c.q.] left been more open about their contempt for self-government."

11.  The case for self-government, in one sentence.  "Some things are too important to be left to the god-men experts."  That's because experts, even god-men, are simultaneously worms and gods.  "Government by experts would, however ardent their original zeal for the public welfare, mean after a time government in the interest of experts."

12.  The Fourth Turning to come?  "What if we could teach people the right lesson this time, namely that the problem is government intervention itself?"

13.  Ya think? "Authorities say that even though frost has made an appearance, people should not bring their shacks on the ice."

14.  Likewise.  "I find it hard to feel bad for poachers who get trampled by elephants and eaten by lions."

15.  Deconstruct bourgeois norms at your peril.  "Either civility is demanded across the board, right or left or in between – or it is not. It has become obvious that 'not' is the operative understanding. So have fun with the mockery, with pouring scorn, ridicule and derision."

16.  We call the ad popularum fallacy a fallacy for a reason.  "Our constitutional order emphatically rejects the premise that 50 percent plus 1 makes wrong into right or tyranny into justice."

17.  Self-selecting into their hothouses? "Many Liberal Arts Students Need a Lesson in Free Speech."

18.  Push the union brothers around at your peril.  "[I]f you are a politician or a person who fully supports the vaccine passports and mandates, prepare to enjoy the cold and the dark."  This is what democracy looks like.  "They’re not going to be lining up to vote for Democrats."

19.  Weimar America?  "[Y]ou're not a true lesbian unless you have sex with men."  Who knew "cissexism" was so extreme a thought crime?

20.  The more Americans get to know Biden, the less they like him.

21.  Bet on emergence.  "The power of federalism, not only to help people who don’t like each other much to co-exist politically, but to sand down the rougher edges of government stupidity, is a lesson this country would be blessed to learn, while we can."

22.  Gerrymandered out of a job? "Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-16) announced Friday he would not be seeking Congressional reelection in the 2022 midterms."

THE LOGIC OF POSITIVE ECONOMICS.

Don "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux explains why taking minimum wage proposals to their "logical conclusion" is illogical.  The "logical conclusion," which might manifest itself in conversation or on talk radio as “Why raise the minimum wage to only $15 per hour? If the minimum wage works as promised, why not instead raise it to $50 per hour, or even to $150?!” really isn't.  Here's the first teaching point.

When I analyze minimum-wage legislation with my freshman economics students, I always emphasize the fact that the analysis itself cannot determine if such legislation is good or bad. Such a determination is not in the province of science. Economic analysis can reveal only the likely consequences of a minimum wage. Assessing the merits or demerits of these consequences necessarily involves value judgments. And because minimum-wage statutes, like nearly all government interventions, have both upsides and downsides – in popular parlance, they generate some ‘winners’ and some ‘losers’ – value judgments cannot be avoided when considering how to weigh the benefits reaped by the ‘winners’ against the losses imposed on the ‘losers.’ Science cannot tell us the maximum amount, if any, of a loss the ‘losers’ can suffer in order for the policy nevertheless to be justified.

We have stuff like Hicks-Kaldor or Scitovsky welfare criteria for that.  As far as the policy itself, if you get the pay raise, you're happy, but if you're let go (or, more commonly, don't see the hiring that doesn't take place) you're not.

Economic analysis reveals convincingly that a minimum wage very likely reduces the employment options open to low-skilled workers, including stripping some of them of jobs altogether. But this analysis also reveals that a minimum wage results in some other workers being paid wages higher than they’d be paid without a minimum wage. Most people today assess the first consequence as a cost and the second consequence as a benefit.

Thus, the reductio wipes out an important part of the trade-off: nobody gets the pay raise.  The serious work takes place in the neighborhood of where we currently are, with some people seeing pay raises and others seeing frustration.  It might be that on balance, the losers from the policy might be able to bribe the potential winners into not making the change, given a sufficiently omniscient planner.  That analysis, however, requires a good understanding of the supply and demand elasticities.

In a follow-up post, he notes that it's possible to raise the issue of "how high?" in a way that neither gets into the reductio nor requires understanding of elasticities.  “If it’s truly good to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, surely it’s even better to raise it to $50 per hour! Given your assumptions about the way economies work, why not do so?!”  The assumption he's assuming about his interlocutor is something along the lines of "Business owners are all, like Scrooge McDuck, swimming in money."

That, dear reader, might be why it's useful to introduce economics ab initio with trading for mutual gain, arbitrage, and opportunity cost, before introducing institutions such as business organizations.

STRANDED ASSETS.

The taxi medallion, which is a municipal license to offer transportation service for hire, has a value equal to the capitalized value of future monopoly rents, and a long history of existing to preserve urban transportation interests.

Any cartel arrangement, however, is only as good as its ability to prevent unauthorized people from seeking a piece of the action.

Local and federal progressive lawmakers expressed solidarity on Sunday with New York City taxi drivers who were five days into a hunger strike, demanding Mayor Bill DeBlasio embrace a debt relief proposal for drivers who owe hundreds of thousands of dollars for the medallions they purchased in order to work in the industry.

After spending a month protesting outside City Hall, members of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) began the hunger strike last Wednesday in the hopes of forcing the mayor to respond.

The NYTWA has proposed a debt relief program that would cap outstanding medallion debt at $145,000 and payments at $800 per month—a plan they say is far superior to the city's $65 million debt restructuring program.

The taxi drivers claim in equity might be stronger than that of the fast-food worker who took out an expensive student loan for an unproductive gender studies degree.

Drivers in New York City save up tens of thousands of dollars for down payments on medallions, allowing them to own their cabs. The medallion market has served as a major revenue stream for the city, bringing in $850 million during the administrations of DeBlasio and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as drivers have been encouraged to take out huge loans to buy their medallions.

Many of these medallion owners are recent immigrants. Wall Street banksters hold the mortgages on the taxi medallions. Unfortunately, Albany is selling a competing permit, called a driver's license.

According to the NYTWA, the average owner-driver owes $550,000 on medallions that are worth only about $100,000.

Ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft as well as the coronavirus pandemic have driven down demand in recent years, leaving drivers earning little more than minimum wage and struggling to pay their medallion debts.

It's always easier to impose regulations than to remove them. In this instance, there is a stranded cost problem, and providing relief for people who made what looked like the correct decision under a previous policy regime is likely to be better for economic welfare than expanding the cartel to include the ride-share operators.

FREQUENCY, DEPENDABILITY, AND RELIABILITY.

Whether or not the Democrats' spending spree comes to pass, there are people making plans for what to do with the money, once it's appropriated.  (Yes, everybody who buys a Power Ball ticket makes the same sort of plans.)  There's a lengthy Midwest Regional Rail wish list out. and it notes the paucity of trains on the ground, something that other observers of Passenger Rail have also drawn attention to.

The background for all three events can be found on Amtrak’s map of the Midwest, which has not changed much since the 1970s and early 1980s, at least as far as routes are concerned. There are more trains on most of the routes today than there were decades ago, but the lines on the map have changed little over the decades. Corridors radiating from Chicago to St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Carbondale, Ill. formed the basic network. Illinois sponsors two round trips between Chicago and Quincy, which started more recently, although there were once trains to places like Peoria and Decatur that no longer run. There are also trains across Missouri, between St. Louis and Kansas City. There is the Pere Marquette between Chicago and Grand Rapids, but there is no longer a Hoosier State between the Windy City and Indianapolis. The long-distance network radiating from Chicago has remained essentially unchanged since 1985. Today it is frozen by the Passenger Rail Investment & Improvement Act (PRIIA), which defines Amtrak’s “national network” as being limited to trains that ran in 2008.

But if you're fantasizing about spending Other Peoples' Money^(TM), you can draw a really ambitious map.

Federal Railroad Administration concept map retrieved from Railway Age.

Looks like some hoped-for faster running in several States, presumably involving new track construction.  The details of who pays for what matter, as some of the states are reluctant to participate in supporting passenger trains.

Illinois is the only Midwestern state that has developed more than one corridor. The Lincoln service between Chicago and St. Louis now has four daily round trips, plus the Texas Eagle. Only in 2006 was a third train added between Chicago and Carbondale (that count includes the one to New Orleans) and a second train added between Chicago and Quincy. Missouri has two trains between St. Louis and Kansas City, but reducing service to a single round trip has often been threatened and did occur during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Michigan, the Wolverine route has never had more than three round trips daily, and the Pere Marquette route to Grand Rapids has never had more than one since before the Amtrak era. In Wisconsin, the Chicago-Milwaukee trains keep running, but there has been no expansion north of there. Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker famously killed a plan that would have enhanced the Hiawatha route to Minnesota and re-route the trains to add Madison as a stop.

Elsewhere in the region, the picture has been even worse. In 2019, Indiana killed the Hoosier State, which provided service between Chicago and Indianapolis on the four days a week that the Cardinal does not run. Ohio almost had the long-awaited 3C+D corridor (which would have served Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Dayton), but former Republican Gov. John Kasich killed it about the same time Walker killed the Madison project. While the current governor, Republican Mike DeWine, is not as staunchly opposed to transit as Kasich was, it appears unlikely that he would fund the corridor terminated by his predecessor.

The High Speed Rail Alliance are more optimistic about the plan, although note that its success is not dependent on speed.

First, it lays out a compelling vision for an network of high-speed trains that would transform travel across the Midwest. Second, it makes a strong case for fast, frequent trains that are coordinated and well-integrated into a network. While speed gets most of the spotlight when people talk about trains, frequency and coordination are key to leveraging the full power of a rail network. Third, it points out the urgency of regional cooperation and big-picture planning.

The plan envisions a network that consists of of four “pillar corridors” radiating out from Chicago, with endpoints in Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Detroit. These corridors are the system’s backbone. Their real power, though, isn’t that they would move people at high speeds from point to point within each corridor. Their power lies in the way they would make connections much faster and easier between hundreds of cities throughout the Midwest.

That’s because the “pillar corridors” would be integrated with transit systems and regional lines that connect mid-sized and major cities—like Indianapolis and Cincinnati, and Kansas City and St. Louis. There would be 24 trains per day on the “pillar”lines and 16 trains per day on the regional lines—a vast increase over current service levels on U.S. passenger trains.

They, too, are indulging in fantasies about holding the winning lottery ticket: see, for instance, their conception of a Chicago Union Station with the old Penn Station concourse grafted in.  But check out that 24 trains a day (does that refer to one per hour, day and night, or twelve pairs?) on the principal corridors.  They like that in the Twin Cities.

Currently, a single train — the Empire Builder — makes an eastbound and westbound stop at the St. Paul Union Depot as it travels between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest at speeds no faster than a typical car and often slower, given delays caused by competing freight traffic. Ramsey County officials received $31.8 million in federal funding last year for a second Chicago-bound train, the Twin Cities-Milwaukee-Chicago Second Train, which could roll out in 2024.

By way of comparison, here is the June 1954 service offered by the Burlington Route, Chicago and North Western, and The Milwaukee Road.

Click it to enlarge it.  I left out the Chicago Great Western, which missed most of the major population centers going the great way round through Oelwein, Iowa, and the Soo Line, which offered an overnight train to Duluth-Superior but its line through the Fox Cities of Wisconsin also got in the way of fast running.  Note that a train could call at Eau Claire or La Crosse but not both, and that a through train could go through Milwaukee or Madison, but serving both was slow.

The timetable alludes to service beyond the corridors.  One Milwaukee Road train pair through Madison, 11 and 22, was the Sioux with sleeping cars for and from the Dakotas, and the Chicago and North Western's 519 and 518 also carried sleeping cars for and from there.  All those early morning departures from St. Paul included the Empire Builder, North Coast Limited, and Olympian Hiawatha from the Pacific Northwest; those were still running as separate trains from Chicago.  In later years these were combined with Zephyrs or Hiawathas as an economy measure.  Northern Pacific's Mainstreeter was still a separate train east of St. Paul, but Great Northern's Western Star cars ran in Burlington's Black Hawk, and The Pioneer Limited carried the Columbian's Chicago sleepers.

The railroads paid attention to connectivity, note how Chicago and North Western's 400 and 518 connected at Wyeville so that passengers off the Rochester Line could get to Milwaukee or Twin Cities lines passengers could get to Madison.  On The Milwaukee Road, note how 58 allowed passengers from smaller towns to connect to the Afternoon Hiawatha or to get to Chicago more quickly by changing to Fourteen, the On Wisconsin from Madison.  (I left out the Wausau and points north service to keep the chart manageable.)

And yes, there were rivalries, note the eastbound Morning Hiawatha and Morning Zephyr both away from St. Paul (some stunt on the paired track as far as Hastings) and into Chicago at the same time.No doubt, somebody would sniff about wasteful and duplicative competition.

Under those schedules, there were sixteen or seventeen trains between St. Paul and Chicago, and some of those were of long-distance trains still long enough to rate their own schedule.  At no time, though, was there anything resembling a memory pattern on any of the railroads.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. NORMALITY IS DEPRAVITY.

The house organ for All Woke Things Considered discovers an unintended consequence of social distancing.

LGBTQ+ college students face “sizable” mental health challenges compared to their heterosexual and cisgender peers, according to a new report by the Proud & Thriving Project.

The study found that LGBTQ+ students experience a higher incidence of substance misuse, depression, suicidal ideation and academic and extracurricular disengagement than their non-LGBTQ+ peers.

The Proud & Thriving Project, a collaboration between the Jed Foundation, the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals and other groups, surveyed 907 high school and college students -- 602 LGBTQ+ and 305 non-LGBTQ+ -- with college students making up two-thirds of the participants. The group separately surveyed 194 college, high school and middle school counselors and administrators.

Oberlin is probably a better place than Shutter Island if your mind's not right.

The pandemic only exacerbated these discrepancies, the report found. Nearly all the counselors and administrators surveyed said that COVID-19 worsened symptoms of depression, anxiety, loneliness and difficulty coping with stress among LGBTQ+ students. Eighty-six percent named anxiety as the top-presenting issue among the LGBTQ+ students they served over the past six months, 84 percent cited depression and 75 percent listed “family concerns” -- including fear of coming out and acceptance of their identity -- as the biggest concern among their LGBTQ+ students.

Sofia Pertuz, senior adviser at the Jed Foundation, noted that some LGBTQ+ students who returned home during the pandemic struggled with finding a private space to talk about their mental health issues -- especially if they weren’t out to their family. Additionally, some LGBTQ+ students who didn’t have health insurance couldn’t access outside mental health practitioners for services that they received in person from their institutions, which especially impacted BIPOC LGBTQ+ students.

“Colleges, specifically, were safe havens for many LGBTQ+ students because they found LGBTQ+ centers for schools that had them, or they had designated roles, or they had an office of diversity and inclusion where they felt like someone was trying to help,” said Pertuz.

To be sure, where LGBTQ+ students attend college greatly impacts their experience. Half of the students surveyed reported that their high school, college or university is a top LGBTQ+-affirming space. But the report found that students in states that lack protections for LGBTQ+ individuals experienced additional stress and felt less supported by their institutions.

The people who used to inhabit Shutter Island don't have those resources, but they always have San Francisco.  "The deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals, the closure of psychiatric hospitals begins after World War II. It accelerates under President John Kennedy. … It was progressives who led the charge to empty the mental hospitals. The promise was we would have community-based care. That was never built."  That's from an article about a different problem.  Read it on your own time.

TURNOUT MATTERS.

Robert Barlow might be correct in suggesting that the doddering ficus is a puppet.

Biden takes the heat and pays the price in the opinion polls so the rest of the Democrats can remain hidden in the shadows. Joe Biden is not behind everything that is hurting in America today: soaring inflation, rising gas prices, growing supply shortages, increasing food prices, a skyrocketing border crisis, ongoing employment shortages, and everything else that negatively impacts Americans.

The Democrat party gave Joe Biden his presidency because it knew that Biden's mental acuity was not sound enough to make difficult decisions. Party members knew that putting Biden in the White House would leave them in the powerful position to make destructive decisions, knowing that he would go along because he is a Democrat and knowing the party had given Biden the gift of the presidency with his presidential portrait to eventually be unveiled in the White House's East Room.

The Democrat party is making decisions and hiding safely from their voters in the shadow of Joe Biden's name.

Recall, dear reader, that if Donald Trump had not injected himself into the Georgia senate runoffs in the way he did, the spending spree the Democrats would still like to go on might not have been as ambitious, nor could court intellectuals appealing to the coot's vanity or the communist wing of the Democrat caucus hoping to buy off their base have pushed their shopping lists as hard as they have.

It's thus on voters disaffected with the malaise, the scolding, the incoherence, the gerontocracy, to turf out, at all levels of government, those politicians most likely to continue the malaise, scolding, and incoherence.  It's on the opposition not to be as delusional as the Democrats are.

PRIVILEGE IS CIVILIZATION.

No matter how many times I remind you of that truth, and that you ignore that truth at your peril, there is always somebody who wants to guilt-trip people into ignoring hard-won lessons of long standing in order to drag them down to the standard of people who ignore those lessons.

The National Council on Family Relations, a professional association started in 1938 and consisting of hundreds of marriage and family therapists and researchers, just announced a webinar called, "Toward Dismantling Family Privilege and White Supremacy in Family Science."

Just as white people are "privileged," according to [critical studies], so too is the nuclear family, which supposedly enjoys "unearned benefits in U.S. laws, policies and practices" over "non-traditional configured family systems" – including single-parent families and "committed partners living together and raising children."

The question which seems almost too-obvious to ask (but which alludes [c.q. and again, anathema on voice recognition -- Ed.] most social scientists) is this: Why is it that intact (two-parent) families consistently outperform others on every measurement – income, independence and children who are healthier, happier and less prone to social pathologies.

Apparently family "science" is a cult incantation in which it's forbidden to point out the anomalies columnist Don Feder raises in that closing sentence.  It's about time people who get accused of "unearned privilege" push back, perhaps they could flip their critics arguments back at them.  That is, claiming to be higher on the evolutionary scale, or better adapted to the world they live in.

THE GALES OF NOVEMBER, ANTICIPATED.

Everybody's going surfing, surfing Wisconsin style.

Hidden near the base of the power plant in Port Washington is some of the best surfing along Lake Michigan.

On Monday, after overnight storms brought powerful winds and cold rain, surfers raced to the coast as soon as they could to catch the swell.

“When the conditions are good, you gotta be on it. So that’s why a lot of people will just drop what they’re doing and go surf," said Chris Ganski, a pastor at City Reformed Church in Milwaukee.

Because the lake is smaller than the ocean, the best waves come immediately after the storm, no cyclone half a world away generating the swells the way it works in California or Hawaii.

Right now, surf season is peaking on the lake. Beginning in the fall, typically, storm systems bring cold air and strong winds that create some of the best, albeit windy, conditions of the year.

Surfers will hit the lake into the winter, though some will drop off as the water temperatures continue to fall.

And if you wipe out, the water is unsalted and free of sharks.

WHEN THE DONKS LOSE SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.

Which, apparently they have.

Raggedy Antoinette has to work on her hair-flipping and uptalking.  Small detail, I suppose.

It’s good that they finally hit some of the troubling highlights about Biden that really needed to be hit, including his incoherence and creepy ways. It’s also important to acknowledge how badly he’s doing in approval, so that impresses itself on those on the left who watch SNL but may not be seeing that on places like MSNBC. It punctures the bubble, and they get to see a little more reality.

Enjoy.

RAILROADS CANNOT RECAPTURE LINKS IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN BY DEFAULT.

Shippers can see through the "operating efficiencies" spin.

The pandemic-associated supply chain problems have brought forward a long-anticipated shortage of truck drivers that was always going to power the shift to a more intermodal-like share of highway traffic. It might even help improve carload siding-to-siding traffic share vs. trucking or barges. But that doesn’t, from the available commercial statistics, appear to be happening.

There is very little statistical evidence showing that railroad freight market share is now growing by taking away vast amounts of trucking business. There are a variety of sources for that slowing intermodal rail growth theory.

There are no short-term solutions, and the railroads have to think about how best to do shorter-haul and retail intermodal trains.

ILLINOIS TRIBAL POLITICS, ROUND DOS.

No sooner do I call attention to the ridiculous Illinois congressional redistricting than the politicians come up with another pooling of voters.  "Illinois Democratic mapmakers in Springfield carved a second Hispanic district and, in a surprise, threw Democratic incumbent Reps. Marie Newman and Sean Casten together, setting up a potential divisive primary."  It's the same game Republican gerrymanderers have played, creating ethnic districts that come close to Democrat pocket boroughs, the better to concentrate the Republican voters.

The current Hispanic congressional district, the Illinois 4th, was created only after a federal court fight in the wake of the 1990 Census. In order to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act, the courts allowed Chicago’s two Hispanic communities — on the North and South Sides — to be connected by adding a thin bit of suburban turf to link them together. The district was contorted into an “earmuff” or “C” shape in order to also preserve the 7^th as a Black district, also mandated under the VRA.

The Springfield mapmakers on this second try drew a heavily Democratic district designed to send a second Hispanic to Washington by essentially dissolving the current 3^rd congressional district represented by the freshman Newman.

It’s recognition that the current 3^rd is a remnant of the Mike Madigan era, drawn specifically to protect and preserve former Rep. Bill Lipinski and his son, Dan, whom Newman defeated in the 2020 Illinois Democratic primary.

Under the proposal, the earmuffs are decoupled and a new 3^rd district is now anchored on the North Side, heading west to DuPage County.

Ah, yes, the old Grand Duchy of Mount Prospect, now a latifunda.  But where are the non-Democrat politicians who will contest the ethnic voting blocs so created?  And for all the efforts by Democrats to create majority-black safe districts, Illinois is sufficiently riddled with crime, corruption, and taxes that "The loss of Black population in Illinois means fewer Black residents in the three districts — all Democratic — created to yield Black lawmakers."

THE ALTERNATIVE MINIMUM UNREALIZED CAPITAL GAINS TAX.

At least the punish achievement crowd are beginning to figure out that wealth, a stock, is a sum of flows over time.  "Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden is expected to release the details shortly, but we know that his plan makes billionaires pay annual taxes on their increased wealth. This is key, since the ultra-rich get the vast bulk of their money from investments rather than from paychecks like most of the rest of us."

Investments produce interest or dividend income on a regular basis, or they appreciate in value, which is a capital gain.  Capital gains are notional until the asset changes hands, and it is those notional gains that the taxman is after.

The tax is expected to target people with $1 billion in assets or more than $100 million in income three years in a row. Every year the tiny fraction of Americans in this elite group would pay a tax on the increase in value of stock and other tradable financial assets. They would owe a tax on gains from real estate and other less liquid assets when they sell them, along with annual interest fees.

It's nyekulturny to point out that "expected to target" comes awfully close to "bill of attainder." It's probably also rude to point out that the exercise is in service of the grand fiction of living at the expense of somebody else.

The proposal could raise hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade but not enough to cover the full Build Back Better plan. Given our country’s many pressing needs, we must keep up the heat on conservative Democrats to embrace a full fair tax toolbox. These should include raising top income and corporate tax rates, closing loopholes, and other innovative reforms on the table.

I've been hearing about these reforms for over fifty years; some of them have become policy, and yet, the promised improvements in the life of the poors never seem to materialize.

A SEQUENCE TAYLOR HEINICKE WISHES HE COULD ERASE.

He grew up a Packer fan, and now he wears Washington Redskin Rentseeker uniform number four in tribute to his boyhood hero, Brett Favre.  On Sunday, he was calling plays in Lambeau Field.

Facing third-and-goal from the Green Bay 3-yard line, Heinicke scrambled to his right to find a wide-open path to the end zone. He then dove and rolled in for what he thought was a score.

A Packers fan growing up, Heinicke then lived out a likely childhood dream, hopping into the stands for a Lambeau Leap when he spotted a Washington fan in the crowd.

Unfortunately, there are rules protecting quarterbacks from being hit on running plays.

It turns out Heinicke's knee hit the turf with the ball just short of the goal line. Heinicke wasn't tackled. But he gave himself up on the play as a quarterback diving head first. Instead of an easy walk-in touchdown, Heinicke was instead down just short of the goal line after replay review overturned the call on the field.

The drive wasn't done yet, though. Heinicke got another shot on fourth down. But the Packers stuffed him on a quarterback sneak and took over on downs. Instead of cutting Green Bay's second-half lead to 21-14, Washington remained down a pair of touchdowns on the road against an Aaron Rodgers-led offense.

After the game, though, the quarterback demonstrated he was familiar with Swamp ways.

After the game, Heinicke took more issue with officiating than his own execution.

"I don’t want to get into specifics, but I felt like I was in there both times," Heinicke told reporters, per ESPN's John Keim. "I don’t want to get fined up here so I'm not going to get into specifics."

In the same way that Washington politicians blame everybody but themselves for losing an election, Washington footballers and their scribes blame a rigged system.  "Referees, Aaron Rodgers combine to drop Washington to 2-5."

While Heinicke shouldn't have leaped, the play also should have been a touchdown. Refs and replay officials and rules officials at the league level are just over complicating things at the goal line. It's too much and it's silly. That was a touchdown. Just use your eyes. Also would have helped if Heinicke just dove the whole way into the end zone. And on Washington's fourth-down attempt from the one-foot line, replay officials again botched a touchdown.

Although the referees intrude themselves too much into the flow of the game, they do have the task of enforcing the rules, and if you're going to annoy the football gods by Leaping while not wearing green and gold, well, karma knows what it's doing here even if Joe Biden doesn't.

THE HARVEST IS IN.

The move of the hot pepper plants from the Victor E. Garden to elevated grow boxes on the deck seems to have been successful.

Habaneros closest to the camera, ghost and scorpion on the plants behind.  Here's part of the haul.

A productive afternoon of peeling, chopping, and cooking turned out this way.  The lids warning of hot contents aren't kidding, this year's batch packs a punch.

The haul of Roma tomatoes was not as big as the early returns suggested, but there is material for spaghetti sauce over the winter.

I was able to find sufficient lids to complete the water bath canning.

A local farm from which I bought additional tomatoes also will sell plants that yield larger plum tomatoes than the ones I got.  I'll likely switch to that supplier in the spring.

AN EMPTY SUIT HOLDING AN EMPTY BAG?

"Build Back Better" might have included piddling away our energy independence, and then begging third world countries to pump more oil.

Perhaps the idea was to use the higher prices to induce substitutions.  But in order to induce substitutions, there have to be substitutes.  "Fossil Fuel Investment Drops, and Renewables Aren’t Ready."  That article notes the tar-sand and shale-oil sources freed up by fracking have underachieved financially, and perhaps investors are less prone to put more money into those fields than they used to be.  "Oil between $45 and $50 a barrel is considered the break-even point for most shale operators, which means that they need crude prices of at least $45 to balance their operating cash flows with capital expenditure."  The exception might be in Texas's Permian Basin, although the nature of active investors is changing.  "Oil prices above $80 a barrel are once again spurring a revival of shale drilling in America’s biggest oil field, where production is expected to return to pre-pandemic highs within weeks. Only this time, the surge is being driven by private operators, rather than the publicly traded companies that fueled the previous booms. And they see little reason to slow things down."

The publicly traded companies are proceeding more cautiously, and shoring up their balance sheets.  Whether they will resume exploration, or whether the colluding countries of OPEC can keep the crude oil prices above $65, are known unknowns at this writing.

MAKING ILLINOIS SAFE FOR ERIC ZORN.

He came to the defense of Illinois Democrats creating safe Congressional districts because Republicans in other states were also creating safe districts.  "Then I look around our deeply polarized country, see how high the stakes are in the fight for the future and how important it is for the Democrats to hold the line where they can."  The new map is out, and the Bantustans have some really weird shapes.  I'm not familiar enough any more with the census tracts to rule on whether Chicago has been subdivided into one predominantly black district and another predominantly Hispanic district, so as to create the majority-minority districts, the better to have a diverse collection of faces (the minds are interchangeable) in Congress.

Perhaps those tricks will backfire.

The flip side of gerrymandering as many winnable districts as possible for Democratic candidates, however, is that you have to pack as many Republican voters as possible into those three other districts. By cutting places like Bloomington, Champagne [c.q.], Decatur, and Peoria out of their surrounding, redder areas, Democrats have created some serious vote sinks where Republicans make up more than 65 percent of the population.

Instead of a reddish-purple downstate, you've got that ragged blue scar and a bunch of districts where the Republican primary election will effectively decide who goes to Congress. And when primary elections have more significance than general elections, it gives more power to a party's base.

There's also one district several hundred miles long, stitching together all sorts of sparsely settled flatlands that are more than four leagues from the heavily Democratic clusters outside Chicago and along the Alton Route.  So much for creating compact sets.

The legislature had to craft fewer Congressional districts because the state is losing population, perhaps because of the fine job petty dictator governor J. B. Pritzker is doing chasing productive people out.  Whether Republicans, or some other politicians, will be able to compete more effectively in all these pocket boroughs by running against that record remains to be seen.

THE ETERNAL FRUSTRATION OF BASEBALL.

For the fourth straight season, the team that eliminated the Milwaukee Brewers represents the senior circuit in the World Series.  During the basketball championship, at least one sports pundit wanted Atlanta and Los Angeles, rather than Milwaukee and Phoenix, for the finalists.  Atlanta did play Los Angeles for the right to get to the World Series.  The junior circuit will be represented by the Astros, which were a National League team for years.  National politics, unfortunately, intrudes.  "Georgia versus Texas. Neither state has a mask mandate. Neither state will have people deputized to check COVID 'papers.' Vaccination rates in both states are about the same as California."  Play ball.

A MODEL RAILROAD IN FULL SCALE?

Seriously.  "Self-driving trains could be greener, carry more stuff, and help unclog America’s congested supply chains. And making them a reality will likely be far easier than perfecting autonomous vehicles."

The article was offered as a tease, and now it's behind the paywall.  The argument, though, is that there's no reason a fully grade-separated railroad could not be operated entirely by remote control, presumably with the positive train control information being processed by an onboard computer that does what the human operator is supposed to do.  That might involve working around the paywall.

I’ve written about the limitations impeding grand ambitions for self-driving cars. But trains have qualities that let them steer around those problems. Most important, trains are on tracks, which means an artificial intelligence train engineer doesn’t have to worry about issues affecting drivers of cars or trucks—no tailgating, lane changes, left turns against traffic, and so on.

“We think that trains are going to reach full autonomy faster than vehicles,” says Maxim A. Dulebenets, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Florida A&M University who recently published a broad review of the literature on autonomous trains. One reason: hundreds of passenger trains are operating autonomously in the world already, as part of city metro systems.>

Yes, as long as the dispatcher can't set up conflicting routes, and as long as no miscreant can hack the control system. Think of one of those old-style spaghetti bowl model railroads with the owner throwing remote control switches and turning the rheostat on the power pack.  Or perhaps there's a way of adapting walkaround radio control in the manner of the Cold Spring Shops layout to the Great Outdoors.

A future of autonomous trains could mean putting a lot more freight onto America’s existing rail network without adding new lines, says Nalin Jain, group president of digital electronics at Wabtec, a Pittsburgh-based train-manufacturing company that traces its roots back more than 150 years. Existing and future technology allows trains to be longer, to run with less distance between them, and to be broken down and reconstituted at ports and rail yards in a more efficient fashion, he adds.

Yes, a new generation of automatic couplers, plus distributed power and proper blocking of the cars, has potential.  Whether the railroads will go after the additional traffic, or consider adding more retail railroading, is another matter.

LET'S FIND A HAPPY MEDIAN.

Matthew Continetti asks, "Who will speak for ordinary Americans?"  You've got the Pillage Party, the Freakshow Party, the Fundamentalist Party, and the Laissez-Faire Party, and those four clusters are incompatible in some way with each other.  Let the fun begin!

The most radical experiments burned themselves out. Countercultural theorists feathered their academic nests. Hippie attitudes and aesthetics proved compatible with consumer society. Crime, welfare dependency, and divorce receded. This integration of "bohemian" and "bourgeois" reached its apogee in 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The year is worth noting. Just as it looked like one set of problems were solved, other crises appeared on the horizon. The Black Lives Matter movement grew during the protests in Baltimore over Freddy Gray’s death in police custody in the spring of 2015. Caitlyn Jenner appeared on the cover of the July 2015 Vanity Fair, heralding the next debate over sexual identity and mores. That autumn, high-profile incidents on the campuses of Yale and the University of Missouri marked the arrival of "cancel culture." And Donald Trump crisscrossed the land on his circuitous route to the White House.

Suddenly, the modified orthodoxy of liberal, "Bobo" democracy—what’s come to be known in some quarters as "neoliberalism"—faced a countercultural challenge of its own. Liberal principles of free markets, internationalism, democratic government, individual rights, and the rule of law trembled under pressure. What made this latest countercultural rebellion unique was its pincer attack. There used to be one counterculture. Now there are two.

Loosely, those are the Freakshow and Fundamentalist Parties.

Our two countercultures, separately and together, correctly identify weaknesses and flaws in twenty-first century liberal democracy. But they mistakenly view these problematic conditions not as discrete challenges but as totalistic indictments. They marry disinterest in empirical reality with utopian expectations from politics. They collapse the distinction between private and public that guarantees political, economic, and religious freedom. As they consolidate control over their respective institutions, they silence dissent and promote victimhood, hopelessness, paranoia, and fear.

Ordinary men and women are caught in the crossfire of this three-front war between the left counterculture, the right counterculture, and the rest of America. Facing the curse of inflation for the first time in decades, the American who fills up the tank or buys groceries must experience something like despair as he watches the attempts to cancel Dave Chappelle, remove statues of Thomas Jefferson, promote quackery about the coronavirus, and pledge allegiance to a flag carried in the battle of Capitol Hill. Who will speak for normal people, for Americans who love their country, who desire nothing more than ordered liberty and the opportunity to better their conditions and raise their families in stable environments? Who can triangulate between the countercultures of left and right and the real silent majority of Americans, who would like nothing more than the extremes to go away?

It might be as simple as stop making everything a national issue, and let people sort things out among themselves.  Perhaps, Mr Continetti continues, seasoned with the bourgeois virtues.

As religious affiliation declines, and as some orthodoxies enter into concordats with nationalists hostile to democratic capitalism, the priority must be the vigorous and nonsectarian promotion of what were once called "middle-class values"—moderation, civility, empiricism, prudence, humility, restraint, and reverence for the law—and the families that transmit these values to the next generation. Only a sober and reflective defense of the constitutional order and sustained attention to the priorities and aspirations of everyday, nonideological men and women will allow us to resist the two countercultures. Before they bring America down with them.

That's going to take true believers of all the factions emulating the lightbulb.  Whether there will be enough realism among sufficiently many true believers for each faction to back away from the abyss remains to be seen.

THE VALUE OF MEMORY PATTERNS.

As California's Passenger Rail operators resume something resembling regular service, they're paying attention to the fundamentals, which are frequency, connectivity, and dependability.

Beginning Monday, Oct. 18, the San Joaquin Joint Powers Authority will again offer direct Amtrak train service between Sacramento, the state capito,l and Bakersfield, Calif., when it adds a sixth San Joaquin round trip south of Stockton, Calif. The other five departures in each direction will continue to originate or terminate at Oakland’s Jack London Square station.

The following Monday, Oct. 25, the LOSSAN Rail Corridor agency will add another Pacific Surfliner round trip between San Diego and San Luis Obispo, Calif., while entirely revamping schedules so that departures from each station occur at the same minute in each hour that a tran operates. Weekday and weekend schedules will also be identical, as they currently are on the San Joaquins.

Weekday and weekend schedules differ for a variety of reasons, but a primarily regional service isn't in the workday-commuter business, and a number of Commuter Rail authorities that used to think of themselves in those terms are thinking differently.

I'm also encouraged that passengers have the opportunity to purchase food and drinks.

[Marketing manager David] Lipari says the San Joaquins are offering cafe fare on most trains, based on equipment type and staffing.

“On trains unable to offer food service, the authority has worked with a vendor to produce a free upgraded snack box, which includes four products from California and bottled water,” he says. “The snack boxes have been a welcome addition by our passengers, especially those traveling longer distances.”

The new trains take their places on a schedule where departures are spaced throughout the day, either two hours or four hours apart, and clock times during the hour are uniform at each station in each direction.

There's something to recommend memory pattern schedules.

Milwaukee, January 1941

Selected trains had full dining car or tavern-lounge service.  In another month, the Electroliners would offer tavern-lounge service on five trips, three hours apart, daily.  A Milwaukeean or Chicagoan could get to the station before the top of the hour and get on the way.

A COUNTEREXAMPLE CAN BE A DISPROOF.

College football season is well under way, with the bowl picture emerging.  What has not been emerging are outbreaks of Wuhan coronavirus.

Penn State hosted Auburn on Sept. 18, with 109,958 fans in attendance dressed in white. It was the second largest post-pandemic crowd of any sporting event, meaning it had to be a widespread superspreader, right?

If you take Twitter for real life, you were probably fed this nonsense, but NBC’s Shaquille Brewster is reporting that the large, unmasked crowds have not contributed to a spike in COVID-19 cases. Brewster says that all college football states in the south have reported a decline in cases since the start of the season. That includes Florida, which has seen hospitalizations fall 64% since last month, despite routinely seeing Florida fans pack The Swamp with 90,000 plus for every home game.

Well, no, and when evidence is contrary to priors, shouldn't people be revising their priors?

Brewster said that doctors have contributed [c.q.] (more evidence that voice recognition is flawed? -- Ed.) the decline to three things: open air venues, rise in vaccinations and more natural immunity after the Delta variant swept through younger populations.

With open air venues proving to not be superspreaders, the COVID-19 mob has now turned their attention to the large indoor events that are returning.

We might have a natural experiment unfolding, with the Chicago Bulls playing home games under the continued tyranny of Lori Lightfoot and J. B. Pritzker, while Milwaukee Bucks home games are mostly mask-optional.

We also have college football becoming a rallying point for the populist insurgency.  Laura Ingraham took her show to Mississippi Friday night for some pregaming.  Between university administrators alienating their physical and experimental science departments, the national government treating disaffected parents like domestic terrorists, and big city mayors continuing to be soft on crime, the correlation of forces seems to be tilting against the self-styled progressives.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, CHILDREN OF ALL AGES.

Feld Entertainment is casting for a new version of the Greatest Show on Earth, as it plans an animal-free relaunch of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 2023.

It's always better with elephants, and a train.  The culture was not destroyed in a day, and making the itinerant circus great again will take more than a few days.

There are other itinerant circuses still touring, and their 2022 seasons will be revealed over winter.

Find yourself a circus and go to it.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

With the coming of winter, the cold-flu-and-corona season is likely to turn out like last year.

So much so, indeed, that we kick off with the beginning of the spin.

1.  "We set out to flatten the curve, and we ended up stamping out the flu."  We'll see.

2.  What did you expect the denial of coherent beliefs to lead to? "In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition."

3.  It's a cult.  "Across a remarkable range of issues, the superstition that the president is a talisman now reigns unchecked."  You'd think that a quarter century of a legacy giving way to a chocolate messiah who was followed by a rent-seeking reality show host and then a doddering ficus would change a few minds.  "In the coming years, conservatives ought to do their level best to find and promote that rarest of birds: the politician who knows his place."  Read the rest.

4.  Today, we are becoming like Brazil.  That is, "We don’t need a lecture from Michael Sandel to know that ‘meritocracy’ has badly misfired."

5.  Lori Lightfoot never had a clue.  "She can’t deal with skyrocketing violent crime, in the rough neighborhoods and now violence is in the Loop, on the North Side, everywhere. And now police are issuing warnings about violence on Michigan Avenue." A stretch of North Michigan Avenue remains vacant and locked up.  With cheerleaders like Neil Steinberg, Chicago deserves to get what will come, good and hard.  " Chicago cops don’t want to be told to take the vaccine because they’re Red State white bread Trumpies huddled in their walled enclaves in Blue State multicultural Chicago. Not taking the vaccine is the middle finger to science and authority that, being cops, they just can’t deny themselves."  Indiana, I understand, is recruiting police officers from Illinois.

6.  End the mask mandates now.  We simply cannot continue a begrudged compliance.  It might once have been reasonable to forgive excess caution in the face of extreme uncertainty, but we’re long past that point.

7.  How bad does a supply chain crisis have to be for Dunkin Donuts to be out of Donuts??

8.  These pickups aren’t designed for work.  Exactly, if you can't get 4x8 building materials in the bed, it's not a proper truck.

9.  Just like those streets lined with American elms, when the failure comes, it will come everywhere.  "The regulatory and financial system we have today is optimized for development monocultures."

10.  Relaxed practicality.  "People intermingled because they were not all that different."

11.  If we are lucky.  "Have we reached the high water mark of woke?"  Case in point? "You make Superman a bisexual, self-obsessed narcissist because you yourselves are self-obsessed narcissists."

12.  We are Team Labor Shortage.

13.  Draw up a little list? "If no one misses them, either, maybe they, too, are better off not planning a return to the office anytime soon."

14.  Hector, condescend, deplorable-shame, disrespect.  "How infuriatingly, insultingly out of touch they are."  Case in point: "These days, the men and women who worked through the whole pandemic are being shamed and patronized by the very people whose cushy existences they facilitated for a year and a half. "

15.  If you can't condescend, whine.  "Wailing about fairness is emblematic of the impotent strategy progressives have deployed to steamroll Manchin and Sinema."

16.  Perhaps some introspection would pay dividends for Fauci.

17.  Epistemic closure in a nutshell.  "[W]hen you want to find the intolerant, look for Democratic strongholds where you find a lot of college diplomas."

18.  Raggedy Ann, avatar of aristocracy.  "People are straining to put food on the table and gas in their cars; they increasingly fail to see the point in going to work at all. Psaki’s response is that of the anointed class she represents: shut up and take it."

19.  The essential elements of the 2020 election controversy.  "Two ingredients drove the outcome in 2020: First, private philanthropy injected into government election offices and, second, a banana-republic style suspension of agreed-upon election rules. You didn't need much outright voter fraud when these two ingredients combined to poison the 2020 election."  Private activities to get out the vote are one thing; improper departures from codified rules are another.  Buy this book.

20.  Lori Lightfoot fouls her nest.  "I don’t feel like the onus is on [Kane County personnel] to go in there in an emergency situation that was created by poor government and a lack of support the officers receive."

21.  Second step: "The cure for ignorant politicians is supposed to be elections."  There is a first step.

22.  Turf 'em out.  "Blame the individuals whose choices brought about such negative unintended consequences."

JOE BIDEN IS A JOKE.

That is a thing, #BidenIsALaughingstock, and it requires little elaboration.

I do not mean this as a sharp criticism, but quite literally. Joe Biden is a meme. He is a punchline. He is a source of mirth and amusement. Worse still, he is the subject of a series of jokes with which the apolitical and disengaged have become casually familiar. “Why,” I hear it asked, “has Biden fallen so far, so quickly in the public’s estimation, and why has he not recovered?” The answer to both questions is that he is inspiring the wrong response in the public at large. Disappointment can be addressed. Anger can be quelled. Suspicion can be dissipated. Ill fortune can be reversed. But mockery is another matter altogether: In politics, ridicule — that freewheeling cousin of contempt and derision — has a nasty habit of becoming permanent. “They laugh that win,” wrote Shakespeare. Indeed. And they who are laughed at, lose.

It's even catching on in the swamp.

I have noticed the Biden jokes creep in to the imagination of the broader citizenry. At a friendly tennis match recently, I heard an older gentleman excuse his having forgotten the score by explaining that he was having a “Biden moment.” At dinner, people who lose their train of thought mid-sentence, as if they have been hit by a Mack truck, have started to say, casually, “Oh dear, I sound like the president.” And then there are the memes and images and jokes that are sent around ad nauseam, and all have the same achromatic presumption: that Joe Biden guy is inadvertently hilarious.

Take the town hall he conducted last night on CNN (up against a baseball playoff and the beginnings of pro basketball and pro hockey) that Dominic Green characterized as a "Soviet town hall." It was Soviet only in the sense of friendly media, but nobody gets sent to gulag for watching hockey game or baseball.

Joe Biden attempted a Brezhnev-era theatrical of his own. In the Eighties, we laughed at the Soviet leaders’ transparently crude bumbling before the cameras. Their low-grade production values and rambling, slurred speeches exposed them as a decayed and senile regime.

I don't know, maybe Joe Biden is the poster boy for ending the cult of the presidency.  He's surely not making any case for confidence in governance.  Somebody asks, "What percentage of income do you believe is fair for the wealthy to pay their 'fair share?'"  It's cruel of me to point out that the question conflates flows (income) and stocks (wealth).  It's proper of me to point out that the coot was not briefed in on tax incidence.  (Maybe that will age Raggedy Ann even more today cleaning it up.)  But all he could do was gripe about how some corporations brought in a lot of revenue and didn't pay taxes.  (That's a Democrat talking point of long pedigree, and we have an alternative minimum tax to ensnare filers because of it.)  Take it away, Toni Williams.  "If corporations don’t pay a 'single, little red cent', it’s not because they are cheaters. It’s because they take full advantage of state and federal tax laws and tax abatements offered by states and municipalities. Don’t like it, change the tax codes."

THE LIGHT BULB HAS TO WANT TO CHANGE.

That's a punch line that might say more about academic psychology than the casual teller might suspect.

It's also an observation germane to how higher education might get around to clearing out the cancel mobs.  The latest atrocity involves a Chicago astrophysicist whose colleagues at THE MASSACHVSETTS INTITVTE OF TECHNOLOGY invited to give a major guest talk about astrophysics, only to withdraw the invitation because that astrophysicist had reasonable doubts about the latest diversity, inclusion, and equity fads.

Let the soul-searching begin.  Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan called attention to a particularly foolish quote a Williams professor of geosciences offered to one of the coastal house organs of Morale Conditioning. "This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated."  "Absolutely best quote so far," she writes, and that's not meant in a good way.  A commenter expands.  "These are the unspoken, unchallenged assumptions underlying so much of these cancelleations, and they are simply infantilizing, even dehumanizing, of Black people."

Those developments are salutary, as University Diaries are the observations of a retired professor of English, with a concentration, as far as I can tell, in analysis of poetry, which is to say, not the sort of potted political economy that has destroyed much of the humanities, and many of her regular commenters are people who share most of the traditional stances of higher ed types.  That is to say, when University Diaries calls attention to the excesses of the cancel mob, and the cancel mob doesn't turn up in the comments, but other dismayed academicians do, dismayed, that is, at the woke weirdness, perhaps there remains a possibility of higher education reclaimed.

Reason's Robby Soave might be praying that the reclamation begins.  "It should be obvious that no place of healthy and open inquiry could thrive under such rigid ideological requirements."  Hot Air's John Sexton is having fun, as you might expect, with the freak flags flying, concluding, "My point here is that we may have a problem when the readers of the NY Times (not a right wing outlet last time I checked) make infinitely more sense than some of the professors at elite colleges. MIT should be ashamed for its decision."

HOW MANY HOURS DOES IT TAKE TO LIFT A CONTAINER?

Six.  Got a problem with that?

Crane operators who belong to a powerful union and earn up to $250,000 a year transferring containers from ships to trucks are worsening the supply chain crisis that threatens Christmas by goofing off on the job, frustrated truckers told the Washington Examiner.

The finger-pointing at the busy Los Angeles County ports comes as scores of container ships are anchored off the California coast, waiting in some cases for weeks to unload their freight. The Biden administration has scrambled to get shipping executives, port officials, and labor to tackle the problem. While the reasons for the burgeoning backlog are complex, truck drivers say not everyone seems to be working together.

Finger-pointing might be apposite, as operators of heavy machinery in transportation, including commercial truckers, are pretty good at extracting rents.  Favors for favors are part of the business.

The Washington Examiner spoke to six truck drivers near the Long Beach/Terminal Island entry route, and each described crane operators as lazy, prone to long lunches, and quick to retaliate against complaints. The allegations were backed up by a labor consultant who has worked on the waterfront for 40 years. None of the truckers interviewed for this story wanted to provide a last name because they fear reprisals at the ports.

It sounds like the truckers are learning the same lesson the manager of the itinerant circus learned when he pushed the blacksmith or the electrician too hard. (Do it yourself, Mac.) “This is all a reflection of the management they have down there, the inmates run the asylum. The managers are all afraid to say anything because the operators are so powerful they get management fired if they don’t like them.”